The Deathmaker

I've written a piece for Mubi.com on the 1995 German film The Deathmaker, which dives into the extensive single-room interrogation of Fritz Haarmann, the serial killer first dramatized in 1931 by Fritz Lang with M. The film's directed by Romuald Karmakar, a filmmaker that too few cinephiles are familiar with. Head on over to The Notebook to hear about why I find this spatially limited film so damn compelling.

DIY Dystopia

Balagan Films of Cambridge, Massachusetts represents what is currently the heroic norm in avant-garde cinema curation and exhibition: a not-for-profit operation scouring the world for distinctive aesthetic experiences while relying on crowdsourcing to scrape enough funds together to just barely survive. At Balagan’s latest program – their first after an abnormal hiatus of several months – the staff’s repeated plugging (self-consciously described by head curator Jeff Silva as “beating a dead horse”) of their soon-to-expire Kickstarter came across less as cash-happy beggary than as an unfortunate necessity, an earnest plea for assistance better to get out of the way up front and move on to what really matters: the moving images.

The films in this latest program, which was entitled “DIY Dystopia” and ran approximately an hour and a half, are associated by their shared concerns over the state of the natural world in an increasingly jeopardized industrial landscape. An additional charge of immediacy is attached to this theme when considering that all of the filmmakers involved – Douglas Urbank, Jennifer Reeves, Christina Battle, Dan Baker, and Ben Rivers – are currently based in cities; an intensely “artificial” environment, as one Balagan curator noted. (Dante’s Quartet (1987), a film by the late Stan Brakhage, was also featured in the lineup, and he too spent a great deal of his life in an urban center.) Incorporating a blend of traditional shooting, hand-painting, optical printing, found footage manipulation, and other esoteric uses of celluloid, the films not only seek unpredictable methods for representing the contemporary environmental crisis but also tie this lament into the decay of material cinema as a larger practice and as a way of seeing.

Boston local Douglas Urbank’s in-progress found footage film WWII kicked off the evening accompanied by a live score from acoustic improv trio Duck That, a hissing, squelching, howling exercise in sustained tension that eerily matched the images of dead soldiers being carted to and fro in wheelbarrows and Nazi officials gathering in chunks. In fact, the otherworldly rattle emanating from Duck That’s shadowy corner beneath the screen – blown through woodwinds, gargled through loudspeakers, and punctuated by the sounds of unidentifiable trinkets – threatened to divert the attention away from Urbank’s somewhat dryly repurposed imagery, in which the only conspicuous marks of deconstruction are animated shifting tear lines and rows of circular negative space, implemented as if to suggest the footage crumbling and splitting apart.


The next film, Jennifer Reeves’ Landfill 16 (2011), offered a far more dense and mysterious visual surface. Presumably a tattered amalgamation of direct painting/scratching and less controlled manners of celluloid handling (i.e. burying in the dirt), the resulting visual chaos alternately evokes bubbling magma, eroded rust, and scorched Earth. The film’s weather-beaten color palette – resembling that of late-period Tony Scott – mutates as frequently as the textured surface, pulsating inward and outward in a mess of scratches, blotches, and Petri dish patterns. Towards the latter half of the film, barely legible images of wildlife begin emerging beneath this layered visual noise, marking the first instance of a rather didactic gesture that repeats throughout these films: the posing of a contrast between technology/human waste and seemingly untainted nature. (Landfill 16’s ambient soundtrack, which pits together distant industrial noises and ghostly field recordings, forges the same dialectic.)

Christina Battle’s Buffalo Lifts (2004) packs similarly hypnotizing imagery into its concise three-minute running time: an extended shot of a buffalo herd moving, significantly, from right to left that is nearly overwhelmed by the calculated destruction of the film’s surface. Here, a particularly punchy metaphor is raised regarding the simultaneous degradation of the natural world and physical cinema. As the buffalo charge insistently across the frame – their mere directionality subliminally invoking degeneration – they rush towards extinction, just as the celluloid they have been captured with is combusting around them, reducing them to strokes of pure movement. The film’s silence underscores its power; no frivolous elements are needed for such a harmonious matching of form and content.


Battle is also responsible for Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road and 97th Street (2002), a work of similar brevity and potency. The film’s focal point is an image of a silhouetted oil derrick bobbing slowly in and out of the ground, but it’s by no means a very descriptive shot. Instead, the methodical motion of the drill is reduced to a graphic cadence in the frame around which the detritus of burnt, dirty film stock gathers. Through rephotographing techniques, Battle shows the image being knocked out of alignment with the projector, a sudden boundary obstruction that echoes the derrick’s disruption of the line between land and sky. As in Buffalo Lifts, neither the Earth nor celluloid can survive such exploitation of the natural world.

Dan Baker finds a lovely image for this inherent doom of nature in the face of man-made extravagance in Transaension (2006), which the filmmaker claims is about fossil fuel extraction: a human figure, burning like the sun in the bottom right corner of the frame, dwarfed by a fog of fiery abstraction, stacked up like layers of compromised geological crusts above him. It’s a fleeting image, but it’s undeniably the most resonant of the show. Baker pushes past some of the simple-minded dichotomies permeating the rest of the films to arrive at a crystallization of human resilience against its own self-destructive tendencies. The rest of the sex-minute film is spent building up a hellish miasma of red and orange blotches and spiderweb scratches suggesting cracked rock, all set to a menacing low-frequency drone; this is human progress as an inescapable nightmare, not something to be pondered or lightly questioned.

