The Island of St. Matthews (2013) A Film by Kevin Jerome Everson

I'm not so keen on The Island of St. Matthews, currently in a week-long run at Anthology Film Archives in New York. This documentary/film poem was captured more than directed by Kevin Jerome Everson, and, frankly, doesn't provide the visual interest to warrant its exceptionally sleepy pacing. I wrote it about it for In Review Online here.

A First Exposure to the Films of Timoleon Wilkins...

As subjects, roiling water surfaces and bokeh are fairly played out in lyrical/personal/diaristic 16mm Bolex filmmaking. That Timoleon Wilkins manages something like a fresh take on them says a great deal about the level of his sensitivity. Among other things, Los Caudales (2005) features dozens of seagull’s-eye view close-ups of lapping water on high-contrast black-and-white reversal stock, the resultant image a defamiliarizing dance of bright white dots and squiggles on a jet-black surface. Parts of Quartet (In Camera) (2009) study permutations of light photographed through telephoto lenses, and instead of an anarchic sprawl of light blobs, Wilkins achieves something closer to the balletic choreography of Len Lye’s films, albeit in a far more muted and unpredictable register. It bears mentioning that this is only a fragment of the material Wilkins finds fit to turn his camera toward.

Educated under the tutelage of Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado and far from quiet about his admiration for and familiarity with filmmakers like Nathaniel Dorsky, Bruce Baillie, and Bruce Conner, Wilkins sits pretty squarely in the romantic tradition of avant-garde cinema, the strand of underground filmmaking that valorizes the cameraman as a soloist with a unique ability to imprint his or her own subjectivity on the camera eye. Up to a point, Wilkins benefits from the acknowledgment of such ancestry. For one, it’s part of what brought him to Boston in the first place, Dorsky being the relatively fashionable commodity that he is, at least in the bone-dry marketplace of contemporary experimental cinema. (Rob Todd’s continuing obscurity, on the other hand, needs to be corrected.)



Still, Wilkins’ work creates distinct impressions. The most conspicuous of these is tied to his status as a lifelong citizen of the West (Colorado, Mexico, and Los Angeles are the touch points I’m aware of), the landscapes of which inflect his films to a significant degree. If Peter Hutton’s New York Portraits, sublime as they can be, are quintessential expressions of the cramped geography of the East Coast, Wilkins’ films achieve something similarly archetypal with regards to the openness of the West. Big skies, sacred-seeming cloud formations, vast plains, elongated highways, wandering cattle, and vast beaches are all subject to scrutiny. Land merges into sky, thunderstorms erupt (or are merely implied to erupt through inspired aperture futzing), and Wilkins’ camera follows telephone lines along the highway as if to celebrate the freedom of movement afforded by the landscape. In my own experiences out West, such ample space means feeling liberated from staying too long in one place; movement becomes a texture of life.

Made between 1998 and 2010, Lake of the Spirits, Los Caudales, The Crossing, Quarter, and, especially, Drifter—all of which were shown at the Harvard Film Archive’s recent tribute to Wilkins—evoke this restlessness. Four of them are silent, yet the dynamism of their montage and the diversity of their images generates a tone more exploratory than contemplative. Intermittent flashes of bright light (or perhaps merely blank leader, it’s hard to tell) act as optical refreshment as well as ways to transition between rushes of abstraction (bokeh, light leaks, water surfaces, objects photographed and/or processed in such a way that they become unidentifiable) and sections of documentary-like observation (flowers, landscapes, sparingly used human faces). In posing these two representational extremes side by side, Wilkins is constantly seeking their points of intersection, the moments where the banal turns into something magical. Edited largely in-camera—that is, conceived as a linear flow of images in conjunction with the filming stage—these films are therefore documents of Wilkins’ thought processes while shooting them—the flickering of his consciousness, if you will. And they are unbelievably beautiful.

