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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: film (page 6 of 13)

Reviews of Two Fan Fictions

22 July 2007 / / 0 Comments

Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing “secondary worlds.” Ms. Rowling’s world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature — from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from “Star Wars” to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that clichés endure because they represent truths. Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child’s own power of fantasizing.

A.S. Byatt

Blood-soaked and piled high with deformity, the film is commercialized Surrealism. El Topo has been called a Zen Buddhist Western, but in terms of its derivations it’s a spaghetti Western in the style of Luis Bunuel, and tinsel all the way. The avant-garde devices that once fascinated a small bohemian group because they seemed a direct pipeline to the occult and “the marvelous” now reach the new mass bohemianism of youth. But the marvelous has become a bag of old Surrealist tricks: the acid-Western style is synthesized from devices of the once avant-garde–especially L’Age d’Or and the whole lifework of Bunuel, with choice lifts from Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, too.

The movie may seem bewildering, however, because the narrative is overlaid with a clutter of symbols and ideas. Jodorowsky employs anything that can give the audience a charge, even if the charges are drawn from different systems of thought that are–as thought–incompatible…. Well, of course, you don’t need erudition to draw on matters religious and philosophical that way–any dabbler can do it. All you need is a theatrical instinct and a talent for (a word I once promised myself never to use) frisson. Jodorowsky is, it is true, a director for whom ideas are sensuous entities–sensuous toys, really, to be played with. By piling onto the Western man-with-no-name righteous-avenger form elements from Eastern fables, Catholic symbolism, and so on, Jodorowsky achieves a kind of comic-strip mythology. And when you play with ideas this way, promiscuously–with thoughts and enigmas and with symbols of human suffering–the resonances get so thick and confused that the game may seem not just theatre but labyrinthine, ‘deep’: a masterpiece.

Pauline Kael

On Formalism: 5 Films

30 March 2007 / / 1 Comment

None of these movies merited a whole entry, but maybe we can find an interesting gestalt amongst them. I watched them in a 24-hour period last weekend in an attempt to clear my mind of impinging quotidian matters.

Dillinger is Dead (Marco Ferreri): Ferreri copped Godard and Bunuel’s provacateur attitude without putting much substance behind it. Everyman Michel Piccoli comes home from his job, puts his wife to bed, putters around the house for about an hour, then shoots his wife dead and takes off for Tahiti as the cook of a ship. But Ferreri doesn’t have the chops to move beyond the overt cinematic critique to something more interesting; you’re always at a distance from Piccoli, especially when you shouldn’t be. Godard could have pulled off an involving and alienating portrait of such ennui; hell, Bresson should have! (Am I the only person who thinks it would have been hysterical to see his non-acting and serious-serious-serious approach applied to modern domesticity?) Ferreri can’t, and the thing turns out to be a relic of the 60s in which edginess was charmingly naive and free of the tired shock tactics that Haneke, Noe, Von Trier, and others would bring to popular art film later on.

Anguish (Bigas Luna): And speaking of shock tactics, this is a film about a dentist who kills people and extracts their eyes under the hypnotic suggestions of his mother. Actually, no, that’s The Mommy, the movie that is being watched by a movie audience in Anguish while a killer stalks the theater. Then, of course, mother’s boy goes to a theater and much self-reference ensues. Were it merely a horror movie, the characters and settings would be all at the mercy of frights and gross-outs. Here, the characters and settings are at the mercy of the metafictional gimmick. Unfortunately, good horror movies know to provide payoffs every 10-15 minutes or so, and after Anguish shoots its metaphorical load in its first reveal, Luna runs out of tricks, though he tries his best.

Of Freaks and Men (Alexei Balabanov): A gang of S&M pornographers in turn of the century St. Petersburg wreak havoc on families and a pair of Siamese twins. Very formalistic, down to the sepia-toned film, it resists any but the most superficial psychologizing of its characters (the arid plot description that the link gives does not disguise any deeper depths). Spurred by dissatisfaction at what the film appears to present, I drew my own interpretation that the film is an analogy of exploitation and art film. By giving the (presumably highbrow) viewer all the signifiers of classicist, formalist “art,” it serves the same purpose as the short pornographic reels shot by the characters do for their intended audience. I’m pretty sure this was not Balabanov’s intent. Nonetheless, a beautiful final shot.

The Silver Globe (Andrzej Zulawski): Considerably chewier than the above. Based on the Jerzy Zulawski’s science-fiction trilogy The Lunar Trilogy about the colonization of the moon (published in 1903-1911!), the film was never completed due to government interference. It’s a bonkers tale of astronauts founding a primitive civilization on the moon, who then receive a later astronaut as their savior, who saves them from the hostile, animalistic bird creature civilization that is native to the moon. Fascinating but endlessly problematic, the film’s entire first hour is presented as documentary footage shot by one of the original astronauts via his helmet-cam, and everyone speaks in leaden, impenetrable metaphors. There’s much that could be construed as some sort of criticism of Communism, but the film is such a mess that its ultimate statement against Communism is the idea that such a whack film could be made in Poland in the 70s.

