Bringing Up Baby (1938) A Film by Howard Hawks

In Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks delights in introducing zany element after zany element, an accumulation of absurd details so overwhelming that it's a wonder he manages never to lose sight of the film's fundamental dramatic and thematic goals. A tame leopard, a pending $1 million museum donation, a missing Brontosaurus bone known as the intercostal clavicle (this being a screwball comedy, a term that receives its fair share of repetition), a yapping dog that likes burying things deep in the ground, a rural circus and the wild leopard it mistakenly lets loose, and plenty of other details compile around the central comic entanglement of David Huxley (Cary Grant) and Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn). David's a prudish, even-tempered paleontologist with an impending marriage to a professional assistant that's destined to develop into a passionless coexistence, as well as a four-year-in-the-making dinosaur sculpture waiting on one last elusive bone. Susan's a prickly, siren-voiced, and utterly selfish ditzy woman gone madly desperate for love. Hawks creates two people so totally opposite that the increasingly surreal series of events and parade of oddness they collaboratively produce feels like a natural extension of the void existing between them.

This void is at first deepened, then detailed, and finally eliminated through Hawks' construction, a series of combative circumstances and childish games ever escalating in absurdity and dramatic stakes. In the early stages of the plot, mistaken identity plays a pivotal role in the combat between Grant and Hepburn. David first runs into Susan on a golf course where a mix-up occurs regarding the question of who possesses a certain golf ball that has strayed from David's hole onto Susan's. David insists that it's his, that he took a faulty swing, while Susan is insistent upon continuing to play with it. Moments later, she tries to leave the parking lot in his car, clumsily bumping other vehicles as she leaves the parking space in front of David, who pleas in irritation. Susan is plucking the objects of David's lifestyle away from him right before his eyes. If the external markers that come to define these characters are this impermanent, this liable to shift at a moment's notice (indeed, later on the very names of these characters are hilariously called into question), then the identity that they embody must be too. Hawks is aware of the duplicity of identity, the fact that humans are mere vessels for a shifting variety of potential selves that are brought about through interaction with the public world.

Susan's theft of David's possessions is passed off as unintentional yet feels oddly calculated, as if the beginnings of a compulsive longing towards David that expresses itself as the film progresses through increasingly over-the-top acts of selfishness and dependence. As outlandish, manipulative, and seemingly mean-spirited as it gets, Susan's behavior is bent on a single goal: keeping David in her company. That need is acted upon throughout in the form of conflict, which Susan explicitly refers to as being the fundamental expression of human love (though she's accusing David of creating this conflict, it's clear that it represents her inner mantra of flirtation). In order to give David a reason to be by her side, she pretends over the phone to be getting attacked by her aunt's pet leopard (the titular "Baby," which she has just been asked to temporarily care for). From there, the film proceeds in similarly loony fashion, with Susan constantly creating circumstances of a problematic nature for David so that he will be forced to spend time with her; to name a few, she parks in an illegal space in his car, she steals the adjacent vehicle, she misplaces his clothing, and she lets her aunt's dog George get a hold of and subsequently bury the intercostal clavicle. It's an awfully selfish set of actions for a character to perform, and a strange movie ploy in general, but Hepburn brings a sense of overwhelming romantic desperation to the part that prevents Susan from becoming merely a sadistic bitch.



David's goal the whole time is to recover his bone and retrieve the $1 million he had coming to him for his museum, but every time his tasks seem on the cusp of being accomplished, Susan steps in and throws a wrench in the operation. It certainly doesn't help his case that Susan's Aunt Elizabeth (May Robson) happens to be the wealthy women behind the hefty donation, and her lawyer, Alexander Peabody (George Irving), is one of Susan's good friends. What this means for David is that he has to prove to these people that he is a worthy recipient of the money while being pushed to the brink of aggression by Susan. The role of chance, such a powerful factor in the sorting out of this situation, is materialized by the traveling circus that is passing through Aunt Elizabeth's rural Connecticut town. If Baby can be said to represent a surrogate child for David and Susan – who amount to a surrogate marriage over the course of the film – then the search for the misplaced Baby and subsequent failure to recognize the right animal when presented with a wild leopard released unintentionally from the circus illustrates just how profoundly unprepared either of them are for any kind of serious adult life. Likewise, the constant roles they are forced to play, the childish games they find themselves involved in, and the lies they tell in order to avoid confronting any sort of deeper truths about themselves or about their situation, suggest the impish, chaotic lifestyle both of them seem prone to – naturally so for Susan, and perhaps beneath the surface of David's pragmatic exterior.

This move from adult responsibilities to childish tactics is mirrored by other key structural progressions in Bringing Up Baby: the move from the suburban to the rural, from day to night, and from social order to disorder. Everything in the film follows in tandem: as more craziness is dumped into the plot, the day gets longer, and the characters progress further into the dark forest in search of their leopards (shall I say, their structure?). By the end of the night, nearly all of the characters have found themselves in jail cells, and though Hawks finds a hilarious narrative justification for it (they're all recoiling from the encroaching leopard), the metaphor is about as blatant as metaphors come: not only does Susan get herself in trouble with her bewildering behavior, she also manages to swallow up everyone around her in her mad pursuit of love, which runs counter to any of the conventional methods and laws of the public world. Indeed, the success of her pursuit (and of David's) is reliant upon her(/his) ability to break from the structure of her(/his) life.



