As a former model and the daughter of a well-known actor, Nastassja Kinski entered the business with a background that might meet with skepticism. How does an actress already under the dual burden of these two prior roles come into her own? In Kinski’s case, it’s by imbuing each performance with a keen emotional intelligence. At just 14 years old, with the help of German New Wave actress Lisa Kreuzer, she landed her first role, as a mute girl in Wim Wenders’s The Wrong Move (75). The next year, she starred as a nun in the poorly received British horror film To the Devil a Daughter but only won recognition in the U.S. in 1979 with Stay as You Are, an Italian production in which she played alongside Marcello Mastroianni. Roman Polanski’s Tess followed, and that film, along with others featuring the roles for which she is best known, is part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Nastassja Kinski retrospective, spanning 15 years with a particular emphasis on the early Eighties. The nine films in the series showcase a variety of roles and performances, from sad poppet to sensual provocateur, but with none of the superficiality those labels might imply.

Tess

“Very grown-up and very childlike at once” is how an ogling 1982 Rolling Stone profile described Kinski, quoting her mother, Ruth Brigitte Tocki. One need only watch a scene from Tess or Maria’s Lovers (84) to see this quality in action. In both, Kinski plays beautiful young women hemmed in by stifling societies and ill treatment at the hands of men, during the late 19th century and 1940s, respectively. During early scenes in Polanski’s Thomas Hardy adaptation, her frilly bonnet, pale clothes, and soft features practically turn her into a baby, inviting our sympathy from the outset. Over the course of the sprawling story, we see, in painterly compositions, the trials and tribulations that force her to grow emotionally, until she commits a terrible but understandable act that costs her her life. Her changing outfits alone chart her trajectory: from virginal whites, to elegant lace, to grey, tattered rags, to a scarlet dress complete with a veiled hat befitting a femme fatale. Her vulnerability wavers, but it’s always close to the surface.

In Maria’s Lovers, Kinski plays a World War II veteran’s wife in Pennsylvania mining country, and she looks childlike even when she is with child, her delicacy all the more striking in contrast to the brutishness of her partners. When she goes to her husband to announce her pregnancy, she wears light, prim clothes and holds an ice cream cone, walking tentatively and standing out in the industrial setting. You can feel her hesitation in the way she says “This baby needs a father” and then her teary resolve in the face of the cruel response. As she cries outside, one of her husband’s colleagues comes up to her, offers her an apple and asks if she needs any help. She half-smiles as she takes the apple, and bites into it, considering what she’ll do next. In most of her films, Kinski’s character is, tragically, far too good for most of the men she’s paired with. Like the man with the apple, we feel the urge to protect her, and she doesn’t win this trust from the audience with overacting, as many actresses have tried to, but by suffusing her characters with sadness and mystery, in a way that makes us want to know what she is thinking. When Tess’s baby dies, and later, when her husband callously rejects her, Kinski isn’t showy but rather something much rarer: sympathetic.  

Exposed

Lest this childlike nature imply a lack of power, Kinski has other, more seemingly sophisticated roles, and this chameleonic quality ensures her a sense of agency. She performs memorably in more lurid fare as well. James Toback’s Exposed (83) is by no means the strongest film in the series, with its flimsily constructed plot about a small-town-girl-turned-model who gets mixed up with terrorists, but she still gives a strong performance and is able to deliver a line as cliché as “I’m not like most people” with sexy intrigue. As an older model at a glamorous New York gallery party puts it, she has “the mystery of Garbo, the wit of Lombard, and the sensuality of Monroe,” and her simultaneously confused and satisfied look as she flips through a magazine with her face on the cover shows her awareness of her fantasy object status. Paul Schrader’s Cat People (82) is the better of these two titillating films, with its sweaty Reagan-era music-video aesthetic. Despite Kinski’s claim in the very pages of this publication (Sept/Oct 82) that she didn’t like the film, she is well suited to the role of someone not quite human—she gets to play both overwhelmed and dangerous.

Cat People is obviously a long way from Tess, but her distinct features unite all of the roles on display in the Film Society series. There’s that voice: soft, slightly accented, again almost childlike and vulnerable, but capable of imbuing her lines with emotional power. In Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (84) a classic American road film as envisaged through the eyes of a European director, Kinski plays Jane Henderson, the mysterious, missing wife of Travis (Harry Dean Stanton). Her absence makes her a mythically alluring figure and shapes the film’s plot. She first appears in Super-8 footage, and when we see her in the present tense, at the strange Americana-themed peep show where she works, her presence feels hard won and we hang on to her every word. She speaks in a measured Southern accent that endearingly wavers: she sounds a bit like a child, but has lived a full life, one whose decisions haven’t always been fully explained. With her pink sweater and blonde bob, sitting behind glass, she is an apparition of feminity, composed yet nebulous.

Paris, Texas

Then, of course, there’s that pout. Surely Kinski has one of the most expressive mouths in the movies. Accented with pink lipstick in Paris, Texas, or with a whistling scene in Tess, the smallest upturn or downturn of her lip is filled with nuance. As a circus performer in Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart (82) she enchants in stylized close-ups, clad in sparkly makeup, her lips forming a perfect smirk. She’s an idealized woman, yet the film is so over the top, and her distinct appeal in such full force that she’s more of an actual pixie than a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. In Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Moon in the Gutter (83), Kinski is a vixen in red lipstick and a red dress and, driving a red car, a beacon of femininity in contrast to the seedy world around her, accompanied by backlighting and a classical score. 

Kinski is one of those actresses who even in a not great film is inevitably interesting: surely the highlight of The Hotel New Hampshire (84) is Kinski, clad in a comical bear suit, playing a sullen (and, surprisingly for her, unlikable) woman of ambiguous sexuality. Here and in her other roles, Kinski isn’t just a naïf—she’s more mysterious and can play more tortured characters than the prototypical gamine, and she’s never simply “cute”. She taps in to a subtle sweetness and sadness that can take us by surprise, putting us in thrall to her, our emotions hinged on the quivering of her lips and her expressive, slightly sleepy eyes. In Paris, Texas, Kinski’s Jane Henderson says: “I don’t mind listening. I do it all the time.” And we don’t mind watching her.

Nastassja Kinski: From the Heart runs November 27 to December 3 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Ted Hope is an influential figure in the film community who has served as inspiration and mentor to countless filmmakers. In 1990, Hope co-founded production and sales powerhouse Good Machine with writer/producer James Schamus and the company went on to produce such acclaimed and award winning films as American Splendor, The Ice Storm, In the Bedroom, and Happiness. He is currently the CEO of Fandor.

Some rituals help keep us focused throughout the year. This article marks the fourth time I have looked back at all the good things that occurred in the film biz and listed them for all of us—but the first time I am posting it in FILM COMMENT. Tracking them throughout the year keeps me from abandoning hope for film art, culture, and business. Sometimes they may just be the silver lining in the storm cloud, but nonetheless they keep me going and keep me convinced that we truly are building it better together. I hope these good things do something close to that for you. It’s been a good year, and I have many morsels to tempt you with. And of course the year’s not over yet, so perhaps you will have some things to add too. Try on these initial 10 for size!

1. We Finally Have the Capacity to Consider a Total Systems Rebuild for a Better Film Ecosystem.

Producing has always been about managing complexity. Until recently, the question of how to build a better world for film was just too immense even to study. There are so many stakeholders, so many interconnected processes. It is not getting smaller or less challenging, but we are growing more connected and have more or less documented many aspects of what a better future might look like. We can now consider the whole fully and work to build it better. Now the only question is “Will we?”, but we do know that if we do, it will be a joint activity, a community endeavor. We may never really get it right. But we can get it down; the facts are there. I have written over 125 steps myself—all of which I think are achievable. It is a process that needs an organization to manage it, though. Maybe one will step up. I am ready to get this party started.

2. Audiences Are Rebelling Against the Repetitive Menu Hollywood Has Been Serving.

At the end of the summer, The New York Times proclaimed: “American moviegoers sent a clear message to Hollywood over the summer: We are tired of more of the same.” Hopefully the telex was read full stop, and going forward, we will return to an era of diverse offerings, including many more films for adults. Okay, this is the optimistic spin on a declining box office, but people can dream, can’t they? After all, the two top films (The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy) both poke fun at our comic-book movie culture (even if they also revel in it) indicating the audiences see it ripe for ridicule. And of course if this is the case, audience will have no short supply of what to rebel against as Disney has 11 forthcoming installments of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Warners has nine of its superhero world, Fox and Sony have plenty in Spidey and X-Men on the way, and Universal is unlocking its own Monster Universe. Woo-hoo. I just can’t wait.

3. It Is a Fantastic Time to Be a Storyteller.

The barriers to entry have dropped. The tools keep getting better and better. Funding is coming from more places than ever before. Opportunities abound. Freedom to experiment expands. We can take control of more parts of the process than ever before. To me it feels like we are on the hockey-stick part of the curve. We are skyrocketing toward a new future. Now if we can only find a better business model… but wait, what’s that?

4. A Better Business Model for Content Generation and Distribution Has Been Proven and Is Now Being Replicated Widely.

“Would Netflix become HBO or would HBO become Netflix?” was the question of last year. Now we see the answer is that they each take on the other’s best attributes. In one week or so, Netflix jumped heavily into the feature-film production business and HBO cut the cord. Meanwhile, a slew of others climbed on the SVOD bandwagon (HBO, CBS, Tribeca/Lionsgate, Univision, RLJ, even YouTube), even as some recognize that it ain’t so easy to build a subscriber base (Redbox Instant by Verizon). Vimeo, Starz, Sony, Showtime, and DirectTV are sure to soon follow. SVOD & OTT are now recognized as great business models. As I have said before, an aggregated audience—united by taste, engaged by context, demonstrating their preferences and desire, and incentivizing discovery—offers both predictable returns and forecastable results. And as HBO recognizes, nothing beats a digitally native relationship when it comes to data. It’s time to cut the cord and build a direct relationship with the fans. Not only is subscription a recurring predictable revenue stream, but a digital native experience also creates better data about what people want, when, and where. And the public wins big as they are no longer forced into absurdly priced cable bundles. Some may argue this is not in fact a new model but how content creators and their benefactors have always had to evolve, for after all it is still those that fund the creators that benefit most…

5. 2014 Started Off by Showing That Things Haven’t Really Gotten Any Worse Than the Year Before.

Grab your victories where you can, right? Level is better than downward. When it was announced that Home Entertainment sales did not go down in 2013, it felt like a reason to pop the bubbly. In fact, digital and electronic sell-through improved significantly in 2013. Electronic sales jumped nearly 39 percent to $1.3 billion in 2013 and for the first time eclipsed the $1 billion mark. Total digital spending, including rental, SVOD such as Fandor and VOD, climbed 24.8 percent to $6.5 billion. Woo-hoo!

6. Hollywood Has Fully Abandoned Movies for Adults.

If it wasn’t for Megan Ellison and Fox Searchlight, there would be next to no intelligent films coming out of Tinseltown (see point #2 above). The reason we can rejoice at this is that it’s fertile ground to build an alternative enterprise on. The competition has gone away. They have abandoned the space. What better time to launch a new brand known for producing ambitious and diverse work. Good Machine Two anyone? You know someone is going to do it.

7. Studies Have Shown That Watching Movies and Talking About the Issues Raised Within Them Can Prevent Divorce and Separation.

I have long felt that movies can change the world; it’s nice to see they can at least save relationships. This past February The New York Times reported on the study that reinforced the idea. If you want to try yourself, the tools are here.

8. More and More Companies Are Funding “Content.”

Every day it seems another player announces funding for serialized programming—too bad it just ain’t the same for movies. That said, this means work for those who produce stories for a living, so it is a big reason to cheer. This year we saw Microsoft and Yahoo join their fellow tech partners over at Amazon and Netflix (and then, of course, Microsoft pulled back out just as fast). And Crackle’s in the game, too. AOL is playing with long-form, just not scripted yet. Only Google seems able to resist the call. The former print-media powerhouses like Condé Nast and The New York Times are all running a ton of “shows” too. Who will be next? Will any of it be any good? Will these companies all later regret this choice? At least there’s some work available…

9. The Effort to Build a Sustainable Investor Class for Independent Film Has Begun.

Make no mistake, this is the best sort of disruptive initiative there could be. Hollywood has only been in the business of dumb money previously, and did all they could to spend it as fast as possible on their preferred clients, eating it up, and spitting it out. Sundance is now building the fourth leg of the indie-film table—and with that firm support, many new enterprises may appear. Sundance is in its second year of Catalyst (which I heralded last year along with some other startups), which is essentially an investor training camp, committed to determining best practices for investors committed to ambitious and diverse film. This year, though, I could witness Catalyst firsthand. I cannot think of a better initiative for a film support organization to be involved in, and there’s plenty of room on the field for others still to play. If our industry banished “dumb money” and instead looked to keep capital at play longer and in more ways, we may actually be able to build a film ecosystem predicated on today’s realities, needs, and nuances.

10. A New Storytelling Medium Is Here and It Could Alter Everything. 

As Carina Chocano observed so well in California Sunday Magazine, Virtual Reality and Oculus Rift collapse both time and space, inserting us into the narrative. Instead of suspending our disbelief, in entering the immersive virtual reality world, we have to remind ourselves not to believe. Of course, not everyone is so bullish that VR can ever be cinematic. And it has been a very long time since we were initially promised this particular jetpack, but it may have finally arrived (granted I have not been offered the opportunity to try it yet—hint, hint).

In the days ahead, I will continue building out this list, 10 virtues at a time, first on Keyframe and then with the complete list on HopeForFilm. We have a lot to be thankful and hopeful about. We are figuring it out, and it is getting better and better.

“That arid wisdom that holds there is nothing new under the sun, because all the pieces in the meaningless game have been played, and all the great thoughts have already been thought. That is the verdict which critically determines the limits of possible experience.”

—Max Horkheimer

Besieged by information coming at us from all angles, incessantly, we supposedly have virtual access to everything everywhere and fewer and fewer chances to experience anything in person, libidinally. Once described as windows to the outside world, screens are becoming shields behind which we hide, putting everything but the familiar and innocuous at a safe distance. When the world around us manifests itself primarily through images and the latter are used to confirm our petty theories, fears, and prejudices, how are we to break through and reclaim reality? How can we reach out to the world instead of letting it come to us mediated, redacted, and ultimately disembodied? The loss of a communal dimension and the rise of collective solitude are depriving us of the innate curiosity that is in the eyes of every newborn. More and more, people seem to want their solipsistic visions and obsessions to be pampered, their thematic tastes endlessly affirmed. What lies outside the frame is no longer a source of enchantment and discovery but an unwanted detour, away from our comfort zone. Any audacious (documentary) film festival—like Doclisboa—must invert this tendencies, disclose synergies where there was automated division, pave the way to discovery instead of curating its own artistic ego, stimulate rather than gratify. The unexpected is the antidote to the algorithm of recommendations.

The Sound Before the Fury

Be it the programming of a festival lineup, the making of a movie, or a revolt in a maximum security jail, any ambitious undertaking should always aim at what common sense would deem improbable, if not outright impossible. The Sound Before the Fury by Lola Frederich and Martin Sarrazac, a profound film that is only superficially simple, is precisely about this. In the aftermath of the Attica prison revolt, Archie Shepp was inspired to record the jazz album Attica Blues. Over four decades later, Frederich and Sarrazac filmed Shepp and his big band preparing for their anniversary performance of the album at a jazz festival in France. Archival footage of the Attica revolt and testimony from its surviving protagonists are edited into the rehearsals, and out of this dialectic parallel emerges the (political) essence of creativity: the orchestrated effort to change, to imagine and implement, if only for a fleeting while, a world of beauty without chains. What links the historical images of prisoners transcending the barriers of race to question their captivity and those of musicians fine-tuning their collective performance is not only the obvious thematic link, but the shared position of unity in which both groups found themselves. In each case, the insurgent prisoners and Shepp's big band have to abandon individuality and recombine as a polymorphous, collective being in order to achieve their goals. Neither the musical performance nor the revolt that inspired it would in fact be possible without this conscious process of selfless union and solidarity.

Belluscone

While The Sound Before the Fury recounts the story of a success (though, in the case of Attica, bloodily suppressed), Belluscone by Franco Maresco tells in sarcastic detail the story a failure—namely, that of the director to complete a documentary about Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and his connection with Sicily and the unlawful powers that govern the Italian island (i.e., the legendary Mafia). But the film is also about a more important failure, that of describing and documenting a reality that has long outstripped fiction and its outdated means of expression. The nature of Maresco’s failure at tracing the economic and cultural links between Berlusconi and the Mafia is in fact aesthetic; not even his cynical and absurdist style is enough to represent the insanity of a country in grotesque decline. Unlike the many and useless documentaries that have been made throughout the years on the “colorful” Italian politician/TV mogul/institutional pimp/self-made man/et cetera, Belluscone finally exposed Berlusconi for what he really is: the result and not the cause of his country's problems. The comical and criminal connections between him and the Mafia are nothing but the demented outcome of a situation that can no longer be documented in journalistic fashion, but only with(in) the theater of the absurd. That it took a manic-depressive genius to make the first valuable film on the mastermind of Italy's political circus only adds further evidence to the fact that we need new linguistic ways to describe a world spinning out of control—where “normalcy” often amounts to sheer delirium.

Snakeskin

The necessity of finding a new way to comprehend and narrate our predicament lies at the stylistic core of Snakeskin. Daniel Hui’s ambitious but unpretentious film accepts the complexity of Singapore’s past and its multiple strains of subjectivity. One of the many schizophrenic creations of imperialism, the Southeast Asian island is here rendered through a sort of science-fiction cartography that traces this history as reflected in the landscape. In a similar but less dogmatic vein as Masao Adachi's “landscape theory,” with echoes of the Black Audio Film Collective, the film gives voice to the stories left unheard behind the walls that are built around history so that it can be learnt as a monolithic and unequivocal body of knowledge. The personal recollections of ethnic minorities, film impresarios, and the ghosts of the city coalesce into a polymorphic narrative intimately lensed but told in a choral voice.

