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

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

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

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

Wendy and Lucy (2008) A Film by Kelly Reichardt

Often times there are stories that may crop up invariably for years, played out with minor differences in the films they inhabit. This works to recontextualize these snapshots to suit the times. Kelly Reichardt's third feature, Wendy and Lucy, is shimmering proof of this fact. Most specifically, cinema fans will be able to recognize the film's firm parallelism with Vittorio De Sica's Italian neorealist classic, Umberto D.. Wendy, standing in for De Sica's titular character, is an early twentysomething on a cross-country trip to Alaska in search of employment. Along with her is her affable dog Lucy, the only companion she seems truly connected to in her travels, similar to the way Umberto clung tightly to his delightful dog Flike. Wendy's car breaks down in Oregon, sending her through a succession of unfortunate occurrences that are propounded by her meager savings, namely the loss of Lucy who was tied up outside a supermarket when she was caught shoplifting. She spends the film searching for Lucy while trying to get her car fixed by the local mechanic.

The film is built around a largely introspective, first-person structure; Wendy's experiences are the camera's limelight, with the background almost always appearing out of focus unless resting on the Oregon residents she meets. She is an audience surrogate seeing her remote surroundings for the first time as we are. The only sincere help she receives comes from a down-and-out Walgreen's security guard who is first seen ushering her car out of the parking lot after Wendy illegally slept there for the night. Even then, what financial help he can offer is especially limited.

Wendy and Lucy continues Kelly Reichardt's restrained, un-preachy brand of unmistakably American filmmaking. 2006's Old Joy was a lyrical look at two old world liberals living under the Bush administration who had lost their ability to express emotions, and were also rather needy. Reichardt heads further into the troubling issue of poverty in recession-era America with Wendy, a desperate character whom Michelle Williams confidently plays with no-bullshit despondency. This time around the style is pointedly harsher and more matter-of-fact, with Reichardt eschewing music entirely (albeit in Old Joy she remained a minimalist in terms of the addition of music, setting only scenery-driven moments to Yo La Tengo's gorgeous guitar washes).

Reichardt sticks admirably to the most traditional methods of storytelling; there is not a single wasted moment as she places us durably at Williams' side throughout the film. Wendy's motivations are entirely comprehensible, whether she's frighteningly shuffling down the smalltown streets at night via the cloaked cuts of a succession of fluid tracking shots or walking out of the grocery store with unpurchased dog food, an act that was very much the instigator for her predicament. Reichardt's film is deliberately paced but always engaging, troubling but never heavy-handedly tragic, hopeless but always uplifted by Williams' staggering performance. Wendy and Lucy makes another sturdy case for Reichardt as one of America's most modest up-and-coming poets, an uncommon director who always manages to avoid didacticism in communicating a vividly pressing point. Very much like De Sica.

Silent Light (Stellet Licht) A Film by Carlos Reygades (2008)

Silent Light starts and ends with a sunrise and sunset, a monumentally simple concept that surprisingly has never once, to my knowledge, been exercised in a film. The two shots are undeniably sublime, protracted glances at the beauty of our world, and create something akin to the curtains opening and closing in the theater, a mere blink of the world's eye that exposes an age-old tale underneath it in the Mennonite community the film is set in. Director Carlos Reygades is unafraid to allow something so ordinary to grace the screen for an extended period of time, and in this refusal, demands the hushed attention such a cosmic act of nature deserves. His camera begins pirouetting through the starry night sky, eventually spiraling towards the ground and finishing with a languorous dolly in between two silhouetted trees, revealing the expansive sky as a slowly evolving amalgam of vibrant red and yellow paint. Accompanying it is the amplified buzzing of cicada bugs and the soft purr of the dawn wind. The shot's coda is essentially a reversal of the first one, and it is one of the most satisfying, visually orgasmic finales a film can offer, an aurora-borealis-like sight that accounts for one of the finest moments in contemporary cinema. These two shots contain enough wonder for an entire film, and I would have called it a masterpiece had they been the only components of Silent Light. The bleak moral play that exists within the remainder is, in this line of sight, somewhat of an addendum, enough to make a strong piece of pure cinema to be sure, even improved by the confounding impression that the opening leaves over, but it can be tedious.

