Some World Cinema.

Downpour (1972), directed by Braham Beyzale. Goodbye Mr. Hekmati. This Iranian film tells the bittersweet story of a young teacher who arrives at a new place and new school. The film opens with his arrival at the place where he will live, and among other belongings he brings books, a lamp, and a mirror. The books make it into his room, but the mirror and the lamp (sorry, but M. H. Abrams comes to mind) are broken before they can enter the new dwelling. Later the books will tumble from their shelves. The signs are not good, and Mr. Hekmati will have a rough time in his new job among new neighbours and new colleagues. He will also meet a young seamstress who catches his fancy. For her part, the young seamstress, Atie, has a suitor, a bullish butcher by the name of Rahim. Rahim and Hekmati become rivals, and there is an amusing sequence in which Hekmati tries to transform from the 99 pound weakling he is into someone who can take on Rahim in a fight. Late in the film, we have a night of drinking end in a funny fight between these two rivals. The film has humour and also sadness. It also has a gaggle of likeable kids who come through when it is most necessary. The kids’ show of affection for Mr. Hekmati is double-edged; it gives Mr. Hekmati his just recognition for single-handedly restoring the school assembly hall and stage, and it also precipitates his transfer away from the school and area. Thus, the film ends with a reversal of its beginning, the cart with Mr. Hekmati’s belongings now departing. Visually, the film has a few striking compositions, and we can see shades of neo-realist films, plus the influence of Kurosawa. 

 

Chess of the Wind (1976), directed by Mohammad Reza Aslani. Image and, after the 1920s, sound are the essence of cinema, and Chess of the Wind is a film of image and sound. It does have a doozie of a plot, but the visual sumptuousness and haunting sound are at the forefront of this examination of decadence. Long lost, the film was rediscovered in 2014 when the director’s son found it in a junk shop in Tehran. What a find. For those in the west, the film plays out as an exercise in the gothic with its action taking place inside a large and luxurious house with its wheelchair-bound matriarch who wields a mean thing-a-ma-bob with deadly force. Or does she? Punctuating the action inside this luxurious house is a repeated shot of local women washing clothes at a fountain in front of the mansion. These women serve as a sort of Greek chorus, commenting on the lives of the rich. The plot gives us a number of people circling the matriarch in hopes of acquiring her wealth. No one is particularly pleasant. The film was banned by the Islamic Republic, and it is easy to see why. This is a devastating critique of a social system that insists on hierarchy, and that functions on greed and corruption and even violence. Its target may be the Pahlevis dynasty in Iran, but the critique covers that which came before as well as that which came after. Most impressive for me is Aslani’s painterly sensibility manifested in the colour and compositions. The actors are also impressive, especially Fahkri Khorvash as the paraplegic Lady Junior. We are lucky to have had this film survive.

Lucia (1968), directed by Humberto Solas. This film is a product of the Cuban Revolution. It has three parts, each part giving us a different Lucia, a woman (or women) who chronicle Cuban history from the late 19^th century. Part one takes place in 1895 during the war of independence. Part 2 takes place in the early 1930s during the regime of Gerardo Machado, and Part 3 is a story from the 1960s. Each Lucia represents a different class: first the upper class, then the middle class, and finally the working class. Each episode offers a glimpse into history and the changing of social and political relationships. The emphasis is on revolution, first against Spain, then against a dictator, and finally against the patriarchy.  Solas’s camera is fluid to the point of being frenetic, and his lighting is hot, very hot. Scenes of battle across fields or brouhaha on the streets are hectic with quick and insistent cutting. The hand-held camera roves about quickly. The film somehow reminds me of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) and also Soviet cinema from its early years. Aside from some furious action, Lucia presents faces, the faces of people from all classes up close and personal. This is a film of faces and furious action. It also manages to carry its revolutionary zeal heavily. What we see does not inspire optimism in revolutionary action.

Prisioneros de la Tierra (1939), directed by Mario Soffici. This Argentinian film deals with the exploitation of workers in early twentieth-century Argentina. The mensus (indentured labourers) are taken deep into the wild to work for a company clearing forest and running a mill of some kind. Their lives are controlled by the brutal mill contractor, Kohner, played by Francisco Petrone. The men are brutalized and suffer from disease, malaria and worse. To help deal with the men’s sickness, the contractor takes a doctor, Dr. Else (Raul de Lange), and his daughter with him to the yerba mate plantation. The doctor has a serious alcohol problem. He is also proud of his sturdy walking stick, an object that proves fatally dangerous. The daughter, Chinita (Elisa Galve), finds herself attracted to one of the workers, Esteban Podeley (Angel Magana), while Kohner finds himself attracted to Chinita. You can bet trouble ensues. The plot has some affinity with that in films such as High Sierra (1941) and its remake Colorado Territory (1949). To tell you this is to let you know the film shows the dark side of life. The black and white cinematography in Prisioneros de la Tierra has an expressionistic edge that highlights the jungle drudgery and dread. The film examines capitalism’s unrelenting drive of the downtrodden worker. If the film has a bright spot, this spot is to be found in the one-armed character who is always happy, and who plans to make much money by distilling orange liquor. Unfortunately for him, Dr. Else drinks all the samples of this range liquor. Undeterred, the one-armed fellow insists he is happy. 

 

Sambizanga (1972), directed by Sarah Maldoror. Maldoror worked as an assistant director on Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, and she brings the political intensity of that film to Sambizanga. This film tells the story of the arrest and incarceration of a construction worker, Domingos (Domingos de Oliviera), and the quest of his wife, Maria (Elisa Andrade) to find him. Maria, with her young son on her back, walks the long journey to Luanda seeking news of her husband. Meanwhile, Domingos is beaten by the Portuguese authorities in their effort to get him to divulge the names of members of the liberation movement. Maria finally reaches the city and tries to get information of the whereabouts of her husband. The authorities prove less than helpful. By the time Maria does locate Domingos, he has been beaten to death inside one of the city jails. The film begins and ends with powerful shots of a raging river. These shots indicate the powerful forces, emotional forces, at work that will not be quelled. As for the narrative, this begins with the apparently contented life of Domingos and Maria and their son, then moves to their separation when Domingos is arrested, and finally moves on to Maria’s doomed quest. This is a powerful film that deals with corrupt colonial authority and indomitable human drive for liberation from oppression. At one point, we have a character tell those around him that the rich need the poor in order to maintain their position of privilege and ease. The rich exploit the poor. It so happens that in Angola the rich are white Portuguese and the poor the Black Africans, but colour is not a necessity for this system of oppression to exist. As I say, this is a powerful film, simple, straight forward, and honest.

