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

Movie Review: The Seventh Continent (1989) (Or: "Days of the Living Dead," a Michael Haneke Nightmare)

Without knowing it at the time, we spend the first sequence of Michael Haneke's Der Sebiente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent) in the eyes of Eva, a five-year-old girl who is the daughter of the two main characters, Anna and Georg. From the backseat of the family car,Eva watches the backs of her parents' motionless, silent heads as they ride the car through a mechanical car wash. A part of their routine, the complex innerworkings of the car wash, which regularly cleanses the dirt of the outside world off their little shell, no longer elicit any wonder, interest, or conversation. Indeed, little else does either. They remain silent, staring forward, passing through life from one spiritless routine to the next.

The inhuman, disinterested clockwork of the first segment follows through the first ten minutes of the film, with no human faces entering focus in the frame and scarcely a word of conversation. From an alarm clock radio comes a disembodied voice as from the bed march two voiceless bodies, the camera frame decapitating them as intense close-ups linger on their various rituals--washing up, tying shoes, preparing store-bought coffee with an electrical coffee pot, mindless motions of muscle memory. The car leaves the garage through the mechanical door and glare from the sun across the windshield blinds us from seeing into the family's mobile cocoon. Out in the world, Eva goes to school, Georg to work, and Anna to the grocery store. Pedestrians bustle in the distance, hurrying across the frame, their faces blurred. Georg hurries across his workplace and the grinding machinery across the factory floor is far more noticeable than any of the workers' faces. At the grocery store, we gaze at the pristine, identical manufactured goods filling the shelves and not any of the shoppers.

Throughout everything we hear the cold voiceover of Anna reading a letter she has written to Georg's mother--a letter filled with trivialities and empty words in which she describes the recent death of her own mother in terms of the stress that the unexpected event has burdened their otherwise structured lives with: planning a funeral, dividing up belongings, navigating the minutiae of inheritance law. She appends a post-script: Georg sends his love and is awfully sorry about not writing himself, but his life is much too busy.

Georg's main preoccupation is to advance his career, a drive that overworks him to prove his mettle for an advancement that can only come with the removal of his superior, an older man with failing health.

Ten minutes of normal people living their modern, successful lives pass, a long duration in film time, and not one face--the seat of emotion, the usual indicator of character, the most distinguishable and unique attribute of most people--is captured by the prying camera's eye. Not one meaningful interaction is witnessed. Only grocery store aisles, shoelaces, and traffic.

The first close-up is of five-year-old Eva, who frightfully explains to her worried teacher that she can no longer see. Has she been stricken with a brain aneurysm? Is she symbolically stating that she's already seen everything in her life--the car wash, the breakfast table, the traffic--hundreds of times before? Her teacher tests her, and she fails. She really can see. But why would a five-year-old invent such a disturbing lie?

On the heels of this close-up, this moment of personal contact, the film jumps into extreme, abnormal close-ups and a rather uncomfortable moment of intimate contact as Anna, an optometrist, examines the eyes of an older woman who is one of her patients, using retinoscopes, phoropters, and mechanical prods. The eyes are the windows to the soul, and as Anna prods and distorts the woman's eyes into monstrous shapes, we hear a story from the old woman that reveals the ugly landscape of her soul. As a teenager, she and her peers humiliated her best friend for one day showing up to the school wearing glasses. Still unrepentant decades later, the woman blames her own failing eyesight on an act of karmic witchcraft perpetrated by the degraded ex-friend. In a world where intimate friendships can suddenly sour and many personal encounters result in anger and misery, it's easy to see why many may choose to avoid getting to know others, to disconnect from situations that may result in physical or psychological harm, to remain sheltered and private. Not all human interactions, Haneke shows, are beneficial and inspiring. Even Anna, who later recounts the woman's anecdote with her brother and colleague to Georg and Eva at the dinner table that night, does not gain anything meaningful from the tale of betrayal; she uses the anecdote to mock the woman, an amusing bit of workplace gossip offered up and promptly forgotten.

Why trust your bosom buddy when her own vanity and insecurity can be used as a weapon against you? Why trust anyone when you yourself are untrustworthy and self-serving? When Anna learns about her daughter's prank at school that morning, she confronts the frightened young girl, who adamantly denies having pretended blindness. Anna insists upon the truth, promising the five-year-old that no harm will come to her for confessing, but as soon as Eva admits to the untruth, Anna ferociously slaps her. Will the impressionable child, betrayed by her own mother, ever trust anyone again, or will her relationships remain no deeper and no more dangerous than fleeing encounters with a grocery store cashier, whose fingers race across the register keypad with robotic precision and whose words and thoughts are limited to price tags? Is she destined for the emotionless life of an automaton, reciting memorized prayers at fixed times, filling up the car with gas when the meter runs low, and having passionless sex at regular intervals?

Amongst this parade of sterile environments, featureless humans, and well-rehearsed rituals arise several opportunities for meaningful contact as troubled individuals, swallowed by the impersonal society around them yet still struggling to breathe, deviate from the preset parameters, throwing out their flailing arms for a life preserver, a piece of driftwood, or a stable friend to hold onto. But Anna and Georg, skilled swimmers at peace in the ocean of inhumanity, know never to enter the grasp of a drowning man, who will frantically pull you down into the abyss in his desperate clutch before you can save him. When Anna's brother's thoughts turn to their recently deceased mother during dinner--a woman who once mused that we might all be a little more peaceful if we had "a monitor instead of a head to see our thoughts"--and he begins to weep, the family, listening to rather loud American pop music from the stereo rather than talking to each other, tries to ignore him and give him time for it to pass before Anna, rather uncomfortably, rises to place her hand on him. The crying abates without any need for discussion, and the family turns to a more acceptable activity: silently watching television. Better to be fed an image, a message, and a distraction than to try to make sense of the chaos inside ourselves. Better to have a television screen than a brain.

