A scattering of films.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964), directed by Stanley Kubrik. It has been 60 years since this film premiered. It was sobering then, and it is sobering now. Perhaps even more so. The array of phallic images throughout, and the nearly all male cast give us a world in peril because of a bunch of lunatic men, soldiers and politicians. Testosterone runs the show. General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), with his thrusting cigar and then ejaculating machine gun, represents the paranoia we see at work today, a paranoia that opens itself to conspiracy theories. Ripper fears that our “precious bodily fluids” are being tainted by the country’s water supply that has supposedly been poisoned by those darned Ruskies. Meanwhile we have B-52 Bomber pilot, Major ‘King’ Kong (Slim Pickens), donning his ten-gallon hat and riding off to doomsday with a hip and a holler, reminding us of America’s love of the Wild West and its willingness to exterminate peoples – in this instance all peoples. Names such as General ‘Buck’ Turgidson (George C. Scott) and Colonel ‘Bat’ Guano (Keenan Wynn) remind us of the scatological theme at work throughout. Then we have the mixing of forces: Communists, Fascists, Democrats, all nutty and bull-headed and given to violence. In the world this film depicts, no one is safe and friendly fire is serves as prelude to world annihilation. We do not see a lot of Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers) in the film, but he is the epitome of the mechanical man with a fantasy of a world in which beautiful women outnumber men 10 to 1. Sellers, by the way, plays three roles, Dr. Strangelove, President Merkin Muffley, and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a German Nazi, the American President, and an English officer. This three-way role is a reminder of the replication of idiocy across national boundaries. This satire is vicious, funny and disturbing, a reminder that when things look bleak or bleaker than bleak, laughter is perhaps the only way to cope. I say cope, not survive. Dr. Strangelove and Kubrik’s Paths of Glory (1957) are two of the finest anti-war films that we have.

 

Prisoners of the Mountains (1996), directed by Sergei Bodrov. This is an updated version of a story by Tolstoy. It tells of two Russian soldiers fighting against Chechnyan rebels, one a hardened soldier Sacha (Oleg Menshikov), and the other a fresh young recruit, Vanya (Sergei Bodrov), who find themselves captured by the rebels. The man who has them prisoner in a small mountain village is Abdul-Murat (Jamal Sikharulidze); he wants to exchange these soldiers for his son who is a prisoner of the Russians. As things move along, we come to know a few of the villagers, including Abdul-Murat’s daughter Dina (Susanna Mekhraliyevah), the tongueless Hasan (Aleksandr Bureyev) who likes to “sing,” and Vanya’s mother (Valentina Fedotova) who is a teacher. The two prisoners find ways to interact with the villagers, and even become friends with some of them. Vanya fashions a clever bird mobile for Dina, and both soldiers enjoy the company of Hasan. This is, however, war, and we can expect things to take a sour turn. They do. War is hell. The filming location is in Dagestan (bordering the Caspian Sea), and shots of the village and surrounding mountainous terrain are impressive. The rocky environs are bleak, underscoring the harshness of life and the bitterness of war. As anti-war films go, this one works well. We get to know these people well, if not intimately. This is a worthy film, although it skirts the ugliness of war somewhat. 

 

Adoption (1975), directed by Marta Meszaros. This film communicates an intimacy rare in film. It consists of close-up shots of faces, mostly the faces of women, ordinary women. We have workers in a wood factory caked with sawdust, the girls from the Children’s Home, and of course the two principal characters, Kata (Katalin Berek) and Anna (Gyongyver Vigh). Kata is a 43-year-old widow who is having an affair with a married man. She has decided that she wants a child, but her lover Joska will not hear of this. As for Anna, she keeps running away from the Children’s Home, and she wants to marry her boyfriend, Sanyi (Peter Fried). Kata becomes something of a surrogate mother to Anna, allowing Anna and Sanyi to tryst at her place, and helping the two lovers convince Anna’s parents to consent to their wedding. The relationship between Kata and Anna, then, has something to do with motherhood, and Kata becomes convinced she can be a good parent. Once Anna is married (a marriage that Meszaros hints will not be successful), Kata sets out to adopt a child. The film deals with child abuse, emotional stress, parenthood, and relationships, both those between lovers and those between friends. The film is shot in a lightly misty black and white, giving the people and their actions a delicate feel. The focus is on the lives of women, their strength and resilience in a patriarchal Hungary. If there is any influence here, it is to the French New Wave, and Kata’s lover, Joska is played by Laszlo Szabo, an actor who appears in at least five films by Jean-Luc Godard. I also think of Cassavetes’s Faces (1968). The feel for human desires is palpable in this remarkable film.

