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.'"

The Trip (1967) A Film by Roger Corman

"Roger Corman's The Trip is exactly what one would anticipate an exploitation film made in 1967 about an LSD experience to be, offering its only pretext for its psychedelic indulgences during a madcap credit sequence where hack commercial director Paul Groves (Peter Fonda) is visited on a beachfront set by his wife, Sally (Susan Strasberg), with whom he's going through a divorce. Despite nearly being swallowed up by a jagged Electric Flag fusion number blaring away on the soundtrack and interfered with by title cards set against what looks like swirling colored molasses, the brief exchange between the couple is lovely in its understatement, with currents of regret and longing coursing implicitly through their shared glances as lines of communication are interrupted by the chaos of the shoot." Review continues at Slant.

Don't Look Back (1967) A Film by D.A. Pennebaker

"In an age when Bob Dylan occasionally comes down to earth to lend gravelly gravitas to a Chrysler commercial or to half-heartedly spoof his own tactful reserve in an IBM spot, it's possible to forget that he was once the most enigmatic iconoclast in the musical world, his slippery identity impervious to both the prying inquiries of the press as well as the more innocuous curiosities of his fan base. But even 48 years after its release, and well into Dylan's current phase of relative transparency, D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back retains something of a forbidden quality, a feeling that we shouldn't be privy to the things it shows us. Granted, it's precisely this intimate access that the behind-the-scenes documentary theoretically sells, but long before this particular kind of film congealed into a recognized genre, not to mention before label operations micromanaged artists to such an extent that anything approaching an “unfiltered” exchange between documentarian and celebrity was a logistical impossibility, Pennebaker was stealing private moments that the entire world was salivating for, but had no reasonable right to witnessing." Continued on at Slant Magazine, where I review the new Criterion Blu-Ray.

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.

Cemetery Without Crosses (1969) A Film by Robert Hossein

"If Cemetery Without Crosses feels subtly but unmistakably different than other westerns, that's because it is: It's the lone French western to emerge from the genre's European (though mostly Italian) overhaul in the mid '60s. This geographical and cultural novelty adds another layer of pretext to the film—importing and performing a popular filmmaking mode from another country, and indeed even offering its own spin on the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone (who, in a telling gesture of artistic cross-pollination, guest-directed one scene). Hossein, who stars in his own movie as a mysterious lone rider lured back into violence by an old flame, was a popular actor in France at the time (Jules Dassin's Rififi being one of his celebrated roles), and with Cemetery Without Crosses he uses his star persona to both point toward the icon-driven nature of the classical American western and ultimately undercut the narrative implications of that tradition." Full review of the new Arrow Films Blu-Ray courtesy of Slant Magazine.

Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) A Film by Billy Wilder

"In the credit sequence of Billy Wilder's scathing sex comedy Kiss Me, Stupid, the chauvinist performance of tipsy swing vocalist Dino (Dean Martin) is intercut repeatedly with a group shot of male bartenders laughing hyena-like at his sexist jokes. The message—men are a predatory and cowardly bunch—is clear and the tone-setting mode of address even clearer: caricatured, repetitive, and pitched right at the threshold of burlesque humor and discomfort. (It takes a small cognitive leap to consider how David Lynch, an admitted Wilder fan, took this approach and ran with it in his own discomfiting suburban nightmares.) Things get pointedly faker from there." Full review of Wilder's misunderstood flop and Olive Films' new Blu-Ray release of it is over at Slant.

All Fall Down (1962) A Film by John Frankenheimer

All Fall Down doesn’t have a plot so much as a cluster of relationships that collide with one another over the course of two hours, messily coexisting largely in the space of a suburban home. These relationships belong to a family, though we wouldn’t know it from their interactions. Irregularly developed brothers Clinton (Brandon de Wilde) and Berry-Berry (Warren Beatty) both call their mother Annabell (Angela Lansbury) by her first name. Alcoholic, borderline nutso patriarch Ralph (evoking the father in Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace) calls his eldest “Rhinoceros” for no apparent reason, and eventually claims that he truly is a Rhinoceros. Berry-Berry’s a moody drifter with a rotating pile of intense but disposable romantic relationships—the latest being his impromptu marriage with his brother’s love interest, Echo (Eva Marie Saint), who also happens to be his mother’s good friend (there are no women of significance under 40 in this movie). At one point, in a moment of revealing mystery, Berry-Berry kisses Annabell upon returning home after years away and the camera catches only an obstructed view from behind Beatty’s shoulder, leaving up in the air the question of whether it’s a tender mother-son cheek-peck or an incestuous spit-swap.

All of this suggests a nuclear family unit fractured by suspended Freudian anxieties, ingrained timidity around one another, and a lingering sense of postwar malaise, none of which director John Frankenheimer attempts to analyze for the audience. His filmmaking is both totally direct in its full disclosure of each narrative incident from unbiased, detached points of view and deeply quizzical in its refusal to investigate the root causes or immediate repercussions of peculiar household behavior. Why, for instance, does Annabell seem to coax her youngest boy into various romantic situations with her peer, and then shrink in apparent jealousy when her eldest swoops in on the situation? Why, when this initial flirtation does strike with obvious sexual implications, does Ralph shrug the whole thing off as if it’s just teenage tomfoolery? When Berry-Berry finally obliges to share a coffee with his parents for the first time in years, the awkwardly contrived nature of the arrangement is palpable: this is a family who has lost all ability to behave like a family, leaving only demented miscalculations of intimacy instead.



For a microcosm of the film’s approach, look no further than the brisk climactic scene, in which Berry-Berry undergoes a midnight meltdown that ends with him berating his wife for her pregnancy before charging out of the house in exhaustion. The scene starts with Beatty brooding in the living room, his dead stare and the abnormal silence of the household acting as omens of something terrible on the horizon. Hobbling portentously up the stairs in front of a queasy handheld camera, Berry-Berry then invades his brother’s room upstairs for a moment of sulking, during which the camera temporarily settles back into sturdy repose. After inspecting the other two bedrooms for signs of life, Beatty barrels back downstairs and all the way down to the basement, where he finds Echo reading at Ralph’s desk. With the exception of one cutaway to the brother’s perspective as he gleans the ensuing argument from a crack in the soaking ground-level window outside, the whole exchange plays out in a few up-close-and-personal deep-focus shots that put characteristic emphasis on Beatty’s dripping perspiration. Soon after, the final disintegration is captured in a sweeping front-yard crane shot, the claustrophobic chamber drama tone suddenly blossoming into full-blown melodrama.

Nervous motion, jumbled trajectories (in this case, up, down, and back again), and a mixing of visual styles on a scene-by-scene and sometimes shot-by-shot basis—the movie sustains this temperament throughout. One minute it’s tossing off a Bigger Than Life-esque sequence of stairwell histrionics and the next it’s passing time with mopey small-town atmospherics reminiscent of late John Huston. All Fall Down feels like a broken film about a broken family living in a broken time and place; nothing moves fluidly, and nothing should.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) A Film by John Huston

(Disclaimer: Reflections in a Golden Eye was originally released with a sepia cast applied, but from what I understand a large portion of surviving circulating prints feature the film's original, more neutral color grading. Strangely, most of the images online for the film are sepia-toned, so although I've used these images, this review reflects the alternate version that I saw.)

“Economize! Turn the lights off!” So goes the instruction on a poster pinned to an office wall at a southern military outpost in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. By no means is this quirky bit of set decoration a focal point—it’s centered in a master shot between two officers, but it’s so small in the frame that it would be hard to read outside of a movie theater—yet for some reason it caught my eye, and Huston, symbolist that he is, probably didn’t put it there randomly. Reflections, an almost coming-out melodrama that plays out in a regimented, heteronormative milieu, puts a fair amount of emphasis on lights. On his nightly peeping tom rounds, a laconic private waits outside his major’s house for the last remaining bedroom lights to be switched off before infiltrating the home to ogle its snoozing matron. Later, he will be discovered when someone enters the room and flicks on the switch before leaving in horror without flipping it back. Most dramatic of all, the climactic finale occurs during an exaggerated lightning storm—nature’s own way of violently flickering on and off the lights.

