Three Colors: Blue (1993) A Film by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Krzysztof Kieslowski is a director who loves to devote a series of projects to a common theme, films that allegedly represent, or comment on, long-held ideals, like the Ten Commandments for instance. Such is again the case with his Three Colors trilogy, a set of works designed to reflect the motivations behind the three colors of the French flag. What’s interesting is how tenuous the connections are that he makes to the given ideal he is working with. It is never glaringly obvious what value his film is supposed to be illuminating; instead, Kieslowski’s films always tell rich stories of everyday occurrences which open up - through his gently poetic eye - into dense parables covering a range of existential topics, in the sense that they are such fundamental human questions that coincide with the entire thrust of life. Blue is a typically moving, immaculate work centered on the idea of a woman’s choice to either embrace a new life or continue to bitterly reject it, and this basic conceit ostensibly riffs on the notion of individual liberty.

Yet it is also a film about trauma, grief, cynicism, sensuality, love, recovery, and the elusiveness of truth. Kieslowski gives equal weight to all of these themes, and has something sophisticated and unique to say about each. Warranting equal praise is the radiant Juliette Binoche, who subtly breathes tangible life into these ineffable qualities through a range of distinctive facial expressions and gestures. She plays Julie Courcy, a woman who loses her husband and young daughter in one of the earliest scenes of the film in an unexplainable car crash in the middle of the French countryside. Miraculously, Julie survives the accident only to come out of a coma and discover her family is dead. She is immediately disillusioned, unable to come to terms with the sudden loss of what is most dear to her. The only family she has left is her bemused mother (Emmanuelle Riva) who sits in a nursing home all day with her eyes glued to the TV watching images of people tightrope walking and bungee jumping, a clear symbolic parallel to Julie’s own life, teetering on the edge of total neglect to the point where she is nothing more than a blank figure. Her partly blind mother claims to be able to see the whole world in the TV, an ironic counterpoint to Julie’s own temporary immunity to life’s pleasures.

Julie’s husband was one of the world’s most distinguished symphony composers, so his death is not only a private tragedy but also a public one. Images of him and Julie flood the media, and this ubiquity does not alleviate Julie’s grief, especially when journalists begin questioning her against her will about the rumors that she was actually the real composer of most of his work. Julie strives to become a non-presence after resurrecting a long stagnate attraction to a neighbor named Olivier (Benoît Régent), only augmenting her sorrow after sleeping with him. She empties out her home and relocates to the middle of Paris, deliberately not informing anyone she knows about her decision in an attempt to free herself from all connections to the world, be it material or psychological, and immerse herself in anonymity. Kieslowski materializes this deep grief with a series of quiet, morose scenes that are light on dialogue but heavy on expressive close-ups. One specifically effective scene has Julie sitting at her piano for the last time, lethargically playing one of her husband's compositions with one hand. The camera cuts back and forth between softly focused tracking shots across the written music and shots of Binoche's barren visage, set to a creepy piercing piano. The scene culminates with Julie slowly sliding her hand down the piano top until it crashes down violently, the final time she expects to personally commit her husband's work to audible music.



It is not, however, the last time she hears the music, for she finds that it repeatedly reverberates in her head during late-night swims at an ethereally electric blue pool. Being able to hear the voluptuous symphonic movements, replete with flutes, violins, and piano, gradually assuages Julie back into an admiration of the sensuous textures of life. The sweeping music also coincides with her reacquired love for small surface pleasures such as the taste of coffee (Kieslowski watches a sugar cube become slowly consumed by liquid), her family's blue jewels that she hangs from her living room, and the warm, irresistible urge for human companionship (she gains a friendship with an emotionally feral stripper living in her apartment complex). Julie even learns a shattering truth about her husband that she did not know before his death, but she does not grow bitter. It is significant that at the height of this re-emergence, Julie dives into the pool and floats in a fetal position for an extended moment, as if she's truly being reborn. She successfully completes her grieving state, although the potent sense of melancholy remains through the very last frame of the film.