Hit 2 Pass

A humanist road movie dressed in the pixelated grains of early archival digital images, Kurt Walker’s Hit 2 Pass is a pensive, circular journey into a remote corner of Canada and the iconography of videogames. A group of friends, all males, travels to take part in a “hit to pass” race—a kind of stock-car competition in which contestants must bump any car they pass—after fixing up an old automobile found in a godforsaken garage. The speed of the cars becomes irrelevant; it’s the humanity of the racetrack and its marginal world that counts, as we take the view of young souls faced with the ineluctability of adulthood. The space the film traverses is mostly interior, reconsidering and renegotiating the meaning of their trip and their life trajectories from different angles. Hit 2 Pass is an act of genuine and tender interrogation and self-discovery that explores the gap between the immaterial excitement of videogames and the complexity of life. Like the most humble and earnest first features, Walker's film is open about its own imperfections so as to carve out its own distinctive and tentative place in the saturated imaginary of contemporary cinema.

Besides the films, old and new but in all cases aimed at the present, what distinguishes Doclisboa from many other festivals is the capacity to create a space for encounters and exchange, for the celebration of bodies as well as minds. Even its schedule, which keeps mornings free of screenings, respects the much-suppressed need for human contact from which cinema has and will always originate. At a time when the economic blackmail of profit is shaping much of our cultural environment, the courage that Doclisboa displays in its choices is a beacon of determination (as opposed to vain hope) that is as inspiring as it is needed.

Fassbinder died either on the evening of June 9 or the early morning of June 10 in 1982, just three weeks into the editing of Querelle. As has been well-documented elsewhere, his prodigious filmic output and drug abuse fed off each other: his body was discovered by Julie Lorenz, his editor and occasional lover, in the apartment of fellow director Wolf Gremm, next to notes for a film about German-Polish socialist agitator Rosa Luxemburg. (The television in his room was still on, a mundane detail which continues to move me.)

Despite this reputation, his untimely passing was shocking—Richard Roud initially thought BBC Radio Three’s announcement of the death of a “well-respected German filmmaker” was referring to Douglas Sirk—and was considered a loss to film culture worldwide. Querelle, on the other hand, has consistently received mixed reviews, when it’s received any attention, since its 1983 release, even among those who have written book-length appreciations of his work. In the initial reactions to the film, four main camps emerge: purists who believed Fassbinder fouled up the original, Jean Genet’s 1947 novel Querelle of Brest; purists who believed Fassbinder was wrong to surrender his heartfelt naturalism for Genet’s brash thought experiment; people who find its portrayal of sexuality and theatricality abhorrent; and people attracted to its eroticism and frank depictions of gay sex. After putting off watching it for many years, I was surprised by how fresh and genuinely funny it is. More than anything, Querelle is a sui generis work that doesn’t clearly point toward “what could’ve been” had Fassbinder lived, but rather it’s yet another tantalizing one-off experiment, like so much of the director’s work, which plays upon themes and aesthetic strategies from Satan’s Brew, Effi Briest, and Veronika Voss (to name only a few).

The novel Querelle de Brest seems perfectly suited to Fassbinder, if nothing else for his affinity to its contradictory, inflammatory author. Genet was the son of a whore who was adopted by a stable family and did well in school; after his foster mother died, he was sent to a new family who were shocked by his shady habits, thievery, and fondness for wearing makeup. After living in a penal colony for three years and being discharged from the army for homosexuality, Genet began writing poems, plays, and novels, in and out of prison, that centered on (or celebrated) criminality. (For those of you drawing comparisons with John Waters’s Female Trouble: the protagonist of one of Genet’s most famous works, Our Lady of the Flowers, is a drag queen named Divine, from which Waters took the name.) With vibrant, florid prose, Genet used the coded slang of gay culture and radically extended it to situations and socially marginalized characters, bending sex, race, and morality along the way: his notes for The Maids state that the two sisters who murder their overbearing employer be played by middle-aged men, while the guiding conceit of The Blacks is a play-within-a-play in which black actors don whiteface (to say nothing of its detailed instructions for what additional elements are required for all-white or all-black audiences, respectively). More than just being adept at artful provocations of the right and left (sometimes simultaneously), the particular transgressive nature of Genet’s writing—inverting identities, or featuring those that get stuck halfway—shaped Fassbinder’s work just as much as Sirk’s use of space.

Querelle de Brest, like Our Lady of the Flowers, infuses explorations of homosexuality and duplicitousness with Christian iconography. Fassbinder’s adaptation is largely faithful, though occasionally interrupted either by voiceover narration or black-on-white intertitles, lengthy quotations from Genet or other (homoerotic-tinged) philosophers. Querelle (Brad Davis) is a sailor who deals drugs in whichever port he lands in. Arriving in Brest, he meets his brother Robert (Hanno Pöschl) at La Féria, a brother owned by Madame Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau) and her husband Nono (Günther Kaufmann). Robert became Lysiane’s lover after winning a game of dice against Nono; ordinarily, the rules of the game are that the loser has to be fucked by Nono. When Querelle meets his drug connection, they have a “hypothetical” exchange about which guy Robert would or wouldn’t be fucked by, and Querelle slices his throat. Unlike the character in the novel, this is Querelle’s first killing rather than a continuation of a well-established criminal life. But, truer to Genet’s work at large, the quasi-Rod Serling voiceover compares the events to The Visitation, Querelle’s physical charisma transfigured into something Christlike: “Little by little, we realize that Querelle, already inside our flesh, was growing, developing in our soul, feeding off the best within us. After discovering this about Querelle, we want him to become the very hero of those who are contemptuous.”

However, Querelle doesn’t become that hero. The murder marks his moral decline, and he goes on to betray everyone around him. He also slowly begins to accept his homosexual desires, but in fits and starts: he intentionally loses a game of dice with Nono, but also frames fellow murderer Gil (played, like Robert, by Pöschl) for the murder he committed by orchestrating a robbery. [That’s what happens! Lotsa kisses.] The dual casting, along with much of the narration, suggests that at the root of his attraction to men is narcissism. Querelle is continually compared to his brother, and at times he’s almost inseparable from him: in one of the film’s most exhilarating scenes, the pair engage in a West Side Story–style knife fight, mirroring each other’s movements, their threats dubbed over their unmoving mouths. (These are interrupted by the voiceover, which intones: “The combat in which they were engaged was more like a lovers’ quarrel.”) Querelle only fully allows himself to love Gil after giving him Robert’s clothing and a fake mustache, a finishing touch that fully transforms him into Robert.

Writing in 1994 about the VHS release in Sight & Sound, Monika Treut sagaciously noted: “Being male is something we don’t know much about. But in Querelle we can study maleness by watching the protagonists act like members of an unknown—and at the same time familiar—tribe.” What consists of femininity has always been very obvious: its signifiers (like makeup) and behaviors (like cleaning) have been beaten into us through the wonders of consumer advertising. Codes of maleness, straight or gay, are all too often reduced to how heavily one’s hands are held or as a struggle to become the alpha male. Querelle probes deeply into the collective male psyche, portraying it as grotesquely twisted by the necessity to be strong and silent. (The perfunctory dialogue—this was Fassbinder’s third film in English—is dubbed in clipped, manly tones, and shuttles between G-man banter and porno confab.) As the director put it, Genet’s imaginary, all-male Brest is quasi-fascistic, a place where “if you don’t function perfectly . . . you have to become a traitor, a murderer, you have to become violent.”

The lone (speaking) woman of Brest, Lysiane, slowly recedes further and further into the background as the film goes on. In several scenes she’s reduced to crooning a line from Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “Each man kills the thing he loves.” Querelle, miserably drunk, intends to make love to her in a final fuck-you to Robert, but can’t perform because he’s not attracted to women anymore—an anti-climax. In the film’s ambiguous ending, Lysiane performs a second tarot reading of an also drunk Robert, and cackles: “I was wrong! You don’t have a brother!” The bar erupts into laughter as Querelle boards his ship, presumably to sail away again. Is Lysiane just insulating herself from his rejection, or was Querelle a figment of Robert’s homosexual desire that she has now safely stuffed back into the closet?

For all of its suggestive narrative interplay, Querelle has a clear-cut visual aesthetic. Although the flattened-out sets are anachronistic and fake-looking, the frame is always active, with extras moving in the background, or color gels highlighting a face or a section of space, in a more controlled manner than in Lola but equally dazzling. In one instance, one of Querelle’s lusting admirers, a navy lieutenant played fantastically by Franco Nero, has a harsh exchange with the police, and a slice of red light? appears on his neck like a slash mark, as if telegraphing what the officers would like to do to him. Every scene takes place in the yellow-orange glow of a rising (or sinking) sun, and that light extends to even to the darkest, underground interiors. Peer Raben’s score, particularly the all-male choral drone that recurs during the intertitles, imparts a religious solemnity to the text.

There often seems to be more anxiety about a “last film” than a first: both Ingmar Bergman and Steven Soderbergh, separated by 31 years, opted to mark their retirement with a final cinematic offering, before continuing to work in television. Of course, making such a proclamation is a luxury: even if you didn’t have a fatal disease (like Jarman), get murdered (like Pasolini), or just grow old (like Huston or Renoir or Ray), there are plenty of directors (like Welles) who died amid multiple, decade-plus struggles to realize projects. There are strong arguments to be made that the announcement of a “last film” is either an attempt at savvy PR or an admission of declining creativity; it’s clear that Fassbinder wouldn’t have fallen into either camp. An unexpected stopping point, Querelle contains more than enough material for us to keep dreaming on.

From the opening shot of Unbroken—a gorgeous view of B-24 “Liberator” bombers flying in blue sky and dawn-tinged clouds—director Angelina Jolie and her ace cinematographer, Roger Deakins, prepare the audience for an epic. Their depiction of the dangers inside a B-24 will stun even viewers who’ve already devoured Laura Hillenbrand’s compulsively involving and insightful biography of World War II bombardier Louis Zamperini. It’s breathtaking to see Zamperini (Jack O’Connell) navigate the bomb bay catwalk, a mere nine inches wide, as the bay doors open wide beneath him and only his balance prevents him from plummeting into the ocean.

Taking off from Hillenbrand’s detailed renderings of bombing raids and attacks by Japanese Zeros, Jolie brings a fresh eye to aerial combat. Her emphasis on the American fliers’ close, chaotic conditions, and the gunners’ and bombardier’s exposure to open sea and air, primes a viewer’s senses. It raises hope that her kinetic and psychological instincts will bring to vivid, unruly life Hillenbrand’s turbulent saga about the son of Italian immigrants who became an Olympic runner and Olympian survivor, enduring an unprecedented number of days adrift in the Pacific and then two years of torture in Japanese prison camps.

Undoubtedly, Unbroken stems from Jolie’s genuine devotion to Zamperini’s story. But any filmmaker who celebrates “a triumph of the human spirit” risks falling into hagiography. And that’s what happens with Jolie’s Unbroken, which dramatizes Zamperini’s wartime ordeals as his Stations of the Cross. In the sequence at the center of the movie’s ad campaign, a savage Japanese commandant orders the emaciated hero at gunpoint to heft a weighty beam and hold it above his head. The resemblance to crucifixion becomes unmistakable when the beam slips behind his neck. Jolie can be a sensitive, even limpid director; she doesn’t flinch from atrocities, and doesn’t rub the audience’s noses in them, either. But in her worst piece of direction, the “destiny” themes of Alexandre Desplat’s clichéd score, complete with heavenly choirs, swell over the soundtrack as the crucifixion tableau melts into a closeup of Zamperini displaying grit and perseverance in his Olympic running days.  

Unbroken contains other equivalents to Biblical agonies. In a modern form of scourging, scores of Zamperini’s fellow prisoners are compelled to punch their comrade in the face. These tortures, though grounded in fact, are grueling rather than revelatory. This film’s ability to connect with audiences will probably depend on their love for the Good Book—or perhaps for Hillenbrand’s excellent best-seller. On its own, the movie grows increasingly one-dimensional, crippled by the ambition to be inspirational.

The problems begin when the filmmakers interrupt the opening sequence to flash back to Zamperini’s youth in Torrance, California. Rather than catch viewers up in the herky-jerky momentum of a speed demon’s early life, the film presents a series of emblematic moments. It introduces the impatient young Zamperini (C.J. Valleroy) tapping his feet at church, on a Sunday when his priest just happens to be telling his congregation to “accept the darkness,” “live through the night,” and “love thine enemy.” The movie depicts Louis as a very juvenile delinquent without exploring the reckless creative temperament he displays even as an inveterate thief. Every scene delivers a lesson. When his Italian-speaking father (Vincenzo Amato) gives Louis a spanking, he explains that he can’t tolerate a wayward child, because “They already don’t want us here.” The film’s didactic approach particularly diminishes the character of Louis’s brother Pete (played first by John D’Leo, then by Alex Russell), who coaches him in running to keep him out of trouble. Pete becomes a homily machine, churning out uplifting phrases like “If you can take it, you can make it” and “A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory.” Of course, these sayings come in handy later. After Pete sends Louis off to the Olympics, the movie cuts back to the B-24 making a daredevil landing.

The four credited screenwriters (Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson) telegraph ideas about fortitude, faith, and pride without piercing to the heart of hard-shelled characters. The filmmakers apparently feel that only Deep Thoughts and extravagant gestures can hold their own against bullets ripping into metal, sharks attacking life rafts, and kendo sticks scarring American flesh. Zamperini’s remarkable accomplishments at the 1936 Berlin Olympics enter the film in a brief interlude between two halves of a dire plane crash. The movie reduces Hitler’s Olympics to Louis’s 5000-meter race and a few poignant moments. These happen mostly via cuts back home to Torrance, where even Louis’s bête noire, the hometown cop, has his ear glued to the radio. (Zamperini does get to cast a meaningful glance at a Japanese competitor.) Louis intends to run in the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, but instead reaches Tokyo in the worst possible way.

The combination of action interruptus and over-sold, character-building vignettes prevents editors Tim Squyres and William Goldenberg from finding a satisfying rhythm. It also stymies performers like O’Connell from achieving any illusion of spontaneity. The connections between sections feel forced, as do the stated themes—most of all, the hero’s burgeoning religious faith. At one point, Zamperini interrupts the prayers of his best Army Air Force friend and pilot, “Phil” Phillips (Domhnall Gleeson), and says, “My mother does that sometimes.” After they crash into the Pacific, they float away from the wreckage on two lashed-together rafts, and Louis seeks a deal with God. If He really acts like a savior, Zamperini will devote his life to Him. As drama, it’s the strongest part of the movie: O’Connell does his most alert acting as he calms and humors a numb or hysterical third survivor, tail gunner “Mac” McNamara (Finn Wittrock), and takes charge of his wounded skipper (played by the sensitive, modestly stalwart Gleeson without an ounce of self-pity). But the attempt to portray religion as central to the bombardier’s survival, or to depict Louis himself as a spiritual symbol, holds no water. The bulk of the movie pays tribute to his stoic determination, not his trust in the divine; always a competitor, he simply refuses to break down and let his captors win. The movie devolves into an extended face-off between Zamperini and a Japanese sadist known as “the Bird,” who persecutes the hero across two camps. The spectacle is fiercely compelling—the human equivalent of an irresistible object meeting an immovable force—but both the immovable force and irresistible object are also impenetrable characters.

What’s befuddling is why Jolie and her backfield of writers transformed a book that’s full of texture and incident into such a single-minded film. They ignore colorful figures who could have fused the fractured chronology, like a Japanese émigré named Jimmie Sasaki. This seemingly innocent college friend of Louis’s at USC later served the Emperor as a mysterious bigwig at the secret interrogation center where the Japanese held Louis for a year and 15 days. (The film ignores Zamperini’s college days and collapses his withering experiences at that center into his time at two POW camps.) Even worse, the filmmakers give amazingly short shrift to the POWs’ mastery of theft and sabotage. Hillenbrand writes that at the Omori camp, located on an island in Tokyo Bay, “Deaths from illness and malnutrition had once been commonplace, but after the thievery school was created, only two POWs died, one from a burst appendix. And in a place predicated on degradation, stealing from the enemy won back the men’s dignity.”

Did Jolie and company fear that showing how “Two-foot long salmon would emerge from under shirts” and “three cans of oysters from a single boot” would bring the film too close to John Sturges’s The Great Escape? Unbroken needs some of that film’s gallows comedy and improvisatory vitality. After all, one of the book’s central chapters is titled “Farting for Hirohito.” (“When the men were ordered to bow toward the emperor, the captives would pitch forward in concert and let thunderclaps fly for Hirohito.”)

Jolie’s film also could use the dynamic, sometimes satiric political drama of David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, a POW movie that dared to contrast different kinds of excess in Japanese and British military pride. In Unbroken, it’s chilling to see a haughty, anonymous Japanese officer daintily eat dinner while overseeing Louis’s first real interrogation. But the movie doesn’t delve any deeper into the mores and biases of the Imperial Japanese Army, so there’s no resonance to the POWs’ theory that the Bird, the scion of a wealthy family, was incensed to the point of insanity when he entered service as a lowly corporal. Jolie doesn’t touch on his insecurity among his fellow Japanese and his resulting need to befriend and then brutalize his prisoners. Hillenbrand writes that when he “wasn’t thrashing POWs, he was forcing them to be his buddies,” hauling them into his room for late-night “tea parties,” where he’d lecture them on literature and hold concerts. Miyavi, a Japanese singer-songwriter, imbues the Bird with an ambiguous sexual presence. He expresses the erotic glee he gets from smashing Louis’s face and torso, but he can’t reveal the full extent of this villain’s nihilism and volatility. The Bird does call POWs his “friends,” and he wants Louis to congratulate him when he’s promoted to sergeant. But he remains an enigma. When Louis sneaks into the sergeant’s room after the war ends, the only clue he sees is a photo of the Bird as a boy with his military father. (You have to read the book to learn that this dad died or left his family when his son was young.)

