Dancing Arabs

“Jerusalem is one of the strongest brands in the world!” Thus was contemporary marketing jargon applied to a 5,000-year-old city by Nir Barkat, the city’s mayor, speaking at the opening night reception for the 31st Jerusalem International Film Festival, on the lawn of the Jerusalem Cinematheque. This was shortly after we, the assembled, had been given instructions as to what to do in case of air-raid sirens. As hostilities between Israel and Hamas ramped up in the days before the festival began, the world-premiere screening of Eran Riklis’s Dancing Arabs and the subsequent gala which had been arranged to occur at the Sultan’s Pool outdoor auditorium were canceled, and this less conspicuous event, which had quick egress to safe cover, had been slotted in its place.

Barkat was wearing a natty sharkskin suit. One of my fellow journalists, who’d been born on a kibbutz in the north of Israel and who knew the country well, commented that the mayor would’ve been wearing shorts and flip-flops 20 years ago. Much, evidently, has changed. Jerusalem is flush with money. Israeli cinema, once regarded with derision at home and abroad, has achieved an international prominence. Nadav Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher, for example, arrived at JIFF after eliciting much talk at the Cannes Critics’ Week, while Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation, a black comedy about life in the Israeli military, won top honors at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. However, for those looking to reminisce over a bygone, less prestigious, less self-important era in Israeli movies, the JIFF offered the documentary The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films, a tribute to the flashy buccaneer team of Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan, both of whom were present for the screening. This must have been one of Golan’s last public appearances before his death last Friday, and he was on the grind to the very end—Screen Daily reported that he had a hand in a forthcoming “kibbutz horror picture set on the eve of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.”

In the days since we were gathered together on the Cinematheque lawn to hear Mayor Barkat boast that the city had in recent years acquired “four or five times more culture,” the Jerusalem brand has encountered pretty heinous PR. This was Thursday, July 10, when the kill count was reportedly Israel: 77, Hamas: 3, before a thousand opinion pieces, and #FreePalestines, and calls for boycott, and Sean Hannity posing with his hand on the Wailing Wall as though he’s leaning against an extended cab Ford F-250 flowed through the social media timelines of the world. Some hearts and minds have been won: I am writing on the eve of an announcement by London’s Tricycle Theatre that it won’t be hosting the U.K. Jewish Film Festival, as it has for the last eight years, so long as the Israeli government continues to finance the event.

During my week at the JIFF, the IDF continued to run up the body count, while Hamas kept up their scattershot campaign of rocket attacks, which only periodically blundered their way so far north. Approaching Jerusalem from Ben Gurion Airport, my party and I saw fading contrails over the city, left by defensive missiles from the touted Iron Dome interception system. As reported, the Hamas attacks seemed to have little effect other than disrupting the function of day-to-day life—I shared my flight back to New York with a group of American kids returning from Birthright wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “WE DIDN’T HAVE TO GO HOME THANKS TO THE IRON DOME.” This mere “disruption” becomes rather more disturbing, however, when you witness a panicked mother shrieking Allez! at her children as she’s dragging them towards cover, and when you have to contemplate that, as French speakers, they’re very possibly among the influx of Jews leaving France because of rising anti-Semitism in Paris and across Europe.

Two productions by the subjects of The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films

Taken altogether, it’s enough to make you want to quit the human race entirely—or at least the Old World, as in the case of Dancing Arabs screenwriter Sayed Kashua, who a week before his movie was slated to premiere stirred up controversy in his Haaretz column by announcing that he was leaving Jerusalem, and Israel, once and for all because “the lie I’d told my children about a future in which Arabs and Jews share the country equally was over.” Dancing Arabs is based on two novels by Kashua who, like the film’s gifted protagonist Eyad (Tawfeek Barhom), is an Arab Israeli from Tira who attended an overwhelmingly majority-Jewish Jerusalem boarding school in the late Eighties and early Nineties. The stitches resultant from sewing two books together still show a little in the film’s uneven tone, but journeyman Riklis (The Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree) manages a more-than-usually engaging pop drama thanks to a breakout performance by Barhom, whose talent merits more than the IMDb page full of “Islamist” and “Terrorist #2” usually reserved for Arab actors.

The film’s title, presumably, refers to a scene in which Eyad, on a school vacation during the First Gulf War, watches his father and neighbors cheer on a Scud missile on its way towards Jerusalem—I thought of this scene often in days to come while reviewing the much-circulated footage of Israelis cheering on terminal missile strikes in Gaza. By this point in the film, Eyad has a Jewish girlfriend living in the Holy City, and in this moment he realizes the full extent of his alienation from his family and his background—which is not to say that he henceforth becomes peacefully integrated into Israeli society. The film’s rather pessimistic conclusion, arrived at through a number of identity-switch narrative contrivances that I won’t get into here, is that the best chance an Arab has to get ahead in Israel is to become a Jew.

On the screen and off, one was never far from discussion of what was euphemistically called “the situation.” In a press interview at the close of the festival, Noa Regev, the first successful CEO successor to emerge since the retirement of Cinematheque and festival founder Lia Van Leer, put a positive spin on holding such an event on the cusp of all-out war, calling the JIFF “an event where people from all over Israel—people from the cultural life here—came together and had an open dialogue about the situation.” There were also, of course, visitors from abroad. David Mamet was reportedly in attendance—I didn’t see him, but imagined him walking around shirtless save for a bulletproof vest, à la 50 Cent. Ulrich Seidl, scheduled for a master class, stayed home, while Spike Jonze apparently got into town before waffling on his, releasing a statement that said “it felt like the wrong time for me to be talking about movies with everything going on.”

As days passed and the death toll mounted, this was increasingly the sentiment. I attended one panel discussion on film criticism where the ongoing crisis of the profession was among the items discussed, and it must be said that this topic, which on the best of days is tempest-in-a-teapot, seemed rather egregiously irrelevant amid a real tempest. On the festival’s seventh day, a group of Israeli filmmakers called a press conference to issue a statement calling for a cease-fire, which read in part “in these violent days, it is impossible to talk only about cinema while ignoring the killing and horrifying events around us.”

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

The Kindergarten Teacher’s Lapid was among the signatories, as were the brother-sister team Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz—he is an instructor in the film department at Sapir Academic College, adjacent to Gaza. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, which played in Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes this past May, and on which the siblings are co-credited as writer/directors, was far and away the most affecting and fully realized Israeli film that I saw in Jerusalem. It’s the capstone of a trilogy outlining the domestic misery of Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) and Elisha (Simon Abkarian), a married couple who, as the film begins, have been living separately for some time. (One doesn’t need to have seen the previous entries in the series to find an access point to this one—I had not.) Viviane is seeking a gett—an official writ of divorce—and Elisha steadfastly, perversely refuses to grant it, something the learned rabbis sitting in judgment of their case, conducted according to the dictates of Orthodox Jewish law, have little power to influence.

The action of Gett is almost exclusively confined to the courtroom, through an endless procession of hearings spaced out by two months, three months, six months, stretching into years. The execution is formally stringent; Viviane is introduced as a structuring absence, the other characters being shown through her point of view before she herself appears. The cinematographic restraint allows performance to come to the fore, with particular notice due to Sasson Gabai (best known from 2007’s The Band’s Visit) and Rubi Porat Shoval, as Elisha’s sanctimonious brother and Viviane’s snappy sister-in-law, respectively. The linchpin of this Divorce Israeli Style, of course, is Elkabetz, whose taut self-regulation finally snaps with a Magnani-like explosion directed towards the court, to a resounding round of applause from the audience.

It may be that the imperative to forever be addressing “the situation” hampers the Israeli cinema’s freedom of movement. Even the social issue at hand in Gett—a result of the lack of separation between church and state in democratic Israel, very much at the heart of contemporary troubles—condemns the film to relevance. Other Israeli films on the slate exhibited another certain tendency in the national cinema, earnest exercises in representing marginalized groups and figures: the Ethiopian-Jewish immigrant community in Bazi Gete’s Red Leaves; a man whose entire life is swallowed up by his endeavors to rescue pit bulls from dog-fighting and euthanasia in Tal Michael’s documentary Pit Bulls: Flesh & Blood. But in this year’s crop of films, one favored topic asserted itself over the others. As the festival wore on, it became a bit of a running joke to mention “that incest movie,” which equally might refer to That Lovely Girl, Ben Zaken, or Princess—and that’s only of what I saw.

Princess

That last film, which was written and directed by Tali Shalom-Ezer, was the best of the three, which is to say that it was good enough for one to want it to be better. The main attraction is the performance duet between Shira Haas and Adar Zohar-Hanetz, respectively playing 12-year-old Adar and Alan, the lookalike “twin” whom she brings into her family’s apartment after a mysterious encounter on the street. The uncannily synchronized movement of their bodies in play and mock-sexual roughhousing, seen in extended takes, stayed with me long after leaving Jerusalem, though these intriguing pathways finally deliver the film to an overfamiliar destination. (Princess shared the festival’s Best Israeli Feature Film Prize with Gett, which also won the audience award.)

In addition to having free license to wander at will between screenings in the Cinematheque’s four houses, we media guests were presented with assorted evidence of the vitality of Israeli cinema, watching international filmmakers pitch projects developed under the auspices of the Film Lab at the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School. Because of the small domestic market for Hebrew-language films, the School’s slightly Walter Matthau–esque head Renen Schorr explained, a healthy Israeli film industry relies on exportability by way of the festival circuit. Does the popularity of incest as a theme stem from a fear of international isolation, seemingly realized by the Tricycle Theatre’s boycott? Thinkpiece to come! As to how exportability will be affected by “the situation” remains to be seen—though it comes pretty far down on the list of concerns.

Gagman

Lee Myung-Se taught me how to watch movies. It was 1999 and I was capable of shooting off my opinion gun, dashing out lines about how “this movie sucked” or “that movie is an embarrassment.” I thought it was my job to spot what was wrong with a film and tell a director how to fix it. I figured that I’d seen a lot of movies and therefore I was the guy who could separate the wheat from the chaff. I was the audience advocate. I was, in other words, an asshole.

Then I met Lee Myung-Se.

To say Lee Myung-Se is polarizing is a gross understatement. His first film, Gagman (89), was trounced by critics but later hailed as an essential work of the Korean New Wave. His next movie, My Love, My Bride (90), was a huge hit and is currently being remade with Jo Jung-Suk and Shin Min-Ah. Then came First Love (93), a straightforward love story that bombed at the box office yet today, even more than Gagman, people consider it a masterpiece. Lee followed it up with his most divisive movie yet, Bitter and Sweet (aka Affliction of Man, 95), depicting a week in the life of a middle management corporate drone that felt like a Frank Tashlin musical.

Their Last Love Affair

After that came Their Last Love Affair (96), a movie charting the start, and end, of a brief affair between a married professor and a journalist; it too was roundly rejected. But his Nowhere to Hide (99) became an international hit and pushed Lee back to the top of the heap—only to be followed by a four-year period spent wandering in the desert. Wanting to make American films, he moved to Queens and tried to get a Hollywood project together. But his insistence on final cut scared away producers, and so he spent those years taking endless meetings and watching thousands of hours of movies at Film Forum, rediscovering Buster Keaton and Akira Kurosawa.

In 2005, he returned to Korea and made Duelist, his take on the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon swordplay films popular at the time. With as much disregard for genre convention as every other Lee Myung-Se movie, audiences had a tough time with it, and it didn’t do well at the box office. M (07), his ghost story, was another box office misfire. He was briefly attached to the spy comedy Mister K (12) but was fired from the film early in the shoot for acting like one would expect Lee Myung-Se to act when put at the helm of a big-budget spy comedy: rewriting the script on the fly and shooting scenes in a manner not becoming an action film. That was two years ago. Since then, silence.

Korean film critic Kang Han-Seop wrote an essay about her career-long relationship with Lee and his movies for a book published by KOFIC, and she delights in making fun of him, calling him arrogant and pretentious, while defending his movies as truly great. But the pivotal story tells how after she saw his second film (My Love, My Bride) she sat with him and accused him of selling out, of being an empty stylist, and of betraying his potential. Lee responds with one devasting line: “I’m not the kind of director you think I am.”

Duelist

How many times have I felt like I knew a director? How many times have I pretended to understand their motivations, their goals, and their aspirations based on nothing more than a gut feeling after conducting an interview or reading their press? How often have I imagined some relationship between myself and a director, claiming that they’ve “betrayed” me, or “disappointed” me, or even that they’ve “lived up to their potential?” It wasn’t until I actually spent a lot of time with one director that I learned how wrong I was.

Lee divides audiences and disappoints some viewers not because his movies are bad, or he’s somehow incompetent. Lee makes exactly the movies he wants to make. The problem comes because he’s not the kind of director we think he is. On the surface, his movies look like action films, horror movies, romances, and knockabout comedies, but they don’t offer any of the traditional satisfactions of those genres. Lee uses genre to give audiences ground to stand on, but he’s not interested in delivering genre beats. He’s interested in film as film, not as a sub-branch of the other arts but as its own entity, divorced from the conventions of painting, literature, and music. So much of the language of film is handed down secondhand from other forms—story, rhythm, texture—that the true language of film remains elusive. 

Nowhere to Hide was Lee’s attempt not to thrill audiences but to depict the rush of movement onscreen. Plot, dialogue, character—none of these are as important to him as the feeling a scene creates in the viewer, and with Nowhere to Hide Lee wanted to get the audience drunk on adrenaline, high on the thrill of the chase. When it’s all over, he doesn’t deliver narrative closure, but gives the weary viewer a brief scene of the lead detective coming alive again as he embarks on yet another hunt, futiley chasing after an ever-diminishing buzz. These cops aren’t cool badasses, they’re action junkies who need to stay in motion or risk confronting the emptiness of their own lives. 

Nowhere to Hide

Duelist veers even further from expectations, M downright destroys them, and the know-it-all I was in 1999 would write these movies off as “style over substance” or “noble failures” or “20 minutes too long” or some other bullshit that made me sound smart. But when Lee Myung-Se moved to Queens, I wound up spending a lot of time with him and one day I shot my mouth off and his producer took me aside and, in so many words, told me to shut my piehole. And I did. And I actually learned something. I stopped polishing my own opinions about movies and started listening to what a director had to say about them. I stopped taking the easy way out and merely complaining when a film deviated from my expectations, and instead accepted that Lee’s choices were on purpose, that he was making the movies he wanted to make, and my job was to follow his train of thought.

Before I met Lee Myung-Se I grouped movies into successes or failures, but Lee says none of his movies are failures. Each are exactly what he wants them to be. We can dismiss them, but maybe we’re missing something in the process. Talking about the reception to his once-reviled movie First Love, he says: “In 1993, people saw it and thought it was childish and embarrassing. We sometimes judge things saying it wasn’t good at the time, so it’s not good. In some cases we need to withhold our judgment. Momentary judgment can be overturned at any time.”

Coming to Duelist from this angle, it was not the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon clone that it was marketed as. It wasn’t even really an action movie. It was a romance with Namsoon (Ha Ji-Won) playing a young cop in the Joseon Dynasty who runs into the sexy Sad Eyes (Kang Dong-Won) when she starts to unravel a counterfeiting case. Early summertime scenes of slapstick humor, Keystone Kops kollisions, and Namsoon striding around with a sneer on her face and her sleeves rolled up are all buried like a corpse beneath a layer of snow as the movie turns serious. These two kids fall for each other, but the movie’s bitter bite comes from the assertion that both young lovers have been betrayed by the older generation. Namsoon's mentor, Ahn, has taught her how to fight, but that's it. Sad Eyes was trained by his surrogate father to be nothing more than a killing machine. They’ve both been given nothing but hammers, so to them the world looks like an endless series of nails. Their romance is doomed because they never developed the emotional equipment to give and receive love.

Duelist

The story ends in tragedy but Lee Myung-se uses his directorial prerogative to wrest a happy ending out of the jaws of defeat and allow his characters a final, spectral pas de deux, and it's one of the kindest moments in movies, a touch of mercy from a director who thinks that Korean cinema is obsessed with violence and brutality. 

Lee is obsessed with memories and dreams. Gagman was born when he saw the title written on a chalkboard in one dream and before he wrote First Love he saw the line, “First love is the door to the secret of time,” written on another dream chalkboard. M began 10 years before he shot a single frame, when Alfred Hitchcock appeared in a dream and wrote the letter “M” on yet another chalkboard. When he writes a script he sometimes enters a fugue state and bangs it out fast. Other times it takes him months, with each scene taking weeks to develop. While shooting, Lee doesn’t drink, and every night he meditates, sometimes all night long, emerging in the morning with the images he wants to capture the next day. The only American director I know of who works this way is David Lynch. 

A high percentage of the running time in Lee’s movies consists of scenes that aren’t real. Duelist starts with the telling of a folktale and the movie is stuffed with ghostly appearances, fables, and alternate courses of action all presented onscreen as if they’re real. A stake-out in Nowhere to Hide shows time passing like a hallucination. For Lee, filmmaking is a ritual that eliminates the difference between reality and fantasy, and nowhere  is this more apparent than in his ghost story, M, a movie about how the world of the living looks from the point of view of the dead, and a movie I didn’t particularly like when I first saw it.

M

Using reflections, shadows, doubles, and a disorienting visual plan, M blurs the line between memories, dreams, reality, and ghosts to create something close to an actual onscreen apparition. Don’t Look Now plays the same game, and so do movies like Last Year at Marienbad, but Lee makes it even more explicit: what is a ghost but a memory that won’t leave you alone, what is a phantom but a dream in broad daylight? This point-of-view is closer to the actual experience of seeing a ghost than a movie like The Ring with its unquiet, long-haired spooks crawling out of TV screens to kill their victims, but The Ring satisfies the requirements of genre, while M is a more perplexing object. In film critic talk, this would make it a failure. 

But...

Recently a friend of mine died. A few months later I was walking home one night when I saw him coming up the street towards me. “I wonder what Dan’s doing in this part of town?” I thought to myself. It was a completely matter-of-fact moment then, three seconds later, I remembered that Dan was dead and the guy coming up the street merely looked like him. I felt simultaneously comforted and unsettled for the rest of the night, and even now I feel a weird moment of frission as I type it out. These are the ghosts Lee Myung-Se is describing in M, ghosts of memory that become real for a moment, hitting us harder than any uneasy spirit from beyond the grave, then slipping back into mundane reality. It took me seven years to stop having an opinion about M, and to listen to the movie. Seven years after it came out, I realize that M wasn’t a failure after all.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

… Johnnie To is currently shooting a musical about office politics starring Chow Yun-fat and Sylvia Chang. It’s based on Chang’s smash hit stage musical, Design for Living, and until now I hadn’t even noticed that there’s an online trailer for her musical. And here’s one of the first photos I’ve seen from the set of Johnnie To’s film! 

… Speaking of musicals, China has decided it’s time to start getting serious about them. Now that the Chinese film industry is expanding like wildfire, the state feels that it’s time more Chinese people got into musicals, especially since lots of major urban areas either have, or are building, giant performance arts centers and they don’t have enough Chinese productions to fill them. So now, a one-million-square-foot center is being built outside Beijing that will develop Mandarin-language musicals that can tour the country. The cost is about $320 million. First up, a Mandarin version of Sondheim’s Into the Woods that’ll play for at least 100 performances in Beijing when it debuts in November, before embarking on a national tour.

… You know that talking raccoon who was raking it in at the box office? He’s got nothing on Choi Min-Shik. With a role as the bad guy in Luc Besson’s Lucy, which just set records in the United States, and a lead role in the new Korean box office smash, Roaring Currents, a period naval action film that had the highest opening day ticket sales of the year and took in $25.8 million on its opening weekend, Choi is having a huge mid-career revival. Also, Choi is made of flesh and blood and does not root through garbage cans for his food. Suck it, raccoon.

Ruroni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno

… In Japan, Rurouni Kenshin, the live-action adapatation of the popular samurai manga broke box-office records when it came out back in 2012. Now, part one of its two-part sequel, Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno, has broken the first movie’s opening weekend gross by about $3 million. Its haul of $8.03 million makes it the biggest live action opener of the year in Japan. Audiences are staying tuned for more record slashing and smashing as part two of the sequel, Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends, opens on September 13.

… One hundred Koreans, including directors Ryoo Seung-Wan (The Berlin File) and Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy) have signed a letter submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council and the South Korean Ministry of Foreign and Trade in Seoul that calls for the South Korean government to halt all arms sales to Israel (last year they sold about $22 million in arms to the country) in order to protest what the letter calls the “civilian massacre” in Gaza. This probably won’t end well.

… It looks like Stephen Chow is not following up his hit film Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons with a sequel. Instead, he’s casting the lead role in his contemporary fantasy flick The Mermaid, hoping that he’ll find a fresh faced actress for the part. Rumors have it that he’s also looking for a co-director and is shooting for a Spring 2016 release.

… Kinema Club is making available a free ebook edited by Mark Nornes called The Pink Book: The Japanese Eroduction and its Contexts. A collection of essays about that strangest of Japanese film genres, the pink film, this is a pretty breathtaking achievement with essays by everyone from Donald Richie to Sharon Hayashi. A $25 hard copy is also available.

…The first trailer is up for the latest installment in Hong Kong’s unstoppable, beloved animated series, Mcdull: Me and My Mum. Like every McDull movie, this one will probably make you laugh, then break your heart.

Isabelle Huppert's acting is one of the great enigmas of cinema. You would never exactly think of her as a chameleon and yet, watching her on screen, you never really perceive her as “Isabelle Huppert” either. She seems capable of taking on any part she fancies, yet she almost never noticeably does anything to transform herself; she's not one for putting on a voice, adopting mannerisms, or otherwise doing what is still widely known as 'doing a Meryl Streep' (grossly unfair as that simplification is to Ms. Streep herself).

It's almost as if Huppert's distinctive talent is not to transform herself, but to dissolve—attuning herself so entirely and subtly to the rhythms of a character that she entirely becomes that character without our even noticing that any metamorphosis has taken place. It's what makes it so difficult to stereotype Huppert as any particular type of actor, or as herself embodying any particular type of persona in the real world.

This means that Huppert can play radically different characters in succession without them either defining her, or leaking into each other. Take some of her recent parts: the colonial survivor, tenacious in the face of social breakdown in Claire Denis's White Material (09); a flamboyant fantasist in Marc Fitoussi's frothy comedy Copacabana (10); the uncomprehending, vulnerable daughter of elderly parents in Michael Haneke's Amour (12); a comically lascivious Mother Superior in Guillaume Nicloux's Diderot adaptation The Nun (13); a bored married woman pondering an affair in a softer comedy, the recent French release Paris Follies (Fitoussi again,14). Add these up and you have a range that, in its extreme contrasts, simply wouldn't make sense for any other contemporary French actress (although I might take a bet on Emmanuelle Devos pulling it off). Capping the mystery of Huppert is the fact that she's able to do this with no or little “furniture” to bolster the characters—at most, a whimsical fur hat in Paris Follies, or perhaps a slightly different smile, or the corners of her mouth drawn in a slightly new tautness, but that's it.

However, Huppert pulls off a differently miraculous performance in Abuse of Weakness. This is one of those roles that strike you from the start as intensely daunting—until you realize that Huppert makes you aware of the difficulty by seeming to take it so totally in her stride. It's a difficult role not only because she plays a character suddenly affected by a physical disability, but also because that character appears to be more or less a direct representation of the film's writer and director, Catherine Breillat.

Abuse of Weakness deals with the real-life experience already detailed by Breillat in her book of the same name—the director's encounter with one Christophe Rocancourt, a confidence trickster who scammed her out of some 700,000 euros, after she planned to cast him in one of her features. Breillat's film begins with Huppert, as the director's alter ego Maud Shainberg, alone in bed as she suddenly experiences a massive brain hemorrhage—as Breillat herself did in 2004. Maud finds her body twisted out of its usual shape, unable to control her movements or facial expressions. Seeing her wracked with frustration during a physiotherapy session, we realize that this is a woman who is used to exerting control not just over herself, but over the world—and now she's losing it. As Maud passes down a hospital corridor, the figure seen walking with a stick in the background—shakily reattaining a degree of physical ease that as yet evades Maud—is none other than Catherine Breillat. The director is at once putting her Hitchcockian authorial mark on the film, and reminding us that Maud both is and is not to be read as Catherine Breillat—make of that contradiction what we will.

In hospital, Maud tells her producer, "I've sunk like the Titanic. If I ever resurface, I'll be an atomic bomb"—a statement at once rueful and defiant. She does indeed become that bomb—though it has no casualty but herself. Returning home, Maud happens to see a TV interview with one Vilko Piran (played by French ex-rapper Kool Shen), a confidence trickster imprisoned after scamming 35 million euros from various sources. He is now promoting his self-justifying memoir, in which he lays his crimes squarely at the door of a world in which "most people have lost their humanity." Maud fairly wriggles with delight, bowled over by Vilko's "icy hangdog look . . . his bitter pride . . . No repentance, I love it!" She decides to make Vilko her next male lead, and imperiously commands that he be brought to her, like a child demanding a new toy—"Je le veux!” (“I want him!")

Vilko visits Maud in her elegantly furnished house, and promptly starts strutting to impress her. He climbs up on her bookcase, inspecting her library; he's a Nietzsche fan, he tells her, but adds: "I don't buy books, I steal them." His perpetual bad-boy posturing is patently corny, as if daring Maud to slap him down. At one point, he turns up at her place with 200,000 euros in cash, stuffed into a bag from Paris store Tati—a brand synonymous with proletarian thrift—and claims it's the loot in some sinister corridors-of-power deal. "It's from the Minister of the Interior," he insists, then sulks: "You don't believe me? Nothing surprises you." His whole routine could be summed up as "Mommy, you're not looking."

Maud is hardly taken in, but relishes the imposture anyway. The pair are made for each other, given that Maud is also on a mission to impress; after her stroke, that's understandable. Shopping for new boots after the hospital, she announces that she has designed her own, and brooks no argument from either her assistant or the shoemaker: she wants the look as S&M as possible, with chains and buckles to make it "un peu rock 'n' roll.” And she works herself up into a delirium as she pitches Vilko the tale of Last Tango–like amour fou in which she intends to cast him: closing her eyes, waving her hands, she revels in her own persuasive power as a storyteller. Maud's film, needless to say, never happens; instead, she invests her time and energy in turning her own life into a melodrama with Vilko as her co-star.

It's Vilko who insists on Maud spending time with him; before long, he's complaining that she has made him dependent, that he's become "permanently anguished"—which fills her with proprietorial delight. Helping Maud into her car, Vilko complains, "Your big trip is turning men into slaves"—fair enough, as he has become another of those spellbound, feminized men that populate Breillat films, like the dashing but androgynous Ryno in The Last Mistress (07), or Rocco Siffredi's softly philosophical stud in Anatomy of Hell (04).

That the pair's relationship is not overtly sexual makes it all the more perplexing. When Vilko lunges at Maud for a kiss, she recoils in horror—or coquettish pretend shock. When she punches him in annoyance at one point, he taunts her, "Firm young flesh feels good, eh?"—although that's not what she's interested in (besides, Kool Shen is 47, and easily looks it). The pair's rapport is more like a chaste, mutually teasing mock romance: "Tell me I'm your last love," Vilko urges. Inevitably, heartbreak ensues. One day, Maud gets a phone call from Vilko; we don't hear what he says, but it reduces her to tears, and we know she's experiencing the agonies of the damned.

The relationship's most mysterious element is that Maud keeps handing over money to Vilko, whenever he demands it. Her first check to him is a loan, she reminds him; but the checks keep coming, helping Vilko live in splendor with his vampish young wife (Laurence Ursino), who eventually disappears from the scene, perhaps because there isn't room for her and Maud in Vilko's life. The more checks Maud signs, the more she and Vilko become imprisoned in their complicity. Because she's having increasingly unaffordable work done on her house, her physical world shrinks (a parallel with her damaged body). Her bedroom becomes a storeroom, then Vilko, newly homeless, moves in: they end up sharing bunk space, farcically—him with his sleeping bag crammed into a tiny cot, her bundled up just as awkwardly in her own bed.

If the narrative becomes repetitive, that serves to make the flow of time all the more uncertain, as it can be in tales of love or madness. Money flows out mysteriously, just as mysteriously returns, then disappears again as if it was never there in the first place. A close-up shows Vilko placing a 90,000-euro check on Maud's bedside table; in the morning it's gone, as if money were prone to evaporate in air.

In the end, Maud's family gather round to help out—and to try and understand exactly what's been happening with her. Her daughter asks what was so special about Vilko, and Maud simply answers: "He was there." Breillat ends on a devastatingly opaque close-up of Huppert's Maud, quietly tearing up as she tries to explain her motivations. But we are left with no explanation at all, just a mesmerizing riddle: "It was me, but it wasn't me. But it wasn't anyone else. So it was me. But it wasn't me."

Only a performer truly confident with opacity—that is, who can convey enigma without appearing to flirt with us—could carry off a moment like this. But this note comes at the end of a film in which Huppert does precisely what I claimed, earlier on, that she didn't ever do: transform herself physically. In fact, in Abuse of Weakness she does just that, enacting Maud's physical agonies to upsetting effect: early on, trying to force open the fingers of what has become a fist, or later, collapsing in spasms while the camera hovers above her, detached, as if refusing to help (a perfect cinematic expression of the film's autobiographical fiction as out-of-body experience).

