Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire (1974) A Film by Tony Palmer

"Like [D.A.] Pennebaker, [Tony] Palmer shoots in 16mm in anonymous green rooms and regal concert halls but plays looser with his aesthetic (mixing monochrome and color stock) and allows himself more fanciful editorial digressions. A live performance of 'Sisters of Mercy,' for instance, intercuts Cohen's on-stage act with both contemporaneous footage of him on tour and various flashback snippets of the singer reading and writing poetry, while a radiant rendition of 'So Long, Marianne' intermingles impressionistic home movies of Cohen as a young boy. In a more dubious example, Palmer sources graphic clips of suffering in Vietnam during the war to complement Cohen's musings on the political utility of his music—an intrusion which effectively sullies the suggestive vagueness of his lyrics on these subjects."

Full review here.

Fantastic Planet (1973) A Film by René Laloux and Roland Topor

"Fantastic Planet's blend of straightforward, almost elementary storytelling (any missing context is filled in via a voiceover by Jean Valmont as the adult Terr) with heady themes and eroticized imagery marks the film as a relic of an era with much looser standards around the dichotomy of the children's film and the adult drama. Also pinning it to the early 1970s are the unmistakable assimilations of psychedelia into the Ygam ecosystem: The Draags nourish themselves by sidling up against sproutings of plant life and inhaling for extended periods of time, after which their souls, encased in tiny orbs, rise upward to attach to headless naked bodies, which then proceed to tenderly embrace. Casually liberated sexuality runs rampant on Ygam, from the female Oms whose breasts hang freely to the various phallic and vaginal estuaries in the landscape. Even the Oms' rocket ships, which propel them to one of Ygam's moons in a tactical effort to evade the Draag's gassing assaults, leave no question as to what their shapes are meant to evoke."
Full review here of the Criterion Collection blu-ray.

Robert Aldrich Retrospective

The Harvard Film Archive is hosting "...All the Marbles (The Complete Robert Aldrich)" this summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm proud to say I contributed the introduction, as well as program notes on Kiss Me Deadly, World for Ransom, Ten Seconds to Hell, The Legend of Lylah Clare, Attack!, The Longest Yard, Big Leaguer, Apache, The Last Sunset, The Choirboys, The Dirty Dozen, Kiss Me Deadly, The Prowler, Sodom and Gomorrah, Too Late the Hero, The Grissom Gang, 4 for Texas, Hustle, The Southerner, The Angry Hills, The Frisco Kid, Emperor of the North, and The Big Knife.

Here's an excerpt of the intro:

"In many ways, Aldrich came out of the gate with a will to impress and a sensibility largely formed. In the first three years of his career alone, he directed Apache, one of the first Hollywood Westerns to center on a Native American protagonist (despite a bronzed Burt Lancaster playing him) and treat the subject of the white man’s colonization of the West bluntly; Vera Cruz, a financially triumphant vehicle for Lancaster and Gary Cooper; Kiss Me Deadly, a cause célèbre for the tough-to-please Cahiers du Cinéma clique and a sly retooling of the film noir genre; and The Big Knife, a scalpel sunk deep into the charade of a movie industry founded on duplicity and authoritarianism. These were films that aimed to make a mark, upturning expectations for the genres in which they worked and casting a view of society as inherently broken, a wall against which principled men must relentlessly push. They laid down the archetype that would course through Aldrich’s entire body of work. In his words, 'It’s the same character in a number of pictures that keeps reappearing…a heroic figure, who understands that the probabilities are that he’ll lose.'"

Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy

"Musical leitmotifs play a central role in Wim Wenders's 'Road Trilogy,' acting as both mood-setters and structural backbones. Nowhere is this more evident than in Alice in the Cities, which contains in one track, an arpeggiated acoustic guitar and synthesizer loop banged out in an afternoon by German krautrock group Can, the entire methodology and temperament of what would become a philosophically linked series of films. In musical-theory terms, the piece drones on an Aeolian modal chord and never settles on the root, creating a suspended sense of irresolution and uncertainty that aptly sets the stage for the 1974 film's meandering dramatic trajectory, as well as its ultimate view of life as a series of chance encounters without a clear end point." Full review of the new Criterion blu-ray here.

The Emigrants / The New Lands (1971 / 1972) Films by Jan Troell

"'We're the best of friends.' That's the endearment that a married couple, played by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, whisper to one another in Jan Troell's The Emigrant. For anyone familiar with von Sydow and Ullmann's collaborations in the filmography of Ingmar Bergman, it's a deeply moving moment as much for its narrative context—Ullmann's character is suffering from seasickness aboard a ship to America as a storm beats against her cabin and fellow peasants wail outside the frame—as for its metatextual implications. The two actors sparred, trembled, and agonized together on screen so routinely under the gaze of the famously penetrating Swede that a comparatively blissful moment almost registers as a glitch, even as it doubles as a validation of the pair's fruitful working relationship. It's hard to imagine any fan emerging from the scene, sensitively prolonged by Troell in intimate close-ups, with dry eyes." Review of an excellent new Criterion Collection disc continues at Slant.

Figures in a Landscape (1970) A Film by Joseph Losey

"Figures in a Landscape is composed entirely of such small-scale strategic warfare, and Losey graciously perceives no crisis of entertainment value. Why bother injecting dramatic banalities when the visual dynamics of the story already produce their own tension? Political and geographical contexts go scrupulously unexplored, the identity of the oppressor is never clarified (all we see of the pilots are portions of their backs in over-the-shoulder shots framing their front window's panoramic ground view), and the backstories of Shaw's barking alpha and McDowell's trembling beta are only vaguely and incrementally doled out. What remains is something at once meticulously tangible in its moment-to-moment action choreography and eerily abstract in its larger narrative design." Full review of this film's new Kino Lorber blu-ray up now at Slant.

Out 1 (1971) A Film by Jacques Rivette

"In a hushed sequence in the penultimate installment where one character begins to explain the 'dangerous things' Colin has gotten himself into, Rivette discreetly reverses the dialogue track when it seems crucial revelations are on the horizon. The result is an unintelligible, uncanny garble (one imagines David Lynch had this effect on his mind when he conceived of the Red Room dialect in Twin Peaks) that singlehandedly puts to rest any and all expectations that this mounting mystery will be 'solved.' In doing so, Out 1 subtly pivots into a more reflective mode for its final hours, one that officially dissolves the concrete details into ciphers and red herrings and redirects attention to the sources of the anxieties driving them." Full review of this 13-hour behemoth, about which I was decidedly ambivalent, over at Slant Magazine.

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.

The Black Stallion (1979) A Film by Carroll Ballard

"With the exception of the hushed pitter-patter of feet pressing into earth, the occasional low murmur of rather inconsequential dialogue, and a varied score that often pares down to just the soft plucking of a harp, Carroll Ballard's The Black Stallion might as well be a silent film. A curious artifact from the unstable transitional period as the New Hollywood Cinema ceded to the early blockbuster era, the film owes the storybook simplicity of its visuals to the crystalline children's films of Albert Lamorisse—most specifically 1952's White Mane, with which it shares the subject of a boy-horse friendship. The breakout effort from now-ubiquitous cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, The Black Stallion is a relentless procession of lavishly framed images, each one a marvel of compact visual storytelling. Only in its latter half, when Ballard accommodates a plot progression involving a Kentucky horse trainer, does the film exercise conventional mise-en-scène with shot-reverse-shot patterns unifying a dramatic space. Before that, and especially in its lengthy sequence of courtship between the boy, Alec (Kelly Reno), and the stallion, referred to simply as "Black," Ballard affords each deep-focus shot a concise descriptive power unto itself. The sound could be muted without any loss of comprehension." Full review of Criterion's new Blu-Ray continued at Slant.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) A Film by Melvin Van Peebles

Of Melvin Van Peebles’ furious but short-circuited cinematic sojourn I’d only seen The Watermelon Man until now, which looks practically clinical and anonymous compared to the impassioned energy of the much more down-and-dirty Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. That so many have objected to the film on the grounds of its prioritization of technique over all else is a frustrating confirmation of the exact same dominant white man's aesthetic bias that Peebles is aggressively rejecting with this movie (walking out of the screening, friend and fellow critic Jake Mulligan astutely pointed to the discussion in Something in the Air about the extent to which revolutionary ideas must be expressed with revolutionary aesthetics, rightly implying that Peebles’ film lands on the side of the mad young radicals). Progressive intentions aside, though, it's clear that Song is expressing its ideas through discursive stylization rather than classical notions of narrative, character and theme, and it’s absurd to hoist upon it conditions which it doesn’t even set for itself.