After all the dizzying layers of symbolic game-playing, there comes a beautiful shot in the final scene of the film that that suddenly crystallizes what was perhaps only vaguely visible through the overlapping chatter of Hawks’ high-velocity filmmaking: Susan breaking through David’s dinosaur and David saving her by grabbing her hand, refusing to let her fall into the rubble, a perfect visualization of a relationship that is simultaneously parasitic/destructive and productive/vital. Susan’s been clinging to David throughout the film, destroying his comfy complacency, yet the aspects of her character that so sharply contrast his persona are also the forces that agitate his sense of self and usher him towards a (potentially) "better" happiness. The bricks and mortar of Grant’s previous regressive lifestyle – after all, he's an archaeologist for God's sake, digging up bones! – have been replaced by something new, a hesitant embrace of the chaos and spontaneity that Susan represents.

But this embrace is about something less specific and less trite than love. The conclusion of Bringing Up Baby has been lambasted for the abruptness of its seeming dramatic shift – that David suddenly admits to loving Susan. However, the word "love" emerges from David out of what appears to be practical impulse: a desire to influence Susan to either get off the precarious ladder or take his hand – ultimately, to resign to safety. Yet it is significant that this is one of the few scenes in the film where Hawks shows David actively looking out for Susan's best interest. He has come around to her in some way, but how? Is he acknowledging the strangely absorbing, major influence she's had on his life? Is he, to put it simply, greeting the fact of his vulnerability? To the same extent that Grant’s final, falling-out-of-the-mouth “I Love You” is less a true statement than a verbal placeholder for a major shift within himself, Bringing Up Baby traffics in all sorts of external presentation that it proves not to be fundamentally about. In Hawks' film, everything stands for something, a dynamic alternative to a man who has built his life around empty markers of contentment.

Screening Notes #14

It Happened One Night (1934): What I find so propulsive about It Happened One Night is its structure more than anything (though the chemistry between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert is certainly contagious): an unhurried dance between day and night, the former defined by its caustic rush and the latter by its revelations and sense of mystery. It's easy to start longing for the coming of night, when Capra's punchy jabber dissolves into charged silence. The erotic and romantic tension between Gable and Colbert becomes a palpable element, increasingly so as the film wears on and the convincing opposites venture, accidentally but also purposefully, away from the grips of civilization and into, as usual, the wilds of Connecticut. I get a kick out of how Capra stages his Walls of Jericho bedroom scenes during rainstorms, allowing the drips on the window to represent – pardon my vulgarity – sexual juices flowing. I also get a kick out of how the ending, highly reminiscent of The Great Madcap in its turns of events, refuses to reveal the reunion of Gable and Colbert, instead disguising it in the economical dropping off a bedsheet.

The Thin Man (1934): Putting its emphasis equally on the sterling comic duo of William Powell and Myrna Low and an overstuffed, vapid murder mystery, The Thin Man shows some of the poisonous effects of a novelistic foundation. There's so many seedy characters in The Thin Man, so many minor subplots and non-sequiturs, that Powell and Loy occasionally get lost in the fray, when really the film could just place their boozy marriage at its core and watch them interact for an hour and a half. Admittedly, there's at least 15 too many martini jokes, and nearly as many twee comic relief bits featuring the cute puppy Asta (though the second installment has even more, and they're worse), but in general any time director W.S. Van Dyke places his camera in their vicinity the film is zippy, tough-talking gold.

Design for Living (1933): I'm working on a Mubi piece that will explore the idiosyncratic texture of Lubitsch's mise-en-scène and editing, so for now I'll just say this: what a kinky film! The subtexts and innuendos swirling around this love triangle – polygamy, homosexuality, oedipal complex – are strongly felt, yet Lubitsch implies so much non-visually that even if this was made during the time of the Production Code nothing concrete could have prevented its release. In many ways, it's the riskier cousin to Wilder's Some Like it Hot, viewing the conventions of social roles and professional success as equally stifling and slippery in their ways.

Days of Heaven (1978): Seeing this again on celluloid on Harvard's shimmering big screen, I was struck by how decidedly not gorgeous so many of its images actually are; for all of Malick's bad rap as a man who allegedly "just shoots pretty pictures," viewers so often forget how skilled he was in his first two films at pairing majestic beauty with the comparatively mundane and rugged. The fading rays of the sun are in fact not always at just the right angle in Days of Heaven. Sometimes they're blocked by objects, leaving the camera and the subjects in shadows. Other times, they're beating down unflatteringly on farm workers. It's these moments that make the natural wonders so remarkable, such a relief for these troubled, drifting figures. I now consider Days of Heaven to be one of Malick's very best films, a work that expresses a sublime ideal in art: at once iconic and specific, vast and small, existing and already gone.

Grand Illusion (1937): For whatever reason, Jean Renoir's one of those universally lauded "masters" of the medium that I have, up until now, been completely unexposed to. Despite his reputation among highbrow critics, I was pleased to see how open and populist Renoir's sensibility actually is. Now I understand what those free-spirits in Annie Hall meant when they mentioned seeing Grand Illusion as if it was the stoner comedy of the week; it's a very relaxed, and relaxing, film, a loose ensemble piece that is more about shuffling through vignettes of male camaraderie than anything else, even in spite of its war movie trappings. I found the film's final act, when two French soldiers finally escape prison and find shelter in the German countryside, to be genuinely beautiful and warmly human, and the preceding two acts somewhat erratic, with episodes of dated men-dressing-up-as-women comedy and heartfelt wartime conversation butted up awkwardly against each other. But this is never less than a breezy way to spend two hours.