 Foreign Correspondent (1940), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is quite an amazing film, featuring set designs by the inimitable William Cameron Menzies (Things to Come 1936, Invaders from Mars and The Maze, both 1953). The various set pieces are as good as anything in other Hitchcock films: the windmills, especially the gothic interiors, the umbrellas, the crash through the awning, and the fabulous plane crash in mid ocean leaving a few survivors clinging to a broken and detached wing of the plane. These are all memorable, and that sequence after the plane crash on the water is very convincing (it reminded me of Lifeboat). The plot turns on the bad guys’ quest to discover the contents of Article 23 (I think it is 23), an article in a treaty signed between Belgium and another country (I can’t remember what country). Article 23 was never written down; rather, it was memorized by just two people, one of whom the bad guys kidnap and torture to force him to divulge the contents of Article 23. McGuffin. The cast is attractive and fun. Joel McCrea and Larraine Day are the two young people who run into difficulties trying to sort everything out. The main villain is only half villain; he is played by the suave Herbert Marshall. Edmund Gwenne, Robert Benchley, and George Saunders come along for the ride. The script has its touches of humour. I ought to note that the cinematography here is in the more than capable hands of Rudolph Mate. This film is a lot of fun.

Suspicion (1941), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is the one that got away from Mr. Hitchcock. He did not get his wish to have the ending follow the ending of the book from which the screenplay derives. If you watch the film with the original ending in mind, then Johnny Asquith (Cary Grant) will give you chills. He is a ne’er-do-well playboy who charms the wealthy woman, Lina (Joan Fontaine), marries her, and then sets about to control her considerable wealth. His ultimate goal appears to be to get rid of Lina by giving her poison, arsenic. She is suspicious, and her suspicions in the book are well-founded. Not so in the film. The film’s ending negates all the suspicion and does so rather weakly. Having said this, I take note that this is a Hitchcock film and it does have his trademark touches, the ominous lighting, lush landscapes and interiors, likeable supporting players, the very Hitchcockian glass of milk, the trains and the scenes of perilous driving. Lina focalizes the action. This manipulation of point of view is also a Hitchcock trademark. 

 

Dial M for Murder (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is Hitchcock’s first of three films with Grace Kelly, and his only film shot in 3D. Like Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948), this film takes place mostly on one set, the apartment of Tony (Ray Milland) and Margot (Kelly) Wendice. The confinement to one set gives the action a claustrophobic feel; it is also a sign of the origins of the story in a stage play by Frederick Knott. We have characters and situation familiar to Hitchcock. I think of Hitch’s Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train (1951) when I see Tony Wendice. Both have a suave charm that exudes something sinister. Tony is a tennis player, and hence something of the anti-Guy Haines (Farley Granger), also from Strangers on a Train. Then we have the proposed murder. Here Tony bamboozles, or more specifically blackmails, his old school mate, Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson) into carrying out the dastardly deed. The action turns on objects, as so often in Hitchcock, here a latchkey (or a number of latchkeys), a pair of scissors, a scarf, a letter, and various items that decorate the apartment. So much depends upon characters, and the cast here deliver engaging performances, especially Milland as Tony and John Williams as Chief Inspector Hubbard. As far as Hitchcock films go, this one is, perhaps, not top drawer, but it does have its charms. And one very Hitchcockian moment is when the murderer falls to the floor with scissors in his back and we watch those scissors slide deeply into him as his weight presses down. The dark side of genius indeed.

 

The Trouble with Harry (1955), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The opening credits pan along a line of what look like a child’s drawings of birds and trees and such pastoral images until we stop on a corpse. The illustrations are by an uncredited Saul Steinberg, and they set things up nicely. The film offers pastoral of the macabre. Set in and around Morrisville, Vermont in the autumn, the film boasts gorgeous shots of the countryside with its fall colours. In the beginning, we see a young boy with his plastic ray gun wandering this lovely countryside until he comes upon the body of a man. Thus begins a caper involving this dead body. I’ve lost count of how many times the other characters in the film bury, exhume and rebury this body – poor deceased Harry. Was he murdered? Who murdered him? Such questions hardly matter. What matters is the grisly goings-on carried out with insouciance. Apparently, Hitchcock liked this film, and we can see why. It is wry and gruesome, reminding me of Hitchcock’s mischievous introductions to his television programme. Part of the joke rests in the film’s lack of a set-piece such as a chase on a national monument or suspense of the who-done-it. This is, after all, pastoral, and pastoral delivers a world attractive in its pleasantries. I suspect even the so-called genius artist here is part of the joke. Art really is in the eye of the beholder, or in this case the rather myopic millionaire who offers to buy all the artist’s work. The film is a lark.

 

To Catch a Thief (1955), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is another innocent-man-out-to prove-his-innocence film from the master. The master, however, dozes through this one. Here the man-on-the-run plot makes way for the romance of two sophisticates, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, both at their most icy, witty, and attractive selves. Awkward sentence for an awkward film. But Hitchcock serves up some sumptuous location shooting, and a lavish party scene. The characters are decidedly not the hoi polloi. We are among the wealthy set on the Riviera, where a retired jewel thief, John Robie (Grant), finds himself the object of a police hunt because the police assume he is the perpetrator of a series of jewel heists. He must elude the police while proving his innocence, all the time romancing a wealthy heiress, Frances Stevens (Kelly), who first accepts his innocence, then does not, then does, and so on until the two of them finally come together in the most fairy tale of endings. The film is certainly lush, but it is also slight.

 

North by Northwest (1959), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This thriller was fun the first two or three times I saw it. It is still fun. It has, perhaps, more set pieces than any other Hitchcock: the scene in the United Nations building, the chase down the faces on Mount Rushmore, strangers meeting on a train, the drunken drive down the mountain road, the wacky antics during an auction, and pre-eminently the corn field scene. The latter remains a masterclass in building suspense in an environment so clear and open that nothing could disturb the stillness. “That’s funny. That airplane is dusting crops where there ain’t any crops.” Indeed. The plot is typical of Hitchcock’s insistence on the wrong man theme, the innocent caught in a web of intrigue. Here the intrigue has something to do with a man who does not exist, spies, the Cold War, an icy blond, and a suave villain with a trio of henchmen, one of whom, Leonard (Martin Landau), has more than a passing interest in his boss. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint make an attractive romantic pair. As I say, the film is a lot of fun. It does, however, take a willing suspension of disbelief, especially nowadays, because the back and front projections and sound stages fitted out for various locales (a forest near Mount Rushmore, for example) are so obvious. Note the dining car scene on the train. The train is traveling from New York to Chicago, yet out the window we have a scene passing by (a couple of shots repeated) that looks nothing like upper New York State, at least to my eyes. But I quibble. Roger Thornhill and Eve Kendal on the run make for exciting, witty, and even suspenseful adventure.

