Movie Review: Code Unknown (2000)

There were some parts of Code Unknown (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages) the specifics of which I did not understand. Some of these same parts, I think, were intentionally inaccessible. That's okay. Tonally, the film makes perfect sense. Though the title literally refers to an apartment building access code, the title more generally refers to the complex, unintelligible cipher of our emotions. Michael Haneke's film is about the emotional retardation of the present age, an era in which it has become increasingly difficult to understand our own emotions and their consequences and nearly impossible to interpret and respond to the feelings of others. Code Unknown is a complex portrait of various people unable to comprehend that they do not live in a void but within an interconnected society.

Suitably subtitled Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys, Code Unknown offers numerous snapshots of the lives of people from around the globe. At the center is an incomparable Juliette Binoche as Anne Laurent, a rising actress whose brother-in-law Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) is a sullen, rebellious teenager. Jean's aging father's dream is that Jean will inherit the family farm, a beautiful and prosperous estate, but though Jean has no dreams of his own and though he needn't continue to run the farm once his father dies, he refuses to cooperate. The father (Josef Bierbichler) bribes him with a motorbike and with soft words, and he quietly excuses himself to the bathroom so that he can cry alone in the dark while flushing the toilet. He does not want the family legacy to cease.

But Jean uses the motorbike to run away and disappear, leaving a terse note that he does not wish to be found. While walking the sidewalks of Paris on a drizzly day, he absentmindedly throws a half-eaten croissant into the lap of a homeless, older woman (Luminita Gheorghiu). Though most passers-by would probably not even notice or care about this rude treatment of a disheveled vagabond, and though the woman scarcely even responds herself--happy just to have food and not surprised at being treated with contempt--an astounded Amdaou (Ona Lu Yenke), a young man of Malian descent, pursues Jean, insisting that he apologize to the woman for his awful behavior. Jean refuses, a scuffle ensues, and the police arrive on scene. Handsome, white Jean is dismissed, black Amadou spends a night in prison, and the homeless woman is deported.

The film delves into the lives of all parties involved. We see Amadou's father, a cab driver, abandon his family to return to Mali. We see one of his fares treat him with entitled annoyance without realizing that the cab driver is a human being facing an emergency. We see Maria, the panhandler, in her native Romania, unable to tell her closest friends and family members that she was destitute in France and did not return of her own free will. We see Jean's father worriedly telling Anne and Anne's husband Georges (Jean's older brother, played by Thierry Neuvic) that Jean has disappeared. Stressed and depressed, he picks at crumbs on the tabletop with his fidgeting hands. When Anne tries to comfort him by placing her hand over his, he abruptly rises and leaves the room. Even when others do reach out to us, we do not know how to respond.

The beautiful, natural, and extremely talented Juliette Binoche is the focal point of the film, and we variously see her in all positions of the emotional divide. We also see her in the only three melodramatically, intensely emotional scenes of the film, three scenes in which she is performing as an actor: first in a thriller film, where she has just found out that she is about to be slowly murdered by a psychopath and responds (very convincingly) with confusion then desperation then tears, second in a stage comedy in which she laughs riotously while revealing her true feelings about a rival, and finally in a romantic drama in which she reacts with fear, tears, and love when her fictional son nearly falls off a twenty-fourth floor balcony. These scenes illustrate what we typically see in art and what we often expect from our own lives and relationships--passion, honesty, argument. The scenes in which Anne is not acting illustrate what we more often get in reality, such as the aforementioned scene where Anne tries to console her father-in-law but is cut off.

In another scene, a neighbor turns to her via an anonymous note for help in protecting a violently abused child. Earlier we witnessed the abuse second-hand. Anne is ironing while watching the television and hears agonized screaming in the distance. She mutes the television, worries over the screaming, but continues ironing. The screaming stops, some moments of silence pass, and Anne turns the volume on the television back up. She continues ironing. When she receives the note, she deliberates with Georges over how to respond to the worrisome note. This conversation turns into an argument; Georges doesn't want to think about the problem since the note wasn't addressed to him, and Anne accuses him of being heartless. In the end, Anne does nothing about the troubling situation, and the child is killed. Anne attends the funeral.

In the film's climax (though to call it a climax implies that the film has a plot, and Code Unknown really doesn't have a narrative-driven structure... when I say climax, I mean the most emotionally powerful scene, which is almost at the end of the film and which is also the last scene with audible dialogue), we see Anne in need of help herself. On the train, she is accosted by a suave Arab teenager (Walid Afkir), who presumes that she is a wealthy, racist, and arrogant bitch and then simultaneously flirts with and verbally assaults her while a friend stands nearby, laughing at the bully's antics. There are several other people on the train, but except for an old woman who disapprovingly looks at the boy and then turns away, nobody says or does anything. Anne remains silent, ignoring the boy as he belittles her, not wanting to acknowledge his rudeness with a response. She rises and walks to another seat, but he follows her. She continues to ignore him as best she can, and finally he sits beside her, silent, normal. The train comes to a stop, the doors open, and he spits on her face at close range. As he bolts out the door, an older Arab man (Maurice Bénichou) trips him. The boy responds with anger, calling the gentleman a fool. The gentleman calmly--though with obvious nervousness--removes his eyeglasses, wordlessly hands them to Anne across the aisle, and rises for a fight, yelling at the boy in Arabic. The boy backs down. The man sits back down and continues staring forward, as before, as though nothing has happened. Anne hands him back his glasses, then wipes her face. The train continues moving, with the boy off-camera, and all is silent. The train comes to another stop, and the boy exits with a loud and frightening threat directed toward the man. Crisis averted, Anne breaks into tears. All she can manage to say is a sob-choked "Merci" to the man who stood up for her, but he does not respond, does not know how to respond, just continues staring forward as people do on a subway.