There's something about the contrast between these agonizing physical moments and Huppert/Maud's odd insouciance elsewhere in the film that make this performance seem like a very effective shorthand, rather than the totally invested physical recreation of disability achieved by, say, Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot or Mathieu Amalric in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. And, having met Catherine Breillat more than once since her stroke, I have to say that Huppert seems somehow to have perfectly internalized her personality and her physical manner—even though it's clear that she's in no way impersonating her in the usual sense.

Shot with clean, spare simplicity by the Dardennes' regular DP Alain Marcoen, this is a very simple work, almost prosaically so at times—as if Breillat wanted to purge the film of anything that wasn't strictly to the point. An example of its sparseness is the occasional touch of score—the odd stark, melancholy scrape of solo violin by Didier Lockwood.

As for the title, “abuse of weakness” is a French legal term, suggesting that Rocancourt (or Vilko) has taken advantage of Breillat (or Maud) when she was vulnerable. Given the strength of will that the film attributes to Maud (and which we're used to associating with the famously tough Breillat), you also wonder just who has exploited whom—and whether Kool Shen quite knew what he was getting himself into when he consented to appear as the hapless Vilko. He's very good, though, and oddly comic, perhaps despite himself—his Vilko a sort of malign but ineffectual imp, as though Maud has summoned him out of her obscure desire. Why him? He was there.

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, the day will come when no one will be able to afford to live in New York City other than anthropomorphized sacks of money, of the sort carried by Rich Uncle Pennybags on Monopoly game cards. We who temporarily live here know and accept this fact, and know that the best any of us can hope for is to buy a little time.

It is towards that end that a few months ago I left behind the apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where I’d lived for something like eight years, and relocated to bucolic Woodside, Queens. (For those so inclined, I wrote a bit about the cinema of Williamsburg here.) Cinephiles will of course recognize Woodside as the home turf of Edwards Burns and Roman Coppola’s dad, whatsisface. I am now a 25-minute walk or two subways stops away from the Museum of the Moving Image, which hosts repertory screenings every weekend, and from the United Artists Kaufman-Astoria 14 (discussed here) just up the street, a state-of-the-art multiplex with all of the trimmings. In theory, I never have to leave my neighborhood to fulfill my moviegoing needs—but as a new Queens resident, I believe it is my duty to know my borough and its theatrical outposts as best as I can. This becomes all the more imperative when one considers that movie theaters, particularly humble, independently operated neighborhood houses, are at this point at even greater risk of being priced out of New York than people who, honestly, I don’t care much about in the first place. (Case in point: I am writing shortly after the announcement of the closure of the Brooklyn Heights Cinema.) And since I’d been remiss with my blockbuster-going this summer, last week I set forth to kill two birds with one stone.

In selecting theaters to visit, I looked for those that had some historical patina; as such, the various Bow Tie cinemas strung along the LIE, though undoubtedly not without inducements of their own, have been omitted. Inevitably I will have missed some points of interest in designing my itinerary, and I hope that readers will draw my attention to these oversights. I have tried to provide historical background for each stop, while hopefully not overindulging, and this would have been impossible without the website Cinema Treasures, an invaluable resource not only for basic information on theaters (Architect, Style, etc.), but for the colorful recollections provided in the Comments section. Contributions by Warren G. Harris, Ed Solero, and others have been of great use here, and I hope that they will not resent too much my drawing on their historical research in service of my own fame and Web metrics.

Theater: The United Artists Midway, 108-22 Queens Blvd, Forest Hills

The first on my to-do list is a theater whose Streamline Moderne curves I had more than once admired while puttering along Queens Boulevard. The Midway was originally an RKO theater, named for the U.S. Navy’s decisive victory over the Imperial Japanese fleet in the summer after Pearl Harbor, and it opened for business on September 24, 1942, mere months after the smoke had cleared in the Pacific. It was a 2,002-seat single-screen house then, but by the time of its 1997 purchase by the Heskel Group had been made into a quad, and today it boasts fully nine screens. The theater does a brisk business for United Artists, and the interior conforms to the Nineties pseudo-Deco style favored by the UA chain, though the original façade designed by Thomas W. Lamb Associates is still clearly recognizable from archival photos. (Be sure to view the mosaic by Richard Haas on the front of the neighboring TD Bank, which depicts Forest Hills’ Station Square and the area's ersatz Tudor architecture.) Until April of this year, visitors also had the option of the two-screen UA Brandon just around the corner on 70-20 Austin St. In happier days the Brandon was known as the Continental, and in 1963 it hosted the “Exclusive Queens Engagement” of Lord of the Flies. We were not, however, in the market for anything quite so dark.

Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy

A few years back, I co-programmed Slither, the directorial debut of Guardians of the Galaxy helmer and newly crowned Hollywood royalty James Gunn, at the bottom half of a double bill with Jeff Lieberman’s 1976 Squirm. The thematic link, such as it is, was that both films feature gross, slimy creatures crawling over nubile human flesh. The Slither screening is, to date, the only time that I have programmed a movie that went on to show to a completely empty theater. (I wasn’t even there—out of town or something.) Gunn’s a guy who’s been kicking around seemingly forever, a onetime associate of Lloyd Kaufman at Troma—there’s even a Jackson Pollock punch line in Guardians which is pretty close to a line in his script for Tromeo and Juliet (96). I suppose the talking point for Guardians is that Marvel’s hire of a fairly unproven quality onto a $170 million property (itself not based on one of their name-recognition titles) is a “gamble,” but as was proven with Edgar Wright’s acrimonious departure from Ant-Man, they are not precisely a director’s studio, and nothing will hit screens under their invaluable imprimatur without having been thoroughly vetted.

But I’m not even mad at the Marvel Studios Tradition of Quality. They’ve elbowed their way to the fore in the business of flashy floor-show movies, movies featuring heroes and villains played by appealing actors sparring spectacularly for possession of powerful gems or cubes or whatnot, displaying a lab-tested balance of humor and action, which dependably deliver All The Feels to a paying audience. If I, like most of America, only went out to the movies a few times a year, I’d probably Make Mine Marvel, too. For one night, I indulged in the harmless fantasy that this was my summer movie, enough to tide me over until I took the whole family to Night at the Museum: The Battle of the Five Armies in December. In between would pass birthdays, vacations, small triumphs and setbacks at the office, and for days, even weeks at a time, my mind would not once be troubled by the thought of going out to a movie theater of any kind. It was a beautiful dream, but waking from it I remembered that I am a depraved troglodyte, and so on the following night…   

Theater: Sunnyside Center Cinema, 42-17 Queens Blvd, Sunnyside

The big draw at the Sunnyside Center Cinema, insomuch as there is one, is the price tag: $5 before 5 p.m., $7.50 for prime time. A neighborhood theater of none-too-imposing dimensions, it manages to house an alarming six screens, not one of which could seat more than 80. The Center Cinemas was converted to digital in 2012, though today it continues a proud, long-running tradition of projecting all of its movies without regard to proper masking. (The 2.35 wide-screen image of my film was stranded amid an expanse of excess screen.)

According to what I can cobble together from various sources, the Center came into the world on April 24, 1942—it was then called the Center Theatre—with a double feature of Sullivan’s Travels and The Lady Has Plans. The seating capacity on opening has been variously reported at 598 or 599. Because of competition from nearby chains, the Center had to rely on second-run and revival house fare, its specialty denoted by a sign over the entrance that read “Good Movies, Like Good Books, Never Grow Old.” (Inlaid into the lobby was the motto “Center Theatre, Home of the Proven Hits.”) Unsubstantiated rumor has it that, on the commentary track for the Criterion Collection release of The Thief of Baghdad, Francis Ford Coppola speaks of attending the Center Theatre with his father. At Cinema Treasures, a user has uploaded a newspaper advertisement from October 18, 1954 which suggests the sort of double bill that young Coppola might have seen: a John Ford program made up of The Informer and The Quiet Man. You won’t find the likes of this at the Center Cinema any longer, though one can hear the accents of Erin immediately next door at P.J. Horgan’s Bar & Restaurant, which serves a pretty decent hamburger, and has for 40-odd years.

Horgan’s days are numbered now, as are those of the Sunnyside Center Cinema. According to the Sunnyside Post, on December 20, 2012, Dime Savings Bank sold the building containing both Horgan’s and the Center Cinema for $6,675,000 to the newly formed 42-25 Queens Blvd. Corporation, a group almost certainly comprised of awful white-collar bell ends who will probably convert the space to residential units for other awful white-collar bell ends when Center Cinema owner Rudy Prashad’s lease runs out in December 2014. The Center Cinema hasn’t even been allowed to go out with dignity intact. On April 10 of this year, the marquee was damaged—by a passing truck, according to building manager Michael Christopher. “[T]here was no sign of a truck on the scene,” notes an article in the Post, which goes on to say that “A firefighter who evaluated the condition of the sign said it was rotten inside and would most likely have to come down.” As of the date of this writing, the sign still stands. Hey, know what else is rotten inside and will most likely have to come down? Capitalism.

Movie: Lucy

In which Scarlett Johansson, a perfectly ordinary peroxide blonde party girl abroad in Taipei for some reason, is turned into a drug mule against her will by Korean gangsters, gradually transforms into an omnipresent demigod when a pouch containing the experimental designer drug ruptures inside the corner of her tummy where it has been stored, and races against time to transform herself into a USB stick containing the whole of knowable knowledge before disappearing into the last reel of Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars.  

Guardians of the Galaxy is in every respect a superior movie to Lucy, and I prefer the entertainment product of Marvel Studios to that of EuropaCorp almost across the board. I guess that makes me a pair of pleated khakis instead of Parisian pleather pants with extraneous zippers, because while you can always score points by rolling your eyes and going “Marvel has their next 17 superhero movies planned out, Hollywood is creatively bankrupt,” Besson’s multiplex pollution (Paris When It Bleeds, Assassinette, Le Dernier Arrondissement) tends to get waved past when it isn’t cheered on outright. Lucy is the sort of thing that coasts on the “batshit” defense, which holds that everything is permissible of a movie, so long as it’s improbably off-the-wall enough, mania being taken as evidence of personality. It qualifies for the batshit exemption in spades: where most directors use only 10 percent of the filmmaking technique available, Besson drenches you with Koyaanisqatsi-scale bucketfuls, even tossing in a bit of Eisensteinian intellectual montage when Lucy is first being lured into the den of villainous, inscrutable Asiatics,  a scene cross-cut with footage of a cheetah stalking its prey. I cannot fathom seeing this as anything but embarrassing. Not to get all Jay Sherman, but It Stinks.

Theater: Fair Theatre, 90-18 Astoria Boulevard, Jackson Heights

As with the Midway, I first noticed the Fair, located on the south side of on Astoria Boulevard, while driving past. The intact marquee, which reads “Fair 3,” is hard to miss. It blazed out in the night for the first time when the theater opened in 1939—the “Fair” refers to the World’s Fair, which was then underway in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

The Fair’s boisterous façade belies mystery within, however. The theater doesn’t list showtimes on the Internet, and when I called to inquire after them, whoever answered the phone blurted something about “Chinese movies,” and promptly hung up. Not so easily dissuaded, I stopped by with my ladyfriend in the late afternoon one day, after dim sum in Flushing. (Asian Jewels, 13330 39th Ave.) We got as far as the lobby, where we’d stopped to stare confusedly at the list of unfamiliar titles listed as playing, when the ticket booth attendant, a friendly fellow of Subcontinental stock, ambled out to talk to us. (You enter the theater’s double doors by passing through a turnstile next to the booth.) “You’re looking for new movies, multiplex movies?” he asked, though more in the manner of a statement. “There’s a movie theater that way,” he continued, pointing down the road, “We play second-run movies, Indian movies, Chinese movies.” Now, my ladyfriend happens to be a Chinese person, so it might seem that it would be within the realm of possibility that we might want to watch a Chinese movie, but something about this fellow’s demeanor seemed to say “This is not the right place for you two.” All the more confounding, given that this was allegedly a theater playing second-run Indian and Chinese movies, is the fact that while we were idling in the lobby, most of the people who passed in and out were middle-aged white chaps. Here the principles of Holmesian deduction that I had learned from a youthful engagement with the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle went to work, and a lightbulb came sputtering to life over my head: “Oh,” I thought, “they play porn here.”

Obviously the lady was holding me back, so ditching the dame I returned on an overcast Tuesday around quittin’ time.

Movie: Something with Keanu Reeves, some Indian thing, some porn.

The ticket is for a single admission the Fair is a pretty steep $15, but for that price you get free range on the theater’s labyrinthine premises. (Thrifty return customers, however, can buy a ticket book that offers 10 admissions for $50.) Past the double doors one enters a cool, dark lounge area decorated with underpopulated aquariums and lined with plushy armchairs, occupied by a clientele who are, for the most part, as gray as your average MoMA crowd. There is a small vending machine area tucked to the immediate left, and just beyond that, the lounge opens onto the main auditorium. Two stairwells leading to the balcony level flank the main entrance on either side, and next to each stairwell is a bank of lockers which can be rented with a small deposit.

The only other occupants of the vast theater were a lightly canoodling couple who didn’t seem terribly interested in what Keanu Reeves was doing on the screen. (He rarely seems interested himself.) This is because the main auditorium, despite or rather because it takes up most of the building’s square footage, is an afterthought in this kind of operation. The reason is a Giuliani-era anti-porn zoning law which requires that smut peddlers dedicate less than 40 percent of their retail space to obscene materials—the same reason that the porno shoppes under the BQE on Brooklyn’s 3rd Avenue, for example, all come equipped with a big room full of dusty children’s videos and People magazines from 1991. Most of the foot traffic led away from the main auditorium, past the lounge, past the two, closet-sized theaters playing the advertised Bollywood/kung-fu fare, past a curious fresco of a flamenco dancer and the men’s restroom which was decorated with a cardboard cutout of John Wayne and a three-foot tall reproduction of Michelangelo’s David, and into the two theaters playing XXX material. One screen was playing same-sex stuff, the other hetero, though I would venture to guess that the theater, which is honeycombed with booths (purportedly mirrored) for trysting, is more or less exclusively a gay cruising spot. I would be remiss not to mention that “Rude” by the Canadian pop-reggae outfit MAGIC!, the reigning Worst Song That I Have Ever Heard, was playing in the adult houses, and though it was not improved exactly by the setting, it at least acquired an element of humor when serving as the soundtrack to vigorous butt-stuffing.

This disproportionate division of floorspace between the official front and the real adult attractions is basically the same setup that I discovered when I visited the Kings Highway Cinema in Gravesend, which I had previously believed to be the last functioning porn theater in the five boroughs, for a 2012 Village Voice piece on “New York’s Far-Flung Theaters.” I will say that the Fair seemed to be quite a bit better kept up, with very little of the stale cum-and-disinfectant stench that hung over the Kings Highway. Insofar as I could tell, there was an amiable, “Everybody knows your name” vibe among the patronage, encouraged by the management, who advertise free pizza on Friday and Saturday nights. Rumor has it they even host an Academy Awards party—and this is maybe the only context in which I can imagine myself enjoying Oscar’s biggest night.

Read part two of Bombast’s Queens tour.

Read part one of "Queens, City of Cinema" here.

Theater: Cinemart Cinemas, 106-03 Metropolitan Ave., Forest Hills

I’ve been periodically visiting the Cinemart for years—it was a 20-minute drive from my former home in fashionable Williamsburg, and I (very belatedly) saw The Social Network there in the winter of 2010, on a slightly worse-for-the-wear 35mm print. Yes, the prospect of livid-green emulsion scratches, prancing dust mites, and encroaching tendrils of detritus are the principal allure of this Forest Hills house which, bravely waiting for this digital fad to blow over, has yet to switch brands to digital.

Architecturally, the building is nothing to write home about. The façade has been repeatedly altered to the point where the original character has been entirely lost. Though there was a rumor at one time that the ceiling panels in the lobby were going to be removed to reveal the coffered majesty underneath, today the lobby remains a more or less intact specimen of 1989 multiplex décor, which never fails to send me on a Proustian journey to the late Showcase Cinemas Tri-County in Cincinnati, Ohio. When the present-day Cinemart first opened its doors on March 10, 1927 as the 1,300-seat Metropolis Theatre, however, the scene described by the Forest Hills-Kew Gardens Post was quite a bit more impressive:

“It is modern in every detail and nothing has been omitted that will contribute to the comfort and convenience of its patrons. The decorations are carried out in French gray, old rose and gold. A huge crystal dome has been installed in the center of the house. All of the seats are on one floor. On the second floor there are luxurious lounging rooms for the use of the theatre’s patrons. A $30,000 Wurlitzer organ has been installed, which will alternate with an eight-piece orchestra in furnishing music during the running of the pictures . . . The opening day [March 10] program includes Blonde or Brunette, starring Adolphe Menjou, and a Hal Roach comedy, Why Girls Say No.”

As it happens, this was a little too much luxury for Forest Hills at the cusp of the Depression, and the Metropolis would fold in short order. After lying fallow for a couple of years, the building reopened in March 1931, wired with Western Electric sound equipment, as the Inwood Theatre. This in turn closed its doors on August 31, 1953, and sometime afterwards was reborn as the Inwood Art Cinema, whose programming seems to have been a mixture of rep revival and foreign fare, today unfathomable though not at all uncommon in the years immediately following the crumbling of the American studio system. In 1959, for example, we find a double feature of The Red Inn and Caroline Cherie, two films by the French comic actor Fernandel, at the Inwood Art. This is the same year that a print of Modern Times, apparently not authorized for exhibition, was seized from the projection booth by Federal marshals.

The theater remained a single screen through the Seventies, even as it gained the new sobriquet CinemaArt (later shortened to the present “Cinemart”), and started booking slightly seedier stuff. In 1972 the Inwood played host to Barnard L. Sackett’s Eroticon, while the Long Island Press of January 12, 1973 lists a double bill of Oh! Calcutta and Fritz the Cat at the theater—the same double bill that was then playing at the Fair. (This trajectory is, again, typical, as the racy foreign import gave way to domestic titillation and then, frequently, outright smut.) The Cinemart was finally twinned in 1982, when most of New York’s single screens were being partitioned, and right around the time that it began playing tonier new releases—apparently A Room with a View held on there for 56 straight weeks. Today it has five screens, and is operated by longtime independent Nicolas Nicolaou, who also owns Cinema Village in Manhattan and the Alpine in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which could be a column unto itself.

Movie: Transformers: Age of Extinction

My companion and I arrived at the ticket window a few minutes before the listed 8:00 start time for Transformers: Age of Extinction, only to discover that there was no 8:00 Transformers: Age of Extinction being advertised at the window. “What happened to the 8:00 Transformers: Age of Extinction?” I, a 33-year-old adult man, sweating profusely, lips stained with red wine, asked the teenager in the booth. “There was a problem with the print,” she responded. Viva 35mm!

The only other showtime nearing was an 8:15 X-Man: Days of Future Past, which I would rather eat a bowl of scabs than watch, but we weren’t going to go home after having come this far without a dose of Tinseltown magic, so off we went to…

Theater: Main Street Cinema 6, 72-66 Main St, Kew Garden Hills

The palace-to-plex story should be familiar by now. In the beginning was the Main Street Playhouse, designed by architect Joseph Unger and unveiled sometime in 1940—a “Grand Opening” ad shows a double bill of Mervyn LeRoy’s Escape and the Wallace Beery Western Wyoming. The Main Street Playhouse begat the Main Street Twin when, in order to keep up with the times, the Playhouse was twinned in 1985. This wholly failed to solve the Main Street Cinema’s financial problems, but after being closed for a time, the theater rose from the ashes as a six-plex: the old balcony became screens #5 and #6, the loge level was made into #3 and #4, and the front of the theater was made into #1 and #2.

The Main Street Cinema is under the same management as the Sunnyside Center Cinema (see part one of the survey), another already smallish cinema subdivided into roughly living-room-sized theaters, and they have the same ticket prices and the same house publication, the Movie Facts pamphlet (“Your Guide to the Movies Since 1972!”) The theater we sat in (#4) had a couple of torch-shaped sconces on the wall, which apparently have been retained from days of yore—a regular attendee from the early Sixties remembers them on Cinema Treasures, where most recollections from this period speak of a bill heavy on kaiju and Famous Monsters of Filmland fare. Perhaps most thrilling of all: Fran Drescher, television’s The Nanny and a native of Kew Gardens Hills, once worked at the candy counter.

Like the Sunnyside, the Main Street has been converted to digital in recent years—an expense that they could probably ill afford. One of the old Simplex X-L 35mm projectors, manufactured in Bloomfield, New Jersey, now stands in the lobby, serving a purely decorative function. Nearby is a stairwell which leads to a disarmingly spacious waiting area, which I found empty save for a Rigid Air Mover floor dryer and a discarded insert from a lady’s shoe, and the bathrooms beyond. I popped down before the feature, bladder full to bursting from an extended layover at Parson’s Ale House (79-08 Fresh Meadows Blvd—10 bucks buys you a Wild Turkey and Guinness!), and stumbled into a cluster of tweens pirouetting about madly. From whence came all of this energy, all of this passion to DANCE? Well, as it transpired, they’d just come out of the movie we were on our way into…

Movie: Step Up: All In

This, the fifth film in the Step Up franchise, was my second outing with the series. Step Up: All In carries over several characters from Step Up Revolution, including protagonist Sean Asa, played by MMA-fighter-turned-dancer Ryan Guzman. This installment picks up a few months after the conclusion of Revolution, in which Sean and his Miami-based crew, “The MOB,” were about to live virally ever after, having parlayed their vaguely anti–Wall Street (or anti-guys-in-suits) street theater into a commercial contract with Nike.

I saw Step Up Revolution in 2012, and reviewed it for The Village Voice. Revisiting that “Tracking Shot”—one of innumerable 200-worders that I was then grinding out for an amount that I frequently earn for 4,000 words these days—I find it acceptably well written, but condescending and failing entirely to convey the film’s sense of giddiness, which I refer to in passing. It seems to me the product of a critic entirely unhappy with his position and, because of this, insensate to unexpected pleasures—perhaps because I happen to know that both things were, at this particular point, true. More than once, I stoop to mockingly quoting dialogue from the film for word-count filler, as though anyone on the planet would watch a Step Up movie for the Noel Coward–esque epigrams, and note that the film is “ideologically incomprehensible,” comparing it to The Dark Knight. This is, in fact, true, though I’m not at all sure that it’s a liability worth noting.*

Step Up: All In is, like its predecessor, “ideologically incomprehensible.” It’s larded with dreadful dialogue and cliché situations. And I couldn’t possibly have enjoyed it more. As the film opens, The MOB are in disarray, having been lured from Miami to Los Angeles by the Nike shoot and then staying on for what has turned out to be the illusory promise of more riches. Doubts about Sean’s leadership enter crisis mode when he pushes The MOB, unprepared, into an impromptu dance-off with the top-dog local crew, The Grim Knights, who humiliate them so thoroughly that they take the next flight back to Miami.

Sean, still clinging to the L.A. dream, sticks around, sleeping in a closet at the ballroom dance studio operated by the ambiguously European grandparents of his friend “Moose” (series regular Adam G. Sevari), who now works in a laboratory/factory of some kind. (It’s the sort of child’s conception of a grown-up job that Antoine Doinel used to land.) Sean gets word of an America’s Best Dance Crew-like televised competition that’s to be hosted in Las Vegas by one Alexxa Brava—the grand prize is a regular casino gig—and sees this as his last best shot. With a pause for a reprisal of the “You’re eating cooked testicles” gag from Chevy Chase’s Funny Farm at Moose’s grandparent’s dinner table, Sean and Moose set about assembling a new crew that includes Moose’s friend, Andie (Sevari’s Step Up 2: The Streets co-star Briana Evigan.) They use Moose’s workplace to create a Frankenstein-inspired mad science number, and enter the contest under a name that I have entered on my notepad as an impenetrable scribble that’s something like LIMNWXYRKP. (They pronounce it “Elementrix.”)

The audition piece is good enough to write XTRMNTRs ticket to Vegas, where Sean’s competition includes not only The Grim Knights and their taunting leader Jasper (Stephen Jones), but his old crew, The MOB, now mortal enemies. Arrived in this city of dreams, Sean and Andie, who’ve shed their love interests from their respective Step Ups, try to come to terms with a burgeoning attraction, which nearly gets hot-and-heavy during a late-night visit to the Neon Museum, when they turn a New York-themed teacup ride with taxicab spinners into the staging ground for a slinky duet to “old school Bobby Brown.” (This carnival version of the ’hood is as near as All In gets to the stink of the streets, while both performers would’ve been in diapers during the heyday of New Jack Swing.)

Blooming romance is stymied by the face that Sean’s bullheaded will to win blinds him to the needs and feelings of everyone around him, including Andie. The strain reaches breaking point when LMFAO learn that the outcome of the final round is fixed. At this point Sean, still no great shakes as a leader of men, decides he wants to throw in the towel, because after all this was only about “All our hard work paying off so we can have some actual stability.” Now Andie, lent particular moral authority by Evigan’s glass-gargler delivery, establishes her moral authority: “It’s far more than that for me.”

I don’t mind telling you that I was genuinely moved here. I had begun to self-identify quite strongly with Sean, who had lost sight of his priorities in pursuit of the phantom of stability, whom I fancied had the same difficult relationship to his profession that I had around the time that I was reviewing Step Up Revolution—“Got the spirit, lose the feeling,” in the words of Ian Curtis. And it’s at this point that Step Up: All In, like Revolution, begins tossing aside its convictions with such blithe indifference that it seems not to notice that it’s doing so at all. Though Sean briefly flirts with cynicism after discovering the fix (“It’s reality TV, nothing’s real,” he spits), it turns out that the system does work, and that talent will out in the end—Sean’s crew are so overwhelmingly the favorite after the big dance-off that they get the Vegas contract and the regular paychecks that go with it. It’s not whether you win or lose, but better to win all the same, n’est-ce pas? As in Revolution, you can’t go two scenes in All In without tripping over a product placement—Nike, Starbucks, Gordon Ramsay, Google, VH1—but this time this backdrop only seemed to underscore the film’s clear theme. In the logo-plastered, everything-bought-and-paid-for dystopia which is contemporary America, the only possessions that you indisputably own are your integrity, your ecstasy, and your own body—much the same thematic territory explored in Step Up alum Channing Tatum’s Magic Mike. 

In filming those bodies in glorious motion, All In director Trish Sie, a choreographer-cum-filmmaker, favors proscenium wide shots which keep all the moving parts of the big, full-crew numbers visible at once. Show-stoppers include a Newsies-chic number with Sean and company channeling a Forties boxing picture, climaxing with dancers being “knocked” out of the ring and then spewed back onstage; the Grim Knights as a gang of aggro Roman Centurions; and, finally, XLR8R and The Mob joining forces for a steampunk megaproduction, capped by Sean sending Andie soaring clear onto the ceiling of the theater… Yes, I should mention that the movie was projected in the 1.85 aspect ratio, though the screen had been masked into a 2.35 slit, meaning that the image spilled over the top and bottom. At one point I went out to explain the problem to a 17-year-old with a managerial air, and he slipped into the projection booth as though to do something, at which point I returned to the theater, where the masking stayed resolutely in place for the rest of the picture. Try getting that experience in your living room!

The Main Street Cinema is hardly the last of Queens County’s rich moviegoing offerings! I have yet to visit the Fresh Meadows 7 or the nearby Bombay Theatre, which has apparently picked up the Bollywood business from the Jackson Heights Cinema on 82nd Street, nor have I seen the Loew’s Valencia in Jamaica, one of five “Wonder Theaters” opened in greater New York in the late Twenties, along with the Loew’s Jersey, now in clear-and-present danger of becoming only secondarily a venue for showing films.

Here I should note again that “endangered” is the rule rather than the exception when it comes to New York City moviehouses, regardless of borough. With this in mind, I’d like to pour a little out for the screens that aren’t with us any more. For the Olympia and Loew’s Triboro on Steinway in Astoria, the Trylon, the Earle, the Mayfair in Flushing, the Ditmars (which showed Greek movies), the Polk in Jackson Heights, the Ridgewood, the Deluxe in Woodside, and the Hobart, which 50 years ago would’ve been my local, situated a crosswalk away from my front door at 31st Ave and 51st St. and specializing, per a January 1963 item in Boxoffice, in “playing art and foreign films.” The Cinema Treasures comment sections are particularly priceless here. One reads “Not being from Queens I never visited the theatre. But my cousin did all the time and that is where he contracted ringworm.” Another: “Hobart Theater’s summertime motto [was] ‘Beat the heat in a Hobart seat’ because it was one of the first to have air-conditioning. We tough kids used to parody the motto as, ‘Beat your meat in a Hobart seat.’” Who says film history isn’t a gas?

