The Passion of Anna, In Images

(Note: Visual Spoilers ahead.)

Scenes from a Marriage (Episodes 4, 5, and 6) A TV Series by Ingmar Bergman (1973)

The sense of finality that looms over Paula, the third episode of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, made it seem as if there was nowhere else the series could go. Johan and Marianne (Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann), the content lovers of the first two episodes, wound up in a split that would last an indeterminate amount of time, and the sheer cruelty and tactlessness with which Johan revealed his infidelity left no hint that a reunion would come any time soon. Vale of Tears, the fourth episode of the series, leaps ahead about eight months from the emotional explosion of Paula to depict the first meeting of the still-legally-bound couple in the suburban home where Marianne and her two daughters continue to live. The occasion would seem ripe for bitterness and hostility, but instead the evening begins in rather unexpected fashion. When they first see each other at the front door of their home, Bergman reveals the moment by observing Marianne's reaction to it, but she is not uneasy or cold. Instead, she approaches the door like a girl about to see her prom date - that is, with a sense of anticipation and surefooted confidence. There is no villainous POV close-up of Johan, only an unassuming profile view as he enters the tight frame from the left, smiling gently at the sight of his well-dressed wife. This is the key to Bergman's non-judgmental outlook here, which recognizes evil and unfairness but always allows for time to smooth over rough patches, if not entirely wipe them away.

Obligatory catching up and hesitant stabs at intimacy dominate much of the action that opens Vale of Tears, but slowly Bergman peels back the unruffled surface to reveal layers of regret, disappointment, and anger. Johan is quick to mention how he has become tired of Paula's mood shifts and pettiness, and also makes an offhand comment about how Marianne turns him on, but his affection feels impermanent. Marianne teasingly resists Johan's kisses and modest sexual advances, mentioning her own casual romantic affairs in the process. They sit down for tea and dinner, and both of them seem acutely aware of the dangerous dance they are involved in, as well as the sense that they are cycling through old routines in a new light. After dinner, the two sit down on the couch (throughout Scenes from a Marriage, a couch is used as a transitional device between small talk and sexual flirtation or intimate conversation), continuing to liquor themselves up and geting closer and closer to acknowledging the elephant in the room. Marianne, sensing her self-confidence waning, deflects the pressure from Johan by reading an entry in her diary that she wrote during their break from each other.

Essentially a reflection on her own identity at this cross-section of her life, the diary entry is extremely confessional, putting her struggles with Johan in the context of her often tumultuous upbringing. Bergman visualizes the scene by pairing Ullmann's words with archival photographs of the actress throughout her life. It's one of the most poignant scenes of the entire series, subtly self-reflexive in the way it draws attention to the longtime collaboration between Bergman and his primary muse, whom he used at various points in his career to reflect different sacred relationships in his life (his mother, his lover, his wife, etc.) Also, it's a very significant scene in the progression of both the episode and the entire series, seeing as it marks a shift in Marianne from a confused victim of Johan's erratic behavior to a women capable of detached self-analysis. Early in Vale of Tears, Johan gives a typically Bergmanesque monologue about loneliness being the default mode of existence, the only way to truly feel secure, but Marianne offers an indirect rebuttal by suggesting that security comes from a feeling of self-respect and self-understanding, which help to stave off loneliness. When she finishes reading the entry, she realizes that Johan has actually fallen asleep and missed much of her speech, proving not only that he's characteristically self-involved but also that his presence and attention is inessential to her stability as an individual. But, as is par for the course in Scenes from a Marriage, temptation and memory flows back into consciousness, and the episode concludes with a prolonged, uncertain progression into bed for the couple, a passionate but transient attempt at sex, and Johan's grumpy departure in the middle of the night.



Bergman's own sympathies seem to jockey back and forth throughout Scenes from a Marriage nearly as often as Johan and Marianne's power roles reverse during conversation. There are moments when Johan's cynicism and despair sound as if they were spoken right from the mouth of the director (and given Bergman's own turbulent marital history, some of his declarations are especially ominous), and other times when he uses Ullmann as an instrument to openly reject Johan's worldview and project a belief in trust and love. Other times the drama onscreen is so alive and free of ideological positions that Bergman seems unsure of who to get behind, and the next episode of the series, The Illiterates, is an example of such an entanglement. Taking place entirely within Johan's nondescript, under-furnished office space, the episode depicts, at least on the surface, the couple's signing of their divorce papers, but a seemingly simple task leads to a harrowing exposé of the trials and tribulations of their marriage, as well as their current feelings towards one another. While the visual style of the episode is particularly bland, even pedestrian (flat lighting and predictable shot-reverse-shot structures), the emotional content is riveting and complex.

Over the course of the episode, Marianne progresses from a cheerful mood to lustful excitement, sudden apathy, mounting irritation, an outburst of repressed exasperation, a return to tenderness, and finally utter exhaustion and pain; Johan, on the other hand, moves from apathy through longing, confusion, depression, narcissism, hatefulness, irritation, and ultimately violent rage. It's a roller coaster showcase - aided by a perpetually dwindling brandy bottle - of all the buried emotions brewing within the first four episodes, the full realization of the totality of Johan and Marianne's relationship. Ever the master of organically butting up contrasting mental states against one another, Bergman presents one of his most exhaustive studies of explosive human behavior in a 50-minute stretch of dialogue that hardly ever pauses until the final beat. Within this time-frame, there is Scenes from a Marriage's most sensuous moment (an unbroken two-shot of Johan and Marianne making love on the office floor with the giddiness of two teenagers finally afforded a moment alone) and its ugliest (Johan hitting and kicking his wife until she's bleeding and defenseless), and Josephson and Ullmann's rigorous performances naturally connect the two extremes. Miraculously, the episode concludes with a sense of hope just barely intact, even as the couple admits defeat and silently signs the divorce forms in the final shot; a clear horror runs through Johan's eyes after his act of brutality, realizing he has done something unimaginable to a person he obviously still loves.