The Last Bolshevik (1993): Chris Marker's eccentric elegy to, autobiography of, and celebration of Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin would have probably been doubly rewarding if I were familiar with Medvedkin's work at all, but even without any knowledge of the filmmaker beyond name recognition, there's still a power and charm to The Last Bolshevik. Marker's narration and assembly entertains many a'digressions without losing sight of the overall argument (namely, that Medvedkin was one of the most distinctive and subversive directors of the Silent Era in Russia), and he also manages to provide a rich summary of Russian politics and culture around the time of Medvedkin's life without ever making it feel like a dry history lesson. Shot on cheap digital video and blown up to a big screen, the film's crude superimpositions and unconventionally lovely images boast a uniquely palpable texture of their own, which didn't help keep my brain focused on the knotty content.

One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (1999): I found myself much more moved and involved by Marker's comparatively straightforward, hour-long Tarkovsky memorial than the Medvedkin piece, largely because I'm so familiar with Tarkovsky's work. Marker eloquently, poetically suggests that Tarkovsky's the only filmmaker whose work "exists within the space of two children and two trees," referring to the opening and closing shots of his body of work (from Ivan's Childhood and The Sacrifice, respectively), and frankly, that insight alone would do, but Marker also goes on to trace the mystical and political allusions running through his work, in addition to editing in privileged glimpses of Tarkovsky at work on The Sacrifice and in his death bed. There's a lot packed in to a relatively brief study, but it's fleet-footed in that way that is specific only to Marker, who tosses off profound observations without making a big fuss about it.

The Exorcist (1973): Loren Rosson calls this the best horror film ever made, and I'd agree that it deserves to be mentioned in the pile, but as much as it disturbs me on a visceral level (how could it not?), I find that it doesn't have as lasting an impact as I'd like it to. Seeing it at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery should have been the ideal situation, but unfortunately the raucous crowd primed to laugh at anything remotely "dated" and the regrettably under-sized screen for such a sprawling lawn certainly didn't augment the effect of Friedkin's eerie and surprisingly low-key tactics. Still, the guy's a master of foreplay, thanks to some subtle lifts from Bergman's sensibility (ticking clocks, gusty winds, tipsy zooms, anguished females, Max Von Sydow) and an inbred feel for atmosphere, all of which contributes to what Stephen Russell-Gebbett has eloquently referred to as "the horror before the Horror."

How The West Was Won (1962): Three-strip technicolor: the immersive experience I've always been looking for and failed to discover with the advent of IMAX, as well as a sadly brief phenomenon. Screening at the Cinerama Dome and viewed from the second row, this was a monstrous thing to behold, requiring an entire 90 degree turn of the head in order to digest all of the details in the vast landscape of the frame. This image (the term seems inadequate, since the format redefines our understanding of the "image," but I'll use it anyway) actually approximates a realistic field of view, with each edge appearing at the furthest point in the peripherals. For optical reasons, the majority of the key action takes place around the center of the frame, encouraging the viewer to use the left and right strips as mere visual noise to complete the "entrance" into the picture, but I had a lot of fun ignoring the actual drama to focus on the nooks and crannies in the panoramic image, following the progression of separate mini-movies occurring in the production design. As for the film itself, it's a robustly patriotic romp; unfortunately after a long day I dozed off during John Ford's sections (reportedly the finest in the film, according to who you ask), but head director Henry Hathaway had a showman's grasp of the material and an equally romantic command of imagery. All this aside, the three-strip technicolor is what I was most interested in.

P.S. Big kudos to anyone who can try their hand at identifying the hidden theme of this post. Clue: take note of where the screenshots are placed, and what they're separating. 2nd clue: it's not in my words, per se, it's in the films themselves.

Stanley Kubrick, Ranked

(This is the third entry in the Favorite Directors Blogathon. Next month is Andrei Tarkovsky.)

For what it's worth, I've had more "fun" watching the films of Stanley Kubrick than those of almost any other director, which runs counter to accepted truths of the notoriously reclusive director's work being "cold to the touch" and, worse, "too challenging." Starting with 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, Kubrick embarked on a string of films so creatively focused and immersive that the inconsistent gaps that separated them must have had some kind of major healing power, rejuvenating his intellect and shifting his curiosity to another existential mystery. He's one of those filmmakers that every entry-level cinephile devours in their early days of film appreciation, and the same was true for me, but the difference is that I've never grown tired of his work or used it merely as a stepping stone to a wider culture of film. I've found that he, in so many ways, is one of the backbones of film culture, his influence reaching, consciously or otherwise, across directors worldwide for decades. More often than not, when I seek all that is good in cinema, I find echoes of Kubrick under every stone.

Few directors had as immaculate and intuitive a grasp of aesthetics as Kubrick. From his crisp, orderly compositional sense, to his careful choreography of color and movement, to his uncanny knack for picking the perfect piece of music to accompany a given scene, his films evolve in a fluid, cumulative manner, casting a spell with near-mathematical precision. But while the surfaces of his work are often approached as if an equation, the emotional and thematic material underneath is not; Kubrick had a wonderful ability to leave the most significant mysteries of human behavior and the universe intact. Characters seethe with emotion in his films – megalomania, madness, fury, sexual desire, fear, joy – and he approaches them with a unique mix of empathy and clinical curiosity, meanwhile juxtaposing them against the larger tides of history, nature, and the perplexities beyond Earth. His oeuvre, though regrettably slim, comprises an attempt to transpose all the thought capable by a single human being onto the cinematic medium.