Blue, like The Double Life of Véronique, is an aesthetic revelation, a fusion of sight and sound that is flawlessly immersive. Kieslowski is a master of evoking inner states purely through cryptic visuals, subtle transformations of light, and shocking editing rhythms. As usual, he works with cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, who seems to always adopt his languorous visual storytelling style effortlessly, lighting the sets and actors in a way that is perpetually attuned to the natural changes in light over the course of a day, yet is also somehow vaguely unnatural. Zbigniew Preisner matches the grandiosity and intimacy of his score for Double Life, and Binoche captivates in what may be her finest and most emotionally rich performance. The humanity in Blue is also endlessly rewarding; as a story that could have become positively grim, instead it maintains an understanding of the possibility of second chances, of starting anew in life without forgetting the pleasures of the past.

Police, Adjective (Politist, Adj.) A Film by Corneliu Porumboiu (2009)

Corneliu Porumboiu's Police Adjective is strikingly similar in style to both Christian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007) and Christi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), a triad of Romanian films distributed in the United States which embody the heart and soul of what is being deemed a Romanian New Wave. The grossly overused term - which, since the renowned French New Wave from the 1960's, has been uttered nearly every time a country that most people have never heard of unexpectedly shows some faint cinematic pulse - is actually quite adequate here given the homogeneity that is all of a sudden present in this artistically ambitious batch of works. In the years prior to these films, Romania's cinematic output was bland under a Totalitarian state, and the current works adopt a harshly critical tone against this once-prevailing political framework, the remains of which have given Romania a grayish bureaucratic patina, an inevitable vibe for a slowly recovering nation. The films literally reflect this stasis. Comprised of long, mundane blocks of time, they painstakingly document real-life situations rather than construct contrived plot lines. It has an Italian Neorealism ring to it, but such films had a greater sense of immediacy, exploring urgent social problems, whereas the Romanian films have broader questions to ask. In fact, there's a sense that these films could go unseen, and nothing would change (that is, if we want to believe that cinema can cause social change in the first place).

There are two ways to consume this work, and they are not mutually exclusive, but in some instances can be. One is to endure them, to watch them with an undiscriminating, objective eye, and by the end simply shrug your shoulders. Ok, that's it. It's difficult to think of a movement of films that are so uniformly nondescript, so hopelessly matter-of-fact and earthbound. One might argue that an Argentinean filmmaker like Lisandro Alonso is another in this breed, but truthfully there's always a mysterious undertone to his work, something potentially symbolic or metaphysical, but the Romanian films have no interest in flowery associations. They sit on the ground and stay there, refusing to stand up and jump or even kick their feet for that matter. The other way to watch the films is critically, with one eye on the material and the other on the larger context it's taking place in, to stay in tune with the subtle links to the societal flaws that are pertinent both directly to Romania and indirectly to the rest of the world. In The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, we get so locked in to the physical moments of the film that we may not fully notice and dissect the scathing critique of the health system that it is. This is how the two viewing apparatuses are sometimes separated, and in this way the Romanian films can incidentally work against themselves.

Poromboiu's film is the first of the three to hinge itself most substantially around an issue that is not necessarily specific to Romania, but an issue of ethics and morality that is identified with mankind. It follows a recently married undercover cop named Cristi (Dragos Bucur) who is investigating a group of high school students who are lacing their cigarettes with THC, a proponent of marijuana that is illegal in Romania but acceptable in several other parts of Europe. He observes the suspects from afar, outside of school and on the street, subsequently recording his day's observations on a document for his supervisor. At night he goes home to have dinner with his wife Anca (Irina Saulescu), who is a schoolteacher and a fan of innocuous Romanian pop songs. She brings up the fact that their relationship is not working, but Cristi brusquely turns the conversation into something unrelated. The film is relentlessly focused on the minutiae of all of these routines, and is so effective in its attenuated pacing that it occasionally tips over into tedium. Yet we subtly accumulate knowledge about Cristi's pragmatic, skeptical demeanor and gain a comprehensive understanding of the behavioral tics that inform the set pieces later in the film, which are basically petty, but paradoxically profound, linguistic debates.