Peebles’ gamble is more about destroying any sense of pleasantness, coherence (temporal or spatial), or fluidity from his film’s surface in an attempt to harass the cultural hegemony that habitually subjugates black expression. The movie’s violent layering of beats—a mash-up of various 20th century African-American musical heritages such as funk, jazz, spirituals, street folk—is the gutsiest move and achieves the most tremendous effects, as a cacophony of clashing sound escalates into a sonic mess that wages war with the buffoonish hollering of the white pursuers. Peebles complements this aural disarray with a splatter of visual excess: snap zooms covering the entire spectrum of some of the longest zoom lenses available to 16mm guerrilla filmmakers, in-camera superimpositions, prismatic filters, disorderly handheld work and an onslaught of staccato cuts to traveling shots, all filtered through a quintessentially 70s palette in which the sky’s more burnt orange than blue. This overabundance works best when Peebles’ own character (a fugitive escaping from the largely white police for typically dubious reasons) is on the go, less so when making pit stops at his whorehouse for inert vignettes of awkward missionary sex. Fortunately, Song’s final movement into the desert is relentlessly peripatetic, and it’s where the style crescendos to a primal scream of outrage. Who, during a sequence of such phenomenally grating sensory bombardment, would be foolish enough to go looking for “dramatic content”? Vincent Canby, that’s who.

Fedora (1978) A Film by Billy Wilder

"Death-haunted work often grips the twilight stages of great artist's careers, and this one is no exception: Wilder's penultimate effort disperses the funereal gloom of its opening scenes across its runtime all while disentangling, flashback by flashback, the events leading up to the titular diva's horrifying suicide." Full piece on Billy's newly restored Fedora up now at Slant Magazine.

Mean Streets Discussion

When watching The Wolf of Wall Street for the first time, one of the earlier Scorsese films that came to my mind most assertively was Mean Streets, Marty's gritty NYC gangster movie from 1973. I found the resemblances less apparent on my second viewing of Scorsese's latest, but my passing mention of it in my initial review of Wolf was thankfully enough to send Kenji Fujishima down memory lane. He and I had been loosely discussing a possible conversation-style column for In Review Online for a while, so we jumped at the opportunity to further flesh out the deeper connections between the films as well as the special importance of Mean Streets in Scorsese's body of work. We've been cooking up this correspondence for a while now, and if you have time to spare for a long article, you can read the proud results here.

(Some of) The Warts of War: Sidney J. Furie's The Boys in Company C (1978)

(The following is my term paper for Vietnam in American Film, one of my last classes at Emerson College.)

Inaugurating what would quickly become a decades long fascination with the subject, Sidney J. Furie’s The Boys in Company C (1978) was the first Hollywood feature film about America’s military involvement in Vietnam to emerge after the end of the war. Radically different in tone and narrative than John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968) – one of the few Hollywood combat films made during the war as well as the last American film to depict the war in Vietnam before Furie’s film – The Boys in Company C follows a geographically diverse group of twentysomething recruits through their first tour of duty as members of the Marines from August 1967 to January 1968 (Hyams 200). Instead of aiming to arouse the patriotic fervor common to World War II Hollywood films, Furie opts for a more critical view of the military operation. In doing so, however, he continues to borrow a melodramatic language that places emphasis on sympathetic individuals rather than problematic political realities. Even as the film offers an indictment of militaristic arrogance by targeting its satire at inept superiors, its ultimate sentimentalization of the exploited soldier’s experience ensures that it stays within the realm of melodrama and never wrestles with more fundamental systemic questions.

A close look at the context surrounding The Boys in Company C’s production and release reveals the unique place it was to hold in the national consciousness, a place both embraced and complicated by the film itself. Produced primarily by the Hong Kong-based Golden Harvest Company (a studio often associated with cheaper, riskier movies), shot on location in the Philippines, and featuring some actual members of the military, not to mention the fact that the film was the first to muster up the bravery to fictionalize a still touchy subject, the production had several superficial indicators of artistic ambition and grittiness. Then, the film’s marketing campaign emphasized that its main characters were “the craziest group of men this country ever sent off to war,” implying a sense of irreverence missing from the gung-ho patriotism of World War II films (Maslin). This sense was confirmed by reviews, which identified the film as a “frank, hard-hitting drama” (“The Boys in Company C”). To a certain degree, it’s obvious that the climate surrounding the film was one of both surprise and hesitance towards a new representation of war “that wouldn’t have been possible in a movie of the early 1940’s” (Ebert). However, this surface novelty proves not radical enough in the face of a particularly problematic war in which the U.S. government’s mistakes were of greater importance than those of the individuals involved in combat.

The film’s concern for people over politics is announced right from its opening scene, a credit montage introducing the audience to the five central characters as they prepare to enter boot camp, saying their final goodbyes to friends and loved ones. Each character represents a different shade of 1960s Americana. Middle-class high school stud Billy Ray Pike (Andrew Stevens) is pragmatically consoled by his father as he prepares to exit the car: “you’re doing the right thing, get the service out of the way.” Tyrone Washington (Stan Shaw), an urban drug pusher clad in a flamboyant striped shirt and straw hat, fields concern from a buddy regarding how Tyrone’s absence will impact his drug access. Wide-eyed loner Alvin Foster (James Canning), who has aspirations to become a combat journalist, is enlightened on the seriousness of the war by an experienced elder. Italian-American pervert Vinnie Fazio (Michael Lembeck) tries in vain to sneak in one last shag in plain sight with his disinterested girlfriend. Bearded, guitar-strumming hippie Dave Bisbee (Craig Wilson) is nearly dragged away from his car at the end of the scene, a muffled “make love not war” tossed into the wind as his final message to the civilian world.

The Deer Hunter (1978) A Film by Michael Cimino

Particularly during a time of our continued military entanglements with foreign nations, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter comes across less as an honest grappling with the American involvement in Vietnam than as a deeply myopic stroking of American machismo. Opening with a wedding and ending with a funeral, the film announces itself as a vital statement on the transformative effects of the war on our national consciousness, positing with its very structure that the war presented a threat to our sanity, well-being, and, most of all, our moral exceptionalism. Trouble is, the only perspective it bothers to represent is that of the working-class male, and thus the film’s every development is filtered through masculine ethos, which, by extension, is equated with American national identity. Inevitably, this leaves out the possibility of hearing from women, and, most egregiously, the Vietnamese people, all of whom, historically, should be owed a say in these pivotal events.

The film divides its three dramatic acts quite transparently: pre-Vietnam, Vietnam, and post-Vietnam (these acts refer not to the actual timeline of the war but rather to the involvement of the main characters in the war). In the first act, Cimino laboriously establishes the drab Pennsylvania industrial milieu in which these characters live and work. Michael (Robert DeNiro), Stan (John Cazale), Nick (Christopher Walken), Steven (John Savage), and John (George Dzundra) are all factory laborers who spend their free time hunting deer in the mountains nearby. The sheer amount of time spent on this preamble to combat is designed to outline the core American values embedded within the milieu that will be compromised by the experiences in Vietnam: material modesty, work ethic, commitment to community, and self-reliance.