Street Trash (James Muro): I actually only saw the last half of this one, which probably wasn’t such a bad move. It bears all the markings of its time: 80s splatter gorefest about homeless people exploding and beating each other up. I wasn’t aware, but apparently the whole genre dried up when the Japanese banned the films after some serial killer claimed inspiration from them. Anyone have a cite? Anyway, I’m not much of a fan of splatter films because they all blend together, but this one has a few tricks. The standard schlock double irony is there (the film towards its material, and the audience towards the film), but the aggressively random plotting (mafia and Vietnam vets, but they never meet up)sends it into slightly more memorable Ray Dennis Steckler territory, even as the higher-than-usual puzzlement of the actors over how seriously to take themselves signals a death knell for the genre.

What I will say is that these films left me with little that I could take back with me as a writer, and with the exception of The Silver Globe, they left me with little that I could take outside of the realm of film itself. (The Silver Globe is something of a special case, as the movie text is mostly incomprehensible but its literary origins still show through.) So leave aside Zulawski’s film. Of the remaining four, even Ferreri’s film, supposedly about modern everyday life, is subsumed by the overwhelming sense of “Can you believe what they’re putting on the screen?!” For me, they all point out the fallacy that formalism must restrict itself to addressing the limits and variations of its own form. It cannot; instead, formalism must invoke other media and forms–real life being only one of them–in a way that is not explicitly representational. This is evidently not easy to do, but one glance at Godard and Jancso reminds me of the ever-fruitful possibility. But for formalism to comment on its own form alone: this is the point at which film becomes a fetish rather than an art.

David Lynch’s Inland Empire: hypotheses and spoilers

28 December 2006 / / 30 Comments

Mr. Waggish has allowed me to write this guest post about the David Lynch movie we saw tonight. (My film criticism credentials: Explained plot of Hukkle to Mr. Waggish, 2003.)

The problem with trying to come up with a single interpretation for this movie is that this defies Lynch’s explicit intent. I’ve found a couple of other explanations that seem at least as convincing as this one, linked to at the bottom of this post. But before I advance my hypothesis about Inland Empire‘s plot, let’s clarify some terminology.

Worlds:

  • Hollywood: Nikki Grace’s mansion; Jeremy Irons’s film studio.
  • Suburbs: Susan Blue’s retro house, next door to The Phantom’s house; Billy Side’s mansion; the burlesque club; the upstairs room; Hollywood & Vine.
  • Poland: snowy street scene, horse-drawn carriages and vintage cars.

Major characters:

  • Lost Girl: sits in room 251(?) of a Polish hotel, crying and watching talking rabbits on TV. Catchphrase: “I don’t know where I am.” Head is sometimes blurred out. May be the mother of Piotrek Krol’s son.
  • The Phantom: runs a Polish circus. Walks up and down Polish streets orchestrating screwdriver murders via hypnosis.
  • Nikki Grace: an actress, played by Laura Dern. Talks in a Martha Stewart-y voice and dresses in very severe, tidy clothing.
  • Susan “Sue” Blue: a pregnant housewife; Nikki Grace’s part in the Blue Tomorrows movie. Talks with a strong Southern accent; clothing ranges from colorful and feminine (at the beginning of the movie) to a pair of black capri pants (in the middle of the movie) to a worn-out burgundy maternity blouse and black suit (at the end of the movie). May or may not have had a son who died.
  • Piotrek Krol: is both Nikki Grace’s husband and Susan Blue’s. Wildly jealous. Shoots blanks (but maybe didn’t always). Appears to have a history with Lost Girl.
  • Devon Berk: an actor, played by Justin Theroux. Dresses in bad-boy leather.
  • Billy Side: Sue Blue’s rich lover in the Blue Tomorrows movie. Generally wears a dapper white suit or a black one.
  • Doris Side: Billy Side’s wife, played by Julia Ormond. Wears either a white t-shirt and cutoffs, or a fancy black suit. Is known to carry a screwdriver around in her ribcage.

Anyway, here’s my best effort at making sense of the movie, in chronological order, do with it what you will:

Once upon a time, in Poland, there was an evil Phantom who ran a motley circus. The animal handler in the circus, Piotrek Krol, had a beautiful wife (Lost Girl) and a son. But the Phantom coveted Krol’s wife, so he hypnotized her or slipped her a roofie, had sex with her, and installed her in a hotel room where she could do nothing but watch TV for all eternity.