*- David Bordwell, writing about The Dark Knight in a piece called “Superheroes for Sale”—he also loathes it—gets the salient point about the measured ambiguity of multiplex fare:

“Hollywood movies are usually strategically ambiguous about politics. You can read them in a lot of different ways, and that ambivalence is more or less deliberate. A Hollywood film tends to pose sharp moral polarities and then fuzz or fudge or rush past settling them . . . [F]ilmmakers pluck out bits of cultural flotsam opportunistically, stirring it all together and offering it up to see if we like the taste.”

This is certainly holds true for Marvel Studios products like The Winter Soldier or Guardians, slated for release years in advance but equipped with narrative hooks that the topical issue of the day can be conveniently hung on. The Kree as Hamas? The Kree as the IDF? Do I smell a thinkpiece!? 

Aleksandr Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse screens next Friday in Strange Lands: International Sci-Fi at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Genre is the great friend of political allegory, particularly inside authoritarian states. While Chinese film of the late Nineties and Aughts preferred historical costume dramas to comment on the corruption that accompanied neo-Confucianism, many artists in the Soviet Union’s heyday seized upon the themes of disillusionment and persecution recurrent in science fiction. Aleksandr Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse transposes the Strugatsky Brothers story about a Leningrad-based astrophysicist prevented from finishing a revolutionary study by an apparent conspiracy to a medical doctor in Turkmenia who’s being prevented from studying the relationship between religion and illness by mysterious events. The mirrored relationships between the novel and film—and the implications of setting the film in a barren, far-flung region of the Soviet Union that had its traditional way of life destroyed after resisting Bolshevism—drives home the alienation and oppression.

Sokurov was at the Locarno Film Festival to present short films made by his students, which is where FILM COMMENT Digital Editor Violet Lucca and Lucas Neves of Folha de São Paulo caught up with him to speak about adaptation and politics.

Days of Eclipse

Violet Lucca: Days of Eclipse will be playing in New York next week, and I wanted to ask you a few questions about the film. Specifically, why did you choose to adapt Strugatsky’s stories in the way you did?

There is a huge distance between literature and cinema. I would say that they have nothing in common. The script or a history told in words—as in the Strugatsky novel—are absolutely different kinds of storytelling, and in this way the visual nature of the story and the script are completely different.

So it’s impossible to put a novel on the screen, or any story told in words. It’s impossible to make a cinematic transposition of Hamlet or King Lear. Because Shakespeare has said all of what he wanted to say—he’s made all of his points. He doesn’t need some explication or transposition to another field. He is endless in his words. With cinema, we have to start from the beginning, without words. By making a film, we make a completely different story—something that’s not even the script, actually. And if we are making something Shakespeare wrote, we are not making a King Lear. Because the word is saying something, and the visual instrument is saying other things. The word is free, is open and endless. And the visual, unfortunately, is ending during each screening. The word is like a free man, and visual art is a man in prison, in jail.

The Strugatsky Brothers themselves told me that it was impossible, that this didn’t need to be made into a film. They allowed me to use their novel only for financial reasons. They don’t need the film. It’s me who needs it. So they told me, you could do all that you want. Unfortunately, most writers aren’t able to understand that literature and cinema are completely different fields.

Lucas Neves: But you have adapted Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Platonov, Goethe. It’s hard work, but you’re willing to do it. I once read that you consider yourself to be more of a literary person than a cinema person.

The plots created by writers are more certain, more significant. I think the future is the written plot by the writer. Because the plots written by Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens and William Faulkner will exist in the future. For example, Faust by Goethe is a work we have not yet finished decoding. Like Dostoevsky’s works.

In my opinion, cinema as an art is a small child who needs to be supervised by an adult. And the plots that have been proven by time, that have lasted until now—I can find a good base from them. Using plots from literature, I can avoid some mistakes that I can make while making the film. And that’s really important, because a director is going to make a lot of mistakes during filmmaking. There are no timeless films at all, or timeless filmmakers. We all make mistakes. We know about the existence of very gifted composers or writers, but no filmmakers. We are condemned to make mistakes. Because we are filmmakers, we are dealing with temporary instruments, and this is the reason for our mistakes. These instruments are not proven by time. They are too young.

We are pushed to make films about contemporary things. They seem to say: “Look around, life—modern life—is so various, please shoot it, not other things!” Only some filmmakers are able to say: “Wait. We are not able to understand this life, we don’t have the necessary distance. We don’t know the direction of this progress, so how can we say something if we can’t understand it?” So in my opinion, this love for crime plots, for representing crime on the screen, is slowly pushing literary plots out of our consciousness, our mind. In this way, people are not more interested in the mind, for work of the mind. They are not going to engage the mind, and we can observe the results of this everywhere. The politicians who are completely ungifted, aggressive; they have power now. You can also see it in the aggressive behavior of people today.

LN: You just talked about cinema as a small child that needs support from a higher being, a higher institution—that there are great musicians, great writers, but that there aren’t great moviemakers, great directors. Do you really stand by this idea? Eisenstein or Tarkovsky weren’t great filmmakers?

It’s provocative. No, I don’t think that in cinema there are big personalities. No. The tradition is too young. We don’t have enough people to compare. We can compare the cinema as an art to a physician who is trying to study a million health problems of people without knowing how to help them. Every physician makes a discovery and then proclaims his method as the unique and best one to help people, but the disease or problem continues on.

Every physician thinks, “I’m the great one,” putting themselves on a pedestal. Therefore none of them has the intention of uniting forces. Even now we don’t have a common language of cinema. Can you imagine science or medicine without the Latin language? It’s a system by which you can name things: the language can help concentrate on the most important aspect to study, and, at the same time, to get a look from the other side. In cinema we don’t have such a language, a common language.

VL: When Days of Eclipse was made, it was 1988, the era of glasnost, near the end of the Soviet Union. What was it like making films at that time, especially compared with now?

In 1988 I used to work as an absolutely free man. Now the question is, once a film is finished, how to be happy with it. But even in Soviet times, I used to work as a free man, like now. And I’m very lucky, because I continue to work. Documentary or fiction, the films are my films. I’m not given scripts—I can say that I am working with myself and with a scriptwriter. It’s always my choice to make a film.

LN: In your films you’ve portrayed the intimacy of leaders like Hitler and Hirohito and Lenin. What would the intimacy of Putin look like if you were to portray it?

I never have any latent wishes or goals. I think if I had an idea to make a film whose main figure is Putin, I would do everything I wanted to do, completely freely. I could make the film following Putin’s life as it’s going, with a level of intimacy. I’ve met him many times, and I spoke with him many times. And I have absolutely no fear to speak with these people, these representatives of power.

From my personal experience, I met with Yeltsin for many years. Observing Yeltsin, and from studying historical figures like Hirohito, Lenin, and Hitler, I can see that they are the most unfree people in the world. They have no freedom at all. Maybe they are more human than we are. President Obama is a slave to the system. He is completely unable to follow his own wishes. Even if his personal ambitions can be satisfied as the president of the United States, few know that he is a slave of this system. People in power all have a phobia, and it is the most horrible phobia that we can imagine: what should we expect tomorrow? They are sleeping with this nightmare every night, and they wake up with this nightmare. I don’t recommend anyone having such a nightmare.

LN: And what do you think tomorrow holds for Putin in the wake of the Ukraine, the sanctions from the Western countries?

In 2008, I publicly declared that the war with Ukraine and Kazakhstan would come soon, that it would be unavoidable. But I don’t think that we can create politics as a kind of direct movement on the highway. We can’t follow this idea. Politics are another kind of movement: one step forward, two steps back, and three steps left and right. And then back. Then really quickly forward, very slowly back, and then…stop!

Russia, the United States, and China are condemned to have these big and tragic actions. They will damage other countries involuntarily, into the future. To avoid this problem we have to get rid of all the nuclear weapons, and get rid of the amount of land these countries have. Because even though we are rapidly developing technology that gets enormous results from a political point of view, we are still in the Middle Ages.

You can announce that the zone of the United States’ interest is the Middle East. And Russia can announce that the zone of their interest is Ukraine, and that France’s zone is Africa. Why? England has India as its zone of interest. Why? It’s really strange as an ideology because there are no more kings or kingdoms. What do these intentions mean? It means it’s time to re-educate politicians. The international police have to arrest all the heads of huge states, party leaders, and all the United Nation representatives, and deport them to the Sahara, just to make them leave the field. Give them some little food and water, and teach them from the beginning. But instead, we are supporting these aggressive types of people and this aggressive cinema based on violence. 

VL: Land and language is really important in Days of Eclipse. Why did you decide to set the adaptation in Turkmenistan?

Because it’s a marvelous place from a visual point of view, and it is a marvelous people. It was really interesting from an ethnographic point of view. I know that I like them because I spent my childhood there with my parents. I lived there. I know the Turkmen, and how proper they are. I’ve never seen aggressive people there. It is an astonishing thing, people without aggressiveness.

VL: But that region was really important in the Basmachi Rebellion.

They were just fighting for freedom, for independence. But not all people are able to live in peacetime without aggressiveness­—with freedom and peace. Just compare with Ukrainians, who are never happy to live together with Russia, or so we as Russians have perceived it. There is no doubt that Ukraine has to be an independent state. No doubt. This anxiety to live together—it was hard. And by the way, from an historical point of view, the Ukrainian communists, supporting the communist regime, were particularly cruel and particularly devoted to the communist cause.

VL: Your casting choices also favored ethnic minorities, or parts of the Soviet Union that had been historically maligned. How did you choose Aleksei Ananishnov for the lead, Malyanov?

I chose him, a nonprofessional actor, to play Malyanov because it’s a really rare human story to be performed in a human way. His friend [Eskender Umarov] is a Tartar from Crimea, just like he was in the script and the novel. There is no [professional] actor capable of performing the destiny of these people, the Tartars of Crimea. Ananishov really was a scientist at this time: he worked at the university in St. Petersburg, Leningrad. He was really convincing at representing scientific practice.

LN: You recently wrote an open letter to the president in defense of artistic freedom and tolerance in Russia in the wake of a problem with an independent TV channel. I’d like to know about the current state of artistic freedom of speech in Russia today.

I wrote the letter not only for the imminent closing of these two channels, but defending Dozhd (Rain) TV and the young people who are in jail at the moment—guiltless, but unfortunately there are no results of these appeals, except some difficulties for myself. The situation is really heavy at the moment. We are trying to convince the president that he can’t follow this politic. But we haven’t received any answer. None of my appeals were answered. It wasn’t a personal letter to the president, but a public appeal, and it hasn’t been answered yet. It’s a bad situation. I don’t know what is the future for news stations. Because from one side we see that the rating of Putin is going up: the people seem to like him more than Stalin, for example. And from the other side, not so much: we have these protests, appeals, letters, and opposition movements. Unfortunately, we cannot reach any result through the law.

I fear that in the future there might not be the possibility to make such an appeal because all of these institutions will be closed. This political fight is really heavy, really hard. I fear that the small group of very rich people who have power now fear that the balance will change, so they will not permit an open society to exist. If it were open, their manipulations and affairs would be well known in society. And the situation will take a long time to change, because Russia is a huge country. When our president is going to sleep, the people on the other side of our country are getting up for work.

Publicity still for Forgotten Faces

Seventy-five percent of Hollywood’s silent film output is lost forever, dumped in the ocean, burned as scrap, or consigned to some other form of ignoble oblivion. Every discovery and restoration, then, arrives as a miraculous gift. Such is especially the case with the 1928 crime melodrama Forgotten Faces, one of the highlights of this year’s Capitolfest, the annual showcase of classic film in Rome, New York. It was never lost, just banged up and lying idle, until the Library of Congress initiated a restoration that was completed in the last few months. According to the Library’s James Cozart, the screening was its first in 35mm since the silent era.

Forgotten Faces, directed by Victor Schertzinger, is historically significant as one of producer David O. Selznick’s early features at Paramount. “My first real production,” he called it, following a few Westerns he didn’t care for. Paramount player Clive Brook stars as “Heliotrope” Harry, a gentleman thief tossed in jail for killing his wife’s lover. Before turning himself in, Harry leaves his baby girl on the doorstep of a rich, childless couple. Desperate to keep his lush of a spouse Lilly (Olga Baclanova) away from their girl, he tasks his former partner Froggy (William Powell) with making sure the kid turns out OK. Once Harry is out of the clink, he impersonates his daughter’s butler to protect her from Lilly, who will stop at no underhanded trickery to get her hands on the girl’s money.

The convoluted plot was adapted from the short story “A Whiff of Heliotrope” by Richard Washburn Child, first published in Heart’s magazine in 1919. Even in 1928 the material was considered musty, with the New York Times review declaring it “sentimental and old.” What makes the film hit home are its somber performances and the eloquence of its late silent-film style. With its mobile camera, ingenious transitions, and expressionist lighting, Forgotten Faces demonstrates the influence of F.W. Murnau, who had arrived at Fox in 1926. Though the film’s an obscurity today, it has had its champions. The London Daily Express critic George A. Atkinson placed it on his list of the top 20 American films of 1928, and Andrew Sarris includes it on his “Directorial Chronology” of the significant films of 1928 in The American Cinema.

The opening sequence is a crane-shot stunner which begins with the camera perched at the top of a well-appointed private casino den. Slowly it lowers closer to the action, catching the craps table mid-game, as well as the ornate jewelry decorating the players. Then everyone stops, raising their arms all at once. In the same continuous shot, the camera turns toward the doors, revealing Harry and Froggy standing there with guns ready. This teasing, tense use of off-screen space would be used a couple of years later by Fritz Lang in M, when the kangaroo court freezes and reaches for the skies when the cops interrupt their trial of Peter Lorre.

Another sequence, in which Harry kills his wife’s lover, exhibits similar off-screen sophistication. Brook’s face is clenched in silent rage, his gun hidden below the frame line. Suddenly a plume of smoke rises from beneath him—indicating a shot has been fired. It’s an infernal and disturbing composition, one that expresses the demons festering underneath Harry’s sophisticated veneer. Brook underplays throughout, his aristocratic aquiline face battling mightily to remain unperturbed. In the March 1931 issue of Screenland, Brook chose it as his favorite role up to that point, topping his turn in Sternberg’s Underworld (27).

The tour de force of Forgotten Faces is a long take occurring near the climax, beginning on a monumental staircase that Lilly climbs, packing a revolver to plug Harry. The set must have been enormous, as the crane ascends with her to vertiginous heights. The house is sliced in half like an opened dollhouse to display Lilly’s ascent, as she exits the stage-bound melodrama of the plot and enters pure artifice.

Who was responsible for the visual invention on display? Schertzinger had been working as a director since the late 1910s, with his first credit being the baseball comedy The Pinch Hitter (17). But he was trained initially as a musician, growing up in Philadelphia as a violin prodigy who performed in concert halls at the age of seven. Thomas Ince hired him to compose incidental music for his Triangle Film Company, including his epic Civilization (16); Schertzinger would also write the music for the American Songbook standard “I Remember You” (lyrics by Johnny Mathis). He was a proselytizer for the union of film and music, telling Motion Picture News in 1916 that movies were “evolving its own form of musical expression. It may take time, possibly years, but when it comes the music of pictures will be a noble and worthy sister of the music of the operatic and concert stage. But it will be distinct—it will be different—a form of art as inspiring as that from which it springs—the motion picture.”

The next year Schertzinger would become a director, and he elaborated on the continuity between the métiers to Motion Picture World in 1918: “The photo-play, which has become distinctive art, is developed much along the same lines as a musical composition. The composer is given inspiration for his music by some theme, and in the developing of this he conveys to the ear of the listener an impression of his own mental picture. So it is with the photo-play . . . The composer must use the variations of tone, the divisions of time, the modulations of volume, the crescendo, the diminuendo, etc. The director has at his command the diversity of scenery, the various modes of expression in living beings, the effects of lights, the contrasting of locations and character, etc. But in the picture as in music there must be harmony.”

The filmmaker achieves this kind of harmony in Forgotten Faces, in concert with his actors, the young Selznick, the cinematography of J. Roy Hunt, and the vital uncredited art director. Viewing it in a luminously restored 35mm print at the Capitol Theater—a movie palace that opened the same year as the film—was a rare, vanishing pleasure, smuggled straight from the expressive peak of the silent era.

Red Hollywood has its exclusive theatrical run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “Red Hollywood and the Blacklist,” a series curated by Thom Andersen and featuring additional films related to the blacklist, runs August 15 to 21, also at the Film Society.

Of the many edifying pleasures of Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s Red Hollywood, the first and most striking is the notion that anything like a “Red Hollywood” existed in the first place. The 1996 essay-documentary details the phenomenon: during the 1940s and ’50s, numerous Communist (and Communist-sympathizing) filmmakers were making ideologically charged contributions to Hollywood cinema. Andersen and Burch’s illustrated history deploys clips from over 50 different films written and directed by victims of the Hollywood blacklist to describe a corpus of politically and socially engaged filmmaking that is nearly inconceivable in today’s industry. Previously shown in New York in a different form as part of a 2005 Andersen retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives, and in a new edit this past spring at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real, Red Hollywood returns for a week-long theatrical run. Here are a few of the films quoted and discussed within the film.

The Sound of Fury (50)

One of several crime pictures mentioned in Red Hollywood, Cy Endfield’s The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me!) is also one of the bleakest. In Andersen and Burch’s reading, Endfield’s film presents crime as the result of social and material forces rather than any natural inclination towards wrongdoing. But this summary only scrapes the surface of the film’s incendiary politics. Sound of Fury draws its power from a dialectic struck between two characters: Howard, a family man who reluctantly enters a life of crime after weeks of unemployment, and Gil, a popular journalist who writes sensationalistic accounts of Howard’s crimes. The class gulf between their two worlds, which allows Gil to condemn Howard thoughtlessly from a comfortable vantage point, leads to moral catastrophe. In a pessimistic update to Fritz Lang’s already bitter prewar precursor Fury (36), a mob of angry townspeople, riled up by Gil’s stories, drags Howard from his cell and murders him in the street. Howard has been condemned twice—by a society that offers him no legal opportunity to provide for his family, and by an upper-middle-class man who denounces his tabloid victim as a “monster” without considering his material circumstances.

The Sound of Fury spells these ideas out fairly directly through the superfluous character of an enlightened European professor who acts as a mouthpiece for all social commentary. But that character’s redundancy is perhaps only felt so keenly because of the power and efficacy of the rest of the film. Working with DP Guy Roe (Armored Car Robbery), Endfield shrouds every scene in shadows, making for a consistently noxious atmosphere of guilt and paranoia. When the vigilante mob arrives to murder Howard, they appear as an undifferentiated mass of barely illuminated faces—the homogenized result of Gil’s blaring one-note denouncements. What’s most compelling about Sound of Fury finally is how potently it registers the tremendous cost of not understanding, or refusing to understand. As Gil, shocked into silence, stands listening to the sounds of Howard’s savage public execution, the insanity—and the horrible ease—of passing judgment in ignorance is felt vividly in the film’s perceptively class-conscious drama.

Tender Comrade (43)

In 1947, HUAC attacked Tender Comrade as an “example of Communist subversion” for its “espousal of communal living,” as Red Hollywood describes it. Written by Dalton Trumbo and directed by Edward Dmytryk, today its communal theme seems less threatening and ambitious than innocuous and even patriotic. Presented in Red Hollywood as one of many films investigating the experiences of modern women, Comrade concerns the lives of four World War II army wives who decide to cohabitate in order to save money. The film is partly couched as a tribute to homefront perseverance—the drama partly centered on how the women can best honor the work of their enlisted husbands.

Trumbo’s script drops the occasional hint that America is approaching dark times: “He died for a good thing, don’t let them swindle you out of it.” Throughout, the women toss around a number of ambiguously political statements, the most frequent being a mention of how they run their home “like a democracy.” Dmytryk and Trumbo don’t elaborate greatly on the experience of communal living outside of one or two minor squabbles easily resolved by vote. Comrade is most effective when depicting what the communal situation replaces: a traditional husband-wife relationship. The opening scene of Jo and her husband’s reunion, shot as a twilight reverie, is more captivating than nearly anything that follows. For a film denounced as Communist subversion, Tender Comrade today looks like one that actually enforces certain aspects of the status quo.

Intruder in the Dust (49)

Adapted from the Faulkner novel by Ben Maddow, Intruder in the Dust is the only film presented in Red Hollywood as a subject of controversy among party members. While intended to address anti-black racism, Intruder was rebuked by Communist critic V.J. Jerome, who argued that it posited “lynchings are [mainly] the problem of a few right-thinking, educated, better-class whites.” Although Paul Jarrico, producer of Salt of the Earth, presents a counterargument in the documentary, it’s hard not to agree with Jerome. Intruder begins with Lucas Beauchamp, a black man living in the rural South, being falsely accused and arrested for the murder of a white man. Only Chick, a young white boy, believes Lucas’ claims of innocence, and he and his uncle attempt to exonerate Lucas before a lynch mob can break into the jail.

With its “wrong man” plot and frequent scenes of nighttime snooping, Intruder translates seamlessly from Faulkner’s novel into a genuine Southern Gothic film noir, its best moments prefiguring The Night of the Hunter in their swampy atmospherics. But the glimmers of subversion in the story are quickly overshadowed by the whodunit. And despite the constant specter of lynching, whenever the issue of racism is broached, it’s presented as, above all, a test of white people’s moral sense. In the final moments of the film, Chick and his Uncle reduce Lucas to “the keeper of [their] conscience,” with little done to problematize this statement. That said, Juano Hernández’s performance as Lucas somewhat undermines the liberalism of these conclusions. Radiating a palpable indifference to the concerns and feelings of the white protagonists, one gets the feeling that he will carry on perfectly fine without them.

Salt of the Earth (54)

During the blacklist, a number of filmmakers decided to band together and form their own company: the Independent Productions Corporation. The experiment was unfortunately short-lived thanks to pressure from the major studios, which prevented their work from being shown anywhere outside New York. Directed by Herbert J. Biberman, written by Michael Wilson, and produced by Paul Jarrico, Salt of the Earth follows a labor strike by predominantly Chicano miners over poor safety conditions, all the way through to their eventual, hard-won success. Their triumph lies not only in victory over white, corporate interests, but also in the feminist renegotiation of the balance of power within their own community. Initially, the miners treat their wives’ demands as insignificant in the greater scheme of things, fighting against their oppressors while reproducing sexist structures in their own homes. It’s only when the men find no other option than to cede the picket line to their wives that the power dynamics of the community begin to shift. Roles are reversed: the women prove themselves just as able, if not more, to hold and organize a picket line, while the men discover the difficulty of housework and childcare.

While this all has the makings of a pedagogical lesson, Salt never succumbs to simple banner-waving, no doubt in part due to the naturalism of its performances and setting. The neorealist film was partially shot on location in New Mexico with a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, the majority of them actual miners. Even at its most stylized, as when Biberman intercuts a wife’s childbirth with the beating of her husband by cops, the effect is always to better ground the audience in the reality of the characters’ struggles, never to sensationalize. At the end, when the protagonist’s husband recognizes the error of his sexism, it’s not out of some spontaneous revelation or appeal to an abstract standard of morality and justice, but rather a position that has formed slowly and organically over the course of the film through experience and discussion. That’s what makes Salt of the Earth the most radical film of the lot: it’s not just a denunciation of sexism, racism and corporatism, but a sensitive, rousing illustration of the process of overcoming them.

Hospital of the Transfiguration

1.

The first mention of “invaders” in Edward Zebrowski’s Hospital of the Transfiguration comes nearly 20 minutes into the film. In the scene in question, the director of an isolated Polish mental hospital is introducing what turns out to be a brief, bizarre talk from the institution’s eccentric philosopher-in-residence. “I am confident that this will be a memorable event,” he tells the assembled crowd, “at a time when intellectual life has been suppressed by the invaders of our country.”

That time is 1942. The okupantów in question are the Nazis, and the hospital’s honored intellectual guest is, in fact, closer to a political refugee. At any moment, the center could be liquidated by the SS on charges of harboring “degenerates,” its patients and doctors murdered in a matter of hours. These facts are never far from mind in Zebrowski’s film, one of a number of rare and valuable movies screening this month at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of a weeklong retrospective of postwar European science fiction. But that they are sometimes out of sight at all—hinted at, briefly faced down, and thinly papered over before returning with awful urgency in the movie’s last 10 minutes—is worth considering.

Much of the scene-by-scene drama in Hospital of the Transfiguration (79) is generated by ideological rifts within the hospital’s staff. Stefan (Piotr Dejmek), the idealistic new recruit, has a stiff sense of integrity that sets him at odds with his more cynical superiors on matters of hospital management and, above all, medical ethics. The conflict between young, principled humanitarians, older compromisers, and savage men of power was perhaps the great theme of Polish cinema in the handful of years leading up to the first stirrings of Solidarity—for further evidence, see Krzysztof Zanussi’s Camouflage and Andrzej Wadja’s Man of Iron—and in this respect, Hospital of the Transfiguration arguably spends much of its runtime more rooted in the politics of 1979 than in those of 1942. The movie’s profoundly upsetting last act, in which the presence of the Nazi genocide catastrophically re-asserts itself into the hospital’s world, shifts the balance, reducing all the movie's Cold War-era concerns to distraction and, ultimately, irrelevance. 

Hospital of the Transfiguration

Hospital of the Transfiguration was included in the Film Society’s science fiction series on account of its source material: it was adapted from the famed Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s second novel, a grim realist story written only five years after it was set. Lem’s first book, The Man of Mars, has often been dismissed as juvenilia; it wasn’t until his next work of fiction, 1951’s The Astronauts, that Lem would settle into science fiction, the genre for which he is now best known. For Lem—as for many European writers and filmmakers of his generation—it was sci-fi that ultimately presented itself as the genre best equipped to make sense of the wreckage of the first half of the twentieth century, in part because of its tense, ambiguous relationship to technological progress.

In midcentury America, the typical sci-fi film would be advertised as a model product of the newest and most advanced technologies. “Amazing sights the human eye has never before seen!” boasted one poster for 1953’s It Came From Outer Space. “Fantastic sights leap[ing] out at you,” promised another. “NOTHING LIKE THIS,” a third humbly announced, “HAS EVER HAPPENED BEFORE.” The lesson conveyed by the movies themselves, however, was inevitably that nothing “like this” ever should have happened. The film’s crisis, whatever it was, would again and again be attributed to a scientist’s efforts to understand too much, overstepping his or her bounds in the process. They created a monster. They were too curious. They went too far. “The science fiction films,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1965, “are strongly moralistic. The standard message is the one about the proper, or humane, use of science, versus the mad, obsessional use of science.” That the science-fiction films themselves nearly always came off as products of “the mad, obsessional use of science”—albeit the science of cinematic illusion-making—neither Sontag nor the science fiction filmmakers explicitly acknowledged.

Golem

In America, questions surrounding the moral, political, and spiritual consequences of technological progress ended up being posed most often, and arguably most successfully, in the language of mass spectacle. In countries struck closer and deeper by the atrocities of the war, the same questions likewise found their fullest expression in the sci-fi film. But it was a changed sort of expression: more agonized, more private, and more willing to run up against philosophical dead ends. The nightmare of the American sci-fi moviegoer is that science has delved too deep into nature, awoken something in nature, and that nature is now preparing to take its revenge. The nightmare of the Polish or Czech moviegoer in the wake of the Second World War is that science has simply done away with nature, that moral laws, human lives, and natural ecosystems have been reduced to putty in the hands of technological progress—in other words, placed under the dominion of a distinctly fascist kind of rationality.

In 1971, 13 years after writing The Hospital of the Transfiguration, Lem published The Perfect Vacuum, his first collection of “reviews” of nonexistent books. In the long concluding essay, billed as the acceptance speech of a fictional Nobel laureate, we are introduced to a 20th-century cosmologist who “does away with the distinction between “natural” (the work of Nature) and “artificial” (the work of technology) by re-casting the laws of physics as rules in a game whose stakes are still in the process of being re-written. Each human civilization slowly revises the rules, which is to say, re-writes the laws of nature. “The assertion that a civilization must become more perfect ethically the more developed it is instrumentally and scientifically,” we’re told, has no place in the theory of the “Cosmogonic Game”:

One can control atoms, and then one can alter the properties of atoms as well. In this, one ought not to ask oneself whether the thing that will be the “artificial” product of such operations will not prove “more perfect” than the thing that was, hitherto, “natural.” It will be simply different, according to the design and intention of the Operating Parties.

In his winkingly evasive introduction to the book, Lem—writing about himself in the third person—hints that “neither I nor anyone else will be able to prove to him [Lem] that he has taken seriously the model of the Universe as a game.” Still, the narrator confesses, “I suspect that there was [such] an idea, an idea that burst upon the author—and from which he shrank.”

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne

2.

Karel Zeman, one of a handful of filmmakers included in the Film Society series to indirectly confront the “idea” from which Lem shrank, was born in 1910 in Ostroměř, a small town to the north of what is now the Czech Republic. In his twenties, he worked in advertising design and traveled extensively. Aside from forcing him to forgo a planned stay in Morocco in 1939, the German invasion seems to have little effect on his working life; by 1943, after getting the attention of an influential director, he had transitioned from designing store-window displays to a job at Kudlov’s Bata Film Studios. He began his film career as a puppeteer and animator, and soon showed a genius—visible in work as early as his beguiling, delicate 1949 short Inspiration—for finding new and imaginative ways to integrate animation with live-action photography.