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1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Whether or not there can ever be a film as culturally earth-shattering as 2001 is tough to say, but what is certain is that the impact of this provocative, lunatic space essay is no less visceral or significant today. What Kubrick was ever-so-majestically hinting at with the film – that the so-called technological "progress" of man could in fact be the very downfall of the species, that in order to move forward we need to reconnect with some primitive concept of self, and that what we know about the universe is very likely only a puny sliver of the vast sea of what can be known – won't become irrelevant until something cataclysmic, something like what happens to Bowman at the trancelike close of the film, jolts the entire human race into some new, higher stage of existence. What else can be said? It's a leap forward, and in some cases, in all different directions, for humanity, for philosophy, for cinema, for Kubrick's career, etc., and it's also the filmmaker's most ambitious, visionary, and transcendent moment.

2. Barry Lyndon (1975): The impressive balancing act of Barry Lyndon is that, even as it features Kubrick at his most analytically removed from the material, it maintains a vivid dramatic impact. As the film progresses, Kubrick's central character, the unremarkable farmhand-turned-aristocrat Barry Lyndon (Ryan O'Neal), becomes increasingly dwarfed by his surroundings, merging into Kubrick's decidedly stiff mise-en-scène as if a figure in an oil painting, yet at the same time he grows into a more tragic and lonely figure. Through its witty, detached narrator, its exaggerated costuming, and its rambling narrative defined by acts of role-playing and phoniness, Barry Lyndon explicitly calls attention to the flaws inherent in shaping history into linear narratives, as well as the absurdity of sentimentalizing any one individual over another. It's curious then – and indicative of the internal counterargument at the core of the film that plays very much to its advantage – that these characters do ultimately emerge as real, flesh-and-blood human beings with their own insignificant hopes and dreams. This is cinema that both acknowledges humanity's endless loss to the flow of time and seeks to discover something lasting, beautiful, and permanent in the impermanent.

3. The Shining (1980): When I think of the ever-intangible quality of "atmosphere," I think first of The Shining, which has as unique and memorable an atmosphere as any film ever made. I think of big band music wafting through cavernous hallways (apparently, so too does James Kirby, who has made several brilliant albums inspired by these sounds under the pseudonym The Caretaker). I think of the acres of thick snow encasing the Overlook Hotel. I think of glowing table lamps surrounded by thick cigarette smoke, around which ghostly flappers convene. The Shining's gloomy, enveloping atmosphere becomes the central guiding force of its narrative, as the mansion develops a mysterious aura that drives Jack Nicholson's writer-father to violent insanity. The performances here are suitably larger-than-life, all shrieks and glowers and varying states of hypnosis that culminate in a harrowing implosion of familial security, and the camerawork and set design is hallucinatory, emphasizing the imprisonment of the central characters to fate and history. The Shining also gets bonus points (as if it needed them) for having the most tantalizing trailer ever made.

The Master (2012) A Film by Paul Thomas Anderson

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

So often as viewers we forget the craft of good film acting. We take advantage of the fact that there's a distinct and challenging path taken to get to a representation of a character onscreen. The film actor is highly fragile material, and anyone who's ever tried their hand at directing – or even anyone who's ever witnessed a director/actor relationship in action – knows that at any given moment communication can break down entirely, that something in the air, something difficult to pinpoint, can combust between the director and the actor and cause nothing to turn out as expected or hoped for. Nurturing a strong collaboration is sort of like zen or voodoo. When it works, a sacred zone with a unique, primitive language develops. Once you're in that zone, a lot can destroy it. It's complicated by nature, vulnerable to slight outside influence, and susceptible to minute shifts in power dynamics. Come to think of it, it's a lot like the relationship between Lancaster Dodd and Freddie Quell.

Paul Thomas Anderson's last two films (and to a lesser, varying degree every film that came before them) have been profound studies of great acting performances – not just films that feature great performances, but films that observe, explore, flaunt, and valorize them. Indeed, Anderson has somewhat suddenly become one of the most gifted actor's directors out there, and, as far as I'm concerned, has overseen the finest feats of acting yet in 21st century American cinema. It certainly helps that he's had some not-too-shabby resources to work with - Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Dano, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Joaqiun Phoenix are some of the best in the business - but even the best are human and are therefore capable of falling apart in a role. Even more so than There Will Be Blood, Anderson's new film The Master engages intimately with its central performers; if the prior film was a controlled, brooding slice of perfection, the new one is bulky and exploratory, but what it lacks in overarching fluidity it makes up for in extended, near-transcendent observations of human behavior at its most unpredictable.

Daniel Plainview was a force of life in There Will Be Blood, a total animal, and in some sense Anderson's crisp widescreen compositions and assured pace kept him at bay. At the same time, the tension between his feral, explosive qualities and the film's formal restraint was a major source of excitement. To a degree, The Master keeps this tension intact, yet it also indulges its attention on the mysterious, compulsively watchable Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), and eventually his foil Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), at the expense of forward narrative momentum. This is a film that finally earns the definition "character study," rather than just wearing it as a vague indicator of depth. Many scenes are exclusively about picking apart the central characters, defining and exploring their hidden complexities, and observing their physical form for great lengths of time; indeed, the film's centerpiece is an extensive "therapy" session between Dodd and Freddie in which they do exactly these things to each other, and Anderson films them in piercing close-ups (rarely has a shot-reverse-shot set-up felt this tangible, this searching).



The first, and strongest, half of The Master follows Freddie, a discharged World War II veteran, as he boozes, curses, and masturbates his way through postwar malaise. Anderson's structure is very much free-form and circumstantial here, reflecting the unhinged drift of Freddie's life; something happens, then another, then another, and so on. Freddie has sex with the sandcastle of a naked woman, descends into the bow of a Navy ship (not unlike how Plainview descends into the parched Earth) to suck down the first of many poisonous alcoholic concoctions he makes in the film, works a brief stint as a migrant farmer before being chased from the land by angry Filipino workers who insist he's intentionally poisoned their ailing co-worker with one of said concoctions...etc. While circumstances accrue on top of each other, the filmmaking seems every bit as uncertain of the near and distant future as the drunken, sex-obsessed Freddie. Both Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Werner Herzog come to mind during this compellingly aimless section, the former for the planted, shallow-focus camera that pans and tilts perfunctorily as its subject of focus drifts around the space and the latter for the nonjudgmental devotion to the mad logic and trajectory of the central figure.