Alongside these relatively low-profile works, Balagan curators thought it fitting to conclude the program with films by Stan Brakhage and Ben Rivers, two artists already somewhat well known for their expressions of a pastoral ideal. Dante’s Quartet, a hand-painted assault structured around Dante’s four stages of afterlife, and Ah, Liberty! (2008), another of Rivers’ monochrome, cinemascope explorations of human communion with nature, provided a rather serene ending to the dystopia presented by the other films. Two Years at Sea, Rivers' first feature-length work, was one of my key discoveries in 2011 and remains one of my favorite films of the decade so far, and this short, Rivers' very first release according to IMDB, works in a similar vein. Naturally lit black-and-white images of wildlife mix with a score comprised mostly of diegetic sounds, but here Rivers brushes up against narrative and genre elements. The film's premise is simple: a seemingly pure landscape becomes host to a series of increasingly bizarre human interferences culminating in a pair of hooded toddlers beating and swatting mindlessly at the wreckage left by an earlier brush fire. These odd staged bits rest somewhere between horror and absurdism, but the overall tone lands on the lighter side largely because of Rivers' inspired use of the spacious 2:35:1 format, which creates an inherently freeing composition; even in an ostensible close-up, there's a great deal of image for the eye to explore.

It's easy to wonder whether the Brakhage short was included merely for the sake of contrasting a current, politically charged approach to handmade film with an older, more metaphysical one. Otherwise, Brakhage's short seems out of place in the context of all these self-consciously environmentally-minded works. At the very least, its existence within such a contemporary program exposes how prevalent and unavoidable this issue is in our present world; recognizing the eerie parallels between the decline of celluloid and the decline of the natural world, these filmmakers seem to have arrived at their finished material out of a sense of obvious ethical responsibility. The urgency shows. Only a measly portion of contemporary cinema bothers to creatively engage with the unignorable fate of our industrial over-reliance, and Balagan has managed to tactfully unify the noble few.

The Deer Hunter (1978) A Film by Michael Cimino

Particularly during a time of our continued military entanglements with foreign nations, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter comes across less as an honest grappling with the American involvement in Vietnam than as a deeply myopic stroking of American machismo. Opening with a wedding and ending with a funeral, the film announces itself as a vital statement on the transformative effects of the war on our national consciousness, positing with its very structure that the war presented a threat to our sanity, well-being, and, most of all, our moral exceptionalism. Trouble is, the only perspective it bothers to represent is that of the working-class male, and thus the film’s every development is filtered through masculine ethos, which, by extension, is equated with American national identity. Inevitably, this leaves out the possibility of hearing from women, and, most egregiously, the Vietnamese people, all of whom, historically, should be owed a say in these pivotal events.

The film divides its three dramatic acts quite transparently: pre-Vietnam, Vietnam, and post-Vietnam (these acts refer not to the actual timeline of the war but rather to the involvement of the main characters in the war). In the first act, Cimino laboriously establishes the drab Pennsylvania industrial milieu in which these characters live and work. Michael (Robert DeNiro), Stan (John Cazale), Nick (Christopher Walken), Steven (John Savage), and John (George Dzundra) are all factory laborers who spend their free time hunting deer in the mountains nearby. The sheer amount of time spent on this preamble to combat is designed to outline the core American values embedded within the milieu that will be compromised by the experiences in Vietnam: material modesty, work ethic, commitment to community, and self-reliance.



For the sake of plot convenience, the second act presents the inverses of these values, naturally displacing these negative attributes on the Vietnamese without ever realizing the floating irony that Vietnam’s history of imperialist manipulation mirrors some of our own early struggles to become an autonomous nation. Without deviation, our “enemies” are presented as barbaric, impulsive, and careless with regards to the life or death of their peers. Russian roulette, which eventually factors heavily into the plot, is formulated as the harrowing site of all these qualities, and the violence-plagued pleasure districts that Michael and Nick find themselves charting perilously into represent the opposition to the modesty and faithfulness that mark the film’s notion of American domesticity. These high-stakes events and settings are incorporated by the film exclusively for the purpose of challenging the characters' inner strength, and thus the narrative demands that they be pitched at the level of hyperbolic extremity. The result is an undifferentiated mass of hollering Vietnamese hooligans (portrayed, largely, by Thai actors) whose lives are apparently consumed by pointing handguns at anonymous heads and shouting deadly instructions, or unleashing cries of thoughtless thrill at the sight of blood gushing freely from someone's skull.

Anyone with even the smallest margin of empathy and understanding for that which is unknown to them should be able to spot such ludicrousness as a grotesque distortion of an Other. Perhaps this shortsightedness would be less offensive if Cimino didn't relay his fear-mongering exaggerations through a veneer of authenticity. The Deer Hunter as a whole is production-designed with exquisite attention to filth and squalor, and it saves its grimiest effects for Vietnam; the back-alley roulette room where Nick finds his sanity slipping away is a madhouse billowing with smoke, illuminated by a single unflattering overhead source, and otherwise shrouded in murky shadows where one can only assume the walls are caked in dried blood or Stalin portraits. While this filth is disorienting, seemingly a black hole of darkness capable of destroying one's sense of space and time, the lesser circumstances on the home front feel comparatively inviting. The only dangers presented by the Pennsylvania environment are metaphorical rather than actual; thanks largely to snatches of mystical a cappella drenched in church reverb, the mountains emanate mythical overtones throughout, and it is here that the central metaphorical challenge of the film is posed: will the men be able to kill the deer in one shot, thus affirming their strength and certitude, or will they need two shots, thus descending to the misogynistic level of “pussy”? Cimino applies the ill-fitting logic behind this masculine code of honor across the film.