This genuine and emotionally resonant scene is filmed in one long cut with the camera acting as an inactive eye witness. The point-of-view is that of someone riding the train but refusing to act, just as all of the other passengers witness Anne's dilemma but pretend to remain ignorant. The boy is just a boy and it doesn't take much to put an end to his hatred, yet no one is willing to offer the slightest assistance. They all pass the buck to fate or to more noble heroes. Would we do anything if in the same situation? How much injustice do we see daily that we pretend does not exist? How often do we convince ourselves that we are not the hero-type, that some crises are better left resolved by others? When the gentleman stands up for her, he seemingly does so before he even realizes that he has resolved to do it. Afterward, he remains speechless and uncomprehending, still unable to talk to or even look at the woman he has just saved, unable to share words at a time when words would mean so much.

Code Unknown speaks volumes about the war-torn landscape of our emotions; this review has only scratched the surface, without examining Georges's career as a wartime photographer of atrocities, Amadou's acceptance-seeking white girlfriend, Amadou's superstitious mother, or the deaf children who bookend the film with a guessing game of charades in which they act out complex, enigmatic feelings. One of Michael Haneke's best films, Code Unknown is a rich movie that perfectly captures our current crisis of disconnect.

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Juliette Binoche, Luminita Gheorghiu, Ona Lu Yenke, Thierry Neuvic, Maurice Bénichou)
9/10

Movie Review: Funny Games (1997)

Sometimes a great movie is ruined by its message--not because it's an offensive message, but because it's an obvious, an unnecessary, or a heavy-handed one. And at times like those, the viewer begins to suspect that he is being insulted or condescended to by the filmmaker. While Michael Haneke's direction of tension and editing of suspense is top-notch in Funny Games, his philosophical intent is obtuse and obnoxious.

Funny Games is a study of theodicy, a story of inexplicable evil and gratuitous violence. An upper middle class family, vacationing at their sunny, charming lake house for a weekend, is visited by two polite but aggressive young men, who hold the family hostage and unleash unchecked physical and emotional violence upon them throughout the night. That's what Funny Games is about on the surface, but the film is really about itself, an examination of its genre, an eye trained on violent entertainment that demands viewer involvement in the disturbing crime. Not merely a thriller to be consumed, Funny Games attempts to deliver consequences to the viewer, to ask him what possible enjoyment he expected from watching unbridled misery?

The typical thriller film relies on a number of conventions. First, we must be able to see the contest between the good guy(s) and the bad guy(s) as indicative of some greater moral or philosophical struggle. While they needn't be one-dimensional, the good guy(s) must represent some virtue (masculinity, justice, faith) while the bad guy(s) must possess some vice. This vice usually is revealed in some back story, serving as the instigator of the bad guy's turn to crime. Drug abuse, jealousy, greed, insecurity--it's often not anything believable. In Funny Games, the maniacal Peter and Paul have no back story, though they jokingly offer a number of stereotypical reasons for their fall from grace--heroin addiction, envy, abusive childhoods. Life is a continuous chain of countless causes and events, many of them minute, some of them irrational, millions of them undetectable; in reality our motivations are not so easily traced as in the movies. Our lives do not so easily fall into philosophical dichotomies and moral juxtapositions.

Furthermore, if Paul and Peter, the ambiguous villains of the film, have no discernible cause for their evil, then what virtues do Anna, Georg, and their young son Schorschi represent? Economic security? Lesiure? Minding their own business? Being courteous, but only to a point? They're a traditional, happy family unit, but they're hardly virtuous for being so. There's nothing vile about them, but neither is there anything emphatically great about them that forces us to root for their survival.

Which brings me to another convention, an obvious one that was actually codified in the Motion Picture Production Code from 1930 to 1968: the good guys always win. Purity, even if flawed, always triumphs, and crime never pays. As a correlative, children--who are always pure except in cases of temporary satanic possession--are always to survive. A good guy or two might fall in the process, but at least one hero always remains standing.

Well, Haneke doesn't bother with this expectation. The good guys don't always win in reality, and whether they do or not, it more often is a result of chance than of storytelling justice. Even the most common of cinematic conventions Haneke subverts. A major plot occurrence, the first murder, suddenly happens off-screen while the camera follows Paul into the kitchen to make a sandwich. Paul frequently winks at the camera and speaks to the audience, inviting them to participate in the game and take wagers on what the film's outcome will be--something that all viewers do subconsciously while watching any film, but without ever being accused of it. When Anna begs the sociopaths to kill them quickly and get it over with, Paul complains of the loss of entertainment value and the fact that they have not yet reached feature film length. (In other words, we need to give these sadistic viewers what they paid for.) Following the first murder, the film ceases to speak in "film language"--cuts, close-up, music, action--and instead depicts a realistic portrayal of the aftermath of horror: a mostly silent, static, ten minute long-distance shot of the two exhausted, speechless survivors too battered and stupefied to comprehend their misery while the bloody corpse lies in the corner of the frame. A typical thriller rarely pauses, and never for this long. As a result, the typical thriller never gives the viewer much time to think, never allows the viewer a chance to allow the reality of violence to sink in. In this ten minute, utterly disturbing sequence, the viewer is forced to reflect on the violence he has willingly volunteered and paid to see, to wonder what enjoyment he expected.

Arno Frisch invites us to join in on the fun.

But the most startling break from convention is during the climax, when Anna seizes an opportunity to kill her captors. After shooting and killing Peter, Paul coldcocks her, hunts for the remote control, and rewinds the film. When the opportunity arises again, Paul intercepts her and maintains the upper hand. This may outrage many viewers. That's breaking the rules! You can't do that in reality! He's not allowed to have so much control! But, of course, this isn't reality, there needn't be the same rules, and all control has lied in Michael Haneke's hands throughout the film.

