Somewhere in the dialogical midst of the documentary Double Play, James Benning says to Richard Linklater: “I’m not interested in them making another good film . . . I’m more interested in my students finding a new language, a new way of working, of pushing to make the film culture grow.” In the July/August issue of FILM COMMENT, Holly Willis sheds some light on how Boyhood does just that over the course of its radical temporal experiment in depicting experience on screen. “At its core,” writes Willis, “Linklater’s attentive portrait of a Texan boy named Mason is less about what it means to be a young male than it is an evocation of another key theme in the filmmaker’s body of work, namely time. And not just time as a philosophical concept, but our time, the present moment, and what it means to be alive now. Right now.”

That attentiveness is part of why Manohla Dargis in The New York Times memorably declared the film to be a masterpiece of realism—a realism that “is jolting, and so brilliantly realized and understated that it would be easy to overlook.” Yet if the quality and scale of the film’s realist execution is unprecedented, the approach, Willis says, also harkens back to the earliest of mandates in cinema: “to reflect reality as it occurs in time in a sequence of images.” To achieve that feat while filming over the course of 12 years, Linklater stuck with the traditional medium of 35mm film to chronicle the lives of Mason and his family—divorced parents Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), and older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater).

And so as the characters grow and age, the look of the movie remains consistent, convincing, and uniquely expressive. Amy Taubin argues in Artforum that the truly fascinating aspect of Boyhood is how it spotlights the temporal paradox tacitly embedded in cinema. The use of 35mm “lends Boyhood the sun-dappled look of a memory piece, despite being couched in the present tense—as a succession of present moments . . . Boyhood in its entirety belongs to the past of cinema, just as Coltrane’s boyhood has passed before the audience ever sees Mason on-screen.”

If the medium of Boyhood looks backward during an era in flux, so, too, does the story, by its very approach and texture. Mason’s story is told as if filtered through memory, frequently omitting the sort of pivotal moments which are paradigmatic of the coming-of-age genre but which in actuality often fail to impress upon the mind. Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot reminds us of what Arquette’s Olivia says to her son toward the end of the film: “Arquette mentions a ‘series of milestones’ to Mason, including ‘the time we thought you were dyslexic, the time we taught you how to ride a bike’; also weddings, divorces, getting her master’s degree. At this point, we realize that we didn’t see any of this onscreen.” These unseen scenarios are the photo-album moments Linklater bypasses in his unassuming epic of growing up, of time passing and life happening, and which resonate with many of our own memories of childhood, whether or not we grew up in Texas with divorced parents, fought with an overachieving older sister, went in costume to a Harry Potter release party, or posted signs for an Obama campaign.

All of which may not be for everyone: even for A. A. Dowd, who wrote of the film favorably for The A.V. Club, Linklater’s formally unconventional narrative comes across as more desultory than drifting and functions as “an excuse to indulge in some of his signature Lefty sloganeering and stoner philosophizing.” But as Double Play director Gabe Klinger observes in a Cinema Scope essay on the film’s approach, “the hidden aim of Boyhood is to dismantle that convention in mainstream narrative cinema that characters’ lives have to be defined by prescribed momentous events.” Linklater’s movie is instead an extraordinary piece of filmmaking and organically shaped drama, in which “Mason Jr.’s personal trajectory is never forced upon us; he becomes assertive and more interesting over time. This makes his maturation plausible in a narrative sense (and the film’s conclusion satisfying), but also aligns with the film’s philosophical view that life’s substance is found in the in-between moments.”

Boyhood’s cyclical quality, always between being in the present moment and becoming memory, makes the jumps into Mason’s future all the more tinted with nostalgia, eventually leaving us at the doorstep of college where we as viewers exit Mason’s life. We know that the time before our eyes has already passed, on screen and off, and we wonder: where does it go from here?

Since the advent of CGI, people no longer talk much about “unfilmable” novels—or if they do, they generally mean novels that can’t easily be filmed because they’re too nebulous, or bulky, or purely linguistic. But anything that simply involves spectacle and the fantastic is no longer a problem, as long as you can afford armies of VFX techies to crunch algorithms.

But here’s a prime example of a novel which was long considered a classic case of the unfilmable: Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours, the title usually translated as Froth on the Daydream, though it literally means “The Froth of Days.” Written in 1946, Vian’s novel is pure fantasia, the story of the burgeoning and tragic demise of a romance, set in a surreal postwar Paris, something between a Lewis Carroll daydream and a futuristic utopia that abruptly turns sour. L’Écume des jours, with its ludic flights of free association and its jazz-fixated aesthetic (imagine Rimbaud if he’d been a Louis Armstrong fanatic), is the sort of book you visualize so vividly while reading it that there doesn’t seem any pressing reason for actually turning it into images on a screen. (In fact, the book has previously been filmed twice: once before in France in 1968, and more recently in Japan as Kuroe, aka Chloé, with a cast including Tetsuo iron man Shinya Tsukamoto.)

The book belatedly became a cult item in France in the late Sixties, but Vian, who died in 1959 (while watching a movie adaptation of another of his novels, I Spit on Your Graves), was already famous in various guises. He was a postwar Saint-Germain scene-setter, a scandalous crime writer (writing Spillane-ish faux-American thrillers under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan), a jazz trumpeter, a record company executive, and a singer and writer of acidic chansons. In his songwriting, he’s perhaps best known for the stately but impassioned antiwar anthem “Le Déserteur,” but he’s also the immediate precursor of Serge Gainsbourg, both in the way he used his creaky “non-singer” tonalities to superb effect and in his scabrous wit. (His S&M love song “Fais-moi mal Johnny” [“Hurt Me Johnny”], as sung by Magali Noël, is one of the most outrageously perverse numbers you’ll ever hear.)

In truth, I can’t imagine that even a version of L’Écume des jours starring Tsukamoto could be much stranger than Mood Indigo, which is the English title of the adaptation undertaken by Michel Gondry. You’d imagine that Gondry would be a perfect fit for Vian’s imagination: he’s a polymath steeped in pop culture, with a naturally transatlantic sensibility and a powerful streak of the unashamedly childlike vision that characterizes L’Écume des jours. Vian’s novel is indeed, in a sense, about childhood and its end. Its hero is a carefree playboy named Colin, who has everything—money, leisure, youth, and an attentive chef-manservant named Nicolas, who’s a cross between Jeeves and Escoffier, with a priapic streak. Colin also has a miraculous machine of his own creation, a “pianocktail”—a keyboard crossed with a drinks cabinet that, when played, turns jazz numbers into heady cocktails (a hep update on the “perfume organ” from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s manifesto for Decadent aesthetics, the 1884 novel Against Nature).

The only thing Colin lacks, and yearns for, is someone to love, but then he meets Chloé. They fall instantly in love and soon marry. But then (and I’m not revealing too much since this is one of the book’s most famous conceits), Chloé falls ill from a water lily growing in her lung—a parody of the Romantic myth of the consumptive heroine as seen in La Dame aux camélias, woman as exotic but transient flower.

One important feature of Vian’s book is that it isn’t purely about the whimsical paradise where it begins, but is just as much about the collapse of that paradise—for its characters are essentially children, doomed to become careworn adults before they are ready. As Chloé wanes, the world Colin and she share vegetates, shrinks (literally), loses its bloom, its joy, its energy. This is a tragedy of entropy and decay—and to Gondry’s credit, he’s as interested in the fall in Vian’s story as he is in the initial Eden. But I don’t think most viewers will come away haunted by the film’s dark passages: what will stick with most people, and no doubt severely rankle with many, is the goofy exuberance of the first half.

What’s remarkable about Gondry’s ambition is that he really has brought a vast amount of Vian’s material onto the screen. The film bombards us with ever crazier imagery: a humanized mouse dancing between “strings” of sunlight, tables of animated food à la Svankmajer, eels that pop in and out of water taps, and most gorgeously, a goofy dance called the biglemoi that turns dancers’ legs into elongated rubber stalks. The setting is ostensibly postwar Paris, but Gondry pursues Vian’s anachronistic turn, sometimes to inspired effect. There’s a sci-fi-primitive kind of video jukebox (put on an Ellington LP, and the Duke appears on a screen, played by, who else, August “Kid Creole” Darnell). There’s a sort of imaginary proto-Google system, which involves binoculars, a heavily staffed call center, and a creaky version of the pre-Internet Minitel system that was popular in France in the Eighties. There’s an inspired moment in which Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloé (Audrey Tautou) visit Les Halles in Paris and see it as the fenced-off worksite it has actually been of late—stepping out of the fiction into a vaguely recognizable now.

You could draw up an inventory of Gondry’s different types of visual ideas: literal representations of images in the text (an ice-rink worker with the head of a bird); more concrete variations of poetic images (a passing pink cloud here becomes a fairground-style car that the lovers ride, hoist aloft by a crane); elaborations of things simply hinted at in passing by Vian (like some otherwise inexplicable slapstick business with an over-lively chair); flights of fancy that aren’t in the text yet catch its spirit; and additions that are entirely Gondry’s own, like the inspired framing device of starting the film in a sort of text factory where armies of typists hammer out the story that’s being told.

The point is that Gondry does it all, and with indiscriminate energy, as if he doesn’t know what to leave out or to go easy on. He can’t resist any impulse to go the whole nine yards, and further still (which would explain the reported budget of $23 million). It means that much of the film will make no sense at all if you haven’t recently read the novel—and even then you’ll be lost some of the time. I had to look up the episode of the pharmacist’s shop where rabbits shit out pills after eating chrome-plated carrots, and I can’t conclude it was entirely worth Gondry’s trouble to actually portray this. That’s the big problem: everything in the film is so solid, so real-seeming (partly as a result of Gondry’s brilliant way with analog as well as digital illusion, and techniques like stop-motion), whereas the novel is by nature light, a construct of weightless, casually handled language from which images emerge as if by magic. Gondry’s habit of turning Vian’s poetic hallucinations into sight gags makes for a sometimes oppressive literalism.

There’s also a problem of coherence. The film currently runs at 94 minutes, pelting along at a rush that doesn’t always make immediate sense, even as pop surrealism. But the original cut released in France earlier this year was a full 130 minutes; I haven’t seen it, but I can’t imagine how the film would have been bearable at that length. There’s a fair bit of material in this shorter cut that feels like a set of scarred remnants from the original—fragments of a crazed public appearance by adulated philosopher Jean-Sol Partre (Philippe Torreton), borne aloft in a giant replica of his own pipe, and the end sequence which tumbles a little too abruptly into the depressive mood of the book’s dying fall. Still, the downturn in mood is distinctive and unforgiving, at odds with the reassuring pathos of weepie convention. Color increasingly bleeds from the film, the screen itself shrinks, darkly vignetted at the corners, and the end credits, over black-and-white footage of Duke Ellington projected underwater, offers as depressive a conclusion as I’ve seen on screen recently. I just wish this lugubrious turn felt fully earned—but perhaps that’s a result of the film’s radical contraction. And I wish that, as well as maintaining the melancholy, Gondry had managed to evoke the black satire and anger that are key to Vian’s anti-authoritarian, anti-military (and anti-work!) stance.

There are other problems, notably the casting. I’ve never warmed to Tautou, the original Gallic Pixie Dream Girl—but aged 37, and 13 years after Amélie, it doesn’t entirely suit her to be gamining around, all wide-eyed and bubbly. The same goes for tireless grinner Romain Duris (now 40), who even 20 years ago would have been too wolfish for virginal dreamer Colin. Gondry might have done better to cast two ingénu unknowns, but that doesn’t buy you a massive effects budget. It’s also irksome that he’s cast Omar Sy as Nicolas; it introduces a racial mix into the story, making it more plausibly about modern France, but at the uncomfortable cost of making Nicolas a compliant black sidekick.

Mood Indigo is, by any sane criteria, a quixotic, even ill-advised folly. There’s a certain overexertion to it all—like Terry Gilliam, Gondry is a Stakhanovite of surrealism, always compelled to push things that little bit harder when you wish they’d been handled lightly. Yet it’s hard not to marvel at his ambition, to be struck by the sheer joy, and sometimes beauty on display here. Whether Gondry’s flamboyant, insistent, and often expensive images match the weightless delirium you can conjure up for free by reading Vian is another question. Mood Indigo proves that L’Écume des jours can be filmed—but it probably can’t be, as film, successfully re-dreamed.

Some time ago a friend told me, with regard to my own online self-presentation: “It’s great how you tell everyone how terrible they are.” Now, the idea of being remembered as a critic at all is the height of delusional self-importance, but pretending for a moment that such things as legacies still exist, this is not precisely the one that I’d been hoping to build.

Such matters have been on my mind since reading a piece on the subject of “being a colossal prick on the Internet” which the critic Glenn Kenny posted a few weeks ago on his website, in which the author reviews his history as an online shit-stirrer and town decrier. These reflections were prompted by a widely circulated Internet kerfuffle in which one Ed Champion unloaded 11,000 words of animus on Emily Gould (pictured above), a pioneering Gawker gadfly in the Wild West years of Web 2.0, since turned woman of analog letters. Kenny, recognizing something of himself in that frothing jeremiad, states that we should “spare a little compassion for” Champion, concluding that such excessive ad hominem rancor—as distinct from actual criticism—says more about the writer’s unhappiness and thwarted sense of ego than it does about his putative subject. Speaking from experience, I will confirm that there is some direct correlation between a dearth of paying assignments on the horizon and finding the time to form (usually unfavorable) opinions about the work of your peers. When you’re in the pink, you’re simply less likely to worry about what anybody else is up to.

It takes some cojones to write a mea culpa on the order of Kenny’s, but, odd as it may sound, I hope he hasn’t retired his shillelagh for good. I say “odd” because, as the score of humans with the inclination and ability to remember such things will recall, I’ve absorbed a few brickbats from Kenny myself. For the most part they didn’t rattle me too much, as I was reasonably comfortable that they fell wide of the mark, though once he caught me dead-to-rights inverting the names of Antoine d’Anthac (fictional) and Jean Anouilh (real) in a write-up of Alain Resnais’s 2012 You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, and sometimes I still feel the bruise from that one. As much as there is a temptation to blame your editors or proofreaders (kidding, of course) when something goes to print with a glaring error, the conscientious writer knows in their secret heart who the buck stops with.

Why, then, am I speaking in favor of abuse and contempt? In the immortal words of Amanda Young in Saw: “He helped me.” While outright calumny doesn’t do anyone any favors, having one’s failings pointed out certainly can, especially if you happen to be inclined towards Maoist–style self-criticism. And if nothing else, being on the receiving end of an occasional dousing in Haterade or throwing of shade is palpable evidence that people are paying attention to what you’re doing—though it’s not necessarily evidence, as is often assumed, that you’re doing anything right. It is also a reminder, should any be needed beyond one’s own self-regulation, to keep your writing, your facts, and your ideas as tight and orderly as possible, lest any opening be provided for those who wish to see you face-plant.

Armond White, for one, hasn’t let the innumerable breaches opened by his ever-devolving prose style deter him from keeping up his pose as the last standard-bearer of critical excellence. See, for example, his review of Life Itself, Steve James’s documentary about the life and work of the late Roger Ebert, for the National Review. (White has also contributed to FILM COMMENT, in years past.) In the piece, White refers to criticism’s legacy of “rigorous practice and high aim” to which, implicitly, the piece’s author is the inheritor. This phrase is found in the same paragraph where the co-host of At the Movies is referred to as “Eber.” (His wife’s name is later incorrectly given as “Chazz.”) Further on, as he’s using the term “Internetters” and leaving a parenthetical dangling obscenely open, White refers to Ebert’s “epigones equally prone to intellectual banalities,” also dismissed as “disciples” and “followers.” (In their numbers we must count Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, whose long piece on his tenure at the last incarnation of Ebert Presents: At the Movies is one of the better film-related reads I’ve encountered this week.)

White is the author of an annual “Better-Than” list which uses one presumably underrated film as a stick with which to wallop another presumably overrated one. Along these same lines, he rebukes Ebert’s legacy of “bonhomie and patronage” by contrasting it with the truly gallant career of Pauline Kael—who, of course, was never known to trade in favors. (I kid. Onetime “Paulette” Paul Schrader describes the height of Kael’s influence, when she tried to place him at a newspaper in Seattle, thusly: “[I]t was like the height of the British Empire: ‘You take Rhodesia.’”) That both Ebert and White benefited from Kael’s patronage at various points in their careers—she provides a pull quote on the back cover of White’s essential collection The Resistance—is a fact that White doesn’t explore in greater depth, though in a Cal Trask moment, he does squeeze an apocryphal report of Kael’s dislike for Ebert’s televised endeavors in his 2008 essay “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies,”* which ran in the now-defunct New York Press, and from which both the phrase “Internetters” and most of the salient points in the Life Itself review are lifted intact.

White’s shortcoming as a critic today isn’t his truculence, but the numbing repetitiveness with which he clangs away at the same points. Rather than engage with the phenomena of transient images passing before us on a screen, he prefers to analyze the presumed sociological effect of these movies, largely in terms of the wish fulfillment and back-patting reassurance that they offer the inscribed audience—and assigned critics. (See, for example, his review of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which could easily have been written, in toto, without seeing Richard Linklater’s Boyhood.) This is a pseudo-science if ever there was one, though it provides the writer with an inexhaustible army of straw men to put the torch to, the classic example of this approach being Kael’s “The prissy liberals who wouldn’t give a man with the D.T.’s a quarter for a shot (‘He’ll waste it on a drink’) are just the ones who love the message they take out of Ikiru.” White is, in his fashion, a principled critic, but once you’ve learned the approximate dimensions of those principles, including their many curious loopholes, there’s very little reason to go on reading him for insight, unless you’re a like-minded individual looking for the same brand of gratification that he rebukes critics and their sheep-like readership for seeking in films—reassurance, that is.

White, at least as he comes across on the page, isn’t a critic who exudes a great deal of warmth, while Ebert, judging from the (almost-) unanimous sense of loss that greeted his passing, did. I know critics who consider White a mentor figure, though the image he projects, particularly in the way that he addresses young writers, is that of a gatekeeper who would ward off pretenders to the citadel of criticism with a flaming sword—in marked contrast to the jocular, make-room-at-the-table invitation offered by Ebert. (By virtue of his incomparable name recognition, Ebert was virtually guaranteed to sit at the head of the table, but many nearly-as-well-established figures can’t be bothered to condescend to their professional inferiors.)

I am either uniquely qualified or uniquely unqualified to offer observations on these men. I’ve never met or otherwise interfaced with either. I have read (conservative estimate) 10 million words of White’s writing but, while I was moved by Ebert’s princely comportment during his long illness, as was practically everyone who was aware of it, I have not read him regularly since using his “The Great Movies” essays as a kind of training-wheels canon in my early years as an Internetter with an interest in the Seventh Art.**

My returning to White time and again—a habit of which I’ve been cured in recent years—indicates a certain addiction to bellicosity, and who am I to deny it? A little fighting spirit keeps film culture sharp, on the edge, where it needs to be. Pugnacity was certainly essential to what Phillip Lopate called the “heroic era of moviegoing” in America, a phrase quoted by White in his “What We Don’t Talk About…” screed, and one that named a dangerously seductive myth. Those of us who didn’t experience this period firsthand are encouraged to imagine that film culture at the end of the Sixties was a sort of Monster Island, resounding with the thunderous footsteps of Kael, Andrew Sarris, John Simon, Renata Adler, and Dwight Macdonald instead of Godzilla, Baragon, Mothra, and Rodan, titanic figures exchanging polemics in place of atomic heat-rays.*** Kenny, who wrote about music in the Village Voice in the early Eighties, writes of his early education in the “old-school type Voice pissing-match tradition,” which has been described to me by other veterans of the paper from the same period as a kind of internecine between-the-cubicles warfare in perpetuity, it being vital to the origin myth of the once punchy and self-destructive paper that the tree of journalistic liberty must be refreshed weekly with the blood of co-workers.

The classic film-section example is the house-divided cover dedicated to Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, which pitted Sarris [Anti] against J. “art-house acid” Hoberman [Pro], though there are a plenitude of other instances. The Voice was even willing to provide a platform for outsiders to attack its own, as in the February 22, 1973 edition, where we find Whitney Museum film curator David Bienstock given a full page to respond to Jonas Mekas’s criticisms of New York’s showcases for independent film in his “Movie Journal” column. (Typical excerpt: “[I]s his attitude governed by the fact that he does not control these showcases, preferring to give them as little acknowledgement for their efforts as possible because he deems them competition with his own projects?”) Mekas was by then programming at the still-young Anthology Film Archives, having emerged victorious from a grapple with Amos Vogel for control of avant-garde cinema in New York, though this was only an undercard for film culture’s Ali-Frazier rivalry of the day: Kael-Sarris. The bad blood began with Kael’s rejoinder to Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” her “Circles and Squares,” which was published by Film Quarterly. And the acrimony was still fresh as late as July 1980, when the Voice ran a two-and-a-half-page piece by Sarris called “The Queen Bee of Film Criticism,” ostensibly occasioned by the release of a new volume of her collected criticism, When the Lights Go Down, which fairly bristles with lively put-downs:

“She not only knew how every movie had been put together, and what shameful compromises had to be made, she could also read the minds of the filmmakers, the players, the viewers, and, best of all, the reviewers. It was, of course, all an illusionist’s trick, since anyone with Pauline’s degree of claimed clairvoyance would have been rich and famous much sooner in life.”   

Some of the same gladiatorial spirit, though on a far more demotic/dumbed-down level of discourse, was kept up in the testy “cross talks” between Siskel and Ebert. Discussing his tenure on At the Movies, Vishnevetsky describes the cross talk as “the unscripted back-and-forths which are the core of the show,” and recounts how they were monitored for quality by the show’s director, a non-moviegoer and, as a layman, theoretically the ideal sounding board for their ability to retain viewer interest. In today’s film culture this formula is echoed in tens of thousands of round-table podcasts and transcribed conversations, which for the most part replace fighting words with low-stakes affability.  

All of which is not to say that one has to go far to find invective. The Internet didn’t originate chippiness among the chattering classes but helped to elevate it to a new level by fostering a deadening of empathy, favoring quick press-send rashness over tempered contemplation, and in many cases offering the protection of anonymity. I was recently reminded of the existence of “The Rock Critical List,” a 1999 screed attributed only to one “Jojo Dancer aka The Gay Rapper” that is a collection of staggeringly vicious, ad hominem attacks on 10 of the more prominent practicing music writers of the day. (It also happens to be rather well written and savagely funny. The author’s nom de guerre, by the by, comes from Richard Pryor’s self-directed 1986 auto-biopic Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling.) In Daniel Nester’s recollection of “The Rock Critical List” for The Morning News, victim Simon Reynolds is quoted saying, quite perspicaciously: “In some ways the R.C.L. was an advance glimpse of the free-for-all of semi-anonymous invective that is the blogosphere.”