As a movie, Unbroken wants to be the strong, silent type. But more precise colloquial dialogue might have kept the film from sliding into nightmarish stylization. (The best line—Phil’s copilot comparing flying a B-24 to “sitting in a living room and trying to fly a house”—is a clever variation on a quote in the book.) By the time the action moves to the Naoetsu POW camp on the west coast of Japan, everything seems horribly sudden; one moment the POWs button up against the bitter cold, the next they strip to the waist in baking heat. Reduced to slave labor, including hauling coal on their backs, the prisoners accumulate layers of soot until it’s a second skin.

The filmmakers chose not to dramatize that Louis was plotting with a dozen other officers to kill his nemesis, but never got the chance. It’s as if Jolie thought that any touch of derring-do would corrupt her film’s sanctity. Zamperini’s heroism was actually rooted not just in faith but also in guile, audacity, ingenuity, and even humor (working as a camp barber, he once shaved a prison guard’s eyebrows to look like Marlene Dietrich’s). Honoring his memory should also mean seeing him in the round. A film that was truer to life would also have been more entertaining. 

When Charles Willeford died, aged 69, in the spring of 1988, he’d been publishing fiction for 35 years. He’d only begun to be handsomely remunerated for his work in the final months of his life, an irony that he certainly would have appreciated were it not for the minor distraction of his failing body. Up to that point Willeford had supplemented his income by reviewing books (mostly mysteries) in the Miami Herald and teaching literature at Miami-Dade Community College, though before that his “day job” had been the U.S. Army and Air Force, in which he served in various capacities between 1935 and 1956.

Miami Blues

The money came when Willeford, finally, created a franchise character—Miami PD detective Hoke Moseley—and starred him in a series of police procedural mystery novels: Miami Blues, New Hope for the Dead, Sideswipe, and The Way We Die Now. Moseley is a divorced father of two girls whose professional experience has equipped him with a pessimistic view of human affairs and a pragmatism which allowed him to negotiate the world as it is. Though only of middle age, Moseley wears dentures—he had a dentist pull all of his teeth before they had a chance to rot on their own. The first Moseley book appeared in 1984, and the last, posthumously, in 1988. A bit over two years after Willeford’s death, the first and to date sole Hoke Moseley film was released: George Armitage’s Miami Blues, starring Fred Ward as Moseley.*

Despite Willeford’s long struggle for recognition, Miami Blues wasn’t the first film adaptation of his work. That would be 1974’s Cockfighter, from Willeford’s screenplay of his 1962 novel, directed by Monte Hellman, starring Warren Oates, and distributed by Roger and Gene Corman’s New World Pictures, Ltd. At New World, as previously at American International Pictures, Corman had created an incubator for young talents, and his roll call of graduates includes Hellman, Jonathan Demme, and Joe Dante, to name but a few who went on to illustrious careers. George Armitage, also a product of the Corman system, was busy carving out his own career when Cockfighter was going before the camera, but would connect with Willeford himself in due time.

The available dossier of information on Armitage is next to non-existent. Insofar as I can tell, the only published survey of his work appears in a piece by Dave Kehr in the September/October 1977 issue of FILM COMMENT, titled “Four Auteurs in Search of an Audience.” (The others are fellow Corman veterans Jonathan Kaplan, Paul Bartel, and Demme, who would eventually produce Armitage’s Miami Blues.)

Miami Blues

According to Kehr, Armitage worked as an associate producer in television in his twenties before racking up his first listed credit as screenwriter. This was on the Corman-directed Gas-s-s-s, or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (70), a counterculture cash-in of which I reserve a faint and not-very-fond memory. The following year Armitage graduated to the director’s chair with Private Duty Nurses, a rushed-into-production follow-up to New World’s The Student Nurses, directed by Stephanie Rothman, a standout as a female director within the Corman system, and herself a subject for further research.

Private Duty Nurses is concerned with the adventures of three nurses doing their internships, Spring (blonde Katherine Cannon), Lola (black Joyce Williams), and Lynn (brunette Pegi Boucher), and follows them from the operating table to the boudoir. They take a house together in a seaside neighborhood in Los Angeles’ South Bay area, work together at the hospital, and spend their downtime in a local bar where the house band, identified in the credits as “Sky,” are forever wanking away onstage. (Sky’s front man, Doug Fieger, would finally grab the brass ring in the late Seventies as lead vocalist for The Knack, with the hit “My Sharona.”) Sky specialize in leering, swaggery cock-rock—when they first appear they are performing a song called “How’s That Treatin’ Your Mouth.” This performance is immediately followed by a scene which illustrates the perils of free love and sex-god posturing, as Lynn allows a practiced lothario, Dewey (sandy-haired Paul Hampton, shamelessly skeevy and very funny), to take her back to his blacklight fuck pad for a spectacularly lousy lay and unceremonious brush-off. This very human, downbeat scene is not, unfortunately, the harbinger of what’s to come. The nurses pair up with matching paramours to enjoy the nearly motionless sex so popular during the period, and to confront burning questions of the day—limiting quotas for black doctors, pollution in the Santa Monica Bay, and the plight of the returning Vietnam vet—while Armitage toggles between the diverging plots without finding much of a rhythm.

Evidently, Private Duty Nurses performed well enough to keep the franchise afloat, and Armitage co-wrote the next entry, Night Call Nurses (72), though the directorial reins were handed to young Kaplan, who would go on something of a run through the Seventies with titles like The Slams, White Line Fever, and Over the Edge. Armitage would provide one more screenplay for a New World production, 1975’s Darktown Strutters. Directed by William Witney, a prolific director of low-budget serials famous for his knockabout action sequences, Strutters is a surreal whodunit featuring a lady biker gang which, depending on who you ask, is either the epitome or a parody of the Blaxploitation boom.

Hit Man

Armitage’s sophomore directorial outing, 1972’s Hit Man, fits a bit more comfortably within the limits of Blaxploitation, but only just. Written and directed by Armitage and produced by Gene Corman in his B-unit at MGM, Hit Man is an adaptation of Manchester-born Ted Lewis’s novel Jack’s Return Home, also the source of the previous year’s Get Carter. Armitage’s treatment transposes the novel’s action from northern England to the underworld of black California: a heavy dude named Tyrone Tackett (Bernie Casey) arrives at LAX from Oakland, with the intention of investigating his brother Cornell’s suspicious death. A big man with a touch of steel gray in his hair and a long athletic stride, Tyrone doesn’t snoop so much as strut on the trail of his brother’s killers. His mission takes him between a Sunset Boulevard motel, the Watts Towers, a downtown Los Angeles porno theater—in which bad news babe Pam Grier’s planetoid-sized afro is backlit by a projector beam—and a safari-experience park (“AFRICA-america”) where he feeds Miss Grier to the lions after having confirmed her role in his brother’s death and the corruption of his niece. Nearly everyone Tackett meets in the course of his investigation will be similarly implicated, and similarly dealt with; he engineers a war between the black mob and La Cosa Nostra, and emerges as the last man standing. This is the sort of thing that Kehr was thinking about when he wrote that “George Armitage is a man with an obsession,” that obsession being “a peculiar vision of the American Armageddon.”

Armitage’s next project, a spectacular study in our national tradition of might-makes-right called Vigilante Force (76), arrived just in time for the Bicentennial. The title card, emblazoned in red, white, and blue, appears over a montage of anarchic violence: barroom brawls that end with shots fired, a police cruiser being pumped full of lead. If feels like a wide-open Wild West frontier town, but in fact it’s Elk Hills, California, 1976—a sleepy backwater that’s been booming since the oil reserves were opened during the energy crisis, bringing in workers, grifters, hookers, and lots and lots of dirty money. “If this is God’s country, he’s using it as a hideout” says young Paul (Massacre at Central High’s Andrew Stevens) to his boss at the tractor shop, Ben Arnold (Jan-Michael Vincent, fresh off White Line Fever). This is shortly before Ben has the bright idea of encouraging the town sheriff to deputize his brother, Aaron (Kris Kristofferson), who was cast off by Elk Hills after he came back from multiple tours in Vietnam a little bit cracked, only to be called home when his particular war-zone skill set is needed. Understandably, Aaron doesn’t feel any particular loyalty to his hometown, and after laying down law and order backed by brute force with a cabal of fellow vets and ex-cop cronies, he begins to plan his own putsch which will unburden the full-to-bursting bank of its new cash.  

The elevator pitch might’ve gone “It’s Walking Tall meets East of Eden.” There’s an uneasy truce between the frequently-shirtless brothers, and the memory of an old contest over a girl rankles them both. Aaron’s easygoing demeanor is revealed as the hiding-in-plain-sight proof of a completely deadened moral sense, and Kristofferson’s squint has never been so malevolent as when he prepares to execute his brother’s pretty schoolteacher girlfriend (Victoria Principal) with a bullet in the back of the head. (“I don’t wanna talk about it, and I don’t wanna hear about it. I’ve seen and heard it all.”)

Vigilante Force

In the final showdown, Ben and his hunting club, the “Green Mountain Boys,” get the drop on Aaron’s gang. The Green Mountain Boys favor muzzle-loading rifles and coonskin or tri-corner headgear; when they hit Aaron and his boys on the morning of the 4th of July parade, the enemy are wearing red marching band togs with gold braid, and look like nothing so much as British Redcoats. As if the Revolutionary War motif wasn’t enough, Armitage throws in associations from movie lore—the gun-down blowout was one of the last scenes shot in Simi Valley’s Corriganville Movie Ranch, a much-used location for studio Westerns. The final firefight is a succession of suicidal stuntman swan dives and big Bigger BIGGEST explosions; as Kehr writes: “It’s a film that doesn’t play so much as it burns itself out, like a case of malaria, burning from one violent episode to the next with little or no regard for the niceties of narrative structure or character development.” As in Hit Man, Armitage shows an eye for off-the-main-highway spaces, and he’s not hurt one bit by having legend-in-the-making Jack Fisk—also designer of Darktown Strutters’ many psychedelic touches—as his art director. (One of the film’s most memorable locations, however, didn’t need to be improved: John Ehn’s Old Trapper's Lodge, which Bernadette Peters’ tuneless saloon chanteuse/ call girl operates from.)  

Armitage’s fondness for playing fast and loose with American iconography is on full display in his next film, Hot Rod, a 1979 TV movie made for ABC. Gregg Henry, soon to become a De Palma favorite, stars as Brian Edison, a Brooklyn-bred racer who shows up two weeks before the Munn’s National Drag Racing Championship with the intention of entering his HEMI-charged 1965 Plymouth Belvedere. Almost as soon as Edison arrives in town, his car is totaled when he’s run off the road by a ’69 Oldsmobile Cutlass painted up like a Matchbox car, whose driver, Sonny (Grant Goodeve), happens to have the last name Munn—the son of the local root beer magnate (Robert Culp), who has every intention of fixing the race in Sonny’s favor. Edison salvages the engine block, shoehorns it into the chassis of a gray primer ’41 Willys Speedway Coupé, and starts taking Sonny’s girl (Robin Mattson) out for moonlit drives, while collecting trumped-up tickets from the local bought-and-paid-for sheriff (Pernell Roberts).

An air of nostalgia for an uncorrupted past hangs over the proceedings—in this case, that longed-for Eden is the dawn of rock ’n’ roll, presumably before fences were put up to delimit American individualism. Henry is introduced wearing a James Dean Rebel red windbreaker, and when Edison picks up hitchhiking rock ’n’ roll DJ Johnny Hurricane (Royce D. Applegate) as he’s thumbing on the roadside, his passenger announces: “I don’t care where you’re going. I’ve been standing here since 1959.” The showdown between the Munns and Edison is framed as a confrontation between creeping corporate stooge-ism and core throwback American values of privateer self-sufficiency. “There's nothing like building up an old automobile from scratch and wiping out one of those Detroit machines,” as Warren Oates’s cliché-spouting “GTO” has it in Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop—but Hot Rod really believes the clichés.

Hot Rod

Munn buys off his help, while Edison’s comes on a volunteer basis, from a back-to-the-land hippie gas station owner (Ed Begley, Jr.) and Sonny’s ex-, Jenny. Edison and Jenny’s romance is kicked into next gear in a lovely scene where he lets her take the wheel of the Willys—Sonny would never let her drive—and she really opens it up to the tune of Ritchie Valens’ “Dooby Dooby Wah.” “Classic” rock is the pulse of the film, used in a way that’s both on-the-nose and quite resourceful: when Edison and friends decide to strike back against the Munns’ incessant sabotage by clandestinely harvesting new parts from police cruisers and Sonny’s car, the action is scored to the Bobby Fuller Four’s ringing rendition of “I Fought the Law,” drawn out with a long purpose-built instrumental break.  

For the filmmaker and critic Dan Sallitt, a fan of Armitage, the director “works out of a laconic, laid-back posture that is redolent of the Sixties, of Zen masters,” and through his films he “projects an ideal of how to live in the world.” Edison certainly appears to be a philosopher in the mold of Robert M. Pirsig, and lays out his worldview to Jenny thusly: “See, the secret of street racing’s a mystery to most people, but I got it figured out… When it breaks you build it again. It blows up with a four-barrel carb, go dual quads. That blows up, inject it. Gotta fix it faster.”

Edison is a font of such wisdom, in monologue or aphoristic form. “They take all the fun and try to sell it back to ya,” he says of the Munns, whose sponsorship decal he refuses to paste on his car (“I’m not a comic book”). Armitage’s mise en scène, however, has a kind of comic-book impact, and the premise of Hot Rod is put across with a clarity that comes across as purity. As Kehr notes, the director has the ability to elevate cliché to archetype, “condens[ing] his peripheral characters into animated icons.” Sadly, the opportunities to join the phone-booth-small Armitage Fan Club are presently limited. Hot Rod enjoys a very high reputation among enthusiasts of the automobile movie, not least for its vintage footage of Fremont Drag Strip in northern California, but has never received an adequate home video release, while Vigilante Force is only available in a manufactured-on-demand DVD from 20th Century Fox/MGM.

Hot Rod

Given the unease with encroaching corporatization evident in Hot Rod, it should perhaps come as no great surprise that Armitage went missing during the 1980s, when the B-level action picture lost a great deal of market share to the John McTiernans and Scotts of the world. There is no trace of Armitage through the Reagan years, which doesn’t necessarily imply that anything sinister or even particularly interesting had befallen him. Sometimes projects fail to come together year after year until a decade has passed, just like that, and you get in the habit of paying your bills by doing uncredited punch-ups on demand until that’s who you are. Sometimes another one never does come together—thus has many an interesting career (Larry Yust, Robert Kaylor) petered out.

Armitage would eventually get another shot, with Demme’s help, and when he finally did re-emerge, it was with his very finest film: 1990’s Miami Blues. The movie might seem to belong to the wave of crime thrillers that followed in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough, save for the fact that it was released a couple of years in advance of Reservoir Dogs; it can never be overstated that Tarantino was more the critical mass dam-burst of several certain tendencies in crime fiction and cinema than a catalyst in and of himself. The popular nomenclature for these movies through the Eighties was “neo-noir,” a label Tarantino rejected: “I don’t do neo-noir,” he said, “I see Pulp Fiction as closer to modern-day crime fiction, a little closer to Charles Willeford.”

Miami Blues is about as close as a film can get to the spirit of Willeford, though Armitage’s script does some smart streamlining of the novel. For example, California sociopath Freddie Frenger, Jr. (Alec Baldwin) still bumps off a Hare Krishna at the Miami airport in the film, but the Dickensian coincidence of that Hare Krishna turning out to be the brother of Susie (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who grounds the movie emotionally), the call-girl/Miami-Dade Community College student who “Junior” Frenger shacks up with shortly thereafter, has been omitted.

Miami Blues

Junior is an American bad man of the sort that’s as old as Jamestown colony, but he’s infected with an entirely contemporary spirit: he’s a maniac who thinks he’s an entrepreneur. Junior gets the drop on Hoke, makes off with his shield and gun and, with the power of assumed officialdom behind him, starts shaking down Miami’s criminals for all they’re worth, presumably cribbing his dialogue from episodes of Miami Vice. (Willeford had been asked to write for the show, and submitted a script where Crockett came out of the closet.) Willeford could write suspense scenes with the best of them, but he was also a brilliant social satirist, taking full advantage of the all-access badge of the police procedural to cut cross-sections through the ethnic and social strata of an absolutely of-the-moment Miami and its supermarkets, timeshares, and residential hotels. His “mystery” plots are festooned with miscellaneous, mundane details that finally emerge as elements in a vast hellscape panorama, teeming with the taken-for-granted absurdities intrinsic to contemporary American life—an au courant quality parodied by the title of his last Moseley book, The Way We Die Now.

It’s a great movie for mouths, those telltale indicators of class: Leigh’s uncorrected lisp and overbit frown, Ward’s denture routines, Baldwin’s put-’er-there come-on smile, a rehearsed-from-infomercials cover barely concealing impatient ex-con wariness. (Junior is only sincere when first seen, gaping out the window on what’s presumably his first airplane ride.) While never acquiring the social graces to correspond to his ambition, Junior drags Susie into his white-trash fantasy of upward mobility financed by banditry. (In fact, Miami Blues parallels another superb Reagan/Bush I–era snapshot, Raising Arizona.) The film contains a marvelous scene where Junior and Susie, play-acting at being yuppies, meet for a terrace brunch overlooking a water ballet. Junior shows up in a pastel Coogi sweater and lemon-colored slacks, asks for separate checks, enthuses over the Spencer’s Gifts T-shirt she’s bought him (“Shit Happens When You Party Naked”), then spits up the yogurt on his salad (“This ice-cream dressing is sour as shit”). The “Party Naked” bit, I should add, is Armitage’s invention.