Freddie speaks with his head tilted upwards, the line of sight from his squinted eyes just barely reaching over his cocked face, and through only one side of his perpetually slanted mouth, but for quite some time he doesn't speak much at all (like There Will Be Blood, The Master begins by merely dropping the viewer into its hero's milieu, catching the mood of the environment without launching into a narrative). His default pose is to hunch over while peering blankly into the distance with a vaguely inquisitive expression that is really just the shell-shocked result of a man longing for sexual contact. Before any significant lines of dialogue are spoken, this sense of physicality is overwhelming, dominating Anderson's loosely-defined frames. In fact, the mere observation of Freddie's formidable presence in such great detail cements the notion that The Master, despite the fact that its titular figure is Lancaster Dodd, is ultimately Freddie's film, and Anderson's fascination with him as a living, breathing, altogether authentic human object runs throughout the entire film even as other threads come and go.



One of those threads: "The Master" himself, Lancaster Dodd. That the initial meeting between Dodd and Freddie is kept offscreen is perhaps a sly suggestion on Anderson's part that he is less important as a man in his own right than as a man with an effect on Freddie. Instead, Dodd's presence is first symbolized by the romantic ocean-liner that Freddie inadvertently stumbles upon and on which Dodd is throwing a party for his quasi-religious fan-cult – that is, to Freddie, an emblem of status, wealth, and achievement (traits whose implications Anderson will gradually pick apart over the course of the film). In a film that gently scrambles chronology and elides revelations without calling much attention to it, it's par for the course that Dodd and Freddie's first onscreen conversation feels like the continuation of a conversation the previous night aboard the ship; Dodd inquires about Freddie's alcoholic concoctions, and Freddie awkwardly inquires about a job (which Freddie "gets," but the nature of that job is never clear, suggesting that a relationship to Dodd's cult is work enough). Already there is a sense of a mutually beneficial relationship at play. The Master details the transition of those benefits from concrete forces to the abstract, intangible stuff of macho relationships.

Dodd is referred to as "The Master" by a swarm of mostly retired women, and he spearheads a worldview dubbed "The Cause." (For extra information on the associations with Scientology, see Kent Jones' comprehensive piece. I won't go into any of it here because I recognize that Anderson's aims are much less specific than this single religious denomination). As Dodd's son (Jesse Plemons) puts it, Master's "making it all up as he goes along," pulling wholesale from various schools of thought such as Buddhism, Christianity, Freudian psychology, New Age Spirituality, and the pragmatic everyday teachings of self-help books. The actual content of his theories is of much less interest to Anderson than the persona of leadership he is able to erect and wield to his social and financial advantage, as well as particularly how that persona acts as a much-needed grounding for Freddie, who up until meeting Dodd appears on the brink of self-destruction.

As in There Will Be Blood, the central character dynamic is that of a forward-moving introvert and the false prophet that distorts, partly unintentionally, the introvert's true self. Anderson's riffing, quite explicitly, on a master/servant dynamic, yet he's also continually revealing the unexpected nuances of this type of relationship. The aforementioned therapy scene doubles as an exposé on the notion of performance, and where Dodd succeeds in his work is getting Freddie to finally break through his off-putting weirdness and reveal something about his emotional core. His confession that he's in love with a girl back home (embodied as an angelic adolescent ideal by Madison Beaty) emerges so organically and spontaneously that it's as if he wasn't even consciously aware of it until prodded by Master. But as much as Master is able to excavate unseen dimensions of Freddie, Freddie's nearly puppyish servantry proves instrumental in the maintaining of Master's sanity and confidence as a leader. (Freddie's support is even more important to Dodd than his disapproving wife's (Amy Adams, who is all but suffocated alongside these monstrous performances), or any of his other female followers (Laura Dern among them). Women in general play only a peripheral role in the development of these absorbed male egos, and when they do figure, it's mostly in the form of one-note abstractions.) Late in the film, when Freddie is about to free himself from Master's grip once and for all in a dialogue scene that takes place in Master's very Citizen Kane-ish dwelling – also reminiscent of Plainview's final resting place (more and more similarities arise...) – Master tells him "if you leave me, I never want to see you again." It's a telling statement that gets at the dependent quality of the relationship; Dodd wants a definitive answer regarding whether or not he will have access to Freddie's presence, because if he doesn't at least know, he seems unable to go on.



At any given moment The Master feels like it's going to explode with tension, that the primal churnings of man will wreak havoc on the unruffled surface of the film. This has been a recurring sensation in Anderson's filmography, but it's never been quite this palpable. The tweaks in Anderson's style (less tracking shots, less completely static compositions, less depth of field, a lot less) have shifted greater emphasis to the interactions of the characters themselves, and even when a composition smacks of immediate subtext - such as in the brilliant jail cell scene between Dodd and Freddie in which each of them occupy their own half of the frame, one frenetic and one stoic - there's a casual, almost fly-on-the wall quality to the images. Even a tight close-up has a loose, moldable essence. In every sense, the image-making is the antithesis of the shots that Freddie takes during his on-again-off-again role as an advertising photographer, first for a department store and later for Master's own brand: posed, artificial images of America, of consumerism, of normalcy, images that Freddie rejects entirely in his haphazard, messy pursuit of pure behavior.