A film culture in which there’s nothing worth putting in the boot over is hardly worth having at all, so the question arises: how to find a middle road between numbing “If I link-a you and you link-a me” collegial circle-jerks, and sweeping denunciations with all the precision of a nail-bomb going off at a marketplace? I’ve written about critical straw-manning before, in a piece where I quoted at some length the conclusion of Decency & Disorder 1789-1837, Ben Wilson’s cultural overview of the period that Lord Byron dubbed the Age of Cant, and its warning (“Accusations of cant should be used sparingly”) still seems like a good one to me. My natural inclination is to throw elbows like I’m playing Bill Laimbeer in NBA Jam, but I shall endeavor to practice such temperance as Wilson commends until next week. Adios, ya flaming phonies.

* Serious question: Is the “Ye-Ye” in a list of films given in White’s article meant to be Edward Yang’s Yi Yi? Is this a rhetorical device?

** My relative lack of acquaintance with the most famous American film critic of all time is more a matter of happenstance than conscious avoidance. I never had formative experiences watching At the Movies, common among my generational coevals, and mostly remember Siskel and Ebert for their contentious appearances on late-night chat shows. I was familiar with Ebert’s prose reviews from the handful that were included with the CD-ROM (!) Cinemania ’94. Cinemania was a pre-IMDb database whose indexes were only rivaled by those of VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever guide, and it was the nearest identifiable thing that I had to a cinephile gateway drug, packaging laughably low-quality multimedia material (for some reason I remember a highly pixelated version of a battle scene in The Birth of a Nation and the audio from the climax of Rosemary’s Baby) with excerpts assembled from several film-related books and review collections. Among the source texts was Ebert’s Video Companion, though Maltin’s consumer guide was far better represented, and Kael (whose 5001 Nights at the Movies capsules were included) made a far deeper impression.

*** Of the critics from this period considered essential today, the outlier with regards to calling out other critics by name is Manny Farber, who rarely if ever picked a fight, perhaps because his termitic explorations took him too deep Underground to keep track of what was going on in the surface world. The exception is his typically conflicted eulogy for James Agee—I suppose he thought that if you were going to go hunting, you might as well go after big game. Because he didn’t cross over with the other critical kaiju, we might compare him to Daiei Film’s Gamera.

The latest Film Comment Selects Double Feature brings together two adaptations from the early Seventies: one from a notorious source, Philip Roth’s seminal novel Portnoy's Complaint (pun intended),and one lesser known—Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife—but no less deserving of notice. Both starring Richard Benjamin, they’re time capsules dealing with sex and therapy, the screening lets the films creep back into our consciousness (like so many sexual thoughts).

Diary of a Mad Housewife

In Frank Perry’s adaptation of the Kaufman novel, Benjamin plays Jonathan Balser, the lawyer husband who does much to drive Tina (Carrie Snodgress), the housewife of the title, mad. Jonathan is an insensitive, not to mention wholly irritating, man; he repeatedly uses the word “bloody” as an insult, though he’s not British, and the cloying, childlike voice he uses every time he says “roll in the hay” is the opposite of sexy. (Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, with his famously ravenous sexual appetites, ends up being the more “likable” depiction of early Seventies male—relatively speaking.) Jonathan’s pretentiousness aligns our sympathies with Tina. She never reaches the depths of Gena Rowlands’s unraveling character in A Woman Under the Influence, but we can see the stifling nature of being a housewife in every little gesture; the first word we hear her say, in her distinctively soft and nasal voice, is “sorry.” In that early scene, she gets dressed and ready for the day while Jonathan berates her. The couple is in the bedroom, and she’s partially unclothed, but there’s no sexual energy, and the patterns of the unloving marriage (which will only worsen) are clear. The small gesture of Tina putting on her bra askew is a sure sign of trouble.

The tale of the dissatisfied housewife is nothing new, but what’s interesting about Diary of a Mad Housewife is that it takes place in New York City rather than the suburbs (the place in which this specific type of melancholy is often thought to take root), and the way in which it is so clearly a product of the burgeoning women’s lib movement. While not explicitly about women’s lib (Tina doesn’t label herself a feminist, and it’s painfully clear that those around her would consider the word taboo), Diary of a Mad Housewife exists in a world on the cusp of change: the housewives are starting to realize that they deserve better, and trying to figure out what to do about it, while the husbands are too obtuse to care. This datedness can give some of the dialogue a stilted quality (at a party, a man with whom Tina ends up having an affair asks: “Does screwing appeal to you?”); the phrase “male chauvinist pig” frequently comes to mind. With its near-caricature depiction of sleazy males whose very existence justifies the need for feminism, Diary of a Mad Housewife becomes somewhat tragic, and almost painful to watch. The men are so priggish that one wants to grab them by the shoulders and scream, and Tina has no female friends to confide in. Most damagingly, Jonathan’s constant belittling of her is picked up by their two daughters. Every time we see Tina’s therapist, shown upside down from her POV on the couch, he’s talking at her, not to her, offering nothing but the hollow sentiments of the patriarchy: “Why can’t you accept the force of your husband without resentment?” Let her count the ways.

Portnoy's Complaint

If Diary of a Mad Housewife probes the female psyche, Portnoy’s Complaint attempts the same with the male of the species, using Roth’s still-shocking source material. The sole feature directed by Ernest Lehman—the screenwriter of North by Northwest, Sabrina, and West Side Story, among others—never quite leaves the territory of sex romp. Most of its amusements come not from the title character but from Mary Jane Reid, also known as “the Monkey”—Portnoy’s female equal in perversion, played by Karen Black, all fluffy hair, spangly coordinated outfits, and saucy cooing. It may be worth the price of admission just for the moment in which she exclaims “Ooh, thighs!” as Portnoy reads “Leda and the Swan” aloud to her. Alongside Diary of a Mad Housewife, the limited pleasures of the film come not from genuine subversion but images of subversion flattened into kitsch. In the opening scene, miniskirt-clad women suddenly appear naked, in a flash of Portnoy’s dirty mind. It’s funny in the way a Sixties Playboy comic is funny: endearing because we can recognize its naughtiness as tied to a specific time and mindset.

In the days before the on-screen proliferation of the bawdy bro, Benjamin’s sinister undercurrent of smug entitlement, combined with his clean-cut, somewhat nerdy look, make him a viable sketch of the educated male in the era of sexual revolution. (The sense of entitlement is uncomfortably oppressive when Portnoy is forcing himself upon an Israeli girl—and whenever Jonathan says or does almost anything in Diary of a Mad Housewife.) Similarly, Black’s idiosyncratic sex appeal is well suited to the role of flighty fashion model/pervert. She’s a “free spirit,” a woman who, unlike Tina, revels in carnal freedom and attempts to call the shots in the bedroom. Roth’s novel, unlike the film, hits on a more universal form of perversion. The very fact that it’s filled with dirty energy makes it challenging to adapt—how, during this time, with these resources, could one make the film sexually shocking without being silly?

Portnoy's Complaint

Both movies present early-Seventies archetypes that verge on clichés. The key difference is that in Portnoy’s Complaint, they pass by in a blur of miniskirts and sex jokes that feel of no great consequence, while in Diary of a Mad Housewife, we fear that the consistently misunderstood protagonist may crack under their weight.

High-powered Hollywood execs may claim that making a Wonder Woman feature film is “tricky,” but China doesn’t give a damn. It’s been putting ass-kicking women on screens since 1930 when the country’s first major movie star, Chin Tsi-ang, starred in a series of swordswoman flicks. Famous for doing all her own action scenes, she went on to produce Hong Kong’s first kung fu film (The Adventures of Fong Sai-yuk, 38) and action ace Sammo Hung (she’s his grandmother). 

But by anyone’s standards, the Queen of Action is Angela Mao, famous in the West for her brief role as Bruce Lee’s sister in Enter the Dragon. Trained in hapkido, wushu, and taekwondo, Mao made almost 40 flicks before retiring in the early Eighties, but her true legacy lies in the 11 movies she made for Golden Harvest with Sammo Hung from 1971 to 1977. And now Shout! Factory has sent six of them storming onto DVD in one butt-kicking box set.

BROKEN OATH (77)

With action pioneer Chung Chang-Wha (director of Five Fingers of Death) directing this Chinese remake of the 1973 Meiko Kaji revenge picture Lady Snowblood, Angela Mao attacks her role like an Olympic athlete trying to take home the gold. After her dad is killed by a team of synchronized assassins and her mom is framed for a crime she didn’t commit, Angela is born in prison. Mom promptly dies and her aunt, a pickpocket genius known as 1000 Hands, turns Angela over to some Buddhist nuns to raise, hoping that they’ll meditate the violence out of her. But Angela just sticks around for the kung fu instruction and rolls her eyes during the speeches about ending the cycle of violence. After she kills three bandits, the nuns kick her out into the world. “It’s fate,” they shrug. “She’s violent.”

Sporting Princess Leia buns, Angela tracks down the five men who killed her parents, murdering them with scorpions she keeps hidden in her bra. Bruce Leung (a Bruce Lee imitator who would go on to become a star in his own right) teams up with her, and the two become the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of vengeance. For once, Sammo Hung doesn’t choreograph the fights for this movie, but action director Yuen Wo-ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill, The Matrix) brings his own gothic sensibility to the proceedings, which feature a freaky pair of bodyguards (one played by Sammo Hung, the other one a fire breather) and a final showdown with a gaggle of chortling, identically masked opponents.  

WHEN TAEKWONDO STRIKES (73)

Directed by the man who discovered Angela Mao, Huang Feng, with action by Sammo Hung, and co-starring Carter Huang (Thunder in Big Trouble in Little China), this flick goes great with a case of beer. Case in point, the opening credits show off co-star Jhoon Rhee, father of American taekwondo, wearing a white jacket that says “Tae Kwon Do” on the back as he does taekwondo. Set in occupied Korea during the 1930’s, Carter Huang gets mistaken for a Korean resistance fighter and is chased by the evil Japanese into a church where a George Lucas lookalike is preaching. The Japanese act all sneery about Christianity, so Jhoon Rhee has to show up and dish out a great big helping of pain. Turns out he’s the rebel they’re actually looking for. 

It’s a cheese fiesta. Ann Winton does bell-bottom fu, the Japanese keep tying people to their Torture Crucifix in the dungeon where they dispense topless floggings, and “Thus Spake Zarathustra” booms on the soundtrack every time a fight breaks out. Angela finally shows up to save the day, both for the Korean revolutionaries and the audience. She and Sammo are clearly having a blast in their scenes together, and the finale rolls out Hwang In-shik, a truly intimidating Korean screen fighter (he took on Jackie Chan in the climax of several movies). His fight with Angela is a thing of beauty. “There’s no need to thank me,” she says when it’s over, surrounded by dead bodies. Oh, yes, there is.

STONER (74)

Originally envisioned as Bruce Lee’s follow-up to Enter the Dragon, Stoner was supposed to star Lee, Sonny Chiba, and Mr. Temporary James Bond himself, George Lazenby. But after Bruce Lee died, Chiba bailed and Golden Harvest slashed the budget. The result is a thankless slog enlivened by some funkadelic Seventies kitsch as evil drug dealers use computors to create “Happy Pills,” a female Viagra that is somehow worse than marijuana and LSD combined. Lazenby shows up to shut it all down, as does Angela. Bruce Lee’s mistress, Betty Ting Pei, cashes in on her 15 minutes of fame to play a drug dealer’s girlfriend who drinks brandy from a champagne coupe like trash.

Lazenby’s enthusiastic leg flails are all over the finale, and, despite having Huang Feng and Sammo Hung on hand, no amount of revolving desks, 11-year-old sex club bouncers, or blondes carried into orgies on giant platters like honey-baked hams can redeem this turd.

A QUEEN’S RANSOM (76)

After Stoner flopped, Lazenby (playing a bad guy this time) and Sammo teamed up with Jimmy Wang Yu to make The Man from Hong Kong for Golden Harvest, which hit big. Trying to replicate its success, Golden Harvest cast Lazenby as a baddie again with Sammo and Jimmy in A Queen’s Ransom, a film about an IRA plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II on her 1975 visit to Hong Kong. Despite being loaded with surreptitiously shot footage of QE II and her actual security detail, it isn’t very memorable. Angela Mao barely appears, the Lazenby flail is in full effect, and the only person who seems to be having a good time is sex star Tanny Tien Ni, who plays Jenny, a hooker and police informant. After bouncing across the screen with a sexy grin, she publicly denounces Queen Elizabeth: “This is a city of crime, and she’s its queen!” An Oscar for Tanny, demerits for everyone else.

THE HIMALAYAN (76)

This was the final movie Angela and Huang Feng made for Golden Harvest, and the second-to-the-last they made together. Once Golden Harvest has congratulated itself in the opening voiceover for traveling all the way to Tibet to shoot the movie, things kick off with plenty of dramatic ambition. The first half is a showcase for the under-rated Chan Sing, one of the great sneering bad guys of Hong Kong film, having a ball playing Gao Zhen, the oldest brother of a shabby Tibetan family who wants to get his hands on the Ceng family forture. Plan A: marry off his youngest brother to Lady Princess Ceng (Angela Mao). Little brother balks, so he goes to Plan B: kill little brother and replace him with a double. 

Plan B works, but the marriage hits a snag when it turns out that Angela is in love with a stable boy, played by super-kicker Tan Tao-liang. Cue Plan C: frame Angela and Tan for murder and take over the family after they go on the run. Angela and Tan wind up learning real kung fu from the Eagle Lama (played by director Huang Feng), but that means it takes the entire movie for the two of them to unleash hell because they’re supposed to have started as kung fu idiots. Fortunately, Chan Sing is delightful as a human bulldozer, beating everyone down with overacting and some seriously painful-looking kung fu. Good things come to those who wait, however, and when Angela and Tan return for the final showdown, they give us one of the best final fights ever put on screen. Tan shows off his insane kicking skills, but the movie hits Kickass Overdrive when Angela sends him to the sidelines and goes head-to-head with Chan. Taking repeated punches to the face, she demonstrates that while she may be a Princess, she can save herself, thank you very much.

THE TOURNAMENT (74)

Four of these movies are directed by Huang Feng, and star Angela Mao, with Sammo Hung on action (alongside his stunt crew that’s a gallery of future directors and stars like Eric Tsang, Yuen Wah, Yuen Biao, Corey Yuen, and Ching Siu-tung). So what makes The Tournament such a cut above the rest? More than any other title in this box set, this movie showcases Angela Mao not so much as an actor but as a force of nature. The story: Carter Huang and another Chinese guy go to Thailand to make money in the Thai boxing ring. One winds up dead, and Carter comes home humiliated, which drives the Hong Kong Martial Arts Association bananas. Stupid Thai people have embarrassed Chinese kung fu, and they blame Master Liu, Carter’s dad and kung fu coach. In a fit of shame, Master Liu hangs himself, and that would be the end of the movie—if his daughter wasn’t Angela Mao.

Marching over to the Hong Kong Martial Arts Association HQ (which, in a bit of bad taste, seems to be 41 Cumberland Road, the house where Bruce Lee was living when he died) she announces that she’s heading to Thailand to learn muay thai. The Martial Arts Association gets all spluttery and indignant. How dare she suggest that muay thai is a “real” martial art! Is she looking down on Chinese kung fu? “That’s right,” she says. “I look down on it. I’m going to go master Thai boxing and use it to take care of you old fools.” And she does. Sammo Hung is a master of high-impact fight choreography, and every punch and kick in this movie hits like a Mack truck. Hwang In-shik rips up the screen as an arrogant Japanese martial artist, and Angela is human tornado. First she mops the floor with some karate chumps, then she beats down the Hong Kong Martial Arts Association, then she hands Thailand its collective ass on a platter, and finally, for dessert, she lays into a white guy. A true star, she sends electricity vibrating through the screen every time she appears. 

So in order of quality:

Broken Oath - Best All-Around Movie

The Tournament - Most Righteous Non-Stop Mayhem

The Himalayan - The Final Fight from Heaven Award

When Taekwondo Strikes - Cheesiest Guilty Pleasure

Stoner - The George Lazenby Trying Really Hard Merit Badge

A Queen’s Ransom - Best Appearance By Queen Elizabeth II in a Supporting Role

There are no links to other news this week because right now there’s only one thing that matters. This past Sunday, one of cinema’s great talents passed away. Thailand’s Panna Rittikrai, director, actor, and action choreographer, died from liver and kidney failure. He was 53 years old. 

Born in Northern Thailand’s Issan region, Rittikrai talked about his early career in an email interview I did with him a few years ago. “My first step in the movie business was to apply for the stunt position at Coliseum Film,” he wrote. “At that time, Mr. Kom Akkadej wanted to shoot a film called Petch Tud Yok, and he hired me as a stunt man and assigned me to teach kung fu to Sureewan Suriyong, who was considered the Queen of Action Movies. Then, I became a stunt choreographer for the film called Phayakyeegey. Last but not least, I became the director of my own movie called Born To Fight in which I also played a leading role.” 

Early on, Rittikrai was making movies that were, essentially, released on VHS, but he was already building a stunt team and making a name for himself as one of Thailand’s most innovative action directors. He aimed high. 

“My action style was influenced by Bruce Lee,” he wrote. “My early works were also influenced by Akira Kurosawa.” Rittikrai’s philosophy was straightforward. “For my style of choreography, I try to make the most of natural abilities. I prefer realities to techniques.” 

He eventually discovered future star Tony Jaa and tried to make a movie with him. “It was a low-budget movie,” he wrote, “in which I wanted to mainly present Tony Jaa. However, I could not wrap up the project because of the shortage of financial support. I also thought that [the] movie lacked uniqueness.” Soon afterward, he teamed up with director Prachya Pinkaew and choreographed the action on Ong Bak (03). “When I made Ong Bak, I realized that the uniqueness that I had looked for is Muay Thai.” 

What followed was a series of action movies that became international hits and rewrote the rules of action choreography: two sequels to Ong-Bak (which Rittikrai directed), two Tom Yum Goong movies (which he choreographed), Chocolate (which he choreographed), and a remake of Born to Fight.

Everything that made Rittikrai great was in full effect in the last movie he directed and appeared in, BKO: Bangkok Knockout (2010). Although the story was slight (a bunch of kids are trapped in a warehouse and have to fight their way out) the action is non-stop. Rittikrai himself plays an unstoppable asthmatic killer, and the stunts have to be seen to be believed. The best thing you can do right now is head over to Netflix and watch the whole movie. If you can get past the first 20 minutes of setup, you’ll be in for one of the most hard-hitting displays of ass-kicking you’ll ever see. The fact that the movie was designed to showcase Rittikrai’s team of stuntpeople and students makes it all the more moving, turning it into a showcase for the unsung heroes who double the stars and do the dangerous stunts but whose faces never get to appear on screen. 

His influence has been tremendous. Every time you see someone take a knee to the face in a movie, or an elbow to the top of a head, that’s Rittikrai’s influence. But he did more than just add some muay thai spice to action choreography. Panna Rittikrai changed action in movies forever, bringing a more realistic approach to stuntwork at a time when CGI was taking over. In a world that was in danger of turning entirely digital, he reminded everyone that nothing could beat the thrill of analog. A true badass, and by all accounts a real friend and mentor (he’s the guy who pulled Tony Jaa out of the darkness when the star was threatening to destroy his own career around the time of Ong Bak 2). Rittikrai’s death robbed the world of all the movies he might have made. We’re left poorer by this loss.

New York’s most prominent LGBT film festival turns 26 this year—a milestone that occurs against a background of shifting politics, fortunes, and ideological fault lines within broader queer discourse. While legal restrictions against gay marriage continue to crumble in several states and trans leaders have achieved new levels of mainstream-media attention, heated debates over linguistic appropriation, levels of social privilege, and the messy complexities of the LGBT community’s coalitional nature have lit up social media, print publications, and public gatherings throughout 2014. (Though by no means encompassing the range of issues and opinions expressed within these debates, two good primers are Parker Marie Molloy’s Advocate op-ed against the use of the term “tranny” and Zack Ford’s piece at Think Progress on the complex overlaps between trans and drag communities.) Such deliberations have a long lineage within LGBT history and have already produced some vital insights, but they can also leave those on all sides a bit battle-weary and suspicious of finding common ground.

While it would be foolhardy (even counterproductive) to expect a LGBT film festival to manufacture a sense of we’re-all-in-this-together harmony, the stand-out films at this year’s NewFest nevertheless showcase what art can bring to a disparate-yet-connected group of people: the complication of set assumptions; the expansion of intellectual and emotional possibilities; the richness of experience as filtered through the camera’s gaze. These movies do not offer a solution to the hard questions of contemporary queer existence so much as encourage those within it to approach said issues with revitalized eyes and an empathetic heart.

We Came to Sweat: The Legend of Starlite

Both I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole and We Came to Sweat: The Legend of Starlite continue the long tradition of LGBT documentaries that preserve individuals and institutions vital to queer history that might otherwise be blown away by the winds of time. As the title implies, I Always Said Yes chronicles the multitude of professional and personal parts played by the eponymous filmmaker, whose most famous works are the Seventies erotic classics Boys in the Sand (71) and Bijou (72). We Came to Sweat, meanwhile, details the history of a pre-Stonewall LGBT establishment—the Starlite Lounge in Brooklyn, a haven for the borough’s black gay community since its opening in 1959 that became threatened with eviction in 2010. Neither film offers a particularly striking departure from the documentary traditions within which they operate. We Came to Sweat chiefly relies upon fly-on-the-wall footage of community meetings and barroom conversations to chart the efforts to negotiate for the Starlite’s continued existence, while I Always Said Yes operates safely within the template of talking-head interviews and archival footage. Their value comes from the simple fact that someone decided to point a camera at people and places that matter and will not be around forever. The aging Poole proves a feisty and unabashedly emotional guide to his own creative highs and private lows, acknowledging the wayward nature of his career path without a trace of self-pity. Denizens of the Starlite also get their moments in the cinematic sun, sharing their memories and savoring the ineffable pleasures of their beloved gathering place as the possibility of its erasure looms perilously close. This is cinema as archive—an impulse that remains essential even in the era where sophisticated documentary/fiction hybrids and self-reflective non-fiction practice gains much of the spotlight.