Jimmy P. (2013) A Film by Arnaud Desplechin

Full disclosure: Jimmy P. is the first Arnaud Desplechin film I've seen, so I wasn't able to weigh it against the French director's other lauded achievements. That said, I think that looking at the film with fresh eyes may have made me more open to its particular strengths than those downgrading it for not being Desplechin'y enough. I first saw the film at the end of a viewing-heavy week at the New York Film Festival, where I fell asleep. From what I did see, I had a sense that the dozing was my own fault and not the film's. Luckily, my suspicions were confirmed.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) A Film by John Huston

(Disclaimer: Reflections in a Golden Eye was originally released with a sepia cast applied, but from what I understand a large portion of surviving circulating prints feature the film's original, more neutral color grading. Strangely, most of the images online for the film are sepia-toned, so although I've used these images, this review reflects the alternate version that I saw.)

“Economize! Turn the lights off!” So goes the instruction on a poster pinned to an office wall at a southern military outpost in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. By no means is this quirky bit of set decoration a focal point—it’s centered in a master shot between two officers, but it’s so small in the frame that it would be hard to read outside of a movie theater—yet for some reason it caught my eye, and Huston, symbolist that he is, probably didn’t put it there randomly. Reflections, an almost coming-out melodrama that plays out in a regimented, heteronormative milieu, puts a fair amount of emphasis on lights. On his nightly peeping tom rounds, a laconic private waits outside his major’s house for the last remaining bedroom lights to be switched off before infiltrating the home to ogle its snoozing matron. Later, he will be discovered when someone enters the room and flicks on the switch before leaving in horror without flipping it back. Most dramatic of all, the climactic finale occurs during an exaggerated lightning storm—nature’s own way of violently flickering on and off the lights.

In this context, this peculiar wall adornment registers as a detail of some significance. Residing as it does in a major’s office and thus intended, however subtly, as “official” advice, the poster makes a basic enough request: turn off unneeded bulbs to conserve energy and lower costs. When separated, however, from that utilitarian plea and placed into the larger atmosphere of social repression in which the story circulates, the exclamation-pointed advice may subliminally take on the tone of a threat: play by the rules, or else. If cost-cutting is a way of preemptively avoiding the possibility of an economic meltdown, so turning the metaphorical lights out is code for keeping transgressive behavior at bay; in both cases, the preservation of social order is the goal.

Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando) knows only order. In his role of authority, he regularly spits received wisdom regarding military duty to a classroom full of recruits and assigns groundskeeping duties that will tidy up the post. In his free time, he pumps iron in front of a mirror, sweating to maintain the expected image of an army chief. All around him are the pillars of a respectable life in the military: a buxom wife named Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) who acts as a sort of empress of the training community, cooking meals for evening functions and socializing all around the post; a large home, suitably overwhelming the unglamorous barracks of the trainees; and a cornucopia of patriotic pins lining the lapels of his expertly tailored beige uniform.



The “problem,” construed as such by his own conscience as much as by the implicit behavioral codes of the military system, is that Weldon harbors an unexplainable urge toward a younger, chiseled private (Robert Forster)—coincidentally, the same man who, unbeknownst to him, has eyes for his wife. Weldon's is an interest that goes beyond platonic respect or macho concern; it’s a magnetic attraction of implied but never explicitly stated homosexual nature. But it’s also an attraction that Weldon would never be able to articulate or admit to himself. Submerging himself in this conflicted interiority, Brando is a bundle of gestural tensions. He mechanically repeats normalized behavior—stoically tugging his beret down over his eyes, raising his chin up, straightening his suit—but within these stiff mannerisms, his eyes dart around nervously, his syllables trail off into mumbles, and a glossy layer of sweat sits perpetually on his skin. When his beret is blown off in one key scene, it’s a much more profound disruption that it seems on the surface.

Weldon’s arc moves from external to internal rejection. Initial jealousy regarding Leonora’s adulterous behavior with lieutenant peer and neighbor Morris (Brian Keith) culminates in a convulsive beating of her angelic white stallion, an eruption that can easily be read as an act of violence against his wife given Huston’s obsessive linking of the woman and her animal. Burnt out on this ineffectual revolt, Weldon begins to timidly pursue his object of desire, meanwhile all but handing his wife over to Morris. Unable to reconcile his new longing with his duty as an impartial major, self-hatred sets in, and Reflections closes on Weldon’s violent, misguided attempt to do away with the impulses that his rational brain rejects. Repression guards. Awareness disgusts.