The first of these unadorned, drolly staged knockouts is also the first time we view Anca and Cristi together at night. It is a remarkably protracted scene in which Cristi eats dinner alone at the table while Anca listens repeatedly to a boisterous "I Don't Leave You Love" by Mirabela Dauer in the adjacent living room. Cristi asks his wife to turn the music down to no avail, then ends up sitting in the living room with her and arguing about the use of empty symbolism in the song like "What would the sea be without the sun?" Anca takes the banally evocative lyrics for what they are while Cristi tries to analyze them, finding only a dead end which has no practical application in terms of real relationships. This finicky, judgmental ear for nonsense is indicative of Cristi's overall stance in life, his lucid approach to language, behavior, and morality. He begins to have qualms about arresting the students because of how minor the offense is, how unfair the punishment is, and how soon Romania will be legalizing the very substance which would put them in jail. More broadly, Cristi does not comprehend the indirect usage of language through figurative devices, which extends to his disinterest in allowing language to dictate society.

This, however, is precisely what the climactic scene of the film proves, that the ways in which we process and understand life all comes down to words, and that the "official" words are the ones that oppress the individual. Police, Adjective's most widely discussed scene - and for good reason, given the fact that it successfully elucidates all of the film's themes and even spotlights some new ones that were only vaguely implicit throughout - is when Cristi approaches his boss about the fact that he doesn't think the kids should be punished for their slightly inadvisable acts. He informs the boss that his conscience told him that making an arrest would be against his morals because of the drug's impending legalization. This leads to an excruciatingly long-held static take that watches the boss fire words at Cristi, intending for him to look them up in the dictionary and read them aloud. The neutral definitions end up proving Cristi wrong and validating the boss's thesis that nothing is above the law, and it is the job of the policeman to honor the laws put in place for society. Poromboiu, ever aware of the hypocrisies of bureaucracies, realizes that this statement has yet another unacknowledged layer: this is indeed the same mindset that lead to and helped sustain the Totalitarian state of the past, as well as the countless oppressive societies in the history of the world. It seems you can't retreat from the dualities of language after all.

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009) A Short Film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The jungle is shockingly alive and direct in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new short film A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, a fragment in "Joe"'s multi-part art piece Primitive. Its unfettered power bursts down the boundaries between the domestic and the natural, the internal and the external, in a small, extinct village called Nabua in the Northeast of Thailand. Decades ago, Nabua was home to a brutal police invasion that lead most of its inhabitants (Communist farmers) to either flee from their intimate cabins or bear witness to violent captures. Now Joe's swooping, weightless camera peruses the abandoned houses of the long-gone townspeople searching for ephemera from their life there, time-worn traces of the past. We glimpse ruffled coats, portraits on the walls, and mosquito nets, frozen in their positions as the materiality of the cabin decomposes around them. The perpetually ajar windows clatter against the slit-holed wooden walls and allow the unpredictability of nature to invade the once-comforting living spaces.

Joe's film is enormously tactile in both its evocative imagery and its dense, atmospheric surround-sound (watch this one with the best possible speakers), allowing us to float through the physical spaces of the film but also through time, as the repetitive narration is the rehearsal of a letter being written to the titular Uncle Boonmee by a group of leisurely Thai soldiers who are digging in the village. Its redundancy, paired with the fact that each new reading is by a new voice and accompanied by images from a new cabin, suggests the reincarnation of Boonmee, a familiar theme for Joe. His life in Nabua is emulated in the lives we learn about through the souvenirs of time present in all of the rooms. A Letter to Uncle Boonmee is an unexpectedly tranquil short film, an affirmation of the kind of director I expected Joe would become after seeing Syndromes and a Century. It's also a work which one especially cannot do justice to without paying tribute to its remarkable images, so I present to you, unedited, a whole string of them...