Following this vitriolic emptying of emotions, Scenes from a Marriage offers an exquisite settling of the tides in its next and final episode, In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World, which ultimately finds Josephson and Ullmann in precisely the situation its title pronounces. The episode marks a departure from the claustrophobic soul-baring of Paula, Vale of Tears, and The Illiterates and a return to the quotidian casualness of the first two episodes, only a newfound sense of wisdom and honesty has been infused into the relationship. Before Johan and Marianne are seen together though, Bergman opens the episode with two separate scenes of them going about their newly independent lives. In the first, Marianne makes a brief visit to the home of her mother (Wenche Foss) - who up until this point has only been spoken of, and quite frequently - to ask her some questions about her marriage to Marianne's father. She admits to having felt qualms about marrying in the first place given some dormant feelings towards another man, and her confession is perhaps what sparks Marianne's own admission to Johan later that she cheated on him briefly early in their marriage (a remark that is insignificant alongside Johan's own behavior in the series). Bergman also shows Johan in his office dispassionately fielding jealousy from Eva (Gunnel Lindblom), who also appeared in The Art of Sweeping Under The Rug criticizing Johan's private poetry. It was never clear until now that they were sexually involved, adding another, retrospectively trivial, ripple to Johan's infidelity.

When Johan and Marianne do meet up, we discover that it is seven years since their last meeting (presumably the fanfare of The Illiterates) and exactly 10 years after Innocence and Panic, making it their would-be 20th anniversary. Now split up and involved with their own respective spouses (both seem about as forebodingly "content" in their marriage as they did with each other at the beginning of Scenes from a Marriage), the two of them get together to spend an evening at their summer cottage, where Marianne still spends time with her children and Johan hasn't visited since Paula. Yet again, Bergman stirs up a hint of drama around their initial meeting, shooting from across a busy roundabout as Johan approaches his ex-wife. They stop suddenly behind a tree, and there's an abrupt air of mystery regarding whether they are embracing each other in excitement or going through an uncomfortable greeting. When they emerge moments later in a jovial dash towards the car, it plays like Bergman's subtle declaration that all pettiness and bile have escaped from their relationship, leaving only a mutual sigh of acknowledgement that the past is officially past.



This attitude is compounded when after only five to ten minutes in the cottage they decide they cannot spend their evening amidst so many troubling memories so they end up going to Johan's friend's Fredrik's cottage instead. Johan and Marianne's method is not to ignore the past but to realize that it cannot be altered, and that dwindling upon it only means spoiling the positive feelings still existing in their relationship. When they enter Fredrik's place, a log cabin with a seaside view, they share unspoken laughter about the mess inside, focusing their attention on a clownish paper mache face dangling from the ceiling. Bergman, too, seems peculiarly fascinated by this ornament, staging the subsequent conversation with it sandwiched between Josephson and Ullmann in two (three?) shot and even intercutting a tight close-up of the face in the midst of their dialogue. It suggests a mask, a representation of larger-than-life emotional characteristics now extinguished from the couple's interactions. The conversation in In the Middle of the Night is level-headed and honest, yet it does not lack the power of the dialogue in the rest of the series; instead, is charged with a different kind of energy, a depth and richness only capable of being achieved after the kind of feral outbursts in the previous episodes. The final scene, with Johan and Marianne embracing in refreshingly immediate affection, ignoring time and the vagaries of their condition, is one of the most moving in Bergman's entire body of work.

It takes a lot, of course, to get there, and Scenes from a Marriage is rarely an easy ride, both in terms of the uncomfortable level of intimacy on display and the utter refusal on Bergman's part to lend the miniseries any kind of aesthetic flair. But there's a certain level of focus here - a desire to eschew extraneous shots, settings, and characters (Bergman never shows Paula, Johan's mother, or even the couple's children) - that is astounding and truly respectable. What is left is a series of stark, uncompromising images of Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, two of Bergman's most committed performers whose souls had been transparent in the Swedish director's work before, but perhaps never with quite this level of visibility and vulnerability.

See episodes 1, 2, and 3 here.

Scenes from a Marriage (Episodes 1, 2, and 3) A TV Series by Ingmar Bergman (1973)

Scenes from a Marriage marks an interesting crossroads in Ingmar Bergman's career. Directly after the primal abstraction of Cries and Whispers, only five years after the batshit insanity of Hour of the Wolf, and preceding a decade which included an exile in Germany and some of the director's strangest, most scattershot work (a decade that nonetheless culminated in his magnum opus Fanny and Alexander), the six-part miniseries is notable for its disarming simplicity and verisimilitude. If Bergman ever resembled Rohmer and Ozu, it's in Scenes from a Marriage, which candidly presents the domestic life of Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann), a seemingly prototypical married couple. Shot largely in his hometown of Fårö Island and surrounded by his regular crew of collaborators during the late 60's and 70's - Sven Nykvist on camera, Lars-Owe Carlberg as Producer, Siv Lundgren as Editor - as well as actors and actresses who were among his closest friends, the series benefits from the sense that Bergman was extremely relaxed and focused while making it. Feeling little need for visual acrobatics, non-linear storytelling maneuvers, or sly metaphors, the series presents life in a direct, unadorned fashion, knowing that human emotion over the course of time is beguiling enough.