Miami Blues re-established 47-year-old born-again tyro Armitage at the top of his game, but his next project, 1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank, was decidedly retrograde, a bald-faced attempt to capitalize on the Q.T. craze. (At one point, during a shootout at a convenience store, a cardboard display advertising Pulp Fiction is even caught in the crossfire.) For the first time Armitage isn’t directing from his own screenplay, but from one assembled by a crew headed by John Cusack, who also stars as Martin Blank, a contract killer pursuing a target while attending his 10-year high school reunion in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The location, a posh and very exclusive suburb of Detroit, seems to have been chosen for no reason other than the access it provides to a staggeringly lame title pun—get it?—and Armitage’s usually keen sense for class has been smothered so as not to harsh the fun of Cusack’s exercise in “all-Eighties, all-vinyl” Gen X nostalgia. When Blank is reunited with his old HS sweetheart, Debi (Minnie Driver), and she casually mentions her “$700 prom dress,” I heard the voice of Tackett in Hit Man, about to eliminate a target: “Chicks like your bullshit bourgeois daughter can do anything they wanna do, ’cause you got the bread to make it cool.”

Grosse Pointe Blank

Grosse Pointe Blank isn’t a badly made movie by any means—if anything, it’s remarkable how Armitage consistently managed to keep the rust off with such long breaks between projects—but I must confess that certain temperamental distastes render me almost entirely unable to appreciate what qualities it does have. The Nineties, an almost obscenely frontloaded decade, got ugly in a hurry, with dedicated “Alternative” FM radio forgetting Nirvana’s culture-shock to play on the Marcy Playground, and the vitality of Hong Kong action vitiated into movies featuring the exchange of tart, sarcastic asides in the midst of gunfire, and the cheap irony which one critic correctly identified as “the ideological white noise” of the decade. (It is not insignificant that Marvel comics gave motormouth wiseass Deadpool his own glossy in ’97.) Like Martin Blank, Armitage may have had a sense that he had some lost time to make up for, but this was not the way.

Grosse Pointe Blank’s chic obliviousness is compensated for in the first five minutes of Armitage’s next and to-date final film, 2004’s The Big Bounce, which delineates stark divisions of race and class in paradisiacal Hawaii. Native protestors have shut down work on a construction site. The foreman menaces one of his workers for goofing off and playing softball during the downtime, and for his trouble the foreman takes an aluminum bat to his face.

Because the worker is played by Owen Wilson, the bat to the face is delivered amiably, almost apologetically. Wilson is Jack Ryan, a beach bum who supplements his income with occasional B&E jobs—because he comes off as such a sweet-natured mensch, no one seems to have the heart to keep him in jail for any amount of time. After Ryan’s latest trouble with the law, district judge Walter Crewes (Morgan Freeman) takes the lad under his wing, giving him some work to do around the cluster of beachfront rental cabins that Crewes owns. It’s here that Ryan hooks up with lithe white-trash sylph Nancy (Sara Foster), the mistress of the millionaire prick running the construction job that he was fired from, who recruits Ryan to her scheme to screw over said prick for a few hundred thousand of his millions. A great many twists and turns ensue, but the only thing that demands attention is the interplay between Wilson and Foster, both bronzed and slim-waisted, with blonde hair forever in a saltwater tangle. They are golden children of the sun running amok in paradise, without a care and without scruples, and just to watch these scheming savages is a justification of the film’s existence. 

The Big Bounce

The Big Bounce belongs to a vogue for screen adaptations of the novels Elmore Leonard which is inextricable from the “Pulp Fiction moment,” beginning with 1995’s Get Shorty (starring a Tarantino-resuscitated John Travolta) and including, of course, Jackie Brown two years later. It’s based on Leonard’s first crime novel, published in 1969 under the same name and made that same year into a universally despised Ryan O’Neal vehicle. The action has been moved from Leonard’s home state of Michigan to Oahu, to allow for plenty of establishing helicopter shots rolling in with the clear surf and interstitial views of adults at play, which may seem to be fulfilling some kind of tourist board quota, though they are actually the glue that holds the movie together. Larceny is just another of the hobbies bred by idleness here—like body-surfing and cliff-diving.

This particular vision of utopia didn’t resonate. The Big Bounce was shunned by audiences, lambasted by critics, and, most damningly, by Elmore Leonard, who in a 2004 interview with The Guardian kvetched at some length about Armitage’s adaptation. (“It’s a mystery to me why people buy one of my books and then take out everything that made them buy it in the first place.”) It came with a $50 million price tag, and failed to bring back more than a fraction of that. Armitage hasn’t had a directing credit since, and his current inactive streak is now nearly as long as his stretch between Hot Rod and Miami Blues.

I’m not here to argue that The Big Bounce was a perfect movie. The setup isn’t laid out cleanly enough to allow the payoff resolution to snap into place satisfactorily, and sometimes it feels like a leisurely Hawksian hangout that’s been forced to keep to the timetable of a “taut” caper—you want to kick back and watch the dominos game between Freeman, Willie Nelson, and Harry Dean Stanton for a full 15 minutes at minimum. But it is an insidious element of contemporary criticism that, in order to be heard over the din, we increasingly speak of films outside the current release cycle only in terms of lost masterpieces or edifices marked “overrated” that are fit to be torn down. Armitage is a middle-range director with real camera sense—his strategically deployed handheld work is particularly spry, and he does marvelous short-lens work on busy action scenes that lends them a rare verisimilitude. When circumstances aligned in his favor, he could by very good indeed. By my count, he has one film of the first rate (Miami Blues), two that are nearly there (Vigilante Force, Hot Rod), two that are more to be recommended for moments more than for their whole (Hit Man, The Big Bounce), and then the rest. I have no idea if he’s looking to add to that total, but if so, some enterprising producer at, say, WWE Studios should take note. A good B director is an American classic, like a ’41 Willys, and shouldn’t be left to gather rust.

* Shameless self-promotional aside: I and co-programmer Nicolas Rapold, of FILM COMMENT fame, recently introduced Miami Blues at BAMcinématek, in a Floridian sidebar to their “Sunshine Noir” series, alongside 1970’s Darker Than Amber, an adaptation of one of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books, which Willeford would likely have reviewed during his time at the Herald.

Read the full text of the essay.

The first thing that impressed me in A Most Violent Year, written and directed by J.C. Chandor, was the overcoats worn by Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain—pale, bulky, very sumptuous. Very significant too: the coats represent their characters’ aspirations to affluence, success, and respectability, but while they keep their wearers warm through a New York winter, they also function metaphorically as armor in the battle they’re about to enter in a brutal business world, and armor against painful truth.

The coats are the sleekest, chicest adornments in a film that’s otherwise starkly downbeat, visually and dramatically. A Most Violent Year is a tough, mature piece of storytelling from Chandor, whose 2011 debut Margin Call was an impressive surprise, and whose follow-up All Is Lost (13) was widely admired. While the latter is still on my catch-up pile, A Most Violent Year—this week named Best Film by the National Board of Review—is high on my list of the year’s movies that I want to see again in 2015. It’s an impressive, substantial piece of work, and a proper old-fashioned nail-biter too.

The action is set in New York in 1981, following what one character points out was the city’s worst-ever year for rape and murder. Throughout, we see a harsh, battle-scarred place: scenes in the outer boroughs show desolate stretches of wasteland, subway windows are opaque with graffiti, and stretches of bleak riverside terrain are ripe for seizure in property wars. It’s pretty much the Wild East, but protagonist Abel Morales wants to be the good guy in the white hat. Played by Oscar Isaac, Abel is the ambitious owner of an oil heating company; he’s planning a major expansion, and to that end intends to buy an expanse of grim-looking riverside property from its owner, a Hassidic patriarch. Abel prides himself on doing things legit—on having got to where he is through principled practice, energy, and charm. But it’s a tough playing field, and not everyone else in his business has his scruples; Abel’s trucks are being hijacked by parties unknown. When we meet some of Abel’s competitors—notably the well-established, impeccably smooth Peter (Alessandro Nivola)—it’s clear that he’s operating in a world of smiling but bloodthirsty wolves, and it can’t be long until his own hands have to get dirty, or bloody.

Abel is deceiving himself too—forgetting what it means that he has bought the business from the gangster father of his wife Anna (Chastain). She is Abel’s business partner and accountant, and he seems to be in denial about how much of her business talent and professional ethics she has inherited from the family firm. Chastain gives her best performance yet, her increasingly formidable hardness in counterpoint to Isaac’s restrained composure. When we first see Anna, she’s jabbing with a pencil at an adding machine—one of those simple but telling bits of specialized physical business that gives a character that extra edge of reality—and before long she’s jabbing an icy, varnished fingernail at the district attorney (David Oyelowo) who’s come to seize their business records. The next thing she brandishes is a gun—so it’s a characterization that’s aggressive in gradual increments.

The film works gradually overall, nicely pacing its revelations of plot, character, and background. For example, it’s only late in the film that Abel speaks Spanish for the first time, and we realize that the film has held back on revealing too much about his origins and making us think about his backstory. For most of the film, Abel presents himself as a smoothly packaged performance, an already finished and polished personality, something he does with pride and finesse. In a terrific scene in which, quietly but persuasively, he trains his apprentice sales force in the art of winning over new customers: when offered a drink, ask for tea not coffee, because it shows you have class; and look people in the eye just a little too long: “You’ll never do anything as hard as looking someone straight in the eye and telling the truth.” Well, yes—but then Abel and Anna have opponents who find nothing easier than looking people in the eye and lying.

A Most Violent Year is about the recent past in a number of ways: it’s about New York before the precarious boom of the Eighties, about the harshness of its “frontier town” years. DP Bradford Young and production designer John P. Goldsmith paint this world in tones of oppressive beige and brown muddiness—the murk that the couple are trying to escape from into a shiny, glossier Eighties world—but the visuals are without the arch exaggeration that films often use to reassure us that the past is the past, exotic even when it’s squalid. This movie may be set three and a half decades ago, but the action always has an absolute sense of present-tense actuality, and is set in a real world rather than one obviously filtered through film history.

But the story is also set in a past now unimaginable to most cinemagoers—a time before Internet and before mobile phones, when business had to be done face to face. Abel spends a great deal of his time going to meet people: to broker a property deal with cash-packed attaché cases; attending polite dinners where the mutual hostility crackles palpably but just out of sight under the table; petitioning people who might just bail him out of an increasingly tight situation with a loan that he’ll have to sell his soul for. Confronting the people who he knows are conspiring to destroy him, Abel tells them: “What I’m saying is stop. Now. Have some pride in what you do.” He says it calmly and authoritatively, but ultimately he’s still pleading, throwing himself on their mercy. When you negotiate with people face to face, Chandor reminds us, the potential for frustration and humiliation is phenomenal—in a way that seems almost forgotten in cinema, but that was once the moral center of so much crime and boardroom drama. (It’s also the basis of the Dardenne Brothers’ labor relations melodrama Two Days, One Night, opening later this month.)

Chandor very astutely conveys the matter of what professionals show, and what they hide—not least from their own allies. A flat-capped Albert Brooks, for example, as the Morales’s lawyer Andrew Walsh, comes across as a canny, reassuring, tweedy sort of yeoman figure; it’s only as things progress that we begin to realize how much he’s made of the merciless stuff of a mob consigliere (Abel shows wonderful distaste when Walsh beckons him aside for a confidential chat, and Abel mutters ruefully, “Is this what it comes to—that we have to walk outside like fucking gangsters?”). And Anna, though manifestly a rock-hard cookie from the start, emerges as someone who’s capable of anything—ready to stand by Abel and protect their family to such a degree that she’s prepared to crush him too if he doesn’t come up to scratch (her killer line: “You’re not gonna like what’ll happen once I get involved”).

The interplay between Isaac and Chastain is superb, and at its height, we get something else that we don’t see much of in the cinema these days: the serious marital row. By which I mean a major-stakes face-off between two adults whose emotional, social, and financial existences are inextricably knitted together. The scene is all the more convincing, and moving, in its dynamics in that it flares up in a sudden flurry of yelling and then, just as dramatically, is over.

This is a well-honed modern tragedy about the difficulty in the adult world of being good at what you do and being good. It’s also a sparely executed thriller that has some great sequences in a classic vein: a tense household-in-peril moment, a nice bit of sour comedy when cops arrive at the Morales family’s shiny new modernist home during a children’s party, and Abel has to sneak out and dispose of the compromising business records; and a bracing old-school pursuit sequence. Reviewers have compared Chandor’s film to prime Sidney Lumet, which is bang-on, and Isaac’s quietly commanding performance to Al Pacino’s Michael in The Godfather, partly because Abel too is a man of integrity who’s nevertheless destined to dive into the moral morass with everyone else (actually, rather than Pacino, there are beguilingly odd overtones of Christopher Walken in Isaac’s generally soft-spoken delivery—“We’re on the same side here” becomes, “We’re on the same side? Here.”) In fact, A Most Violent Year is one of those rare films that, like The Godfather, explore the messy, critical collision zone between crime, business, politics, and home life. It’s a world in which, finally, your soul stands slightly less chance of staying clean than a camelhair coat.

A Most Violent Year opens December 31 in New York and Los Angeles.

To put it in Scorsesean terms, Paul Schrader’s The Dying of the Light was supposed to be “one for them”: a commercially minded spec script that Schrader put on the market in 2009 with the intention of selling it to the highest bidder and then moving on with his career while someone else made the movie. And for a while, it seemed like that exact thing was going to happen. In May of that year, the script was optioned by producer Nick Wechsler and announced as one of the first projects of his producing deal with French studio Gaumont, then looking to expand its English-language slate. No less a Schrader acolyte than Nicolas Winding Refn (who recently told Variety “There would be no Drive without American Gigolo”) was attached to direct, with Harrison Ford in discussions to play the lead role of Evan Lake, a veteran CIA agent tracking a Bin Laden–esque terrorist while battling the early symptoms of frontotemporal dementia—an Alzheimer’s-like deteriorative brain condition.

The prospects sounded intriguing, if not exactly like a box-office bonanza. But then, supposedly, Ford balked (at the fact that Lake dies at the end) and Refn walked (upset with Ford’s mandated script changes), and for a while it seemed that Dying might well die there. Flash forward to 2013, with Schrader himself back in the headlines thanks to his crowdfunded objet du scandale, The Canyons, and the Dying script back in his hands. A new version of the project comes together, this time with a comeback-minded Nicolas Cage as Lake and Schrader himself directing on a $5 million budget (of which $1 million is Cage’s salary) and a location shoot in Romania (where much of the film is set) and Australia (doubling for Kenya). The money behind the movie is being supplied by one David Grovic (aka David Haring), a mysterious Bahamanian businessman whose prior film credits include the ludicrously bad John Cusack–Robert De Niro thriller The Bag Man, which Grovic directed and acted in too. Perhaps it could be argued that the writing was already visible on the wall, but an indie filmmaker like Schrader, with a willing backer before him, knows better than to ask too many questions.

Well, the best was not to come. As you may already have heard, there is a version of The Dying of the Light escaping into (a handful of) theaters this weekend, alongside a simultaneous VOD release. It ends with a title card that states “A Paul Schrader Film,” but it is such in name only—a version of the movie that neither Schrader nor Refn (who retains an executive producer credit) nor Cage endorse or have done anything to promote, assembled by a team of producers without the input of Schrader or the film’s credited editor, Tim Silano. In the past few months, a spirited game of he-said/they-said has played out in the press, with a gag-ordered Schrader accusing his producers of taking the film away from him when he refused to make all of their desired changes to his director’s cut, and said producers firing back that Schrader quit the picture without ever completing it, and that their version is, well, a lot better. (Meanwhile, the movie’s nominal distributor, Lionsgate, has said nothing at all, which in a way says everything.)

But what of the movie itself? As one who has seen both versions of Dying, I can report that in neither edit is Schrader’s latest a masterpiece, while in both it is an efficient and mostly effective B-grade thriller rooted in a distinctly Schraderian sense of guilt and moral anguish, and featuring a very fine performance by Cage. Compared to two of the most famous hatchet jobs in cinema history—the “short” versions of Heaven’s Gate and Once Upon a Time in America—you could even argue that Schrader has gotten off easy, with no major alterations to his narrative structure or the running time. And yet, and yet, and yet…

In both versions, Dying gives us a Lake who’s been removed from the field and stationed behind a desk as the hours tick down to his inevitable gold-watch retirement. But per Schrader’s Dylan Thomas title (fresh from its mantra-like use in Interstellar), Lake refuses to go gentle into that good night, intent on tracking down the Arab terrorist, Muhammad Banir (Alexander Karim) who kidnapped and tortured him two decades earlier in an attempt to unmask a CIA sleeper agent in his ranks. The cavalry arrived just in time to extract Lake, but not before he’d taken a bullet and left behind a piece of his right ear for his troubles. Like Travis Bickle and Hardcore’s Jake VanDorn before him, Lake is obsessively driven, a man on a mission, convinced that the presumed-dead Banir is in fact still alive, a theory that gains traction when a Kenyan national is found ferrying experimental drugs from Bucharest to Mombasa—drugs used to treat the very rare form of anemia from which Banir was known to suffer. But with Lake’s own fatal medical condition out of the bag, he can rally no internal support at an Agency eager to put him out to pasture. So he goes rogue, with a dutiful young agent (Anton Yelchin) in tow.

In some ways suggesting a cross between the Bourne franchise and Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden (with its belated reunion of torturer and victim), Dying moves swiftly through the obligatory procedural moves en route to what clearly interests Schrader most: the inevitable face-off between these two doomed men, one slowly being poisoned by his own blood, the other by his brain. And despite Schrader’s penchant for somewhat perfunctory political stake-planting (as when Banir regales Lake with the familiar tale of Islamic ideologue Sayyid Qutb’s horrified visit to the decadent West in the late 1940s), those scenes nevertheless carry a stark power. As in David Gordon Green’s Joe, Cage seems committed to acting again in a way he hasn’t for most of the last decade (in which he became something of the poor man’s Liam Neeson in an effort to pay off a massive tax debt). There’s real fear in his Lake, the terror of a man slipping in and out of his own consciousness, and the Swedish-born Karim (who had a small role in Zero Dark Thirty) is equally impressive, holding on to every fiber of his fanaticism with his weakened, weary body.