Lyle

An unapologetic piece of genre red meat, Lyle offers a queer spin on the Rosemary’s Baby school of maternal horror. Gaby Hoffmann plays Leah, a homemaker with a young daughter and another child on the way. The film opens with her and partner June (Ingrid Jungermann) moving into a spacious old apartment that has a foreboding history of child deaths. It would be unfair to give much away regarding Lyle’s plot, though part of the pleasure comes from writer-director Stewart Thorndike’s bald-faced engagement with the conventions and clichés of the domestic freakout out film (from Repulsion and The Exorcist to Joshua and Grace). They’re all here—shadowy hallways and creaky doors; unnerving neighbors; an increasingly suspicious spouse—and Thorndike works them with the gleeful proficiency of a true horror aficionado. What elevates Lyle above giddy pastiche, though, is its unnerving refusal to tip its hand regarding whether Leah’s increasing fears for the safety of herself and her unborn child reflect the delusions of a lonely and grief-struck individual or a sinister conspiracy touched by the paranormal. Hoffman walks the line between embattled and unhinged with unwavering commitment. If it’s perhaps open to question whether Lyle engages as provocatively as it could have with the intrinsically queer elements of its narrative (the question of whether the film would be different with a heterosexual couple crossed my mind once or twice), Hoffman’s ferocity grounds you in the specificity of Leah’s terrors enough that such hypotheticals cannot negate the chill that Lyle’s feverish climax leaves in your heart.

The Foxy Merkins

The specificity of lesbian desire comes explicitly to the fore in The Foxy Merkins, even as it’s reflected through the funhouse mirror of observational farce. A NewFest alum whose delightful debut feature, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, was screened in 2011, Madeleine Olnek directed and co-wrote (with stars Lisa Haas and Jackie Monahan) this comic buddy movie about New York lesbian prostitutes Jo (Monahan), a seasoned pro who insists upon her own fundamental heterosexuality, and Margaret (Haas), a newcomer in search of her long-lost mother. Olnek tracks the pair through a series of comic set-pieces at once deadpan and slightly surreal, from a client’s insistence on paying Margaret with a Talbot department-store gift card (whose status as an unlikely pick-up spot becomes a running gag) to the appearance of a motor-mouthed merchant (Alex Karpovsky) in an outer-borough cemetery hawking the titular hair pieces. Unlike Codependent’s breezy spoofing of 1950s B-grade sci-fi, The Foxy Merkins mines humor from the experiences of what are essentially homeless sex workers—a balancing act between wry satire and empathy that Olnek occasionally fails to maintain. (Her decision to include to-the-camera “interviews” with other prostitutes adds to the sporadic queasiness of whether the film glosses over some less-than-amusing realities for the sake of dry visual gags.) But Olnek has an ace up her sleeve. Just as Codependent’s true subject was not cinematic satire but the compromises of romantic love, The Foxy Merkins ends up being a sharp-eyed study in the vicissitudes of female friendship, particularly between lesbians and straight women. The transient nature of Margaret and Jo’s adventures together leads to a poignant conclusion regarding the possibilities and limits of their bond, affectingly underscored by perhaps the best film-ending music cue I’ve seen of any NewFest movie this year.

Blackbird

Melodrama forms the heart of Patrik-Ian Polk’s Blackbird, and I mean that in the best way possible. This chronicle of Randy (Julian Walker), a black gay teenager coming of age in a small Southern Baptist town, is practically bursting with plot points, including (but not limited to) missing children, broken families, secret romances, surprise pregnancies, tragic deaths, a last-minute reunion, and tearful confessions. It’s not exactly the rhythms of life that are captured by Blackbird’s narrative plentitude. Even at its best, you can feel the plot gears turning. What it offers instead are the pleasures of big-hearted and fearless investment in expressing as many emotions, experiences, and events as one can fit within a 102-minute running time. Polk’s sense of generosity and willingness to expand his universe evermore pushes the viewer through rough patches of clunky exposition and overly pat character arcs—never more so than in an audacious climatic dream sequence that outlines the varied fates of Randy and his close-knit coterie of high-school friends and college-aged boyfriend. That such gambits pay off reflects not only Polk’s own adventurousness but the trust he puts in his cast (which includes Mo’Nique and Isaiah Washington as Randy’s separated parents), who all deliver nuanced and fiercely empathetic performances.

The Third One

Finally, two films tackle the complexities of queer male sexual and emotional bonds with equal degrees of erotic frankness, but in the service of quite distinct visions. The Third One offers a beguilingly straightforward take on an online threesome, in which a thirty-something couple (Carlos Echevarría and Nicolás Armengol) chat up the fresh-faced Fede (Emiliano Dionisi) and eventually invite him over for dinner and to spend the night. Though writer-director Rodrigo Guerrero begins the film with an extended series of webcam images and floating text-message boxes, he shoots the majority of the film with well-modulated long takes and fills the soundtrack with reams of flowing naturalistic dialogue. And when the film (ahem) climaxes with the long-awaited three-way, he frames it as a spontaneous and joyful union of bodies. The Third One acknowledges the emotional vulnerabilities and interpersonal frictions that allow all three to agree to their evening together, but the film’s ultimate vision of polyamorous connection is an unabashedly optimistic one. Julián Hernández’s I Am Happiness on Earth shares The Third One’s interest in the explicit depiction of queer sex in various configurations, including a lengthy mid-film-within-a-film segment chronicling a bisexual threesome that’s as much dance as it is copulation. That sequence is framed as part of the larger erotic opus of Emiliano, a smoldering filmmaker whose idealized visions of sensual union form a counterpoint to the cavalier way in which he treats his young lovers: first, a love-struck dancer; and later, a smitten rent boy. Hernández critiques Emiliano’s fetishization of erotic imagery via the camera while simultaneously capturing the film’s copious sex scenes with gorgeous chiaroscuro lighting schemes and sensuous tracking shots. (A knowing bit of self-awareness has Hernández opening the film with a luxuriant circular track around a dancer, followed a few scenes later with Emiliano using exactly the same camera move to film another dancer.) I Am Happiness on Earth finds beauty in the queer erotic image even as it remains suspicious of how said imagery can provide a fleeting substitute for the realities of sexual connection—a paradox that Hernández’s deceptively simple narrative leaves for the viewer to untangle.

NewFest runs July 24 to 29 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Traditionally, about the most damning dismissal of any screen drama is to call it “filmed theater” (although Serge Daney once coined an even more damning epithet: "filmed cinema"). Film critics are habitually wary of cinema that’s based on or about theater, as being somehow fundamentally uncinematic, an ersatz hybrid, not the real thing (that is to say, not either real thing). This despite a history of extraordinary films which play on the differences and affinities between the two forms: Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Welles, Olivier doing Shakespeare; chamber pieces by Bergman, Oliveira, Rohmer, Polanski; von Trier’s Dogville and Manderlay; Rivette’s play-within-a-film constructions... But when a movie presents itself as primarily a play that’s been filmed, cinephiles are likely to back off.

I don’t have any particularly strong memories of Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, his 1994 collaboration with Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, except that it features a brilliant performance by Julianne Moore, presented without superfluous distraction. In it, a group of actors arrive at an empty Manhattan theater and slip seamlessly from the reality of the venue space into a performance of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, as adapted by David Mamet. You’re constantly aware of the gap between the actors on screen and their 1890s Russian characters, between the bare boards of the New York theater and the play’s rural setting—and that gap, in your mind, constantly widens and narrows.

Jonathan Demme’s A Master Builder is, seemingly, a much simpler proposition. Dedicated to Louis Malle, it presents itself as a fairly faithful screen version of Ibsen’s play The Master Builder (or, as it’s credited here, Halvard Solness the Master Builder). The film distances itself slightly from the original by substituting an indefinite article, as if to remind us that this is just one possible take on Ibsen—but distances itself less than when it premiered in Rome last year under the title Fear of Falling, which signposts the key theme far too blatantly. The screenplay is a new adaptation of Ibsen by Shawn, and the film bears the credit “Created for the stage by André Gregory”’; the duo had already worked on this production for 14 years. That might suggest Demme didn’t have to do much beyond turn up at the location, Manhattan’s stately Pen and Brush Club, for a week and simply point his, or rather DP Declan Quinn’s, camera at the actors. So you come to A Master Builder thinking “Is that all there is?”—and you end up getting something considerably more.

Here’s the story: Halvard Solness is a builder-architect specializing in the construction of very tall spires and towers—a former creator of churches who has turned to building homes, for reasons to do with his and his wife Aline’s horrific backstory. Solness employs a young draughtsman, Ragnar, son of the aged Brovik, Solness’s former boss who’s now his assistant. Ragnar wants to create his own buildings, but Solness won’t give him a break—supposedly because he can’t dispense with Ragnar’s draughting skills, but in reality because he’s terrified of younger competition. Ostensibly to keep Ragnar in place, Solness has hired the young man’s fiancée, Kaya, as his bookkeeper—but, the play’s ambiguities being what they are, it really seems that Solness is detaining Ragnar in order to keep Kaya in his own sexual thrall. Then another young woman, Hilde Wangel, turns up out of the blue brimming with an ingénue’s adoration...

But Hilde’s attentions are not what they seem, and one measure of any staging of the play is the way it brings out the strangeness and danger of the three-way dynamic between her, Solness, and Aline. First published in 1892, The Master Builder was partly inspired by Ibsen’s relationship with a Viennese woman named Emilie Bardach; he was 61 when they met, she was 18. In the play, Hilde reminds Solness, who claims to have forgotten, that she was only 12 or 13 when, years earlier, he kissed her, called her his princess, and promised to give her a kingdom. Hilde’s extreme youth in her story may have been read differently by late-19th-century audiences, who might have thought it acceptable for an eminent male to fuss over an underage girl; today, we’re more likely to read Solness’s attentions as an act of abuse, and that’s the theme that gives this film its disturbing force.

Ibsen’s notes emphasize Solness’s status as an embodiment of masculine power riding for a fall: “He is a middle-aged man, strong and forceful, with close-cropped, curly hair, a dark moustache, and thick, dark eyebrows.” Most productions cast someone young enough to plausibly play lover to a Hilde in her early twenties: recent versions have featured John Turturro (at BAM) and Stephen Dillane (at London’s Almeida Theatre) opposite Wrenn Schmidt and Gemma Arterton, respectively, as Hilde. In this film, the casting of Shawn might look downright perverse, or like bizarre self-aggrandizement on the actor-writer’s part. Here’s this bald, diminutive, whiny-voiced, altogether comical-looking guy, and he’s supposed to be exerting a potent sexual dominion over both Kaya and Hilde. Okay, so Hilde describes Solness as “some weird, half-human mountain creature” (some English versions simply have “troll”), but she’s apparently paying him a weird compliment, portraying him as some mythical lover cum earth spirit. But seriously, to present the 70-year-old Shawn unambiguously as a magnetic object of adoration for young women, that would be as ludicrous as… well, I’m sure you can think of your favorite Woody Allen movie.

Of course, Demme and his collaborators know exactly what they’re doing, and make it clear from the start that Solness is a spent force. The novel twist here is to open with Solness on his sickbed, suffering from some undefined but grievous ailment. When Brovik (Gregory) comes to his bedside, both men look ravaged. Gregory’s lined face and creaky voice, set against Shawn’s petulant, impatient whine and his repertoire of sour grimaces, together suggest two grey-faced, depleted old adversaries, still feebly warring. And Shawn’s head on the pillow looks oddly detached from the rest of his body, giving him the appearance of an imperious, cantankerous baby laying down the law to all around him. Suffice to say, when his face draws close to that of a trembling Kaya (Emily Cass McDonnell), it’s a monumentally troubling moment.

Demme has described his film as “a haunted house movie”, which is very apt; the patrician expanses of the Brush and Pen, standing in for the Solness residence, certainly evoke an artificially preserved, enclosed world haunted by past horrors. But I’d be more inclined to think of this as a home-invasion thriller. Early on Solness predicts, “The younger generation will turn up one day and knock on the door,” and soon enough Hilde arrives—with a knock like a death knell, as arresting as the nocturnal hammering in Macbeth.

With her entrance, Solness’s world and the film itself simply explode. Lisa Joyce’s Hilde is an alarming, excessive bombshell. She strides in wearing all white—scarf, high socks, shorts—with a mane of golden hair, drinking in the world through enormous eyes: she’s an intensely sexual presence, at once ingénue, hippie wayfarer, and exterminating angel, resembling a cross between a Seventies centerfold and one of Robert Crumb’s outdoorsy fantasy women. She’s irresistible, and possibly deranged—although pretty much everyone here is, in one way or another. When Hilde reminds Solness of what happened between them, he denies it—then, under her spell, confesses. The interactions between the pair in the first act are mesmerizing, and Joyce’s explosive laugh, sometimes a girlish peal, at others suggesting the cackle of an avenging fury, is quite terrifying. Joyce plays up Hilde’s sexuality to tremendous effect: when Hilde gushes over the priapic towers that are Solness’s specialty, we don’t know whether she’s herself sexually obsessed or mocking his phallic pomposity.

By framing the drama with the circumstance of Solness’s illness, the film suggests we’re watching a deathbed delirium, as if he is summoning up Hilde as a punishing phantom. And by filming in a real, fully fleshed-out setting rather than on the overt stage space of Malle’s Vanya, Demme strikes a tantalizing balance between naturalism and Solness’s inner world. It also means that the performances come across somewhat differently: you know the people on screen are actors doing Ibsen, but their intensity also suggests that Ibsen’s characters are themselves enacting a psychodrama, a grim ceremony that can only end in death.

It took me a while to adjust to the heightened tone, but this is a terrific performance film, and brilliantly cast. Crackling with neurotic electricity, Julie Hagerty’s Aline suggests the emaciated intensity of a medieval martyr and the bitter monomania of a character who now channels all her desire into a fixation with “obligation”; and she and Joyce make astute complementary casting, their huge eyes uncannily suggesting mother and daughter, or versions of the same woman. Dr. Herdal is played by Larry Pine, who was also in Vanya on 42nd Street—one of those quintessential “that guy” actors whose faces you recognize, and who comes into his own here as a discreet, insightful fount of sanity, but who’s also probably indulging Solness in his febrile confusion. As for Shawn, he really is masterful: the actor has often put his physique and his tetchy manner to cartoonish comic use (Malle’s Crackers was a good example of his half-man, half-turtle persona), but his seriousness here, the outright vulnerable monstrosity of his Solness, is truly something.

As for Demme and long-term collaborator Quinn, who also shot Vanya: just pointing the lens? Not quite. They may conceal their hand, making the camera presence seem as casual as possible; perhaps the most Nordic thing about the film is the echo of early Dogme handheld style, hovering close to the actors’ faces. This creates an unsettling, oppressive intimacy, but the apparent looseness of the approach makes you all the more aware when certain shots suddenly display a symbolic resonance: a brief wide of Solness and Aline sitting isolated in their empty kitchen, or the close-up in which a wild-haired Hilde dominates the screen, while behind her, Solness (or really, just the top of his bald head) looms, grumbling and gnome-like. Filmed theater? Absolutely, but also, to my complete surprise, something else again.

Fourteen years ago as of tomorrow, Don Weis went to his reward. You may be excused for not immediately recognizing the significance of this event.

In cinephile circles, the name “Don Weis” is probably best recalled for the enthusiasm that it sparked in a handful of French film-lovers in the middle years of the 20th century. It may seem perverse, but those are the years in which the groundwork for modern film culture was laid, for better or worse, and their preferences and prejudices continue to resound through the decades. Here is Jacques Lourcelles, writing about Weis’s 1954 film The Adventures of Hajji Baba in the 1992 Dictionnaire du cinéma: “American critics, so seldom lucid,* evidently ignored this praiseworthy film… [It] earned the reputation it deserved thanks only to the clear-sightedness of certain French cinephiles, and in particular of the MacMahonists.”

The name “MacMahonists” derives from the Cinema MacMahon, the theater founded by Pierre Rissient in the late 1950s, which still today can be found on the Avenue Mac-Mahon, in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe. The MacMahonists were a small but vociferous bunch who had their own house publication, Présence du cinema, co-edited by Rissient and Michel Mourlet.** The interests expressed therein were apparently nearer to those of the Cahiers writers of the period—J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum note in their Midnight Movies that both Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player were “fragment[ed] into a shrine of MacMahonist fetishes”—than those of the Marxist-identified Positif. Dave Kehr defines their critical credo as “a sort of muscular realist approach that, in particular, disdained the use of special effects and complicated visuals—anything that would distort the spatial integrity of the shot or the continuity of an action.” The presence of certain (mostly he-man) actors, and in particular the existential integrity of the gesture, was particularly fetishized; see for example Mourlet’s proclamation “Charlton Heston is an axiom,” in a 1960 Cahiers essay titled "Apologie de la violence."

It was in a 1962 Présence du cinéma article called “Introduction à Don Weis” that Gérard Legrand called The Adventures of Hajji Baba “one of the 50 best films in the history of cinema” and Weis one of “the freest, most refined and fascinating talents in Hollywood.” Legrand, a surrealist poet who collaborated with André Breton and was later a regular contributor to Positif, goes on to praise Weis’s films for their “the sense of humor, the comedy, and the abundance of invention combined with a dryness in the images” and for the director’s “passionately balanced research between horror and fascination, satire and lyricism, in view of the less superficial aesthetic perfection of someone like Douglas Sirk.”

This brings us to the prodigy himself. Weis was born in Milwaukee in 1922. Milwaukee is of course the largest city in Wisconsin, the cradle of American filmmaking genius, as the birthplace of Nicholas Ray, Joseph Losey (both of La Crosse), and Orson Welles (Kenosha). These men were of the generation preceding Weis’s—and it should be noted that his second wife, Rebecca Welles, was not Welles’s daughter with Rita Hayworth. He was, then, of prime fighting age when the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor. Instead of heading for the front, Weis stayed in southern California, where he’d attended the University of Southern California film studies program and, after a stint as an errand boy at Warners, started working at the Jack Warner–founded 1st Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Corps at Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, which produced propaganda and training films.

In peacetime, Weis went to work for John Garfield’s Enterprise Studios, a stronghold for leftist filmmakers, and in the late ’40s and early ’50s he is credited as dialogue director or script supervisor on some of the most gritty, hard-hitting, politically committed films of the period: Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (48), Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave (49), Ida Lupino’s Outrage (50), and Losey’s M and The Prowler (both 51). Perhaps on the strength of these associations, Weis was signed to a two-year contract at MGM by Dore Schary, then chief of production, who was known for his liberal politics. In terms of overtly politicized content, Weis’s apprenticeship would appear not to be reflected in the films that he made as a director, which is understandable, as he was starting out on the job when many of his former associates were being put out of work by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Though Weis was a Schary hire, he was assigned to Louis B. Mayer films. Case in point is I Love Melvin, released in spring of 1953 approximately a year after Singin’ in the Rain had done nicely for MGM, and reuniting two of that film’s stars, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor, he of Singin’ in the Rain’s suicidal “Make ’Em Laugh” routine. (Reynolds is also in Weis’s buoyant The Affairs of Dobie Gillis of the same year, which also showcases a young Bob Fosse.) Melvin starts off looking very much like another backstage musical, but the big number being enacted on a Hollywood set by starlet Judy LeRoy (Reynolds) fades out just as she’s about to be kissed by Robert Taylor—Judy’s mother shakes her awake, and the dreamer is revealed to be a chorus girl still living with her parents, born Judy Schneider. Enter Melvin Hoover (O’Connor), a cloddish, penniless photographer’s assistant working for LIFE magazine who falls for Judy and uses her lust for fame as a passkey to her affections, promising to make her a cover girl, though such a promise is well beyond his ability to fulfill it.

The “rude awakening” introduction can be read as an inside joke about Melvin’s origins, humble compared to those of its predecessor. Melvin wasn’t a product of Arthur Freed’s famous unit, responsible for top-line musical product like Singin’ in the Rain, but a 77-minute programmer with just enough budget to cover the Technicolor and some location shooting in New York. The version of the city that the film offers is a pretty milk-and-cookies, middle-class one, and you’re taken aback the first time that Judy walks out of her parents’ clean, doily-stuffed apartment, so like a cozy Midwestern home, and emerges on the actual streets of the Upper West Side. Comparatively, Gene Kelly’s On the Town looks like a work of stark neorealism—though Melvin does beat that film’s semi-sequel It’s Always Fair Weather to the punch with its roller-skating number “Life Has Its Funny Little Ups and Downs,” tremulously sung by Noreen Corcoran, then a charming child actress playing Judy’s little sister. (And while Robert Taylor is the real McCoy, in another fantasy sequence the film deploys dancers in somewhat nightmarish Astaire and Kelly masks.)

I had the pleasure of watching I Love Melvin with an audience this past Tuesday at BAMcinématek, the first half of a double bill with Weis’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba, which I co-programmed with FILM COMMENT senior editor and film culture gadfly Nic Rapold. I can report that the movie plays remarkably well, earning actual applause with the death-defying “Football Ballet” and O’Connor’s manic “I Wanna Wander” number, in which he ransacks the costumes and sets of the LIFE photo studio, taking on a dozen different characters in rapid succession. (Ideally a couple of these wouldn’t involve doing “Chinky eyes” and playing an ooga-booga nose-ringed savage, but whaddya gonna do?)

The year of I Love Melvin was the last one on Weis’s MGM contract, and the studio worked him hard—the musical was one of five films he directed that were released in 1953. His first solo outing, The Adventures of Hajji Baba, would open in ’54, made under the auspices of the independent producer Walter Wanger. Wanger was then in the midst of staging a comeback of sorts—in 1951, he had discovered that his wife (and Fritz Lang’s muse), Joan Bennett, had been having frequent extramarital assignations with her agent, Jennings Lang (no relation), using the Beverly Hills apartment of one of Lang’s underlings at the MCA talent agency for their trysts. This arrangement was apparently one of the inspirations for Billy Wilder’s celebrated The Apartment some years later, a fact that, even had he known it, would probably have given very little succor to Lang after Wanger discovered him and Bennett in flagrante delicto-ish, and shot him in the groin.

Well served by a temporary insanity defense, Wanger would put in a four-month sentence at the minimum-security Castaic Honor Farm, located 40 miles north of Los Angeles. From this experience sprang Wanger’s first real project upon release, Riot in Cell Block 11, a brutal depiction of an inmate uprising filmed on location at Folsom State Prison by director Don Siegel, which was released in February 1954. (Riot recently became the first Siegel picture to receive the Criterion Collection treatment, and the disc is zealously recommended.) Hajji Baba, “Suggested By” James Justinian Morier’s 1824 The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, came to theaters that fall. Riot is black-and-white, a squat and gritty thing, its newsreel opening marking it as urgently contemporary. There isn’t a single woman on screen until the last shot, and the score is blunt and perfunctory. Hajji Baba is DeLuxe Color and CinemaScope, an escapist Orientalist fantasia. Its cast included once-and-future Playboy Playmates Joanne Arnold (May 1954), Pat Lawler (August 1955), and Pat Sheehan (October 1958), alongside a bevy of other pin-ups in skimpy desert wear. (Elaine Stewart, the female lead, would eventually pose for the magazine in 1959.) The zesty score was the work of Dimitri Tiomkin, who also provided the instrumentation to the Nat “King” Cole theme song “Hajji Baba (Persian Lament),” a piece of loungy exotica (“Come to my tent, oh, my beloved…”) swinging along with Nelson Riddle’s orchestra which fades in and out on the soundtrack throughout the movie to curious fugue-like effect, as if playing on a transistor radio wandering in and out of range.

