Safe (1995) A Film by Todd Haynes

At the core of Todd Haynes' Safe is the idea that the human body is a cage housing fragile, valuable material, and that it's constantly threatened by the harsh and jagged environment around it. When that cage and its components becomes vulnerable for any number of reasons, it stands no chance against the elements. This is precisely the process of disintegration that Haynes documents in his second feature, and it reinforces every aesthetic decision that is made in the first half of the film: the uncomfortably intimate mic'ing technique, wherein tiny microphones seem to rest within the shirts of performers and capture every fidget, swallow, or scratch in precise clarity; the distant, geometric framing that reinforces the endangerment of the individual in the context of larger spaces; the nearly ubiquitous offscreen presence of terror-mongering radio broadcasts; and perhaps even the repeat appearances of sweet, luxury foods like cake and milk, the frequent consumption of which can be undesirable for the digestive system. Haynes makes the audience especially sensitive to even the most innocuous external stimuli (in one shot even a bedroom chair glows with malign purpose), as well as to the internal bodily functions that deal with these forces. It's all a way of framing the supposed "environmental illness" of his main character, the bored, vacant San Fernando Valley housewife Carol White (Julianne Moore).

It doesn't take long to discern the absurdity of this alleged "environmental illness" and begin to identify the metaphorical territory Haynes is working within. But in Safe, it's far easier to realize that Haynes is aiming for metaphor than it is to pinpoint the exact nature of those hidden resonances. Carol wears white throughout a good portion of Safe's first half, one of the first and most salient tip-offs to her hypersensitivity to the outside world and consuming desire for sterility. Also, when asked how she's doing by an equally uninspired suburban housewife or by her skeptical husband Greg (Xander Berkeley), Carol always responds with a timid, clearly half-hearted "well...good," indicating that she's deeply troubled. Haynes applies some of the standard tropes of the horror genre and its repeated emphasis on the clueless female protagonist - consistently having Carol walk her way into uncomfortable scenarios, composing reaction shots that suggest something garish out of frame only to reveal simple domestic items, stranding characters in huge rooms where anything could lurk in the shadows - so that he can undermine them at every turn, forcing the audience to position Carol's rattling psyche as a direct result of her boring, stifling milieu.



As an openly gay filmmaker, Haynes has been exploring these kinds of victimized figures throughout his fascinating career, and in this homosexual context, Safe becomes a charged allegory for the self-perpetuating anxieties of being forced by societal standards to live the "normal" life, a subservient dynamic that the film insists ends only in misery and isolation. The film is structured on the surface as an enlightenment narrative and on the subtextual level as a maddening descent into obscurity, away from any semblance of civilization or happiness. As Carol becomes increasingly vulnerable in her bright, slick domestic environment (displayed in the kind of Sirkian vibrancy that Haynes would expand upon in Far from Heaven), she in turn seeks any method of medical assistance that can ease her discomfort, shortness of breath, and spontaneous vomiting. When conventional doctors fail to see any indicators of sickness and her husband's attitude shifts precariously from revolt to irritation to sympathy (Berkeley's performance is a quietly virtuoso one), Carol's search becomes progressively extreme until it's clear that what she is really seeking is a full-blown escape from her suburban life. As a result, she finds herself attracted to an informercial for a New-Agey self-help clinic set in the middle of the desert called Wrenwood, which boasts to have found the simple cure for the types of "environmental illnesses" plaguing people like Carol.

At Wrenwood, Carol appears to have found a refuge where she is given space and treated with affection by likeminded peers. The head of the clinic, the seemingly benign and respectful Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), speaks in calming, inspiring tones about his own healing process from the contaminating factors of reality, referring specifically to pollutants but more broadly to social structures, politics, and media. His teaching and nursing at Wrenwood is decidedly laissez-faire, and he encourages his patients to take the same approach to their own acts of personal rejuvenation; at one point, he even states proudly that he has finally ceased reading the newspaper, a blunt declaration of insularity delivered like a presidential keynote address. Haynes' detached, probing camera, however - always distant and wolf-like, glimpsing all the nuances and details that Carol misses - gradually unravels Dunning's thin facade, revealing him to be little more than a nihilistic hippie and a shameless opportunist. One shot in the second-half of this tantalizingly bifurcated film - shortly after Carol has been relocated from an airy cabin with porch-like screen windows to a circular metal cage resembling both an outer-space vessel and a womb (both offer striking potential interpretations) - catches a view of Dunning's modern mansion sitting atop the peak of the valley Wrenwood is nestled in. One senses that Dunning has built his home there not for convenience or pleasure, but merely to reinforce a messiah-like image of himself to his clients.



Carol never seems to realize this though, and the film becomes increasingly unsettling as she warms up to Wrenwood, eventually appearing to be at relative peace with herself in this stale, limiting community. Whether or not her husband buys into the mumbo-jumbo about a full healing and return to ordinary domesticity supplies the film with potent ambiguity; Berkeley and Moore's scenes together at Wrenwood possess a morbid awkwardness, as if he is slowly realizing his complicity in the act of gradually burying his own wife alive. In the second-to-last scene of the film, Carol, at the encouragement of Dunning, gives a birthday speech to her environmentally ill peers about how good she feels at the clinic and how much she believes she has improved since leaving her San Fernando Valley existence. In the pale desert cafeteria and under Dunning's vaguely ominous scrutiny, it's staged as a personal breakthrough, but Haynes' stiff mise-en-scène still renders it cold and lifeless, perhaps even more disengaged than at an earlier at-home-mom get-together in the film's first half, where at least there was color and non-diegetic sound to spice up the atmosphere. Any epiphany here is mired by the indistinct rhetoric of Dunning, by his shallow understanding that to retreat entirely from society and relevance is to find yourself. Even Carol herself makes an unintentional effort to prove him wrong in an enigmatic final-act moment when an implied love interest (James LeGros) prompts her to finally proclaim self-love in front of her small, dingy mirror. Perhaps people are necessary after all.