The talents of Meryl Streep, Rutanya Alda, and Amy Wright, meanwhile, who constitute the pining feminine cluster back home, go to waste against the brute force of all this macho grandeur. As Linda, the conflicted love interest of both Michael and Nick, Streep is allowed the most screen time by a long shot, but even then her potentially complex character is reduced to a stick figure of grief, indecision, and longing, the collision of which Streep does her best to muscle out in numerous close-ups. Especially in the film’s final third, she is always on cue to be acted upon according to the needs of the script. She is less a character than a cipher onto which the male characters’ romantic desires and frustrations can be projected, and thus is physically oriented as such; when Michael finally returns home, she is merely sitting there in the middle of the room doing nothing when the door is knocked, her motionless pose of ennui not only a comically overwrought actor’s gesture but also a crystallization of her blatant passivity throughout the film.

If there’s one thing The Deer Hunter fully understands it’s masculine stubbornness and the absurd lengths to which a man will go to affirm his bravery and self-sufficiency, or, to put it more fittingly in the terms of the film, to prove that he’s not a pussy. The issue with the film, however, is not the degree to which it represents this quality of virility, but the astounding arrogance it takes to conflate this position with national identity. Nick's final, and ultimately fatal, dismissal of Michael's plea to come home is particularly wrenching because it fully invests in this warped mindset at the expense of an uplifting outcome. But in the end it's Michael who the film equates most squarely with the persevering virtues of the American Man because he finds a less senseless outlet for this stubbornness, overcoming the tempting madness of the "enemy" to re-focus his attentions on his local community. Yet in doing so, he remains stubborn; his unwillingness to recognize the root of the issue – his country's flippant refusal to try to understand the victims of their attacks – muddies his supposed self-actualization, even as the film celebrates his behavior as headstrong leadership. It's possible to praise the film's downcast ending as an admirably ambivalent take on patriotism, but even its manufactured ambiguity is flimsy: the "wounds" of the war may weigh heavily over these characters, but the lasting impression is of a questionable moral victory for those surviving.

A Tangle of Notes, Impressions, and Questions on Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma

(Note: This piece assumes that you've seen the film. If you haven't, I strongly encourage you to do so before navigating my jumbled thoughts. The film is part of The Criterion Collection's characteristically revelatory edition, "A Hollis Frampton Odyssey.")


- Opening in darkness, Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma (1970) asks its viewer to clear his/her perceptual slate and approach the film with fresh eyes and ears. Then, for its ensuing hour, it asks if this is even possible.

- Pulling its title from a mathematical theory proposed by Max Zorn in 1935 concerning algebraic sets and limits and featuring readings from a primitive grammar textbook, Zorn's Lemma sets itself up against man-made systems for comprehending the world and then creates some of its own corresponding yet distinctly cinematic systems. One of these is the film's structure, divided into three sections and progressing, broadly, from darkness to light, from sound to silence to sound, from visual absence to visual assault to mechanical recording, and through various attempts at rule-bound objectivity.


- In the film's extensive, unfurling middle section, the question of intentionality vs. spontaneity is repeatedly frustrated. Frampton's self-imposed A-Z structure, for the most part, dictates itself, but there are continually slippages of rationality when it seems as if the mathematical ordering of images and words has been deliberately obstructed. Assuming the one-second shots were arranged chronologically according to the order in which Frampton filmed them, I can't help but wonder whether a sly pairing such as "limp member" might not be quite so aleatoric. And if it's indeed something Frampton slipped in deliberately, why? This middle section is a puzzle of images without a clear solution, and in such cases I get the sense that the lack of clarity is carefully modulated, that Frampton might be fudging with his own rules as a way of positing the impossibility of objectively making sense of the world.


- I interpret Zorn's Lemma as a film about the limits of constructed knowledge systems (i.e. language, symbolism, time, cinema), so in one sense my desire as a viewer is to witness Frampton crafting a set of principles that he pedantically follows, only to watch as that system naturally crumbles, forcing a secondary system to emerge. In the context of Zorn's Lemma, that first system is language, broken into letters and their accompanying words, and the secondary system is images, which begin to emerge as Frampton runs out of the filmed words he collected. One way of looking at the second part of the film is through the assumption that words are unambiguous and closed-off while images are alive to the interpretive powers of the viewer, but then there are Frampton's additional tricks that complicate this reading. First, there is the fact that the words too are images, and secondly, there is the fact that the images too are a construction of the man behind the camera, framing the world according to his existing set of principles. These paradoxes and complexities are crystallized by the seemingly arbitrarily recurring motif of optically-printed text on top of an image, a calculated effect that simultaneously makes plain and simple the word/image double standards and also seems to violate Frampton's rules.