So The Dying of the Light isn’t so much a massacred film as a dismembered one. What’s missing in the theatrical cut, like the missing piece of Lake’s ear, is something that might pass unnoticed by many but which nevertheless leaves a hole. It is, in short, Schrader’s signature, as if the movie had been directed by some fugitive from justice who dipped his fingers in acid to remove the prints. The principal stylistic concept of Schrader’s version (which exists only in workprint form) was that we would see the world through Evan Lake’s increasingly unreliable eyes, with distorted camera angles and sound effects used to suggest his weakening grasp on reality. Those effects have been jettisoned here in favor of a more conventional strategy of having Lake’s periodic head pains trigger jagged flashbacks to his torture at the hands of Banir (a scene Schrader originally dispensed with under the opening credits). Also removed: a prologue in which medical scans of Lake’s brain were accompanied by voiceover narration explaining his condition, a tip of Schrader’s hat to the stomach X-ray opening of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (a film, and filmmaker, one doubts Schrader’s backers have ever heard of).

In the end, it’s obvious that The Dying of the Light itself will pass into the night remarked upon by few, save for a handful of still-gainfully-employed critics and bloggers. Even in his post-Canyons glow, and with Refn’s added hipster cachet, Schrader is not quite fashionable enough to be taken up as a cause à la Kenneth Lonergan or James Gray (nor is Dying, ultimately, as worthy a film as Margaret or The Immigrant). But if nothing else Dying serves as one more all-too-familiar tale of the little respect afforded major American filmmakers at the studio and indie level alike, and of the countless producers, distributors, and financiers who will happily mangle an artist’s vision, only to still treat the end product like yesterday’s fish wrap. Something is dying here, indeed, and Paul Schrader’s career is the least of it.

He scurries through the rubble, a furtive man in shabby clothes. Afraid of being seen, he hides from the camera following him, pushing aside aghast pedestrians and stumbling over construction detritus in his hurry. In a way he resembles Estragon in Waiting for Godot, fleeing an attack from assailants. Or the vagrant in Molloy, retreating to his mother’s room so he can “finish dying.”

His name is "O," and he is the chief figure in Film, the only screenplay written by Samuel Beckett, and he is played by Buster Keaton. Fifty years ago, Beckett and Keaton collaborated in New York City on the movie, an unlikely pairing of two of the greatest artists in their respective fields. Film won Keaton a standing ovation at the 1965 Venice Film Festival and received modest distribution in the United States. But for years it was surrounded by tantalizing rumors of deleted scenes, tension on the set, and drastic changes to the script during shooting.

A fuller picture of the making of Film has begun to emerge with the revelation of some little-known documentation that offers fresh perspectives on its creators. With the forthcoming documentary Notfilm, filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman reveals audio tapes of Beckett in production meetings with Film director Alan Schneider and cinematographer Boris Kaufman, outtakes of Keaton at work, and, amazingly, a reconstruction of the movie’s long-lost original opening scene.

Film starts with Barney Rosset, owner of the influential Grove Press. His authors would include Nobel laureates like Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Harold Pinter. Rosset was also a central figure in pioneering obscenity trials involving Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer. But what he really wanted to do was make movies. A veteran of the Army’s Signal Corps, Rosset produced an independent feature in 1948 about racism called Strange Victory, directed by Leo Hurwitz and not a big hit at the box office. It took him 15 years to put together another movie project, time he spent building Grove Press into a major force in the American cultural landscape.

Rosset asked Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Eugène Ionesco to contribute short screenplays to what he saw as a three-part omnibus film. Beckett began working on what would become Film in the winter of 1963, writing to his friend Alan Schneider that the project “petrified” him. What eventually emerged was a complex, idiosyncratic story about different modes of seeing. In the script, “O”—the name represents not only a character but a point of view—is pursued by “E,” a separate means of perception.

The Russian-born Schneider had directed the American premieres of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Although he had never worked in motion pictures before, Schneider agreed to direct Film. Beckett corresponded frequently with him about the project, discussing casting as well as how to shoot the script. “I loved it, even when I wasn’t completely sure what Sam meant,” Schneider wrote in his autobiography Entrances.

Since the film was essentially a silent comedy, Beckett and Schneider hoped that Charlie Chaplin might play the lead. (He refused; as a rule, he declined to read scripts submitted to him.) They also approached Zero Mostel and Jack MacGowran, both veterans of Beckett productions. As the shoot grew closer, they considered Alec Guinness and then Buster Keaton.

According to James R. Knowlson, Beckett’s authorized biographer, the playwright had a “longstanding” interest in film dating back to the 1920s. Beckett was fond of silent comedy, in particular Chaplin’s The Kid and The Gold Rush. He also watched some of Keaton’s features: Sherlock, Jr., The Navigator, Go West, The General. Beckett even thought of a career in cinema, writing the Russian master Sergei Eisenstein around 1936 to apply to be his trainee.

Opinion is divided about how strongly silent film comedians influenced Beckett. As Bill Irwin, a noted clown and the first performance artist to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, put it: “Some people feel that baggy pants and Beckett, it’s a complete connection, it makes perfect sense. Some don’t feel that way. But to me, he did seem to have an eye, a visual memory, for baggy pants comedy.”

For Ian McKellen, who has toured the world in a production of Waiting for Godot with his friend Patrick Stewart, the influence is clear. “In the printed text of Godot, halfway through the first act, Beckett has his only footnote: ‘All four wear bowlers.’ This sets Didi, Gogo, Pozza, and Lucky in their time, when most men wore hats,” he wrote by e-mail.

“But all in bowlers? In the snatches of music-hall routines which both pairs of characters have displayed, the audience is reminded of bowlered comics, Laurel and Hardy in particular. (Didi and Gogo might be the stage names of Vladimir and Estragon.) . . . It’s a small side-step to Buster Keaton, another master comedian whose trademark character was a victim battling against the world’s madness.”

Irwin agrees that Keaton’s screen character must have appealed to Beckett: “There’s something in Keaton about an interior life broiling below the surface. It’s similar to what you see in Patrick McGee as he does Krapp’s Last Tape, which Beckett wrote for him. And Beckett may have been drawn to the fact that for Keaton, smiling was not part of the repertory.”

Keaton was famous for his stern, unyielding visage—”The Great Stone Face,” as he was sometimes called—but just as important to his success on screen were his indomitable spirit, his focus and perseverance, his refusal to give up when buffeted by fate. These traits played out in his real life as well. A star in silent film, Keaton went into a decline in his later years. But he never quit his career.

“He was taken for granted somewhat,” film historian Leonard Maltin said about Keaton. “He still worked, he turned up on television with some frequency, but he should have been treated like royalty.”

Keaton accepted $5000 for three weeks’ work. In his autobiography, Schneider was dismissive of the comedian when they first met in Keaton’s home in Los Angeles. For one thing, Keaton, who had turned down the role of Lucky for the American premiere of Waiting for Godot, didn’t much like Beckett’s piece. “The script was not only unclear, it wasn’t funny,” as Schneider recalled.

What’s more, Keaton had timed the script, which came out in his mind to four minutes, not the 30 minutes that Beckett had planned. “He’d be glad—for a fee—to supply some ideas,” Schneider noted, adding that they were “from 1927.”

Beckett flew to New York (it was his only trip to the United States) in July 1964, to meet with Schneider, Rosset, and the production team. He would remain for most of the shoot, despite what he called “desperate” heat and humidity. “Had to stop every few yards and hold on to things, chiefly pillar boxes,” he wrote in a letter.

At first the team met at Rosset’s house on Long Island, where their discussions were tape-recorded. For years the recordings languished in obscurity, until Lipman approached Rosset about restoring Film for the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Rosset provided Lipman with the audiotapes—a rare find because of the paucity of audio records of Beckett’s voice.

“One of the neat things about these tapes . . . is that he’s in active debate with the production team,” Lipman said. “You hear his in-depth conversations with Alan Schneider and Boris Kaufman as they try to determine how to represent different types of vision on film, a central concept of Film itself.”

Kaufman, Film’s director of cinematography, won an Oscar shooting On the Waterfront, and had just finished filming The Pawnbroker. (Beckett attended a pre-release press screening during his visit.) He also photographed À propos de Nice, Zéro de conduite, and L’Atalante, three films by the noted French director Jean Vigo. Even more tellingly, he was the brother of Dziga Vertov, the Russian filmmaker behind The Man with a Movie Camera, perhaps cinema’s most famous self-reflexive film.

“Notfilm traces all these parallel paths,” Lipman said. “There’s the relationship between Kaufman and Vertov, between Kaufman and Vigo, and then the cross-pollination between Kaufman, Keaton, and Beckett, who in Film are analyzing cinema itself. Because Keaton, too, had all these self-referential bits in his films.”

Keaton’s silent films—the 19 shorts and 11 features he personally supervised—have a technical sheen and aesthetic curiosity that have not been matched to this day. As a screen character, Keaton always knew that a camera was watching him. He covers the lens to protect his wife’s modesty in One Week, throws a kiss goodbye to viewers when he falls off a cliff in The Three Ages, and in the dazzling Sherlock, Jr., he leaves a projection booth and enters into the very movie he had been showing on the screen.

“What may have appealed to Beckett, and to everybody else for that matter, was Keaton’s mathematical sense,” Irwin suggested. “There’s a precision and formality to his work. Take One Week, where he has to build a house following numbered instructions, but the numbers are all wrong.”

Schneider introduced Beckett to Keaton in the comedian’s hotel room just before the production began. By all accounts it was not a happy meeting. Keaton drank beer, watched a baseball game on television, and gave monosyllabic answers to Beckett’s questions. “They had nothing to share,” Schneider wrote later, although Beckett did agree to let Keaton use his signature pork-pie hat in the film.

Although Film was a low-budget, independent production, Keaton’s appearance in a Beckett work was still pretty big news, covered by both The New York Times and The New Yorker. Among the crowd watching was the French director Alain Resnais.

Thirteen-year-old Leonard Maltin also came to the shoot.

“As a kid I had gotten hooked on silent movies, particularly silent comedy,” he recalled. “So Keaton loomed large in my consciousness. The opportunity to meet him just presented itself. The irony is that standing on that set at the very same time, although I didn’t know it, was Buster’s friend and fellow actor James Karen. For the past 30 years he’s been one of my closest friends.”

Irwin also singled out Karen for his impersonation of Beckett on the set. “I remember Jimmy quoting him, in a brogue, saying something like: ‘Mr. Keaton, Mr. Keaton, could you do two-and-a-half blinks?’“

Film has always been controversial, for Beckett and Keaton fans alike. One reason may be that fully a quarter of the movie was discarded by the filmmakers. The original opening scene featured elaborate shots of a dozen actors as they moved down a street, choreographed to very specific camera movements. When they viewed the material later, Schneider wrote: “The lighting was gloomy. The performances, except for Buster’s, were terrible. The group scenes suffered so badly from that strobe effect that they were impossible to watch.”

Unfortunately, the filmmakers had already burned through a significant portion of their budget on that one day, and couldn’t possibly reassemble the cast for retakes. Beckett, by reputation so protective of his work, simply scuttled the material and came up with a new opening.

“That’s the way Film has been known for years,” Lipman explained. “When Barney talked about the film he said, ‘We spent all this money, we did this elaborate scene, and it’s lost.’ But then during one of my many visits, Barney said he had some outtakes under his sink.”

Lipman found several rusty cans of film that included footage of the missing scene. Using digital tools, he could reconstruct much of the scene, correcting camera anomalies likes bumps in camera operator Joe Coffey’s pans.

He also found new Keaton footage. “Many of his best takes wound up on the cutting room floor,” Lipman said. “They didn’t fit in with the overall choreography of Beckett’s vision. Or sometimes Keaton’s face would creep into the shot. Conceptually you could not see Keaton’s face from beyond a 45 degree angle, at least until the end.”

Schneider praised Keaton’s professionalism in Entrances, even if he didn’t get the comedian’s sense of humor. He quotes Keaton as remarking: “I’m beginning to catch on to this Shakespeare stuff.” “He knew by the time we were finished that it all ‘meant’ something, even though he still was not sure exactly what,” Schneider added.

After the Venice screening, Keaton told reporters, “I don’t know what it was all about, perhaps you can tell me.” The comedian moved on to new projects, including a screen adaptation of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. As for Beckett, he wrote that he enjoyed his time in New York. He attended a Mets doubleheader at Shea Stadium and even visited the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens. But he never returned to the United States. And although he wrote and directed for television, he never worked in motion pictures again.

Film did not turn a profit. In fact Rosset spent so much money on it that he had to cancel plans to shoot the Pinter and Ionesco pieces. But a few years later he earned a windfall from distributing the notorious Swedish import I Am Curious (Yellow).

Lipman and producer Dennis Doros are still piecing together Notfilm, and you can find more information about the film at its website. But even at this early stage the documentary is changing how we perceive Film.

Starring Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain as investigating judges looking into the murder of a police informer in a predominantly Algerian-French suburb of Lille, Serge Bozon’s Tip Top may be the most enigmatic film in this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Bozon’s third feature traffics in provocation (Belgian comedian François Damiens starts the film and a brawl with a flurry of racist epithets), political critique (spoiler: the “bad guy” usually sits beneath a portrait of Nicolas Sarkozy), and flat-out weird slapstick (Huppert repeatedly sticks her tongue out to catch the blood from a cut on her nose incurred during an S&M session with her violinist husband). This outré material is anchored by a rigorous sense of camera placement, a delectably jarring rhythm, and abrupt, playful dialogue courtesy of Bozon and his co-screenwriter Axelle Ropert (director of Miss and the Doctors, also in Rendez-Vous). As labyrinthine as The Big Sleep, and as wild as Jerry Lewis, Tip Top is undoubtedly a thing unto itself: a sly portrait of contemporary France disguised as a B movie.

Tip Top opens Friday for an exclusive one-week run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. During Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in the spring, Bozon, an occasional actor, critic, and leading tastemaker among the young set of hardcore Parisian cinephiles, told FILM COMMENT about the basic principles behind his complex film. 

If your previous feature hadn’t been called La France, you probably could have used that title for Tip Top, which paints a portrait of France today.

I agree. This is the first of my films to have a strong relationship to contemporary French society, and oddly that’s because there are a lot of Arab actors in the film. This is always complicated to say, because what I mean by “Arab” here is not someone who has a different passport than I do—they are as French as I am—but people who have an Arab background and darker skin. Anyhow, if we shot the same script and replaced all the parts played by Arabs with Franco-French actors, the film would lose that relationship to contemporary France. It would also lose its most unsettling, painful aspects.

Ironically, your film achieves this representation of France through a B-movie script more typical of American cinema.

Yes, but the B-movie element isn’t only in the script. You can apply the same principle to the sets, the costumes, the frame, and the editing. The film has limited locations, to which we return repeatedly, such as the hillock where the informer died, where the supervisor kills himself, and where Damiens’s character prowls at dawn. Despite the fact that the characters are very different because of their jobs or personalities, they keep returning to these places, not for practical reasons like having a bite to eat, but because they are obsessed with them. That makes for something disturbing. My film has a splintered quality, it’s not very linear. We needed something to counterbalance that nonlinear side so we didn’t wind up with something too fractured and coarse, even from an aesthetic perspective. The idea of limited locations can be linked to the fact that all the car scenes are shot head-on and that all the scenes in Huppert’s room are shot from the same angle with the same framing and lighting. We didn’t do this to follow Oulipo principles or to pay homage to B movies: B movies were shot fast for financial reasons, so angles were repeated, which gave the films an unsettling quality that stuck in your head. We needed principles like these to give the film linearity and an obsessive consistency.

Which also explains the role played by Arabs. Everybody in the film keeps coming back to the question of Algerians. The film is actually quite simple: for example, all the French people in the film are obsessed with Arabs, and all the Arabs are obsessed with the French. The women only sleep with Arabs. In the men’s case, it’s not libidinal, but François Damiens’s character is learning the language, while his boss is interested in the riots in Algiers. A lot of critics describe the film as madcap and over the top, but I find it more unsettling. I see Tip Top as a rather dark film.

But there’s a real comedic intent that goes quite far into slapstick at times.

Totally. Look, I don’t have many ideas at first. I participated in writing the script, but it was really Axelle Ropert who did it, so it’s not like I showed up saying, here’s what I want to do, this is what I want to say. Plus the film is based on a novel. So I don’t have a strong point of view I’m trying to express during the writing, I’m not trying to take a position. On set and in the editing room, I’m dealing with more practical concerns like what location we choose. It’s only once the film is finished and I see it along with everyone else that I start to have ideas, just like the ideas I have when I see other people’s films.

Of course, there are comedic aspects to the film, and I wanted them there. Take the beginning of the film: François Damiens goes into a bar and starts yelling out extreme racist insults. I find this comical, but at the same time, it’s typical. It’s not something I find madcap or crazy, it’s actually quite scary, it’s aggressive. It’s a peculiar type of comedy that resembles the effect of the film as a whole. It makes you a little ill at ease. It’s not gratuitous because if you make a film centered on Arabs, the first question that comes up is that of racism. That scene goes so far into it that it deals with it for all the scenes. You never even have to bring it up again because it’s been said to the power of 10. The film’s comedy is like that scene.

It’s also a kind of disenchanted comedy. You have a critique of French institutions, using comedy to show them as fossilized and trivial.