 

I Confess (1953), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The exteriors for this film were shot in Quebec City, and we have some lovely reminders of the beauty of this city. Montgomery Clift plays Father Logan, a priest who hears the confession of someone who has committed a murder, and soon after finds himself accused of the same murder. Of course, he cannot betray what he has heard in confession even though this means he must go to trial for murder. The film is something of a dry run for The Wrong Man (1956), and like that film, I Confess is dark and dour. Despite the real killer being exposed at the finale, none of the characters emerges unscathed. The deep black and white with dark streets, shadows and other trimmings of cinema noir accentuate the difficulty the characters face. The one flashback, shot from the point of view of Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), is bright and sunny, contrasting the action in the ‘present’ time. The contrast of light and dark is, perhaps, at the centre of the film, as is the contrast between reason and faith. Hitchcock appears very early in the film, crossing the screen laterally and in extreme distance suggesting a certain distance from the proceedings, a certain absence of humour felt throughout the film.

 

Stage Fright (1950), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Is it Elsie, Phyllis, or Mavis? No, that would be Doris who is not really Doris but rather Eve. Such is the delight of Stage Fright, a film that has one of Hitchcock’s most outrageous tricks. He enjoys manipulating his audience and here he does this with a flashback right at the beginning of the film. He also turns the tables on the man-on-the-run theme that is front and central to so many of his films. And then we have the cast. The performances are superb, especially those of Alastair Sim, Richard Todd, Jane Wyman, Michael Wilding, and Marlene Dietrich. Joyce Grenfell as “Lovely Ducks” has a small but very amusing part. We have many of the Hitchcock touches: the opening curtain that tells us we are entering a play in which all the characters are performing roles, the doll that seems so important at the time, but really is something of a diversion, the fair (put to even more extensive use in the following year’s Strangers on a Train), the family that functions, but barely, the humour, the superimposed shots, and so on. We even have musical numbers, "La Vie en Rose" and "The Laziest Girl in Town," allowing Dietrich to play her sultry best. The film reminds me of Billy Wilder’s Witness For the Prosecution. Saying this is something of a spoiler.

 

Notorious (1946), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is the one about drinking, about patriotism in the extreme, about government callousness, and about a mother and a father, especially a mother. Oh, it is also a spy thriller, set just after the Second World War and involving uranium (the atomic threat). The film uses rear projection extensively and the technique seems somehow appropriate in a film dealing with subterfuge and sleight of hand (literally in the scene with the key change). We also have many close-ups of bottles, of glasses, of cups and saucers to drive home the ominous aspect of drinking. It can be lethal! The morality of using a young woman's sexuality to obtain information is questionable, and the hero is possibly less likeable than the villain. Leopoldine Konstantin, in her only American film, plays Claude Rains's mother; she is memorable. Hitchcock appears about an hour into the film, drinking a glass of champagne at a party. He exits quickly. This is not my favourite of Hitchcock's films, but it just might be his first fully-formed Hitchcock movie with all his signature elements, a central love story that centres on trust and suspicion, a camera that has a voyeuristic lens, a playful manipulation of objects, framing that limits the characters' actions, and so on.

 

Spellbound (1945), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is the one with the Salvador Dali designed dreamscape, and this sequence is memorable. Also memorable are the straight razor and the over-sized pistol, typical Hitchcock quirks. I will add the skiing scene which is memorable for its silly amateurish filming. And finally we have the stuff about psychoanalysis that will strike us a dated now. We even have a doctor, Dr. Brulov (Michael Checkhov), who not only mentions Freud, but who looks like Freud. The story involves amnesia, guilt complexes, romance, and an on-the-run couple. The film somehow leaves me flat, but it does have its moments. I confess that John Ballantyne”s (Gregory Peck) tendency to recoil and even faint at the sight of straight lines leaves me unconvinced. But both Peck and Ingrid Bergman as Dr. Constance Peterson are likeable actors, and they manage to capture our sympathy as the couple trying to figure out what makes the Peck character faint and fall every so often. Of course this has something to do with childhood trauma. The film also has a parade of other familiar actors: Wallace Ford, Leo G. Carroll, Rhonda Fleming, John Emery, and Regis Toomey. Toomey has, I think, one line and Wallace Ford does not have many more. This may not be the best of Hitchcock’s films, but it is clearly a work of the master.

 

Shadow of a Doubt (1943), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Small town America, homemade apple pie and ice cream, family dinners, friendly neighbours, pretty houses and gardens, a family of five, and then along comes Uncle Charlie. Shadow of a Doubt may lack the set-pieces we see in famous Hitchcock films such as North by Northwest or Psycho or Foreign Correspondent, but it does have Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) reminds me of another Hitchcock villain, Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) from Strangers on a Train (1951). Both are suave, loquacious, wily, and devious. Both are, perhaps, just a tad loony. Uncle Charlie’s dinner-table diatribe against rich widows is chilling and at the same time hilarious. The plot has Charlie visiting his sister’s family in a tidy town somewhere in California. Uncle Charlie’s niece (Teresa Wright), named Charlie after him, begins to suspect that her uncle is not all he pretends to be, and herein begins the intrigue. The father of the family, Joseph Newton (Henry Travers) is an unsuspecting innocent who likes to spend his time discussing ways to murder people with his neighbour, Herbie Hawkins (Hume Cronyn). These two provide a rather macabre humour, a typically Hitchcockian humour. I often say that Strangers on a Train is my favourite Hitchcock film, largely because of Robert Walker’s Bruno Antony, but I will add that Joseph Cotten’s Uncle Charlie comes in a close second.

 Champagne (1928), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Apparently, what we have of this film is an inferior studio print. It is okay, but it leaves me wondering what a fine print would look like. Anyway, this is, once again, Hitchcock learning his trade. The plot is a riches-to-rags-to- riches romantic comedy that involves a pampered young woman from a wealthy family who disobeys her father and flies to the middle of the Atlantic to catch up with her beau who is on a ship to France. What follows is a series of scenes in which the young woman falls from grace, meets a moustachioed man who might be a cad, gets a job in a cabaret, almost becomes a woman of the night, and finally finds security back in the arms of her father and her beau. The man who could have been a cad proves to be something else. We have a couple of sequences that involve the young woman’s fears manifested in a sort of daydream, some nifty camera work on board ship to let us know the discomfort of seasickness, and a couple of object-oriented shots typical of Hitchcock. The young woman is the familiar twenties girl, bubbly and wilful with a Cupid-bow mouth and cropped hair who is bent on having her own way. This is the sort of thing Hitchcock would try again in a film such as Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941). Here, things drag rather too much.  