Morris’ wife, Alison (Julie Harris), is an embodiment of Weldon several stages developed. A common target of gossip for slicing her nipples with garden shears after the death of her newborn, she is at least comfortable in her own abnormality. Her transgressive self-abuse, which effectively cuts her off from her assumed womanly duty, is nothing if not committed. With this assertive display of individuality, Alison is free to indulge unconventional relationships, such as the one she shares with her flamboyant Asian houseboy (Zorro David, a fairly obnoxious role), who’s the most liberated character in the movie and therefore the one who delivers the titular nugget of wisdom. Still, the price she pays is to be a perceived nut, and her offscreen fate comes in a home for the ill.



Reflections in a Golden Eye’s opening sequence shows Weldon’s object of desire passing through the hazy dawn landscape and saluting the horses in their stable, a series of images that immediately bonds him to the natural world. Soon, he will be revealed as something of a pervert; his trips to Leonora’s room find him sniffing her lingerie, and he also frequents the forest for jaunts in the nude. But one thing is clear: he’s a man at one with his environment, his body, his sexuality, and his identity. Weldon, who’s acknowledged around the post as a klutz on horseback, seems to long for that sense of internal stability as much as he longs for the man himself.

Framed in widescreen, obscured by a great deal of shadow or forest haze, and scored to a creeping, tension-filled medley of flutes, clarinets, strings, and glockenspiels by Toshirô Mayuzumi (the composer for several key films by Mizoguchi, Oshima, and Imamura), Reflections drifts along like a dream, with many muggy lulls punctuated by sudden bursts of heightened emotion. Multiple scenes between Brando and Taylor, likely intended by the studio as the film’s real selling point, have an awkward, stumbling pace that suits this atmosphere (though a definite lack of on-set chemistry is felt, it couldn’t be more appropriate given the nature of the couple’s waning marriage). Weldon’s presence—and this is the brilliance of Brando’s performance—has a palpable impression of sleepwalking, a quality that Huston maps onto the film’s rhythms. A highlight scene features nothing more than Weldon navigating a post-boxing match crowd at night in pursuit of the solitary private, trailing him down the street and then picking up his dropped Baby Ruth wrapper as if hoping to find some clandestine love note. The whole thing has the surreal tension of an out-of-body experience.

As Weldon's inner and outer selves start to collide in the final scene, Huston appropriately inflicts the shock on the environment. For the first time, Weldon spots the private tip-toeing around his house. As he impulsively fixes his hair for a possible meeting, the environment shudders and a thunderstorm elevates in intensity. The light of everyday ritual and the darkness of bottled up desires infringe upon one another in the form of lightning. Flicking on the light switch as the man enters his wife's room, Weldon makes a desperate attempt to introduce his latent identity into the realm of the visible, but undergoes a spasm of denial as a result. Huston's final shot—a continuous panning movement between Weldon, his shrieking, just awoken wife, and his fallen object of desire that suggests the cameraman frozen in a robotic loop—could hardly be more perfect: Weldon's is an unresolvable turmoil.

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013) A Film by Denis Côté

Despite calculated leaps in genre and tone, Canadian director Denis Côté's return to fiction is a frustratingly sluggish and opaque affair that ultimately uses its elliptical plotting and contemplative images in the service of a pretty generic revenge yarn. There seems to be political commentary buried within, but either I'm not sufficiently tapped in to the contemporary Canadian state of mind or Côté's filmmaking is just a bit too self-consciously impenetrable. Though the former assertion is probably true, that didn't stop me from arguing the latter here.

Mean Streets Discussion

When watching The Wolf of Wall Street for the first time, one of the earlier Scorsese films that came to my mind most assertively was Mean Streets, Marty's gritty NYC gangster movie from 1973. I found the resemblances less apparent on my second viewing of Scorsese's latest, but my passing mention of it in my initial review of Wolf was thankfully enough to send Kenji Fujishima down memory lane. He and I had been loosely discussing a possible conversation-style column for In Review Online for a while, so we jumped at the opportunity to further flesh out the deeper connections between the films as well as the special importance of Mean Streets in Scorsese's body of work. We've been cooking up this correspondence for a while now, and if you have time to spare for a long article, you can read the proud results here.