 

A couple of recent films: The Velvet Underground and The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Velvet Underground (2021), directed by Todd Haynes. This documentary captures the spirit and the style of its subject in a stunning manner. Rather than a behind the scenes look at a band, this film is an exploration of an art movement, an explosion in the New York City art world of the 1960s and 70s, especially the former decade. The split screen, and multiple split-screen echoes the Warhol films that are an essential part of that 1960s art scene. Even the close-up interviews with various people close to the band have a colour reminiscent of the time and place. This is a film to go alongside Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), Velvet Goldmine (1998), and of course I’m Not There (2007). 

As for Macbeth (2021), directed by Joel Coen, this is a film that offers a feast to the eyes, a homage to such film makers as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and Jean Cocteau. The lighting and cinematography are fabulous. The acting is fine. Denzel Washington’s Macbeth communicates a world weariness appropriate for the character, and Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth is subtle and very effective. My only disappointment is that the line, “What, you egg? Young fry of treachery,” is gone from the script. Obviously, they did a bit of trimming. In any case, both these films are well worth seeing. Oh, and the witches in Macbeth, especially the one who speaks, are extremely effective.

 

Salt of This Sea (2008), directed by Annemarie Jacir. When I lived in Reading, England, I knew a man and his family who were Palestinians from Syria. This man became a friend. He told me of his family who had, prior to 1948, lived in Palestine. Upon the establishment of Israel, however, this family and many other Palestinian families, had their homes confiscated by Israeli forces and turned over to Israeli people. My friend had papers stamped with the word “stateless,” as I recall. In any case, this film deals with the after-effects of that time of dislocation for some. It is a polemic, and as a polemic it carries intensity. As a dramatic film, however, Salt of This Sea falters. It begins well with the arrival of a young Palestinian woman from Brooklyn to Israel. This woman, Soraya (Suheir Hammad), has ostensibly come just “to visit.” Her actual intention is to find her ancestral home. From this opening at the airport the film moves on to become a love story (of sorts), a tour of various places such as Ramallah, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, a heist story, a road movie, and a two for the road film. The film’s intentions are clear and even laudable, but as a film of just over 100 minutes, it takes on too much. Perhaps the most telling part of the movie comes when Soraya visits the home of her grandfather. The present occupant is a young Jewish woman who is kind enough to invite Soraya and her two male friends into this house. The visit results in Soraya demanding that the current occupant acknowledge that the house belongs to her, Soraya, and that the Jewish woman can stay because Soraya allows her to stay. We have here a knot difficult, if not impossible, to unravel. This is a film that will divide viewers. It works best, I think, when the camera gives us shots of oranges or gates or walls or streets or panoramas of the countryside. Such shots communicate with more subtlety than much of the human interaction does.

The Ascent (1977), directed by Larisa Shepitko. This is Shepitko’s last film, and it is intense. This is a Russian film with much of the sensibility we have come to associate with Russian literature and film. It is an anti-war film to set alongside such films as Paths of Glory and All Quiet on the Western Front. Filmed in winter, The Ascent gives us a screen filled with white, the white of snow and sky. The story involves two Soviet partisans who are trying to find food for the ragged band of people they have left in the snowy forest somewhere in Belarus. Danger in the form of German soldiers lurk all about. At the outset, one of these partisans, Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) appears to the stronger of the two. The other man is a teacher of mathematics, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov), and he receives a wound early in the action. As the film proceeds, Sotnikov emerges as the stronger of the two, refusing to provide information after he and Rybak are captured by Germans. Rybak, on the other hand, collapses. The film is about survival, sacrifice, betrayal, and patriotism. The most impressive aspect of the film for me is the cinematography, the snow-filled vistas and the intense close-ups of faces (something we might think of as a specialty of Soviet cinema from the beginning), and the fluid camera working in such harsh conditions. Things do not end well for the partisans, reminding me of the fate of the three soldiers in Kubrik’s Paths of Glory. Both films use black and white cinematography to emphasize the coldness, the sharpness, the flatness, and the starkness of war. The title might indicate an attempt to show the fate of the people at the end as a spiritual ascent, and we have images, especially that of Sotnikov’s still face, that clearly invoke iconicity (icon in the original sense).