Dekalog (1989), directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. This is a ten-part television mini-series based loosely on the Ten Commandments. I will comment on it in two parts. Here is Part One. Dekalog: One deals with a father and young son who are both computer geeks. The father, a university professor of computer science, is at best an agnostic. His son, Pawel (Wojciech Klata), is a curious boy who asks his father questions about life and death, questions his learned father finds difficult to answer. But answer he does. The two of them make calculations regarding the safety of the ice on a nearby small lake, and Pawel takes his new skates for a try-out.  Meanwhile Pawel’s aunt is concerned for the boy’s spiritual training. The film presents us with believable people, and plausible situations. It also presents us with serious questions regarding faith, science, and human fallibility. Dekalog: Two turns to questions of love. Here we have a woman, Dorota Geller (Krystyna Janda) with a problem. Her husband is gravely ill with cancer and she carries the chid of another man. Should she have an abortion or not? She seeks the help of the doctor (Aleksander Bardini) who is treating her husband and who happens to live in the same apartment complex as she does. This doctor proves not to have the greatest bedside manner. Anyway, the film keeps us focused on the inner turmoil experienced by both Dorota and the doctor. Both have suffered and are suffering. Both face the dilemma of going on despite life’s difficult turns. The resolution here just may offer a bit of hope in a barren and chilly world – Coleridge’s “cold world.” Dekalog: Three introduces us to Janusz (Daniel Olbsychski) a taxi driver who comes home on Christmas Eve dressed as Santa Claus. He and his family are having a fine night before Christmas when the phone rings. Ewa (Maria Pakulnis), Janusz’s former lover has called to ask for his help in finding her husband who has apparently gone missing. Thus begins a night of searching and discovery. What we discover is that Ewa’s husband is not missing and that she has hopes of reigniting an old flame. The night’s events have something of the sensibility of Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) without the over-the-top surreal feeling or the comedy. Atmosphere is everything in this play with adultery and prevarication. Brightly lit Christmas trees dot the city streets and squares. The highlight is the station person who rolls up on a skateboard. She is amusing. All the actors are subtle. And morning brings resolution. Dekalog: Four focuses on honouring your mother and father, although the honouring here is closer to Sophocles than to the Ten Commandments. A young woman has lived for twenty years with her father, her mother having died just five days after giving birth. Father and daughter are close. He leaves on a business trip and while he is away, the daughter, Anka (Adrianna Biedrzynska), discovers a letter left for her by her mother. Does she read this or not? She tells her father when he returns that she has learned that he is not her father. She also confesses to having affection for him that is deeper than that of a daughter. Here the Oedipal theme finds a twist. The experience of this Dekalog is intense, very intense. And uncomfortable. Most of the action takes place inside the father and daughter’s apartment, giving what we experience a claustrophobic feel. Quite amazing. Dekalog: Five takes us to a dark place, and the look of this one reflects a glumness, a sickly green with a touch of orange letting us know we are in a hellish place. Thou shalt not kill. A young lawyer defends a young man who has murdered a taxi driver, but this young lawyer loses the case and the young man is sentenced to hang. The lawyer is devastated. Punishment, he asserts, is a form of vengeance and we know what the Lord saith. This short film on the evil of killing, no matter who carries out the killing, individual or the state, is expanded in Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing. Both the shorter and longer versions are released in 1988, the same year in which Poland abolished the death penalty. This film, Dekalog, appeared on Polish television, and it is quite stunning. Highly recommended. Stay tuned for Part Two. 

Part Two: Dekalog: Six warns about coveting our neighbour’s ass, as it were. Nineteen-year-old Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) spies on his neighbour Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska). After fiddling with her mail (he works in the local post office)  and arranging to deliver her morning milk, he finally meets her and admits that he has been watching her with her lovers. Rather than go to the police, Magda encourages the young man, going so far as to bring him into her flat and attempt to seduce him. The experience for Tomek is harrowing and he attempts to commit suicide by slicing his wrists. The film is intense and discomforting. Has Magda acted wisely? What motivates her? Has the young man’s loss of his parents driven him to this neediness? The film may raise such questions, but I am not sure it answers them. Dekalog: Seven asks “Can you steal something that is yours?” Thou shalt not steal, and yet who has stolen the child Ania (Katarzina Powowarczyk)? Ania’s birth mother, Majka (Maja Barelkowska), was 16 when she gave birth to Ania, and Majka’s mother, Ewa (Ana Polony) assumed the role of Ania’s mother. Six years later, Majka wishes to take on the role of mother. Since Ewa is unwilling to relinquish her role as mother, Majka kidnaps Ania. All of this plays out amid talk of wolves and fairy tales and family and lives broken by the events of six years before. Young Ania remains confused. Majka remains outside, expelled from school and from her life as mother. All that is left is departure. Dekalog: Eight concerns bearing false witness. University Professor of ethics, Zofia (Maria Koscialkowska) receives a visit from the American translator of her works, Elzbieta (Teresa Marczewska). Elzbieta attends one of Zofia’s classes where we hear recounted the events of Episode Two. We also hear Elzbieta’s story of a Jewish child turned away from a safe haven during the war. It transpires that Elzbieta is the child and Zofia is the woman who turned her away. Before going back to Zofia’s for dinner, the two stop at the place where the events in the war took place. Here Elzbieta disappears for a short while, effectively abandoning Zofia and allowing her to experience the fear of abandonment. The two women spend the night together and the following morning turning over the ethical knot that was their war time experience. Dekalog: Nine focuses on Romek (Piotr Machalica) and Hanka (Ewa Blaszczyk) who are trying to come to terms with Romek’s impotence. Romek had appeared briefly in Dekalog Six, and now we revisit the difficulties that love can cause. Romek suggests that Hanka take a lover, but when she does, he becomes obsessed with fear of diminution. Mirrors and distance shots suggest people beside themselves, people losing a sense of confidence and importance. The situation leads to near disaster. Dekalog: Ten actually has comedy, perhaps of the darker sort, but comedy nonetheless. It ends in laughter. The narrative, succinct and efficient as always (no need for “five days earlier” or that sort of slippage through time), concerns two brothers whose father has died leaving a fortune in stamps. Their attempts to decide what to do with this collection prove complicated, to say the least. These attempts involve barring windows and doors, getting a guard dog, dealing with a small assortment of people with designs for the collection, and a donated kidney. You will just have to see this for yourself. As a television series, this is daring and thought-provoking.

 Some silent German cinema:

The Student of Prague (1913), directed by Stellan Rye and Hanns Heinz Ewers. This one stars Paul Wegener who later plays the famous Golem in three films (two lost). Here he is the student Balduin who suffers depression because he has no money. He wants to join the hoity toity and when a Caligari-type fellow named Scapinelli (John Gottowt) visits him with a proposition Badluin cannot refuse to accept it. Scapinelli will give Balduin a ton of money and in return asks to take whatever he wants from Balduin’s room. Since Balduin has nothing of importance in his room, he accepts. Scapinelli proceeds to take Balduin’s reflection from his full-length mirror. This scene provides the high point of the film. From here we go on to have a doppelganger story in which Balduin, now wealthy, woos a local countess, kills her fiancé in a duel, and generally finds himself embroiled in terrible goings on thanks to his other self. Made in 1913, The Student of Prague is remarkable. It does not, however, have the brilliance of later German silent cinema, including the ones below. It runs on rather too long and drags with scenes of a swooning countess and unremarkable encounters between Balduin and his alter-ego. As an example of early narrative film, The Student of Prague is interesting, if ponderous.