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009) A Film by Werner Herzog

Of the two loosely connected films that comprise an unintentional diptych of the American law system, Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is unquestionably the proverbial head-scratcher, a bizarre, inchoate collection of non-sequiturs resembling the more erratic projects of David Lynch, who serves as executive producer. The film was decades in the making for Herzog and fellow screenwriter Herbert Golder, who first concocted the script in the 1970's but were unable to find sufficient funding for the production until recently when Lynch showed an interest with his Absurda Productions. Based loosely on the true story of a grad student who killed his mother with a sword after become maniacally invested in his production of the Greek tragedy Electra, by Sophocles, in which he played the lead character Orestes whose actions he imitated, it is indicative of the kind of meta-textual tale Lynch would be sympathetic toward. I asked Herb Golder about the type of creative relationship that Herzog and Lynch shared during the making of the film, and although he insists that Lynch never once set foot on the set, I take his statement that the finished product is completely of Herzog's sensibility alone with a grain of salt. With distinctly Lynchian line delivery, a story whose blurring of reality and fiction is largely INLAND EMPIRE-esque, and the inscrutably random appearance of a midget (Verne Troyer), My Son often times feels like Herzog's sloppy thank you note to Lynch.

This is not to say however that Herzog's footprint is invisible, because after all, we're talking about a director who, above all others, can't help but kick around in the mud of his own work. The central character is a testament to this fact, another peg in a long line of "mad men" that Herzog likes to capture on screen, people who push themselves radically outside of society. Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) is presumably in his late twenties or early thirties but still lives with his eccentric mother (Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie) in a San Diego suburb, much to the dismay of his curiously complicit fiancé (Chloë Sevigny). His life is superficially hygienic, with a ready-made dinner available for him every night and a home that is garnished by phony implications of the happy, good life - a bright pink exterior, waltzing flamingos, and an ostentatious garden. Yet this showiness is also slightly off-kilter and disturbing, hinting at the unsteady waters of Brad's own schizophrenic persona. The film's first scene is a crude variation on the Twin Peaks opening, with two happy-go-lucky detectives (Willem Dafoe and Michael Peña) cruising through town right before receiving a call about an unwieldy murder, and from here the film excavates the enigma that is Brad via flashbacks that are elicited by Detective Hank Havenhurst's interviews with Brad's theater director (Udo Kier) and Sevigny's character.

Beneath the guise of bizarreness, there is a standard police procedural, and Herzog seems to want this conventionality only to tweak it with the hypnotic quality of his performers. Despite the fact that Brad is the film's singular oddball, Shannon is very much the actor who seems to embrace the freest manner of performance with wacked-out lines that come entirely out of the blue ("Some people act a role, others play a part!"; "God is here! But I don't need him anymore!"). The seemingly sane citizens are by contrast purely artificial, stilted creations, incapable of focusing on anything outside the crime scene filling up the picturesque street. It is fitting then that the majority of the film's laughs are evoked by Brad, the strange figure who holes himself up in his home with two "hostages" and shouts outlandish orders at the police officials barricading the exterior. In a one-off comment on the somnambulance of the task force, Brad wanders right by Dafoe's investigator when the case is first cracked open, muttering something about his "Razzle Dazzle" coffee cup while Dafoe apathetically ignores him. This comic absurdism does not weigh into the story as much as it should though, for Herzog's exploration of the crazed mind at the center of My Son is for the most part sincere, and with its pseudo-mystical underpinnings, it is hugely unconvincing and leads nowhere.