I needn't say that this is an unpleasant film. Haneke has tried his hardest to make it so, and he has succeeded rather marvelously, stripping every ounce of entertainment and hope from this movie. A skillful director, he ratchets up the tension between the opposing parties in their struggle for power. From the film's opening credits--when a beautiful aria is cut off by screaming spazzcore as the film's English title slams onto the screen--he threads the movie with discomforting hints that something is wrong. An awkward conversation with neighbors, an unnecessary pair of gloves, a suspicious and almost insulting clumsiness, the far-off squeal of a dog, a rude imposition phrased in the politest of terms--Haneke knows how to shove needles into the viewer's spine. The acting perfectly suits the film's intent. Arno Frisch, who plays Paul, has dark, vacant eyes and a nihilistic contempt, yet he projects a handsome, charming exuberance; we almost like him, despite how horrible he is. Susanne Lothar as Anna is likable enough and pretty enough, yet she's also a bit cold and snobbish; we almost don't like her. And Ulrich Mühe as Georg is the antithesis of our desired action hero: inactive, crippled, indecisive, and ineffective--yet, for all of that, never unlikable. Would we, after taking an unexpected blow to the knee with a golf club, be any more courageous than him? The film is certainly well made.

Yet by the time it was over, I found myself wondering why Haneke had bothered with such a ham-fisted expose. If he thinks that violent entertainment is a recent phenomenon, then he's mistaken. Violence has been relished in art and literature since the dawn of history. The supposition that violent entertainment begets violent actions and thoughts in reality is unprovable but, in my opinion, false. Sleep experts theorize that the wackiness, horror, and violence of our REM dreams is to prepare us to encounter and survive any such obstacles we may come across in our waking lives. Horror movies, thrillers, and action flicks, I think, sometimes serve a similar purpose, forcing us to think about the most unexpected of occurrences so that if we come across them in our lives we won't be like deer in headlights, too surprised to react. If Haneke thinks that violence is so inexplicable and unwarranted, striking random people whether they deserve it or not, then maybe it's not a bad idea to be prepared.

Anyway, it's hard to side with a filmmaker who wants his viewers to suffer simply for wanting to enjoy his film.

Funny Games (1997)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Arno Frisch, Susanna Lothar, Ulrich Mühe)
7/10

Movie Review: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)

Given how interesting The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video were, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, the final film in Michael Haneke's "Glaciation Trilogy" about the frigidity of modern society, is a huge disappointment. I suppose someone could surmise that from the awful title, which accurately sums up the content of the film: seventy-one brief scenes (including television news clips) leading chronologically to a random act of violence.

The seventy-one scenes, excluding the news clips (which detail ethnic violence, foreign invasions, ethnic clashes, IRA bombings, genocidal war, and child abuse), relate six exposition-free stories about a handful of characters we know nearly nothing about. These are the stories, in no particular order:

-A young army cadet robs the base armory and sells the weapons and ammunition to the black market, only to have his barracks ransacked by martial detective.

-A young boy who has escaped drugs, prostitution, and poverty in Romania illegally hitchhikes to Austria because a girlfriend informs him that people are nice to children there. He instead encounters (with a few exceptions) apathy and hostility as he loiters and pandhandles at a train station, committing small crimes to sustain himself. He eventually turns himself in to the police, hoping to find warmth and refugee status there.

-A married couple that desperately wants a child adopts a foster daughter who is emotionally hardened, fearful, and untrusting. They try to elicit warmth from her, but quickly give up and return her to the agency when they hear the story of the Romanian boy on the local news. They adopt him in her place.

-An armored truck driver who makes bank deliveries grieves over the failing health of his baby daughter. He prays fervently for her recovery, for world peace, for continued safety, and for the end of various other sufferings, yet his marriage and his child's health gradually deteriorate.

-An unhappy bank teller estranges her family from her elderly father, a man of poor health whose lonely life consists of watching television, talking on the phone to the daughter who is uninterested in him, and making monthly trips to the bank in order to withdraw his pensions and see her.

-An impulsive, passive college student whose only passtime is ping pong, though he's not particularly good at it, obtains--through a random chain of events--a gun from his roommate. This was one of the guns stolen by the army cadet. One afternoon before Christmas, he goes to a gas station to fill up his tank before picking up a friend, but he forgets his cash. Hassled by the driver behind him, treated brusquely by the gas station attendant, frustrated by a broken ATM, humiliated by a man in the long line inside the bank, and impatient to pick up his friend on time, he snaps, pulls the gun, shoots up the bank, and commits suicide in his car. Though details are not specified, it is implied that he has randomly killed the elderly father, the foster mother, and the armored truck driver.

The news treats the shooting spree as a random act of inexplicable violence, but the recurring news clips throughout the film, all of which show a steady stream of violence and horror, suggest that the media has created a culture in which people have accepted violence as a regular solution to problems, the only way to be heard in a society that isn't interested in hearing about anyone's minor problems. The details of the film's multiple stories help cement this idea. The bank teller doesn't care to hear about her father's failing health, and she only asks him how he's doing when he shows up at her work because it is instinctive for her to ask this to customers. When he actually answers her, she is annoyed and explains that she doesn't have time to be bothered. The foster family adopts a psychologically damaged girl, but is too impatient to actually help her; she isn't able to quickly fill the spot they've made for her in the way they want it filled, so they easily replace her with another candidate. The armored truck driver prays devoutly to God, but the prayers fail to cure his daughter or save his life. When he quietly and unexpectedly tells his wife that he loves her during dinner, she responds with suspicion and confusion until he slaps her. The only moment of genuine connection in the film is at the train station, when the Romanian boy pretends to be in a swimming pool with another young boy across the tracks. Perhaps these two boys are still too young too have learned apathy and disregard.

