The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) A Film by Tommy Lee Jones

Haunted by the ghosts of Sam Peckinpah and John Huston, Tommy Lee Jones' only theatrical feature to date, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is a strange, uneven neo-western whose slim storyline is often held together only by an overwhelming vision of the West as a place of collapsing moral fiber and dissolving identity. Jones directs himself as the paunchy, mumbly ranch hand Pete Perkins from the desolate town of Van Horn, Texas, and Perkins' modus operandi throughout the film is to quietly, insistently preserve a tradition of moral responsibility and human empathy in his dull border town, where multicultural tensions flare up regularly. Policeman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) is at the center of his town's bigotry, a volatile figure who spends his days chasing "wetbacks" through the dusty Texas landscape and indifferently disrobing his bored wife Lou Ann (January Jones) in unlikely domestic spaces. Pepper's one-note performance does little to disguise the fact that he's the loud caricature of the narrow-minded American authority, and much of the film's issues lie in its simplistic staging of the American way of life, which is boiled down to "fucking billboards," prostitution, emotional distance, and ugliness. Unsurprisingly, given the authorial one-two punch here - Jones and notoriously heavy-handed writer Guillermo Arriaga - Mexico embodies a sacred land in the film's universe.

As such, the film's plot works to reinforce that image of unshakeable nationalism. Hinging on the sudden, sporadic killing of Perkins' friend and colleague Melquiades Estrada (Julio César Cedillo), Arriaga then weaves a structure around the three separate burials of Melquiades' corpse, the first two of which are considered rash and unholy by Perkins. Simple enough, it seems, but Arriaga insists on fracturing the chronology a bit to insure that viewers witness the banal death of Melquiades from more than one perspective. The third burial is Perkins' attempt to offer the proper closure to Melquiades' spirit, and it involves him kidnapping Norton, forcing him to dig up the body, and escorting both the body and a hand-cuffed Norton across the border to seek an ideal resting place. Perkins enacts the whole affair with a yawning tenacity, not necessarily vengeful in his justice but exhaustedly adhering to his own sense of spiritual and moral duty.

The character gives Jones a comprehensive workout in the kind of gruff but oddly gentle, outdoorsy conservatism that his screen persona has so often imparted within Hollywood in recent years. Perkins feels very much like the rough draft of Ed Tom Bell in the Coens' No Country for Old Men, with the weary stares and interior digressions of that character echoed here in more primitive forms. Part of this incompleteness has to do with the film's shoddy sound mix, which subsumes voices into the static drone of the West, but it also stems from the generally paltry writing and directorial development. The film relies on its audience buying the close bond between Pete and Melquiades in order to succumb to the act of brotherhood that occurs in the second half, but the script only allows the two characters a couple of clipped, aimless scenes together, hoisted on the assumption that sharing afternoon hookers is enough to signal immutable friendship. Moreover, Jones spends more time hovering over Norton and his vile police companion Belmont (Dwight Yoakam) during the first half of the film than he does any of the more interesting and ostensibly primary characters. Nonetheless, even in the absence of the glue that would make Perkins a complete character, Jones still comes across as an element unto himself, a tired patriarch once shown respect and admiration and now merely a ghost roaming in his own territory.

The first half of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada owes something to Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show as a postmodern homage to the small-town rhythms of early Westerns by Ford and Hawks. Jones aims to capture the lazy routines of Van Horn, limiting the scale to a few classic locations and a rotating cast of townies. Sometimes, as when the camera rests on January Jones' frustrated and adrift beauty in the local diner (shot in a grotesque shade of blue and uncomfortably overexposed), or when macho camaraderie is established at the police station, the film casually develops an internal flow, but other times Jones seems to be roped in by Arriaga's gimmicky suspense-building maneuvers, which actually stomp out the director's attempt to get on the town's wavelength. Free of the script's needless devices in the second half, Jones strays from Bogdanovich to settle into a patchwork, nearly stream-of-consciousness trip through Mexico to bury Melquiades. The body decays (the resulting corpse's gloriously low-rent production values allows it to stand in as a symbol of death rather than a specific person), and surrealism starts to creep in. Jones appears at ease with the kind of loose linearity that this chapter offers him, unsurprising for a man whose default gaze is a tired, no-nonsense one that stares incessantly forward. As the sun-baked march coalesces and begins to turn the bad guy good, Levon Helm arrives for a haunting cameo as a blind man living alone on his porch in Mexico, with nothing to do but listen to the radio sullenly now that his son has died over the border. A professed Bible adherent, the man requests that Perkins kill him for fear that God might disapprove of suicide.

