Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton) A Film by Ingmar Bergman (1953)

Ingmar Bergman's career prior to his international arthouse landmark The Seventh Seal is shrouded in mist and routinely neglected as inferior to later successes, a director merely refining his chops before fully realizing his capabilities. But Sawdust and Tinsel has actually been referred to by Bergman as his first good film, one with which he was finally able to express something personal. It's a ragged effort without the lofty aspirations that typify Bergman's finest films, and never quite reaches the kind of complex psychological tension that is his trademark, but it uncannily anticipates many of the technical and dramatic features that would show up consecutively throughout his sixty-year career. Released a year before La Strada, Bergman, like Fellini, centers his film around a group of traveling circus entertainers, many of which are reduced by the public to their fundamental shortcomings: there is the "idiot", Frost (Anders Ek), the "whore", Alma (Gudrun Brost), and The Dwarf (Kiki). This is lowbrow art, or "artifice" as it's defined at one point by the local theater director (Gunnar Björnstrand), in the truest sense, garish displays of physical buffoonery and odd feats that delight the lowest of townies, but Bergman is never condemning the group. Instead, Sawdust and Tinsel unveils the humanity in these people with an ever-watchful eye towards the unfairness they face, and, as in much of Bergman's work, attempts to blur the line between art and life.

It's of course necessary to acknowledge that for Bergman, to create a humane film is not to make something deeply compassionate and light; it's to be attentive to the humility that reveals these aspects, and it's bound to be a rather bleak outing. Work is not coming too easily for these carnies. The ringmaster, Albert Johansson (Åke Grönberg), is having regrets about abandoning his wife Agda (Annika Tretow) and his children for life on the road, for he is finding it difficult to make ends meet. At the same time, he is conflicted because of the fact that he cannot handle stasis. He considers his wife's life on a quiet street to be trifling and inactive, but when the troupe returns to Albert's hometown in need of new costumes from the town theater, he feels a desire to be in her company once again. Meanwhile, Albert's voluptuous mistress Anne, played by Bergman's wife of the time, Harriet Andersson, drifts towards infidelity herself, flirting temperamentally with the theater's androgynous Shakespearean actor, Frans (Hasse Ekman). When Frans essentially has sex with her against her will, an indecent act which is only suggested by Frans' bogus offer of a precious amulet after locking the doors, it triggers a threatening power play between Albert, Anne, and Frans, one that Albert is most passionately involved in.

Sawdust and Tinsel is one of the first times Bergman embraced the themes of shame and humiliation in a sexual context. Fear of disloyalty pervades the film, only augmented by Andersson's frank, domineering beauty, which is evident in the way she commands the ring during performances and the way she criticizes the theater's actresses for their flat chests. There is almost a masculine bravado to Anne's presence, even if most of her expressions tend towards inertia or anxiety, and it's as if the glimpse of underarm hair during her seductive talk with Frans is a conscious visual signifier of this. One can understand Albert's brute possessiveness towards her, and the fact that he is so enraged when after relentless questioning he discovers her informal tryst with Frans. Yet this scene also begins as a remorseless display of power, with Albert threatening Anne with violence, and ends as a pitiful showcase as he moans about the futility of life while perspiring profusely. After nearly taking the life of Frost, who spontaneously shows up in the trailer during Albert's most heated moment, he turns the gun haphazardly on himself, lamenting the "pity that people must live on this Earth", but quickly pulls it away in subservience.



This startling act of near suicide seems to prefigure Albert's later decision to commit what amounts to a figurative suicide, a self-punishment of sorts. In a fit of histrionic emotion, he retreats to the cage of a grotesquely treated bear owned by Alma and shoots it, with Alma following behind him in tears. Murdering the bear means destroying something beastly and impotent, which is what Albert proves to be in the scene directly prior. At a circus performance, he is taunted by Frans who is seated in the front row of the ring while Anne circles on a horse. Frans shouts derogatory remarks that clearly reference the sexual encounter he had with her the previous evening, which riles up the crowd more than anything in the actual show. Bergman builds up an enticing editing rhythm that echoes the crescendo towards a shoot-out in a Western, alternating between increasingly tight close-ups of Albert's infuriated mug and Frans' jeering expression. Eventually there is a succession of shots focusing on one of Frans' eyes, all mascaraed up to emphasize one finishing touch of effeminacy. Albert finally reaches his boiling point and a duel is declared, in which Frans makes an absolute fool of him in front of his own audience, kicking him in the dirt until he is swinging in the air wildly, a defenseless bull that Frans simply laughs at. At this point, in order to redeem himself, Albert has nowhere to go but down, and Anne feels racked with guilt.

The film does not only build to a climactic moment of mortification though, for Bergman announces shame right from one of the earliest scenes of the film, the only overtly dreamy and expressionistic sequence in Sawdust and Tinsel. While the troupe rides their horse-drawn trailers through what appears to be murky late afternoon, the woman sitting in the front of the caravan recounts a story from the past to Albert about Frost experiencing his wife Alma bathing in the sea naked in front of an Army regiment. Shown in flashback, the scene is luridly overexposed, presaging a later dream sequence Bergman would shoot for Hour of the Wolf, and boasts an oddly unreal use of sound. Amplifying the soldiers' raucous laughter one moment and falling into complete silence the next, it acutely represents Frost's sudden humiliation in the face of his wife's lewdness. Aside from this one artful interjection, the film's visual style is primarily sedate, with a sprinkling of unique tracking shots that obscure space in the backstage of the theater. The most notable visual feature however is Bergman's frequent employment of a bifurcated frame with two floating heads, one in the foreground facing the camera and one in the background, something that he would later use to stunning effect in Persona. This technique manages to separate the two figures spatially and emotionally, and Sawdust and Tinsel is rife with emotional distance. Yet the final shot of the movie is not so hopeless, suggesting that the show, and by extension life, must go on regardless of the troubles that are faced.