The only heartfelt minute out of one hundred.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance is a film about emotional frigidity, but the film itself is too cold and impenetrable to be enjoyable. Besides the scene with the two boys at the train station (and another brief moment when the Romanian boy makes friends with an immigrant Polish newsman despite the language barrier), the film is heartless and mechanical. (In one scene, for instance, the future murderer practices ping pong by himself for five or more minutes of uncut screen time. Maybe that's supposed to show us how lonely his life is? But shouldn't any athlete practice his sport? What's really so bad about that?) The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video were disturbing and dreary, but by showing the very worst of lives, those films encouraged us to choose different, happier lives. 71 Fragments is bleak for bleakness's sake, insisting that violence is a part of our world and that meaningless suffering eventually comes for all of us, whatever we do. Someone tell me where the shred of hope is in that because I'm at a loss to find it.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Gabriel Cosmin Urdes, Lukas Miko, Udo Samel)
4/10

Movie Review: Altered States (1980)

Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky successfully fought to have his name removed from the credits of Altered States. Though the shooting script remained entirely faithful to his story and his words, he felt that his dialogue, when voiced by these actors (William Hurt in his first role, Blair Brown, Charles Haid) under Ken Russell's direction, was rendered incomprehensibly silly and raving mad. His assessment was a fair one, but it's hard to imagine any way in which these lines could not come across as being the words of lunatics. (Take, for instance, this line delivered by a totally drunk William Hurt at a bar to his buddies: "What dignifies the Yogic practices is that the belief system itself is not truly religious. There is no Buddhist God per se. It is the Self, the individual Mind, that contains immortality and ultimate truth.")

I find it baffling that Chayefsky, who wrote Network, one of the most perfect screenplays of all time, just a few years before, produced a script that sounds so written and unrealistic. Perfectly formed sentences using convoluted jargon to express solidly constructed, complex ideas. You can hear the pointedly pronounced commas and semicolons. No one ever falters or stutters here. No one is ever at a loss for words, which is surprising, given the mind-blowingly bizarre subject matter.

Altered States tells the story of Eddie Jessup (Hurt), a young Harvard scientist experimenting with isolation chambers and psychoactive drugs to explore altered states of consciousness. He's a strange young man, extremely driven, obsessively focused, constantly manic, and almost pathologically antisocial. He meets Emily (Brown), a beautiful anthropologist, marries her, and has children, but their life together always takes the back seat to his career, a situation that she knowingly enters. As Jessup secretly experiments on himself with an undocumented tribal drug from Mexico, he begins to tap into genetic memory, collective consciousness, and his primal roots--not just mentally, but physically. On a path to unlocking the mysteries of the self and the meaning of the universe, he takes a crash course backwards through the ages of the cosmos, with brief interludes as a caveman and as a gelatinous blob of primordial ooze. At risk of transforming back into a unicellular being and perhaps even assimilating with the universe in some sort of reverse big bang, he finally looks outside of himself for one moment to see the despair of his wife and realizes that maybe love, companionship, and mere normal existence is preferable to scientific nirvana.

You heard me right. Taking shrooms in an isolation tank physically transforms him into a caveman. And then into a blob. There's some mystical, pseudoscientific explanation for this, something to do with genes never changing throughout the course of history and with the mind/soul having as much direct influence over the body as the body does over the mind/soul. It's absurd, of course, but that's clearly what Ken Russell was aiming for. (Was Chayefsky not aiming for absurdity? If not, then that calls his sanity and brilliance into question.)

Ken Russell, who directed the phenomenally strange and enjoyable The Who musical Tommy, relishes in bizarre imagery and surreal, drug-induced moments of absurdity. Unfortunately, for a movie so surreal, I found the offerings to be rather tepid and customary. Jessup's hallucinations/experiences borrow heavily from loaded Judeo-Christian symbolism. Christ hangs on a cross, his head replaced by a goat's in a nod to J.G. Frazer's theories about Christ as a sacrificial scapegoat (see The Golden Bough). Emily as Eve feeds Jessup as Adam pudding in a rather English garden of Eden while a serpent slithers nearby. Cast out of paradise, they enter brutal reality, wandering into an atomic explosion. There are images of lizards that draw upon the idea of the reptile brain. There are rather stereotypical descriptions of caveman life, and the universe in its earliest stages is seen (just as in the Bible) as a watery Chaos waiting for God to carve into order. It seems to me that bizarre, surreal hallucinations wouldn't be so archetypal, straightforward, and obvious. For a movie that's supposed to simulate a bizarre, eye-opening trip, the visuals are rather pedestrian.

What's most bizarre, in fact, is how nonchalantly the characters respond to to these increasingly impossible revelations. After an extended sequence in which Jessup, transformed into a hairy, goofy, squealing hominid, has raced down corridors, attacked security guards, climbed fences, defecated in public, and killed and eaten a deer, he returns to his normal body, his wife, and his home with only a foggy recollection of the experience. He describes to Emily his motivation during the spree--how all thoughts of the past and the future, all worries and concerns and complicated yearnings had slipped away, replaced with the mere need to survive, to eat, to drink, to sleep, to stay alive. Dewy-eyed and smiling, he tells her, "I hunted, killed, and ate a small gazelle. It was the most satisfying experience of my life."

Needless to say, she is horrified.

Which highlights the only truly interesting quandary in this film: what is knowledge or enlightenment if it removes you from the things that make you human? Is the ending, in which Jessup chooses to stay with Emily and to love her rather than to attain the ultimate solution to his questing, a victory or a tragedy?

Altered States could have been a pretty good movie, but subpar acting from Hurt and Brown (only Charles Haid, as a loudmouthed, Southern-twanged scientist friend, shines in this film) and unrealistic dialogue prevent its message from ever being driven home.