- Meanwhile, the images themselves are complicated. They are too diverse to be pinned to a shallow, undifferentiated reading as "images," posed dialectically against "words." There are shots that are temporally-bound (a jar filling up with beans, a cropped view of hands assembling a tinker toy, a man painting a wall) and others that are infinite. The time-based shots are defined by the fact that the actions contained within them are finite; they will end, and, presumably, so will the shot. On the other hand, the ocean or a single leafless tree on a hill will continue existing indefinitely. Only the representation of it through the camera will end. Frampton is calling attention to the inherent discontinuity between material reality and the human need to compartmentalize it, to give it shape and meaning through representation. Is there any other way to interpret the special effects shots in the film (two halves of a woman's head unsettlingly misaligned or three identical figures bouncing a volleyball in the same frame) than as flagrant expressions of this urge?


- The film's final section, then, is the (attempted) inverse to this manipulation: people performing an action seemingly of their own accord (walking across a snowy field into the forest) and a static camera recording that process in three uninterrupted takes, each the length of an 100-foot 16mm roll. On the surface, the approach might seem God-like, or at least that's how I see it. These figures appear to be unaware of the camera and their resulting representation therein. However, as a cinematic spectator it's obvious that this is a constructed scenario merely aiming for the illusion of truth. In service of its reprisal of age-old debates about photographic objectivity, this section decidedly inverts Frampton's editing system in the second section; here, cuts (which resemble dissolves in this case, complete with the defects inevitably accompanying the tail end of the film roll) are dictated by the limits of the cinematographic apparatus, not any editorial consciousness. But when a sudden squall of snow fills the frame, momentarily flooding the film with natural beauty despite seeming to arrive with unnatural haste, can we still trust this to be the case, or has Frampton's (and, by extension, man's) desire for aesthetic surprise and fulfillment intruded?

-On the soundtrack, loopy words spoken by two women at the pace of a nagging metronome dissolve into sonic mush. Again, the possibility of a subjectivity (the women's voices) is raised within a rule-bound system (the metronome) and the latter overwhelms the former. The subjective is reduced by the limits within which it is contained. Zorn's Lemma demonstrates that everything inside of it is a product of human interference, and any attempt to dissect its contents can only be as rewarding as its viewer (and its viewer's accompanying systems for understanding the world) will allow it to be.

New Robert Todd Films

(Note: Many of Todd's films – including some of those discussed in this piece – are available in full or excerpted form on his treasure chest of a Vimeo profile, but I have only written about the films I saw in the theatrical setting. It goes without saying that this is the ideal venue for this kind of work.)

The otherworldly meditations on the everyday produced by Boston-based filmmaker/professor Robert Todd are some of the most underappreciated visions in contemporary experimental cinema. Living in the same niche as the much wider seen work of Nathaniel Dorsky, Todd’s films have consistently targeted an alternative way of seeing the world, privileging abstraction over concrete representation to turn mundane spaces into alien landscapes of light, color, and texture. However, despite the way his work brushes against the unknown in its willful transformation of perceived reality, it also maintains a sensuous connection to earthbound pleasures; though he’s lived and worked in a major urban center for decades – a quotidian reality that would lead another filmmaker to concoct something like Peter Hutton’s New York Portraits – his films are notable for their tranquil evocations of nature, of animals, of children playing, etc.

For the majority of his career, much of this material has been captured within and around Boston. Todd’s past year’s worth of work, however (which recently screened at the Paramount Theater), finds his camera discovering the latent alcoves of cinematic beauty in locales as diverse as Canada and Portugal. All shot on 16mm and presented silent or with ambient soundscapes, the six works presented (part of an alarmingly prolific total of 14 in 2012) expand upon Todd’s sophisticated idea of the lyrical film, not only widening the depths of mood already achieved in his oeuvre but also introducing new landscapes, textures, and perspectives.

The program opened with a somewhat comfortingly familiar slide into the Todd world: Summer Light: Tuesday, a silent, sunny ode to his Jamaica Plain residence that Todd himself described aptly as “the way my mind works.” The film is the fifth and final piece in a series of works focusing on different qualities of light in the summer, and here the focus is on even mid-afternoon rays obstructed by layers of foliage. Todd's richly textured images of plant life, unidentifiable surfaces, and the rare, fragmented hint of humanity are marked by strong contrasts between sun-bleached portions of the frame and regions shrouded in thick darkness. Long lensing renders much of the images as washes of color and light punctuated by one particularly detailed focal point, such as the skin of a leaf or the surface of a chain-link fence. The fluidity of these images in conversation with one another becomes especially impressive when taking into account that they were edited in camera on a single 100-foot roll of 16mm; analog dissolves and subtle superimpositions abound, speaking to Todd's prophetic feel for tempo, visual architecture, and exposure.

If Summer Light: Tuesday seems to exist within Todd’s artistic/mental comfort zone, the next films suggest the filmmaker attempting to chart less familiar modes of representation. Construct is shot at an emu farm in one of Todd’s favorite formats: high-contrast black-and-white stock, which casts the photographed reality under a particularly chalky chiaroscuro, rendering it strange and unearthly. The science-fiction undercurrent of Todd’s work detected by one commenter in a post-screening Q&A is a sentiment that likely arose from this film in particular. Given the way Todd’s close-ups, canted angles, and distinctive film stock transform the emus into an amorphous mass of silver fur and twig-like limbs, mistaking the film for extraterrestrial footage is not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Likewise, every earthly object has been transformed into an abstraction; a sheet blowing in the wind becomes something else entirely, and the source of one cotton-like surface dappled with light is impossible to discern. On the soundtrack are what presumably were once diegetic recordings at the farm, but they're distorted and looped beyond recognition so that what's left is a murky drone augmenting the already ominous mood developed by the imagery.

