The Death of Louis XIV (2016) A Film by Albert Serra

"In prior efforts, Serra has shown a penchant for degrading his iconic subjects and passing the result off as humanizing historical realism—dwelling on Casanova as he admires his own excrement or shovels heaps of animal meat in his face, for instance. That tendency isn't fully abolished in The Death of Louis XIV, but it's tamed. The emphasis is where it should be—which is to say, not on the Sun King's increasingly black, gangrenous left leg, but on the leader's face, and the faces of those around him, as he sluggishly succumbs to his undoing. The humanity of the situation, rather than the grotesquery, is Serra's focus here, which is already a promising recalibration of his sensibility."

Review continues at Slant.

Zurich Film Festival

"It's generally agreed upon that one should allow themselves a few hours of decompression and acclimation when first landing in a faraway city, but as I drowsily touched down for the 12th annual Zurich Film Festival after an arduous 10-hour flight, time was not on my side, so I rushed instead to a film that captures something ineffable about the frazzled traveler's mindset. Gabe Klinger's Porto, my first taste of the festival at an evening showing, is about bemusedly roaming in half-light through a foreign city while periodically drifting in and out of recollections of a potent recent relationship gone sour."

I attended the Zurich Film Festival and covered it across two dispatches for the House Next Door.

Dispatch #1: On Porto, La Reconquista, Lady Macbeth, and Two Lottery Tickets
Dispatch #2: On Vanatoare, Europe, She Loves, Einfach Leben, Sketches of Lou, The Eremites, Misericorde, El Invierno

Story of My Death (2014) A Film by Albert Serra

"Most damningly for a film so clearly in pursuit of dreamlike illogic, Serra fails wholly as an image-maker. That cinematographer Jimmy Gimferrer's work in Story of My Death (principal photography apparently yielded over 400 hours of semi-improvised footage) has been speciously compared to Caravaggio's canvases is an insult to Caravaggio. Allegedly framed in 4:3 but re-sized for widescreen in post-production and bearing all the compositional inelegance that such an approach would imply, the film looks to have only incorporated the bare minimum of artificial lighting, in many cases using none at all—an admirable gamble when you have a genuine wizard like Emmanuel Lubezki on your team, but a foolhardy and arbitrary aesthetic handicap in this case." Full review here.

The Artist and the Model (2012) A Film by Fernando Trueba

Fernando Trueba's (or, as I argue in my review, Daniel Vilar's) The Artist and the Model, for In Review Online.

The Great Madcap (1949) A Film by Luis Buñuel

When Ramiro (Fernando Soler), the rich drunkard in Luis Buñuel's The Great Madcap, wakes up from an intoxicated stupor to find himself dressed in rags and surrounded by dusty, cement walls, he resembles Lon Chaney Jr. awaking to the shock of misplaced hair and fangs in The Wolf Man, or Bela Lugosi finding much to his dismay that a scientific experiment has given him thick black fur in The Ape Man, or any other B-horror character emerging in unexpected new form after a night's sleep. The only difference is that it's not hideous physical deformities that cause Ramiro's horror and disgust but rather a sudden shift in material wealth and social class, as if he had taken one wrong turn and wound up in the slums indefinitely. In the context of the film, it turns out his experience of poverty is only fleeting; he eventually discovers that his family, fearing that he might descend into alcoholic madness, has merely played a prank on him to inject some much needed doses of humility (their wanton gamesmanship is no less a trivialization of the poor). But like many of the Spanish director's bold conceits, this one has an inherently charged political connotation: the privileged bourgeoisie always possess a knee-jerk smugness towards the lower rungs in the social system, as well as a denial of the existence of economic hardship so powerful that issues of poverty might as well be a surreal fabrication.

One imagines this disorientation to have been something like the feeling Buñuel himself had when suddenly forced in the midst of public backlash following L'âge d'or to stop making features, and subsequently when he re-emerged nearly twenty years later to begin working on commercial Mexican fare. The Great Madcap is the second of these efforts (following the light musical Gran Casino) and the first to point convincingly towards Buñuel's future, even if it's a somewhat rigid and lopsided screwball comedy, a film with only fractions of the satiric bile and mad logic he dropped in L'âge d'or and would eventually unload later in his career. Hints of these tendencies are most apparent in the film's absurdly broad setup, which begins with Ramiro getting bailed out of jail and segues into his reintegration with his ungrateful family. No one in the family - not Ramiro's marriage-obsessed daughter Virginia (Rosario Granados), his spoiled son Eduardo (Gustavo Rojo), or his two scheming, deadbeat brothers Gregorio (Francisco Jambrina) and Ladislao (Andrés Soler) - has fully absorbed the impact of the recent death of Ramiro's wife, even as it's launched Ramiro himself into an alcoholic fit. They continue to shamelessly feed off of their father's wealth and resources.