The Manxman (1929), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is Hitchcock’s final silent film, and the New York Times reviewer, Mordaunt Hall, provides an apt assessment: “The production is not brilliant, but the shortcomings in acting and to a certain extent in the direction are atoned for by the artistry of the scenes” (NYT, Dec. 17, 1929). This is a competently made melodrama. Nothing special. Fisherman Pete fancies Kate Cregeen. What he does not know is that his friend, the lawyer Philip, also fancies Kate. She hops around being friendly to both men. Pete, using the Cyrano technique, has Philip put in a good word for him with Kate’s father, but the father does not want his daughter marrying a penniless fisherman. Pete leaves for faraway parts and Kate says she will wait for him, thus sealing everyone’s fate. While he is away in South Africa, Pete becomes rich, but he is the victim of a false report that he has been killed. Meanwhile Philip and Kate are having a good time back on the Isle of Man, and she declares her love for him, but he notes that she has given her word to Pete. Oh, but Pete is no longer an impediment because he has conveniently died. Wait, no he has not died. He turns up at the most inopportune time. Kate’s father is pleased because the poor fisherman has become the wealthy traveller returned from across the sea. Anyway, Kate marries Pete, much to her chagrin. Of course, a surprise awaits us, and the great millstone grinds on giving us one of Hitchcock’s formidable objects to underscore the theme of time and fate grinding on relentlessly. Things look bad for a while until Philip steps down as the local Deemster (judge/magistrate), Pete sets sail again, and Kate recovers the baby she has lost for a while. Baby? Well, I sense that you can figure things out. The ending is, well, sort of happy.

 

Blackmail (1929), directed with panache by Alfred Hitchcock. This is often cited as the first British sound film, and it shows. The first 8 minutes are silent. People do talk, but we do not hear what they say and there are no intertitles. After 8 minutes sound begins and we have some by the way chatter from a number of peripheral characters. Then things get going. Hitchcock is obviously enjoying himself in the making of this one. His cameo lasts longer than most and he actually interacts with another character, a small boy on a tram. We have familiar Hitchcock touches: for example, his focus on specific objects such as the bread knife, the painting of a jester, stairways, faces, truck wheels, an ashtray, and so on. He also uses sound in an interesting manner, most especially at the breakfast table when the young woman, who has used a bread knife to kill her attacker, hears only the word “knife” when others at the table talk. The plot has the usual Hitchcockian twists with the principal character caught in a web that threatens her undoing. The scene in which the artist tries to rape her is quite daring for the time (Oh those lascivious artists!). The scene of the woman descending the stairs after she avoids/disposes of her attacker nicely balances the earlier scene in which she and the artist climb the stairs. Here the descent is vertiginous. The film does have the slowness of silent cinema, but it also has its charms. This is Hitchcock learning his craft and doing well.

 

Murder! (1930), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is Hitchcock’s third sound film, and it displays his interest in the live theatre, performance, and plot intricacy. We have an introduction (the opening murder and the zany interviews that follow), then act 1, the trial scene with the jurors finally debating the verdict and Diana Baring (Norah Baring) being sentenced to hang, act 2, one juror, Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshal), begins to rethink the case and then decides to investigate, act 3, Sir John discovers the truth of events and exposes the real murderer, denouement, when Sir John and the now proven innocent Diana are a happy couple plying their acting chops on stage. The convoluted plot has many characters and much maneuvering by the players. The film begins with the murder and a stage performance at a nearby theatre, and it ends with a stage performance. We have cross-dressing and the interplay of the theatre with the circus. Act 1 moves toward a scene reminiscent of 12 Angry Men, although this jury does have three women. Everything hangs (as it were) on an elusive name. Motive for the murder has something to do with a character frantic to conceal that he is a “half caste.” And so race is on the agenda here, but race just may be a sleight of hand for something else here. The film hints that the murderer may be gay. I mentioned cross-dressing, and this appears early in the film as an aspect of the farce the company of actors are performing, but it also appears in a far less necessary context later in the film. Murder! is a bit ponderous, but it has its moments. Una O’Connor has a small role as a landlady with a gaggle of active and loud children. She is always a treat. And Hitch ambles by in front of the camera in one scene. Finally, the film is noteworthy for having what some say is the first instance of voice-over on film. This occurs while Sir John is shaving and rethinking his decision to go along with the guilty verdict.

The Skin Game (1931), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. At the outset I quote an anonymous online reviewer: “The film’s sound quality so poor during the auction sequence that one can’t hear the reading of the land’s particulars improves as the story progresses.” Our copy of the film had poor sound quality throughout, and this did diminish our appreciation of the viewing experience. This film has its moments, but these are few. Viewing this after Blackmail proves detrimental to this film. Its story derives from a play by John Galsworthy that pits old money and the landed gentry against the newer industrial class whose wealth comes from factories that blacken the land. Edmund Gwenn, who later appears in The Trouble with Harry, delivers a boisterous performance as the industrialist who has designs on property adjacent to the estate of a local squire. This is not a thriller or a murder mystery, and despite Hitchcock’s attempts at suspense (during the auction, for example), the action is fairly tame and certainly not surprising. The most interesting character is the industrialist’s daughter-in-law who has a clouded past and whose emotional turmoil is the key to the film. All in all, this is a pleasant domestic story without a blond woman or a Hitchcockian set piece or any eye-catching camera work. Unless you can find a copy with decent sound, I would recomend that you pass to another film by the master. The title, by the way, refers here to a situation in which no one emerges unscathed.

Rich and Strange (1931), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This film is rich in filmic stuff and strange in story and mise en scene. What makes the film attractive is the, at times, witty script; the characters are also quite well fleshed out, as it were. What is less successful is the resolution in which the young, appealing, intelligent (most of the time), and conflicted Emily stands by her rather dull, selfish, bored, and dumb husband, Fred. But if we set this aside, we may find delights in this strange journey of a film as it takes our protagonists east of Shanghai (an alternate title) and finally home again. Along the way we have a fancy-dress ball, dancing, the Folies Bergère, exotic locales, and shipboard romance. We also have a camera that notices tangled rope and chains and life full of flurry and boredom. The title, as an intertitle lets us know, derives from The Tempest: “There’s nothing left of him,/He’s undergone a complete sea change/And become something rich and strange.” Of course, the mention of a sea change resonates with the experience of the two main characters in the film. Previous to this voyage of discovery, they had lived a conventional life in London going about their daily routine without much fanfare or excitement. Then they inherit money and go on their travels to experience life. They do. Experience life, that is. She finds herself attracted to a dashing gentleman on board ship; he finds himself seduced by a “princess,” a slinky woman who bilks him of a thousand pounds. Like the marooned on the island in Shakespeare’s play, our two main characters confront their passions, the depths of human desire. If there is a master of the revels here, it is Hitchcock who stage-manages everything with a keen eye for detail. The shipwreck at the end is quite fascinating, and I daresay Fred’s contempt for the people who save him and Emily is yet another reason to dislike this person, and to feel disheartened at her decision to stay with him.