Safe is a scathing critique of the false promises and damaging hidden side effects of supposed "cures" for "abnormalities," which Haynes might identify personally as AIDS. It's not hard to draw a line from Dunning's preachy spiritualist to a clueless conservative posing the idea that homosexuality is a disease that can be cured through self-reflection. But its greatest strength is that it is also many other things: a metaphor for political manipulation and the widespread dumbing-down of civilians, a plea for the equal rights of women in a masculinized society, a cautionary tale about the necessity of exercising freedom in your own life choices, an argument for active engagement in the world, particularly in those things that are readily available to you such as family and community, and a chilling dissection of both the numbing plainness and the ubiquitous hazards in the modern world. Despite his many peaks, Haynes has not made a film this viscerally affecting since.

The Turin Horse (2011) A Film by Bela Tarr

Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse would seem like The End even if the director himself hadn't boldly declared it his final feature. Brooding, angry, apocalyptic, and bathed in the kind of deadly seriousness that only accompanies major artistic statements, the film is a lugubrious retreat from civilization, narrative, perhaps even existence and - in its final moments as gas lamps fail to ignite in the darkness - illumination, the stuff of cinema itself. This is a massive, earth-shaking film, even as its geographical specificity and narrative simplicity seems to imply something smaller and humbler than anything Tarr has done before. Taking the episode that allegedly launched Nietzsche's prolonged madness and near-comatose state in 1889 as its starting point, the film then builds a world around the horseman who the famous philosopher witnessed beating his stubborn animal. In a career filled with subtle Breughelian moves, it's Tarr's most overt yet, a deliberately withholding maneuver that hearkens back to the painter's Fall of Icarus, where the more historically notable, titular scene was similarly disregarded. It's also an immediate reminder of Tarr's fundamental concern: the overlooked, the misunderstood, and the seemingly unimportant people, whom he always proves to be irrevocably human in one way or another.

The horseman, named Ohlsdorfer and played by Tarr regular János Derzsi, sustains a meager livelihood in a harsh, arid Hungarian plain with his loyal and hard-working daughter (the familiar Erika Bók). A torrential windstorm presses on day and night, never ceasing, picking up vicious tornadoes of dirt and leaves and making it so that any trip outside is an epic pilgrimage. Their stone cottage, practically crumbling from the incessant beating it takes from the weather, is dark and grimy. The dirt caked on its every surface is paid vivid attention by Tarr's camera, and painterly shafts of light slip in through the house's few tiny windows, creating a cavernous space of deep blacks and ethereal whites. Within this tactile yet otherworldly location, the father and daughter enact and reenact the same domestic routines day after day, their lives consumed by the labor required to maintain even the slightest sustenance. This work demands so much of them that they have nearly ceased verbal communication entirely, save for the occasional unintelligible grunt from the father and curt declarative statement from the daughter ("It's ready," referring to the two boiled potatoes that comprise their every meal, is a common one).

Tarr, more faithful to the chronological flow of daily life than ever before here, molds these endlessly repeated routines into a linear six-day structure with title cards indicating each new day. It's one of the two structural decisions that allows the film to somewhat closely resemble Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman - the other being his decision to vary the camera's relationship to these routines throughout. Like Akerman, Tarr has discovered brilliantly simple ways to induce a kind of quotidian hypnosis and lend the film an unlikely sense of propulsion. In The Turin Horse as well as in Jeanne Dielman, a curious tension is maintained between predictability and unpredictability; while the narrative rhythms and repetitions make perfectly clear what the actors will perform in the next scene and roughly how they will perform it, there is never any way to guess how those actions will be composed, and the subtle distinctions in the cinematographic design dredge up emotional depth and complexity beneath the seemingly mundane flow of everyday life. (For instance, the first meal portrays the father as animalistic, the second conveys the calm subservience of the daughter, and the third detects a kind of harmonious intimacy between them in two-shot). Furthermore, any disruption to the actual content of the repetitions is doubly unnerving, because audience awareness has been heightened by the relative redundancy therein.



In this light, The Turin Horse establishes a set of narrative patterns to be performed roughly in order: 1) the daughter wakes, only to be followed shortly after by her father; 2) the daughter, after adding fire to the hearth, heads outside to retrieve water from their well and returns to help dress her father in his day clothing; 3) they both take a swig of palinka, the father's preferred hard liquor; 4) she prepares two boiled potatoes for them to eat; 5) he heads out to the barn, where he takes the horse out of its stable for a ride into town to fetch amenities; 6) upon return, she helps him back inside and dresses him into his night clothing; 7) they sleep. These activities are broken up by portions of rest and sizable chunks of time sitting and looking out the window at the featureless Hungarian landscape, as if in a church pew. They occur over and over, passionlessly and without blemishes, yet there's something too lived-in about their movements, too ancient about their behaviors, to compare them to robots programmed for work. These are people who are fully aware of their destitute situation and who despise every minute of it, yet they are at a loss to change it. Like the stubborn drunks from Damnation, the poor and gullible small-town farmers from Satantango, or the brooding bay watchmen from The Man from London, their lives are victim to a brutal fate machine that they are forced to either endure or be defeated by.