During these opening scenes that establish the family and their regular routine of debauchery, Buñuel abandons subtlety in favor of wide strokes at upper-class complacency. Vignettes around the mansion include the family butler Juan justifying the theft of his Ramiro's cigars by claiming that he feared they would dry up, Eduardo pining for a new luxury car after supposedly destroying his previous one, and Ramiro fielding various requests for money. At work, Ramiro has taken to drinking in an attempt to forget his grief and has received blunt criticism from his peers for it, but his economic and professional status has allowed him to indulge regardless. In this early stage of the film, everything takes place indoors on boxy, conspicuously cheap sets, a logistical necessity that helps to emphasize the sense that the accoutrements of a wealthy lifestyle are ultimately synthetic, superficial, and fleeting; stripped suddenly of their luxuries, the family would resemble ducks with their heads cut off, totally ignorant of how to exist organically in the exterior world amongst other people. In one hilarious wide shot, Buñuel frames Ramiro and his well-dressed friends stumbling drunkenly to sappy orchestral music, the idea being that even within their familiar surroundings, they're already clueless.

The family's subsequent prank on Ramiro is therefore tinged with devilish irony, ostensibly designed to teach the patriarch human values that they themselves lack. Without the knowledge the family possesses that all will naturally return to "normal," Ramiro, after shaking off his dreamlike shock, inevitably descends into depression and makes a ridiculously botched attempt at suicide. Aiming to jump off the roof of a building in a poor district of Mexico City, he only falls a few feet before being braced by a bit of scaffolding and rescued by a construction worker named Pablo (Rubén Rojo) who insists that if he were to hit the ground from such a height it would only result in a life in a wheelchair that would arguably be worse than death. That Ramiro falls for Pablo's heroic rescue disguised as an obvious lie does little to bolster his appreciation of life and love though; soon after, when he overhears a conversation about the prank and fumes at his family's insensitivity, he responds by launching a trick of his own in which he purports to have actually lost his fortune, meanwhile continuing to live in his mansion and overseeing his family's newfound poverty. It's a mean-spirited turn of fate engineered by Ramiro that he passes off as his own attempt to teach his family members a sense of dignity and humility; the difference is that they gradually come to embrace their modest means of living, finding small sources of success and happiness.



Despite the ludicrous nature of these twists and turns, there's a fundamentally simple-minded core to The Great Madcap, an element of moralistic pandering inherent in its script that belies even Buñuel's subtle suggestions that the problems with humanity are too broad and diffuse to be reduced to class distinctions (after all, nothing proves capable of shaking the family's place in the upper-class, but their pettiness largely remains even after some breakthroughs). Buñuel sees the major issues in the film's ensemble of characters to be an absence of love and appreciation towards others and a blindness towards diversity, issues too deep-seated to be cured by loopy plot devices, but the film nevertheless implies that Ramiro's family has been taught a lesson through their involuntary hardship. Virginia, initially set upon a marriage to the wealthy Alfredo (Luis Alcoriza), changes her mind when confronted with her love for Pablo, a romance that transforms her initially narrow worldview. Pablo's near-rejection of Virginia on account of his discovery that she is in fact rich adds a blip in the streamlined nature of the film's moral, offering a lower-class attitude nearly as reductive as that of the financial elite, but it's treated merely as a momentary reaction to shock rather than a bottomless aversion to a group of people and therefore doesn't signal as the locus of Buñuel's energy in quite the same way that his skewering of privilege does. For the most part, there's a black and white dichotomy at the heart of the film that is occasionally saved by the sheer hilarity of Buñuel's investment, but otherwise threatens to reduce the film to a blunt parable.