Shutter Island (2010) A Film by Martin Scorsese

(DISCLAIMER: It would be absolutely silly to read this essay without having seen the film yet. Needless to say however, there will be spoilers, and very significant ones at that. I promise that this essay will ruin your experience of the film if you read it beforehand.)

With Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese has made his best, most distinctly personal film since 2002's Gangs of New York. It's a bold, reflexive work that puts conventions to their greatest possible use while simultaneously expanding upon them, and it's the most enjoyable big-movie experience I've had in a theater since Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007). On the other hand, the film has received a passionately polarized mix of responses in the blogosphere, and ironically, the flaws that many well-respected bloggers point to are ones that I do not vehemently disagree with. Shutter Island does occasionally luxuriate in too many red herrings, moments that retrospectively are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It also has a denouement that smacks of didacticism and only for a moment threatens to compress a harrowing cinematic yarn into the constraints of a cheap storytelling gimmick. I do, however, object strongly to the popular critical contention that the film too often confuses what it is and what it should be. Why should Shutter Island be anything? It doesn't know whether it should be a drama or a mystery? That's absurd. I say it actively blends these genres, becoming a collage.

Martin Scorsese has never been a director to firmly cement his films in an audience's preconceived notions. Naturally, I went into Shutter Island under the impression that it was a thriller, if only for the advertising and critical brouhaha surrounding it. But was I prepared to be confronted with a film that would subvert this genre early and often? Absolutely. Saying the film is a clear-cut thriller is as silly as saying Mean Streets is a gangster movie, Raging Bull is a boxing movie, and After Hours is a dark comedy. Shutter Island is not nearly as raw and unrestricted as many of his early gems, but it's equally confrontational; Scorsese is still asking striking questions about the self, about violence, about guilt, and about movies, he's just doing it in a way that is superficially more streamlined and accessible. I don't think it buries the gravity of his inquiries to know that the film is fun, pulpy, and game-playing. In several instances even, these seemingly lowbrow traits are inextricably bound to the film's themes.

Consider the film's opening frames as evidence of this very fact. Leonardo DiCaprio - a government agent named Teddy Daniels - is vomiting beneath a ship deck, experiencing a bad case of seasickness, before ascending onto the main deck to have a word with his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo in a role that flawlessly channels noir sidekicks). The two begin conversing about their destination, a remote island off the coast of Boston called Shutter Island where there is a massive institution for the criminally insane. A supposedly dangerous patient named Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer) has disappeared inexplicably from her cell, and these two Federal Marshals have been assigned the duty of investigating this mystery. Something immediately feels off-kilter during their conversation - the editing is awkward, the line delivery is stilted and caked in a caricatured Boston accent, there is a distinct lack of whipping wind, and most distastefully, we can palpably sense the scene is shot in front of a green screen. Scorsese's too adept a filmmaker and technician to allow these blemishes to grace the screen unmotivated, yet at this point any logical explanation for them is elusive. They simply exist, noticeable maybe on only a subconscious level to many, but the fact is that whether it is acknowledged implicitly or explicitly, this is indelicate filmmaking. This is also to say nothing of the fact that the scene's clumsy back projection could very well be a perverse reference to Alfred Hitchcock's films, which often had this type of technical inferiority even if for their time they were thought of as immaculately constructed.



Teddy and Chuck arrive at the portentous Shutter Island and get to work on their investigation, steadily growing more and more uneasy by the place, which seems inescapable with its thick security and layers of barbed wire fencing. Though the film progressively builds a tighter technical gloss, shaking loose elements that announce themselves as incompetent, the bizarreness of the opening moments spills over uncannily. The clear delineation of foreground and background also establishes itself as a figurative parallel to the shifty play with reality that starts occurring in the film. Oblique reference points - the well-kept office of the head doctor on the grounds, Dr. Cawley (an endlessly menacing Ben Kingsley), the Mahler spinning on vinyl beside the booze-swigging Dr. Naehring (another strong portrayal by the always reliable Max Von Sydow) - begin activating enigmatic visions in Teddy's mind, fragments that are at first mere ephemeral indicators of violence and trauma, only gradually revealing themselves as being linked to Dachau concentration camps and Teddy's past as an American soldier involved in the camp's liberation. There are also faint jabs at a romance with a woman (Michelle Williams) associated with heartbreak and tragedy. Water is the trigger for these recollections, and in his sleep, nearby drips induce one of the film's most lilting, visually dazzling dream sequences, a long dance of disconnection between him and the woman, ostensibly his past wife, in their old home that is crumbling around them. The scene recalls Tarkovsky's Mirror and is set to Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight", one of my favorite contemporary classical pieces - a divine combination.

