A story can feel entirely different depending on whether you know the ending in advance; that’s implicit in the nature of tragedy, which addresses your awareness of watching the inexorable workings of the “infernal machine,” as Cocteau put it. So Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher felt like an entirely different film to me on my two viewings. The names of John E. du Pont and the Schultz brothers may well ring a bell with you (and if not, here’s a major spoiler from The New York Times).

When I first saw Foxcatcher, in Cannes this year, I knew nothing about the real-life background to the story. The film felt maddeningly elusive: I couldn’t really tell how comic the comedy was meant to be, couldn’t quite tell how unequivocally the film was meant to be read as a sports movie… In short it seemed to be one of those films that keep you asking, more than a little impatiently, “Just where is all this going?” Well, maybe I was being obtuse, or suffering from that festival fatigue that can severely numb your perceptions, but on a second viewing, with everything now seeming to point irrevocably towards the outcome, Foxcatcher felt a lot more focused and coherent, and I appreciated the film’s qualities more. And yet conversely, it become slightly less intriguing: once you know the specific incident that’s coming, Foxcatcher becomes a coherent, outcome-focused true-life drama, whereas if you don’t, then it’s something oddly fragmented and perplexing, and certainly the damnedest—most eccentric and melancholic—sports movie you’ve ever seen. I’m glad I got to see both versions, if you see what I mean.

Set in the Nineties, the film opens with Olympic gold-medalist wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) giving a glum, inert motivational speech to a group of schoolchildren, for a $20 fee; he’s standing in for for his older brother Dave, also an Olympian, and more of a star attraction. Dave (Mark Ruffalo, bulked up and bearded like Popeye’s nemesis Bluto) runs a team and is a more forceful, canny, balanced family man; whereas Mark is sullen, solitary, and inarticulate, his whole being somehow defined by lack. That lack (possibly associated, in Mark’s real life, with the early death of his father, although the film never mentions it) is only filled in by Dave, seemingly the missing part that allows him to function. Their relationship is spelled out early on by a very eloquent scene, as the brothers greet each other with an embrace that’s also a battle hold—it begins with hugs and a tender “How you doin’ buddy?” before passing through various shades of violence and tenderness. It’s a superbly choreographed and performed pas de deux in which Tatum and Ruffalo become a piece of living statuary. If there were an Academy Award for Physicality, the pair would win it hands down.

Then Mark acquires a guardian angel. A phone call summons him to meet “John E. du Pont, of the du Pont family”—the multimillionaire scion of blue-riband grandees going back to the 18th century. Mark sits waiting at the august family mansion in Pennsylvania, in a vast stately library (the sort that doesn’t seem to have many books on view), and in walks John Eleuthère du Pont himself—at which point the film’s weirdness quotient shoots up several notches. Du Pont is a strange enough character in himself—detached, stiffly courteous, yet also oddly informal, shuffling in with no ceremony in a short-sleeved shirt and announcing: “I’m a wrestling coach and I have a deep love for the sport.”

But then there’s the strangeness of Steve Carell’s performance—and the strangeness of the very fact that it’s Carell in there, entirely unrecognizable, even down to his eyes, under the prosthetics. It’s the most thorough facial transformation of a normally recognizable star—perhaps beyond Charlize Theron in Monster’s Ball, De Niro at the end of Raging Bull, Nicole Kidman in The Hours. In fact, that seems to be Kidman’s Virginia Woolf nose itself staging a comeback on Carell’s face, and the effect can be a little distracting (not least for Carell himself, who’s required to squint past it).

And yet the brilliance of Carell’s performance is that it emphasizes its own oddness all the way, along with du Pont’s. For this is a portrait of a man who might be an ordinary example of the eccentricity that accompanies wealth and privilege (the rich and powerful often coming across as all the stranger when they try to act normal). Or alternatively, du Pont’s disturbance may be far more extreme than the sort that ordinarily accompanies the assumption of entitlement. You have to reach the end of the story to know for sure.

At any rate, Mark is dazzled by du Pont’s quietly rousing talk of patriotism and Valley Forge, and agrees to sign up on Team Foxcatcher, named after the patron’s farm. He is soon in thrall to the great man, who’s determined that his protégé should see him as a father figure. For du Pont is obsessed with adulation, and with creating his own myth. In one of the film’s most excruciatingly comic moments (so effective because so dryly handled), he tells Mark: “Most of my friends will call me Eagle—Golden Eagle. Or John.” He later has himself videotaped giving a pep talk in a golden satin jacket, in front of an eagle statue and the Stars and Stripes. And, en route to an event in his private plane, he runs Mark through a speech he wants him to make, paying tribute to his noble mentor—a hilarious mantra of “Ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist!”

The drama racks up several notches when du Pont insists on adding Dave to his team—or rather, his collection. By now Mark is a changed man, traumatized or jealous that he has to share the glory, or du Pont’s attentions. Precisely what happens to erode Mark’s already damaged psyche, and precisely why he starts rebelling against du Pont, is never spelled out but left for us to piece together—a mark of narrative intelligence and restraint on the part of Miller and screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman. There’s one notable jump, and on first viewing, I wondered whether a whole chapter had been jettisoned in the edit, although I’m now inclined to think that this ellipsis is integral. It involves a fade to black, shortly after Mark’s tribute speech. Du Pont has, for the first time, been plying him with cocaine on the journey there; and now, after the jump, we can see that Mark’s body is no longer a temple, and neither is his psyche. He’s highlighted his hair, is surrounded by beer bottles, and now seems to have become an intimate personal attendant-cum-confidant to du Pont. The wrestling holds that the pair practice together now seem more sexually charged than you’d expect, even by the usual standards of male mano-a-mano tussling.

Exactly what’s going on here is left to us to gauge. But there’s certainly a powerful sense of two lonely men, neither properly grown up, responding to each other’s need, even if the playing field is hardly level. A constant theme is du Pont’s petulance and his simmering resentment of his mother Jean. She’s played as a chilly, ever-so-graciously castrating grande dame by Vanessa Redgrave (whose passionate left-wing convictions give a tart poignancy to her portrayal, the character’s regal dowdiness uncannily recalling Britain’s reigning monarch).

Mrs. du Pont shudders at wrestling as a “low” sport, while her son loathes her favored equestrian pursuits: he has his team clear away her hunting trophies, bleating contemptuously, “Horse are stupid. It’s all very silly.” Later, when mother and son finally sit down together, she asks what he intends to do with his old train set. He snorts at such fripperies: “I am leading men! I am giving America hope!” But clearly he’s a man for whom life is about turning everything he fancies into his personal train set, whether it’s buying a tank from the U.S. Army or assembling a team of blue-collar males as possessions. Which makes Foxcatcher the most explicit American film in a long time about the wealthy riding roughshod over the working class.

Inevitably, it’s the rich man, in his flamboyant weirdness, who hogs the limelight in this story, not least because Carell’s performance is so magnificently odd, both troubling and touching in its creation of a vulnerable monster. It’s far more than a catalog of tics—the quiet, ruminative “Ohhhh…”, the dead eyes, the way du Pont carries his head as if it’s a little too heavy, and the sing-song sourness of his killer line, “Did you catch the fox—Motherrrr?”* It’s a wonderful portrayal of delusion and vanity, and as the story progresses, of something more troubling. And the film very elegantly lets the strangenesses crop up, without making a big deal of them: like du Pont’s sudden appearance in a Civil War jacket, which is never commented on.

But Carell’s performance shouldn’t overshadow the less demonstrative roles. Ruffalo is solid and tender, putting some warm new inflections on the gentle-giant routine that he’s been perfecting all these years. And I fear I underrated Tatum’s achievement on first viewing. It’s the hardest thing in the world to give life to a character that’s so much about inarticulacy, interiority and repression, but the subtle, sometimes enigmatic changes that Dave goes through make this a very nuanced performance indeed.

With its leisurely pacing and the austere muted palette of Greig Fraser’s photography, this is a rich, serious film, but it doesn’t quite overcome a certain academic solemnity—you sense a rather dogged determination to be a Great American Film, not least in its earnest questioning of some of the totems of Americanness. Yet there’s plenty of subtly handled excess to hold you aghast—and whichever way you slice, I maintain that yes, it is the damnedest sports movie you’ve ever seen.

* If you will, this film’s show-stopping Milkshake Line, after There Will Be Blood’s “I drink your milkshake!”

Hiroshima Mon Amour

The Marguerite Duras retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center this month—18 years after the celebrated auteur’s death—presents an ideal opportunity to contemplate her place in the history of cinema. For while Hiroshima Mon Amour, the screenplay she wrote for Alain Resnais to direct, became an international success in 1960 (and remains a touchstone of “art cinema” to this day), the films she subsequently created on her own, beginning in 1969 with Destroy, She Said, have been alas, for the happy few.

Born Marguerite Donnadieu in 1914 in what is now Vietnam, Duras has throughout her work—47 books and 19 films—spoken constantly and above all passionately of love, in ways far more intense and idiosyncratic than normally found in cinema. Hiroshima Mon Amour has the audacity to connect the two theaters of the Second World War through the depiction of a love affair between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) in Hiroshima, the city over which the first atomic bomb was dropped. For the actress, who has come to Hiroshima to appear in a film “for Peace”) the new affair revives memories of an older one—her first, in fact, with a young German soldier in her hometown of Nevers, France, when she was a teenager during the war. 

Juxtaposing hypnotic tracking shots through postwar Hiroshima with newsreel footage of atomic bomb blasts, dramatic re-creations of the massacre, and fresh footage of the critically injured survivors, Hiroshima Mon Amour periodically flashes back to the heroine’s doomed romance with the German soldier, who was shot and killed by Allied forces on the final day of the war. Because her love for this soldier was regarded as collaboration, she was duly punished; her head shaved, she was long confined to a cellar by her parents, deeply ashamed, and fearful of retaliation from the outraged community. Eventually, she’s spirited away to Paris where she begins life anew, becoming the actress we now see in Japan.

Hiroshima Mon Amour

There is, needless to say, an imbalance between the singular death of a German soldier and the mass slaughter of Japanese civilians by the atomic bomb. But Duras’s emphasis—even at this early stage of her cinematic evolution—lies on the voices of her principal players. Throughout Hiroshima Mon Amour we hear Riva and Okada in voiceover, speaking in halting sentence fragments: he asking her questions, she carefully composing a récit of her past life and her reaction to the Hiroshima of the present. This isn’t ordinary conversation, nor is it dramatic speech of the standard “realistic” sort. It’s closer in many ways to opera, and Duras’s scrupulous choice of words coupled with her keen awareness of their aural impact reaches a crescendo in the film’s finale. “You are Hiroshima,” Riva says to her Japanese amour, to which Okada responds: “And you are Nevers—Nevers in France.” Thus individual lives are bound to the fate of nations. 

Quite heady stuff for 1960. Even more so today, when serious, formally challenging motion pictures about major modern history are virtually unknown. Duras’s interests, however, weren't historically bounded any more than they resembled "real life” as it is commonly conceived. For through her films, Duras created a world all her own, committed to exploring emotional states at their most rarefied and extreme. And while it may look to the casual observer something along the lines of the world we know, it's in actuality as abstract as a science-fiction fantasy or a surrealist dreamscape. 

Destroy, She Said unfolds in the garden of a country hotel adjoining a forest that threatens the soigné guests (Michael Lonsdale, Henri Garcin, Nicole Hiss, Catherine Sellers) in some strange, difficult-to-define way comparable to to the "something" that so unsettles the upper-crust swells in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance. Low-key in tone, it does not seem like the sort of "art film" designed to break new ground. But it does so, and by explicit intention: Duras described her text as "a book that could either be read or acted or filmed or, I always add, simply thrown away." The key word in this is "book," as literature is always primary for Duras—even in the midst of the seemingly resolutely "cinematic." It's not by accident that Lonsdale—soon to emerge as a key Duras interpreter—plays a character called "Stein." His name is derived from Duras's novel The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, the most crucial work of her entire oeuvre. 

Destroy, She Said

Written in 1964, The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein is set in a small French town called S. Thala where the title character, engaged to a man named Michael Richardson, sees her fiancé snatched away by an older woman named Anne-Marie Stretter at a country ball in “Town Beach.” This event is so emotionally overwhelming that it continues to reverberate in her life a decade later. Lol's romantic loss is a spectral coup de foudre that Duras utilizes again and again in her work, most importantly in India Song (75). Adapted from the second novel in the Lol V. Stein  series, The Vice-Consul, India Song was originally commissioned by British theater director Peter Hall. But when that stage production never materialized, India Song was made into a film, taking the form of what might be called a dance-drama. Resplendent in chic evening clothes, its actors (Delphine Seyrig, Mathieu Carrière, Claude Mann, and Lonsdale among them) move about in a lushly decorated mansion without speaking a single word. 

This isn’t the S. Thala of The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein but rather Lahore, India, in the Thirties. Off-screen voices (chiefly those of Duras and Françoise Lebrun, the unforgettable anti-heroine of Eustache's The Mother and the Whore) inform us of dramatic action which we do not see performed, as would be the case in a conventional drama. We are instead told how Anne-Marie Stretter overwhelmed an entire community with her sexual power, driving the Vice-Consul of France into madness. The insanity is given voice repeatedly in the film as Lonsdale screams out her "maiden name,” Anna-Maria Guardi. This in turn is the sound referred to in the title of an alternate version of India Song that Duras made in 1976: Son Nom du Venise dans Calcutta Désert. Son Nom pairs the very same soundtrack as that of India Song with shots of the now deserted set—an abandoned mansion in the heart of Paris. If anything expresses Duras’s view of sound as primary and image secondary, it’s this persistence of a sonic idea across multiple works.

That’s not to say Duras shortchanged the visual dimension of cinema, but she was radically parsimonious with it. This is best demonstrated by 1977’s Le Camion, starring Gerard Depardieu and Duras herself, and principally set in the writer-filmmaker’s own home. Seated at a table with Depardieu sitting across from her, Duras relates what "would be" (as she puts it) a story about truck driver and a garrulous female hitchhiker he picks up by chance. Periodically the film cuts away from this placid storytelling scene to shots of a truck rolling down a highway with Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations" playing softly on the soundtrack. Instead of a film about a truck driver and hitchhiker, we get a description composed entirely in the conditional tense. Obviously of no commercial value, Le Camion premiered at Cannes where it was awarded fulsome praise by, of all people, Pauline Kael. A critic with next to no patience with the avant-garde, Kael was totally won over by Duras and wrote about the film in a New Yorker article that was nominally devoted to Star Wars.

Le Camion

"This is the writer-director George Lucas's own film, subject to no business interference," Kael dryly remarks of the blockbuster, "yet it's a film that's totally uninterested in anything that doesn't connect with the mass audience.'' Le Camion also makes no pretense of trying to "connect" with such an audience—which fascinates Kael. "Conditioned from childhood, people go to the movies wanting the basic gratification of a story acted out . . . Each time she cuts to the outdoors, you're drawn into the hypnotic flow of the road imagery, and though you know perfectly well there will be nothing but the truck and the landscape, you half dream your way into a ‘real’ movie." But as Star Wars demonstrates, "real movies" aren't what they used to be. 

Duras had no hope of replacing "real movies" with her conditionally tensed ones, but she went on making her sui generis works anyway—aided by a curious “real-life” character named Yann Andrea. A fan of India Song, Andrea entered Duras's world in 1980 when he helped her through a “rest cure" designed to stem her alcoholism. His account of this, in a 1983 book entitled M.D., was met with some degree of critical interest. Duras's own interest in Andrea quickly became an obsession. He appears with Bulle Ogier in Agatha et les lectures illimitées her 1981 reworking of elements that first appeared in her early biographical novel Un barrage contre le Pacifique (aka The Sea Wall), filmed by René Clément as This Angry Age in 1957. While Anthony Perkins and Sylvana Mangano play characters based on Duras and her brother in Clement’s version, their emotional conflict doesn’t go so far as incest, which is frankly discussed in Agatha. As nothing in the film is conventionally dramatized (Andrea and Ogier are seen wandering about the lobby of a hotel on the Normandy coast that also served as a setting for her India Song variation avant la lettre, La Femme du Gange, in 1974), no acting in the conventional sense was required.

Duras’s entire attitude toward actors is passing strange. Jeanne Moreau has been the performer most identified with her work, starring in the 1960 film of Moderato Cantabile directed by Peter Brook, and Duras’s own 1972 Nathalie Granger. Both stories feature children who resist music lessons amidst reports of a serial killer who is on the loose but never seen. Moreau is low-key in the first film and even more subdued in the second, in which she sits at home (Duras’s again) with another woman played by Lucia Bose. The women’s relationship is never defined, and their virtual immobility is disrupted only by the appearance of a washing-machine salesman—played by Depardieu in his motion-picture debut. Obviously ill-equipped for the job, he delivers his spiel to Moreau and Bose in an energetic, tough, and often incoherent style; he’s eventually seen dashing about the neighborhood in a state clearly suggestive of mental imbalance. It’s astonishing to see so vivid a performer becalmed only a few years later in Le Camion. 

But this is nothing compared to the way Duras treats Bulle Ogier, Matthieu Carrière, and Dominique Sanda in Le Navire Night. The récit concerns a man and a woman who conduct a romance entirely over the telephone without ever meeting in person. Who the three stars are supposed to “represent” in this scenario is not at all clear. Neither is the reason we see them only in a few shots, predominantly showing them sitting calmly while makeup is applied to their faces, as if in preparation for a scene to be shot. But no such scene ensues. What we see instead are shots of empty roads, water puddles, and ceiling fixtures while the actors’ voices relating the “story” drone on. This same anti-technique was utilized by Duras in short works made from outtakes of Agatha—Cesarée (78) and L’Homme atlantique (81)—both of which will be screened alongside Marin Karmitz’s 1964 Duras adaptation Nuit Noire, Calcutta.

Les Enfants

Curiously, Duras ended her filmmaking career with something resembling the conventional. Les Enfants began life as a 1970 book she wrote for children entitled Ah! Ernesto, later filmed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in 1982 as En rachâchant (a rendition Duras disliked; also part of the retrospective’s shorts program). The story concerns a little boy who doesn’t want to go to school lest he learn things that he doesn’t already know. Les Enfants expands this slim tale to feature length with the novelty of having Ernesto played by an adult actor, Axel Bogousslavsky. It’s wryly amusing in a way quite unusual for Duras. More importantly, it’s shot in a more or less ordinary style, with actors playing actual characters and speaking words on screen in the usual manner.

That Duras would conclude her filmmaking career in this manner must be regarded in the context of a career that was devoted to textual elucidation. One suspects that the success of her novel The Lover in 1984—an overwhelming hit with both critics and the general public—put her off from filmmaking. Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1992 adaptation of this tale, which was another derivation from the Un barrage contre le Pacifique cycle and which related how her family pimped her out to a wealthy Chinese man, was served up in the plush “high-class” erotic style of the Emmanuelle films. In what you might call anticipatory retaliation, Duras in 1991 wrote The North China Lover, a “remake” of The Lover adding details that the first version of Duras’s original novel didn’t include, all folded into an explicit critique of the film she suspected (with good reason) Annaud was putting together. 

Duras makes her final film appearances in two 1993 documentary shorts directed by Benoît Jacquot: Écrire, in which she discusses her work process, and The Death of a Young English Aviator, in which she visits the grave of a British flier killed during World War II who she discovered was gay. The latter revelation was of pivotal import to Duras in her final years, given her close relationship with Yann Andrea, who was also gay. Andrea had looked to Duras for emotional support after being spurned by a man with whom he had fallen in love but who turned out to be straight. Duras’s fascination with Andrea recalls an extraordinary interview she conducted in 1980 with Elia Kazan in Cahiers du Cinéma (December 1980), entitled “The Trembling Man.” Duras had just seen and been duly impressed by Kazan’s Wild River, his 1960 film about an official from the Tennessee Valley Authority trying to convince a stubborn old woman to abandon her house so that a dam can be built. As the TVA official, Montgomery Clift, who was in poor physical shape at this point in his life (he would be dead six years later), visibly trembles when Remick’s character expresses affection for him in one scene. Duras hailed the moment as expressing “a new condition of love”—a notion that puzzled the otherwise deeply flattered Kazan.

The “new condition of love” she spoke of to Kazan so rapturously was fully explicated by Duras in two books: Blue Eyes, Black Hair (86), dealing with the rejection and consequent abjection Andrea faced, and Yann Andrea Steiner (92), in which Duras folds her curious beloved into her own personal mythology. Andrea went on to write his own memoir of their relationship, Cet Amour-là, in 1999, but before then, he helped Duras write her final book, C’est tout (95). It consisted literally of the last words she ever spoke, ending with “Viens vite. J’en ai plus de bouche, plus de visage”: “Come quickly. I no longer have a mouth, nor a face.”

C’est tout.

The retrospective By Marguerite Duras runs October 15 to 22 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

They called him Mr. Monster. From 1955 to 1990, Kim Ki-young was the lunatic in the attic of Korean cinema, a former newsreel propagandist who went on to write, direct, edit, and art direct deranged movies full of gothic lunacy which were funded by his wife’s dental practice. A lover of meat (he would often lock the door of his room on set and grill mountains of animal flesh just for himself) he made 32 movies, eight of which remain lost today, having apparently been turned into hats. His most famous film is The Housemaid (60), which tells the story of an evil maid who destroys a family. Criterion-approved, it’s widely considered one of the great Korean films of all time, and Kim apparently loved it too, revising its story for Woman of Fire (71) and Woman of Fire ’82 (82). Excess is the key to his filmography, but despite containing gems like Iodo (77) about murder on an island ruled by women, and Carnivore (84) about a family obsessed with the patriarch’s impotence, one movie looms over them all, a staggering monument of weirdness: A Woman After a Killer Butterfly (78).

Thanks to the Korean Film Archive, which has a YouTube channel that currently showcases 98 restored Korean classics with English subtitles, anyone can put their brain in a blender and enjoy Killer Butterfly for free. Nam Koong won stars as Kim Young-gul, a miserable student stumbling through three scenarios, each one more insane than the last. In the first, he heads to the country with some buddies to catch butterflies. There he meets cute with a young woman who's waiting for her friend. She tells him, “People’s deaths are just as trivial as a butterfly’s death. Want some juice?” He accepts, and after chugging it down she asks, “Is death really noble? The juice is poisoned. I don’t want to die alone.” He’s miffed, but she’s delighted. “We’ll be going to heaven together!” she crows before keeling over dead, sending him running through the field screaming, “I’m dying!” before collapsing, and waking up in a hospital where a cop informs him that not only has he been cleared of the murder, but he can have the butterfly necklace the woman who tried to poison him was wearing when she died, because who wouldn't want a souvenir? For those keeping count, the movie is just past its five minute mark.

Young-gul stomps home to his shack and decides to hang himself because, you know, life has no meaning. An itinerant bookseller pops up offering to sell him a book proving that if you have enough willpower you can never die. “Get out of here. I hate books!” Young-gul yells, then promptly kills the bookseller. “Damn,” he mutters. “I had to kill someone before I killed myself.” He buries the bookseller, but true to his claim, the guy keeps coming back from the dead, eventually returning as a spooky blue-lit skeleton who repeatedly smacks Young-gul in the head, cackling about his superior willpower.

Speaking of skeletons, the bookseller eventually crumbles into dust and Young-gul runs into a buddy who takes him spelunking to steal the skeleton of a 2,000 year old woman from a cave. If Young-gul can reassemble the pieces, his friend promises, maybe the famous Dr. Lee will hire him as an assistant. A big fan of puzzles, Young-gul puts her back together and the skeleton is reborn as a slinky naked chick who really, really, really wants to eat his liver. It’s a rocky relationship because every time she lapses into silence he has a pretty good idea of what she’s thinking.

“Are you thinking about eating my liver again?” he asks.

“I’m starving…” she whines.

“Are all girls like this?” he growls. 

“Give me a break,” she says. “It’s been 2,000 years.”

“Ugh,” he rolls his eyes. “Girls come with so much baggage.”

Eventually he returns home with a rice cracker machine that shoots fresh, hot rice crackers across his shack in a puff of smoke. “We might need the extra money,” he explains. Then she explains how she needs to eat his liver NOW. Convinced, he lies back and she takes a knife, but then decides she likes him too much and, as rice crackers fly across the room and form a warm, starchy mattress, they make love, after which she crumbles into a skeleton. Not one to miss an opportunity, Young-gul takes her bones to Dr. Lee and gets hired as his assistant.

That would be a happy ending, except for the fact that Dr. Lee’s daughter, Kyungmi, is the “friend” suicide girl was waiting for at the beginning of the film. “My poor friend died alone,” Kyungmi sighs. “I don’t want her to be alone in heaven.” 

“Your friend’s burning in hell for trying to kill me,” Young-gul responds with his typical charm.

Kyungmi really wants Young-gul to kill himself, but he refuses, which drives her nuts. Meanwhile, Dr. Lee is getting anonymous fresh skulls in the mail. He loves nothing more than measuring skulls to prove that Koreans are descended from the Mongols (“Not me, I’m no half-breed spawn of Genghis Khan,” Young-gul spits) but Young-gul thinks there may be some shady business going on. Shady business like a man dressed as a giant butterfly stealing fresh corpses? Probably. 

Young-gul begins to feel that maybe he’s losing his marbles. “I’m not crazy, but I guess crazy people would think that,” he admits. Suddenly, Kyungmi gets a cancer diagnosis and her dad decides that the best remedy is for her to get laid, so he sends her and Young-gul camping with strong young people. That night in their tent, surrounded by the sounds of all the other teen couples having sex, Young-gul tries to rape her. “Don’t even think about it,” she warns, before begging him to kill himself so she’ll have the courage to die. “Let me think about this…” he mutters before she slaps him across the face

“Dad, it was fun,” Kyungmi says, returning home, head bowed, arms hanging limply by her sides, voice dead. She zombie-walks upstairs to her room and Dr. Lee corners Young-gul, “Did you guys do it?” Dr. Lee asks. When he gets a “no” he goes berserk. “Why don’t you just cut it off?” he howls at Young-gul, who only had one job. “Screw this!” Young-gul shouts and takes off to meet up with his buddy in a bar. “Enough talk about death!” he cries. “Let’s drink!” Yeah, yeah, his buddy says, then slips him a mickey in his beer and drags his unconscious body to the giant butterfly man who promptly saws off his head and mails it to Kyungmi in a box tied up with pink ribbon. 

