Kenneth Anger Shorts

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

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

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



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



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



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

Collateral (2004) A Film by Michael Mann

Michael Mann's Collateral is largely a compromised film, and for this it's all the more intriguing to excavate where Andrew Sarris' auteur theories prove to be true - that is, that it's through bankable Hollywood material imposed on a director (this being one of the few films Mann does not share a screenwriting for) that his/her particular shining traits manifest themselves most vividly. Not that this is not still quintessential Mann - after all, it's a straight-and-arrow crime movie much like his earlier, other one-word-title works like Thief and Manhunter - but it repeatedly struggles from common denominator tactics, like the stylistic jabs at contemporary pop-culture relevance (a groan-inducing inclusion of Audioslave's "Shadow on the Sun"), and several times threatens to become a boneheaded chase picture. The hammer-to-the-head Audioslave moment, for instance, which overpowers the mood of what is otherwise one of the film's most chilling, surrealistic moments, hints at a bigger clumsiness at work here, a trait that is partly intended (the gritty, textural digital video) and partly, I suspect, accidental. In particular, it is the incessant and sometimes laughable use of musical score (is that a Garage Band drum loop I hear?) that is damaging, undermining the film's seriousness as if to suggest it's all a campy romp. But it is only because Collateral's imagery is so luminous, its psychological inquiries and sociological commentaries so penetrating, that I am willing to push my selective attention to the brink and pretend the music's not there.

As usual, the substance of Mann's filmmaking is in his evocative visuals that capture in ways that are offhand and retrospectively powerful the complex wealth of emotions his films concern themselves with. Therefore, I'll focus on specific images that do justice to this facet of his skillset and demonstrate Collateral as a sharper film than it may superficially appear to be.

An average Los Angeles taxi driver named Max, played here with palpable verisimilitude by Jamie Foxx, is at the film's center, and he is the nexus onto which the audience projects its sympathies. He tends to his ho-hum job on a daily basis with a genuine drive for professionalism and an effortless approachability - the first ten minutes show him first buffering his cab and then carrying on a conversation with a lovely young lawyer named Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) without making it too obvious that he's flirting. But it's only temporary, he insists, as his real goal is to run a successful limo business. Trouble is, there's no superhuman hustle in him, no spontaneity that would inspire a breaking of routine, so he's really been in denial, convincing himself he's capable of something without any plan to actually put it into practice. In establishing an easygoing, almost fairy-tale-like mood in this opening sequence, Mann hints at the kind of cruise control mindset towards life that will be painstakingly picked apart and shattered for remainder of the film. In the image below, which is part of a series of moody shots during Max's escort of Annie, Mann draws attention to this delusional, self-deceiving character by capturing life as a reflection, life as an illusion. Max wants to see behind the glass, but is stuck in forward motion in his taxi.



The film abruptly turns noir when Max proceeds to pick up a spiffy, seemingly pleasant guy who gradually reveals himself to be a cold and calculating hitman, Tom Cruise's Vincent. Max quickly finds himself unwillingly complicit in a succession of mysterious assassinations as Vincent offers up a hefty sum for the night's work, and since he's got a gun perpetually slung at his side, Max has no business saying no. Vincent maintains a rock-solid wall of inscrutability in terms of personal history; he simply kills because it's his job, and he does his job well. He also won't let someone as low on the totem pole as Max spoil the precision with which he goes about his work. It's a classic, archetypal meeting of two different "types": the morally questionable, thought-provoking outsider and the naive everyman. The struggles of values, codes, and worldviews between them is an endlessly revealing process, and to some extent, though Vincent is far more self-assured and unbreakable, each of them is backed into a wall, faced with a situation that will challenge their preconceptions in some way. Max lacks the charisma and willpower of Vincent, while Vincent is in serious need of Max's affability and reasoning. In one of Collateral's first climactic scenes of struggle, Mann stages the action in a narrow highway overpass, with fences surrounding the two central characters. As typical a noir touch as it is, it nonetheless works like a charm, making concrete the existential imprisonment they face.