If the script's spiral into easy moralizing is its greatest flaw, Buñuel's stiff visual style often fails to shift the attention. Some of Buñuel's stylistic tics - his method of starting a scene on a minor detail before dollying back to reveal the entire space, his habit of bunching bodies together in comical medium shot - emerge in striking ways, usually to underline the way that objects have defined the wealthy lifestyle or to emphasize the smallness and dysfunctional nature of the characters, but the film's default mode is unimaginative wide shots that exist seemingly for no other aesthetic reason than to capture all of the often busy staging in one fell swoop. (An early instance of effective camera movement and cross-cutting follows Ramiro as he makes a mess out of his daughter's wedding recital, and it's predictably one of the most dynamic scenes in the film.) But directors like Buñuel tend to couple weak decisions with convincing ones, and as such, The Great Madcap's combination of rigid studio setups and freer on-location sequences anticipating Los Olvidados' primal vérité offers a fascinating counterpoint to the more schematic choices. When we see children run through the background of a frame, it alone sends a ripple of anarchist energy through this otherwise commercially contained, if frequently funny, product.

The Strange Case of Angelica (2010) A Film by Manoel de Oliveira

In the pivotal scene of Manoel de Oliveira's meditative, clear-eyed The Strange Case of Angelica, a curious detail emerges. A rural village's only photographer, Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), is hired to snap a posthumous photo of the recently deceased Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) in her family's posh, aristocratic hill-top hotel. Much of the photographic act is revealed in the same long shot. At first properly exposed (and indeed relatively dim), the image's highlights are blown out when Isaac requests a new, brighter bulb as a replacement in the overhead lamp hanging above Angelica's festooned corpse. The details in the lamp's cover are suddenly rendered indistinguishable, and parts of Isaac's face become a wash of white. Oliveira, the oldest working filmmaker at 103 years of age, surely possesses the chops to guard against such a "blemish," but he elects not to. In doing so, he problematizes the very nature of image production, calling attention to the materiality of the medium. It's only the first step in an elegant, compact metaphor for cinema itself, for what compels its making and what encourages our spectatorship.

Sure enough, this subtle manipulation of light is only of peripheral importance in the scene; rarely in The Strange Case of Angelica are there not multiple layers of meaning operating at once. More bluntly, the scene's purpose is to incite the conflict weighing on Isaac's psyche throughout the film. Upon peering in his camera's viewfinder, Angelica's eyes open and she bears a wide grin, shocking the already unsettled photographer. It's the beginning of a private pact between the ghostly Angelica and the weary, probing Isaac, which ultimately takes the two of them floating high above the village at night as Méliès-like specters, their bodies seemingly eternally embraced before Isaac is thrust abrasively out of the realm of dreams. Ayala, who enacted a familiar dance of unintentional playfulness and seduction in the similarly backward-and-forward-thinking In the City of Sylvia, taunts Isaac in both his waking and sleeping states, coming alive in his printed photographs and arriving as a glowing black-and-white phantom on his balcony. Often times it is to the unawares of Isaac, who, like a wide-eyed schoolboy, finds his lover disappearing every time he turns around sensing her presence. He is trying to capture that which is not there, that which is an illusion.

Of course, such is the apparatus of filmmaking, wherein celluloid presents images of a lost moment, forever consigned only to the physical medium. (Fittingly, Oliveira lingers on "empty" frames for some time after narrative action within those frames has ceased, quietly combating pictorial transience, the dominant mode in the modern world.) The film invokes a clear sense of Isaac's lineage: a dreamer, a poet, a thinker, a romantic, an introvert, an outcast, a cultural connoisseur, a revolutionary - in effect, a surrogate of the early film director. As such, he is prone to the two fundamental cinematic impulses: that of George Méliès, the grasp for the fantastical and unobservable, and the Lumière brothers, the realist urge. Alongside his compulsion towards Angelica, Isaac is indescribably drawn to taking photos of laborers in the hills, obsessively depicting their pickaxes pummeling into the Earth. Later, he begins following the gyrating gears of a tractor sifting through dirt, snapping as many shots as possible. Glancing over these and other images draped across a string beside his balcony, the suggestion comes gently to the fore: he has created movement.