That’s not even the end of the movie, but you get the picture: batshit insane doesn’t even begin to cover it. One part David Lynch, one part John Waters, Kim shot this movie fast and cheap to fill the quota for local productions, so no one cared what he did as long as he turned out something resembling a movie. With his characters tucked into the corners of the frame, shooting through beer bottles to get lighting effects, Kim uses theatrical lighting to make characters appear and disappear from scenes, bathing his sets with splashes of danger red and corpse blue, occasionally leavened with chemo green. The camera hides behind furniture, peeks out around the edges, and then clubs viewers over the head with zooms, cutting from scene to scene with no rhyme or reason, as if you’re slipping in and out of consciousness. All the dialogue is dubbed by actors who have swallowed their mics, so no matter where they’re standing in the room they sound like they’re shouting right in your ears, and every shot is full of knick knacks. Chains dangle from the ceilings of fancy living rooms, walls are encrusted with motel art, candles are constantly being lit and waved in front of the camera, and viewers are treated to frequent, lingering close-ups of Mrs. Butterworth bottles, Princess phones, tacky ceramic statues of prancing ponies, and taxidermy.

“What’s up? You still hallucinating?” is a common greeting, and if a character is carrying a box in public it’s only a matter of seconds before some vagrant sneaks up, karate chops them, steals their box, then attacks them with a steam shovel. It’s a movie where characters are constantly making portentous pronouncements about death, then immediately undermining them by saying, “I need to pee. I really need to pee…”

Woman Chasing a Killer Butterfly was shot during the military dictatorship of President Park Chung-hee, a time when students were kept under the iron fist of government control and many became obsessed with existentialism and nihilism. It was also a time when lots of students found work as tutors for upper-class families, which put poor, working-class kids in close proximity to the precious daughters of One Percenters. That history gives the film a deeper meaning, but maybe I’m just kidding myself—there might be no deeper meaning at all. 

After all, Kim Ki-young would be the first one to say that one explanation is as good as another, as in a scene where Kyungmi rails against her father:

“Mom told me to never marry a boring lifeless man like you,” she screams. “Even if he’s a millionaire, she said you made her want to commit suicide.” 

“Hm,” he says, calmly. “Maybe you’re just not getting enough sleep.”

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

Nang Nak

…Thailand has added 25 more movies to its National Film Heritage Registry, a promising archival preservation effort by a country which has lost a large portion of its film history to humidity and poor storage. Currently numbering 100 titles, the Registry’s latest titles include everything from Nonzee Nimibutr’s hit supernatural film Nang Nak (99) to King Rama V Visits Stockholm (1897), one of the two oldest remaining examples of film footage of Thais. At the link there’s full info on all 25 of the latest entries, from a bit of Thirties film introducing the first radio station in Phaya Thai Palace, to the oldest surviving Thai horror movie, Pry Ta Khean (40).

…The Donnie Yen vehicle Kung Fu Jungle just bowed at the London Film Festival before its October 30 Hong Kong release, and the first review in from Screen is a rave. Directed by Teddy Chen (Bodyguards & Assassins), Donnie plays a jailed killer who’s released to use his incredible kung fu to catch a martial arts killer played by Lost in Thailand’s Wang Baoqiang. Says Mark Adams, “The final showdown is beautifully staged—especially a pole-fight sequence—but the film also features a series of stylish and nicely brutal fight scenes, including a sword-fight battle in a movie studio set; a grappling fight in a tattoo parlor and perhaps most strikingly a fight using kicks in a Kowloon arts centre atop a massive art piece skeleton.”

…Looks like Rigor Mortis kicked off a revival of the hopping vampire craze, and now Wong Jing, Hong Kong’s King of Bad Taste, is getting on the bandwagon. Sifu vs. Vampire stars Yuen Biao as a Taoist priest going after (what else?) a vampire. Aided by Ronald Cheng and Philip Ng and lots of dodgy CGI, this looks like a throwback to the late Eighties heyday of the anything-goes craptastic blockbuster.

…Speaking of head-scratching new movies, nothing says “What th- ?” more than the trailer for Takashi Miike’s latest, a bizarro take on Battle Royale with school kids being tormented by Japanese folklore. As God Says is the title, but who cares? After making a lot of respectable movies in a row, it looks like Miike is back to dishing out pure insanity.

…Hong Kong’s Occupy Central movement is still going on, and the stars who spoke out to show their support are paying a price in a vicious online campaign—supposedly orchestrated by the Mainland government—that accuses them of breaking their “rice bowls” i.e., making money in Mainland China but not sucking up to the Mainland government. A “guidance model” essay has been making the rounds online, instructing users to boycott stars like Chow Yun-fat, Chapman To, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Denise Ho, Anthony Wong, Michelle Chen, and more. In the words of the model essay, “These people normally dug up piles of gold in the Mainland, and at the key moment, they stab their homeland in the back. I can tolerate it no longer and urge all Mainland internet users not to watch their work and performance, and Mainland film and television production companies would refuse their performance in the Mainland.”

Denise Ho’s response? “It’s so dull.” Chapman To’s response, “I’m not interested in responding.” And Anthony Wong? “To the official media: if I have to betray my dignity for your bowl of rice, sorry, your bowl of rice costs too much…We are not beggars, we are art workers with a conscience…Save it to scare those backstabbers who are used to eating your dog food! I am a Hong Konger." When asked if he was worried about a boycott, Wong answered for most Hong Kong people with a shrug, “Oh, well,” he said.

…Hey, kids! Want action figures of Hong Kong cops tear gassing peaceful protesters? Hong Kong toymakers gotcha covered!

Pulp Fiction

If Pulp Fiction, released twenty years ago this week, was the film cultural equivalent to Nirvana’s Nevermind in pop music—and I’ve argued this point more than once—then Quentin Tarantino was our Kurt Cobain, or at least a Cobain-caliber star with Krist Novoselic-caliber charisma. The two men were united by more than the fact of their being suddenly trampolined into iconic fame at approximately the same time thanks to a combination of diligence, talent, and good (or ill) luck. They were four years apart in age. They were both the products of broken families, raised by single-mothers. They were both high school dropouts. They were both autodidacts who created their own syllabi with texts that had no place inside official school culture. For Tarantino it was films and crime fiction; for Cobain, rock n’ roll music. When they became obscenely famous, they dragged their formative influences and new obsessions along with them into what we once quaintly called the “mainstream.” Tarantino shilled for Wong Kar-wai, Jack Hill, and Jackie Chan; Cobain for The Vaselines, Raincoats, Daniel Johnson, and the Meat Puppets. Tarantino’s promotion was emphatic, even shrilly insistent; Cobain’s casual, tossed off, but they were both to a significant degree defined by their tastes. They were, in short, fans.

Neither invented the celebrity-as-fan, but they might be said to have created the template for the contemporary version. In the film world, Tarantino was preceded by the likes of Martin Scorsese and John Waters, who were still providing valuable curatorial service when I was an adolescent—I imagine I would’ve gotten to Scarlet Street and Jean Genet eventually without their help, but I doubt it would’ve been as easy. I’m not sure who has stepped up to play a similar part in the interceding years. Despite having punctiliously avoided her artistic output, which is insofar as I can tell terrible, I’ve noticed that Lena Dunham has established a good track record as a well-wisher and dispenser of lip-service, if not a paying employer. Perhaps it’s difficult to point to any stand outs because fandom is no longer an exception but an epidemic, the very air that we breathe.

“If you’ve got friends, you’ve got fans.” I was informed of this fact today by an ad on Facebook, a website that I principally utilize as a means by which to peddle my sonorous long-form film chat to “a small coterie of friends and critics,” to borrow Dave Kehr’s description of the target audience for Billy Wilder’s Fedora. In terms of the economy of Likes and Retweets that Facebook and other social media services have invented, and which mastheads/content providers have eagerly seized on and perpetuated, this Friends = Fans equation is more or less exactly correct. If you’re self-promoting a song, a show, a sketch, a record, or a new piece of writing, the quantifiable success of the endeavor, including to some degree its ability to be monetized, is largely contingent on your social media presence. The theory goes that genuine talent will be rewarded with more friend/fans, and more friend/fans will lead to greater public approbation and success. Friendship is fandom, and fandom is the coin of the realm. Incidentally, the Facebook ad was encouraging me to “Like” Facebook.

Inherent Vice

One definition of fandom appears in Logan Hill’s recent New York Times profile of P.T. Anderson. “As he talked about the film [Inherent Vice], Mr. Anderson, fresh from a morning run along the Hudson River, was never less than possessed by a fan’s enthusiasm—unpretentious and quick to profess his admiration for Mr. Pynchon and to note other ways the film might have turned out.” “Enthusiasm,” “unpretentious,” and “admiration” are the key words here, all positive things, and they combine to create an impression of fandom that I don’t suppose many would quibble with—indeed, fandom does not allow for quibbling. (“Quick” is also relevant.) Judging from my social media feed when the trailer for Mr. Anderson’s movie appeared, many members of the wide world of film culture are standing by to express “a fan’s enthusiasm” for anything that he might have done or will do. And let he who is without sin cast the first stone—if tomorrow were the last day of 2014, I would include the trailer for Dumber and Dumber To on any Year’s Best list.

I’ve been thinking about the role of fandom in the economy of film culture and criticism for some time, thanks in part to a series of conversations that I’ve had with fellow critic Eric Hynes. (We are mutual fans.) Ignoring for a moment any talk of “changing media landscape,” let us presume for a moment that now, as ever, all critics began their engagement with their medium of choice as fans—all enthusiasm and hero-worship and so on—and presumably remain so up to a degree befitting professional decorum and dignity. In a moment when professionals and nonprofessionals alike commingle their scrawl on the bathroom wall that is the comments section, and everyone will be heard in the “conversation” (a/k/a Twitter dogpile) one way or another, what now distinguishes criticism from fandom?

Historically, the division has always been a touchy subject. For highbrow critics, the fan was the other guy—“fanatic” is defined by “intense uncritical devotion,” and therefore the fan is someone who by very nature of their devotion has taken leave of their critical facilities. For the discontents of auteurism, la politique des Auteurs was a Trojan Horse meant to stealthily institutionalize fandom, a way for boys who’d graduated from their Topp’s cards to authoritatively bloviate about mise-en-scene in a tone that they’d previously used to talk about OBP. Certainly Pauline Kael thought so, though she stumped for younger talents like Brian de Palma, Warren Beatty, and James Toback in a manner suspiciously close to that which the auteurists reserved for the late films of Hawks, Ford, and Hitchcock.

Spider-Man

Let us allow that everyone, but everyone, has their favorites, and thus ever has it been, since well before the days when Ruskin championed Turner and Hazlitt went to bat for Edmund Kean. Fandom consists of cheerleading those favorites on to victory. Criticism is a process of interrogating those favorites—interrogating their work, interrogating the response that it evokes in yourself and in others, evaluating strengths alongside of weaknesses, or accepting that the two may be inextricable from one another, much as fandom is inextricable from evaluative criticism, if such a division were even to be desired. The definitions I’m offering are personal and idiosyncratic, but I think it comes down to this: where fandom cheerily accepts, criticism is suspicious.   

The Americanism “fandom” has been in common parlance since the turn of the last century, and is predated by many elder synonyms. There are, however, two developments that have in the new millennium given it a particular coloration. The first, referred to above, is the usage of fandom for promotion—of self or of others—and data mining purposes on-line. The second, also directly related to the Internet, is the mainstreaming of fan culture. This event is usually dated to the stratospheric, even unprecedented fin-de-siècle success of certain works in genres that, at the moment these works appeared, were widely considered the exclusive territory of nerdlingers—the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, and so on. The table had already been set, however, by Tarantino and Cobain, both steeped in the specialized worlds of fanzining and bootlegging. (Tarantino was a crossover figure to the ComicCon set; I beg you to recall that Christian Slater plays a comic store clerk in 1993’s True Romance.) In the funky underground/counterculture niches that they’d gestated in and crawled out of, as in the worlds of sci-fi/fantasy/superhero fandom, alternative organs for news and criticism had been constructed in the shadow of the official ones, which had for the most part failed to take the objects of fandom seriously. Rolling Stone won’t give a fair shake to SST releases? The New York Review of Books won’t give space to Chris Claremont? Fuck ‘em, we’re going FUBU. Far from blinded by “intense critical devotion,” the line was that fans weren’t unqualified to evaluate the objects of their fandom—they were the only ones uniquely qualified to evaluate them. Why send a critic to do a fan’s job?

There was more than a measure of necessary cultural course-correction when these fan-based cultures hit critical mass, but yesterday’s Salon des Refusés is tomorrow’s Academy—which brings us to the present exalted state of fandom, fandom in decadence. Unlike the gloomy “Time to make the donuts” business of criticism, fandom is fun—remember that “enthusiasm”! It doesn’t follow, however, than fandom exclusively engenders positivity—observe what happens when in-the-tank fandom runs up against criticism of the cherished object by an outsider. You might argue that any cultural specialization is a form of fandom, but I’ve never yet been given the pitchfork-and-torches treatment by angry Alain Resnais-heads, whereas say the wrong thing about Chris Nolan and prepare to get swarmed like you just slagged One Direction. So totally does fandom dominate the conversation now that stances “against” rather than “for” become banners of anti-fandom, to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Gray. Last week I wrote something not-entirely-admiring about Gone Girl and the films of David Fincher, and because it happened to be the movie of the moment, it was duly passed around by people who had their own compunctions about the movie, and I managed to pull a readership somewhat above my usual dozen or so reliable shut-ins. There is—have you noticed it?—a new sense of pride of ownership in not connecting with a work of art, and anti-fanclubs form with the same vigor once reserved for fandom. Didn’t “get” Boyhood? Not feeling the fuss around K-Stew? Just cue up Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone” and take a stroll down Twitter lane!

Inglourious Basterds

Anti-fans seek other anti-fans, and fans seek their own kind. And because like goes with like, we arrive at the particular critical reception afforded to the record collector rocker or the cinephile filmmaker. In the cases of Tarantino and Cobain, the massive popularity of their work cannot solely or even primarily be attributed to critical culture forming a column and marching in lockstep behind them, but it’s undeniable that the fan-creator is a particularly tempting subject for the fan-critic. “I like him, but how could I help it?” critic Dave Marsh wrote of Elvis Costello in the May 18, 1978 Rolling Stone, more or less summarizing the allure. “He is so much the perfect rock critic hero that he even looks and acts like one of us: scrawny, bespectacled and neurasthenic, doesn't know when to shut up, bone-dull onstage.” And just look at the difference between the reception of a World War Two epic from Q.T. and, say, one from David Ayer. The ladies and gentlemen of the press like creators who talk shop in terms of influences—that is, fandom—and for a filmmaker to wear their cinephilia on their sleeve is, if nothing else, to ensure themselves a press willing to listen. There are nearly one million words of interviews with critic-turned-director Olivier Assayas that attest to this fact.¹

We root for our own team, and in doing so we perpetuate certain provincial tendencies. If New York City’s assurance of sitting at the head of the table in the cultural conversation is no longer what it was, it is for the moment holding firm,² and this is reflected in our vested interest in keeping the idea of the East Coast—specifically, New York City—intellectual alive. Hence the disproportionate press granted to figures like Dunham, Noah Baumbach, and Alex Ross Perry, in precipitously ascending order of the circumference of their pop cultural footprints and my appreciation of their work. (“This is the THIRD email in a row someone has pitched me something on Alex Ross Perry,” an editor recently replied to an e-mail of mine.)

This leads quite naturally to the question of conflict of interest. Unless you are an independently wealthy individual working as sole editor and contributor to your own publication, a la Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel, and are capable therefore of staying out of the fray entirely, it’s unavoidable that such conflicts will arise, and anyone who claims to be entirely immune to them is most likely a grandstanding fibber. (I saw you scarfing those canapés at the Squid and the Whale party in 2005, Armond!) Critics work as programmers, and vice-versa. Critics make films, and filmmakers act as critics—even if, via a site like Talkhouse, only for a day. (Surely the oddest fantasy camp ever created, this.) The middle-sized festival circuit is a cut-rate permanent paid vacation for the footloose film journo, who’ll find something nice to say about the experience if they’re expecting a return invite. Payola rules everything around me! In most cases, we can only rely on the conscience of the individuals in question to either provide the requisite (usually very boring) “full disclosure” side note, or to recuse themselves from writing entirely when anything approaching objectivity is unachievable.³

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1

Part of this uncomfortable, jostling intimacy comes as a natural result of circling wagons in a serious-minded film culture that, rightly or wrongly, is convinced of its own imperilment. What results is the curious phenomenon of rallying ‘round the flag of “difficult” art by subjecting it to soft analysis. “Everyone’s too goddamn nice,” a friend was complaining to me about the NYC scene in the midst of the New York Film Festival love-in, and I’m not sure he’s wrong. It’s one thing to take potshots at big entertainments made by monolithic multinationals that’ll hardly feel the sting, but to apply the same rigor to one’s colleagues is out of the question. We’re all in this thing together, right? And anyways, you never know when you’ll need to ask somebody for a job. These institutions ain’t loyal!  

This is, after a fashion, business as usual. What I have seen change in my decade on the scene, really and truly, is the degree to which critics, increasingly indistinguishable from fans, are now pulling no-extra-charge-working-round-the-clock shifts as street team publicists for forthcoming films. (Given that the current model demands that every as-yet-unestablished writer act as their own self-publicist, it is unsurprising that such activity would come as second nature.) Here is where the double meaning of “fan” is relevant—as in fanning the flames, building social media brushfires into a roaring blaze. Geeking out in public forums, the critic places themselves in approximately the same position as the teenaged Hunger Games obsessive who volunteers their time and effort to keep the franchise in full sight of the Internet, in hopes of being rewarded by official recognition, followers, and requests for friendship. And remember, kids: “If you’ve got friends, you’ve got fans.”  

The gentleman newspaper critic caricature of the classic Hollywood cinema was a figure at once impressive and ridiculous in his self-importance, usually an ascetic, imperious fop with a pert moustache, walking stick, and a British accent who said things like “solipsistic, soporific drivel,” and whose scourge honest artists lived in cringing horror of. Very probably this creature—part imposter nobleman, part George Jean Nathan—never existed in actual fact, but I can say with some assurance that a contemporary caricature does, Tweeting “masterpiece” before the credits have rolled on several dozen new films a year and taking canoodling selfies next to famous faces after a 15 minute interview in order to suggest a false intimacy. Perhaps this proximity to glamor has become a compensation prize to stand in lieu of a living wage, but all of this fandom feels a wee bit obsequious. If it’s come down to a matter of Which Side Are You On?, I’ll be over here doing my best Waldo Lydecker impression.   

1. Proximity and distance, either historical, geographical, cultural, or all three, have a great deal to do with allowing for such phenomena, and they cease to play any particular role when the gap between critic and artist grows great enough. Edward Yang was a cinephile; Hou Hsiao-Hsien isn’t. Both filmmakers’ occidental fanbases are for the most part either attentive to members of the critical caste or part of them, and but their relative relationship to film culture doesn’t play anything like the same role in English-language writing about them.

2. As participation in the critical conversation is less and less contingent on the writer’s being headquartered in a media capitol, and the pay for contributing to that conversation becomes less and less, I suspect we will increasingly be hearing from correspondents in Duluth, Transylvania, and even Woodside, Queens, who’ve been properly vetted for access to press screening links.

3. This would probably be a good spot for something about #Gamergate, but I don’t know anything about it, because video games are stupid and for nerds.

Lav Diaz's latest movie, From What is Before, premiered in August at the Locarno Film Festival. His 2001 film Batang West Side screens October 19 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's series Time Regained: The Films of Lav Diaz.

From What is Before

For more than 10 years now, Lav Diaz has been using digital technology to emancipate his cinema from "the business and bullshit feudal mentality of the Philippine studio system." It all started in spring 2003, when he and cinematographer Richard de Guzman decided to complete a several-years-in-the-making independent movie about the trials and tribulations of a Filipino family from 1971 to 1987 by shooting in digital instead of using more expensive 16mm film.

In Diaz's own words, consumer digital equipment changed everything:

You own the brush now, you own the gun, unlike before, where it was all owned by the studio. Now it is all yours. It is so free now. I can finish one whole film inside this room . . . We do not depend on film studios and capitalists anymore. This is liberation cinema now . . . Digital is liberation theology. Now we can have our own media. The Internet is so free, the camera is so free. The issue is not anymore that you cannot shoot. You have a South East independent cinema now. We have been deprived for a long time, we have been neglected, we have been dismissed by the Western media. That was because of production logistics. We did not have money, we did not have cameras, all those things. Now, these questions have been answered. We are on equal terms now.

Cheap digital technology has allowed filmmakers all over the world to appropriate the means of film production, postproduction, and distribution, and to pursue their vision and agenda without compromising with studio “gatekeepers” who only regard cinema as the business of selling escapist entertainment to a mass audience for profit.

Evolution of a Filipino Family

That said, what is Diaz’s vision and agenda exactly? In a nutshell, every film of his deals with two interconnected questions: “What is cinema?” and “What does it mean to be a Filipino?” If you ever have the chance to ask Diaz about these two issues, he would surely shy away from any definitive statement by saying that it is an ongoing investigation and that he doesn't really know the answers yet. However, his praxis—or “methodology,” as he likes to call it—is clear: from Evolution of a Filipino Family (04) on, he has been using a peculiar temporal strategy based on extremely long takes and radical running times in order to recover Filipino history from oblivion and reclaim his country's ancestral Malay identity.

A five-hour-and-38-minute “anatomy of a Filipino village in the early Seventies,” From What is Before—the Golden Leopard winner at Locarno—might just be the most blatant example of Diaz’s aesthetic and ethical concerns. As for the Bazinian question about the ontology of the medium, in presenting a dramatization of his childhood memories Diaz clearly understands cinema as a means to connect the Filipinos of today with their country’s history, through an incessant dialectical movement between present and past, the personal and the collective, the particular and the universal.

The aptly titled From What is Before reenacts the lives of humble men and women residing in a remote barrio in the Maguindanao province, a micro-cosmos that is meant to represent the whole Philippine archipelago: Itang (Hazel Orencio) takes care of her mentally disabled sister Joselina (Karenina Haniel), who is rumored to have healing powers; Tony (Roeder Camañag) distills alcohol all day in exchange for a few pesos and, unbeknownst to Itang, gives vent to his sexual impulses on defenseless Joselina; Sito (Perry Dizon) works as a cowherd for a rich landowner and does his best to protect little Hakob (Reynan Abcede) from a terrible secret about his origins; Heding (Mailes Kanapi) goes from village to village peddling mosquito nets, mattresses, blankets, and pots; Father Guido (Joel Saracho) tries to spread God’s word among the villagers, while Miss Acevedo (Evelyn Vargas) is committed to giving poor kids an education.

From What is Before

Although Diaz admits to having used “a certain degree of abstraction” in creating archetypal characters and plotlines from personal recollections and real-life encounters, From What is Before takes place in a very specific timespan: from 1970 to 1972, the year in which President of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and announced the coming of the New Society. According to Diaz, the period of martial law (1972-1981) is the fourth and most violent cataclysm in Filipino history, one that plunged the entire country into its darkest period. After hundreds of years of Spanish colonization (the very name "Philippines" comes from King Philip II of Spain), decades of American rule in the early 20th century, and a few years of Japanese occupation during World War II, an educated Filipino man came and used jurisprudence, Catholic religion, superstition, economic wealth, political influence, espionage, and brutal military and paramilitary force to seize absolute power. As we can see both watching Diaz's movie and reading the text of Proclamation 1081 declaring martial law, Marcos’s modus operandi was clinical. Elected president in 1965 and again in 1969, he spent his second four-year mandate executing his master plan for staying in power beyond the eight-year constitutional limit: taking advantage of the religious turmoil in Muslim Mindanao and the rise of the armed wing of the Filipino Communist Party across the country, he managed to instill his fellow countrymen with the fear that the Philippines might be on the verge of a civil war that could overthrow democratic institutions. Marcos further manipulated them into believing in the necessity of martial law by staging a series of terrorist attacks, the most (in)famous one being a fake ambush on his protégé, Minister of Defense Juan Ponce Enrile, right before martial law was proclaimed. As a final touch on his Machiavellian political masterpiece, he concluded Proclamation 1081 with the words “In the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and seventy two,” thus presenting himself to the Christian majority in the country as the executor of God’s will—a justification by faith that probably constitutes the most common form of aprioristic validation of human actions throughout history.

In this atmosphere of paranoia and political and religious extremism, it was easy for the President to convince people that, for peace and order to be maintained, he “shall direct the entire government, including all its agencies and instrumentalities, and exercise all powers of his office including his role as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines” (General Order no. 1, September 22nd, 1972). However it was not “peace and order” Marcos was interested in, nor were peace and order actually a major problem for Filipino people. As Sito tells Lieutenant Perdido (Ian Lomongo) in a memorable scene in From What is Before, the problem for Maguindanao villagers is institutional neglect, not the activities of leftist parties and Muslim separatists. Over the centuries, under the rule of this or that political regime (Spanish monarchy, the short-lived First Philippine Republic, American Insular Government, Japanese-sponsored puppet republic, the “independent” Filipino government granted by the United States on July 4th 1946, Sharia law, Marcos’s dictatorship), nothing has really ever changed for them, and they have always been living abandoned in the middle of the forest, with no usable roads or bridges, no electricity, no health care assistance, very few education facilities for children, scraping out an existence by hunting, fishing, picking fruits, and farming the small common lands not yet bought by landowners. This is one of the main reasons behind Diaz’s carefully composed, almost immobile, extremely long takes adding up to enormous running times: first, duration is an affirmation of importance in cinema, so showing poor, neglected people on the big screen for several hours calls attention to their very existence and their desperate living conditions; second, the filmmaker's peculiar aesthetic is meant to make us experience the burden of centuries of suffering, i.e. what Diaz calls “the agony” of his people.

The praxes of colonialism, feudalism and fascism are all based on the assumption that he who controls time controls people’s lives. The examples are countless, in the Philippine archipelago as anywhere else. Roman Catholic missionaries, Spanish and American slavers divided indigenous peoples' days into time slots reserved for praying, working, and sleeping. Both Japanese invaders and dictator Marcos implemented curfews in order to imprison Filipinos in their own houses every day from midnight to dawn. And as the exclusive owners of capital, means of production, postproduction facilities, and screening venues, Filipino studio heads have been able to impose a two-hour maximum on escapist movies for both filmmakers and audiences for decades now.