 

The Indian Tomb (1921) directed by Joe May. The film is an adaptation of Thea von Harbou’s novel, Tomb, and the script is by von Harbou and Fritz Lang. What they produce is orientalism print large. The film is rather slow and ponderous at nearly four hours, but it is also lavish to a degree. May pulls out all the stops with this presentation of an India filled with lepers, tiger pits, snake charmers, magical yogis, and massive architecture. Indeed, the large sets rival those in Griffith’s magnum opus, Intolerance (1916). Conrad Veidt appears as Ayan III, an Indian prince who revives an ancient yogi and sends the yogi to England to fetch the architect Herbert Rowland (Olaf Fonss). Ayan wants Rowland to create a tomb for his wife. Rowland goes, leaving his fiancé Irene Amundsen (Mia May) behind. Rowland soon discovers that Ayan’s wife is not dead. She is very much alive and has had an affair with the Englishman, Mac Allen (Paul Richter), putting both their lives in danger from the vengeful Ayan. Meanwhile Irene has followed her fiancé to India. Both Herbert and Irene find themselves prisoners of Ayan, and Herbert becomes leprous after knocking into the head of a buried leper. Yes, you read that correctly, a buried leper. Then we have Mac Allen finding himself inside the tiger den. Ouch, this does not end well. The production has huge sets, and much exotica. As far as silent films go, this one is not the most engaging, and it does run on for far too long (4 hours, remember). However, as an exercise in colonialist thinking, it has its interest.

 

The Hands of Orlac (1924), directed by Robert Wiene. Compared to Wiene’s most famous film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Hands of Orlac is minimalist, using few tricks of the camera to underline the psychological state of the protagonist. The minimalist sets sometimes move to complete emptiness and blackness, a telling mark of Orlac’s inner darkness. This is a Freudian film with images of castration, desire, and even a bit of the family romance tossed in to stir things up nicely. The emphasis on Orlac’s psychological torment is impressive. His doctor tells him that the mind controls the body, the spirit controls the hands, but Orlac does not heed this advice/warning. Instead, he allows his repugnance to take over. Orlac is a successful concert pianist who suffers irreparable damage to his hands in a train wreck. The damage to his hands is so severe that his doctor replaces his hands with the hands of a murderer. Once Orlac learns this alarming news, he goes wildly bonkers, reviling his new hands and going so far as to plead with his doctor to remove them. He fears the murderer’s hands have the power to control his will, even to the point of turning him into a murderer. Indeed, a murder takes place and from all appearances, the murderer is Orlac. But is he the murderer? We have a mystery, not too complicated a mystery, but a mystery nonetheless. This version of the story finds a happy ending that is, perhaps, less satisfying than the ending might have been, but the focus on Orlac’s ordeal is impressive and convincing. One reason for the success of the action is Conrad Veidt’s acting. His Orlac is lean, gaunt, distraught, agonized, demonic, terrified, conflicted, and engaging. Things move along at a glacial pace (that’s glacial in contemporary terms – they are melting quite rapidly), and the acting is histrionic in a good way. 

 

Variete (1925), directed by Ewald Andre Dupont. This is a remarkable film, not least for the camera work of Karl Freund. The camera swings, slides, follows, and at one important moment remains still. This moment of stillness allows the characters (3 of them here) who are drunk to stagger in and out of the frame, accentuating their drunkenness. We also have skillful use of double exposure, and even deep focus. The story is familiar and looks forward to films such as Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and von Sternburg’s The Blue Angel (1930). As in the latter film, Emil Jannings stars here as the man whose obsession for a woman leads to tragedy. Jannings is Boss, a carnival trapeze catcher who has a wife and child. Then an orphaned refugee, Bertha-Marie (named for the ship on which she arrived in Germany) comes into his life, and he falls for her flirtatious ways, leaving wife and child and finding a new life with the Artinelli group (actually just one Artinelli played by Warwick Ward) performing at the Berlin Wintergarten. Scenes of the trapeze artists in action are impressive, especially for 1925. Anyway, trouble ensues when the oily Artinelli has eyes for Bertha-Marie. For her part, young Bertha-Marie (Lya De Putti) tries to have both Boss and Artinelli. Can this end well? Not a chance. Boss learns of Bertha-Marie’s fling with Artinelli, and he flies into a jealous rage. Actually, he does not fly. He simmers until his rage boils over and he ends Artinelli’s life. He goes to jail, and his jail time bookends the film, most of which is told in flashback. This is an impressive film that has touches of expressionism to compliment the realism of events. 

 Lots of films for August.

The Truth About Charlie (2002), directed by Jonathan Demme. Trying to capture the excitement of his film Something Wild (1986), Demme sets out to remake Stanley Donen’s Charade (1963). I fear he overreaches with this glitzy and dizzying film. I say dizzying because of the angular, mobile, and downright baroque camera work, along with extreme close-ups and point of view shots from dead people. The actors here, Mark Wahlberg (in the Cary Grant role!), Thandiwe Newton (trying to be as pixie-like as Audrey Hepburn), Tim Robbins (as Walter Matthau), and the three toughs who threaten the bewildered young widow, are, I guess, okay. They have big shoes to fill, and those shoes do not fit as comfortably as we might like them to fit. For cinema buffs, Demme tries to channel the French New Wave, going so far as to have the likes of Agnes Varda, Anna Karina, and Charles Aznavour appear in cameos. We also have a few frames from Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. All of this is, perhaps, earnest, but also perhaps a bit misguided. If you have seen Charade, then my advice is simply to stop there. On the other hand, maybe Mark Wahlberg in hats, including a beret, are what you are looking for.

 

Nope (2022), directed by Jordan Peele. A gigantic cowboy hat in the sky that sucks up puny humans and maybe even horses. Or is this simply a flying saucer winging its way across the California desert? In these days when a “whistleblower” tells us about aliens on earth, Nope seems pertinent. I guess it is, although more pertinent is the vacuuming of black people from history. The brother and sister who are left to run a horse ranch that caters to Hollywood films just happen to be the great great great grandchildren of the jockey, Domm, who rides the galloping horse in Eadweard Muybridge’s early attempt to capture motion on film, or at least in a series of photographs (1878). In other words, a black person is the earliest motion picture star. Who remembers the name of that jockey? A poster in the ranch house advertises the film Buck and the Preacher (1972), a sly reminder that western movies (and the west in American history) did have persons of colour, although these people have, for the most part, been sucked up into that alien machine that is Hollywood. Nope is about the movie business, about spectacle, about erasure, about seeing and not seeing. I wish I could say I enjoyed the film, but truth to tell I found it rather lumpen. The pacing is slow and the ideas somewhat ragged. The film, dare I say, ought to be better than it is. The concept is intriguing and the play on genres is attractive. Ultimately Nope is about saying no to history that refuses to tell everything there is to tell.