Zeman turned to directing features in the mid-Fifties. The two densely plotted and incredibly elaborate fairy tales he made in, respectively, 1958 and 1961 might seem odd to mention in the same breath as “the wreckage of the first half of the 20th century.” Zeman’s best films have a strong romantic streak, an icing of melancholy, a preference for sublime and grandiose imagery—cavernous palace halls, shoreless oceans, rotund tropical suns—a certain degree of naïve innocence and a somewhat thin sense of tragedy.

In Zeman’s The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (the film of the director’s chosen for the series) and Baron Munchausen—both live-action films staged against stunning two-dimensional hand-painted sets—dirigibles and submarines play dangerous games of cat-and-mouse, moustache-twirling barons ride horses off cliffs, sea monsters threaten divers, sailors and pirates, princesses manage to maintain their towering coiffed hairdos even in the bellies of whales, and dashing young men escape in hot-air balloons with the damsels they love. These movies have a number of elements that keep them from caving in under their own sense of wonder: their manic bursts of bustling activity, their dense, sometimes jarring compositions, their reckless narrative speed. Still, it’s striking that their artistic models are all either somehow naïve in their deceptions—the hand-tinted fixed-camera trick films of George Méliès and Segundo de Chomón—or so stiffly formalized as to be totally transparent about their own illusion-making: Gustave Dore woodcuts, 19th-century adventure story illustrations, silent-era cut-out animation.

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne

Both films, like their American contemporaries, have a love-hate relationship with technological progress, which they position as both an object of wonder and a source of extreme danger and risk. In The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, the earliest of Zeman’s three Jules Verne adaptations, an aging scientist convinces himself that his unscrupulous kidnappers want him to design a powerful explosive as an alternate energy source, not, as it of course turns out, as a bomb. But unlike its American counterparts, The Fabulous World of Jules Verne never falls into the bind of relying for its effects on the same cult of technological progress it criticizes. Its “special effects” are pointedly, refreshingly hand-generated, its narrative logic essentially that of the imagination’s free play. It’s remarkable to consider that a pair of Czech films made barely a decade after the end of the occupation could still believe so firmly in the imagination’s ability to make space for itself to move.

Zeman’s next feature, by all accounts a darker and more explicitly antiwar affair, was co-written with the great Czech fantasist and social critic Pavel Jurácek, now perhaps most famous in the English-speaking world for having written Vera Chytilová’s Daisies. When Zeman was trading his window-display job for an entry-level position at Bata, Jurácek—over twenty years Zeman’s junior—was growing up under the roof of a father who also, it seems, designed shop windows. Six years after his 1957 graduation from FAMU, then a breeding ground for New Wave filmmakers, he wrote Jindrich Polak’s Ikarie XB-1, a film now regarded as one of the high points of Eastern bloc sci-fi. The same year, he co-directed a half-hour-long short, his first, with Jan Schmidt. Their next collaboration—Schmidt directing, Jurácek writing—would inherit Zeman’s refusal to make use of the technological arsenal available at the time to sci-fi filmmakers, but none of the older director’s faith in the liberating power of the imagination.  

The six young women who, with two key exceptions, make up the entire cast of The End of August at the Hotel Ozone have, in fact, nearly no imaginative inner lives. Among the last survivors of an unspecified but presumably nuclear holocaust—the film opens with a multi-lingual chorus of countdowns layered over static shots of churches, factories and fields—they respond to unfamiliar stimuli with a mixture of childlike astonishment and desperate, knee-jerk violence. It’s not exactly the “savage,” animalistic state we have come to expect from pilgrims in post-apocalyptic fiction—C.F. Ramuz’s The End of All Men and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in literature; or films like Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and Louis Malle’s Black Moon—although the movie, like those works, is deeply concerned with the capacity of people to maintain a kind of civilized core in the absence of civilization. If anything, it’s by capriciously and randomly dominating nonhuman animals that the survivors in Schmidt’s film remind themselves of their privileged status as humans. One picks up a snake, inspects it, and methodically crushes its head with her fingers. Another wounds a wild dog with a bullet, then, standing above it, dashes its skull in with the butt of her rifle. Together, the group kill and graphically disembowel a cow.

The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

The world of these women, children when the bombs fell, is one without history, memory, or, therefore, tragedy. The job of investing the present with a sense of tragedy, an awareness of what has been lost and what is being lost, falls on the movie’s two older characters: the gaunt, aging woman who acts as the group’s guide and maternal protector, and the greying survivor they encounter who may be the last man on earth. She, showing them the rings of a tree, gives them access to a history from which we, the viewers, are barred. “Then the dogs tore apart the last boy.” “Helen drowned around here.” “This is where Marie died.” When, in a particularly haunting close-up midway through the film, she’s left sitting alone by the side of a fire, her eyes lose their practical resolve, her face softens into a pieta-like expression of serene, bottomless grief, and her mouth curves into a slight smile. It’s one of the great moments of total introspection in modern cinema.

When she meets the innkeeper, it’s as if they had fallen out of touch years before. But the moment of recognition between them—they’ve never met—is more primal than that. After years of forced isolation, he is an overzealous child with her, inviting the group into his well-kept home with quivering lips and evident pride, delighting in the relic-like significance they find in his crumbling old newspapers and his crackling phonograph, for which he only owns a single, worn-out record. One senses that Schmidt, like Zeman, shares this man’s deep love of the analog man-made object, hand-crafted, irregularly and organically textured. Indeed, for all its profound grief at the uses to which modern science has been put, the Eastern European sci-fi film is always suggesting what a utopian alternate history of technology might look like: a history in which technology functions as an extension of nature rather than a way of controlling or supplanting it. In the work of more optimistic filmmakers like Zeman, this story is indulged in indefinitely; in the work of tougher, less idealistic ones like Jurácek and Schmidt, whose film ends with an eruption of tragically unnecessary violence, it is exposed for what, in the end, it is: science fiction.

The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

3.

Most of the Film Society’s series draws on sci-fi from the Warsaw Pact states­, and the common impression one gets from watching the Eastern bloc titles included—two films apiece from Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the USSR—is that sci-fi thrives in colder, more politically repressive climates. For one, it has always had a high, inbuilt aptitude for allegory, which has made it attractive to filmmakers working under stricter censorship codes. But there is, I think, also a degree to which the dystopian imagination flourishes in environments where reality is already perilously close to a dystopia. In some measure, an artist’s relative talent for sci-fi is a mark of her ability to conceive of destruction: in some cases, the destruction of cities, political institutions, and individual rights; in others, the dismantling of basic metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the self and the structure of reality. The genre’s most effective practitioners are often those who have learned to take nothing for granted, to expect the upheaval of their assumptions and routines, to doubt.  

The key factor in the development of the Warsaw Pact sci-fi film might, then, have been that postwar Eastern European filmmakers were in a position to address the crises of the Forties—the war, the bomb, the systematized mass murder of European Jews—using a vocabulary drawn from the paranoid, stifling atmosphere of life under Soviet-influenced communist rule. (Before its explicit last-act reckoning with the Nazi occupation, Hotel of the Transformation, for instance, is essentially a gritty denunciation of institutional bureaucracy.)

The opening shots of the prolific Polish director Piotr Szulkin’s grim urban nightmare Golem, which shows this trend at an especially advanced stage of development, are of mushrooming atom bombs. Somewhere in a rubbish-strewn, puddle-ridden, generally run-down Polish city, the premise goes, a scientific initiative has been launched to create synthetic human beings capable of re-populating the earth in the event of a full-scale atomic war. The prototype is a handsome, quiet, gentle-hearted man with a single name—Pernat—who somehow winds up, after the liquidation of the project, living alone in a squalid apartment building and coming into contact with a cast of characters that could have been lifted more or less straight from a Dostoevsky novel: a strong-willed prostitute, a doomed teenage girl and her dotty, mystically inclined father, a raving madman, a belligerent police interrogator, a cruel landlord with a mysterious past.  

Golem

Pernat himself is a kind of Myshkin figure, a placid innocent who appears to the worldlier people around him as both a subject of fascination and a sap to exploit. But he is also the befuddled sort of hero prevalent in twentieth-century Czech and Polish fiction, knocked haplessly around an institutional pinball machine whose operations and motives he never comes to understand. Released—twice—from prison after being grilled over crimes with which he has nothing to do, he is given back the wrong hat and coat (“the name and ticket match”); asked for his name by the police, he’s told that the name he gives is not his real one; drawn up an escalator in one of the movie’s most overtly surreal passages by the sound of a rock concert, he finds a lone guitarist playing to an enormous empty stadium as a TV crew debates which clip of crowd footage to stick in the background.

It’s tempting on this account to take Golem as a direct response to the especially tense atmosphere in Poland at the time of its production: months before the first outbreak of Solidarity and several years after the end of the country’s short-lived economic upsurge. To my mind, however, it’s the legacy of fascism, rather than the opacities and injustices of communism, for which the movie reserves the biggest store of its anxiety. The thought of what would happen if technology were capable of doing nature’s work is at the heart of every artificial-intelligence story, but it takes on special relevance in the context of the postwar sci-fi film. One of the most potent nightmare scenarios at play in Szulkin’s film is that a fascist state equipped with cutting-edge technologies and motivated by a ruthless brand of instrumentalism has somehow managed to extend its jurisdiction beyond the bodies of its subjects and lay claim instead to the whole person, body, mind and soul.

Here Szulkin is cutting very deep. If there is a single redemptive idea running through much of even the bleakest dystopian fiction and film, it is that there is something about the ontological status of human beings that the state, however advanced its technologies, cannot touch. It’s striking how often this idea comes under fire in international sci-fi throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Blade Runner, a sort of cross between Eastern bloc sci-fi and American noir, shares with Golem a basic narrative premise, a dour color palette of oranges, yellows, browns and greys, a tone of nervous paranoia—in both movies, the hero comes across Cassandra-like figures who seem to know more about his origins than he does himself—and even the murder of an oculist as a key plot element. In Morel’s Invention, a drugged, ritualized staging by the Italian filmmaker Emilio Greco of the great Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’ most famous novella, an inventor develops a machine that creates physical-seeming, looped “projections” of its test subjects, who then, struck with a terrible disease, die.

Golem

Eastern bloc sci-fi filmmakers were, in short, not alone in using sci-fi as a venue for the staging of threats, the rehearsing of worst-case scenarios, or the imagination of destruction. But it’s difficult not to think, watching a film like Golem, of the threat Lem was hinting at in his “new cosmology” (“one can control atoms, and then one can alter the properties of atoms”), its implications for human freedom (“according to the design and intention of the Operating Parties”), and the dismaying frequency with which, in the history of Eastern Europe in the 20th century, the staging of this threat in fantasy coincided with its execution in fact. 

Kin-dza-dza!

A distress call originates from a remote land. The senders implore the intervention of a more politically stable and technologically advanced state, to assist, enlighten, or liberate them. That widespread trope in science fiction—perhaps the most common inciting event is an interplanetary Mayday—takes on allegorical dimensions when tales of deprived citizens crying for help come from behind the Iron Curtain.

The Strange Lands series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center spotlights a number of sci-fi relics of the Cold War, many involving populations (or disadvantaged sectors of the populace) reaching out through risky or deceptive means to those with power to aid them. One such film is Gottfried Kolditz’s In the Dust of the Stars, released in East Germany in 1976. The final sci-fi production from the GDR’s state-owned Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft studio (DEFA), In the Dust of the Stars contains no shortage of anti-imperialist propaganda and swipes at Western culture. But in the same way Lang’s Metropolis can be understood as both a universal denunciation of class disparity and a cry for social justice at home, this film is too tortuous to be read as mere critique of capitalist decadence.

The action begins when the spaceship Cyrano reaches planet TEM 4, after a six-year journey in response to an SOS. On arrival, Captain Akala (Jana Brejchová) learns from the planet’s ostensible leader Ronk (Milan Beli) that the Temians sent no deliberate distress signal. The crew is invited to a psychedelic “midnight party,” shot like something from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, showcasing the wanton depravity associated with Western excess—drugs, belly dancers, ornamental snakes—during which all memories of their mission are wiped clean. Only suspicious navigator Suko (Alfred Struwe), who has remained on the ship, escapes erasure and later learns the source of the call for help: the planet’s native Turi have been conquered and enslaved by the Temians, forced to work in underground mines.

In the Dust of the Stars

On the surface, the Temians seem to represent Americans. The real chief of TEM 4 (Ekkehard Schall), a cavorting Caligula, appears in various scenes with hair alternately dyed red, white, and blue. The reigning powers oppress those with fewer resources, and the chief cautions Akala that “Your great era is coming to an end.” But whose great era is actually obsolete? With their egalitarian order, freedom from censorship, and autonomy to pursue missions of mercy, Akala and her crew seem more like the democratic wave that will crash on the shores of subjugation and rescue TEM 4 from a repressive system. The hedonistic Temians paint an alarming picture of how liberty begets libertines, but perhaps the snakes are red herrings. A double meaning is at work when a crew member tells the Turi: “We cannot build a shield around your planet so you can develop undisturbed.” Manifestly an echo of Star Trek’s Prime Directive against tampering with the progress of alien civilizations, it’s also a call for transparency, an avowal of the inefficacy of subsisting in secret: the Curtain must come down.

A far-flung message also serves as catalyst for Herrmann Zschoche’s Eolomea, produced by DEFA in 1972. A council convenes to discuss the fate of eight missing spacecraft, declaring a ban on space travel until the cause is pinpointed. It’s revealed to be a Morse Code communiqué from the constellation Cygnus, which is deciphered as “Eolomea”—eternal spring. State scientist Maria Scholl (Cox Habbema) and pilot Dan Lagny (Ivan Andonov) discover that Eolomea is a distant planet, the Holy Grail of space travel, and the ships were hijacked by Scholl’s mentor, Prof. Tal (Rolf Hoppe), for an expedition to that world without governmental consent.

In a startling denouement, scrupulous bureaucrat Scholl upholds Tal’s act of defiance, maintaining the supremacy of exploration over regulation. The film itself reflects this belief—namely, that curiosity and awe are worthier causes than pedantic adherence to protocol (“Man has the brain, but administration has the control” someone says with a sniff of derision). Dan, the Han Solo-ish hero of the piece, is a rule-bending rogue, defying the travel ban to visit a colleague, maintaining a stash of contraband liquor, and corrupting government property (a ramshackle robot with a nobly intractable fealty to Asimov’s Laws). Though the protagonists are stand-ins for government functionaries, not saviors from abroad, Eolomea allows for (and endorses) the possibility of dissent if the reasons are just.

Eolomea

A stray notion that skims across the Anglo viewer’s mind when considering these parables from the GDR—and one that further complicates their etchings of future history—is that everyone from Earth to TEM 4 is speaking German. While this plainly derives from the films' national origins and not from Kolditz or Zschoche posing alternate outcomes to World War II, the reactionary bromide '...or we'd all be speaking German' faintly surfaces to suggest the empire has extended its dominion to the cosmos--and all that might historically entail.

Georgiy Daneliya’s 1986 Russian cult classic Kin-dza-dza! is not necessarily what one would call a subversive work, but its Wizard of Oz-ian narrative of seeking passage home from a bizarro landscape doesn’t expunge the haste with which “home” was initially abandoned. When, at the start of the film, two passersby are greeted by a barefoot man in a tattered coat and offered a galactic teleportation device, one of them, a construction foreman (Stanislav Lyubshin), reflexively activates it, sending himself and a young violinist (Levan Gabriadze) over the Soviet rainbow to the planet Pluke.

Unlike the opulent milieus of In the Dust of the Stars, The Tenth Victim (the future as Pop Art battleground), or Morel’s Invention (a throwback to the Art Deco of the 1920s), Kin-dza-dza!’s Pluke is a desert wasteland. The inhabitants are greedy and primitive, with no more than a 10-word vocabulary (though they quickly master Russian and Georgian). Their society is divided between two groups: the favored Chatlanians and the subordinate Patsaks, who wear bells in their noses. The unit of currency is the ketseh, or matchstick, and those with enough of them may wear colorful pants and be exempt from nightly beatings, as the others squat and slap their faces in deference. It’s Marxism of the Groucho variety.

Kin-dza-dza!

With shades of Blade Runner and The Road Warrior, Kin-dza-dza! uses absurdist humor to portray the randomness and idiocy of social hierarchies. The two castes are physically indifferentiable. Even the privileged class admits the distinction is not national or biological—rather, in the presence of a handheld detector, one group triggers a green light and the other an orange light. On neighboring planets the Patsaks dominate the Chatlanians—the assignation is arbitrary.

But underlying the zany free-market satire remains the question of why the foreman pushed the button in the first place. Mere curiosity, or boredom with his wife’s macaroni? Or was the comrade answering a distress call from within?

Life and death are nothing but show business in twenty-and-fourteen.

This paraphrase of a line from Menahem Golan’s 1980 The Apple, which I am indebted to a Twitter acquaintance for, was proven in spades last week after a spate of prominent celebrity passings, of which the first and by far the least widely mourned was that of Golan himself. It can’t be said that the news came as a surprise. A friend who saw him and cousin/partner Yoram Globus at the Jerusalem International Film Festival, which I attended in early July, reported that Golan was looking a bit worse for the wear, while the most vivid memory that I have of a 2010 phone interview that I conducted with him is a three-minute uninterrupted coughing fit that occurred in the middle of the chat.

I wrapped the Village Voice profile piece that resulted from that interview by waxing elegiac for “a film culture richer with wild cards, buccaneers, and gate-crashers, blissfully oblivious to the mandates of good taste, willing, as with [Jean-Luc Godard’s] King Lear, to sign a $1.5 million contract for a scriptless movie on a napkin.” (In retrospect, I think that it's perhaps incorrect to presume obliviousness, of which more anon.) This ain’t just whistling Hatikvah—in 1987 alone, Cannon Films, co-chaired by Golan, released not only King Lear but Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly, Jerry Schatzberg’s Street Smart, and Andrei Konchalovsky’s Shy People, the last two films showcases for top performances by, respectively, Morgan Freeman and Barbara Hershey. That same year (1987) Cannon released The Barbarians, a sword-and-sorcery neo-peplum film directed by Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust), starring “The Barbarian Brothers” Peter and David Paul; the Golan-directed arm-wrestling opus Over the Top; and Masters of the Universe, a consummately terrible live-action He-Man film starring Dolph Lundgren and (I swear to God) Frank Langella as Skeletor that would go a long way towards irreparably shattering the Cannon Films piggybank. This 1987 promo video, set to Sammy Hagar’s “Winner Takes It All” (the theme from Over the Top), is a relic from this heyday. The fall was soon to come.

The above cross-section of releases gives a pretty good idea of the Cannon strategy: one for the groundlings, one for prestige. This is not to reduce Golan and Globus’s motives to the basest grubbing for money or recognition. There was obviously an eccentric personal vision behind their corporate identity, as any entity that was content merely to settle for accolades would not have put out so many interesting films instead of tony costume dramas and literary adaptations. You could say a lot of things about Cannon, but no one could accuse them of going middlebrow.

The Cannon stratagem, which depended on milking cash cows like Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Michael Dudikoff to underwrite the art films, says something about how Golan and Globus thought about culture—which brings us to The Apple, one of a staggering 45 films credited to Golan as a director. (He wasn’t entirely above the lure of the classics, having made a 2002 adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment starring Crispin Glover, which I have not had the pleasure of seeing.) A true outlier in the Golan corpus, The Apple has gradually eclipsed even his 1977 Operation Thunderbolt, a raid-on-Entebbe actioner fairly throbbing with Israeli patriotism, in popularity. I’m not here to riff on a dead horse, but to inquire into what The Apple suggests about Golan’s relationship to film art, and what its cult reputation says about the terms in which we ourselves think and talk about culture today.

For those who have not taken a bite out of The Apple, the story—and I should mention that Golan is credited as the screenwriter—is as follows. The setting is America in 1994. The film was in fact shot in the fall of 1979 in West Germany, mostly inside what appear to be a series of shopping malls and corporate parks. In this dystopian future, a multinational called BIM (Boogalow International Music) rules the pop landscape with a spangled iron fist, quashing any conceivable challenge to their dominance. For example: an unknown boy-girl duo, Alfie and Bibi, from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, threaten to upset BIM-backed ringers Dandi and Pandi at the Worldvision Song Festival. Once Alfie and Bibi slowly overcome the catcalls of the jaded audience with their honey-toned duet, BIM head Mr. Boogalow orders his manservant, a lithe flamer named Shake, to undermine their performance by playing cacophonous feedback over the PA system. (It’s an improvement to my ears, but never mind.)

Mr. Boogalow is played by the Polish actor Vladek Sheybal, most familiar—to me, at least— from his turn as the Russian General in John Milius’s Red Dawn a few years later. He wears a Mephistophelean goatee, a plum-colored tuxedo with massive lapels and a silver cummerbund, and cubic zirconia-encrusted jewelry which appears to have been filched from the drawer of a Sarasota retiree’s vanity. Such sartorial flights of fancy are the fashion of the day, diligently obeyed by Dandi and Pandi (Allan Love and Grace Kennedy), a biracial, somewhat androgynous duo—he has long blonde hair, while the scoop front of his silver lame jumpsuit reveals a baby-smooth chest. Belting out lyrics which preach moral equivalency (“There ain’t no good / There ain’t no bad” begins their beyond-good-and-evil anthem “Do the BIM!”), Dandi and Pandi lead their enthralled audience in a stomp-along chant accompanied by kung-fu calisthenics. Their aggressive, glam-fascist aesthetic is not so far from that of prefab concoction “Beef” in Brian De Palma’s 1974 Phantom of the Paradise, which was released to Blu-ray by Scream! Factory last week, though The Apple is five years down the line, and so glam is here conflated with then more-or-less contemporary disco. Alfie and Bibi (George Gilmour and Catherine Mary Stewart), are both white, wholesome, square-jawed, earnest folkies, and they perform a white, wholesome, square-jawed, earnest song called “Love, the Universal Melody.” (You can’t dance to it, but it does elicit emotional swaying.) The contrast between these two duos lays out the defining dichotomy of The Apple, designed as a morality play in which good and evil do exist, the latter represented by the corporate-controlled electro-artifice of Boogalow and BIM, the former by the holistic, unplugged, back-to-nature mellowness of Alfie and Bibi.

The allegorical tug-of-war begins in earnest when Alfie and Bibi, following their near-coup, are invited to a debauched BIM party, which might be mistaken for one of the lavish Cannes shindigs for which Golan and Cannon were once famous. Bibi, being a woman, is drawn to the luxe life as Eve was to the apple. Serenaded and pawed by blow-dried imp Dandi and seduced with the promise of pieces by “in” fashion designer Ingrid Stockinger, Bibi signs her life away to BIM. Alfie, struck by a phantasmagoric vision of Boogalow as the devil reigning over a Hell House version of the netherworld, declines. Keeping his precious indie cred intact but losing his girl, Alfie goes to live in a cold water tenement flat where he’s doted over by Miriam Margolyes, playing one of those warm, earthy, chicken soup-wielding Jewish mothers that Vera Gordon used to specialize in. He records a drippy, mournful, over-orchestrated ballad called “Where Has Love Gone?” and gets the “I don’t see a lot of money here” treatment at the studio, while Bibi has her first BIM-backed hit in “Speed,” which posits amphetamine abuse as a kind of patriotic duty. Taunted by the image of Bibi’s face on omnipresent billboards, Alfie makes a last-ditch attempt to win her back by crashing yet another BIM soiree, this one full of he-shes and resembling a Studio 54 production of Fellini Satyricon. Failing to accomplish his goal but instead roofied and raped by Pandi, Alfie comes to on a park bench where he is being looked over by a hale, frank, bluff, hearty fellow with a flowing gray beard and a floppy, broad-brimmed Walt Whitman hat who leads him to an encampment of “refugees from the Sixties, commonly known as hippies.”

Back in BIM-land, it’s the morning after, and the sight of Shake wearing a speedo and an Amazing Stories kimono while lasciviously pronouncing “sauna” is enough to make Bibi suddenly ashamed of her life of sin. She sets out to rejoin Alfie, and they are reunited in the cave refuge of the hippies, like the catacombs of the early Christians. Some time later—time enough for Alfie to have acquired a blonde infant and Richard Jordan’s beard from Interiors—BIM storm troopers under the command of Boogalow come crashing through the woods looking for Bibi, who is to be tossed in the slammer for breach of contract. The police round up the flower children and begin marching them towards an undoubtedly grim fate when the procession is interrupted by the arrival of “Mr. Topps,” played by a guy who looks like a post-crash diet Laird Cregar with flaxen blonde hair, who Raptures the freaks up to his white Cadillac in the sky, where they will depart for a better life in the beyond.

This Mr. Topps is apparently a God figure whose long-prophesied return is central to the belief system of the hippies. I say “apparently” because we haven’t heard him spoken of up to this point. The Apple presents itself as a Rockist, “Burn Down the Discos” tract, but despite the fact that the hippies are the film’s ostensible good guys, Golan is able to summon up very little interest in them, and spends as little time in their patchouli-scented company as possible, preferring whenever he can to film transvestites swanning about and drinking out of huge triangular tumblers. Golan cannot locate the spiritual glory in resistance or opting out, as François Truffaut does when he leads Oskar Werner’s Guy Montag to the “book people” in his Fahrenheit 451 (66); what Golan conveys instead is that, to paraphrase Pauline Kael on Fellini Satyricon, he thinks it’s a ball to be a pagan. Far more than Gilmour and Stewart’s Alfie or Bibi, the film’s star performance is Sheybal’s as Boogalow. One exchange in the contract-signing scene even suggests that Golan regards Boogalow as a sort of alter ego. “Boog is already selling your first album,” Shake tells Bibi. When she protests that she and Alfie “haven’t even made it yet,” his response is, “First you sell it, then you make it”—this is a wink-wink reference to Cannon’s own production line technique, which relied heavily on hustle and pre-sales to keep the conveyor belt running smoothly.

Boogalow hogs all the best numbers—that is, the most spectacularly awful ones—too. There’s “Showbizness,” referenced at the beginning of this piece, and “How to Be a Master,” which sounds like canned reggae with vocals by Vlad the Impaler, in which Boog expresses sentiments worthy of a concentration camp kapo. (“Step on those who fall!”) Though The Apple lays down its scene in a future America, a glimpse of West Berlin’s Fernsehturm (TV tower) betrays the actual location—I believe it may take place in the same “universe” as 1982’s R.W. Fassbinder-starring technothriller Kamikaze 1989. Golan, born in Israel in 1929, was a proud Jew who changed his surname as a patriotic tribute to the Heights, and would have been more than a little aware of the recent historical legacy of Germany, which looms over the film. “Do the BIM!” is adopted as the official theme of the country’s “National Fitness Program,” which requires the citizenry to engage in a mandatory daily hour of Jazzercise, an edict which smacks of official Körperkultur. In one scene, Margolyes’s stock-Jewish landlady (“You kids today, you’re so meshuggah…”) is stopped in the street because she isn’t wearing her “obligatory BIM mark”—it’s a stick-on holographic triangle, but one has a funny feeling that Golan is evoking the Judenstern yellow badge.

At the same time that Golan is aligning BIM and its lockstep followers with the fascists, he paints them with much the same brush that the Nazis used to paint their cultural enemies—depraved, barbaric, having altogether too much fun—though here the issue is degenerate pop instead of degenerate art. If I didn’t know who had made The Apple, I would be tempted to call entertainment magnate Boogalow, with his eyeshadow and his glitter-dusted beard and his Oriental sensuality, a caricature of Jewish cosmopolitanism—see the press conference in which he answers reporters’ questions in French, German, Italian, and American—but perhaps it is better to say that Boogalow is representative of the effeminizing effect of culture, and leave it at that.

The film’s moral and aesthetic confusion doesn’t end here. The musical alternative offered by Alfie and Bibi is entirely insufficient as a contrast or counterbalance to BIM’s military-industrial-musical complex—it’s drippy, anodyne, wet-blanket stuff, closer to The Carpenters than “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It appears that Golan is trying to harness some of the (more than faintly homophobic) sentiment of the famous Disco Demolition Night bonfire at Chicago’s Comiskey Park here but, confoundingly, the jackboot crack of the bi-furious BIM sound “rocks” quite a bit harder than the neuter folk offered in its stead. (The film’s vision of a future that is sneeringly cruel and queered up—these two aspects inextricable from one another—is somewhere near that of Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed.) When Alfie’s ineradicable convictions reduce him to slumming it up, the pseudo-Lower East Side that he is consigned to is clearly a constructed set. All of this suggests that the authentic life which is set up as an honest, decent alternative to BIM’s decadence is in fact nothing more than another false front, a series of signifiers denoting authenticity. God is the Devil! The Lamb and the Goat have fused as one!