For the sake of plot convenience, the second act presents the inverses of these values, naturally displacing these negative attributes on the Vietnamese without ever realizing the floating irony that Vietnam’s history of imperialist manipulation mirrors some of our own early struggles to become an autonomous nation. Without deviation, our “enemies” are presented as barbaric, impulsive, and careless with regards to the life or death of their peers. Russian roulette, which eventually factors heavily into the plot, is formulated as the harrowing site of all these qualities, and the violence-plagued pleasure districts that Michael and Nick find themselves charting perilously into represent the opposition to the modesty and faithfulness that mark the film’s notion of American domesticity. These high-stakes events and settings are incorporated by the film exclusively for the purpose of challenging the characters' inner strength, and thus the narrative demands that they be pitched at the level of hyperbolic extremity. The result is an undifferentiated mass of hollering Vietnamese hooligans (portrayed, largely, by Thai actors) whose lives are apparently consumed by pointing handguns at anonymous heads and shouting deadly instructions, or unleashing cries of thoughtless thrill at the sight of blood gushing freely from someone's skull.

Anyone with even the smallest margin of empathy and understanding for that which is unknown to them should be able to spot such ludicrousness as a grotesque distortion of an Other. Perhaps this shortsightedness would be less offensive if Cimino didn't relay his fear-mongering exaggerations through a veneer of authenticity. The Deer Hunter as a whole is production-designed with exquisite attention to filth and squalor, and it saves its grimiest effects for Vietnam; the back-alley roulette room where Nick finds his sanity slipping away is a madhouse billowing with smoke, illuminated by a single unflattering overhead source, and otherwise shrouded in murky shadows where one can only assume the walls are caked in dried blood or Stalin portraits. While this filth is disorienting, seemingly a black hole of darkness capable of destroying one's sense of space and time, the lesser circumstances on the home front feel comparatively inviting. The only dangers presented by the Pennsylvania environment are metaphorical rather than actual; thanks largely to snatches of mystical a cappella drenched in church reverb, the mountains emanate mythical overtones throughout, and it is here that the central metaphorical challenge of the film is posed: will the men be able to kill the deer in one shot, thus affirming their strength and certitude, or will they need two shots, thus descending to the misogynistic level of “pussy”? Cimino applies the ill-fitting logic behind this masculine code of honor across the film.



The talents of Meryl Streep, Rutanya Alda, and Amy Wright, meanwhile, who constitute the pining feminine cluster back home, go to waste against the brute force of all this macho grandeur. As Linda, the conflicted love interest of both Michael and Nick, Streep is allowed the most screen time by a long shot, but even then her potentially complex character is reduced to a stick figure of grief, indecision, and longing, the collision of which Streep does her best to muscle out in numerous close-ups. Especially in the film’s final third, she is always on cue to be acted upon according to the needs of the script. She is less a character than a cipher onto which the male characters’ romantic desires and frustrations can be projected, and thus is physically oriented as such; when Michael finally returns home, she is merely sitting there in the middle of the room doing nothing when the door is knocked, her motionless pose of ennui not only a comically overwrought actor’s gesture but also a crystallization of her blatant passivity throughout the film.

If there’s one thing The Deer Hunter fully understands it’s masculine stubbornness and the absurd lengths to which a man will go to affirm his bravery and self-sufficiency, or, to put it more fittingly in the terms of the film, to prove that he’s not a pussy. The issue with the film, however, is not the degree to which it represents this quality of virility, but the astounding arrogance it takes to conflate this position with national identity. Nick's final, and ultimately fatal, dismissal of Michael's plea to come home is particularly wrenching because it fully invests in this warped mindset at the expense of an uplifting outcome. But in the end it's Michael who the film equates most squarely with the persevering virtues of the American Man because he finds a less senseless outlet for this stubbornness, overcoming the tempting madness of the "enemy" to re-focus his attentions on his local community. Yet in doing so, he remains stubborn; his unwillingness to recognize the root of the issue – his country's flippant refusal to try to understand the victims of their attacks – muddies his supposed self-actualization, even as the film celebrates his behavior as headstrong leadership. It's possible to praise the film's downcast ending as an admirably ambivalent take on patriotism, but even its manufactured ambiguity is flimsy: the "wounds" of the war may weigh heavily over these characters, but the lasting impression is of a questionable moral victory for those surviving.

A Tangle of Notes, Impressions, and Questions on Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma

(Note: This piece assumes that you've seen the film. If you haven't, I strongly encourage you to do so before navigating my jumbled thoughts. The film is part of The Criterion Collection's characteristically revelatory edition, "A Hollis Frampton Odyssey.")


- Opening in darkness, Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma (1970) asks its viewer to clear his/her perceptual slate and approach the film with fresh eyes and ears. Then, for its ensuing hour, it asks if this is even possible.

- Pulling its title from a mathematical theory proposed by Max Zorn in 1935 concerning algebraic sets and limits and featuring readings from a primitive grammar textbook, Zorn's Lemma sets itself up against man-made systems for comprehending the world and then creates some of its own corresponding yet distinctly cinematic systems. One of these is the film's structure, divided into three sections and progressing, broadly, from darkness to light, from sound to silence to sound, from visual absence to visual assault to mechanical recording, and through various attempts at rule-bound objectivity.


- In the film's extensive, unfurling middle section, the question of intentionality vs. spontaneity is repeatedly frustrated. Frampton's self-imposed A-Z structure, for the most part, dictates itself, but there are continually slippages of rationality when it seems as if the mathematical ordering of images and words has been deliberately obstructed. Assuming the one-second shots were arranged chronologically according to the order in which Frampton filmed them, I can't help but wonder whether a sly pairing such as "limp member" might not be quite so aleatoric. And if it's indeed something Frampton slipped in deliberately, why? This middle section is a puzzle of images without a clear solution, and in such cases I get the sense that the lack of clarity is carefully modulated, that Frampton might be fudging with his own rules as a way of positing the impossibility of objectively making sense of the world.


- I interpret Zorn's Lemma as a film about the limits of constructed knowledge systems (i.e. language, symbolism, time, cinema), so in one sense my desire as a viewer is to witness Frampton crafting a set of principles that he pedantically follows, only to watch as that system naturally crumbles, forcing a secondary system to emerge. In the context of Zorn's Lemma, that first system is language, broken into letters and their accompanying words, and the secondary system is images, which begin to emerge as Frampton runs out of the filmed words he collected. One way of looking at the second part of the film is through the assumption that words are unambiguous and closed-off while images are alive to the interpretive powers of the viewer, but then there are Frampton's additional tricks that complicate this reading. First, there is the fact that the words too are images, and secondly, there is the fact that the images too are a construction of the man behind the camera, framing the world according to his existing set of principles. These paradoxes and complexities are crystallized by the seemingly arbitrarily recurring motif of optically-printed text on top of an image, a calculated effect that simultaneously makes plain and simple the word/image double standards and also seems to violate Frampton's rules.


- Meanwhile, the images themselves are complicated. They are too diverse to be pinned to a shallow, undifferentiated reading as "images," posed dialectically against "words." There are shots that are temporally-bound (a jar filling up with beans, a cropped view of hands assembling a tinker toy, a man painting a wall) and others that are infinite. The time-based shots are defined by the fact that the actions contained within them are finite; they will end, and, presumably, so will the shot. On the other hand, the ocean or a single leafless tree on a hill will continue existing indefinitely. Only the representation of it through the camera will end. Frampton is calling attention to the inherent discontinuity between material reality and the human need to compartmentalize it, to give it shape and meaning through representation. Is there any other way to interpret the special effects shots in the film (two halves of a woman's head unsettlingly misaligned or three identical figures bouncing a volleyball in the same frame) than as flagrant expressions of this urge?