 

The Boy with Green Hair (1948), directed by Joseph Losey. This is Losey’s first feature film, one that Howard Hughes tried to sabotage for its pacifist message. Three years after its release, in 1951, Losey was blacklisted in Hollywood. As for the film, it is an anti-war film, but it is much more. It deals with bullying, small town mentality, xenophobia, magic, and story. Storytelling is at the heart of this movie. The frame has young Peter (Dean Stockwell) tell his story to the good Dr. Evans (Robert Ryan), and within Peter’s story we have stories of war orphans, stories of a song and dance man Gramp (Pat O’Brian), stories of Peter’s parents. As for Peter’s story, is it true? Did he really wake up one morning to find that his hair had turned green? Dr. Evans says he does not believe this story. And yet we have young Peter with a shaved head. And yet, we have clear indication that Dr. Evans is moved by the story. We have the obvious connection between Peter’s green hair and the oh so vividly green plants that his mother nurtured, and the green of the forest. Peter is, after all, “Nature Boy.” He is young and in the spring of life. He is hope for the future. His innocence puts a stay to a world of experience. This little boy is not, in the long run, lost. The ambiguity that is at the heart of his story is that necessary teasing that all good stories offer listeners, a teasing that promotes thought and empathy and understanding. After the local barber shaves Peter’s head, something he does in order that Peter no longer look different, although a boy in 1948 with shaved head looks as “different” as a boy with green hair I would think, the barber asks the assembled – Gramps, the milkman, the grocer, and so on – if they would like a lock of the green hair. No one takes him up on this offer and so the barber simply sweeps the hair away. I guess everyone wants any evidence to disappear. The green hair, however, remains, it remains in story, and story remains and remains. Story has a stubborn power to remain, and perhaps even to influence. And then again, perhaps not. We still have war, bullying, xenophobia, orphaned kids, and small minds. We also still have The Boy with Green Hair, and perhaps we are the better for having this story.

Night Train to Munich (1940), directed by Carol Reed. Often compared to Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), Night Train to Munich has the same screen writers, Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. The two films have a train ride in common as well as the comedic pair, Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford, and female lead Margaret Lockwood. The hero and his adversary are played by Rex Harrison and Paul von Henreid (Victor Lazlo in Casablanca) respectively. The whole thing plays out with intrigue and earnestness, but without Hitch’s comic touch or the master’s handling of suspense. Made near the beginning of the war, the film does touch on atrocities of concentration camp life (before the full horrors were known) and the ins and outs of war. Of the many films made during this troubled time, Night Train to Munich is something of a slight, if diverting, entry. Paul Henreid’s character, Karl Marsen, is effective; he is an example of someone completely captured by an ugly ideology and capable of disguising this ugliness – for a time. The film is a forerunner of Reed’s most famous film, The Third Man (1949).

And speaking of Casablanca,

Casablanca (1942), directed by Michael Curtiz. “Vultures, vultures everywhere.” This film is arguably the finest example of Hollywood film making that we have. We have seen this film umpteen times, and it never fails to please. From script to costumes to cinematography to performances to sets to soundtrack to story, this film has it all. It is collaborative film making at its best. I will say that one character uses the word “lesser” when he ought to have said “fewer,” but we can forgive this one faux pas because the whole thing is so rich and satisfying. I need not mention the leads because they are so well known, but I will mention minor characters such as Carl (S. Z. Sakall), Sascha (Leonid Kinskey), Yvonne (Madeleine Lebeau), and the Pickpocket (Curt Bois). These performers sparkle, as does the whole cast. The film has humour, music, tension, melodrama, and even a bit of violence. “What nationality are you?” “I’m a drunkard.” Louis asks Rick why he came to Casablanca, and Rick replies that he came for the waters. “But we are in the desert,” Louis notes. Rick’s response: “I was misinformed.” There is so much to admire in this film that I have no doubt we will watch it again before too long. Watching it for the first time, one knows that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

 

 Let's add a miscellany of films:

Assassin (2015), directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. This film looks as if it is going to be an example of wuxia, a martial arts film. However, it is something else indeed, a mood piece with a plot that is both simple and daringly opaque. Unlike most martial arts films, or films in general these days, Assassin moves at an excruciatingly slow pace, with moments, long moments, of silence and stillness. The few bursts of action punctuate the stillness forcefully. Mostly we have beautiful people in beautiful costumes placed carefully in beautiful sets or in beautiful landscapes. The plot has the eponymous character exiled in order to prove herself a ruthless assassin, and the film places the viewer in something of an exile too. Do we have the patience to see the film to its end? Well, we do, and we did. And the assassin, Nie Yinniang (She Qui), proves herself a woman with heart and compassion. She wanders off with the maker of mirrors.

 

The Land (1969), directed by Youssef Chahine. This is a film in the tradition of Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (1930). It tells the story of a community of small farmers in Egypt who find their livelihoods put in jeopardy by a local landowner who sets out to build a road where the farmer's fields are. Their only hope rests in solidarity, a solidarity that proves illusory, impossible to achieve. Chahine's work, or at least the work of his that I have seen, champions the peasant and the worker, but rarely does this support for the common person end in disarray. We usually have a ray of hope at the end. Not so here. The workers cannot put aside selfish interests for the greater good. One member of the "camel police" proves a friend to the peasants, but his friendship is not enough to make things go well. Things definitely fall apart. The film sprawls, it tells a story with many characters and many story lines following the interaction of these many characters. The overarching theme is clear, but the intricacies of human interactions sometimes are less than clear.

 

Unknown Origins (2020), directed by David Galan Galindo. This is a Spanish film about comic books and superheroes. It has something of the sensibility of the Canadian film, Bon Cop, Bad Cop. It plays with a seriousness belied by a delight in costumes and allusions to Marvel, DC, and even the old Detective Comic. It is clever, if a bit nerdy. Perhaps the cleverest costume is the lead character's. This is David, a police detective who wears a conventional dark suit and tie. If the film is slight, then it is also campy and not without charm. If you have an interest in comics, then you might well find this an hour and a half worthwhile. If you do not like comics, then you might find this nonetheless an offbeat detective story.

Detective K: Secret of the Virtuous Widow (2011), directed by Suk-Yoon Kim. This South Korean film reminded me of the Detective Dee films from China/Hong Kong. It is a period piece, set in the late eighteenth century, and involves court intrigue, fancy costumes, much running about, a few disguises, and quite a bit of humour. Frankly, the plot lost me quite early in the film, but this hardly mattered because the pace is swift and the characters likeable. Detective K reminded me of Sherlock Holmes with his deductive powers and his Watson-like sidekick who is something of a dog whisperer. Oh yes, then we have the very large dogs. The virtuous widow is suitably virtuous and mysterious and alluring. I confess that I would have liked to know what was going on, but nevertheless I enjoyed the film.