In this context, this peculiar wall adornment registers as a detail of some significance. Residing as it does in a major’s office and thus intended, however subtly, as “official” advice, the poster makes a basic enough request: turn off unneeded bulbs to conserve energy and lower costs. When separated, however, from that utilitarian plea and placed into the larger atmosphere of social repression in which the story circulates, the exclamation-pointed advice may subliminally take on the tone of a threat: play by the rules, or else. If cost-cutting is a way of preemptively avoiding the possibility of an economic meltdown, so turning the metaphorical lights out is code for keeping transgressive behavior at bay; in both cases, the preservation of social order is the goal.

Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando) knows only order. In his role of authority, he regularly spits received wisdom regarding military duty to a classroom full of recruits and assigns groundskeeping duties that will tidy up the post. In his free time, he pumps iron in front of a mirror, sweating to maintain the expected image of an army chief. All around him are the pillars of a respectable life in the military: a buxom wife named Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) who acts as a sort of empress of the training community, cooking meals for evening functions and socializing all around the post; a large home, suitably overwhelming the unglamorous barracks of the trainees; and a cornucopia of patriotic pins lining the lapels of his expertly tailored beige uniform.



The “problem,” construed as such by his own conscience as much as by the implicit behavioral codes of the military system, is that Weldon harbors an unexplainable urge toward a younger, chiseled private (Robert Forster)—coincidentally, the same man who, unbeknownst to him, has eyes for his wife. Weldon's is an interest that goes beyond platonic respect or macho concern; it’s a magnetic attraction of implied but never explicitly stated homosexual nature. But it’s also an attraction that Weldon would never be able to articulate or admit to himself. Submerging himself in this conflicted interiority, Brando is a bundle of gestural tensions. He mechanically repeats normalized behavior—stoically tugging his beret down over his eyes, raising his chin up, straightening his suit—but within these stiff mannerisms, his eyes dart around nervously, his syllables trail off into mumbles, and a glossy layer of sweat sits perpetually on his skin. When his beret is blown off in one key scene, it’s a much more profound disruption that it seems on the surface.

Weldon’s arc moves from external to internal rejection. Initial jealousy regarding Leonora’s adulterous behavior with lieutenant peer and neighbor Morris (Brian Keith) culminates in a convulsive beating of her angelic white stallion, an eruption that can easily be read as an act of violence against his wife given Huston’s obsessive linking of the woman and her animal. Burnt out on this ineffectual revolt, Weldon begins to timidly pursue his object of desire, meanwhile all but handing his wife over to Morris. Unable to reconcile his new longing with his duty as an impartial major, self-hatred sets in, and Reflections closes on Weldon’s violent, misguided attempt to do away with the impulses that his rational brain rejects. Repression guards. Awareness disgusts.

Morris’ wife, Alison (Julie Harris), is an embodiment of Weldon several stages developed. A common target of gossip for slicing her nipples with garden shears after the death of her newborn, she is at least comfortable in her own abnormality. Her transgressive self-abuse, which effectively cuts her off from her assumed womanly duty, is nothing if not committed. With this assertive display of individuality, Alison is free to indulge unconventional relationships, such as the one she shares with her flamboyant Asian houseboy (Zorro David, a fairly obnoxious role), who’s the most liberated character in the movie and therefore the one who delivers the titular nugget of wisdom. Still, the price she pays is to be a perceived nut, and her offscreen fate comes in a home for the ill.



Reflections in a Golden Eye’s opening sequence shows Weldon’s object of desire passing through the hazy dawn landscape and saluting the horses in their stable, a series of images that immediately bonds him to the natural world. Soon, he will be revealed as something of a pervert; his trips to Leonora’s room find him sniffing her lingerie, and he also frequents the forest for jaunts in the nude. But one thing is clear: he’s a man at one with his environment, his body, his sexuality, and his identity. Weldon, who’s acknowledged around the post as a klutz on horseback, seems to long for that sense of internal stability as much as he longs for the man himself.

Framed in widescreen, obscured by a great deal of shadow or forest haze, and scored to a creeping, tension-filled medley of flutes, clarinets, strings, and glockenspiels by Toshirô Mayuzumi (the composer for several key films by Mizoguchi, Oshima, and Imamura), Reflections drifts along like a dream, with many muggy lulls punctuated by sudden bursts of heightened emotion. Multiple scenes between Brando and Taylor, likely intended by the studio as the film’s real selling point, have an awkward, stumbling pace that suits this atmosphere (though a definite lack of on-set chemistry is felt, it couldn’t be more appropriate given the nature of the couple’s waning marriage). Weldon’s presence—and this is the brilliance of Brando’s performance—has a palpable impression of sleepwalking, a quality that Huston maps onto the film’s rhythms. A highlight scene features nothing more than Weldon navigating a post-boxing match crowd at night in pursuit of the solitary private, trailing him down the street and then picking up his dropped Baby Ruth wrapper as if hoping to find some clandestine love note. The whole thing has the surreal tension of an out-of-body experience.

As Weldon's inner and outer selves start to collide in the final scene, Huston appropriately inflicts the shock on the environment. For the first time, Weldon spots the private tip-toeing around his house. As he impulsively fixes his hair for a possible meeting, the environment shudders and a thunderstorm elevates in intensity. The light of everyday ritual and the darkness of bottled up desires infringe upon one another in the form of lightning. Flicking on the light switch as the man enters his wife's room, Weldon makes a desperate attempt to introduce his latent identity into the realm of the visible, but undergoes a spasm of denial as a result. Huston's final shot—a continuous panning movement between Weldon, his shrieking, just awoken wife, and his fallen object of desire that suggests the cameraman frozen in a robotic loop—could hardly be more perfect: Weldon's is an unresolvable turmoil.

Fantasies of Restoring Order: On China Gate and The Ugly American

In the context of Hollywood Vietnam War films, Samuel Fuller’s China Gate (1957) and George Englund’s The Ugly American (1963) represent two distinct poles: the former is a B-movie less concerned with social and political statements than with melodrama and spectacle while the latter purports to be an important, liberal-minded Big Statement movie about the political involvement of the United States in Southeast Asian affairs. Unsurprisingly, given Hollywood’s historical patterns for representing foreign Others, both films, though superficially dissimilar, spring from the same mindset and ultimately function in nearly identical ways. Erecting simple-minded dichotomies of good vs. evil (literalized as Not Communist vs. Communist) and moral behavior vs. barbaric indifference (diplomacy vs. War), they effectively trivialize the realities of the American involvement in Vietnam, reducing the particular experiences of Vietnamese people to broad melodramatic strokes while opportunistically distorting American political and militaristic action. By virtue of their different stylistic and narrative approaches, however, they take different paths to produce this problematic effect.

***


China Gate opens with a quasi-documentary montage parroting an American newsreel that hastily summarizes the French involvement in Indochina around the time US troops began infiltrating the region. Strikingly contradictory in tone to the rest of the film (though the movie as a whole is no stranger to tonal inconsistency, as the musical interludes will attest), this expository prologue is ostensibly designed to lay a foundation of verisimilitude to the forthcoming narrative, as if to indicate that the ensuing events will be located within a very real historical milieu. Of course, this quickly reveals itself as a patently absurd concept. As the montage settles into staged footage of a young Vietnamese boy and his dog being pursued by a bloodthirsty Communist and the narrator remarks upon the dangerous divide among the Vietnamese people, the speed with which the gulf between the supposedly authentic and the melodramatic is leaped is extraordinary. Fuller’s attempt to inject pathos atop journalistic authenticity is clumsy to say the least, and it momentarily, if not permanently, derails the film’s contrived sense of authority on its subject matter.