 

Number 17 (1932), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This early Hitchcock has some notable features, but for me it is perhaps the least interesting of his early films. The lighting, often moving with candles, and shadows gives the atmosphere a suitable tension. Those shadows really are terrific. The stairway, as often in Hitchcock, is a major focus. We also have a train/bus chase for the finale. The young woman set up to be the female hero disappears for this finale, something the trickster Hitchcock would do again in Psycho. The drama of the corpse in the first third of the film might be a reminder of the eponymous Harry in the later film. Then we have the question of identities; a few of the characters are not who they claim to be. All this is vintage Hitchcock and quite entertaining. Yet I found the film too close to the many low budget Hollywood films from studios such as Monogram and PRC that involve a group of people, a detective, and a cavernous house at night with much rushing about. In retrospect, Hitchcock’s film is far better than those Hollywood second features, while retaining something of the format of those films.

 

Young and Innocent (1937), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This is a brisk turn with the man wrongly accused of a crime theme. It shares this theme with more famous Hitchcock films: The 39 Steps, Saboteur, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest, for example. The film begins with the McGuffin, a belt detached from a trench coat and floating by the body of a murdered woman. Of course, a young man is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and hence begins his adventures on the run while he tries to prove his innocence. As in The 39 Steps, he is aided, both reluctantly and then willingly, by a young woman who happens to be the daughter of the police captain. At one point the two fugitives attend a child’s birthday party, and here themes of disguise and performance underscore the film’s concerns. Most of the principal characters find themselves in disguise and performing at one time or another, and the climax of the film takes place in a hotel ballroom with an orchestra (the musicians in blackface!) whose drummer is the real villain. We have the familiar Hitchcockian blend of humour and suspense, and his interest in both ends of the social spectrum. Our young innocents not only prove the young man’s innocence, but they also have their youthful innocence tempered and tested as they descend into places their social standing might have shielded them from had they not found themselves in the predicament that has befallen them. This is a breezy romp that serves as a follow-up to 1935’s more famous The 39 Steps.

 Godzilla anyone?

Destroy All Planets (1968 – aka GAMERA VS VIRAS), directed by Noriaki Yuasa. This is the worst man-in-a-monster suit film I have seen. It did not help that the print was terrible, washed out and delivered in pan and scan. The monster here is a very large turtle (reminded us of Pratchett’s Great A’Tuin), that spins through the sky shooting flames from where his four legs are/should be. He can also spew flames from his throat, like Godzilla. He faces several adversaries here, in film footage from earlier films – quite a lot of it, too much of it Yawn. His main adversary, however, is Viras, a meanly tentacled pointy thing. We have the requisite toppling of buildings and crashing into the ocean and rolling about in a free-for-all between these two monsters. Meanwhile, two young Boy Scouts, one Japanese and the other American, find themselves captured by aliens who have come to take over earth. Being Boy Scouts, the young boys prove to be resourceful and with Gamera’s help, they save the world, or at least Tokyo. Hollywood did this kind of thing with the ‘B’ westerns in the 30s and 40s, cobbling together a film with footage from previous films. It was lame on horseback and it is lame with flying monsters.

 

All Monsters Attack (1969), directed by Ishiro Honda. This kaiju film receives a rating of 3.9 on IMDB. Apparently, it is one of the least appreciated Godzilla films by both critics and fans. Too bad. In my humble estimation, this is about as good as it gets. The film actually has a plot – a young boy, Ishiro (Tomonori Yazaki) endures mistreatment by a number of bullies, and he retreats into a fantasy world where he meets animated versions of his toy friends – Godzilla and his ilk. He also meets Godzilla’s son, Minilla, who also suffers from bullying. Real life and fantasy life reflect each other. In real life, Ichiro has parents who work all the time and leave him under the care of a neighbour who is a toy maker. Being left on his own, Ichiro finds himself threatened not only by the bullies, but also by a pair of incompetent thieves. In his fantasy world, Ichiro is under threat of attack by a Kamacuras, a huge mantis thing. He falls into a hole and is rescued by Manilla. Manilla has a father who hangs around and tells him to buck up and meet his bully head on, as it were. Ichiro helps Manilla deal with the creature that bullies him by instructing him to use a catapult. Back in the real world, Ichiro escapes from the thieves and also gets the better of his bullies. The action takes place in a polluted city, Kawasaki, giving us a taste of the environmental theme we will see more forcefully in Godzilla vs Hedorah. Our protagonist, Ishiro, is a lively tyke, and an attractive character played well by young Yazaki. The monsters have character, and perform their bits admirably. As a film about a young boy’s fears and struggles, All Monsters Attack is a refreshing change from the familiar stomping of cars and crushing of buildings and snagging of planes. This is, dare I say, a sweet little film. Thanks again Cole and John.

 

Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971), directed by Yoshimitsu Banno. Sometimes called Godzilla vs the Smog Monster, this film takes on pollution, both our polluted skies and our polluted ocean. The film contains some disgusting shots of both land and sea littered and ruined by pollution of various types. These shots are quite powerful, and we might be mindful that this is 1971. Fast forward to 2021, and we have not progressed in our attempt to clean up the environment. Anyhow, in this film all the sludge that drains into the sea has spawned a sludge monster, Hedorah. This creature grows and grows and partitions and mutates; it can swim, crawl, walk, and fly in its various manifestations. The only human who seems to grasp the situation and know how to deal with it is a young boy. Adult humans are incapable of stopping this creature and its onslaught on the environment, but the nuclear-spawned Godzilla arrives to help out. For a time, Godzilla too seems helpless against an adversary that mutates and grows and hurls acidic sludge. But then this Godzilla is clever, and he figures out how to turn the tables on Hedorah, using a man-made contraption and his impressive breath. The gestures of both monsters are a hoot to behold. Accompanying this confrontation of monsters are a number of animated sequences and a recurring psychedelic scene in which dancers, at one point, have fish heads of various colours and shapes. The accompanying song, calls for the saving of the earth.  Music throughout the film is strange, and I guess this is appropriate for a strange film. Thanks to John and Cole Boivin for sharing this film with us.