Yet there are always signs of change for better or worse, little hiccups in the drudgery of existence that suggest a reversal, or at least a slight turn, of fate. In Tarr's work, these instances often stand in metaphorically for misleading forces of authority, false promises that lead only to greater misery. Other times, they merely reinforce a vision of the contemporary world as disharmonious, chaotic, and cosmically imbalanced. In The Turin Horse, they act as gradual reminders of mortality, the notion that none of our consistent routines can last forever and we are all bound to die. First, a strange guest (Mihály Kormos) arrives, at first seeking to refill his supply of palinka and then launching into a vague, extended rant on the rotten state of existence that seems to mirror some of Tarr's recent, only-slightly-more-specific musings on the "shitty" current state of society. (Few directors can pull off allegorical dialogue that is this generalized and open-ended, but Tarr lets it absorb fluidly into the vaguely unreal mood of his cinematic world.) Second, a band of hysterical America-bound gypsies raid the well that provides the father and daughter their only source of water. Ohlsdorfer shoos them away with wicked verbal aggression, but not before they steal some of the water, drop a curious quasi(anti?)-Bible in the daughter's hands, and potentially cast a spell on them that is the cause of their dry well the following day. Finally, in the throes of all this, and likely inspired by the never-ending gale outside, their horse refuses to take the father into town and accept food and water.

Each of these domestic interruptions points towards the film's blackly comic absurdity. Tarr's always had a nasty sense of humor, but here it reaches its darkest and most biting. At the end of Kormos' speech, the longest stretch of dialogue in the film, Ohlsdorfer unleashes a sharp brush-off that instantly puts into question the integrity of the man's ideas: "Come off of it. That's rubbish." Later, when the father and daughter choose to leave their home, Tarr holds a long, long shot of the nearby hill and lonely tree over which they passed, only to watch as they slowly return after a minute or more from an empty, static frame. It's a gag that wouldn't be out of place in a Monty Python film. That being said, there's nothing funny about the horse's slow, assertive abstinence from activity, which seems as much an active rebuttal to her owner's often harsh ways as it is an act of resignation to the unforgiving grimness of her life. She stares her own mortality in the face, which supplies additional poignancy to the existential perseverance of the father and daughter. Who comes away with a better scenario in the end is one of the most intriguing questions Tarr leaves on the table.



Whatever the case, The Turin Horse undoubtedly creates a world that is perpetually on the brink of finality and asks its characters to allow civilization to fail or push it onwards. Every one of the film's major aesthetic contributions underlines this idea. The single musical piece by the always impressive Mihály Víg is relentlessly churning and circular, its minor-key organ arpeggios and wheezing violins insistent reminders of the redundancy of quotidian life, and its dark, intense forward motion a hurdle towards an impending doom. So constant and menacing is this triplet dirge that it underscores the banalities of daily life with a throbbing dramatic pulse. Fred Keleman's cinematography, meanwhile, finds expressive ways to outline every dimension of the film's limited chamber space with elaborate camera moves - often on a steadicam, a device that is used more consistently here than in any Tarr film, but which is wholly necessary given the drastic single-shot trips from hushed interiors to blustery exteriors - that draw attention to the feebleness of the human body and the weight of time. László Krasznahorkai, the writer of every Tarr film since Damnation, supplies the film's enigmatic monologues and narrations (including the Nietzsche anecdote that opens the film), as well as the fictional sacred text that Bók reads, phoneme by phoneme, in a haunting scene on the fifth day. Tarr's wife/editor Agnes Hranitzky, always finding the perfect beat in her husband's majestic tracking shots to cut to the next, is also credited as co-director.

That this is reportedly the last time this visionary team will collaborate seems to have nudged them all to the top of their game, with each distilling his/her own special talents to cohere with the tantalizingly bare-bones texture of Tarr's film. The Turin Horse, despite its repetitiousness, its tiny ensemble, and its utter narrative void, is an unfailingly evocative and affecting achievement, a film that possesses a raw, wordless power. It bears the sense of a single individual expressing his deepest, most sincere thoughts about existence and the state of our world, which he perceives to be tarnished by authority and political manipulation, corrupted by capitalism, and exhausted by poor quality of living. This is, for sure, Tarr's bleak worldview, but it's not without a beacon of gleaming optimism, a permanent love for even the most destitute people and a belief in their essential dignity.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943) A Film by Jacques Tourneur

In the Val Lewton-produced, Jacques Tourneur-directed RKO horror classic I Walked with a Zombie, the "zombie" is chiefly a metaphor for the steady encroachment of a dark past, the messengers of a long-overdue retribution. Placed beside the contemporary predilection for zombies as empty purveyors of shock and gore, the film's thematically charged representation of the folkloric figure is a refreshing difference. Set on an island in the West Indies during what is presumably the time of production (1943) - that is, only a short 75 years or so after the Civil War and right in the final three decades of Jim Crow-era America - the film focuses on the arrival of a young nurse named Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) to care for the vegetative wife of Paul Holland (Tom Conway), a wealthy plantation owner. The precise cause of Jessica Holland's (Christine Gordon) mysterious illness is unknown, though metaphorically there is a suggestion that it is some kind of karma-like punishment for an affair with Paul's brother Wesley (James Ellison) that the script hints at vaguely. On the outskirts of this melodrama is a strange voodoo camp lead by the African-American workers at the plantation, and although only revealed in the second half of the film, the camp has a constant, menacing presence in the film, its eerie tribal drums and atmospheric chants echoing through the humid Caribbean air.

The visual and geographic division between the slave laborers in the corn fields and the Americans with their petty dramas in the palatial estate is an immediate sign of Tourneur's intent. This is a film about the massive, often unaddressed exploitation of blacks by white men and women of privilege, a history of condescension and subservience that continues today in subtler iterations. Late in the film, the mother of the Holland brothers as well as a nurse sympathetic to voodoo, Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), gives a matter-of-fact description of zombies as "both living and dead," which might as well be in reference to the film's underlying subtext: the ceaseless struggle between blacks and whites. For the plantation owners, the African Americans are both living - living enough to complete work for them - and dead, totally peripheral to their lives of luxury. Even more unsettling in retrospect is the notion that our collective memory of the atrocities of 20th century America (and before) jibes with the same description. They can never quite be snuffed out, even as many try so desperately to block them from consciousness.