Later at work, in a segment that takes place about one year later after Georg has assumed the position of his older superior who has fallen temporarily sick (and hence unprofitable) and been forced into retirement, Georg has an opportunity to share insights with the man he has only ever seen as an obstacle and never has a fellow human being. When the former boss comes to retrieve his belongings only to learn that they have all been boxed up and shuffled off to some unknown storage facility, he lingers over Georg, yearning to speak. Maybe he wants to warn him that one day he too will become old and less productive and his cog will be easily replaced and forgotten. Maybe he has come face to face with death and has learned something about its purpose. Maybe he wants to explain what it's like to suddenly become unnecessary, or maybe he's just lonely and unoccupied and needs a friend to laugh with for a minute or two. Whatever it is we never learn, as Georg remains stone-faced and unreceptive. The boss exits and Georg returns to more important matters--namely, staring at a computer printout of endless numbers.

Most devastating, however, is the failed opportunity for connection between Anna and Eva. When Anna discovers a sentimental piece of journalism about a girl who loses her eyesight but gains dependable companions amongst Eva's belongings, she begins to suspect what may have motivated Eva's strange prank. Eva isn't some drowning stranger, but her own daughter and progeny, so Anna cautiously approaches her, asking her if she feels lonely or unloved. Eva rather unconvincingly denies this (maybe she's still reeling from being slapped earlier in the day for telling the truth), and Anna too quickly accepts her denial. Her daughter is learning to swim.

In the segment that comes a year later (the same year that Georg rejects his boss), little has changed. Georg is still too busy to write to his own parents. The television and the radio still substitute conversation. The same routines must be carried out ad infinitum. Driving home in the rain while listening to soft rock--the closed windows and the surround sound radio sheltering them from the elements, the traffic, and the outside world--the family passes a car accident and a covered corpse. Rushing to the car wash to cleanse themselves of this close contact with impure reality, the family finally reveals a shred of the humanity and mortality they once did and still do possess. Anna breaks down in tears. Georg, who feels nothing, says nothing. Anna cries harder, turning to the backseat (unlike in the opening segment) and grasping her daughter's hand, smelling it, squeezing it, tasting it, trying to perceive and connect with warm, loving flesh in any way possible. Eva does not withdraw, and eventually even Georg enters the group hug, coldly touching Anna's face with the back of his hand--a hard and cold spot on the body where there are few nerve endings.

Another year passes and despite the breakdown things are worse than ever. At dinner, Eva quickly eats cold, colorless corn flakes in an extreme, static close-up that reveals how little effort and love went into preparing and consuming the meal. Anna's uncontrollable brother no longer attends these now silent meals. In bed Eva hugs a stuffed animal rather than her mother, and in a long shot at a doctor's office waiting room, five people sit quietly waiting without speaking to each other more than salutations.

Georg finally writes to his parents, and the voiceover recitation of this letter contains perhaps more words than he speaks throughout the rest of the film, but the letter is a one-way monologue rather than an invitation to communication, a suicide note that can never be responded to because by the time it reaches his mother he and his family will be dead. The family runs through a checklist of removing themselves from society--withdrawing their money from the bank, excusing Eva from school, quitting their jobs, and selling their car--and they do this under the guise of moving to Australia. The implication is that Australia is the seventh continent of the title, but Australia is more properly the sixth continent. Antarctica is the seventh continent, a frozen, silent wasteland unfit for human survival. Georg and Anna, as frigid, fixed, and speechless as glaciers, are true Antarcticans, and it is to a frozen, barren hell that they prepare to disembark.

Even in death they are "systematic" and emotionally uninvested. Materialistic, they destroy the belongings that mean so much to them prior to destroying their physical selves--dismantling furniture, smashing electronics, ripping clothing, shredding books, records, papers, and photographs, cracking mirrors, and crushing clocks. In a society where the dress shirts you wear mean more than the body that they clothe, it is no longer sufficient to suicide to merely kill the body. One must also murder the accessories, and this murder is done with the same rigid, mechanical organization as all their other routines. As pristine as their actions are their emotions, which remain sterile throughout the complete disintegration of their lives. They do not discuss fears, regrets, or nostalgia. They do not discuss anything at all. When the phone rings, they dismantle it, and when the doorbell rings, they mute the doorbell. Only when Georg kills Eva's pet fish by smashing the aquarium with a sledge hammer do they exchange a few words, but at this point a few words cannot melt the icicles that have crystallized and hardened their souls.

They flush their cash, they have their last silent meal, and they drink poison while watching American pop music videos (ironically, "The Power of Love") on television--the one possession too important to destroy. Eva says her prayers and dies. Anna faces a death as messy as any life should be, though she tried so hard to keep it clean. And Georg, at last as literally alone as he has always metaphorically been, slips into unconsciousness while staring at television static. The chaotic static is a monitor that reveals the thoughts in his head, glimpses of all the people he could have interacted with but never did, all the moments that could have been meaningful but never were--the gas station attendant he could have chatted with, the brother-in-law he could've consoled, the retired boss he could have listened to, the strange dream he could've shared, the daughter he could have learned from, the wife he could've loved.

But these regrets are at best hunches, like flashes of inspiration that come to one in a dream but slip away in intangible threads when light strikes the eyes. In a society where dependence on humans and social interaction is not necessary and is sometimes detrimental to survival, where people work together but separately, always replaceable, and never deviating too far from the normal and productive center, Georg has never learned the language of emotion. These frantic impulses can no more be acted upon than a dream about flying.

Fear of death, of mess, of rejection, of heartache, of loneliness, of meaningless, and of failure forces us to dehumanize ourselves. If we latch on to a world of tangible, permanent objects, if we hoard these objects and make them an important, definitive part of who we are, then we can survive through their permanence much longer than one hundred and twenty years. If we keep them clean and well-polished, our lives can stay clean. If we dutifully fulfill the same obligations and behaviors every day, we can erase our sense of time and by erasing time we can erase our feeling that time is running out. If what we do today is the same as what we did yesterday and what we did the day before and what we will do tomorrow and the day after, then we can imagine that we are timeless, that we will always be able to do these things. If we keep ourselves constantly distracted with these routines and with television and with work, then we need never think about death or despair. People die and force us to think about our own eventual demise; even though we knew them day after day, eventually they ceased to be and so will we. Best not to have people in our lives. Best to keep our noses as close to grindstone as possible, lest the view from above be too terrifying and unfathomable.