Luckily, it was a magical, timeless hotel room, so her TV was state-of-the-art. One of the things she could see on TV were three Talking Rabbits, who appeared as American sitcom characters but were also the manifestations of three Polish magicians (there will be a scene where the latter’s outlines blur into the former). Unlike most of the people she watched on TV, the Polish magicians could actually see her too, as well as perform limited travel between worlds.

Krol went around looking for his wife, but when he was driven up to the circus shacks, he was told by a coworker that the Phantom had vanished. Then the three Polish magicians summoned him to their chambers. They showed him his wife (Lost Girl) but he could only hear her, not see her. They told him that the man he worked for (i.e. the Phantom) was responsible, and they gave him a gun that had the power to kill the Phantom.

Krol left the circus and arrived in America, where he married Sue Blue but never really seemed to love her. He left the Phantom-killing gun in the drawer of their bedroom. At one point, they had a barbecue and Krol’s circus friends all showed up punctually at 3pm, in an ominous fashion. Neglected by Krol, Sue became the mistress of a rich man named Billy Side.

When Sue tells Krol that she’s pregnant, Krol realizes that she must be having an affair and beats her savagely. Sue goes to Billy’s house to try to get his help, but she’s confused and disheveled from the beating. Billy refuses to recognize Sue in front of his wife Doris and his son, and sends her away. She goes up to the house next door, where she sees the Phantom. He frightens her, and she picks up the weapon that’s closest at hand, a screwdriver.

Eventually, Sue ends up on the streets. The Phantom takes Sue’s shape and mingles with the prostitutes, jeering at them and at Sue. Sue catches a glimpse of her doppelganger across the street, which is scary, but she also sees Doris, disguised as a prostitute and trailing her. She’s scared that Doris wants to kill her, so she ducks into a burlesque club. After sitting there a while, she’s escorted by the woman in red lace (some kind of magician?) towards an upstairs room where one of the Talking Rabbits (who fades into invisibility, maybe because she can’t see him) and a guy with crooked glasses are sitting. In the room, she feels compelled to deliver a series of monologues that describe her own history of violence and explain a lot of the backstory having to do with Polish legends (like the fact that the Phantom has a one-legged sister). But when the guy with crooked glasses gets up to answer the phone, she sneaks back out onto the street and into the company of the prostitutes. Being a violent sort of person, she’s about to demonstrate to them how to give herself a back-alley abortion with a screwdriver, when Doris comes up, grabs the screwdriver, and stabs her.

As she bleeds to death while her prostitute colleages flee screaming, Sue stumbles for a few feet and then pitches against a wall where some homeless people are sitting. In her dying moment, as she watches the homeless woman’s lighter flame, Sue has a Mulholland Drive-style vision that spins the street sign she saw (“Hollywood”) into a fantasy where she is a glamorous movie star named Nikki Grace.

In this fantasy, she’s living in a mansion resembling Billy’s well-appointed apartment. She has servants and a caring butler, and her husband Krol is just a shadowy figure in the background. However, the first hole in her fantasy appears when she gets an unexpected visit from Grace Zabriskie, who tells her that she has a part in an upcoming movie, but that the movie has a murder in it. Zabriskie also tells a Polish story about a boy (Krol?) who left a house (Poland?) creating his own reflection, and that’s how evil (the Phantom?) first came into the world. In this story, there’s also a girl (Sue? or Lost Girl?) who got lost in an alley behind a marketplace (Nikki’s stage set? Sue’s burlesque theater? Lost Girl’s hotel?) but found the road to the Palace (heaven? Lost Girl’s hotel?).

The movie is called “On High In Blue Tomorrows,” and it’s the story of Sue Blue’s life until a few seconds past the point of her death.

During the first script reading, Nikki finds herself disproportionately moved by the story. They hear a strange noise in the background, and Devon goes to investigate. The strange noise turns out to be Nikki herself, knocking around in her own fantasy. Jeremy Irons tells them that the movie is based on a Polish story called 47 and that it’s a remake of a movie that was never completed because the stars died in mysterious circumstances. (We never see the putative original movie; I think it is simply Sue Blue’s real life.)

Despite (or maybe because of) fantasy-Krol’s threats, Nikki and Devon find themselves oddly drawn together, and they end up having sex in a motel room that strongly resembles Sue and Billy’s bedroom. Fantasy-Krol watches and then vanishes for the rest of the fantasy. (The fact that he vanishes at this point is what makes me believe that Hollywood is a fantasy and the Suburbs/Poland are the reality.) When Nikki and Devon have sex, this catapults Nikki back into “the movie” (Sue Blue’s life story), which she experiences as having happened the day before when she was filming a scene of the movie and then got lost during the filming.