All of this firmly implants the sense that something is suffocatingly intimate about Shutter Island for Teddy, something so fatefully bound to his psyche that the landscape both evokes primal emotions from him and reflects those same emotions - the island is witness to a violent hurricane the second day Teddy and Chuck arrive. Teddy starts having convincing suspicions about the institution being a vast repeat of the Holocaust horrors, an evil place where people are forced into being labeled insane and are subsequently exploited for inhumane testing, the biggest-kept secret in the history of human experience. It's a hypothesis that is preposterous only at face value, for in the context of the film Scorsese weaves in hints towards it with such deftness that it makes us deeply sympathetic towards Teddy, who DiCaprio plays with the ideal mixture of despair, hubris, and subdued kookiness. Yet there remains the potent sense of discomfort and distrust announced by the opening scene as well as several odd moments after, which hints at something more mysterious and unreachable beneath, something only half-validated by the unexpectedly sudden appearance of the missing woman who turns out to have an intense emotional connection to Teddy that he does not openly admit having an awareness of.

At this point, with the film presumably nearing an explosive climax, Scorsese has two options: resolve the mystery in a startling twist or leave things hanging on a note of delicious ambiguity. He chooses both. Many would likely object to this reading, because it is easier to push it aside as an ill-fitting backpeddle towards referencing M. Night Shamyalan, a dull way of wrapping up the story in a neat little bow. But it's a great deal richer than that, and while I agree that the dialogue during the reveal is several notches too pat, too explanatory in regards to the plot, it does not quite wrap up the mystery entirely. Instead, the revelation of Teddy really being Andrew Laeddis, a patient for two years at the institution struggling from severe post traumatic stress - which has been criticized for being hinted at too early - only introduces another mystery, a mystery about the human soul and its ability to disguise its own flaws. Telling the story in a more linear manner, one in which we are aware from the beginning that Teddy/Andrew is indeed insane, would sacrifice the powerful experiential nature of the film, the way that it manages to make us feel as delusional as him in those final moments which have us doubling and tripling back on our preconceptions. Whatever conclusion is reached by the roll of the credits then just infuses the preceding two hours of the film with multi-layered meaning, an a-ha moment if there ever was one. And equally, I don't think this relegates the early scenes to mere cinematic fluff and genre tomfoolery; they are loaded with magnificent imagery and clever narrative detours that provide indefinable insight into the troubled psychology of DiCaprio's character.



If structuring the film around a massive scenario of role-playing wasn't enough to suggest the apparatus of the cinema, Shutter Island embraces another level of meta in the fact that it is steeped in classic Scorsese tropes as well as tropes from classic films Scorsese admires. That might need re-reading, just as this is a film that requires tireless unpacking in order to markedly pinpoint the layers of artifice, delusion, and reality that are interwoven. One of the clearest reference points is Hitchcock's Vertigo, in its use of frightening heights (the apogee of Teddy's delusion is situated symbolically on the precipice of a cliff), female doppelgängers, and a spiral staircase that positions itself directly prior to the climax, a suggestion of ascent to epiphany that is immediately and curiously complicated by his wife's ghost telling him that "this will be the end of you". The film also makes stunning use of allusions to Kubrick's The Shining; along with the more blatant presence of ghostly reminders of Teddy's tragic past in the image of his bloodied little girls, there is even a shot of a red door being overcome by the torrential rain outside, a combination that creates the optical illusion of flowing blood. Of course, the plot's similarities have so many parallels as to be unnoticeable. Shutter Island is also the story of a man coming to a place he may or may not have been before, and who we find is hiding something that drives him insane.

This is not to propose that the film is a mere pastiche of references though, for it finds plenty of ways to become distinctly its own. The film's multivalent final line - delivered with sublime redemption - is fascinatingly continuous with Scorsese's ongoing interest in the reputations we face in our looming deaths. Just as Travis Bickle needs to do something, whatever he can, before dying to make his mark on the world, Andrew Laeddis must choose whether or not he can live a dignified life even after regaining sanity. It's a frank look at the process of Catholic guilt and atonement, the all-consuming question that means life or death. I found it terribly moving, especially after that intensely emotional flashback where DiCaprio and Williams have finally synched up in realistic terrain (the scene includes one of the most piercing gun shots I've ever witnessed, both emotionally and sonically). And needless to say, the cinematography is remarkable (the only exception being a few errors in continuity), with harsh backlighting that becomes one of the primary visual motifs - perhaps suggesting the blinding truth always behind Teddy's back? When the final ominous orchestral chugs bellow in black screen space, echoing the beginning of the film, and suddenly signal the first title card, there's no question for me as to the singularity of this work in Scorsese's long career.

Play Time (1967) A Film by Jacques Tati

While watching Jacques Tati's exuberant 1967 film Play Time, during every shot you are confronted with an alarming decision of what to look at. Almost right after you make this choice, you are left with another feeling, a lament for what you did not get a chance to look at: damn, I should have spent more time watching the funny guy sampling the lurid desserts at the convenience store, you may think to yourself. Fortunately, this is a not a setback, for I suspect it opens up the potentiality for completely new viewing experiences each time it is watched and re-watched, a broad sampling of new mini-narratives and a chance to divert your attention to the stubby guy with the sad look on his face rather than the ostentatious American grandma. With Play Time, Tati achieved something rare in cinema: the ability to give the audience total freedom as to where the gaze wanders. It is not a commonality for individual cinematic images to be as democratized and uniformly frantic as they are in Tati's whimsical evocation of a day in the life of Paris, and the result is a monolithic work of go-for-broke art that simultaneously overloads the senses with quotidian silliness and breezes by with a perpetually light tone.