The actual 1994 was, on the pop culture front, very different from that imagined by The Apple. Arbiters of youth culture were in the sway of Mr. Topps, and the authentically lived life was extolled. The phrase “The ’90s are the ’60s turned upside down” was bandied about, though what precisely that meant I was never sure. We had Woodstock ’94 and rock stars who would sooner suck on a shotgun than corporate dick. Interscope exec Steve Berman, playing a major-label scumbag, commanded a mock Eazy-E to “Sign your life… I mean your name… on the contract” in the “Dr. Day” video, but Dre and Death Row knew better. America had awoken from the lull of the pop narcotic and was rocking again, having seen hair metal, Paula Abdul, and Milli Vanilli for what they were, the product of conspiracies by sinister, BIM-like record labels to gin up pop phenomena that they themselves could control. People drank out of cylindrical glasses.

America wasn’t primed for The Apple in 1994, but its midnight-movie legend grew with each passing year and now, 20 years later, when certain tied-and-true Us Versus Thems which had held fast since the days of the “refugees from the Sixties” no longer sufficed to explain the cultural landscape, it is very much a Movie of the Moment. Pitchfork, a popular music review website founded in ’95 by a sallow, whey-faced Milwaukee teenager named Ryan Schreiber as a forum for shoddy writing about “indie” guitar bands, has just run a primer on “20 Essential K-Pop Songs” by one Jakob Dorof, praising the “hyper-realized pop commodities” and “hugely saleable genius” of the South Korean music industry. The least of us—that is, the journalist caste—have internalized the art of marketing and marketing as an art, and so a host of catchy new terms have emerged which put a fresh coat of paint on ideas about taking pop entertainment seriously that are at least as venerable as Gilbert Seldes’s 1924 The Seven Lively Arts. The enthusiast of the today’s neo-Tin Pan Alley tradition is now a “Poptimist,” in whose prose the word authentic is scarcely found unencumbered by scare quotes, while the staunch fetishist of “realness” (I went and did it!) can now choose from any number of punk bands whose members met at obscenely expensive liberal arts universities.*

In short, the world has finally, very nearly, attained the chaotic grotesquerie of The Apple. Lines like “A computer for a heart” in Boogalow and Shake’s “Showbizness” plugs into contemporary Singularity chic and, released today, Bibi’s “Speed,” which has it that “America, the Home of the Brave / Is popping pills to keep up the pace,” would’ve launched a cycle of thinkpieces reading it as satire, as surely as Lana Del Rey’s “Brooklyn Baby” or Michael Bay’s Pain and Gain or any other contemporary text which begs interpretation as criticism-by-way-of-exemplification. There ain’t no good, there ain’t no bad!

I suspect that Golan’s thinking on Trash, Art, and the Movies was, by contrast, rather binary, despite what the self-subverting The Apple betrays about him. If the Norris vehicle Missing in Action, released by Cannon in November 1984, was Golan’s Dandi and Pandi track, then Love Streams, released in summer of the same year, was his Alfie and Bibi cut. Here the metaphor becomes problematic, because one is in fact a masterpiece, and the other is a worthless piece of offal. (I leave it to the reader to puzzle over which I am designating as which.) As clearly as Menahem Golan’s track record as a producer, The Apple reveals a man who venerated the sublime, and couldn’t stay away from the ridiculous. Passions for either, not to speak of both, are always in short supply, and so I salute his passing, and wish him a happy journey in the white Caddy of Mr. Topps.

* Pop quiz: are you a Vulgar Auteurist, or do you prefer Slow Cinema? Trick question. If you accept the validity of either designation, step in front of an Amtrak.

His name isn’t really Patrick Lung Kong. He’s not sure exactly how old he is because his mother isn’t confident she remembers his birthday. He says he was born in Hong Kong, but we have to take that on faith because he doesn’t have a birth certificate. His career lasted only 14 years, and he made only 14 films, but those movies are the seed from which the Cantonese film industry was reborn in the Seventies and Eighties.

Last weekend, the Museum of the Moving Image gave Lung Kong a Lifetime Achievement Award and began a Lung Kong retrospective (which continues through this weekend) and the big question is: why should we care about a bunch of 50-year-old Cantonese films? The easy answer is to look at who does care. Tsui Hark walked away from postproduction on his latest movie, The Taking of Tiger Mountain, leaving his crew at loose ends while he flew to New York to present Lung Kong with his award. John Woo planned to drop everything on his production of The Crossing and come too, but at the last minute had to cancel because his shoot was falling behind schedule (he sent a personal video message for the public screenings). Sam Ho, former programmer at the Hong Kong Film Archive, and a man who has dedicated his life to preserving the history of Hong Kong film, flew in for the occasion.

What is it about Lung Kong that elicits this respect?

Starting his career as an actor, often holding down a day job as a stockbroker throughout his career, Lung Kong was a shot of adrenaline to the heart of Cantonese cinema. Hong Kong cinema has always cycled between periods of Cantonese (local dialect) dominance, and Mandarin (Mainland China) dominance. Cantonese is the language of Hong Kong, also spoken in parts of Southern China, but Mandarin is the language, not just of Mainland China, but also of the vast Chinese diaspora. Make your movie in Cantonese, and its reach is limited. Make it in Mandarin and you can reach almost any Chinese community in the world.

In the Fities and Sixties the Cantonese industry was dominant in Hong Kong, turning out mostly comedies and melodramas, and its biggest stars were women like Connie Chan and Josephine Siao Fong-fong. Shaw Brothers came along with more expensive Mandarin movies and by 1967 it was beating Canto-cinema like a redheaded stepchild with its wuxia films. In the early Eighties, Cantonese cinema took the lead again with comedians like the Hui Brothers and (later) Stephen Chow, and action stars like Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-fat. Today, with buttloads of money to be made in Mainland co-productions, Cantonese-language movies are stuck once more with lower budgets and smaller stars, while Mandarin language co-productions are lavish films stuffed with the likes of Gong Li, Tang Wei, Zhang Ziyi, and slick special effects.

Cantonese cinema of the Sixties was a cinema in decline. The budgets were low—Lung Kong’s Story of a Discharged Prisoner cost about US$12,000—and the schedules were fast, with Cantonese films often having a theater date already booked before shooting even began. Mandarin movies, on the other hand, generally took about 35 days to shoot and cost around US$38,000. Once Shaw built its studio in 1961, Mandarin filmmakiers had access to vast soundstages, film processing labs, and enormous prop and costume shops. Cantonese filmmakers couldn’t compete. It didn’t help that the head of one Canto-studio, Mr. Chun Kim, made dry statements about the duty of Cantonese cinema like, “Only films that are both entertaining and educational will be well received by the audience, and only those films that are well received by the audience can fulfill educational purposes.”

It’s no surprise that Cantonese cinema was held in low regard, called “Cantonese moldies” instead of “Cantonese movies” with their directors called “wonton noodle” directors for their reputed habit of calling action then going out to get a bowl of noodles while the camera ran. But Lung Kong had a chip on his shoulder: he wanted to win respect for Cantonese movies, which he felt were the very heart of Hong Kong’s identity. His first film was Prince of Broadcasters (66), a typical “moldy” love story that he did his best to inject with life. It did well enough to earn him more freedom and another film. This would be Story of a Discharged Prisoner (67).

Story of a Discharged Prisoner is mostly remembered today as the movie that Tsui Hark and John Woo remade as A Better Tomorrow (86) but future influence aside, it’s a hell of a flick. Patrick Tse (father of star Nic Tse) plays a thief released from prison after a 15-year sentence who winds up crushed between the cops and the crooks. On one side are his old gang, led by Sek Kin (of Enter the Dragon fame, overacting wildly in a performance that Lung Kong only half-succeeded in reigning in) who want him to pull a robbery. On the other side are the cops, led by Lung Kong himself, who believe that Tse can’t reform and it’s only a matter of time before he becomes a criminal again (in A Better Tomorrow, John Woo plays this role). As Sam Ho says of the cop: “He’s not a bad guy, he’s actually a man of deep conviction. Only in this case, he’s wrong.”

Hiding the fact he was in prison from his brother (the family says he was in Singapore doing business) Patrick Tse gets backed further and further into a corner until he finally takes the rap for a crime committed by his brother. He’s sent back to the slammer as Lung Kong’s cop gives a smug “I knew he was no good.” Tsui Hark first saw the movie on television when he was a teenager and it instantly caught his attention. “It didn’t look like any other Cantonese films,” he remembers. And it doesn’t. Lung Kong was using handheld shots when other directors believed you couldn’t keep a shot in focus if it wasn’t on a tripod. He took his camera out into the streets, shooting in Kwun Tong squatter slums to show what Hong Kong really looked like and it’s full of surprising details, like Patrick Tse’s release from prison filmed as if he was a man leaving the comforts of home.

Story hit Hong Kong just as the city was struggling to find its own identity. Caught between right-wing colonial rule by the British and dissension from left-wing factions sometimes secretly allied with Communist China, Hong Kong was tearing itself apart in a series of riots, bombings, demonstrations, strikes, and police actions that left 51 people dead (15 of them in bombings) and saw 5,000 arrests in one year. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Hong Kong was Patrick Tse. At a charity screening for the Hong Kong Discharged Prisoners Aid Society, Lung Kong was photographed sitting next to Paul Tsui, Secretary for Chinese Affairs, who was one of the highest-ranked Chinese in the colonial government. Based on the photo, the left denounced Lung Kong as a traitor, the head of the studio was advised to burn the film, and a bomb was planted in the theater on opening night. Unwilling to write off the budget, but unable to promote the movie, the studio buried its release, and yet it became a word-of-mouth hit and one of the most influential Cantonese films of all time.

Patrick Tse was one of the biggest male stars in Cantonese cinema, commanding up to 25 percent of a film’s budget as his salary, and he knew a good thing when he saw it, commissioning Lung Kong to shoot his next movie for Tse Brothers Motion Picture Company. Lung Kong paired him with Canto-cinema’s biggest female star, Josephine Siao Fong-fong, in The Window (68), a color film about a loser street thug (Tse) who accidentally kills a man during a mugging. Learning that the man’s daughter (Siao) is blind and will now be sent to live in a home, he tries to atone for his crime by becoming her caretaker. As anyone who’s ever seen a movie knows, these two will fall in love, and everything will end terribly.

A star vehicle as much for Siao as it was for Tse, her performance avoids the easy motion-picture cliches about the blind, and is even more impressive when you realize that she was required to wear milky contact lenses so painful she had to be hospitalized at the end of the shoot. Before Lung Kong, Cantonese movies were happily by-the-numbers with plots based on other movies, jokes and character types recycled from film to film, and music often just needle drops from commercially available albums. Lung Kong based his movies on situations and people he observed in real life, he shot on location, he commissioned original scores, and did everything possible to break free of convention. Although his movies have been so frequently imitated today that their innovations can be hard to appreciate, they are delivered with such strong conviction that it doesn’t take too much squinting to see that they were blasts of fresh air in a moribund industry.

Working with Siao again, Lung Kong’s next film was the incomparable Teddy Girls (69). The studio told him they’d accept any script he turned in, so Lung Kong gave them a rip-roaring teen-girls-gone-wild story that caused some of his actresses to sweat over the content. Launching itself at the viewer’s face from the first scene, Teddy Girls starts at a go-go party where a (presumably drunk) Siao dances with wild abandon as the camera frugs right along beside her. When her girlfriend is accosted, she barely hesitates before smashing a bottle and taking on the molester. Arrested, she chooses juvie over going home, but breaks out when she learns her mother has committed suicide after her boytoy loses all her money on bad investments. Teddy Girls bursts with creative energies: flashbacks are staged as soap operas on TV; funerals unfold on stark soundstages; luxury homes are vast wastelands scattered with mod furniture; and Siao’s gang of teddy girls are ready to brawl, stab a punk, or wrap a chain around their fists and start thrashing at the drop of a hat.

Lung Kong’s movies are often accused of preaching, and they do take jarring periodic breaks for a social worker, psychiatrist, or reporter to deliver a sermon on some social injustice. To us these may seem like creaky conventions, but to Lung Kong they’re the point, in the same spirit of Brecht breaking the fourth wall to have actors directly address the audience. Lung Kong could not have made the movies he made if he thought they were “mere” entertainment. He wanted to teach audiences, to lift them up, to reach even the most blue collar, unemployed illiterate and have them think about different ways of seeing the Hong Kong around them. These aren’t flaws in his technique, these are the point of his technique.

Lung Kong would go on to make 11 more movies—from science fiction comedies to an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Plague which was destroyed when unidentified leftist groups cut 40 minutes from the print without his permission before the release—but it’s these three films (Story of a Discharged Prisoner, The Window, Teddy Girls) on which his reputation largely rests. In the early Eighties, due to health concerns, he retired from filmmaking and moved to New York, where he’s lived ever since.

So what? It’s not wrong to ask what a bunch of old Cantonese movies have to offer a modern audience, and the only response I have is to offer the end of Teddy Girls, a classic Lung Kong “sermon scene.” After the girl gang has broken out of prison, committed some bloody crimes, and been re-arrested, the head of the reform school (played by Kenneth Tsang) watches the police and press circus depart with his former charges in chains, leaving him standing all alone on a darkened city street. From out of the shadows, Lydia Shum, one of the girls who had been released and actually managed to go straight, approaches, lunch bucket in her hand. She’s on her way to her night job in a factory, and confesses that she should have been arrested for keeping watch during the gang’s crime spree, but Tsang is exhausted. “Next time,” he admonishes her, “don’t do it again.”

He starts the long walk back to his car, Shum keeping pace next to him. “Is it far?” she asks. “It’s a long way ahead,” he warns her. “Can I walk with you?” she asks. Surprised, he turns to her, then nods, and the two of them walk into the darkness together. It’s a scene that’s echoed by the end of Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels (95) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0d5-ge8KmY] as Michelle Reis asks Takeshi Kaneshiro for a ride home on the back of his motorcycle after a long, cold night of pointless violence. “The road isn’t very long,” she thinks, “and I know I’ll be getting off soon, but I’m feeling such warmth at this moment.”

Two people keeping each other company on a long journey through the night, unsure if anything they do makes the slightest bit of difference in the world, but grateful that, even if only for a little while, they don’t have to make the journey alone. There are 26 years between the endings of these two movies, and the singers are different, but in Hong Kong, the song remains the same.

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: The Cinema of Patrick Lung Kong continues through August 24 at the Museum of the Moving Image.

FILMOGRAPHY

Story of a Discharged Prisoner (67) You can also watch this on YouTube with subtitles.

The Window (68) One of the three great Lung Kong films, this remains one of the most stylish tragic romances ever to come out of Hong Kong.

Teddy Girls (69) You can watch it subtitled on YouTube.

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (70) Lung Kong’s adaptation of The Plague was butchered by forces unknown, but remains one of the first science-fiction movies from Hong Kong to imagine the city wiped out by a disease.

Pei Shih (72) One of Lung Kong’s few Mandarin-language movies. Lung Kong tweaked the typical Mandarin romance formula by incorporating mental illness into his movie. Written by Pansy Mang (he named the movie after her), it was a huge box-office event at the time.

Mitra (77) While attending the Tehran International Film Festival, Lung Kong decided to shoot this romance with an all-star cast including Sylvia Chang and Alan Tang. One of his most beautiful movies, it’s also written by Pansy Mang

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

Toronto Preview Edition

The Toronto Film Festival has announced its lineup, a mixture of the good, the bad, and the befuddling. But any way you slice it, there are a lot of Asian movies here, so let’s dive into the pile.

CITY TO CITY: SEOUL

Toronto’s focus on another city, this eight-film sidebar of movies set in or around Seoul has some of the most interesting films in the line-up. There’s Cart a sort of retail Silkwood by Boo Ji-Young, one of Korea’s few female directors. A Hard Day about a cop who tries to cover up a hit-and-run accident, became a word-of-mouth hit at Cannes, where FILM COMMENT called it a “rollicking thriller . . . carefully orchestrated, beat for beat” and Variety called it “…taut…elaborate…near-faultless…” You can see the trailer and make up your own mind.

Another of Korea’s few female directors delivers A Girl at My Door in which Bae Doo-Na returns to the screen to play a big city cop, exiled in disgrace to a hick town, where she gets involved with an abused girl looking for help. Variety says it’s a “wrenching drama” and Screen says it “…starts off as a seemingly familiar domestic drama before spiralling off into something more unnerving and vaguely disturbing.” And if you need a Bae Doo-Na fix, here’s the trailer. A dark horse is Confession a film from a first-time director about some friends who pull off an insurance scam robbery only to have things take a bad turn. But the trailer looks slick and tense. And, finally, make sure to smoke a big fat joint before watching A Dream of Iron a documentary about shipbuilding that swings between hip-hop-inflected found footage remixing, genuine emotion, and stoner hypnosis as giant sheets of steel are bent into the hulls of huge ships for looong minutes at a time.

THE BIG NAMES

These are the big-ticket movies with name brand directors.

Haemoo (aka Sea Fog; Shim Sung-Bo, South Korea) A Gala presentation for the Bong Joon-ho-produced directorial debut of Memories of Murder screenwriter. It’s about a disaster at sea in which a crew smuggling illegal immigrants winds up suffocating most of them. An uplifting evening for Toronto’s glitterati is assured!

The Golden Era (Ann Hui, Hong Kong) Fresh from closing the Venice Film Festival, Ann Hui’s biopic about famous Chinese novelist Xiao Hong will appear like stately, slow-paced magic.

Tokyo Tribe (Sion Sono, Japan) The director continues to validate his existence by making some of the world’s most exciting movies. The only Asian movie in the Midnight Madness line-up—just look at the trailer and try to resist its anarchic pull. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaB-rNM4OCM]

Over Your Dead Body (Takashi Miike, Japan) It’s Miike, making a play-within-a-play horror movie. ’Nuff said.

The World of Kanako (Tetsuya Nakashima, Japan) The first film in four years from Tetsuya Nakashima, probably Japan’s smartest director (Kamikaze Girls, Memories of Matsuko, Confessions). Who cares what it’s about? Just go see it.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata, Japan) A charmer from Studio Ghibli partner Isao Takahata, it’s one of two Ghibli films in the line-up, sending the studio out on a high note. The other Ghibli movie is documentary, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, directed by Mami Sunada and all about the inner life of Ghibli.

Breakup Buddies (Ning Hao, China) After finally passing the kidney stone that was No Man’s Land [http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/kaiju-shakedown-no-mans-land-ning-hao] through the urethra of Chinese censorship, it looks like Ning Hao is happy and carefree once more in this break-up comedy about two dudes disappointed in love and going on a road trip.

Coming Home (Zhang Yimou, China) China’s master filmmaker has delivered a movie about the Cultural Revolution! One way this sensitive topic might be broached to pass muster with Chinese censors? Lead character (Gong Li) has amnesia and can’t remember the darn thing.

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2 (Johnnie To, Hong Kong) There’s no such thing as a bad Johnnie To film, so it’s nice to see the sequel to his hit romantic comedy in the lineup, but let’s face it, this is a consolation prize for the fact that apparently his Chow Yun-fat / Sylvia Chang musical, Design for Living, isn’t ready yet.

Dearest (Peter Chan, China) Peter Chan weighs in with his sure-to-be-harrowing movie about a father looking for his abducted child. Out of the entire festival, this has the performance I’m most excited to see: comedian Huang Bo delivering a dramatic performance as the dad.

Revenge of the Green Dragons (Andrew Lau & Andrew Loo, U.S.) Sporting a new, straight-to-video-worthy title, this film co-directed and produced by Andrew “Infernal Affairs” Lau delivers what might be a great Chinese-American saga, or exploitation crap. You be the judge!

Kabukicho Love Hotel (Ryuichi Hiroki, Japan) The one-time master of the pink film turned out four films in 2013 (plus a TV miniseries) but he hasn’t been prominent on the film festival circuit in a while. Now he’s back with a film about a love hotel and, to be honest, anything by the man who made Vibrator [http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70061077] is worth watching.

Fires on the Plain (Shinya Tsukamoto, Japan) Let’s face it, Shinya Tsukamoto is in a class all by himself, and his remake of Kon Ichikawa’s 1959 antiwar classic has a typically Tsukamoto credits list. Producer: Shinya Tsukamoto, Director: Shinya Tsukamoto, Writer: Shinya Tsukamoto, Editor: Shinya Tsukamoto, Cinematographer: Shinya Tsukamoto, Production Designer: Shinya Tsukamoto, Starring: Shinya Tsukamoto. I’ve heard that the entire audience will be made up of Shinya Tsukamoto clones, too.

Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-oo, South Korea) Hong, a director who seens to exist solely within film festivals like some kind of artsy hologram, delivers yet another movie to stroke your goatee to. It also represents a new trend in Korean moviemaking: short films! It’s only 66 minutes long.

Reverie (Im Kwon-taek, South Korea) Korea’s elder statesman delivers an 89-minute movie about cinematic icon Ahn Sung-Ki who has cancer and wants to have sex with a younger woman. Serious themes are sure to be broached, but ultimately why do so many old men spend their time making movies about wanting to have sex with young women? Oh. Right.

THE DARK HORSES

These have some promise but aren’t as well-known. But any of these films could turn out to be the must-see of the festival.

Mary Kom (Omung Kumar, India) Priyanka Chopra stars in this biopic about a female boxer. It could be horrible and trite, or it could be the next Rocky.

The Crow’s Egg (M. Manikandan, India) This Tamil film about two young boys from the slums on a quest for pizza continues the troubling trend of India as a purveyor of cinematic poverty porn for Western audiences, but it still might be an amazing movie (after all Slumdog Millionaire was poverty porn, but it also managed to be an amazing movie). The first-time director showed promise in his short films, and it contains two elements that prove irresistable to audiences: children and pizza.

Where I Am King (Carlos Siguion-Reyna, Philippines) This Filipino movie about a wealthy man on the verge of bankruptcy who returns to the slum where he was born already has reviews out [http://twitchfilm.com/2014/08/cinemalaya-2014-carlos-siguion-reynas-hari-ng-tondo-where-i-am-king-is-a-crowdpleaser-with-s.html] and it actually sounds like it might be pretty great.

Justice (Joel Lamangan, Philippines) The legendary Filipino actress, Nora Aunor, plays a middle-aged domestic worker who tries to remain loyal to her employer, who happens to be a human trafficker. The reviews aren’t good [http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/373434/lifestyle/reviews/movie-review-there-s-no-justice-in-joel-lamangan-s-hustisya], but Nora Aunor is a force of nature who should not be underestimated.

Men Who Save the World (Malaysia, Liew Seng Tat) Is it a train wreck or a good time at the movies? Variety is decrying it as “neo-colonialist” and “loaded with racially problematic scenes and homophobic gags,” [http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-men-who-save-the-world-1201282850/] but this Malaysian comedy about a haunted house seems to be getting booked into lots of film festivals and has the support of a whole slew of big name international arthouse production outfits like the Hubert Bals Fund and the Sundance Institute.

I Am Here (Lixin Fan, China) The director of Chinese film Last Train Home turns in a documentary about reality show contestants in the mega-popular reality talent show, Super Boys. You can read all about it here [http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/in-china-super-boys-learn-to-say-i-am-myself/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0], but it sounds like the kind of documentary that could break into the Western mainstream.

THE REST OF THE FEST

All probably worthwhile movies, but they don’t have the obvious potential of the other movies listed here.

Red Amnesia (Wang Xiaoshuai, China) The director of Beijing Bicycle delivers a movie about an old woman getting threatening phone calls.

In Her Place (Albert Shin, South Korea) Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Albert Shin delivers a movie about rich people adopting a “troubled rural teenager.”

Dukhtar (Afia Nathaniel, Pakistan) A woman takes her 10-year-old daughter and flees so that the kid can avoid an arranged marriage. Mean men chase her. I’ll probably cry before the end.

Flapping in the Middle of Nowhere (Diep Hoang Nguyen, Vietnam) A debut feature from a Vietnamese filmmaker about a couple who need to raise money for an abortion. He gets involved in illegal cockfighting. She becomes a hooker. Much sad, very depress.

Sway (Rooth Tang, USA/France/Thailand) According to the blurb it’s a “globe-spanning narrative latticework that places private experience on the same scale as broadcast news.” I have no idea what that means, except that it’s about three couples in Paris, Bangkok, and Los Angeles.

Unlucky Plaza (Ken Kwek, Singapore) A Singaporean film from first-time director, Ken Kwek, about three disparate characters: an arrogant young motivational speaker, his girlfriend, and a single father.

Partners in Crime (Chang Jung-chi, Taiwan) From the director of festival hit Touch the Light comes this Taiwanese movie about a schoolgirl who kills herself.

From What Is Before (Lav Diaz, Philippines) A five-and-a-half-hour movie about a village in the Philippines during the Marcos regime. Winner of the Golden Lion at Locarno.

Still the Water (Naomi Kawase, Japan) Naomi Kawase continues to bore the balls off audiences around the world with this movie that the critics are calling “chunky” “underdeveloped” [http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/still-water-futatsume-no-mado-705554] and full of “pompous philosophizing.” [http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/cannes-film-review-still-the-water-1201186839/]

Journey to the West (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan) - Tsai Ming-liang continues to explore the drying of paint in his fourth (his third? his fifth?) movie about a monk walking very slowly.

Songs From the North (Yoo Soon-Mi, South Korea) It’s a movie about North Korea and it’s only 72 minutes long, so it’s got two things working in its favor. A documentary essay, the reviews are meditative [http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/in-songs-from-the-north-and-durak-community-goes-to-extremes-20140822] and the trailer is kind of entrancing [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIYKvU-KxHo].

In 2004 Catherine Breillat suffered a debilitating stroke and three years later, while slowly recovering, she began a relationship with Christophe Rocancourt, the already infamous “swindler of the stars,” who took advantage of her diminished capacity to scam her out of a fortune and ultimately her sense of self. Abuse of Weakness, her almost sensationally restrained (if typically fraught) latest feature, follows Maud Shainberg (Isabelle Huppert), a filmmaker who, recovering from a stroke, decides to cast a con man who has written a book about his crimes, the roguish Vilko (Kool Shen), in her next feature. Maud is captivated by Vilko’s “bitter pride,” his grim, striking face and confident mannerisms that seem to come straight from one of her scripts.

Abuse of Weakness has a steady undercurrent of tension throughout, and Huppert’s emotionally clamped down performance combined with the alternately placid and disturbing textures of Maud’s life give it the feel of a waking dream, with hints of the Gothic. FILM COMMENT spoke with Breillat about the film recently in a spirited and lengthy Skype session.

One of the first things I want to ask you about is the scene when Maud says, while being fitted for orthopedic shoes, “The handicapped need an S&M look.”

When I was in the hospital, I asked my producer Jean-Francois [Lepetit], who plays the producer in the film, to give me Crash, the Cronenberg. Because when your body is not beautiful, you need that look. It’s the only one that will allow you to be elegant. And me, I love elegance. I was like a dandy and then I didn’t have a choice for what I could wear. The orthopedic shoes are normally very, very ugly—they’re for older women, and with my personal design they became beautiful. Everybody said they couldn’t tell the shoes were orthopedic.

When Maud explains the movie she wants to make with Vilko, she describes a bloody image she has in mind: “Streams of red on surgical white tiles.”

That’s something I like very much. In almost all my films I like that kind of design. It’s beautiful to me.

Abuse of Weakness has a creaminess to its color palette, with many shades of white and off-white, as if to pinpoint a blankness.

The whites, the reds, the browns are also the color of romance, and they’re the special colors of the painter George de La Tour. And I think they’re very, very beautiful together. In the beginning of the film I wanted it completely abstract—just the white sheet on the bed—so you cannot know if it’s a mountain or what. And then you realize it can’t be a mountain when the sheet begins to move. We had to shoot the sheet before it begins moving for two or three minutes, and I said to Isabelle: “Oh, the sheets aren’t playing good, they’re not beautiful, and you have to try moving them again with your feet because they can’t looked ‘arranged.’” It’s like a painting, in fact, an almost abstract painting or photograph of a mountain with snow on it. And then when she begins to move, you see her white skin, which I love having in all my films.

It seems like at the beginning of the film, the dominant color is white and then as it progresses you fill out the palette, but they’re monochrome colors: somebody wearing all black, for instance.

When I decided on the costume and told Isabelle I wanted her to be all in black, with those very thin trousers, she said to me: “Never, never!” So then I told her: “Isabelle, you have to know that for me the location is also a costume. You’re surrounded by white, and it’s as if you’re ink in a Japanese painting.”

So that she’s like a line drawn across the screen.

Yes, this brings me pleasure. I think film has to tell a story and have all the emotions that come with that but also the emotions of colors. I’ve been doing that, in fact, since my first feature, A Real Young Girl. My inspiration was Luminist American painting, but after that, I made some more realistic films. Since then, I’ve really taken a lot of care in choosing what colors to use. Fat Girl is a specific green, purple, and yellow, but not lemon yellow, yellow like you find in India. I’m very attentive to the use of color.

Even from one scene to the next, the colors respond evocatively to one another, so that these choices register over the film as a whole.

When Vilko falls in Maud’s esteem, she wears a horrible nightgown in this horrible violet—she doesn’t care to seduce him, she doesn’t want to be elegant. Her choice signifies that she does not in fact consider him a man. She’s wearing something like an old dress, very different from what you would wear if you were going out. She doesn’t care about him like she did when they first met.