The first episode, Innocence and Panic, begins with a wide shot seemingly from the perspective of the television camera that is shooting an interview with Johan and Marianne for an unspecified women's health publication. An interviewer (Anita Wall), eventually revealed to have a past school connection with Marianne, probes the couple about their two children and the history and state of their relationship, for the most part gently skimming the surface but also occasionally veering into unexpectedly private territory (sex life, infidelity, philosophies of love and happiness). Throughout the conversation, the interviewer and her offscreen cameraman periodically ask the couple to freeze in their respective positions for a photograph, ostensibly attempting to catch the lovers in some kind of emblematic pose. It's a fitting introduction to this almost excessively intimate and confessional series, an acknowledgement on Bergman's part of the somewhat voyeuristic nature of the project even in spite of its status, technically speaking, as a fiction. Like the opening of Persona, the scene explicitly calls attention to the apparatus of the cinema and the presence of the camera.

This interview also works to lay bare the exposition so that Bergman can jump right into the thick of the drama without having to find ways to develop a bed of narrative context. In fact, at first glance, the subsequent scene doesn't even situate Johan and Marianne as the focus of attention, instead placing the psychological torment of their friends Peter (Jan Malmsjö) and Katarina (Bibi Andersson) front and center. The two couples have a dinner party that slowly unravels into intoxicated confessions of loathing from Peter and Katarina towards one another, an ugly spectacle revealed in tight, clammy close-ups that the complacent Johan and Marianne merely observe in discomfort. Before they digress into antics though, Peter and Katarina mostly make offhand jabs at what they see as the unnatural perfection of their friends' marriage, which has just reached its tenth year. Bergman delicately implies that the hostility that soon boils over between the two of them leaving Katarina humiliated is not a far cry from normalcy, only an exaggerated expression of the insecurities lurking just beneath the surface that can be prompted by even the slightest misunderstanding.



Innocence and Panic concludes by introducing Johan and Marianne in privacy having an extended conversation about the prospect of another child. Their discussion starts in an image that has been quoted several times in the history of cinema since: a wide two-shot from the end of the bed, composing the evenly spaced couple in the center of the frame below a wide expanse of blank wall, both reading a book underneath a cream-colored comforter. Despite the sterility and symmetry of the shot, there's a certain implicit tension in it. It's a configuration that seems too good to be true, perhaps indicative of an orderliness that masks underlying disorder, and indeed later quotations of the shot have often capitalized, sometimes unsubtly, on this impression. But Bergman's treatment of the scene is more organic and complex than this kind of semantic reading allows. When Marianne reveals that she is pregnant, Johan reacts in a calm, collected manner, tactfully asking her whether or not she plans on having the baby. Johan's lack of bias and his graceful respect for his wife's decision is contrasted by her internal confusion and moral dilemma. The conversation, superficially goal-oriented and simple, stretches on for quite some time, and it eventually becomes clear that Johan's indiscrimination, his inability to actively influence Marianne one way or another, only scrambles her even further.

The tendrils of miscommunication stemming from this piece of expertly crafted dialogue extend an air of unease into the second episode of the series, The Art of Sweeping Under The Rug. The title refers to the final scene of the episode when Johan brings up his declining sexual desire only to follow it up by announcing that he needs to get some sleep, but it might as well be in reference to a great deal of the interactions particularly in the first half of the series, where deeper topics are frequently touched lightly but ultimately brushed aside. It's not that Johan and Marianne are afraid to be honest with each other, or that they are incapable of seeing the darker truths of life, but they are cautious of spoiling the positive aspects of their relationship, and they usually end conversations in a loving embrace as if to cement the essential tenderness of their marriage. Such is the case late in the episode when the couple discusses the idea of taking a vacation for a change and it leads to a contemplation of the negative effects that routine might have on their relationship, but naturally the conversation culminates in love and acceptance, with Marianne declaring "I'm so very fond of you." It's clear that there's a lurking irritation here on Marianne's side, especially given the fact that Johan tried to cancel dinner plans with Marianne's mother earlier in the episode and went on to insist upon sticking to a low-key routine that would allow little time for intimacy.



The title's significance could also be said to be reflected in another scene in Marianne's family law firm when she speaks to a woman (Barbro Hiort af Ornäs) desiring a divorce. As a lawyer, Marianne is obligated to maintain stoicism, but her job's demands can't force her to ignore her strong reaction when the woman describes her loveless marriage. She explains how she and her husband have sustained a modest, content relationship for several years despite their utter absence of passion as well as her indifference to her children, and how she has ceased to get sensual pleasure from the material world. Marianne is shocked not only by the way it shatters her perception of family as the most fulfilling source of happiness in life but also by the fear that such alienation could, or perhaps already has, befell her. The woman presents her situation as a sudden realization of all the time she has spent sweeping her apathy under the rug, so to speak, and it puts into perspective Marianne's own way of dealing with hidden marital issues.

If the first two episodes of Scenes from a Marriage coast along on these kinds of subtle deflections of seriousness, the next episode, Paula, offers a sudden outburst of all the repressed dissatisfaction existing in Johan and Marianne's relationship. Set at the family's summer cottage under a forebodingly grey sky (it's easy to forget the episode is shot in color at all), it concerns Johan's confession that he has fallen in love with another woman (the Paula of the title) and his announcement that he will be leaving Marianne and their children the following morning. Following the steady, if questioning, romance and domestic complacency of the first two chapters, the drastic shift in mood and tone is a daring, ambitious move by Bergman, particularly in light of the show's success up to that point. Doom seems to announce itself from the first shot, an image of Johan driving along the island road at dusk in between two sparse trees and through floating fog. He is greeted by a jovial Marianne who wasn't expecting him this particular night, but it is not long before she detects his somber attitude.