We are first introduced to Freddie through a view of the top of his grey combat helmet, a blank surface that hints at the existential juncture of this character. It's also a clearing of the slates that supports the notion that The Master is the story of mankind, told through Freddie: a slow movement from primal, uncivilized existence towards economic and cultural superstructures (Dodd), and how the authentic human is perverted along the way. Perhaps this is giving Anderson too much credit, that it's cohering ideas that were fuzzy in the conception of the film, but there's too much of an insistence upon defining the term "animal" here to not acknowledge Anderson's cosmic ambitions. Put simply, Freddie is an animal, a man who listens to his primal sexual and violent instincts, while Master is a man who tries to reject the idea of animalism only to continually reveal his instinctual side in outbursts of emotion as he feels his air of authority slipping away. As much as Freddie's a prick, the film sticks with him and harbors a tragic romanticism towards him, because when the influence of social organization has left the picture, he's still there at the center of the film, a man unwilling to temper the volcanic urges within him.

Samsara (2012) A Film by Ron Fricke

When deciding whether or not to see Samsara at the Dome in downtown Hollywood – an incredibly vast and immersive movie experience that is every bit worth the steep price of admission – I made the mistake of perusing Rotten Tomatoes for quick and dirty judgments (funny how we can look at this tactic as a mistake, when, at core, it’s the essential commercial purpose of film criticism), and the blurb that I had floating in my head while the film washed over me was this one from the Chicago Reader's Ben Sachs’: "Any sincerity inherent in the project is overwhelmed by the manufactured awe of its godawful New Age score." Now, I admit, it’s not necessarily professional practice to be so persuaded by other critical work in the formulation of one’s opinion, but Samsara's music is such an unmistakable element of its texture that it's probably impossible not to feel one way or another about it. In this case, I sympathized with Sachs' assessment, so I kept wondering, is he correct to say that this music that's just plain goofy is overwhelming the sincerity? That's a tough question to crack, because I'm not sure I buy the alleged sincerity of Samsara to begin with. I'll go a step further than Sachs' and others and argue that in addition to being plain goofy, this music gets at the core of what I found grating and ridiculous about the larger artistic and philosophical modus operandi of Samsara.

Written by Michael Stearns, Lisa Gerrard, Marcello De Francisci, and performed with musicians Bonnie Jo Hunt, Ron Sunsinger, and Vidia Wesenlund, the Samsara score is a synthesis of reverby Enya-esque ooh's and ahh's, spaced-out synth-pad drones, vaguely indigenous drum rhythms and chants, a grab bag of tropes from different cultural musics, and ever-escalating-and-sustaining climaxes, and the number of musicians who worked on it only gives a hint of the clusterfuck eclecticism on display. It also reflects the guiding ethos of the film: cover everything, mix it all up, and present it as one piece, because everything belongs together and warrants the same level of attention. Carried along by this flowing, rarely ceasing musical accompaniment, the images start to feel democratized to an outlandish extent – the slicing of raw poultry is observed with the same detached, aestheticized awe as the painted face of an Aborigine. Everything is viewed as if a lunar landscape, something worthy of caution and wonder.

The idea at the heart of the film is interconnectedness, which justifies Fricke's seemingly haphazard cutting between radically different locales (poverty-stricken countrysides to bustling urban metropolises, for instance), but there's a superficial quality to this universal equation. Unlike, say, Terrence Malick (another filmmaker who works on this cosmic scale but in a more searching, inconclusive manner), Fricke seems to have decided from the onset that there is something sacred in everything, meanwhile missing the unique charm of something plainer, more-down-earth. It's no surprise that some of the film's most genuinely humbling moments comprise the only times the musical score lets up and we glimpse an image for what it really is, without the thick gloss of importance laid upon it. A waterfall, or a roiling cloud of volcanic smoke, or a speckled cityscape dotting the night sky, is sublimely beautiful on its own, but with the relentless side-note that it's only sublime paired with something else, it becomes a trite, degraded postcard-ready picture.



Samsara aims for nothing less than an existential survey of the past and current history of life on Earth. At a certain point, it feels like it’s working its way through a checklist of major talking points of humanity both in a contemporary and a metaphysical sense: war, religion, prostitution, food industry, poverty, etc. The film's game plan is simplistic: juxtaposition. Let's try juxtaposing the ancient with the modern, the poverty-stricken with the well-off, the mechanical with the organic, the violent with the gentle, the macro with the micro, the vertical with the horizontal, etc. The question of intersections, of revelations, of sums, of outliers, is so rarely addressed; instead, Fricke is keen on stepping back to play the contemplative card, shuffling the puzzle pieces for the fun of it and leaning back on the knowledge there's a picture within there somewhere.

Now, to step back for a moment, I should admit that Samsara houses some of the most immaculately photographed, "breathtaking" images I've seen in my life. Among them: pyramid temples spaced out in a verdant landscape and illuminated by the last golden beams of a sunset; a slowly panning time-lapse view from the inside of a shack in the desert; color-coded assembly lines that stretch as far as the eye can see; soaring shots over intersecting urban highways at all different times of day; an aerial glimpse of a vast religious ceremony in which people miles apart from each other bow in unison, creating a collective "blinking" effect that has to be seen to be believed. For these shots alone, I'd recommend seeing Samsara on the biggest screen possible. But as a cumulative work of art, I feel cheated. To the extent that the film expresses anything, it deals in fortune-cookie clichés: destruction is creation, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, power corrupts, progress is relative, etc. If you're looking for a bit more of this, Samsara's not a bad place to find it.