From What is Before

Diaz's mise en scène and temporal strategies must be theorized as weapons in the struggle for the emancipation of his people. Utopian as it may sound, in From What Is Before as in all his other independently produced works, Diaz has been trying to destroy time as a commodity and as an instrument of control, thus reclaiming Filipino people's ancestral Malay identity:

[My films are so long because] my cinema is not part of the industry conventions anymore. It is free. So I am applying the theory that we Malays, we Filipinos, are not governed by the concept of time. We are governed by the concept of space. We don't believe in time. If you live in the country, you see Filipinos hang out. They are not very productive. That is very Malay. It is all about space and nature . . . In the Philippine archipelago, nature provided everything, until the concept of property came with the Spanish colonizers. Then the capitalist order took control. I have developed my aesthetic framework around the idea that we Filipinos are governed by nature. The concept of time was introduced to us when the Spaniards came. We had to do oracion [prayers] at six o'clock, start work at seven. Before, it was free, it was Malay.

No matter how interesting Diaz’s discourse on the tyranny of time is, his films are very hard to watch both because of their length and their total disregard for the conventions of mainstream filmmaking such as narrative economy and continuity editing. Consequently, detractors often dismiss them as a sort of festival porn for the titillation of highbrow aesthetes, nothing but an endurance test for wannabe cinephiles, whereas aficionados use them to praise Arte Povera radicalism and the revolutionary power of slowness. As Diaz has said over and over, though, putting a label on his work is inherently wrong: it really doesn't matter if the films are slow or fast, rich or poor, long or short, in black-and-white or in color. The only thing that matters is that they are “free cinema”—personal works free from the industry's dictations, movies that leave their spectators free to decide whether to embrace the whole experience or go away after a few minutes. After all, it certainly isn't mandatory to like Diaz's movies!

From What is Before

However, for those who feel like trying something different from the usual mainstream fare and diving into Diaz's first major film festival success, From What is Before might just be the perfect film to gain a familiarity with the Filipino filmmaker's credo: that it is only by investigating the past and learning from experience that we can actually understand what's going on in the present and work in order to change the future for the better.

That’s why, before being a good or a bad movie, From What is Before is first and foremost a film that had to be made. Because Ferdinand Marcos’s son Ferdinand Marcos Junior is running for 2016 presidential elections in the Philippines as a candidate for the Nationalist Party. Because most of the dictator’s relatives and close collaborators during martial law still occupy positions of power in the Republic of the Philippines. And last but not least, because the Abulug barrio in which From What is Before was shot one year ago still has no paved roads, no bridges, and no electricity.

The killer shot in Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (aka Turist in Sweden) arrives 10 minutes into the film, lasts some four and a half minutes, and will leave you gasping, especially if you had no idea that it was coming—just as the film’s characters weren’t expecting the event it depicts. If you’re allergic to spoilers, you might want to skip the next paragraph, but the shot has already been much discussed in reviews, and a glimpse of it even appears in the trailer and on the poster—so I don’t think Östlund is that worried about giving the game away.

The image is of an avalanche at a ski resort in the French Alps. A Swedish family is sitting among tourists eating on an outdoor patio, and we’re hearing expressions of nervousness about the snow rolling down the opposite slope. Don’t worry, the father assures his family, it’s a controlled avalanche—just before the snow rushes towards the patio and engulfs everyone, and the entire screen, in a cloud of opaque whiteness. The shock effect is extraordinary, and having seen Force Majeure twice, I can assure you it’s still extraordinary even if you know it’s coming. The father is right, of course, the avalanche is controlled—in the sense that this image has been created digitally. To be precise, the film uses footage of a real avalanche, composited together with footage of the actors, with a computer-generated cloud of snow then added to surge up and engulf the screen. Once it clears, nothing in the film is the same again. But what will surely become known as “the famous snow shot in Force Majeure” is, I think, destined to be a key point in future discussions of digital special effects and how they work on our imaginations. What’s startling here is not just the dynamic realism of the image, but the way it interacts with and impacts upon the people on screen: it affects us because it affects them so strikingly. Here’s a rare use of spectacular CGI that absolutely takes the human factor as its focus.

The event that properly kick-starts Force Majeure is important less for the coup de cinema with which Östlund startles us, then for the way it affects the people who live through it. Agreeably laid back, vaguely hip middle-class Swedish couple Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) have brought their two young children Vera and Harry (real-life siblings Clara and Vincent Wettergren) to France on a brief skiing holiday; they’re all seen at the start of the film, herded into an archetypal happy-family pose by a resort photographer. The place is idyllic, with its white slopes and deep blue skies, yet there’s something ominous in the air; Östlund and DP Fredrik Wenzel build up a potently sinister atmosphere at the start by showing us cannons going off, sprays firing on the slopes, and a detachment of snowmobiles gliding uphill—presumably methods to create smooth, skiable snow, emphasizing the artificial, created nature of this perfect “natural” environment. The gentle twang of lift cables adds to the mood, as does the soundtrack’s signature flourish, a snatch of Vivaldi’s “Summer,” playing rather threateningly on accordion.

There’s a brief idyllic moment at the start: the family doze together on the bed of their warm brown pine-walled hotel room (as if they’ve brought their own Sweden with them), all snuggled up in identical blue long-johns. Even Tomas answering his cell phone when he’s supposed to be relaxing doesn’t break the mood. Then the inadmissible happens: the incident during which Tomas behaves with what appears to be outright cowardice. “Cowardice” is an old-fashioned word somehow, and a highly charged one that you don’t often hear these days outside war situations; it smacks of official stigmatization of the shell-shocked in Ypres. But it becomes the cross that Tomas must bear. His first thought during the avalanche—on a conscious or unconscious level—is to save himself. That reaction threatens to fracture both his psyche and his relationship. The issue comes up, shortly after the event, during a dinner with two other tourists, and while Tomas jokingly denies it happened, Ebba can’t let go. She still can’t when they’re joined by two friends from home: Mats (Kristofer Hivju), in his forties, with the shaggy beard of a seasoned outdoorsman, and his 20-year-old girlfriend, Fanny (Fanni Metelius). In an uncomfortably funny scene, Mats gamely tries to bail Tomas out by talking about survival and involuntary instinct, but puts his foot in it horribly by digressing into talk about a horrific shipwreck.

Writer-director Östlund has a history of making his audiences uncomfortable, in causing us to ask ourselves precisely what we would have done if faced with the situations shown in his films—and I doubt there’s any viewer of an Östlund movie who genuinely comes out certain that she or he would pass muster if put to the moral test. His previous films were Involuntary (08), which packaged together a number of inconsequential but painful social scenarios, and the considerably less comic Play (11), which brought questions of class, race and social responsibility to bear on an incident of youth bullying, observed at a cool distance in surveillance style. Force Majeure belongs to what you might call the genre of “middle-class squirm” fiction, which asks (or pressures) its viewer, or reader, to identify with complacent bourgeois characters who hysterically try to deny the truth of their own guilt in a crisis. In cinema, Michael Haneke’s Caché (05) is a prime example, while a recent literary case is the Dutch novel The Dinner by Herman Koch, adapted last year by Menno Meyjes, and about to be remade by Cate Blanchett.

Tomas is indeed squeezed horribly in Force Majeure, and so indeed is everyone. His son starts sulking, then blurts out that he’s worried his parents will divorce. The contagious nature of people’s traumas emerges when the film follows Mats and Fanny back to their room after the evening with their friends, and we see how Tomas’s ordeal is affecting their sleep: Fanny can’t resist telling Mats that he would have acted just as badly himself, whereas a younger guy she knows, one Filip, would surely have passed the test. As for Ebba, she’s shattered by the idea that her husband has failed the most basic test of a father’s atavistic protective instincts, but in any case, she has already started to question this whole marriage business. She’s shocked to hear another married Swedish woman at the resort talking about her open marriage—to Ebba, it just doesn’t compute—but later, she’s on the phone to a female friend and laughing approvingly at news of her affair. Tomas listens ashen-faced in the foreground, all his male certainties wiped out.

There are some delicious bitter comic touches—like the slow camera creep forward, which reveals that Tomas is trying to peel off a decal that someone, we never learn who, has stuck on his door (you have to peer a bit, but it depicts a chicken). And there are moments of agony that hit a Bergman register—Tomas crying on the floor while the children pile onto him in helpless support, shrieking for their daddy. But Östlund tends to give the anguish a cold comic twist, too. After Tomas has abjectly fallen to pieces in the corridor (“I’m a victim too!”), Ebba has to persuade a hotel worker, who’s witnessed the whole scene from afar, to let them back into their room.

But the film’s cruelest moment is a farcical vignette that recalls some of the cartoonish everyday horror in Involuntary. Tomas and Mats are sitting outside with a beer, having repaired their damaged manhood on a bonding jaunt in the mountains. A young woman comes up to Tomas and tells him that her friend thinks that he’s the most attractive man there. Even at a distance, you can see Tomas glow a little; then she comes back and announces that it was a mistake, her friend meant some other guy. The sharpness in Östlund’s comic touch comes in the way that he won’t let go, but has the scene play out longer than the comedy, as Mats starts bristling, itching for a fight with a man who’s walked into shot.

There’s definitely a touch of Caché about the film: the pitilessness, the long static shots, the impersonally clean luxury of the enclosed tourist world it evokes, with even the warm brown pine of the hotel décor coming to look antiseptically fake and unwelcoming. There’s also a very Haneke-esque touch to the enigmatic shots of the family in their mirrored bathroom, where you may find yourself wondering nervously where Wenzel’s camera is hidden. I suspect it’s been digitally erased, but the effect is unsettling, making us feel very intrusive indeed, yet uncomfortably close to these people.

The story ends with a delicious bit of ambivalence, the family’s final ski outing (the film is divided into chapters for each day), in which, as I read it, Tomas colludes in an outrageous bit of theater engineered by Ebba to help him regain his tenuous status as alpha male. The film could have ended perfectly here; I’m not sure about the enigmatic coda, which leaves the story, and a huge swathe of cast, dangling in uncertainty. This might be the clever grace note that sends us out with one further unsettling pinch, or it might just be superfluous; after two viewings, I’m still not sure. It doesn’t damage the film, though; this is still a confident and provocative piece that, as I’m hardly the first critic to point out, you should think twice about choosing as a date movie.

With sparing (but incisive) dialogue, long takes, and majestic wide shots, Force Majeure depicts the crisis of faith surrounding a Swedish father, Tomas, who runs away from a life-or-death situation instead of protecting his wife and children. They survive; his ego does not. This clash between base instincts and societal expectations puts Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund on familiar dangerous ground. His last feature, Play (11), dramatizes a series of real-life, racially charged thefts committed by children, while Incident by a Bank (09) re-creates a bungled robbery using solely a wide shot of a city block (garnering the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at the Berlinale).

FILM COMMENT digital editor Violet Lucca spoke with Östlund on an unseasonably warm October day about social—and filmic—conventions, the week before Force Majeure showed at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (which will host a retrospective of his work in January 2015).

Your mother was a schoolteacher, and I think when you grow up in a house where someone is a schoolteacher, you grow up with a different understanding of human behavior. How would you say it’s affected your work?

It’s interesting that it could be discussed in this way. I guess you’re right, in some way. If you look at Involuntary [08], my second feature, the character of the teacher in that film is totally based on my mother. She had those behavioral experiments with her fourth-grade students.

How much psychological/sociological research did you do for this film?

I spent a lot of time trying to find studies that I could use to motivate the actions that take place in the film. There were two studies in particular that were very important to me. One showed how much more likely divorces are after an airplane hijacking, and the other was about surviving maritime catastrophes. From the Titanic to Estonia, you could see that men of a certain age are the ones who survive. I thought that was very interesting when you compare it to, for example, film history, where the main character or hero is always [a man]. This is so commonly reproduced, but when it comes to reality and a crisis situation, the ones that die are women and children. When people say, “I wonder what you would have done,” I can say for certain that a man is more likely to run than a woman.

Like your previous work, Force Majeure is intended to foster a philosophical debate about what human behavior means or implies. Do you envision that being more of an internal process, or do you want people to talk it out?

Yeah, in a group. We have to be aware of the roles that we play as men and women, and that we are adapting to those roles—very often, not being aware of it. Those expectations make us unhappy and very confused. It’s so interesting to look at, for example, the history of the nuclear family. The “nuclear family” was a word that was invented in the Forties. Before that, a large family was the norm. We are walking from the large family to the nuclear family and now to the single household. Stockholm has the most single households in the world. This development, this progress, is very connected to the consumer society, because if you are one person living in one apartment, you want to buy one TV, one phone, blah, blah, blah. We’re becoming more and more efficient as consumers, so I think it’s hard for us to separate our wants in life from what we are doing to maintain this kind of lifestyle and this kind of society. So we need to question the strong, fundamental beliefs that we have in the nuclear family, and where we’re heading.

The film’s trajectory reminded me of Hollywood films in which a career woman is struggling to be a good mom, but here it’s the opposite: all the impulses that have allowed Tomas to provide for his family as a breadwinner—ruthless self-interest and opportunistic focus—estranges him from them and destroys their trust.

I was definitely aware of that. If you look at the most conventional way of telling a Hollywood story, it goes like this. There is a family living in peace. Suddenly, there’s an outside threat. The man has to use violence—he doesn’t want to, but he has to, he’s forced to. And when he’s used violence, killed the bad guys, the family can go back and live in peace. This story arc is an ideological way of looking at existence and society. And I am very interested in a situation where we can identify that we are doing the wrong thing. A dilemma. For Tomas, running away and then trying to face what he had done is a dilemma. Because it’s hard to say, “I’m sorry I did it,” and hard to lie also.

What I also wanted to do is, if you look at the structure of a conventional film, the character that loses his or her dignity in the beginning will redeem themselves before the film ends. In a way, in my films, everyone loses their dignity, and they don't get it back.

At the end, when they’re on the slope and there’s the bad weather, is that real, or is that something that it’s almost like the parents are undertaking in order to repair the family?

I see, a group therapy thing. It’s a group therapy ski run.

Is the film making fun of Tomas, or do you have empathy for his behavior?

I definitely have empathy for him. At the same time, I think he’s extraordinarily silly. But this kind of lifestyle—I mean, just look at the electronic toothbrush. We’ve reached a level of comfort, and we’re allowing ourselves to let relationship problems be the main focus of our lives. I think that that kind of lifestyle is silly, and we have to look at those problems from a realistic perspective—this isn’t something that we should put all our strength into. Shouldn’t being at that socioeconomic level make us think: “How do we change other people’s situations? How do we fight for other people’s rights? How do we deal with extreme poverty in other parts of the world?” But Western society, and the whole culture that we are basing our society on, is telling us that we are allowed to put all our effort into relationship problems. I mean, I feel totally connected to this kind of behavior. Of course, they’re silly. [Laughs] But I still have sympathy for people who are silly.

Where did you find the accordion rendition of Vivaldi’s “Summer” that pops up throughout the movie?

It’s a 12-year-old boy that plays it. If you YouTube “kid shreds the accordion,” you will find him playing the accordion like a maniac. When I found that YouTube clip, I really loved it, and I wanted to have it like the score of the film. It raises the intensity, and made the film more dynamic.

Do you spend a lot of time on YouTube?

Yeah, I do.

What do you look for?

The latest clip that I’m in love with is “BBC mistakes cab driver for IT expert.” Have you seen that?

No.

It’s about a taxi driver who accidentally ends up in a BBC studio. They think he’s an expert on Internet rights. The interviewer says: “Welcome to Guy Kewney!” And in the moment that he’s introduced as Guy Kewney and realizes that there’s been a mix-up, he suddenly starts to play Guy Kewney. He’s like: “Yes, hello…” Then they have this conversation that is total nonsense, and the journalist doesn’t stop the interview because both of them are so obsessed with getting through the interview without any awkwardness. They are not detecting that it’s completely wrong. I think that humans are like that; we’re playing roles of ourselves, and we can be very stuck in a role. [Note: Guy Goma, the interview subject, turned out not to be a taxi driver: he was applying for a job at the BBC and got called into the wrong room.]

You shot Force Majeure in three different geographical spaces: the interiors in a resort in Sweden, the exterior shots in British Columbia and the French Alps. How did you join them together, in filmmaking and narrative terms?

I wanted the interiors—they are almost a bit red-colored, warm, it’s as if they’re taking place on the inside [bodily]. When you are on the mountain, you are totally dependent on the mountain. You’re on the outside. With the ski resort, there’s a constant struggle in the ski resort between the civilized and the uncivilized—humans are trying to control the force of nature by blowing snow, grooming tracks, and building fences to stabilize the snow. There’s something very interesting about that environment as a metaphor. And of course, I mean, the inside: if you’re on a holiday and have relationship problems and argue, but don’t want to do it in front of the kids, you have to step outside the room and be in the hallway.

Why do you prefer to shoot from such a long distance?

When I was filming skiing—as I did when I was around 20 and 25—you always wanted to see the skier in the environment and see how the skier is planning the run, doing the turns, avoiding certain dangers or objects or whatever. I think that when you are filming people in a room, and we see the difference between our bodies, that kind of setup is very important in what we are doing or not. Before, I haven’t been interested in the face of a character. I didn’t think we could get a lot of information from the face. But in this film, it was very important what was happening on the inside of the characters. If you look at Ebba when she’s losing control of herself or in touch with her emotions, there’s real drama taking place in her face. For me, this was a step to getting a little closer to the actors than I have been before.

The film’s Swedish title is Turist, and internationally it’s Force Majeure. Did you decide to make that change?

I think Force Majeure is a much better title. It was called Turist when we first got funding. Originally the film was a multi-plot story told in three episodes about well-to-do Swedes encountering human behavior that they had only thought people in war zones or natural disasters had to deal with, and then having to face those sides of themselves. But then when the idea of the avalanche came up, I immediately understood that I only wanted it to take place in a ski resort. The title Turist was so established in Sweden that I couldn’t change it to Force Majeure. But for the international title I wanted to go for Force Majeure.

When you’re directing actors, how much room do they have to improvise with their body?

We did a lot of improvisation during the casting, during the rehearsal, and the night before we’d shoot a scene. Even when we are on set and shooting, I re-consider, re-write, and use things that actors are adding. In some senses everything goes according to the script, and in others there’s a lot of improvisation. It’s different in different scenes. 

How do you make that decision?

Every day on shooting it’s a struggle. You have a vision of what you want to do, but when you see, you see, oh, no, it’s not like this. You have to fight, fight, fight, and try to get it the way you want it to be. If you’re really lucky during a shooting day, you get a little bit above your expectations. You’re reaching something that’s even better than you thought. But it’s a big part of the shooting. I think one of the big errors people make when they are shooting film is that they’re using the script and following the script like this… [Taps on table] But to put something from paper to a practical, working scene is a huge step. You immediately detect what’s wrong with a script when you try it—what you need to reconsider.

There are a lot of ways you could interpret the ending, where Ebba [Tomas’s wife] demands to be let off the bus that’s driving them to the airport, and everyone else follows her. Why did you choose to close on that note?

I wanted to raise questions for the audience to deal with. There are three things with the ending. One of them is that everyone is doing the same thing as Tomas in the avalanche. The other thing is that Charlotte [a woman Ebba meets at the resort] is the character that is supposed to be punished, if you look at conventional films. Anyone who’s promiscuous or unfaithful gets punished at the end of the film. And I almost wanted the audience to hope for Charlotte to go over the cliff and crash down as punishment for her sinful way of life. But instead, she’s the one who makes it to the airport. [Laughs] The third thing that happens is, in the beginning, all the people that leave the bus are ashamed of exaggerating their emotions. But after a while, they feel a connection as they’re walking together on the road. This is what it’s like to be a human. I mean, it’s an emotional roller-coaster upside-down, and we are trying to disguise ourselves. We are trying to put on a face—we are so afraid of showing who we are in front of other people.

Charlotte’s character was interesting, because so much of what this film and Play deal with is primal reactions—things we do that we just don’t understand or can’t rationalize. But her actions are the antithesis of biological psychology, which attributes so much behavior to ideas like “Women have only so many eggs, so they’re not promiscuous like men, and they put their children above everything.” But Charlotte’s like: “Fuck that.”

Yeah. [Laughs] 

Her behavior casts some doubt on the tendency to explain such things biologically. Why did you choose to have a character like this?

For me, Charlotte’s a person who talks about herself in a hypothetical way. She says things like: “Why should I be jealous if my man has sex with another woman and it’s a good time for him? Shouldn’t I be happy for him?” She’s a person who puts herself above the constructed idea of faithfulness, and based on a person that I know. He’s a man, and he’s around 70, and loves to talk about himself like that. Even though he can’t live by those hypothetical ideals, he’s still interested in questioning the kind of view that we have on life.

It’s interesting to look at the idea of being faithful when it comes to sexuality. That was something that started in the human history when we started to own land. Before that, humans were having sex in the same way that animals did. We were walking in the woods, and suddenly we saw someone and had sex. But when we wanted to control who would get our property when we die, and the values that we have in life, suddenly we had to control sexuality. That’s when we decided that we had to be faithful. And now we have emotions connected to a structure. And so she’s a person who’s above the structure, or at least she wants to be—above this economic structure of creating those emotions.

Speaking of animals, what’s happening with your next project, about a bunch of actors pretending to be monkeys?

Actually, I haven't found a way of doing that film yet, so I’m doing another project. It’s called The Square. It’s about how our attitude towards society, public, and our common responsibility have changed. If you look at my father, when he was brought up in Sweden, when he was 6 years old, his parents put an address tag around his neck and left him out on the street to play. At that time, that was very common. In that time, you thought of other adult people as ones who could help your kids. Today, we see other adult people as ones who are a threat to your kids.

It’s a radical change of attitude. If you look at Sweden now, they’re starting to build gated communities. A gated community says: “We’re taking responsibility for what’s happening on the inside. We don't take responsibility for what happens on the outside.” So The Square is about a city where they have created a symbolic place that will remind us of our common responsibility. The symbolic place is a square, marked in white, and set up in a strategic place in the city. If you need help, you can go stand in that square. If you are tired and you don’t want to carry luggage, you can put it in the square, because in the square you’re not allowed to steal. It’s like a crosswalk; there are rules that are connected to it, and in the same way.

So of course this square has a philosophical meaning too. If these are the rules inside the square, what are the rules on the outside? Are you allowed to steal outside the square? Certainly not. Shouldn’t you help your fellow citizens outside the square? Of course you should. This square is like an invention that exists in this city, and will be like a red thread through the film. And we will see different situations, when different individuals are trying to deal with how hard it is to take responsibility, how afraid we are to lose face in front of each other, how afraid we are of violence—and also that we are getting to be passive spectators when it comes to public spaces.

Given that Nightcrawler is all about TV journalism, its content hardly screams “Breaking News.” The film reveals that freelance TV news-gathering is a nasty, amoral business, and that TV news-broadcasting is sensationalist and cutthroat, a fertile breeding ground for opportunistic bottom-feeders. There seems little to add but to ask: so, what else you got? Even so, while Nightcrawler is neither revelatory nor exactly up-to-the-minute, still this debut feature from writer-director Dan Gilroy (brother of Tony, and writer on The Bourne Legacy, Real Steel, and Tarsem’s insane The Fall) has an efficient, concentrated punch. It’s a no-nonsense, old-school exercise, with a tinge of borderline trashiness, down to that Eighties-sounding electric guitar in James Newton Howard’s score. But its oddly archaic feel makes Nightcrawler enough of an anomaly among 21st-century thrillers to feel distinctive, sufficiently vintage to feel fresh again.

The film’s trump card is Jake Gyllenhaal, who, following the intense eccentricity of his two recent roles for Denis Villeneuve—a doppelgänger duo in Enemy, a doggedly compelled detective in Prisoners—seems to have set his heart on being the weirdest on-screen presence in North American cinema. Like Joaquin Phoenix in The Master, Gyllenhaal plays a character who seems to fit so awkwardly in his own skin that you get a pain in the shoulderblades just looking at him. Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom, a man who spends his nights awake in Los Angeles, initially scavenging scrap metal to resell, which he does with a disarming eager-beaver spiel: “Who am I? I’m a hard worker, I set myself goals, and I like to be consistent.”

Who is he, indeed? Some insomniac with a troublesome mental profile, an indomitable survival instinct, and a tendency to spout glib, pre-digested management-motivational nonsense. Living in a drab box of an apartment with his TV for company, he’s like a super-debased cut-price descendant of the existential loners that once populated Jean-Pierre Melville films (and Walter Hill’s tributes to them).

The fundamental logic of obsession stories is that characters blunder by chance into the thing that becomes their fetish, their raison d’être. That’s what happens to Louis when he discovers that there are armies that roam the Los Angeles night looking for catastrophes that they can film and sell as hard news—crimes, killings, messy arrests. He chances on one such scene, learns from veteran nocturnal cameraman, or “nightcrawler,” Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) that “if it bleeds, it leads,” and realizes that Loder’s profession is a viable career option for a man with a head full of delusions and a flexible body clock.

Exchanging a stolen bike for a secondhand video camera, Louis is initially inept at his new profession but is prepared to break all the rules of professional and moral decorum observed even by Loder. He acquires the tricks of the trade (learning how to read police codes like a good Boy Scout), and picks up sales technique: like a robotic learning machine, he sees, hears, absorbs all. He soon has sufficiently juicy material to impress the news editor at failing TV station KWLA, Nina (Rene Russo), whose idea of quality material is simple: “Think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.”

Nina has an unashamedly sensationalist and racist agenda: she wants shock stories about white victims of black violence, “urban crime creeping into the suburbs.” Louis soon chances on a prize scare story: a case of rich white folks slaughtered in their luxury home, complete with blood-splashed walls, a heart-stopping child’s-nursery shot, and even perps high-tailing it in their getaway vehicle (of course, he keeps the best bits under wraps for future use).

He’s now indispensable to the station and he knows it, as we see in a genuinely squirm-inducing restaurant scene: he’s soon pressing Nina for funding and for sexual favors, in the same wheedling, smiling, blandly corporate tones (“I have to think that you are invested in this transaction”). An equally appalling, but more overtly comic, scene has him posturing like a knight of the boardroom as he gives a job interview to the luckless Rick (the excellent British actor Riz Ahmed), plying him with empty motivational verbiage (“I’m giving you a chance to explore career options,” i.e., “I’m going to exploit you mercilessly—and you’ll be grateful”). There’s a nice reprise of this scene later on, when Rick, now desperate—earning next to nothing and realizing he’s putting his life on the line—nevertheless allows himself to be suckered by more shiny words, to be precise, the title Executive Vice President.