It is difficult to imagine two more markedly contrasting movies, and it seems feasible that Wanger wanted to offset his risk (Riot, billed “Walter Wanger’s RAW-TRUTH EXPOSE!”) with a sure thing (Hajji Baba: “The girls pronounce it ‘Hotcha Baba!’”) A bronzer-slathered John Derek, a favorite of young lady moviegoers at the time, plays Hajji, a barber who dreams of wealth and adventure. Hajji finds his opportunity in a chance encounter with Princess Fakzia (Stewart), running away from the marriage that her father has arranged for her so that she may be instead be wed to the bellicose Nur-El-Din (Paul Picerni), her absence no doubt a relief to her handmaidens, whom she is seen abusing with impunity. Despite poor first impressions, Hajji and the princess become traveling companions—she of necessity, he for an emerald the size of a ping-pong ball—and set out to cross the desert together.

Casual cruelty of the sort that Fakzia indulges in is very much one of the movie’s hallmarks, from the image of a handmaiden having the bottoms of her feet slashed with a crop, to the bodies strung up outside the camp of the Turcoman women—escaped harem girls who’ve formed into a band of hard-riding, hell-bent-for-leather brigands. Their leader, Banah (Amanda Blake), takes Hajji for her concubine, though not before warning him what becomes of her castoffs: “They rot in the sun when their ardor cools.”

Redhead Blake makes quite an impression on screen with a wet, bloody smear of lipstick, malachite-green silks, and massive gold gauntlets. Production designer Gene Allen and fashion photographer Hoyningen Huene, credited here as “Color Consultant,” create a distinctive palette for each of the tribal groups that Hajji and Princess Fakzia encounter in their travels: green for the Turcoman women, red-and-gold for Osman Aga (Thomas Gomez) and his fellow merchants, black-and-white for Nur-El-Din and his soldiers. The program notes for a screening of the restoration of Hajji Baba at the 2013 Venice film festival refer to these as “symbolic,” but if this is the case, then I suppose that the rooms at Graceland or the suites at the Madonna Inn are symbolic as well.

The Adventures of Hajji Baba is, yes, tacky. It is also full of what Martin Scorsese is fond of calling “strong images”: the pan across a canyon pass that ends on the imperious, battle-ready Banah; the tracking shot along the chained legs of the Turcoman women when they’ve been captured; the tiered hammocks of Nur-El-Din’s harem, from which Rosemarie Stack’s Ayesha steals away in the night; and, throughout, the voluptuously beautiful lead performers looming against cloudless blue skies. If we are to understand Legrand’s canonization of Hajji Baba, we must understand it as championing an intoxicant, imagist cinema over a sober, responsible cinema. Because films like I Love Melvin and Hajji Baba have no redeeming social value beyond their cinematic brio, they are ideal rallying points for anyone championing “movies for movies’ sake,” as Hoberman and Rosenbaum identify the MacMahonist creed in Midnight Movies.

“Movies” per se seem to have held no such sacrosanct place for Weis, and Hajji Baba would appear to be both the apex and the beginning of the end for Don Weis, auteur. For in 1954 he had also begun to direct for television, the upstart, encroaching medium that sumptuous widescreen entertainments like Hajji Baba had been cooked up to combat. His first outing was an episode of I Married Joan, which for three seasons on NBC detailed the misadventures of the wacky wife of an upright judge, respectively played by Joan Davis and Jim Backus (who has a chewy role as Melvin’s splenetic, drunk, and possibly deranged boss).

Over the next three and a half decades, Weis would direct episodes of anything and everything put on television. He presided over episodes of The Jack Benny Program (10 of them), The Andy Griffith Show (9), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (5), The Twilight Zone (1), The Patty Duke Show (9), Batman (4), Planet of the Apes (2), Ironside (57), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (4), Starsky & Hutch (7), M*A*S*H (16), Hawaii Five-O (11), CHiPs (9), Fantasy Island (22), The Love Boat (7), Remington Steele (17), Hill Street Blues (4), and Freddy’s Nightmares (1). There was steady work to be had in the little box, if nothing else—the year after Hajji Baba, Blake, the leader of the Turcoman women, would begin a 19-year stint as Miss Kitty on TV’s Gunsmoke. Weis’s final credit dates to 1990. In retirement, he headed the Motion Picture Permanent Charities Committee (PCC) and served on the New Mexico Film Council.

When I said earlier that Hajji Baba “appeared” to be Weis’s apex, it is because I have had neither the time nor inclination to post up in a viewing booth at The Paley Center for Media and summon every 22 minutes of network television that Don Weis ever directed, right down to the last MacGyver (1 episode). In addition to Weis’s TV output, I count a total of 20 theatrical features to his name. Of these, about half are available on DVD or some kind of streaming service. Among the missing titles are Hajji Baba and 1953’s Remains to Be Seen, a June Allyson–Van Johnson pairing about which a very young François Truffaut filed an appreciative notice, as well as the 1968 Phyllis Diller vehicle Did You Hear the One About the Traveling Saleslady?, co-scripted by future M*A*S*H writers James Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, which seems like it would have to be engagingly appalling.

Aside from the canonical Weis, I will put in a word for 1965 teen musical Billie, a return to “Football Ballet” territory with Patty Duke playing a tomboy high school track star. It has some fairly provocative things to say about sex roles, for a while at least, and reunites the winning duo of Weis and Backus, clueless patriarch in this Gender Rebel Without a Cause. (Here's Duke singing the fairly wrenching “Lonely Little In-Between,” from the film.) Andrew Sarris, who cagily consigned Weis to the “Miscellany” section of The American Cinema, gives italicized preference to 1959’s The Gene Krupa Story, starring Sal Mineo, and 1963’s Critic’s Choice, with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. Rounding out the Weis oeuvre, there are six TV movies, the last of these being 1981’s The Munsters’ Revenge.

Weis died in Santa Fe at age 78, presumably comfortably off and possibly even with a tan. It is unclear whether, at the end of his days, he knew anything of his French following. I can find no evidence that any of Weis’s devotees made the trek to Los Angeles with a tape recorder in hand and gave him a chance to cast his Hollywood output in the light of subversive art, as Sirk would. If he did know of his cult reputation, it is not at all clear that he cared, and certainly nothing about his conducting of his career suggests that it was done with critic’s choice in mind. Even in Paris, the flame of Weis love would appear to have dimmed—a friend tells me that Bertrand Tavernier, once a Weis partisan, has tempered his appreciation. Sarris was always cautious, writing that “the Don Weis cultists in Britain and France are not normally frivolous, but just this once it remains to be seen,” and calling the director’s career “longer on commission than on conviction.” If he wasn’t convinced by 1968, there’s little chance that he ever would be.

I prefer to file Weis under “Subjects for Further Research” for the time being—that’s a lot of Ironside episodes to clock for anyone who wants to call themselves a completist. While Don Weis the man remains a vague figure, in I Love Melvin and The Adventures of Hajji Baba you can see the film sense that made him an unwitting cause célèbre. For a while, in a handful of lobbies and cafés in Paris, at least, Don Weis seemed like a hill worth fighting and dying on—and for a few films, at least, he was.

* Har. Har.
** The MacMahonist roll call included Lourcelles and Fereydoun Hoveyda (who wrote for Positif as F. Hoda), later Iranian ambassador to the U.S. under the Shah. Bertrand Tavernier, Jean-Claude Biette, and the robustly entertaining Louis Skorecki have variously been listed as fellow travelers. The RC Cola to the Pepsi and Coke of Cahiers du cinéma and Positif, Présence du cinéma folded in 1967.

When Momo and her mother in A Letter to Momo move to the picturesque island of Shio to live with her grandparents, the city kid immediately comes off as a typically apathetic youth. Momo is unimpressed by natural beauty and unable to relate to her widowed mother's enthusiasm about returning to her childhood home. But her behavior, in Hiroyuki Okiura’s new film, has an understandable source. She’s felt a numbing sense of guilt since the death of her father, their final moments together marred by a major fight. Soon, however, the grieving Momo finds distraction in the form of three yokai (spirits of Japanese folklore) who live in the attic, sent to watch her and her mother “from above.”

Momo’s coming-of-age story is a magical experience in many senses Through its small-town setting and sense of supernatural whimsy, A Letter to Momo confidently invites comparison with its Studio Ghibli forebearers as it sends Momo on fantastical adventures reminiscent of My Neighbor Totoro. But it’s produced by renowned studio Production I.G., known for the influential sci-fi anime Ghost in the Shell. The scenic island landscapes are so richly and busily detailed that Momo’s initial withdrawal from these overwhelming new surroundings in fact makes sense. And it’s beautiful: the nuanced portrayal of natural light makes the presence of this lively exterior world felt even when the characters are indoors. In one lovely scene, a heart-to-heart between Momo and her mother during a power outage, Momo gazes upon a portrait of her father as the waning sunlight is suppressed by a window.

Momo’s relationship with the yokai provides an emotional outlet, as well as the chance to finally make peace with her father's passing. These yokai sidekicks, in contrast to the comparatively simplistic designs of the main characters with their muted colors and flat feel, possess a kinetic energy that radiates with every movement. Though humanoid creatures, they’re not what one would call aesthetically pleasing, eyes bulging out of wan, oversized heads. But Letter’s animators, whose credits include Spirited Away (another influence) and Paprika, demonstrate their skill at seamlessly integrating such fantastical elements into the mundane world. In one montage, when the yokai wreak comical havoc on the family house—eating Momo’s food, using her bathroom, and making her do an embarrassing dance with them—they’re a pleasure to watch.

Momo’s search for solace from grief becomes moving as the dynamics between her and her family grows and deepens in complexity. The yokai build a friendship with Momo that grants her a needed space for levity. Around them, she becomes expressive in a way that she rarely is with her mother, grandparents, or the neighbors who attempt to befriend her. Even at their first encounter, her static face blooms with expression, and her arms finally become unstuck from her sides to flail with abandon. At the same time, the excitement introduced by the yokai produces a strain on Momo’s relationship with her mother and a stronger desire to find the words to finish writing to her father, who left behind an unfinished letter to her.

Still, Momo's displays of emotion belie an otherwise flat characterization. Despite the amount of time spent with her, both in and out of flashbacks, she never becomes a truly compelling or inspiring protagonist, as nearly all of the Miyazaki heroines do. Considering that she is in some serious psychological pain, it's not totally surprising that Momo spends at least half of the film with her shoulders slumped and head down; it's just a bit disappointing that she rarely reveals herself to be more than what she appears on the surface, exhibiting a plot arc more than a full-fledged personality.

Yet the stunning animation, from the energy of its characters’ faces and bodies to those entrancing backgrounds—it’s as if the island is taking quiet, deep breaths—securely rank the film alongside other worthy entries in post-Miyazaki anime. Mamoru Hosoda’s superlative The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, for example, is definitely one cinematic cousin. Okiura’s film also joins two other GKIDS releases this summer, Wrinkles and Patema Inverted, as reminders of the unique vigor and resilience of traditional animation (alongside one other reminder, for New Yorkers: the Museum of the Moving Image’s Chuck Jones exhibition). And like other superior excursions into fantasy, A Letter to Momo gives life to spaces we have never been but now need to visit.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Final Episode

Forty years ago last month, on June 29, 1974, a shot of Hiroshima’s ruined Genbaku Dome hit cinema screens like an epitaph, marking the end of Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Final Episode, the final film in Kinji Fukasaku’s epic secret history of post–World War II Japan, The Yakuza Papers. Essentially one 634-minute movie split into five parts, this is the story of a Japan where honor died in one mushroom cloud and human sympathy was incinerated in the other. It’s the story of a country built on greasy whorehouse handshakes and backroom deals, where politicians need criminal muscle to get out the vote, and who you pay off is more important than who you are. It’s a grand, glorious gun opera and the best way to see it is all at once, one movie after the other smashing into your face. When you pick yourself up off the floor, your skull will be splitting from keeping track of all the plotlines, characters, subplots, gang names, and knotty alliances, but your nerves’ll be buzzing. 

Starting in the 1960s, Toei had become a factory for yakuza movies. By 1967, 37 of their 55 features were yakuza flicks, all of them ninkyo type, which were mythic man-tales about a noble yakuza like Takakura Ken (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) reasserting the ideals of Japanese chivalry and honor by hacking apart dozens of dishonorable opponents from a rival gang. But the real yakuza never had a scrap of honor. In the 19th century, the yakuza were a part-time secret army for the right-wing government, breaking up strikes and labor unions, while ultranationalists like Toyama Mitsuru regularly forged brief truces between yakuza and the police to promote his agenda. When Japan held its first open elections in 1892, Mitsuru brought together an alliance of yakuza, ultranationalists, and cops under orders from the Minister of Home Affairs to wage a violent campaign to tip the election to the right. And it was the yakuza who helped run Japan’s official Opium Monopoly Bureau dedicated to building a thriving opium trade in China to undermine that country’s stability.

Tokyo Drifter

And it wasn’t just the Japanese government who cozied up to the yakuza. After World War II, the occupying Americans were terrified of Communist agitation, and the yakuza were allowed to control the black market for food in exchange for breaking strikes and attacking the headquarters of left-wing politicians. Most importantly, the Americans secured the release from prison of Class A war criminal Yoshio Kodama, a major yakuza figure. As long as he helped them fight Communism by using his vast smuggling network and his political connections to do their dirty work, they turned a blind eye to his drug dealing, murder, and general yakuza-ing. 

The real yakuza were a million times more interesting than the cinematic yakuza—especially for Fukasaku, who was born and raised in postwar Japan.

“I grew up surrounded by the ruins of war,” he said in an interview for Patrick Macias’s book Tokyoscope. “Life was extremely difficult. It was like living in a constant state of violence . . . We were living under the U.S. Occupation . . . This was a great humiliation . . . As a boy aged 14 or 15, this had a tremendous impact on me. I was very upset about it.”

Street Mobster

Starting in 1972 with Street Mobster, Fukasaku pioneered a new kind of yakuza movie, the jitsuroku or “realistic” style, shot primarily handheld. His chief inspirations were the newsreels that played before features, not only for their camerawork but also their content. During the late 1960s and early 70s, Fukasaku was watching newsreel footage of a breathtaking series of riots, protests, assassinations, attempted coups, public suicides, and police actions, as the Japanese government (with occasional yakuza assistance) stomped the political left to death. (These were some of the events dramatized years later in Koji Wakamatsu’s harrowing United Red Army.) 

When the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper began publishing Koichi Iiboshi’s two-volume, interview-based memoir of Kozo Mino, a jailed Hiroshima yakuza boss, Fukasaku jumped on the project. Teaming up with screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara they went to Hiroshima and did extensive research, interviewing many local yakuza and putting together their nonfiction epic. In 1974, Kasahara wrote: “We could not say that the films were true in the publicity material [but they] are close to a true record.” 

Battles Without Honor and Humanity

The five Battles Without Honor and Humanity movies (released in 1973-74) would be the bomb Fukasaku would use to explode not just the myth of the righteous yakuza, but also the myth of Japan’s post-WWII recovery. Fukasaku viewed the series—set in Hiroshima, not Tokyo—almost as science-fiction films. Talking to Chris D. in his book, Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film, he says: “The Battles Without Honor films are also set outside Tokyo, in Hiroshima right after the war. There was a lot more street crime, much more mindless violence and many gang wars in struggles for supremacy . . . The genesis of the extreme violence with the gangsters almost appearing right out of the dust and smoke of the mushroom cloud . . . that’s why we used the stock footage of the bomb going off at the beginning of the film.” 

Though it was shot one year after The Godfather, the differences between Coppola’s film and Fukasaku’s couldn’t be starker and they’re summed up in their opening shots. The Godfather begins with a shot of Marlon Brando hovering in the murk of his study and moves on to a complicated wedding scene that outlines the characters’ relationships. In Battles, the figure of Marlon Brando is essentially replaced by Little Boy, which presides over these movies like a malignant irradiating god, with the yakuza spreading across the nation like cancer. When Fukasaku’s players are presented they’re shown as wild dogs fighting over the scraps fallen from their masters’ tables. Their connections are economic, not emotional.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity

The first Battles focuses on Shozo Hirono, a soldier returned from World War II who winds up joining the Yamamori-gumi (Yamamori gang, or family). He and his band of bloody brothers spend all five movies rising up, and falling down, the ranks. Hirono is played by the shark-faced Bunta Sugawara, a 40-year-old actor who had bounced from minor failure to minor failure before meeting Fukasaku. Speaking with Macias, Fukasaku said: “From growing up in the postwar era, I was attracted to characters who had only violence and strength to believe in and depend on. I was hoping to meet actors who had the same kind of feeling, and that was when I encountered Bunta Sugawara. I was delighted to find that we shared the same kinds of ideas . . . I don’t think I would have realized how much fun it could be making a film without Sugawara.”

Fukasaku has a blast in Battles, constantly upsetting expectations. Widescreen was the Japanese film industry standard, but rather than using it to depict epic vistas, Fukasaku dropped his camera into crowded black markets and hellhole bars. The famous yakuza dignity degenerates into farce as solemn pinkie amputation ends with a chicken stealing the amputated digit. Full of close-ups on sweaty faces, terse conversations, sudden votes, and cigarettes ground out in anger, with close to 50 speaking parts, there’s some confusion about who's who and which faction is trying to kill which other faction, but the joke is that Fukasaku’s yakuza are occasionally just as lost as the audience.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deathmatch in Hiroshima

Battles Without Honor and Humanity was a hit, and Fukasaku began turning out the sequels. But, again, unlike The Godfather which traces the rise and fall of Michael Corleone, Fukasaku ignores following individual characters because he’s telling the story of postwar power. That’s why Bunta Sugawara’s Shozo becomes a supporting character in Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deathmatch in Hiroshima (73). This film is based on the life of Yamakami Koichi, whom Kasahara met while doing research for the screenplay. Kasahara, who was trained as an Army reservist but was too young to be called up, later wrote of this second film: “I intended to write an elegy to Yamanaka, a youth who trained in the military tradition, but was too young to have actually gone to war. He offers his oyabun [boss] the loyalty he once offered the state. He uses his 24-caliber pistol, a substitute zerosen, freely, as he assassinates people while whistling a military tune . . . In reality I had wanted to expel the vestiges of that time which remained within me.” 

Deathmatch in Hiroshima opens at the dawn of the Korean War and centers on a character named Yamanaka (Kinya Kitaoji), who falls in love with his boss’s niece (Meiko Kaji, Lady Snowblood) and gets his long-delayed wish to be a kamikaze pilot granted when he’s turned into a trained attack dog for the yakuza. The mood is more psychological and the yakuza family intrigues are greatly simplified, but the film also features one of the series’ only female characters. Dropped into the blood-slimed power struggles, Meiko Kaji watches the men she loves die like dogs (her husband was a kamikaze pilot), and she howls like a flayed cat thrown into a salt water bath. Seeing the yakuza from a female point of view is almost too harrowing. Except for a few bit players, we barely see any women in The Yakuza Papers again.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Proxy War

But that’s not to say there aren’t plenty of characters to sink your teeth into. The great villain of the piece is the treacherous Boss Yamamori, who’s as liable to burst into tears as order a hit, and he’s matched in ruthless cunning only by his plump, cheerful wife. Sonny Chiba literally rips the scenery to shreds as Otomo, a scarily tanned yakuza thug, hand surgically attached to his crotch, who struts the streets like a demon from Hell. But it’s Bunta Sugawara’s Hirono, the soldier turned gangster, who is the de facto main character, and his double-breasted purple suit is the center of gravity around which the rest of the cast revolves. 

By the end of the first movie, Hirono has fallen completely out of favor. Relegated to supporting status in Deathmatch in Hiroshima, he slowly makes his comeback because, as he drolly puts it, “I know a lot of people.” In part three, Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Proxy War (73), the most compelling of the five movies, he gets a tragic comeuppance. Set against the backdrop of the U.S. and USSR’s own proxy wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, this middle installment depicts a bloody battle of succession in which Hirono is forced to choose sides in a stupidly pointless power struggle. 

Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Police Tactics

Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Police Tactics (74) starts in 1964, on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics, when Japan wanted to show off its recovery and police flooded the streets to stop the embarrassing yakuza bloodshed. In real life, that was the era of Kodama’s Kanto-kai, an ambitious attempt to form a pan-yakuza, ultranationalist secret army. It was also the era when the yakuza began giving up brawling in bar rooms for voting in board rooms, funneling their massive wealth into legitimate businesses. The series comes to a realistic but anticlimactic conclusion in Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Final Chapter (74). Actor Kinya Kitaoji returns as a totally different character, Matsumura, an android-like young man who doesn’t seem to sweat. He wants to transition the yakuza from street gangs to political groups, and men like Hirono are no longer necessary. The yakuza have penetrated legitimate business and politics so deeply that there’s no longer any difference between the two. To Fukasaku, Japan didn’t have a gang problem, Japan was a gang. As the final movie ends, the Genbaku Dome looms on screen one last time, a reminder of the shattered ruins of Hiroshima that didn’t mark the end of a war, but the beginning of another. A war that the average people lost.

These movies chart a social movement, from back-alley brawls to the back-alley deals that built Japan, powered industry, and shaped politics. But while the focus is on power, it's the personal details that bring these movies to life. Later in the series, Hirono is cooling his heels in a jailhouse corridor when an old enemy is brought by on his way to court. They sit on the bench together for a few minutes, chatting about how they got to this point. Behind them, snow blows in through a broken window and these two once-great gang bosses curl their toes in pain: they used to have the police in their pockets, now they’re wearing cheap government slippers in the middle of winter. It’s a telling, tiny detail of what happened to power in Japan. It went from the personal clout built on fists, to corporate authority wielded by faceless men in comfortable offices. And the people who put them there, whether they’re voters or the yakuza, can’t even keep their feet warm.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

... Transformers 4 became the highest-grossing movie of all time in China after only 17 days, and the world mourns. It’s even inspired farmers to give up their jobs and start selling overpriced Transformers statues instead.

... While it won’t match the overall box office of Transformers 4: God Is Dead, the third part in China’s popular female-centric movie series, Tiny Times 3, did bump it out of the top slot on its opening weekend. And there was great rejoicing.