Yes. I was interested in questions of protocol because it connects to how you direct actors and to Isabelle Huppert’s acting style. Protocol also means institutions, and if you say “respect the protocol,” you know things aren’t very lively. Protocol is like burying the institution. But I didn’t really try to make a critique of institutions because I don’t know them so well. It’s more instinctive. Look, in France, the yokels will go see a Dany Boon film and the sophisticated set will go see Pascal Bonitzer—in the U.S., it would be Woody Allen. I wanted to make a movie in which the comedy wasn’t a way to tell the audience they’re watching a chic, cultured movie. I didn’t want to have any difference, I wanted the comedy to be as trivial as possible, with people eating rudely and making animal noises.

The worst thing about cinema today is ghettos. A film’s audience often recognizes itself in the film. I wanted to make a film whose audience was unidentified and that did not have that art-house/prestige or non-art-house/no-prestige distinction. Slapstick helps to equalize things. Frances Ha is the exact opposite of what I want to do. People see it and tell themselves, oh great, we’re post-students, we’re vaguely marginal, we don’t make a lot of money, but we’re fragile and touching and we all have artistic desires. The relationship to the audience is very demagogical. It’s an insider, nostalgic film, with a very negative relationship to cinephilia and the New Wave used as pleasant identifying signs that rub you the right way.

Another example: I like rock. But when you go to a festival anywhere in the world, after a certain time of night people are going to talk to you about drugs and rock and it will always be the same. There’s a kind of adolescent culture purring all over the world because it’s so proud of being marginal, of having dropped out. I’m like Rohmer, I think dropping out is sad. My positions are violently against this kind of elegant saudade of loserdom. 

So do you agree with Huppert’s character’s statement that the unemployed are parasites?

No, no, no! [Laughs] That’s different. I’m not talking about the social fact of being unemployed. I’m talking about films which take comfort in being underground and apart, in which the viewer, who is himself a post-student loser, is being flattered for being a loser. I’d rather film the people who work at Air France or someone working in a bank. But you have to be sharp: look at Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel. At first glance, it’s similar to Frances Ha. You’ve got two losers, black-and-white film, the Sixties vibe, all those identifying signs, same audience. But strangely the film has something more aggressive and acerbic to it. Plus there’s the incest. So that film goes beyond its prettiness. We drifted away from my film, but it’s because you asked me about slapstick, and I wanted to make clear that the comedy in Tip Top was not at all related to chic identification.

What about the relationship of comedy and politics? The “bad guy” sits beneath a picture of Nicolas Sarkozy and an unknown woman. Are we supposed to make a literal connection between wrongdoing and Sarkozy or is it simply a comic conceit?

It is kind of funny, because we’re mixing Sarkozy with this unknown woman, but at the same time it’s not gratuitous because the most important scene for that character is the last one between him and Huppert, in which Huppert realizes that the heart of the investigation is love. All the women in the film deeply loved their husbands. And the “bad guy” loved his wife so much that he became corrupt for her. So he’s corrupt, but there’s also a deep romanticism at play. The book by Bill James was totally different. Like many books that attempt to be provocative and somewhat antisocial, it falls prey to that “no one is innocent” shortcut I hate. I wanted to keep the novel’s aggressive humor, but not the cynicism. On the contrary, in the film you realize that people really love each other. So in the end, you realize that the picture of the unknown woman is not just a gag but a revelation about the depth of love, which also relates to the informer’s son Aurélien. His part isn’t fundamental, but he’s crucial because as soon as he’s in the shot, we realize the film has a dimension that isn’t funny at all. There’s something very unsettling and tender, which people often don’t notice the first time around. The shots of the child are like the final one of the bad guy’s wife: they make you realize that there is a “pure at heart” side to the film, that the characters aren’t corrupt in the usual sense.

Earlier you said you don’t take a strong position going into making the movie. What made you want to make it?

In general, I think filmmakers have too many positions, starting with me. The only difference is that my positions are as a critic and are ideas that come to me after the fact. I made Tip Top because I felt like doing something different from my other films, in a contemporary setting. Axelle Ropert brought me the book because she thought I’d like the humor, female protagonists, and final scene. I didn’t necessarily like the book as a whole, but I could tell there were things that would be good for me. Then we had to remove the cynicism and transfer the action from a bourgeois English setting, which did not feature a single Algerian. I knew the film had to have a social uneasiness, which is nearly its cement and is completely absent from the novel. Once we had adapted the film, I searched for economy. It needed to be head-on, a little brusque. Instinctively, I felt this project needed a form that wasn’t ceremonious or suave, but raw. Not in a stupid sense—I didn’t want it to be ugly. But it needed to be more graphic than pictorial.

In Tip Top, the police beat people and watch them. In a more subtle manner, we’re also aware that the media is watching. The film begins with a shot from a TV journalist’s balcony, which is the same point of view as that of the cameras shooting the Algerian riots we see on the TV news in the film.  

Absolutely. That’s the balcony principle. The French critic Jean Douchet pointed it out to me. He liked that we avoided sinuous, gauzy tracking shots with lots of depth of field and filmed more head-on. Douchet observed that the film either consists of people against walls or on balconies, so the only depth of field in the film is when we’re on the balcony: we’re only on the balcony when there’s voyeurism, and the voyeurism is always connected to the media. From a balcony, you can watch a guy doing his dishes across the courtyard or people making a revolution in the street.

But one makes mistakes from the balcony: when the TV journalist sees Damiens’s character recover an envelope from his boss’s body, he assumes they’re having sex. Does that mistake call into question the images of the Arab Spring shot from the same perspective? If you’re clearly questioning the media, it’s hard to believe that you have no position.

Films always do better by being simple and straightforward and going straight to the heart of the matter. I insist: I have no position. It was Jean Douchet who pointed out what I just told you, I hadn’t even noticed. But what I can say is that despite my lack of interest in documentary film, for the first time in my life I used images that were really raw. They don’t come from TV, they’re images of the riots which people in Algiers shot from their balconies. These images on an obscure local TV channel make something very raw appear on screen suddenly. Those images of riots in Algiers have a power of authenticity. It’s a basic Bazinian concept: something bursts into the fiction and burns it a little. It’s different than the TV journalist making a mistake when he sees the cop trying to get the envelope from his dead boss, which looks like a fully dressed act of sodomy. I like that kind of gag because it’s related to a plain police procedural question—how do you retrieve an envelope from a body lying face down without leaving any traces—but is also vulgar and aggressive.

It’s an abrupt tonal shift, which comes from people like Paul Vecchiali and all those directors who fought the real and the entire idea of biographical, depressive cinema in the name of fiction and tonal shifts. It’s the old story at the heart of French film: when Jacques Rivette directed his major documentary about Renoir, Renoir, le patron, Eustache was his editor. When they finished editing, they asked themselves what Renoir had taught them. Eustache said that Renoir says you should only film what you know, i.e., your life. And Rivette answered that what he understood was that you should film what you don’t know at all, what you’ve never experienced and could potentially never experience. Since then, French cinema has always been split between those like Eustache and Garrel who filmed their own lives and those like Rivette and Vecchiali who wanted to hold onto the risk of fiction, as well as abrupt tonal shifts and comedy. I belong in the Vecchiali category. I’m deeply in favor of narrative, with secrets, reversals, and surprises, which is a minority position nowadays. Take Laurent Cantet’s The Class, Justine Triet’s Age of Panic, or Kechiche’s films: many more films are based on an immersion in the real, with a documentary background, which isn’t to say that they are all the same.

We started by talking about another potential title for the film. I’d like to close by asking your interpretation of its actual title.

I like short titles: L’Amitié, Mods, La France. Why? It’s similar to what I was saying about economy regarding sets, angles, and costumes. It’s more likely to stay in your head. Tip Top also has a comedic ring to it, in the sense of a duo: Tip and Top. The film centers on a female duo, which is quite rare. It’s a subtle duo, too. It’s not like Laurel and Hardy, the fat guy and the skinny guy. It’s that one wants to be the other. Sally [Kiberlain] wants to be Esther [Huppert]. The film’s hourglass, its rhythm, is her transformation. Sally gradually dresses, talks and behaves like Esther and once she manages to imitate her boss in her sex life, the film can come to a close. The mimetic trajectory is finished—there’s nothing left to be imitated. The end may seem abrupt, but it’s totally logical: there’s nothing left to be filmed; the transformation has happened. 

Translated by Nicholas Elliott.

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 Friday for an exclusive one-week run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (Last month, the director visited 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]

The Migrating Forms festival of film and video is a cinephilic matchmaker, joining the hands of art-gallery devotees and repertory cinema denizens in moving-image harmony. Whether it’s gallery installations or genre entries, shorts or features, programmers Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry try to give everything equal pride of place. This year’s edition features work by 30 artists from 12 countries, ranging from Rachel Rose’s microscopic ruminations on mortality to Cory Arcangel’s deep browse through the Subway sandwich chain’s bizarre online empire, while also finding room for the scrappy postapocalyptic sci-fi of Hong Kong’s Fruit Chan.

Sitting Feeding Sleeping

The simple act of moving video art from the gallery to the big screen can focus attention. And the finely detailed work of Rachel Rose, who will present an evening of her work on December 11, rewards a closer look. The three films on the program invent something like an archaeology of mortality. Sitting Feeding Sleeping (13) was Rose’s response to a bout of creative paralysis, what she described to Mousse magazine as “deathfulness: being alive, but feeling dead.” She traveled to a cryogenics lab, a zoo, and a robotic perception lab, all places of mediated living or lifelike simulacra. As she speaks about cryonics and Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) in a lifeless auto-tuned voiceover, she associatively edits together images from all three sites, with graphical intrusions from her Adobe Premiere software.

Palisades in Palisades

An even more spectacular smash-up of organic-artificial-technological occurs in Palisades in Palisades (14), a kind of molecular history of the New Jersey park. Her camera zooms into a Revolutionary War-era painting of the park, pushing closer until it blurs out of focus, then dissolving into the pores of a woman’s skin and then again into a map of the park. Then we see the woman herself sitting in a wooded area, her eyelids fluttering, the soundtrack a heavy industrial hum with orchestral strings floating above. Everything is layered and connected, as the wrinkles of her clothing become the folds of George Washington’s pants in a portrait made during battles fought on the same location. Her body is part of a continuum of Palisades Park, her flesh and fabrics channeling and mingling with the flesh of the past. Rose’s most recent work, A Minute Ago, continues these layered investigations, this time taking a freak hail storm on a summertime Russian beach and merging it with Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, everything breaking down into precipitation-sized pixels.

Freshbuzz (www.subway.com)

Cory Arcangel’s Freshbuzz (www.subway.com) is a prankish guided tour of the secret byways of the chain’s content-overloaded website and social media accounts. Arcangel is teasingly methodical, clicking on every single sandwich variation, which reveals a short video of plasticine meats. The same camera move is repeated in all, and becomes a kind of corporate incantation—starting in extreme close-up, then arcing backward as if overwhelmed by the deliciousness on display. It’s worth waiting for when he delves into the “nutritional” videos hosted by the improbably named “JJ Virgin,” who cheerfully relates how Subway sandwiches can help cure depression.

The Midnight After

There is no calming the unfortunate souls who board the minibus in Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After. Chan is a cult figure in Hong Kong cinema, a chronicler of the handover-to-China malaise, most famously in 1997’s Made in Hong Kong, a howl of discontent shot with nonprofessionals on leftover film stock. The Midnight After returns to similar thematic ground with its story: following a plague, the population of Hong Kong literally disappears, as if the Chinese takeover has rendered its population invisible. It’s a Twilight Zone scenario adapted from a popular web serial written by message board writer known as “Pizza.”

Lam Suet (a jolly axiom of Johnnie To films) is a bus driver shuttling a ragtag group of passengers to Tai Po, including a pompadoured Simon Yam (gleefully dirtying his debonair image). As they drive through a tunnel, the rest of humanity disappears: Tai Po is a ghost town, and their phone calls go unanswered. A mysterious disease then begins picking off the bus riders one by one. The initiating event is left unexplained, borrowing from free-floating anxieties like the SARS virus, but it’s ultimately a parable of disappearance. As the characters wander through the emptied-out city, The Midnight After becomes a mournful eulogy for the city that was, and, Chan intimates, will be no more.

The Airstrip – Decampment of Modernism, Part III

Heinz Emigholz’s The Airstrip – Decampment of Modernism, Part III is another urban journey colored by loss, though this time in a rigorous documentary form. It is the 21st installment of his Photography and beyond series, in which the filmmaker attempts to “look at architectural spaces that . . . have been sorely neglected by ‘architectural history,’” as well as how they function and feel in the communities they serve.  In The Airstrip, he focuses on modernist structures, capturing them in a series of comprehensive long takes and taking in the surrounding neighborhoods and the populations that course through them. The instigating factor is Emigholz’s obsession with the Northern Mariana Islands, launching pad for the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The film opens with an epigraph about “The time between the bomb’s release and its explosion”—neither the future nor the past, but a suspended state of absolute nothingness. Emigholz travels through Europe to Latin America to the Marianas, and ends in Germany, at Berlin’s neo-baroque Neptune Fountain, erected in 1891. Its frolicking prewar nymphs stare across the street at the Rotes Rathaus (the “Red City Hall”), a former residence of Joseph Goebbels.

Quickeners

The world imagined in Jeremy Shaw’s Quickeners is a dream of what never was. Enchanted with footage of West Virginia revivalist snake handlers (taken from the 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People), Shaw decided to layer an invented sci-fi narrative atop it. The story takes place in a future world of “quantum humans” who live as hive minds linked through neural networks. Some people suffer from “human atavism syndrome” and resurrect ancient rituals of prayer and dance, claiming it helps them to “transcend” the neural web. Shaw’s fiction taps the primal power of this 40-year-old religious gathering, building to a psychedelic shudder.

Here's to the Future!

For more chilled-out group activities, look out for Gina Telaroli’s Here’s to the Future!, which captures the camaraderie that emerges during a movie shoot (full disclosure: I am friendly acquaintances with Telaroli and others in the film). A group of pals get together to film a scene from Michael Curtiz’s 1934 film The Cabin in the Cotton that features class tension and a seduction. The same scene is blocked and shot over and over, with different actors cycling in and out of roles, each personality imbuing the scene with a different vibe. It plays as menacing or blackly comic, resigned or filled with rage. Jacques Rivette once proposed that every film is a documentary of its own making, a tenet which Telaroli embraces and pushes to its extreme limit, encouraging the crew and actors to bring their own cameras to the set. The resulting movie is a patchwork of HD, cell phone, and webcam images, as egalitarian with its pixels as it is with its crew members.

That open-minded attitude is representative of the Migrating Forms festival at large, which gathers an eclectic group of image-makers who come from vastly different backgrounds and exhibition spaces to see how their ideas ping off of each other and the screen. Each program demands new ways of seeing, the series a constantly shifting perceptual challenge.

Migrating Forms runs December 10 to 18 at BAMcinématek.

Chris Rock finds his crackling identity as a moviemaker in his third film, Top Five, the way he found his incendiary personality as a standup in his 1996 HBO special, Feel the Pain. Whippet thin and volatile, Rock, in his breakthrough days, was dangerous but disarming. He gave his spindly body a forward tilt, matching the way he treated his gut feelings as the galaxy’s true center of wisdom. He pulled out the stops on his brusque, unsentimental view of life, discovering his stage legs by going out on a limb as a hip young truth-teller rather than an oblique yarn-spinner like Bill Cosby or a one-man carnival of characters like Richard Pryor. Multiple personalities didn’t spring out of him. But he expressed multiple varieties of irony and anger in his reedy, insistent voice. Having persevered through a difficult childhood and adolescence—he lived in Bed-Stuy, but attended white schools elsewhere, in a state of fear—he had the confidence to explode American concepts of race. His most famous routines tackled black-on-black prejudice. In his 1997 comedy book, Rock This!, Rock saw one race-charged situation this way: “A brother in his sixties hates everybody. He can’t stand white people. Why? Because old black men went through real racism. He didn’t go through that ‘I can’t get a cab’ shit. He was the cab. The white man would jump on his back and say: ‘Main Street!’ An old black man also hates young black people. To him, they’ve fucked up everything he’s worked for.”

In his new movie, Top Five, Rock brings off a fabulous new twist on that “‘I can’t get a cab’ shit,” deflating the idea that there’s been no racial progress in America. But he also takes a sharp satiric scalpel to the implicit racism that thrives in “progressive” parts of mainstream American culture. Top Five is the great leap forward for Rock’s filmmaking that Feel the Pain was for his standup. He creates an independent persona, “Andre Allen,” who is as smart, witty, and complicated as Rock himself, then crafts a scenario that allows Allen to earn our laughter—and even our romantic identification with his amorous longings. Among 2014 comedies, only The Trip to Italy can match it, and Top Five is visceral, topical, and funky. As Allen, Rock expresses his mordant rage at hipsters of any race who condescend to black artists, whether a radio producer who urges him to “bring the stank” to his reading of a promo or the showbiz honchos and fans who think the most he can aspire to is a buddy-movie franchise and the nouveau riche glitz of reality TV.

No Rock comedy has embraced African-American culture as fully as Top Five, yet it’s also his most universal film. Playing a stand-up comic who hit the Hollywood jackpot as a crime-fighter in a bear costume called “Hammy”—with the inevitable catchphrase, “It’s Hammy time”—Rock creates, in Allen, a portrait of a popular artist as an All-American burnout. Delayed adulthood is putting some crushing pressure on him. Acclaimed and beloved as a funnyman, Allen doesn’t want to make more comedies—he says he doesn’t feel funny. Everyone else views Uprize, his serious film about the Haitian Revolution of 1791, as a change of pace, but to Allen it’s the start of a new phase. And though he isn’t ready for marriage, he’s preparing for a wedding from media hell.

When Allen was on fire as a stand-up, he was high on alcohol or drugs, and now he’s sober. Even his right-hand man, played by J.B. Smoove (Curb Your Enthusiasm) with all his unctuous, rollicking Smoove-ness, thinks everyone is funnier when drunk (including, he says, Oprah). Top Five takes place on the day Uprize opens. Instead of celebrating his premiere, Allen frets about bad reviews and box office, agonizes over his impending televised nuptials to a Bravo lifestyle star named Erica (Gabrielle Union), relives his up-from-the-hood past for a persistent New York Times profile writer, Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson), and, gradually, realizes what the audience knows early on: that he should be marrying her instead of Erica.