Shortly thereafter, China Gate attempts to extinguish the ludicrousness of its opening minutes by applying a sense of “grittiness that is generally absent from polished Hollywood high-budget films [of the 50’s]” and introducing its subject: Sgt. Brock (Gene Barry), an American mercenary in a multinational group recruited to destroy a Communist arms depot near the Chinese border (Gordon 3). Having abandoned the Asian son he had with a Eurasian ally named Lucky Legs (Angie Dickinson), Brock is identified as a racist early on and thus the spectator’s alignment with him is challenged. This raises the central narrative question of the film: will Brock overcome his racism or will he be defined by it? It goes without saying that, because Brock is an American and because the film is “less about Cold War politics per se than about the American culture of which they were a reflex,” either outcome will be reflective of national identity (Berg and James). Therefore, in order to stabilize the spectator’s moral alignment with the subject, the film will have to present Brock righting his wrongs.

Because racism is raised as a narrative problem, tolerance is formulated as a virtuous quality, making Lucky Legs the film’s core embodiment of the good and moral. Communism, meanwhile, is presented as a kind of accepted evil; its sympathizers are either barbaric (eating dogs, or, worse, little children), scheming (luring the soldiers into deadly traps), or prone to base impulses. In this light, although Lucky Legs lives up to her name as a woman capable of using her sexuality as a tool for manipulation (one prurient image that scans the length of her body is presumably designed to illustrate the visceral effect she has on those she manipulates), the fact that she is doing so in the service of tolerance and anti-Communism allows her to retain an essential goodness. Such a characterization is what leads to an impression of China Gate as “violent anti-communist propaganda" (Rev. of China Gate).



It becomes clear that in order to stabilize the spectator’s alignment with the subject in the context of this starkly delineated moral universe, Brock must assume the positive qualities of Lucky Legs. As is typical of Hollywood melodrama, the film’s narrative problem is coded into a heterosexual romance. As such, Brock and Lucky Legs’ near-constant bickering about vaguely outlined romantic woes and their controversial offspring through the first two acts of the film clarifies that the narrative problem is unresolved; conversely, when Brock climactically apologizes to Lucky Legs for his behavior – a move that kick starts the spectacular action of the film’s final act – all order is restored. As Marsha Gordon puts it, “interrogation and violence almost inevitably climax in an acting out of desire between men and women” (Gordon 6). No matter that Brock’s apology seems fueled as much by erotic lust as by self-realization; the lasting impression, in a narrative sense, is that he has accepted the errors of his ways in the first two acts of the movie. Through the convenient wonders of plot contrivance, he is now tolerant of his Asian son. He has successfully moved “between the spheres of the hyper-masculine and the heterosexual/domestic,” a trait that defines Fuller’s combat films of the 1950's (Gordon 1).

Despite this seemingly uplifting reversal, however, the resolution of China Gate also must offer a casualty. The death of Lucky Legs at the Communist arms depot where the film spends its final half-hour is a way of cementing the evils of Communism and punishing the subject for his wrongdoings while simultaneously reaffirming a sense of American patriarchal virtue, and by extension stabilizing the spectator’s moral alignment with the protagonist. Brock’s escape from the Communists in an airplane is a literalization of the higher realm of understanding to which he has ascended, and the concluding shot of him walking away from the Vietnamese rubble clutching the hand of his Asian son is – notwithstanding the decrepit scenery and the somber Nat King Cole score – an emblem of victory against Communist evil, racism, and wrongheaded attitudes in general, as well as the culmination of “the making of a ‘real’ man and a ‘real’ father from the scraps of a war-torn soldier“ (Gordon 13).

***


Like China Gate, The Ugly American – based loosely off of a novel by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer – also immediately compromises its bid to be taken seriously, this time by cloaking South Vietnam as the fictional “Sarkhan.” The presence of Marlon Brando, the proliferation of political dialogue, the integration of drawn-out, “frighteningly realistic” Vietnamese riot scenes, and the very fact that the film is adapted from a distinguished novel are all indicative of director George Englund’s aspirations to seriousness. However, this odd re-titling of a geographical region comes across as a critical red flag in assessing the film’s mark of authenticity (Rev. of The Ugly American). Looked at another way, this slight dodging of reality may in fact be an even more elevated stab by Englund to assign sociopolitical importance to his movie, as if subscribing to the idea that by sidestepping specificity the material gains additional, universal relevance.

Driving the film's talky, didactic drama is Ambassador Harrison Carter MacWhite (Brando), a mustachioed scholar whose smartly articulated stance of racial and political tolerance in an early courtroom scene suggests a liberal compassion that is complicated once he is sent to Southeast Asia as a diplomat to assist in the building of a “Freedom Road” to Sarkhan’s northern border. There, he is confronted with a complexity amongst the Sarkhanese citizenry that not even he expected, and it is this profusion of viewpoints and allegiances that ultimately forces him to fall back on knee-jerk hostility and ignorance. In a more daring move than the A-B character trajectory in China Gate, The Ugly American begins by presenting a protagonist who appears sophisticated, morally exceptional, and kindhearted only to show him descending into unflattering qualities when his intellectual authority is challenged in new surroundings.

J. Hoberman summarizes the film’s title as an American who, upon entering a foreign country, either “exaggerate[s] the mindless conformism and conspicuous consumption that presumably characterized life at home—or else they ‘isolate themselves,’ take refuge, as a turtle retreats into a shell.” MacWhite falls into the first category of this definition. As his “sublime ignorance of local realities” reveals itself, he dons increasingly prim and well-tailored suits, gets escorted in limos around Sarkhan, and returns to his hotel to spit objectifying one-liners at his wife. When a rioting Vietnamese populace storms MacWhite’s limo at the airport in the latter half of the film, it acts as the most crushing blow to the character at this low point in his progression. It’s also, given the scene’s documentary veneer (hand-held cameras, diegetic sound), a moment of recognition of such an obvious manifestation of mounting local anger that it steers MacWhite towards a desire to uncover the truth, to more comprehensively understand the Vietnamese political situation.



Of course, the film assumes that this desire alone is enough for the spectator to begin feeling sympathetic again towards the protagonist. MacWhite uses a far less hostile and more inquisitive tone in his second extended conversation with Deong (Eiji Okada), an old Sarkhanese friend who is now fighting for national independence from Imperialist efforts (a position that MacWhite conflates with Communist sympathies). He also spends the final act of the film marked by an expression of puppy-dog innocence, a face that screams apologetic compassion. These surface characteristics simplistically pry the audience’s sympathy back towards MacWhite even as his founding dramatic question (is Deong a Communist or not?) and his defining narrative goal (to build a “freedom road”) crystallize his narrow-minded approach to diplomacy throughout the film.

Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, the progressive authors of the novel, sought out George Englund according to the understanding that he was a director who was “dedicated, skilled and who knew something of the world outside of Southern California,” but The Ugly American’s final stab at a critique of American ignorance is only a small gesture towards the hope for a deeper domestic understanding of foreign affairs, not exactly the parting gift of an educated, critical activist. The authors also briefly describe the finished product as “a colorful and very forceful movie,” and their euphemistic one-line review gets at the core of The Ugly American’s offenses: it forces a statement upon the viewer about global awareness and tolerance (which MacWhite ultimately embodies by the film’s conclusion) without sufficiently thinking these positions through (Burdick and Lederer).

WORKS CITED

-Berg, Rick and James, David E. “College course file: Representing the Vietnam War.” Journal of Film and Video. Volume 41. Issue 4 (Winter 1989): 60-74. Print.
-Burdick, Eugene and Lederer, William. “The Ugly American Revisited.” Saturday Evening Post 4 May 1963: Vol. 236. Issue 17. P. 78-81. Print.
-Gordon, Marsha. ““What Makes a Girl Who Looks Like That Get Mixed Up in Science?” Gender in Sam Fuller’s Films of the 1950s.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Volume 17. Issue 1 (2000): 1-17. Print.
-Hoberman, J. “Believe It or Not: J. Hoberman on the Ugly American.” Artforum April 1991: 27-28. Print.
-Horton, Robert. “Sam’s Place.” Film Comment. Volume 32. Issue 3 (May-June 1996): 4, 7-9. Print.
-Rev. of China Gate, by Samuel Fuller. Monthly Film Bulletin. Volume 24. Issue 276 (1957): p. 87. Print.
-Rev. of The Ugly American, by George Englund. Variety Movie Reviews. Issue 1 (1963): p. 101. Print.