One element that makes the film uniquely Herzogian is its impulsive globetrotting. For a while My Son appears to be locked in to one locale, but as flashbacks grow increasingly tenuous and inexplicable, we see Brad in the misty mountains and tumbling rivers of Peru and the destitute streets of China. In Peru, he is with a disparate pack of marijuana-smoking free-spirits previously unidentified within the present-day of the story who lounge around on tall rocks and stare at the passionate waters, as alive with elemental energy as the rapid fog in Heart of Glass. Here he is a lone rider, supposedly unaware of the presence of others around him as he speaks nonsensical spiritual babble. One of the film's best images occurs in Peru, which I sense is a lift from somewhere else in his oeuvre, with the camera tracking around Brad in the middle of imposing mountains as he stares into the lens, his voice repeating on the soundtrack: "why is the whole world staring at me?". The brief China segment shows up almost incidentally, giving rise to a documentary quality. Herzog's crude digital footage captures underprivileged men and women as Brad becomes one of them, perusing the crowd conspicuously. These episodes are basically inconsequential in the context of Brad's mental disillusionment, but they have something to do with his increasing interest in an ill-defined New Age Spiritualism that leads him to call himself Farouk and the Greek tragedy he is acting in.

Herzog is mostly screwing around in My Son, letting his thoughts manifest themselves on screen with no inhibition. It's problematic, because the story of Brad McCullum - a matricidal wack-job succumbing to the customs of an ordinary life yet also repelling against them wildly - is potentially intriguing. As it is, the film is awkward and unfocused, drifting around at such a rate that it tends to forget elements that should be essential to its core, such as the Greek tragedy propelling Brad's insanity, or the indifferent, corrupt police force that could have been put to great use. At Herzog's best, he can conjure up transcendent escapism, but his worst work (in which I think My Son must be included, although this is only from my peripheral perspective, having seen it once in a screening environment that was less than ideal) tends to feature a director who is under the impression that he can get by simply with the clout of his own spontaneous genius.

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) A Film by Michael Haneke (2009)

Dualities abound in Michael Haneke's latest film, The White Ribbon. The title refers to the white cloths that a Pastor (Burghart Klaußner) bestows upon his children as a reminder to practice purity and strong morals, yet beneath this facade there is a static cruelty in their own village. Just as righteousness does not come without pain, love does not come without punishment, and healing does not come without violence, revealed singularly by the town's doctor (Rainer Bock) who also is a savage cynic and an incestuous swine. These affirmations of the polarities of human behavior are not uncommon for the Austrian director of such films as Caché, Code Unknown, and The Piano Teacher, in which the slick, masterly surfaces rarely provide fact, but instead conceal something deeply ambiguous underneath, sometimes even contradicting the latent content altogether. This is once again the case in The White Ribbon, where the idyllic turn-of-the-century German village that the film is set in is really an eerie landscape of menace, a place that is cold and uptight from the very beginning of the film - and presumably even before - when the doctor comes home on his horse only to have it tripped by a transparent wire running across two trees. This incident inexplicably paves the way for a longer string of increasingly extreme displays of strangeness and brutality.

Guiding us with less than a sure hand through it all is the elderly voice (Ernst Jacobi) of the village's schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), who readily admits that he is unsure of how many of the stories he is telling are entirely true. The presence of this unreliable narrator, reminiscent of Citizen Kane, cloaks the film in perpetual doubt. He could be leaving details out inadvertently or skewering the actual events that took place, which is an accurate instrument for Haneke's continuing preoccupation with the elusiveness of truth. In this sense, the schoolteacher shares similarities with the audience, trying to piece together fragments from within the timeline of his life as opposed to our narrower timeline, the film. Such a description can't help but illuminate how Haneke is not much different, the one difference being that he is purposely excising plot points to augment the mystery. As it progresses, The White Ribbon hinges more and more on its central narrative mystery: who is the guilty party behind all of the ominous occurrences? I hazard to say that Haneke is any more suited to find the answer than a given audience member. This is why all talk about Haneke being an overbearing polemicist seems off-base; he's more of an open-minded explorer, always mindful of the various conscious and unconscious implications that his images can evoke.