Oliveira, on the other hand, humbly rejects camera movement for the vast majority of the film, preferring to keep his camera - like the Lumière's - a stationary observer. There is supreme formal precision to the film, a fixed understanding of the behavioral patterns within a single rectangular room that is reflected in nearly symmetrical compositions that allow space for multiple planes of action to occur in one shot. The Strange Case of Angelica, however, is not exactly a "room film" in the same way that a Roy Andersson or an Akerman is a room film; Oliveira has constructed a fully realized, hermetically sealed fable world with a firm sense of built-in rhythms and patterns. The film's repetitive skyline cutaways have a storybook quality to them, containing the action within a single community and also reinforcing a temporal linearity. It's fitting that the film concludes on the shot of a woman closing up the boards on a window until the screen goes black, an image that is instantly reminiscent of Satantango. Like Tarr, Oliveira is interested in maintaining a communal narrative and entertaining the many digressions it brings, and when that narrative reaches a conclusion there's no more space for it to live beyond the cinema. Allowing it to exist would mean suggesting a continuity in the cinematic space Oliveira has built, which runs counter to his intentions. Instead, he finds this world, drops in on it in the middle of the night and leaves with it faded to black, preserving its memory.

The Strange Case of Angelica is an argument for the timelessness of images, for the fact that pictures, particularly moving ones, can reflect an immortality that causes the mortal to pine in hopelessness. There are gentle, multifaceted dichotomies at the center of the film - mortality and immortality, life and death, realism and surrealism, past and present - that Oliveira wisely navigates, finally coming to the conclusion that they are irresolvable, that there is no ideal course of action, only an endless tug-of-war between two respective poles. In an act of pure selfishness that is the sum of all those ruminative stares off camera and into the Great Beyond, Isaac eventually implodes with consuming desire for Angelica and commits some unfussy form of suicide, running to the hillside and collapsing before a procession of chanting children. Back in his room under the detached care of a village doctor, Isaac finally succumbs to death in one of Oliveira's most elaborately choreographed, yet entirely modest, long takes. His concerned landlady enters the room, sighing in quiet despair and acknowledging the inevitability. Her sigh is quite like that of the filmmaker, who at such an old age presents with utter clarity a simultaneous fear and embrace of the void, which of course is entangled (as with all great directors) with an awareness of the enduring power of love.

In the City of Sylvia (2009) A Film by Jose Luis Guerin

Consisting of a man, an audience surrogate, sifting through beautiful French passersby on a lazy summer afternoon in Strasbourg, Jose Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia is a heterosexual male fantasy executed with the patience and precision of a private investigator's video tapes. I'm being tongue-in-cheek, of course, because the film doesn't possess the kind of perversion of the male gaze that such a description would suggest. What is does do is accurately convey the loneliness and romantic desire of an adrift artist seeking companionship in a foreign city, an act of voyeurism that gently comes to mirror the filmmaker's search for a subject, as well as the viewer's search for meaning within an onslaught of daily visual and sonic stimuli. It's about an unnamed man (Xavier Lafitte) silently probing the female public for a so-called Sylvia, a woman from 6 years prior that he had a memorable night with at a bar called Les Aviateurs, but the tip-off to this plot detail - ultimately the entirety of the film's narrative content - is not revealed until more than halfway through. So until this realization, the man's pursuit is shapeless and abstract, the only proof that he's looking for anything at all being the numerous sketches of slightly varying women that he keeps referring to in his notepad.

Therefore, divorced from defined narrative purpose, In the City of Sylvia returns the cinema to its earliest practice of unmitigated observation, in the process drawing attention to how much our quotidian lives are spent merely watching life unfold around us. The film is broken up into two major set pieces bookended by shorter scenes of the protagonist's untethered contemplation, the first of which is a prolonged, deceptively simple episode of the man's perusal of various women at an outdoor cafe we later learn is associated with the Drama Conservatory, where Sylvia was allegedly studying. Guerin resists the urge to impose much action upon the nearly thirty minute sequence, instead simply watching the wordless ping-pong of glances between cafe patrons. Lafitte, with his notepad and his beer, is patiently perusing the crowd, staring at the unself-conscious expressions of women without the faintest hint of sexual predation. Rather, with the help of his sketches, he's trying to put form to an amorphous memory. Guerin compensates for the film's bland technical craftmanship (it's as if a bounce card was the only tool for illumination, resulting in a lot of flatly lit faces) with placid and subtly tricky compositions that play with ghostly juxtapositions of foreground and background, placing heads in compositional relationship to one another despite their differing depths in the frame. The effect is a fragmented facial collage, suitable to the uncertain recollections of Latiffe's hopeless romantic.