Emus return in Sunderlight, this time in color but looking no less menacing. If there's one key difference between Construct and Sunderlight besides the shift to monochrome to color, it's the overarching tone. While Construct is eerily meditative, Sunderlight is the closest thing to an imposing horror film in Todd's body of work, an impression largely aroused by a haunting, sustained ambient score of clipped diegetic noises, long bell-like tones, and ghostly, operatic vocal bits. The bizarre presence of the emus is crucial too; these slender, jittery creatures stare at several points directly into the camera, and the only thing separating them from the viewer is a measly wire fence that Todd's camera pays a great deal of attention to. It's possible to read a certain environmentalist warning into the film (could Todd be making a statement about the dangerous human habit of forcefully containing nature?), but as with all of these pieces such narrative or thematic analyses come up short. What's really achieved here is the approximation of a completely foreign perspective. Brakhage's lofty aim to use the camera as a child's eye is fully realized by Todd; Sunderlight presents an environment so profoundly fragmented that every shot feels like an unsettling discovery through some primitive consciousness.

The same impulse towards extracting a sense of uncertainty or danger out of ordinary places is inherent in Passage, though it’s re-contextualized to fit a more geographically and thematically diverse film. Erecting dichotomies such as nature vs. civilization, subjectivity vs. objectivity, and comfort vs. foreignness, Todd’s camera spans a nondescript forest, Portuguese ruins, and tall, mathematically ordered buildings to present a meditation on visual forms that echo across organic and man-made phenomena. As is often the case, Todd uses an aesthetic framework to link his images together; in this case, it’s the visual incorporation of dark doors and windows framing the world beyond it, implemented as portals to the various locations in which he films (the idea of passageways, both organic and synthetic, was established by Todd with his 2011 film Portcullis). Within this framework, nature possesses a serene quality (typical in Todd’s work and another of several things that aligns him with Brakhage) while buildings and foreign landscapes are to be regarded with additional caution and consideration.

Mosaic de Porto continues the arms-length fascination with Portugal introduced by Passage. In both films, footage taken in the country is clearer, crisper, and more evenly lit than the type of amorphous, intimate imagery in Todd's domestic work, but despite that superficial clarity the Portuguese material feels distant and unknown, the activities captured capable of overwhelming Todd's usual command of the frame. Mosaic de Porto offers a flurry of afternoon impressions in a well-populated area, shifting from a significant human element (children running around in grassy fields and families gathered for picnics) to images of the landscape and architectural creations. Rather than bending the physical world to his own painterly aspirations, Todd's presence is closer to that of a fly on the wall, collecting bits and pieces of what's happening around him, attempting to adhere to his impulse towards contemplative abstraction but consistently being thwarted by the level of exuberance and newness in his vicinity. As such, in spite of its brevity Mosaic de Porto nonetheless bursts with life, showcasing a looser but no less potent side of Todd's artistic sensibility.

The evening concluded with one of Todd’s throwaway joke films – a mash-up of close-ups of Elijah Wood from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy that’s allegedly a homage/update to Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc – but even this seemingly tossed-off experiment is in line with Todd’s sensibility, sharing parallels with his lyrical work in the way it takes a familiar object (a daily environment, a pop culture item) and distorts it to create an unfamiliar space of contemplation. By isolating the emphatically emotional close-ups of Wood, the actor's face becomes a landscape of reflection, simultaneously encouraging and frustrating a narrative reading. Todd, noticing certain patterns within Wood's expressions that fall loosely into the categories of wonder and intense agony, slowly sculpts the arrangement of the shots to extract a bizarre maternal narrative in which the smiley Wood seems to birth a devilish doppelgänger who is repulsed by his creator. There were plenty of laughs scattered throughout the theater during this clever repurposing act, but they were balanced by the sense that Todd’s aims were just as eye-opening and worthwhile as in his more decidedly serious work. In the process of watching these films, one witnesses the physical world radically re-imagined in a way that that unveils the beauty, complexity, and strangeness previously hidden in plain sight.

Screening Notes #18

The Day He Arrives (2011): I don't feel comfortable writing at length about Hong Sang-soo's work yet, due both to my limited exposure to his films and also to the fact that I sense a strong understanding of his worldview can only adequately be gained after seeing a large chunk of his movies, if not his entire body of work. As of now, there's an entire code of language and a warped way of seeing things that I can only grasp superficially. That said, I have been thinking a lot about The Day He Arrives in the context of the monologue given by Richard Linklater at the start of Slacker: the existence(s) of Hong's characters splinter off into multiple possible directions – all of which are visualized in identically drab fashion (a surface homogeneity that probably accounts for the spatiotemporal confusion) – based off casual misunderstandings and fanciful mental projections. In other words, the introspective rumination that occurs during conversation is concretized into separate chapters of the narrative, an approach that becomes doubly fascinating through Hong's refusal to actually consistently depict an inner life.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937): The final half hour of this movie is perfect. Never before and never since, to my understanding at least, has the love of an elderly couple been conveyed with such compassion, purity of vision, and such a wonderful lack of condescension. Beulah Bondi's bashful glance at the camera in a NYC ballroom as she's about to kiss her longtime husband (played by Victor Moore) on what is potentially their final night together crystallizes the pointed balancing act of pathos and irreverence that characterizes Leo McCarey's approach. Unfortunately, I'm not as keen as others on the rest of the film, a scenario in which the couple's self-involved urban children are forced to reckon with their parents' newfound homelessness that occasionally veers into a preachy territory that is quite atypical of McCarey's work. The director's greatest sensitivity is saved for Bondi's self-proclaimed "favorite son" George (Thomas Mitchell), but beyond this portrayal the film offers far too many instances where the message of a scene is all too clear.