Shutter (2004), directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom. We first watched this horror film from Thailand ten or more years ago and it scared the heck out of us. Since Halloween is about to arrive, we decided to dust off the DVD and watch it again. The viewing did not disappoint, although I have to confess it did not scare the heck out of me this time. The film does, however, know how to construct a convincing and creepy psychological thriller and without all the Kensington gore we see in Hollywood attempts at horror these days. Shutter is closer to a film like Hitchcock’s Psycho, than to the Saw franchise or the Hostel franchise or to the remakes of Japanese horror films or even the remake of this film. In fact, we have one jump scare that comes right from Psycho. The two directors begin the creepiness near the beginning and never let up. Scenes in the developing room are frightening as is the "bed scene." The walking-on-the-ceiling scene is cool. A second viewing also allows us to see just how much of what we see throughout prepares for the revelations as we close on the end, an end that is a zinger, a hum dinger, and both inevitable and satisfying and creepy. As horror films go, this is a worth putting on your viewing list.

Jodorowsky's Dune (2013), directed by Frank Pavich. The greatest movie never made! Actors include Mick Jagger, Orson Wells, Salvador Dali, artists include H. R. Giger and Jean 'Moebius' Giraud, and music by Pink Floyd. Oh, and then the participation of Dan O'Bannon because Jodorowsky had liked the film Dark Star (who wouldn't like Dark Star?). This documentary has an infectious appeal as it traces the work of Jodorowsky through the collation of the script and story boards for Dune. Oh, and did I mention that Jodorowsky had not read Frank Herbert's book? I found this film a hoot. And of course El Topo and The Holy Mountain have their moments here.

Furious (2017), directed by Dzhanik Fayziev. Set during the mid 13th century, this film follows in the wake of late Eisenstein masterpieces Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. It is a rousing patriotic song with lots of crunching battles. Echoes of Eisenstein conjure up the heroic history of Russia, but there is a touch of Tarkovsky too, especially in the palette. This celebration of Russia even has the Russian Bear; the Bear turns up just when things seem lost, like the Cavalry in so many Hollywood westerns.

 Just a few films for the beginning of August.

Les Bonne Femmes (1960), directed by Claude Chabrol. This is Chabrol’s third film, and it is a strange character study that focuses on four shop girls. Jane (Bernadette Lafont), Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon), Jacqueline (Clothilde Joano) and Ginette (Stephane Audran) are all clerks at a light fixture and electrical appliance store owned by a flamboyant old tyrant (Pierre Bertin). The film begins with a shot of the Arc de Triomphe, an irony if there ever was one. The Paris we see here is drab to the point of dullness (in Alexander Pope’s sense), neon at night with loud clubs and nudie shows, a public swimming pool, a zoo with animals in small cages (we get the point!) and an array of shops. The four young women have little ambition beyond finding a man. One woman sings at a cabaret at night, and another has a creepy fellow with a motorcycle who follows here from place to place, and another has a stuffy boyfriend. None of these young people has much of a life beyond a dull job and nights of carousing. There is a bit of a mystery here, and things do not end well for the young woman who finally encounters the motorcycle man. None of these women has much beyond kitchen appliances in her future. Just as the women lead dull lives, the film delivers dull entertainment with just a whiff of misogyny. 

 

L’Amour Braque (1984), directed by Andrzej Zulawski. Supposedly based on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, this film is idiotic in the extreme. Kinetic, loud, boisterous, confusing, fast-paced, wild, and overly flashy, L’Amour Braque is a film easy to dislike. And I disliked it. The violence, the misogyny, the crassness, the pretentiousness turned me off almost from the beginning. I say “almost from the beginning,” because the first scene in which Disney-masked men rob a bank is fun, and we have a bit of cavorting that is reminiscent of scenes from The Joker. Such cavorting, however, soon becomes tiresome. No one here has a trace of likeability, although the camera enjoys lingering over the face of Sophie Marceau. She is one of several women in the film who appear abused and in undress for no apparent reason. The title translates as ‘Mad Love’ but the only madness here is madcap capering by all involved. Characters say they are in love, but I find no love here, just plenty of human behaviour that is demeaning. If I were you, I would not go out of my way to see this film. Perhaps it captures the 1980s and films penchant for kinetic editing that surfaced in music videos of the time, but this does not make it an involving film – or even interesting in any satisfactory way.

The Children Are Watching Us (1944), directed by Vittorio de Sica. This is an amazing film, partly because of the compelling performance of Luciano De Ambrosis as the child protagonist, Prico. Prico is a five-year-old child caught in a family experiencing dissolution because of the mother’s adulterous affair. We watch as young Prico does typical child things: ride his scooter, play in a hayloft, try to swim, and so on. We also look on as Prico watches his parents squabble, and as he peers in puzzlement as his mother meets a strange man in the park, or as he looks through windows or bannisters at goings-on he does not understand. The camera work recording the watching and the playing is fluid with long tracking shots that seem to depart from characters, to intensely intimate close-up shots, to the masterful final shot of Prico turning from his mother and walking the length of a huge cavernous room and departing through the doors. As I watched, Henry James kept coming to mind. Like James, De Sica and his screenwriters, especially Cesare Zavattini with whom De Sica collaborated on many films, are sensitive to the child’s bewilderment in a world of adults whose actions he does not comprehend. This poor kid is passed from one adult to another, from one place to another, while his mother and father attempt, vainly, to work out their differences. This is a film that deals with daring themes, especially the break-up of a family, themes that went against Fascist values of the time. Quite remarkable.

 

Stromboli (1950), directed by Roberto Rossellini. The first of five films Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman, Stromboli brings together the Italian realist style with Hollywood melodrama. The action mostly takes place on the isolated volcanic island of Stromboli. Here Karin (Ingrid Bergman) finds herself a fish out of water, newly wedded to Antonio (Mario Vitale), a humble fisherman. Karin is Lithuanian and has survived the war using any means available; she now finds herself, rather unwillingly, in a strange and even hostile environment. She married Antonio while in an internment camp because her application for an Argentinian visa failed. Now she finds herself in a place she cannot abide.  Her attempts to have the local priest and then the local lighthouse keeper help her get away prove less than successful. She is beside herself, finds that she is pregnant, and decides to cross the island on her own to find a boat to somewhere else, anywhere else. The film has the volcano, flying birds, barren rocks, thrashing tuna captured in huge nets, a ferret and a rabbit, labyrinthine pathways to communicate the emotional inner life of the film’s protagonist. The island contains elemental life, life in extremis. Simple Antonio cannot understand why his wife does not just settle in and conform to the ways of the island, ways Karin finds primitive and uncivilized. The ambiguous ending has Karin wake near the top of the mountain to express a sense of renewal, although whether this sense of renewal means she will return to the village and her husband or continue on her trek across the island to find escape remains unclear. This is a slow bubbling boiling film.

 

Europe ’51 (1952), directed by Roberto Rossellini. This is the second of Rossellini’s collaborations with Ingrid Bergman, and it tells the story of Irene Girard (Bergman), the wife of a wealthy American living in Rome with their son, Michel (Sandro Franchino). Feeling neglected and unloved by his parents, especially his mother, Michel dies after trying to commit suicide by throwing himself down a spiral staircase. The spiral is a motif that turns up elsewhere in the film as a reminder of the spiralling out of control that enters Irene’s life after the loss of her son. The film reminded me of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) in its narrative arc. Europe ’51 is, of course, quite a different film from Fuller’s raw portrait of a descent into madness. Irene may end up in a mental institution, but she is decidedly not mad. She is more saint than insane. Rossellini positions Irene between the Marxist left and the Christian right. She quotes scripture, much to the consternation of a priest. She is at the bedside of a dying prostitute. She works in a factory and decides the labour market is more aptly thought of as a slave market. She seems most content with a gaggle of children about her. Her desire is to spread relationship and love, and of course this desire must be thwarted by the “powers that be,” men! Irene’s activism does not conform to either the right or the left politically, and consequently she is made to suffer. This film sits comfortably alongside Rossellini’s Joan of Arc at the Stake (1954).