For the last scene [a meeting between Maud and her family], I found that location very late in preproduction. We couldn’t find a space that would fit a desk big enough that I’d be able to have Maud’s entire family on one side with her alone on the other side. When I finally found a place, it was a very beautiful room with beautiful objects in it. I thought Maud should be alone on one side of the table, like she was in an aquarium, with a magnificent green silk curtain behind her, a special green that I love. She had to be surrounded by fragile colors that could go against her slightly red hair, her pale, pale skin, and I asked my costume assistant to buy me some natural Shantung silk to make Isabelle a coat especially for that location. I also had her buy a silk shirt, which had to be almond-green, and a little blood red coral necklace, so that the coral necklace is like a line of blood—I wanted a color similar to the blood when Amira Casar cuts herself [in Anatomy of Hell, 04].

Before shooting we hung a number of costumes against the background of that location to make sure I had made the right choice and I think Isabelle wanted very much for us to choose this pink silk shirt with black embroidery on it and the black Guy Laroche coat, which belonged to me when I was younger and which we had fitted for Isabelle. I can’t wear it anymore, since the brain stroke. The scene without that shirt, without that color, even if she played it the same way, would be different. It’s because of these colors that she looks so lost, and pale, and lost not only in herself but distant from the other people in the scene, who are in the pragmatic world, the reasonable one. So you see the misunderstanding between them: she’s in another world not only because she didn’t know what she was doing but also because, at the same time, it’s not her. She lost the comprehension of a normal person, even those who love her very much and she doesn’t understand herself, as well. I think that this con man not only takes all her money away but also her personality and that is much worse.

When Maud writes Vilko all the checks, he helps her hold the checkbook. And they have this banter back and forth, insulting each other as she gives in to his demands.

She does, but she doesn’t really want to. She does it because he asks her to, but why does she write him the check? From the beginning it’s not really normal and after that it’s like, well, if she wrote one she’ll write another. It’s like a torrent, a habit. Something you do every day without thinking about. But after the first time he explains that, “If you are not happy to give me the money, then I’ll give it back.” And she says, “No, no.” That’s just a strategy of the con man, and she’s closed in by this strategy. I don’t know if people realize that. When Vilko begins helping Maud, almost every day, they become friends, very close, and nominally he is also rich but maybe he has the money in some “fiscal paradise.” If Maud made the film they would get money, French money, so in fact she can think he would be able to repay her.

When he helps her walk in the street, if she had a normal body he would never do that for her. It’s a little like something you would do for a lover. It’s a very intimate gesture when he lifts her into the car. For me this is also the story of a sick body against a very healthy body. The sick body is of course like a child in the hands of the healthy body. At the same time, it’s ambiguous because he doesn’t just want to take her money away, he’s doing a sort of seduction. He has a real friendship with her, with real affection. But it’s the affection of a scorpion. Everything has to be in his interest. The whole relationship is almost that of lovers. Not physical love but perhaps like two adolescents.

The second time she writes him a check, I don’t want to explain why, so I treat it like an American comedy. I was thinking of Monsieur Verdoux. Even at the end, she doesn’t want to write the checks, because it’s boring to write when you only have one working hand. I think it’s also a very amusing relationship, like when they’re in the two bedrooms next to each other and she doesn’t want to give him a pillow. He’s in a very uncomfortable bed, like the one from Kazan’s Baby Doll: the bed of a girl, a little girl, not of a man, and she doesn’t give him a sheet, doesn’t want to give him a pillow. All that is the amusement of adolescents.

That reminds me of when Vilko is trying to persuade Maud to write a book with him by saying their names would be together “for all eternity.” It’s the way a teenager thinks of love.

Yes, in a certain sense. But at the same time it’s a way to hide how and why she’s giving him the checks, because he asks her to put that it’s an advance on the writing of their novel, which is completely incredible. Not just because it’s 50,000 [euros] but also because only an editor would give an advance on a book, never a co-author. So it’s a mixture of adolescent love, with thoughts of “eternity,” like drawing a heart on a tree, but also for him a way to seduce her while taking the money. It’s always ambiguous because he is almost in love with her. Sometimes she dominates him and sometimes he dominates her.

Do you think that he likes being dominated by her?

Perhaps. But I’m not so sure, because as I said, she’s dominated, as well. She doesn’t have freedom of movement, and he helps her, like when her hand is broken. It’s very strange when he feeds her the sandwich to eat like she’s a child, and this can be a domination if it’s done without tenderness. Maud’s daughter feeds her, too, but she’s very cold about it, while Vilko has a sort of tenderness, but also spite. It’s in Maud’s character to always be the dominant one, but her weak body allows him the ability to dominate her. 

In the scene where Maud is fed by her daughter there’s a shot of Maud’s own mother sitting on a couch tearing at her diaper.

Maud knows she’s the next one who’ll become like the grandmother. Of course, generation after generation becomes the old, nice grandmother, and Maud sees that she’s very close. She tells Vilko that she’s “half a corpse” and the grandmother is “half a corpse” as well, but without her brain intact. Maud still has that.

When Maud looks over at her mother she’s confronted by a fear, and also something that’s inevitable.

Of course, because it is her future. Very soon, in fact. You know, when I’m at the airport or rail station I always ask for a wheelchair, and when you’re in a wheelchair, the normal persons won’t look at you because you’re not at eye level. You only see another person’s face if you stare up at them, and that is a sort of domination.

Was it difficult getting used to those things day after day?

Yes, objectively, yes. To be in a wheelchair, to have an invalid body, everyone can dominate you very easily. But at the same time, I am very, very, very strong. When I’m on set, I am the chef, I dominate everybody. Because on the set, it’s my brain I’m imposing with to make the film. The first day working with Isabelle was difficult because we are two very tyrannical women. Of course, she is only the actress—she has to understand that, and me, I am the author. She is just material for me—wonderful material, a Stradivarius. A great violinist with a Stradivarius makes the greatest music. But she is the Stradivarius, I am the virtuoso. At the same time Isabelle is a virtuoso as an actress. But of course I have to dominate her. The first day was difficult, but after that we were like sisters.

She didn’t want to play me, she wanted to play Maud, a fiction. Physically she’s not like me, she’s very different, but after a while she became more like me. I never directed her in this sense. All of my actors end up resembling me closely. Anne Parillaud in Sex Is Comedy is very far off from me both as a character and physically, but after, she was like me and I don’t want that. I think it’s because I’m tyrannical. In all my films I reveal myself even when I want to hide within a character, so that all my actresses finish looking like me. By magnetism, by impression. Like very close friends who end up looking like they’re from the same family. Or the manner in which you laugh. Isabelle didn’t want to laugh like me but by the end she did, even though I didn’t impose it on her.

Because the actors become so similar to you in certain ways, when you look back at the movies do you relate to them in part as these time capsules of your behavior?  

Yes, because I don’t know where I get the courage from. I am usually very shy. My sort of film is very intimate, and I’ve always said that my story is the story of everybody if I tell what’s real, the truth, what one person would never say to another but which I say to the spectators. And this way, a person will think it’s their story I’m telling, because everybody has the same emotions, the same shyness, the same shame. I know only me, so if I project these things onto a fictional character, of course it’s fictional but of course it’s also me. When I’m shooting a film suddenly nothing can forbid me, even shame or shyness, to do what I think is beautiful and ambiguous and has a feeling of humanity. But sometimes when I see my films once they’re finished, I think: “Oh, how can I have done that?”

I’m also very much a puritan. I love sin, but I’m still a puritan. And I think that’s why I make these brutal films. Also, when I was young I read many, many books, and I noticed that the great authors, whenever they write about sex and love, are vulgar and brutal and against women, with a fierce alpha violence—and that is something I love. As a director, I take delight in and have a propensity for doing things like that. So sometimes when I read about how I’m a feminist I think, “Yes, in my life, politically,” but in my films you find lots of masochism and with my female characters I’m not politically correct enough for feminists. In France, they don’t accept me, but one critic loved my film because I explained that a woman has to be a masochist in order to love men. I think I have the anatomy of a woman and the authority of what normally belongs to a man.

I love to experiment with this authority on strong men—for example, the technicians and workers on set. I was friends with the director of Gaumont and when I told him I wanted to make films he explained to me: “Oh, no, Catherine, you are a dandy, you speak in a slow voice, you cannot direct workers, they’re very masculine.” But it’s not in my manner to be commanding. I never give orders. My manner is more a fascination, a sort of mysterious magnetism: step by step, everybody on the set becomes the film—they become like me. I do nothing directly to make this happen, I don’t know how it works because I never give orders. Yes, I make the choreography very, very precisely, and I make the costumes and almost all the set decorations, but after that I don’t give orders. Even with the actors, they have to respect my chorography of the scenes, but I never work with them beforehand. On the set I don’t tell them what they have to do, I shoot the first take without giving any direction, because if it was marvelous and magic, after that I won’t be able to get it again. But it’s very rare that the first take is marvelous so I say to them, with real violence, I think, “What did you do?”

I direct by the contrary, by the opposite. When I was younger I found who I was in my opposition to the adults, to everybody, because I am very proud and I hated being a child and obeying, even obeying my sister, who was older than me. I direct in the same manner, by saying what is bad and boring in their performance. The first time they’ll often play the scene with psychology, using their own logic to understand the lines and that is completely boring for me. I always say to them, if they act the scene like that, then why make the film—I can publish a book instead! I tell them that there’s something between the words and the silence that they aren’t giving me, that they have to surprise me. Then I tell them, for example, maybe when you’re speaking you are lying to this other person or perhaps you are very sincere and you’re lying to yourself.

I always say that cinema is like an ideogram, these abstractions: you have 26 letters to work, like in the Occidental alphabet, and with this you can explain the entire world. But it’s very linear. What’s so exciting for me about making movies is when, with these 26 letters, you have two opposite, ambiguous feelings in the same moment. It's violent and unexplainable. If I can get this to happen in a single shot, it’s magical and everybody on set becomes silent with emotion. I’m very tyrannical with the actors but sometimes I try not to be, because it’s all about creating these emotions, and they’ve taught me something about what are the real movements and the underground movements of our emotional life. I don’t know how to talk about my scripts before we start shooting, it’s like something that’s inside myself that I don’t want to admit or talk about. I think this might be complicated for Americans to understand because producers always want to know before production starts what the author intends to do. In fact, all you have to do is just shoot the script as written and you can’t know anything about it before you start shooting.

Sometimes I’m afraid of a scene and I’ll cut out certain lines because they’re too ridiculous. For instance, at the end of the film when Isabelle says, “Like in the supermarket” [comparing overstocking a shopping cart with writing checks to Vilko], it explains the reality of what happened but it’s also a ridiculous thing to say. Suddenly, I became afraid of my own phrase, thinking that it’s an impossible thing for her to say, but Isabelle told me: “No, no, I want to say it.” In that last scene, which was our last day of shooting, she did everything perfectly in the first take, without my having to say a thing. She had become my actress, who belongs only to me and no one else.  

To me this film is quite similar to the previous two, Bluebeard [09] and Sleeping Beauty [10]. It feels like another fairy tale: the intensity of the central relationships, the sublimated nature of romantic love and sexual desire. Did you feel it was similar in those ways while making it?

Perhaps, but Anatomy of Hell was as well. Anatomy of Hell is about a beautiful woman and a beast, really. As I was born a girl, I was also born with Beauty and the Beast as a part of my outlook and I’m always working with these fairy tale themes. Now I want to make another film about rape, but it’s so not politically correct, and I don’t know how to get money for it. The world is getting more and more politically correct, more academic.

What would the story of that film be?

As I said, I never know exactly what it is I want to do. But I know it would be violent for everybody, toward everybody. That’s what I like, violent and brutal and emotional at the same time.

There’s a heavy dreamlike quality to Abuse of Weakness, especially with the many scenes of Maud asleep or slowly waking up. They seem of central importance to the film.

Because of my condition, in order for me to stand up, I have to be very concentrated. It takes a lot of energy and afterwards I have to rest for a long time.  When I’m tired, I have to go to bed right away otherwise I’m in danger of falling.

What was your experience working with Kool Shen?

So strange, because I’m in one world, Isabelle’s in another, and he’s off in his own world as well. He’s a very aggressive rapper, which is what I wanted and why I chose him. There was a cultural gap between him, Isabelle and me. Kool Shen is so intelligent, very impressive: he has a cold, mathematical intelligence. Isabelle was fascinated by him because he never performed with emotion, always understanding the scene very coldly. He never tried to charm her, not at all like a gigolo. The original was more like a gigolo, always trying to charm. I think he becomes stronger like that and their relationship is more complex. What is rare, for all actors, French ones especially, is the ability to act a scene with this brilliant light of love in their eyes. He did it effortlessly. Then at night he would go off to play poker and he lost a lot of money doing that.

The first time we met he was quite different, though. In English it’s always “you” but in French one can say tu, which is the familiar way to say “you,” or vous, which is more distant. The first time I met Kool Shen, I said vous and we were both on the defensive. When you meet with a prospective actor it’s they who have to do the charming and you can dupe yourself about who you really want after getting to know them and doing a screen test. With Kool Shen I felt right after the first screen test that I definitely wasn’t making a mistake. He is the character, he has the brutality, a body that can enter a space and take it, make it his property.

So my producer and I called his agent to offer him the role, but then I started watching the test again and again and again and suddenly I realized that I’d made a mistake. Yes, he was good with some passages and in the way he used his body, but some other passages weren’t so good. I did some tests with other actors and I called Kool Shen to say that I think we’re both on dangerous ground. Because even though he is the character, I didn’t know if he could handle all the scenes, especially because I do a lot of long, long shots and I wanted this distance. So I showed him his test and the tests of the other actors and pointed out: “Here it’s you who is the best, here it’s him who did better with that line.”

Kool Shen despised Rocancourt and I think it is impossible to play somebody you despise and it becomes a caricature. Then we did another test to see if he could do the scenes without his own construction of the character, without psychology, and I had him do the scenes of seduction from Fat Girl, very bourgeois, a long monologue, almost three pages. He went off to learn the lines, and when he came back for that second test I was afraid, if it turned out he was bad, that I wouldn’t know how to tell him. I never watch the actors in front of me, I always watch the television monitor. It’s not the same thing in front of you that’s on the TV—cinema isn’t theater, it’s not flesh, it’s image and frame. My assistant shot the test and read the girl’s lines, and Kool Shen spoke the lines like they were his own, like he wasn’t an actor in a scene but a person in their real life. The first take was so beautiful and we did it a second time, of course, and a third time, and it was always beautiful. He was so tired by the end but still had such fervor, such passion, and we knew that we didn’t even need to watch the test, that I’d be able to get exactly what I wanted from him on set, this sort of fever, this trance. Unlike with Isabelle, after that I never had to fight with him.

All the relationships in the film are defined by their power dynamics: Vilko, Maud’s assistant and producer, her family. The focus is on who has control and where it comes from—who has the ability to command a situation and why.

Maud controls the situation but she can’t control herself. Being with Vilko she forgets she’s an invalid. She’s lost the ability to defend herself because, with him, her life becomes sweeter. It’s very complicated. When I’m making a film I’m not an invalid, but in my normal life, when I wake up every day, it’s very hard. Even if I want to get a book from my library, it’s impossible and that’s always a surprise for me. At the same time, I’m always laughing, but that’s a protection. If I thought about how difficult it is for me to stand up, to move around, I’d have to cry, so I prefer to laugh. If I go out to buy something I can’t be elegant, I have to wear a backpack, which is awful and not my style.

My life is a continual balancing of the elegant and the horrible, what’s difficult to do and what I have power over. In the difficulty of my body, of course, I am a loser. But I’m also a winner when I’m really me, when I talk to people, when I speak about film—I have an energy for these things and that’s something that can never be stopped. 

In the Italian thriller Salvo, the hit man of the title (Saleh Bakri) forges an unlikely connection with Rita (Sara Serraiocco), the blind sister of the man he is hired to kill. Two extended set pieces define the film: their initial circling encounter in the family’s house, and an abandoned mine where the pair must hide out afterward. FILM COMMENT spoke about the movie in depth with the directors, Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, shortly before its screening in New Directors / New Films this past spring. Salvo is currently screening in an exclusive theatrical run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

There’s a sumptuous quality to your film, and a formalist quality too. Sometimes the plot falls away and the film becomes about vision and the play of light, the layered use of light, as in the 25-minute sequence in Rita’s house. In almost every shot there’s a sharp differentiation between background and foreground space, through lighting and focus, and the cinematography is reminiscent of approaches more common to black-and-white film than color.

Fabio Grassadonia: What you’re saying was at the core of our idea from the beginning. Because it was our first experience as writer-directors, we wanted to tell our story, a story deeply connected to us. We thought it was time to go back to Sicily, where we both come from. So we thought about a story that starts like an action or mafia movie. There is a Mafioso, a hit man who has to kill someone for some reason, and we let the audience believe they are inside a typical Sicilian story about the Mafia. But then something impossible happens in the meeting between these two human beings and the characters and the audience fall into another kind of story, the story we were really interested in: the story of a possibility of change. Because this is a story about the meeting between two dead souls, and the most impossible of possibilities arises from this meeting. The sparkle of a new life comes from this meeting. They start to learn how to protect this possibility changing, of looking for another kind of life, from the world they are surrounded by.

Antonio Piazza: Even in working with the actors our approach was different. We were talking about the plot and the characters’ psychology, but the rehearsals, for example, were a kind of dance. The very first rehearsals we had with the two main actors, they pretended to be wild animals trapped in the same cage, which was the room. This approach continued during the shoot, so the sequence in the house was like a piece of choreography. Our very first idea of this project was this hit man in front of a blind girl, and something extraordinary happening in this violent context. The idea was to work with their bodies, to stay with them, with as little dialogue as possible, to the point where we’re taking the risk of losing the audience. Even the work with did with the plot, the first draft had a lot more—we took away as much as possible.

The acting style in the film is not naturalistic, it’s artificial. In that first scene in Salvo’s room, it’s as if all the objects around him are keeping quiet, and then you hold on the clock right as it turns to 5:30. You get the sense that all of these minute movements, how somebody positions their body, are of great importance. Could you talk about choreographing the camerawork so that it responded to and heightened the actors’ physicality?

FG: At the core of the story are the idea and the theme of blindness. First of all, we had to define the point of view of this hit man and this girl, in order to catch the essence of their souls. In the beginning of the film we have this hit man, who is nothing more than a killing machine, and we put the camera on his back. We stay close to him and from time to time we catch only his eyes. But his eyes are not the eyes of a human being, they are the eyes of a predator looking for his target, to kill, to achieve what he needs to achieve in the moment. Also, it was very important in that first scene you were talking about to present him like a soul already in trouble, in crisis, trapped in a prison, in a cell. Even before the clock starts to sound, he’s already awake, he can’t sleep, and he’s an object trapped among all these other objects. He’s a dead soul; there is no life there.

Then this killing machine enters into Rita’s house. In that moment Rita feels someone, something, and we build her own point of view as a blind girl into the story. It was very important to build a sensorial experience for the audience, and we decided to put the camera in front of her face, very close so you can really read and see all the emotion. If you want to understand what is going on around her, you have to listen because all the things happening around her are out of frame. When we built this strange slow dance between the two of them inside the house, we did it in this way, playing with his point of view and with hers.

Then in the moment when they meet and Salvo must kill her, something impossible happens [when she suddenly gains sight]. He can’t kill anymore, and we start to build only one point of view. Because they are connected together they have to find a way to accept each other. For her, this gift means first of all a destruction: the way she used to experience the world collapses in the moment when her sight comes back. But it’s also a terrible moment for Salvo because he sees, for the first time, a human being in front of him, not a target to be killed. And through her, he is seeing himself for the first time. Through this process the two points of view become one, and through this new point of view we build their new story.

During that sequence in the house, you can feel their two points of view coming together, almost merging, glancing off each other and then finally locking in. I can’t remember their exact gestures but I do remember the frightened look in her eyes, and her movement out of darkness into light, or out of light into darkness. Can you talk about how you balanced the choreography of this as an action sequence, with having the film enter fully into the characters’ subjectivity?

AP: We started with the idea of not seeing his face at the beginning. If you remember, we only show details of his body, like in that first scene, and then after that only his eyes. It’s almost like a video game, following him from the back while he’s shooting. Basically, at the beginning Salvo is just a gaze looking for a target. Then we accompany him into Rita’s house and something is already changing from the very first meeting with Rita, the first time he sees her down in the basement [before the meeting a few minutes later when her sight is restored]. Somehow she sees him, even though she’s still blind, and this poses a question to him—it’s as if he’s meeting blindness. It’s a house of light and darkness and our work with the director of photography was all about that, using chiaroscuro and this idea of always moving from dark to light and then back into the dark. 

This “house of light and darkness” seems to be a part of the characters themselves and, as you were talking about souls earlier, you could say the house is a reflection of their souls, moving through them as they move through it. The complexity of the lighting makes it feel like the shadows have volume and mass.

AP: For this part of the film we were especially thinking about the old noir films, American and French, where the use of light is expressionistic, emphasizing the difference between light and dark. Our cinematic approach was to make use of genre, even when the story is going into a more intimate direction. Later in the film, at the abandoned mine, it’s like a spaghetti Western style.

FG: Regarding the scene in house, every time they cross each other, either in a conscious or unconscious way, there is a moment of light. Then they meet but still have to build this new possibility, and they’re forced and imprisoned in a closed environment, like the abandoned mine. 

The shot of Salvo riding the elevator by himself (to the underground hideout where he meets with his boss) reminds me of an optical illusion. It’s similar to Rita’s “blind visions.” Could you talk about your use of visual abstraction?

AP: All of the film is built like this, on very simple and almost abstract shots. With that elevator shot we wanted to move away from strict realism and try to go to another kind of land. The character of Salvo isn’t like a real Sicilian killer, he’s elaborated through our imagination, our dreams, made more abstract. It’s a thin line between reality and dream, and the shots were conceived to follow along this thin line.

The movie has a lot of religious imagery, or suggestions of religious imagery. It’s hard to put your finger on, like that fine line between dream and reality. Were these religious associations on your mind from the beginning?

AP: We were aware there was a possible religious meaning to Rita regaining her sight, which is a kind of miracle, and we didn’t want to avoid it. For example, they never really question why and how it happened, they never go to a church. It’s different from other films where something big like this occurs. But at the same time, building the story in an archetypical way, it’s basically a brutal sentimental education between the two of them. Salvo is not the kind of person who says “I love you.” The only things he can do for her is bring her water and food because he doesn’t know how to care about someone else. So some of the scenes might have a religious background to them, which doesn’t mean you have to be a believer, but it is in the background, a possibility.

FG: In a way Salvo is the story of a man who sacrifices himself to save another human life, so those religious readings are possible. There is enough space to question this film from many different angles.

What’s most important in his sacrifice is the tenderness that develops between them, a tenderness that is conveyed primarily through touch. The worldview of the film strongly conveys how cataclysmic or life-giving a single touch can be.

AP: At the end of the day that’s what it’s all about. New possibilities can be created just by touching another human being.

FG: This can happen in the meeting of two human beings, during a particular moment of grace. There is still the possibility to deal with our souls in a different way. Coming from the kind of society we come from, it’s very difficult for us to believe that there is still the possibility for change. In this wasteland, two dead souls making contacting, touching, meeting, can start to live again. And as you said, there is tenderness—there’s no hugging or kissing or love in the night—there’s just one dinner, the two of them, very tender, surrounded by enemies. But they can enjoy that moment, they really are together. Love is always connected with moral choices, and she knows that she has to wait for him to die before she can finally go to her new life.

What Salvo and Rita realize that no one else in the movie does is the necessity for other people and the commitments that that requires of you. Could you talk about the two lead actors? Taken together, they’re like two parts of an equation, especially in their gestures and movements.

AP: We had two separate approaches because they have very different backgrounds. Saleh Bakri is a professional actor; he’s been in many movies. He shared his understanding of the character with us, and it was a more traditional  construction of his character, in a good way. He was bringing his own suffering—for example his own suffering relating to where he comes from, because he’s a Palestinian with Israeli nationality and he’s very conflicted about where he’s from. He was putting all of this into the character of Salvo, which is completely different, in this other reality of Sicily.

We met Sara Serraiocco thanks to a long casting process, and she was not a professional actress then. We didn’t want to work with a famous Italian actress because we really wanted you to believe she was blind and not someone very famous pretending to be blind. This was her first role ever, and she did some tough preparation, interacting with blind people and even living with blind people in Rome and Palermo. And we kept them [Bakri and Serraiocco] separated from each other for as long as possible, because we wanted to keep the energy of their really meeting for the first time. The preparation they did share beforehand was never rehearsing scenes of the script together but, as I said, pretending to be animals trapped in the same cage. All of their scenes were shot chronologically, so for the two of them this journey was of getting to know each other for real.

Their body language toward one another changes significantly throughout the film: her fear of him goes away, and they begin to acclimate to each other. Because there is almost no dialogue, their body language makes up nearly the entirety of the characters.

AP: With Saleh it was really about being a machine, at least in the beginning. He’s very, very sure of himself. With Sara we did a lot of hard work to create that body language by working with blind people. She spent days living in the same little house in a village near Palermo with a blind girl who is also named Rita. And then we made a short film in Palermo, in which the main character is a 10-year-old blind girl, and Sara observed her closely. This girl has a very strong, peculiar face and expressions—it’s almost as if you can read the world in her face.

Alan Clarke’s 1979 drama Scum, probably the best-known British film about life behind bars, features a scene in which Ray Winstone’s young offender thrashes the opposition among his fellow inmates, famously concluding with the words, “I’m the daddy now.” David Mackenzie’s Starred Up similarly charts the jail progress of a young man who’s clearly, precociously destined to be the “daddy,” the alpha male, on his wing. But there’s an obstacle, or possibly an advantage, waiting for him in the prison where he’s just arrived: there’s already a daddy there waiting for him. Literally his daddy.

The term “starred up” refers to a procedure by which a young offender is moved up into an adult prison—apparently because the prisoner in question is considered high risk, and ripe for tougher conditions. Exactly what’s at issue in the case of Eric Love (Jack O’Connell) isn’t spelled out in Starred Up, a film that makes a virtue of its parsimony with backstory. In any case, the film doesn’t waste time or words at the start, hurling us as if bodily into its world. It begins with 19-year-old Eric arriving in prison. We first see him in close-up, head down, eyes sunken, and thereafter his face retains that guarded look, even when he’s grinning jubilantly at some triumph—he’s always holding back, and judging by the few details we learn about his life, he has good reason to.

We follow Eric’s entry into his new world, one that we can guess is immeasurably bigger and colder than the institutions he’s known till now. Ronan Hill’s sound mix offers an instantly alienating and engulfing symphony of buzzers, alarm bells, slamming doors, the accompaniment to the acrid yellow lighting behind those doors. A steadicam follows Eric through corridors and up staircases—echoing the tracking shots of Scum, in fact. Starred Up may be a prison movie, but it feels more as if it’s set in a submarine. Throughout, we see nothing of the outside world, and barely—until the end at least, when the film momentarily “surfaces”—any significant glimmer of daylight. It’s a remarkably claustrophobic film—as a prison drama ought to be.

Having very effectively sketched out his milieu with a minimum of spoken words, Mackenzie applies the same economy to telling us what kind of anti-hero we’re dealing with (I’ve slightly lost track of this director’s output, but I’d hazard a guess that this is his most controlled film since Young Adam, as well as his punchiest). No sooner is Eric shown into his cell than he’s using a melted toothbrush to fashion a rudimentary weapon of a razor; we instantly realize that, young as he is, he has an old lag’s knowledge of the tricks for surviving the harshest conditions. A further brushstroke in this character sketch is a series of shots in which he peers cautiously through the crack of his barely open door: a close-up of his eye, a blurry shot of what he sees, a very concise evocation of his alert, suspicious mind.

These first 15 or so minutes are so tautly executed that some of that tension drains out once the drama proper kicks in. In that opening, we appear to be getting a raw glimpse of an inconceivably grim way of life that most of us will never have to face; then the film puts its cards on the table and declares itself a melodrama. Enter a prisoner with a sour, contemptuous face, who approaches Eric with the businesslike walk of someone who has a lot of visits to make—he’s the boy’s father Neville, already a long-serving prisoner within these walls. The actor is Ben Mendelsohn, who’s recently become the international screen specialist in variously feral, scarred, abject characters that you wouldn’t want to meet, partly because they probably smell acrid (Killing Them Softly, The Place Beyond the Pines and most memorably, Animal Kingdom). Neville sidles up to greet the son that he clearly hasn’t seen for years, and essentially gives us the boy’s life story in a couple of muttered sentences: “Stupid fuckin’ junkie slut she was… Fair play offing that geezer…” (we later learn that Eric has brutally killed a pedophile, probably only part of a nightmarish back story). Unsettling a presence as Mendelsohn’s Neville is throughout, the effect is almost scuppered in this first utterance, which uncomfortably makes you aware you’re watching an Australian actor struggling to sound Cockney and coming out a bit Dick Van Dyke at the first hurdle.