Johan proceeds to explain his decision with cruel honesty, treating his blooming romance with Paula - which he has kept a secret from his wife for months - as an inevitable fact of life that cannot be reversed. His tone of voice is calm for the most part, inflected by the same kind of cerebral detachment that has characterized his diction throughout Scenes from a Marriage, but occasionally he raises his voice and impulsively lashes out against Marianne, which makes him resemble Peter from the first episode. Ullmann plays Marianne's response to the situation with a conflicted mixture of disbelief, anger, and acceptance, and her glazed eyes during the unveiling suggest that each emotion has become indistinguishable from one other. Her shock at the sheer suddenness of Johan's confession is mirrored by the audience's shock at such a radical leap in Johan's attitude, and as a result the entire episode plays like a surreal nightmare, an illusion of a marriage going as horribly as possible. Only a slimmer of hope that it's all a dream could possibly explain Marianne's level-headed reaction to her husband's wickedness, her complete lack of externalized anger and even her willingness to help Johan pack for his trip. But there's nothing dreamy about Bergman's presentation of the sequence; as usual, his camera remains fixed unflinchingly on the faces of his actors, following their every move, unwilling to offer any relief from the inscrutable display of emotions.

In fact, Bergman's approach here is so unadorned that it nearly comes across as uncinematic, which is a common feeling I get while watching Scenes from a Marriage. The series' reliance upon zooms and pans to follow the action often give it the feeling of a stage play shot from the perspective of an audience member. Too frequently, Bergman and Nykvist allow the brilliant acting and the dialogue to do all of the talking instead of discovering dynamic ways to frame and block the conversations, the latter generally being a hallmark of their approach. Nevertheless, there's the occasional stroke of ingenuity - the shot in the second episode that observes as Johan and Marianne enter in and out of rooms in the hallway of their home, capturing with Ozu-like precision the flow of everyday life, the aforementioned bed shot in the first episode, or the overhead shot in episode 3 of the couple in a crying embrace in bed, so tight as if to portray them as one body - that exposes their visual abilities and keeps the miniseries from divulging entirely into the domain of theater. Of course, Bergman was a master of both mediums, but his greatest work tends to obliterate the idea that there's any such thing as a medium at all.

Continue to episodes 4, 5, and 6 here.

The Great Madcap (1949) A Film by Luis Buñuel

When Ramiro (Fernando Soler), the rich drunkard in Luis Buñuel's The Great Madcap, wakes up from an intoxicated stupor to find himself dressed in rags and surrounded by dusty, cement walls, he resembles Lon Chaney Jr. awaking to the shock of misplaced hair and fangs in The Wolf Man, or Bela Lugosi finding much to his dismay that a scientific experiment has given him thick black fur in The Ape Man, or any other B-horror character emerging in unexpected new form after a night's sleep. The only difference is that it's not hideous physical deformities that cause Ramiro's horror and disgust but rather a sudden shift in material wealth and social class, as if he had taken one wrong turn and wound up in the slums indefinitely. In the context of the film, it turns out his experience of poverty is only fleeting; he eventually discovers that his family, fearing that he might descend into alcoholic madness, has merely played a prank on him to inject some much needed doses of humility (their wanton gamesmanship is no less a trivialization of the poor). But like many of the Spanish director's bold conceits, this one has an inherently charged political connotation: the privileged bourgeoisie always possess a knee-jerk smugness towards the lower rungs in the social system, as well as a denial of the existence of economic hardship so powerful that issues of poverty might as well be a surreal fabrication.

One imagines this disorientation to have been something like the feeling Buñuel himself had when suddenly forced in the midst of public backlash following L'âge d'or to stop making features, and subsequently when he re-emerged nearly twenty years later to begin working on commercial Mexican fare. The Great Madcap is the second of these efforts (following the light musical Gran Casino) and the first to point convincingly towards Buñuel's future, even if it's a somewhat rigid and lopsided screwball comedy, a film with only fractions of the satiric bile and mad logic he dropped in L'âge d'or and would eventually unload later in his career. Hints of these tendencies are most apparent in the film's absurdly broad setup, which begins with Ramiro getting bailed out of jail and segues into his reintegration with his ungrateful family. No one in the family - not Ramiro's marriage-obsessed daughter Virginia (Rosario Granados), his spoiled son Eduardo (Gustavo Rojo), or his two scheming, deadbeat brothers Gregorio (Francisco Jambrina) and Ladislao (Andrés Soler) - has fully absorbed the impact of the recent death of Ramiro's wife, even as it's launched Ramiro himself into an alcoholic fit. They continue to shamelessly feed off of their father's wealth and resources.



During these opening scenes that establish the family and their regular routine of debauchery, Buñuel abandons subtlety in favor of wide strokes at upper-class complacency. Vignettes around the mansion include the family butler Juan justifying the theft of his Ramiro's cigars by claiming that he feared they would dry up, Eduardo pining for a new luxury car after supposedly destroying his previous one, and Ramiro fielding various requests for money. At work, Ramiro has taken to drinking in an attempt to forget his grief and has received blunt criticism from his peers for it, but his economic and professional status has allowed him to indulge regardless. In this early stage of the film, everything takes place indoors on boxy, conspicuously cheap sets, a logistical necessity that helps to emphasize the sense that the accoutrements of a wealthy lifestyle are ultimately synthetic, superficial, and fleeting; stripped suddenly of their luxuries, the family would resemble ducks with their heads cut off, totally ignorant of how to exist organically in the exterior world amongst other people. In one hilarious wide shot, Buñuel frames Ramiro and his well-dressed friends stumbling drunkenly to sappy orchestral music, the idea being that even within their familiar surroundings, they're already clueless.