Screening Notes #24

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009): The above image gets at all that's so gently beguiling about Manoel de Oliveira's recent films. It shows a man relaying a tale of thwarted romance to a female stranger on a moving train, and it's the framing device that houses Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl's narrative proper. But what are the characters looking at? And why is the camera placed in this strange location, perched above them so they look like they're transfixed by the tripod legs? Also, why do they never make eye contact? What seems a familiar setup is rendered subtly off through its presentation, a trait I'd use to describe the film as a whole. A straightforward narrative of old-fashioned courtship is observed: the man on the train becomes infatuated with a young girl in a window across the courtyard from his office, tracks her down, professes his love, has his request to marry turned down by his employer uncle, performs an odd job to become financially independent, returns to his object of affection, discovers a character flaw, and angrily casts her off. It's a simple morality tale, or so it seems, but the devil's in the details: the low-decibel but niftily selective sound design of urban Lisbon, telling gestures and bodily positions such as the girl's sudden foot kick or final shoulder slouch, and, again, Oliveira's funky deep-focus framing. I see the critique of female objectification excavated by the film's admirers (Glenn Heath Jr. astutely offers such a reading here), but at the same time I'm not convinced this is quite that cut-and-dry. There's something more in the way this movie moves that I need another look to put a finger on.

Mon Oncle Antoine (1971): Canadian filmmaker Claude Jutra's most well-known film Mon Oncle Antoine has the narrative directness and emotional clarity of a Robert Frost poem. It tells of a little boy gradually opening his eyes to responsibility, sex and death in a small Quebec mining town riddled with working-class outrage at the mandates of a mostly offscreen conservative government. With the exception of a slow-moving first act, which divides its dramatic emphasis in puzzling ways, Jutra centers his focus on this boy (Jacques Gagnon, whose eyes have a Bergmanesque opacity). The film's perspective skews gently towards his sense of dazed discovery, allowing Jutra's naturalistic rendering of the community to come across all the more authentic, never scrutinized or falsely dramatized. A final act involving the botched retrieval of a corpse in a heavy snowfall is the film's real achievement, its best showcase for Jutra's ability to uncover great nuance without any tendency toward overstatement, stylistic or performance-based.

Gremlins (1984): A movie theater nearly overflowing with cackling villains, hysterically absorbed in the screen. A man and a woman conspiring against them in the shadowy alcoves of the theater. A murderous plot involving flammable material and a match. A smoking, flaming screen and its eventual tearing down. Sound a lot like the climax of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds? Sure, but it's also the same template for the climax of Joe Dante's hilarious and stylistically muscular sci-fi holiday film Gremlins. Thus, American cinema's most conspicuous thief pays explicit homage to a no less reverential but far subtler American genre craftsman. Tarantino's steal was inspired; Dante's invention was brilliant. In Gremlins, a boy must put an end to the multiplying effects of his hasty consumerism. The resulting destruction is tied to the act of cinematic spectatorship. Can there be such thing as an active, productive viewer/consumer? It's a question also asked by Inglourious Basterds.

Taken (2008): Like Pierre Morel's District B13 (another Luc Besson production), Taken is first and foremost a showcase for its central performer. But Liam Neeson's strengths are of a different tack than those of the gymnastic David Belle. He's sharp, quick-thinking, internally composed but always on the move, relentless and lethal but nowhere near as athletic as Belle. Taken, then, is a ruthless and single-minded revenge movie that aligns perfectly with Neeson's abilities. Morel's terrible at drama – that much is clear from Taken's bookends (boneheaded attempts at father-daughter bonding), or the entirety of District B13 for that matter – but he's a whiz when it comes to frenetic pacing, dogged pursuits, swift fight sequences, and pulsating testosterone. Thus, sixty minutes of Taken have a breakneck, lupine energy, culminating with a moment of Liam Neeson driving a hijacked car along the Seine that's near-transcendent. Whatever grave extra-diegetic implications exist in its female trafficking plot are neutralized by Morel's termitic filmmaking, prioritizing one hard beat at a time.