Part of why Collateral works so well as a psychological study is because of the unlikely and unusual sense of camaraderie Max and Vincent develop over the course of the narrative, even as they debate and threaten each other on the surface. This is a complex relationship, one driven by disconnect and obligation but reminiscent of masculine bonding, or friendship, regardless. And since friends assist other friends by revealing their shortcomings, this is precisely what happens in Collateral (though the end result is less fulfilling than it is viciously cathartic). Foxx emits subtle signs in his face and body movements that gradually indicate a character transformation, an adoption of some of Vincent's strengths. In the scene below, in which Vincent sends Max into a shady situation to retrieve a special flash drive, Max's self-confidence finally makes itself known. The oddly cumulative visual progression of the scene - the notion of the style being in sync with the emotions in an uphill climb towards the payoff - begins by framing Max and the object of interest, Felix (Javier Bardem) in ways that break compositional rules to suggest a fundamental discomfort. It's like the two are not even in the same room. But Mann slowly builds towards a standard shot-reversal-shot setup, getting closer and closer and approximating Max's growing bravery.








As well as being a crime thriller, Collateral doubles as a road movie, sharing that genre's equalization of literal and figurative transportation. Almost the whole film takes place on the road, in the busy inner city streets and spacious freeways of LA, only stalling for brief episodes of action. Even when Max purposely crashes the taxi - a cathartic moment that signals an abandonment of his prior methods of self-actualization - the film simply shifts to a new means of passage: the metro line. It's where the edge-of-your-seat climax and resolution ensue, as Max and Vincent face one another, both with gun in hand, on either side of a conjoined subway car. The characteristic object of interest dividing them is of course a female. Coincidentally (and this is a spot where the film is weighed down by Hollywood contrivance), it's Annie from the beginning, and Vincent needs to murder her while Max wants to save her). I won't reveal what happens, and perhaps it's negligible anyway, because whatever the outcome, Max emerges a changed man. As the film winds to a close, Mann frames his protagonist beside a glass building where a vast power plant is reflected. It's nakedly indicative of progress and energy. The mechanical becomes the personal.



On a side note, Mann has pointed towards Dr. Strangelove as one of the key films to get him into cinema in his younger years for its simultaneous high-mindedness and box-office prosperity, so we know he's a Kubrick fan. Here he regurgitates to shocking effect a technically groundbreaking scene from A Clockwork Orange in which Kubrick dropped his camera inside a box from the third story window of a building to visualize a first person suicide attempt. This time Cruise's Vincent is on the other side of the window with a gun, and the repercussions are seen only from Max's unsuspecting vantage point.






What prevents Collateral from being a truly great Mann film is its frequently cheesy action movie stylings, and as much as they tend to line up with his prior work, they just don't feel necessary or justified in the context of this sparse, existential narrative. It's irritating because I can envision a film with even greater impact, with less bludgeoning musical choices and fewer serendipitous images of a menacing Cruise emerging laughably into frame. Still, what remains when you push aside the gloss is a luminous portrait of nighttime LA, a pair of raw, eye-opening performances, and the first-rate contemplation we've come to expect from the director.

The Social Network (2010) A Film by David Fincher

Early trailers, with the particularly inspired addition of a choir version of Radiohead's "Creep", would have lead you to believe The Social Network would be a film about virtuality, digital voyeurism, and ultimately, the changed social dynamics of the internetworking age. It's both a blessing to the film's classical narrative efficiency and a head-scratching peculiarity that director David Fincher could hardly care less about any of that. What he has devised really has more in common with the great literary and cinematic traditions of flawed ambition dramas, of antihero studies like Citizen Kane and Fitzcarraldo. So while The Social Network may be one of Fincher's most accomplished, mature films, it's also perhaps his most confined and unmitigated, or his least interesting in terms of argument's sake. One can often sense the gears churning, as the film's predictably inscrutable subject Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) builds the internationally famous social networking enterprise Facebook.com and hits the various narrative checkpoints along the way, evincing small, ephemeral psychological insights: he gets dumped by his girlfriend, hops on Napster founder Sean Parker's (Justin Timberlake) boat to maximize a level of "cool", screws over his best friend and CFO Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) once achieving a state of cyber domination, and finally attempts to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend in a wondrous in-joke that concludes the film. As drama, it has a tendency to be inoffensively by-the-numbers, but its real strength is as a classical entertainment.