Nightcrawler contains some clunky overstatement: would someone like Nina ever really come out with anything as excruciatingly quotable as that “screaming woman” line? Or Loder with “if it bleeds…”? Only if they’d heard the lines in a bad movie. Yet Nightcrawler persuade us that we’re looking at a world in which everyone gets by without thinking for themselves, idly recycling thirdhand lines that they’ve picked up somewhere—which lets them concentrate on following their self-preservation instinct undistracted. Meanwhile, such is the film’s bitter cynicism that the two ostensibly decent characters—the nebbishy Rick, and Nina’s colleague-with-a-conscience, played by Mad Men’s Kevin Rahm—are depicted as doomed-to-extinction milksops who can barely get a line out, let alone a pithy one.

But if Nightcrawler is often heavy-handed, it’s also effectively gripping. In a way, its quotient of cliché brings a dash of B-movie timelessness—or at least, out-of-timeness, in that it doesn’t really feel like a 2014 film. There’s a harsh, neon brassiness about the film that’s very Eighties: not just in the climactic car chase action (in a way, as opportunistic as Louis himself), but in the overall look, with DP Robert Elswit giving Los Angeles and its night lights a synthetic metallic sheen, with echoes of Michael Mann, from Thief to Collateral.

Louis is the kind of quietly feral monomaniac that James Woods might have played in his prime. He’s not entirely believable or consistent as a character, shifting seamlessly from sycophantic underling to strutting faux exec as he teaches Rick to kowtow to him. But the smartness of Gilroy’s script is that it tells us next to nothing about Louis. With no backstory, he’s a stranded delayed adolescent, flailing for himself in the city and inventing himself as he goes along—the sort of work for which it helps not to have such unnecessary ballast as a soul. His ferocious capacity for delusion makes him a nephew to Rupert Pupkin—but I’m also reminded of Tom McCamus’s actor turned impostor in the largely forgotten but very effective David Wellington’s I Love a Man in Uniform, a film that similarly suggested that people accidentally walk into the role that becomes their destiny, whether they really know their lines or not.

And the fact that we know nothing about Louis makes his relationship with Nina all the more effectively perverse: we can just tell that this is a boy with horrific oedipal issues. Somehow, he’s able to see right through to her weaknesses—he knows that, personally and professionally, she’s deeply disappointed with her life, and he’s not afraid to twist the knife. Russo, age 60 and playing Nina knowingly as a hardboiled faded coquette, gives a steely performance that shows no vanity and no mercy towards herself; if writer-director Gilroy weren’t her husband, you might consider this casting decision as cruel as it’s astute.

Gyllenhaal, merely, is mesmerizingly odd, delivering Louis’s mantras with almost churchy piety, the better to bring out their manic hollowness. He lifts this film several notches with his physical presence alone: skeletal, oddly greasy from Louis’s topknot down, and with a stare that looks as if it’s been painted directly onto his eyelids. His central presence helps make Nightcrawler vivid and fresh, even if what it has to say about its subject looks a little old hat. (But then, part of the film’s argument is that TV itself has become slow and antiquated, desperately struggling to keep up with the pace of events in the age of instantaneous online news.)

And still the industry keeps feeding itself: the closing punch-line is bathetic in its crunching irony, but the scene itself makes its point, as Louis addresses a group of eager new recruits who are about to start the worst job they’ll ever have, under the worst boss imaginable. Nightcrawler might feel a little dated overall, but it makes one observation that’s nothing if not current: it’s set in a world in which a young workforce is only too willing to get its blood sucked for a platter of promises and shiny managerial rhetoric.

Located midway between the cities of Portland to the south and Bangor to the north, Camden is a snug little harbor town in Maine set off against the mountains which cradle it against the sea, the whole scene as adorable as a miniature diorama. The area’s scenic beauty—the peak of Mt. Battie! the steeple of the Chestnut Street Baptist Church!—has not escaped the attention of those who make movies, and so, depending on your misfortune as a moviegoer, you may have seen Camden in such films as the Stephen King adaptation Thinner and Grown Ups 2.

Happily, the abovementioned titles aren’t the sole contribution that Camden has made to the world of cinematic arts. For the last decade, at the very end of September, while the summer residents are tarping up their boats, the town has played host to a four-day documentary film festival, the Camden International Film Festival. (The acronym is “CIFF”; spoken aloud, it sounds like hip slang for syphilis.) On the two occasions that I’ve had the pleasure of attending, CIFF has fallen opposite the opening weekend of the New York Film Festival, but this is less important than the fact that it falls approximately half a year after True/False—the Columbia, Missouri boutique fest that is to supporters and practitioners of formally ambitious documentary what Burning Man is to granolaheads and tech zillionaires—and so CIFF has become the nearest thing to T/F on the Eastern seaboard. Which is not to say that CIFF hasn’t established an identity very much its own, thanks in no small part to the Points North Documentary Forum, now in its sixth year, which includes a pitch award, and which this year was joined by “AJ+ Pitch,” a live pitch sponsored by Al Jazeera’s AJ+ channel.

Ne Me Quitte Pas

Aside from screening a smattering of obvious crowd-pleasers, the CIFF slate tends towards material that demands a fair amount of viewer sophistication, and is therefore lucky to take place far from NYU. The fest also asks for a certain measure of organizational discipline from attendees: each film screens once and only once, with venues spread between Camden and nearby Rockland. For Mainers, it’s an opportunity to catch up with various documentaries that have been picking up festival buzz through the year—Actress, Art and Craft, Rich Hill, Happy Valley, Ne Me Quitte Pas, The Overnighters—but for anyone who’s already pretty much caught up, there are additional inducements, and the occasional happy surprise.  

The Iron Ministry

My first screening of the fest was J.P. Sniadecki’s The Iron Ministry, fresh from Locarno, next stop the NYFF. Here the co-director of People’s Park has mixed together scores of trips on the Chinese rail system, through all regions and in all levels of comfort, into one 82-minute journey. The film begins by buffeting the viewer with abstracting close-ups while exploring the nooks and crannies of a violently tremoring car: cigarette butts sloshing in black-as-tar water, raw meat being stored in the open air. The opening sets the table for a purely observational Sensory Ethnography-style catalog of “experiential” details, but Sniadecki doesn’t bind himself to any preordained template. This allows for one standout scene which begins when the filmmaker, a fluent Mandarin speaker, initiates a conversation with two Hui Muslim Chinese traveling for a holiday. They’re joined by two non-Muslim Chinese who ask the Hui questions about their lives, and as they do an undercurrent of tension becomes evident beneath the pleasant curiosity, a subtle back-and-forth in which the questioners encourage the Hui to say something—implicitly, for the camera—about the great liberties afforded to minorities in China, and the Hui politely demur, until finally the conversation drops off entirely. Similarly, The Iron Ministry doesn’t so much conclude as fall away: because Sniadecki is constantly revising his approach, by the time his film pulls into the proverbial station, there is no established style or theme to break with for accent. (The logical-if-perhaps-too-obvious end point would be the brief detour into a posh bullet train which once and for all banishes the illusion of this material coming from a single train ride.) Sniadecki’s free-form openness is winning, and he has gathered a handful of irresistible scenes together here, but when The Iron Ministry wraps, one has precisely the impression of having watched a handful of scenes rather than a fully realized work.

Guidelines

Jean-François Caissy’s Guidelines certainly can’t be accused of being too freewheeling. A favorite at the festival but to my mind too hemmed in by its own, uh, guidelines, the film’s subject are at-risk students at a secondary school in rural Quebec, and its various fixed-camera long-take tableaux are shot on and off school grounds. Time and again it returns us to dreary, dun-colored counselors’ offices, the frame in most instances set firmly on kids shot from an off-center perspective while they’re being interrogated and instructed by school authorities, vaguely reminiscent of Antoine Doinel at the head-shrinker in The 400 Blows. We never see the same student in the spotlight twice, which is a pity because some are simply more interesting than others—I’m thinking particularly of a husky-voiced girl, seemingly entirely free of empathy, who shows up within the first half-hour to be confronted over her bullying of another student, and is never heard from again. The rigidity of the school scenes is, I suppose, meant to contrast with the scenes of footloose outdoor idyll, but no real relaxation of the formal strictures is ever evident. Still, there’s enough here to mark Caissy as one to follow: he has an unfailing compositional eye, and a measure of visual wit, mostly evident in observation of improbably elastic young bodies.

In Country

Against the visual rigor and conceptual stiffness of Guidelines, I’ll pit Mike Attie and Meghan O’Hara’s In Country. It’s a film that too often falls back on banal or predictable images, but it’s astir with material that prods at the ambivalences that many of us feel about the American martial tradition, and is at times greatly moving. Attie and O’Hara embedded themselves with a group if Oregon reenactors who, on weekends in their state’s verdant forests, keep on re-fighting the Vietnam War with blanks. Copping lingo learned from repeat viewings of Apocalypse Now, these guys first appear as figures of fun, though as the filmmakers follow them on their civilian rounds and dole out backstory—many are actual veterans or on active duty, and one is a Vietnamese national who fought with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam—their psychological need for these war games becomes increasingly apparent. Reenactment footage is deftly intercut with the veteran’s home movies from the field and well-chosen archival material from Vietnam; the contrast never serving the purpose of simple mockery, but rather creating disquieting echoes along the corridors of history. 

Waiting for August

On awards night, Guidelines earned a Special Jury Mention, while the same jury gave their Emerging Cinematic Vision Award prize to Amanda Rose Wilder’s Approaching the Elephant, which documents the first year in the life of a New Jersey “Free School” in which young students are invited to create their curriculum on equal footing with their instructors. I should like to add an honorable mention of my own for Teodora Ana Mihai’s Waiting for August, which shares more than its gerund title with Approaching the Elephant—they’re both films about kids trying to work things out by themselves. (A comparison to Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos’s Rich Hill is also apt, as both are films about striving for the appearance of domestic stability against staggering odds.)

In Mihai’s film, unobtrusive in style and cumulative in effect, the children are a brood of seven living on the top floor of an apartment block in Bacau, Romania. During the absences of their mother, who has to work in Italy 11 months out of the year in order to support them, 15-year-old Georgiana has emerged as something like the de facto caretaker, cooking, laundering, and supervising the running of the surprisingly functional household. (Eldest boy Ionut comes off as mostly useless, seen playing first-person shooter games on the shared antique PC, which is also used for choppy cam-chat sessions with mom.) Mihai’s film has already had its token New York run at the Quad Cinema, but it deserves some kind of afterlife, for it achieves a rare mixture of total access and respectful distance which made Georgiana the most compelling subject I encountered at this year’s CIFF.

Laura Poitras’s Edward Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR premiered at the New York Film Festival to extraordinary applause, reflecting not only the grip its subject matter exerts on the public but also the efficacy of the filmmaking. FILM COMMENT sat down with Poitras after a public screening for a conversation that ranged from what revelations still surprise her, to the role of narrative in documentary and journalism, to how she knew she was being followed in Hong Kong. CITIZENFOUR opens theatrically this Friday.

This film is not just a guy in a hotel room, like a subpoena deposition. I really like the image you start out with, for example: a ribbon of light through the darkness. What is that exactly?

That’s a tunnel emerging into Hong Kong. At the beginning, you don’t see where it’s going, and then when we arrive in Hong Kong, you get the skyline. It’s also psychological—it feels like I’ve been in a tunnel for the past year.

As if the last movie you did, The Oath [10], wasn’t high-tension enough.

Definitely. I’ve been more stressed working on this film than being in Iraq during the occupation.

Just in terms of what the movie discloses, what does it reveal that has not been disclosed already?

I could answer that in a couple ways. For one thing we wanted to make a film that wasn’t about breaking news, but was about a story that would have resonance now and in five years or 10 years. But there are things that are new in it. The fact that Lindsay Mills has moved to Moscow to be with him hadn’t been disclosed before Friday night at the premiere. There are [also] some things in the final scene. Some things have been published—the watch-list documents have been published—but the role of the Ramstein air-force base is in the film. We’re working on it, and there have been other whistle-blowers who have talked about Ramstein as being key for the U.S. drone program. There’s that, and then there’s the President being the person who decides who gets killed in the drone program. That’s also been reported in other ways, but we’re doing different reporting.

Then there was a section called “Into the Archive” called Core Secrets, which is looking at some of the highest level of classification in the U.S. government. You see it when Snowden leaves the hotel room, and there’s this cut to the archive called “Core Secrets,” and you see some of what’s being initiated. That’s something we published on The Intercept on Friday, simultaneous with the film. There’s a story by me and Peter Maass which looks at these Core Secrets, which involves things like having people who work for the U.S. government deployed in the technology industry to build in backdoors, through encryption and stuff.

We intended to have [CITIZENFOUR] work as a narrative that’s not going to have a wave of headlines, and then all of a sudden be old news. So we wanted to make it a story.

That’s sometimes a challenge for documentaries. When documentaries come out, people often treat what they say as if it’s news and nobody ever said it before. I always wonder how much documentary filmmakers grapple with that.

I mean, we are definitely doing long-form journalism. It’s great if there’s something new in there, and it can get attention. But it has to go further and go deeper to have any depth.

There’s something especially striking about the nature of what CITIZENFOUR reveals, though. It’s not as though the government is spying too much—it sounds like it’s just spying all. It’s shocking, and not just the first time you hear it. It’s almost as if you need to be told certain things more than once—and need to be told it in a particularly effective narrative—in order to absorb it.

Obviously I choose to do visual storytelling—if you connect emotionally, then maybe you can shift consciousness in a certain way. There’s lots of information that we know about. We know that the U.S. has a drone program, or we know that we torture people. But if you can actually communicate those things in a way that hits people in a different way, then I think it’s fundamentally different. It’s not about news or not news—it’s about whether it has any emotional resonance. And therefore it’s about whether people care, or don’t care. The work I do tries to ground it, so it’s about communicating on the level of emotions, or empathy, as much as it is about information. There’s information that’s not revealed—that we know about—but the fact that we can see why he did it, and what he sees as the danger of it, changes how we interpret that information. If he’s willing to risk his life for this, perhaps it’s important that we pay some attention rather than brush it off.

The film’s structure—having the hour or so in the hotel room frame bookended by the outside world—is very effective. The way you set it up, it’s almost as if the room was the theory—and as soon as you leave that room you’ll be encountered with reality, with the world.

That’s really interesting. What do you mean when you say “theory”?

You have all this stuff he’s telling you. And you have no particular reason to doubt it, but it’s still just stuff he’s telling you. But then you have the news reports, and then it’s happening, and it’s real in a way that it wasn’t real before.

Yeah, I mean that does mirror, like, time stopping. And then all of a sudden psh!—something exploding beyond the hotel room.

It’s also like a cat-and-mouse game—until he comes out. What made you linger on those shots him getting ready to leave? Picking things up, milling about. These moments feel like they last a long time, after the very dense scenes of him talking.

With everything in my relationship with Snowden, it was always: “Here’s the next step.” He didn’t say when we first started corresponding: “Oh, I will go to Hong Kong at some point, and then we’ll meet there.” It’d be like, “I need the key, let’s exchange email addresses,” and then, “You should go here and we’ll wait for the next thing.” I only knew one step ahead, and I didn’t know he was leaving the country until he’d already left and then went to Hong Kong. But I kind of thought he had the next step planned after the hotel room. When he’s packing and leaving, you realize that his planning actually stopped—right there. It was important to show that—that it’s clear he didn’t have an exit strategy in that moment, and the kind of emotion that goes with that.

Once he’s left, it’s surprising that he ended up taking a flight that would go through Russia. Were you surprised by that?

Whatever his choice was for Hong Kong, it seemed that when the U.S. issued an extradition warrant it wasn’t safe for him to be there anymore. Then it does create a problem of what airspace, how do you get out of there, in a way that the U.S. is not going to intervene. As we saw later, when the U.S. downed the airplane of the Bolivian president, the U.S. was really after him. But I actually thought he had a strategy with regard to Hong Kong. After that—this has been widely reported—he was in transit in Moscow and was trying to get to Latin America.

Could you talk about when you decided to film?

After he, Glenn [Greenwald, journalist], and I met, we went back to his room, and I did take out my camera really quickly. Partly because I know Glenn pretty well, and I knew he was going to want to jump right in, and I didn’t want to miss that. So I took out my camera right away—which was probably a bit awkward, and he was probably also a bit nervous. Then I started filming, and on this first day, I filmed—and Glenn did—a really lengthy debrief of who he was, his biography.

The “you” story. I love that phrase.

[Laughs] Yeah, it was the “you” story. And it went on for hours. Glenn was incredibly on point to try to understand who he was, why he was making this decision, and where he came from. That was the first day, and the second day Ewen [MacAskill, defence and intelligence correspondent for The Guardian] was brought in. And he did a separate kind of vetting which we see in the film. Then they progressed, and so the first Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday were a lot of who are you, why are you doing this, and a lot of technical talk. He’s describing programs, and telling us about whatever, about XKeyscore, about Tumult, all these different things.

I like that you kept all that in.

Right, it becomes about journalism. And we’re all like, what the fuck are these things? Of course, now these things are all more in our vocabulary. Then Glenn starts publishing, and there’s a change. Because that’s when the NSA visit Snowden’s home where his girlfriend is living, and that’s when you realize there’s a bit of a race, or a clock ticking. The government clearly knows that he’s gone, and they probably know he’s the source. But they’re not ready to do a press conference or anything. And we’re publishing, and I think because Snowden had already made the decision that he wouldn’t remain anonymous, we felt it was important for him to articulate why he did what he did. So there was a bit of time pressure.

Were you filming every time you were there with him in the room?

Not every time but a lot.

How long were the sessions?

Each day was different. I’d say I filmed four hours a day, but each day was different.

You can see him changing also in that time, on his face.

It’s beautiful. First you have these strangers meeting, and a sort of awkward encounter, and then slowly getting to know each other, and then you realize the stakes for him get higher and higher. Then you realize the world outside is paying attention. From a filmmaking perspective, there was a lot of drama.

By the third or fourth day it’s clear he hasn’t been sleeping. But I suppose you might not have been sleeping that well either.

I was not sleeping, no. I was very concerned that at any moment the door would get kicked in. I felt more afraid while making this film than any other film I’ve made. Because these are really powerful forces that we were angering and we knew we were doing it.

At a certain point, you said you realized you were being followed. What were you seeing?

I wanted to stay in Hong Kong and film, and after he left the hotel room, and he went underground, I actually wanted to film where he was. I was talking to his lawyer and asked if that was possible, and we tried to make a plan where I could be taken out of the hotel room and put someplace and maybe meet up. And then, yeah, it was just clear…

What literally did you see? Was it a person walking behind you or a car?

Yeah. A car, a person. Different things.

It’s funny, I can sit here and have my little paranoid flights of imagination—and then you just confirm them.

I mean, it wasn’t surprising, that after that, people would follow me as a way to lead to him. That’s ultimately why I left. I said, it’s too risky. I was eager to keep filming if that was possible. But it just seemed risky for him, and also risky for me. And at that point, everyone else had left. Glenn had left, Ewen had left, the Guardian had left, so I was the only person there.

I remember seeing some cheesy movie in the late Nineties, Enemy of the State—

Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that a few times.

[Laughs] A few times? It’s no longer cheesy, in a way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s actually right.

Being in the thick of it, you must no longer be surprised by things.

I still do get surprised by things. For instance, I was surprised that the CIA spied on the Senate committee to investigate torture. I thought that was surprising! I was like, really, you’d think that they wouldn’t go there. Specifically because you have people in those committees who have supported the torture programs—you’d think that they wouldn’t spy on Congress. But, no, they do. So you think you’re not going to be surprised, and then things happen. And there was also some stuff in Germany where the CIA had a double agent, who was spying on the German inquiry into the NSA. And you just think, come on guys! That’s just going too far.

What about the second half of the film, is there a second film that could come out of that?

It’s too soon to know.

One aspect related to some of this is the role of business in surveillance. Is that ever something you’d like to explore?

I do think that money and capital is going to have a big impact in terms of how the surveillance debate plays out, because what we’ve seen is that there are big U.S. companies that want to have a market internationally. These revelations make foreign citizens rightfully concerned about handing their information over to the U.S. government—which then opens up a marketplace for other people to step forward that aren’t cooperating so much with U.S. internet companies and telecoms. I think that there will be economic pressures that will have hopefully a role in creating technologies that are privacy-preserving as opposed to privacy-destroying. People—both U.S. citizens, and internationally—will expect that.

Right now we’re in the era of handing over everything, the data. We haven’t really gotten the blowback from that yet, but I think there is going to be blowback. There’s going to be a generation of people who grow up and have their photograph—you know, their parents put their photographs there—and then there are these facial-recognition technologies... Et cetera. And there are going to be people who grow up and say: “I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to live where there’s a digital trail that collects everything I’ve said, every friend I’ve had.” I think there is both a right and a human desire for privacy. And we haven’t really seen how that’s going to play out, both in terms of what governments do, and also what companies and commercial entities do.

So your view is that at some point people will react to the blowback.

I think so. I think there will be a blowback, and people will demand it. And parents will say: “I don’t want my kids, all the details about my kids, in the hands of a company or government.” That the right to privacy is a fundamental right and it’s a fundamental human need. And if you look at any repressive regime, you can see that that’s what happens: this kind of information can be used against populations. Right now, we’re in sort of a naïve state of mind thinking that it’s all innocent. I mean, Google’s email services—you can search things, you can find things, super convenient, et cetera—we all naïvely think that this is never going to be used in ways that could work against people.

It’s a challenge talking about the film because there are so many intersecting issues. But I wanted to ask about feeling part of cinema verité, as a filmmaker, and it’s funny because so much of the cinema verité people know from the Sixties and later is about famous people.

[Laughs] Not everything! You’ve got Salesman. It’s so brilliant.

I love Salesman! Or Frederick Wiseman.

Yeah, any of Wiseman.

But what I really appreciate about CITIZENFOUR is how it’s merged with journalism in a way. At the Q&A, you called yourself a documentary filmmaker, but you also then used the term “videojournalist.” Is it all together for you?

Clearly I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I do think I do visual journalism, and that’s different than print journalism. And I would also say that I’m an artist. So I think that those things cross. So, a long form of film is not just about journalism. It’s about narratives and stuff like that. I think they’re both.

You’ve done installation work in the past. What are you planning next in that regard?

The Whitney asked me to do a show in 2016, so that’s probably my next big project. But I still have documentaries and shorts that I want to do.

And how do you balance, how do you reconcile the artistic imperatives with the duty you’ve spoken of in doing journalism?

It’s hard. It’s hard, because there’s still a lot of reporting that needs to be done. And I feel an obligation that it needs to happen. It’s a challenge because the reporting takes time, and it takes time to find partnerships that don’t make mistakes that could cause harm. All those kinds of things take time to navigate. But ultimately, I think what I can contribute, or what’s maybe more unique, is what I can do with the camera instead of what I can do in print. There are plenty of great print journalists that can report on the NSA stuff. But I think that my skills are maybe better used in other ways.

We did a piece [Chokepoint] about a German company that was targeted by the GSHQ [British intelligence]. What the NSA and GSHQ are doing, which is really pernicious, is they target engineers at telecoms, personally, so they can get their passwords and get into their networks, and get their customer data. So they target this German company that provides Internet to Africa and the Middle East. They actually have names of employees and these documents. We published about it, which is a big deal, because it’s the U.K. targeting another European Union country. But then we did a video on it, which shows these engineers learning that their names are in this list.

Chokepoint

For me, that’s what videojournalism can do, where you see the faces of the engineers being shown the data going, oh my God, I’m being targeted so that you can find out all of what my customers are doing. The print journalism is essential, and should be done, and I’ll continue to work on it, but to actually show the faces of somebody—an engineer who’s entrusted with customer data—realizing that his name is in an intelligence document, and to see that reaction, it’s a different way of communicating information. It’s powerful. It’s information that wouldn’t surprise you, so there is that idea of “yes, you know everything,” but it’s how you can know it in different ways.

The below articles were produced as part of the 2014 New York Film Festival Critics Academy, whose participants were invited to contribute writing about the selection.

The Secret Sharer: Seymour: An Introduction

At the height of his fame, Bob Dylan complained of a cult of fans so awestruck that they’d sift through his cigarette butts in search of enlightenment. Fifty years later there remains something attractive about a gifted artist who hates publicity. The phenomenon lies at the center of Ethan Hawke’s documentary, Seymour: An Introduction, though at first it seems to be completely absent. Seymour Bernstein is a brilliant piano teacher and gentle, nurturing mentor, who helped Hawke overcome his stage fright so quickly that the actor has now returned the favor by directing this documentary. He is shy and humble, and has lived much of his life in the same tiny apartment.  He genuinely dislikes self-promotion, crafty or otherwise.

For such a talented musician, Seymour’s lack of name recognition might come as a surprise, and indeed, Hawke spends much of his documentary attempting to explain just that. A soldier in the Korean War, then a world-class concert pianist, Seymour abandoned his promising career to teach students full-time. Many of these, like the journalist Michael Kimmelman, were children when they met first him; now fully grown, they still talk with him on the phone and meet up for coffee.  When Seymour explains that a patroness from his concert days fell in love with him, we nod: everyone who gets to know Seymour falls in love with him. He makes modesty attractive, seemingly by ridding himself of every possible pretension.

Seymour would balk at the idea of being called a guru, but Ethan Hawke’s film ends up suggesting as much through its the distance created by its reserve about his personal life. Aside from a few sad mentions of an overbearing father, we learn next to nothing about Seymour’s family, nor do we hear more about his romantic life.  And while we see plenty of fruitful and entertaining piano lessons, it’s nearly impossible to imagine Seymour when he’s not teaching his eager students.  These omissions say a great deal about the limits of our relationship with this man.  Hawke doesn’t sift through his hero’s cigarette butts, but it’s ironic that in refusing to do so, he endows his friend with the kind of mystique that Seymour’s career (and, superficially, the film) discourages.

To his credit, Hawke isn’t a conspicuous presence in his film, in the way other famous actors turned documentarians have been.  Neither, in a way,  is Seymour.  Few people realize how many hours of practice it takes to be a great pianist, he tells us, yet he gives no explanation of how those years of practice turned him into a wise old man who could cure stage fright in a day.  Part of the reason people obsess over the tiniest details of celebrities’ lives is to provide some link between the banality of their own lives and the mystery of their idols’.  In denying us these things, Seymour may be trying, in his sweet, wry way, to discourage his fans—all fans—of relying on other people for the answers.—Jackson Arn

Labor Intensive: Two Days, One Night

Receive a €1,000 bonus, or save a colleague's job. That's the dilemma 16 workers at a solar-panel factory face in the Dardenne Brothers' suspenseful social drama Two Days, One Night. It’s their latest film devoted to the cause of portraying the working class, but the tendency stretches far back for the filmmakers. Since they began in the late Seventies with a number of video documentaries, the Belgian duo has examined the role of labor, solidarity, and moral integrity in a working-class environment.