Taurus (2001): I had the unfavorable, and frankly inexcusable, misfortune of seeing this on a shockingly atrocious digital transfer in a theater, and not just a run-of-the-mill indie cinema but a...wait for it...actual cultural institution known as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. When, citing the digital artifacts and near-YouTube quality, I prompted an employee to explain to me the logic of charging money to display a .mov file that should never have even been within shouting distance of a projection room, I received a pithy "it was what the company gave us." Leaving aside the mystery of whether or not the staff even bothered to test the film prior to scheduling it, the bigger issue here is one of standards and general cultural responsibility, the apparently unreasonable assumption being that a museum should be honoring their exhibited mediums with the utmost fidelity. Anyway, it's an even greater shame because Taurus strikes me as one of Alexander Sokurov's best films, and certainly the only one I feel like I've ever had a fairly solid grasp on after a single viewing.

Like the final reel of Citizen Kane elongated into one long, slow yawn interrupted involuntarily by hiccups and grumbles, this two-part dirge watches from its stoned perspective as Lenin completes the transition from once-relevant political figure to stumbling icon of obsolescence in his family's foggy country estate. Sokurov's 4:3 frames, slapped with a vignette of murkiness (or, again, was it just the residue of the transfer?) and lit with a diffuse brown aura, embody the shrinking and decay of Lenin's senile mind and crippled body. Comparisons between Sokurov and his Russian antecedent Tarkovsky have always felt a little superficial to me, as though the mere fact that the two filmmakers trade in vaguely similar visual languages, draw upon similar artistic influences, and come from the same country implies deeper connections, but here the surface parallels are hard to ignore (fog-enshrouded fields and slow tracking shots behind trees are plentiful, and one scene features Lenin and his wife chatting while lying in tall grass). But here, as usual, Sokurov's typically lowly body humor and rambling dramatic structure is after a far more earthbound truth than those pursued by Tarkovsky—specifically, that those having lost power can only exist delusively in the dark waters of their own past, a perceived legacy outweighing the value of the present moment.

Faust (2011): Two weeks removed from this screening and its majestic oddness still eludes me. If Taurus is Sokurov's most straightforward film, Faust is at the opposite end of the spectrum, a slippery concoction whose visuals – alternating between show-stopping moments of clarity traceable to iconic European paintings and inebriated, claustrophobic trudges in soft-focus through damp, dark interiors – seem beamed from another world. My desire to return to the film's revelatory atmosphere of booze, mud, guts, flatulence, and philosophy has been great, but now it looks like my big-screen opportunities have dwindled, which is OK with me; several passages of it have the uncanny, unfinished mystery of the most haunting folk tales (and not just because the movie's based on a folk tale), the kinds whose images never quite leave the brain even through long droughts of contact. At this point, I'm just vomiting baffled reverential nonsense, so I might as well just add more to the pile: Alexander Sokurov is a visionary.

The Color Wheel (2011): Mostly everything about The Color Wheel's climactic post-grad party – the rudeness of JR's old high school peers, her spectacularly awkward dodging of employment-focused conversation, the increasingly macho gang-up on Colin, the superficiality of one girl who's both JR's arch-enemy and Colin's longtime crush – is dug into a bit too hard by Alex Ross Perry, a sudden pivot into subjective fantasy designed to almost legitimize the brother-sister duo's terminal mean-spiritedness up to this point. It nearly throws the film off its rails, but the subsequent 10-minute pillow chat between JR and Colin makes everything right again, in addition to radically deepening the film's emotional landscape. The Color Wheel is pretty much virtuosic in its wall-to-wall chatter; the words are progressively meaningless so as to avoid any possible dead air that might force inner confrontation. In this particular centerpiece, JR's dialogue is entirely superfluous, and when it comes to a sudden halt, the film unleashes a shockwave of emotional comprehension hitherto stifled beneath a facade. Generic acoustic-strummed driving scenes and some awfully broad gags do nothing to suggest the challenging places Perry's film ultimately goes.