This is especially unexpected from Fincher, whose prior films often seem decidedly averse (that is, by Hollywood standards) to the crowd-pleasing factor; witness the cerebral melancholy of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the creepy body horror of Seven, the literal-mindedness and subversive genre-mingling of Zodiac, or the nihilism of Fight Club. His no-fun sensibility notwithstanding, The Social Network announces its whimsical, accelerated attitude right from the get-go, in which the impact of the tumultuous break-up scene that catapults the plot lands somewhere in the ballpark of a vaudeville show. Much of this must be credited to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who specializes in the kind of conversational ping-pong that Zuckerberg and his soon-to-be ex Erica (Rooney Mara) engage in, but it's of course also perfectly staged and acted; Fincher's simplistic reversals and shallow depth of field insure the attention is directed only at Eisenberg and Mara's terrific on-screen chemistry and disastrous romantic compatibility. He's simultaneously flexing his ego about his ability to maintain a sweeping presence in Harvard University's prestigious "Final Clubs" and irrationally analyzing her harmless responses, all of which illuminates his casual condescension. Meanwhile, she's growing increasingly impatient with his inability to detect his own social shortcomings, so that his eventual proclamation of her as "just a BU student" is the unsurprising final nail in the coffin that thoroughly earns her dismissal of him as an "asshole".

Fincher bathes the scene, and by extension, the remainder of what takes place on the isolated campus of Harvard University, in the marvelous hazy golden light he loves to employ, and it's not just aesthetic fluff. His rendering of the royal atmosphere of the most exalted college in the nation is some of the finest mood-building of his career. A constant sense of pesky menace dilutes the school's otherwise distinguishable core values, and accounts for the extended post-credit montage of juvenile internet mongering that Zuckerberg inspires across the campus and eventually the entire city of Boston. Fueled by his recent break-up, he drunkenly codes an imbecilic spam site called Facesmash that offers the possibility for more inebriated misogynists to pit fellow female students against each other in a battle of hotness. This is the kind of rampant desire for social and sexual acceptance that seethes beneath Zuckerberg's mostly disinterested, elitist facade and guides the eventual birth of Facebook, which is his attempt to supplant all real-world social hierarchies with an online counterpart, amassing such intimate details as relationship statuses, pictures, personal interests, etc.



You get the idea. Plot synopsizing has been beaten to death elsewhere, so I'm not going to spell out every individual right and left turn The Social Network takes. Ultimately, it seems pointless anyway, because the film doesn't bring anything particularly new and unique to the table narratively, which isn't inherently a negative trait. The film vacillates between three strands: the actual chronological entrepreneurial ascent of Zuckerberg and, eventually, Parker, and two separate legal trials detailing the lawsuits placed against him by Saverin (for corporate exploitation and treason) and a pair of twin brothers, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (for what they deem, largely due to their own brand of elitism, to be intellectual theft). Fincher's complex editing scheme - jumping back and forth based on associative and sometimes direct links, creating a flashy web of cause and effect - is a staple of legal dramas/biopics such as this, but the orthodoxy doesn't matter because of how well the form is employed. Like Zuckerberg's own skittish, multi-tasking mind (an idea he memorably asserts to a lawyer when answering a question about where his attention is), the film careens like the very nature of our convergence culture, in which the average person does not focus his/her attention on one platform but many at the same time. People no longer lead private, immediate lives; we are existing across various planes on a daily basis, those of the physical, emotional, and digital spheres. One might argue that this is how humans have always carried on, perhaps in different, more primitive iterations, but that it's fundamentally the same nonetheless. And I would adamantly agree, except that Facebook and the internet have accelerated, simplified, and standardized our ability to perform this balancing act.