The film chronicles an austerely, but not explicitly, religious man named Johan who is juggling two women in his life, a rather surprising fact considering the rigidity of the community. The Mennonites are settled in the Northern tip of Mexico, speak a German dialect called Plautdietsch, and adhere to liturgical activities in their withdrawn village, a place where the sounds of spoons upon bowls seem to reverberate for miles. Following the opening sequence, we see a silent family in prayer before a table of food and only hear the loud ticking of a clock in the background, which is trailed by a shot of a shiny disc on the clock that reflects the whole family. Immediately, Reygades also presents the village as a place where the slog of time is far more relevant to life, a characteristic that it shared with its festival companion, Times and Winds; each second that clicks by, it seems that emotions are magnified. Representing Johan's past lover but established partner is his wife Esther, a somber woman who cares for the pair's children and is well aware of Johan's admitted adultery with Marianne, another woman in the community with some physical similarities who genuinely feels bad for Esther. Johan feels some grief over his crisis, evidenced by the number of times Reygades patiently observes his weeping, but also believes that God has chosen a path for him to be with Marianne. He clearly still harbors much love for Esther, but his physical and emotional desire for Marianne is overwhelming, a notion he makes perfectly clear to his preacher father. Johan's struggle is universal - the difficulty to resolve one's polarized romantic feelings - but his method of dealing with it is certainly unusual. Esther makes her despair known in the climactic scene (staged traditionally in accordance with climate), first accusing Marianne of being a "damn whore" and then lamenting the past when her relationship with Johan was functional. The love triangle is an extremely unconventional one, with Marianne in complete understanding of Esther's turmoil, Johan unfazed by his dishonorable acts, and Esther repressive with her disapproval.



Carlos Reygades is a director whose first two features, Japón and Battle in Heaven, were both stylistic originals but nonetheless did little to foreshadow the ascetic, contemplative tone of Silent Light. The film's visual palette is representative of both Tarkovsky and, more presently, Lisandro Alonso. Each time Reygades establishes a scene with a wide shot, that wide shot lasts much longer than one might expect, and eventually, after tracking into the scene creepily, it becomes the shot for the entire scene. This is most mysteriously displayed when Johan visits a friend at his garage and the interior is pitch black until the camera enters completely. Also, the camera will perform the equivalent of Ozu's "pillow shots", only for Reygades, they frequently come during the middle of a scene. For example, when Johan and Esther are driving through inundant rain, the camera cuts away from their conversation inside the car - which always includes only one of them in the frame at once to suggest their spiritual disconnection - to follow on the dirt road at a distance before returning. There are also observational pauses in the story when we just view the family bathing outdoors or Esther driving a tractor through the wheat fields. For the first thirty minutes or so, this rhythm is tiring, but once Johan's crisis is learned, the film accumulates herculean force. In many ways, Silent Light is a riff on Dreyer's Ordet, except without such a blatant fixation on the religious strain. This is most evident in an exactly congruent denouement that acts as somewhat of a resolution to Johan's crisis and a justification of Marianne's earlier, and likely true, statement: "Peace is stronger than love." Whether this is an "homage" to Dreyer or a ripoff is in question, because there is a sense that Reygades uses the scene in the same affirming manner. Despite this though, the scene's power within the film is unquestionable, as are the other 145 minutes of elemental, authentic filmmaking. Silent Light is an assured film that uses the beautiful perplexity of nature to compliment and bookend the fragile frameworks of love and faith.

Badlands (1973) A Film by Terrence Malick

Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) is one of the most enigmatic Western rebels in the history of American cinema. The same can be said about his naive partner Holly (Sissy Spacek). Terrence Malick's debut is a strange, impressive film that, despite focusing all of its screen time on a young couple on a killing spree in the Midwest, is something of an anti-character study. Malick does not plumb the psychology of his characters by providing back stories, details of their experiences, or their relation to others and their society. Kit and Holly are opaque characters in the strictest sense of the word; their physical existence is all we are treated to, leaving us to make attempts at applying their physical surroundings (the extensive South Dakota and Montana frontier) as hints towards their erratic behaviors. Simultaneously though, Kit and Holly are likable, down-to-earth figures. Malick seems to have been on a mission to assert that there are pressures and justifications, possibly bigger than the world and our perception of it, that lead people to acts that are seen as evil to the majority.

Badlands sets itself up against understandable ideals; Spacek's pragmatic, drawly narration (which sounds on and off throughout the entire film) introduces Holly as a simple person bearing a vaguely troublesome road to where she's at (a 15 year old, mature-for-her-age redhead). Her father is a domineering, brutal cowboy who of course disapproves of his daughter's evolving companionship with Kit, a 25 year-old, denim-flaunting garbage boy with a poker faced cordiality, and her mother is out of the picture. Holly is understandably attracted to Kit; he commands her attention with his seeming ambivalence and she gushes (or at least I suspect she does, for nothing in her flat inflection suggests it) about his uncanny resemblance to James Dean. When Kit murders her father shortly after he denies a grant for sharing company with his daughter, Holly responds only with a hollow slap in the face and a suggestion of calling the police, to which Kit replies modestly something to the tune of, "You could, but it wouldn't be so hot for me". The two, about as unconventional a couple as any (most would say Holly is too young for Kit), subsequently flee the scene and drive headlong into the empty American West, with Kit shooting anyone who threatens their anonymity.