Altered States (1980)
d: Ken Russell W: Paddy Chayefsky
(William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban)
5/10

Movie Review: Intolerance (1916)

Intolerance has a reputation as being D.W. Griffith's apology for the racist content of The Birth of a Nation, a mea culpa for promoting intolerant ideas and a condemnation of the horrors to which racist ideas lead. I don't know very much about D.W. Griffith or his feelings in the year between the release of this two landmark films, but I think this reputation is largely mistaken. The poorly-titled Intolerance has nothing to do with racism, and except for a few Ethiopians in a battle scene, black people do not even exist in this film. (Nor white people pretending to be black people!)

Intolerance is not an attack on racism but an expose on "intolerance," which according to Merriam-Webster is a concept meaning, "the state of being unable or unwilling to endure." There's a rather large gap between loving or embracing something and "tolerating" it. I don't love standing in a long line on a hot day, but I tolerate it because sometimes I have no other choice. I don't enjoy paying my credit card bills, but I tolerate doing so because otherwise I'll be penalized. I'm not happy that libertarians or arch-conservatives exist, but I tolerate their freedom to think whatever absurdities they want. Because what's the other option? Genocide? Violent outbursts? Lawlessness? Concentration camps? Most sensible people (though certainly not all, I'm afraid) have a pretty good understanding that these reactions aren't sound reactions. Intolerance, I suppose, is aimed at an audience whose natural reaction would be to violently annihilate whomever they disagree with (which happens throughout the film), a rather small demographic of which I am fortunate to not be a member. In all other instances, he's simply preaching to the choir.

Should the North have tolerated slavery? Was the Civil War an unnecessarily bloody act of intolerance? Should we tolerate D.W. Griffith's desire to create a bestselling, historically-inaccurate blockbuster epic that insists segregation is essential? Are people who strike these films being intolerant? Yes, I suppose so.

Intolerance, more accurately and artfully subtitled Love's Struggle Through the Ages, is a three hour and seventeen minute presentation of four thematically linked but otherwise unrelated stories: a Babylonian tale about the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE, a story of the crucifixion of Christ in 27 CE, a depiction of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre by Roman Catholics against Protestant Huguenots in France in 1572, and a modern tale about Americans in 1914 encounter temperance movements, mobsters, and injustice. The inspiration for the film began with only this final story before expanding to include the Babylonian tale, originally conceived to be a separate film. The French and Judean subplots were a later development, a fact made obvious by their limited screen time and underdevelopment. (I haven't actually calculated, but I imagine the French scenes occupy only about twenty or twenty-five minutes of screen time; the scenes about Jesus amount to only a handful of brief scenes and shots.)

The modern story is about a girl-woman who, following the death of her protective father, marries a reformed mobster and has a baby, only to have her life devastated by the intrusions of nosy prohibitionists, a gangland boss, and his jealous, murderous wife. This story--the original story--has the least to do with "intolerance." If you consider that this extremely grandiose film--the most expensive and largest of its time--was released only eighteen months after The Birth of a Nation, the supposition that the latter film is a complete reversal in sentiment and a meaningful, thoughtful apology for the former wears very thin.

And yet, unlike The Birth of a Nation, which is mostly just praised for its technical and narrative innovations and not for its actual thematic content, Intolerance is also exalted for the depth of meaning and earnest emotion that it supposedly contains. To me, the story is just as shoddy, inaccurate, and naive as the earlier film, though the presentation is certainly breathtaking and beautiful, even almost a century later.

D.W. Griffith had the resources to physically build a separate universe. What would be manufactured today using computers and trickery was actually set before the camera. Vast Babylonian walls and idols. Hundreds if not thousands of extras in exotic period dress. Elaborate recreations of ancient religious rites. D.W. Griffith, the only filmmaker of any real renown at the time, needn't have spared any expense at fulfilling his dream, and he clearly didn't. It's stunning to see the output of someone who was the undisputed god of his industry at the time, someone who could make happen whatever he wanted to happen. He wanted one of his actresses to have eyelashes so long that they would brush her cheeks, so he and one of his makeup artists invented false eyelashes. He needed to film an execution scene, so he in collaboration with the department of corrections built an exact replica of a modern gallows. He had the money to hire as many extras as he needed. It's difficult to imagine any filmmaker today being so free of hurdles, and the results are jaw-dropping.

The editing is also amazing, as the four stories cut back and forth, cleverly building upon each other's emotions and energy. As vengeful prohibitionists raid bars and gambling halls, the film recounts Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine. As a man is sentenced to death, we see struggling to carry his own cross. As a woman races to alert Babylon that they are about to be destroyed by the Persians, a young woman races to intercept a train carrying to governor so that she can beg him for a pardon for her condemned husband. This frantic, energetic, multilayered editing had never been done before, though Eisenstein soon perfected it and now even the simplest television commercials exploit these techniques. The cinematography by G.W. Bitzer is also brilliant, as in the depiction of modern capital punishment, which despite being a violent killing is brightly-lit, sterile, cold, mechanical, and precise. A red-filtered shot of Jesus, far in the background, impossible to be rescued, hanging atop his cross on Calvary as frantic silhouettes mourn in the foreground, their arms writing in the air, is one of the most disturbing and beautiful shots I've ever seen. The extravagant costumes, the make-up, the realistic sets--all are top-notch. Even the special effects are rather shocking and effective, as in one scene when a burly warrior decapitates another on the battlefield.

Perhaps the first stunning mise-en-scène in cinematic history, couple with the most skillful editing of its time. From the unavoidable agony of Christ's crucifixion...

...to the routine, bureaucratic execution of the young husband.

The acting is mostly convincing, though only Mae Marsh as the young bride in the modern story is especially remarkable. Her odd childishness and naivete, on a crash course with a brutal reality check, is genuine and memorable only because of how consistently strange it is.