Finally, after changing seats to get a new angle, he sets his sights on a slender brunette (Pilar López de Ayala) and takes it upon himself to follow her throughout the city, attempting to decide with some certainty whether or not she's Sylvia. The ensuing chase sequence plays like what Before Sunset would have become had Ethan Hawke been too afraid to approach Julie Delpy, and other times, particularly when Guerin indulges a delicate undertow of physical comedy (the man's compulsive spilling of drinks, his bumping into various objects), like the time-stretching of a Jacque Tati gag about the confusion and isolation of the contemporary urban labyrinth. (Guerin finds enjoyment in the multilayered wide shot made possible by the cobblestone back alleys of Strasbourg, transforming Latiffe into a curious lab rat with a perpetually shifting end goal.) But of even greater interest is the fact that the whole sequence - and much of the film, for that matter - is without dialogue and told in the primal visual language of silent cinema, which makes it tempting to view it as the modern update to F.W. Murnau's similar boy-chasing-girl work, Sunrise. Both films include a bittersweet scene on a moving tram (here, it's Latiffe's eventual meeting and hesitant exchange with Ayala), and both use their visual repertoire to evoke both the subjectivity of their central characters and the occasional omniscient perspective, a mysterious third person that can naturally be linked to the audience.



Guerin seems to have deliberately fashioned his film in such an open-ended manner so as to invite these decade-spanning cinematic associations. Because after all, In the City of Sylvia proves to be in its own quietly self-referential way about the experience of watching and making movies. Latiffe, suggesting an androgynous Renaissance painter with his flowing long hair, skinny mustache, and loose, unbuttoned long-sleeve shirt, compiles the various physical features of the women around him into his notepad, hoping to concretize the vague impressions in his mind, much like the slow process of mental images into scripts and ultimately cinematic images. Moreover, it gradually becomes clear that what he's searching for is not necessarily The Sylvia (although it does begin that way), but rather The One; this is a sneaky stand-in for our own goal-aspiration processes, which often start specific and wind up broad and redefined. Latiffe approaches Ayala and discovers not only that she is not Sylvia, but also that she has been aware of his following her for quite some time. He instinctively feels awful and lets his feelings of shame and regret overshadow any attempt to get to know this women who he has clearly been infatuated with regardless of her identity.

Ayala's character slips out of the back of the frame when she exits the tram in a wide shot that Guerin returns to two more times and uses as his final image, converting it now into a metaphor for missed opportunities. But it remains ambiguous as to whether or not Ayala makes a presence in the film again. In one of Guerin's several compositions to make stunning use of reflections and multiple planes, Ayala shows up unexpectedly as a specter laid across the reflective glass of a moving tram seen from Latiffe's perspective, coexisting with the (real or imagined) bodies of various other women boarding the tram or in the nearby area. Is she really there waiting to get onto the tram, or has the romantic metropolis shattered itself into a space of both facts and illusions? Latiffe's object of desire has expanded, fragmented, and reshaped itself, and the city that was once a habitat for one Sylvia has become a place bearing countless Sylvia's, countless opportunities for romantic involvement. He doesn't realize this instantly, or else his enigmatic hookup with a random girl from the bar - shot by Guerin in the tantalizing low light of his hotel room - wouldn't have been so unfulfilling, but perhaps by the end of the film he has come to terms with the absurdity of his quest. If not, he can only get as far as his notepad, nowhere near the heights reached by Guerin's seemingly slight film.

Cria Cuervos... (1976) A Film by Carlos Saura

Ana Torrent and landscapes. These seem like two surefire ingredients for majestic pictorial beauty. I remember being instantly drawn to Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) on the strength of its eerie DVD cover image alone: the haunted young actress frozen in the middle of a train track extending into the horizon line, challenging the camera with her probing, thousand-mile stare. An elegiac, unusual film in its own right to be sure, but what I remember most vividly from it are the expressive panoramas of Torrent in the vast landscapes of Spain, simply existing in that inherently intense, hypnotizing way of hers. My fascination led me to Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos..., one of the most alarmingly exquisite films I've seen a long time (on the basis of how little I knew about it going in and how much I was moved coming out), one in which Torrent thoroughly ups the ante. Released three years after Spirit of the Beehive and only marking her second feature role, the film, thin on narrative details and thick on symbolism and metaphysics, is an elegy to a missed childhood, a deep-focus snapshot of a frail family tree, an angry critique of a Fascist-controlled nation, and a hopeful search for new beginnings. Its nucleus is an opulent Victorian mansion in Madrid crammed within layers of boisterous traffic and cluttered modernization, home to three young sisters living with their strict aunt and mute grandmother, a succinct juxtaposition of the old and the new, the past and the uncertain future.