I Walked With a Zombie traces the ways in which the African-Americans gradually infringe upon the tale of Betsy and the Hollands and ultimately reclaim the land as their own. First, Betsy, an audience surrogate stumbling into this uneven social landscape, is introduced to a strangely foreboding statue within the Holland's gates of St. Sebastian with arrows shot through its heart that was allegedly ushered into the island on a slave ship. It's a striking, multivalent image and one that seems to be a self-congratulatory emblem of equality for the white folk, as if their use of laborers in the corn fields is an act of salvation from their prior exploitation as slaves at sea. Yet it carries a secondary, possibly unintentional meaning as well: the notion that the African-Americans can be freed from brutality in death, which is particularly ironic given the progression of the narrative therein. A tall, black zombie known as Carrefour (Darby Jones), the guardian of the late-night voodoo tribe, eventually finds his way into the grounds of the plantation, silently beckoning forth the comatose soul of Jessica, knowing that she too longs vacantly for the blissful release from her pitiful worldly existence. She is also a victim of a powerful white, patriarchal grip.



Tourneur keeps the ostensible narrative of the film to a minimum. What is revealed is mostly fragments of a past story weighing on the present, which deepens the film's circular idea of history and shifts the emphasis to the metaphorical implications of the horror. Betsy is made privy to the Holland backstory through the gossip delivered in song form by a black man (Sir Lancelot) crooning near her afternoon lunch with Wesley. Clearly, the island's inhabitants have made a fuss about whatever happened between Paul, Jessica, and Wesley, and the rumors fly across the town, taunting the rich, snobby men. When Wesley overhears the song, he fumes angrily and quickly puts an end to the man's entertainment. In a scene shortly after, the man signs the song again, this time at dusk in a quietly menacing tone. He trudges slowly towards Betsy during his airy calypso ballad, his face becoming fully submerged in shadow. What was at first a harmless tune is now a dark omen through Tourneur's chiaroscuro light and somnambulant staging. The same effect is achieved in the film's horror centerpiece when Betsy guides the sleepwalking Jessica through the corn fields at midnight, stalling occasionally at portentous indicators of death such as a skull, an animal carcass, and the towering Carrefour. Tourneur's minimalistic staging and lighting, as well as his lingering, evocative close-ups, makes it easy to forget the sequence was crafted in a soundstage with cheap props.

Such is the essential lesson of Tourneur and Lewton's cinema: that careful, crafty wielding of sight and sound, as well as a purposeful use of space, absence, and metaphor, renders production value and budget quite negligible. I Walked with a Zombie is so unsettling, so politically and racially motivated, that it's almost as if Tourneur's entire purpose for the relatively measly $150,000 granted to Lewton from RKO was to unravel a disguised attack of white privilege and historical disregard. It's possible to make the case that Tourneur's reliance upon the African-American figure as the source of schock and horror merely perpetuates negative stereotypes, but the film actively denies presenting these "zombies" as malicious monsters, instead treating them as melancholy figures seeking acceptance. In this light, Darby Jones gives a truly haunted performance as Carrefour, the zombified slave carcass with beady eyes and a perpetually sad, disheveled deer-in-the-headlights expression. Shirtless so as to expose the lung churning determinedly inside his bony frame, and with dark pants too short to extend the entire distance down his lanky legs, Jones glides through the film enigmatically, a specter from a dark past that just won't go away. And Tourneur's film operates in a similar fashion, its creepy, insistent rhythms and vital worldview still possessing a raw energy today.

Metropolitan (1990) A Film by Whit Stillman

One could imagine even Luis Buñuel, the famously scathing critic of the bourgeoisie, warming up to Whit Stillman's wry, patient debut Metropolitan, a film with an unapologetically affectionate perspective on the upper-class. At the very least, Buñuel, who, coincidentally, is one target of the relentless verbal gamesmanship in Stillman's film, would have hesitantly applauded the American director's confident simplification of space and time, a strategy Buñuel himself tried in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Metropolitan unfolds in the confines of a few ritzy Manhattan apartments (which, with their rich color schemes and baroque furnishings, all look roughly the same) and in a vague portal of time coined "not so long ago" in title screens. Though the setting is specific - it's the Christmas season and a group of vacationing prep school students are getting together to attend gala debutante balls - the film luxuriates in a generic sense of "pastness", and its anachronism is matched by arch performances that have little concern for conversational realism. This is a film that is very much satisfied with its own insular world, with seeming to exist entirely outside the concerns of society.

Stillman uses this detached, formal approach for comedic ends, and it's fitting because the characters inhabiting this milieu are just as self-involved, just as oblivious to "normal" life. The group of friends refer to themselves as the Sally Fowler Rat Pack, named after Dylan Hundley's character, a dainty, stuck-up girl who often appears the most charmingly naïve in the group. Always beside her is Jane Clark (Allison Parisi), her slightly huskier, more self-aware mirror. Of course, in the company of girls like these, there needs to be a third wing, which is occupied by Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina), a timid Jane Austen fangirl with the kind of vaguely tomboyish look that characterizes French New Wave starlets. Naturally, the group's most shamelessly articulate, geeky member, Charlie Black (Taylor Nichols) - also the character who dubs the group a part of the supposed U.H.B., or urban haute bourgeoisie - harbors a mostly unspoken crush on her that is disrupted by the arrival of a slightly less affluent Upper West Side outsider named Tom Townsend (Edward Clements). (Much of the audience's awareness of class hierarchies is telegraphed through dialogue about specific sections of the city.) Charlie adopts a knee-jerk distaste of Tom's ways, which he finds unusually conniving and ideologically problematic (he proclaims a devotion to the socialist theories of Charles Fourier and neglects reading books in favor of literary criticism), while the nihilist blowhard of the bunch, Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman), predictably is attracted to Tom's unconventional ideas.