Fincher's decision to impart such shallow focus, singling out individual characters in a room with ghostly blurs of people behind them, is an apt visual metaphor for this 21st-century insularity. It's only a shame that he didn't decide to carry these thematic concerns further, settling instead for what is primarily a classical character drama, a power struggle between a group of males all fighting for authority and economic affluence, albeit with differing methods. I can't help but think: why not take full advantage of the fascinatingly modern themes at his disposal with this kind of story? Granted, the film's few instances of direct Facebook-related content - Saverin's girlfriend fumes over the lack of mention on his profile page about being in a relationship, Zuckerberg's insistent refreshing of Erica's page after sending a friend request her way - are cute and distorted at best, so maybe dealing with the internet trends openly was something Fincher and Sorkin were, to borrow Zuckerberg's snappy line, "intellectually and creatively (in)capable of doing." As it is, The Social Network is a tremendously functional movie, with phenomenal performances, a driving score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, assured pacing, witty dialogue, and eye-catching images, but it rarely breathes like a work of art. With that said, I look forward to being entertained by it again.

Hunger (2008) A Film by Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen's brutal, transcendent prison drama Hunger has to be one of the most impressive films to not win a Palme D'Or in the Cannes Film Festival's long and vibrant history. Weaving its serpentine, minimalist narrative through the stories of prison officer Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), two cell partners named Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan) and Gerry Campbell (Liam McMahon), and finally the desperate martyr who becomes the film's main focal point, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), McQueen essentially divides his film up into two stages in the extended revolt of Irish Republican Army prisoners: the initial dirty revolt, which entails the refusal to bathe and the spreading of human waste, and the tragic hunger strike of the film's title. More fundamentally though, it's pitched between atrocity and contemplation, as the visceral battle of the first half gradually gives way to morbid silence. This dissection of a historical event - the 1981 IRA strike - marks a sharp left turn in the career of director Steve McQueen, who has hitherto worked principally in the realm of structuralist installation art. His grasp of the cinematic medium in the feature-length format, however, is clearly significant. Though the film progresses rather like an abstract tone poem, failing, perhaps intentionally, to delve too deeply into character psychology, there is always - in spite of McQueen's startlingly disjunctive stylistic ideas - a coherent and otherworldly force guiding it along.

The weighty political implications of the film are more or less brushed under the rug by McQueen in favor of viscera and emotionality. This is, of course, really a monolithic conflict between a subversive clan of Irish Republicans and the cold, didactic Thatcher regime, which had at the time been ambivalent and discriminatory towards the Roman Catholic community of Northern Ireland, but it's treated more as a timeless battle between an oppressive authority and the seemingly powerless underdogs. The disembodied radio voice of Margaret Thatcher (or "vapor", as McQueen describes it) doesn't enter into the film until three-quarters of the way through, emphasizing the insignificance of political conflict when placed aside real, physical conflict. Political conflict, McQueen suggests, is what allows a government official to hide behind her curtain and coolly analyze a situation without actually understanding it. Hunger marks an attempt to shed light on the vicious human battle that went on inside the Maze Prison without any presuppositions about who's right or wrong. Neither the prisoners nor the often savage guards are cheaply antagonized; McQueen takes pains to reveal them in both moments of quiet introspection and erratic violence. Raymond Lohan, for instance, is first shown eating breakfast in the calm of his suburban home before heading to work, where, after checking for bombs planted underneath his car, he routinely terrorizes the prisoners. Later, he compassionately visits his comatose mother at a geriatric home. All in a day's work.

Raymond's story is mostly backgrounded though by those of the prisoners. Naked and surrounded by filth of the scatological and insect sort, the men waste away somberly in their cells, fiddling with secretly transported notes detailing some vague, unidentified scheme (an escape, or perhaps the eventual shocking murder of Raymond?). For all of the tactile sensations - the overwhelming reek, the ubiquitous slime - McQueen presents the cells as something of a spiritual abode, a place of relative tranquility in comparison to the violence and exploitation that is endured outside the excrement-caked walls. The lone source of light in the cell is a diminutive window that collides with the various contents of the room to produce a warm, golden glow, a sense of holiness juxtaposed against the decidedly unholy behaviors inside (clandestine masturbation, damming of the walls to spread urine into the halls). McQueen's painterly, Costa-like compositions discover the unexpected beauty in this paradoxical space: primitivized, desperate men silhouetted against the textured surfaces, reaching out to any hint of freedom and life, such as in a long, impressionistic shot of Davey fixating his fingers on a fly circling the bars on the window. McQueen even manages to create abstract art out of a cleaner spraying the feces off the wall, an image that reflects his backdrop in gallery installation.