- The film's final section, then, is the (attempted) inverse to this manipulation: people performing an action seemingly of their own accord (walking across a snowy field into the forest) and a static camera recording that process in three uninterrupted takes, each the length of an 100-foot 16mm roll. On the surface, the approach might seem God-like, or at least that's how I see it. These figures appear to be unaware of the camera and their resulting representation therein. However, as a cinematic spectator it's obvious that this is a constructed scenario merely aiming for the illusion of truth. In service of its reprisal of age-old debates about photographic objectivity, this section decidedly inverts Frampton's editing system in the second section; here, cuts (which resemble dissolves in this case, complete with the defects inevitably accompanying the tail end of the film roll) are dictated by the limits of the cinematographic apparatus, not any editorial consciousness. But when a sudden squall of snow fills the frame, momentarily flooding the film with natural beauty despite seeming to arrive with unnatural haste, can we still trust this to be the case, or has Frampton's (and, by extension, man's) desire for aesthetic surprise and fulfillment intruded?

-On the soundtrack, loopy words spoken by two women at the pace of a nagging metronome dissolve into sonic mush. Again, the possibility of a subjectivity (the women's voices) is raised within a rule-bound system (the metronome) and the latter overwhelms the former. The subjective is reduced by the limits within which it is contained. Zorn's Lemma demonstrates that everything inside of it is a product of human interference, and any attempt to dissect its contents can only be as rewarding as its viewer (and its viewer's accompanying systems for understanding the world) will allow it to be.

What's Up, Doc? (1972) A Film by Peter Bogdanovich

Surfacing after the quiet, melancholy, restrained The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich showed himself to be a true chameleon, and an especially adept one, with his diametrically opposed follow-up What's Up, Doc?, a delightful homage to the great American film comedies (and sometimes foreign comedy) of the preceding six decades. Specifically, the film uses Howard Hawks' screwball gem Bringing Up Baby as a fundamental reference point for its structure, plotting, and characters, but along the way it also targets Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Tati, Lubitsch, McCarey, Sturges, and Wilder, and features fleeting references to other non-comedic classics like Vertigo and Bullitt (the latter only a year old at that point). Bogdanovich, ever the film scholar, is creating a kaleidoscope of cinema pastiches, committing wholeheartedly to Godard's line of thinking regarding the inherent thievery of the medium. But, as a film made just a few years after the collapse of The Production Code and the introduction of new, still uncertain rating system in the MPAA, What's Up, Doc? is permitted an erotic energy only implicitly acted upon – and often avoided altogether – in the screwball comedies of the previous 40 years.

Here, Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand replace Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn (David and Susan from Baby) as Howard Bannister and Judy Maxwell. O'Neal, the kind of unassuming star who can headline a film without making a particularly bold impression (and I say this in acknowledgment of it as a unique trait), is a perfect match for the absent-minded professor type seen so frequently in early American comedy and which Grant could play so well. Howard is a cluelessly geeky musicologist searching for the supposed inherent musicality of igneous rock formations (the film makes hilariously articulate use of his out-there pastime) who is about to be trapped in an outlandishly formal marital arrangement with his fiancée Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn). In his well-tailored suits, his corny bow ties, and his boxy glasses (a getup that can be traced back to Harold Lloyd), he screams uptight and malformed, but Judy, in addition to finding him an attractive man stuck in the body of an out-of-touch nerd, recognizes his debilitatingly plain lifestyle and sees something inside of him in need of awakening. She then sets as her goal the complete upending of his life, assuming at some point along the way he will fall for her.



It's a screwball setup that is familiar to the smallest detail: the male heading towards a passionless marriage tied to old-world values confronted by a brassy, sensual, and unapologetically disruptive love object, wherein he is forced to ultimately re-evaluate his standards of living. Bogdanovich even echoes key plot developments and sight gags used in the setup of Baby such as the female's pseudo-accidental ripping of the back of the male's suit-coat, her role-playing as his wife during professional circumstances and talking over him when he tries to deny the fabrication, her disruption and near-sabotaging of his pursuit of a large grant from a professional colleague, and the integration of an object on the loose that needs to be re-captured (a leopard in Baby, igneous rocks in What's Up, Doc?). Other stray allusions are scattered across the film: Howard finds Judy in his hotel room lounging in a bubble bath, reprising Tony Curtis' identical behavior in Some Like it Hot; a secretive conversation at a festive dinner takes place underneath a table, borrowed from the same film; Howard and Judy sing a duet on a piano, obliquely reminiscent of Ralph Bellamy and Irene Dunne belting one out in The Awful Truth; Howard and Judy must negotiate a financial mix-up towards the end of the film, recalling Clark Gable's humble sacrifice of reward cash in favor of a measly $10 at the conclusion of It Happened One Night. The list goes on.

Instead of feeling like Bogdanovich is hollowly parroting his beloved classics, these varied reference points are given life by the film's singular location, its lively performances, and especially its extratextual context (1972 and the onset of a different approach to cinematic romance and sex), allowing it to feel like one last hurrah for the old tradition as Hollywood ushers in a new, uncertain era of comedy. That the film is set at a musicology convention at a hotel seems particularly apt; not only is Howard in a transitional state as a character, traversing from one mode of being to another, but so is the genre Bogdanovich is working in. Throughout the film, Bogdanovich cleverly manipulates the sexual energy, comedically towing the line between the polite innuendo of the past and the looser approach to the human body brought about by the sexual revolution. When Howard finds Judy in the bubble bath and begs her to leave, she playfully threatens to get out naked, prompting shrieking discomfort from Howard. One gets the sense that if Howard were not so uptight, a sex scene might have unfolded right then and there, but instead all that happens is a rolling-on-the-floor simulacrum of sex with Judy in a towel and Howard in a suit, itself an image of physical contact that would never have been permitted in the 30's. Later, when the two finally do kiss, Judy is extremely forward in her sexual advances, letting down her hair and spreading her body out towards him. When they begin passionately making out on the floor, Bogdanovich slyly cuts to a shot of a shocked janitor walking in – a variation on the default gesture of passivity marking early screwballs. In these instances, Bogdanovich is overtly creating a dissonance between the withholding of desire and the outright expression of it, a dichotomy that marks the juncture at which the film rests in the history of American comedy.



What also lends What's Up, Doc? a weight of its own is the fact that Bogdanovich, having already proven his chops as a Fordian dramatist, has a remarkable sense of how to patiently build a joke. The film's claim to fame is a spectacularly lengthy chase scene through the hilly streets of San Francisco that is the full realization of the Looney Tunes sensibility alluded to in the title. Trying to escape the convention, Howard and Judy (at this point, Judy has sufficiently charmed her object of desire) hop on a stray bicycle with a grocery bin attached in the front, loading up the four overnight bags uproariously misplaced and mixed up throughout the film. One contains Howard's rocks, another contains Judy's underwear, yet another contains a bag of jewels, and the final bag is filled with confidential government paperwork. The ensuing sequence features the owners of each bag chasing the two lovers to reclaim their respective property: Eunice's fiancé, a horde of fellow musicologists' colleague, an old women's jewels, and a gang of secret agents' prized information. (It goes without saying, but once the chase balloons inevitably into urban chaos, policemen catch on as well.) Chock full of spun-out cars, swift changes of direction, and near-catastrophic evasions of obstacles, it's a manic cartoon brought to life that is informed by a Tati-esque sense of the inherent confusion of the modern urban environment.

The best thing about this sequence is the play with space and movement, as well as the physical interaction of bodies within that framework, so the mad logistics of what's actually going on take a backseat, which is somewhat true of What's Up, Doc? as a whole. Plot-wise, the film is never quite as tight or satisfying as the great Hawks, Sturges, and Wilder comedies Bogdanovich is drawing from (the whole bag thing, for instance, gets awfully confusing, and not always in a funny way), but O'Neal, Streisand, Kahn, and the rest of the ensemble are so assured in their roles that they supply a cinematic energy to compensate for the moments when the script lags or feels overly familiar. Similarly, Bogdanovich's compositional discipline and knack for color coding (the faded tones of Howard and Eunice's clothing are contrasted by the hotel's vibrancy as well as Streisand's bright blue eyes and, with the exception of her hip detective look, passionately colored outfits) offers a dimension of New Hollywood formalism to a genre not previously known for visual flair. Both qualities give What's Up, Doc? its precise balance of homage and conscious separation.