Keyhole (2011): Cinema needs a little space carved out for a filmmaker Guy Maddin who excavates beyond-obscure crevices of film history and repurposes them to his own end, in the process revealing how these utterly forgotten moving-image strands are part of a cinephiliac subconscious that continues to inflect the alternative mainstream and the avant-garde. Take Keyhole, a film that has a palpably musty stench of unimaginative detective miniseries only watched by those on the late-shift in some ice-cold Canadian suburb in 1941, yet also seems to echo the mood of early David Lynch and the Freudian narrative logic of Un Chien Andalou. Maddin understands the eternal magnetism of cinematic images and stories more than almost any filmmaker working today, the way they unspool wildly in our brains, losing specificity and everything but sensory impact – this idea was practically the thesis of My Winnipeg. If that film rendered this truth direct and visible, Keyhole returns to Maddin's habit of coding it impulsively into the DNA of a film; like Brand Upon the Brain, the film often feels like little more than an attempt to tell an absurd noirish tale through Maddin's fogged vision. What emerges is simultaneously wholly original and vaguely, mysteriously familiar.

Unstoppable (2010): Disclaimer: I've been slow to catch up with Tony Scott's work after his recent suicide-cum-critical-reappraisal, so my thoughts on these films are anything but fleshed out. My exposure to his body of work is pretty scattered; I saw Man on Fire, Domino, and True Romance when I was much younger and haven't felt the urge to revisit them, whereas the only thing preventing me from tackling his alleged magnum opus Deja Vu is a feeling that in order to get the most out of it I need to bone up on the earlier stuff – classic auteurist assumptions, really. As for Unstoppable, I'd only caught bits and pieces of it on television before finally watching it start to finish recently, and the responses I fleetingly assumed during those earlier fragments collected into something of a stance this time around on this alternately admirable and frustrating thriller: the movie's interesting aspects – its kinetically gorgeous visuals, its barrage of narrative perspectives, its geographic specificity, its vivid sense of being on the precipice of life and death – are routinely complicated by surface-oriented stupidity. For instance, there is the film's socioeconomic stereotyping, wherein each class archetype is addressed through its own blunt symbology (the Hooter's girls are treated to prurient booty shots, the mustachioed, bar-dwelling railway employee is signaled by clichéd country music, the Soulless Corporate Head spends the entire movie in an anonymous grey urban suite), or the flagrantly unsubtle methods of aligning the spectator's responses to the central crisis with those of the third-party onlookers. Still, there's a lot going on here that bears repeat consideration, something I'll hopefully get to after further examination of Scott's cinema.


Faust (1926): Out of a classic German legend consisting of angels, devils, mystical pacts that compromise souls, and other sensational details, F.W. Murnau fashioned a down-to-earth romance that is just as much about humankind as a more decidedly unremarkable film like Sunrise. Funneling the narrative into a flawed romance between the hasty but good-hearted protagonist (Gösta Ekman) and a beautiful commoner (Camilla Horn), casting the Catholic orthodoxy as a morally bankrupt evil, and privileging images of small communities, simple acts of kindness, and humbling forces of nature over the sensational hysteria of the plot are just a small sampling of the ways in which Murnau bends this ancient parable to his desired ends. That said, Faust is still rousing spectacle as far as the twenties are concerned; Murnau renders the iconic and the mythic as eloquently as the human and the mundane, most memorably in a stunning special-effects shot of a larger-than-life demon shadow engulfing a wintry German town and in a final stratospheric battle between the Angel and the Devil. Unfortunately, the otherwise functional theatrical setting in which I witnessed the film (live electronic keyboard score, big screen, respectful audience) was hampered by the irreconcilable flaw in the fact that the movie was presented on a DVD with conspicuous interlacing.

China Gate (1957): Following an ostensibly documentarian but patently ridiculous opening informational montage on Communist and French intervention in Vietnam with a moody ballad of the titular song crooned by Nat "King" Cole set against elaborately production-designed war wreckage is about as sturdy a method as any for wiping away any semblance of narrative authenticity and authority on the Vietnam War, and director Sam Fuller continues to apply irreverent and often times tasteless elements to a strife-torn backdrop throughout China Gate. For much of the film's middle section, the Vietnamese jungle is nearly mistaken for a steamy bathhouse, with petty narratives of lust, betrayal, and selfishness strewn around. Big Statements are kept to a minimum here, but the film's overblown assumptions (that every Communist is a crude womanizer, mindlessly lethal, and essentially synonymous with Stalin, that all children are innocent and pure, etc.) still supply laughs, and it becomes difficult to disentangle the film's perceived racial tolerance and such broad generalizations. Fuller's always good for impressions of brawny stylistic heft though; every gunshot fired rings deadly, momentarily trivializing the plot's goofiness. And one would be hard-pressed to find a more expressive airplane/helicopter getaway sequence than the muted, pared-down, harrowing one that concludes this film.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943): Revisiting this on a 16mm print confirmed what a genius piece of filmmaking it is, and furthermore how ahead of its time it was aesthetically, narratively, and politically. Deren's subtle and hypnotic modulation between slow-motion and real-time anticipates Tarkovsky, her rabbit-hole narrative – complete with recurring objects and motifs – is a clear template for Lynch, and her approach to the image of femininity espouses a critique of Hollywood objectification that has inflected a number of socially-conscious filmmakers too great to accurately summarize in a sentence. What really stuck with me this time around was the film's entrancing score, a buzzing, clamoring drone prophetic of Toru Takemitsu's work for Hiroshi Teshigahara and also reminiscent of ritualistic tribal music, speaking to an enduring interest in the topic that eventually led Deren to the villages of Haiti.