The girls are on vacation, a time to play, to let thoughts wander, to get lost in fantasies, memories, and dreams, and the film itself follows suit. After a touching montage of family pictures set to a gorgeous Federico Mompou piano piece that opens the film, Saura gets right into his deft interplay of past, present, illusion, and projection. Tiptoeing down the stairs in a composition reminiscent of German Expressionism, the middle child Ana (Torrent) wanders over towards a lurid bit of middle-class melodrama where mysterious dialogue snippets protrude from behind closed doors. One gets the sense that Ana has a hunch about what they are discussing, who "they" are, and why they are making a racket in the middle of the night, but Saura leaves the audience in the dark. A light turns on in the room, emanating from the crack in the door, and a woman subsequently flees from the room in a hurry, her bra conspicuous from behind rumpled clothing. Ana and the woman make fleeting eye contact. After she leaves the house, Ana enters the room and removes an empty glass of milk from the bedside table, proceeding to wash it in the kitchen. Out of the back corner of the frame, Ana's mother (Geraldine Chaplin) casually approaches her, inquiring about why she is awake so late and then sending her off to bed. In this calmly dreamy opening sequence, Saura has subtly embedded three motifs that will be repeated throughout the film, and the most enticing part is how he leaves the notion of actuality dangling in the air. His images hit with such a visceral impact that their logical dividends can only be sorted out gradually as the film progresses.

Indeed, in a manner even more forward and direct than in Tarkovsky's Mirror, a film which shares much with Cria Cuervos, Saura lets family history dissolve along with the vagaries of time and space. Though his editing appears to induce linearity, albeit with a somewhat suggestive and uncanny chronology, the sequences in Cria Cuervos - the aforementioned included - often seamlessly blend reality with distortions of it as filtered through the distressed mind of the dark-eyed protagonist. For instance, Chaplin's offhand entrance into the kitchen belies the fact, learned only minutes later, that she is actually a ghost. The tomfoolery occurring in the closed room was actually the scene of Ana's father's death, which Ana is convinced was a product of her poisoning his milk. He, Anselmo (Héctor Alterio), was a military officer and a traitorous husband responsible for the figurative "sickness" that indirectly claimed his wife's life. This tension is explored most evocatively in a marvelous sequence late in the film that begins with the mother playing piano to Ana to put her to sleep (that Mompou again), and culminates with her sobbing in front of her husband in the entryway of their home about his insincerity and its psychological effects. Curiously, Saura shatters the perception of temporal fluidity when Ana transitions from being the flesh and bones of the scene to being the omniscient, ghostly observer, watching her deceased parents bickering across a rigid wall of time just as her mother intruded gracefully on the present moments before.



What makes Cria Cuervos so endlessly fascinating and dreamy is the fact that Saura never once makes an attempt to maintain any sort of prolonged plane of reality. The world is ever susceptible to ghosts of the past and ghosts of the present, anything warped by young Ana's morbid, heartbroken perspective. In her dreams, we witness a tender, almost erotic relationship between her and her mother, conjured as a delicate and affectionate woman whose pointy bone structure and frail features suggest years of problematic living. In one of the film's more Bergmanesque touches, Chaplin addresses the camera directly as Ana's adult incarnation, waxing about the false promise of a wondrous childhood and the many psychological wars she battled. Saura introduces this with an elegant camera move from Ana's closeup to Chaplin's embodiment, something which is instantly perceived as mother and daughter, but which soon proves to be yet another instance of various realities coexisting. Even more so, it forwardly proposes that the pains of one generation are transmitted to the next, creating perhaps an ourobouric loop of trauma. Incidentally, this deeply personal notion is inseparably linked to the political undertones nestled into the film. Cria Cuervos was produced and released at the time of General Franco's passing, marking an end to a sustained period of political oppression in Spain and the inauguration of democracy. But just as the tortured memory of her conniving military father haunts Ana and is the source of her desire to bring death upon those she dislikes (late in the film, she tries to poison her Aunt Paulina (Mónica Randall)), there is no promise of the dictatorial, fascistic impulses of the past not spilling over into the new Spain.