Hunger is necessarily low on dialogue for its majority - better to luxuriate in the primal emotions at work in the struggle, an interplay of muscle and mind that leaves no room for words - but when screenwriter (and unsurprisingly, playwright) Enda Walsh steps forward for a bravura display of linguistic profusion in an incredibly protracted scene of dialogue between Bobby Sands and a priest in an empty mess hall towards the middle of the film, it's unexpectedly effective. The heavily discussed 17 1/2 minute static take follows the most physically and emotionally extreme stretch of the film, when the prisoners are subjected to cavity searches in the face of an unrelenting SWAT team whose shield-banging provides an intense percussiveness to the scene's clamoring mise-en-scene. It's fitting, then, that the film's gradually accumulated intellectual probing coalesces out of this violent action, which heightens the sensitivity of the audience to an alarming degree. The cautious and winding path of their conversation from harmless, blackly comic small talk to full-fledged debate about the ethical implications of a hunger strike - with the priest detecting a misanthropic, murderous bent to it and Sands defending his decision as the only remaining manner of revolt - highlights the divide between ideology and experience, detached viewpoint and first-person stance, even further. Having witnessed the brutal, wordless struggle that McQueen so skillfully portrays, which culminates less out of a political ideas than it does out of sheer firsthand savagery, it's only natural that we come to side with Sands as he delivers a personal anecdote of desperation and in-the-moment decision-making in a powerful, rhythm-altering close-up.

After this burst of verbiage, the film settles into the fatal, meditative tone that marks its slow conclusion. Sands initiates the hunger strike that expands to several prisoners in the Maze, but McQueen centers his attention strictly on his protagonist as his body rapidly emaciates and his flesh forms lesions from severe depletion of nutrients. There's a deeply Christian flair to Sands' martyrdom, his singular leadership of the revolt, and his gradual weakening in the face of his cause. Perpetually in bed denying the meals delivered regularly at his side, McQueen bathes him in white light, and he is given a final, touching moment of reminiscence in a brief memory of childhood, a last escape from the oppression that surrounds him. The young Bobby is embarking on what seems to be a boy scout trip to the woods, where he eventually finds himself jogging, all alone. He stop mid-path and stares at the tall, imposing trees around him, while an atmospheric string section bubbles up from the silence, the only instance of a musical score within the narrative of Hunger. It's an appropriately enigmatic finale to this humanistic, uncomfortably moving work of art, a stylish display of the simultaneous anguish and willpower of the human spirit that loudly proclaims the entrance of a distinctive filmmaker.

The American (2010) A Film by Anton Corbijn

"Boring is not a critical argument. Slow is not an inherently negative trait." These were two of the touchstone quotes in Harry Tuttle's extended defense of contemplative cinema at his blog Unspoken Cinema this summer. I was hoping I wouldn't have to go reaching for these again anytime soon, but here I am using them as ammunition for Anton's Corbijn's The American. Who would have thought they would come attached to a wide-release film starring George Clooney, directed by a pioneer of frenetic and imaginative music videos, and fastened to a marketing scheme that mislead opening weekend moviegoers into expecting some rehash of the Bourne franchise? Suffice to say, the film with the friendly title has procured a massive ambivalence from national audiences, with responses ranging from unwarranted outrage at the film's supposedly "slow" pacing and simple bafflement, the notion of being struck like a deer in the headlights with little to say. A primer for some of the anti-intellectual banter the film has inspired:

• "Those who believe they’d be happy watching George Clooney do nothing for two hours can now test that theory...Like a soccer game that ends in a 0-0 tie, the silence is eventually snooze-inducing no matter how many different ways Clooney manages to look pained in his self-inflicted isolation."

        Tricia Olszewski, Washington City Paper

• "The slow pace gives The American a very European feel to it, but, more often than not, you’ll find yourself bored and wish that at least some kind interesting event will occur or that the pace would pick up a little more---a lengthy sex scene with Jack and Carla, for instance, could have easily been trimmed down. Also, with the exception of a few lines of dialogue from the priest, there’s not enough comic relief to enliven the film."

        Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru

• "George Clooney produced and stars in this international spy thriller, which he probably thought of as existential but which registers onscreen as a giant bore."