 

Godzilla (2014), directed by Gareth Edwards. No more rubber suited monsters. We have CGI Godzilla, and he’s a whopper. He may be big, but he lacks the personality (!) of the rubber-suited guy and his fellow creatures. Having said this, I note that this film tries valiantly to continue the themes and sensibility of the 1954 original Godzilla movie. We have the nuclear backdrop to what happens folded into the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the 2011 Fukushima disaster. We have the human element as we follow, first the American scientist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche), then their son Ford (Aron Taylor-Johnson) and his family, wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and son Sam (Carson Bolde) as they try to reunite after being separated by various chaotic events initiated by the monsters. And speaking of monsters, we have a couple of new ones called MUTOS (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms), who feed off radiation, even to the rather wacky willingness to swallow nuclear bombs. Our hero, Godzilla, comes along to restore balance (?) by defeating the two MUTOS. And yes, we have lots of buildings crushed, large bridges destroyed, jets tossed from the sly, boats flipped about like toys, and so on. All this adds up to a not uninteresting melange. I forgot to mention the Japanese scientist, Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) who wanders about looking dour and trying to be heard above the furor. I’m not sure if any of this makes sense, but it makes for impressive fireworks. 

 

Godzilla: King of Monsters (2019), directed by Michael Dougherty. This entry into the monsterverse picks up from the 2014 film, and several of the characters return: Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), Dr. Graham (Sally Hawkins), Admiral Stenz (David Strathairn), for example. We also have new characters to play out the human element to the plot, most obviously the Russell family, father (Kyle Chandler), mother (Vera Farmiga), and daughter (Millie Bobby Brown). This family is separated both by choice (the father and mother separated after their son Andrew was stomped on by the Big Guy in the 2014 film) and by circumstances (the monsters have a way of separating people physically while bringing them closer emotionally). Then we have the monsters: Mothra, Rodan, MUTOS, King Ghidorah (Monster Zero), and Godzilla. One nifty trick that is easy to miss is that one of the scientists here is Dr. Chen (Ziyi Zhang) and she apparently has a sister. Those who remember Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) will know that Mothra is accompanied by tiny twin sisters with tiny voices. Anyway, the monsters here are suitably large and suitably destructive and suitably loud. They make a lot of rubble. As for the plot, that has something to do with nuclear power, a monster from outer space, and the balance of nature that depends upon the Titans (the monsters), well do we really care? This is a film in which the lost city of Atlantis can make an appearance without comment, and a teenager can steal a crucial device and escape a well-sealed compound with people, including her mother, all around her and a father’s attempt to open an airplane door from the outside takes precedence over the battle of two behemoths. In other words, this is a film with scrappy bits that hang onto the larger confrontations of the CGI monsters. If you like this sort of thing, then this film is for you. If you are more “meh,” then perhaps you might like a good western!

 A few by Truffaut.

Mississippi Mermaid (1969), directed by Francois Truffaut. Truffaut dedicates this film to Jean Renoir, and I assume he does so because of Renoir’s focus in his films on the machinations of people in love. In Mississippi Mermaid, Truffaut focuses on a fellow besotted by the beauty of his mail-order bride, a bride who is not the person he thinks she is, but this ultimately does not matter because he finds her so compellingly beautiful. The fellow, a rich owner of a cigarette factory on the island of Reunion (Jean-Paul Belmondo) remarks: “Before I met you, life seemed simple. Now I know it isn't. You really fouled things up." Yes, indeed. At one point in the action, Julie (Catherine Deneuve) and Louis (Belmondo) go to the cinema to see Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, and we know how the French directors of the New Wave loved Johnny Guitar. This noir western delivers a quirky love story suited to the sensibility we see in Mississippi Mermaid. Of course, the two leads in Truffaut’s film (Deneuve and Belmondo) bring their cinematic history with them to deepen the viewer’s experience. Deneuve’s work with Luis Bunuel and Belmondo’s with Godard enrich their roles here. This is a story of obsessive love. The heat emanating from these lovers has its counterpart in the snowy end to their time together.

 

A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972), directed by Francois Truffaut. Imagine the nastiest of film noir pictures melded with broad comedy, farce really. Well, if you can imagine such a film, then this just might be it. We have the rather dim noir hero who encounters the femme fatale, we have the narrative voice-over and flashbacks, we have people on the run, we have a prison, and we have a number of violent encounters. I stop to catch breath. We even have a Hitchcockian scene on a church tower. The whole thing is played for laughs, played broadly and even bawdily. Nice tracking shots carry us along. Lunacy, or should I say loonacy as in looney tunes, abounds. This is uncharacteristic for Truffaut. Or is it? We still have his interest in the intricacies and vagaries of the human heart. The action is fairly predictable, but the characters manage, just, to keep it interesting. The main male character, who ends up being a sap, is an academic who is writing a book on female criminals. The main female character is a prisoner who has quit a story to tell. The way she tells this story is not always the way we see the same story. Narrators can be unreliable.

 

The Woman Next Door (1981), directed by Francois Truffaut. The first thing I thought of after watching this film was King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun. Duel in the Sun has the nickname, “Lust in the Dust,” and The Woman Next Door has little or no dust, but it does have the other. In a little village just outside Grenoble, France, next door neighbours find themselves embroiled in an old secret. Once again Truffaut considers affairs of the heart, its passions and desires and confusions and errors and intentions and complications. People play tennis, drive cars, have dinner, have encounters in the grocery store, have assignations here and there, draw conclusions on the wall. We have a narrator, a woman with a prosthetic leg who once threw herself from a window in despair after being jilted in love. Truffaut delivers his story with a Hitchcockian flair, the camera peeking at things best kept secret. I used to say I was not a fan of Truffaut, but this past while his films are nudging me to change my mind. This guy knows how to tell what might be a banal story in an intriguing manner.

 

Finally Sunday! (1983), directed by Francois Truffaut. This is Truffaut’s final film, and it ends with the camera focusing on a group of children kicking a camera lens back and forth, a fitting final metaphor for Truffaut and his compatriots in the ‘New Wave’. These directors kicked around the filmic experience in a playful manner, delivering a variety of cinematic pleasures. The cinematic pleasure here is Truffaut’s kicking about a blend of Hitchcock and cinema noir. And he has great fun doing this. The protagonist is Julien Vercel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a businessman who may or may not be a murderer. He is on the lam, out to prove his innocence. Sound familiar? Like Hitchcock protagonists, Vercel is aided by his loyal secretary, Barbara Becker (Fanny Ardant). They meet the usual suspects in their adventures. As in Hitchcock films, the viewer is offered snippets that may or not prove helpful in figuring out who did what. Shot in black and white by Nestor Almendros, the film looks vibrant. Now a confession: I watched this film while feeling quite drowsy and so I should really watch it a second time when I am more alert. The film deserves close attention. What, for example, does Kubrik’s Paths of Glory have to do with this film? Also why does Truffaut reference Convoi de la peur (1977), an American film (Sorcerer) based on a French film, Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur, 1953)? In other words, Finally Sunday! has many details for the observant viewer.