 

Journey to Italy (1954), directed by Roberto Rossellini. Here is a film that looks forward to Anotonioni, Godard, and Wenders in its use of space and its concentration on the existential tangle of its characters. The two main characters are Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) and Alex Joyce (George Saunders), an English couple on a trip to Naples to sell a villa that Katherine has inherited. Finding themselves alone for the first time in a long time, Katherine and Alex discover they do not like each other. She spends her time visiting museums and archeological digs, and he spends his time flirting with other women. We have Vesuvius to remind us of emotional turmoil below the surface of things, and Pompey to remind us of life’s brevity and life’s surprises. In other words, the setting becomes another character influencing these two English persons. The interaction between these two is fraught with tension. Things reach a crisis when the two, encapsulated in their metal automobile, find themselves amid a throng of pilgrims following a statue of the Madonna. They must emerge from their encasing and enter the throng, resisting the pull of the acolytes. Here in this moment of fervour, they realize their love for each other. 

 

Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case (1959), directed by Jean Delannoy. Starring Jean Gabin as Inspector Maigret, this is a traditional whodunnit. All the elements are here: country village with an assortment of characters, big country house with faded aristocracy, local priest, and seven suspects for what Maigret thinks is a murder, although the local doctor has issued a death certificate stating “heart attack” as the cause of death. And indeed, Maigret’s friend, La comtesse de St. Fiacre (Valentine Ressier) does die from a heart attack while sitting in a church pew. She has just opened her missal and discovered a newspaper clipping inside. This causes her heart attack. Who could have placed the clipping there? Who would want this unassuming woman dead? Is it the wastrel son? Or the ne’er do well secretary/art critic? Or the priest, the doctor, the grounds keeper, the grounds keeper’s son, the driver/butler? Maigret will sort things out. He gathers all the suspects at a dinner to expose the dastardly murderer. All this is carried out efficiently and nostalgically. There is nothing left to take from this mansion except the 12:15 train. 

 July is here and so are a random set of mini reviews.

Death Takes a Holiday (1934), directed by Mitchell Leisen. Death takes a three-day holiday posing as Prince Sirki. He wishes to know what it is like to be human. He finds out. This is a strange one. Death becomes infatuated with Grazia (Evelyn Venable), a young woman who loves life and is infatuated with death. Frederic March as the titular Death is excellent. The filming has a creepy look suitable to the subject. Money, war, and love are the three “games” humans play, although for three days war is put on hold, money talks, and love will out. The sets are opulent, the dialogue clever, and the performances fine. 

 

The Villain Still Pursued Her (1940), directed by Edward F. Cline. Here is one for the ages, a parody of conventional Victorian melodrama with overly formal speech and over-the-top characters who regularly break the fourth wall to speak to the audience. The narrative has an innocent mother (Margaret Hamilton) and daughter (Anita Louise) set upon by the villainous lawyer Cribbs (Alan Mowbray), complete with black cape and large moustache. Cribbs has design upon the daughter and upon the house of mother and daughter and the larger fortune of the Middleton’s who hold the mortgage on the mother and daughter’s house. When he appears onscreen, an unseen audience sets about hissing. Edward Middleton (Richard Cromwell) is the innocent young son who falls into Cribbs’s trap and becomes an inebriate. We also have Edward’s friend, William Dalton (Buster Keaton), who finds it difficult to remember his own name. The film has two breaks in the narrative while title cards call members of the audience to fetch their children or go to their cars. Keaton has a couple of pratfalls, and we have the obligatory scene of pies tossed into people’s faces. This is a strange little film in which everyone goes about performing with studied seriousness. The whole concoction is directed by Edward F. Cline, a director who also worked several times with the likes of W. C. Fields and Wheeler and Woolsey.

 

Dishonoured Lady (1947), directed by Robert Stevenson. This melodrama turns on psychiatry. We have beautiful Manhattan magazine editor, Madeleine Damien (Hedy Lamarr), suffering from thoughts of suicide. In fact, the film opens with a dramatic attempt on her part to commit suicide. At the advice of her therapist, Dr. Richard Caleb (Morris Carnovsky), Madeleine gives up her job and penthouse to move to Greenwich Village and become an artist. Here she meets a young doctor doing research. This is David Cousins (Dennis O’Keefe). Of course, they fall in love. But wealthy lothario Felix Courtland (John Loder) desires Madeleine, and he does his best to seduce her. She is in his house when young Jack Garet (William Lundigan), arrives and murders Mr. Courtland. The police suspect Madeleine and she ends up on trial for murder. She refuses to defend herself because David appears to have abandoned her, and she thinks she has nothing to live for. The rest you can figure out easily. Love will win the day. This is not a melodrama without interest. It has touches of noir. It has Margaret Hamilton as a landlady. It has Hedy Lamarr. 

 

Woman in the Dark (1934), directed by Phil Rosen. Poverty Row sometimes produced gems, and Woman in the Dark shines in its small way. Pipe-puffing John Bradley (Ralph Bellamy) has just got out of prison. He has spent three years behind bars for manslaughter; he killed a man in a bar fight. Despite a fierce temper, John is a good fellow. Helen Grant (Nell O’Day) has her sights set on John, but he is taken by the sultry Louise Loring (Fay Wray) who is on the run from wealthy lothario Tony Robson (Melvyn Douglas). The action plays out over a night during which John gets in trouble and ends up on the lam with Louise. Roscoe Ates as Tommy Logan provides some needless humour. As things transpire, Louise goes back to Robson, but just so she can uncover the truth of Robson’s evil ways. The film was released just after the Hollywood Code tried to tame the more raunchy elements of pre-code films, but Woman in the Dark manages to have quite a few racy bits, including the dress that insists on falling from Fay Wray’s shoulder, the focus on Miss Wray’s legs, or the disrobing scene. We also have some use of flashback that is noteworthy. 

 

Chamber of Horrors/aka The Door with Seven Locks (1940), directed by Norman Lee. This is a surprisingly effective little murder mystery with familiar ingredients: gothic mansion, mute and large butler, somewhat mad doctor, adventurous woman, dashing young man, ditzy female sidekick, sleepy detective, locked room, sinister cloaked figure sneaking about in the shadows. It also has a torture chamber and a tricky goblet. Oh, and a door with seven locks, the keys to which are what turn the plot. The villain, Dr. Manetta (Leslie Banks), expresses remorse at having to kill the fetching June Lansdowne (Lilli Palmer), remarking, “She plays Chopin delightfully.” The atmosphere works well enough, the actors enjoy themselves, the fights are furious, and the whole package is, despite the familiar trappings, quite enjoyable. 