Michael Haneke presents a portrait of life in our times that is prophetic and disturbing. With a methodical and exacting eye, he shows that our attempts to prolong life by not living too fully has made life nearly an extension of death. The actions of the family in the third act remind me of people preserving their own tombs and preparing their own bodies for purification and mummification, like a newborn infant crawling into a jar of formaldehyde to stave off decay. Decay, messiness, pain, and death are the price of action, meaning, love, and life. Better to burn brightly and briefly than never to light the flame at all. Through his brutal examination of emotional frigidity, meaningless existence, and alienation, Haneke exorts us all to reenter the realm of the living.

Der Siebente Kontinent isn't on the TSPDT? list of the greatest movies of all time. In fact, none of Haneke's films are. But this one, at least, certainly should be.

Der Siebente Kontinent (1989)
d: Michael Haneke w: Michael Haneke, Johanna Teicht
(Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, Leni Tanzer)
9/10

2009 Cinema in Review

I thought about not bothering with this sort of list this year since my theater experience in 2009 was thoroughly disappointing and--oddly and frustratingly so--very different from the average moviegoer's and critic. But I've been writing these recaps for years now, so why break with tradition?

First I'll list my favorites in various categories, then I'll break down all the films I saw last year in order of merit, with brief reviews.

Best Film: Where the Wild Things Are
Best Male Lead Performances: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart; Max Records, Where the Wild Things Are; Colin Firth, A Single Man; Nicholas Cage, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans
Best Female Lead Performances: Gabby Sidibe, Precious; Carrie Mulligan, An Education; Catalina Saavedra, La nana (The Maid); Alison Lohman, Drag Me to Hell; Zooey Deschanel, 500 Days of Summer
Best Male Supporting Roles: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds; Jim Broadbent, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; Christian McKay, Me and Orson Welles; Robert Duvall, Crazy Heart; Zach Galifianakis, The Hangover
Best Female Supporting Roles: Mo'Nique, Precious; Zoe Saldana, Avatar; Julianne Moore, A Single Man; Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
Best Adaptation: Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers, Where the Wild Things Are
Best Original Screenplay: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Up
Most Interesting Directors: Werner Herzog, The Bad Lieutenant; Sam Raimi, Drag Me to Hell
Best Editing: Chris Innis, Bob Murawski, The Hurt Locker
Best Artistic Design: Ian Phillips, A Single Man
Best Cinematography: Lance Acord, Where the Wild Things Are
Most Important Documentary: Food, Inc.
Best Animation: Coraline
Best Soundtrack: The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Best Original Song: "Hold on You", Crazy Heart (not "The Weary Kind")
Best Villain: Mrs. Ganush, Drag Me to Hell
Worst Everything: My Bloody Valentine 3D

All the Movies, in order of best to worst
Where the Wild Things Are: An emotionally raw, transfixing, and quietly uplifting fantasy of the responsibilities of attachment and the fear of abandonment.

Precious: Controversial subject matter that's typically reserved for melodrama is handled with a touch of humor and dogged determination that refuses to let it sink into the dredges of bathos, providing real solutions instead.

Up: The mostly silent beginning is one of the most elegantly composed and heartbreaking moments of cinematic history. The Apocalypse Now-meets-talking-dogs middle parts can be a bit silly, but the overall story of seeing every life as a worthy adventure is moving and memorable. Plus, aging, death, fatherhood, abandoned dreams, lost innocence, and a hundred other subjects.

Drag Me to Hell: A perfectly toned blend of comedy, horror, suspense, romantic drama, and capitalist commentary.

Food, Inc.: A quite disturbing condemnation of mindless consumption, urging viewers to remove their gullets from the feeding machine and begin thinking about what they put in their bodies. Even the scene that features a conscientious, organic farmer is horrifying as he butchers a screaming chicken.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox: Perhaps a little too quickly paced at times and sometimes a bit too quirky for its own good, but this anthropomorphic adventure tale about self-identity and failed expectations is hysterically funny.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans: One of the oddest movies I've ever seen: an unbelievable, over-plotted, melodramatic crime thriller that realizes how ridiculous it is yet plays it straight anyway. Perfect satire--because even if you don't get the joke, then it still works well as a rugged cop mystery.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: The first of the series that I actually enjoyed, this beautifully filmed fantasy blends the magic and the real world, the comedy and the drama more seamlessly than previous attempts.

A Single Man: A heartfelt tale of despair that urges viewers to seek out the beautiful moments in life. Also, one of the few gay movies that isn't obsessed with its gayness.

The Hangover: It's just a raunchy romp, but it's hilariously executed.

Crazy Heart: Believable little touches, excellent performances, and a great soundtrack make a tired, predictable tale of a washed up man's man a standout in its genre.

Goodbye, Solo: A quiet, convincing, and
original story about suicide that doesn't offer trite solutions to a complex problem.

La nana (The Maid): A rewarding little film from Chile in which a woman begins the search for joy and identity amongst the stressful grind of routine, obsession, and isolation.

Moon: A trippy, claustrophobic science fiction thriller that offers interesting observations on the essence of humanity and our short lives.

Teza: From Ethiopia and highlighting its culture and political history of the past few decades, this interesting response to communist tyranny illustrates how the "otherness" and ongoing struggle of dialectical Marxism eventually defeats the aspirations it once had in mind, substituting one bureaucratic oligarchy for another. What's born in violence cannot end in peace, and an ideology focused on a black-and-white opposition between "oppressors" and "oppressed" eventually branches out into endless arbitrary divisions between "true" and "false" communists. A powerful if overlong film, it also examines racism and superstition.