Still, things quickly hot up again. Pathologically volatile, Eric has hardly settled in before he’s made a dangerous enemy, brutalized a well-meaning fellow con and found himself savagely holding his own against a phalanx of armored guards, eventually making the unanswerable move of sinking his teeth into one officer’s crotch. On the plus side, it proves that he qualifies for the prison’s anger management therapy sessions. They are led by a volunteer worker named Oliver (Rupert Friend), and these sessions look as if they’re going to provide the dramatic core of the film.

The film quickly sells us on the idea that Oliver’s group is the best thing that could happen to Eric—and that it would be pretty beneficial for similarly irascible Neville, if only he could manage to do more than storm in, hover tetchily for a moment, then furiously storm out again. But once the sessions get under way, they don’t quite deliver the emotional grit we hope for. Prickly badinage and challenging stares are exchanged between the men, who occasionally stand up and face off—violence being averted by Oliver’s technique of standing between the opponents and gazing balefully at the floor. At one point, he gets confrontational; “You’re a black cunt,” he tells one of the attendees (all black except Eric), yet no one really takes the bait, and the conversation drifts to a debate on the pros and cons of cunnilingus. Somehow these scenes, which feel as if they’re partly improvised, never quite find their dramatic rhythm. That’s partly because they’re so often interrupted by some sudden explosion or other; and even if male rage is its dominant theme, the film does seem a little generous with such explosions, which play havoc with its rhythm.  

I wish that Mackenzie had given us more of these group sessions, let us get to know the men and their interrelationships—ideally in long takes, if not quite at Frederick Wiseman length. But the hurried rhythm of these scenes isn’t the whole problem; there’s also the sheer oddness of Oliver. As played by Friend, he seems at some moments self-effacing to the point of being downright wet, yet at others seems to exert a barely believable  authority over cons and prison staff alike. Defiantly facing off against Sam Spruell’s imposingly malign deputy governor, Oliver comes across like the charismatic leader of an experimental theater workshop who’s been posted in a tough high school. It’s such an odd performance by Friend—his feminine thoughtfulness accentuated for maximum contrast with O’Connell’s macho ferocity—that you can’t really believe in Oliver, and that means you can’t quite buy in his methods either. That’s all the more odd since screenwriter Jonathan Asser himself ran a similar group in London’s Wandsworth Prison, so Oliver appears to all intents and purposes to be a version of Asser, with the therapy material presumably drawn from his own career.

By and large, the film feels on surer ground dealing with Eric outside the group—although there it comes much closer to the routine tropes of the prison movie, especially to such apprenticeship dramas as Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet (its rise-to-power themes echoed in one character’s observation, “'Starred up' means you’re a leader. And without leaders, where would we be?”). Some of the broader elements do make this feel more like a generic slammer movie than the exercise in hard realism promised by the opening: the corrupt authorities conspiring against vulnerable prisoner and would-be redemptive outsider alike; the establishment that’s really run by the inmates; the soft-spoken guru-like prisoner kingpin (Peter Ferdinando). 

But there’s a lot of emotional heft to the gradual rapprochement between Neville and son. The rivalrous stare-downs between them are effective enough, but the gulf between their characters and their experiences of the world emerge most eloquently when Eric sees his dad’s cellmate put a tender hand on Neville’s knee, and the boy suddenly learns something he never suspected about the parameters of masculinity: “It’s fuckin’ prison, innit?” says Neville (after which Eric returns to his cell and shudders in horror).

You can’t imagine anyone getting close enough to put a hand on Eric’s knee, but who knows—by the end of the film, he may have learned to loosen up a little. And by the end, you really do care to know where Eric is headed. That’s partly because of the mesmerizing and often downright frightening intensity of Jack O’Connell, whose muscular, fearless performance is utterly compelling (and I partly mean fearless in that he’s not afraid to thrash around naked in a tiled shower room while his character is being garroted). While some of the actors here project hardness a little deliberately, O’Connell seems to take Eric’s constant fury in his stride. There’s something at once elastic, hyper-volatile and yet extremely casual about his performance; his Eric has the manner of an athlete wanting to get through the day and do his moves, and contemptuously brushing off anything that’s going to stop him.  O’Connell—also impressive as a stranded soldier in the forthcoming ’71—gives Starred Up the muscle and above all the emotional continuity that holds it together. Playing the star prediction game is usually a futile business, but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who identified O’Connell as a screen daddy in the making.  

Bollywood is where celluloid craziness lives. The slab-o’-style opening of Don, the first dance number in Gumnaam, the moment when Amitabh Bachchan emerges from an enormous egg in Amar Akbar Anthony and sings “My Name is Anthony Gonsalves,” Anil Kapoor’s performance as Quincy Jones by way of Mr. Mxyzptlk in Taal, Anil Kapoor (again) doing a naked Matrix fight scene while on fire in Nayak. But it’s the rare Bollywood film that stays crazy and entertaining throughout, adding up to more than the sum of its nuttiest parts. After all, once that opening number is finished, Gumnaam turns into a pretty boring Ten Little Indians remake. But here are four pre-Nineties Bollywood movies that know how to keep things hopping all the way to the end credits.

MARD (1985)

The ultimate Manmohan Desai dshoom dshoom actioner, Mard was a superhit, becoming the top-grossing movie of 1985 and getting a 70mm Tamil-language remake by Superstar Rajinikanth the following year. But where Rajinikanth failed (gasp!) with his remake, Amitabh Bachchan takes home all the macho trophies. Director Manmohan Desai makes movies where the Brits are evil, the working class are king, rich girls ride around in convertibles with bodyguards wearing complicated S&M gear, no one can find a top hat that fits, and he’s never met an emotional beat that didn’t call for a 360-degree camera spin, a couple of zooms, and quick cutting between five different angles.

Mard reveals the secret truth behind British colonialism: they were basically vampires (at one point they even drain the blood from their Indian slaves to ship overseas). Looting Mother India of its precious artifacts in the morning, the Brits round off their afternoons with some light machine-gunning of innocent Indians while cackling through their tea and crumpets. By the time this flick is finished, you’ll want to march on Downton Abbey and burn it down.

Desai likes to start his films with the parents of his hero, and here Bachchan’s dad rides his horse after the damned looting Brits escape in an airplane. He shoots them in their wrists with his Tommy gun and throws grenades into their tanks, then lassos their plane, ties it to the ground, and kills a British general with his bare hands. After carving "Mard" (which means "macho") into his newborn son’s chest, he’s betrayed by a doctor, drawn and quartered, and then blown up. It’s up to this macho baby, played as an adult by the Big B, to continue the good (albeit totally over-the-top) fight. Providing able assistance are his hyper-intelligent dog Moti and talented horse Badal. 

Delivering so much psychic whiplash that your brain needs a neck brace, the film presents the young colonial beauty Lady Helena in a leather catsuit, trying to ruin the Big B’s self-esteem by whipping him. When that doesn’t work, she resorts to flamenco dancing, but Moti sneaks into the torture dungeon underneath a room-service cart and frees his master. Then the next minute, Lady Helena and the Big B are getting married. Deal with it.

COOLIE (1983)

The movie that almost killed Bachchan when a stunt went wrong was the second-highest-grossing Indian release of the Eighties. Though it does not feature any colonial vampires, it is another all-singing, all-dancing, all-macho mind-blower from Desai. 

Exchanging the Hindus of Mard for Muslims, things start rocking when ultra-criminal Zafar Khan gets out of jail, ready to marry the nubile young Salma. First stop? Her dad’s bird store, where he is informed that Salma has married some guy named Aslam. Enraged, Zafar kills her dad, then flies off in his helicopter. He lands at Salma’s house, but her mom fights him off with a burning log, aided by lightning bolts of divine disapproval. Back into the helicopter Zafar goes, next turning his rage on Aslam, the man who stole his Salma. Aslam works at a dam, which Zafar destroys, unleashing a flood that drowns half of India. Salma washes up unconscious on the roof of her house, so Zafar rescues her with his helicopter, despite being attacked by her dead dad’s highly intelligent falcon (who wears more gold chains than Mr. T) which rips out his pilot’s eyeball. By now Salma has amnesia, and she’s forgotten that she lost her baby in the flood.

That baby grows up to be Amitabh Bachchan, king of the train coolies! The Big B gets the coolest entrance in motion picture history: leaping off a bridge with a cigarette in his mouth, a falcon on his arm, and a gun in his hand. A story about the power of labor unions and the inherent justice of international socialism, Coolie is also a movie in which a grown woman lusts after a 9-year-old boy and plasters her bedroom with life-size photographs of him that she kisses with erotic longing. Coolie knows what its audience wants (separated sweethearts, the love of a boy for his mother, helicopters, highly intelligent falcons) and serves it up by the shameless shovelful.

DISCO DANCER (1982)

A major hit, this flick made Mithun Chakraborty a star in the Soviet Union, where Disco Dancer sold close to 50 million tickets. And why not? This is a universal story about a boy, a dream, and a disco. Everybody can relate! Chakraborty plays Jimmy, a little boy from the slums who plays a mean guitar and grows up to be a disco dancer, singing his unforgettable hit “I Am a Disco Dancer” (D is for Dance, I is for Item, S is for singer, C is for chorus, O is for orchestra). But Jimmy has dethroned Sam, the former king of disco, and Sam will not go easy into that long night. First, he hires a gang of finger-snapping thugs to take Jimmy down. When that fails, he electrifies Jimmy’s guitar, and while that doesn’t kill Jimmy, it does give him a crippling case of discophobia. Will Jimmy overcome his trauma in time to face down the world champions of disco?

There is no way to discuss a movie like Disco Dancer in any human language. We simply don’t have the words. But Jimmy doesn’t need our words. He's got kung fu and disco. When things get really hard, he puts on his poncho of sadness. Anuvab Pal, who published a book about the movie, writes: “It was perhaps the greatest cultural event of the Eighties. Everything we were going through, socialism, class struggle, culture clashes, [all told] through the existential journey of Disco Dancer.” Maybe, but don’t forget that there are also plenty of onstage machine-gun assassinations during disco concerts. 

TEESRI MANZIL (1966)

Some swinging jazz! A girl runs up a hotel stairwell! She leaps from the roof! She smashes to the ground! Then the camera pans across gawking faces surrounding her bleeding body, each actor’s credit perfectly timed for the moment their grim mugs hit the screen. Teesri Manzil is shot in shimmering jewel tones, filmed on sumptuous sets with plenty of soft focus and surreal Sixties style, and if any movie was crying out for a Blu-ray restoration, this is it.

Sunita, the dead girl's younger sister, heads to the resort hotel where big sis worked, determined to discover why she jumped. All she knows is that her sister dated Rocky, lead drummer for the hotel band and the man Sunita is certain drove her to suicide. But on the train she meets Rocky, and he’s instantly smitten. Telling her his name is Anil, he hides his true identity and, despite the fact that Sunita finds him so annoying she gets her entire field hockey team to beat him up, the two eventually fall for each other. 

Any camp here is 100 percent intentional. The musical numbers are New Delhi Dali, with famed item dancer, Helen, gyrating inside giant eyes and crawling over sculptures of Rocky’s name spelled out in 10-foot-tall letters, while making multiple costume changes (three in the first number alone), and hoofing it with backup dancers wearing wedding dresses while Rocky plays the water glass, the spoons, the trumpet, and the drums. Even when the music’s not playing, the film’s a delight. Asha Parekh is a spitfire as Sunita, and Shammi Kapoor plays Rocky like Jerry Lewis and Jerry Lee Lewis rolled into one, doing a sort of screwball Elvis-by-way-of-Nic-Cage performance as a man high on his own cologne. 

And yet Teesri Manzil has a heart. The number “Tumne Mujhe Dekha Ho Kar” is as close to perfection as Bollywood gets. Rocky/Anil has confessed his double identity to Sunita in a letter, telling her she can reject him or, if she still loves him, she can come to his show that night and see him as Rocky for the first time. Helen, because she’s Helen, decides to be evil and intercepts the letter, making sure it’s not delivered into Sunita’s hands until she’s seated and the show is about to start. When Rocky comes onstage, he thinks Sunita’s accepted his proposal, but as she reads his words, her tears smear the ink. 

Rocky sings his song full of romantic longing (“Finally your footsteps have found their way to my heart/As if all roads have at last reached their end/O my dear, O my dear/You have been kind enough to look at me/The earth has stopped moving, the sky is silent”). When it’s over, Rocky asks Sunita to marry him. Furious at his betrayal, she flips the table and accuses him of murdering her sister, both their hearts breaking while mascara runs down each of their cheeks. What adds extra poignancy is that Kapoor shot this scene immediately after his wife, beloved actress Geeta Bali, passed away from smallpox. Shooting was stopped so he could be by her side while she died; then he returned to the set and, with much coaching and support from the crew, shot “Tumne Mujhe Dekha Ho Kar” on his first day back.

It’s a motion picture moment that is gorgeous and goofy, silly and sublime, extravagant and emotional, and, if you let it, it will break your heart.

That’s the beauty of Bollywood.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

… The dancing god of Bollywood, Hrithik Roshan the Double-Thumbed Dynamo, is rumored to be starring in Step Up 6. While Hrithik would honor Hollywood if he graced it with his presence, India already has plenty of movies that serve up far more of what the Step Up series dishes out, and in tastier portions with extra cheese. If you want to see proof, it’s as simple as ABCD: Anybody Can Dance.

… Speaking of Hrithik, Dhoom has turned 10! On August 27, the first in Bollywood’s very modern, very loud, very popular heist/action/musical/stunt/special-effects/comedy/thriller series hit the big screen, and since then, the three films together have grossed well over $120 million. Dhoom 3 has even become the highest-grossing Bollywood movie of all time. The Times of India gives us seven reasons to love the franchise, and if you’re looking for a frame of reference, just imagine the Fast & Furious movies with more musical numbers. You can catch all three Dhooms on Netflix streaming: Dhoom | Dhoom 2 | Dhoom: 3

… Helen, co-star of Teesri Manzil, is one of the biggest stars of classic Bollywood, famed for dancing in what were known as “item numbers," musical show-stoppers inserted in a film that were bound to generate pop cultural frisson due to their daring, their sexiness, and their ambitious staging. Her stepson is Bollywood star Salman Khan, one of the most controversial actors in the world. Accused of stalking and perhaps even abusing his former girlfriend Aishwarya Rai, he has served prison time for poaching an endangered species (the chinkara), and in 2002 he drove over a group of homeless men sleeping outside of a bakery. He pled not guilty to killing one of them and injuring three others. A trial has been a long time coming, but it was set to begin on August 19 of this year. Then most of the documents, including witness statements and the case diary, went missing. However, a week later, they were located elsewhere in the police station. Finally, 12 years later, the trial is set to proceed.

… Actress Priyanka Chopra plays world-champion boxer “Magnificent Mary” or “Mary Kom” in the film Mary Kom premiering at the Toronto Film Festival, so the news is full of her doings. Makeup artist Uday Shirali talks about making Chopra look like Mary, Viacom has announced they’ll be distributing the movie on 250 screens outside of India on September 5, and Chopra has officially announced that she is almost definitely not taking part in the ALS ice bucket challenge.

Ra.One

… For decades, film was not recognized as an official industry in India, which meant that producers couldn’t get bank loans. To fund their projects they borrowed from private investors, including loan sharks and companies with ties to organized crime. The result was that many famous crime figures often used productions to launder their cash. In 2000, the government finally recognized film, and the industry began the complicated business of disentangling itself from its less savory business partners. Recently, there’ve been fears that the crime bosses are back, with Shah Rukh Khan requesting extra police protection after allegedly being threatened, and shots reportedly being fired outside the home of Karim Morani, producer of films like Chennai Express and Ra.One. This week, police are having to reassure jittery industry insiders that the bad old days are not making a comeback. Read more about organized crime in Bollywood in this interview with reporter Anupama Chopra.

Une simple histoire

The retrospective for Marcel Hanoun held at New York’s Anthology Film Archives this past spring represented a tremendous opportunity for those who have heard about the filmmaker’s elusive contributions to the history of French cinema but have been unable to experience it firsthand, save for his debut, Une simple histoire (59). The series marked the first dedicated survey of Hanoun’s work in the U.S. and benefited from a recent comprehensive retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française (for which a number of gorgeous 35mm and 16mm prints were struck) to bring a selection of Hanoun’s films to the city where Une simple histoire received its belated U.S. premiere at the 9th New York Film Festival in 1971.

Hanoun, who died in 2012, emerged on the scene as a peer of the Young Turks of Cahiers du cinéma and the Left Bank set. Indeed, Une simple histoire premiered at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival alongside Breathless and The 400 Blows. But while the arc and aspirations of Hanoun’s career superficially appear to resemble those of Godard, Hanoun was quicker to establish and uphold his underground bona fides. He produced an audacious body of work with decidedly modest means and displayed an aggressively iconoclastic formalism more or less from the start. The films that followed Une simple histoire—which was hailed shortly after its NYFF screening by Jonathan Rosenbaum as “a Bressonian analysis of an Italian Neorealist subject” and seized by Noël Burch as one of the key works of postwar European modernist cinema in 1968’s Praxis du cinéma—mostly acknowledged the conventions of narrative filmmaking only long enough to plot their destruction.

The Authentic Trial of Carl-Emmanuel Jung (66) presaged the stagey docufiction interrogations of collective trauma in films by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and, more recently, Joshua Oppenheimer. An opening text announcing that the trial is a total fabrication colors the jarring testimony regarding concentration camp atrocities that comprises most of the speech in the film. Hanoun’s “Seasons Cycle”—Summer (68), Winter (69), Fall (71), and Spring (72)—is a series of varyingly successful but uniformly fascinating investigations into whether filmmaking can serve as an adequate metaphor for thought itself. (Winter and Spring are especially superb on this front.) There’s also the willfully slight, sexually explicit curio The Gaze (77), which, per John Gianvito, endeavors to be a movie about sex that “would be perceived not as erotic nor pornographic,” but instead winds up being probably the most obtuse, self-consciously metaphysical porno ever made.

The Authentic Trial of Carl-Emmanuel Jung

But the film that left the strongest impression after Anthology’s retrospective, and the one that best encapsulates the sensibility manifest throughout these diverse works, is October in Madrid (67), which Hanoun (in voiceover) describes as the byproduct of “3000 meters of film and a borrowed camera.” It amounts to a radically personal record of failure in filmmaking, freely and movingly capturing the myriad impasses and missed opportunities that characterize life in any artistic vocation, let alone one as fundamentally industrial as cinema. A diary film, a travelogue, a 16mm mosaic of fragments of movies that could have been: October in Madrid is all of these things. If one is willing to indulge Hanoun’s monomania for metacinema, the film makes for provocative viewing, with beautiful, casually composed images all along the way.

The film’s opening shot establishes Hanoun’s aesthetic concerns and strategies: a long take of a woman applying makeup and taking a phone call within a tight close-up reminiscent of Warhol’s Screen Tests or his film portraits of Edie Sedgwick. Hanoun then goes on to outline the reason for his being in Madrid—namely, a passionless gig shooting a “commercial short” that thankfully falls apart upon his arrival in the Spanish capital. Hanoun parlays the production’s collapse into another project, a spendthrift portrait of a woman named Carmen—but again, it’s not long before Hanoun’s actress drops out of the project and the listless auteur finds himself out on the street searching for a new star. He pauses along the way to film a group of bandoleros (proto-hipsters if ever there were some), observe people strolling in the park, visit filmmaker Luis García Berlanga at his home (a remarkable sequence in which voice and image drift out of synch, as if wandering away from each other), take in an obligatory mod dance party, and check out the gargantuan sets left over from the production of Anthony Mann’s 1964 The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Hanoun also meets with actors and prospective crew members for the film(s) to come, including an interview with the young woman who serves as Hanoun’s assistant and spiritual guide, Nadia. She opines: “I don’t think a film can be linear . . . There’s simultaneity [in film as in the process of thought].” This notion captures something of Hanoun not just as a filmmaker but as a thinker. (And for Hanoun, these two roles are seldom if ever distinct, as with Michel Lonsdale’s pensive filmmakers in Winter and Fall, men for whom the minor obstacles of their profession serve to symbolize their tumultuous inner lives.) “We are not yet capable of introspection in cinema,” Hanoun declares at one point, and his filmmaking sought to discover the forms by which such a thing would be possible. Hanoun’s cinema is unapologetically lofty in its epistemological ambitions, but his best films juxtapose this impulse with openly personal content, warming up material that might otherwise have been too abstruse to take seriously. Such is the case with October in Madrid, where talk of subjectivity and the convolutions of thought is accompanied by rich documentation of the places and people that helped to generate them.

October in Madrid

Though Hanoun spent much of his career representing mental operations and psychic unrest as the practice of filmmaking, October in Madrid is singularly dense with traces of life outside the mind. It might best be characterized as “a film about making a film about one’s inability to make a film,” yet it nevertheless manages to touch upon something tangible and human amid its playful self-reflexivity. It is a near-masterpiece for anyone who is on intimate terms with the feeling of failure.

October in Madrid screened at Anthology Film Archives as part of its Marcel Hanoun retrospective from May 29 to June 5.

I haven’t been by the last remaining Kim’s Video since word of its imminent closure arrived this year with the spring flowers. In point of fact, the store on First Avenue, the last redoubt of an empire which once covered Manhattan from stem to stern and even straddled the Hudson, has never held much interest for me—I believe the most recent purchase that I made there was a copy of Something Weird Video’s double-bill DVD of Joe Sarno’s Sin in the Suburbs and The Swap and How They Make It, sometime in 2010. I was, I suppose, part of the problem.

The Swap and How They Make It

In some small way, however, I was also a part of the Kim’s story. I was an assistant manager at the chain’s location at 85 Avenue A in the East Village, up until a week before its closing in fall of 2004, almost 10 years ago. The Avenue A store had first opened in 1987, when the side business in video rentals that Korean businessman Youngman Kim—I never knew anyone to call him anything other than “Mr. Kim”—had started in his dry cleaning enterprise just up the block became popular enough to demand a storefront of its own. (The beginnings of what would become the legendary Kim’s collection were assembled by Matt Morello, a film student.) It was the first Kim’s Video, and the first to go—its passage was noted in a New York Times piece headlined “The Customer Was Always Right? Not at Kim’s Video on Avenue A,” which began “Some call the shop’s heyday a ‘reign of terror.’ Some say the employees were ‘haughty’ and ‘hostile.’” This was my first real job in New York City, and the best job that I have ever had.

In the decade that followed the decease of Avenue A, Kim’s locations folded one after another—the Bleecker Street “Kim’s Underground,” the Broadway and 113th Street store in Morningside Heights, convenient to Columbia University, and in 2008, the “Mondo” flagship at 6 St. Mark’s Place. It should be noted that the boundlessly self-pitying Kim wasn’t forced out of his citadel. He owned the five-story building—former address of the New St. Mark’s Baths, the setting of Andy Milligan’s 1965 Vapors—but sold it to move a streamlined inventory into the smaller First Avenue storefront. You might ask why, upon seeing that the video store business model was endangered, Mr. Kim didn’t repurpose some of the square footage in this prime piece of real estate as, say, Williamsburg’s Videology later did. That would be a very good question. Anyways, the First Avenue Kim’s was really no replacement for Mondo at all, for it was never in the video rental business. Mondo’s 55,000-piece collection—including the absorbed Avenue A catalog—was shipped off to Salemi, Sicily, to a “Centro Kim” that had been readied to receive it, a boondoggle documented in a 2012 Village Voice piece by Karina Longworth. (At present, it would appear that the vaunted Centro Kim is acting as a shelter for stray dogs.)

While the First Avenue Kim’s was but a shadow of its former self, its expiry has nevertheless inspired a round of media eulogies. New York Magazine’s Bedford + Bowery site held a wake/oral history, in which former employees and customers swapped stories from their time with the chain. I was invited to contribute, but demurred—it’s an admirable piece of work and all, but I’m not in the habit of giving my clicks to somebody else, gratis. The inevitable New York Times obit depicts Mr. Kim suffering from much the same malaise, engendered by a world that expects to be entertained for free: “‘I am the loser,’ he said. ‘Netflix is the winner.’”

The closure of Kim’s is part of an ongoing systemized denuding of brick-and-mortar businesses dealing in media in New York City. This extends even to movie theaters—see my piece on the cinema houses of Queens, from a couple weeks back—and especially to video stores, once as common as the passenger pigeon, and now near to sharing that noble bird’s fate. Since the last days of Mondo Kim’s, I’ve seen one regular video store after another give up the ghost—World of Video on Greenwich Avenue in the West Village in 2012 and, earlier this year, Photoplay in Greenpoint, a far better store than Videology in its prime. These businesses just can’t pay the rents in today’s New York—and it is doubtful that their employees could either.

The King of Comedy

My job history in the months after I arrived in New York City was not auspicious. I’d put in some time working for a since-defunct Franco-American film festival in New York and Provence and, upon returning stateside, had managed precisely two shifts at a frozen yogurt chain that hoped to imitate the success of the then-ascendant Tasti D-Lite—showing up for my third, I was told that I didn’t have “the right attitude,” and sent on my way. When my friend called to tell me that she’d seen a “For Hire” sign on the vitrine of 85 Ave. A, I was employed as a foot courier—the same job that Rupert Pupkin has in The King of Comedy—my daily wages just enough to keep me in street meat. (I’d applied at the Blockbuster Video that then existed at Broadway and 10th, but no dice.) I hightailed it up to the store from Red Hook, where I was then living in a jerry-rigged plywood “loft” created by a Hungarian ceramic artist who’d decided to save rent on her studio/living space by taking in boarders. (I eventually moved out under a cloud of acrimony, after she’d left me a lengthy note the tenor of which was that, yes, I lacked the right attitude.) Not a week later I was behind the counter at Kim’s, learning the archaic program through which you called up customer accounts and checked titles out of the library, on a computer that would’ve had trouble running Oregon Trail. As long as I live, I will always remember the first movie in the system, arranged by reference number, whose title I would have occasion to look at maybe a million times during my tenure, highlit by a cursor every time I rang up a rental. That movie was called A Cum Fucking Whore Named Kimberly.¹

My attitude was not a problem at Avenue A, where surliness was part of the uniform—in the space of six weeks, my attitude had even improved, and I had rocketed up the ranks to the post of assistant manager, thanks in large part to my aggressive, enthusiastic expansion of the Auteurs section. (I added “André de Toth.”) The concurrent pay raise kicked my salary up to the princely sum of $6.00, paid weekly in a crisp white envelope, cash on the barrelhead. On a 40-hour week, that meant take-home pay of $240, and astonishing as this now may seem, this was somehow enough to live off of in New York City, thanks to my being possessed of a young person’s ability to contently live like an animal. I was sustained by an affordable cheese slice across the street, twofer drinks specials at Opaline, a neighboring basement bar whose claim to fame was their underwear dance parties, and 99-cent, 16-ounce Hollandias—a pissy Heineken knockoff lager—at the bodega on the way home. Immediately above me in the chain of command was a fellow named Steven Oddo, perhaps best known as the rail-thin young man who carves the word “WAR” into his chest at the beginning of 1992’s War Is Menstrual Envy, a film by ex-Mondo employee Nick Zedd, who in the Bedford + Bowery piece refers to Mr. Kim as “a petty business tycoon and tinhorn dictator.”² This connection might not mean very much to you, but it did to me—as a kid frequenting Video Vault in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia, where my mother lived, I’d worked my way through the entire Zedd filmography, and now here I was, brushing elbows with fame! (White Reindeer director Zach Clark, a former Video Vault employee, has written a few words for the departed institution in his eulogy for Something Weird Video founder Mike Vraney.)

I later learned that Alex Ross Perry, a filmmaker who turns up in all of these Kim’s pieces with depressing inevitability, had worked with Mr. Oddo on the sales floor at Mondo after the death of Avenue A, and that our marvelous mentor had exposed us to many of the same films: Florida exploitation maven Barry Mahon’s maladroit 1970 stab at a children’s picture, Jack and the Beanstalk; a pair of TV movies (Bill and Bill: On His Own) in which Mickey Rooney portrayed a mentally retarded adult named Bill Sackter; and, above all, William Edwards’s 1969 Dracula (The Dirty Old Man). Perry, who left Mondo during its “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic period,” belonged to the last graduating class of Kim’s alums, who through the years are a distinguished company. Their number includes Garrett Klahn of Texas Is the Reason (Ave. A), whose “Nickel Wound” I spent much of 1997 getting emo to in a Mazda 323 hatchback, and Hangover auteur Todd Phillips (Mondo), whose dismissal for lying down on the job, detailed in the Bedford + Bowery piece, sounds remarkably similar to my own.³ Apparently Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs also worked at Underground at some point—I remember that the page for her account in the Avenue A system said something startlingly vile in the Notes section. (This was essentially a space for clerks to leave shit-talk about customers for co-workers to see. It was something of a sport to keep a straight face while ringing someone up when you’d just pulled up a page calling them a “PIG FUCKER.”) Perry’s Mondo classmates were cinematographer Sean Price Williams—who was responsible for the hiring of documentarian/ gadfly Robert Greene—as well as actor Kate Lyn Sheil, and Michael M. Bilandic, whose Hellaware will be opening next month at Cinema Village and who, disconcertingly, is the first person I can remember ever recognizing my name as a byline when I was renting something or other.