Bluebeard (2009) A Film by Catherine Breillat

The films Catherine Breillat has made after Anatomy of Hell have marked a compelling and cohesive direction in a career otherwise defined by scattershot provocations. Her career trajectory now loosely resembles David Cronenberg's; both begin with abrasive, explicit hammers to the cerebellum (a mode Cronenberg pulled off with greater success) and eventually switch gears suddenly, making way for talky period dramas that only appear sober in relation to the ornery visuals that preceded them. In Breillat's case, this transition has yielded fruitful results, and Bluebeard is yet another assured and thought-provoking effort alongside the restrained and mysterious The Last Mistress (my favorite of the three) and the deliciously surreal The Sleeping Beauty. These films share a singular approach to fairy tales and period detail, a detached, self-consciously unreal presentation of history that meshes elegantly with their essayistic, analytical nature.

Like its follow-up, Bluebeard operates on two levels: in Sleeping Beauty, it was a whimsical hundred-year dream and an unhinged reality, and in Bluebeard, it's a scene of two sisters reading Charles Perrault's titular fairy tale and a visualization of the story. Having gathered their ideas about the social institutions Perrault tackles in his cautionary tale (courtship, marriage, sex) merely through an uneven mix of watered-down official explanations and fragments of hearsay, the sisters explore and discuss the text in their dusty attic like kittens suddenly presented a new, curious object to play with. The younger of the two, Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites), handles the material with the easy confidence expected of a child with such a minimal grasp of the topics it deals with (she believes homosexuality to mean the love that consummates a marriage), while the older sister, Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti) - perhaps because she's within a stone's throw of puberty - urges her sister to stop reading even as she hesitantly, fearfully listens in.



The dynamic of naïveté and apprehension existing in this situation is matched by Breillat's dichotomous presentation of the fairy tale setting, a place of stiff mannerisms and postcard-perfect compositions interspersed by the occasional hyper-sensual image: a ladle entering a bubbling broth in tight close-up, a beheaded foul mechanically flailing about as its body perishes, the barbaric Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) devouring a massive hunk of meat, three girls hanging above a floor skimmed in blood. Shots like these spike Breillat's otherwise hermetic, controlled atmosphere, and generally correspond to some psychological or emotional development both in the sisters reading the story and the sisters within the story. Not that there's much difference; by giving them variations on the same names - the sisters in 17th century France are named Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton) and Anne (Daphné Baiwir) - it's clear that Breillat means to suggest the universal impact of the fairy tale, the sense of identification naturally triggered in young readers. In this regard, the spunky, assured Catherine is mirrored by the confident, gorgeous Marie-Catherine, while the frightened Marie-Anne gets her surrogate in the form of Marie-Catherine's jealous, ill-tempered older sister Anne. Sibling rivalries, Breillat argues, have featured the same core components across generations.

In the tale of Bluebeard proper, Marie-Catherine and Anne are students in a convent whose father has recently died, forcing them to return home to their grieving and impoverished mother (Isabelle Lapouge). On their trip, they catch a glimpse of Bluebeard's mansion, a towering, isolated castle on a hill that reflects the man living in it. Word trickles down to these girls that the women Bluebeard marries are never seen again once they enter his grounds, and this news provokes the expected terror and curiosity in the older and younger sister, respectively. One of Bluebeard's messengers approaches the poor, fatherless family offering stability and happiness, the implication (unchallenged by the mother) being that another man must fill the patriarchal void left by the deceased father in order for the young girls to achieve any kind of upward mobility in this strict society governed as much by gender as it is by wealth and possessions. Soon enough, Marie-Catherine is living with the behemoth Bluebeard, though the relationship dynamic does not play out as predicted; one of the first things Marie-Catherine does is request her own room small enough to prohibit Bluebeard from entering, a cunning, lightly seductive ploy to assert her power in this male-dominated zone.



Indeed, it's Marie-Catherine's smarts and charm that allow her to subvert, for quite some time at least, Bluebeard's oppression. The mere sight of her dainty figure juxtaposed against Bluebeard's vast, imposing frame suggests an absurd degree of dominance only augmented by the cartoonish scale of the interiors, but in the face of Marie-Catherine's fortitude Bluebeard appears tender and oafish. Shades of Beauty and the Beast are inherent in Perrault's original, and I suspect Breillat intends to gesture towards them only to eventually diverge in the opposite direction of that openly romantic sensibility. If the relationship between Beauty and the Beast is ultimately open and honest, defined by a willingness to seek the ideal, Marie-Catherine and Bluebeard's is so entrenched in pre-destined social roles that it plays like a long test in which both are constantly navigating the treacherous waters of the other person, searching for untrustworthy qualities even as they hope not to find any. Bluebeard's final test of Marie-Catherine's character is to have her hold on to a special key while he's out of town, meanwhile forbidding her from the entering the room it opens. What ensues is no less shocking for its sense of inevitability. It's a confirmation of the enslavement of these individuals to the overarching sexual politics of their environment.

Breillat formalizes the cyclical nature of the denouement by literally repeating shots over and over, all the better to reflect the same ideologies of marriage and gender being taught to young girls again and again. To cement the impact of the story on the minds of the contemporary sisters, Breillat first has Catherine appear in the fairy tale world performing Marie-Catherine's behavior and eventually intertwines the final act of the tale with the girls' own trajectory. As such, the building tension between Marie-Catherine and Bluebeard is not cut off prematurely as it may appear to be, but is rather extended and completed by the scene between Catherine and Marie-Anne. Encroaching violence spills over into their psyches; Catherine delights in her sister's discomfort, and Marie-Anne, reaching a climax in her awareness of romantic inequities, falls, literally, into adolescence, through the space left by a missing floorboard in the attic. It's a transition that, as in The Sleeping Beauty, is violent and disorienting.