The Cheat (1931), directed by George Abbott. Tallulah Bankhead stars as Elsa Carlyle, young wife of Jeffrey (Harvey Stephens). Elsa lives recklessly, losing much money gambling, losing money from a charity bazaar, and then turning to sly, sadistic Harvey Livingstone (Irving Pichel) for help. Livingstone is a twisted orientalist who has Japanese servants, a large statue of Yama, god of destruction, and a cabinet in which he places small dolls that represent the women he has enjoyed! These dolls, by the way, have a symbol etched or burned into their base that indicates that Livingstone possesses these women. This is all very kinky and unpleasant and pre-code. Poor Elsa finds herself entangled in Livingstone’s clutches, and when she tries to escape from his unwanted and aggressive embraces, he brands her chest in a startling scene. The branding represents Livingstone’s rape of Elsa. The final scene of this potboiler takes place in a courtroom where Jeffrey is on trial for shooting (but not killing) Livingstone. The stalwart Jeffrey is taking the blame for something his wife has done, and she finally blurts out that she is the guilty one, not her husband. She exposes the brand on her chest and the courtroom crowd goes into a frenzy, attacking Livingstone who has been sitting and smugly smiling at events. The film presents us with a nasty bit of orientalism. The lavish dance sequence in the middle of events is as obvious as one could look for. In all, the film meshes Japanese, Chinese, and Indian cultures in its orientalist unpleasantness.

 

Sin Takes a Holiday (1930), directed by Paul L. Stein. “Oh, Lady --- what clothes!” This is the tag line for Sin Takes a Holiday, and it cues us to the real interest in many of these pre-code films: the clothes the women wear. Silks, satins, and furs adorn the lovely women who inhabit art deco apartments giving Depression-era audiences something to wish for. Here the story has young secretary, Sylvia Brenner (Constance Bennett), working for a womanizing divorce lawyer, Gaylord Stanton (Kenneth MacKenna) who asks her to marry him just so he can keep on seducing other married women without having to worry about having to marry one of the women he seduces. Sound naughty? Well, this is pre-code naughtiness. After accepting his offer of marriage, Sylvia heads for Paris where she has an affair with the dashing Reggie Durant (Basil Rathbone). Reggie has been a ladies’ man, but he falls in love with Sylvia. She, however, has her sights set on her husband-in-name Gaylord. Perhaps the most noteworthy naughty aspect of this film is the character, Grace Lawrence (Rita LaRoy). Grace makes a living from marrying wealthy men, divorcing them, taking alimony, finding another rich sap, marrying him, then divorcing, and so on. She intends for Gaylord to be husband #3. As pre-code films go, this one is passable.

 

Millie (1931), directed by John Francis Dillon. “Impressively lousy,” this is how Danny Reid describes Millie. The melodrama follows the eponymous Millie (Helen Twelvetrees) from her late adolescence to middle age. She marries into a wealthy family, divorces after she discovers her husband cheating, is courted by another wealthy man, takes up with reporter Tommy, discovers Tommy also cheats, is friends with two sharp women, discovers her daughter, at 16, is set upon by the wealthy man who failed to seduce Millie, and finally finds herself on trial for murder. She did indeed commit the murder, but the jury acquits her because she shot the man who tried to seduce her young daughter. This is pre-code stuff, sexual inuendo, loose living, and getting away with murder. This is a pot boiler. Despite the rather over-heated plot and characters, the film manages to say something, 1930s style, about women, independence, and sexual predation. This film is interesting as a record of its time.

 

Kept Husbands (1931), directed by Lloyd Bacon. Before he was a cowboy, Joel McCrea was a “kept husband” in this pre-code romance about an earnest young man who finds himself married to a wealthy spoiled brat. The spoiled brat is Dot Parker (Dorothy Mackaill), daughter of Arthur Parker (Robert McQuade), steel magnate, and she thinks nothing of asking her father for ten thousand bucks here and another several thousand there. For everything to turn out right, young Robert Brunton (Joel McCrea) will have to find a backbone and take control of his life. Going home to mother just won’t cut it. As something of a one-man chorus, we have Hughie Hanready (Ned Sparks, he of the strident voice). The hint of adultery when Dot spends a long night with Charlie Bates (Bryant Washburn) is typical pre-code titillation. On the whole, this is tepid stuff, interesting as a period piece. But without a lot of staying power. There are a few good lines, and an unflattering portrait of the wealthy to keep us interested, but we know all too well how things will work out.

 

The Lady Refuses (1931), directed by George Archainbaud. Archainbaud went on to glory as director of several Hopalong Cassidy films and other small budget westerns. Here he directs the irrepressible Betty Compson as a woman from the streets, June, who finds herself hired by a dapper gentleman, Sir Gerald Courtney (Gilbert Emery), to attract his son Russell (John Darrow), and draw him away from the gold-digger Berthine (Margaret Livingston). June does her job well and finds herself loved by both father and son. She rejects both of these suitors because neither of them believes she is anything more than the woman of the streets she was when Sir Gerald first met her, when she was seeking refuge from the rain and from the police. This is a nice pre-code production that does not shy away from examining the manner in which men think of women, and the difficulties women have trying to live independent lives. Much of what goes on is implied rather than shown outright, and this makes for clever film-making.

 

The Woman Between (1931), directed by Victor Shertzinger. The woman between in this soap opera is Julie (Lili Damita), and she is between father, John Whitcomb (O.P. Heggie) and his son Victor (Lester Vail). You see, Julie has married John and this marriage has alienated John’s son Victor who does not like his father remarrying after his mother’s death. Then, as fortune has it, Julie meets Victor on board a ship returning to the U.S. from France, and the two of them fall in love. Here we have yet another pre-code exploration of human relationships. Julie also happens to be a successful business woman, running her own fashion empire. What is a befuddled independent woman going to do? For one thing, she sings a sultry chanson. How will this Oedipal situation resolve itself? Despite its flirtation with naughty themes, The Woman Between is slight, not one of the best pre-code films by any stretch. However, it does have William (‘Wild Bill’) Elliott as an extra in one of the party scenes. And it also has a couple of irritating young women to wring the most from an awkward situation.

 

Wild Girl (1932), directed by Raoul Walsh. Filmed to resemble the experience of reading a book, Wild Girl is a mishmash of genres: western, romance, social commentary, and comedy. Somehow Walsh makes it all work out smoothly. The filming takes place in Sequoia National Park, and among the huge trees the characters look small, like fairies cavorting. Joan Bennet as the titular ‘wild girl’ meets handsome stranger Billy (Charles Farrell). She has been courted by a few men, but this Stranger is the first one she feels drawn to. For his part, the Stranger is a southerner looking for the dastard who was responsible for the death of the Stranger’s sister. This dastard just happens to be the town of Redwood’s most prominent citizen, Phineas Baldwin (Morgan Wallace), who is a slimy womanizer who has, more than once, forced himself on Salomy Jane. Cleverly filmed and well-paced, the film has a number of set pieces, from the chilling lynching scene to the scene in which Eugene Pallette playing likeable stagecoach driver Yuba Bill imitates the sounds of neighing horses. Ralph Bellamy turns up as Jack Marbury, a card shark and gambler with a heart of gold, something like the John Carradine character in Stagecoach. The story derives from Bret Harte’s short story, “Salomy Jane’s Kiss.”