The family's subsequent prank on Ramiro is therefore tinged with devilish irony, ostensibly designed to teach the patriarch human values that they themselves lack. Without the knowledge the family possesses that all will naturally return to "normal," Ramiro, after shaking off his dreamlike shock, inevitably descends into depression and makes a ridiculously botched attempt at suicide. Aiming to jump off the roof of a building in a poor district of Mexico City, he only falls a few feet before being braced by a bit of scaffolding and rescued by a construction worker named Pablo (Rubén Rojo) who insists that if he were to hit the ground from such a height it would only result in a life in a wheelchair that would arguably be worse than death. That Ramiro falls for Pablo's heroic rescue disguised as an obvious lie does little to bolster his appreciation of life and love though; soon after, when he overhears a conversation about the prank and fumes at his family's insensitivity, he responds by launching a trick of his own in which he purports to have actually lost his fortune, meanwhile continuing to live in his mansion and overseeing his family's newfound poverty. It's a mean-spirited turn of fate engineered by Ramiro that he passes off as his own attempt to teach his family members a sense of dignity and humility; the difference is that they gradually come to embrace their modest means of living, finding small sources of success and happiness.



Despite the ludicrous nature of these twists and turns, there's a fundamentally simple-minded core to The Great Madcap, an element of moralistic pandering inherent in its script that belies even Buñuel's subtle suggestions that the problems with humanity are too broad and diffuse to be reduced to class distinctions (after all, nothing proves capable of shaking the family's place in the upper-class, but their pettiness largely remains even after some breakthroughs). Buñuel sees the major issues in the film's ensemble of characters to be an absence of love and appreciation towards others and a blindness towards diversity, issues too deep-seated to be cured by loopy plot devices, but the film nevertheless implies that Ramiro's family has been taught a lesson through their involuntary hardship. Virginia, initially set upon a marriage to the wealthy Alfredo (Luis Alcoriza), changes her mind when confronted with her love for Pablo, a romance that transforms her initially narrow worldview. Pablo's near-rejection of Virginia on account of his discovery that she is in fact rich adds a blip in the streamlined nature of the film's moral, offering a lower-class attitude nearly as reductive as that of the financial elite, but it's treated merely as a momentary reaction to shock rather than a bottomless aversion to a group of people and therefore doesn't signal as the locus of Buñuel's energy in quite the same way that his skewering of privilege does. For the most part, there's a black and white dichotomy at the heart of the film that is occasionally saved by the sheer hilarity of Buñuel's investment, but otherwise threatens to reduce the film to a blunt parable.

If the script's spiral into easy moralizing is its greatest flaw, Buñuel's stiff visual style often fails to shift the attention. Some of Buñuel's stylistic tics - his method of starting a scene on a minor detail before dollying back to reveal the entire space, his habit of bunching bodies together in comical medium shot - emerge in striking ways, usually to underline the way that objects have defined the wealthy lifestyle or to emphasize the smallness and dysfunctional nature of the characters, but the film's default mode is unimaginative wide shots that exist seemingly for no other aesthetic reason than to capture all of the often busy staging in one fell swoop. (An early instance of effective camera movement and cross-cutting follows Ramiro as he makes a mess out of his daughter's wedding recital, and it's predictably one of the most dynamic scenes in the film.) But directors like Buñuel tend to couple weak decisions with convincing ones, and as such, The Great Madcap's combination of rigid studio setups and freer on-location sequences anticipating Los Olvidados' primal vérité offers a fascinating counterpoint to the more schematic choices. When we see children run through the background of a frame, it alone sends a ripple of anarchist energy through this otherwise commercially contained, if frequently funny, product.

David Lynch, Ranked

(This is my first entry in the Favorite Directors Blogathon. Next month is Ingmar Bergman.)

Of all the filmmakers I could claim to be among my favorites, I probably have the most long-standing and thorough relationship with the cinema of David Lynch. Of course, he's a director interested in a fairly seedy, macabre universe, and as such I've spent what could perhaps be defined as an unhealthy amount of time consuming and burrowing into his work. That being said, I haven't seen any of his films in quite some time, the last significant stretch of viewing being my 2009 blogathon (wherein I did retrospectively inadequate and amateurish work trying to dissect his genius), but the fact that after a considerable time away from his sensibility there is still a rather influential Lynchian element to my perception of the world says a great deal. I'm beginning to believe the power of Lynch's images and the rhythm of his cinematic world is impossible to shake. He belongs to a coveted handful of directors who have constructed a reality that is totally distinctive and separate from our own. Many directors react to the external world to construct their personal brands; Lynch finds uncharted territory within.

Features

1. Mulholland Drive: Not only does Mulholland Drive re-contextualize Vertigo, it goes beyond it, offering up an incredibly rich exploration of desire, identity, dreams, articiality, and the Hollywood dream machine. The film overflows with doppelgangers, cinematic quotations, genre pastiches, red herrings, euphoric twists, and enigmatic characters; in many ways, it's a deconstructive history of Hollywood cinema itself and the various techniques it uses to simultaneously provoke audience excitement and suggest deeper psychological constructs. The real miracle is how Lynch manages to wrangle all of his seemingly disparate threads together in support of the film's overarching themes while never breaking the spell of the haunting atmosphere.

2. Eraserhead: Speaking of haunting atmospheres, Lynch's debut is seemingly built entirely around them. Alongside some Quay Brothers and some Tarr, Eraserhead is easily within the pantheon of cinema's greatest sustained mood pieces. It relishes in dirt, fog, concrete, industrial moans, slimy liquids, and metal, an environment at once frighteningly tactile and vaguely surreal. Missing the idea that it's actually about rather abysmal human fears (of parenthood, of commitment, of change) and not just disgusting mutant babies and dudes with weird hair and weird mannerisms is easy; Lynch has designed this throbbing drone so that it only affects on the subtlest, most subconscious levels.