The Nightingale's Song (78) tells of the Walloon Resistance movement in World War II, partly through syndicalist and communist resisters who struggled to avoid working for the German occupiers. When the Boat of Léon M. Went Down the Meuse River for the First Time (79) and For the War to End, the Walls Should Have Crumbled (80) both look at the 1960 Belgian general strike. Lessons from a University on the Fly (82) is a series of interviews with Polish immigrants about their trades, their journeys to Belgium, and union efforts. And Look at Jonathan (83) follows Jean Louvet, the left-wing playwright and founder of a proletarian theater.

The Dardennes trace similar themes in their fiction films, mostly social realist parables featuring characters who must navigate some ethical dilemma. In La Promesse (96), teenager Igor struggles to extricate himself from his father's practice of exploiting illegal immigrants, eventually siding with the family of an employee who died in a construction accident. In the Dardennes’ first Palme d'Or winner Rosetta (99), the 17-year-old title character violently protests her firing at an ice cream factory. Desperate to support herself and her alcoholic mother, she spends the rest of the film searching for work.

At one point, Rosetta snitches on a friend selling under the table at a waffle stand. She wanted his job, she tells him, but it's more than that. She would never cheat, and, as a hard worker who takes pride in her labor, has nothing but contempt for his theft. Like Sandra (Marion Cotillard) in Two Days, One Night, Rosetta has no desire to revolt. It's not a question of worker against employer—the two women just want do their job and be part of society. "I want a job! I want a normal life, like yours!" Rosetta screams at the boss who fires her.

Money matters, but work is also key to shaping identity and sustaining one's humanity and moral compass. That's evident in The Son (02) and The Child (05), in which young unemployed men fill the void with crime and nihilism. Sandra in Two Days, One Night is older, less angry, and more nuanced in her outlook on life. Neither she nor the film judges the workers who decline to give up their bonus because they need the money. She understands—she even feels guilty for asking. While Rosetta pushes a fellow worker out of the nest, Sandra refuses to let others suffer for her benefit. She only wishes her co-workers would demonstrate the same solidarity. "Don’t pity me," she tells them. "Just put yourself in my shoes."—Freja Dam

By Reputation: Maps to the Stars & The Clouds of Sils Maria

The cult of celebrity has become a beast that feeds upon itself, influencing contemporary media and threatening to overwhelm mainstream culture. Two films at this year’s New York Film Festival pointedly attempt to subvert its authority by scrutinizing the operations and very premise of celebritydom.

Written by Bruce Wagner, David Cronenberg’s caustic comedy-drama Maps to the Stars revolves around an ensemble of dysfunctional caricatures who eagerly feed off their toxic, vacuous environment. Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) returns unannounced to Los Angeles in an attempt to reconcile with her estranged family: high-flying quack therapist Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), stage mom Christina (Olivia Williams), and post-rehab child star Benjie (Evan Bird). She lands a personal assistant job with Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), a past-her-prime actress and epitome of narcissism, troubled by memories of childhood abuse that may or may not be imaginary. Along the way, Agatha becomes infatuated with Jerome (Robert Pattinson), a limousine driver and struggling writer/actor.

These are familiar characters whose qualities have been heightened: the self-medicating actress clinging onto her crumbling career, the celebrity doctor with his own reality show, the heinously oblivious child actor with pre-teen appeal, the desperate hangers-on who never quite make it big. The emptiness of their actions and conversations, which feature constant spewing of industry names, is distasteful but yields a morbid delight. They are less people than grotesque manifestations of depravity and vapidity, haunted by both literal and figurative ghosts of the past. Now that’s entertainment!

Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria examines the subject of fame and celebrity culture from a different angle, as it is encountered by characters within its narrative. Actor Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) was made famous by her role in Maloja Snake, a play about a tumultuous relationship between a seductive young woman and her older counterpart, and now finds herself at a crossroads. Upon the death of the respected author of Maloja Snake, Maria this time takes the role of the older woman in a new production of the play, but she struggles to surrender to the role, which entails reckoning with the passage of time in painful ways. With her personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) by her side, she retreats into the mountains to prepare.

As the two women share a growing intimacy, their experiences and dynamic mimic those of the characters in the play. Maria begins to gather information about the actress playing the role she originated—the self-destructive Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz). But poring over pictures, videos on the Internet, and gossip (which Valentine delights in sharing), only gives Maria a sense of her as a celebrity. Even when they meet, the young star seems to accept her outlandish persona and even thrive on it. The choice to cast Kristen Stewart as Maria’s assistant adds an effective layer of reflexivity. At the film’s New York Film Festival press conference, Stewart herself remarked on the irony: “I had to make sure my cheeks weren’t turning red when I said some of the lines in the movie.”—Amanda Yam

Modernist Love: Hiroshima mon amour & Life of Riley

At the 52nd New York Film Festival, Alain Resnais’s 1959 debut feature, Hiroshima mon amour, shared the stage with his last, Life of Riley. It was a pairing that represented two halves of a career: Hiroshima, the film that prompted Eric Rohmer to label Resnais “the first modern filmmaker of the sound era,” the film that might have been to cinema what Picasso’s Guernica was to painting; and Riley, a vibrant comedy of manners about (in)fidelity and aging love, an endearing balancing act of frivolity, solemnity, and slapstick, brimming with a swirling play of cheeky British humor imported into the French idiom.

Resnais’s style between Hiroshima and Riley varied with his source material, from the literary modernism that guided his output of the Fifties and Sixties, to the often whimsical, somewhat mannerist theater-pieces that anchor much of his later work. For Hiroshima, Resnais was tasked with finding a formal language commensurate to Marguerite Duras’s formidable screenplay, a devastating sketch of the interpenetration of private desire and world-historical trauma. The story follows a love affair between a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) and a French woman (magnificently played by Emmanuelle Riva) that unhinges in place and time, transcending the present tense of its action—Hiroshima, 1959—and implicating not only the faded shadow of the atomic blast, but the repressed wartime experiences of Riva’s character as well. The fractured linearity of time and place, image and sound, resembles and enacts the cracks in memory, the blank spots where a past has been repressed beyond recall—a past that flares up in the shock of one image intercut against another.

Life of Riley begins with a tracking shot of a country road (in England, we soon learn) that moves in a way partially reminiscent of the gliding, sweeping movements from Hiroshima. But the now whirling and clanging, now somber and elegiac modernist score that drives the older film is swapped out for X-Files composer Mark Price’s ebullient, goofball musical accompaniment of buzzing horns, flutes, and harpsichord. Almost all of the action in Riley unfolds on soundstages—chiefly on three, each corresponding to the courtyard of a different couple, two of whom are preparing for a play. All three pairs go through the alternately farcical and sincere motions of dealing with news that the eponymous George Riley has cancer and only months to live. Riley, who never quite shows up, is a playful, vivacious, half-cherished, half-abhorred man, we learn, who has embedded himself, long before the action of the film, into the lives of all its six principal characters—as one-time lover, jilted husband, jovial best-friend, hospital patient, and instigator of panging jealousy. These roles play themselves out across the film with a dramatic flare probably reserved for the theater, but with a quality—secured by Resnais’ technical virtuosity, dexterously balancing stage-framing master shots, medium shots, and close ups—that translates to the screen with emphatic success.—Michael Blum

Avatar

Digital projection came as a blitzkrieg, and carried the day before most of us knew what was happening. “Who would have dreamed film would die so quickly?” Roger Ebert wrote in November, 2011, asking the question that much of film culture was two years anno Avatar. But the element of surprise is gone now, the trenches have been dug, and the surviving 35mm partisans, having lasted two long winters, are finally mounting an offense.

Earlier this year I devoted this column to a discussion of the aura of 35mm projection —always present, but intensified by the increasing presence of DCP projection, which was already the standard for first-run theatrical distribution, and is now making significant inroads in repertory film exhibition. The title of the article, “This Print Could Be Your Life,” alluded to Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book subtitled Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, which itself takes its title from the Minutemen song “History Lesson – Part II.” I drew out a tenuous analogy between 35mm projection and live music performance—as opposed to a niche recording format like vinyl, to which it is more often compared—and ended with a Utopian fantasy that celluloid be kept alive by a grassroots network like that described in Azerrad’s book, which had once existed for underground music.

The proposed solution was, of course, patently ridiculous—a vast, well-organized, and well-financed bloc like that which has put DCP over as an exhibition format for films originally shot and traditionally projected in 35mm can only be combatted by an equally vast, well-organized, and well-financed opposition. And while 35mm sectarians have existed since the issue first arose, in last six months we’ve seen forces massing on either side of the border, beating swords against shields, as though a showdown is imminent.

A brief timeline of events in the interim. At a May 23 press conference, held on the occasion of a 35mm Cannes 20th-anniversary screening of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino tells reporters: “Digital projection and DCP is the death of cinema as I know it . . . Digital projections, that’s just television in public.” Over the summer, Tarantino, along with a consortium of “Hollywood’s elite” that includes J.J. Abrams, Martin Scorsese, Judd Apatow, and Christopher Nolan, successfully petition Kodak to continue its manufacture of 35mm stock. The wistful regret over the too-hasty abandonment of analog film evident in this gesture can be encountered throughout film culture. “At risk of sounding pretentious,” Frederick Wiseman says in a Q&A after screening his National Gallery for a Toronto International Film Festival audience, “[film] was more artisanal.” Wiseman is 84, and we expect old men to dig in their heels against change, but then we have 44-year-old P.T. Anderson, for some folks’ money the best we’ve got in American movies, presenting his shot-on-film Inherent Vice on good ol’ 35mm at the New York Film Festival.

Interstellar

“[T]here’s room for both things” said Anderson of the 35mm vs. digital question, though not everyone has been so sanguine. In early September, Tarantino announced that he would be taking over control of Los Angeles’ New Beverly Cinema, which he has owned for the last seven years, from manager and programmer Michael Torgan, and that his first order of business would be to convert the New Bev into an all-35mm house.¹ Not one to be left behind in clout-throwing, Nolan, a vocal and eloquent advocate of shooting on film and the closest thing that studios have to a sure bet commercially, has decided to make his forthcoming Interstellar available two days earlier to venues willing and able to show the film on 35 or 70mm film.

While 35mm production is hanging on by its fingernails, it can’t be denied that we are living in a Golden Age of content farming, and all corners of the Internet movie chat community have chimed in to discuss the merits of dogged allegiance to the musty format, bringing along the inevitable wave of backlash. In the Balder & Dash section of rogerebert.com, an October 8 post by one Aaron Aradillas titled “Film Is What You Use to Make Movies” (http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/film-is-what-you-use-to-make-movies) decries the elitism implicit in prizing 35mm for creating an “exclusionary, what-the-cool-kids-are-into mentality that is quite toxic to the movie-going experience.”

As it happens, I disagree with just about every word in Aradillas’s piece, right from the opening proposition: “Going to the movies has always been one of the simplest, most democratic of life’s pleasures.” I should certainly hope it’s not that simple, lest I’ve wasted the last decade of my life trying to crack it—and were it not for concerned moviegoers, programmers, and filmmakers creating noise enough to form the “division” that Aradillas notes, there would be no way to generate awareness and mobilize opinion in favor of keeping 35mm in play as an exhibition format. This isn’t about exclusion, but desperation; as was proven by Scorsese’s casting himself as the public face of film preservation in the early Eighties, cultural priorities are determined in no small part through squeaky-wheel agitation.

The debate has duly rolled on through the month of October. In Indiewire’s weekly Criticwire survey, posted on the 14th, Aradillas’s piece was given as a prompt for a colloquium posing the question: “How important is it to you to that movie shot on film be seen the same way, and given that that [sic] 35mm screenings are increasingly rare in most parts of the country, is it possible the stance that you haven't ‘really’ seen a movie until you've seen it on celluloid does more harm than good?”²  Finally, just a few days ago, a widely distributed missive from Alamo Drafthouse co-founder and CEO Tim League surfaced, encouraging fellow exhibitors to respect the wishes of the Nolans and Tarantinos, and to band together to “ensure that 35mm never dies.”

Deathdream

As it happens, I visited the Yonkers Drafthouse that League mentions in his column only last weekend, to view a 35mm print of Deathdream aka Dead of Night, Bob Clark’s 1972 Canadian-financed, Florida-shot riff on The Monkey’s Paw, about a KIA Vietnam soldier (Richard Backus) returning home to his unsuspecting family. I’d last seen the movie in Dayton, Ohio in 2000, at one of the annual Horrorama marathons that I attended while at university in the area, hosted by the late, lamented Barry “Dr. Creep” Hobart, former host of WKEF’s Shock Theater, and one of a proud national fraternity of regional horror show hosts. (Paul Thomas Anderson’s dad, Ghoulardi, was another.) The print in Yonkers was courtesy of the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA), an organization formed by League, wife Karrie League, and other Austin, Texas-based programmers. (Anderson and Nicolas Winding Refn are newly appointed board members.) The “[g]reen lines . . . carved into the film from bad film handling or dirty equipment” which League mentions in his piece were much in evidence on the print, and the color had faded to various tones ranging from tomato sauce to tangerine skin. On the ride back, my friend Clyde suggested marketing flip-down shades with various blue filters for 35mm devotees, which would provide a sort of on-the-spot color correction.

For League, the degradation of a film print through the course of its lifespan in exhibition will necessarily “diminish the experience for every subsequent audience”—though I might have chosen the more neutral “alter” in the place of “diminish.” Aradillas, meanwhile, goes to town on the strawman phenomenon of “putting a premium on ‘beaten up’ celluloid,” though the sole source that he cites to confirm that such a phenomenon in fact exists is Tarantino himself, quoted discussing the “character” of his “washed out,” “beat up” print of Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner.

The process of rot and desiccation which film goes through has aesthetic properties of its own—these are on display in the retrospective of Bill Morrison’s work currently underway at the Museum of Modern Art, which I’ve written about, and I’ve long admired Manny Farber’s description in his essay “Underground Films” of the environment in which the action films he discusses are usually ingested, a “nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience, prints that seem overgrown with jungle moss, sound tracks infected with hiccups.” Nevertheless, among the moviegoers that I know who privilege 35mm projection—and that’s a lot of them—I’ve never heard anyone express excitement over the shabbiness of a beat-up print or the marvelous tactility of its haptic scruffiness, any more than I’ve heard anyone get out of a show at some rock barn exalting over the sludginess of the sound.

If optimal image quality is desirable, than how can anyone justify favoring perishable celluloid? The issue was broached in a 1981 forum between Pauline Kael and Jean-Luc Godard, held at the Marin Civic Center in Mill Valley, California, during which the topics of discussion include Scorsese’s ongoing struggle to get a more durable color stock from Kodak:

Kael: If you look at a 20th Century-Fox, a wide-screen movie of the fifties, it has faded to a pale blue.

Godard: So what?

Kael: [T]here are a lot of us who would like to see movies in the condition that they were made in.

Godard: Okay, so beginning today or tomorrow, change stock. Do it on videodisc.

JLG is, to use a charming Anglicism, taking the piss, and they are talking at cross-purposes—she about archival prints, he about new work—but his crack gets at the oxymoron at the heart of the argument for digital. “If you want a movie to be consistently ready to play out in something like its original condition,” the argument goes, “you’ll have to play it out on something other than its original format.” And though 35mm remains the preferred archival format, archives have proven less and less willing to part with their celluloid when a DCP replacement exists. David Bordwell, in a recent post about his personal experience with archives at his blog Observations on Film Art, succinctly summarizes the new reticence to lend holdings in anything other than DCP, and the problems that this poses:

“[T]he arrival of digital cinema as an exhibition technology was alarming. For reliable conservation, films would have to be maintained on photochemical supports. But for projection, many titles would have to be converted to Digital Cinema Package files. An archive with tens of thousands of titles faced enormous costs and effort in transferring just a fraction of its collections. Even with DCP conversion becoming faster and more flexible, it would leave thousands of films that could not be shown. Just as bad, with the new format becoming universal, even photochemical prints of indifferent quality became rare artifacts, to be protected rather than circulated. A DCP file can fail without long-term consequences; it can be rebooted or replaced by a clone. A scratched or torn print is damaged forever. It is as if art museums began displaying high-grade digital scans in order to protect their paintings.”

Archives sit on their 35mm holdings, protecting film heritage for future generations by keeping it away from them, and from the greasy fingers and cigar ash of indelicate projectionists. Even a holdout like “To Save and Project,” MoMA’s “annual festival of newly preserved films,” seems gradually to be going to way of “To Preserve and Overprotect,” its dedication to 35mm this year showing the first sign of erosion. (Meanwhile, other venues have been further testing the viability of 35mm-as-marketing-hook, like IFC Center with its “Celluloid Dreams” series, which has apparently enjoyed great success.)

A Tale of Springtime

If nothing else, the increased presence of DCP as a format for the exhibition of repertory films should assure a basic level of that elusive “optimal image quality,” but what constitutes image quality is, of course, a highly subjective matter. As Bordwell notes, “[s]ometimes high-intensity scanning of negatives makes a film too sharp, too revealing.” And how! At a recent New York screening of Eric Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime, my companion and I were able to sit through about 20 minutes of the agonizingly immaculate DCP restoration before we hit the bricks.³ The image had been scoured of its every imperfection, but in the process it had also been cured of its ineffable beauty—and Rohmer, more even than most, evaporates without beauty.

I should add here that Rohmer, who died in 2010, was an early adopter of new digital technologies, having shot his Revolutionary France–set The Lady and the Duke on DV partly for the capability of integrating actors into backdrops redolent of 18th-century paintings, and transferred the result onto 35mm for exhibition. This particular case raises some interesting questions, but in cases where a film (or movie, if you prefer) has been shot digitally with the expectation of its being projected digitally, there’s no pressing reason that priority should be given to its being projected otherwise. Likewise, when screening work from the first 115 years of film history, original format should whenever possible be given priority. All that I and most of my ilk are angling for is to retain some unbroken physical connection to that first century-and-some-change of cinema history. This is a modest enough undertaking, though the line on the 35mm partisan, usually described as a “fetishist,” is that he or she ascribes mystical qualities to film stock, the way that defenders of the embattled book—as opposed to the tablet—supposedly rhapsodize about the smell of paper.

I won’t deny that there is a sentimental element to 35mm partisanship, for this is a format that will age and show wear, as we do, and finally die, as we must. For a moment, watching Deathdream in Yonkers, I even indulged in the fancy that I might be watching the same print I’d seen 14 years ago at Dayton’s Neon Movies, when Dr. Creep still crept among the living. Certainly there was nostalgia aplenty in the first round of eulogies for film which came in 2011, when the first-run theatrical changeover was already well underway and Ebert declared “my war is over, my side lost, and it’s important to consider this in the real world”—but also a fair amount of cautious optimism. I even expressed as much at the time.

My optimism has lessened in direct proportion to my practical experience of the Brave New DCP World. For all the rep calendar ballyhoo about “glorious,” “stunning” new 4K restorations, we seem to be about on par with the Victorians when they started restoring Renaissance paintings to blindingly bright palettes meant, quite inaccurately as it happens, to reflect their original splendor. (Wiseman’s National Gallery is instructive viewing on this matter, and on the matter of contextualizing exhibition.) League writes, “With digital presentation, the movie looks as good at the first screening as it does after playing for months,” but this presupposes that the movie looks good in the first place, as opposed to merely freshly scrubbed. If it doesn’t? Tough titties, you’ll be looking at it on DCP for the foreseeable future anyways, because any print is safely sealed away miles beneath the earth’s crust.

The way we watch movies, like everything to do with them, is inextricably tied up with dollars and cents. This goes for the low-overhead-no-shipping-fees-no-projectionist DCP push, and it goes for the entrenched 35mm opposition as well—aside from a stated preference for celluloid, what Nolan and Tarantino have in common is that they are both quite wealthy. “I've never gone through the Citizen Kane-like labyrinth,” Tarantino was quoted saying earlier this month of his private film stock, from which he plans to do a great deal of the programming at the New Bev, before going on to outline his outreach policy: “If people come, fine. If they don't, fuck them.” The Kane analogy seems apt, as this “I’m rich, bitch” braggadocio has shades of Charles Foster’s “You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years.”

The new scarcity of film versus the democratic availability of digital means that the former has now taken on the aspect of a luxury item, as if shooting on 35mm is the hot-shit young director’s equivalent of parking a Bugatti in the studio lot. Per Aradillas, shooting on film is “expensive and time-consuming,” while digital is less of both, and therefore, presumably, more simple and democratic. Nolan’s perspective on this point is interesting, as his pragmatism counters this received wisdom: “I think, truthfully, it boils down to the economic interest of manufacturers and [a production] industry that makes more money through change rather than through maintaining the status quo. We save a lot of money shooting on film and projecting film and not doing digital intermediates. In fact, I’ve never done a digital intermediate. Photochemically, you can time film with a good timer in three or four passes, which takes about 12 to 14 hours as opposed to seven or eight weeks in a DI suite. That’s the way everyone was doing it 10 years ago, and I’ve just carried on making films in the way that works best and waiting until there’s a good reason to change. But I haven’t seen that reason yet.”

As the debate drags on, I have a feeling that we can look forward to more of the A Movie is A Movie crowd tarring 35mm partisans with the brush of elitism—never mind that, in their open-minded acceptance of changing times, these jes’ folks anti-snobs are effectively championing a corporate dictum that put thousands of projectionists, lab techs, and auxiliaries of old-fashioned celluloid production, postproduction, distribution, and exhibition out of work, all in the name of the bottom line. Come to think of it, I was very nearly one of them—from 2005 to 2011 I worked as the technician at the New York City branch of the Paris-based company Laser Video Soustitres, operating a laser engraving machine that burned subtitles, frame by frame, into the emulsion of 35mm prints. (I also had, before this, a stint as a very, very bad print trafficker.) Only when it became obvious that 35mm subtitling, as a full-time occupation, was about to go the way of Connecticut whaling did I finally transition into the far more stable business of full-time freelance criticism. It remains to be seen what industry I will turn out the lights on next.

If you have banged about with celluloid as much as I have in a lifetime, you become quite incapable of seeing anything sacred or romantic about it. And though there are, as I hope I’ve displayed, ample reasons to stand behind celluloid as a viable and, yes, superior exhibition format, 35mm partisanship has been reduced to a matter of sentimentality and snobbery—for Aradillas, the “emphasis on film stock is shutting out movie lovers who don’t live within a major media market.” He is talking about Nolan’s power-play (and the one that’s to be anticipated with Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight), which is apparently of far greater concern than the forced DCP switch-over that has shut down hundreds of theaters and counting which lacked the backing of a corporate parent company to help foot the bill.

Let’s set aside the issue of new releases—and I have few illusions as to the possibility of the DCP genie being put back into the bottle here—and limit our discussion to the question of screening pre-digital changeover work in original format. In North America alone, there are still venues which have the equipment and occasional inclination to screen repertory 35mm prints from Providence to Silver Springs to Cleveland to Omaha and points west. Granting that the quality of these facilities and their dedication to programming film varies greatly, I will produce a figure from my backside and say that 80 percent or more of the population of the United States lives within a couple hours’ drive from one or more of these locations.

It’s a nice little network to build on—though there are those today who question the continued viability of communal moviegoing, regardless of format. In fact, ever since glowing picture screens first became a fixture in the American home 65-plus years ago, programmers and exhibitors in every city have faced the question of how to get audience asses out of homes and into the seats. Here is where the new cachet of the 35mm print comes in, now granted artifact status and bearing the added (and real) incentive of a unique viewing experience every time. DCP may have a few top-down logistical advantages over film, but it’s got nothing going when it comes to ballyhoo. Recall Film Forum’s failed evocation of This Is Cinerama with their “This is DCP” series in February 2012, as though the term “DCP” could ever be redolent of anything but glass-box corporate parks, or any number of adjectives could sex up the phrase “4k restoration”! It remains to be seen if this bit of 35mm saber-rattling signifies anything more than a bubble of gas leaving the bloated corpse of celluloid, but some of us hold out hope all the same…

For help with the technical gibble-gabble in this piece, I am greatly indebted to Museum of the Moving Image Assistant Programmer Aliza Ma for her invaluable assistance.

1. Tarantino’s managerial tenure has been troubled from the get-go. Shortly after he announced the ouster of Tolson, New Beverly regular and archivist Ariel Schudson took to her blog to question the decision, blaming starstruck QT fanboys for “favoring 35mm over human experience” as well as, echoing Aradillas, condemning a perceived trend of “format fetishization over film appreciation.” More recently, Julia Marchese, a New Bev employee since 2006, handed in her resignation letter over the blogosphere, complaining of a “social media muzzling,” the installation of security cameras, and other Stasi-like tactics instituted by the incoming Tarantino regime. (Marchese’s name may be familiar to non-Angelenos from having been previously attached to a pro-35mm petition, issued in the dark days of 2011.)

2. This attitude may best be summarized by a response that Jean Eustache, an early VCR owner, gave in a 1980 Cahiers du cinema interview: “To speak of television and VCR, there is one very simple thing that I draw from my experience, forced or not: One can take a grand pleasure in re-viewing films on television and VCR, but one has difficulty discovering a film; I believe that you can only discover a film at the cinema . . . Television underlines its conventions; it is an instrument for re-viewing, not for viewing.”

3. By contrast, I have never walked out of a movie showing in 35mm because of a print’s quality, or deficiency thereof. My personal best/worst in this regard was sitting through the entirety of an unspooling of the 1967 Phil Karlson Western A Time for Killing which was a) an almost avant-garde pan-and-scan of what is in fact a ’Scope film and b) out-of-synch by something like two seconds. For whatever reason, this over-articulated image raises my hackles in a way that nothing else does.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most influential films ever made. Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur was the first animated cartoon created by the self-described “originator and inventor of Animated Cartoons.” Not quite, and... not quite.

McCay certainly wasn’t the inventor of animated cartoons, but that didn’t stop him from billing himself that way in the opening credits of his 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania. And although many would identify Gertie as the first animated film, that, too, wasn’t the case. It wasn’t even McCay’s first, as it was proceeded by Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912), both adapted from his incredibly popular newspaper strips Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, respectively.

What is true is that, along with French artist Émile Cohl, McCay was one of the first filmmakers to move animation beyond trick films and gimmickry and to introduce a more artistic impulse into the form. Also, Gertie inspired many early animators—including one Walt Disney—with perhaps the earliest example of a relatively well-developed animated character in a film.