The Hurt Locker: A tense study of bomb defusers in Iraq, this nerve-racking drama never quite took hold of me like it did to many others, though its exploration of life-gambling adrenaline addiction is interesting. In the end, as the main character walks the sterilized, organized aisles of an overstocked grocery store in his hometown before requesting another return to duty, it's an interesting lesson that people who have faced death can never quite return to life the same way.

The Cove: An interesting--albeit too self-serious--examinations on illegal dolphin abuses in a coastal town in Japan and it's deleterious effects on human health, wildlife, and basic justice.

Sugar: From the makers of Half Nelson, another poetically-filmed story about down-and-outs with wasted potential in New York City. Depicts the American professional sports as the horse race that it is, where players can easily be discarded for a broken leg, and where steroid abuse (effectively filmed in a way I've never seen before) is both necessary and prohibited. Sometimes in life the possible dreams are better than the impossible ones.

Bruno: Not as good as Borat, and a bit more stagy than the previous film, but its look at American superficiality and mindless, contradictory homophobia is pretty funny throughout.

500 Days of Summer: Only at the end of this movie do we realize that Summer isn't a villain or a heartless monster. Levitt's character was too preoccupied with himself (his boring, immature self) and too in love with love to spend any time actually getting to know or love Summer. Summer knew this all along and never pretended to offer anything more than friendship. By breaking his childish heart, she provides the sturdiest foundation for his character development. Only at the end does he--and we, through his eyes--see reality as it truly is instead of through the blurred filters of epic romantic comedy. An original story, even if the direction and screenplay have some serious flaws.

An Education: A well-made coming-of-age story (based on a memoir) that provides a conflict between the easy, fun, carefree life and the world of hard work and organization. It's really too specific and on too small a scale to be very memorable or important, though there's nothing particularly wrong with it, either.

Up in the Air: I'm not really sure why people were so taken with this film. The time-sensitive, attention-grabbing scenes of layoffs and economic recession don't really jibe with the main plot, and it's obvious that they were overemphasized later in the film's development as they became more timely. The main story is a predictable, pat set-up: George Clooney is presented as a strong, modern man who has all the answers, but his life philosophy--which involves avoiding all relationships, emotion, and real responsibility in favor of the latest technologies--is obviously destined for failure from the very beginning. When he finally realizes that sometimes pausing for a moment of human tenderness and connection can be a good thing--perhaps the very best thing--is anyone in the audience really surprised? Was anybody really nodding along with his speeches about sharks and severing ties in the beginning of the film? Did anybody really learn anything they didn't already know, or do people just like this film because it reaffirms something they unthinkingly knew all along? The film's quirks were obnoxious, and George Clooney's acting was much better in Michael Clayton, which examined somewhat similar themes a much more exceptional way.

Star Trek: Fun, involving, and original, but really nothing too special, and it never seemed very realistic.

Coraline: Eye-popping stop-motion animation, spectacular set pieces, clever touches, hilarious characters, and moments of genuine horror. Unfortunately, some of the voice acting is weak, and the plot--about a girl who must choose between the doldrums and disappointments of reality and the sinister illusion of utopia--is somewhat jumbled and unconvincing.

Inglourious Basterds: Man, I don't even know what to say about this movie anymore. Some of it I loved. Some of it I despised. Some of it was brilliantly orchestrated. Some of it was self-indulgent and distracting. I think its intent is interesting, and yet I disagree with it. Maybe I'd like it better a second time, or maybe I'd just hate it more.

Me and Orson Welles: You've seen it all before in a dozen similar movies, but at least it's watchable and fun. It comes close to achieving greatness, but it cuts itself short. Two important complexities are missing. First, the movie assumes we already know how brilliant Orson Welles was, and so it spends a lot of time highlighting his flaws without ever effectively showing us just what was so brilliant about his genius. Second, it sets up the talented Claire Danes as a smart woman willing to prostitute herself to succeed, but it never really reflects on the seriousness of that.

The Road: Viggo Mortenson is good, and the book it's based on is beautiful, but the movie's oddly unengaging and the kid can't act.

Watchmen: About the best film that could've been made from the source material, which is to say that the source material is much too expansive to really suit any filmed adaptation, regardless of length. The art direction is good, the casting is mostly appropriate, the violence is cool, the soundtrack is evocative, but I can understand how someone who hasn't read the graphic novel would have no idea what the hell was happening.

District 9: File this with Up in the Air under movies with obvious yet overly preachy lessons. Apartheid is bad. Killing babies is bad. Being ignorant and racist is bad. It's 2009. How many people don't know this already?

Avatar: The last twenty minutes or so are great, but the rest is tedious, calling attention to itself and never really convincing the viewer that it's reality. The acting, except Zoe Saldana, is dreadful. The plot is the same old predictable Chosen One/Messiah parable. The screenplay is awful--it's a couple hundred years into the future, but everyone talks like it's 1998 (eternal literature is written in language that never sounds dated; that's why Burgess made up the Nadsat argot in A Clockwork Orange, because he feared that if he just used normal slang then the future would seem awfully dated after a few years... how is Avatar, with all its annoying slang, going to sound in ten years?). All the characters are caricatures, so it achieves the impressive feat of being offensive from all angles--from a leftist viewpoint, I'm offended that the Na'vi's chosen hero, who they all bow down to, is a white earthling who delivers a rousing speech in his own language instead of theirs (which, clearly, is only done for our benefit, since he can speak their language perfectly fine)--I guess the Na'vi were just a little too primitive to produce their own Messiah. Even from a conservative viewpoint, we see the military, the American government, and American business as wholly evil, capable only of atrocities, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And everyone says, screw that, it was visually captivating! He created such beautiful sights out of nothing! That's never been done before! First off, I wasn't that captivated. Second off, yes it has--Pinocchio was more visually rich, created out of "nothing." Coraline was more eye-poppingly interesting. Beowulf used 3D IMAX technology in a more stirring way, even if it didn't look as realistic. Screw Avatar.