 

Kameradschaft (1931), directed by G. W. Pabst. The title in English is “Comradeship,” and the film is about German and French miners working together to rescue miners trapped in a collapse deep in a mine on the French side of the German/French border. The Germans and the French have an uneasy relationship, but when the chips are down, the miners realize they are comrades and come together to help alleviate a terrible situation. The film does not focus, to any great extent, on specific characters, but rather focuses on the rescue itself. Pabst and his set designer constructed amazingly realistic sets in an old airline hangar near Berlin. The mine collapse and the rescue are dramatic and convincing, and when we take into account when the film was made, the action is even more impressive. Fire and water are much in evidence. The thrust of the film is humanity’s ability to come together in the face of disaster, and Pabst communicates his message well despite the censorship of the time, just a couple of years from the Fascist rise to power in Germany. The actors manage to convey personality even under duress. Language proves to be awkward, but ultimately no impediment to the rescue effort. This is a dazzling exercise in film making, and I dare say it has lost none of its power despite being made over 90 years ago.

 Some World Cinema:

Law of the Border (1966), directed by Lofti O. Akad. Imagine a Turkish western, and then watch Law of the Border. The film has a hero (or anti-hero), Hadir (Yilmaz Guney) who is reminiscent of Clint Eastwood in his Leone westerns, taciturn, menacing, and prone to outbursts of violence. At least one scene in Law of the Border clearly reflects the Leone films. Set in a village near the Turkish/Syrian border, the film follows Hadir, an impoverished man trying to raise his son in an area where just about the only means of making a living is through smuggling. This is dangerous business, the border lined with landmines, and the authorities on the watch and ready to use their firearms. What lifts this film above the pulp storyline is the realist picture of life downtrodden and lean. Into the community comes a female teacher. On her arrival, the village does not have a school and none of the children has any education beyond the skills it takes to survive in a dangerous and barren land. The teacher manages to convince, with the help of the new local commandant, the villagers to use an abandoned building as a school. Hadir’s son proves to be bright, and Hadir can now envisage a better future for his son. Of course, matters turn dire. We have shootouts and landmines exploding. All in all, this is a gritty exercise in film making. Law of the Border turned out to be an important film in Turkey, reviving the career of Akad who had retired, but who now returned to make several more important political films in his home country.

 

Muna Moto (1975), directed by Dikongue-Pipa. This film from Cameroon is a devastating critique of a system of oppression, especially against women. Tradition can be both sustaining and celebratory and also burdensome and retrograde. We see this in the story of two star-crossed lovers who fall victim to the dowry and patronage system. The two principle actors, David Edene as Ngando, and Arlette Din Beli as Ndome, give intense and compelling performances. The camera is fluid and poetic as it details life in a Cameroonian village. Life is difficult, partly because of the colonists depleting of the fishing resources. Ngando works at night fishing and during the day chopping trees in an effort to get what he needs for the dowry. His efforts prove exhausting and futile. His uncle, who already has four wives, one of whom is Ngando’s mother, pays the dowry and tries to take Ndome for himself hoping she will give him a child. She does have a child, but not the Uncle’s. This is a delicately emotional film that delivers a stark vision of the clash between tradition and modernity.

 

Insiang (1976), directed by Lino Brocka. We recently watched Red Cliff, a film nearly 4 and a half hours long with hectic activity, bodies of horses and men flying through the air in slow motion. The film probably took months to film. Insiang, a 94-minute film from the Philippines, took 17 days from the beginning of production to its appearance in theatres. Both are astonishing films. Insiang begins as a neo-realist look at life in the slums of Manila, turns to melodrama, and then to tragedy. The pre-credit sequence takes us inside a slaughterhouse where pigs are being gutted. The opening is visceral, and it sets up both the latent violence that exists in the impoverished lives of the slum dwellers and the ending of the film. The plot takes us close to the lives of one family, especially the lives of the eponymous character, Insiang (Hilda Koronel) and her mother, Tonya (Mona Lisa). These two have a difficult relationship because Tonya sees in her daughter the husband who left her for a young mistress. Tonya has taken on as a lover a young man from the slaughterhouse, Dado (Ruel Vernal). He, of course, has eyes for the luminous daughter. Insiang has more than one man seeking her attentions, and she hopes to escape her life with a curly-headed fellow named Bebot (Rez Cortez). Bebot proves as trustworthy as Dado or the husband of Tonya. Anyway, these characters live lives in a crowded, noisy, dirty, and closed in space. We often see them, especially Insiang and her mother, behind barred windows or gates or fences or lattices. The drama plays out with intensity and even a certain predictability, a predictability that does not fully prepare us for the end of the film. This is a powerful, and I daresay important film.

 

Taipei Story (1985), directed by Edward Yang. This is a film that examines urban malaise. It begins with a good-looking couple examining an apartment for rent. The man, Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien) seems bored and uninterested as he swings his arms like a baseball player. The woman, Chin (Tsai Chin) lists the commercial items that could fit here: stereo, tv, VCR and so on. Cut to the film’s near final shot of blood on the street adjacent to a pile of thrown out items such as a tv, a couple of soft chairs and bags of stuff and you see what such dreams come to. The film moves along at a slow measured pace, rarely, if ever, changing the pace. It is a slow burn. Throughout the film, we have references to the United States as a place of possibility and hope, but such possibility and hope are as illusory as all dreams. At one point a character asks Lung what Los Angeles is like. He replies that it is much the same as Taipei. Another connector is baseball. Lung, as a young person, was a fine baseball player with dreams of making baseball his success in life. Once again, we have a reminder of dreams failing to come true. Shots of the city in both daylight and at night keep reminding us of the combination of decay and glitter, of hope and its opposite. As I watched the film, I kept thinking of Kramer vs Kramer (1979), although the two films are quite different. Taipei Story is, however, about a couple’s strained and unworkable relationship. We also have a cast of peripheral characters nicely drawn. One of these characters, an architect, looks out a high-rise window at the city and remarks that he can no longer tell which buildings he has designed because all the buildings look the same. This pretty much sums up the vision of a world drained of energy, a world of boredom and ennui.

 

Revenge (1990), directed by Ermek Shinarbaev. This film is part of the Kazakh New Wave, a movement in Russian cinema that arrived just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It begins with a prologue set in the seventeenth century in which we see the rise of a young Lord who comes into conflict with his best friend, the court poet. Then we move to 1915 Korea where the actual story begins. Before the film ends we have visited China and finally Sakhalin on Russia’s eastern coast. By the end, we have moved foreword to just at the end of 1945. The story finds impetus in the killing of a young girl by a drunken teacher back in 1915. This murder results in the father of the murdered girl seeking revenge, something he seeks vainly for years, ultimately passing on his desire for revenge to his young son from a second wife. The son seeks revenge for many years until … Well, you will have to see what happens. The film is noteworthy for its light. Scenes are filled with light, a light that counterpoints the darkness in humanity’s heart. We also have a number of cryptic but compelling images: a huge sea turtle far from the sea and seeking to return home, a rat dowsed in gas and set on fire running frantically until it finds a barn with hay, a hedgehog, a young man hemorrhaging blood from his groin, a fast-moving truck with an iron container chained to its bumper, more than one mute person, and more. The film seems to have something to do with time and space, as well as to the deleterious effects of seeking revenge. Some of what we see reminded me of images in films by Tarkovsky. All in all, this is a strange, yet powerful film.