McCay was born in either Michigan or Canada, likely in the late 1860s (a definitive birth record doesn’t exist). Early on, he displayed unusual talent and enjoyed a number of gigs as a commercial artist before creating his first newspaper strip, A Tale of the Jungle Imps, for the Cincinnati Enquirer, in 1903. He quickly moved on to New York where, after a number of other relatively short-lived strips, he began the long-running Dream of a Rarebit Fiend in 1904 for James Gordon Bennett’s Evening Telegram. The strip remains a landmark in cartoon art as a formal tour de force and McCay’s unparalleled abilities as a visual artist.

Original Gertie panel, courtesy of The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, The Ohio State University, Columbus

McCay created other strips, editorial cartoons, and illustrations for Bennett’s papers including the New York Herald. In 1905, the strip considered to be his masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland, debuted in the Herald. Its popularity added to McCay’s fame as the strip was adapted into a stage play, and McCay received a lucrative contract to appear on the vaudeville circuit where his skill and ability to draw quickly were popular with audiences. Additionally, McCay explored new possibilities in cartoon art in Little Nemo by experimenting with panel size and the visual suggestion of movement that anticipated his animated films.

While one can detect a “cinematic” quality in many Little Nemo strips, McCay credited his son’s flip-books for inspiring him to experiment with film. Just as producers would mine superhero comics for content decades later, McCay adapted his popular strip into his first animated work. One can only imagine the thrill audiences experienced when they saw the instantly recognizable characters from McCay’s Little Nemo strip appear on the big screen, beginning with the cigar-chomping clown Flip exhorting them to “Watch me move.” McCay was able to re-create his visual style from the page onto film quite effectively. Although the backgrounds were sheer white, the characters were exact replicas of those in his strip and the hand-drawn animation is beautifully realized with elegant movements, characters squashing and stretching, and a still impressive use of perspective as a dragon disappears into expansive white background.

McCay’s next film, How a Mosquito Operates, was adapted from a single Dream of the Rarebit Fiend strip: a giant mosquito donning a top hat torments a man as he tries to sleep. The quality of the animation—the movement, the realization of the flying insect—is astonishing. There was nothing else like it upon its release.

Original Gertie panel, courtesy of The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, The Ohio State University, Columbus

Likewise, audiences had seen nothing like Gertie the Dinosaur when it was released in 1914. Unlike other animated characters that had appeared on screen, Gertie had a personality. She was shy, she cried, she danced, and she was both playful and mischievous. And she vividly occupied space. It’s a testament to McCay’s genius that he was able to realize Gertie as a massive creature whose limbs bore weight. When she lies on her side and breathes, her chest rises and falls as we’d expect it.

His most influential work, Gertie the Dinosaur was, like his previous two films, first seen by the public as part of his vaudeville stage show. Later, he would add live-action sections to both Little Nemo and Gertie so that they could be released more widely in theaters, without him present. Before 2009, I, like most, had only seen Gertie in its theatrical version with the live-action footage showing McCay and cartoonist buddies including Bringing Up Father creator George McManus driving through Central Park and visiting the American Museum of Natural History, where McCay bets his friends he can create a film that will bring a dinosaur to life.

There had always been moments of this Gertie that seemed a little off to me in terms of pacing, but once I saw the great animator and animation historian John Canemaker* re-create McCay’s live presentation at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2009, my minor reservations disappeared. The title cards that McCay inserted for theatrical play really don’t do justice to a McCay stand-in exhorting Gertie to emerge from the rocky background, or reprimanding her and eventually making her cry for the little nip she takes at her ringmaster. McCay made the film with this accompaniment in mind. At the climax, McCay would disappear behind the stage curtain and his animated avatar would magically appear on screen, at which point Gertie would take him upon her head and lumber off into the distance. Once you’ve seen the film with a live stand-in, it’s hard to be satisfied with the theatrical version.

McCay would go on to make eight more films, including The Sinking of the Lusitania, a still emotionally moving piece of World War I propaganda. Some exist today only in fragments, such as his Gertie sequel, Gertie on Tour. It’s Gertie the Dinosaur, however, that remains McCay’s cinematic masterpiece. Animated masterpiece, I should add, because McCay’s work for the page at essentially the same time was and remains unparalleled. That he was able to create work in two mediums that was unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries is nothing short of astonishing. He’s one of the great American artists of the 20th century, and it’s a shame his is not a household name.

* Canemaker’s book Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (revised in 2005) remains the definitive book on McCay and supplied biographical background for this article.

“Gertie the Dinosaur Is 100 Years Young: John Canemaker Presents Animated Masterworks by Winsor McCay” will take place November 7 at the Museum of Modern Art as part of To Save and Project: The 12th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation.

Talk about Asian horror and people usually think about J-horror’s dead wet girls with long black hair and bad attitudes, but scary movies have been flickering across Asia’s silver screens for decades. Here are 31 obscure, terrifying, and often just plain weird, cinematic nightmares, one for each day of the spookiest month of the year.

Lost Souls (Hong Kong, 1980)

Filmmaker T.F. Mous grabs your shoulders and screams in your face for 90 minutes in this all-you-can-eat buffet of human atrocities. A bunch of Mainland immigrants sneak into Hong Kong and immediately get abducted by human traffickers, then taken to a rape camp in the country where they are tortured, brutalized, and murdered. Shaw Brothers had no idea what they were getting into when they greenlit this one.

Heaven and Hell (Hong Kong, 1980)

Five years in the making, many consider this Chang Cheh’s worst movie, but those people are incapable of experiencing joy. Two angels are kicked out of heaven for loving too hard, then they’re reincarnated on earth and murdered by gangsters in a series of weird, ultra-stylized dance/fight numbers, and finally wind up in Hell. There they meet the Five Venoms crew, who decide to fight their way back to earth. Featuring major players like David Chiang and Alexander Fu Sheng, this is where kung fu meets a Chick religious tract with a scoop of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on the side.

Bloody Parrot (Hong Kong, 1981)

Losing their grip on the box office, Shaw Brothers vowed to give kids what they wanted, combining sex and horror in this surreal wuxia shocker. Ostensibly about the legend of a bloody parrot, it’s really just an excuse to show lingering close-ups of gory autopsies, fights with naked women possessed by demons, and a “What the hell?” underground climax featuring a cannibal and a statue that shoots eye lasers.

Mystics in Bali (Indonesia, 1981)

This isn’t a fictional film, but rather a real-life warning to tourists: piss off an Indonesian witch and she’ll make your head come off, guts dangling from your neck, then send it out to fly awkwardly through the night, occasionally stopping to suck fetuses out of pregnant women. Cheap to the point of being downright disturbing, MiB is so full of DIY special effects that by the time women are vomiting mice and pig men are being hatched while optical effects of holy power crackle across the screen, your head will be flying off, too.

He Lives by Night (Hong Kong, 1982)

Hong Kong Director Leong Po-chih combines two good flavors that go great together: Canto-comedy and Italian giallo. Sylvia Chang plays a late night radio DJ whose latest caller really, really wants to kill her, kind of like Play Misty for Me only with more men wearing sparkle cosmetics. Scenes of disco fashion and giant prop comedy sit uneasily next to superbly orchestrated stalk ’n’ slash set pieces that feel like something out of Argento if he ever contemplated murdering someone with a 7-Up machine. 

Lady Terminator (Indonesia, 1983)

After an eel swims up her wazoo, an American anthropologist becomes a kill-krazy Terminator in this gleefully trashy Eighties exploitation crowd-pleaser. The titular Lady Terminator dresses in black leather, enthusiastically machine-guns men in the crotch, and castrates them with her vagina eel. Keep telling yourself: there is no subtext…there is no subtext…there is no subtext… 

Possessed II (Hong Kong, 1984)

Internet piracy wins this round. Dedicated online fans have painstakingly pieced together this obscure Hong Kong freakshow, pulling scenes together from multiple sources to present the best and most complete version of this film about a woman who gets possessed, causing her to pick up men in nightclubs, turn into a werewolf, and murder them with sex. Needless to say, the Hare Krishnas have to get involved to sort it all out.

The Drifting Classroom (Japan, 1987)

Kazuo Umezu’s manga series, about a sixth grade classroom that suddenly teleports to a bleak, futuristic hellscape where the kids all murder each other, gets the big screen treatment from Nobuhiko Obayashi (House). This time, the sixth graders are happy shiny students in an international school, their teacher is Troy Donahue, and the film plays like an After School Special…except for the killer bugs, inappropriate sexual overtones, and psychotic children.

Magic Cop (Hong Kong, 1990)

Mr. Vampire is great and all, but whoever had the idea of upgrading Lam Ching-ying’s Taoist Priest to the Hong Kong police force should win all the awards. Lam’s country cop comes to the big city to solve the mystery of the zombie drug dealers (who are getting reanimated after being stabbed in the brain with icicles). What follows is a pretty much nonstop magical duel between Lam and Japanese bad girl Michiko Nishiwaki, who has a psychic cat and unlimited undead bodyguards, including Frankie Chan (Full Contact) and super-kicker Billy Chow.

Intruder (Hong Kong, 1997)

Hong Kong/Mainland tensions get worked out via limb amputation in this fable that teaches us that being nice to strange prostitutes never pays off. A cab driver shows some interest in Wu Chien-lien (Where is she now?) and immediately regrets his decisions when it turns out she’s a Mainland criminal, hiding out in Hong Kong using a dead hooker’s ID card, and what she really needs is to tie him to a table and slowly saw off his arms. From Johnnie To’s Milkyway Image production company, this was torture porn before torture porn was cool.

Wild Zero (Japan, 1999)

Japan’s hardest-rocking band, Guitar Wolf, takes on zombies in Thailand, and at one point, an electric guitar turns into a sword and slices a UFO in half. That should be enough to let you know whether this one’s for you, or if you hate joy.

Marronnier (Japan, 2002)

Shot like a cheesy karaoke video, dripping with cartoonish gore, this film from director/writer/editor/puppeteer Hideyuki Kobayashi pulls out all the stops in this suicide charge of unhinged, outsider filmmaking about,…well, let the publicity materials describe it for you: “Her apprehensions mount until the deranged stalker finally seizes his prey, plunging Marino into a dream-world of living dolls and satin wedding-gowns, hacked body parts and bondage! Can she and her friends escape before being turned into Numai's blasphemous mannequins?” Dennis Harvey reviewed it in Variety calling it, “Barely coherent…hapless…bad…worse…" which mostly suggests that Dennis Harvey wouldn’t know a great movie if it turned him into a living dead doll.

The Uninvited (Korea, 2003)

Lost in the flood of nearly indistinguishable horror movies that Korea hemorrhaged in the early 2000s, this is one of the coldest, most anti-human ghost stories to ever creep onto the big screen. An interior decorator sees dead people, and so does his upstairs neighbor, but then the movie shrugs off that entire plotline and submerges viewers into a spookily quiet, glacially slow, cryptically oblique ghost story done Henry James style. Full of brooding atmosphere and alienating screen compositions, it’s a useful litmus test: some people will find it boring and slow, others will find it a heartbreaking work of staggering unquiet.

The Macabre Case of Prom Pi Ram (Thailand, 2003)

Part police procedural, part remake of The Accused, this flick recreates a true crime from 1977. When a mentally ill woman gets off a train at the wrong station, she finds herself in the remote village of Prom Pi Ram, which, in Thai, probably means something like “Welcome to Our Misogynist Hell on Earth Where No One Will Help You and Everyone Will Rape You and Then Murder You to Cover Up Their Crimes.” Half the movie takes place in the present as two flat-footed cops track down the culprits (spoiler alert: everyone did it), while the other half follows the young woman’s final, fatal night. 

Late Bloomer (Japan, 2004)

This low-budget Japanese oddity needs to have more champions because it is one of the greatest films about disability ever made. Director Go Shibata worked for five years with Masakiyo Sumida, who has cerebral palsy, to make this movie about a speed metal fan with cerebral palsy (played by Sumida) who becomes a serial killer when he can’t take the patronizing way the world treats him anymore. If people won’t respect him, then Sumida is determined they will fear him. 

P (Thailand, 2004)

Former child star Paul Spurrier (Max Headroom) lived in Thailand for years before making this movie that immediately caused the Thai government to bust a gasket. A young girl moves to Bangkok to make money as a bar girl, but unfortunately she sucks at her job. Then she has the idea of using some down-home black magic to make herself more appealing to men, and, as we’d expect, that doesn’t go very well. Spurrier and his young cast have created an ambitious, beautifully shot flick that manages to straddle the line between empowerment and exploitation.

Ek Hasina Thi (India, 2004)

The highlights from every female action movie ever made are stitched together into this insane Frankenbeast of a film that comes screaming at you with blood under its nails and a mad, empty gleam in its eyes, courtesy of Bollywood starlet Urmilla Matondkar. It starts innocently enough as she meets the guy of her dreams, but then he asks her to store a suitcase for him which turns out to be stuffed with drugs. She goes to prison, at which point the movie becomes a woman-in-prison grindhouse flick, but then she escapes and by the time men are being eaten alive by rats, it’s become full-bore gothic horror. 

Hellevator (2005, Japan)

This super low-budget, ultra-ambitious science fiction flick takes place in a single elevator, but its ambition carries it across the finish line. In the future, vast cities are traversed by massive, slow-moving elevators. Psychic schoolgirl Luchino is on her way to level 180, when the elevator makes an unplanned stop at level 99 to pick up two prisoners: a terrorist, and a cannibalistic serial rapist. When the two creeps break their chains, and the elevator plunges down the shaft, things turn dark and claustrophobic.

Nightmare Detective (2006, Japan)

Totally psychedelic, and totally psychotic, this should have been the big break into mainstream box office success overseas for director/actor/editor/writer Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: the Iron Man). Instead, the Weinstein Company got their mitts on it and barely released the movie on DVD. Ryuhei Matsuda plays a shut-in whose ability to enter dreams has made him irritable and angry about this whole human existence thing, while pop star hitomi plays a young cop who needs his help to catch a self-mutilating psychic vampire. Simultaneously the most mainstream and most bizarre movie Tsukamoto has ever made, it deserves way more attention. 

Exte (2007, Japan)

Chiaki Kuriyama (Go Go Yubari from Kill Bill) is a hairstylist who battles an evil haircut in this horror flick that might be the most underestimated movie in Sion Sono’s filmography. A satirical deconstruction of J-horror tropes, it’s one of Sono’s slickest and sickest flicks, featuring a hirsute corpse, a singing, hair-loving psychopath, illegal surgery, and killer hair extensions. Insert “bad hair day” joke here.

The Butcher (Korea, 2007)

In 2006, the Korean film industry fell apart, so first-time director Kim Jin-Won went totally off the industry map to make this grotty, found-footage horror flick about snuff film producers. Everyone is sick of found-footage horror by now, but this simple little fable (people go to countryside, people meet pig farmers, people get turned into human pork) is in such bad taste, so raw, and so out of left field that it actually seems believable that you might have just found it on an old tape you picked up in a thrift store. 

Kala (Indonesia, 2007)

A narcoleptic reporter and a gay cop are trapped in a labyrinthine conspiracy to steal the First President’s Treasure in this alternate-history sci-fi horror flick that was a massive blockbuster in Indonesia. Joko Anwar’s follow-up, The Forbidden Door, is a more technically polished movie, but Kala, for all of its absurdities, is so much more over-the-top, managing to combine standard horror movie shocks, political outrage, death-metal pomp, and science fiction into one package that there really is nothing else like it out there. 

M (Korea, 2007)

Psychedelic eye-melter about a man stalked by his high school sweetheart who may be real, or a ghost, or a memory, or there may be no difference between the three. After all, what’s a ghost but a memory you can see? What’s being haunted but having a dream while you’re awake? So confusing that it’s almost impossible to unravel what’s actually going on, Lee Myung-Se’s movie is like dreaming with your eyes open, and it pretty much sunk his career. He hasn’t made a movie since.

X-Cross (Japan, 2007)

Just when you thought you’d seen it all, here comes Kenta Fukasaku (son of Kinji Fukasaku of Battle Royale fame) to deliver a no-holds-barred guilty pleasure. An example of X-treme female bonding, two young women wander into a quaint village for their vacation and quickly discover that what the quaint locals want is to ritually murder them and saw off their legs. Separated, they stay in touch via cell phone, allowing the movie to rewind and show its best scenes from two points of view, and let’s not even mention the surprise entrance by a secondary villain halfway through the movie: a fresh-faced Lolita wielding a five-foot-long pair of scissors. 

Akanbo Shojo (Japan, 2008)

Director Yudai Yamaguchi is best known for his nutty comedies like Cromartie High School, but here he perfectly recreates a horror film from 1983. Dusted with kitsch, every soft-focus composition, every Mitteleuropean milkmaid’s outfit, every line of insane dialogue, every bizarre plot twist feels like a very strange fashion magazine spread from another decade. The only things modern about this movie are the sudden eruptions of spurting, Fulci-esque gore that break out whenever Tamami, an evil baby, makes an entrance. With its rotten tongue firmly planted in your cheek, this flick  sends up the genre with its creaking doors, flaming candelabra, moving shadows and mysterious noises while it delivers goopy genre thrills. A trip back to the Eighties in a funktastic time machine that’s powered by freakazoid blood, this is a modern day art object disguised as a slasher flick.

When the Full Moon Rises (Malaysia, 2008)

In an effort to make Malaysia’s lost film history live again, director Mamat Khalid has fired lightning into his own black-and-white, faux-classic film. Set in 1956, on the eve of Malaysia’s independence, this is a Guy Maddin movie if Guy Maddin was Muslim and worked with a film history full of communist cells and hypnotized sleeper agents. At first you don’t know what to think: is this a send-up of noir conventions? Is it a satire? Is it just plain weird? But then the laughs start coming and they don’t stop as the main character is drawn deeper into the mists of mystery and his macho image becomes downright bizarre. You don’t need a degree in film history to understand what’s funny about a terrified man who has fallen in love, against his will, with a sexy were-tiger.

Possessed (Korea, 2009)

This movie pits traditional Korean folk religion against modern evangelical Christianity and the results are, quite literally, drowning in puke. When a woman’s teenage sister goes missing she finds that her ultra-evangelical mom and the lazy cops have one thing in common: they are totally unhelpful. She starts to look into things herself and quickly wishes she hadn’t. A bit derivative, there’s still more than enough originality and demonic birds to make horror fans happy.

Bedeviled (Korea, 2010)

Beaches from hell, this is a harrowing tale of female friendship that starts when a cold-as-ice career woman heads back to her granddaddy’s hometown to chill out for a while and finds it much as she remembers: an untamed hellhole of an island populated by a handful of ruddy-faced men and old women bleached orange by the sun, a misogynistic anti-Eden where the women work in the fields from dawn to dusk and compete for a place in their abusive menfolk’s beds. The career woman’s childhood BFF has been eagerly awaiting her arrival, less to bond than to get help escaping, and at this point, one thing becomes clear: no one is getting out of here alive. If you don’t finish this flick shaking with rage, there’s something wrong with you.

Confessions (Japan, 2010)

Polished, sleek, and deeply evil, Confessions open with the story already in high gear as high-school teacher Yuko announces to her class that she’s retiring because two students murdered her young daughter. Oh, and that milk they’re all drinking for snack time? She’s injected it with HIV+ blood. From there on, it’s all-out war between teacher and students in a battle of wills that sees kids have nervous breakdowns, and teachers devolve into vengeance-dispensing maniacs. Cold, calculated, and with a black, black, black view of human nature, this one’s not over until the final line yanks the rug out from any viewers still looking for a happy ending.

Asura (Japan, 2012)

A lush animated feature about a child cannibal in famine-wracked feudal Japan whose taste for human flesh has turned him into a demon, this flick is the anti-Miyazaki movie. Painted in something that looks like watercolors on film, it’s as beautiful to look at as its story is wrenching to watch. Bleak, harrowing, and not what you’d expect from a typical animated film, it’s based on a banned manga by George “King of Trauma” Akiyama, and opens with a scene in which a mother tries to murder and eat her own baby. 

Sapi (Philippines, 2013)

Less a traditional narrative and more a cinematic tone poem, this story of two local TV crews fighting over who can come home with more ratings-friendly footage of a possessed woman sounds like the most boring “Ethics in Journalism” class ever audited, but Brillante Mendoza (Kinatay) conjures up an apocalyptic mood with storms constantly boiling in a bruise-colored sky, dogs getting run over in the street, ten-foot-long snakes appearing in the middle of modern-day television stations, and a climax involving one of cinema’s greatest WTF shots of all time. 

Watching Jean-Luc Godard’s recent work can be a source of joy, but also of terror—especially if you’re trying to write about it. Your eyes are bombarded with violent, abrupt changes of texture, color, and form, sometimes obliged to take in several superimposed images and captions at once—and now, in Goodbye to Language, with the additional stimulus, or demand, of a very idiosyncratic use of 3-D. Your ears, meanwhile, try to apprehend snatches of text, often spoken off screen, fragments of music that start and stop with equal suddenness, and a dizzying array of sound effects—barking dogs, gunshots, a particular intense burst of cawing crows that, in this new film, had me putting my hands to my ears. The sheer assaultive power of Goodbye to Language makes it Godard’s most vibrant and exciting film for some time and, you might say, his most terroristic: he’s never been so true to André Breton’s dictum, “Beauty will be convulsive or not at all.”

But imagine trying to write about all this. You sit there in the dark, barely able to see your notepad because of the 3-D glasses, and you’re only halfway through scribbling down one gnomic caption or literary quotation—and I mean just scribbling, never mind attempting to absorb or interpret—when two more have followed. Godard, or his film, may ostensibly be saying goodbye to language, but if so, it’s as if the Word is being thrown a spectacular bender of a going-away party. Propositions, allusions, sounds, images rush on in wave after wave, each building a new layer on top of—or violently erasing—what’s immediately gone before. Trying to make any sense of it all, even in the most rudimentary or provisional way, is an anguish-inducing process. What’s more, as a critic you’re aware of the armies of commentators who appear to take Godardian complexity in their stride, and of the academic specialists among them: you feel gauche even noting that all this stuff is hard to take in, when you know that there’s someone out there just waiting to point out, “And of course, you failed to notice that the two-second burst of Sibelius signals Godard’s volte-face on his previous position vis-à-vis the Lacanian Real.” Put it this way: I love Goodbye to Language and I couldn’t have missed writing about it, but part of me wishes I’d taken on Ouija instead.

That’s why I was relieved, and filled with admiration, when I read David Bordwell’s enthusiastic analysis of Goodbye to Language on his website, in which he dares state something that’s often considered inadmissible in discussions of Godard. That is, not only is it hard to tell what’s going on in the film in terms of narrative, but it’s also hard to make sense of the relentless flood of text. Before embarking on a useful analysis of the film’s formal qualities, and exactly why they make the film so hard to read, Bordwell refers to Ted Fendt’s extensive list of texts and films quoted or alluded to in Goodbye to Language. Fendt himself admits that knowing Godard’s sources may only be “about as useful to ‘unlocking’ the films and videos as reading a heavily footnoted copy of The Waste Land.” Still, a blockage of understanding is surely essential to an understanding of a Godard work as it is when dealing with any hermetic or gnostic text: bafflement is the first necessary step to eventual (if endlessly deferred) enlightenment.

As always for Godard, Goodbye makes use of an intriguing mixture of familiar and unfamiliar names, and some unlikely ones that you wouldn’t have expected Godard to refer to. Whether or not these texts are part of his all-time personal reference library, or his current bedtime reading, or simply things that he happens to have skimmed recently (as someone is seen flicking through Dostoevsky in an early shot), you always come away with a list of suggestions for further reading. Each film is no more prescriptive for further investigation than, say, a musician’s playlist. We’re told what’s on the (real or imaginary) JLG shelf right now, which is to say: what’s on his mind. Thus, Goodbye contains plugs for the paintings of Nicolas de Staël; the science fiction of A.E. van Vogt (whose novel Null-A Three is seen in French translation) and Clifford Simak (whose City is quoted, unattributed, in a moving passage about puppies listening to stories about humans); V.S. Naipaul (dialogue about Africa alludes to “a bend in the river,” the title of his 1979 novel); the philosopher Jacques Ellul; and the mathematician Laurent Schwartz, whose work in the theory of distribution and the Dirac delta function seemingly informs the film on some level that I couldn’t begin to speculate about.

The question is what this torrent of references might all mean—or rather, how we as viewers/listeners are encouraged to make it mean something. The great riddle of the quotations in Godard’s films is the way that they are taken out of context, used as free-floating emblems, without clear indications of where they’re from, or how they relate to the new text in which they are embedded. The way a phrase will appear enigmatically isolated on screen has the autonomously provocative force of an unexplained slogan on a T-shirt; if Godard had turned up in Cannes this year, he could well have worn one emblazoned with the closing caption of his last feature Film Socialisme: “NO COMMENT.”

Godard’s textual borrowings are often delivered by off-screen voices, so that we can’t easily decide whether the words are being spoken firsthand by characters in the film (if they really qualify as “characters”), quoted by them as overt quotation, or being spoken by the film itself, as it were. Borrowed language is simply absorbed into the film’s overall texture, just as assorted images are implanted directly in the surface of Rauschenberg’s collages on canvas or metal; or just as literary quotations, both modified and unmodified, were stitched seamlessly into the writing of Isidore Ducasse, aka the Comte de Lautréamont, who declared in his Poésies (1870), “Plagiarism is necessary,” thereby offering a militant manifesto for sampling culture avant la lettre.

As for the way Godard’s textual uncertainty confounds and stimulates, take a simple example from Goodbye, heard more than once. A young woman’s off-screen voice asks: “Monsieur, is it possible to produce a concept of Africa?” Fendt attributes the line to philosopher Jocelyn Benoist, but without knowing the original context, it’s hard to say what it means—nor why producing a concept of Africa is the most urgent of priorities, when the continent’s current woes perhaps demand more pragmatic solutions. But the line prods us violently, given its cryptic nature, and given the urgent, even militant tone that it’s given by the voice of the young woman who may be one of the several women seen in the film. The “Monsieur” so urgently addressed may be a teacher—which an older, raincoated man named Davidson (Christian Gregori) who is seen reading, appears to be. Or it may be Godard himself—or the Academy, as it were, Western knowledge embodied and (to judge by the woman’s delivery) found wanting.