Fittingly, it seems that for most of The White Ribbon, Haneke is deliberately trying to be as open-ended and neutral as possible. The film's central characters are almost uniformly nameless, and instead are simply stand-ins for the structural mechanisms in society which they represent; that is, the doctor, the schoolteacher, and the pastor position themselves as microcosms of the health system, the educational system, and the church, respectively. While it can be clear when Haneke is condemning a behavior and when he is praising one, the precise reasons behind them are ambiguous. Thus we get a morally nebulous character like the Pastor, who adheres so vehemently to his own austere moral code, leaving no room for all things casual and enjoyable, that he tends to lose sight of what is really right on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis. One night, he denies his children dinner and delivers cane whippings the following morning because they wandered into the village without guidance. Yet he also has the capacity to show genuine compassion towards his young boy when he kindly replaces his dead bird with a new one, an emotional dynamic that the acrimonious doctor seems incapable of engaging in with his own offspring. Haneke is less interested in hammering a one-sided "parents-are-bad" or "institutions-are-bad" message home than he is in presenting multifaceted views of complicated, mostly antagonistic figures.



And even more than a bleak character study, The White Ribbon is a broader allegory on the nature of cruelty and hostility, so static across generations that it threatens to be a never-ending cycle. Here Haneke's denouncement is more straightforward and transparent: children are impressionable in the face of their guiding figures, capable of being gradually bent to the way of life around them, and therefore it is the adults who are to blame for this transfiguration of evil. That the film is set directly prior to the point in Germany's history when they would perform the most vicious, monstrous acts of human evil imaginable - one of the more leaden, overtly convenient choices Haneke makes - is heavily significant in suggesting that the negative impact that the adults have on the new generation of children is indeed substantial. The depiction of children in the film is decidedly nontraditional; acting, or nonacting, with the same deadpan, morose theatricality as their older counterparts, the children cheerlessly mope through the village, their most unconstrained human contact coming in the form of playing a wood flute beside a pond or having a delicate conversation about death, as in the case of the doctor's young son and his older babysitter. Yet even in these instances, the weight of oppression hangs over the proceedings, as if an adult is going to spontaneously enter into the scene to deliver some form of unearned punishment. Such an atmosphere is undoubtedly representative of the quiet fear that rests in most of the children's expressions, and manifests itself most directly in a character like the Pastor's son Martin (Leonard Proxauf), who is surely on a path towards deep depression.

Haneke's crisp black-and-white and traditional yet slowly paced mise-en-scene reflects the burdens of the story in a way that is not emotionally distancing, but rather emotionally devastating. While clearly an antecedent of the visual and narrative stylistics of Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, and Ingmar Bergman (Bergman especially, whose Winter Light involves characters that in some ways feel reborn in The White Ribbon), the film also manages to incorporate some of Haneke's own personal traits as a director, such as the occasional long take and the use of off-screen violence and teasing, elliptical cuts. The film is also characteristically absent of a score, with the diegetic exception of the children's choir that is shown from time to time in the church, as in the final scene. Like Caché, Haneke fixes his camera on a large group of people, this time gathering rather than dispersing, and as the schoolteacher informs us, probably for the last time. While the audience may collectively sigh at the lack of resolution, Haneke has once again managed to instill shrewd poeticism into the most prosaic of surfaces.