A Serious Man: For me, this was like watching a foreign film without subtitles. A chore to watch, as I constantly felt that everything was going over my head. Is the only lesson "God works in mysterious ways," or is there more? Is that nihilistic, depressing lesson really worth sitting through?

Zombieland: The picture that effectively killed the zombie movie trend. Not a single joke that hasn't been done before in better films. The set design and direction is extremely fake, and Jesse Whatshisface comes across as an unattractive, unfunny imitation of Michael Cera. Just watch Shaun of the Dead instead.

Angels & Demons: It's completely ridiculous from beginning to end, but it's really not so bad. Sometimes making a pizza out of a piece of bread, some tomato sauce, and a piece of sliced cheese and throwing it in the microwave is just what you're craving, you know?

The Soloist: Melodrama.

2012: OMG, I would have loved this movie when I was nine! The end of the world is choreographed specifically for John Cusack's viewing pleasure. For someone lucky enough to narrowly escape imminent, catastrophic death three dozen times, you'd think he'd get better roles. My favorite moments: the majority of the world's population is eliminated (think September 11 times five hundred million), everyone cries for a couple minutes, and then everyone's emotions are back to normal, with ample one-liners; at the very end of the movie, having seen the destruction of America, Brazil, India, China, Russia, and key points in Europe, the scientists realize that Africa has remained completely unscathed. Throughout everything, not one person bothered to check on Africa. Figures.

My Bloody Valentine 3D: Some movie tickets should come with mail-in rebates. It did have the greatest tagline of the year, though: "Because nothing says 'date movie' like a 3D ride to Hell."

Escape from reality, but into what? Eight movies about children's imagination.

Albert Lamorisse's most enduring legacy may be his development of the game of world domination, Risk, in 1957. But almost as well-known is his 1956 short, mostly silent film Le Ballon rouge, which won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay--the only time a short or a dialogue-free picture has ever won in competition with a feature film. The Criterion Collection released the short on a disc that also featured Crin-Blanc, Cheval Sauvage, a 1953 short by Lamorisse that is an interesting and perhaps depressing companion piece to the more well-known movie.

Both movies feature young boys who are cute, persistent, lonely, and innocent who form intimate bonds with non-human and likewise innocent friends against a backdrop of an insensitive and violent world.

In White Mane, (Crin-Blanc), young Folco (Alain Emery) is bathed in soft, radiant light, dressed in unblemished white despite his time spent fishing in the swamps of southeastern France, with cherubic blond hair, clean features, and a face betraying the calm and wisdom of many decades. From afar he watches the roping of White Mane, a vibrant all-white stallion whose strength and determination have made him the leader of his herd. The local ranchers--soiled, grizzled, loud, and harsh--have decided to tame his wildness, to make him submit to their ownership and authority, to crush his freedom and exploit his strength. To their chagrin, he defeats them and escapes. Several attempts fail, and a swearing ranger offers him up to hell in frustration. Folco, watching their struggles and in admiration of the horse, asks if he can now have the horse since they have given up, and they condescendingly explain that he could certainly have the wild beast if he could ever achieve the impossible task of catching it.

Small, harmless Folco armed only with a fishing net, a rope, and his implacable will manages to rope the curious stallion. White Mane cuts loose, racing at breakneck speeds through the watery marshes. Folco holds tight. He is dragged through the mud. His desire to be with the horse is greater than his humiliation, pain, or fear. He must prove himself of the utmost determination in order to gain the horse's respect. White Mane slows, halts, and glances back. This tiny, gentle creature, now slathered in mud but still gripping the rope, doesn't want to whip, conquer, exploit, or abuse him. He merely wants friendship, love, closeness. The bond is formed.

When White Mane suffers an injury from a competitive horse after returning to his herd, he seeks the boy's help. Folco gently bathes his hooves and uses his own clothing to bandage the bleeding wounds. Folco proves himself the best friend out of people and horses.

But men do not keep promises and they are not comfortable with being outshone. The ranchers return, and forgetting that they gave the rights to the horse to Folco, they attempt to take back the seemingly tamed animal. They use their greater size, numbers, strength, and weapons to intimidate the boy, cursing at him and threatening his life. Our two heroes, equally armed with their loving bond, their purity, their resilience, and their strength, flee across the beautiful, sun-bleached dunes of Camargue until they are blocked by the shores of the Mediterranean. Trapped between humanity at its evilest and nature at its most infinite and frightening, the film reaches its climax.

I'll return to the ending later. First, back to The Red Balloon. The plot is simpler: Pascal (Lamorisse's own son) discovers a large red balloon on the streets of Ménilmontant in Paris. The balloon is slightly out of reach at first, but he coaxes it to come to him and it does. Gradually it becomes clear that the balloon behaves in ways counter-intuitive to normal physics, that it, in fact, seems to have its own will and emotions. The boy and the balloon stroll together hand in hand, drawing wonder, envy, confusion, and irritation from passers-by. The relationship is not without obstacles. Soon a trolley conductor refuses to let the balloon board, and the boy walks with it in solidarity. The balloon's desire to be with the boy in the classroom elicits alarm from the teacher, commotion from the classmates, and anger from the principal. Despite adversity, they stick together. But soon the mob becomes unavoidable, society and the corruption it brings closes in, and an army of envy and prejudice rises up against the pair. A band of roaring bullies chases the frantic couple through dirty alleys and murders the balloon in a field of dirt.

But then the reversal happens: balloons of all colors from all across Paris are awakened by the unjust sacrifice and run to Pascal's aid. He grabs on and the enormous, colorful cluster ascends him to the heavens. As the small child floats precariously above the city, the film ends triumphantly.