L'Enfance Nue (1968) A Film by Maurice Pialat

As portraits of disaffected youth go, Maurice Pialat's L'Enfance Nue makes François Truffaut's already restrained The 400 Blows look downright sentimental and sensationalistic. Pialat's debut traces with its rigorously pared-down approach the downward trajectory of a young boy named François (Michel Terrazon) from the hands of one foster family to another and finally to a youth ward, all the while forgoing explanatory passages or psychological detailing to suggest that this disheartening path is an inevitability in the dilapidated working-class world Pialat depicts. It's a stark, unforgiving film, laying the blame not on the unruly child but on the pitiless society itself that insists on organizing, explaining, and punishing youthful behavior but ever so rarely on simply understanding it.

Pialat, meanwhile, maintains a directorial distance precisely to create an undiscriminating space for the viewer to try to understand François, or better yet, to merely see him for what he is: a sensitive boy frustrated by his unstable living situation and the lack of care and attention he is afforded. Pialat's curt, observant visual style – free of acrobatic fanfare or musical accompaniment – reduces the narrative to physical action: François walks here and there, François lies in bed, François fights his surrogate brother, François steals an item from a store, François kisses his surrogate mother, etc. The majority of the dialogue in the film comes only from parents and authority figures, cynically analyzing these points of action Pialat zeroes in on. More often than not, their conclusions simultaneously complicate and simplify what is seen on screen. Complicate, because they create a convoluted and needless set of repercussions, and simplify, because they take an impulsive action, difficult or perhaps even impossible to accurately decipher, and label it not as the inherently complex human act that it is but as the result of something concrete and reductive: anger problems, social neglect, etc.



The film begins in a muddy mining town stacked with identical white houses with putrid yellow trim, one of which contains the 10-year-old François and the laboring married couple he's living with for the time being. He lives alongside an adopted sister who is treated to a decorated bedroom while François must spend his nights on a firm mattress in a cramped corner (a blunt dichotomy that Pialat doesn't belabor). Pining for something, anything, to do in this dull community, he wanders the grounds, abandoning his sister for his own exploratory ambitions. As a result, François is disconnected from his caretakers, showing up late to dinner and barely helping around the house. Catching wind of his foster parents' plans to send him off, he and a group of likeminded rascals from around the village collaborate on the reckless killing of the family's cat, dropping it down what appears to be ten or more flights of stairs. The unmediated shock of this act – portrayed by Pialat in a ruthlessly matter-of-fact medium angle without suspense-building close-ups – is followed by a moment of François fashioning a makeshift shelter for the severely injured animal, and eventually by a wide shot of him disposing of the body amidst some rubbish on a hill. It's a challenging progression of events, shifting the viewer from the knee-jerk disapproval of the boy's violence to an almost sympathetic depiction of his subsequent nursing and finally to a detached perspective of his questionable disposal of the body.

Similar ellipses ensue, always encouraging an imaginative rather than reductive reading of the offscreen moments that connect the depicted events. In fact, a fairly radical one occurs only shortly after François rids of the cat corpse. When his foster mother escorts him out of the house to be placed in an anonymous authority vehicle, Pialat offers the closest thing to a tear-jerking moment in all of L'Enfance Nue: a panning close-up of the boy's blank face as the car drives away and he stares back at his "mother." The moment is undercut, however, by the subsequent shot of François surrounded by more in a continuing line of tentative "mothers," as well as a bevy of foster children, in a cab on a moving train. The image is ripe with metaphor: here is a boy swarmed by possible caretakers, none of whom quite fulfill that title, and other children in similar situations, as the outside world whooshes by as a blur. Transience, instability, familial oversaturation without the proper attention – these are the default qualities of François' existence, visualized in this shot in such succinct fashion.



Naturally, this train merely transports him to another foster family. This time, it's not the parents that passive-aggressively mistreat him but his new foster brother, who rejects François as if he's a foreign parasite invading the body. By contrast, François' new adult guardians – played by Marie-Louise Thierry and René Thierry, the real-life foster parents who inspired Pialat to make the film – are soft-spoken and superficially caring, not to mention committed to creating a non-threatening environment for their children. But although François warms to them, and especially Marie-Louise's decrepit but still spirited mother, more than his prior caretakers, the atmosphere of detached generosity they cultivate seems the antithesis of François' prior engagements, and it ultimately prompts more fits of rebellious activity. Or is it that the sudden death of his surrogate grandmother – telegraphed by Pialat in a bang-up series of cuts that skips over the entire process of grieving – marks François' parting with the last possibility of connection in his life and essentially drives him back to insecurity? The film avoids any sort of one-to-one relationship. Soon enough, François is being shuttled to a delinquency ward after throwing a rock at a car and causing a crash.

L'Enfance Nue's English translation is Naked Childhood. The nudity, here, refers to a sense of rawness, of uncultivated life force. There's an implication on Pialat's part that this primal form is noble and altogether human, but also that it must be adequately nurtured (though the film never shows us what that ideal nurturing looks like, probably because there's no easy answer). What's clear enough is that the illusion of guidance in L'Enfance Nue is inadequate: François is treated as an object to be passed from place to place, filed by authorities, and tucked under bed sheets to be quiet for the night. Rarely in the film does anyone attempt to level with him or understand his behavior. (The Thierrys come closest to doing so, but their curiosity is held at arm's length.) If he is spoken to at all by authorities, it's in the form of a brusque interrogation, questions of purely utilitarian purpose: "where are your biological parents?"; "do you like living with your foster parents?"; "why did you do what you did?" François shoots back vacuous, confused stares at these interrogators, and you can't blame him. Pialat's film painstakingly explodes the legitimacy of such questions. It asks its audience to look, not to ask.

The Passion of Anna, In Images

(Note: Visual Spoilers ahead.)

My Night at Maud's (1969) A Film by Eric Rohmer

My Night at Maud's is simultaneously one of the most accessible and thorniest of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, exploring as it does the diverse philosophical terrain of a simple bourgeois love triangle. The film is marked by a ruthlessly droll and de-romanticized adherence to the romantic ideal that we are all meant for certain types of people, and fate will inevitably lead us to them. Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a self-professed Catholic and lover of mathematics, is fond of such a model, and discredits entirely the role of spontaneity. Maud (Françoise Fabian), on the other hand, the sophisticated and proudly atheist brunette friend of Jean-Louis' old academic pal Vidal (Antoine Vitez), does not succumb to the idea that there is any predetermined plan for her life and conducts her behavior accordingly. Despite the inherent contradictions in their personalities, Jean-Louis and Maud discover conversational chemistry in the film's centerpiece, a long scene in which the two men visit Maud for a dinner that gradually becomes a soul-bearing evening of talk. As a result, Maud slowly becomes Jean-Louis' project in the same sense that the many men of Rohmer's Moral Tales settle upon a woman to distract them from their more stable lovers and proceed to dissect the every move of said female. But unlike these other characters, Jean-Louis does not possess any flesh-and-blood lover as much as an ideal object - a blonde woman named Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault) that he glimpses regularly at church.

At the core of the film are the concepts of Blaise Pascal, the Catholic French philosopher and mathematician whom Jean-Louis, Vidal, and Maud tirelessly discuss. Pascal's Wager, a much-debated philosophical proposition that states that the logical man should obey faith and reject nihilism because there is nothing to lose and everything (salvation, grace, etc.) to gain, becomes a central talking point for Jean-Louis and Vidal when they reunite in Clermont towards the beginning of the film. As is characteristic of Rohmer, intellectual discussions such as these always mask more immediate thought processes and crises in the lives of his characters, and in Jean-Louis' case, the Wager becomes as much about his own romantic pursuits as it is about religion. If the odds of Jean-Louis' perfect mate existing are 1000 to 1, for instance, then he is resolutely set upon following that single possibility at the behest of all other options, and despite his dismissal of Pascal as too severe in his Catholic faith and reasoning, he obliges by the same principle in his search for a partner. Maud - the most knowable of Rohmer's many mysterious female specimens, and indeed one who presents a kind of moral and philosophical grounding in the film - sees right through Jean-Louis' intrinsic hypocrisy, yet searches for a human core to him regardless. In a subtle twist on the established convention of the Moral Tales, it is the female who orchestrates a greater portion of the scheming and manipulation, and Rohmer's biting dialogue (more linear and coherent than the digressive bouts of La Collectionneuse, for instance) keeps the audience especially alert to the fact that she is always a step ahead of Jean-Louis.