It's the story, though, so slapdash and ill-informed, that is this otherwise brilliant film's downfall. Consider the historical gaps. Griffith depicts Babylonia as an exotic utopia obsessed with romance and in awe of Ishtar, its goddess of love. Enter the Persians, led by the brutal, war-mongering, intolerant Cyrus the Great, who, according to Griffith, wipes this civilization off the face of the earth. Did Griffith know anything about history? The Babylonians were oppressive conquerors who, as seen in the Hebrew Bible, attempted to eradicate the Israelites of Judea by destroying their temple, outlawing their religious practices, and killing, enslaving, or relocating many of their people. Ishtar was as much a goddess of war as of love (and agriculture, as well), and her religious rites involved sacred prostitution, not romance. Cyrus the Great, far from being an intolerant war-mongerer, was extremely tolerant of the people in his dominion, respecting their religions, traditions, and laws and administering a highly organized government with an impeccable human rights record. The Hebrew Bible treats Cyrus as a vessel of God's will, ranking him almost amongst the prophets and the saints in terms of his importance. Without Cyrus, Judaism would have perhaps been erased. Without Cyrus, the subplot involving Jesus may have never happened.

Not too mention that without Jesus the subplot involving Catholics massacring Huguenots would have never happened either, but that's a completely different can of worms.

And what are we to make of the modern story--more about injustice than intolerance--which claims that prohibition and its dangerous trappings are the result of insecure old women who can no longer get laid, who jealously channel their sexual frustrations against beautiful, young people? What does it say about this treatise on intolerance that the motivation behind its major plot is rooted in sexism and ageism?

Intolerance is a strange film--undeniably artistic, but with obvious shortcomings. I don't consider it the masterpiece that others do, but it clearly paved the way for other masterpieces, and that's got to be worth something.

Intolerance (1916)
d: D.W. Griffith w: D.W. Griffith, Hettie Grey Baker, Tod Browning, et al
(Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Constance Talmadge, Alfred Paget)
TSPDT?: #54
8/10

Movie Review: The Birth of a Nation (1915)

There's something uncanny about seeing black people--in fact played by white people--holding their hands protectively over a ballot box while sad, defeated white people--also played by white people--walk away uncounted. In the reversal of The Birth of a Nation's denouement, when armed Klansmen on horseback prevent these same black people from exiting their homes on election day and making it to the polling centers, we at least have the sense that we're finally seeing a true approximation of history. What's scary is that we're supposed to be cheering at this return to "the way things should be" or "the way things always have been."

The Birth of a Nation is a frightened and frightening, unapologetic, and inaccurate defense of slavery, racism, and segregation, coupled with a heartfelt condemnation of war, which ironically was one of the only things that helped put an end to slavery in the United States. They say history is written by the victors, yet D.W. Griffith had the technical ingenuity and cinematic ambition to write his own grandiose account of history before the victors could. It's a scary and difficult thing to admit that you were wrong, even after defeat. Much easier is proving that you were right all along and that you should've won. The Birth of a Nation depicts Southern plantation owners as quaint, peaceful people with modest ambitions who participate in slavery because it fittingly supports the moral order of the cosmos: civilized white people making the important decisions while supporting the impulsive, primitive black people who wouldn't even know how to support themselves without white structure. In the Civil War itself, the Southern generals are courageous, fair, and heroic, and they only lose due to the dastardly tactics of the North. Reconstruction puts animals in charge of men, and the insistence that racism is a false doctrine encourages animals to try to rape ladies. How much better everything would be if those power-hungry, foolish Northerners would've just minded their own business!

When Barack Obama was running for the presidency and was likely to win, my 87-year-old Georgian grandfather asked me to alleviate his fears about a black man being in charge of the white people, to assure him that the black man, when the reins were finally changed, wouldn't retaliate with all the oppression and violence that had been inflicted on his kind in the past two centuries. Underlying this fear wasn't the belief that black people were savage animals but that they were too savagely human, that they would take their revenge when finally given the chance, that an eye would at long last be taken for an eye, and my grandfather had never expected to lose an eye and certainly didn't want to lose one now. It's frightening to see that some of the same fear of reprisal and unwillingness to apologize that inspired a 95-year-old movie still exists today.

It's common practice to praise D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation for its technical innovation and cinematic milestones rather than its naive, propagandistic message and blatant racism. I'm not in the habit of judging artistic merit by its historical importance, however--not unless it still manages to awe after history has passed. The Birth of a Nation horrifies but does not awe. Characterization is simple, the story is naive, the title card writing is immature, and the film stretches on much too long. Some scenes are genuinely executed in a heartfelt, touching manner--such as the grizzled hospital orderly in the background who snatches quick, loving looks at a pretty, young visitor while pretending to be disinterested, or the young, war-torn yet optimistic sister who fashions a primitive ballgown out of raw cotton in order to make her brother feel happy and at home upon his return from war, a "ballgown" which only emphasizes their fallen position yet still manages to crack a smile across his tortured face. Such scenes exist in frequent numbers in the over three hours of The Birth of a Nation, yet they are overshadowed by the racist proclamations that consistently steal the show. Should I be impressed that a scene in which "black" politicians who have taken over the senate floor and turned it into a pigsty cheer in exaltation while passing a law that allows them to have sex with white women actually inspires in me the disgust that Griffith intended? No, because that nauseating discomfort is ironic, inspired more by the surreal blackface and the ridiculous, racist historical inaccuracy than anything Griffith actually intended. I find it funny that Griffith had to hire white people in order to make his black villains truly revolting.

That blackface helps the viewer to see The Birth of a Nation for what it really is, an epic fantasy with no basis in reality.