The squeaky clean polish of the film's metropolitan Paris does not just look artificial, it is. The most salient of many markers of artistic kinship with current Swedish director Roy Andersson is the fact that the film's setting is entirely constructed from scratch in a vast studio. This is an impressive, but also hugely exorbitant feat for Tati and his crew, for the set is adorned with massive urban conglomerations of seemingly full-size glass buildings, traffic circles, and a fully functioning populous. Pervading the film is a firm sense of this fakery, and Tati will often subtly draw attention to the fact that it is less a reproduction of Paris than a cartoonish prototype of a city in an increasingly modernized world, one whose idiosyncrasies are suppressed in the face of consumerism, technology, and globalization. For instance, the architectural landmarks that are a stamp of Paris's cultural heritage, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, are only seen via transitory reflections in swinging glass doors, and are otherwise conspicuously absent from the film. Ultimately, the world of Play Time, dubbed "Tativille", could be anywhere, a hypothesis made clear in one visual joke involving a series of posters on a wall depicting different countries with the same box-like twenty-story building nudged next to a stereotypical image of one of the defining characteristics of that country.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Tati looks at the changing world not with an eye for dissociation and confusion but rather for genuine enjoyment and discovery. The film drifts in and out of different subjects extemporaneously - a group of bemused American tourists, a drunkard, and of course Tati himself, playing his famous Monsieur Hulot character in typically short pants and long jacket - and each perceives the environment as something alien yet altogether compelling, a playground for endlessly inspiring possibilities. Hulot is the most profoundly unsettled of the bunch, constantly being thrown off his intended path to meet with an American official by the exciting new trinkets of urban life; he marvels at the odd way in which the waiting room chairs in an office building make a vulgar plop sound and reform themselves every time he presses down on them, stands shocked and transfixed when all of a sudden the room he thought he entered suddenly transforms into an elevating contraption that sends him up a number of floors and into a new, undesired labyrinth of office cubicles, and looks on in bafflement when indistinguishable faces from his past experiences at war resurface and compete for his company. Whereas he is literally jolted involuntarily off his path by these uncontrollable forces, the tourists burst headlong through the consumer jungle without any deterrents, advancing on to more exciting attractions before they've even had time to truly process one.



The comic irony with the tourists is that they're relishing nothing more than banal commodities of a competitive industry, unoriginal and wholly unpractical inventions that have nothing to do with Paris and everything to do with a desire for a faster, more convenient way of living. One gets the sense that the souvenirs the women salivate over (all of the tourists are old women, presumably reaping the fruits of their husbands' retirement funds) - sound-proof living room doors, brooms with headlights - could have been manufactured in any industrially mature nation, America included. What matters instead is the infatuation with the glamor of travel and foreignness, and even though they spend only a day there and wax ignorant about the nearest Americanized options, they get their coveted share of exoticism. Tati's presentation of them is teasing yet not overly critical, only a fun-loving gesture of mockery that illuminates the garish fashions, bland homogeneity, and short attention spans of some American tourists. Furthermore, he seems to celebrate their ecstatic myopia and the fact that its enough to wring pleasure out of an antiseptic maze, reducible as it is to a series of lifeless grids.

This is most tellingly conveyed in the 45 minute sequence that is very much the film's nucleus, a meticulously detailed opening night at a high-class restaurant. It must be one of cinema's most methodical build-ups of accumulated sight gags that doesn't so much culminate in one explosive punch line as it does gradually pile on the absurdity until the night reaches its inevitable conclusion. The tourists and other wealthy, snobbishly dressed patrons swarm the place before it has even been fully constructed, a premature act of excitement that ultimately costs them the structural integrity of the restaurant. Tati layers on little quirks, letting certain characters appear several times in similar shots. One particularly well-executed joke is the couple who have a large fish fillet on a platter in front of them but are unable to dig in because new waiters keep coming over to season it under the impression that no one else has, only to get distracted and abandon it. The entire scene vibrates with life, and the frames are absolutely filled by the end of it with dancing bodies. Although Play Time is an impudent satire, Tati is as attuned to the economy of people's behavior as he is the silly trivialities and hypocrisies, the way that they can make the most out of their situations and be delighted by even the most artificial and literally unfinished surfaces. It's a stunningly visual film that exploits the medium's fundamental faculty of sight, and is all the more stately on the biggest screen you can find.

Eclipse (L'Eclisse) A Film by Michelangelo Antonioni (1962)

I have a troubling relationship with Michelangelo Antonioni's loose early 60's trilogy (the other two being L'Avventura (1960) and La Notte (1961)), because it seems that just about every time the films become so achingly beautiful that I'm in awe, Antonioni does something that achieves little more than bland fulfillment of the conventions of alienation that were in vogue in the art cinema of the time. L'Eclisse represents the apogee of this divide, with sequences that are among the most sublime Antonioni ever committed to film and others, like an endlessly prolonged stock market diversion or the moments when Monica Vitti can't utter anything but the words "I don't know", that are irritating beyond belief. Throughout these works, one senses that Antonioni was building up a personal stamp in the public's eyes, one that dealt with longeurs of wordlessness and blunt acknowledgments of the kind of dwarfing effect that modernity has on the individual, and, either consciously or subconsciously, he was factoring in what was expected of him. Thus, there are times when Antonioni is just being Antonioni, lounging in his signatures without necessarily always servicing the work. I find L'Eclisse to be the most accomplished of the three films though despite the transparency of these shout-outs to himself, because when it shines, it really shines.