Go! Go! Go! (1962-64): A frenetic single-frame diary of Maria Menken's daily NYC commute to her desk job and throughout the city that achieves levels of whimsy, poignancy, and darkness that go well beyond mere observation. This is a film seemingly comprised of impulsive gestures with the camera that nonetheless captures impressions of urban truth: bodies moving rapidly to and fro, boats docking and setting off in a harbor photographed in such a way that they resemble toy ships being manipulated by a child, people relaxing on a beachfront surrounded by looming buildings, and humorous asides distilling and poking fun at constructions of gender norms, such as an amusing bit at a muscle show. Menken's in-camera editing unfolds with joyful abandon, passing over large swaths of time to get at key aspects of the modern city. Looked at this way, Go! Go! Go! suggests the mechanics of mental recollection, the strange feeling of cycling through a day's, week's, or month's worth of events in one's head.

Geography of the Body (1946): If Menken herself is absent from Go! Go! Go!, she's very much present, albeit heavily segmented and abstracted, in her husband Willard Maas' film Geography of the Body, which, superficially speaking, takes her body (and an unidentified male's) as its subjects. Visualizing the "mysterious caverns" referenced by surrealist narrator-poet George Barker on the soundtrack(a text related in Barker's droll British accent, suggestive of a particularly flamboyant Kubrickian monologue), Maas shoots these figures in tight close-ups, focusing on neglected portions of the human body, discovering textured landscapes among the flesh. His takes are relatively long, allowing the eye to search for context among what are decidedly decontextualized images. Often times the shots are fairly legible (it's hard to mistake an ear or a hairline for anything but), though Maas also trains his camera on pulsating muscles, obtuse angles, and murky black holes that are very difficult to get a coherent grasp of. An avant-garde hit in its day for obvious reasons, Geography of the Body is the notable for the way it continues to inspire powerful dislocation in the face of such a seemingly intimate subject as the human body.

Outside Satan (2011) A Film by Bruno Dumont

Viewed under proper circumstances – 35mm projection, expansive 2:35:1 aspect ratio unhindered by cropping, hushed theater without booming action movie screening next door; in a word, a devotional setting – Bruno Dumont's Outside Satan bears down on you. Alternating between statuesque close-ups of faces against skies and rapturous deep-focus views of the rural dunes of Nowhere, France, the film essentially presents a series of richly detailed landscapes to meditate upon, but this desire for contemplation is complicated throughout by a vaguely sinister energy. At any given moment, nature seems capable of assuming either a rejuvenating or actively violent role; so too does the screen itself, its physicality occasionally threatening to burst outward at the viewer. Of the many contemporary practitioners of so-called "slow cinema" (a trend that's too diffuse and noncommittal to be called a genre), Dumont is one of the least likely to allow for spontaneity. With his subtly micromanaged mise-en-scène, he summons a compositional intensity that lends minuscule gestures – a whistle through fingers, a dog's bark, a sudden bodily movement – an unsettling charge. Outside Satan takes full advantage of this latent unpredictability, thus finding a stylistic match for its willfully impenetrable protagonist.

Both Outside Satan and Dumont's preceding film, Hadewijch, deal with modern figures of intense religious devotion (overt in the latter, implied in the former) driven to acts of destructiveness. In this case, Dumont centers his attention on a stoic, misshapen drifter (David Dewaele) who behaves as some kind of vessel for the alternately satanic and saintly energy flows of a dreary seaside village. Under his wing is a punkish girl with a pixie cut (Alexandra Lemâtre) who lends him bread daily (the first of the film's several Christian allusions to emerge) and follows him as he roams the windy outskirts of the town. Occasionally, they face the vast landscape before them and kneel down into prayer position. They barely speak, and when they do it's a banal collection of curt sentences suggesting the barest skeleton of a relationship marked by suppressed emotions, unremarked-upon individual traumas, and co-dependency. Early on, there is an indication of the peculiar philosophical space that binds them together: the girl follows the man to the back of a rusty shed, they wait with a rifle for a man to emerge from a barn nearby, Dewaele shoots him, and the two of them stand there motionless, solemnly directing their gazes towards the ground, flickering no visible signs of either emotional guilt or a desire to flee the scene.