This conversational sparring is on greatest display in the titular event, which comprises a significant chunk of the film's running time. Vidal, clearly in love with Maud, has too many drinks at dinner and quickly proves the joke of the evening, while Jean-Louis follows not far behind, voicing his newfound Catholic values to unanimous skepticism and contrasting the casual sensuality of Maud with his comparatively rigid social behavior. Lofty hypothetical questions pepper the discussion and reveal dialectical attitudes towards love, faith and reason, and fate and free-will. Yet these men who are deeply concerned with intellect (much of their action involves discussing books and scanning books) have difficulty discerning and acting upon the underlying subtexts of a social scenario. Maud represents the opposite, and her skill in manipulating Jean-Louis' pretenses comes to the fore in a moment shortly after Vidal leaves the apartment. Jean-Louis tries to leave but she asks him to stay. He doubts her and questions her seriousness. In slight irritation, she tells him to leave if he wants. He gestures awkwardly towards the door. He finds an excuse to sit back down on the couch, and she insists that if she wanted him to leave that she'd tell him. It's a familiar exchange between a man and a woman tentatively pursuing romance, yet so much brews beneath the loaded silences, his petty justifications and her confident declarations. The entire sequence - remarkably well acted, staged (a nightgown-clad Maud lies down in bed about halfway through, at once tempting and quizzing the men), and paced - dissects Jean-Louis' obvious hypocrisies, the emptiness of his alleged moral chastity, and the damaging politeness of his demeanor.



When the night turns intimate for Jean-Louis and Maud, he is unable to consummate a clear instinctual affection towards her. Upon kissing her, he turns away, scoffing at his own betrayal of desire for Françoise. Jean-Louis' conception of fate is strangely skewed, as it seems like he subconsciously guides his own life to realize his own desires, writing off the result as fate. Chance and happenstance play pivotal roles in the progress of the narrative: Jean-Louis randomly meets his old friend who takes him to Maud's, he finds himself sleeping there through a combination of snowy weather and Vidal's drunkenness, he stumbles upon Françoise while driving through town and subsequently is forced to stay the night at her place when an icy street thwarts his car's momentum, and he crosses paths with Maud while vacationing with Françoise (now his wife) in the brief epilogue. Yet Jean-Louis only takes full advantage of these unforeseen circumstances when they comply with the vision he has for his life (and which Maud so astutely mocks, continually calling out his single-minded fascination with blondes and Catholics). His moral code has mandated that he experiences life in one specific way, and that all spontaneous endeavors that could lead to perhaps better options (the chemistry he shares with Maud, for instance, unquestionably surpasses that which he shares with Françoise) are snuffed out.

Rohmer and his regular cinematographer Nestor Almendros subtly present the film through Jean-Louis' strict perspective. (Travelling shots from his car window proliferate and gently underline this idea.) Whereas Maud's inner-city apartment is seen as a flat, drably bourgeois space (with grey as the dominating shade), Françoise's outer-city residence is contrasted, with its heavenly white lighting and cozy vibe, as some kind of exotic escape despite the lesser amenities. The sadness here is that Jean-Louis' wooing of Françoise seems more of a contrivance and a resignation than the product of a genuine longing and love (though it may become that). This is perhaps illuminated to him in the film's wonderfully ambiguous epilogue, which juxtaposes a fully realized, unified vision of his hopes and dreams with an unexpected recall of the past. Jean-Louis pauses in mid-sentence when describing the chance meeting between him and Maud on a sunny beach, and a narration recites his jumbled thoughts during the pregnant silence. Both Jean-Louis and Françoise shrug off the encounter, but there is nonetheless an impression of regret, confusion, or uncertainty implanted in the pause. The final image of the married couple and their young boy running off towards the waves, deliberately romantic in its symmetrical composition and hazy late afternoon light, is not without a tinge of irony, a typically Rohmerian suggestion that the moral code so rigidly followed by the protagonist may be as much a curse as a blessing.

La Collectionneuse (1967) A Film by Eric Rohmer

Wise and aloof, contemplative and so discreet that its nuances fly by without the most careful of observation, Eric Rohmer's La Collectioneuse defies all of the fashionable signposts of the French New Wave. It seeks to put a microscope to the affected machinations of young people, exposing the falseness beneath the facade rather than celebrating the art of role-playing. The film was the third entry and first feature-length work in Rohmer's Moral Tales, a series built around the trope of a male character involved in a relationship being tempted by an auxiliary love interest/sex object, all the while self-consciously testing his own moral code, making an elaborate psychological game out of the potential for infidelity. Here, that figure is Adrien (Patrick Bauchau), a dangerously suave and judgmental art dealer who skirts to his friend Rodolphe's countryside villa with the straight-faced hipster Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) in an attempt to reach a state of total nonintervention in life. He finds his courageous act of stasis to be a "better contribution to mankind than working", so he trudges around the picturesque French estate passively reading books, walking aimlessly around the grounds, taking early morning dips in the ocean nearby, and lounging in the blank bedroom that has been appointed to him by Rodolphe.

The men's inertia is threatened by the presence of Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a young, unflappable free-spirit that catches Daniel and Adrien's unawares when they discover that she is also spending vacation time at Rodolphe's place. Haydée abides by a schedule opposite to that of Daniel, whose pursuit of an ascetic lifestyle allows for no nightlife. At first, she's but a fleeting phantom, leaving only traces of her uninhibited but not unusual flights of twentysomething recreation, but eventually, in their disengaged voyeurism, the men start to take note of her allegedly worthless and hollow male visitors. Desperate to put an end to their feelings of inferiority, yet always concealing any wiff of jealousy or desire, Adrien and Daniel begin to make offhand stabs at communication with Haydée, eventually forcing complacence upon her. They start to incorporate her into their activities, never failing to suppress their brutally specific criticisms of her, calling her a "miserable specimen", a "slut", and a "collector" of lovers with the kind of casual delivery that would suggest they really think their judgments are the final say. Despite their linguistic prowess and lofty existential concerns, these men are deeply malformed. Their immaturity is revealed in great swathes of behavioral idiosyncrasies, which Rohmer, attentive as ever even in this primitive stage of his career, holds an unblinking eye to: note Adrien's awkward picking up and putting down of the telephone after Haydée uses it, or his neurotic biting of a rock to displace the conversational tension with her during one scene on the beach.

Adrien's hyper-articulate, context-heavy narration guides the dramatic action and offers an additional layer through which to scrutinize the discontinuities between thought and behavior, principle and impulse. Rohmer's leading males are so self-assured, so certain that they are following the proper path, that it's easy to fall into a trap in which they appear righteous and sympathetic. Yet as much as Adrien frames Haydée's day-to-day behavior as manipulative, as if she's playing a game with his emotions by sleeping around with Daniel and others, it's really Adrien who's the weasel, feigning affection and then slipping away with the exacting care of a great dictator. Late in the film, he practically whores Haydée out to an American art dealer (a menacing, Sean Connery-esque Eugène Archer) by dropping her off at his house for two days, effortlessly making it a perverse part of his master plan of directing Haydée's attraction to him (and somehow it works, if only temporarily). While Adrien speaks internally of his dominance of the social situation, the onscreen action tells a different story. The American picks apart Adrien's pretensions of passivity, making him look like nothing more than the lazy narcissist he is (any shades of virtue in Archer, however, are stomped out like a cigarette when he childishly slaps Haydée for breaking a valuable vase).