The film makes something of an ambiguous leap of faith in its closing minutes though. Ana wakes up to find that her attempted murder of Aunt Paulina was unsuccessful. Her sister wakes up in the throes of a violent, sadistic dream involving her parents right before she was killed. And vitally, vacation has ended, and school is back in session. The subsequent images of hordes of children hurrying into the school buildings is indicative of both restless energy and will to learn and a profound ambivalence. Is their mass education promising for the future of Spain or is it ill-fated, destined to exist under the influence of an older generation with older values? If the other events in the family household suggest averted violence and second chances, can the nation be spared the same opportunity? All of this is underlined further by the presence of the chirpy pop song by Jeanette that is repeated throughout the film, the song that Ana and her sisters improvisationally waltz to earlier on. While the jaunty rhythm and up-to-date instrumentation are typical of a modern sensibility, Jeanette's wistful lyrics about missed opportunities and a lost past do not sound so optimistic. This tantalizing irresoluteness is central to the success of Cria Cuervos, a magical film that tries desperately to celebrate the small pleasures of life but continually mines the troubling truths in the shadowy past.

Age of Gold (L'âge d'or) A Film by Luis Buñuel (1930)

Age of Gold is an unparalleled early example of surrealist filmmaking, and indeed a landmark of cinema in general, in which Luis Buñuel cracked open his thematic toolbox in as over-the-top a manner as possible. An Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou) - his previous collaboration with surrealist painter Salvador Dali - was technically his first film (albeit with a short running time at 16 minutes), but whereas that film favored the poetics of irrationality, Age of Gold follows a thin storyline and makes several anarchic statements that were wholly absent from the former. One can actually grasp at the several meanings apparent in any given image from the film and tie them together as one coherent, if broad, commentary, as was not the case in the general euphoria of Un Chien Andalou's images, which mainly arose out of Dali and Buñuel's dreams and contained only scant, inconsequential meanings. The film is essentially the first true Buñuel film, less a product of Dali's uncompromising imagination and more of Buñuel's own sensibility, indicated by Buñuel's declaration that Dali only imagined a very small portion of the scenes in Age of Gold.

The society that Buñuel is targeting with the film is metaphorically evoked in the opening scenes which demonstrate the lives of scorpions with an instructive voice-over. Scorpions are creatures that smugly refuse the company of others during solitude, devour creatures lower than them with nonchalance, and appear genuinely intimidating. High society in Buñuel's France does not stray far from these oppressive traits. The film's protagonist, a mustachioed man with a magnetic attraction towards the glistening daughter of a clergyman, is perpetually a victim of this society, caught first in a mud bath making love to her beside religious furor led by the Majorcans, a symbol of the dominating upper class (so dominating in fact that before this, a troupe of bandits fell defeated simply for deciding to approach and attack them). He also is dragged ruthlessly around urban France by two authorities, during which he imagines the woman's advertised fashion poses as desirous sexual behavior, until he finally slips free, booting a blind man in the chest while he's at it.

In doing so, Buñuel greets for the first time his distinguished theme of desire, although it is understandably portrayed most frankly here. Once the hero finds his way into the bourgeois gathering that makes up for nearly three quarters of the film, he at last meets back up with his lover only to find his erotic appetite not entirely satisfied; an obligation and the mounting pressure of the elite sitting nearby listening to a classical music performance force him to abandon his female (leaving her to her own devices sucking sensually on the toe of a garden statue) and explode in rage in an upper story room (firing inanimate objects out the window). The film concludes with perhaps its most controversial stretch: a demented staging of "120 Days of Sodom" which features a Christ-like figure surfacing from an orgy to the repetitive clamor of the drums of Calanda. Of course there are times when Buñuel's images simply emerge out of an interest in the absurd and shocking, for instance the appearance of a cow seated like a pet atop the object of desire's bed. Moreover, this gives the film its surrealist badge, and it works splendidly as a trip through the uninhibited subconscious. It's enough of an accomplishment that Buñuel had the audacity to kick down the door to what is socially, politically, and religiously acceptable and cause public outrage in response.