At the end of White Mane, the horse plunges into the crashing waves of the sea with the boy holding tight. The ranchers know better and, finally expressing some sensibility and caring or perhaps just lying again, yell for the boy to turn back, that their current path in the treacherous deep can bring only death. As the horse and boy disappear into the waves, the storytelling narrator optimistically explains that the horse did not turn back and that the boy held on trustingly and that they eventually reached the "wonderful place where men and horses live as friends, always."

When you think of cluster balloon flights into the stratosphere, you tend to imagine Larry Walters, who in 1982 ascended three miles into the sky over San Pedro, California, in a lawn chair attached to 42 helium-filled balloons. His story is an oft-repeated anecdote about achieving the impossible, reaching your dreams, and overcoming human limitations like fear and gravity. Tellers of the anecdote tend not to mention that he shot himself in the heart in 1993 at the age of 44.

Lamorisse's films offer no practical outlet to his child protagonists. His boys are isolated, silent, unwatched. Pascal's parents, siblings, and nannies are completely absent, and while Folco has a family, the father is old and tired and unable to keep up and the brother is merely a baby. Their only friends are sentient, non-human beings that seem to be sent from heaven, guardian angels that offer protection and the promise of a safer haven--whether high in the sky or on the other side of the sea--that does not exist outside of the fantastical worlds of the films. Maybe the balloons will set him down gently in some nice courtyard. Maybe there really is an island with an equestrian utopia in the waters south of France. But more than likely the kids are about to die. In the world of Lamorisse, society grows increasingly bleak and destructive with time and experience. Children may be born with a tabula rasa, but their relationships with other humans quickly fill that slate with the ugliest ideas. The only way to escape corruption is to escape society altogether, which Lamorisse presents as a transcendent choice.

It's odd that this dark lesson is presented in movies with such beautiful settings, soaring scores, artful cinematography, and cute children. I find it unfair not to allow the protagonists any realistic escape, but Lamorisse is of course not alone in his belief that angelic children cannot escape harsh reality except through death.

In Guillermo del Toro's 2006 El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth), young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is torn between two similar worlds: the brutal reality of Franco's post-Civil War Spain and the not-necessarily-true fantasies of her fairy tale books. The adults in her life--her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil), her army stepfather (Sergi López), her family's housekeeper (Maribel Verdú)--tell her she's too old for make believe, that she should put down her books and face the real world, that such nonsense is only for silly children. These adults, of course, are miserable. Her mother is widowed, lonely, "sick with baby" in a troublesome pregnancy, and married to a man who belittles her and doesn't particularly care for her except for the fruit of her womb, which will provide him with a male heir. Her stepfather, the vicious and single-minded captain of an army outpost in the Guadarrama mountain range, is almost pitiful in his obsessive need to carry on his legacy through a son. And Mercedes the housekeeper, whose brother is one of the Maqui guerrillas fighting against fascism in the forest, is constantly in fear for her own life (she's a spy in the captain's household) and those of her comrades.

The stepfather tortures, kills, and fumes, the housekeeper sneaks and prays and plots, and the mother collapses into a bloody, sedated fever. Ofelia remains unexposed to most of the violence and despair, but as she wanders her new house and its strange surroundings, escaping into her own adventurous imagination, her fantasies exhibit parallels to the violence around her. To prove her legacy as the daughter of an ancient underworld king, she must fulfill three tasks. First, she must destroy the fat, greedy toad that is choking the roots of a once illustrious fig tree (which may have to do with fascist choking the life and culture of beautiful Spain). Next, she must retrieve a dagger from the lair of a horrifying, child-eating monster who sits before a sumptuous banquet (which visually matches a scene of the horrifying, child-killing stepfather, sitting before a crowded dinner table at a party while discussing a new, very strict rationing program he is going to institute in town).

The world of the adults and Ofelia's world remain physically separate (though thematically similar) until the third task, when she is ordered by the eerie faun (Doug Jones) to kidnap her baby brother and take him into the ancient, dangerous labyrinth. Her mother has died. Her stepfather has gone on a murderous rampage. The housekeeper has been discovered and captured by the army. All hope for the real world has evaporated. Ofelia, in hot pursuit by her bloody and poisoned stepfather, steals the heir and flees to the center of the maze, where the faun presents the dagger and explains that the blood of the innocent infant (just a tiny bit!) must be spilled in order to unlock her magical kingdom. Only by sacrificing two drops of blood can she return to her ancient throne as princess of the underworld.

She hesitates. She won't let an innocent baby be harmed. The faun demands: cut the baby and be saved by magic or refuse and return to reality. Ofelia grows up. Fairy tales are for children, and now she must be adult enough to protect the baby. Sometimes, too, fairy tales can be just as ugly as reality. She refuses. Her stepfather catches her and kills her. But as her blood spills into the puddle of rainwater, an illuminated epilogue with a cheery faun and her mother and father resplendently adorned atop luxurious thrones explains that the final task was to sacrifice herself instead of the innocent. As her real body bleeds to death in the dark rain, her fantasy body is crowned and welcomed home, and so the film effectively combines a range of interpretations suitable for both those who care to believe in the redemptive power of imagination and those who see only the evil of the physical world, with an interesting middle range for those who realize that even in fairy tales horrible things can happen and that even on our miserable earth a noble deed such a sister selflessly protecting her brother can occur.

I suspect Pan's Labyrinth was to some degree inspired by Victor Erice's 1973 El espíritu de la colmena. In The Spirit of the Beehive, a young girl (Ana Torrent) in Franco's 1940s Spain is introduced to fantasy, death, disappointment, and fear. Ana's source of inspiration isn't a fairy tale book but a dubbed showing of Frankenstein, in which a pitiful but deadly monster mindlessly kills an innocent girl before being hunted and killed himself. The film, it seems, introduces her to the concept of death, and she begs her slightly older sister to explain to her what dying is all about. Her sister mischievously avoids the questions, insisting that nobody really dies in movies and filling her head with magical tricks she can use to summon the monster, who according to her lives in an abandoned building outside of town.