La Collectionneuse marks Rohmer's first collaboration with cinematographer Nestor Almendros, whose exquisite eye instantly became an inseparable element of Rohmer's work. The sparsely gorgeous, summery color compositions which reached their fullest force in Claire's Knee are already in evidence here, contributing a mood of languid relaxation. In keeping with a reductive principle borrowed from the minimalism of Bresson, Rohmer strips most of his images of any extraneous objects, ultimately discovering a common pictorial rhythm with a burst of each primary color in almost every shot. Shooting in wide shots that feel both composed and tossed-off, Rohmer and Almendros capture with the gift of natural light images that possess the warm hues and palpable textures of a great painting; often times the soupy early evening skies seem like painted backdrops, a la Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus, yet somehow they maintain a weighty realism. Rohmer suspends his characters in such wondrous environments that it's an even greater tragedy that they're so preoccupied by petty concerns.

In fact, this constant, overwhelming presence of natural beauty is a humbling reminder to the viewer that there are larger, purer forces than the characters' pseudo-romantic ploys. If the people in La Collectionneuse are evasive, complex, and impenetrable - the sudden tonal shifts in many of the conversations are beguiling - the landscape that they occupy is uniform and majestic, a tension that levels the film with a mesmerizing consistency. Crucially, Rohmer never dips into judgment himself, instead letting the moral dimension of the film rest somewhere in between his own stance, that of the characters, and that of the viewer. To cement the open-endedness, Rohmer has Adrien return to a state of zero by the end of the film. After renouncing his infatuation with Haydée once and for all, he considers himself to be at last capable of utter freedom, finally stripped of any unwanted temptations. But quickly he realizes that he's plagued by anxiety, that the illusory rewards of his self-confirming victory were only temporary. Perhaps he has solved his own predicament by realizing that aspirations to nothingness are simply illogical and that there's no joy to be obtained from a life of social and existential apathy. In doing so, he has allowed Rohmer to emerge from a perplexing and revealing dive into the male psyche.

The Silence (Tystnaden) A Film by Ingmar Bergman (1963)

Context has such an integral, inborn relationship to narrative that when it's stripped away, as it is largely in Ingmar Bergman's The Silence, the effect is shocking and unsettling. One of Bergman's most abstract films, The Silence is an outgrowth from no foundation, a tree without roots that springs towards the sky regardless with no base of logic to understand its tangled paths. Alienated sisters Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) await an ineffable something in the cab of a train along with Anna's young boy Johan (Jörgen Lindström), coming from nowhere in particular as stated by the film and headed to wherever the train takes them. This is not a train as a train, that practical engine for getting people and materials to and fro, but rather a train as the purest cinematic cipher of meaning. It's a nakedly psychological construct, a symbol of instability and transition, and throughout The Silence Bergman continues to fearlessly employ these abstract and ungrounded representations, beckoning more aggressively than ever for an active engagement from the viewer. The lopsided family moves from one marker of limbo to another, from a train to an iconically strange hotel somewhere in war-stricken Europe, and in doing so they set in motion Bergman's mysterious parable of miscommunication and eroticism.

The Silence doesn't have a narrative form so much as an obscure musical pattern, which at a concise 92 minutes feels like a winding slow-burn towards a pensive climax. Bergman maps out the separate journeys of the three characters in this foreign land of "Tivoli", a fictional town where the inhabitants speak an inscrutable language and go about their daily activities with mechanical precision. It's logical to assume that the journey of each character is meant to intersect in some way, at least metaphorically, but Bergman keeps them self-contained, providing no recognizable motif with which to connect them. Instead, they're arranged in counterpoint to one another in an almost free-associative manner. Johan scours the opulent halls of the hotel throughout the film with curiosity and playfulness, finding himself fooling around with a troupe of dwarfs who perform at a local cabaret and appear to be the only other occupants in the hotel. Meanwhile, sexually promiscuous Anna shows up at the same cabaret desperate for physical contact only to sit in a booth beside a couple making uninhibited love in the corner. All this time Ester, whose unspecified illness instigated the family's detour in the town, kills time alone in the hotel room masturbating, smoking cigarettes, listening to Bach, and having convulsions that occur at erratic intervals.

When the three of them share the same space, there's a tension and jealousy in the room that Bergman captures with spare brilliance. In fact, right from the beautifully evocative opening sequence on the train, Bergman highlights the unrest that radiates through the sibling relationship for the rest of the film. Out of utter silence and ennui, Ester begins coughing and struggling for air, at which point Anna ushers Johan out of the cab to tend to her sister alone. The assistance she offers is masked somewhat by Bergman's restricting perspective, a medium shot of Johan looking through the door as Anna moves about in the foreground. Immediately, Johan is established as the point of sympathy, a nexus of hope and optimism continually challenged by the combative relationship of the sisters. Upon returning to the cab, the atmosphere is chilly and uncomfortable, and the feeling of not being privy to key information clearly overwhelms him. The ensuing sexual rivalry between Ester and Anna - wherein Anna uses the sensual embrace of her own body and an openness to meaningless sexual encounters to taunt Ester's contrasting revulsion of sex - seems to have such a tacitly powerful impact on Johan that Bergman makes sure to visualize it before it even formally begins: a series of tanks drive by outside the train window, their outstretched cannons thrusting forward like an onslaught of phallic imagery.



These kinds of startling associations - between war and sex, violence and sexuality - spring up repeatedly throughout The Silence. Wandering the hallways, Johan wields a plastic cap gun tucked into his pants that he jokingly pretends to fire at a man on a ladder fixing a lightbulb just before admiring a provocative Rubens painting adorning the hotel wall. Later, Anna has carnal sex with a soldier temporarily lodging in town who doesn't even understand Anna's heated admissions about her sister due to the language barrier. In fact, the presences of war and sexuality, almost the only thematic presences in the film, weigh so heavily on The Silence that it's impossible not to think of them as informing one another. As such, the image of a hulking tank trudging through the dark streets glimpsed by Ester through the window seems to be a direct result of all the sexually charged bickering between her and Anna, a visual representation of the hostility and destructiveness of their relationship. Similarly, the shot of an emaciated horse strapped to a heavy load (perhaps of war supplies) suggests the baggage attached to the youthful, innocent Johan, the only main character here who seeks lasting gratification from this alien vacation. He even sparks up an odd and wordless camaraderie with the elderly hotel waiter who tends to Ester's illness, witnessing the man's unsettling presentation of childhood photographs, most of which consist of him standing beside a tall white coffin that he points to giddily.

Naturally, what all this sex and violence spirals towards is death, that omnipresent concern of Bergman, but here death is not predicated upon God's presence or absence. God is totally out of the picture in The Silence, which is clear enough from the title and the mere fact that the film is the final installment in Bergman's "Silence of God" trilogy. Ester's eventual death, only hinted at by the ending of the film when Anna and Johan leave her alone in the hotel, is solely a product of her confining and unearthly form of love, her inability to actually communicate with other humans in a nurturing manner, not by a refusal on God's part to soothe her crisis. This exorcism of religious inquiry from Bergman's artistic search is a vital step in his career, a move that results in one of his bleakest, most nihilistic films but doesn't prevent him from staring with utter conviction into the human soul and its curious way of forming frictions that result in war and interpersonal conflict. The Silence is a mysteriously compelling poem built from a minimal scenario whose symbolical resonances never fully conquer the film's existence as believable, intensely acted drama.

My Name is Oona (1969) A Short Film by Gunvor Nelson

Gunvor Nelson's 10-minute short My Name is Oona is an often unfairly forgotten gem of experimental cinema, cloaked to some extent by the works of the bigger names of Nelson's time. Its relatively diminutive stature aside, it's an enormously moving visual and sonic poem about identity that manages to get at the simultaneous excitement and anxiety that comes with a knowledge of one's self. Nelson obliquely posits this knowledge in the film as the sensation of gradually coming to consciousness or waking up, capturing in a stirring succession of incomplete, fragmented images her young daughter Oona's realization of her name and her physical world. Her radiant face is subjected to intense scrutiny, pausing in front of the camera to stare into the lens or glimpsed in candid moments of play, grinning hugely. Equal time is spent reveling in the natural landscape around her, such as the silvery bushes that swoop by a tracking camera or the sun-blasted field where Oona rides her horse. The visual information is delivered only in snatches, interrupted by cuts to black or swiftly excised just before the viewer has a full spatial grasp. This naturally creates an impression of ephemerality, which is representative of both the relationship between Nelson's camera and Nelson's daughter and the fleeting nature of childhood itself.