 

 Shooting Stars (1928), directed by A. V. Bramble and Anthony Asquith. “A must-see for all silent film fans,” so says the liner note from KINO KORBER, and you know what! This is a reliable comment. Everything from the cinematography to the sets to the editing to the acting even to the story is first-rate. The moving crane shot near the beginning of the film is nothing short of astounding, especially for 1928. The camera, peering from on high, follows the action as a couple of actors walk through studio sets, the man following the woman and we see various film sets and ongoing work in a bustling studio. In other words, much of the film deals with the making of movies and it does this with loving attention to detail. We see directors at work instructing actors, cameramen rolling film, lighting persons handling lights, set people arranging furniture and flowers, actors pretending to be on horses when they are just on wooden structures pulled along rails. All this is fascinating. Then we have the story of two married actors whose marriage is in trouble because the woman, Mae Flowers (Annette Benson) is having an affair with another actor not her husband, Andy Wilks (Donald Calthrop), a comedian in the Charlie Chaplin vein. Mae’s husband is Julian Gordon (Brian Aherne), and he is a cowboy in films. Julian and Mae are making a movie called Prairie Love, and Mae slyly puts a real cartridge in a gun that one actor will use to shoot Julian in a scene about to be shot. Of course, things go seriously wrong and do not work out as Mae had hoped. The action gives us an insight into the rather vain lives of celebrities; we often see them preening themselves, looking in mirrors, or posing for the public. The intent is, perhaps, to remind us of scandals that unsettled Hollywood in the 1920s, scandals that involved such actors as Fatty Arbuckle and Olive Thomas. Then we have the mysterious deaths of Thomas Ince or William Desmond Taylor. In short, Shooting Stars would have been provocative stuff in 1928. It remains a testimony to the excellence of silent cinema.

The Flapper (1920), directed by Alan Crosland. This is one of the ill-fated Olive Thomas’s final films. She died after taking a poisonous concoction by mistake in a Paris hotel room when she was just 25. In The Flapper, she plays 16-year-old schoolgirl ‘Ginger’ King. Ginger has a rebellious streak and a fancy for an older man, Richard Channing (William P. Carleton). She finds herself in trouble after, on her way home from boarding school, taking a side trip to New York where she falls in with a couple of shady characters. She also adopts the “flapper” fashion and in the process popularizes the term for the next decade. The first half or so of the film has some impressive winter scenes, especially the ones focusing on winter sports: skating, skiing, tobogganing, and even ski jumping. Then we have the winking moose head affixed to a wall in one scene; what this is doing in the film is beyond me. Also endearing are the inventive intertitles with their clever art work. All in all, this domestic comedy is amusing and entertaining. Its focus on the expectations for young women is also worth the viewing. 

 

The Haunted Castle (1921), directed by F. W. Murnau. If I listed my ten favourite directors, Murnau would be one of them and he would appear near the top. Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Faust, Sunrise, City Girl, Tabu – these are magnificent achievements. The Haunted Castle comes just before Nosferatu and it is Murnau getting ready for those later films. Something of a murder mystery, The Haunted Castle moves slowly. Everything moves slowly here from the characters to the story. The acting involves much swooning. The “Anxious Man” offers some comic relief, but mostly we have much swooning. What is, however, noteworthy are the sets and compositions. The interiors with hallways, doors, stairs, and large rooms are excellent. The KINO restoration of this film is stunning in its clarity and tones from auburn to blue to familiar black and white. The story also has a couple of dream sequences that gesture toward expressionism. What matters is what we see. The story is slight and, perhaps, obvious. At the centre of the story is a bit concerning what we see not being what we see, and this serves as a nice comment on the film itself.

 

The Phantom Honeymoon (1919), directed by J. Searle Dawley. Picking up on the popularity of spiritualism at the time, this film is a darn fine ghost story. Told in a series of flashbacks, and with a final sequence that shows the phantom couple touring the world in their phantom car, this is a film with flare and energy. The duel that results in the death of the bride groom involves a snake rather than swords or pistols. The location is a cavernous castle. The characters are lively, and early on we have an imaginative bit with the two lovers riding on the back of the car of the cad who perpetrates the murder of our hero. The special effects are impressive for a film made in 1919, and the narrative, using both analepsis and paralepsis, is sophisticated. The frame has a ghost debunker, Professor Juno P. Tidewater, travelling Europe with two nieces, and happening upon Belmore Castle, known to be haunted. He meets the Hindu caretaker, Sakes, and listens to Sakes recount the history of the castle’s haunting. The ins and outs of the story are intriguing, to say the least. This film is a forgotten gem.

 

Bestia (The Polish Dancer, 1916), directed by Alexander Hertz. This is an early Pola Negri film, made in Poland in 1916 and released early the following year. The film has one rather dramatic and passionate dance sequence, but mostly it is a melodrama about a young woman who desires independence, runs off with her boyfriend, takes the boyfriend’s money, finds employment as a model and then as a cabaret dancer, finds love with a married man (she does not know he is married), thinks to marry this man, learns the truth, is murdered by her former boyfriend, and meanwhile the married man separates from his wife and she dies. This is not a comedy. The film is shot well and for the most part the scenes play well. Pola Negri is interesting. The early scenes in which the young woman’s father berates her for staying out late are powerful. All in all, this is a competent early film, but nothing out of the ordinary.

 

Hypocrites (1915), directed by Lois Weber. Weber is one of the first women film directors of note. Before she entered the film industry, she was a street evangelist, and her time delivering the gospel serves her well in Hypocrites, a film that focuses on two clerics, one from the Middle Ages and one in modern times. The medieval monk Gabriel (Courtenay Foote) sculpts a beautiful naked woman and presents it to the monastery and the outside community as the “naked truth.” The people kill him for creating this salacious statue. The modern cleric, known as the Abbot (Herbert Standing), preaches a sermon on hypocrisy and tries to tell the people in his congregation the naked truth. Here the naked truth is allegorized in the figure of a naked woman (17-year-old Margaret Edwards) superimposed on the film. This is, perhaps, the first time that film showed full frontal nudity. In any case, the Abbot does not fare much better than his medieval counterpart. One member of his congregation calls for him to be fired, a member of the choir reads a newspaper, the Abbot confiscates the newspaper, and he dies holding this newspaper while sitting inside his church. This is, apparently, scandalous as the final shot of the film indicates. Throughout the film we have much allegorizing in the manner of, say, a John Bunyan. Truth as an unclothed woman is as daring as we could ask for, and Weber’s handling of a dual story is firm and accomplished.