Nothing comes too easily to the characters in Top Five, but there’s nothing labored about the movie, either. As a writer, Rock sets up one volatile situation after another, no sweat, and as a director, he captures his performers at their most explosively spontaneous. (The exceptions, of course, are in the snippets from Uprize, depicting Allen and his co-stars looking as glum as Al Pacino and company did in Revolution.) When Rock, as a director, puts a collection of funny people into a single apartment, including Sherri Shepherd, Tracy Morgan, Leslie Jones, Michael Che, and Jay Pharoah, the result is both absolutely real—the opposite of a Bravo show—and a verbal version of a Silly Symphony. Playing Allen’s oldest friends and loved ones, they yell out their picks for a list of Top Five rappers. The sequence is simple and terrific: Rock riffs with his co-stars in character, and earns the biggest laughs in a room full of scene stealers. Jones says Tupac Shakur might have evolved into “one of our political leaders.” Rock’s Allen thinks Tupac might have ended up as “the bad, dark-skinned boyfriend in a Tyler Perry movie.” Allen’s homeboys challenge him the way only time-tested friends can. When Allen selects LL Cool J as his sixth man, he defends himself for choosing the star of NCIS: Los Angeles by insisting he means LL Cool J “Before the show—before the show.”

Almost all the characters are full of surprises, including the pretty, shallow Erica; Allen credits her with forcing him to go sober. (The movie’s low point is Erica’s clunky speech acknowledging her own empty glamour.) Dawson’s reporter, Chelsea, hides a secret that’s brilliant as a comic device, but incredible as a reflection of journalistic reality. Yet even with its flaws, the screenplay is true to Rock’s art of upending expectations, not merely coining new expressions for home truths. Cedric the Entertainer is uproarious in the debunking role of a randy, sticky-fingered comedy promoter. He comes on as a streetwise genie, offering Allen anything he might desire, but he really uses his position to satisfy his own appetites. In the resulting Rabelaisian debauch, Rock displays a rare gift for raunch: as a writer-director, he recognizes when over-the-top is the right place to be; as a performer, he realizes the humor of getting small when Cedric goes big.

This hyperbolic set piece anchors Allen’s confession of his wayward alcoholic past; Chelsea, it turns out, is also an alcoholic, with some kinks in her life, too. Her disclosure of her boyfriend’s sexual preferences tops even Cedric’s bawdy excesses for erotic farce with a red-hot payoff. Amazingly, and touchingly, these scenes fit right into the growing intimacy between Chelsea and Allen. As frank as they are tender, as blind as they are smart, these grown-ups make beautiful romantic comedy together. Dawson and Rock match up perfectly in quickness and intelligence as well as carnal awareness. They truly convince you that two genuine, attractive people can indelibly bond in the course of a single day—these performers go beyond portraying sexual tension to achieve, at their best, a sensual relaxation. Cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro (Melancholia, Nymphomaniac) and editor Anne McCabe (Adventureland, Margaret) augment the characters’ ambling rapport with framing and cutting that help Rock maintain his focus on the actors’ unpredictable rhythms and reactions. A running-jumping-and-standing-still joke about the couple interacting with a gaggle of girls skipping rope is as full of charm, joy, and down-to-earth wonder as any routine by Chaplin—the man Allen calls “the KRS-One of comedy.” As the girls keep twirling their rope while Allen contemplates jumping in and Chelsea jubilantly joins them, it becomes a thrilling example of an inspired director locating huge laughs on and off the beats.

Rock has always had one eye on posterity. In Head of State (03), his first movie as a writer-director, he paid homage to Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He played a political innocent—a D.C. alderman—who is chosen as a presidential candidate by cynical party leaders but gains traction with voters when he asks: “How many of you work two jobs, just to have enough money to be broke?" Rock based his second movie, I Think I Love My Wife (07), on Eric Rohmer's delightfully airy Chloe in the Afternoon, hewing close to Rohmer's plot about a near-affair between a well-off family man and a bohemian gal who used to be his best friend's girlfriend. Despite its clever, fascinating sociology (upper-middle-class black parents try to be racially proud yet color-blind, spelling out rather than saying "white" and "black" in front of their children), one sizzling Viagra gag burned the rest of this wan film to a crisp.

Using classic models by Capra and Rohmer inhibited rather than unleashed the writer-director-star; these movies gave us bits and pieces of Chris Rock. Top Five boasts an impressive pedigree, too: its creative forebears include Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. But this film’s exploratory humor links it more directly to Rock’s engaged 2009 documentary, Good Hair (he produced and narrated; Jeff Stilson directed), which investigated the meaning and impact of female hairstyles within the African-American community and the tangled roots of white and black culture. In Top Five, Rock imbues a character more like himself with all his bristling sensibility—and creates a movie with its own candid, marvelous voice. As far as 2014 comedies go, it’s in my Top One.

We Are the Giant

It may not be strictly true to say that history is happening faster than ever. But today—thanks to electronic media in general, and social media in particular—we can certainly see and hear it happening with much shorter delays than ever before. Traditional television, radio, and print coverage struggle to persuade us that they’re not entirely redundant in the Twitter age, with news breaking and spreading the very moment that it happens. Imagine, then, how archaic cinema documentary must now seem, with its invariably longer postproduction processes, how far it is doomed to lag behind other communication channels.

Yet this is precisely a time when we need the possibilities that serious documentarists can offer. Some can genuinely lay claim to having an truly independent voice, or to gathering the testimonies of independent or non-official voices; for example, in this year’s Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (which I haven’t yet seen), Ossama Mohammed mixes YouTube footage with material filmed in Homs by activist Wiam Simav Bedirxan. Those documentarists who take longer to prepare and present their material can also claim to offer a critical distance not available to those who work in the moment. For others, the language of cinematic documentary, while it hardly guarantees objectivity or even detachment, offers at least the possibility of an uncluttered, lucid presentation of events: there’s something at least refreshing, even liberating in the absence of corporate logos, screens within screens, tickertape “breaking news” strips and all the other distracting furniture of TV news.

Two contrasting documentaries about recent protest and activism are released this week. One of them is anything but uncluttered, but its claim to our attention is based on a pamphlet-like urgency of presentation. We Are the Giant—by U.S. director Greg Barker, who made last year’s Manhunt—is about three pairs of activists involved in the Arab Spring. They are: Osama and Muhannad Bensadik, a father and son involved in the Libyan struggle against the Gaddafi regime; Syrian activists Ghassan Yassin and Motaz Murad; and sisters Zainab and Maryam Al-Khawaja, active in Bahrain. All of them have vital stories to tell, sometimes disturbing, generally inspiring even when the individual outcomes are tragic: Muhannad Bensadik, for example, was killed at 21; the sisters’ father, veteran activist Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, was subjected to horrific torture in prison; and only last week, Zainab—a hugely charismatic embodiment of modern revolution, tweeting as @angryarabiya—was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment after tearing up a photo of Bahrain’s King Hamad.

We Are the Giant

As the title suggests, We Are the Giant is a very impassioned film; in a sense, it’s a primer in revolution, and an advert for its energies. Throughout, quotations flash up from historic makers of social change—Jesus, Mohammed, Thomas Jefferson, Che Guevara—and glossy, fast-moving animated sequences show images of revolution through the ages. This device is singularly unhelpful—it makes little sense to indiscriminately collate images of Lenin, Mao, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Solidarnosc, as if the kinds of revolution they embodied were all equivalent. The shortcomings of such montage—more a mash-up of historical “highlights” than a properly dialectical juxtaposition—comes in the Syrian sequence. A piece of street-shot footage shows a young girl happily singing in a street—suddenly and terrifyingly interrupted as a bomb goes off behind her. We then get a quotation from Stalin—“The easiest way to gain control of a population is through acts of terror”—followed by a montage of acts of such oppression (Sharpeville, Soviet tanks in Prague, Burma), but it tells us nothing except that tyrannical states act in horrifying ways.  

In presentation, the film is a sometimes manic, sometimes over-romanticized mess, but the debate comes from the people it introduces us to. Interviews with its subjects intercut with footage from various sources, both formal (TV) and informal (mobile phone footage). Some of the testimony is startling and direct—like Osama remembering his boy urging him to action “like a father talking to a son,” and the Al-Khawaja sisters talking about their father’s example. A key theme that emerges from their comments is a debate on peaceful as opposed to armed resistance: Motaz Murad, for example, argues that revolution is compromised when weapons are introduced, because then the power really belongs to whoever supplies the arms. The film’s too deliberately stirring filmic rhetoric dulls its effect, but its remarkably courageous subjects are fascinating in themselves; it would have been better either to see a longer film giving all three pairs a cooler analytical treatment, or a more detailed portrait of any one duo. As it is, the third section, on the sisters, somewhat dominates, just because it has a greater clarity, and because the two are such lucid and compelling on-screen presences.

A completely different approach is taken by Byelorussian-born Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa in his Maidan. Loznitsa was a documentarist before turning to fiction in his unsettling My Joy (10) and In the Fog (12), and Maidan is his extremely controlled depiction of the protests in Kiev last winter against Ukraine’s then president Victor Yanukovich. Maidan gives the lie to the idea that cinema documentaries are inevitably dated by the time they appear: the last events filmed here happened in February 2014, and the film premiered only three months later in Cannes.

Maidan

Maidan at once plunges us into the thick of events and yet maintains a rigorous detachment from them. Loznitsa—one of three cinematographers, alongside Serhiy Stefan Stetsenko and Mykhailo Yelchev—took his cameras into Kiev’s Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti, where the protest movement known as “Euromaidan” or simply “Maidan” took root last November in response to Yanukovich’s refusal of closer integration with Europe. The film follows the occupation of the square over several months, during which the government imposed laws against freedom of speech and public gatherings, activists marched on the Parliament building, and riot police moved in on the square with live ammunition. In the end, one of the film’s handful of captions tell us, over 100 people were killed, over 100 were missing, and hundreds were injured, while Yanukovich himself fled to Russia in February.

It’s an intensely dramatic story, and no one would have blamed Loznitsa for presenting his material to evoke a heightened sense of the white heat of history. In fact, Maidan is all the more intense for the sobriety of its execution. Loznitsa simply plants his cameras in and around the square and shows us what’s happening in a series of fixed shots. They include a series of panoramas of a crowd listening to speakers on a podium, with deep focus allowing us to study in detail the faces of hundreds of citizens of all ages: we’re reminded that history is made by ordinary people, not necessarily only full-time activists, but also citizens simply inspired to turn up on the day. The film’s first section shows the backstage area of revolution, as it were: the halls and corridors of an august-looking building that become the headquarters of the protest movement; people wander around distractedly, try to catch some sleep on the floor at night, read posters and signs on the wall, or just take refuge from the winter cold. A later sequence shows us kitchen volunteers preparing sandwiches.

In general, Loznitsa gives us the mass instead of the individual—shows the surge and flow of the crowd, rather than the supposed focus of the action. We hear, but only sometimes see, speakers on stage, some of them poets encouraging the cause with what sounds like fairly sentimental doggerel, to judge by the subtitles and the delivery. But mainly the film is about the crowd of people determined to stick it out in the square for as long as necessary. As a result, there are only a few shots that obviously stand out as striking—although conversely, there’s a barely a shot in the film that isn’t striking. One can say that in editing the film, Loznitsa has been very democratic in organizing his material: few obvious highlights, no mere interludes. A few images, however, do stand out as different: vistas of the square overshadowed by black plumes of smoke, and a remarkable shot through a bus window, with massed police riot shields on the other side.

Maidan

By and large, the camera doesn’t move: Loznitsa positions it and, instead of seeking action, allows action to fill the space of the shot if it happens to come along. The camera does move a couple of times, however; once during a skirmish at night, when someone shouts out that the “Berkut” special forces are shooting at journalists, and the camera moves to a safer place nearby (relatively safer: everyone we see seems to be coughing and gagging from tear gas). Later, the camera scans the action from a rooftop when the conflict is at its height.

Maidan is hard to follow at times because there are few captions (which only explain general background events) and no authorial commentary. The commentary instead comes from what we hear on site: speeches on stage, songs in the crowd, a protest poem muttered sotto voce by someone off-screen early on, Ukraine’s national anthem as sung by the crowd and also by a man who wanders into shot carrying a guitar and ends up as the focus of an impromptu sing-along. There’s also the heart-rending traditional lament sung during a funeral at the end of the film; and a bouncy satirical rewrite of “Bella Ciao” at Yanukvich’s expense (“Vitya, Ciao!”). The voice of the people comes in many different registers.

The film ends up telling you a certain amount about what happened in Kiev—and these days, documentaries arguably don’t need to provide too much specific detail, but rather spur you to go and Google the hard information for yourself. What Maidan does is to show us how it was to be there, day after day. Loznitsa at once captures the thick of it, and lets us stand back and watch from afar. And while the framings are not overtly painterly as such, the act of framing does something extraordinary: each shot becomes a sort of epic canvas, rather like the Russian historical paintings of the 19th century. But each detail of each shot shows you how a multitude of small everyday moments, often mundane in themselves, together make epic history: Maidan demonstrates that revolution is also the small business of daily life. In other words, within any event of earth-shattering change, there’s always going to be someone trying to catch a wink of sleep, or getting on with the catering.

With one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, death permeates the lives of the poor in South Korea. Park Jung-bum's breakthrough debut The Journals of Musan (10), which follows a North Korean defector's quest for employment in Seoul, takes place on the outer margins of society. While a fluffy white dog provided warmth for Musan, there is no space for repose in the life of Jungchul, played in a starring role by Park himself in the director’s new feature Alive (San-da). A manual laborer who scrapes together a living in the Gangwon province, Jungchul has run out of luck and savings: his parents are dead; his sister suffers from acute depression and her daughter is fatherless; his attempt to industrially produce soybean paste has resulted in nothing but rotten produce; his team manager has betrayed him and his colleagues and fled with their pay. Amid such hard times, Jungchul struggles onwards with aggressive physicality and a primal drive for survival.

Like his bold, vigorous performance, Park's unflinching long takes work in the film like tenacious stares—often directed at scenes of violence or despair. The new film departs from the Italian Neorealist style that heavily informed The Journals of Musan. Instead, the dominant influence here is that of recent East Asian cinema. The movie’s persistence and heightened despondency recall Wang Bing's The Ditch and Secret Sunshine by Lee Chang-dong, for whom Park formerly worked as an assistant director. But Park's Alive has more drive than the works of his contemporaries. The experience of watching its three hours of anguish may at times feel like walking through mud, but Park's belief in the stamina of his characters pulls us through to the end: giving up is not an option for Jungchul.

Alive has its New York premiere at BAM’s Migrating Forms series on December 14. FILM COMMENT spoke to Park after the film’s international premiere at the 67th Locarno Film Festival.

How long did the project take to complete? It's been a few years since your last feature, The Journals of Musan, which dealt with the lonely life of a North Korean defector in South Korea.

Since The Journals of Musan, I shot a short film called Dear Du-han (13), which was produced by the Korean Human Rights Commission as part of an omnibus film series, If You Were Me 6. I started thinking about the script of Alive immediately after completing The Journals of Musan. Right before the shoot I finally received funding from external investors on top of the support from the Jeonju Digital Project 2014 set up by the Jeonju International Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere. I started pre-production in August 2013 so it has taken a year in total.

You played the lead character in both of your features. While Musan was a near-silent figure reminiscent of Takeshi Kitano, whom you’ve cited as an inspiration, Jungchul is very different, particularly in the defiant way he communicates with others.

In Journals of Musan, Musan experiences psychological problems because of what happens to him over the course of the film. It shows how you can change when undergoing such a process. In Alive, Jungchul is struggling to survive, responding to external triggers by shouting and fighting. For me, the two characters share the same interior world but they express it differently externally.

In The Journals of Musan, the focus is on one character and the film is entirely driven by him. In Alive, the story is sprawling with many more characters performing significant roles. How did you navigate the switch?

 The underlying theme of The Journals of Musan, which deals with a story about a North Korean defector, was loneliness. This is why his unresponsiveness was essential. In Alive, the central themes went beyond loneliness to encompass death and love, which is why it was important to include more characters.

For The Journals of Musan, you mentioned that you took on the main role because you didn't want other actors to have to suffer the pain and endurance Musan had to go through. But in Alive, the other characters also suffer beatings. What changed?

All I can say is that I'm extremely sorry. The scene where Sooyun whips herself was one of my biggest concerns in the making of the film. Even though the actress Lee Seungyeon agreed, I struggled with the ethical dilemma of making her go through with it. Initially the scene involved falling down a mountain, but we decided against it and replaced it with a scene of self-harming in a last-minute decision. First, I demonstrated the scene by whipping myself to show Lee Seungyeon how painful the experience would be for her. Even so, she still agreed to do the scene. I felt terrible for going through with it.

Alive is mostly composed of long takes. The takes begin before violent moments occur and still continue after they're over.

I'm not the type of director that enjoys filming in a style that is rigidly faithful to a script. I prefer being more impulsive and intuitive, so I provide my actors with a key word or a given situation and ask for them to respond, which is probably why I have to shoot so many takes for each scene. But because all of the individual takes were different, it’s impossible to cut them and assemble them separately. My intentions with this film were to portray being alive—the sounds and the physicality of breathing—as well as the effort and sweat it takes to survive. Dividing the shots and assembling them together would have felt fake and disingenuous. I didn't want for the flow to be interrupted. Breathing is not a manufactured process but a natural act, which is what I wanted to explore in the film.

How about the long takes depicting violence?

We couldn't shoot too many takes for the scenes involving violence, because they were emotionally charged and too physically demanding. Throughout the shooting of this film I lost a lot of weight. When the other actors hit me, they could feel their punches echo through my bones and I could sense that they were being cautious because they didn't want to hurt me. But what I needed was actually the opposite. I realized early on that hitting with half a punch only results in shooting more takes as it provides less convincing outcomes. When somebody is hit with genuine intent and aggression, we could finish the scene with one or two takes.