We Won't Grow Old Together (1972) A Film by Maurice Pialat

Maurice Pialat's second full-length feature We Won't Grow Old Together is a devastating exploration of a slowly disintegrating romantic affair that is about as brutally honest about the self-destructive interdependency of relationships as any film ever made. As is typical of French cinema of this era, it concerns a brutish, self-involved artist type and his ethereal, sophisticated partner, a tendency seemingly reflecting an autobiographical realm for filmmakers like Godard, Truffaut, and of course Pialat. But whereas Godard and Truffaut's early romances are tinged with a certain swagger, Pialat's work is defined by its serene neutrality. We Won't Grow Old Together takes as its subject the relentless coiling and recoiling of a relationship, with characters variably looking villainous and sympathetic, and Pialat's camera remains a curious, impartial observer, never quite passing judgment even during the lovers' more explosive fights. There's an unknowable complexity to human relationships, Pialat understands, and his respectful approach preserves this truth.

Things get even more complicated in adulterous relationships, which We Won't Grow Old Together proves – imperceptibly at first – to be studying. Jean (Jean Yanne) is married to Françoise (Macha Méril) but has been involved with a mistress named Catherine (Marlène Jobert) for six years. Françoise's screen time is radically truncated in favor of Jean and Catherine's, making it appear initially as if Jean and Catherine in fact married and Françoise is the mistress (that Françoise embodies a level of acceptance and even support for her husband's extramarital activity is an idiosyncrasy I can only interpret as being part of a different mid-century French mindset). But Pialat's choice to focus on the relationship of unmarried lovers is pivotal: this is a situation in which no formal agreements have been made and only emotional rather than concrete stakes are on the line. Such a relationship superficially grants a lack of concern for one another's feelings, and Jean takes this to the extreme by assuming a degree of license for psychologically and emotionally abusive behavior. For Pialat, this arrangement is fertile ground for emotional honesty.



The film begins with Jean inviting Catherine to the Camargue region where he is visiting for one of his several odd jobs as a cameraman. (Jean is, as so many New Wave protagonists are, a filmmaker and a cinephile, and his sporadic references to great directors are the vehicles for Pialat's own cinephilia.) On this trip, Jean treats Catherine like swine (or, as he puts it, a rat) for no discernible reason, showering her with bitter remarks and disturbingly direct (albeit untruthful) summaries of her personality. We learn that Catherine is an aspiring actress with inconsistent success, and Jean's cruel behavior seems to stem as much from his inability to possess her artistically as it is to do so personally. During these spiteful rants, Pialat's detached camera (either remaining wide or fixed in eye-level two shot, but only rarely relaying information in the shot-reverse-shot formula) makes plain the angelic composure of Catherine in contrast to the animalistic tendencies of Jean, which is not so much a passive submission to Jean's vitriol as it is an assertion of her own strength. Among its many other compassionate qualities, We Won't Grow Old Together is a celebration of Catherine's wisdom and resolve.

Lest it seem unwise that Catherine remain involved in such a problematic relationship, let me point to the ways in which Pialat displays an understanding of the complexity of human behavior and how breaking free from long-term relationships is never as easy as simply walking away. After a certain length of time watching resolution follow psychological combat, it becomes clear that the film is adopting a structure of repetition: Jean explodes at Catherine, Catherine deflects, Jean returns to her to offer cool tenderness, and the cycle repeats. The closest the film comes to schematism is in a too-clever cut from Catherine declaring her wish to never see Jean again (or something to that effect) to a shot of Jean picking up Catherine from a business meeting presumably only a day or two later. Aside from this rather calculated effect, Pialat allows great space – through pauses, through cresting and falling tension, through wordless sequences of narrative cushioning – for the vulnerable emotional landscape between the two to develop organically. The film does not follow a tight-knit timeline either: one moment, the lovers are conversing in Jean's car in Paris; the next, they're at Catherine's mother's (Muse Dalbray) seaside cottage. Dissolution and reconciliation, as unwise a cycle as it may seem given the destructive circumstances, is occurring at a naturalistic pace that is only obscured slightly by Pialat's steady fascination with the process of break-up, which manifests itself in an elliptical cutting rhythm that often forgoes the chunks of time the two spend apart to focus on moments of connection.



Pialat balances Jean's aggression with scenes of comparative serenity that, if not quite capable of justifying the continuation of this affair, at least pose high points that suggest why Jean and Catherine got this far in the first place. Of particular note is the section of the film spent by the sea, where the neutralizing effect of the ocean and Catherine's parents seems to illuminate an otherwise subsumed affection between the two that is crystallized in a lovely scene of late-night waltzing. Suggested by a single long take of Jean and Catherine in the middle of a crowd, the scene shares the rejuvenating ambiance of a similar moment in Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum, but unlike Denis' climax, which seems to crystallize undercurrents in the rest of the film, the peace and quiet rendered here is only fleeting. When they return to the cottage, Jean makes a sexual advance on Catherine during a comfortable embrace in bed and upon rejection finds himself tearing her shirt and throwing another fit. It's harsh and disruptive, but utterly plausible in the rugged emotional terrain cultivated by Pialat throughout the film.

We Won't Grow Old Together pulls a fascinating paradigm shift in its third act by placing sudden emphasis on Jean independently coming to terms with the cruelty of his behavior. Faced with a Catherine whose patience is wearing increasingly thin, Jean must consider the question of whether or not making a concerted effort to resolve issues is worthwhile. Françoise returns crucially in this section to side wholeheartedly with the abused Catherine, even as she calmly directs her husband towards an overdue resolution. Here, Pialat peels back Jean's rigid surfaces to reveal a clumsy, fundamentally sensitive beast underneath. It's the kind of radical openness and enduring compassion that cinema rarely has the time, energy, or intelligence for, and it transforms the film from an insightful study of a romantic relationship to a broader, more devastating investigation into human frailty. I can't think of a shot that could better clarify this than We Won't Grow Old Together's perfect parting gesture: an image, repeated from earlier in the film, of Catherine flailing about joyfully in the ocean, overtaken here and there by a wave. It's an impression of happiness that will likely haunt Jean forever, representing a kind of emblem of the casualties of his behavior even after any specific memory of Catherine has faded.

Scenes from a Marriage (Episodes 4, 5, and 6) A TV Series by Ingmar Bergman (1973)

The sense of finality that looms over Paula, the third episode of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, made it seem as if there was nowhere else the series could go. Johan and Marianne (Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann), the content lovers of the first two episodes, wound up in a split that would last an indeterminate amount of time, and the sheer cruelty and tactlessness with which Johan revealed his infidelity left no hint that a reunion would come any time soon. Vale of Tears, the fourth episode of the series, leaps ahead about eight months from the emotional explosion of Paula to depict the first meeting of the still-legally-bound couple in the suburban home where Marianne and her two daughters continue to live. The occasion would seem ripe for bitterness and hostility, but instead the evening begins in rather unexpected fashion. When they first see each other at the front door of their home, Bergman reveals the moment by observing Marianne's reaction to it, but she is not uneasy or cold. Instead, she approaches the door like a girl about to see her prom date - that is, with a sense of anticipation and surefooted confidence. There is no villainous POV close-up of Johan, only an unassuming profile view as he enters the tight frame from the left, smiling gently at the sight of his well-dressed wife. This is the key to Bergman's non-judgmental outlook here, which recognizes evil and unfairness but always allows for time to smooth over rough patches, if not entirely wipe them away.