War Is Menstrual Envy

That people gravitated to Kim’s is no mystery. It was the best reasonably attainable cinephile job in New York. You could watch and re-watch while you were on the clock, and delude yourself into thinking that this was some recompense for the inhuman pay, because you were getting to make up for it in accrued cultural capital. Time at work wasn’t wasted, the justification went, if you’d been watching Linda Blair in Roller Boogie (79). In fact, I’m not entirely certain that this isn’t true. Avenue A had the additional appeal of not being under the direct supervision of Mr. Kim and the front office, which was headquartered in the Mondo megaplex—a bit like living in the same building as your landlord—and this allowed such amenities as the hour-before-quitting-time beer. About an eight-minute walk from Mondo, it nevertheless had the feeling of being a frontier outpost.

New York City’s loss of 55,000 titles to a Sicilian backwater is tragic—one of the many examples of Mr. Kim’s disastrous, ill-considered, and short-sighted decision-making—but not intolerable. What’s worse is the dwindling and disappearance of the clerk caste that goes with the passing of the video store. Some folks made a career out of it, and this bestowed on them a sort of regality in their chosen workplace. For others, it was a flexible, low-stress way to make a little steady under-the-table cash—I think of the Canadians living illegally in the States, or one wastrel co-worker who regaled us with tales of his other job, fisting guys out on Long Island for cash. For still others, it was a way station en route to the next thing, a chance to orient yourself with regards to art that you knew you wanted to have some kind of professional relationship with, even if you weren’t certain what exactly that relationship was going to be. Nothing has emerged that can serve in the stead of this kind of transitional job—it’s either indentured internship servitude or the white-collar working week, which doesn’t lend itself to play, or offer aspirational space.  

The clerk was a cultural gatekeeper on the intimate, local, village, Employee’s Picks level—since supplanted by the algorithm, which keeps taste safely within self-defined limits, or the voted-by-committee Best List. Once awe-inspiring men and women, the clerks were a sort of first line of defense against dilettantism, inspiring humility in those willing to learn it, conferring knowledge on those who proved themselves thirsty for it. I am, of course, idealizing this transaction, but when I was young, I can remember wanting desperately to win the respect of the people behind the counter, whose encyclopedic genius was seemingly boundless and who, some of them, had attained the venerable age of 24, with all the wisdom that came with it. This humbling fear seems to me a good thing—it’s impossible for me to imagine a formative experience entirely free of this intimidation, in which inexperience can be masked by search-engine quick-draw and the protection of an online persona.

Dracula (The Dirty Old Man)

When I eventually found myself on the other side of the counter, I had another experience entirely—the acquisition of a sense of status, which up to then my life in New York City had been seriously lacking. For better or worse, the very layout of a Kim’s store demanded interface with the clerks beyond shoveling money across the counter. The cataloguing system, an ongoing collective improvisation undertaken by a revolving door cast of employees, cubbyholed the collection into an infinity of categories and sub-categories. This was not designed to serve the needs of a customer to find “exactly what they know they’re already looking for,” as Perry put it to me during a recent discussion of the store’s end of days. Instead:

All the Kim’s locations were idiosyncratically organized, and by virtue of the confusing nature of the store, every employee was placed in a curatorial position of delineating the seemingly boundless options. And giving the employee that much power fundamentally annoys some people. When you have to walk in a store and say "Where is this?" instead of being able to find it in the Comedy section puts people on edge, unless they’re the sort of person who wants that experience . . . The specificity of clerks at Kim’s being different and having a different attitude comes from the fact that they are guarding material, which makes them seemingly better than other people, or seem like they think they’re better.

The money, as I think I’ve made very clear, was chump change, but the prestige of being a Kim’s video clerk was worth a price above rubies. This was sergeant’s chevrons, the doorman’s uniform in The Last Laugh, a status symbol, my first. Before I got the Kim’s gig, I had not been doing too well on my own and at loose ends in a new city. Afterwards . . . well, my life was still objectively horrible by almost any standard, but I felt I’d established a beachhead in New York, socially and otherwise. My circle of friends expanded, and I had female companionship commensurate to my new position. I still own and treasure a makeshift birthday card—done in marker on a sheet of lined notebook paper—presented to me by my co-workers on the occasion of my 23rd birthday, which I spent on the job. It has a lucky penny taped to it.

It seems to me now that my time at Kim’s, a lucky penny that I carry with me everywhere, was the closest that I came to experiencing the New York City—specifically the Lower East Side—of my imagination, in part because I was still rather new to it all. This New York City of the mind was a place of grandiose squalor and decay, where the filth acted as a kind of creative ferment. The former was certainly on display at Avenue A—I remember having to nudge the occasional puddle of puke left on our threshold the night before into the gutter with a bucket of water, and a whole host of Morlocks passing through the swinging saloon doors of the adult section. (By then the Internet had begun to chip away at the over-the-counter trade in smut, the mom-and-pop video store’s one dependable moneymaker, so most of the pornography enthusiasts were either Luddites or born before the Korean War.) We even got remnants of New York’s days as a smut capital—one regular, often happily squiffed, was a former hardcore queen who, under the nom de porn “Helen Madigan,” had done battle with John Holmes’s notorious, loofah-like schlong in the far-off Seventies. She was one of the more well-adjusted customers, though a whole parade of psychopathologies came marching through the door.⁴ As for the creative ferment, I felt like there was still enough proximity to it that I could at least perceive what I’d missed from a slight remove. One regular at the store had been the drummer for John Lurie’s The Lounge Lizards; another had been an intimate of Arthur Russell. We even got Gustav Mahler’s grandson.

Of course, the New York that I was thinking about was over long before I arrived, if indeed it had ever existed. As I understand it, some date the decease of the neighborhood as far back as the day that The Gap opened a store on St. Mark’s Place in 1988, the year after Avenue A Kim’s opened. (The first St. Mark’s location was on the second floor of the Gap building.) Come 2003, Friday and Saturday nights brought out stampedes of horrible bros living that Jägerbomb, Coyote Ugly life, lurching their way towards notorious bro-hole Nice Guy Eddie’s at Houston and A, which today has, disconcertingly, been priced out by more upscale bro-holes. Most of the notable regulars were of another order than that mentioned above—we got Shannyn Sossamon, then at peak intermediary-level fame, Sam Rockwell and his father (very nice!), and Paul Banks, front man of then-band du jour Interpol, part of the Return of Rock which did ever so much for re-building the NYC Brand. (The Strokes’ Albert Hammond Jr., I will note, also worked at Kim’s, though he surely didn’t need to.)

Now it’s all gone, gone the way of Tammany Hall and the Mudd Club and Misshapes (lol). And like all of cultural history, the story of Kim’s is bound to replay itself sometime soon as an entirely unnecessary talking-heads documentary—maybe even a Netflix original!—in which The Folks Who Remember When trot out their over-rehearsed anecdotes for posterity. Should my ever-spreading, ruinously lined, rosacea-speckled face appear in The Story of Kim’s Video, probably directed by someone who’s a current sophomore at Tisch, take pity on me—I lost the job that I wanted most. 

1.  In the course of editing this piece, it was pointed out to me that the title of the film is in fact A Cum Sucking Whore Named Kimberly. The “S” on the box art looks a bit like a cursive “F,” and was undoubtedly entered into the system incorrectly.

2. There is something to this. Like Walter Huston’s cattle-baron potentate T.C. Jeffords in Anthony Mann’s The Furies, who printed “T.C. notes” for his employees to use on his land, Mr. Kim had his own currency, KimMoney. Christmas bonuses came, when they did, in the form of store gift certificates. And any discrepancies in the drawer were taken out of the cash envelope, down to the last penny. Perry posits that most of the famed surliness of Kim’s employees sprang from such routine minor insults: “As long as I’m being treated like a piece of shit, I might as well act like one.”

3. Mr. Kim, for reasons no one could ever fathom, insisted on opening the store at 10 a.m., despite the fact that not a single customer ever came in before noon. As one who frequently had to open the store, I can attest to this fact. I could, for example, throw on the then-newly-released Paris Hilton sex tape as background, as I did one morning, with full confidence that no one would come along to notice, much less be offended.

4. Perry, who worked on the second floor of Mondo, which did DVD sales, remembers a host of regulars:

Two guys, at least in their early seventies, who would come in. They only came in on weekends. They were the absolute worst-smelling men I’ve ever encountered. I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since. They would come in and be around for two hours. They had gigantic jeans knotted with haphazard belts. They spent lots of money, but just took such poor care of themselves. And . . . on the rental floor, everything rented came back. Being on the sales floor, I had to wonder what these homes looked like that they could sustain a weekly influx of merchandise that takes up physical space. There was another guy who we called "The Fisherman" who, 12 months of the year, would wear a rubber jacket. It would be 110 degrees and humid in July and he would come in dressed in this rubber jacket. Also, a short, rotund Asian guy who only spoke in one volume, which was quite loud. He had OCD and was afraid of pens, and he would stand very far away from the register when he came in and announce in his only voice that he needed all the pens taken away and hidden from the counter area. He really liked Louis Jourdan.

Horse Money is the long-awaited new feature from Pedro Costa, who casts Ventura (Colossal Youth) again to play a version of himself, alongside Vitalina Varela. A portion of the film previously appeared, as Costa explains, in a different form and edit in the omnibus Centro Historico. Neil Bahadur interviewed the filmmaker for FILM COMMENT at the Locarno film festival, where he won the award for best director. Horse Money screens Oct. 7 and 8 in the New York Film Festival.

How long did it take to shoot Horse Money?

Well, it was a bit erratic. Because of a lot of things. The film was supposed to include another screenwriter, a composer and actor who I met, shot with a little bit, just a few minutes. He was supposed to write two or three musical scenes. And then he died.

Oh!

It was Gil Scott-­Heron. He was a black American poet, rapper, musician, very, very active in the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, and then he did a comeback with an album. He was the father of a lot of rappers—well, politically conscious rappers. They owe everything to him. And physically, he looked very similar to Ventura. One day I was in New York and I asked a friend who knew him, and I said: “It would be great to have them talk!” Because Ventura doesn’t speak any English, and Gil couldn’t speak Portuguese. So I showed him my films, and he called me and said: “I like this. Let’s meet.” He was playing in Lisbon so I went to meet him, and I proposed [my idea], and he said yes.

He was supposed to write what you see today in the film—probably the montage with the people in the neighborhood, this voyage through the night. That first version was supposed to be written by him, with music by him, and shot perhaps in the same place... Or perhaps not. But it would have had him acting. That is what the first version was supposed to be like. But then he died. That was about two years ago. That was the first blow. So then I attacked the elevator sequence, which is quite big and difficult in itself. We shot that for three to four months.

Your last feature-length film was Ne Change Rien. Was making that any kind of influence on the greater musical element in this film, compared to your previous narrative works?

I think when I thought about Scott-­Heron, I was in New York with Ne Change Rien, around the festival or something. That was the moment when I started talking to people about the music from the New York scene. And then I remembered that, especially with the African­-American poets, the lost poets, there were a lot of very, very strong political rappers working in the Sixties and Seventies in New York and Chicago. I like that very much. Between poetry and rap and music. Rock, funk, books. Scott­-Heron was a writer too: he wrote a great novel called Vulture. I thought of something like that—that the film could be a long rap, and Scott­-Heron could do that. I thought we could get him, and Ventura would sing and Scott­-Heron would say poems. Because Ventura likes to sing, and in Colossal Youth there’s not really that chance.

I remember you mentioned yesterday [at the press conference] how you’re only just starting to like the movie now. Is it usually that way with your films? Or is it specific to this one?

I think I like this more now. I only like some of the others, or small moments in the other films. This one came out so tense—I see a kind of tension that was very difficult to get. That’s because of Ventura too. Some people can do it like that [snaps fingers] like Straub. Well, not like that [snaps fingers again] because they work a lot. But even with the amount of work that we put in the films, and we work really very hard, it’s always difficult to get the... tight tissue—like a nervous body. It’s Ventura’s body, nerves, hands, eyes. It came out exactly how I thought he could be in the film. But that’s him. I do say, “Stand here, look there,” but the words, almost every movement, the timing, everything is him.

And you had Ventura and Vitalina write their own dialogue on the day, each day?

Yeah. That’s the thing that’s the same as before.

How much writing do you do prior to shooting?

Oh, I do it everyday, but... I understood it recently: for me, the secret is not to waste too much time with the same dialogue. When I have a thing I want them to say, or that they want to say, they need to say, we should find the form first, or work on that form. Horse Money has a different rhythm than Colossal Youth, where I did a lot of takes. [I did on] this one too, but in a different way. This was more for the music, for a certain tempo, a certain way of saying things, and looking at things. Colossal Youth was more theatrical, let’s say.

I understand.

It’s a stupid word, but Colossal Youth was a little bit more rehearsed, refined, than this one. Horse Money was a bit more chaotic and physical too. And a bit more mysterious than Colossal Youth, I think. There’s more, “What... the fuck is this? Where is this?” You know, people ask me: “What is that? A hospital? A Roman theater?” But Ventura says it in the film: “I know a bunch of hospitals.” Hospitals, prisons, rooms, it’s all the same, it’s always underground. It’s not one—it’s millions of hospitals and corridors and doors, so there’s no match. It’s a film where nothing matches. The doors are always different, but they are always hospitals, prisons, with the same sound, the same heaviness.

This film is much faster paced than any of your previous movies.

It was something I wanted to try, and say “Can I do this?” Sometimes I can, sometimes I fail, but it has the same coherence. I think I said it yesterday [at the press conference]: “You do not have the time to think.” And that’s what so great about those older films. Karlson, Fleischer, all of the B-­guys. Or like Buñuel, for instance. Not to compare myself, but there’s something that forces you to catch your breath.

How different is the “Sweet Exorcist” sequence in Centro Historico to the edit in Horse Money?

A little bit. Well, quite a bit. People won’t see the differences. There are a lot of cuts. There are things missing. In Horse Money it’s a bit shorter, there are two or three new bits of dialogue, there is a moment in the woods that is placed somewhere else in the finished film. It’s quite different. It’s more musical too. The same piece of music arranged differently.

I got the invitation for [Centro Historico], and because I liked my partners I said: “Yes, but I’m shooting.” They said “Well, can we include this?” and I said “Are you sure? Because this is an elevator and you want something about the history of Portugal.” [Laughs] They said “We don’t care.” 

I remember you mentioning that you were going to make your next film with Vitalina.

Yeah. It’s very good, her name. If you go to the dictionary, it means “full of life.” It’s Latin. Anyway, it’s a recent friendship—we met not even two years ago. I think she can be one of our partners for a lot of things. I would like to do something now with a woman, but I don’t know what yet. It’s not even an idea yet, really more of a desire. But we’ll see, because she has to write it. Well, “write it,” “tell me,” whatever. She has to tell me things, and want to tell me things, and I don’t know if she can do that yet. But we’ll see.

Yesterday at the press conference you said: “You can either ask about the horse, or the money,” and then proceeded to talk about how the movie costed 100,000 euros. What did you mean when you said, “You can ask about the horse”?

[Laughs] Well, because we could talk about the horse, or we could talk about the money. Back home I would prefer to talk about the money. Really, about the money. How much, how do you do films, what can you do today, who is making the good stuff? What’s waste, what’s not, how should you run your crew, how does a film crew work today? Things like that. That’s the money part of the title. “Horse” is everything else. I’m making them like this with these kinds of people, which means they have all the time. They’re free, available, professional. And we are three or four, never more. So I’m not depending on co­productions or anything like that, from Switzerland or France.

It’s all from Portugal.

Yeah. It’s a very small project, really. All we have are sandwiches. We get money every month for all of us. We really didn’t buy anything. Just some things for the elevator.

What about the tank scene?

We called the army. We had to pay for gas. [laughs] And two guys came with the tank to drive it, so we paid for one night. It wasn’t much. Five hundred euros, something like that, which is huge for us. Everything else is fake. The guns are fake—they’re just toy guns.

The money thing is important. It runs through the film. It’s not a metaphor. Ventura talks about it all the time, his pension, his salary, his wages. He’s very dependent on money. Because you think a lot about money when you don’t have it. So the film is also very afraid of running out of money, all of the time. And Ventura, he’s always afraid of losing the contract. Like myself, losing the contract for me is to lose the films, my contract with the film and the people involved with it. And that contract has to be, of course, morally decent. If not, the film will be indecent, like 90 percent of the films today.

In my country, everywhere I see more and more credits—credits that are longer than the films. All the logos, it’s crazy—yesterday I saw a film that had 700 logos. This foundation, the other foundation. Here and Switzerland and Italy—for a seven-minute film. [laughs] The credits were longer than the film. And it’s a bit stupid, because I think you get lost that way. You know, when you get lost in the logos! [laughs] It’s not nice. But if you get lost in the elevator or in the story, that’s good.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Listen Up Philip will undoubtedly garner plenty of attention from critics and audiences for its distinctive, subdued humor and the pleasure it takes in expounding upon its characters, relishing their faults and shortcomings. The film is beautifully shot with saturated, muted dark colors, with suede jackets and retro fonts and book covers rounding out the stylized visuals. The characters are isolated in the fetishistic bubble of theirartistic milieu through their aesthetics and the rich, literary language of its narrator. Philip, a thirtysomething author, misanthrope, and narcissist, gloats over the eloquent verbal abuse he directs at the people around him, perceiving himself to be a larger-than-life personality while remaining completely oblivious to anything that doesn’t concern him directly.

Philip’s nasty antics are immensely amusing, but does the portrayal amount to a glorification of his behavior and egocentrism? FILM COMMENT discussed the question of romanticizing the author, and other aspects of the film, with the director at Locarno. Listen Up Philip screens Oct. 9 and 10 in the 52nd New York Film Festival.

To what extent do you relate to the characters of Listen Up Philip?

The three characters through whom the scenes play out—Philip, Ashley, and Ike—are all equally autobiographical in some way. Obviously, it’s easy to look at me and Philip and say he is an autobiographical character. But the three characters all have different aspects of my personality, each equally well-represented. It was interesting to take Philip, with his youthful sense of rage and entitlement; Ashley with her quiet dedication, doing her work and being as good as she can; and Ike, a dissatisfied, jaded idea of what it means to do well—all of which are things I was struggling with when I was writing the screenplay. When we were rehearsing, Elisabeth [Moss] and Jason [Schwartzman] asked a lot about what brought these two together. It was an important question—we are so clear about what is bringing them apart. Eventually, we realized something that was in the script all along: that the two of them are incredibly similar. We knew that Ike and Philip were similar, but Elisabeth realized that the script was just full of moments where Ashley acted as mean and miserable as her boyfriend. That is what made them such a perfect couple. We don’t get to see that. But we know that she has that in her. And I realized that was because these characters were created from the same place. And I hoped that by watching them play off one another I will learn how to balance these different sides of myself.

Philip is a bastard, but he’s also very funny to watch. Do you think that, for this reason, the audience might enjoy his narcissism and general meanness?

Exactly. David Foster Wallace talks about how he wants to do something complex and challenging from a literary standpoint, but he always focuses on it being entertaining—it’s supposed to be easy to read. This is important if you are trying to do something that is emotionally or aesthetically challenging. You can’t forget that people are going to have to enjoy watching it. As much as I love long, slow, arduous cinema, I’m obviously in the minority: when I go to see six-hour movies in New York, it’s not crowded. I want to make something that is more superficially enjoyable to anybody who just wants to sit down and watch a movie. It’s my responsibility to what I want to do, and so the character has to be entertaining. Jason is a really nice guy, and he is really funny, so he makes Philip what he needs to be, which is someone who you actually enjoy. If an intense, brooding actor like Sean Penn played Philip, he would be a monster, he would be horrifying. No one would enjoy watching the movie, and when he is being funny, you wouldn’t laugh. Having the character be someone who is gentle, funny, and entertaining in their brutality is also true to life. The people that I know are like that. Very mean and miserable people, but they are just so fun to be around, because they are so mean and miserable.

There is a moment when the audience stops laughing and becomes aware that maybe they shouldn’t like him that much.

I love that. In the commentary to Boogie Nights, P. T. Anderson talks about the part where William H. Macy shoots himself. Up to that point, you think the movie is really funny, and then all of the sudden, you are watching a different movie. I wanted to do that, and the structure of the film lends itself to that gear shift. At the end of my last film [The Color Wheel, 11], I wanted people to barely remember that the movie was funny. Which is not a comedy failure. I was just trying to sugarcoat a very bitter package so that you realize that although you may have thought you were getting into a comedy, and you may have consistently treated the first 20 minutes as comedy, by the end what you actually got was a pretty melancholy drama of these characters, one of whom happens to be fairly funny.

Do you think Philip is a misogynist or just a misanthrope in general?

I would definitely say he’s a misanthrope. I don’t think he’s a misogynist, because he loves women, and he says he loves women, and he clearly is obsessed with them.

But many misogynists say they love women.

That’s true. Well, I guess it’s true. But I think he really does love women. It was important to me and it was important while working with the actresses. The women in this film are all much stronger, much smarter, and much more capable than either Ike or Philip—they are two men in their thirties and sixties who are incapable of learning, growing, and changing. Each of the women in the film learns, grows, and changes in the span of her story. It’s really important to me that the film clearly be the story about two horrible men and their unsuccessful attempts to defeat these women, all of whom emerge triumphant in the end.

So why is every one of them somehow unable to leave? Ashley only manages to break up with Philip after he leaves her, Melanie stays with her father through the whole movie though she resents him, and Yvette is very attracted to Philip even though he makes her miserable.

Well, they do—Melanie just gets in her car and drives off. At the end, she just walks out of the situation. That is why we have the line where he has explained to her what he wants her to do, and she replies: “I can’t believe you think this is your decision to make.” I think this an important line. It’s one of the last spoken lines in the film—it was important to us to set it up right at the end—because Ike keeps thinking he’s making the decisions, but in fact, it’s never him. The women are making the decisions for both of them. To this day, we—me and Jason, on behalf of the film—know that this character thinks he’s in control. We want you to know that we both know that he’s not.

And the only reason I could give for that is that it’s just what I’ve seen in people I meet. I’m fascinated by their dynamics. I’ve seen charismatic, talented, but deeply cruel and miserable men having relationships with women, and I don’t understand why they are unable to leave them. When I see a couple like that, all I can think of is what their life is like when they get home. What could she possibly be getting out of this dynamic? It’s fascinating to me, so I wanted to set up three of those dynamics and ask that question over and over. I still don’t quite understand it, but I do connect with it a little bit more now, thanks to the actresses, who explained the ways that they related to what the characters were going through. I don’t think it’s great or cool—I think it’s sad, but I definitely think it’s real. And I think it happens a lot more than most people are aware of.

The trope of brilliant but antisocial artists is very common in film, but why does it only ever apply to men?

It’s funny you say that, because at one point I thought very briefly how it would really be interesting if all the genders in this movie were switched. The male novelists that I was inspired by, both in their work and in their personalities—raconteurs like Norman Mailer, or miserable drunken bastards like Richard Yates—that sort of character doesn’t really exist as a woman. There are no 65-year-old, hard-drinking, miserable, angry women. I thought that maybe it would be interesting to see a young woman come to an older female icon who would have to have been a trailblazer in her field. But I think the angry young man trope just exists in our collective consciousness because it exists in the world, and I think the reason the female version of it doesn’t exist is because it just doesn’t exist. I meet many male filmmakers and female filmmakers, and the women are very confident and happy with themselves. The men just seem so tormented and miserable. If I knew a lot of miserable women, maybe the film would have been pulled into that direction. But the only miserable women I know are miserable because they’re in shitty relationships with horrible guys. Otherwise, they’re all quite confident, and very, very talented.

Is it simply less acceptable for women to be drunk and horrible?

I mean, I would accept it. I just think it might strike people as peculiar. If you’re talking about an angry young man or an angry old man, it’s your version of something that does exist. If you’re talking about an angry young woman and an angry old woman, you are inventing. I don’t want to be the person who gets blamed for inventing a type of miserable, hateful old woman, something that spawns some sort of a conversation, or be in a situation where someone like Louis C.K. says: “What makes you feel like you can write women from this perspective?” I don’t want people asking: “What makes you think you have the authority to put this experience in her life?” The next movie that I’ll make—I’ve said that this is my “miserable men” movie—is my “miserable women” movie. It’s just a different kind of misery.

Do you think creativity is fetishized in our culture?

Definitely. That is why it was important to me to make sure that we never actually see Philip creating anything. You know, it seems very romantic—you see a movie like (500) Days of Summer, where the main character is an architect, drawing on the walls; he gets wrapped up in his passion.  Whereas my personal experience of having written, directed, and finished three movies is just that it’s really boring. Obviously, filmmaking has this really fun component in the middle. But the experience of sitting down and writing is both boring and incredibly unsexy. And that’s why I didn’t want to do a movie about a guy who has writer’s block and who struggles. I wanted to do something that didn’t really focus on the process, because it’s something that people talk about or fetishize. But in fact, my process is just sitting at my desk, my feet up, staring out of the window, getting one paragraph at a time. There’s nothing cinematic about that.

Can a writer ever really go on holiday?

It’s an interesting idea—what do you make of the time when you’re not writing? If you’re a writer and you don’t do anything for six months, are you still working? If you go two years without making a movie, are you on holiday or are you still an active filmmaker? Because, if you’re not working, what are you doing? Well, in the case of filmmaking, you could be prevented from working by circumstances, but no writer will be prevented from working for two years. There is no way for them to say: “I’m ready to do another book, but I just can’t put my money together, find the time.” If you’re a writer, you can literally do exactly what you want to do, every single minute you have access to your brain or something to write down, and that’s what makes that a fascinating profession for me—as someone who doesn’t do it. With Philip, what is important is not that he’s a writer, but that he’s a lonely person. Writing is something you can only do by yourself. Writing and painting. Some things are done entirely in isolation.

Despite its being a kind of mantra for today’s worker, it’s actually a privilege to be able to mix pleasure and work—to do what you love.

I agree. It is a real luxury. I get really excited when I see people on the subway reading anything. I love watching people enjoying the fruits of the labors of people who do not work as hard as them. I love going to a multiplex and seeing Lucy or Planet of the Apes, surrounded by people who waited their whole week to come and luxuriate for two hours in this thing that the people who have a luxurious lifestyle have created. They spend money to come and watch something that a screenwriter could have written on vacation, they watch actresses who are rich and famous and only have to work 12 weeks a year. I love watching people come and support that. I really enjoy when something crosses over and, like I was saying earlier, just becomes entertaining, becomes something that can be enjoyed totally. No blue-collar worker on the subway would ever hold one of Ike’s books.

What would you say the biggest influences on your work have been?

It depends from film to film. In The Color Wheel, I became really obsessed with Philip Roth, whose influence is all over the film, and it’s all over Listen Up Philip as well, not just because he inspired it, but because now he’s just in me. I’ve internalized the lessons that I’ve learned from reading.

He is supposed to be unfilmable.

He definitely is unfilmable. His books are all internal and what makes them exciting isn’t the scenarios or the dialogue, it’s the flourishing language which you can’t really capture. What I've tried to do in these last two films is not filming him, but just internalizing what his work is about and putting it into practice. Richard Yates also really inspired the last two things I did. He is someone else who is unfilmable. The language in his books is just so perfect and so dense. Or maybe he is an influence just because he is so unflinchingly depressing. People can call it cynical and miserable writing, but to me, it is writing that embraces the fact that sometimes, things are just bad. It’s something I’m really inspired by. In cinema, I have a hundred heroes whose work is always there, but I’d never thought I’d be as inspired by a Woody Allen movie as I was with Husbands and Wives.

It’s my favorite.

It’s my favorite too. I couldn’t stop watching it or showing it to everybody who was working on my movie.

At the time, it was not so well received.

No, I think people were just ready to hate. But it was a hit, because people wanted to go see it. It made more money than a lot of his other films. I’ve always enjoyed his films, but I would have never thought that one of them would become the biggest influence on anything I ever did. It felt like a good one to be it, because even in his own body of work, he never really seems to have revisited anything like that. So I feel like being inspired by that is something of an anomaly.

You’ve had some criticism regarding the use of a narrator in Listen Up Philip, which is supposedly a mark of bad writing. Isn’t it funny that after decades of modernist, avant-garde, and experimental films challenging representative practices, there are still debates about whether something can or cannot be cinematic?

It’s pretty unbelievable that in 2014 it’s still an issue. I guess everybody heard it at some film school somewhere and it really made an impression on them because it sounds right. I challenge anybody to watch Barry Lyndon in a movie theater, on film, and say it’s not a cinematic film because of the narrator. It’s surely one of the most beautiful and most cinematically fully realized films anyone has ever seen. And it also has a narrator—which no one really complains about. I think that what we tried to do with the aggressively handheld, very present sense of camera is very cinematic, with the camera two feet away from an actor’s face, capturing the emotion. I would hope that just because there is a narrator it does not take away from how much cinema there is.