3. INLAND EMPIRE: Six years after its release (it feels a lot shorter) and INLAND EMPIRE is still the most fascinating exploitation of the inherent strangeness of the digital medium. Lynch unloaded his subconscious directly onto video, crafting (maybe regurgitating is a better word) a flowing stream of sequences that are all the more mysterious, visceral, and uncomfortable for the sense of intimacy encouraged by digital shooting. The film is a tantalizing patchwork of non-sequiturs, a raw mashup of undigested thriller scenarios that feel as if their logical beginning and end points have been excised, leaving only ghostly hints of a larger narrative design. Many have called and continue to call this baffling and lazy; I see it as one of the most fearless experiments yet in this young 21st century.

4. Lost Highway: Ever the victim of lazy critics hungry to whip out their collection of mortal sin adjectives ("pretentious," "self-indulgent," etc.), I can only hope Lost Highway will one day be widely seen for what it is: a devilish companion piece to Mulholland Drive and a twisted, sometimes scattershot extension of that film's core themes. Like its predecessor, Lost Highway is also bifurcated, hinging on a killer paradigm shift that sends ripples of intrigue throughout the entire film. But its lasting impact has less to do with broad structure or subtext and more to do with eerie specifics: the icy stare of Robert Blake as one of Lynch's greatest "villains," the spectacular vision of a house exploding in backwards slow motion, or the dual performance of Patricia Arquette as a soft-spoken wife and a steamy femme fatale, among many other delights.

Public Enemies (2009) A Film by Michael Mann

Every bullet fired in Michael Mann's Public Enemies signals death. It is not just a sound effect inserted to heighten chaos or extract intensity from violence. It is the sound of another human life fading away, being dissolved by time. We hear flesh tearing, metal intruding into fragile inner parts. And then another gunshot is fired. Throughout the film's 140-minute running time, Mann attempts to sustain the near-impossible feat of drawing attention to the intimacy of this final act without hampering the vicious flow of time, which always brings more casualties, often within fractions of a second. The film, set in the Depression Era and focused on the historic cat-and-mouse chase between outlaw John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and FBI head Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), says very little about organized crime and its changing face, the corporate judicial system, or the worst economic period in American history, and it doesn't need to; nowadays, Mann seems attracted to the crime genre precisely because he is riveted by conflicts of extreme immediacy and gravity, the better to highlight the unknowable void between life and death. He found in Dillinger and Purvis an interpersonal tension, a total ambivalence towards anything beyond the immediate future, and a dangerous occupation - and in Chicago a climate of public unease, economic turmoil, and civic confusion - that suited his fundamental concern for the rush experienced when facing this void. So he ran with it.

While bullets threaten to bust speakers, voices, even when yelling or speaking firmly, have the cumulative effect of a whisper. Not only is this a welcome ingredient for Mann, who has never been a master of dialogue, but it primarily functions as a way of simultaneously rendering words more sacred (what's quietest always invites greater attention) and more meaningless in the context of a broad conflict that plays out through action. There's a moment following a sporadic gunfight that ranks among the most piercing things Mann has ever shot: Dillinger witnesses the slow death of his friend and bank-robbing cohort 'Red' Hamilton (Jason Clarke) in the front seat of a dusty old Chevy, his eyes grinding to a close as his exhausted soul mutters a few garbled syllables. It feels as if the film has momentarily gone silent, and indeed hearing words would probably cheapen the poignancy of the image. I get the strange sensation that Clarke himself is dying, not just his character. Of course, failing to hear what he communicates in those final seconds is mirrored by Dillinger's own inability to comprehend, or fully absorb, the words. The loss of understanding between two people, or between audience and fictional representation, is death as much as anything else.



Digital cinematography (a topic of endless debate elsewhere because of the uncertainty as to whether it produces an essential effect or if it's just a technician's side note) is as integral to the feeling as the sound design. For my generation, DV and HD is the tool of the common man, the domain of the home video and of the majority of my own filmmaking. It's inalterably close to the idea of shooting something "real" (which is not to be confused with saying it looks "real"), whereas celluloid, because of its cost and scarcity, is more difficult to acquire and therefore associated with something unreachable, ideal, beautiful. Mann realizes that the life that interests him is not beautiful, and that digital can, if one wants it to, have a certain kinship with the ugly, the uncomfortable, and the tragic that celluloid must strain to achieve, an ability to reveal these aspects of human existence more directly and more intimately. Public Enemies deals with people who kill and torture and steal and pursue others without considering the larger significance of their actions, and digital cameras detect the weakness and insignificance of them. As usual, Mann compulsively romanticizes and critiques his soulless outlaw characters, but the HD, for me, balances these tendencies. It can't help but make the film resemble actual bodies behaving idiotically in space and time.

It could be that Depp and Bale have both given the best performances of their respective careers or that I find myself increasingly aware of them as real flesh-and-blood actors trying to embody creatures of the mythic imagination. Whatever the case, there's something remarkably moving about the depiction of these two men who are aligned in their isolation and constant forward motion - Bale towards Depp, Depp towards something intangible and ill-defined (happiness, love, thrills, permanence, freedom?) Mann gets right up in their faces when they face pivotal decisions that force them to re-evaluate their quests, such as the encroaching shot in the police station as Bale quietly considers the growing restlessness in his fellow agents, perhaps wondering if he might not be cut out for such work, or the climactic montage of shots of Depp's smirking mug and the beaming image of Manhattan Melodrama, in which Dillinger glimpses himself and the inconsequence of going on. When Mann's not studying their faces, he's adopting their movements and entering their being, so that a shot of another character becomes a view through their perspective, and a jolting body movement is always equaled by a jolting camera movement.