Obligatory catching up and hesitant stabs at intimacy dominate much of the action that opens Vale of Tears, but slowly Bergman peels back the unruffled surface to reveal layers of regret, disappointment, and anger. Johan is quick to mention how he has become tired of Paula's mood shifts and pettiness, and also makes an offhand comment about how Marianne turns him on, but his affection feels impermanent. Marianne teasingly resists Johan's kisses and modest sexual advances, mentioning her own casual romantic affairs in the process. They sit down for tea and dinner, and both of them seem acutely aware of the dangerous dance they are involved in, as well as the sense that they are cycling through old routines in a new light. After dinner, the two sit down on the couch (throughout Scenes from a Marriage, a couch is used as a transitional device between small talk and sexual flirtation or intimate conversation), continuing to liquor themselves up and geting closer and closer to acknowledging the elephant in the room. Marianne, sensing her self-confidence waning, deflects the pressure from Johan by reading an entry in her diary that she wrote during their break from each other.

Essentially a reflection on her own identity at this cross-section of her life, the diary entry is extremely confessional, putting her struggles with Johan in the context of her often tumultuous upbringing. Bergman visualizes the scene by pairing Ullmann's words with archival photographs of the actress throughout her life. It's one of the most poignant scenes of the entire series, subtly self-reflexive in the way it draws attention to the longtime collaboration between Bergman and his primary muse, whom he used at various points in his career to reflect different sacred relationships in his life (his mother, his lover, his wife, etc.) Also, it's a very significant scene in the progression of both the episode and the entire series, seeing as it marks a shift in Marianne from a confused victim of Johan's erratic behavior to a women capable of detached self-analysis. Early in Vale of Tears, Johan gives a typically Bergmanesque monologue about loneliness being the default mode of existence, the only way to truly feel secure, but Marianne offers an indirect rebuttal by suggesting that security comes from a feeling of self-respect and self-understanding, which help to stave off loneliness. When she finishes reading the entry, she realizes that Johan has actually fallen asleep and missed much of her speech, proving not only that he's characteristically self-involved but also that his presence and attention is inessential to her stability as an individual. But, as is par for the course in Scenes from a Marriage, temptation and memory flows back into consciousness, and the episode concludes with a prolonged, uncertain progression into bed for the couple, a passionate but transient attempt at sex, and Johan's grumpy departure in the middle of the night.



Bergman's own sympathies seem to jockey back and forth throughout Scenes from a Marriage nearly as often as Johan and Marianne's power roles reverse during conversation. There are moments when Johan's cynicism and despair sound as if they were spoken right from the mouth of the director (and given Bergman's own turbulent marital history, some of his declarations are especially ominous), and other times when he uses Ullmann as an instrument to openly reject Johan's worldview and project a belief in trust and love. Other times the drama onscreen is so alive and free of ideological positions that Bergman seems unsure of who to get behind, and the next episode of the series, The Illiterates, is an example of such an entanglement. Taking place entirely within Johan's nondescript, under-furnished office space, the episode depicts, at least on the surface, the couple's signing of their divorce papers, but a seemingly simple task leads to a harrowing exposé of the trials and tribulations of their marriage, as well as their current feelings towards one another. While the visual style of the episode is particularly bland, even pedestrian (flat lighting and predictable shot-reverse-shot structures), the emotional content is riveting and complex.

Over the course of the episode, Marianne progresses from a cheerful mood to lustful excitement, sudden apathy, mounting irritation, an outburst of repressed exasperation, a return to tenderness, and finally utter exhaustion and pain; Johan, on the other hand, moves from apathy through longing, confusion, depression, narcissism, hatefulness, irritation, and ultimately violent rage. It's a roller coaster showcase - aided by a perpetually dwindling brandy bottle - of all the buried emotions brewing within the first four episodes, the full realization of the totality of Johan and Marianne's relationship. Ever the master of organically butting up contrasting mental states against one another, Bergman presents one of his most exhaustive studies of explosive human behavior in a 50-minute stretch of dialogue that hardly ever pauses until the final beat. Within this time-frame, there is Scenes from a Marriage's most sensuous moment (an unbroken two-shot of Johan and Marianne making love on the office floor with the giddiness of two teenagers finally afforded a moment alone) and its ugliest (Johan hitting and kicking his wife until she's bleeding and defenseless), and Josephson and Ullmann's rigorous performances naturally connect the two extremes. Miraculously, the episode concludes with a sense of hope just barely intact, even as the couple admits defeat and silently signs the divorce forms in the final shot; a clear horror runs through Johan's eyes after his act of brutality, realizing he has done something unimaginable to a person he obviously still loves.



Following this vitriolic emptying of emotions, Scenes from a Marriage offers an exquisite settling of the tides in its next and final episode, In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World, which ultimately finds Josephson and Ullmann in precisely the situation its title pronounces. The episode marks a departure from the claustrophobic soul-baring of Paula, Vale of Tears, and The Illiterates and a return to the quotidian casualness of the first two episodes, only a newfound sense of wisdom and honesty has been infused into the relationship. Before Johan and Marianne are seen together though, Bergman opens the episode with two separate scenes of them going about their newly independent lives. In the first, Marianne makes a brief visit to the home of her mother (Wenche Foss) - who up until this point has only been spoken of, and quite frequently - to ask her some questions about her marriage to Marianne's father. She admits to having felt qualms about marrying in the first place given some dormant feelings towards another man, and her confession is perhaps what sparks Marianne's own admission to Johan later that she cheated on him briefly early in their marriage (a remark that is insignificant alongside Johan's own behavior in the series). Bergman also shows Johan in his office dispassionately fielding jealousy from Eva (Gunnel Lindblom), who also appeared in The Art of Sweeping Under The Rug criticizing Johan's private poetry. It was never clear until now that they were sexually involved, adding another, retrospectively trivial, ripple to Johan's infidelity.

When Johan and Marianne do meet up, we discover that it is seven years since their last meeting (presumably the fanfare of The Illiterates) and exactly 10 years after Innocence and Panic, making it their would-be 20th anniversary. Now split up and involved with their own respective spouses (both seem about as forebodingly "content" in their marriage as they did with each other at the beginning of Scenes from a Marriage), the two of them get together to spend an evening at their summer cottage, where Marianne still spends time with her children and Johan hasn't visited since Paula. Yet again, Bergman stirs up a hint of drama around their initial meeting, shooting from across a busy roundabout as Johan approaches his ex-wife. They stop suddenly behind a tree, and there's an abrupt air of mystery regarding whether they are embracing each other in excitement or going through an uncomfortable greeting. When they emerge moments later in a jovial dash towards the car, it plays like Bergman's subtle declaration that all pettiness and bile have escaped from their relationship, leaving only a mutual sigh of acknowledgement that the past is officially past.



This attitude is compounded when after only five to ten minutes in the cottage they decide they cannot spend their evening amidst so many troubling memories so they end up going to Johan's friend's Fredrik's cottage instead. Johan and Marianne's method is not to ignore the past but to realize that it cannot be altered, and that dwindling upon it only means spoiling the positive feelings still existing in their relationship. When they enter Fredrik's place, a log cabin with a seaside view, they share unspoken laughter about the mess inside, focusing their attention on a clownish paper mache face dangling from the ceiling. Bergman, too, seems peculiarly fascinated by this ornament, staging the subsequent conversation with it sandwiched between Josephson and Ullmann in two (three?) shot and even intercutting a tight close-up of the face in the midst of their dialogue. It suggests a mask, a representation of larger-than-life emotional characteristics now extinguished from the couple's interactions. The conversation in In the Middle of the Night is level-headed and honest, yet it does not lack the power of the dialogue in the rest of the series; instead, is charged with a different kind of energy, a depth and richness only capable of being achieved after the kind of feral outbursts in the previous episodes. The final scene, with Johan and Marianne embracing in refreshingly immediate affection, ignoring time and the vagaries of their condition, is one of the most moving in Bergman's entire body of work.