        J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader

(*I should also point out that two of the three reviews raised the threatening possibility that you might have to check your watch a few times.)

Now I don't particularly find The American to be a masterpiece of its kind or anything, but I do think it's an enormously effective, thought-provoking character study told with an ease of touch and a blistering intelligence that would likely be missing from the type of movie these critics were likely expecting. This is the kind of faux-journalism that strangles worthwhile cultural items, that stresses the pressures of conformity and ultimately contributes to the continuing production of boring, streamlined garbage. Here is a film that deliberately refuses to engage with the standardized techniques of a modern day thriller or action movie, that decidedly has no room for conscious "comic relief", that doesn't desire to obey the rules for how long a sex scene should be shown because it is after a different effect, and for this it is graded on a false curve. It's not a sin for a film involving guns, hitmen (and hitwomen), and international intrigue to adopt the pace of real life, nor is it fundamentally wrong for the suspense and thrills to exist separated from the ostensible action scenes, instead resting squarely in the confines of Mr. Clooney's skull. It's just a different route the film chooses to take.



Not that it should have been entirely unexpected from Anton Corbijn either, the guy who helmed a gritty, throwback tribute to pained Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in 2007 (Control) and regularly shot videos for Depeche Mode, U2, and Echo and the Bunnymen. Consistently, a somber grace exudes from Corbijn. Even within his endless catalog of arresting photographs of rock icons, there is a pensiveness, a general stillness of mind, that foreshadows Clooney's displaced gun-wielder Jack in The American. After its quietly menacing opening scene, in which danger and violence penetrate him and his lady friend unexpectedly in the midst of a peaceful stroll through a snowy field, the film floats in a kind of purgatorial state as Jack negotiates in a quaint Italian village the hole he has dug himself into from a life of secrecy and disturbance. Bearing in mind the fatalistic undertow of the film (one of the telling indicators being Jack's insistence that he's doing "his one last job"; sounds like Fantastic Mr. Fox, huh?), I don't think it's necessarily much of a spoiler to confess that Jack reaches his end at the film's end, and we sense this occurrence early on, right from when he navigates a long black tunnel in his car in the credit sequence, as if gradually approaching death. But the film's rewards are not strictly in the denouement (though the final scene is quite poignant and poetic in its own right); the substance is found in Jack's muted introspection, his subtly accumulating sense of paranoia, and his tensely staged walks through the nighttime alleyways of this European no-man's land.

He's in Italy to meet a Belgian woman named Mathilde (Thekla Reuten) who will propose a special silenced rifle for Jack to build, her mission's purpose unbeknownst to Jack. It is not, however, this slight mystery that compels the film's plodding, insistent apprehension, but rather Jack's uncertainty as to whether she - or anyone he's dealing with for that matter - is actually earnest. Corbijn expertly poses this ambiguous conflict in a long, sunny scene in the woods when they first meet. The scene has a calm, tranquil air to it, emphasized by Reuten and Clooney's composed performances. Mathilde is assured in her interaction, gradually building, as all sexy assassins do, towards an erotic seduction of Jack, but he has almost equally firm footing, teasing her by revealing a wine bottle when she lies down on a blanket only to swiftly pour it all out. Moments before, to test the effectiveness of the gun's location-obscuring silencer, Mathilde asks Jack to shoot a few feet to the right of her, twice. Instantly, Jack's existential dilemma is strikingly posed: to instinctively shoot away his problem when it stands right in front of him could be to relinquish his deficits right then and there, but it's more likely a broadening of his own rabbit hole of violence, both a literal augmenting of enemies and a metaphorical reminder of the kind of man he wants to escape from, the man who murdered said lady friend at the end of the opening scene out of fear that she might leak information about his identity. The tension is nailed down again in a scene late in the film when Jack reunites with Mathilde to deliver the weapon in a vacant, brightly lit diner. When she leaves temporarily to grab something, the fact that the blinds in the room are down only serves to increase Jack's notion that she is up to no good.