These twentysomethings pursue upward mobility to prevent what they interpret as the foreseeable demise of the U.H.B, but their pursuit is vague and passive, defined by endless stasis and conversation rather than forward activity. What Stillman does show of the dances they attend is brief and fragmentary, emphasizing the idea that whatever they do outside the spacious mahogany rooms where they convene late at night to chat is peripheral and insignificant to them. Instead, love, politics, art, literature, philosophy, and college stories are discussed with the kind of righteous confidence and verve that suggests it's always a put-on, and when Audrey falls for Tom's freckly innocence and proudly contrarian tendencies, the drama that enters their closed circle is enough to confirm there will never be a dull moment. The communication here is controlled, fast, and clever, bringing to mind the fierce comedies of Preston Sturges rather than a twee ensemble piece like The Breakfast Club. Sturges' films were all about structure and pacing, always sacrificing character development in service of the twisty, complicated verbal joke.



Metropolitan, too, relies on its seemingly effortless but totally disciplined pacing. Stillman's work is defined by the leisurely tempo of its plot trajectories (in spite of the speed of the dialogue) and by its sense of casually and almost imperceptibly integrating central narrative threads. What's so impressive about Metropolitan - especially in light of its status as a debut - is the way these plot kernels build up exclusively through conversation scenes rather than through some of the comparatively expressive visual storytelling of The Last Days of Disco, for instance. The effect is akin to listening in to different parts of a room at a party, gradually picking up details that form a larger picture. As such, Audrey's affection for Tom is first sensed, then gleaned, then hinted at, then addressed in part, then addressed in full, as is Charlie's jealousy, Nick's boredom, Jane's backstabbery, and Sally's immaturity. Because Stillman's characters speak so much, it has the effect of either making the majority of their statements unconvincing or perhaps not fully thought out. And naturally, it makes the moments when characters do not speak all the more suggestive and powerful, such as when Audrey slumps quietly as the group plays a dangerous game designed to spill deep truths, or in a throwaway moment in the third act when Nick leaves the group and turns around in the subway station to wave a bittersweet goodbye.

Instances like these make Metropolitan, in addition to being a sharp, funny film, an unexpectedly moving one too. This is not only a film about how unemployed, post-collegiate friends function in an upper-class milieu, but also how their social class figures into their every behavior and thought, so much so that it produces a kind of lament for their perceived demise. Melancholy weighs over the film even during the lightest stretches of comic verbiage, and it's the product of nothing less than a universal fear of the future. I already mentioned Farina’s resemblance to French New Wave actresses, and the film’s carefree but apprehensive mood is emblematic of that kinship as well. Stillman even has Tom pull a plastic cap gun in his final "rescue" of Audrey at the Cape Cod beach house of notorious jerk Rick Von Sloneker - a moment that echoes Godard's early "girl and a gun" cinema as well as some of the hokey romanticism of Truffaut. It underlines a playful whimsy that runs subtly throughout the entire film, a charming amateurishness that gives additional gravity to the genuinely felt performances of characters who, regardless of their abundant and adult resources, have yet to free themselves from adolescence.

Screening Notes #10

Luck (Episode 1 and 2) (2012): A beautiful case study of why I do not watch episodic dramatic television much is Luck, a new HBO horse-racing show which has so far produced two episodes, the first of which is directed by Michael Mann and the second of which is directed by hired hand Terry George, the generically hacky director behind Hotel Rwanda and Reservation Road. Mann brings his characteristic visual flair to the first episode and incidentally introduces a serious digital video language to the realm of television. He continues on the controversial aesthetic paths taken in Collateral, Miami Vice, and Public Enemies - disorienting use of wide angle lenses, unstable, impressionistic staging, downplaying of dialogue in favor of telling body language and facial contortion, distinctly digital rendering of speed and velocity, and general embrace of the industry's cinematographic no-nos. As a result, there's something genuinely exciting and unpredictable about the first episode of Luck. But, as is the trend in television, directorial duties are tossed around to others who attempt to replicate the established style of the show. It's not that the second episode is bad television, per se, just that it's routinely ordinary and unmemorable television defined by the claustrophobic-long-lens-character-drama so commonly accepted as the only way to make dramatic television. Milch's dialogue is sharp, especially given its subcultural specificity, but he needs Mann's unique audiovisual instinct and skill with male actors to make Luck something that is worth the effort to continue watching.

Skinflick (2002): Thorsten Fleisch's seven-minute experimental short Skinflick is an unapologetically surface-oriented film, studying the surfaces of the human body, those of celluloid, those of the camera, and those of light, as well as those of all the mysterious shapes and forms arising from Fleisch's abstracted imagery and relentless editing. Using dichotomous cinematographic methods (direct contact with film, conventional shooting, optical printing) that frustrate the urge to compartmentalize the very nature of film production, Fleisch's film presents an assault of close-up footage of skin set to an unnerving soundtrack of distorted rubbing and scratching. About halfway through, Fleisch slows the montage to reveal a perfectly "legible" image of human skin only to rapidly undermine that sense of foundation and comprehension. Suddenly, his shots begin to take on a life of their own, resembling caves, waves, mountains, snakes, and spiraling vortexes. It's a brilliant interrogation of visual perception and the short distance between familiarity and revulsion.

Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971): Most Robert Bresson films feel like entirely one-of-a-kind works that could have come only from him. Situated between the melodramatic heaviness of Mouchette and Une Femme Douce on one side and the philosophical starkness of Lancelot du Lac and The Devil, Probably on the other, Four Nights of a Dreamer is a comparatively straightforward romantic comedy, and the shift in genre seems to have provoked a rare quality of intertextuality (probably most of which is unintentional) in Bresson's work. The film's naïve romanticism, presented with arid restraint, is the logical seed of a number of future trajectories: the deadpan comedies of Wes Anderson, the swoony European romance of Linklater's Before Sunrise/Sunset series, the detached inquiry into the nature of desire revealed in Jose Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia, among other things. But there's also Rohmer, Truffaut, even Godard in here somewhere, all of which is to say it's a fascinating film.

Beats Being Dead (2011): Class warfare dominates in this tonally ambiguous made-for-TV drama directed by German filmmaker Christian Petzold, so much so that it overwhelms authenticity and narrative coherence. Beats Being Dead is part of a tripartite project (other entries are by Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler) that ostensibly riffs on the same overarching narrative in a small German community, but it's hard to imagine even a larger episodic design lending an air of thematic, dramatic, or aesthetic satisfaction to this sterile dirge about the unlikely romantic relationship of a lower-class Bosnian refugee and a higher-class hospital worker. Petzold's oppressive message - that the rigid borders of class contain individuals and suffocate personal desires - weighs gloomily over the romance from point A (the boy's predatory pursuit of the girl) to point B (the boy's sudden and unconvincing abandonment of the girl in favor of a rich blonde), never allowing anything approaching emotional honesty or complexity to blossom. Toss in a ridiculously forced serial killer subplot that supplies some cheap scares at the end and Beats Being Dead is not only offensive but laughable.

Bergman Island (2004): It was raining the other day and there was a bitter chill in the air, so I thought it best to ignore the pressing work before me and sit down with Ingmar for an hour and a half. It's the second time I've seen Bergman Island, yet its extraordinary simplicity and candidness felt completely new to me. Marie Nyreröd gained access to Bergman's life in his precious Fårö Island only a few years before his death, and the result is one of the most moving documentaries on a filmmaker out there, an essential firsthand look at the creative, personal, and social journey of a world-class director. Some of the archival footage here - an overexposed Bibi Andersson grinning wildly in 16mm on the beach used for The Seventh Seal's opening scene, a young Bergman greeting Victor Sjöström at the Svenska Filmindustri, in-depth glimpses of rehearsals at the Royal Dramatic Theatre - is invaluable, and Bergman's surprising openness is treated with minimal editorializing by Nyreröd and her crew.

David Gatten's Secret History of the Dividing Line

In a cinematic culture where words, whether onscreen or via narration, are commonly ghettoized as paltry emotional shorthand and "visual storytelling" is trumpeted as the pinnacle of the art form, David Gatten's films present an urgent retort. Having relished, dissected, and contemplated the printed word for almost twenty years now - and he plans to continue to do so for the rest of his career - Gatten has rediscovered the mysterious allure of typographic language in a specifically temporal context distinct from literature. The crux of this fascination is Secret History of the Dividing: A True Account in Nine Parts, a series of films initiated by Gatten in 1999 and prospectively set to conclude in 2028. Thus far, four films, all silent and black-and-white and ranging from 18 to 37 minutes, have been completed: Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or The Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing, The Enjoyment of Reading, Secret History of the Dividing Line, and The Great Art of Knowing. Together these films represent an astonishing, mysterious body of work with a distinctive approach to visual grammar, a shifting set of complex themes, and a loose, fragmentary narrative.

The inspiration for Gatten's series is a mesmerizing melodrama circling around the history of the settling of the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina in the early days of Colonial North America. William Byrd II, a government official from Virginia, is the focus of Gatten's historical curiosity. In a forgotten fragment of history, Byrd was one of the pivotal journeymen responsible for finalizing the colonial border, and subsequently wrote two volumes about the experience (one titled The History of the Dividing Line and another more suggestively deemed Secret History of the Line). These two pieces of literature were the seeds of an entire library established by Byrd of writings on the social, economic, and political landscape of 18th century America. However, this sizable repository of personalized knowledge, considered by Gatten to be in many ways the inauguration of American intellectual identity, was gradually eclipsed by a generation of more conventional libraries and has become, like its founder, a mere blip in the timeline of history.



Taking the lead of the supposed "secret history" that Byrd penned which was swiftly obfuscated, Gatten similarly mines the non-sequiturs, loose ends, and unglamorous areas of history. What results is a sprawling interrogation of the notion of historical accuracy, raising the question of what gets into history books to be taught to new generations and why. Part 1 of the series, Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002) - which was actually the third film released, adhering to Gatten's strange, achronological ordering - wastes no time elucidating these themes, opening with a single jagged scratch running frantically through the center of the frame as various dates flash by beside it. It's immediately clear that the scratch represents the border drawn between Virginia and North Carolina, but it becomes several other things in the process: a wavering timeline, a manifestation of the divide between what we know and what we can't know, between reality and fiction, and between life and death. The thematic import of this line weighs on the rest of the series, as Gatten is not so much nodding to the tidiness of the line as he is questioning how accurate it can be when dealing with the mysteries of time and existence. A subplot in Byrd's story is a spooky tale of William's daughter Evelyn, a woman with romantic hardships that plagued the final years of her life, and whose ghost has allegedly been spotted several times roaming around the state border. Gatten wonders whether a narrative such as this, seemingly only the stuff of folk tale, is any less vital, any less instrumental in the progress of history than, say, the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