It goes without saying, but the film is about the difficulty of making lasting emotional connections in an increasingly modernized milieu, and it stars Antonioni's muse Monica Vitti as the romantically, even spiritually confused bella. The first scene of L'Eclisse is actually the middle of a scene, one in which Antonioni does not supply the supposedly essential parts. We experience the feeling of dropping in on an uncomfortable tension between two lovers - Vitti's Vittoria and Francisco Rabal's Riccardo, a smug, corporate type - as it is perceived that Vittoria has in the very near past made a declaration of closure to Riccardo. The silence that pervades the moments with the adult couple shying awkwardly away from each other in a confined apartment space, a polar opposite of the chatty remoteness occurring in a similar scene between Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot in Godard's Contempt, is an immediate predictor of the film's relentless quietude, not just sonically but psychologically. Even in the most boisterous stretches, there is a blankness of mind, a murkiness, a general inability to externalize internal feelings. Vitti may invariably laugh, smile, and dance, such as in an uncharacteristic throwaway visual gag where she paints herself black and has a Kenyan pow-wow with her best friend's colonialist neighbor, but she is never resolutely happy.

About halfway through, L'Eclisse seems to incidentally pick up what becomes its primary plot point, just as L'Avventura unexpectedly transitions from a mystery regarding a lost woman to a timid romance between the two who are dispassionately searching for her. It's important to mention however that a "primary plot point" to Antonioni is just an excuse to explore a theme, and any semblance of story is democratized amongst the other aspects that make up the film. After literally drifting around for an extended period of time after leaving Riccardo, she begins to develop an enigmatic romance with a stockbroker working for her mother (Lilla Brignone) named Piero (Alain Delon). Their interactions begin as fragmented and uncertain; although Piero's attraction is bluntly clear, Vittoria has a habit of turning away from him at all possible costs, though never fully abandoning his company for fear of losing all hope in human connection. Eventually, she has difficulty holding back her attraction, and they grow more flirtatious, even engaging in a few outbreaks of unrestrained jostling with one another. Yet, to emphasize the fundamental distance between them, which can be uncannily felt through through their more mechanized movements, Antonioni, in one of his more leaden uses of visual symbolism, composes them kissing from opposites sides of a glass window. The suggestion is that attraction can exist merely on a superficial level, and as long as there are barriers to put up (the stock market and glass windows, both creations of man), people will forever be doomed to stand on either side, prohibiting them from real physical and emotional contact.



Vittoria's romantic liaisons are foregrounded against the materialistic concerns of urban life. To be more accurate, L'Eclisse is set in what looks like a newly renovated metropolitan area, with vast expanses of construction work within a hilly landscape. There is a driving contrast that the film establishes between the natural and the unnatural or man-made, evident in both the physical landscape as well as the emotional landscape between the sensual, searching Vittoria and the money-hungry Piero. Several instances powerfully illustrate this, such as Vittoria's aimless walks, shot in successions of wide panoramas. Antonioni also extracts the synthetic beauty out of the environment through Vittoria's heedless curiosity; one particularly stunning moment shows her standing motionless before a row of metal pillars clanking in the soft wind. However, there are also times when he brazenly overstates the world's mechanization, and this is precisely what I mean when I say Antonioni's just being Antonioni. The sequences at the stock market are intolerably long and banal, simplistically implying that to experience it for long enough is to truly understand its shallowness. Unfortunately, this comes across right away, and we are left to wallow in a clamor of writhing men in suits, screaming out numbers and plotting their next moves behind gargantuan pillars. Furthermore, the rather absurd, Tati-esque tone of the scenes muddles the intent, attempting to make something that should be dry and mathematical into an almost slapstick romp.

The absence of Vitti's character for a great portion of the stock market scenes is typical of L'Eclisse's propensity to completely strand its main characters and plot line. It's also an augur for the film's notoriously mysterious conclusion, which, after creating the expectation that Vittoria and Piero will meet the next morning in their usual spot, instead becomes an extended piece of visual poetry documenting their absence from the street corner where they first kiss timidly. At this point, the overbearing presence of the locations takes total precedence over the people occupying them, eclipsing them, if you will. Antonioni's aloof camera makes the mundane seem alien, luxuriating in a piece of driftwood floating in a bucket of water, the textures of the skin of a random passersby, or a long, empty street. Droning soundscapes accompany the images, creating what feels more like a sci-fi than a romance. I can't think of a more entrancing way to conclude this lonely, elegiac film, and it almost singlehandedly makes up for the more eye-rolling formalities.

Taxi Driver (1976) A Film by Martin Scorsese

During a protracted scene of dialogue late in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, a twelve year-old prostitute named Iris (a blossoming Jodie Foster) referred to in the pimp world as "Easy" says to Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), the stir-crazy misfit at the center of the film: "I dunno who's weirder, you or me". It's a casual one-off delivered by Foster with the kind of finesse that would suggest it as no more or less important than the rest of the conversation, but it rings with the kind of ambiguous moral inquiry that underscores the entire film. Scorsese's landmark 1970's film is not so much caught up in providing answers or condemning social issues as it is in thrusting the viewer inside the mind of a disturbed individual who, in combating the thing, becomes the thing itself. Bickle, a lonely, self-serious, aggressively moralizing figure, thinks he has it all understood: the New York City in which he cruises with his taxi is rife with corruption, "scum" as he routinely dubs it, and it needs to be swept away. He has no intended solution to this problem other than to simplistically "get rid of it", and Scorsese watches from a respectable, devastating distance as Bickle's one-track mind negotiates the need to purify the urban environment while it rots away without assistance.