 

Kalpana (1948), directed by Uday Shankar. This is the only film by the dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar, brother of Ravi Shankar. It is, among other things, a celebration of Indian dance, at one point noting that Hollywood often mistakenly presents Indian dance as if it were African dance. In any case, the film is much more than a celebration of dance. This celebration is part of a celebration of India, despite all its flaws. And flaws aplenty it has, according to this sumptuous exploration of what ails India. Shankar holds his ideology on his sleeve. He speaks openly here of injustices associated with caste/class, with rapacious capitalism, with education or the lack thereof, with misogyny, and so on. His call for equality of the sexes is forthright and moving. As for the viewers’ visual experience, we have magnificent dance sequences, surreal sequences, echoes of silent cinema, especially Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and painterly compositions, one of which reminded me of Jacques-Louis David. All of this serves a story of a child growing into a man wishing for more than a life controlled by the expectations of elders and tradition. The young man, Udayan (Uday Shankar), finds himself desired by two women, his childhood friend Uma (Amala Shankar), and the wild woman he meets in the wilderness, Kamini (Lakshmi Kanta). Jealousy and anger surface, in a narrative that blends dream and reality. Released in 1948, Kalpana (apparently this means ‘Fantasy’) reminds us that Hollywood was in the heyday of musicals at the time. The film also reminds us just how stubborn are the forces of neoliberalism; the film resonates still.

 

The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), directed by Ritwik Ghatak. Huge trees, a train passing, lattice-work, close-ups reminiscent of Eisenstein, deep focus, odd camera angles, all give this film a distinct feel. The tree we see in the first shot lets us know about stability, rootedness, shelter, nature. That same shot transitions to a close-up of Neeta (Supriya Choudhury) , our protagonist; in the background moving across the screen is a train, letting us know about people on the move, change, and an unknown destination. The lattice-work we see throughout lets us know of constraint. In the first shot, we also hear the singing of Neeta’s brother, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee). Throughout the film sound is either mellifluous or jarring, dissonant. The odd angles tell us of people and places out of joint. The story deals with a family displaced by the partition of India in 1947, and especially the eldest daughter Neeta who is effectively the head of the house. The learned, but feeble, father (Gyanesh Mukherjee), the domineering mother (Gita Dey), the flirtatious younger sister Geeta (Gita Ghatak), the sports-loving brother Mantu (Dwiju Bhawal), and the older brother Shankar all have their own ambitions and rely on Neeta to provide for them. The story follows Neeta in her self-sacrificing decline into illness as she watchs her uncaring family find what they wish for. Neeta is, for sure, a cloud-capped star. This is melodrama, but with a trace of humour and fantastic cinematography. I have neglected to mention Neeta’s boyfriend, Sanat, who is graceless enough to marry the younger Sister Geeta. Sanat, in a love letter to Neeta, calls her a “cloud-capped star veiled by circumstance,” and Neeta is indeed an intelligent woman whose life is ruined by the destructive environment in which she lives. This is melodrama touched by tragedy.

 

Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (aka Joe). Dennis Lim describes this strange and mysterious film from Thailand as “part road move, part folk storytelling exercise, part surrealist parlour game.” This description is accurate, but it hardly touches the strangeness of the film. Viewers first see the words, “Once upon a time….,” and so we know we are in store for a fairy tale. But this is more like the building of a fairy tale as we meet characters who tell us bits and pieces of a story the arises from a mysterious small round object that falls to the floor early in the film. As each set of characters, and actors, tell the story, the story becomes more and more baroque. As we go along, we have a travelling fish seller, a crippled boy and his teacher, two deaf mute girls, a theatre troop, a gaggle of school children, among others, all adding to the story of an alien who comes to earth. Frankly, the story never does cohere for me, although I suspect it might for others. I get the sense we are being introduced to a story from Thai folklore. The filming is in grainy black and white, and it has a documentary feel, although this is not an out and out documentary. We also have moments I might call meta, where the making of the film is what we are seeing. Everything is quite odd, just out of reach, and yet compelling for some reason. The strangeness comes in the form of a sophisticated and complicated film looking primitive and naïve. This is quite an experience.

 

Before the Rain (1994), directed by Milcho Manchevski. This is the first film from a newly independent Republic of Macedonia. As for a summary, Noel Murray in AV Club (July 1, 2008) puts it succinctly:” In the film's first section, ‘Words,’ Grégoire Colin plays a young Macedonian monk who discovers an Albanian girl hiding in his quarters, and attempts to hide her from a local militia. In the second section, "Faces," Katrin Cartlidge plays a London photo-agent who's been having an affair with one of her foreign photojournalists, and struggles with how to tell her husband. In the third section, "Pictures," the photojournalist, played by Rade Serbedzija, returns to his Macedonian village and becomes embroiled in centuries-old skirmishes. Each section "rhymes" in different ways. There's a rumble of thunder in each, as well as a character vomiting, turtles, a snippet of Beastie Boys' "So What'cha Want," and the repeated line, "Time never dies… the circle is not round." For most of the movie, Manchevski subtly suggests that each section is taking place at roughly the same time; in the final five minutes, he reveals exactly which scene goes where, and underlines the idea that in the former Yugoslavia, it doesn't matter whether a person tries to help or stays neutral. Trouble ensues either way.” “Trouble ensues either way,” says it all. Clearly Manchevski has watched westerns and I can locate quotations from both Peckinpah and Ford in this film. The storyline turns on the futility of things, and somehow futility seems to be a word suitable to the situation humanity continues to find itself in.

 

Hive (2021), directed by Blaerta Basholli. Set in the village of Krusha in Kosovo in the aftermath of the 1999 massacre in that village. Many of the men have gone missing, and the surviving wives and families of the missing struggle to find news of their loved ones and to survive without the men in their lives. Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), along with other women of the community, organize to lobby the authorities to find their missing husbands, and also to create a company that makes and sells adjvar, a condiment made from red peppers and aubergines. These women have to contend with the deeply patriarchal villagers, including Fahrije’s father-in-law Haxhi (Çun Lajçi) and her daughter, Zana (Kaona Sylejmani). Fahrije also tries to maintain her missing husband’s bee hives. Those worker bees reflect the worker-bee mentality of the women who set about to control their lives. The handheld camera stays close to Fahrije as she sets out to make life work in an environment wracked by war, and held by misogynist traditions. The film is based on a true story, and it is a testament to independence and the will to survive. 

 

24 City (2008), directed by Jia Zhang-Ke. Filmed as a documentary, 24 City reminds me of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Review in its blending of fact and fiction, real people and actors. It tells the story of an airplane parts factory, and its destruction in order to replace it with luxury apartments. Most of the film depends upon “interviews” with people associated with the factory from its early days to its closing (actually it is moving and not just closing). In other words, the film slyly moves through time without actually depicting those various times. The people we meet all have a melancholy story to tell. The film is quiet, slow, intense, and somehow moving in its presentation of people whose lives have depended on a factory that controlled their lives, and that now, in its fall, leaves them unmoored, drifting too far from shore. This is an unusual film, well worth seeing for its picture of China as it was and as it develops in the present century.