Helm only returns to the film in a punctuational close-up shortly thereafter, and it's too bad that his moment does not last longer. His character underscores a devastating moral ambiguity that only hovers over the film tangentially, hinting at a full emergence in the last act but ultimately a minor subtext. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, instead, seems confused about its intentions, doubling as a preachy argument for multicultural tolerance as well as a more nuanced look at the tensions between old-world and new-world codes of justice. Jones needs a screenwriter to match his archaic sensibilities, not a guy known for his loopy manipulations to admittedly simple stories. It's no surprise that the film is at its most strangely compelling when it's sliding amorphously through a hallucinatory Mexican landscape like the drunk in Under the Volcano; like the best of Jones' performances, these moments carry a relaxed but undeniably melancholy air. The rest is more suited, well, to a performance like Pepper's.

A Performance by Bruce McClure on April 10, 2012

The projector performances of Bruce McClure have ever so gradually spawned a cultish reputation in avant-garde circles, their intense and in-your-face qualities demanding the attention of adventurous filmgoers. Perhaps the major reason why McClure has not quite become a leading fixture with this niche audience though is the fact that his work is fundamentally ephemeral. Limited to late-evening spectacles shown once and never repeated in quite the same manner, his improvisational audiovisual experiences defy the act of preservation in any form, and, given their intermittent strobing effects, any attempt at digital capture is destined to either fail or inadequately represent the woozy ambiance the performances impart on their audiences. The thrill of McClure's work comes precisely from its existence in a dark room amongst various bemused, hypnotized, and enraged viewers, as well as from the sense of it having no pre-destined plan other than what McClure happens to concoct for you in the center of the room.

McClure was at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 10th, a quaint old arthouse that is probably not the ideal venue for his setup: two studio speakers (meant to belt out pummeling industrial soundscapes), a fairly puny six-by-eight projector screen propped up invasively in front of the much larger house screen behind it, and a table strewn awkwardly atop theater seats in the middle of the room upon which two projectors, a tangle of XLR cables, and an assembly line of guitar delay pedals. It's an arrangement that looks gentle and friendly at first, as if for a home movie gathering; that is, before McClure starts building towards a feverish strobing of light and an aggressive layering of harsh, dense electronic tones. At the peak of the mesmerizing chaos, it's easy to wonder how such a forceful sensory overload can emanate from such a delicate-looking apparatus. Part of McClure's ongoing reputation is to go against the grain of every venue he enters, be it movie theater, studio, or museum; pretty much no space can contain the shuttering racket he creates.

The show began with flashes of amorphous shapes against black leader as a dry, harsh crackle resembling the sound of dribbled basketballs bit-crushed and thrown through distortion poked hesitantly through the silence of the room. At this point, the house lights were still on, but when McClure started to apply reverb and looping effects to his crunchy soundtrack, the theater slowly went dark. It's the first gesture that aligns McClure with the structuralists, a way of staging the theater space itself as the inside of a camera. Suddenly, the room is dark and the screen is the world beyond the shutter hole, flickering with light and imperceptible forms. Together, the visuals and the audio stray from any semblance of shape and definition, until the screen is a mere blob of featureless light strobing in and out and the speakers deliver an enveloping drone. McClure riffed on this blueprint for about an hour once it developed, subtly altering the image and soundtrack throughout with his pedal system. Sometimes, the brightest point of the screen was blinding, other times very faint. Similarly, the sound ranged from blistering and high-pitched to strangely lulling. Between the two, the audio is more active, contrasting with the blankness of the image.

A curious dialogue between sound and image developed during McClure's performance. Menacing patterns in the soundtrack appeared to tease out ghostly images in the void of the screen, while persistent attention to the strobing produced a euphoria that caused potentially non-existent sounds to surface in the mix. The result of this fascinating interplay is that no viewer experiences McClure's work in quite the same way; one may interpret his performances as abrasive and violent while others may feel soothed by the experience. I found myself vacillating between these two poles, discovering organic forms in the chaos of the screen at some points and feeling pummeled by the loudness other times. For all the seeming redundancy of the performance, McClure does manage to conjure up a surprising variety of emotional responses.