Bickle is one of the most radically ambiguous anti-heroes that Scorsese has ever filmed, and it would be safe to extend this statement to include him in the entire scope of American cinema as well. His stance as a morally questionable vigilante who rebels against an almost post-apocalyptic milieu of urban angst looms large over the ensuing timeline of American films that take this type of figure as their signpost for dark, serious subject matter: Tyler Durden in Fight Club, to name one, is loaded with Bickle-isms. Part of the reason why he is such a fascinating character is because of the juggling act that is on display between his seemingly astute and well-intentioned dismissal of what he sees as the city's corruption and the psychopathic bloodlust that he embraces to defeat it. It becomes especially difficult to stand by Bickle's side when we witness how impulsive and rash he is when he does not get his way. A radiant love interest named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) avoids him after he foolishly takes her to an adult film as a date, and in doing so Bickle nearly attacks her violently. Though he's been through the war as a Marine and will humbly take any job, he's really a child in a man's body who has a burning desire to eliminate all the obstacles that make life slightly less endurable.

The distorted lens through which Bickle views his surrounding city requires Scorsese to present his favorite setting in the bleakest possible manner, a fever dream of indecipherable sources of neon, wet side-streets lined with junkies and prostitutes, and bland apartment interiors. Much of what Bickle sees is from his taxi, and thus this landscape is usually shown from a voyeuristic perspective, glimpsed through windows and often abstracted by reflections of street lights. Several of these montages have been immortalized in film history, such as the scene that opens the film, with a taxi emerging portentously in slow motion from a cloud of manhole smoke, succeeded by Bickle's famous narration about the scum which envelops him. Set to Bernard Herrmann's final score, a dreamy lounge jazz mix of synthesizers and saxophone, these scenes are rightfully remembered for the beautifully foreboding snippets that they are, pointing subtly but surely towards the tragic bloodbath climax. The uncertainty that accompanies them also carries over into Bickle's ordinary activities, such as meeting up with his fellow cabbies at a diner or ogling Betsy from the street at her workplace. As always, Scorsese's cinematic technique is utterly in synch with the psychological and dramatic imports onscreen, emphatically whip panning, tracking, or zooming when called for. He even finds menace in a moment when Bickle is drinking a seltzer water, the camera ominously gliding towards the bubbling liquid with an enhanced sonic accompaniment, something of a condensed version of the coffee cup scene in Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her.



In fact, Taxi Driver is fundamentally informed by diverse cinematic sensibilities, and in a way becomes a hodgepodge of all of the direct as well as invoked collaborators on the work. Consider the fertile merging of the European and the American; the film presents a nihilistic loner not unlike a Dostoevsky figure within a distinctly American political and social context. Its mirroring of the turbulent racial and sexual tension that existed in the mid-70's is acutely realized, and can be witnessed in Bickle's conspicuous bigotry towards the African American street-dwellers (who work both as continuations of the Vietnamese he antagonized during the war, with the final scene being a chilling echo of the My Lai Massacre, and reflections of the still-prevalent racism of the time, even after the passing of Civil Rights Acts) and the gulf between the openly sexual mindset that leads the trench-coaters to attend porn theaters and the more prudish outlook of a character like Betsy. This distillation of reality is extended by the decision to present New York City in the midst of an exciting voting season, with a heavyweight candidate named Palantine, a loose fictional representation of Ronald Reagan, being an anchor around whom much of the story's action occurs. So if the guts of this film are American, contextually and cinematically (the grandiose sweep of major Hollywood directors like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock guides the proceedings - after all, Scorsese is a firm devotee of classic Hollywood cinema - and even Kubrick's The Shining is recalled in the ironically sedate conclusion), then it is sprinkled with fascinating doses of European arthouse furnishings. Bresson, specifically a la Pickpocket, is felt in the film's emotional distance and use of diary narration as a formal narrative device, and German Expressionism makes its mark on Scorsese's florid visual style, with Fritz Lang's M being a particularly fitting precursor given its general thematic thrust of ethical decisions in the face of an outsider.

The Bresson influence is actually especially substantial because Taxi Driver's screenwriter, Paul Schrader, is an enthusiastic worshipper of the French director's work. He provides the introduction to Criterion's Pickpocket release, and one point he makes seems particularly relevant to his effort with Scorsese. Schrader glows about Pickpocket's achievement of transcendence, which he attributes to the utter absence of direct emotionality in the film with the exception of its closing moments. With Herrmann's score, Scorsese's blackly comic touches, and the spontaneous charisma of Robert De Niro (the widely quoted "are you talkin' to me" scene is a result of improvisation), Taxi Driver is far from the austere terrain of Bresson, but there is still a noticeable stride away from the Hollywood tradition of always keeping the audience emotionally invested in and knowledgeable of the character's motivations. Thus, the film's ambiguous final scene, which comes off as too saccharine by half, approaches a similar level of emotional reward, albeit not a completely understood one. I find this bittersweet ending, which is refreshingly indeterministic, to be the clincher of the film's success, and it is largely the reason why I respect the film more than I did after a first viewing. It gives us both violent destruction and perfect fantasia, and although one might occur in a post-mortal realm, who's to say it matters?

