Daisies (1966), directed by Vera Chytilova. This is a zany surrealistic example of the Czech New Wave. Two young women take note that the world has gone bad. As the credits role, we see shots of bombs and devastation caused by war and toppling buildings, letting us see just how bad the world has gone. In response to this bad state of things, the young women decide to be bad. They set out on a wild adventure into excess, especially excessive eating. Their hedonism knows no bounds. Neithr does the cinematography that jumps about, just as the women jump about, and changes colour as often as the women change clothes or make-up. Some of this reminded me of Bunuel’s Le Chien Andalou, although there are touches of Pasolini and Parajanov here too. I also detected Chaplin as an influence. Without a plot, but with much bravado, this film explores both the excesses of the modern state and cinema itself. This is not a film to be taken lightly; it demands attention and thought. It was banned and Chytilova was not allowed to work for nine years. This ought to indicate just how effective this film is in its critique of state control. 

La Bestia Debe Morir (The Beast Must Die, 1952), directed by Roman Vinoly Barreto. This Argentinian noir has all the elements of a whodunit combined with the edge and visual appeal of film noir. The story is based on Ray Blake’s detective novel published in 1938. The plot is straight forward. Jorge Rattery (Guillermo Battaglia) is a rat of a human being who abuses his wife and his step-son and just about anyone else he can abuse. Soon after the film opens, he unknowingly drinks poison and dies. Who is responsible for this murder? As we begin to unravel the story behind the murder in flashback, we see that Jorge was a hit and run driver, having struck and killed a young boy one wet dark night. The boy’s father, a man named Frank Carter, who writes mysteries under the name of Felix Lane (Narciso Ibanez Menta), decides to seek out the man who killed his son and murder him. Things move along briskly as Felix Lane meets the killer’s sister-in-law, falls in love, finds himself involved with the sister-in-law’s family, becomes friendly with the beast of a murderer, and then briefly becomes a suspect in the beast’s murder. He has, however, a solid alibi. Who, then, did the deed? No, it was not the sister-in-law who has suffered the advances of the beast, Jorge, and who was in the car that fatal night. There are several other candidates, but what interests us more are the relationships between people. Perhaps the most powerful relationship is between Felix and the young step-son of Jorge, Ronnie Hershey (Humberto Balado). Ronnie reminds us, and Felix, of Felix’s deceased son. This is an impressive film with some impressive lighting and camera work.

 

Los tallos amargos (The Bitter Stems, 1956). This Argentinian noir opens with the clock sounding midnight as two men prepare to board a train. Thus begins the move to a perfect murder. This film has several features of noir: voice over, analepsis and prolepsis, cynicism, entrapment, a mysterious, if not fatal, woman, shadows and some dark nights. This is a noir without a villain in the usual sense. Oh, Alfredo Gaspar (Carlos Cores) does commit a murder, but he is really not such a bad fellow, just somewhat slow to grasp things. He is a poor schmuck of a journalist who embarks on a questionable venture with a new-found friend, the illegal immigrant Liudas (Vassili Lambrinos). Alfredo begins to think that his friend is out to con him a well as the customers the two of them are duping. This leads him to carry out an impetuous and extremely foolish act of murder. He buries the corpse, along with a number of seeds the dead man was carrying. From these seeds grow plants that are Alfredo’s undoing. He kneels in front of an oncoming locomotive. The end! This is all very dark and impressive. The camera work is effective, with lines of shadows that communicate threateningly early in the film and nice contrasts of dark and rainy nights with bright sunlit days. That opening with the signaling of midnight says it all. Midnight comes as the stroke of doom. Did I say “perfect murder”? Well yes, if only poor Alfredo knew anything about agronomy.

The Battle of Algiers (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Yesterday was Remembrance Day and we watched Pontecorvo’s devastating film on the struggle for Algerian independence from France in the 1950s and 60s. The film begins with a notice that no newsreel film has been used, and yet everything looks very real in this documentary-looking film. We have several characters to follow, but no heroes or villains. Both sides accept collateral damage in this street-war, fought in alleys, streets, tenements, and markets. The point-of-view is quite balanced, although when push comes to shove, we know where Pontecorvo’s sympathies lie. At one point we have a reference to Sartre whose sympathies were with the nationalists. The French Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) remarks that Sartre always takes the liberal side. In any case, both sides kill indiscriminately. As a captured FLN leader says, one side uses women who carry bombs in baskets and the other side uses napalm dropped from planes. This very real-looking film has a structure, beginning, after a scene in which an abject fellow is tortured for information, with four people, two men, a woman, and a boy, hiding behind a wall while French soldiers, who have learned their whereabouts from the tortured man, seek them. The camera eventually focuses on one of the men, then things fade back years to when this young man was a street thief running from the police. We see how he becomes a member of the resistance. Although the action of the film takes place 50 to 60 years ago and in Algeria, what we experience is depressingly familiar, and similar atrocities continue to take place in various countries. Despite the remembrance of such things past, humanity does not grasp the idiocy, the stupidity, the injustice, the devastation of warfare.

 

Death of a Cyclist (1955), directed by J. A. Bardem. This film brings together Hollywood noir melodrama with Italian neo-realism in order to expose the failings of the social system under the Franco government in Spain. Behind most of the action here is the war, the Spanish civil war and the larger European war a decade ago. The noir elements include a hero caught in a fraught situation, a femme fatale, an arch art critic cynical to a degree, and some of the lighting and camera work we would expect. Then we have the neo-realist parts of the film, shots of poverty and dilapidation, kids in the street, a city divided by wealth, and intense close-ups. The editing is clever and sly pairing shots deftly bring out both emotion and meaning. For example, the cutting between gazes of the lovers as if they were in the same room, although she is actually with her husband and her lover is by himself in another place. Such cutting reaches its witty best when the lover, Juan, exhales cigarette smoke in one room/cut to Maria Jose, his mistress, who brushes smoke away from her husband’s cigarette. We also have the pairing of wealthy children in their finery with the street kids struggling to survive. There is much more to admire in this film, but suffice to say the cyclist has the last word – as it were.

El: This Strange Passion (1952), directed by Luis Bunuel. Apparently, Jacques Lacan liked this film, and it is easy to understand why this might be so. This film, like so many of Bunuel’s works, is about twisted desire, desire so insistent that it cracks open the Real. The opening scene in the church with the priest washing and then kissing the feet of supplicants, our protagonist Francisco (Arturo de Cordova) assisting in the ceremony, and then seeing the feet of a woman whom he instantly singles out as the love of his life indicates the theme of fetishism. Francisco pursues this woman despite the fact that she is engaged to an old friend. Francisco is wealthy and lives in a stately and singularly lavish mansion. His wealth impresses the young woman, Gloria (Delia Garces), and her mother, and Francisco is successful in his pursuit. He marries the love of his life only to fall into violent jealousy as early as the honeymoon. As the masculine definite article of the title suggests, the film is about masculine desire, paranoia, and irrational violence. Twice Francisco tries to kill his wife, failing to do so both times. He also tries to kill the priest who has defended him against the allegations of Gloria. But the film also gives us an opportunity to follow Gloria and her resistance to leaving a man who clearly frightens her. She keeps hoping she can change him. She can’t. Eventually she does manage to escape and find comfort in a marriage with Rafael (Ricardo Lujan), the man she was first engaged to before she met Francisco. The film ends with Francisco living a quiet and contemplative life with monks. His sanctuary is with the Church, an institution that, arguably, initiated all his trouble in the first place. Bunuel is one of my favourite directors. This may not be among the best of his films, but it holds my interest and it clearly deals with Bunuel’s recurring themes.