Jack wants to be able to trust again, to love again, but it's his stone-cold anxiety and professionalism that prevents him from doing so. He has been conditioned to believe that no one in an unknown land is on his side, and that's precisely why the moments when he's alone, which take up the bulk of the film, are so intimidating. The film utilizes sound to great effect in these sequences, alternating long stretches of spacious diegetic noise with an elegiac piano number and a nearly imperceptible low-frequency drone. Corbijn shoots claustrophobic tracking shots from behind Jack's head, obscuring what's behind him, or narrow point-of-view shots, funneling his vision into some nook in a tight alleyway. There's always a sense that something or someone is suspiciously outside the frame, and the film's visual finesse in this regard, which ably conjures the same mental state as Jack, is admirable. When the film finally picks up its central romance, its narrative selling point, Jack's paranoia is so firmly calculated that it feels doomed from the outset. She's a hooker named Clara, and to some extent she's as flawed and persistent as Jack, but she lacks his pessimism and nervousness. She's comfortable in her own skin and in her surroundings. Because Corbijn allows their first full sex scene to be completely and intimately portrayed, and because Clooney's excellent performance conveys glimpses of emotional truth beneath the severity of his exterior (unexpected enthusiasm in the act, small physical gestures, hints in his post-sex dialogue), their romance is convincing and genuine. But he muffs the opportunity by suspecting her as a spy, ultimately correcting himself when it's too late.

It's true that The American utilizes as superficial checkmarks the narrative cliches of the hitman or spy genre (a mysterious protagonist doing his final job and wanting to run away with his beloved, a beautiful femme fatale with chameleonic hair), but its homage-like tendencies are coupled with a sincere inclination to give the characters who normally inhabit these hackneyed structures some room to breathe. It's amazing how confidently the film spotlights Clooney, who is really pitting himself against the "star" persona, minimizing his performance to a succession of subdued mutations in his eyes, mouth, and cheekbones. His work is quite extraordinary. So while Corbijn's well-intentioned, under-the-rader tributes to the European contemplative thrillers of this sort like Melville's Le Samourai and Antonioni's The Passenger are sometimes thin and fraudulent (the frightening unfamiliarity of the location, repetitious uses of landscape shots that dwarf Jack as he drives through, concentration on the mundane rather than the spectacular), his investment in the psychological predicaments of his characters is distinct. He takes the expected strategy (a frenzied, action-packed thriller set in exotic terrain) and subverts it, revealing the fundamental disconnect between what hyper audiences want and what they've been disregarding for so long: penetrating psychological examination.

Getting back to claims of slowness, The American doesn't feel so much slow as it does lifelike, humbly interested in sustaining a level of verisimilitude. Aside from the patience and completeness with which actions are carried out, it's actually taut and unrelenting from scene to scene, never pausing too long to dilute the apprehension. And this belies the fact that much of the apprehension stems directly from the mundane, from the thick slabs of routine and process that comprise the film. The content of Jack's life has been reduced to the assembling of guns, the occasional business meeting, and the obligatory covering of his own back. He's lived this way so naturally and for so long that he cannot fashion a successful comeback, and in this way the film denounces the militaristic nature of the world, arguing that it squanders the possibility for love and tenderness. Thus his final, almost surreal vision of Clara waiting for him in the woods - an image that is the culmination of a gripping sprawl towards death - is as heart-wrenching as it is a kind of morbid told-you-so moment. It's a real shame that The American has been given such flak, because while it reduces a solid achievement to a caricature, it also suggests an audience that fetishizes the kind of gratuitously violent and demoralizing films it implicitly condemns.

Be Kind Rewind (2008) A Film by Michel Gondry

Let it be known: Be Kind Rewind marks the first instance on this blog of me so thoroughly doubling back on an old post, deleting it, and rewriting my evaluation. Rarely have I found a first assessment so off base after a second viewing. My instincts usually land me somewhere in the ballpark, but what seemed like an uninspired trifle that was too cute and contrived in its dewy cultural critiques the first time around (and salvaged only sometimes by flashes of humor) stood out as an enormously heartfelt celebration of folk culture wrapped up in nearly flawless, well-paced entertainment the second time. Also, as pure comedy, Gondry's fifth feature is a gem, hysterically held together by the perfectly cast duo of Jack Black and Mos Def. Black, bumbling and discursive as ever, plays the self-congratulatory Jerry Gerber, the "star" of a series of abbreviated fan-produced blockbusters made at a modest little New Jersey video store, and Def is his dramatic foil Mike, a hesitant, proper employee at the store who is all too fearful of corrupting his reputation with Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), the store's veteran owner who is on a business trip in an attempt to pillage the airtight wisdom of a corporate video store. Jerry and Mike are forced to "remake" the numerous Hollywood movies in the store when a robbery-gone-wrong at the local power plant finds Jerry literally magnetized (a playful, absurdist touch), thus unintentionally erasing the VHS tapes that still comprise the entire catalog.