Uzumasa Limelight

... The Japanese movie about a real-life extra who has been killed in samurai films 50,000 times, Uzumasa Limelight, just took the Audience Award at the New York Asian Film Festival (it actually shared the top slot with Taiwanese food movie Zone Pro Site). You can read an interview with the extra himself, Seizo Fukumoto, now 71 years old, in the Japan Times.

... The Toronto Film Festival is slowly rolling out its line-up. Asian movies include the Bong Joon-ho–produced Sea Fog which is being pitched as some kind of thriller (“The ragtag crew of a fishing boat takes on a dangerous commission to smuggle a group of illegal immigrants…”), even though it’s based on a real-life tragedy in which this “ragtag crew” committed mass murder. Other Asian titles of note include Ning Hao’s latest, Breakup Buddies; Zhang Yimou’s Cultural Revolution movie, Coming Home; and India’s Mary Kom, with starlet Priyanka Chopra playing Mary Kom, based upon the real-life world-champion boxer.

... If there was any doubt that ’80s movie god Ringo Lam (City on Fire, Full Alert, Full Contact), was going to go through with his new movie, Hustle, then let that doubt die like a dog. Production is in full swing on the streets of Hong Kong.

... The Venice Film Festival has announced its lineup with Shinya Tsukamoto’s latest, Nobi (Fires on the Plain), an adaptation of the same novel that formed the basis for Kon Ichikawa’s 1959 version. Ann Hui’s Golden Era closes the festival, and in between there are new movies from Im Kwon-taek and Hong Sang-soo.

... Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un is PISSED. Who made this viral video that shows him having a dance-off with President Obama? This video “seriously compromises Kim’s dignity and authority,” squeal state officials. Unable to understand the internet, North Korean officials turned to China to stop the spread of this viral video. Because it is not stupid, China did nothing. Now North Korea just sits and silently fumes. WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS????

... If you’re Ng See-yuen, Hong Kong’s iconic director and producer (he’s the man who gave Yuen Wo-ping, Jackie Chan, and Tsui Hark, among others, their first big breaks), you know exactly who to blame. When it was pointed out that Hong Kong hasn’t built a Bruce Lee museum, Ng was eager to speak his mind. "There is obviously room but the government isn't discussing it. When West Kowloon started, Leung Chun-ying met with us and asked if we had any requests. Yet last week when we met again with the government, the design actually had no film element. The government does not value film as a culture, only as a commercial product. Hong Kong government has become this dumb." See, even Ng See-yuen hates CY Leung!

... Finally, in news that has already spread around the world like wildfire, Korean god in the form of man RAIN has converted to Catholicism. For the sake of his girlfriend, Kim Tae-hee. No one is sure which is more upsetting: that RAIN is now a Catholic, or that RAIN is probably about to get married. 

Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground
By Matthew Chojnacki
Schiffer Publishing Ltd., $34.99

Billed as “the first book to document the spectacular art of underground film posters,” Matthew Chojnacki’s Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground is a fairly comprehensive snapshot (or let’s say family album) of a convergent moment in cinephilia and graphic design. Born out of the gig poster phenomenon of the past decade, and cross-pollinated with the surge of fan-produced fake Criterion covers that sprang up all over the Internet, the alternative movie poster scene has flourished in the past few years, producing a parallel universe of cult-film art, much of which Chojnacki has collected here.

Though comprised of both online fan art and limited-edition screen prints by accomplished artists, the book’s examples are not so much movie posters as they are souvenirs of movies. They were never created expressly to introduce a film to the public consciousness and sell it to the widest audience (though plenty of them would have done a better job than the original studio-sanctioned designs). Instead, for the most part, these works commemorate and re-imagine films that have already entered some sort of canon or garnered a following.

Alamo Drafthouse’s collectible art boutique Mondo has of course spearheaded and legitimized (and monetized) the movement, and when a number of Mondo posters recently popped up in a Christie’s auction of “Vintage Movie Posters,” it marked a watershed moment of respectability.

One thing the phenomenon of alternative movie posters has done is give a high-profile outlet to illustrators, at a time when illustration had started to seem like a doomed profession, and it is heartening to see the wealth of talent that is out there. Once nearly the sole medium for movie advertising, illustration has been little used in movie posters since the 1960s (with a brief airbrushed resurgence in the ’80s). Photoshop killed the movie-poster star for sure, but then again it is digital tools that have given rise to this rebirth of hand-drawn art.

Chojnacki has selected from work by over 100 artists from 20 different countries to present more than 200 posters (out of 10,000 he looked at). Some were created especially for the book, which presents each poster next to a brief bio and interview with the artist. Though a number of the major players are missing—towering talents like Tyler Stout, Tom Whalen, Olly Moss, Akiko Stehrenberger, and Laurent Durieux—the book includes several superb artists that I was already familiar with (such as Jay Shaw, Jason Munn, Heath Killen, Viktor Hertz, and Matt Needle), and it was a treat to discover others I hadn’t seen before.

Many of the featured designers (perhaps too many) tend to worship at the twin temples of Saul Bass and Drew Struzan, the minimalist and maximalist gods of 20th-century poster design. The Bass homages in particular are far too plentiful. Another problem, common in the fan-art phenomenon generally, is its limited frame of reference. More than half of the films featured in the book were made since the mid-1980s, and probably only about 20 date from before the ’70s. There are very few foreign films (I counted just Le Corbeau, 8 1/2, Léon: The Professional, The Artist, and two films by Dario Argento), and the same directors tend to crop up repeatedly, namely, the Coen Brothers, John Carpenter, David Lynch, Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, and Wes Anderson. 

That being said, the book contains a treasure trove of witty, inventive, and beautifully executed designs, all expressing a geeked-out love for their subjects. Some of my personal favorites are these below.

Irish artist Peter Strain’s pared-down compositions of nearly monochrome images and hand-lettered text... 

(click to enlarge)

Lovely geometric color wheels from British artist Simon C. Page...

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This Cinefamily commission for a rare pre-1960s film in the book (a 1916 Jules Verne adaptation) by Los Angeles’s Dimitri Simakis...

Minimalist classics from Jason Munn, better known as gig poster genius The Small Stakes...

(click to enlarge)

This richly illustrated John Waters homage from Milwaukee’s Little Friends of Printmaking...

Nouveau-retro monster posters from British artist James Gilleard...

(click to enlarge)

Maryland artist Joshua Budich’s Struzan-esque poster for a director who has inspired more fan art than any other...

And, for the Wes Anderson film that may have generated the most fan art of all, this gem from Wales-based Matt Needle…

Cult ’80s movies as cereal boxes, by New Jersey’s Ian Glaubinger...

(click to enlarge)

Italian artist Ale Giorgini’s crowded geometric cartoons...

(click to enlarge)

And finally, an old favorite by Sweden’s Viktor Hertz, one of the best to come out of the minimalist movie poster craze...

Adrian Curry writes the Graphic Detail column in FILM COMMENT and is the design director for Zeitgeist Films.

Given how productive he has been, James Franco has an oddly nebulous profile as a filmmaker. His IMDb listing reveals that he has directed 10 features solo, and several in collaboration—most prominently Interior. Leather Bar., with Travis Mathews—and currently has a film about Charles Bukowski and a version of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury completed, plus another co-directed documentary in postproduction. The fact that he keeps so ridiculously busy (like most people, I can’t help attaching that adverb)—the fact that he’s a prolific director along with being an actor (on stage and screen), fiction writer, performance artist, hawker of Gucci perfume, and, for all I know, virtuoso euphonium player—makes it all too easy to overlook what he actually does behind the camera. In all honesty, I have some catching up to do on Franco’s CV, so I couldn’t say how his new release Child of God compares to early works like Good Time Max (07) or 2005’s The Ape (about an aspiring novelist’s relationship with a gorilla in a Hawaiian shirt).

Still, I can take a guess and suggest that Child of God probably brings Franco closer to the primate realm than he has been since The Ape. And I can say for sure that the film stays quite close to the mode and to the thematic territory of his adaptation last year of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Child of God is an adaptation of the 1973 novel by Cormac McCarthy—the most Faulknerian of latter-day American novelists, as much in his subjects and settings as in his use of language. Franco’s As I Lay Dying was a serious, high-minded venture, but rather disappointing. It faithfully visualized the content and the formal devices of one of modernism’s most notoriously difficult texts but, for all the split-screen photography and fragmentation, came out a little studious and inert—an honourable homage rather than a vivid response to the book’s challenges.

As a teaser for the theatrical opening of Child of God, Franco has released something that in its way is similarly earnest and a little solemn—a showreel of some 30 minutes that he shot three or four years ago in preparation for his intended adaptation of McCarthy’s Old West epic Blood Meridian. This book has long been the Holy Grail of American adaptation and, to be fair, it would probably take Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, and Erich von Stroheim working jointly to capture the text’s visionary extremity, suggestive of Breughel among the sagebrush. While it’s unfair to judge on the basis of this rough sketch—an extended flashback introduced by a narration from a character played by Scott Glenn—his no-frills footage is atmospheric, with an authentically dusty, sun-baked tinge of desert and desperation. But it’s again a little ruminative and literary, and doesn’t make you slaver to see a feature-length extension.

With Child of God, however, Franco—together with his co-writer, long-term associate Vince Jolivette—has come up with something distinctive that both captures the atmosphere of McCarthy’s neo-Gothic universe and suggests a consolidation on the director’s As I Lay Dying. Published in 1973, and set in the 1960s in Tennessee, the film is about a deeply disadvantaged, and increasingly deranged young man, played here by Scott Haze. As a voiceover narrator tells us at the start (one of five different voices in the film, together forming a kind of chorus), “His name was Lester Ballard—a child of God, much like yourself perhaps.” Lester is first seen staring with fiery, suspicious, and altogether feral eyes out through the slats of a barn, just as he later stares between prison bars or out of a cave: he’s by nature a starer, and a scarer. He comes raging and roaring out of the barn to shoo local folk off land with which he might once have had a connection—“Move! Move! Move! This is not your property!” Territory is one of the film’s big themes, for Lester, a perennially homeless pariah, is constantly staking out temporary rudimentary dwellings.

Lester starts as an object of social horror, the Abject personified, then goes all the way in his career as an American bogeyman. Forever hunted down and moved along by the Sheriff of Sevier County (Tim Blake Nelson), he one day finds a young couple dead in a car by the side of the road. Clambering on top of the woman, he begins an enthusiastic career as a necrophile, afterwards hauling her body into the woods, setting up “home” with her in an abandoned barn. He shyly goes shopping to buy his beloved a dress, which he puts on her for a coy tête-à-tête. The evening starts as a gently grotesque parody of old-fashioned courtship—“I’d be honored if I could have one kiss”—before inescapably turning obscene. Yet there’s a sort of poignancy running through even Lester’s most horrific acts.

I haven’t read McCarthy’s novel, though I sense that Franco is taking a cue from the title and from that line introducing Lester as being just like you and me (and all us other “hypocrite readers,” to quote Baudelaire). Lester is indeed a child—an orphan, seemingly traumatized by seeing his father hanged, and who knows what else. If you follow the religious implications of his being a “son of God,” then Lester is genuinely an anti-Christ—a parodic martyr, forsaken by his maker, constantly tested, embodying all humanity’s ugliest excesses on our behalf. From garden-variety imbecile, Lester—his myth narrated by that voiceover chorus—becomes a murderous troglodyte, a modern backwoods cyclops.

The premise sounds familiar, and when Lester bursts out of the woods like a shambling rag doll in his victims’ dresses, you may feel a frisson of déjà vu—another grotesque to add to the bloody gallery along with Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, Leatherface, and all the other avatars of Ed Gein. What’s impressive is that this very simple film manages to take us into Lester’s world—not into his head, it’s too detached for that, but certainly into the universe immediately around him. If the film, with its longueurs and abrupt jumps, suggests a lack of design, it’s because the narrative attunes itself to the repetitive, disconnected temporality of Lester’s existence: DP Christina Voros’s free-roaming camera lumbers around after him, as if he were its documentary subject.

The effect is to give Lester dignity, not to glamorize him—and to make us understand him a little, or at least more than he’s understood by the likes of the Sheriff (a cold-eyed Nelson, giving his best performance, because his least showy). Lester comes alive because Scott Haze inhabits him so fully, playing him as something like a forest animal whose body and mouth aren’t made for human gestures and speech. We hear him roaring through teeth that sound (rather than look) as if they don’t fit; there are chilling moments when the image cuts out on his pained bellow resounding through the forest. And while the Southern Idiot Boy has become a cinematic stereotype milked ruthlessly over the years, Haze makes Lester something of his own, a person with his own voice, gestures and appetites. The thought-out quality of the performance is brought home by one particular line, when Lester spits, “I ain’t ask nothin’ from nobody in this chicken-shot town,” and Haze does something unexpected—he puts the stress on “town.” He’s found the way that Lester speaks, as well as the way he moves.

By the end, when Lester experiences a kind of liberating rebirth, we know who he is. He only wants to be loved. So does Franco the director, of course. With Child of God, he might have come a step nearer.

This Is Softcore: The Art Cinema Erotica of Radley Metzger runs August 7 to 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with Metzger in attendance at multiple shows.

Score

Pornographer, poet of the erotic, softcore tease: will the real Radley Metzger please stand up? The truth is he’s all of the above, a filmmaker attuned to the prevailing winds regarding sexually oriented movies and dedicated to staying on the leading edge of the curve. His reputation has shifted accordingly, and in an era of sexually explicit films like Catherine Breillat’s Romance, Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs, and John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus—movies that polarized critics and moviegoers but clearly have little in common with the XXX porno flicks that once kept run-down theaters in dodgy neighborhoods in business—Metzger’s movies are often damned with faint and snarky praise for their pretty, retro naughtiness. But that kind of reaction says less about Carmen, Baby (67), The Lickerish Quartet (70) or Score (72; released 74) than it does about the general contempt in which the history of sexually explicit movies—a field that encompasses everything from hardcore stag loops to features in which sexual relationships are explored in candid detail within a larger narrative context—is held.

Far from being a linear progression from innocent shorts of belly dancers and decorous stripteases to more risqué “bachelor party attractions” and softcore smut, and ending finally with precisely targeted hardcore, it’s a complicated dance in which hardcore, softcore, and fetish films coexisted from the beginning and moved in and out of the shadows in response to the vagaries of time and place. There’s an eternal verity in the wisecrack that the minute photographic technology became commercially available, some guy was taking pictures of his girl- or boyfriend, and movies were not far behind. The cross-section of vintage pornographic shorts collected as the 2002 anthology film The Good Old Naughty Days is easily accessible proof that someone was filming everything back when your granddad was a beardless youth, from lesbian nun orgies to no-detail-spared masturbation, same-sex frolics, and troilism (all of which are packed into a 15-minute version of Madame Butterfly made in 1925).

The dividing line between smut and erotica is generally drawn by the consideration of some combination of intent, artistry, prevailing cultural standards, local laws and personal tolerance for expressions of amorous affection, sensual pleasure, and nudity. Radley Metzger’s body of work touched all the bases. His softcore films range from the charming naughtiness of The Dirty Girls (65) to the boundary-pushing Score, while his hardcore pictures rank with the cream of the porno-chic crop defined by features like The Devil in Miss Jones (Gerard Damiano, 73), Behind the Green Door (Jim and Artie Mitchell, 72) and Deep Throat (Damiano, 72). And Metzger’s oeuvre is an all-in-one chronicle of theatrical erotica from the mid-1960s, when a few shots of bare breasts and backsides were delightfully titillating to the late ’70s, when video drop-kicked feature-length narrative hardcore into the gutter of history.

Carmen, Baby

But his best films fell between the poles, and they’re the opposite of guilty pleasures. You can groove on the retro fashions and sexual intrigue without putting your brain in park, and they chart the gradual progression in theatrical exhibition from ever harder softcore to increasingly sophisticated hardcore while exploring a world of sexual experience: awakening and disillusionment, experimentation and manipulation, love, lust, betrayal, and despair. Those who dismiss Metzger’s films as stylish but low-brow are at best uninformed and at worst snobs. For the bulk of a 25-year career, he staked a claim on a shifting territory and worked it with intelligence and a certain Continental flair that was equal parts inclination and practicality (the dollar went further in Europe than it did at home).

A movie buff from childhood, Metzger was born in 1929, less than a decade after Russ “King Leer” Meyer. Both directors honed their filmmaking skills in the military, Meyer during World War II and Metzger during the Korean War. Meyer’s groundbreaking nudie-cutie The Immoral Mr. Teas, an hour-long shaggy-dog story about a traveling salesman who can see through ladies’ clothing, opened in 1959, just five years before Metzger’s The Dictionary of Sex. But their sensibilities were a world and a generation apart: raised in suburban San Leandro, California, Meyer came of age in a small-town American era of farmer’s-daughter jokes and busty beauties with hourglass figures, a time when sex was dirty if you were doing it right; his films are smutty fantasies about shanty tramps, whores, nymphos, and strippers, bawdy burlesques with an ugly streak of sexual violence peopled by cartoonishly over-endowed living sex dolls who live to rut. Meyer clung to his ’50s-shaped sensibilities as the counterculture swept over America and was celebrated first by blue-collar joes who grew up lusting for Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, and then by hipsters seeing camp genius in the larger-than-life excesses of a filmmaker who sincerely loved supersized boobs and butts and didn’t get the appeal of slim, restless girls burning with personal ambition rather than thinly veiled contempt for the lechers who pursued them.

Native New Yorker Metzger was a cosmopolitan sophisticate who approached the sexual revolution with the imperturbable curiosity of someone who knew the landscape of the flesh was changing and looked forward to seeing—or even anticipating—what lay around history’s corner. Metzger drew inspiration from classic texts (Carmen and La Dame aux Camélias), recent history (Little Mother, 73, took on the rise and fall of Eva Perón) and contemporary theater (Score adapted the Off-Broadway comedy of sexual manners Score or, No One’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf! by future porn director Jerry Douglas), as well as the uninhibited European art films for which he cut trailers at Janus Films. He distributed his own movies through Audubon, the company he formed in 1961 with Ava Leighton, who was working for Janus when it declined to pick up his first feature, Dark Odyssey (58), a scrappy drama about a Greek sailor trying to avenge the sexual assault of his sister. Leighton could book like a demon—she never took no for an answer—and their partnership only ended in 1987, with her death at age 71.

Camille 2000

Audubon’s initial business plan was to release stylish European genre movies with more nudity and sex than their American counterparts to a growing niche market of drive-ins, art houses, and college-circuit cinemas. These were venues underserved by major U.S. studios and receptive to offbeat material with a little sex appeal—occasionally spiced up with Metzger’s own original footage. The success of Mademoiselle Strip-Tease (57) retitled The Nude Set and released in 1960, Les Collégiennes (59) aka The Twilight Girls (61), and Détournement de mineures (59) aka The Price of Flesh (62) led logically to the decision to make original films. Metzger was pragmatist enough to have learned the lesson of Dark Odyssey, which secured only a handful of bookings, including a single theater in New York, the Cameo, an ethnic cinema that would only take the English-language film if it were dubbed into Greek. He proposed a feature about prostitutes; the subject matter was inherently racy and Metzger figured he could shoot in Europe, where the combination of contacts he’d cultivated as a distributor and a favorable exchange rate would translate into above-average production value.

The result was The Dirty Girls (65), even now widely referred to as a bachelor-party attraction—how “the more things change” is that?—and it was a world-class balancing act. Squeaking through the pre-MPAA certification process uncut, the film delivers sufficient titillation to justify the come-on, made the word “dirty” part of the Metzger brand without treating sex as particularly dirty, and portrays prostitutes as neither golden-hearted good-time girls nor brutalized victims of male oppression—just women playing the hand life dealt them. And the trailer is a quiet jaw-dropper that offers the promise of La Dolce Vita–style decadent frolics with a surprising focus on female satisfaction, hardly the norm in racy movies whose audience was overwhelmingly male. The Dirty Girls made money, netting more than twice what it cost.

After a second black-and-white feature, The Alley Cats (66), Metzger took a deep breath and upped the stakes with Carmen, Baby (67), which transforms Prosper Mérimée’s gypsy tramp into a ’60s Spanish sexpot who systematically compromises, humiliates, and betrays the square cop who loves her. Metzger coaxes from German actress Uta Levka (who played a stripper in The Alley Cats) a more charismatic performance than her subsequent career would suggest she had in her, but she’s upstaged by Walter Wilz’s creepy “Baby” Lucas, the pop-star lover who swills cocktails from a baby bottle. Carmen, Baby was, by Metzger’s estimation, the most financially successful film of his career and served as the template for his class-and-ass Camille 2000, which reimagines Alexandre Dumas fils’ tubercular courtesan as Marguerite, a youthquaker à la Edie Sedgwick with a better reason for her heedlessly self-destructive embrace of drugs, parties, liquor, casual sex and shallow consumerism. She’s dying in the eye of a psychedelic hurricane of inflatable furniture, shag rugs, happenings, chainmail dresses, go-go boots, freak-outs, and op-art everything, and the relentless disposable chic of it all actually makes her doomed romance with wealthy playboy Armand—depicted in a series of swoony sex scenes that bare copious flesh while remaining well within softcore boundaries—more poignant rather than less. Marguerite (Claude Autant-Lara discovery Danièle Gaubert) may be nothing more than a dirty pretty thing to her jet-setting friends, but viewers know otherwise and I’m willing to bet some surreptitious tears were shed in unlikely theaters. Not to be pedantic, but it’s worth noting that Carmen was published in 1845 and La Dame aux camélias three years later: times change, people don’t.

The Lickerish Quartet

The Lickerish Quartet (70), by contrast, is an art-house giggle. Ignore the opening quote from Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (“All this present reality of yours is fated to seem mere illusion tomorrow”)—this is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema with a va-va-va-voom bombshell replacing Terence Stamp as “The Visitor” (yes, that really is how she’s billed). She’s a carnival stunt performer who may or may not have stepped out of a stag movie to toy with a brittle family of neurotic one-percenters who can’t decide whether or not this brunette daredevil is the wanton blonde they just saw on screen. One by one she seduces them while teasing out their insecurities and stripping away their self-serving delusions; from her entrance, breezing along a carnival “wall of death” on her motorcycle, to a playful romp on a library floor decorated with naughty words, she’s the bad angel on everyone’s shoulder. Her libidinal energy cuts through the effete disengagement of her hosts, who’ve taken so many wrong turns in the labyrinths of their own minds that they actually believe they’d rather be holed up in their palatial centuries-old Italian villa watching movies, doing magic tricks, or wallowing in nostalgic thrills than enjoying the company of a lovely, exotic adventurer who enters trailing a whiff of danger, intuits exactly what they want, and enjoys the hell out of giving it to them.