A Bucket of Blood (1959) A Film by Roger Corman

Having directed over 50 features and acting as producer on more than 300, Roger Corman established himself as a skillful craftsman with an uncanny ability to work at hyperspeed, and A Bucket of Blood is no exception. The film, just over an hour, was shot in 5 days for a scant budget of around $50,000. Its tale of a naive busboy desperate to fit in with the sophisticated beatniks around him is ridiculous enough to warrant this kind of on-to-go treatment, but what's surprising is how generally entertaining the film is, and not always by way of kitsch. Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) is the central character, a neurotic loner working in a coffee shop filled to the brim with folk musicians, pompous poets, far-out junkies, and art-world hacks. Unaware of their phoniness, and pathetically determined to appeal to them despite his complete and utter lack of artistic talent, he lives a life of starry-eyed clumsiness. His small apartment, kept up about as well as Henry's in David Lynch's Eraserhead, is the only other location he occupies in life besides the cafe. He is in dire need of a rejuvenation.

This of course being a film in the most primitive, campy traditions of genre horror, Walter finds that rejuvenation - and eventually local and art-world fame - through the macabre. After accidentally stabbing and killing his landlord's cat when attempting to retrieve it from between the walls of his apartment, he finds that the best way to cover up the murder, and benefit from it personally in the process, is to cover the whole corpse with clay, fashioning it as a sculpture of a dead cat with a knife in its side. The corpulent poet from the cafe, Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton), and Carla (Barboura Morris), Walter's love interest, immediately deem the sculpture a masterpiece, forwardly impressed by its acute sense of anatomy. Art critics get word of the piece, and soon he is a hidden phenomenon. Unfortunately, they're curious to see more, and this newfound enthusiasm influences the stubborn Walter to continue creating sculptures. Although his next work is also the product of an accident, killing a local cop with a frying pan out of fear when he threatens with a gun to arrest him for drug possession, Walter begins actively murdering members of the town to fulfill his "artistic calling".

In these startling effronteries, as strange as they are loaded with impracticalities, death becomes creation in an in-your-face manner rarely seen in films. Such a concept would normally be explored obliquely, but Corman lays it right on the table, suggesting that art can spring from even the most unlikely sources. Of course, no one (except for the Walter's boss) raises an eyebrow about the continued absence of the cafe regulars that Walter murders, nor do they ever truly inquire about how he gained his artistic prowess, preferring instead to marvel at it as if it stands on a lofty pedestal, a divine creation erected from God-given talent. Not to mention, where is the ghastly smell of fleshy decay? For Corman, these logistical obstacles were of no bother, for he realized his ultimate goal was to create entertaining movies in short periods of time. If anything, the stubbornness of the Paisley fans and their relentless blindness towards Walter's sketchy methods only amplifies Corman's overall critique of the pretensions existing in the art world, the fact that surface details such as words and forms are of more importance than whether or not their sources are authentic. Made in 1959, A Bucket of Blood effortlessly and humorously deconstructs the emerging beatnik counterculture and - with its jaunty jazz soundtrack - the conventions of horror as well.

The Intruder (L'Intrus) A Film by Claire Denis (2004)

Claire Denis' The Intruder is loaded with Marxist Dialectics, the kind of suggestive cutting collisions that were pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein. A man describes a scene in the woods to his wife as a way of setting an erotic tone between the two of them, followed by a cut to the man's father sitting amidst tall pine trees relaxing with his dogs. A priest speaks about the variety of immoral beings in the world, followed by a cut to the film's blank protagonist, Louis Trebor (Michel Subor). The intentions of these techniques are of course not always cut and dry, for the range of potential associative meanings that could arise out of them is infinite. However, it's important to at least attempt on some level - even if it's subconscious - to interpret and assign meaning to these faint jabs, because they're likely to be all Denis will give you.