It takes a lot, of course, to get there, and Scenes from a Marriage is rarely an easy ride, both in terms of the uncomfortable level of intimacy on display and the utter refusal on Bergman's part to lend the miniseries any kind of aesthetic flair. But there's a certain level of focus here - a desire to eschew extraneous shots, settings, and characters (Bergman never shows Paula, Johan's mother, or even the couple's children) - that is astounding and truly respectable. What is left is a series of stark, uncompromising images of Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, two of Bergman's most committed performers whose souls had been transparent in the Swedish director's work before, but perhaps never with quite this level of visibility and vulnerability.

See episodes 1, 2, and 3 here.

Scenes from a Marriage (Episodes 1, 2, and 3) A TV Series by Ingmar Bergman (1973)

Scenes from a Marriage marks an interesting crossroads in Ingmar Bergman's career. Directly after the primal abstraction of Cries and Whispers, only five years after the batshit insanity of Hour of the Wolf, and preceding a decade which included an exile in Germany and some of the director's strangest, most scattershot work (a decade that nonetheless culminated in his magnum opus Fanny and Alexander), the six-part miniseries is notable for its disarming simplicity and verisimilitude. If Bergman ever resembled Rohmer and Ozu, it's in Scenes from a Marriage, which candidly presents the domestic life of Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann), a seemingly prototypical married couple. Shot largely in his hometown of Fårö Island and surrounded by his regular crew of collaborators during the late 60's and 70's - Sven Nykvist on camera, Lars-Owe Carlberg as Producer, Siv Lundgren as Editor - as well as actors and actresses who were among his closest friends, the series benefits from the sense that Bergman was extremely relaxed and focused while making it. Feeling little need for visual acrobatics, non-linear storytelling maneuvers, or sly metaphors, the series presents life in a direct, unadorned fashion, knowing that human emotion over the course of time is beguiling enough.

The first episode, Innocence and Panic, begins with a wide shot seemingly from the perspective of the television camera that is shooting an interview with Johan and Marianne for an unspecified women's health publication. An interviewer (Anita Wall), eventually revealed to have a past school connection with Marianne, probes the couple about their two children and the history and state of their relationship, for the most part gently skimming the surface but also occasionally veering into unexpectedly private territory (sex life, infidelity, philosophies of love and happiness). Throughout the conversation, the interviewer and her offscreen cameraman periodically ask the couple to freeze in their respective positions for a photograph, ostensibly attempting to catch the lovers in some kind of emblematic pose. It's a fitting introduction to this almost excessively intimate and confessional series, an acknowledgement on Bergman's part of the somewhat voyeuristic nature of the project even in spite of its status, technically speaking, as a fiction. Like the opening of Persona, the scene explicitly calls attention to the apparatus of the cinema and the presence of the camera.

This interview also works to lay bare the exposition so that Bergman can jump right into the thick of the drama without having to find ways to develop a bed of narrative context. In fact, at first glance, the subsequent scene doesn't even situate Johan and Marianne as the focus of attention, instead placing the psychological torment of their friends Peter (Jan Malmsjö) and Katarina (Bibi Andersson) front and center. The two couples have a dinner party that slowly unravels into intoxicated confessions of loathing from Peter and Katarina towards one another, an ugly spectacle revealed in tight, clammy close-ups that the complacent Johan and Marianne merely observe in discomfort. Before they digress into antics though, Peter and Katarina mostly make offhand jabs at what they see as the unnatural perfection of their friends' marriage, which has just reached its tenth year. Bergman delicately implies that the hostility that soon boils over between the two of them leaving Katarina humiliated is not a far cry from normalcy, only an exaggerated expression of the insecurities lurking just beneath the surface that can be prompted by even the slightest misunderstanding.



Innocence and Panic concludes by introducing Johan and Marianne in privacy having an extended conversation about the prospect of another child. Their discussion starts in an image that has been quoted several times in the history of cinema since: a wide two-shot from the end of the bed, composing the evenly spaced couple in the center of the frame below a wide expanse of blank wall, both reading a book underneath a cream-colored comforter. Despite the sterility and symmetry of the shot, there's a certain implicit tension in it. It's a configuration that seems too good to be true, perhaps indicative of an orderliness that masks underlying disorder, and indeed later quotations of the shot have often capitalized, sometimes unsubtly, on this impression. But Bergman's treatment of the scene is more organic and complex than this kind of semantic reading allows. When Marianne reveals that she is pregnant, Johan reacts in a calm, collected manner, tactfully asking her whether or not she plans on having the baby. Johan's lack of bias and his graceful respect for his wife's decision is contrasted by her internal confusion and moral dilemma. The conversation, superficially goal-oriented and simple, stretches on for quite some time, and it eventually becomes clear that Johan's indiscrimination, his inability to actively influence Marianne one way or another, only scrambles her even further.

The tendrils of miscommunication stemming from this piece of expertly crafted dialogue extend an air of unease into the second episode of the series, The Art of Sweeping Under The Rug. The title refers to the final scene of the episode when Johan brings up his declining sexual desire only to follow it up by announcing that he needs to get some sleep, but it might as well be in reference to a great deal of the interactions particularly in the first half of the series, where deeper topics are frequently touched lightly but ultimately brushed aside. It's not that Johan and Marianne are afraid to be honest with each other, or that they are incapable of seeing the darker truths of life, but they are cautious of spoiling the positive aspects of their relationship, and they usually end conversations in a loving embrace as if to cement the essential tenderness of their marriage. Such is the case late in the episode when the couple discusses the idea of taking a vacation for a change and it leads to a contemplation of the negative effects that routine might have on their relationship, but naturally the conversation culminates in love and acceptance, with Marianne declaring "I'm so very fond of you." It's clear that there's a lurking irritation here on Marianne's side, especially given the fact that Johan tried to cancel dinner plans with Marianne's mother earlier in the episode and went on to insist upon sticking to a low-key routine that would allow little time for intimacy.



The title's significance could also be said to be reflected in another scene in Marianne's family law firm when she speaks to a woman (Barbro Hiort af Ornäs) desiring a divorce. As a lawyer, Marianne is obligated to maintain stoicism, but her job's demands can't force her to ignore her strong reaction when the woman describes her loveless marriage. She explains how she and her husband have sustained a modest, content relationship for several years despite their utter absence of passion as well as her indifference to her children, and how she has ceased to get sensual pleasure from the material world. Marianne is shocked not only by the way it shatters her perception of family as the most fulfilling source of happiness in life but also by the fear that such alienation could, or perhaps already has, befell her. The woman presents her situation as a sudden realization of all the time she has spent sweeping her apathy under the rug, so to speak, and it puts into perspective Marianne's own way of dealing with hidden marital issues.

If the first two episodes of Scenes from a Marriage coast along on these kinds of subtle deflections of seriousness, the next episode, Paula, offers a sudden outburst of all the repressed dissatisfaction existing in Johan and Marianne's relationship. Set at the family's summer cottage under a forebodingly grey sky (it's easy to forget the episode is shot in color at all), it concerns Johan's confession that he has fallen in love with another woman (the Paula of the title) and his announcement that he will be leaving Marianne and their children the following morning. Following the steady, if questioning, romance and domestic complacency of the first two chapters, the drastic shift in mood and tone is a daring, ambitious move by Bergman, particularly in light of the show's success up to that point. Doom seems to announce itself from the first shot, an image of Johan driving along the island road at dusk in between two sparse trees and through floating fog. He is greeted by a jovial Marianne who wasn't expecting him this particular night, but it is not long before she detects his somber attitude.