In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa) A Film by Wong-Kar Wai (2000)

Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) and Mrs. Chan's (Maggie Cheung) coincidental romance is doomed from the start. The two have moved into neighboring apartment rooms in Hong Kong on the same day, and just as soon as this happens they suspect both of their respective traveling spouses of infidelity. In the instance of mutual dejection, they begin seeing each other rather routinely enacting rehearsals of the imagined romantic liaisons of their spouses, a sly narrative device that only superficially masks the pair's own growing attachment. Yet we know from the outset that this is a relationship that will not work, if only for reasons outside their control, and director Wong Kar-Wai laments this fact while emphasizing it through tight domestic compositions and a rich patchwork of fragmentary scenes in which words are schematic and desires are withheld. The acute sense of melancholy and longing that imbues In the Mood for Love is masterfully realized through Wong's impressionistic sensibility, and it results in film that, despite its deliberately elusive narrative, which constitutes a memory of the past rather than a present moment, acquires a plausible emotional register. Everything that is mere stylistic flash in Wong's earlier films works marvelously here, as it's always stressing the underlying emotions and themes in the film, and also - being a film that is consciously constructed of moments as opposed to chronological sequences - the precise feelings inherent in every memory.

The immediate discontinuity between In the Mood for Love and Wong's earlier Hong Kong-set films like Chungking Express and Fallen Angels is the level of design precision. His early films display a burst of Godardian energy, seemingly subject to great spontaneity and fluctuation between script and finished product. Here, no notes are bent. The art direction, costumes, cinematography, and musical cues feel so pre-ordained and exact despite the film's strangely episodic, elliptical nature. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung's meta performances are assured and mannered yet not without a sense of humor and imperfection, unlike the freewheeling naturalism of Fallen Angels' sprawling, hyper-kinetic bodies in urban spaces. Although the bulk of Wong's core collaborators remain the same (William Chang is the film's editor, and Christopher Doyle once again lends his talent to the film as cinematographer), In the Mood for Love calls upon Wong to adapt. Its story emphasizes ephemerality as well as formality (the setting is of established middle-class adults in a pivotal early 1960's instead of disillusioned twentysomething loners in a more modernized urban environment), so the style works accordingly. Scenes are alarmingly short and to the point but still beautiful, and that is very much the ulterior motive: the lovers' milieu is only deflating and suppressing the impassioned attraction at the core of their encounters.

Yet the pacing of the film also bends to the mechanics of memory on occasion. Because of the fact that Wong ends the film on Mr. Chow during a lush coda in the midst of Cambodian ruins, and positions its final quotes as those of Mr. Chow, In the Mood for Love presumably is the product of his memory. Therefore, moments of glimpsed tenderness between Chow and Chan are normally protracted by Wong through either slow-motion, matched harmoniously with Michael Galasso's mischief-soaked waltz, or nearly imperceptible shutter speed effects which retain real-time diegetic audio (such instances are infinitely more effective than their overuse in Fallen Angels). Mr. Chow savors these fleeting hints at fully expressed love with Mrs. Chan, and through the magic of his mind, and the cinematic medium, he can extend them, fetishize them, and even repeat them, explaining the several repeated scenes (and images) in the film. We are however left without the subjectivity of Mrs. Chan, and her ambivalent, emotionally confused presence in the film leaves her actual thoughts up to interpretation, but through minor, evocative gestures, Wong (and Cheung) suggests that Chan's repressed feelings are reciprocated.



In the Mood for Love is a decidedly personal, introspective work, but it also has a compressed social and political component to it. In a perfect world, free of societal constructs and points of view towards marriage, loyalty, and manners, Mr. Chan and Mrs. Chow would go unrestricted with their desires, falling for each other the moment their first instinctual love bug crawled out. Repressed romances in the face of a collective society is a storytelling plug as old as dirt, identifiable in the literary works of Shakespeare and subsequently throughout film history, most radically practiced by Luis Buñuel. Wong's film breathes interesting new life into this theme because the rapturous, rainy Hong Kong that Mr. Chan and Mrs. Chow occupy is far from being an oppressive area. Rather, the gorgeous wallpaper and meticulously placed old-fashioned cars are reflective of an adequate, even luxurious Hong Kong, and the economic situation of the time is what initially brings the pair together in the adjacent apartments in the city. As the 1960's progressed, the social situations worsened, culminating in a series of subversive riots in 1966 and 1967, when the film spends its final where-they-are-now episodes. The coming-together of Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan occurs at a highly specific time and place, and the precise conditions of their meeting could not be replayed, demonstrating the impact of the public on the personal.

Given the film's adeptness in conveying the intangible through clever visual and editing rhymes, it becomes rather redundant when Wong adds the captions referring to Mr. Chan in the final acts, phrases which add verbal verification to the broader feelings communicated through the film. This has the unfortunate effect of showing and telling, of limiting the potential for cinematic reflection to what is spoken in summation. "The past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct." In the Mood for Love does not need these words because it has an uncanny ability to make us live this experience of transience and forgetting, to truly feel the sensation of a blurred snapshot. Every ecstatic detail - the bottom of a red window shade blowing next to the floor, a cigarette in an ashtray smacked with fresh lipstick, the rotting texture of a cement wall beside the noodle house - accumulates to convey this with expertise. It's a film whose richness confirms Wong Kar-Wai as a major talent.