When lost in the remake of her own life, Sue has flash-forwards into her own future. She’s visited by a mysterious debt collector. She sees her fellow prostitutes hanging out in the comfortable living room, and one of them tells her how to obtain more visions into the future by burning a hole in a slip, with a cigar, while wearing the debt collector’s watch. Through the slip, she can see the day of her own death, and watch herself delivering monologues to the man wearing crooked glasses.

Finally Sue sees herself die on the street, and she reverts to her Nikki persona, but can no longer fully accept the fantasy. She finds Krol’s gun and wanders to room 47, where she shoots the Phantom, who dies with Sue’s face on. This unlocks the door to Lost Girl’s hotel room; Nikki comes in and kisses Lost Girl, allowing LG to reunite with her long-lost Krol as well as with Billy Side’s son, who may have been Krol’s and Lost Girl’s son under a spell.

Nikki takes her place in front of LG’s TV, but soon finds herself in Purgatory, which looks an awful lot like Billy’s mansion after all, where she dances with the Phantom’s sister (one-legged blonde), Niko (the monkey-owning, holey-vaginaed, blond-wigged dying Japanese junkie/prostitute), and a host of other Lynch extras.

Other compelling interpretations:

  • Beyond Hollywood – Hollywood is real, Phantom is pimp of a white slavery ring; Doris Side and screwdriver girl are two different characters played by the same actress.
  • Thoughts on Stuff – the 47 story is a repeated curse orchestrated by the Phantom, till Nikki Grace breaks the cycle.
  • Cinemathematics – the Lost Girl is a prostitute and this is all a fantasy based on a TV show that she watches in her hotel.

— Mrs. Waggish

Miklos Jancso: The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest

14 November 2006 / / 0 Comments

And then there’s this puzzler. Made in 1999 after a long break, this film sees Jancso and longtime writer Gyula Hernadi abandoning any indicators of their previous, consistent style. Most notably, there are no long takes in this film, making it nearly unrecognizable as a Jancso movie. Instead, we have 105 rather long minutes of sub-Beckett hijinks acted out by two evidently well-known Hungarian comedians (both were in Kontroll), interspersed with cameos from Jancso and Hernadi themselves. The movie doesn’t seem to go anywhere, though there are plenty of odd, deadpan jokes and oblique references to Hungarian history which were lost on me. (Odd that this movie’s slapstick travels less well than the art-house seriousness of Jancso’s earlier work.) Still, the general baseness of the dialogue between the two plays out as a constricted version of Bob and Ray, or perhaps more aptly Bouvard and Pecuchet.

Who knows? Jancso was pushing 80 when he made this, and such a drastic late-career shift is hard to figure. The cold hand of death? Senility? Boredom? Maybe I’ll have a better idea when I’m 80. But for now, I’m not rushing out to see the four sequels.

Andrew Horton has two articles, one on The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest and one on the fourth sequel, The Battle of Mohacs, which just happens to be about time travel.

Miklos Jancso: God Walks Backwards

13 November 2006 / / 0 Comments

A later film from Jancso, dating from 1991 and very topical at
that. It deals very specifically with the fall of Communism as
embodied by the Soviet coup against Gorbachev of that same
year. Jancso was nothing if not au courant; God Walks Backwards
is dizzying in its simultaneous immediacy and depthless irony.

Most of the film takes place in and around a mostly empty mansion
staked with television screens and cameras, as the old Communist
guard, newly-minted democrats, and hedonistic, cynical youth play out
the end of Communism as a farce. The democrats are hypocrites, denying
their past complicity to buy into the latest set of rhetoric that will
keep them in power. The hard-liners are clueless and pathetic; they
tremble just as the leaders of the coup did. And the youth walk around
with a video camera and a silent, naked woman in tow (sexist, yes, but
too true), shooting the action as though it were for nothing but their
own entertainment. Jancso’s long shots pass over the television
screens that present both the action in the mansion and the concurrent
broadcasts of the Soviet coup. A tank rolls into the yards with a rock
star on top (and that naked woman again), and these “democrats” kill
everyone, including the youth.

It is the most effective presentation of Debordian spectacle
in film that I have ever seen, revealing Michael Haneke as the amateur shock artiste that he is, and more remarkable given that Jancso
abandoned his more classicist leanings to adopt an uglier, harsher
contemporary style, all electricity and hum. (Though shot on film, it
often looks amazingly video-like.) There are the obvious points about
the inevitable hypocrisy of the transition from Communism to something
else and of the emptying of the assorted rhetoric. The fragmentation
brought by perestroika is there too, in more comprehensible form (to
me, at least) than in Kira Muratova’s The
Asthenic Syndrome. For such a blatantly political and allegorical
film, Jancso never does bring a polemic to the table, and the final
self-reflexive scene, in which the actors and crew themselves are
subsumed first by decadence and then by machine gun fire, is Jancso’s
acknowledgement that such sincerity could never be: they too are an
instrumental part of the joke.

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