Screening Notes #11

For the past two weeks I have been in the midst of production on my new film I Fell Silent, so film viewing has been pretty sparse. Directing requires a very stable internal space; it's best not to let outside aesthetic ideas interrupt the focus. Nonetheless, I did get around to a bunch of experimental shorts, and they've been weighing on my consciousness despite my best efforts at easy viewing. I'm sure that for the next few weeks I'll be overdriving into a hyperactive cinephiliac schedule. Here's what I saw in the last two or three weeks:

Sarabande (2008): Ridiculously gorgeous. I'm blown away by the liquidness, translucence, and milky textures of Nathaniel Dorsky's images. Dorsky calls to question the very nature and presence of the camera itself, which seems too ordinary and mechanical to capture amorphous clusters of light and color that are this otherworldly. Yet the power of the film paradoxically comes from the sense of these primordial images actually arising, somehow, from the physical world we occupy, in the nooks and crannies rarely sought out by the determined, everyday eye. With the help of macro lenses and the brilliant colors of celluloid, Dorsky insists that we see the world differently and makes us feel like underachievers for focusing so readily on only our common visions.

The White Rose (1967): Bruce Conner's eccentric document of the moving of a massive fresco by San Francisco Beat painter Jay DeFeo is touched by a compulsive heightening of the prosaic to the level of the mythic and heroic. The White Rose is a pedantically chronological account, watching as the muscular movers enter DeFeo's apartment, locate the imposing stone carving, huddle around it deciding how best to approach budging something so vast, and shimmy the artwork out of the third story window and into their truck. Conner injects quirky details throughout, like the way his camera peers childishly around the artwork trying to catch a glimpse of the exhausted expressions of the movers, or the shot of DeFeo sitting defiantly on her makeshift balcony, an eroded cliff on the outer edge of her apartment building. It's not only the melodramatic Miles Davis/Gil Evans soundtrack that elevates the removal of the precious labor of love from DeFeo's studio to high tragedy but also Conner's probing camerawork, which jolts in and out like a spastic art historian fearful for the well-being of the art but too meek to make any sort of impact.

New York Portrait: Chapter 1 (1979): Peter Hutton's serene and painterly films always offer refuge for the burdened and frantic mind, particularly for those that reside within a city and struggle to see beyond the rampant filth and ugliness. Comprised of long static takes, Hutton's New York-based films seem to exist solely within that coveted window of time just after dawn breaks when the city is not yet entirely awash with noise and chaos. Or he just managed to pick the most off-the-beaten-path locations to revel in the silvery sheen and gritty textures of his urban milieu. These images possess a peculiar clarity and dynamic range unique to reversal celluloid stock, and Hutton takes full advantage of that image fidelity, finding tableaus where the relationship between blacks and whites, when seen in the proper format, is downright unearthly. There's also a sense of supernatural chance at play in Hutton's visual scavenger's hunt, especially noticeable as a flock of birds swirl in front of his camera for minutes on end, only to swoop out of frame just as a ghostly airplane slowly enters the shot.

Passage à l'acte (1993) and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998): If anyone told Martin Arnold in the early nineties that he was going to have a surprisingly vast, albeit indirect, influence on the DIY media making of the YouTube generation, he probably wouldn't have believed it. But Arnold's irreverent manipulations of the images of pop culture through looping, skipping, and stuttering bear a striking resemblance to the decidedly sloppy, postmodernist sensibilities of Tim and Eric as well as to all the anonymous humorists in their wake unleashing their bedroom experiments online. What's special about Passage à l'acte and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, though, is the way they impose such a clear sense of purpose. Both films hilariously concoct new subtexts out of scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird and Busby Berkeley musicals, respectively, and turn what are otherwise innocuous gestures into loaded statements of incestuous intent, patriarchal authority, and hormonal energy. A kiss between Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney becomes an animalistic slobber-fest, a father's order becomes a robotic chant, and ordinary movements start to resemble radical distortions of time and space.

No Country for Old Men (2008): I caught just the ending on TV, but what an ending it is! The simple shot-reverse shot setup, the midday brightness and dark undertones of the conversation, Tommy Lee Jones' thousand-mile stare, the unassuming cut to black. Every time I see parts of No Country for Old Men, I feel more and more like it's one of the best of the decade.

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.