The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza) A Film by Lucrecia Martel (2007)

The recent batch of audacious Argentinian films have come from some decidedly opaque filmmakers, but among them, Lucrecia Martel is the most willfully teasing in terms of narrative expectations. Her third feature, The Headless Woman, is a monument to diffuse plotlessness after making us believe after its chilling setup that it will be at least a low-key thriller. Instead, it is a cinema of reactions, of effect rather than cause. Documenting the quasi-amnesiac state of a middle-aged woman in the days following an accident on the road where she collides with a force (the identity(s) of which becomes the latent mystery of the film), it purposely excises the kind of empirical evidence that might lead the viewer to an understanding of what exactly happened. Martel prefers creating an ominous tapestry of portentous diegetic sounds and nondescript visuals reflecting the world only as her anti-heroine sees it, thus leaving us without any accurate frame of reference. The result is a film that washes over the screen in an indistinct blur, making it difficult to engage with during or even directly following the viewing.

It is only now, a day later, that I am able to gain my bearings and recall some of the devices she sneaks into the modest frames, which appear at a surprisingly frequent rate and inspire a curiously numbing effect. These are not only cinematic devices, like offscreen noise, subtly tampered audio, and mildly oblique widescreen compositions, but also elusive narrative motifs, such as incest, bizarre family dynamics, and the intermittent presence of lower-class Argentinians. Martel emphasizes nothing, so it's easy to second guess oneself and wonder if what was seen was really processed or interpreted correctly. Further shrouding the content is the fact that our new experiences are also the main character Verónica's (María Onetto); the guilt, anxiety, and dissociation forged by her accident shifts her significantly out of complacency, to the point where she seems to be reintegrating herself into her own life. Her impending routines - family gatherings, massage sessions, and work as a dental hygienist - remain systematic, yet it is always as if Verónica is experiencing them passively for the first time, a confused voyeur to her own existence. When advanced sexually by her husband's cousin, she first reacts in a trance, then gives in, assuming it is something she has done comfortably for a while. Another crucial scene involves her sitting down with members of her family watching old video tapes and finding herself unable to detect whether the names her mother uses for identification with certain individuals in the video are indeed correct.

For a large portion of time, Verónica remains seemingly adrift from her sense of self, until an unexplainable epiphany leads her to surmise that it was a boy that she ran over with her car. This instantly jars with the audience's preconceived notions, because a relatively identifiable, albeit indefinite, image shown through the rear-view mirror of her car earlier in the film revealed the corpse of a dog. It can be recalled however that the film's dynamic opening frames captured a group of three dark-skinned children and their dog playing hide-and-go-seek along the dirt road through the deserted outskirts of town. When the collision occurs, Verónica blankly stays in the driver's seat of her car, refusing to identify the victim of the crash. In doing so, the film establishes an aversion to sight that is two-fold: firstly, that what is seen may not always be the whole truth, and secondly, that there is a consuming desire not to look, for to see is to face the validation of horror. Accordingly, The Headless Woman is a visually hazy film, heavy on off-center framings and shallow focus, revealing ghostly figures beyond the scope of Verónica's foggy vision.



The realization of the central character's own faults is also something of a vague regaining of her own conscience, for she begins to make decisions that come from a recognizable motivation. She openly admits her hunch to her husband and asks him to drive her out to the scene of the crash in the middle of the night, making it clear that she finally wants to extinguish her guilt through confirmation. However, when nothing to her suspicions is found on the road, she seems to recoil slightly back into her detached state and pursues knowledge of the accident less actively. Gradually, it appears that Verónica is less interested in knowing what happened as an act of justice as she is in simply being able to acknowledge the facts and move on with her life in psychological order. (Such a conceit resembles Antonioni's Blow-Up, in which the pursuit for objective truth was equally misleading. Coincidentally, María Onetto bears a physical and stylistic resemblance to Monica Vitti.) The film's pacing grows increasingly sluggish and fragmentary until after Verónica makes the classic Hitchockian identity transformation (dying her hair from lucid blond to pitch black), it comes to an unexpected halt, one that is far from indicated by the context of the final shot.

Although nearly the whole of The Headless Woman rests on the minor variations, or lack thereof, in actress María Onetto's expression, the film can hardly be categorized as a psychological drama. Rather, it's a purely phenomenological work which is more interested in making us experience before understanding or interpreting. It is also ostensibly a condemnation of a somnambulistic middle class, Verónica being the scathing microcosm, founded on the clear delineations the film makes between Argentinian social classes. Nearly all of the dark-skinned characters in the film function as servants to Verónica's family, and the boy that she presumably hits with her car is further proof of the inability of the middle class to recognize their prejudices. This theme lines Martel's film up with a structurally similar work that also deals with deeply unacknowledged biases: Michael Haneke's Caché. But whereas Haneke's film finds tantalizing ways to augment its enigmatic mystery, The Headless Woman deliberately lounges in a more stoic atmosphere, and for this, it's often a frustrating, alienating piece of Antoniennui introduced by a masterful pre-credit sequence that would suggest a more diversely moody film.