Ingmar Bergman, Ranked

(This is the second entry in the Favorite Directors Blogathon. Next month is Stanley Kubrick.)

When Ingmar Bergman died in 2007 (on the same day as Michelangelo Antonioni) and buzz about the supposed "end of cinema" proliferated on the web and elsewhere, none of it registered much for me. It came at too early a stage in my cinephilia, and at that point I had only seen The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and maybe Winter Light. During this time I was drawn mostly to films with robust visual flair (Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Peter Greenaway, etc.), so I found Bergman's work interesting but mostly unremarkable, my admiration largely detached as if I was forcing myself to adhere to critical consensus. At a certain point a year or two later, after seeing Persona, his work suddenly clicked for me, and it inspired a marathon of Bergmania that left me stunned film after film. I came to the conclusion that Bergman was incomparably consistent and prolific, producing work year after year that shared very similar preoccupations (narrative, thematic, stylistic, and otherwise) without becoming redundant or stale. It seems odd to have paradoxically discovered cinema at a time when all sources told me it was dead, but that was the feeling I had, and the opinion I still hold today is that Bergman's contributions to humanity were no less significant than his contributions to the world of film.

I love and respect him for: his nakedness in dealing with the dark, private, often embarrassing aspects of human nature that so many artists skip over, his relentless bowing to the complexity and enormity of life on Earth, even when dipping into particularly narcissistic territory, his unmatched fascination with the human face, which is of course capable of being the most expressive cinematic element if treated as such, his almost guileless faith in symbols and allegories to express something inexpressible, his vision of cinema as the domain of dreams and spiritual therapy, his fondness for natural landscapes (both as physical facts of life and as manifestations of inner states), his understanding of the psychic dimensions of light and color, his utter lack of qualms about mingling different art forms (theater, music, painting) with cinema, his refusal to water down his sensibility in order to make genre films, understanding that a consistent worldview provides a genre in and of itself, his dogged professionalism and reputation as a leader in spite of his outspoken insecurities and demons, his ability to make every sound and silence count...the list, it goes without saying, could go on.

In putting together these rankings, I felt confident in the opinion I hold on exactly 14 of his films, many of which I revisited in the last few months, which explains the unusual tally. (For the films that do not grace this list, there will be a time when I either discover them or revisit them and feel comfortable canonizing them, at which point they will be added to this post.) Every film on the list below is capable of being reduced to hyperbole; they reflect minor gradations of greatness - that is, my 14th pick is only a couple notches "less great" than my #1 pick. In my humble opinion, almost all of them are "masterpieces," a word I rarely pull out from the cobwebs for fear that it might be an empty buzzword reflecting short-lived thrill, but I dare to say that's not the case here. Bergman has been an enduring part of both my cinematic education and my development as a human being, and I can do nothing but be true to my immensely fruitful relationship to his body of work.

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1. Fanny and Alexander (1982): Christmas is, to me, the most wonderful time of the year for many reasons: for the way it brings together family, for the joy, for the winter season, for the food, for the color palette, for, well, everything. But there is also an air of mystery surrounding Christmas, particularly for a child trying to grapple with its strange folklore. No film in the history of cinema has managed to synthesize all of these qualities quite as organically and effortlessly as Fanny and Alexander, the first half of which presents the most sensually rapturous vision of the holiday ever presented in any medium. The merrymaking, however, gradually gives way to darkness and instability following a death in the family, forcing the young protagonists of the title into the ascetic mansion of their mother's new disciplinarian husband and sending the Bergman surrogate Alexander (Bertil Guve) into a prolonged confrontation with the cruel machinations of the world beyond his cozy, ornately designed home as well as the void beyond life. This is Bergman's most lush, emotionally varied film, a dreamlike coming-of-age tale that reveals great expanses of doom and despair beneath warm, familiar surfaces.

2. The Silence (1963): Rarely, perhaps never, has there been a more succinct expression of the fundamental, irrevocable disconnect between people than the final statement that graces The Silence: "words in a foreign language." It's simple, vague, and awkwardly incomplete but in the context of this primal, hallucinatory masterpiece, it's boundlessly expressive. Hostility, loneliness, pain, and indifference are all minor gradations of an enveloping bleakness here, but the film still feels exceptionally propulsive and moody despite the heaviness of its themes and the seeming redundancy of its expression. An abstract poem carved out of a surreal scenario, The Silence is the wise grandfather to Kubrick's The Shining and probably the scariest film Bergman ever made.

3. The Seventh Seal (1957): Iconic as it is, The Seventh Seal has never drowned under the weight of the many parodies and imitations it's spawned, or its own status as the quintessentially ponderous, death-obsessed European art film. Sure, the film is transfixed by the question of our mortality, but it's also ecstatic in its search for the bright spots of life: a snack of fresh strawberries on a warm Scandinavian summer evening, a vaudevillian showcase in the middle of a town reeling from fear of the Black Plague, and a recurring hallucination of the Virgin Mary in a sunny field all come to mind. In fact, the most lasting impression given off by the film is a sense of calm and tranquility; its contemplation of vast philosophical perplexities feels confident rather than anxious, its visions of the unknowable strikingly relaxed. I can imagine watching this film on the day I die and still finding a charm and level-headedness in it that can defeat the fear of our inevitable fate.