The Birth of a Nation is #133 on the TSPDT? list of the greatest films of all time. This gives The Birth of a Nation the distinction of being the highest rated movie based solely on its innovative use of jump cuts and close-ups.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)
d: D.W. Griffith w: D.W. Griffith, Frank E. Woods
(Lillian Gish, Mae Walsh, Henry Walthall, Ralph Lewis, George Siegmann)
TSPDT?: #133
5/10

Movie Review: Benny's Video (1992)

Michael Haneke's second feature film is also the second in his so-called "Glaciation Trilogy," a trio of pictures about the emotional coldness and psychological impenetrability of modern society that began with 1989's barren, antarctic Der Siebente Kontinent. (Calling his first three films a "glaciation trilogy" implies that the rest of Haneke's films don't disturbingly delve into much the same themes, which is an obvious misstatement.)

Benny's Video begins with footage shot on a hand-held personal video camcorder. Farmers straddle a disoriented pig, hold a captive bolt pistol to his forehead, and slaughter the squealing, startled animal in close-up. (Those who have seen No Country for Old Men will recognize the extermination device.) The video pauses, rewinds, and replays in slow motion, savoring the zoomed-in final moments of the pig's life. They say animals differ from humans in that they have no foreknowledge of their mortality, that they are simpler and blissfully ignorant because they do not bear the burden of knowing death. But in slow motion, one sees a horrifying realization flooding the pig's eyes as the bolt enters his brain. This look of awful epiphany could just be a spontaneous reaction to the physical stimulus, but in slow motion and in close-up, in repeated viewings, it's easy for us to project our own feelings of doom, meaninglessness, and vanity on the pig's last panicked expression.

In Richard Linklater's meanderingly philosophical comedy Slacker, released one year earlier in 1991, a social experimenter/cultist obsessed with television images recounts a story of having seen--in person--an angry drunk stumble out of a bar and land on his own knife, an event that means almost nothing to him because he saw it in the chaotic, unpredictable, and vast reality and not within the confines of a structured, symbol-driven, propagandistic television screen. He can't rewind to examine the details. He doesn't know the whole plot, what happened before and what followed after, so there's no context. Maybe he was a bad guy and the death was satisfying or funny. Maybe the death was the result of some cruel, fateful twist of dramatic irony. Maybe he didn't even die--the spectator, after all, didn't even get a close-up of the knife entering the body, didn't get to immediately cut with a sound bridge of ambulance sirens to the emergency room. Even the blood, the real blood, didn't look like the blood he was used to seeing in movies, the blood that carried so much meaning and connotation in his mind. The hue was wrong, and he couldn't adjust the hue.

There's no knowing how many times Benny, the fifteen-year-old cameraman who filmed the pig's death, has watched the snuff film. There's no telling what the video may mean to him, if it means anything at all. Benny doesn't talk very much, nor does his family especially value communication. A typical family gathering involves them seated around the home entertainment system, impassively watching the last grisly news footage from the Bosnian war while muttering the occasional bit of half-hearted chatter. Haneke's lens cleverly remains glued to the television screen during these scenes; just as they'd rather watch the tube than each other, so must we.

Benny also doesn't spend much time in thoughtful meditation or quiet introspection. His life has been arranged so that he constantly has several layers of distraction competing for his attention, a thick protective blanket of white noise to shield him from any troublesome thoughts. While doing homework he blasts loud punk music and watches television. Before drifting off to bed he doesn't stare at the ceiling or at the inside of his eyelids, reliving the day and trying to make sense of it; he watches the latest Hollywood action and horror films, checked out three at a time from the local rental store.

His parents facilitate this thoughtless, high-tech lifestyle, buying him the gadgetry he desires and not caring that his bedroom is a sealed-off, inorganic crypt with a television screen substituting an open window. Benny has trained a camcorder to stare out his window and down to the faceless traffic on the street. Maybe that helps him to attach some narrative meaning to an otherwise meaningless world. Maybe it helps him imagine that some director, screenwriter, or editor is in control of the chaos outside his door.

There's no context for much of the imagery Benny is exposed to, no emotional intelligence or mental maturity to support what he's seen in his young life. Nobody's told him much about death or life, love or hate, rape and murder, responsibility and disappointment, dependability and despair. He knows these things exist, but they all exist in distorted measurements alongside aliens, car chases, mutants, and talking rabbits, and he perhaps understands as much about all of these as he would understand watching a film in a language he's never been taught. One need only look to his older sister for proof; her presence in the film is brief, and we know simply that she is a successful pyramid schemer who lies to her parents to use their apartment as a party headquarters for her scam. When confronted with the truth, her father scolds her only for not letting him know sooner so that he could properly execute the party by hiring a caterer. Maybe she'll be in prison in a year, but nobody in the family seems capable of conceiving this or understanding why.

A typical Haneke shot: people close together physically yet miles apart mentally.

When Benny murders a young girl using the captive bolt pistol he has pilfered from the farm, he genuinely seems not to possess any motive or understanding as to why he has committed the horrible crime. It is a random act of senseless violence, like changing the channel from a boring teen drama to a serial killer thriller. Benny meets the girl at the video store. She also seems neglected and alienated, and she willingly follows him to his apartment for microwave pizza and strange conversation. Benny is oddly dysfunctional throughout their encounter--charming and polite yet also impulsive. When he tackles her while acting out an unfunny joke about cops on the Metro, we realize his complete lack of social decorum, heightened only by his decision to show her (and to re-show her in slow-mo instant replay) his slaughterhouse video. She's just as intrigued and perplexed. What is death all about? He tells her about dead bodies in movies ("ketchup and plastic") and about the dead body of his grandmother, the sight of which he was shielded from at her funeral several years ago. He can see the explosive murder of millions on television, but his parents have prevented him from coming to terms with the sight of the deceased woman he once knew and love.