The onscreen time allotted to each historical date running along the timeline of the scratch varies drastically. Some dates run only a few frames, appearing as indecipherable flashes of text that mirror the relative insignificance of single moments in such a vast stretch of time. Others, such as the date of the inauguration of Spiritualism in the Americas, or the birth of William Byrd II, show up legibly for a few seconds. Gatten is foregrounding those seemingly trivial aspects of history that are of importance to his project, and neglecting some of the more universally talked-about and written-about cornerstones of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. In doing so, he provides subtle hints towards the thematic and narrative preoccupations that the series continues to explore in fragments. That these are merely hints and not full aesthetic discourses seems essential to Gatten, because the Secret History of the Dividing Line series traces the way a narrative and a work of art is pieced together over time, just as the ideas and stories being explored were nurtured throughout the course of decades and centuries. Further issuing this point, Secret History of the Dividing Line, the film, follows this opening timeline sequence with an extended progression of images of amorphous, gravelly textures, chiaroscuro concoctions smearing half the screen and evoking a primordial soup. It's a gesture that bluntly denies any further intellectual engagement, insisting upon a sensual relationship to the celluloid instead.



The Great Art of Knowing (2004), Gatten's second and most poetic film in the series, extends upon the project's relationship to the act of searching through history and excavating details. Here, Gatten's camera scours a library, revealing old, dusty books illuminated only by a tickle of sunshine sneaking through trees outside. Not only do these luscious close-ups revel in the ancient artifacts of preserved but ultimately defunct knowledge, they also savor the very idea of material aging, bringing dust, wrinkled paper, and archaic cursive writing into detailed view. One can practically smell the organic odor emanating from the old paper. These shots are all about the beauty of the handiwork involved in printing these books, and equally about a lament for the decline of the library or the archive and the loss of printed literature as a primary mode of research. To contrast the printed word, Gatten also reveals excerpts from some of Byrd's writings in onscreen text, begging the same question Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy raised so eloquently last year: is a copy of an original inherently any less authentic or moving?

Gatten juxtaposes his library imagery with the occasional burst of abstraction, like a wispy shot of refracted light or a microscopic view of shrubbery, all of which establishes the undercurrent of micro vs. macro running through the film and more gently through the entire series. The Great Art of Knowing explores both minutiae - the relaxed daily schedule jotted down by Byrd in his journals, the texture of old books, the play of natural light on objects - and grand imagery, such as a black-and-white lithograph of a Renaissance-era creation painting, or a glimpse of Byrd's full name and government rank etched majestically beneath a dramatic logo. The film is posing the comparatively mundane next to the decidedly iconic and searching for the dissonances, or lack thereof, between the two. One can also sense Gatten's interest in spirituality growing in stature; throughout the series, myth, religion, and ghost stories show up offhandedly as ways of glimpsing into the past with greater clarity, or, perhaps for Byrd, living life to the fullest. Philosophical concepts appear as jumping off points for examining and sifting through the vast landscape of history.



The first two films produced in the series - technically part three and four in Gatten's order - are Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing (1999) and The Enjoyment of Reading (2001). The former takes its name from writer Joseph Moxon's 18th century volume on the use of the newly invented printing press, which initiated a widespread proliferation of knowledge that was hitherto unheard of. It's fitting that Gatten would have started production of the series with this film, because like Moxon, it marks an attempt to assess and comment upon the current function and significance of written knowledge. Naturally, the film, as well as its follow-up, is filled with optically printed text, almost at the neglect of any conventionally filmed images, but the ways in which Gatten uses text become intensely and distinctly cinematic. In The Enjoyment of Reading, letters, enlarged and small, zip by on the screen in all different directions (Gatten rarely adheres to left-to-right movement, the standard method of visually depicting historical progress), transforming into pure abstraction. It's simultaneously a clever joke on the title (none of the text is actually legible), a representation of the chaotic progress of many different types of knowledge across history, and a gentle critique of the modern propensity towards speed, which so often reduces disciplined written work to mere visual noise. In Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing, sentences appear on screen slowly and legibly, but their meanings are obscured by nonsensical grammar, forcing the audience to admire the texture of the printed word instead.

This dynamic between admiration of the printing process and argument for the necessity of reading is only one of the many balancing acts on display in Secret History of the Dividing Line, which also negotiates the tricky terrain between progress and stasis, preservation and obsolescence, fiction and non-fiction, cinema and some kind of post-cinema, and life and death. Gatten has embarked upon a body of work that is perpetually shifting and expanding upon its core ideas, and that utilizes a narrative backbone that is broad and intriguing enough to warrant continued attention. Given the web of ideas, methods, and characters Gatten has yet to explore, there is practically a guarantee that future works will avoid redundancy. With its overwhelming accumulation of details and symmetries, the series requires and rewards the kind of devoted, solitary attention with which it was lovingly created.

My Night at Maud's (1969) A Film by Eric Rohmer

My Night at Maud's is simultaneously one of the most accessible and thorniest of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, exploring as it does the diverse philosophical terrain of a simple bourgeois love triangle. The film is marked by a ruthlessly droll and de-romanticized adherence to the romantic ideal that we are all meant for certain types of people, and fate will inevitably lead us to them. Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a self-professed Catholic and lover of mathematics, is fond of such a model, and discredits entirely the role of spontaneity. Maud (Françoise Fabian), on the other hand, the sophisticated and proudly atheist brunette friend of Jean-Louis' old academic pal Vidal (Antoine Vitez), does not succumb to the idea that there is any predetermined plan for her life and conducts her behavior accordingly. Despite the inherent contradictions in their personalities, Jean-Louis and Maud discover conversational chemistry in the film's centerpiece, a long scene in which the two men visit Maud for a dinner that gradually becomes a soul-bearing evening of talk. As a result, Maud slowly becomes Jean-Louis' project in the same sense that the many men of Rohmer's Moral Tales settle upon a woman to distract them from their more stable lovers and proceed to dissect the every move of said female. But unlike these other characters, Jean-Louis does not possess any flesh-and-blood lover as much as an ideal object - a blonde woman named Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault) that he glimpses regularly at church.