This, at its core, is the definition of a "road movie". Malick has no interest in such formalities though. Badlands is deliberately nondescript and visually dominant, a quite plain display of affinity with the classic mythic landscape of America. Malick uses Kit and Holly's transit as a reason to explore the rhythm of the West, a notion he was so taken by that he continued with his next film, the equally singular Days of Heaven. Malick's aesthetic here is just about the same: a devoted attention to a natural look (most often achieved with the lack of artificial light), grandiose bisections of land and sky, and warm, pleasant tones that contrast the lives of the characters on screen, which are the opposite of homely and appear to be headed towards a bleak fate. He also made it known with Badlands that he was one of the clearest descendants of Bresson, a practitioner of an economic flow and an ultimately cumulative poeticism that can be achieved by the subtraction of elements rather than the addition of them. Kit and Holly's sparse, distanced dialogue is absolutely immaculate; more often than not, it does not have to do with the film on any higher level, instead simply acting as tightly written, inconsequential fractions in an oblong whole. Undeniably, Badlands is a stellar debut, perhaps even lighter and more transfixing than any other Malick film.

La Lettre (1998) A Short Film by Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry is an artist who has created some of his finest work in short form or in collaboration with other directors. Like his segment for Tokyo! (2008), La Lettre comes from a collaborative program, in this case designed to center around the coming of the new millennium (2000). Gondry gave the new millennium the feel of an encroaching deadline destined to prove one boy either a man, with the approval of his been-there-done-that brother, or a teenage outcast.

The story details a typical childhood love and the difficulty to reconcile one's tacit desires with reality. Stéphane is a pouty-eyed boy on the brink of adolescence with an interest in photography that somewhat acts as a mask for his consuming affection for Aurélie, a girl he goes to school with who is leaving town for a few days. While Stéphane is enlarging a photo of Aurélie in the family's dark hallway at night (to add to his already extensive collection of photos of her), his brother advises that he "french her" before the year 2000 or else he'll regret it.

His brother's rather imposing warning sets off for Stéphane a swirl of uncertainty and self-doubt, visualized in one of Gondry's characteristically evocative dream sequences. At a cramped party high atop the city with the omnipresent clock tower placed nervously outside the window - the scene looking purposely, as usual, like it was constructed directly in a set - Stéphane trudges around the room with a physically impeding camera on his head, eyeballing the barrage of couples nuzzling each other as they dance. Eventually he makes a move on Aurélie only to clunk her in the face with his lens-face, causing the entire room to quake and the clock tower to inevitably come crashing down on them. The symbols are all quite pronounced: the clock tower acting as the outside forces threatening Stéphane, the camera as the hobby that he veils himself behind.

Gondry's tale is a simple one, but it's unlikely that another director could manage to realize it so imaginatively. Stéphane snaps out of his dream and heads to Aurélie's house at her request, for she has a letter for him. Obviously, as any child in his situation would, he believes that it will be her pronouncement of her love for him. Life however, unfortunate as it is, does not come so satisfyingly. Upon reading the letter he is startled, bombarded by the complexity of life, and, through a series of tactful old-fashioned camera techniques, retreats back into the subjective "reality" of his photographs. This procession would stand as another time Gondry has explored the different realms of reality one utilizes to escape the truth, often in a romantic situation.

La Lettre is brilliant short film with the intimate look of Truffaut's 50's work and a straightforward score that matches Stéphane's minor predicament. It is also one of Gondry's most personal films because he has admitted to his childhood unfolding congruently with Stéphane's; he too was a child enthused by the art of photography and withheld the unattainable romantic desires that are inherent in the era.

After Hours (1985) A Film by Martin Scorsese

After Hours is one of Martin Scorsese's most unnerving studies of urban paranoia, but unfortunately is a film that is frequently forgotten amidst more mammoth works such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or Mean Streets. Filmed in the mid-80's, it was a decidedly smaller production than most of his films, and as a result has slipped into near anonymity aside what preceded it (The King of Comedy (1982)) and what followed (The Color of Money (1986)). It does not lack the energy that such a fact would suggest however; by contrast, the film is always on the move, its camera an imaginative manifestation of its main character's shifty thoughts.

Bringing to the screen a quick-witted, savvy screenplay by Joseph Minion, Scorsese turns a night for Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a pragmatic guy working in a cubicle, into an insanely unlucky fever dream. When the night is young, Paul meets a charismatic blond lady named Marcy in a cafe through a mutual fondness for the book he's reading. They exchange numbers and soon enough he's being driven by a raucous taxi driver to her friend's Soho apartment, during which his only 20 dollar bill blows out the window. The apartment is the habitat of a classic lower Manhattan art-freak, Kiki, who works tiresomely on obscurely contorted body sculptures and exercises a life of sadomasochism and claustrophobic punk clubs. Paul gradually becomes creeped out by Marcy, tells her off, and later that night discovers her dead body. Following this, he bounces randomly from apartment to diner and back again in search of someone who will either lend him some money to ride the subway - whose prices increased at midnight - or offer him a bed to sleep in. To add to his troubles, the neighborhood's fed-up denizens are forming a clan in response to a spontaneous series of robberies, asserting the frantic Paul as the primary suspect.