Score is simultaneously the flipside of Lickerish and the first step in Metzger’s capitulation to the direction in which erotica was headed. The Liaisons Dangereuses-lite plot sics jaded, bisexual swingers Elvira and Jack, their loins girded with toys, costumes, and experience, on fragile innocents-abroad Betsy and Eddie, wide-eyed newlyweds fairly begging to be debauched. Where others might have viewed the original play as a smuttier spin on Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Metzger saw an updated variation on Noel Coward’s comedies of romantic manners for a more sexually frank and fluid era, and cast hardcore actors Gerald Grant and Cal Culver, the “golden boy of gay porn,” as the men (the difference between the uncut and cut versions rests entirely on their scenes). Though Metzger had years of experience shooting women together and none with men, the result is surprisingly persuasive, culminating in crosscutting between the female and male couples that eventually blurs their flesh into a tangle of barely differentiated limbs. And of the two cuts, the hardcore one is the keeper: both Grant and Culver could act and perform at the same time.

Score was relatively well reviewed (though it’s been suggested that some critics praised it for fear of looking like prudes if they didn’t) but tanked financially. Perhaps the mix of gay and straight sex put off rather than attracted the target audience, or perhaps the two-year time lag between when Score was made and when it opened doomed it from the start. With hardcore features like Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones in theatrical release, Score’s trailer made it look talky and smothered in so-last-decade psychedelia. Whatever the reason, its failure persuaded Metzger to stop pussyfooting around and go all in with The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (74), the first of six hardcore features he made under the “nom de fuck” Henry Paris—his middle name plus the city, because “it was good to” him back in the early, dirty days. Pamela Mann and its progeny, including Naked Came the Stranger (75, adapted from a novel that started life as a prank concocted by a group of Newsday writers and became a best seller), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (76), and Barbara Broadcast (77) are all stylish but ultimately more like other porno-chic pictures than Metzger’s own earlier work. The Image (aka The Punishment of Anne, 75), an examination of sexual domination and submission based on the novel by Catherine Robbe-Grillet writing as Jean de Berg, starred Carl Parker (who plays the small but significant role of a telephone repairman in Score) and was strictly a specialty item.

The Image

Metzger’s career came to a close with the tame sex comedy The Princess and the Call Girl (84). Fade out, the end. Except that it wasn’t, because the best of his films endure as more than the sum total of their erotic content. They’re smart, clear-eyed stories in which sex is divorced from guilt but not from consequences, which together show that while times change, people don’t.

Not 10 minutes into John Michael McDonagh’s smartass passion play Calvary, a priest walks onto a beach in the noonday gloom, cassock blowing in the wind like a duster. Cutting through the waves is a lone surfer while a half a mile away a group of men on horseback tear up the sand. The priest and the overcast skies are the only thing that place the beach in Ireland. These sights could be found deep in the deserts of Morocco or along the beaches south of L.A. We’re in some place mythic, a landscape carved out of a cinematic unconscious.

The priest has just been told by a visitor to his confessional that he’s not long for this world. Calvary begins by chewing on the fourth wall like a lion tearing into a gazelle. “I first tasted semen when I was 7 years old,” a man confesses to Brendan Gleeson’s troubled Father Lavelle. “Nothing to say?” taunts the unseen man, forcing Lavelle to reply: “It’s certainly a startling opening line.” McDonagh routinely calls attention to himself as a writer in this way—the third man in the confessional. The man then informs Lavelle that because a priest raped him as a child, he’s going to kill Lavelle Sunday next. Murdering him, a “good priest,” one who found religion late in life in order to better himself, will be a completely random act of violence because that’s how his violation felt. Lavelle makes a concerted effort to do something with his remaining time on earth, to set right a few wrongs. This includes close dealings with no fewer than three suicidal souls, a widow and a man on death row.

McDonagh means to make everyone appear to be Judas Iscariot on the road to the crucifixion—including his hard-drinking, self-hating Christ figure Lavelle. The Ireland of Calvary is the same sort of place as the old West of James Frawley’s Kid Blue or, more to the point, the Vietnam of John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Big enough to hold all of a country’s problems and archetypes, small enough that you can’t ever be alone. Despite the range of splendid, sticky accents, Calvary is as much about America as Ireland, and as much about John Milius’s worldview as McDonagh’s. Like Milius, the Irish-born McDonagh was a screenwriter who picked up a camera (his debut was 2011’s The Guard) partly to better showcase his arrestingly florid syntax. But where Milius was content to let his gifts run rampant, McDonagh follows an effulgent bon mot with a smartass retort to beat the band. “My entire life has been an affectation.” Says an ancient writer played by M. Emmett Walsh trying to wax poetic about his life. Gleeson is only too happy to cut him down to size: “That's one of those lines that sounds witty but doesn't actually make any sense.” All throughout Calvary it’s poetry first, then the punchline.

In The Guard, McDonagh’s story of gunrunners and the castanet-inflected score by Calexico told us we’re watching a Gaelic Western, even if the compositions never kept up. It was a film that let you sink a little too deeply into your chair, hand-delivering every payoff, comic or dramatic. Calvary occasionally gets carried away but never lets its feet leave the ground for long. After all, one of them’s in the grave. It’s a mystery after a fashion, a who-gonna-dunnit, and McDonagh’s words and images keep pace nicely to keep the audience on their toes. Calvary takes its spiritual cues as much from the bible as from this advice given to the hero of Conan The Barbarian: “No one on earth can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts.” Father Lavelle learns this the hard way.

If The Guard is an attempt at a wry, re-imagined Western, Calvary is almost a modern giallo, alive with emphatic religious imagery, beautiful vibrant colours, rapturous locations, and ominous figures obscuring the identity of a would-be killer. The chief difference between Calvary and What Have You Done To Solange? is that no blood is shed until the final reel. McDonagh turns Lavelle’s calm Irish town into a wriggling den of thieves—and world-class thieves at that. Besides Walsh, the cast is rounded out by Kelly Reilly, Chris O’Dowd, Aiden Gillen, Dylan Moran, Isaach de Bankolé, and Gleeson’s son Domhnall. The priest is also no saint, swimming around in the muck with all the red herrings (as in many giallo films, the actual voice of the killer is disguised to prevent the audience from guessing correctly before the reveal). This choice of visual language allows McDonagh to treat everyone alternately like a divine vision or a guilty party. He frequently places Gleeson in dutch tilts with an angry sky at his back like one of Milius’s Hyberborean warriors, part invader, part messenger. Lavelle never tries to solve his own murder—that’s up to the viewer—because deep down he can’t shake the feeling that he might deserve it.

Like Milius’s Red Dawn or Big Wednesday, Calvary is imbued with a certain conservative privilege; Lavelle is mocked openly for his beliefs, his church is defaced, and parents make a big show of hiding their children from him. McDonagh wants the audience to know his hero doesn’t deserve these particular humiliations, but he’s equally quick to point out that Lavelle is just as flawed as anyone filling up his pews. The priest is as much of a trial for his parishioners as they are for him. He’s the priest they, and by extension the rest of us, deserve. In Calvary’s cruel turnabout, McDonagh portrays compassion as all that separates us from animals, even if it kills us. 

Pretty Poison

Whenever the name is mentioned in film circles, the question that always arises is “What ever happened to Noel Black?” In other words, how could a director who showed such huge promise with his belatedly acclaimed first feature, Pretty Poison, be unable to make another film that is a fraction of its quality during the following 25 years?

The death of Black last month awakened memories of my telephone conversations with him in 1994 while I was researching my biography of Anthony Perkins. The 57-year-old director, who had already semi-retired from show business, was happy to talk about his career in general and Perkins in particular.

“The gold-plated nail in my career coffin was pounded when, after the box-office failure of Pretty Poison, I accepted a dreadful project, Cover Me Babe, that never should have been made,” Black remarked during our conversation. “I reckoned that it was better to stay active than to wait for a project I believed in. That was a mistake. It was followed by another mistake, Jennifer on My Mind, one of the dozens of unsuccessful drug pictures at the time.”

Jennifer on My Mind

These two “mistakes”—Cover Me Babe (70), which could have been called Zabriskie Pointless, is an erotic, psychedelic drama in which the avant-garde filmmaker hero (Robert Forster) rails against the studio system (no wonder 20th Century-Fox kept it a secret from the public at large) and Jennifer on My Mind (71), a dreary drug story written by Erich Segal—came at the time when the studios were desperately trying to follow the acid bandwagon of Easy Rider. 

“For five years after the two flops, I devoted myself to writing scripts,” Black continued. “Finally in 1976, I decided to get back into directing through episodic television. The idea of it scared me because I had started in the film business at the top with my own feature.”

While contentedly shooting episodes of Kojak, Quincey M.E., and McCloud, Black attempted a return to the big screen in 1978 with a cheap voodoo horror picture initially called Marianne. Having suffered editorial meddling and script changes, it remained unreleased for six years, until it reappeared on video six years later under the title Mirrors.

Inevitably, whenever a new film by Noel Black would appear, the knee-jerk critical reaction was to compare it unfavorably to Pretty Poison. Here is Roger Ebert on A Man, a Woman and a Bank (79), a mildly entertaining heist movie starring Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams: “Since he made the legendary Pretty Poison in 1968, Black’s career has drifted from TV assignments to obscure features and back again. He’s never really been able to duplicate the freshness of that first success.” Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, on the “dismal, horny teenager movie” Private School  (83), mentioned that Pretty Poison earned Black a footnote in American film history. “Private School won’t warrant another one.”

Pretty Poison

How did Black feel about being treated as a one-hit wonder? 

“I don’t mind, especially as Pretty Poison is what people like to call ‘a cult classic.’ Most of my few other features were done for money. I had two wives and two children to support.”

But Black began, like many filmmakers of the time, under the influence of the French New Wave. 

“I longed to be the American Godard and Truffaut. I had the best intentions, but the reality of the American film business kicked in. After I left UCLA, I was determined to storm the Bastille by making my way into the industry with a short film.”

Black raised $17,000 to make Skaterdater (65), which United Artists bought for $50,000. The 18-minute short, shot with car and tricycle-mounted cameras, is about a group of pre-teenagers zooming around on skateboards in California, and a romance between one of them and a girl on a bike. It won the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, was also nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Short Subject category, and was shown before feature films on release. 

Skaterdater

“I didn’t begrudge UA the thousands they made from the short,” Black commented. “It led to 20th Century-Fox giving me the chance to make Pretty Poison, on which I was given fairly free rein.”

It was Black who decided to cast Tony Perkins, providing the actor with his best screen role since The Trial five years previously. 

“I saw Tony in Neil Simon’s The Star-Spangled Girl on Broadway and thought he’d be ideal. I sent him the script, and he wanted to do it. I then met him for the first time at Joe Allen’s after a performance of the play. He had enormous charm and intelligence, the very qualities I wanted to come through in the role he would be playing. I was looking for the young Tony of Friendly Persuasion and Fear Strikes Out, not Psycho, although commentators naturally made the comparison between Norman Bates and the character in Pretty Poison.”

The character was that of Dennis Pitts, who had inadvertently killed his aunt when he burned down a house at 15, and was confined as a disturbed juvenile for some years. The only thing that keeps Dennis going while working at a dead-end factory job at the Sausenfield Chemical Co. is imagining the bottles passing on the factory line to be the high-school drill team with whom the honey-haired Sue Ann Stepanek (Tuesday Weld) marches after school. 

Pretty Poison

Dennis gradually becomes convinced that the chemical waste his employers discharge into the nearby river at a rate of 17 billion gallons a year is “a diabolical substance.” Deciding to destroy the polluting factory, he enlists the aid of the teenage Sue Ann, drawing her into his imaginary life as a CIA agent spying on the factory. But he soon discovers that she is kinkier than he. While he is merely a young man with a vivid imagination, she is a natural cold-blooded killer, who eventually shoots her mother (Beverly Garland). She is the dominant partner, and takes the initiative in the love scenes, though her view of sex, she says, is that “when grown-ups do it, it’s kinda disgusting, because there is no one to punish them.”

Weld, who reportedly hated her director and the film, proved to be as “neurotic as hell” during production, according to John Randolph, who played Dennis’s parole officer. She often refused to do what Black demanded of her and would break down and cry. 

“Tuesday and Tony got on professionally, though she probably resented how much more in tune he was with me than she was,” Black recalled discreetly. “He was the quintessential professional. Even though he had made 20 or so movies and this was my first, he listened to everything I had to tell him. What he brought was a personal sense of humanity and dignity, which gave the character a sympathetic quality.”

The film does contain one of Perkins’s most absorbing performances. As a man who carries deep emotional wounds—one of his more subtle variations on Norman Bates—he conveys shifts of mood within a controlled hysteria. He was, however, at 35, suspended in an adolescence almost as protracted as Jerry Lewis’s.

Pretty Poison

Obviously influenced by the freewheeling style of Godard’s first period—the relationship of the central couple is reminiscent of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou—Black took 30 days to shoot at lush locations around Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1967, with exactly one day in a studio for the scenes in the prison and an office. Pretty Poison is not only a bizarre black comedy-melodrama, but stands as an early example of a movie with ecological concerns. “While I was looking for the location in four states, I came across a lot of factories expelling worse things into rivers than shown in the film,” Black recalled. 

Alas, Pretty Poison did not inspire Twentieth Century-Fox with any confidence, and they dumped it in a double bill on 42nd Street, after an opening in Los Angeles. According to Black “their unwarrantable action was partly explained by it being the year [1968] of the double assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and a corrosive tale of insidious madness in which a teenage girl shoots her own mother, seemed, to timid studio chiefs, excessive.” 

Neither the stars nor director were invited onto The Tonight Show (a must for plugging show-business wares) and, initially, Pretty Poison was not given a press screening. Nevertheless, Pauline Kael caught up with it and thought it “a remarkable first feature . . . which presupposes an attentive and intelligent audience.” Rex Reed felt that the studio had done their “damnedest to ruin an offbeat, original, totally irreverent examination of violence, refreshing in its subtlety and intelligent in its delivery” by opening it in Los Angeles before New York, at grind houses before transplanting it to art houses. It remained pretty poisonous at the box office. But in 1969, a 23-year-old Paul Schrader, in an article for Cinema, praised both Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Poison for their brilliant portrayals of "beautiful psychopaths."

Pretty Poison

Immediately after Pretty Poison, Black co-wrote (with Fred Segal) a screen adaptation of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (published in 1969), one of many projects that failed to come to fruition. Black continued to see Perkins for many years, during which attempts were made to get together on other movies. In 1974, there was a vain possibility of making a film called Killer, written by Richard Maltby, for New Line Cinema. Towards the end of his life, Perkins fought long and hard to get Black to direct Psycho IV, but that too was in vain. Sadly, there was no Pretty Poison II.

Ronald Bergan is the author, most recently, of The Film Book (Dorling Kindersley), as well as Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life (Little, Brown).

On August 9 & 11, the British Film Institute will screen The Black Cannon Incident, a 1985 work by director Huang Jianxin that’s part of the traveling Century of Chinese Cinema retrospective that previously screened, in slightly altered form, in Toronto. Huang was part of China’s famous Fifth Generation, alongside directors like Zhang Yimou, Cheng Kaige, and Tian Zhuangzhuang. These and other filmmakers revolutionized China’s film industry, bringing it international acclaim and numerous awards. But while Zhang, Chen, and Tian still premiere their movies at Berlin and Cannes, Huang is largely forgotten. The lavish book which accompanies the BFI retrospective contains an entire chapter on the Fifth Generation, but Huang receives a mere 71 words. This neglect isn’t solely the BFI’s problem, it’s pervasive. Crawl around the Internet and the only extensive English-language write-ups you’ll find on Huang are a series of reviews written in 2009 by Matthew Lee over on the fan site Twitch Film. 

The Black Cannon Incident

Why does everyone ignore Huang? Because he’s a comedian. 

The Fifth Generation made movies about how crappy it was to be a woman in China (Raise the Red Lantern), how dismal it was to be Tibetan in China (The Horse Thief), and how awful it was to be gay in China (Farewell My Concubine), but Huang made movies about missing marriage certificates (The Marriage Certificate), androids that attend boring meetings on behalf of party functionaries (Dislocation), and office politics (Back to Back, Face to Face). Comedy never gets the same respect as politically charged drama, but Huang’s movies were the only Fifth Generation films brave enough to depict contemporary China. While the rest of the Fifth Generation were being heralded for their courage, no one was pointing out the fact that their movies were largely set in the past, mostly in Republican, pre-Communist China, or far out in remote provinces among ethnic minorities. Huang wasn’t having it. He set his movies in Shanghai, Xi’an, and other major cities, and grounded them firmly in the present day.

Huang, like the majority of the Fifth Generation, came out of the regional Xi’an film studio during the leadership of Wu Tianming. After university, Huang worked as a script supervisor, editor, and assistant director before attending the prestigious Beijing Film Academy and becoming a director. His first movie was The Black Cannon Incident and it set Chinese film circles on fire. A German translator at a mining company complains in a telegram that a chess set he bought is missing a piece, the black cannon. Suddenly, he’s removed from his job because the local party chief is convinced that this is some kind of code. Things unravel further when the translator who replaces him turns out to be incompetent, and the German company they’re working with has to be kept in the dark about what’s going on. After his name is finally cleared, the translator is informed that he should thank the party for going to such efforts to clear his reputation (which they besmirched in the first place). The last line of the movie comes from the weary translator: “I’m not going to play chess anymore.”

The Black Cannon Incident

Dry as the desert, this was a bureaucratic farce of a type that hadn’t been seen in China for decades (at least not since 1936’s A Night of Madness), and it became a huge success, winning star Liu Zifeng a Golden Rooster Award for “Best Actor.” Two conferences to discuss Black Cannon were organized in January 1986, one by the editors of Film Art and one by the China Art Research Center, but critics couldn’t embrace how radical the movie was. Huang’s satire was too barbed, so they pretended they didn’t get it. One claimed Huang was making fun of the timeless foibles of human nature that clearly predated the glorious Communist party, while another claimed that the movie called for a “modernization of self.” Even Huang bent over backwards to appear that he was not criticizing the government or the party but instead talking about humanity in general. Spoiler alert: he was criticizing the government and the party. 

Huang’s next movie, Dislocation (86), was a sequel in which the disgraced translator invents a robot double to attend boring meetings for him, only to find that it demands independence. That was followed by Samsara (88), an artsy ramble about the son of a high-ranking party official who drifts aimlessly through a life of petty crime, squandering his advantages just like the pampered children of party members who are his peers. A few months later, the Tiananmen Square massacre took place, and film culture, which seemed to be thawing, got chilly again. Huang was in Australia when the June 4 incident took place, so he couldn’t be accused of participating, but whether it was a cultural crackdown, or whether he was tarred by association after Wu Tianming fled to the United States, Huang got scrubbed from official history, not even invited to participate in a Chinese retrospective of the 20 most important movies of the ’80s. He wouldn’t make another movie until 1992. 

Back to Back, Face to Face

But when he came back, it was with a vengeance. Stand Up, Don’t Bend Over (92) was the first of three savage modern social satires from Huang. This one took place in an apartment building as a writer rubs shoulders with the motley cast of characters around him, who range from uptight Party apparatchiks to small-time businessmen whose capitalist ventures are greased with bribes. Next came Back to Back, Face to Face (94), Haung’s greatest film. At its heart is his funniest creation, Wang Shuangli, a small-time official in a remote city who has been acting director of the cultural center for three years. Everyone expects he’ll be named the permanent director, but when an outsider is appointed to “his” position, he fights back with his mastery of bureaucracy fu. Doing everything from sabotaging opinion polls, to suggesting poisoned ideas to his “boss,” to investigating petty cash gone missing, Wang is a monster, but a hilarious one, and as his paperwork war spirals out of control the movie expands to paint the portrait of a Communist Party that is petty, ignorant, venal, and deeply corrupt. 

The third in this series, Signal Left, Turn Right (95) was about a state-run driving school administered by a brainwashed true believer who spends his time raging against Japan’s crimes against China. The easygoing narrative outlines the school’s breathtaking array of scams that leads three disparate students (a bribe-hungry journalist, a junkie, and a nouveau riche sleazebag) to team up in order to pass the final driving test. Huang’s next movie, Surveillance (97),  was co-directed by Yang Yazhou, and it’s basically Waiting for Godot meets Stakeout. In the early 2000s Huang tempered his social critiques with a kinder and gentler view of human nature, turning in movies like Xi’an’s Finest (00), about city cops, and The Marriage Certificate (01), about a couple caught in limbo when they can’t find their titular paperwork. In 2005 he released Gimme Kudos, a quiet, but poignant movie about a man who falsely claims to have stopped a rape and demands that a local newspaper publicly praise him for his deed. 

Founding of a Republic

After that, not much more is heard from Huang until he surfaces as one of the heads of production at the state-owned, massively wealthy China Film Group. It’s a breathtaking leap and one I can’t find an explanation for. In 2009 he co-directed the massive propaganda movie Founding of a Republic with Han Sanping, the powerful head of China Film Group. In 2011, the two men co-directed another massive propaganda movie, The Founding of a Party. The two movies co-starred everyone who wanted to suck up to the Chinese government, from Andy Lau, Donnie Yen, and Jet Li, to Jackie Chan, John Woo, and Chow Yun-fat. They were massively profitable exercises in self-satisfaction and score-settling, scrubbing official history clean of problematic elements, and burnishing the image of the party on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

It’s not a little ironic that the only Fifth Generation director who boldly and directly satirized the moribund, bureaucratic, out-of-touch Communist party now makes his living hosting dinners and playing politics in the same moribund, bureaucratic, out-of-touch Communist party departments that he once ridiculed. Who knows what happened? Maybe he got sick of fighting? Maybe he decided that he wanted to make money? Maybe he stopped believing in his former films? Whatever it was, he leaves behind a neglected legacy of deeply funny, very human movies that sometimes sound like laughter, and that sometimes sound like a scream of frustration from the heart of a totalitarian state.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

… You may have noticed that Andy Lau and now Chow Yun-fat are looking incredibly skinny these days. Rumor has it that a diet guru in Hong Kong is showing the film community’s men how to drop a scary amount of weight in an insanely short amount of time. It looks like the fad may have even spread to directors, several of whom are suddenly looking like super-skinny supermodels. 

… Period action film Kundo: Age of the Rampant (read a review) opened huge in South Korea. This Robin Hood–esque tale blew apart the box office, accounting for 65% of all ticket sales on opening weekend, unseating How To Train Your Dragon 2 from the top slot, and making it the biggest opening of the year.

... In China, horror is holding onto the top box-office slots. China’s 3-D haunted house movie The House That Never Dies is in the number two spot, with US$52 million after only 11 days in cinemas. The success has even turned the Beijing mansion that was the movie’s inspiration into a major tourist attraction, drawing upwards of 500 visitors per day.