We've spoken about Sooyun, but there are other key female roles in Alive. How did you develop their characters?

All the characters in the film are a part of me, and their interactions are a staging of my internal conflicts. I suffer from panic attacks and I'm always aware of the inevitability of death. The question of what it means to live in this world could be expressed through each of these characters.

South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the industrialized world, so it’s a big issue. The catalyst for Alive was the suicide of my friend four years ago. I have internalized the memory of my friend and expressed it through all the characters in the film.

While suicide is death, the title of the film, Alive, points towards life. Did you develop the story according to these themes?

The film operates on the paradox of life and death. My thought was that within life there is death but in death there is no life. People who live in the outer parts of Seoul are experiencing poverty without reprieve in a capitalist society. I wanted to portray this milieu: the process involved living with others and the need to ask for forgiveness.

Early on in the film, Jungchul steals a door from a colleague who ran away with his money, but brings the door back later on. These scenes represent something important for me. Taking the door metaphorically turns the mind into a barren desert; returning the door and bolting it back into place represents forging connections. More importantly, it's an act that can be interpreted as forgiveness, not only for another person but also—on Jungchul’s part— for himself. For me, living life is to be in contact with other people. It involves falling in and out of love and going through painful experiences but also having to forgive oneself, which is the most important thing to do but also the most difficult to accomplish.

Could you elaborate on the theme of Christianity in the film? The church features in key moments of Alive as well as The Journals of Musan and films by Lee Chang-dong, whom you worked with as an assistant director.

I had many questions on the existence of God as a child, and eventually came to believe that God is dead. When I would pray and nothing happened, I immediately arrived at the conclusion that God didn’t exist. Nevertheless, I continued to go to church. I think faith is the moment that you realize you believed in it all along.

Hana asks her uncle why he doesn't pray in church, which contradicts her action in a previous scene where she steals money from a church donation box. It’s a scene that illustrates the complexities of faith. I think religion plays an extremely important role in our daily lives, which is why it appears in my films. Whenever I deal with broader themes, such as life and death, religion naturally comes to the foreground. It's not because I'm a believer or not, but because I feel it’s a part of the human experience.

1. The Wonders
Alice Rohrwacher, Italy

2. Hill of Freedom
Hong Sang-soo, South Korea

3. Pasolini
Abel Ferrara, U.S.

4. The Iron Ministry
J.P. Sniadecki, U.S.

5. From What Is Before
Lav Diaz, Philippines

6. Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait
Ossama Mohammed & Wiam Bedirxan, Syria/France

Don't see your favorite here? Proceed to the Best Distributed Films of 2014.

*self-distributing

A note on the poll’s workings: over 100 North American colleagues ranked their favorites in two categories: 1) those that received theatrical runs and 2) those viewed this year but currently with no announced plans for U.S. theatrical distribution. For each ballot, a first-place choice was allotted 20 points, 19 for second, and so on.

Readers' Poll: Readers are invited to stand up and be counted too! All entries will be automatically entered in our contest for free DVDs from the Criterion Collection. We will print the poll results in our March/April issue and publish your comments on the website. Send your ranked list of the year's 20 best films (plus any rants, raves, and insights) with your name, address, and phone number, to fcpoll [at] filmlinc.com. Deadline: February 2, 2015. First Prize: your choice of Criterion Collection DVDs, up to $200 in value. Second Prize: up to $120. Third & Fourth Prizes: up to $80. The winners, who will be picked by random draw, can select prizes, subject to availability, from the Criterion Collection catalogue.

1. Boyhood
Richard Linklater, U.S.

2. Goodbye to Language
Jean-Luc Godard, France

3. The Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson, U.S.

4. Ida
Pawel Pawlikowski, Poland

5. Under the Skin
Jonathan Glazer, U.K.

6. Stranger by the Lake
Alain Guiraudie, France 

Don't see your favorite here? Proceed to the Best Unreleased Films of 2014.

The first time Kevin Costner opens his mouth in Mike Binder’s Black or White, viewers are likely in for a surprise. The man whose genial California drawl once charmed Susan Sarandon and Eighties America by recounting his innermost convictions (“I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days”) now assumes the authoritative rasp of a mid-career Gene Hackman. The baseball glove that seemed welded to his hand for over a decade has been replaced by a scotch, rocks. This is Kevin Costner at 60. And he’s never been more alive or at ease onscreen.

Critic David Thomson once wrote that “a man like Costner would be killed by humor. The gravity stands high and bright, like an eagle on a peak.” In the Nineties, when the actor went all in on a pair of dystopian epics as grungy and bleak as they were earnest and admonitory, Thomson may have had a point. The everyman had become The Omega Man, and he bore the mantle nobly, playing stoic survivalists literally defined by their quests (The Mariner, The Postman). But just when it seemed we’d seen the last of his gentle smile and unforced charm, a funny thing happened: he hit middle age, and he started enjoying himself again.

The turning point may have been Binder’s The Upside of Anger (05), a dramedy about midlife romance and turning the page on regrets. Playing a likable lush and retired ballplayer who lends his support to a spurned wife (Joan Allen), Costner revealed a sensitivity commensurate with his maturity. Much as playing a boozy neighbor/unlikely love interest had done for Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment, the role of Denny Davies signaled Costner’s entry into character work, and in writer-director Binder, himself an actor and comedian, the star had found a collaborator who knew how to utilize his understated gifts.

Nine years later, they’ve reteamed on Black or White, the story of a hard-drinking widower raising his late daughter’s biracial child (Jillian Estell), forced to confront and defend his principles when the girl’s grandmother (Octavia Spencer) petitions for custody. Binder’s outspoken script so appealed to Costner that the actor financed the film himself, and offers one of his richest and—sorry, Mr. Thomson—funniest performances. Binder, who frequently draws on past experience for inspiration (see Crossing the Bridge and the poignant Indian Summer), spoke with FILM COMMENT about the real-life origins of Black or White and the qualities he appreciates in his leading man.

How did the story first take shape in your head? Was the custody battle kind of the origin point, or did you see it first as a story of two people coming together over mutual need?

Yeah, I saw it more, first, as a family story. My wife and I helped raise a biracial nephew of ours when her sister died. He was seven years old when his mother died, and his father wasn’t in his life. We were involved with his family down in South Central, and my wife’s family, all as this kind of a group raising him. I always thought that was a great starting point for a story about family and race, and how racial relations have to grow forward going forward—where we have to move forward—and I added the custody case aspect as a way of taking the family apart while bringing them back together.

Speaking of Kevin Costner, in my view he’s in the most interesting phase of his career right now. He’s older, looser, funnier, perhaps more at home in his skin than he’s ever been before, and it kind of gives the impression that inside every leading man there’s a character actor struggling to get out.

[Laughs] It’s true.

And I see The Upside of Anger as his segue into character work, so I wonder if you could talk about the evolution of his career and the character acting he’s doing now?

I’ve always been a huge fan of his. He’s always been one of my top two or three favorite actors. I really think that what you say is true, he’s just getting comfortable in his skin. He’s a very interesting actor, and he doesn’t get a lot of credit for all that he does. He plays variations of himself, and doesn’t pick showy performances. They’re very real characters—he kind of reminds me a little bit of what Paul Newman was at that point in his career.

I can see that. I was going to say Spencer Tracy.

Yeah. Absolutely reminds me of a modern-day Spencer Tracy. I think that’s really true.

Because you don’t see the apparatus at work.

That’s right.

How much input into the character did he have? Because it seems like a very conscious departure for him, the way he talks in a rasp and cackles, and that ever-present scotch in his hand.

Oh, a lot. First of all, we’re good friends. Second of all, we produced the movie together. And he’s the movie star, so of course he would have a lot of input. It’s the most I’ve ever collaborated with anybody, and for me it was a really good collaboration. He brings a lot of ideas to the table when creating his character.

As an actor, you’ve worked with the likes of Spielberg and Rebecca Miller and Rod Lurie. Is there any particular advice you’ve been given by a director that you’ve paid forward?

More from Kevin. I mean, from Kevin I’ve learned a lot about how great rehearsals are. If you do enough rehearsal, an actor will drive home and think about new ideas for the scene that, by time he shoots it, he’s had time to really think about it.

You have a background in comedy, and I wonder how that informed some of the more dramatic scenes where there’s humor nested within? Like the scene where Costner orders the father of his granddaughter to get sober, and the punctuation of that scene is Costner pouring himself another scotch.

I think it does. Even when I do drama I’m always thinking about it as a comedy, sometimes to a fault. But I don’t believe there’s any part of human life that suffers from a sense of humor, you know?

There’s a monologue near the end where Costner makes some points about perception—about your first impression and your second impression of a person—and they’re painfully candid. How did you come to write that speech?

When I came to that part in the movie, I wanted to really say what he felt about being called a racist. I really believe that we all see skin color—we’re not blind. But it’s about what’s our next thought, our next action. I don’t dislike anybody because of the color of their skin or their nationality or their sexuality. I’m more concerned about what kind of person they are, what the behavior—what the interaction we’re having is. It has nothing to do with me. I think that’s the majority of people in America and everywhere. It’s not your first thought. It’s your second and your third and your fourth and your fifth thought that’s important.

I just wondered if you were trying to get some of the more self-righteous people who claim they don’t see race at all to acknowledge certain things about themselves.

Yeah. I think that’s a good point.

There were a lot of insights in the margins, like the way Anthony Mackie’s character considers his nephew an embarrassment. That seems to speak to how the actions of members of minority groups are seen to reflect their community in ways that others aren’t subject to. And you use supporting characters to tease out little nuances, like the interplay between the judge and Octavia Spencer’s character, which is almost entirely nonverbal.

The people in this family are all different people. I don’t like it when people are put into monolithic groups. “Black people think this way, and white people think this way,” et cetera. You can have an amazing family, and then there’s one bad apple in the family. Every family has that. And you can have a young guy who just has no sense of connection to his children, and his brothers and his uncles and his sisters are all incredibly connected to them.

There’s a very strong epithet that’s spoken by Costner more than halfway into the film that achieves a jarring effect. How much consideration went into the placement and context of that outburst?

Well, I don’t know, that kind of speaks to itself. We didn’t shy away from it, that’s for sure, or it wouldn’t be in the movie. But we both felt, okay, this is how we want to tell the story, and it’s a horrible word, but he used it, you know, and he’ll have to pay the penalties for it. Or explain himself.

The wittiest line in Birdman is a quote from Roland Barthes: “The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters.” Few contemporary movies transform comic-strip characters into mythic heroes and propel them into resonating odysseys as thrillingly as the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise. Rupert Wyatt’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (11) questioned the ethics of animal testing and conveyed the catalytic impact of a chattering creature learning language. Matt Reeves’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a true science-fiction epic. It renews the idea of a primal “territorial imperative” as war breaks out between talking apes and desperate humans for the streets of San Francisco in the not-so-distant future. The movie came out this month on DVD and Blu-ray; the opulent “Caesar’s Warrior Collection” includes both films, plus a Caesar ape head, a 32-page booklet about “building an icon,” and “four collectible battle-ready ape character cards.”

Comparable in its scope and populist spirit to Spielberg films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it’s the best work so far from Reeves and a prime example of American filmmakers’ knack for creating something fresh out of merchandise fit for yard sales. (The director’s second-best film is Let Me In, a 2010 remake of the Swedish horror film Let the Right One In that both honored and transcended it.) Born in 1966 in Rockville Centre, New York, he lived briefly in Wantagh, then moved to Los Angeles before grade school. Reeves grew up watching Spielberg movies and Star Wars. So did his friend and colleague J.J. Abrams, who is now making Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. The fame they won in their mid-teens at Super-8 contests and festivals in L.A. led to an unlikely assignment: restoring and cataloguing Spielberg’s own 8mm movies.

In our interview, Reeves called the Planet of the Apes series “my Star Wars before Star Wars.” When I reminded him that he was only 2 when Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes opened in theaters (1968), he confessed: “My introduction to Planet of the Apes was the television series, and then I must have seen the originals on TV or in revivals. I know I had the records, the comic books, the toys.” Pierre Boulle wrote the source novel in 1963; the prime-time live-action TV series appeared in 1974—the same year Marvel started producing Planet of the Apes comics—and a Saturday morning cartoon series, Return to the Planet of the Apes, aired in 1975. Reeves said he was drawn to the movie series largely “because of the John Chambers makeup” for the apes. (Chambers was the makeup whiz portrayed by John Goodman in Argo.) But his film employs performance capture rather than prosthetics to get you under the fur of its simian characters, especially its heroic lead chimp, Caesar. What makes Caesar charismatic and profoundly moving is Andy Serkis’s intuitive embodiment of a super-chimp who’s learned to stand on his own two feet.

“When I was watching Rise again,” Reeves said, “I had a son who was learning how to talk. I was studying Andy Serkis doing Caesar learning to talk and looking at my son and seeing ways in which he was an intelligent animal trying to come into articulation. Caesar’s desire to speak, the urgency of it, the desire behind the eyes—it also connected to the instinctual side of myself, or what I thought I saw inside myself.”

The whole movie is excitingly contemporary and complex, not nostalgic or toy-like. According to Reeves, servicing the franchise required him to include just one fantasy aspect: the existence of ultra-intelligent apes: “I wanted to ground everything else in realism as much as possible—as absurd as it sounds, to find realism in the world of this movie.” I told Reeves that Dawn reminded me of an insight the British realist Paul Greengrass expressed to me a dozen years ago: “Today, the major clashes are between two peoples trying to occupy the same bit of land—and armed nationalist campaigns, in conflicts over shared terrain, can only turn oppressed minorities into oppressive minorities.” Reeves’s response: “You’ve made my day.” He considers Greengrass’s United 93 to be “a masterpiece; it affected me in so many ways.”

Now more than ever, Dawn seems wired directly into the zeitgeist. It’s freaky to see military weaponry deployed in an American city—San Francisco—as its streets go up in flames, or to watch a super-swift re-enactment of a fictional “simian flu” destroying human communities. And as portrayed in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, that plague had its origins in the second generation of a drug designed to reverse the effects of a human disease: Alzheimer’s. It proves to be far more efficient at increasing apes’ intelligence and killing people.

In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, set 10 years after the previous movie, ape society has stabilized in Muir Woods. Humans who witnessed the apes swarming across the Golden Gate Bridge a decade earlier have died off. Hundreds of Homo sapiens survivors make their home in San Francisco. These humans need power. The only source available is a hydroelectric dam in Marin County that an architect named Malcolm (Jason Clarke) hopes to get up and running.

When Malcolm’s task force penetrates the apes’ territory, the resulting close encounters of the simian/human kind destabilize each society. Malcolm and Caesar ultimately achieve a hard-won faith in each other. In the apes’ sometimes funny, always potent mixture of sign language and spoken English, Caesar’s simple utterance “Trust” becomes more affecting than his bellowing one-syllable commands (“No!” “Go!”). But desperate parties in each camp undercut Caesar’s peace initiative. Malcolm can’t control either the rampant anti-ape bigotry of an underling named Carver (Kirk Acevedo) or the ruthless pragmatism of his colony’s leader, Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), a good man nearing the end of his frayed rope. On the other side of the GG Bridge, Caesar’s right-hand warrior, a bonobo ape named Koba (Toby Kebbell), rebels against dove-ish policies and infects impressionable citizens with his xenophobia, including Blue Eyes (Nick Thurston), Caesar’s mixed-up son. The Bay Area isn’t big enough for both colonies because tribal die-hards can’t abide a rival species living several miles away.

The movie overflows with spectacular action-film tableaux of photo-realistic apes hunting deer and battling bear in the dense, towering redwoods, or gathering in Caesar’s strict military formation before the gates to the struggling colony of San Francisco, or storming the makeshift parapets of the city in the chaotic climactic battle. The movie is also replete with touching intimate moments: Malcolm’s son, Alexander (Kodi Smit-McPhee), teaching the wise orangutan Maurice (Karin Konoval) how to read a graphic novel, and Malcolm’s mate, Ellie (Keri Russell), nursing Caesar’s ailing wife Cornelia (Judy Greer). The best humor is pitch-black. Koba imitates a circus ape in order to lull armed men into complacence. As Koba gains power and voids Caesar’s rules, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes veers into Animal Farm territory. Suddenly, some apes are more equal than others.

What makes the movie a revitalizing experience from its hopeful beginning to its bitter end is Reeves’s collaboration with Serkis. This actor conjures the kind of leader who could convincingly declare, like the Bedouin chief in Lawrence of Arabia, “I am a river to my people.” As Caesar, Serkis scales tragic heights when he deflects his son’s apology for following the bellicose Koba. Instead, Caesar apologizes to Blue Eyes for making the initial mistake of valuing any ape, including Koba, over any human, including Malcolm. At the climax, when Koba, in extremis, tries to reinstate Caesar’s guiding rule “Ape not kill ape,” Caesar replies: “You are not ape.”

Reeves summed it up for me this way: “The movie is not about anything as reductive as instinct versus intelligence. It's about the battle within each character between violence and his attempt to navigate it or rise above it. I loved in the first film that Andy wasn't lacking in rage—he was filled with rage, but he somehow restrained himself. This film is really about violence versus empathy. Those are the two poles the characters are always grappling with: violence and empathy. When you can see yourself in others, you're less prone to be led to violence.”

Even in a pop-culture era in which the best fantasy films routinely pit conflicted heroes and heroines against villains who share their anguished, convoluted histories, the Planet of the Apes films stand apart because of the degree of ambiguity they pack into their sweeping narratives. These movies are all the more exciting for explosively casting doubt on conventional wisdom and knee-jerk loyalties. As Caesar struggles to behave like a righteous ape, he compels audiences to question what it means to be honorable, whatever their background, tribe or species.