Scorsese imbues this harrowing outing with a surreal, fable-like quality and a Kafkaesque sense of perpetually accumulating doom. His vivacious shooting style incorporates subtle, subconscious messages that manage to make the audience feel the same aggravated, discombobulated feelings that Paul has. Continuity will break, such as when the sound and image do not exactly match up during a scene when Paul sneaks into Marcy's pocket book and discovers a cream designed to soothe burns only to quickly slip it back in upon her return, and the camera will exaggeratedly glide towards objects that either propound Paul's terror or provide hope of salvation, on display when a phone rings in an apartment and Paul lunges towards it with rhythm-snapping immediacy. Scorsese also tracks along the seedy Soho streets in a voyeuristic manner behind or beside Paul, sliding across the ground like a snake bushwhacking through the immense amounts of incessant rain and manhole fog.

In a way, the camera embodies the very movement of mischievousness, as if it's involved in an endlessly hostile practical joke played on Paul. Each time he leaves Kiki's discomforting apartment to the sound of Howard Shore's haunting, minimalist synthesizer jingle, the camera wheels by the sculptures in a POV shot, looking as if they're pushing him away while warning him of eternal damnation. However, eternal damnation is eventually what he evades by some unlikely stroke of luck in the slick, devilishly clever finale. With this, Scorsese hyperbolizes the ourobouric flow of urban life: one can always make it back to work in the morning only to begin another seemingly menacing day in the city.

Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) A Film by Tomas Alfredson (2008)

Vampire films of merit come few and far between, which is why Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In - a work that fuses horror and social realism to engrossing extent - comes as such a surprise. Moreover, in an age where horror cinema has dwindled into empty, gratuitous offerings of torture porn and shock-for-shock's sake ghost stories (no less, the lame cult phenomenon of Twilight), its intelligence should rightfully be highly praised. The film is not a vehicle to explore the spectacle of vampirism; instead, the inclusion of vampire elements helps to add a morally complex dimension to the young relationship between the film's two main characters: Oskar, an inferior, fantasizing 12-year old outcast, and Eli, the mysterious vampire Oskar falls for, unknowing - at least at first - of her bizarre background.

Eli is an enigmatic character throughout, both due to the fact that she is constantly verging on uncontrollable violence and because Alfredson implicitly hints towards her androgynous nature. She repeatedly tells Oskar she is not a girl, which at once can be taken in light of her inhumanity, but following the brief insertion of a shot of her castrated genital region, a gender context is implanted in her statement as well. As displayed in the opening scene, Oskar is a boy who channels the anger he feels from being bullied into vicarious acts - a Travis Bickle of sorts. "Squeal like a pig," he proclaims over a black screen in the beginning before we see him thrusting a knife through the air maliciously. In this light, Eli is the mirror of Oskar: violent, brave, and intimidating. She stirs up courage in Oskar, encouraging him to be proactive when dealing with the bullies at school and henceforth brings about his maturation, which is as much of a negative one as it is positive. The film culminates with Oskar traveling to freedom with Eli; in his mind he is a victim of love but is just as much a product of the seduction of a vampire, destined to become the kind of ruthless supplier of blood that Eli's father was in the film.

Let the Right One In's "love story" however, is by turns complex (as illustrated above) and banal. The two forge their first emotional connection through the ultimate outcast staple: the Rubik's cube. Oskar plays with the device in his free time but cannot solve it, but when he offers it to Eli, she has a curious ability to finish it overnight. This exchange felt familiar and somewhat grounded in the romance and coming-of-age genres, detracting from the relationship that otherwise felt like it was evolving supernaturally. Interestingly, Alfredson keeps most of the violence offscreen or at a distance so that when Eli does make an attack or her father collects the blood of a victim, it is genuinely terrifying. He refuses to romanticize the violence, reflecting how it is a necessary burden for Eli rather than a footloose pleasure.

For the most part, CGI is used tastefully, a method of adding a subtly alien quality to Eli's movements. The film is most frustrating when it is not, such as during a scene when a newly cursed survivor victim of Eli's attack is bombarded by digitized cats and subsequently engulfed in flames as a response to daylight. One of the finest achievements of the film is its pacing and visual focus. The art direction is stellar, an exacting milieu of snow and blood, whereas the camerawork reflects the slow pace of life in the Swedish village the film is set in. Rarely does a vampire film extract so much fear out of calculated ambiance instead of viscera, and it is one of the best films of 2008 as a result.