The casting of Dewaele and Lemâtre, two of the most inherently expressive faces I've witnessed in some time, is essential to the power of these blank slate moments. Dewaele is a strange, intimidatingly unattractive man, like a street rat manifested as a human. His face – framed by a combed mop of wiry dirty blonde hair and punctuated by an uneven unibrow, patchy facial hair, a tight-lipped scowl, and the occasional scar or cut that suggestively comes and goes – rarely interrupts its default expression: a hard-to-read concoction of smug indifference, gentle humility, and barely veiled bloodlust. This face belongs to a stiff, awkward body adorned with wrongly fitting clothes that sometimes create the illusion that bones are jutting out from beneath his skin in random places. Beside him is Lemâtre, her features softer and more recognizably human, her physiognomy more reptilian than rodent-like, and her squinted eyes hinting at years of personal turmoil only obliquely thrown into relief by the thinly outlined narrative detail regarding her apparently abusive father, cryptically identified as the victim of the aforementioned rifle shot.

The cutthroat moral logic guiding this act (the father pays for his wrongs) continues to mark some of the behavior of Dewaele's character. It is not long before he commits another murder, this time bludgeoning the head of a man who has continually made unsuccessful romantic and erotic advances at Lemâtre's character. Later, he has a simultaneously sexual and violent encounter with a female passerby that ostensibly ends with some kind of metaphysical death and rebirth. What links these three victims is a sense of impurity or wrongdoing: physical abuse in the first instance, tactlessness and emotional disregard in the second, and flippant self-prostitution in the last. Dumont is, on the one hand, presenting a character defined by his communion with both the natural world and a higher power who appears to have some sort of agenda to rid the village of any violating behavior. But at the same time, this man is prone to mistakes (he kills a deer when trying to shoot a bird), to perceived discontinuities between thought and action (he enjoys sex with the passerby before punishing her), and to radical shifts in alleged intent to the point that he appears to be shifting at will between binaries of good and evil, self-interest and selflessness, omniscient control and chance.



Put in grander, flashier terms – and the terms popularly bandied about by those trying to make sense of this aggressively provocative work – the man vacillates between Christ and the Devil. But it may be less accurate to say he shifts between these two poles than it is to say he embodies something of both at all times. Brief appearances of iPod headphones and beer cans tell us Outside Satan (otherwise decidedly agrarian) is set in the modern world, which may lead one to believe Dumont is crafting a parable about the place of consuming religious faith in an increasingly anti-spiritual environment. If so, the question that emerges pertains not to whether Dumont condemns or praises the spiritual pursuit (it's fairly clear that it's not so simple), but to the extent to which Dewaele's character's actions are his own or if they are somehow dictated by the movements of the community he exists within. One of the film's pivotal narrative developments involves the possessed young daughter of a widow. The woman routinely invites the man over to her home to monitor her daughter's physical and mental state, and one day he lunges on top of her and bellows into her foaming mouth (an action he will later perform on the female passerby). Upon leaving, the mother graciously thanks him for supposedly saving her daughter.

There are negative repercussions to this shocking quasi-pedophiliac exorcism, though, not in spite of but possibly because of the fact that it's perceived by the woman as a virtuous act (Dumont's approach to the scene, of course, is characteristically aloof). Shortly thereafter, Lemâtre's character dies enigmatically (and, it turns out, temporarily) when she creeps into a rustling darkness in a small forested patch. If the previous moment flirted with The Exorcist, this scene takes even further an undertone of pulpy horror that the film knowingly plays with throughout. Dumont's formidable command of screen space, editing tempo, and atmospheric soundscapes is such that every shot feels as if it's on the precipice of a dangerous outburst that never arrives. Here, the simple cutting rhythm between Lemâtre's apprehensive expression as she moves slowly forward and a static medium shot of a dark alcove in the woods – coupled with the eerie silence following a soft cracking in the darkness – creates unbearable tension. As with so many of the film's suggestive build-ups, however, Dumont dodges the payoff in favor of a classic Bressonian ellipsis that places the emphasis on the result of the act rather than the act: an unassuming fade to black, followed by a tight, abstracted close-up of Lemâtre's lower legs, dirtied by leaves and mud. By never definitively assigning a guilty party to her death (cops do point the finger at an auxiliary character who may or may not be of significance, but one gets the sense that justice has not been served), the film leaves open the possibility that the culprit may not be human at all. Have the cosmos somehow conspired against Dewaele's character, rewarding his "good deed" with a competing tilt of the moral universe?

Outside Satan doesn't have a plot so much as a succession of these mysterious red herrings. In fact, there's an entirely separate narrative thread involving a group of cops investigating the string of criminal incidents that's so opaque it barely even registers as anything more than a collection of wide shots of men in uniform getting in and out of cars, asking witnesses unheard questions, and emerging from crime scenes (strangely, they seem oblivious to the coincidence that Dewaele is always roaming on the periphery). Such is the effect of Dumont's ascetic approach here, which leaves a not-uncomplicated narrative bubbling beneath a sedate surface of spacious, inscrutable images and nondescript ambient sounds. But this sense of calm is only a mask for much darker, more unstable undercurrents, all of which momentarily erupt to the surface when the vast landscape incomprehensibly sets aflame in the final third of the movie, a large-scale metaphor whose extinguishment soon after it arrives is further proof of the prophetic shape-shifting of Dewaele's character. This is a man with destructive and rejuvenating powers, and the scariest quality about him is the suspicion – sustained for the film's entirety – that he's not the one responsible for how he uses them.