Time does not wait for establishing shots. In the rush of Public Enemies, there are only individuals moments stitched together, not the standard chunks of scene and sequence that constitute a traditional approach to narrative. Mann sees the Dillinger/Purvis conflict as an endless string of experience and sensation, an arrow that shoots briefly but violently through history. It's hard to think of a film in recent memory that feels more relentless. Only The Turin Horse comes to mind; Tarr and Mann are interested in worlds with different tempos, but they are equally unrelenting in their relationship with time. Both directors never pause for editorial comment, psychologizing, or prettifying. They are slaves to the march of existence, and if they catch fleeting bits of magic (the horse's tear or the flicker of the lantern in The Turin Horse, the bottom of Marion Cotillard's foot during sex, the crackle of muzzle flashes in the dark forest, or a dying breath crystallized in cold air in Public Enemies) it feels almost incidental.

None of the film's expressive intangibles forgive some of its glaring weaknesses - the underutilized Cotillard as Dillinger's love interest, the salient lack of color correction in some scenes, the sporadic, uncritical recycling of Dillinger iconography - but they do overshadow them. To watch the film from a narrative frame of mind, and thus to get hung up on elements of plot and character that are both secondary to Mann's concern and don't fit conventional structures, is to do an injustice to the film's primary mode as a sensory experience. Few films get inside a period and climb within it like Public Enemies does. Firstly, it's concerned with making the viewer a part of this deadly chase, with transmitting the vertiginous feeling of being in these life-or-death circumstances, and the inevitable side-effect of this immersion is a grand seriousness towards death. The film's only well-chosen use of slow motion (a stray two or three instances in the rest of the film violate the forward thrust) is during the moment of Dillinger's demise, because a work about death must die itself when its subject perishes, and what better way to signal the death of a film than to slow its frame rate, regressing it towards the stillness of photography?

Boy Meets Girl (1984) A Film by Leos Carax

Perched between compulsive citation and the kind of brooding, morbid anxiety that might characterize an older, more world-weary filmmaker, Leos Carax's Boy Meets Girl is about as atypical as directorial debuts get. The film's opening voice-over - set atop a mysterious montage of three images ending in a frenetic view of The River Seine at night and spoken in a craggy voice that could just as easily be a 100-year-old woman or a 12-year-old girl impersonating her grandmother - establishes the movie as the free-associative visions of a dying filmmaker:

"Here…we are…still…alone. It is all…so slow…so heavy…so sad…soon…i…will be…old…and…it will…at last…be over…"

But the film is anything but that. Instead, the narration marks the first lines to introduce the world to the 24-year-old French filmmaker and one-time Cahiers du Cinema writer, and they immediately intone a sense of finality and apprehension over both the film and ultimately Carax's career, in which every film continues to feel uncannily like The End of something. Boy Meets Girl was routinely identified upon its release as the resurrection of the youthful spirit of the French New Wave, the kind of film Godard would have been making had he never matured beyond his jazzy, guerrilla-style romances, and it's become something of an accepted idea that it is. The consensus was missing the point though; Carax, an outspoken Godard fan, was making the Last New Wave film, a work that consciously evoked Godard and other Cahiers disciples even as it deliberately set itself apart from the movement. Still today, when we make knee-jerk comparisons of Carax's early work to Godard and Truffaut, we're denying ourselves the ability to see the poetic singularity of Boy Meets Girl.

In fact, if we disregard for a moment any surface resemblances to Godard (the Karina look-alike Mireille Perrier and her Band of Outsiders-esque tap dance, the naked, articulate dialogue, the delinquency motif), a closer spiritual precursor to Boy Meets Girl isn't Breathless or The 400 Blows but rather Last Year at Marienbad, a film that never fit comfortably into the energetic, juvenile umbrella of the New Wave movement. Both films are elusive romances told from the frustrated male perspective, both are situated within a hyper-extended microcosm of reality, or a hypnotic dream space with the appearance of the physical world, and both use a game (Nim in Marienbad, pinball in Boy Meets Girl) as an occasional metaphor for the ubiquity of chance in the progression of their characters. Carax, like Resnais, even halts the flow of the cinematic world in several instances, making figures freeze in time while the main characters continues to move about. All of this suggests that the 24-year-old Carax's concerns were different, and in some cases far broader, than the 30-year-old Godard's.

Boy Meets Girl represents the first use of Carax's onscreen surrogate Denis Lavant, a herculean actor (in 1984, a non-actor) who has featured prominently in every Carax movie (with the exception of Pola X) through the recent masterpiece Holy Motors. Lavant plays Alex, the figure at the center of each of Carax's first three films, a young delinquent and loner who keeps a brain-like map of his life experiences behind a painting on the wall of his scantily furnished one-room apartment. The map charts, seemingly arbitrarily, the landmark events in Alex's life, and early on in the film he inscribes "first attempted murder" in the middle of blank wall space after Carax shows him strangling the man whom his recent girlfriend cheated on him with. It seems merely a matter of time before all the empty space on the map will be filled with further experiences of Alex's own design; a self-described "filmmaker" who only dreams up titles of films he'd like to make, there is a sense that Alex is trying to steer his own fate. He uses different chunks (theft, murder, break-up, filmmaking, at one point he refers to having not cheated yet) that can be built into a unifying whole, a complete personality. He's glimpsed a pre-destined shape for himself, and the film is part of his attempt to build himself into that shape.