Johan proceeds to explain his decision with cruel honesty, treating his blooming romance with Paula - which he has kept a secret from his wife for months - as an inevitable fact of life that cannot be reversed. His tone of voice is calm for the most part, inflected by the same kind of cerebral detachment that has characterized his diction throughout Scenes from a Marriage, but occasionally he raises his voice and impulsively lashes out against Marianne, which makes him resemble Peter from the first episode. Ullmann plays Marianne's response to the situation with a conflicted mixture of disbelief, anger, and acceptance, and her glazed eyes during the unveiling suggest that each emotion has become indistinguishable from one other. Her shock at the sheer suddenness of Johan's confession is mirrored by the audience's shock at such a radical leap in Johan's attitude, and as a result the entire episode plays like a surreal nightmare, an illusion of a marriage going as horribly as possible. Only a slimmer of hope that it's all a dream could possibly explain Marianne's level-headed reaction to her husband's wickedness, her complete lack of externalized anger and even her willingness to help Johan pack for his trip. But there's nothing dreamy about Bergman's presentation of the sequence; as usual, his camera remains fixed unflinchingly on the faces of his actors, following their every move, unwilling to offer any relief from the inscrutable display of emotions.

In fact, Bergman's approach here is so unadorned that it nearly comes across as uncinematic, which is a common feeling I get while watching Scenes from a Marriage. The series' reliance upon zooms and pans to follow the action often give it the feeling of a stage play shot from the perspective of an audience member. Too frequently, Bergman and Nykvist allow the brilliant acting and the dialogue to do all of the talking instead of discovering dynamic ways to frame and block the conversations, the latter generally being a hallmark of their approach. Nevertheless, there's the occasional stroke of ingenuity - the shot in the second episode that observes as Johan and Marianne enter in and out of rooms in the hallway of their home, capturing with Ozu-like precision the flow of everyday life, the aforementioned bed shot in the first episode, or the overhead shot in episode 3 of the couple in a crying embrace in bed, so tight as if to portray them as one body - that exposes their visual abilities and keeps the miniseries from divulging entirely into the domain of theater. Of course, Bergman was a master of both mediums, but his greatest work tends to obliterate the idea that there's any such thing as a medium at all.

Continue to episodes 4, 5, and 6 here.

Cries and Whispers (1972) A Film by Ingmar Bergman

There's a chilling image early on in Cries and Whispers that gets to the core of the film, perhaps even to all of Ingmar Bergman's oeuvre. It's a tight close-up of Harriet Andersson's face as she lies in bed. It shows a women in a comfortable setting, with a soft white pillow filling up the edges of the frame. Yet the strange progression of feeling that flows through Andersson's face suggests that the pillow has no power over human emotion. Andersson's playing a dying woman named Agnes, but the film has not yet made the fact or nature of her illness clear when the shot arrives. As it begins, Agnes is just waking up. Her face goes blank for a moment before stretching into an odd contortion. The first hunch is that she's yawning, but that supposed yawn shifts effortlessly into a gape of seemingly horrendous pain, and ultimately resolves itself into another blank facade, this time graced by a hint of a smile. It's a close-up of unorthodox length, and across its long runtime it captures a myriad of powerful emotions co-existing: indifference, relief, pain, sorrow, misery, boredom, catharsis, happiness. Bergman's films have always made it an uncomfortably blunt truth that a psyche cannot possess one of these states without the rest of them. Cries and Whispers seems built entirely around that idea.

An echo of this shot emerges later in the film when Agnes' oldest sister Karin (Ingrid Thulin) reacts to Agnes' younger sister Maria's (Liv Ullmann) frank pronouncements of the distanced state of their relationship. Karin buries her face in her hands, beginning to laugh but also cry, and when her face returns from her hands, the distinction between the two is still not obvious. Cries and Whispers boasts some of Bergman's finest and most respectful direction of actresses, a skill he was able to master throughout his career, but here the performances reach majestic levels of complexity and candidness. Andersson with her gasping, unflinching morbidity, Thulin with her ice-cold hatefulness and detachment, Ullmann with her self-involved vulnerability, and Kari Sylwan (as the maid Anna) with her bruised despair; it's impossible not to think of the film first in terms of its faces, big, bold, and passionate, always dominating the screen. A consistent editorial device is a cut to one of these faces staring directly at the viewer, positioned in front of a black abyss. There's an urgent confrontational quality to it.

Limited to a single setting and utter silence with the exception of dialogue, ambient whispers, the infrequent use of Chopin and Bach, and the occasional impact sound, Cries and Whispers distills Bergman's aesthetic to its simplest form. The film feels very little need to couch its spiritual questioning in narrative forms; it uses the enclosed tomb of a countryside mansion as an arena in which to directly address matters of faith, death, and love. Sure, there's a narrative here - Agnes is slowly dying from cancer and the event of death gradually reveals the ugly truth of the sisters' relationships - but Bergman doesn't treat it as such. Rather, the film is a trance-like parade of the most harrowing of emotions, treated in an almost free-associative manner. In the following order, Bergman shows confrontations with mortality, petty displays of vanity and sexual desire, scorching proclamations of self-hatred and insularity, hallucinatory stages of grief, troubling instances of emotional denial, and, finally, an ambiguous vision of posthumous bliss. Stitched together by the pulse of red transitions and the direct address close-ups, there's a great fluidity to this evolution, a sense of logical emotional development that could never come through on paper.

Bergman opens the film with a characteristically moody introduction, a sequence of images divorced from dramatic context. Shots of the outside of the manor on a foggy morning are framed by Sven Nykvist with unusual compositional dynamics - twice, a fat tree is placed just off center in the frame, seeming to insist upon blocking the view of the yard. As the only exterior shots potentially taking place in the "present" (the rest occur in idyllic recollections by the central characters), it's as if Bergman is establishing the present as something that is unreachable, forever shrouded in mist: these women, in their womb-like mansion (Bergman allows only the faithful Anna a brief view out a window), seem to exist perpetually behind the present tense, so fixated on death and despair that they're constantly leaning backwards, their only source of positivity in the past. These images then bleed into close-ups of ticking clocks, one of Bergman's signature motifs. The insistence upon time further situates the sisters in a march towards death, and the next scene features Karin, Maria, and Anna literally waiting for the death of Agnes in the adjacent room. (In fact, at one point Maria even appears dead in a pose that would recently be echoed by a dead woman in Manoel de Oliveira's The Stange Case of Angelica.) Time moves too fast and too slow simultaneously; Agnes both craves a release from her imprisoning pain and fondly recalls instances of pleasure that make the fear of doom palpable.

The figure of Anna offers the only respite for Agnes' consuming misery. Anna's treated with a lack of respect by Karin and Maria, and especially by Karin's malevolent husband Fredrik (Georg Årlin), who later tries to lay off Anna without so much as a thank you for her long-term work, but she retains a core of dignity against all odds, ostensibly due to a belief in God and an understanding of death. This makes her the most suited to deal sympathetically with Agnes' illness, as well as rendering her the mystical presence of the house, a kind of death prophet. The sadness that ignites within her at the prospect of Agnes' end, which is ever so subtly suggested to be rooted in lesbian interest, is overwhelming, but it does not cause her to break down as drastically as Karin and Maria. The two sisters feign self-control, but their devastation manifests itself in immature acts of wickedness towards one another. Death can be a uniting force, but for these women it's something that eats away at their weak inner being, separating the already significant emotional gap between them even further.

A recurring visual element in Bergman's work, particularly with Nykvist as DP, is the alarming use of rack focus to bunch faces up against one another. That technique is used frequently in Cries and Whispers, often when loosely conveying Agnes' subjectivity. One of the sisters will enter the frame and turn away in fright at the sight of Agnes in pain just as the other sister intrudes in the foreground, coming aggressively into focus. For a film so restrained in its visual palette - Bergman and Nykvist rarely move the camera and rarely cut away to wide shots - it certainly finds ample ways to aestheticize the interplay of human faces, extracting a dramatic intensity through such minor means as a precisely choreographed rack focus. The relative subtlety of such maneuvers balances out the film's oppressive use of blood red, a conceit of remarkable effectiveness and remarkable obviousness simultaneously. That it's both points to the great power of Cries and Whispers; red is a color whose implications are built so intrinsically into our lexicon of artistic analysis that it begs to be paired with such vital thematic material. This is a film whose depths are integral to human nature.