The days pass. Ana's father is cold and brooding and possibly connected to the Falangists. Ana's mother is miles away in her own romantic fantasies. Ana's sister continues to mess with Ana's mind, at one point pretending to be killed in a prank that terrifies the girl and brings her closer to a conception of death as the ultimate fate for everyone.

Eventually she comes face to face with death. While playing around the building that Frankenstein supposedly lives in, she meets a fugitive republic soldier who has been injured. She brings him food, a watch, a coat, and other gifts. When the watch she'd stolen from her father suddenly returns to his possession, she begins to worry. Returning to Frankenstein's house, she finds only blood, bullet holes, and her father, who has secretly followed her in order to reprimand her assistance to "the enemy." Deeply disturbed, Ana flees into the forest. She sleeps under the moon and communes with the ghost of Frankenstein. Eventually she's found and brought back home--mute, shaken, forever changed, but at least alive. Without asking for it, Ana has been forced into adulthood, into her coming of age which acknowledges the inevitability of death. The meditative, largely silent film does not end with complete despair, however. Ana still retains her hope and her sense of wondrous possibility as she calls out once more to the ghost.

Not all movies with the theme of childhood escape are so death-centric. Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, which was later released by Disney's Pixar as Spirited Away helping it to become the largest grossing non-American film of all time, depicts an escape into fantasy land that results not in death or brutal despair but uplifting enlightenment. I won't go into the plot because I think it's mostly nonsensical, with illogical occurrences spinning widely out of control, unexpected obstacles springing from nowhere and just as unexpected solutions being presented just in time. In the end, a supposedly sullen, stupid, and whiny young girl is transformed into a courageous, caring, and vibrant young woman. But I don't think the film, however captivating its animation, is effective. In the too brief exposition we get at the beginning, Chihiro doesn't seem exceptionally whiny or rotten or stupid, though plenty of the ugly adults around her tell her so, so any character development of a character whose real world existence is only loosely elaborated upon is, well, minimal. The movie is a lot like Henry Selick's 2009 Coraline, which at least did a better job of delineating the title character's flaws, strengths, and desires even if the fantastical plot lacked parameters and structure. (And, again, eye-popping animation.)

And then there's Spike Jonze's 2009 Where the Wild Things Are, which may be the only film where the protagonist willingly rejects the lonely world of unreality. Based on Maurice Sendak's popular picture book, the film stars the talented Max Records as Max, a lonely, imaginative kid who's being abandoned by all those he loves. His friends, though never specifically mentioned, bail out on him to hang out with newer, cooler friends. His father, whether through death or divorce, exits the picture. And at the beginning of the film, his teenage sister--his best friend--abandons him for a boyfriend and cool kids with a car. Sad and angry, Max marches his snow-wet boots into his sister's room and wreaks havoc, specifically destroying not her CDs or her cool new things but the loving gift he once gave to her, the symbol of their bond. If he can't have it perfectly, unceasingly, at all times, whenever he needs it, he doesn't want their friendship at all, doesn't want even to remember that it ever existed. He destroys the gift, but he instantly regrets it. As strong and independent as his rage might make him at moments, he needs the love of others, however frangible.

When his exhausted, lonely mother (Caroline Keener) invites home a new potential boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), the last straw is broken. Max erupts into an animalistic rage and flees to the forest (it's always the forest where magic happens, any kid can tell you), where he discovers a boat and sails off to the land of the Wild Things. Jonze handles the camera artfully, allowing more of the imaginary world to seamlessly blossom with each cut. There needn't be any logic, order, or believability because we realize that the world exists entirely within Max's mind. When the Wild Things speak, they are aspects of Max's conscience speaking to other parts of his subconscious, trying to reason out solutions to his problems, trying to figure out why the world is so messed up. In reality, we can picture Max sitting under a tree, playing with sticks, tossing pine cones, kicking the dirt, and talking to himself.

In the movie, however, we see the world of the Wild Things, overgrown, impulsive beasts who say the first thing that pops into their monstrous heads. Insecurity, anger, and the demand for unrequited love boil over. When he makes mistakes, people should still be able to love him. Even if he's not all that special, people shouldn't just abandon him. When people make promises, they should keep them. His nagging doubts and most troubling fears are diced and strewn.

Amongst the Wild Things, Max is elected king. With the new responsibility, he attempts to impose his version of utopia, a world of perfect, eternal love where nobody foreign and unpredictable can enter and nobody can ever leave, where everyone sleeps in one jumbled pile at night, where fun is a requirement, and where friendship is an unbreakable commitment. This works only for a few hours, and soon the messiness and complications of reality start to break through. Utopia means nowhere, and no such perfect world exists. People make mistakes. People grow apart. People need space. Sometimes people can't forgive. Sometimes new people enter the picture who may be scary at first but aren't always bad.

In the end, Max bids farewell to his island kingdom and returns to his home, where his relieved mother feeds him chocolate cake and, in a touching moment, falls asleep smiling at him at the kitchen table. Racked with anxiety by his disappearance, she can finally rest now that her baby is home. In a perfect world, they'd stay up talking and playing and eating cake all night, but in the real world she's exhausted and all she can offer right now is a smile, the unspoken fact that she'll always love him, and a piece of cake. And, in the end, maybe that's better than any imaginary world.

A powerfully effective, emotionally raw, well-acted, and lovingly filmed movie, Where the Wild Things Are was my favorite picture of 2009, having affected me in a manner deeper and more truthfully than most things in my life, along the same lines as In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (which also has similar themes to this blog).