But as for knowledge, there’s often a rather hectoring, impatient note in Godard’s films, as if this obsessively eclectic polymath were reproaching us all for not getting the obvious connections that he has made in his studies of politics, history, and culture. For example, a voice (possibly Davidson’s, but I could be wrong) points out that television was invented in 1933 by the Russian inventor Vladimir Zvorykin, then says, “1933—ça vous dit quelque chose?” (“That mean anything to you?”), before pointing out that 1933 was the year that Hitler came to power. We’re free to object that, so what, this tells us nothing, that nothing is proved or really revealed. Yet it’s the impatience implicit in “ça vous dit quelque chose?” that feels dismissive and superior, telling us off for being obtuse, for lagging too far behind Godard’s historical-culture mastery. (Fendt is no doubt right that knowing Godard’s sources may not advance us much, but let me suggest this. You might be closer to understanding a Godard film if you’d read everything the director had read—but then you’d also have to have read it all in exactly the same way that he had read it, making the same connections).

So much for the language to which Godard is supposedly bidding adieu. But what’s the film actually like? Again, hard to describe. The poetic official synopsis gives a seed of narrative of which you can make what you will: “The idea is simple / a married woman and a single man meet / they love, they argue, fists fly / a dog strays between town and country / the seasons pass / the man and woman meet again / the dog finds itself between them / the other is in one / the one is in the other/ and they are three / the former husband shatters everything / a second film begins / the same as the first / and yet not from the human race we pass to metaphor / this ends in barking / and a baby’s cries.” Etc. Like the man said, the idea is simple.

As usual, some responses to the film have been infuriated, with some critics indeed pretty much reduced to barking or crying. But even given the fragments of narrative that Godard has dangled before us in recent features (2001’s In Praise of Love now looks, compared to this, like an old-fashioned movie about movie-making), we long ago abandoned the idea that narrative in Godard is related to mere storytelling, or that filmmaking is about putting a movie on the screen, in the conventional sense. Godard’s recent features are less films, as we usually understand them, than events (both in the media and the ontological senses) and objects. And in Goodbye, Godard’s use of 3-D is a matter of using the screen (with its illusory extra dimension of depth) as a multimedia space in the true sense: he’s creating both a painting and a sculpture.

He has also incorporated the question of 3-D cinema and its nature into the texture and the logic of his film: Goodbye to Language could almost be regarded as an extended visual pun on the 3-D phenomenon. Godard’s short exploratory essay in the form, in the 2013 portmanteau 3x3D, was called Les Trois Désastres (The Three Disasters): 3-D-sasters, get it? He similarly puns in Goodbye by showing us children playing with three dice—trois dés.

Three, however, isn’t the film’s emblematic number—two is. As we know, the third dimension of 3-D is illusory, something created by our eyes’ and brains’ response to two projected images, and Godard is interested in 3-D as a phenomenon of duality. The film is ostensibly divided into two sections, entitled “Nature” and “Metaphor,” but sections under each title alternate throughout, and aren’t immediately easily to pick apart. Both strands involve a man and a woman who are having an affair, as well as, apparently, the German husband of one or the other woman, or both, who suddenly jumps out of a fancy car waving a gun in one of those breakneck, abrupt pieces of desultorily thriller-esque action that’s been a Godard trademark throughout his entire career. Someone gets shot, someone bleeds, but it’s hard to say who, or why.

Both sets of lovers are then seen naked at one or the other partner’s home, sometimes with a TV showing film extracts in the background; one couple consists of Josette and Gédéon (Héloïse Godet and Kamel Abdelli), the other of Ivitch and Marcus (Zoé Bruneau and Richard Chevallier), and at different times both men are seen sitting naked on the toilet. The reference is to Rodin’s Thinker, which as every schoolchild knows, is really of a man taking a crap; sitting in the same position, Gédéon, or possibly Marcus, points out that Rodin’s statue is the image of equality. We all crap, after all—both Gédéon and Marcus do it with accompanying comedy sound effects—but furthermore, “thought finds its place in crap” (“la pensée retrouve sa place dans le caca), shit itself being the emblem of equality because (I think I’m quoting this right) “Dans le caca, il y a ‘ça’ et ‘ça’”—an untranslatable play on the word caca and, I assume, the psychoanalytic connotations of ça (literally ‘that’ but also implying le Ça, the Id).

Anyway, go figure—and Godard’s use of language, whether high-flown or basely punning, is always a provocation to us to do just that, to go off and think about it for ourselves. In fact, the idea that Godard may be working on a higher conceptual plane than the rest of us is always undermined by his willful use of throwaway, facetious, even excruciating gags: Davidson, early on, makes heavy weather of a riff on pouce (thumb), pousser (to push), and Le petit Poucet (Tom Thumb), all by way of telling us that we’re spending too much of our time jabbing at iPhones.

As for how Godard uses the visual qualities of 3-D duality, that’s something else again. The film is shot on a variety of cameras, including the Canon 5D Mark II and lower-end devices by GoPro and Lumix. The types of image and texture are exhilaratingly diverse, causing you to constantly adjust your receptivity. Images of blazingly colored intensity (the wild primaries of In Praise of Love or palettes that echo Warhol’s flower paintings) are juxtaposed with chromatically muted ones. Blurry shots follow ones that are hyper-precise and vivid, like a gorgeously pellucid image of a woman’s hands among fallen leaves in clear water. And images that use 3-D to more or less neutral realistic effect are interspersed with others that heighten the spatial dynamics to startlingly overt effect, e.g. the image of a naked Bruneau holding a bowl of fruit towards the camera. (Forget the proverbial “girl and a gun”—this may well be Godard’s ideal of cinema: a naked girl and a grapefruit.)

As Bordwell points out, in most 3-D films the effect of three-dimensionality eventually wanes, as our eyes and brains simply get used to the illusion (I’m glad he mentioned this, as I’d always worried it was just me). But in Godard’s radically anti-illusionistic use of the medium, you never forget you’re watching 3-D: keeping all its possibilities in play all the time, he somehow finds a further dimension within the three-dimensional. This is nowhere truer than in two magical shots that had people gasping with delight at the film’s Cannes premiere. In both, a woman walks away from a man who remains stationary, as the screen separates into two superimposed images, one moving, one static, one for each eye; even more magically, the woman then moves back to first position, and the divided image somehow regains its initial unity. It’s in-camera magic of a Méliès vintage: a piece of cheap trickery, but brilliantly and simply carried off, finding hitherto unsuspected delight in a simple “improper” use of 3-D. (As Godard has said, the function of 3-D is precisely to remind us that we have two eyes.)

Finally, a man, a woman—and a dog. I haven’t yet talked about the third part of the Godardian couple—which also happens to be the third part of his own couple, a mutt credited as “Roxy Miéville,” and the pet of Godard and his partner Anne-Marie Miéville. It’s easy to get fuzzy about Roxy having more screen presence than any of the humans in the film, which some critics have claimed, and which isn’t altogether true; after all, he (Roxy is male) is just a dog, and no more or less charming than any other dog you might see on screen. The fact is, he’s Godard’s dog, and who would have suspected Godard was a softie about dogs? Roxy may represent nature, but dogs are also one of the fundamental metaphors by which we represent nature to ourselves in our daily lives. Roxy clearly gets Godard out and about—away from the editing suite, and into the hills around his Swiss home of Rolle. And Roxy’s wanderings in the film—he’s seen trotting through woods, sniffing the air on a riverbank, at one point floating down the river in a perilous-looking manner—go paw in paw with the film’s wanderings through certain dog-related thoughts. Dogs are the survivors of the human apocalypse in Simak’s City; a dog is the only living creature that loves you more than it loves itself (according to Darwin, quoting Buffon); “There is no nudity in nature. And the animal, therefore, is not nude because he is nude” (according to Derrida).

It’s very convenient for us, as viewers, to say that we’re more interested in the film’s dog than in its people: it allows us a sentimental escape route to avoid engaging with the film’s own enduring, if jaundiced, interest in humanity. But that’s only something that Godard encourages us to do: when Roxy is on screen, it’s as if Godard, and his camera, are themselves taking a welcome breather, getting away from the cacophony and clutter of human and social concerns. Roxy, after all, sleeps, and seems to be the only one here who does. Two humans (Godard and Miéville?) are heard off-screen speculating about the dozing beast, and the woman speculates that he’s “dreaming of the Marquesas Islands.” (Why? No idea, except possibly that the islands are the subject of a Jacques Brel song.) There’s a hint of envy here: just as Solzhenitsyn (Davidson tells us) didn’t need Google to find his subtitle to The Gulag Archipelago, Roxy doesn’t need the Canon 5D to make his own mental movie about the Marquesas.

But then you suspect that what Godard admires in animals, and envies them for, is the fact that they couldn’t care less about cinema, or about language—just as he himself now has now claimed, in various recent statements, to be outside both areas of human culture. He has also said of dogs that “ils ne communiquent pas, ils communient”—roughly translated as “they don’t communicate, they commune,” although my French dictionary defines communier as “to be, to live, in communion.” Or, perhaps, to create a commonality between things which do not otherwise seem to have anything in common. Could that be a description of Godard’s cinema in general, or of this film in particular? I’m tempted to answer that by quoting a famous line, attributed in Goodbye to Language to Mao Zedong, although it was apparently Zhou Enlai, who when asked about the effects of the French Revolution, replied: “It’s too early to say.”

Pam Grossman is an independent curator, writer, and teacher of magical practice and history.  She is the creator of Phantasmaphile, a blog which specializes in art and culture with a mystical bent, the Associate Editor of Abraxas International Journal of Esoteric Studies, and the co-organizer of the Occult Humanities Conference at NYU.  By day, she is Getty Images' Director of Visual Trends.

Read the full transcript, or watch in five parts on YouTube.

The Quatermass Experiment

Halloween, which traces its roots back to the Gaelic festival of Samhain, is preceded by the one week in the year when all natural order is inverted, and decent, upright film pubs and sites pretend to care even a little bit about horror movies. It’s a grudging concession. As much as we may try to domesticate horror, it remains a touchy, indigestible subject—is there any other genre for which the discourse that surrounds it involves a punctilious avoidance of discussing the thing itself? Horror-as-metaphor is a much-beloved detour, while comedian Paul F. Tompkins has made hay with the “I think we all like to be scared” cliché (Track 4 on the 2009 album Freak Wharf, if you’re interested). The basic appeal, of course, is primitive, ritual. It is a propitiatory offering, allowing others to die in our place. The poet Hart Crane gets to the meat of the matter:

“It’s no use to tell you how futile I feel most of the time—no matter what I do or conceive doing, even. Part of the disease of the modern consciousness, I suppose. There is no standard of values in the modern world—it’s mostly slop, priggishness and sentimentality. One had much better be a wild man in Borneo and at least have a clear and unabashed love for the sight of blood.”

This is from a letter that Crane posted in 1927, some five years before he hopped from the deck of the steamship Orizaba into the Gulf of Mexico, and 84 years before James Franco, beginning a rifling through the costume trunk of American literature that continues to this day, would portray Crane in his New York University MFA film The Broken Tower.

At the same time that Crane was pining for a return to savagery, another sickly giant of American letters, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, was hunched over a desk at 10 Barnes Street in Providence, Rhode Island, writing story after story that evinced a fascinated revulsion with that same subject: man’s devolution to the level of beast. Lovecraft’s yarn “The Horror at Red Hook” appeared in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales. He’d written it a year and a half earlier, during his brief, miserable sojourn in Brooklyn with his then-wife, Sonia Greene. It deals, as do many of Lovecraft’s tales, with an ongoing, shadowy conspiracy to invite a vanquished race of slumberous Old Gods back to our terrestrial plane. In this case the conspiracy was being carried out in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, described as “a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront” where were carried out “antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix the venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors.” You get the idea.

In the Mouth of Madness

Lovecraft labored to make a living by writing for the pulps, but he couldn’t have done much worse for himself financially if he’d been a strict Axel’s Castle modernist like Crane. Today, however, his acolytes are legion, and his influence on fantasy-horror can’t be measured in terms of adaptations alone. I’ve written in the past about the important relationship between Lovecraft’s work and that of John Carpenter, particularly as evidenced in Carpenter’s 1994 In the Mouth of Madness. What Carpenter identifies as Lovecraft’s particular preoccupation—the existence of “the hidden world, the world underneath”—is visible in that film, as in a great many of Carpenter’s, even those which aren’t precisely thought of as “his.” Last week I re-watched Halloween III: Season of the Witch (82), the third of 10 sequels and re-makes to follow in the wake of Carpenter’s 1978 breakthrough Halloween, and the only film in the franchise which doesn’t feature the implacable killing machine Michael Myers. It was the last Halloween film made with the direct involvement of Carpenter and Debra Hill, who’d co-written the first, and who are credited as producers here. They also brought on board Nigel Kneale, the English science-fiction writer best known for the Quatermass films—Carpenter would adopt the nom-de-plume “Martin Quatermass” on his 1987 Prince of Darkness in his honor—to contribute to the original script, though Kneale would request his name removed from the final film.

The screenplay would eventually be credited to Tommy Lee Wallace, also the film’s director—he had played in a band called The Kaleidoscope with Carpenter when they were high-school kids in Bowling Green, Kentucky, followed Carpenter to film school at the University of Southern California, and had a hand in all of his buddy’s early successes in one capacity or another. Carpenter also contributed to the Halloween III script, and there is much in the film—the imputation of collusion between sinister, atavistic forces and corporate interests in contemporary America, the idea of mass media being used as a vehicle to carry harmful subliminal messages—that will reappear six years later in his They Live (which is, it should be mentioned, a far more effective film).

The corporate villain in Halloween III is Silver Shamrock Novelties—Carpenter recorded their insidiously catchy to-the-tune-of-“London Bridge” jingle, which appears in commercials popping up on television screens throughout the film, as well as the rest of the score, with Alan Howarth. Silver Shamrock owns the city of Santa Mira lock, stock, and barrel—it’s a classic California company town, though the omnipresent surveillance cameras are a new touch, two years ahead of 1984. (The film was shot in Loleta, located in the far northeast of the state in Humboldt County.) Dr. Daniel Challis (Tom Atkins) and Ellie Grimbridge (Stacey Nelkin) come to Santa Mira to investigate the death of Ellie’s father, a five-and-dime store proprietor who was murdered after a trip to pick up a shipment of Silver Shamrock masks. Once there, they discover that Silver Shamrock CEO Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy)—of Celtic stock, like most of the town’s population—is in fact a pagan sorcerer; that Ellie’s father was killed for knowing too much by one of the army of lifelike automatons which Cochran has built to do his bidding; and that, by broadcasting a subliminal signal across all network airwaves on All Hallow’s Eve, Cochran will activate a microchip containing a piece of a filched Stonehenge rock built into Silver Shamrock masks, killing the wearer and unleashing a pestilence of untold proportions.  

Of all the movie’s contrivances, the fact that every child in America has a burning desire to purchase one of the rather lame Silver Shamrock masks is perhaps the hardest to swallow. Maybe they’re so popular because there isn’t any competition? The blockbuster has long profited through this model. Indeed, Halloween III is full of passing references to corporate consolidation. “Business was getting bad,” Ellie tells Dr. Challis of her father’s store, before asking “I suppose you shopped at the new mall like everybody else.” Later, posing as a buyer, Ellie chats with another woman in town to visit the factory, who complains that “Ever since they started doing big volume business the little guy has to stand in line.” Cochran’s automatons, like the yuppies of They Live, are camouflaged in the three-piece costumes of respectability. (“He looked like a businessman,” is how Dr. Challis describes Ellie’s father’s assassin.) With Halloween III and They Live, it’s tempting to say that Carpenter substituted Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos with his own “progressive,” anti-corporate version of same, though this oversimplification fundamentally misunderstands the antiquarian Lovecraft, whose xenophobia went hand in hand with his detestation of the industrialization that had brought mongrel hordes to his New England and who, by the end of his life at least, can be found self-identifying as a New Deal Democrat.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Season of the Witch is available on Blu-ray as part of Halloween: The Complete Collection, released in September by Shout! Factory. Those in the greater New York area may also see the film projected on 35mm tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse in Yonkers, which showed A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 this past Tuesday. All of this is part of the harvest of big-screen horror that occurs annually at this time of year, which includes the eighth edition of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Scary Movies” and Anthology Film Archives’ 12-hour “Day of the Dead” horror marathon/crapshoot.

Given that Halloween III deals with the mass manufacture and sale of sinister objects with eldritch import, it might seem like a shoo-in for inclusion in another seasonally appropriate program at AFA which is ending its weeklong run tonight, titled “Industrial Terror.” In fact, the focus of “Industrial Terror” is the relationship between two regional filmmaking phenomena which flourished away from the coastal capitals of American film culture: exploitation filmmaking, particularly horror; and the so-called “industrial film,” a category which encompasses classroom films, corporate-sponsored films, training films, government films, and so on.

The series pairs an industrial film with a genre film by the same director, six pairings in all. For example: Larry Yust and his trusty DP Isidore Mankofsky bring the same level of cinematographic polish and dab-handed editing to their adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (69) for Encyclopedia Britannica Films as they do to their sui generis 1974 feature Homebodies, in which the residents of a Cincinnati tenement, facing displacement by urban redevelopment, turn to industrial sabotage and outright murder. The Lottery and Homebodies both assume a savagery lurking just below the surface of American life, and they share the sense of gallows humor also found in Yust’s Live or Die (79) for the E.C. Brown Foundation, in which the autopsy of two middle-aged bodies is intercut with scenes from the lives of the deceased, elucidating the choices which ended them early.

The series makes the most of such thematic linkages, as in the matching of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Carving Magic (59) and Blood Feast (63)—also paired on Something Weird’s 2000 DVD release—both of which share a leading man (William “Rooney” Kerwin) and an abiding interest (sawing through flesh). In the case of Breakthrough (53) and The Satanist (68), we have two films that are concerned with laying pipe, though in two different senses of the word. The first, credited to one Spencer Crilly, is an industrial made for the Ingersoll-Rand company, whose stock-in-trade is pneumatic drills; it documents the digging of the 10-mile Kemano Tunnel in British Columbia, built to divert the flow of the Nechako River to a hydroelectric dam in Alcan. The second, directed by someone with the no-more-likely-sounding moniker Zoltan G. Spencer who is apparently one and the same individual, concerns a writer and his wife who, while on an extended holiday to relieve his nervous tension, discover themselves to be living down the road from a pagan sex cult.¹

The Satanist

A black-and-white sexploitation romp, The Satanist begins, as does many a Lovecraft tale, with the introduction of a narrator who has returned to the safety of the known world after being driven to the very brink of insanity through contact with “the hidden world, the world underneath,” and who promises to relay his mind-bending experience to us, the audience. This one narrates practically everything we see, in fact, as there is no synch sound, though there is musical accompaniment from a pan-handed, possibly stoned go-go bar pit band, using what sounds like a cookie sheet for percussion. Narrator and wife routinely peep on their occultist neighbor’s sex rituals—because it’s 1968, one still needed to go to the Danes, the Swedes, or to a Michelangelo Antonioni film to glimpse a mons pubis, so there are tits and ass on display but nothing more, and the fellas decorously keep their saggy white underpants on during the act of physical love, as befits a gentleman. Eventually, these dirty birds will be swept into a bacchanal involving men and women wearing domino masks and ponchos, where he will be chained to the wall and subjected to an elaborate cuck fantasy, watching a succession of men wearing a ram’s head mask more suitable to a high school mascot than a Black Mass have their way with his wife.

In every filmmaker the businessman and the artist co-exist, though in radically varying ratios and amounts. I can’t speak for Zoltan G. Spencer/Spencer Crilly’s business acumen without going through his books, nor have I thoroughly combed through his filmography, but The Satanist seems to me the work of an only-just-competent wiggle salesman. H.G. Lewis was trained in sales, and later distinguished himself as author of such volumes as How to Write Powerful Catalogue Copy and Hot Appeals or Burnt Offerings; to this day he insists that he only made gore films with the purpose of turning a buck on the grindhouse circuit, though the gleefully obscene imagination of the movies that he did make belies that claim, and Lewis sometimes achieves effects that are disconcertingly near to the artistry of contemporary Underground filmmaking. As for Yust, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting the man: he has the bearing of a born autocrat; the handful of films that he did manage to make are the work of a real artist; but for one reason or another they weren’t enough to sustain a feature filmmaking career.

For a period of some 20 years it was George A. Romero who, in the American horror industry, seemed to offer the greatest promise of balancing business and artistry. While independently producing a streak of films at once absorbingly visceral and charged with radical content, he did a pays-the-rent side-business in sports profile TV documentaries and commercials with his producer and eventual partner in Laurel Films, Richard P. Rubinstein. Romero was represented at “Industrial Terror” by the film that started it all, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, preceded by a reel of the commercials that he shot for his Latent Image company between 1962 (a year after the Bronx native graduated from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University) and 1973.

Much as I admire Night, the link between Pennsylvania industry and terror is most apparent in Romero’s Martin (77), which revolves around one of the Eastern European communities of the so-called “Rust Belt” who immigrated to America for work when the factories were still booming, bringing with them their native folklore and superstition—the same polyglot masses that Lovecraft despised. Martin was shot in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a city whose name has in recent years become synonymous with “postindustrial decay,” and which happens to be the subject of a series that “Industrial Terror” dovetails with on the AFA calendar, combining the theatrical premiere of the French-produced documentary Braddock America with two works by homegrown filmmaker Tony “Bard of Braddock” Buba. (He recorded sound on both Martin and Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead.) This juxtaposition of programs seems appropriate, as the 21st century has brought on a cross-pollination of horror and documentary, with found-footage horror adopting the aesthetic of cinema verité, curiously at much the same time that it has abandoned horror’s former offhand social concern. (I urge readers to compare the wholly depoliticized scenes in the Newark projects in World War Z to the slum-clearing shakedown in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.)

Homebodies

Writing about Gasland in a year-end roundup of 2010 releases for n+1, A.S. Hamrah noted that “Documentaries now do what both TV news and horror movies used to do—break real stories and scare the shit out of you.”² In the regionally grounded horror film, shoe-leather local reportage was broadcast nationally. Last October, Cinefamily’s “The United States of Horror” series highlighted shot-on-location films that give starring roles to little-screened corners of this nation and their attendant local mythology. Among them were a number of the “Industrial Horror” selections (Homebodies, William Girdler’s 1974 Louisville-shot Abby, Herk Harvey’s 1962 Lawrence, Kansas chiller Carnival of Souls), as well as Romero’s Martin and products by one-man local industries like Arkansas’s Charles B. Pierce (The Town That Dreaded Sundown, 76) and Texas’s Tobe Hooper (Eaten Alive, 77). Now, the audience of the American horror movie may never have been exclusively blue-collar, nor was the industrial film ever exclusively tied to industry. Without getting into causal relations, however, we can safely say that a robust American working class coincided with a robust business for independent—as opposed to corporate—horror.³

Today we’re reassured that America is gaining new manufacturing jobs, though very few of these would fund such luxuries as a babysitter and tickets to the multiplex, and the world visible in the films that I’ve discussed is now as remote as the audiences that they originally serviced. Over-the-Rhine, the Cincinnati neighborhood where Yust shot Homebodies, has been gentrified at one of the fastest rates in the country. By now Halloween III’s Silver Shamrock Novelties probably would’ve ditched Santa Mira and headed back to Ireland to lower their tax rates. (Ingersoll-Rand, who cut Spencer Crilly/Zoltan G. Spencer a check to shoot Breakthrough back in 1953, did exactly that in 2009, after seven years in Bermuda.) As for the super-wealthy—I’ll refer you to the E.G. Marshall episode in Romero’s Creepshow for wishful thinking.

The success of the regional horror film, which produced glories enough in its own right to more than justify its existence, also helped to envision a decentralized apparatus for independent filmmaking in America. The movie I’ve seen this year that best captures the “United States of Horror” spirit is a certifiable indie outlier: Buzzard, writer/director/star Joel Potrykus’s follow-up to 2012’s Ape. Like William Dear, whose Northville Cemetery Massacre (76) also played “Industrial Terror,” Potrykus is based in Michigan. His movie, which has stuck with me more than I would’ve ever expected after one a-few-notches-above-amusement viewing in the spring, concerns Marty Jackitansky (Joshua Burge), a metalhead rip-off artist who squeezes everything he can from his autopilot white-collar job, and who spends his free time playing video games with a doofus work buddy (Potrykus) and forging a “power glove” which imitates the razor-fingered mitt of Freddy Krueger.

Lurking in the boiler room of Springwood, Ohio’s collective unconscious, Krueger was an industrial nightmare troubling the suburban reverie—a bit of foreshadowing, this, for when one of Jackitansky’s schemes threatens to backfire, he’ll run for cover to the gutted city of Detroit, a Braddock on a massive scale. As Marty’s material situation devolves, a wound on his palm which he’d amateurishly treated begins to go through various stages of putrescence—a nagging return of the physical and reminder of his own basic incompetence which accompanies his return to the carrion-like remains of the urban-industrial world. While not precisely beholden to genre dictates, Buzzard picks up a strain which runs through American horror as imagined by Lovecraft, Carpenter, Romero, and Yust’s Homebodies: it’s the economy, stupid.

1. The print of The Satanist played at Anthology was only recently discovered (or disinterred) by Harry Guerro of Philadelphia’s Exhumed Films. (Its only previous trip through a projector this century occurred this past summer, at Exhumed’s “Forgotten Film Festival.”) It was “Industrial Terror” curator Jon Dieringer who discovered that Spencer had also worked under the pseudonym Crilly—or was it Crilly working under the pseudonym Spencer?—and, through a reference in a 1955 issue of the trade journal Compressed Air Magazine, traced the director of The Satanist back to the rugged mountains of B.C. Per IMDb, The Satanist was released exactly nine days after Rosemary’s Baby—though the Ira Levin novel on which Roman Polanski’s film was based had already infiltrated the public consciousness, and summoning-as-plot-hook was hardly something new. In Blood Feast, to take only one instance, Fuad Ramses (emphatically played by Mal Arnold) is butchering Miami’s bachelorettes to give their mangled corpses to the goddess Ishtar, represented by a gold spray-painted department store mannequin.     