At the core of the film are the concepts of Blaise Pascal, the Catholic French philosopher and mathematician whom Jean-Louis, Vidal, and Maud tirelessly discuss. Pascal's Wager, a much-debated philosophical proposition that states that the logical man should obey faith and reject nihilism because there is nothing to lose and everything (salvation, grace, etc.) to gain, becomes a central talking point for Jean-Louis and Vidal when they reunite in Clermont towards the beginning of the film. As is characteristic of Rohmer, intellectual discussions such as these always mask more immediate thought processes and crises in the lives of his characters, and in Jean-Louis' case, the Wager becomes as much about his own romantic pursuits as it is about religion. If the odds of Jean-Louis' perfect mate existing are 1000 to 1, for instance, then he is resolutely set upon following that single possibility at the behest of all other options, and despite his dismissal of Pascal as too severe in his Catholic faith and reasoning, he obliges by the same principle in his search for a partner. Maud - the most knowable of Rohmer's many mysterious female specimens, and indeed one who presents a kind of moral and philosophical grounding in the film - sees right through Jean-Louis' intrinsic hypocrisy, yet searches for a human core to him regardless. In a subtle twist on the established convention of the Moral Tales, it is the female who orchestrates a greater portion of the scheming and manipulation, and Rohmer's biting dialogue (more linear and coherent than the digressive bouts of La Collectionneuse, for instance) keeps the audience especially alert to the fact that she is always a step ahead of Jean-Louis.

This conversational sparring is on greatest display in the titular event, which comprises a significant chunk of the film's running time. Vidal, clearly in love with Maud, has too many drinks at dinner and quickly proves the joke of the evening, while Jean-Louis follows not far behind, voicing his newfound Catholic values to unanimous skepticism and contrasting the casual sensuality of Maud with his comparatively rigid social behavior. Lofty hypothetical questions pepper the discussion and reveal dialectical attitudes towards love, faith and reason, and fate and free-will. Yet these men who are deeply concerned with intellect (much of their action involves discussing books and scanning books) have difficulty discerning and acting upon the underlying subtexts of a social scenario. Maud represents the opposite, and her skill in manipulating Jean-Louis' pretenses comes to the fore in a moment shortly after Vidal leaves the apartment. Jean-Louis tries to leave but she asks him to stay. He doubts her and questions her seriousness. In slight irritation, she tells him to leave if he wants. He gestures awkwardly towards the door. He finds an excuse to sit back down on the couch, and she insists that if she wanted him to leave that she'd tell him. It's a familiar exchange between a man and a woman tentatively pursuing romance, yet so much brews beneath the loaded silences, his petty justifications and her confident declarations. The entire sequence - remarkably well acted, staged (a nightgown-clad Maud lies down in bed about halfway through, at once tempting and quizzing the men), and paced - dissects Jean-Louis' obvious hypocrisies, the emptiness of his alleged moral chastity, and the damaging politeness of his demeanor.



When the night turns intimate for Jean-Louis and Maud, he is unable to consummate a clear instinctual affection towards her. Upon kissing her, he turns away, scoffing at his own betrayal of desire for Françoise. Jean-Louis' conception of fate is strangely skewed, as it seems like he subconsciously guides his own life to realize his own desires, writing off the result as fate. Chance and happenstance play pivotal roles in the progress of the narrative: Jean-Louis randomly meets his old friend who takes him to Maud's, he finds himself sleeping there through a combination of snowy weather and Vidal's drunkenness, he stumbles upon Françoise while driving through town and subsequently is forced to stay the night at her place when an icy street thwarts his car's momentum, and he crosses paths with Maud while vacationing with Françoise (now his wife) in the brief epilogue. Yet Jean-Louis only takes full advantage of these unforeseen circumstances when they comply with the vision he has for his life (and which Maud so astutely mocks, continually calling out his single-minded fascination with blondes and Catholics). His moral code has mandated that he experiences life in one specific way, and that all spontaneous endeavors that could lead to perhaps better options (the chemistry he shares with Maud, for instance, unquestionably surpasses that which he shares with Françoise) are snuffed out.

Rohmer and his regular cinematographer Nestor Almendros subtly present the film through Jean-Louis' strict perspective. (Travelling shots from his car window proliferate and gently underline this idea.) Whereas Maud's inner-city apartment is seen as a flat, drably bourgeois space (with grey as the dominating shade), Françoise's outer-city residence is contrasted, with its heavenly white lighting and cozy vibe, as some kind of exotic escape despite the lesser amenities. The sadness here is that Jean-Louis' wooing of Françoise seems more of a contrivance and a resignation than the product of a genuine longing and love (though it may become that). This is perhaps illuminated to him in the film's wonderfully ambiguous epilogue, which juxtaposes a fully realized, unified vision of his hopes and dreams with an unexpected recall of the past. Jean-Louis pauses in mid-sentence when describing the chance meeting between him and Maud on a sunny beach, and a narration recites his jumbled thoughts during the pregnant silence. Both Jean-Louis and Françoise shrug off the encounter, but there is nonetheless an impression of regret, confusion, or uncertainty implanted in the pause. The final image of the married couple and their young boy running off towards the waves, deliberately romantic in its symmetrical composition and hazy late afternoon light, is not without a tinge of irony, a typically Rohmerian suggestion that the moral code so rigidly followed by the protagonist may be as much a curse as a blessing.