That's when he pulls out the pistol and dares her to shoot him. She refuses and dares him. He refuses. She calls him a coward, and so he shoots. Not once, not twice, but three times. Until her screaming and struggling comes to an abrupt end. Haneke films this scene not in close-up nor with any intensified continuity or emotional editing; we see through the lens of his camcorder, off-center and static. The camera captures all. And where a Hollywood scene would end, or where an intense score would be cued, or where a horrified close-up would occur, life instead just keeps going on. He tries to clean up the mess, but as a fifteen-year-old would and not in any calculated, cinematic way. He listens to music and does his homework. He strips off his clothes, not so that he can be sexual with the body--other bodies don't much concern him, despite his age--but so that he can keep the blood from staining them. He gets blood on his bare torso instead, and it is while filming his blood-stained skin and then watching the video tape that he gets oddly erotic--the image charged with pornographic autoeroticism even though the actual event was sexless. He takes a phone call from his friend. He goes to a concert. He gets a haircut and takes in a movie. He goes to school.

He has effectively changed the channel. The murder is behind him, and he's moved on to different scenes, different episodes, different genres.

Except he hasn't. The body's still stuffed in his closet, and the memory's still buried somewhere in his mind. Plus, most importantly, he still has the videotape.

Arno Frisch handles the role of Benny masterfully--a handsome and superficial exterior with a touch of radiant menace, offering glimpses into an interior that's largely vacant but not entirely so. And it's that occasional, subtle glimpse of a tiny human interior, bursting to breathe and break free, that makes this film a masterpiece. As when Benny nearly confesses to his friend but instead says nothing, or when he shaves off his beautiful locks in an act of nazirite penance, starting anew with a damaged and frail look to match his inner turmoil.

Eventually he decides that the only way to confess is to speak in the only language he understands. With no preamble he plays the videotape to his shocked and silent parents, who immediately switch into film noir mode with talk of alibis, witnesses, and the graphic, meticulous details of body disposal. Their response, so logical, clear-headed, and well-planned, can only have come from having seen so many perfect murders on television and in the movies. For the first time in their lives, they are movie stars, and the event merits an actual conversation rather than listless mumblings.

After establishing that there were no witnesses, they decide to protect their child, not merely because he's their son but also to avoid truthful accusations of child neglect that might be lodged against them. The father plans to discard the body by chopping it into tiny pieces, flushing it into the sewage system, and burning the bones, clothing, and belongings. Benny and his mother, meanwhile, will vacation in Egypt under the guise of attending a wealthy aunt's funeral. And when they are reunited one week later, everything will be back to normal, the murder will be forgotten, and Benny's brief life of crime will never be mentioned again. The tape will be rewound, ejected, and returned to the shelf.

Except Benny is tired of living life as though channel surfing. Benny wants to understand the most important and horrifying thing that's ever happened in his life. He wants to learn what contrition, sacrifice, and punishment are. Benny doesn't want to erase the tape of his memory, not least of all because a mind cannot simply be recorded over. Some remnant of the murder would stay in his subconscious forever, inexplicable, surreal, unaccounted for, resurfacing in untold ways. By protecting him from discovery and punishment, they want to deny him any chance of remorse and redemption. They want to permanently deny him the opportunity to make sense of his life, his mind, and his lethal mistake. They want to prolong his attention deficit and his emotional disconnect. They want to murder his barely living humanity.

They send him to Egypt, birthplace of Moses, of countless gods, and of ancient civilizations, and he spends the eye-opening experience behind his camcorder, trying to make sense of ancient tombs, of parasailers, of vivid sunsets and holy wars from a detached point-of-view. When his mother tries to capture him in the frame, he is sullen and scared. He doesn't want to be a part of this confusing and disordered story. The vacation is one that would change the lives of many people, but Benny only remarks on the heat and his sunburn. Will Benny always be schizoid and antisocial? Will he ever come face to face with beauty and truth?

When he returns to his videos, his entertainment system, and his corpse-less bedroom, he pointedly refuses to tell his father he loves him even as his father insists on saying that Benny is loved by him. Love is not a frightened and selfish attempt to rob a child of moral responsibility by shielding him from consequences. Love is not insuring that an unknown girl remains eternally forgotten. This may be the first thing Benny ever figures out for himself, even if he can't put it into words.

He goes to the police. He shows them incriminating evidence of his parents discussing the disposal of the body. He explains that even though he could have gotten away with it, he felt the need to go to the police, even if he's not sure why. And so he consciously, actively takes the first step in making sense of a senseless act.

Benny's Video, titled in English despite being an Austrian film (a subtle suggestion of how alien pop culture can be), is a phenomenal film, intriguingly acted by Arno Frisch, smartly filmed by cinematographer Christian Berger, and disturbingly written by Michael Haneke. Critiquing and exposing videotape and television culture was an overplayed genre in the late '80s and early '90s. Benny's Video is certainly the best of these films that I have seen, but recall also the Slacker scene, the surreal Videodrome, the bizarre Stay Tuned, the supernatural Ringu, the ghoulish Poltergeist, Stephen King's "The Tommyknockers," and several episodes of "The X Files" and other science fiction/horror anthologies, just to name a few, all of which implied the demonic horror that was lurking somewhere between the screen and the cathode ray. Some of these tales seem quaint and moralistic now, but it's surprising that an equal number of cautionary tales aren't being made about the present age. The Internet, cell phones, satellites, and the instantaneous, easy-access nature of the digital age have changed our expectations and the way our minds work, making us less patient, less focused, less appreciative, and less able to remember specifics from the constant blur of noise and details that bombards us from every direction at all hours of the day. Are today's filmmakers less technophobic? Have we all been indoctrinated by the hegemony of Google?

Where are the horror fantasies about the Internet?

Benny's Video (1992)
d: Michael Haneke w: Michael Haneke
(Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, Ulrich Muhe)
10/10