You can see the trailer for yourself and then read the reviews, which are lousy. 

… And over in Vietnam, another country that until recently kept the supernatural firmly off screen, possession drama Hollow (read a review) has been scoring big bucks at the box office. It opened at the top slot, and seems to be on track to rival the takings of the previous all-time highest-earner, Vengeful Heart, another 2014 horror film.

From Vegas to Macau 1

… A minor scandal has broken out in Hong Kong where Wong Jing is currently shooting the sequel to his Chinese New Year hit, From Vegas to Macau 2. One of the stars is 4-year-old Angela Wang Shiling, who plays a genius computer hacker, but reporters have noticed that most of her scenes are being shot by a 9-year-old double while tiny Angela sits in her car. Wong Jing has gotten so tired of the rumors that the tiny diva is “hiding” behind her older double that he’s gone on the record: “A 4-year-old child's body is very fragile,” he says. “Any major movement could cause a sprain. This is professional behavior. In the film Fat Gor and Ka Fai all have doubles to avoid injuries, what is wrong with that? Do you want to see Little Shiling get hurt?”

… He was Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe movies, appeared in RED 2, and has a role in the new Terminator movie. He starred in A Bittersweet Life, I Saw the Devil, and The Good, The Bad, The Weird. He is Lee Byung-hun, the Korean actor whose abs are one of the great wonders of the world. And now he has a new Korean movie lined up. Directed by Woo Min-ho of Man of Vendetta and The Spies, this new flick co-stars Lee, Cho Seung-Woo (Marathon, Tazza: The High Rollers), and Baek Yoon-shik (Save the Green Planet, The President’s Last Bang). Lee plays a thug who takes care of dirty work for politicians. When he’s left out to dry by his powerful sponsors, he decides to take revenge.

… Kickstarter can get a little overwhelming with everyone’s mom and cat putting together a campaign these days, but U.K. distributor Third Window Films is trying a new idea for them: Kickstarting a DVD. New Directors from Japan is a DVD compilation that will feature films from Nagisa Isogai (28 years old), with My Baby (16 minutes) and The Lust of Angels (40 minutes); Hirobumi Watanabe (31 years) with And the Mud Ship Sails Away (88 minutes); and Kosuke Takaya, with Buy Bling, Get One Free (27 minutes). These directors do not have much exposure in the West, and it’s a very cool idea. Why limit discovering new directors to people who can attend fancy film festivals? Why not give them cheap exposure to a wider audience via DVD? It’s yet another body blow to the whole notion of cultural gatekeeping the way it’s currently practiced by the film community. There’s a trailer on the Kickstarter page, and the campaign has already exceeded its goals, but many days are left to go. 

Last week I finally saw Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a film which takes place in a world where the handful of humans who’ve survived a devastating simian flu epidemic band together in the grandiose ruins of civilization. I couldn’t have chosen a more apt setting for watching it: the sparsely populated Ziegfeld Theater on 54th Street, one of two single-screen moviehouses remaining in Manhattan.

My colleagues in the crit racket beat the drum for Dawn for the most part, but it left me dissatisfied, dispirited, even a little depressed. For a clue as to what was missing, I looked to the dissenting opinions. Among these was that of The New Yorker’s ever-precious Anthony Lane who, writing of the apes’ forest refuge, notes that its “residents communicate in a blend of gestures, grunts, and very plain English, not unlike the customers in a sports bar,” said very much in the manner of someone who has never set foot in a sports bar.* Later, Lane identifies the missing element in Dawn as “wit”—a quality he seems to believe is evident in spades in that sports-bar crack—though I think he’s closer to pinpointing the film’s deficiencies when he compares it unfavorably to its predecessor, 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, in which “the dramatic balance between man and primate was precise.”

Both of the Apes movies are motion-capture makeovers of familiar genres. Rise was a prison-break movie played out inside a primate shelter, replete with cell block bullies and brutal guards. Dawn is a war film, though it belongs to a category that might be called the reluctant war film, while the outpost, edge-of-civilization setting gives it Western overtones. Showing the brokering of a tenuous peace between two hostile peoples, undermined by the actions of determinedly belligerent parties on both sides, it shares its basic narrative elements with Delmer Daves’s 1950 Broken Arrow, if practically nothing else.**

Cowboys and Indians are too hot to handle these days, not to speak of the fact that they’re box-office poison—though it seems like film culture will stop at nothing short of pinning me to the ground and sitting on my chest until I admit that Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger is an unfairly maligned film maudit. Questions of quality aside, by providing a safe sci-fi proxy where questions of tolerance, oppression, and resistance can be worked through without directly touching politically inflammatory issues, the new Apes films work much the same territory as the film franchise that they’re “rebooting,” the first installment of which appeared in 1968 Anno Domini, that year of assassinations, urban riots, and unrest, making monkey overlords and human chattel an elastic metaphor for any and all contemporary caste systems. Today, history cloaked in flexible metaphor and sci-fi togs seems to have overtaken historical fiction. In writing about Edge of Tomorrow, for example, Lane’s New Yorker colleague Richard Brody noted that Doug Liman’s film, which revolves around a beachfront invasion in northern France, was opening on the seventieth anniversary of D-Day. And sure enough, underneath the Warhammer 40,000 body armor and building-a-Call of Duty-cheat-sheet plot, we can discover traces of one of the crucial tests of the American century.

I don’t know if anyone has seen fit to similarly note that Dawn, in which mutually destructive hostility is sparked by a political assassination, was released within a couple weeks of the hundredth anniversary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand getting murked in Sarajevo, but there it is all the same. The Museum of Modern Art, at least, isn’t letting the occasion pass without note: yesterday marked the beginning of a Bismarck-sized program titled “The Great War: A Cinematic Legacy.” Perhaps the folks on 53rd Street feel they owe the war a debt of gratitude, for it is difficult to imagine modern art without the great upheaval of 1914 (I discussed this, and various sundry titles, in a write-up of the series for Artforum).

In his own review of Dawn for Reverse Shot, Adam Nayman speaks to the film’s internal conflict, noting that “the script makes a show of having characters on both sides of the divide try to bridge the gap . . . when all we’re really waiting for is the commencement of hostilities.” When these begin, they don’t disappoint, the highlight being bellicose bonobo Koba (Toby Kebbell) taking on a human tank singlehandedly, killing gunner and driver with his bare mitts and then hopping off while the unmanned vehicle punches a breach in the human stronghold’s defenses. This occurs in a single take, with the POV constrained as though fixed to the tank’s turret, an elaboration of the backseat car-crash set-piece in director Matt Reeves’s 2010 Let Me In, which is the one thing that he can undeniably be said to do well.

The particular push-pull that Nayman mentions—dread of war, anticipation of war—is hardly unique to Dawn. Indeed, you can find it in a great many of the “Great War” titles at MoMA, and it is endemic to the war film itself, which says War Is Hell while at the same time tacitly reconfirming that it makes for hellaciously good cinema. “Go home! A long life eating porridge is best!” Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) admonishes at the end of Yojimbo—and while director Akira Kurosawa may have believed this, little in his filmography*** suggests that he believed that porridge-eating made for compelling movies.

This leads me to a point that I’ve repeated so often that I ought to create a keyboard shortcut to paste it: a film isn’t “problematic” because it is open to multiple interpretations or appears differently to different viewers, unless you insist that films be programmatic in order to “work.” And if you’re not capable of holding two opposing ideas in mind at the same damn time, you might do well not to address something so slippery and treacherous as moving images, the basic material of movies. In the case of screening combat—and its collateral damage—the opposing ideas in question are as follows:

1. That even the war that is deemed most just and inevitable is a tragedy that will result in the destruction of property and the fracturing and displacement of lives, including those of non-combatants caught in the crossfire—and this is among the lucky survivors, who will carry the insuperable burden of their memories to the grave.

2. This same state of war, which is awful if not, historically speaking, aberrant, creates a crucible for the testing of one’s mettle and provides opportunity for the expression of attributes which are widely considered to be desirous, among them courage, selflessness, and cooperation. It is also, at least sometimes, presumably exhilarating—for it is doubtful that an activity which had nothing at all to recommend it would be so consistently popular through the centuries.

A great deal of second-guessing nevertheless surrounds the issue of “How to Tell a True War Story,” to borrow the title of a 1990 short story by Tim O’Brien, formerly of the 3rd Platoon, Company A, 5th Battalion, 23rd Infantry Division. O’Brien tries to distill his Vietnam experience in prose, arguably a simpler task than working in those disobedient images. At least this would seem to be the view of some who suggest that it’s better not to put the camera-eye directly to a subject as sensitive as war at all, for risk of falsifying if not ennobling. This is the position put forth in Level Five, a 1997 essay film by Chris Marker which will be having its premiere New York theatrical run beginning August 15 at BAMcinématek. The spine of the film is a series of video-diary entries from a computer programmer (Catherine Belkhodja) working on a World War II strategy game, and her musings are used as a springboard with which to reach cosmic concerns. The game she is making reproduces the conditions of the Battle for Okinawa, theoretically creating the possibility of reaching other outcomes in what was, as a matter of historical record, an unmitigated disaster, the intense fighting accompanied by mass suicides that depopulated and devastated the island. Here is a snippet of the narration, recorded by Marker himself:

“Mabuni Museum**** [in Okinawa] shows war as chaotic, hard to represent, and unpresentable. But—as in the books and films—the smell of battle is missing. Until we get ‘Smellies,’ like ‘Talkies,’ war films don’t exist. Just as well. I swear there would be no audience.”

One might not think of Marker and Sam Fuller, the gauche American director of pulp-historical gutpunches, as kindred spirits, but Fuller closely echoes Marker’s point in his posthumously published 2002 autobiography, A Third Face.***** A veteran of the United States Army 1st Infantry Division who was a firsthand witness of many of the major engagements of the European theater, including Omaha Beach, Fuller writes:

“There’s no way you can portray war realistically, not in a movie or a book. You can only capture a very, very small aspect of it. If you really want to make your readers understand a battle, a few pages of your book would be booby-trapped. For moviegoers to get the idea of real combat, you’d have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen. The casualties in the theater would be bad for business.”

Regardless of the admitted impossibility of the task, Fuller wasn’t dissuaded from portraying war. His breakout movie, 1951’s The Steel Helmet, was one of the first to depict the ground soldier’s experience in Korea—in fact, Los Angeles’s Griffith Park—and time and again his films would return to the heat of combat, or to the immediate aftermath of struggle an strife. While operating from the same assumptions, Fuller and Marker embody two opposite tactical approaches to representing the unrepresentable: one between the eyes, the other abstract, esoteric. When Fuller, an American Jew who was present at the liberation of the Falkenau concentration camp, wants to show the horror of the holocaust, as he does in his 1959 Verboten!, he has an adolescent German Nazi sympathizer (named Franz Schiller!) made to sit in on the Nuremberg Trials, where he must bear witness to real images from the camps, the eyes of the persecuted, taken from stock footage, boring into actor Harold Daye, who is seen in a series of sweaty, oppressive close-ups.

To this we may contrast the tack taken by Alain Resnais who, shortly after making his essayistic study of black art with Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, 1953’s Les Statues meurent aussi, completed Night and Fog, confirmed as the fourth-best documentary of all time by Sight & Sound magazine’s first-ever documentary poll. Resnais draws upon much the same photographic evidence that Fuller will, but undercuts these images with testimony to the ultimate insufficiency of his means, in language very near to that which Marker uses over 40 years later in Level Five:

“What hope do we have of truly capturing this reality? The wooden barracks where people slept three to a bed, the burrows where they hid and ate in furtive fear and where sleep itself presented a threat. No description, no image can reveal their true dimension: endless, uninterrupted fear.”

I find both Fuller and Resnais/Marker’s approaches moving in their own ways, and can discover no hard and fast rule as to what “works” with regards to communicating something of the historical horror of warfare, or the wanton slaughter that is its byproduct. To return to the Great War: by age 11, the horror of the trenches had been firmly established in my mind by no less a text than the BBC comedy Blackadder Goes Forth. I haven’t revisited Blackadder Goes Forth since it was rebroadcast in the States on PBS, but I can still quite clearly picture the staggeringly depressing last shot of the series, in which the beloved cast of characters go over the top and hurtle towards almost certain death, which makes that Seinfeld finale seem like pretty timid stuff. I was watching Blackadder in the first place because, as I have had occasion to shamefacedly admit in the past, I was a preadolescent Anglophile. This extended to a fascination with the English martial tradition, from the Crusades to the rout of the Armada and well into the “Sun never sets” Empire period. I was recently discussing this with a friend who, as a boy, had been similarly afflicted by the appeal of the romantic redcoat ideal—the whole Rudyard Kipling, Four Feathers thing. It’s not hard to understand the allure of the concept retrospectively, we agreed, for it gives lip service to really admirable virtues to which a boy aspires: bravery, loyalty, modesty, self-discipline, dutifulness, and all of that tommyrot. If you visit the sarcophagus of Horatio, Lord Nelson, in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, you will feel yourself to be standing at the very nerve center of a great national self-romance, bound up in the credo of God, Queen, and country, and it is difficult not to be moved. The problem being, of course, that behind all of this is the historical reality of British Imperialism, of which the best anyone can say is that it was slightly less needlessly destructive than some other strains of the same sickness.

I was still an unreformed wannabe Bombardier when I first watched, with rapt attention, Zulu. The 1964 film is a reenactment of the real Battle of Rorke’s Drift, which occurred on January 22 and 23 of 1879 in the Natal Province of Cape Colony (part of present-day South Africa). Through day and night, some 140 British Army regulars, many of them wounded or ailing before fighting commenced, repelled a few thousand Zulu warriors from their redoubt in a remote mission serving as a supply depot. This victory was much touted in the press, not least because it provided cold comfort for the humiliation that the British had been dealt at the Battle of Isandlwana, in which 1,800 troops had been routed by indigenous forces with superior numbers but far inferior firepower. (These events are at the center of the 1979 “prequel” Zulu Dawn, co-written by Zulu director and co-writer Cy Endfield.)  

I recently rewatched Zulu for the first time since I was a boy. Arguably I was watching it for the first time, as I was seeing the full breadth of the Technirama frame instead of the cropped, pan-and-scan image that I would’ve been exposed to on VHS.****** Technical specs weren’t the only essential differences between viewings, though, for rather than seeing again the celebration of Her Majesty’s Army’s battlefield prowess which I’d taken in as an apolitical child, now I was forced to reckon with the image of slain black bodies being stacked like cordwood before the bulwarks of white defenders.

Zulu will be playing Los Angeles and New York dates in August, as part of the UCLA Film & Television Archives’ program “Hollywood Exiles in Europe” and Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Red Hollywood and the Blacklist,” respectively. The film is included in these series because of the vicissitudes of Endfield’s career: a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania, he was blacklisted from Hollywood in 1951, and subsequently went to the United Kingdom to rebuild his career. While never a card-carrying Red, Endfield had been a member of the Young Communist League as an undergraduate at Yale University in the 1930s. Let us presume that his interest in the Party in these years was prompted not by a desire to sell Washington to the Kremlin but because he was a decent and fair-minded young man, and the Communists were the only political organization who were outspoken on the issue of lynching, still then a regular occurrence in these United States.    

Zulu is one of six collaborations between Endfield and star Stanley Baker, a son of the Rhondda Valley whose “otherness” as a Welshman and working-class roots were very much a part of his star persona. Endfield wrote the screenplay in collaboration with John Prebble, himself a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s, adapting an article called “Slaughter in the Sun” that Prebble had published in Lilliput magazine in 1958.

How did three men with sterling leftist credentials go on to make this straightforward paean to good old God, Queen, and country? Well, they didn’t, exactly. God is principally spoken for by the Swedish missionary played by Jack Hawkins, a secret tippler who tries to break the morale of the garrison’s men, and who hardly cuts a heroic figure. The nearest we come to patriotic commiseration is the moment when, listening to a Zulu battle song and bracing themselves for a final charge, the survivors of Rorke’s Drift raise their voices in a chorus of “Men of Harlech,” a Welsh standard which describes the siege of Harlech Castle by Yorkists during the War of the Roses. Any swig of temporary triumph is accompanied by an ashen aftertaste: when Pvt. Hook (James Booth), a thief and a shirker, is finally forced into action, his delirious superior officer shrieks “That’s my boy, Hook! You’re a soldier now! I’ve made a soldier of you!”—all the while burning to death under fallen, flame-wreathed crossbeams. Later, surveying the corpse-littered ground around the depot, second officer Lt. Bromhead can only congratulate himself by saying “I feel ashamed.”

Bromhead is played by a very young Michael Caine, whose celebrity would soon eclipse Baker’s. The Welshman stayed on to make two more films in South Africa. Dingaka (64), for South African director Jamie Uys, who would later make The Gods Must Be Crazy, reads in synopsis as an earnest attempt at social cinema (“…the story of a tribesman, Ntuku Makwena, who avenges the murder of his daughter according to custom tribal laws. His act of revenge leads him to be tried under government laws, where justice for black people does not exist.”). For Sands of the Kalahari (65), Baker reunited with Endfield, only 50 but already approaching the end of his directorial career. His last completed feature was 1971’s staunchly antiwar Universal Soldier, which can be viewed in full here.

None of the abovementioned films had anything near Zulu’s box-office success—nor, for that matter, did Zulu Dawn. One may chalk this up to the fact that none of those films had anything like Zulu’s black body count—and a brief perusal of the Internet suffices to confirm that the film is beloved of crypto-racist military history enthusiasts. But Endfield’s Zulus, to borrow Quentin Tarantino’s description of John Ford’s Indians, are anything but a “faceless” enemy as met in close quarters, and the movie is something more complex—problematic, if you prefer—than a white-supremacist tract. For one thing, it lays bare the apocalyptic undertones of the Anglo-European militaristic ideal. (From Cloquet, Marker, and Resnais’s Les Statues meurent aussi: “The whites already projected onto the blacks their own demons as a way to purge themselves of them.”) For another, it risks valorizing the colonized other. Here is hip hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, in a 2000 interview, speaking of the inspiration for forming his nonviolent youth organization the Zulu Nation:

“I got the idea [from] . . . this movie called Zulu which featured Michael Caine. [The Zulus] were proud warriors and . . .  fighting very well against bullets, cannons, and stuff. They fought like warriors for a land which was theirs.”

Dawn—…of the Planet of the Apes, that is, not Zulu—seems unlikely to stir similar principled responses, for it removes war to the abstract plane of world-building, which is the favored battlefield of the modern blockbuster. We’re more likely today to see man pitted against simian, alien, robot, Kree, or some combination thereof than against fellow man, thus shaking off the mantle of (potentially audience-alienating) historical precedent. If we can’t tell a true war story, it seems, today we’ll settle for the most fantastic falsification.

* I am indebted to the Reverse Shot blog for picking out another Lane classic, from his 2006 review of Mission Impossible: III: “The grand finale? A fistfight, after which somebody gets run over. Listen, if I want to see that kind of action, I don’t go to Shanghai. I don’t even go to the movies. I go to the South Bronx and stand outside a bar.” Sure you do, Anthony.

** If you are interested in war films by a truer disciple of the great Daves, you could do much worse than the work of Bertrand Tavernier, about whose historical epics Saul Austerlitz wrote well some years back in Moving Image Source.

*** I have not recently re-viewed The Lower Depths or Dodes'ka-den, but I reckon they might contain some porridge.

**** I have not been to the Mabuni Museum seen in Marker’s film, but I have visited The National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial in Kansas City. Last time that I checked, Kansas City is quite a ways removed from the Western Front, but the museum endeavors to get one closer with a section of simulated trench for visitors to enter, not unlike the simulacrum of a Japanese foxhole which Marker shows at Mabuni. (There’s something very similar as well at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia.) Standing in the trench for a few minutes doesn’t, alas, get one much closer to the stench of gangrenous limbs and the moans of wounded men being masticated by rats in their sleep, but the Liberty Memorial is nevertheless worth a visit, even if, like myself, you’ve never wholly agreed with the United States’s decision to involve itself in a dispute between crowned heads and colonial powers an ocean away. I recall one displayed object in particular, a telegram to President Wilson from a man who had lost his wife and mother in the torpedoing of a commercial vessel by a German U-boat, who states that if the United States will not involve itself in the fray, he will “take a man’s chance” and enlist in a foreign army. Such artifacts drive home the emotional stakes behind American intervention.

***** For Fuller completists: for a week beginning this Wednesday, August 6, MoMA will be running daily screenings of daughter Samantha Fuller’s A Fuller Life, which features an odd mix of characters (Jennifer Beals, James Toback, Tim Roth, Constance Towers) reading selections from A Third Face. This comes smack in the middle of the museum’s weeklong Fuller series.

****** Or perhaps I haven’t seen it yet—I was watching the new Blu-ray from the boutique DVD company Twilight Time, though the film will also be making the rounds in a 50th-anniversary restoration by Rialto Pictures. (Maybe I’ll never see it—the restoration is DCP, rather than the 35mm of the original exhibition format!)

Frank Sidebottom started life as a punk-generation songwriter and musician from Manchester, named Chris Sievey. Under his own name, Sievey had a number of minor successes with his band The Freshies (notably a brisk, Buzzcocks-y number called “I’m In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Check-Out Desk”), but in 1984, he devised one of the more bizarre self-reinventions in pop history. He donned a big painted papier-mâché head, and, adopting a high-pitched nasal Northern accent, assumed the role of Frank Sidebottom, an affable, childlike would-be showbiz personality whose knowingly rudimentary songs parodied current pop or hymned his home village of Timperley. In his Sidebottom guise, Sievey had a few droll ideas—not least an EP entitled Frank Sidebottom Salutes The Magic Of Freddie Mercury And Queen And Also Kylie Minogue (You Know, Her Off ‘Neighbours’)—and even achieved some degree of success as an oddball novelty act on British TV. He certainly had a talent as a conceptual or performance artist—one of Sievey’s peculiarities was that he would often keep the Frank head on, and keep up the Frank act, when there was no public to impress, but only members of his band present. And according to journalist-author Jon Ronson, who was at one time his keyboard player, Sievey/Sidebottom had a special talent for calamity, relishing commercial failure rather than success, which he never went out of his way to cultivate.

When Sievey died of cancer in 2010, some admirers hailed him as a genius, but it’s probably fairer to say that he was a sometimes inspired English eccentric and humorist who managed to make one cheap and cheerful gag work reasonably well for a surprisingly long time. But Sidebottom as an undiscovered god of alternative rock? That’s the unlikely conceit imagined in Frank, a new film released next week, directed by Lenny Abrahamson (What Richard Did, 12; Garage, 07) and co-written by Ronson and Peter Straughan. Frank is not the Chris Sievey story, and doesn’t claim to be, but it is, after a fashion, the story of Ronson’s brief career as keyboard player (before he came to write extended essays in gonzo investigation such as “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” filmed with George Clooney in 2009).