 

Wine of Youth (1924), directed by King Vidor. This film has three Mary’s, grandmother, mother, and daughter. The focus is on the daughter, although the mother and grandmother have their moments. Young Mary (Eleanor Boardman) is a flapper, out to experience life in ways the older generation(s) cannot comprehend. She spends her time partying and fending off the advances of two suitors. The thing the older generation finds most disturbing and incomprehensive is Mary’s desire to “experiment” before she gets married, rather than after. Mary refuses her parents’ command that she stay home and live a normal life; she goes for a camping trip with two suitors so she can decide which one of them will make the most reliable husband. On the camping trip, Mary sees the value of a grounded family life like the one she has with her mother, father, and brother. She returns home early to discover that what she thought was a happy family life is no such thing. Her mother and father detest each other. All of this is pretty heady stuff for 1924, and the message is important. I only wish the ending had not found a way of circumventing the impact of what has gone on before. It seems clear that Mary’s parents really do not like each other, and yet at the end we are to believe they have mended fences and are ready to start over.

 

The Show-Off (1926), directed by Malcolm St. Clair. This is a comedy about a blow-hard, a man who is always talking and talking and blathering about what a fine fellow, what a successful fellow he is. He is loquacious to a degree. This motor-mouth man is Aubrey Piper (Ford Sterling), a piker who ends up having to pay the piper. Aubrey’s girlfriend is Amy Fisher (Lois Wilson). Her family, father, mother, and brother, do not, to put it mildly, much care for Aubrey. Anyway, Aubrey and Amy get married, Amy’s father dies, the Pipers move in with the Fishers, and Aubrey just about ruins the household. The film has a wild car-driving scene that results in Aubrey going to court and having to pay a thousand dollar fine. His brother-in-law, Joe (Gregory Kelly), pays the fine with the money he was going to use to finance his invention of a material that prevents rust from forming. Family finances are in a shambles and they are going to lose their house. All appears bleak. Looking on is the girl next door, Joe’s girlfriend Clara (Louise Brooks). She steals every scene in which she appears. Also noteworthy is Claire McDowell as Mom Fisher. Her facial expressions are very natural; she does not display the excessive gestures that some silent acting elicits. This is an amiable, if predictable, comedy/melodrama. You can find an excellent copy of the film on YouTube.

 The Sacrifice (1986), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. This is Tarkovsky’s final film. It is also his most Bergmanesque film. The action takes place in the bleak environment of the Island of Faro, Bergman’s place of residence and location for many of his films. Two of the lead actors, Erland Josephson as Alexander and Allan Edwall as Otto, are members of Bergman’s stock company. The cinematographer is Sven Nykvist who also photographed many of Bergman’s films. The narrative, such as it is, also has the spiritual probing we often have in Bergman’s films. While watching, I thought of both Shame (1968) and Persona (1966). Having made this connection between Tarkovsky and Bergman, I should add that Tarkovsky’s film is clearly of his own making. His use of hallucinatory images, especially nearer the end, and art work and colour are distinctively his own. The story here involves a fifty-year-old former actor celebrating his birthday. Early in the film we hear the unsettling sounds of low-flying jets (I thought of Antonioni), and this sound is a premonition of what transpires later in the film when a television announcer give news of World War 111 beginning. This news, not surprisingly, shatters the birthday pleasantness, and leads to Alexander’s descent into madness. The film gives us a clash of silence and verbiage. Most of the characters are willing to speak at length about such weighty themes as spirituality, performance, mortality, relationships, art, history, and so on, but one character, the young boy referred to as Little Man, does not speak, or speaks very little and hoarsely because of an operation on his neck and (I presume) vocal cords. This young boy’s silence speaks as forcefully as the other characters’ volubility. Finally, what do I think? This is not as impressive a film for me as Tarkovsky’s Stalker, but I do admire the look of this film, a look largely accomplished by Nykvist’s cinematography. The beauty in such minimalist places, outside and inside, I find compelling. And then we have that final image of the burning house, an image, alas, for our times.

 

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1988), directed by Michal Leszczylowski. There are two kinds of film makers, Tarkovsky asserts, the ones who reproduce the world that surrounds them, and the ones who create their own worlds. Tarkovsky mentions Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Dovzhenko as examples of the latter. You can guess in which category Tarkovsky fits. This is ostensibly a “Making of…” film, but it is so much more.  Anyone interested in just how films come into being or in the auteur theory or in the cinema and art of Tarkovsky would do well to seek out this film. We see the collaborative nature of film making in action. We also see just how a film can be the result of one person’s vision. The focus here is the making of Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice. Much of what we see is the work on set, the preparing of scenes and rehearsing of actors, but we also have footage of Tarkovsky speaking to film students and responding to interviews, and an interview with his wife. The footage from the set of The Sacrifice shows just how meticulous Tarkovsky was. He oversees the choice of colours, shapes of furniture, placement of objects such as mirrors or side tables, lighting, and so on. He demonstrates movement for the actors. In short, we see demonstrated Tarkovsky’s idea that cinema consists of bits of time taken from the flow of time and sculpted into an emotional experience for the viewer. This is the best chronicle of how film making works that I have seen.

Mirror (1975), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Poetry in motion. This film is about family, about history, about time, about war, about mothers and sons, about earth, air, fire, and water, about birds, about mirrors, about dreams, about relationships, about children, about adults, about nature, about the mystery and beauty of things. The narrator is a dying middle-aged man contemplating his past in its personal and more widely historical contexts. What we see is both close to incomprehensible and intensely compelling. As we would expect with Tarkovsky, the film gives us a series of dreams, a series of marvellously resonant and beautiful images. This is film making that aspires to the condition of poetry, and – eureka – achieves this condition. The voice over also delivers a poetic effusion to tickle the fancy. This is filmic poetry, as for example in the shots of the wind in the grass or in the trees or in the bushes, or shots of rain falling heavily, or in a bird taking flight, or in objects slowly rolling from a table because of the wind. The simple act of washing one’s hair is poetic, strange, mysterious, and powerful. Then we have small details such as the quickly caught picture of a poster for Andrei Rublev. The final tracking shot is haunting.

Earth (1930), directed by Alexander Dovzhenko. I am sure Tarkovsky watched this film over and over. It has the pace and solemnity of Tarkovsky’s films. It offers both similarity and contrast to Eisenstein’s great work. Similarity in its focus on people and contrast in its slow burn. The plot is slim, having to do with the coming of collective farming and the class struggle. It chronicles the change from one way of life with landowners and priests to another of collective ownership and a new way of doing without clergy. Forms of ritual are changing. Some accept this gratefully and others resist. The scene of Basil’s girlfriend grieving is remarkable. The central action involves, first the coming of a tractor to the land, and second, a night time dance and then murder of a local supporter of change. But plot is less important here than image. This is a film of images, of faces, of fruits, of fields, of rain and wind, and the making of bread. The film, silent though it is, aspires to the condition of music. Slow and poetic, Earth is essential cinema.