2. In fact, I’ve never been convinced that scaring the shit out of people is or should be the principal aim of a horror movie. Here is Parker Tyler, in his 1947 Magic and Myth of the Movies:

“The mistake made by disgusted reviewers is to assume that the object of supernatural horror in films is to frighten, in any serious sense of that infinitive… Nobody goes to the theater to be frightened. Most, including children, go to be thrilled. The esthetic thrill of fear, of mock fear, is pleasure. It may be conventional to have contempt for those adults childish enough to shudder with pleasure at the sight of a lovely, seminude woman helpless in the arms of an irresponsible and repulsive synthetic man. But the obscure processes of sadism are certainly not contemporary news. Admittedly contempt for this sort of thing is the critical device not only of taste but also of an age of reason and materialism; critics may think it merely the maintenance of a high intellectual tone to sniff at low-grade popularizing of emotion, adjudging the popular pleasure in screen monsters as moronic. But the naively susceptible in movie-house audiences are actually more sophisticated than the critics…”

3. The brief J-horror invasion of the early Aughts may, in this light, be compared to the Eighties panic over the domestic market penetration by Panasonic, Sony, Honda, Toyota, and other Japanese companies. These technophobic tracts—a friend used to call them "I’m afraid of my cell phone!" movies—suited a white-collar nation that has largely shifted from goods to services, from the physical to the virtual.

Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan had its world premiere last May in a special screening at Cannes, where it could be easily missed amidst the usual ballyhoo surrounding the main Competition. Yet Loznitsa’s disarmingly picturesque record of the 2013-14 popular protests in Kiev and their violent suppression had the urgency of a dispatch from the barricades, especially in the wake of Russia’s invasion of the Crimea and on the eve of the Ukraine’s presidential election. (The situation continued to develop.) Better known of late for his fiction features In the Fog (12) and My Joy (10), Loznitsa at Cannes had the air of the explicitly engagé filmmaker, as he returned to his roots as a documentarian with Maidan and a short, Reflections, in another selection at the festival, the omnibus Bridges of Sarajevo.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Loznitsa at Cannes about Maidan, which opens next month for an exclusive one-week run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Tonight the director will be present at Anthology Film Archives for a discussion following the screening of three of his short films (including Reflections) as part of Flaherty NYC.

The style of the film is quite distinctive—mostly wide, fixed-camera shots of crowds, with mobile shots for the running battles with the police. What made you choose this style? You don’t always even hear conversations between two people.

It is a popular movement, and what I wanted to show, the subject of my film, is the people. If I start singling out individual characters—just two, three, four, five characters—it would not be the story of the people anymore. It would just be individual characters, and then we enter into the territory of personal dimensions, which wasn’t interesting for this film. That is why I chose a style that enabled me to have many characters, groups, masses of people in the frame at the same time—to observe their actions and movements.

At the same time, you do focus on certain individuals who are martyrs in the cause. So the movie does ultimately have the feel of a tribute or a memorial, because it begins with protest, and it ends with a memorial service.

The extraordinary thing here is the sacrifice that happened as part of this event. If we think about Hamlet, is it possible to think about the story of Hamlet without the death of Hamlet? The death is the fundamental moment in the story of Hamlet. Such sacrifices reveal a certain state of affairs, and reveal the situation as it is. They provoke horror, and this horror brings on some sort of revelation. What I find amazing is that human societies still require such events, such tragic sacrifices, in order to shape up as societies. The story of Maidan obviously is not at all unique, because every society has in its history moments like that, moments of sacrifice.

Freedom doesn’t come for free—there is always a price to pay for human dignity, for human rights. The question is whether the people are actually prepared to pay the price. And if they’re not prepared to pay this price, can we call them dignified humans? Do they have dignity? There’s an ancient saying, perhaps it’s Seneca: a person who lives his life without finding anything worth dying for has lived his life for nothing. So there should always be something in your life to die for. And why are we like this? Why are humans like this?

That’s a very high standard to live by.

My personal opinion is one should live one’s life in such a way that he should be prepared to die every single day. Morally prepared, so to speak.

Like the protests, the movie has a strong religious element. The priests give speeches about forgiveness and repentance, and it’s striking to see political corruption connected with evil and repentance in a religious sense. And that in turn makes the religious idea of evil much more real.

In fact, throughout the protests in Maidan, every four hours there was a religious service. The representatives of virtually all the churches that are active in Ukraine were there. It was an ecumenical situation, with everyone involved—Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Orthodox praying all together. It’s a very important aspect of the movement in Maidan that the Church supported the people. The Church was on the side of Maidan.

Maidan is also simply full of beautiful images. Everything’s very carefully composed; a lot of images look like paintings. One shot evokes the Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People.  How did you plan things out with your cinematographer?

Yes. I didn’t think about that, but everything that you watch before exists in your memory. In the beginning I shot by myself. So thank you for the compliment. [Laughs] I shot the first 45 minutes with my camera. And after that, I met the cameraman three times. I explained to him a little bit, and he shot during the day and came to me, and he understood very quickly what I needed. Because it’s a very, very concrete task. After that, he sent me all the material, and I step by step said, “This is good, this is good, this is not” and so on. A hundred hours [of material].

Could you also talk about the humor in the movie?

Ah, the humor! For example, we have this song “Vitya ciao” twice in the film, based upon the Italian popular song “Bella ciao.” Ciao means goodbye, Vitya means the President [Viktor (Vitya) Yanukovych]. And he is represented in Maidan like a clown. There were a lot of speeches made, a lot of songs, and a lot of them had these humorous or carnival elements. And there are also a lot of small things in the text, nuanced things. For example, in the film we hear someone having a conversation on the phone, and it’s obvious on the other end of the phone, they’re saying: “Where are you?” And the answer is: “Still fighting!”

You’ve also been working on a feature film, Babi Yar. Could you tell me a bit about that?

It’s about the Babi Yar massacre in 1941. I wanted to make this film in the same way I made the documentary: without any hero, with a mass of people, and just following the situation in a documentary way. To see how, slowly and gradually, people plunge into hell. Because there are already films about the Holocaust which show how it started. And nobody, or not so many people, knew how the execution of Jews started from June 1941. When Germans came into Soviet territory, they started killing Jews. And the first mass execution was in Kiev.

You continue to choose challenging material. Do you still get opposition from critics back home?

It’s the other way around. It’s not me who gets challenged or opposed by the critics. It’s the critics who are being challenged and opposed by me. They have a problem—I didn’t have a problem. [Laughs]

Tormento

In 1904 a 19-year-old law school dropout named Gustavo Lombardo founded a film company in Naples. Lombardo began by distributing films by Gaumont, Éclair, Vitagraph, and other foreign companies, but he soon decided to expand his business. He acquired cinemas and studios, started producing movies in 1916, and even published a monthly film magazine (Lux).

The storied name of this burgeoning Italian studio—Titanus—wasn’t adopted till 1928, but it would survive wars, a relocation from Naples to caput mundi Rome in the late Twenties, political upheavals, economic recessions, and numerous technological shifts in the industry. Under the direction of Gustavo Lombardo’s son Goffredo and later his grandson Guido, Titanus managed to remain in business to this very day. Not for nothing does the book celebrating the Titanus retrospective held this past August at the Locarno Film Festival bear the subtitle “Family Diary of Italian Cinema”!

Nobody's Children

Faced with the problem of chronicling the history of this one-of-a-kind, 110-year-old film company, programmers Roberto Turigliatto and Sergio M. Germani chose to focus on movies produced or distributed by Titanus between 1946 and 1965, and especially those made under Goffredo Lombardo’s direct supervision. The first film Goffredo worked on as studio head was Nobody’s Children (I figli di nessuno, 51), a hugely successful melodrama directed by Raffaello Matarazzo and starring Yvonne Sanson and Amedeo Nazzari, the same trio of talents that had already made Titanus rich with previous low-cost Naples-set melodramas Catene (49) and Tormento (50). As many scholars have noted, Goffredo’s debut production—dealing with the aftermath of a love story between a count and a working-class woman—is both a loving homage to his recently deceased father and a way to fight his inner demons.

Nobody’s Children is an adaptation of a novel by Ruggero Rindi, an author beloved by Gustavo for his peculiar blend of Catholic and socialist ideologies. As a matter of fact, Gustavo had already produced two movies based on Rindi’s popular novel: a three-episode 1921 serial directed by Ubaldo Maria Del Colle starring Goffredo’s mother Leda Gys, and Giulio Antamoro’s L’Angelo Bianco (43). To quote film scholar Simone Starace, Nobody’s Children is not only a “self-remake” showing how a family-run business such as Titanus is built upon periodically reviving and updating old box-office hits, but it’s also a family movie in more than one sense: Goffredo might have felt like “nobody’s child” himself, since his parents—producer Gustavo Lombardo and actress Leda Gys—were not married when he was born, just like the characters played by Sanson and Nazzari in Matarazzo’s movie.

I Knew Her Well

Even though these days Titanus’ logo is almost synonymous with Matarazzo’s tear-jerkers from the Fifties, the studio’s output was quite varied. The success of these melodramas and the comedy series Pane, Amore e Fantasia [Bread, Love, and Dreams] and Poveri ma belli [Poor but Beautiful] allowed the studio to diversify its production and finance both commercial experiments in “new” genres and first or second feature films by young, aspiring auteurs. Notable within the first group is Riccardo Freda’s I Vampiri (58), considered by many to be the very first Italian horror movie. Made on an extremely low budget but showcasing lavish black-and-white CinemaScope already mastered by DP Mario Bava, I Vampiri was completely ignored in Italy at the time of its release. But it became so popular in English-speaking countries that it triggered a five-year Italian Gothic Horror production frenzy that lasted until 1964.

Among the young filmmakers fostered by Titanus, the retrospective featured Antonio Pietrangeli’s astonishing debut Empty Eyes (53), about a naive country girl who moves to the Eternal City to escape rural poverty. This drama of big city dreams turning into nightmares anticipated what was later to become the central metaphor in the so-called cinema of the Italian “economic miracle”: the betrayal of true love in exchange for a cool gasoline-fueled vehicle, the symbol of economic wealth and social position. The Italian title, Il sole negli occhi, refers to sun blindness, and indeed heroine Celestina (Irene Galter) learns that life in postwar Italy is a rat race and love is just a mirage. Tangling with taboos such as premarital sex, abortion, and suicide, and paving the way for Pietrangeli’s late masterpiece I Knew Her Well (Io la conoscevo bene, 65), Empty Eyes was one of the highlights of Locarno’s retrospective.

Estate violenta

Valerio Zurlini was another aspiring young auteur given the chance to direct a “personal film” in the Fifties. The result was Violent Summer (Estate violenta, 59), a chronicle of an impossible love story between a man in his early twenties and a thirty-something widow during the fall of the Italian Fascist regime in summer 1943. It’s one of the first Italian films to portray the utter confusion and civil unrest following Mussolini’s “resignation” and arrest on July 25, 1943, when unsettling questions loomed: with Il Duce gone, was the Fascist National Party still in power? Did Italians have to keep on fighting Mussolini’s war against the Allies? And why had they been fighting it in the first place? Alongside Roberto Rossellini’s Il generale Della Rovere (59) and Luigi Comencini’s Everybody Go Home (Tutti a casa, 60), Violent Summer deserves to be credited among the trailblazing films that helped shatter the cinematic silence surrounding the downfall of Italian fascism and the events just before and after the “traumatic armistice” of September 1943.

These events bring an abrupt end to the bittersweet idyll of Violent Summer’s two lovers in the Riccione summer resort, in a five-minute scene that’s worth describing in detail because of Zurlini’s masterful mise en scene. Carlo (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Roberta (Eleonora Rossi Drago) are on a desert beach at night; they kiss, and Carlo moves to take her to his private cabin. Suddenly, the military police arrive with guns and flashlights, and an officer asks the young man to show his military papers. Roberta tries to hide her face in the shadows, ashamed at being caught, as a widow of a war hero and mother of a six-year-old daughter; Carlo meanwhile has been dodging the draft by taking advantage of his father’s position as a Fascist party official and close friend of Mussolini’s. When he feigns ignorance to the officer about having to report to military command, citing the events of July 25, the officer replies that no armistice was signed, the war against the Allies is not over, and Carlo must submit to the draft. As the military police leave, their shadows pass on Roberta’s troubled face looking at her lover.

I giorni contati

Goffredo Lombardo’s taking Zurlini under his wing is the most obvious example of Titanus’s New Wave–style attempt to nurture new talent in Italian cinema. Their efforts made possible movies such as Francesco Rosi’s I magliari (59), Elio Petri’s The Assassin (61) and Numbered Days (I giorni contati, 62, in collaboration with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto (61) and I fidanzati (63), and Brunello Rondi’s Il Demonio (64). Among these, Rondi is probably the least known, ringing a bell only for connoisseurs of Seventies Eurotrash. A screenwriter for both Rossellini and Fellini, he started his directorial career in 1962 with an adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s novel Una vita violenta, directed with Paolo Heusch. But with Il Demonio, Rondi left the Pasolinian borgate of Rome and moved to the outskirts of Matera in order to film a story inspired by an actual crime case and by Ernesto de Martino’s anthropological studies of ancient religious rituals deep in Southern Italy.

Rondi’s solo directorial debut follows the trials and tribulations of Purificazione (Daliah Lavi), a peasant girl who is said to be possessed by the devil and is therefore the victim of violence perpetrated by her family and fellow villagers. Through the cliché story of her tragic romance with a married shepherd (Frank Wolff), Rondi builds an accurate psychological study of the pressures individuals—and in particular an “outcast” like the emotionally and possibly mentally unstable, unmarried young woman Lavi plays—must face in a small, impoverished rural community. Do supernatural forces of evil really exist, or is it rather that the devil is a convenient excuse that allows people to ignore the actual causes of social, psychological, and physical malaise? At the Locarno retrospective, Il Demonio was screened alongside a few cut scenes, including a graphic depiction of rape... and a Bertolt Brecht quote.

Il Demonio

Titanus also lent vital financial support to established maestri: Federico Fellini, Giuseppe De Santis, Alberto Lattuada, Luchino Visconti. (In fact, it was Visconti’s over-budget super-spectacle Il Gattopardo that was a major reason behind Titanus’s nearly going bankrupt in 1964 and suspending production until the mid-Seventies.) The must-see at Locarno was Alberto Lattuada’s Sweet Deceptions (Dolci inganni, 60), in the 90-minute version originally approved by the State Censorship Office in October 1960. Sweet Deceptions was the subject of a tussle between Titanus and the State Censorship Office, with its plot submitted for consideration as follows: “During the course of one day, 16-year-old Francesca decides to embrace her feelings and abandon herself to 35-year-old Enrico [i.e., they have sex]. After the first moments of happiness, however, the girl realizes Enrico is not the man for her and she decides to wait for her true love, without repenting of her experience.” Determined not to allow “the spread of lolitism” in Italy, the State Censorship Office demanded changes in dialogue (a nymphomaniac mother recommending sex to her daughter and to Francesca; schoolgirls discussing premarital sex and lesbianism; a gigolo’s matter-of-fact take on his business) and the shortening of a few scenes (a noblewoman having sex with said gigolo, Francesca and Enrico lying in bed) before approving it.¹ Historical and sociological reasons aside, Sweet Deceptions is a remarkably profound character study, the melancholic-coming-of-age story of a lonely upper-class girl bound to become the kind of distressed young woman portrayed by Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's movies.

In sum, the Titanus retrospective was a gold mine for cinephiles, full of films each deserving an in-depth look (and, in certain cases, rediscovery). My own personal favorite would be Mario Amendola and Ruggero Maccari’s Il tallone di Achille (52), a major example of the Italian talent for turning seemingly mindless slapstick comedy into a sharp critique of modern times. Its half-serious story, a contemporary adaptation of the myth of Greek hero Achilles and his heel, speaks for itself: at the height of the Cold War, the Italian government plans to use supposedly immortal rascal Achille Rosso as a human-sized weapon of mass destruction and as an outer space explorer—for which purpose he is granted 20 beauty queens in order to produce an army of immortal soldiers.

The Titanus retrospective took place in August at the 67th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. For FILM COMMENT's festival report on Locarno, see Chris Darke's article in the November/December issue.

1. When the movie was finally approved, in October 1960, admittance was denied to children under the age of 16, but some adult Milanese citizens still found the movie offensive and denounced it as obscene. Police seized all circulating prints. During the ensuing negotiation between Titanus, the Milanese courts, and the State Censorship Office, many minutes of footage were cut (including Francesca having an orgasm while sleeping), and the sexual morality of Italians over the age of 16 was finally saved.

In an interview in The Guardian this week, Christopher Nolan mused: “What I’ve found is, people who let my films wash over them—who don’t treat it like a crossword puzzle, or like there is a test afterwards—they get the most out of the film.” That’s a fair enough approach to cinema, although hearing it from this director may come as a surprise to anyone who spent time furrowing their brows over the logic of the backwards storytelling in Memento, or that closing shot of the spinning top in Inception. For those of us who earn our living writing about cinema, there usually is a test of sorts after watching movies, and with Nolan’s work, there’s often the temptation to concentrate on solving the crossword of his narratives, to figure out whether or not all the squares really can be filled in coherently.

Not that, as a rule, I care so much about whether narrative hangs together: there are usually more involving things to discuss in any film. But I won’t even try to make sense of the logic of Interstellar. Given that much of the story seems to hang on the rules of quantum mechanics—on the relation of time to mass, velocity, black holes, and so forth—I’ll leave the unpicking of that to people more qualified than I am on the topic. And I’d imagine that Nolan and his co-writer Jonathan Nolan are themselves pretty qualified by now, given that their adviser (and executive producer) on Interstellar is eminent theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. So if you feel that anything in the film doesn’t quite make sense, you might want to consider what the Nolans’ ample scientific expository dialogue has to say about the problem of incommensurable theories, and then give up on worrying too much about Interstellar’s hard-science aspect. You might want to just think about whether Interstellar works as something that, as Nolan recommends, washes over you. But, much as I went into Interstellar with goodwill, ready to immerse myself in the oceanic vastness of a 70mm IMAX projection—well, I’m afraid the film and its visionary aspirations simply didn’t wash with me.

The premise is dead simple, although it gathers some mind-bending complications along the way—narrative complications, that is, rather than the intellectual complexities which quite a few critics have seen in it (including Vivian Sobchack, who has hailed the film’s “complex multidimensionality” in the new November/December issue). The setting: the American Midwest sometime in the future. Earth’s crops are failing as a result of a global blight, and humanity has abandoned wars to concentrate on agriculture. But some still dream of what lies beyond our planet, including Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), an ex-NASA pilot turned corn farmer, whose young daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) shares his dream. As Cooper huskily muses, in McConaughey’s aw-shucksiest down-home drawl to date: “We used to look up in the sky and wonder about our place in the stars. Now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dust.” Hard to know if this is only Cooper’s elegy for faded dreams of space exploration, or Nolan’s complaint because people keep telling him that one of these days he should tone down the genre bombast and make a nice sensible piece of earthbound realism.

While giant clouds of dust loom menacingly, Murph muses that a “ghost” is trying to communicate with her in a book-lined room in her family’s Andrew Wyeth–esque farmhouse. Of course it’s not a ghost, Cooper says, reminding her of the imperatives of rationalism: “Record the facts… analyze… present your conclusions.” But something appears to be talking to Murph in dust, and in code—and in the film’s first wild leap of credibility, father and daughter read some lines on the floor as map coordinates, jump in their jeep, and keep driving until they reach a metal fence. Behind it is the secret HQ of NASA itself, where Michael Caine, as scientist Professor Brand, has been waiting for them. NASA has not in fact been outlawed, as we’d been told, but has been working on a project to send astronauts through a wormhole into another galaxy, to seek out new planets for humanity to live on. Brand has very nearly cracked the problem of gravity on his formulae-scrawled array of old-fashioned blackboards (a metaphor, you imagine, for Nolan’s own favored analogue approach to image-making), and the ship’s ready to go up: all that’s needed is an intrepid astronaut to lead the voyage. “I can’t tell you any more unless you agree to pilot this craft,” says Brand—and the deal’s done, making this the most casual recruitment for a space project since the Tintin book Destination Moon.

Given the initial emphasis on rationalism, the expository style at NASA veers weirdly between nerd science and wide-eyed mysticism. On one hand, there’s a wormhole to fly through—and just how these phenomena work is helpfully explained by crewman Romilly (David Gyasi) using a piece of paper with a hole punched in it. On the other hand, the wormhole itself has a touch of the unearthly, in more ways than one: it’s positioned so conveniently, somewhere beyond Saturn, that the boffins can only conclude, “Someone placed it there”—to which Anne Hathaway, as Brand’s daughter Amelia, adds: “Whoever they are, they’re looking out for us.” In fact, although faith plays a big part in this story, it’s not really religious faith so much as trust in good old human determination, as embodied by plucky, level-headed types like Cooper and Murph (“as stubborn as her old man”). Or, as someone puts it, mulling over the question of saving humanity: “We’ll find a way like we always have.”

So Cooper’s crew head into the unknown, accompanied by a defiantly non-anthropomorphic pair of robots (one of them voiced by Bill Irwin), which you could picture as a minimalist strain of Transformer, made out of rectilinear metal blocks that nevertheless fold and unfold in an ingeniously unshowy fashion. The robots also have variable settings for human characteristics including humor—which might be Nolan’s dry way of acknowledging the oft-voiced complaint that he’s never had much of a funny bone. And so, as Caine’s solemn face fills the ship’s monitor (shades of the frowning on-screen visages of Solaris) and he starts to intone Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the intergalactic awe begins…

And I’m not joking—there really are a number of vistas in this film that are as gorgeous as any space-scapes previously seen in science-fiction cinema. There’s a wonderful shot when Earth’s expanse sprawls vastly over the screen, and another in which Saturn with all its rings glides by, sharp and gorgeous, accompanied by flashes of lens flare. There are also more abstract imaginings: the wormhole, actually a shiny sphere in appearance, provides the film’s own “Stargate” sequence à la 2001, the ship’s cascade down it resembling a tumble down a swimming-pool flume at night. A singularity is also imagined as a sort of deconstructed waterfall of fire.

But it’s once our explorers pass into another galaxy that things take on a new dimension of banality and the film, however magnificently conceived in visual terms, becomes just another space adventure. They land on one planet that seems all sea, only to face mountain-high waves—at which point the film turns into The Perfect Storm. Another planet resembles the surface of Iceland (where this sequence was shot), with the addition of frozen clouds like icebergs suspended in mid-air. There, for reasons I couldn’t quite work out, a previous explorer (played by an uncredited major star: IMDb it unless you’re spoiler-averse) attempts to sabotage Cooper’s mission, and suddenly we’re into a hyper-austere remake of Lost in Space.

There’s nothing wrong in itself with flipping between these different modes of adventure, especially because Nolan’s analogue style—shooting on celluloid, minimizing digital illusion—gives even the more other-worldly episodes a distinctive edge of concrete realism. As designed by Nathan Crowley and shot by Hoyte Van Hoytema, the hardware especially looks like hardware—metal that seems heavy, cumbersome and breakable, as distinct from the aesthetic of weightlessness promoted by most contemporary CGI futurism. Yet the flip side of this deglamorizing tendency is a banalization of the space experience: the explorers seem to get to the wormhole in no time at all, and they’re in that other galaxy (“We’re here!”) as easily as they might change subway lines. (You keep thinking they’ll pass Sandra Bullock, floating by with a neighborly wave.) That Nolan later starts cutting easily between events in the other galaxy and on Earth is ostensibly a daring move, but in fact it further domesticates the drama, the simultaneity of action (e.g., cutting between a spaceship revving up and a speeding car in the Midwest) somehow reducing the two narrative strands to the same level of mundanity.

There’s a further element that has been acclaimed as profoundly daring, and that is the trick of having different events run in parallel, but at different speeds—something Nolan previously did with the reality-within-reality-within-reality mise en abymes of Inception. Here we learn that time on Earth and in parts of space, notably on planets of radically different mass, runs at different speeds, so that on the water planet, as Romilly explains, “Every hour we spend . . . will be seven years back on Earth . . . That’s relativity, folks.” (Something similar also holds for cinema, I suppose, which is why the average Lav Diaz film is actually infinitely shorter than Guardians of the Galaxy.) That means that, while Cooper barely ages on his mission, his daughter Murph grows up to be Jessica Chastain, and his son to be Casey Affleck, and he gets heart-tugging messages from them, prompting thoughts of love, distance, and mortality. “Do not go gentle…” is heard again, and yet again, and a lachrymose tone creeps in, this film’s substitute for genuine emotional depth.

What happens at the climax is barely describable: suffice to say that Cooper plunges boldly into a singularity, emerging in an alternative dimension that’s weirder by far than the peerlessly haunting place where 2001 finally led us, and that seems to be visually and conceptually modeled on one of the best-known Jorge Luis Borges stories. The payoff is that love and old-fashioned book-learning will conquer all. The coda seems to go on forever—neatly illustrating the concept of time’s elasticity—and once 165 minutes are over, you’ll either be left gasping at the metaphysical and scientific amplitude of the film’s vision, or you’ll be muttering my favorite line in it through gritted teeth: “This data makes no sense!”

All credit to Nolan’s ambition, and his dauntless “why not?” energy. But the scale of Interstellar’s execution sits ill with the banality of so much of it, and made me think of other science-fiction films that once made me marvel and filled me with a melancholy sense of the universe as a place of deep, haunting solitude: 2001 most ineffably, but also what you might call the econo-sci-fi likes of Silent Running, Dark Star, and most recently Duncan Jones’s Moon, all pragmatically executed, pared down and yet mustering a massively deep, sad resonance. Interstellar, by contrast, boosts its own resonance with a Hans Zimmer score that sometimes strikingly, sometimes all too overpoweringly, hits us with a distinctive mix of strings and church organ (when Cooper takes his big moment-of-truth ride, the score swells up like a turbo-charged “Liebestod”).

For all its aspiration to the sublime, Interstellar can’t escape the ridiculous. The characters, and consequently the acting, rarely transcend comic-strip simplicity; Cooper’s family inhabit their own belt of purest corn somewhere between Field of Dreams and Ray Bradbury at his folksiest. Admittedly, there’s something boldly simple about proposing to represent our apocalyptic near future and only showing us a rural patch of America, rather than cutting to the gasping multitudes from Canberra to Kolkata, as Roland Emmerich would have done. Yet my Brit sensibility recoils at the idea of an English director so wholeheartedly embracing American myth that he can cheerfully present us with the idea that the destiny of our entire species is being forged in a Midwestern cornfield.

But that’s all part of the film’s crazy oscillation between the infinite and the domestic, between the imponderable Beyond and the cozy old backyard (making Interstellar more than a little Malickian). As the older Murph says, in another choice bit of dialogue: “If there’s an answer here on Earth, it’s back there in that room. Somehow I have to find it!” The answer indeed is found in the form of magnetism, gravity, and love: “Love isn’t something we’ve invented, it’s observable, powerful . . . Love is the one thing that we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.” Hmm. Well, excuse me for being cold-blooded in my critique—but someone has to stand up for “Record the facts… analyze… present your conclusions.”