The Ronson figure in Frank is Jon (Domhnall Gleeson, hugely likeable here), a young aspiring songwriter who spends his days ineptly attempting to cobble together ballads while staring at his computer screen in a dull office job (shades of Quadrophenia, decades on). Then a bunch of madcap bohemians come tumbling out of a van in his seaside town, and it turns out that a band unpronounceably named Soronprfbs, playing in town that night, need a new keyboard player. Jon answers yes to the question “You play C, F, and G?” and lands the gig (by all accounts, Ronson got his job with Sidebottom on the strength of pretty much those qualifications).

Before long, Jon is a fixture in the band, or rather the cult, since Soronprfbs are in the thrall of their mysterious, taciturn leader, Frank (Michael Fassbender), a man who wears a big globe head that almost exactly resembles Sidebottom’s—and never takes it off. That Frank’s Frank is not quite Sievey’s is apparent in the fact that this Frank is no kind of joker, but a very earnest and apparently disturbed Dada master who for a long time doesn’t speak at all—and who, when he’s at last heard singing, bursts into a rather butch agonized basso suggestive of Jim Morrison in one of his self-conscious poète maudit moments.

The extended joke of Frank is the notion, which everyone except us viewers buys into, that Frank is a deep magus whose guidance will lead his collaborators to find their “farthest corners” and make the great album that they have in them. Fame? That’s not so important, except for the more mundane-minded Jon; for his bandmates, the very idea of having an audience at all seems anathema, the worst kind of bourgeois capitulation.

The subsequent story follows Soronprfbs from their retreat in the Irish countryside, where Frank puts them through a program of character-building exercises and ramshackle rehearsals; through a trip across the Atlantic to SXSW, where Jon does the unthinkable in trying to muster public interest; and to Frank’s breakdown and beyond. At that point, Jon takes a break to ask himself some serious questions, while the other musicians reach an unexpected apotheosis: without Frank’s mania and Jon’s earnest competence, they actually sound like the Cowboy Junkies, only quieter, which is not a bad thing at all (their big moody super-slow number is actually “On Top of Old Smokey”). Overall, the narrative drifts like a mildly febrile dream—and it may be that an intense period spent in an unsuccessful band is indeed like a hallucination that abruptly ends, leaving you back in your day job, or in rehab, wondering where all the time and all your talent went.

With gentle wit, the film explores two key ideas. One is that it’s never fun to be the straight person in a band—the sensible, studious type who turns up for rehearsals, works hard on the chord changes, and assiduously posts rehearsal footage online to further the band’s career. It’s this behavior that earns Jon the contempt of his colleagues, who are either deranged social outsiders or work very hard at seeming that way (as quite a few rock musicians do, I’m told). Especially thorny is synthesizer player Clara—“Stay away from my fucking theremin!”—played by Maggie Gyllenhaal with a permanently enraged glare and all the sourness of a natural underground aristocrat who never got over being dropped by 4AD after one single.

The film’s other key idea is that we’re all fascinated by, and somewhat cowed by, the figure of the outsider rock genius, the exalted loser who heroically turns obscurity, failure, and possibly ineptitude into something glorious. We’re constantly hearing in the film that Frank is a creative maestro, though there’s little evidence to back this up; the band he’s assembled sound pretty ropy as they crunch out their mix of stoner prog and indie thrash, and it’s hard to believe, as he intones his trippy divagations (“Screeching frequencies of pulsing infinity!”), that even his most impressionable acolytes are buying into this. The sheer inadequacy of Soronprfbs’ repertoire is one of the film’s running jokes, largely at the expense of Jon, who—despite being saner than anyone else—is more enthused than anyone (“I can’t wait to dive into the creative maelstrom!”). Yet every now and then, the film tries to persuade us that maybe, just maybe… For example, Frank manages to charm an irate German tourist—in fluent German—and before long, she’s thanking him for “this new truth in my soul.”

Not only do certain of the band’s members have histories of mental illness, but Frank’s refusal to remove his painted head is a pathological symptom. Jon, of course, is in awe: “Miserable childhood… Mental illness… Where do I find that sort of inspiration?” But the film pretty thoroughly defuses the myth of madness as a fount of poetic insight, and, along with it, the convention of the melodramatic, all-explaining backstory. “What happened to Frank?” Jon earnestly asks the singer’s father. “Nothing happened to him,” comes the reply. “He’s got a mental illness.”

The sad truth that Frank illuminates is that mental illness in artists can indeed be inspiring—but most often for those onlookers who relish the spectacular chaos of someone else’s life without themselves having to endure the pain. You can read the film’s Frank as mirroring any one of a long line of variously talented musical burnouts, drug casualties, mental patients, or would-be gurus (Syd Barrett, Skip Spence, Roky Erickson, Daniel Johnston, Wild Man Fischer, even that notorious failed folkie Charles Manson), or as having elements of the erratic but genuinely individual outsider figures who managed to sustain long-term careers, like Mark E. Smith, Captain Beefheart, Lee Perry, and Kevin Rowland (whose brief spell in a very unflattering dress may have inspired Frank’s SXSW appearance here). It’s through Jon’s naïvely trusting eyes, and his eventual disillusionment, that we get a chance to measure Frank against such fabled characters, and to find him—and the mad genius myth—wanting or otherwise.

In the end, Frank is revealed to be a middle-aged American with the face of Michael Fassbender (whom, as it happens, Chris Sievey did faintly resemble). And Frank does get a proper moment of glory, one that suggests that maybe Soronprfbs had a decent record in them after all—a thudding neo-psychedelic dirge called “I Love You All.”

Frank is directed with a light touch and few frills (apart from the odd on-screen tweet) by Irish filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson, whose last film What Richard Did was a chillier, tougher dissection of a certain circle of privileged Dublin youth. Despite Irish Film Board funding and Irish stars Fassbender and Gleeson (the latter playing a nerdy English boy), Frank comes across much more like a British film (it was made under the Film 4 banner), with the attendant tendency to be somewhat flip and reassuring and to have some sort of transatlantic “relatability”—hence its American characters and U.S.-set final act. That’s to say that Frank the movie is a little more confused about its own identity than Frank the character. Still, it’s a rare film that gets the phenomenon of rock outsiderdom, and gets it right, but isn’t swayed by the mystique. It’s sweet, just pithy enough, and brings a touch of critical sanity to the question of insanity as performance—it’s a film that, you might say, has its head screwed on right.

Pulp screens Wednesday in Sound + Vision 2014 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

“So, what, you're trying to get a snapshot of Sheffield? Like, the hopes and dreams of the common man?” asks Bomar, a musician, former mental patient, and Sheffield resident who dresses like a thriftier, glam-era Brian Eno. This question cum reflexive critique, casually dropped in the middle of his interview with director Florian Habicht, is delivered in a wry, leisurely manner not unlike that of Pulp front man Jarvis Cocker. These and other moments from man-on-the-street portraits of random Sheffieldians hint that Pulp’s savvy sensibility and worldly wise lyrics aren’t the exception but the rule in this former steel mining town. Even those who aren’t familiar with the band—some kids playing in their front garden, two old ladies at a supermarket, an elderly knife maker—respond to something about Pulp’s music, in ways that aren’t always obvious. After hearing for the first time “Disco 2000”—a song released in 1995 in which a single mom’s childhood sweetheart proposes they hook up in the futuristic year of 2000—a young girl remarks: “The name is really different . . . The song is really exciting. It would really get someone moving on the dance floor.”

The dedicated fans waiting outside of Pulp’s final reunion tour show in Sheffield, decked out in underpants that say “Jarvis” on the back in glittery purple letters, wouldn’t disagree with that fumbling sentiment. But as the full title of the film—Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets—makes clear, this isn’t just a documentary focused on a band, an attitude, a feeling, or a place. Rather, Habicht attempts to engage with all of these elements simultaneously, approximating the experience of listening to music. Susanne K. Langer noted the complexity of these interactions in Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art:

“The tonal structures we call ‘music’ bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human feeling—forms of growth and attenuation, flowing and slowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm or subtle activation or dreamy lapses—not joy and sorrow perhaps, but the poignancy of both—the greatness and brevity and eternal passing of everything vitally felt. Such the same form worked out in pure measures, sound and silence. Music is a tonal analogue of emotive life.”

Music is something that forces us to feel not something, but many things simultaneously. A large part of the power of film comes from the ability to marry music and image, and even the most cloying score or pop track can give power to an otherwise limp or silly scene. By genuinely embracing the richness of music, Habicht avoids the clichés and hagiography of nearly every other music documentary. There are people in this world who are excited by Pulp in a way that nothing else can compare, and there are, in fact, those who live rich and fulfilling lives without ever having heard one of their songs.

We also see a handful of unlikely and eerily astute covers of Pulp hits: a teen dance troupe interpreting “Disco 2000,” an all-female a capella group’s cover of “Common People,” and a coterie of blue-hairs in an old folks’ home singing “Help the Aged” while browsing through magazines. In another context, these performances would be seen as merely ironic or sad; here, they enrich the overall understanding of what the band, and by extension, their music is about.  Although most of the band’s songs fit into the Nineties alternative music cliché of loud-quiet-loud, their melodies and instrumentation are equal parts new wave, disco, John Barry, and Serge Gainsbourg. But what truly makes the band special are their lyrics, which are often a collection of anecdotes that form to tell a larger story. Their most baroque songs, some of which are featured in Pulp, have unreliable and sex-obsessed male narrators (“I Spy,” “Babies,” “This Is Hardcore,” or “A Little Soul”), but others focus on the smaller indignities of life that crescendo into battle cries: rich kids trying to slum it (“Common People”), social misfits (“Mis-shapes”), or a letter to a terrible ex (“Bad Cover Version,” “Razzmatazz”).

Die-hard Pulp fans have plenty to sink their teeth into: the old and new performances, backstage footage, and talking-head interviews with Cocker, Nick Banks, Candida Doyle, Richard Hawley, Steve Mackey, and Mark Webber are engrossing enough to stand on their own. (The film opens with “Common People,” the band’s most famous song, which effectively gets it out of the way.) The interpersonal dynamics, musical techniques, or fears that any particular band member talks about blessedly never get too heavy here, whether the conversations touch on fame, misogyny, drugs, failed past attempts at bombastic stage shows, or who really did do the washing up. Anything else wouldn’t be truthful to a band who got a hit out of a song containing the reality-checking lyric: “The future that you've got mapped out is nothing much to shout about.”

At first glance, the Portuguese filmmaker Joaquim Pinto’s last two nonfiction features, released in the same year and both made in close collaboration with his husband Nuno Leonel, might seem puzzlingly out of synch. Both consist of continuous, single-speaker monologues layered over streams of images, which alternate between intimate portraits of the speaker and reverent, attentive studies of the natural world. In The New Testament of Jesus Christ According to John (13), a beginning-to-end recitation of John’s gospel by Pinto’s longtime friend and collaborator Luís Miguel Cintra, what’s spoken is a received—or revealed—text rather than one invented from scratch. That movie’s action is that of giving a pre-existing message the resonance, texture, vibration, and weight of a voice. Call it a kind of incarnation.

What Now? Remind Me

What Now? Remind Me, on the other hand, is a first-person diary film that Pinto began to assemble shortly after beginning a year-long experimental clinical trial for sufferers of HIV, a disease with which he has been living—in co-infection with Hepatitis C—for two decades. The question of how a text can be made to take on a voice—to call out to a listener—is central to the first film and slightly less relevant to the second. As I understand them, however, both movies are invitations to hear such a calling: from texts, from people, from animals and, above all, from the natural world.

Midway through What Now? Remind Me, Pinto looks back on the shooting of The New Testament. He takes the last lines of John’s gospel—“There are also many other things which Jesus did; which, if they were written every one, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be written”—as a warning regarding “the limitation of text in relation to lived experience.” But the assumption behind What Now? Remind Me is, if anything, that the sum of an individual’s lived experience, and the world in which it is lived, can do the work that we often expect texts to do for us: to testify, to bear witness, to give news. It is a distinctly Christian film to the extent that it suggests that the world can be read in this way, and a firmly agnostic one in its refusal to say what, exactly, the news in question is.

What Now? Remind Me

Pinto was born in 1957 in the bustling coastal city of Porto. He was still in his late teens when, one morning in 1974, he heard a neighbor shouting at him to get out of bed: “The revolution has started!” That day, a bloodless civil uprising in Lisbon had overthrown the country’s authoritarian Estado Novo regime. “Over the next few months,” Pinto tells us in What Now?, “films formerly banned by the censorship flooded the cinemas”—Russian silents, stag films, Godard’s Contempt. He was stunned by Pasolini’s Teorema, which, like his own recent movies, is about the ways that matter can be both animated and destroyed by contact with something immaterial. The following November, when Pasolini was murdered, Pinto was living in East Germany, where he had received a grant to attend medical school. (The university accidentally enrolled him in Economics instead; he spent his time reading, going to free piano concerts, and, he tells us, hanging out with young Vietnamese immigrants.)

By 1976, Pinto had entered film school back in Portugal with the help of the filmmaker João César Monteiro, with whom he would develop a close working relationship during his long, accomplished career as a sound designer. Pinto’s filmography is essentially a condensed history of Portuguese cinema in the second half of the century: his first sound credit was for António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s Trás-os-Montes (76); his second, Raul Ruiz’s The Territory (81). (There is some wonderful footage in What Now? Remind Me of him hanging out on set with Serge Daney during the shoot of the Ruiz film.) He worked with Manoel de Oliveira on, among others, The Satin Slipper (85) and The Cannibals (88), and—through his own company—produced Monteiro’s classic Memories of the Yellow House (89).

His first two films as a director must have made for a jarring contrast with the formally radical high-modernist movies he was making at the time with Oliveira and Ruiz. Tall Stories (88) and Where the Sun Beats (89) are tough, compassionate, oddly muted melodramas set in thinly populated coastal towns. In each film, a handsome, sexually polymorphous male adolescent—Tall Stories’ Miguel is 12 and Where the Sun Beats’ Nuno 19—is caught haplessly between a much older guardian, a secretive young woman, and a seductive young man with whom she’s somehow entangled. This last figure inspires the boy with a mixture of envy, admiration and—more markedly in the second film—desire.

Tall Stories

From the start of his career as a director, Pinto had a remarkable ear for the rhythms of the natural world, and a skill at timing his movies to beat in step with their settings. (It’s the movement of the sea, more than the actions of any of the film’s characters, that sets the pace of Tall Stories.) It’s equally striking, re-watching Pinto’s earlier films from the vantage point of his later nonfiction work, how much of a natural he once was at staging confrontation scenes, first squeezing them dry of any melodramatic excess, then slowly embellishing them with revealing, superfluous gestures: a word left hanging, an involuntary movement of the hand, a sharp casting down of the eyes.

The most revelatory aspect of Pinto’s first two films, though, might be his willingness to shift his attention to figures outside the movie’s primary sphere of concern. To my eyes, the emotional climax of Tall Stories occurs in a dimly lit nocturnal shot just after the two male leads have driven away from the boarding house in which much of the film’s action takes place. As their car ascends a steep hill, the chambermaid Luisa—the older boy’s former conquest, and the object of the younger one’s timid advances—watches them move out of sight. In a long shot, Pinto’s camera lingers on her for a beat or two after their taillights have vanished, watching her lose herself in thought.

The young hero of Where the Sun Beats, a moodier, slightly chillier variation on Tall Stories’ narrative setup, is closer to the age of João, the seducer in Tall Stories, than to that of Miguel, the still-green innocent. With his sleepy, come-hither eyes and perpetually half-open lips, Nuno (António Pedro Figueiredo) arguably gives off a more powerful sexual presence than any character in the earlier movie. The role of the naïve outsider is filled by another, more peripheral character, and it’s one of Pinto’s most striking moves in the film that this boy, as opposed to Nuno, takes over the voiceover narration during one of the movie’s climactic scenes. The premise—a young man with a destabilizing erotic influence on everyone with whom he comes into contact disturbs the fragile equilibrium of a closed-off household—recalls that of Teorema, but Pinto’s film has a searching, luxuriant, digressive streak in which Pasolini, at least during the late Sixties, would never have let himself indulge.

The New Testament of Jesus Christ According to John

The key cinematic predecessor to The New Testament of Jesus Christ According to John is another film of Pasolini’s. The Gospel According to St. Matthew, an unadorned, neorealist dramatization of the life of Christ that Pasolini shot in 1964, is, like Pinto and Leonel’s film, a word-for-word re-staging of one of the canonical gospels from a director who came of age as a gay man in a heavily Catholicized country, committed himself to the Left early in life, and took little stock in the teachings or authority of the church. Pasolini’s project was to re-cast Christ as a kind of Marxist revolutionary; a newly published unproduced screenplay shows that he planned to do the same for St. Paul. The gospel of John lends itself less to such readings; its narrative logic is less that of political revolution than that of revelation, its Christ less a social critic than an embodiment of the Word. It is this theme, one senses, that most interested Pinto and Leonel, who transform The New Testament into a demonstration of what it looks like for a text to find a material voice: literally, by virtue of Cintra’s voiceover, and figuratively, in the movie’s stream of beguiling, tactile images.

This exercise in reading the physical world as a kind of mouthpiece for the revealed Word would, as it turned out, heavily inform Pinto’s next film. Near the midpoint of What Now? Remind Me, Joaquim, home alone, wanders up to Nuno’s room “looking for a meaning.” He scans the bookshelves, finding no fiction, only “books on botany, poetry, sacred books. I flick,” he tells us, “through St. Augustine’s Confessions, which I never wanted to read. The inventor of original sin? Of the Holy War?” No, thanks. The joke, of course, is that nearly every modern author who cares about finding a literary analogue for the process of introspection—from memoirists and personal essayists to autobiographical filmmakers—owes something to Augustine’s Confessions. The writer’s craft of intimate self-disclosure is essentially the art of confessing; it’s telling how often in What Now? Pinto turns his lightweight digital camera on himself for soliloquy-style scenes that, on a purely formal level, recall the tight, unflattering “confessional” close-ups pervasive on low-budget reality TV.

What Now? Remind Me (x 3)

At the same time, if the literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn is right to identify the memoir form’s “essentially religious DNA” in its “Augustinian preoccupation with bearing written witness to remarkable inner transformations,” then it’s unclear to what extent What Now? fits the bill as a spiritual autobiography—or, indeed, as a memoir at all. What is being borne witness to throughout the film is not, it seems to me, any sort of inner transformation on Pinto’s part, nor even the mere process of coping with illness. If there’s a component of religious DNA in Pinto’s work, it’s arguably less Augustinian than Franciscan. The one time we glimpse St. Francis in What Now?, it’s a statue of the friar playing with a dog, much as Joaquim and Nuno are seen playing again and again with their four canine companions: Rufus, the slobbering, affectionate elder whose medical affliction—a lump of fat on his chin that obstructs his breathing—makes him perhaps the favorite of the pack; Zorra, the introspective, quiet beauty who neglects her toys to study the phases of the moon; and Cookie and Bambi, less developed as characters but no less present throughout the film.

It often seems as if the further afield Pinto’s narration wanders, the more frequently his camera keeps coming back to images of the natural world for rejuvenation. The first shot in What Now? is of a slug inching across a swath of twigs; two of its most stunning and prolonged close-ups linger on, respectively, a bee crawling over a half-eaten burger and a dragonfly touching repeatedly down on and back off of a narrow reed. In indoor or urban settings, Pinto’s camera tends to clam up into fixed, slightly cramped shots; outdoors, it roams with unrestrained and eager curiosity. “We are too recent,” Pinto murmurs late in the film over a shot of the afternoon sky. “When we go back to dust, life will sigh with relief.” (The next cut is to Pinto fixed in place outside, silhouetted with the four dogs against the light of a full moon.) Slightly earlier, during a rambling—and, it must be said, somewhat preachy­—monologue on drug trafficking and plant extinction, he sighs that “we have lost our ritual relationship to plants.”

It’s in these moments, when the film’s mode of address is closer to that of a discourse or a sermon than an autobiographical confession, that What Now? Remind Me most reveals a “preoccupation with bearing witness.” The substance of its testimony, as well as that of The New Testament of Jesus Christ According to John, is that plants, animals, and natural phenomena have something to tell us—a message to reveal, a Word to make incarnate, an inheritance to bestow—that can only be heard by careful listening and re-listening, which is to say, recording. An hour into the film, Pinto quotes from a letter written in 1852 by the pioneering German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel. “Dear father,” it begins, “that which for you represents reflection on the history of the world and the destiny of Man is for me, on an even higher level, the observing of nature.”

It is no coincidence that Pinto’s own body was on the brink of collapse as he made these curious inroads into nature’s power to speak and reveal. What Now? Remind Me is, after all, a film about chronic illness: pills, injections, sweat and convulsions, sleepless nights, crushing relapses and precarious holding patterns. Pinto tells us that it is because his current clinical trial involves an extended, mandatory period of rest that he has started flipping through old albums, remembering old acquaintances—the film is dedicated to Claudio Martínez, the editor on Where the Sun Beats, who passed away from AIDS in 2008—and indulging in longer stretches of reflection. And yet it was undoubtedly the experience of illness itself that gave Pinto such intimate access to—and awareness of—the world. Pinto is, in this respect, not far from the model set by St. Francis, who wrote his great nature poem “Canticle of the Sun”—with its invocations of “brother fire,” “sister moon” and mother earth—when his body was blind, broken, and worn down by years of self-imposed mortification.

What Pinto rejects in the Franciscan ethos is its emphasis on the willful denial of the body as a means of turning outward to nature, and, ultimately, to God. In What Now? Remind Me, caring for the body, ministering to its needs, easing its pains and gratifying its pleasures—one of the movie’s most tender passages depicts a brief, unsimulated sexual encounter between Nuno and Joaquim—is an extension of, rather than a distraction from, the task of attending to nature’s call. That nature, considered in the broadest and least personal terms possible, is an active agent of disease as well as a tender interlocutor and a passive victim, is something the movie does not fail to admit. (To cite only the most explicit example, a museum tour late in the film includes several detailed, anatomically correct models of genitals ravaged by syphilis.)

There is no guarantee, the movie suggests, that erasing one’s debts on the land (as Pinto, referencing Leviticus, puts it in one scene), becoming less “recent,” or regaining one’s “ritual relationship with plants,” will get one any closer to recouping the physical and emotional cost of being in a body. But Pinto, in what might be his most important deviation from the tradition of Christian literature he often invokes, refuses to stake his bets on an existence in some world after death. The price of the ticket to this world is, recoupable or not, already paid in full.