Through a strange sequence of events, Alex sees it as part of his idealization that he must fall in love with a recently heartbroken failed commercial actress named Mireille (Perrier). For Carax to illustrate this idea, he constructs an unpredictable narrative progression to open the film. After the aforementioned narration, the film reveals Maite (Maïté Nahyr), a woman who's "driving to the mountains" with her baby daughter, and a pair of skies and poles protrude absurdly through her front windshield. When she pulls over to the Seine, she calls a man named Henri and informs him that she'll be throwing his paintings in the river, then runs over to a man named Thomas (Christian Cloarec) to ask him for the date and time before leaving in her car again, dropping a checkered scarf that matches Alex's sport jacket in the process. Alex then arrives and attempts to kill Thomas at the edge of the bridge, eventually pushing him off. This segues to a gloomy-looking Mireille in her apartment wearing a similar black-and-white pattern on her pants. Her boyfriend Bernard (Carroll Brooks) sits on the bed across from her and enigmatically exits the room moments later saying he "can't talk about [something] here and now," leaving Mireille in confusion. The ensuing break-up occurs through the intercom outside the entrance of the apartment building, where the wandering Alex stops to be a front-row witness to the action. Having just been dumped himself, Alex formulates this as a cosmic exchange of heartache, a turn of fate that allows him to pursue Mireille with utter determination.

This progression of scenes demonstrates Carax's associational montage, which carries the film along according to impulses, emotions, and sensations. Because of Carax's elliptical editing and his propensity to highlight miniature gestures and seemingly insignificant elements in the mise-en-scène - Thomas grabbing a knife while being strangled, Bernard throwing out some kind of tickets from his coat pocket, the blaring Dead Kennedys song that Mireille listens to while being dumped - it's easy to miss narrative details in this sequence, and throughout Boy Meets Girl in general. I'm still trying to unpack the nature and significance of Maite, a character deliberately aligned with Florence, Alex's actual ex-girlfriend, who, like Maite, also threatened to extinguish her ex's creations (in Alex's case, his letters to her). Furthermore, why does she drop Florence's scarf, or does she just happen to have the same article of clothing? Soon after, Alex watches a couple kissing by the river, and the women, whose entire face is never seen, appears to be Anna Baldaccini, the actress credited as Florence, but the man she is kissing is not Christian Cloarec. Intentional or not, these narrative ambiguities contribute to the film's dizzying self-reflexivity and also suggest the way that Alex has tried to depersonalize and obscure his troubled recent past.

Carax himself - whose name is an anagram of the first and middle names of his birthright Alexander Oscar Dupont - is a prankster, and his complete kinship with the anarchic Alex is transparent. Alex spends his time documenting his experiences on his typewriter and filing old letters he has written, and in order to insure the posterity of his feelings he Xeroxes them. The relationship between his methods of observing and preserving reality and the cinematic apparatus is hinted at by Carax through the repeated visual motif of framing Alex within larger frames: a window overlooking subway stairs, an elevator, a phone booth (the glass of which is broken to reveal its own circular lens), not to mention Alex's tendency to observe intimate moments (Bernard and Mireille's break-up, the lovers' kiss on the bridge) from close distances, like a spectator in a theater. Reflections and doubling also take a strong thematic role. At the Xerox store, Alex stands behind identical twins who are placed in front of a large mirror. Notably, Mireille's apartment features a window overlooking both a courtyard and another apartment building that takes up the entire surface of a wall, and she continually sits against it, allowing her faint reflection to have a ghostly presence in the frame. If Boy Meets Girl deals with how our ideal self(ves) are thwarted and redefined by chance, by the intrusion of unexpected life circumstances (hence pinball), then in the final scene, Carax demonstrates how far the ideal self can be distanced from the real self by returning to the image of happy lovers in a window across the courtyard. Thus, the film acknowledges its own conceit of cinema as a duplication of reality as inherently flawed, while at the same time making it known that this striving for the ideal is nevertheless essential to living.

If cinema is not a duplication of reality, it's a construction of it that is subject to its maker's personality and context. Boy Meets Girl, accordingly, is an extremely personal film, as well as a work that is very alert to its own place in cinema culture and film history. During the climactic, titular meeting between Alex and Mireille, Perrier calls explicit attention to her bum tooth and longtime wrinkles, which bluntly separates her from the famously polished Karina. It's as much an example of Carax distancing himself from the shadow of Godard as it is Mireille bearing her soul for Alex, just as a mysterious bourgeois party set piece at the heart of the film (which includes a very meta monologue about silent cinema by a deaf man), with its smoky ambiance and frozen intellectuals, is both a love letter and a farewell to the world of Marienbad. In a broader sense, Carax, the man to propose "the silent talkative film" (see: Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd's book Leos Carax), positions the film in a nebulous middle ground between the potential of silent film and the potential of sound. Like a great deal of mid-century European art films, Boy Meets Girl is entirely post-synched, drawing attention to the divide between the image and the construction of the sonic diegesis. (Its soundscape is one of its most unique features, but that's a topic worthy of another essay.)

In Boy Meets Girl, the setting of Paris seems incidental, and it continues to be in Carax's body of work. The city is nearly unrecognizable through Carax's highly posed, nocturnal universe. Areas of the frame that Carax has no interest in are reduced to murky negative space. Bodies are situated against expanses of black, an effect that is often called upon, illogically, during moments of great introspection. What's in the frame and what's visible is always a highly selective act for Carax, so the setting of Boy Meets Girl feels like an afterthought. Indeed, for a young filmmaker, this counts among the highest praise. Carax's selectivity is mirrored by his understanding that filmmaking is about the search for identity. Like Alex, it's defined by being in a perpetual transitional state. Twenty-eight years after the release of Boy Meets Girl, Carax is still producing work that revels hypnotically in the dark.