My Name is Oona is anything but an idealized, utopian vision of childhood and identity. Nelson suggests that these notions are ever-shifting from tenderness to profound apprehension, and the film's rhythm consciously triggers these emotional fluctuations. It does so, of course, through its visuals (stalling momentarily for lovely slow-motion before bursting into kinetic movement) but even more largely through its hypnotic soundtrack, by Steve Reich. Reich works with the raw material of Oona's own voice as she repetitively recites "My Name is Oona." What starts by sounding like an elementary school speech exercise gradually coalesces into a pulsing vocal drone, with Reich overlapping and warping Oona's voice to the point that it takes on a purely musical, rather than verbal, function. After the first climax of sound fades out, the film luxuriates in a minute or two of peaceful stasis while Oona intimately reads out loud the days of the week. Then Reich begins building up another cacophony of competing voices, this time incorporating an even more unsettling, robotic version of "My Name is Oona" that discordantly scrapes against the surrounding cadence, paradoxically accompanying what are likely the film's most liberating images, the silhouette of Oona and her horse galloping through the wind. The competition between these forces is intensely effective, communicating both a fond familiarity with Oona as well as a visceral discomfort. Because the film is more impactful than most feature-length works, and because few artists can demonstrate such an inseparable pairing of sound and image, My Name is Oona is a landmark in poetic cinema.

Kenneth Anger Shorts

The great, mysterious, and unexpectedly funny counter-cultural hero Kenneth Anger made a special appearance at the Harvard Film Archive a week ago to show a selection of his films from very early on in his career to his latest digital work and to answer the questions of a fanatical audience. I was only able to attend one night, in which some of his most widely known experimental shorts were screening, and I was enormously impressed by the turnout. I've never seen the Archive sell out (they actually had to turn guests away at the entrance when the place had filled up, and I was the final one granted a ticket), and I've especially never seen such a mad, starstruck audience. Normally, cinema crowds are reserved and distanced, but here it was as if a generation of fanboys and fangirls were trying and failing to restrain their giddy idolatry. The result was a theater experience with a sense of communitarian spirit and aliveness that I haven't been apart of in a while, maybe not since witnessing the dreadful Rocky Horror Picture Show cult. Why exactly does Anger, an esoteric leftist, open homosexual, and practitioner of the marginal Thelema religion, inspire such a furor when compared to other experimental film artists? Why not Michael Snow, Bruce Conner (who passed away two years ago), Su Friedrich, or Chantal Akerman? I think a lot of it has to do with the propensity for Anger's films to be considered "trip movies", or works that can pass as pure visual entertainment without necessitating intellectual engagement. These are very approachable films; they straddle so many ideas but do so in a way that invites comfort, a peripheral familiarity with the world as it's depicted.

That sense of comfort is never more pronounced than in Scorpio Rising, his seminal 28 minute short from 1964, and among the closest things to an avant-garde "hit" there has ever been (maybe Warhol's Chelsea Girls is also in contention). The film consciously reflects pop culture through the prism of its own progressive bizarreness, incorporating a deliciously sardonic soundtrack of 60's pop music (Elvis, Bobby Vinton, Ray Charles) and images of national star figures (James Dean). Mirroring this is the self-consciousness with which his central cast of characters - a leather-clad biker gang - go about their preparatory biking routines, suggesting the film is to some extent a comment on image-centric America, where people are swallowed up by images, living either victim to them or in embrace of them. The first section is an in-depth exploration of the gang leader's rituals leading up to the climactic race scene. He's the titular figure, marked by tattoos of his nickname "Scorpio", which adds a take-it-or-leave-it element of astrology to the film. Anger's elegant, roving camera fetishizes his subject, who is in turn fetishizing his own routines of buffering his bike, fixing the engine, decorating himself with his leather jacket and tight jeans, and snorting cocaine. The music comments obliquely on the action onscreen - implicating the bikes as pretty toys with Peggy March's "Wind-Up Doll, or adding an ironic layer of romanticism to the material worship with Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" - but more fundamentally it contributes another texture to the film's steadily mounted mass culture sheen, which coexists side-by-side with the sharp elements of underground, marginal society, such as motorcycle racing, homosexuality, and Nazism. It's as if to suggest there's no high and low, no popular and marginal, that these cultural distinctions are ultimately negligible.

At any rate, these seemingly disparate subtexts collide in a jarring fashion in Scorpio Rising, which features some of Anger's most aggressively associative, Eisenstinian editing. The outburst does not come however until the ending of the film, or perhaps more to the point is to say that the editing gradually accumulates speed and density as it moves forward. It often feels like Anger is building up to some grand narrative explosion, but, in spite of the visceral nature of the imagery, the effect is strictly thematic. As the bike race grows in intensity and danger, found footage (and Anger really puts the "found" in found footage, having literally stumbled upon one of the videotapes he dissects) of Biblical pilgrimages and Nazi rallies caustically intrudes on the linear flow, reminding us that leaders, like the film's protagonist, can manipulate their powerful grasp on people for both merciful and evil purposes. The lingering question, of course, as to whether Scorpio falls into the former category or the latter, is left up to the viewer who must call upon his/her own experiences in assigning meaning to the film's rich associative puzzle. Whatever the conclusion though, Anger doesn't have an influence one way or another; his gaze is deeply respectful, even glorifying, as if he's trying to incorporate himself into the gang and really understand their eccentric ways of life. Or are they really eccentric at all? Somewhere within Scorpio Rising's sprawling tapestry of visual and sonic chaos, you'll discover that such judgments are beside the point.



The second film shown was Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), a six-minute fragment of an unfinished longer work that feels like an abbreviated parody of Scorpio Rising in that it maintains focus on the culture of motor vehicle infatuation and does so with a somewhat ironic detachment. Only here, one gets the sense that the ironic detachment is the sole purpose, making it a less complex, if no less entertaining, work than Scorpio Rising. In this case, Anger trumpets the west coast hot rod lifestyle, floating over a man tending to his ridiculously souped-up, hot pink car. Eroticized images of the muscular, scantily-clad owner and the voluptuous contours of his vehicle humorously discover sexuality in both man and machine, keenly perceptive to how the obsessions of the former influence the designs of the latter. Once again utilizing pop music (The Paris Sisters' "Dream Lover") to energize and comment on the behaviors, the short particularly feels like an influence on kitschy modern-day advertisements, like the kind of all-too-common car commercials that detect this very same intimacy between owner and product. For this, Kustom Kar Kommandos is nowhere near as charming as it might have been when first released, but it remains a funny, pictorially sensuous tidbit nonetheless.



Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), the most unsettling and hallucinatory of the bunch, takes Scorpio Rising's peripheral fixations on death to a greater level of intensity, claiming various iterations of a skull as its central motif. Grotesquely lit faces, disembodied, floating skulls, and, in one instance, a skull-shaped pipe all figure into the film's densely packed visual assault, which is supposedly Anger's genuine attempt to conjure the spirit of Lucifer (the God of Light) and his demon-brother. Whatever the spiritual ambitions of the project, it pays off marvelously, because the trance-like state induced by the film feels at least hypnotic, if not otherworldly. It suffices as simple visual poetry, as the barrage of icons, symbols, occult rituals, and ghastly superimpositions - though designed in the interest of Thelema associations - tend to satisfy as pure plays of light, color, and texture, like in the work of Stan Brakhage. Regardless, most of these images cast a shocking and in some cases lasting spell, such as the repetitious use of the same man's face in close-up with a fury of ghostly symbols dancing around his eyes, or the unexpected diversion of a group of naked man sitting together in the dark, illuminated only by Anger's lurid splashes of red light. This is all facilitated by Mick Jagger's shrill but ultimately fitting electronic score, which incessantly beeps and moans behind Anger's images and dictates the pace of the editing. Whether the staggered inclusion of live Rolling Stones footage is intended as a mere thank you to the band's frontman or a necessary ingredient in the film's puzzling content is never clear (although the latter is likely given Anger's supreme high-mindedness), but it chalks on another layer of mystery to this bizarre, portentous work.