In terms of general narrative sweep, this is a relatively straightforward, by-the-numbers feel-good movie; that is, one in which the underdogs (Mr. Fletcher, Mike, and Jerry) combat a series of misadventures to stick it to the big guns of the media industry (Sigourney Weaver arrives as an uppity enforcer) that threaten to punish them for copyright infringement. It's ultimately only a humble, tentative triumph, nothing that would get their names in the news as cunning revolutionaries against corporate oppression, but a triumph nonetheless. All of their homemade movies, which gradually become the talk of the town, are instantly steamrolled by Weaver's comrades, forcing them to make their most audacious leap of faith. They devise the plan to produce - with the assistance of the various townies who have become regulars at the store - their own original short film based on the life and times of Fats Waller, a legend of the uptown Jazz movement of the roaring twenties who maintains nostalgic value for Mr. Fletcher. In doing so, they're making a small, if substantial, effort towards swimming upstream against the inexorable, often tyrannical flow of mass media, and making a case for the individual over the machine. What reeks of predictability and didacticism is more than redeemed by the tremendous amount of heart and tongue-in-cheek charm throughout. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and doesn't pin itself down to one all-encompassing, negative view of mass culture.



In fact, while on the one hand Gondry is lambasting the impersonal nature of mass media and the ways in which it often cultivates a passive audience, he is also celebrating the lasting spark that such films can and frequently do induce. Jerry and Mike know these movies so well that they can fire through a faithful, albeit superficially ridiculous, interpretation of them in under a day and with boundless enthusiasm. What's more, their customers can rent these movies, notice the boorish discrepancies from the original, and still come back for more, enraptured and unexpectedly impressed by the scrappy layman's versions, stirring up as they do fond memories of the source movies themselves. Beneath this is a reassuring statement from Gondry that whatever the box-office profits of a big-budget feature, whatever the high-falutin' intentions of a major production studio, that it is ultimately the audience who owns the movies in the long run, the vast majority who form potent mental imprints of their individualized experiences of the media. It's an uplifting view of culture, antithetical to the widespread pessimism regarding the "death of movies and art", and nowhere is it more evident than in Gondry's beautifully rendered climax. For all the film's silly, nonchalant humor, the final scene is pure pathos. As the destruction crew waits impatiently outside, the town gathers together in the video store to screen their finished Fats Waller film. The projector's flicker (partly produced by the machine itself and partly a result of Mike and Jerry's foolhardy aesthetic decision to place a household fan in front of the lens to conjure the look of an old-fashioned film) dances across the faces of the rapt audience, alternately laughing and crying at the various roles they played in the film. Gondry's utterly aware of how cheesily meta the scene is, but it's genuinely moving anyway.

Be Kind Rewind's films-within-a-film ultimately owe more to Gondry's faux-DIY visual style than the commonplace look of the film itself, but I can take this small compromise as a necessary move from an indie eccentric attempting to make a message movie about mass culture products from within Hollywood. That's not to say there's an unforgivable shortage of imagination at work here; the shoddy special effects that Jerry and Mike employ to their adaptions, like pizzas behind people's heads to suggest blood, night vision to appropriate evening fight scenes, or numerous cardboard miniatures, are priceless. And Jack Black's performance is one of his most memorable, as it usually is when he's this unhinged. Stumbling around the sets like there is serious cash at stake, his larger-than-life swagger and sense of stray filmmaking knowledge ("you know, you gotta wet the ground!") is hilariously measured. The film is further proof that Gondry is not entirely impotent when reduced to his own material, still capable of crafting charming, emotional works.

Repulsion (1965) A Film by Roman Polanski

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

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

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



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

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