I'll close with Le voyage du balloon rouge, a 2008 feature film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a leader of the New Taiwanese cinema who shot this film in France. Flight of the Red Balloon is not a remake of The Red Balloon; in the first few minutes, the short film is specifically referenced and explained. The red balloon has only a few cameo appearances, there is no mob of angry bullies, and in the end the young boy (Simon Iteanu) isn't whisked away to his imminent suicide. At the very most, Hou's film is a homage. The reflective, real-time film, with mesmerizingly slow scenes where nothing really happens yet emotions are evoked (in my favorite scene, a blind man tunes a piano--a toneless, non-melodic plucking that becomes its own atmospheric score--while the exhausted mother (Juliette Binoche) negotiates a divorce on the phone and Simon, talking to his sister about video games, tries to focus on the positive, with the long scene culminating in the mother drawing herself out of her anxiety to smile at her son, reminding him that she loves him--a scene in which possibly nothing or possibly everything happens all at once as the camera meanders around), is perhaps about a lot of possible things or perhaps about nothing at all. The same dichotomy between the purity of escapist imagination and the frustration of reality is present--here, the bleakness of reality is only a divorce, an obnoxious roommate, stress from work, and so forth (no torture or war crimes, for a change). What's important, though, is that even though the real world isn't always pretty, it's no cause for suicide. Unlike Lamorisse's unsupervised loner, Simon has a mother, a nanny, neighbors, and a sister who love him and care about him. He may be Pascal's spiritual descendant--a good kid who has inherited sadness--but he's not going to be chased through alleys or dangerously dangled miles above the Paris streets. And just knowing that is a powerful calmative.

Le balloon rouge
d/w: Albert Lamorisse
(Pascal Lamorisse)
7/10
TSPDT? #432

Crin-Blanc, Cheval Sauvage
d/w: Albert Lamorisse
(Alain Emery)
7/10

El Laberinto del Fauno
d/w: Guillermo del Toro
(Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú)
9/10
TSPDT? #739

El espíritu de la colmena
d/w: Victor Erice
(Ana Torrent, Teresa Gimpera)
8/10
TSPDT? #204

Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi
d/w: Hayao Miyazaki
(Rumi Hîragi, Mari Natsuki)
6/10
TSPDT? #495

Coraline
d/w: Henry Selick
(Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Keith David)
7/10

Where the Wild Things Are
d: Spike Jonze w: Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers
(Max Records, Catherine Keener, James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara)
10/10

Le voyage du balloon rouge
d: Hou Hsiao-Hsien w: Hao Hsiao-Hsien, François Margolin
(Simon Iteanu, Fang Song, Juliette Binoche)
9/10

Movie Review: To Be or Not to Be (1942)

Inglourious Basterds got its kicks out of rewriting history, attempting to give viewers the cathartic release that reality denied them: Hitler burning, sooner rather than later, in a well-plotted holocaust of his own. In truth, however, the war went on much too long, Hitler exacted a wide-spread and long-lasting influence, and his death like so many others came at his own hand, excusing him from justice and revenge. Tarantino's mission may be well-intentioned, but because it bears no semblance to history and because it doesn't have any practical application to current events, the triumphant release the film's finale may release in us is at best fleeting. I say "us" meaning twentysomething, non-Jewish, American kids who have in no way been directly affected by Adolph Hitler's atrocities in Europe since I think that's the target audience of the film. I have yet to read any responses to the film from people who actually survived the death camps over sixty years ago.

Recently I came across Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 comedy To Be or Not to Be, a film which I assume exerted some influence over the writing of Tarantino's last picture. Both involve resistance groups staging attacks against occupying Nazis while Hitler enjoys a visit to the local theater. Both involve our valiant yet buffoonish heroes sporting silly disguises while improvising taut dialogues with somewhat more clever enemies. Both comfortably assume that the Nazis will be outwitted by the end. The difference between To Be or Not to Be and Inglourious Basterds, though, is that the former film was made at a time when history was actually being written rather than rewritten. In 1942, Hitler's men actually were in Poland, actors and Jews and unhappy Poles actually were being oppressed and killed, the uprising was in effect and could use support of any kind, and the final outcome was still several years to come. In a historical context, To Be or Not to Be really had "something at stake," a crucial element of storytelling according to any writing workshop instructor. That Lubitsch swore by an Allied victory with such certainty was a move of uplifting patriotism.

But even aside from its context, the film is incredible--suspenseful, hilarious, and moving in equal parts. The movie begins with a stage actor portraying Hitler (Tom Dugan) effetely heiling himself after being "Heil Hitler"ed by so many of his men. It's a perfectly-delivered bit of improvisation from the bit actor, but it's roundly attacked by his director Dobosh (Charles Halton), who wants no humor in a serious film about such a grave subject. When Lubitsch's film was released, it too was apparently attacked for making light of the War, but Dobosh and the contemporary audiences seem not to realize the intense power that humor can have in providing a stark contrast to more serious moments. Adding humor to a film emphasizes just how bleak the moments without humor--the non-humor--are. With just one tone, the whole film risks slipping into melodrama.

So when a Jewish actor, having seen Warsaw destroyed, his play censored, and his neighbors killed, quotes the spat-upon Jewish Shylock of The Merchant of Venice to his friend ("If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"), the moment comes across as raw and sincere rather than laughable and trite. We've already roared at Shakespeare and bad acting; we needn't laugh at a man's expression of grief, outrage, and confusion.

To Be or Not to Be is a fine film, well acted by Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Stanley Ridges, and Sig Ruman, wittily directed, fast-paced, and sharply written by Edwin Justus Mayer. A story of intrigue and disguise, it combines a standard love triangle with a thrilling tale of political uprising and assassination. The revenge of a spurned and humiliated lover surrenders to revenge against an occupying invader, and the inflated arrogance of the cuckold proves the most valuable weapon against the arrogance of the enemy leaders. Twists in one plot influence events in the other, and the audience is left always guessing what tricks will be needed for the next narrow escape and--more importantly--always hoping that the narrow escape will be successful. The characters are broad and silly yet always convincing, and in the course of the film their fortunes earned a place close to my heart.

To Be or Not to Be was dismissed in its own time and is largely forgotten today, but it's a terrific comedy and an important installment in World War II cinema. It ranks #72 on the TSPDT? list.

To Be or Not to Be
d: Ernst Lubitsch w: Edwin Justus Mayer
(Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Stanley Ridges)
10/10