The story, as it is, is left deliberately shrouded in mist, replete with seemingly significant gaps in between the action Denis does show. In order to gather any semblance of narrative momentum, one has to look towards the way that the film is essentially divided into three parts, each comprised of a different locale, though not entirely limited to it, and connected by the theme of travel and intended self-renewal. For Trebor, his renewal is both physical and emotional; with a failing heart, he must make a trip to acquire the new organ on the black market (for reasons unknown) and in doing so feels the desire to make a pilgrimage to the remote island of his youth, Tahiti, where he abandoned a son generations earlier (also for reasons unknown). Therefore, the three distinct settings of the film are his lonely woodland cabin on the French-Swiss border, Pusan, and Tahiti. In the lead role, screen veteran Michel Subor plays a man of few words yet capable of making an indelible physical impact. Although he searches for his son, an action that normally would imply grief and sadness, Trebor is really a brooding object more than an emotional human being, his pursuits marked by little perceivable motivation. Instead, we are supposed to dream up some scrape of a backstory when Trebor's married son (Grégoire Colin), whom he neglects, says to his wife after a brief, unexpected encounter with his father: "What a lunatic."

Though The Intruder's primary mode of expression appears rooted in realism, the film subliminally shifts between reality and imagined moments, supposedly in the mind of Trebor. Inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy's book of the same name, Denis permeates the film with a complex sense of impending death, coupled by the frightening situation of heart transplant and the idea that one's own body is foreign to one's self. Given this framework, it is evident that Trebor is aware that he is facing the end of his life and the fact of his own body being invaded by an organ from another, so the film appears to take place in an eerie twilight zone between life and death. Sinister visions bubble up out of obscurity, like Trebor cutting the throat of an unknown teenage boy in the night and wrapping up his body fastidiously, or the image of a bare heart in the middle of a snowy field, being sniffed out by his two watchful huskies. Because of the lack of stylistic dissonance between these scenes and the more explicitly "real" scenes, there is a deep uncertainty as to whether or not they actually occur in the timeline of the story. Similarly, there is inconclusiveness in the depictions of Trebor's human relationships in the film: Bambou, who plays an unidentified pharmacist in the story, sleeps with Trebor but appears to not live with him; a woman labeled in the script only as Queen of the Northern Hemisphere (Béatrice Dalle) is a sassy dog breeder who he desires sexually but receives no requital; and a Russian vender (Katia Golubeva) from whom Trebor purchases his heart transplant violently stalks him afterward.



Each third of the film consciously involves a different style to coincide with the fatalistic progression of the story. The first section, taking place on the French-Swiss border, is arguably its most interesting. Denis' cutting rhythms here are about as radically unconventional as they get. Switching startlingly from close-ups to long shots, subjective point-of-views to objective point-of-views, static shots to suffocating handicams, and from one character to another without introduction, she creates a montage of abstractions that is more a flow of sensuous images than it is a progression of linearity. One of Denis' strong points will always be her knack for shooting entangled bodies, caressing the details of the conjoined figures with effortless eroticism, such as when Trebor's son gets in his wife's pants while their young children whine in the neighboring room. After this section the film's tempo steadily decreases, containing less and less spontaneous interjections. By the finale in Tahiti, The Intruder feels like a completely different work than what its opening anticipated. The shots lengthen, the soundtrack becomes quieter, comedic scenes appear, and Denis begins interspersing the action with footage from an unfinished 60's film called Le Reflux, also set in Tahiti and starring Michel Subor.

All of this curiously approximates the pace of the gradually failing heart of a man apprehensive about the shaky relationship between him and his sons, as well as the locations that he travels through dispassionately, and his internal body and external body. The film's title is fittingly multi-faceted in this light. The heart is an intruder of the human body. Trebor is an intruder himself, infiltrating both his past, his son's life, and the places that are not home to him. There is also a veiled theme woven into Trebor's past of some sort of political fugitivity, as we see him several times throughout the film involved in clandestine transfers of money in Swiss banks. Such scenes though - which could have gained dramatic significance in a more traditional political thriller - are downplayed like the rest of the events that comprise the story, a homogeneity that Denis aims for to encourage viewer participation. While it's difficult to come away with anything concrete after watching The Intruder, with Denis' and collaborator Agnes Godard's ravishing imagery and Stuart Staples' disquieting minimalist score, you're likely to experience a unique and tangible atmosphere within which a puzzling tale of coming death and ephemeral globetrotting exists.