Anger's desire to evoke spirituality with his work is manifested most bluntly in Lucifer Rising (1972), the last film screened at the Archive and presumably another riff on the myth of Lucifer, this time fraught with various other Gods as if to imply a kind of universality. Unlike Invocation of my Demon Brother and his earlier Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Lucifer Rising is much tamer with its imagery in approximating the transcendence Anger is reaching for, using traditional long takes, pans, tilts, and an arcane sense of narrative rather than creating abstractions. As a result, it's often conspicuously self-important, reducible as it is to a series of long, hypnotic trudges by Anger regulars clad in baroque outfits through spaces both natural (ancient Egyptian pyramids and the surrounding desert) and indefinite (dark, shadowy hallways). Surprisingly, what has become one of Anger's defining images - that of a UFO soaring uncannily over a massive Egyptian statue - has also proven to be one of his most dated, an unsatisfying display of special effects wizardry that momentarily removes the seriousness from the film when Bobby Beausoleil's cloying, epic score isn't already doing so. While Lucifer Rising is certainly not without its pleasurable curiosities - the protracted slow-motion shot of lava spouting from a volcano that begins the film, a creepy moment of ritualistic gore - it ultimately feels like an overlong example of Anger indulging without restriction in his scattered mythical and mystical obsessions. As far as I'm concerned, it wasn't an ideal way to conclude the screenings, but it nonetheless lead the way to Anger's own fascinating insights and anecdotes regarding the films. All in all, an illuminating evening courtesy of a film artist quite unlike any other.

Repulsion (1965) A Film by Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski's Repulsion begins and ends on an image of its main character Carol's eye, unblinking and nearly abstracted by the chiaroscuro lighting. In the first instance it's Catherine Deneuve as she sits in a trance at her job as a London manicurist, and the second time it's the worn photographic version of Carol as a young girl, standing with a haunted look in the background of a family portrait. But physical proximity, the film reveals, is no measure for emotional understanding, and as a result both shots remain singularly unsettling, the camera's extreme intimacy doing nothing to illuminate the complicated inner workings of the pathological Carol, who dwells in every scene of the film without ever communicating a graspable level of psychological continuity. She's blank, inexpressive, and aloof, but, like a troubled Hitchockian heroine, she's also physically angelic, clad in a white dress and regularly seen brushing her expertly balanced blond hair. For what reason, we don't know, because she harbors an extreme aversion to the male race, silently interpreting often earnest attempts at communication as vaguely aggressive, hormonal attacks. Like in Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel (whom Deneuve would later work with on Belle du Jour, a film with thematic parallels to Repulsion), Polanski makes the eye a key image only to subvert its familiarity with startling psychosexual ambiguities elsewhere.

It takes approximately 35 minutes for Polanski's film to really click, but when it does, and the horrific madness sets in, one understands the film's sometimes ponderous, disengaging set-up as a basis of normalcy on which to shatter expectations. Polanski saves his most inventive visual and aural motifs for when Carol's sister and husband finally leave the London apartment they're sharing for a vacation in Paris, stranding Carol, much to her dismay, in the quiet, claustrophobic domestic space. Before this, the film nurtures a relative sense of realism, systematically establishing Carol's relationship, or lack thereof, with those around her. She is deeply dependent on her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), even insisting she not go to Paris, while shunning Helen's methodically macho husband Michael (Ian Hendry), who writes Carol's eccentricities off as mere social clumsiness. The persevering Colin (John Fraser) is less apathetic, as he fruitlessly tries time and time again to woo Carol with his cool charm. At work, she is emotionally absent to all but her lovely female co-worker, who elicits rare amusement out of her through the recounting of a famous scene in Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush. This unexpected moment of laughing and communion (and comparative aesthetic convention, as Polanski shoots it in a casual two-shot) throws the film off balance and posits Carol as a potential repressed homosexual.

Any psychological suspicion such as this though tends to find a paradox a scene or two down the road, collapsing into the wash of ambiguity that makes up Carol's enigma. And it is this ambivalence towards pat character explanation, this sidestepping of easily identifiable pathology (a pitfall of its frequent critical bedfellow Psycho), that allows Repulsion to remain the uncannily terrifying film it was 45 years ago. It's after greater, more universal mysteries, like that which aligns it obliquely with Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman: the speculation as to whether Carol's feeling of male sexual oppression and antagonism points to a larger truth about femininity. As Carol spends her first few nights alone, her entire world transforms rapidly into the domain of her itchiest nightmares, such as men invading her privacy and virginity in the wee hours, the barriers around her (walls, cement ground) cracking, and the nagging intrusion of the outside world, constantly attempting to make contact with her through telephones and doorbells. Polanski shoots these surrealistic sequences with claustrophobic dread, alternating between intense close-ups of Carol's distressed facial orientation and wider shots that dwarf her, usually from an oblique angle like the floor or the ceiling. He also will pan into total darkness, filling the screen with black before emerging again to another episode. This particular tactic, as well as the inclusion of a skinned rabbit carcass that Carol leaves out for fear of cooking it, seem like peculiar augurs for the macabre techniques David Lynch would use to elicit disorientation and discomfort in his Eraserhead.



The rabbit, in particular, is one of the film's most interesting perversities. There's something especially penetrating about the way Polanski scrutinizes its slimy, rotting flesh, as if he's anticipating it to all of a sudden come alive like in a monster movie. Furthermore, why Carol does not make an effort to remove it from her kitchen and living room is an even greater curiosity, because it comes to almost signify her grotesque visions, bearing the weight of her traumas. She can't seem to escape them, no matter how simple it might be to do so. This is clarified by a scene when the decapitated head of it is found, shockingly, in her purse at work. But what adds another layer of mystery to it all is how Carol in some instances almost seems to invite her hallucinations. The most unsettling moment in Repulsion reminds me of the sole occurrence of movement in La Jetee, and it comes when Carol applies lipstick before going to bed. In a close-up from above, Deneuve meets eyes with the lens, appearing to grin for just a second. It's as if she's asking Polanski to insert another one of his harrowing rape sequences, and of course, he does. Carol is simultaneously desperate from sexual repression and frightened of sexual contact, which insures she will involve herself in an ourobouric loop of horror.

Sonically, this is just as much of a teasing, dense work. One could say Polanski luxuriates in a tension between "indoor" and "outdoor" sounds, emphasizing how they are infiltrating one another as if through the cracks Carol fantasizes about. On her trance-like strolls through London, jaunty street jazz and eventually a mildly comical banjo-percussion trio permeate the soundtrack. (Later, the same trio is seen out of Carol's window.) Brash, discordant drum solos accompany her in moments of severe panic, like when Colin makes a move on her in the car and she runs inside to wash her mouth of impurity. In its quieter moments the sound of a piano player practicing scales haunts her dreams, and then, the repetition of church bells nearby becomes the only sound during the nightmarish defilement. In fact, the linking of religion and sex is a constant, if superbly understated, motif; Carol herself, in her white nightgown, resembles the group of nuns in the churchyard seen from her window, and her relentless drive for ascetic sexual purity is the exaggerated practice of a devout Christian. This makes her eventual murders all the more chilling, the notion of a woman rising to a heinous act for fear of violating her own code of purity. In the final shot, we see the younger Carol arguably staring uncomfortably at her father, perhaps suggesting a backstory of incestuous abuse that would inspire her abysmal fear of men, but frankly this inquiry suffocates the tensions the film expertly creates, lumping it all into a blunt case study. Carol's tale acquires an iconic weight even as it elides easy interpretation, making Repulsion a disquieting odyssey of a mind out of sync with itself.