Paranoia blues

Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963)

2009-06-13T21:43:00.008-05:00

In Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963), Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), an ambitious and ruthless journalist, tries to get himself admitted into a mental institution in order to be able to investigate the murder of an inmate, which to him seems the only sure-fire way to win a Pulitzer. Fuller, who along with Otto Preminger and Nicholas Ray remains one of the underrated American film masters, doesn't care much for exposition; the opening sequence throws the viewer right into the lurid narrative: Johnny is rehearsing his routine with a psychiatrist, Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn), as his editor, Swanee (Bill Zuckert), and girlfriend, Cathy (Constance Towers), quietly observe. Cathy, a striptease artist who dreams of a "normal" life, is having second thoughts about the role she'll have to play in Johnny's plan, which consists in going to the police pretending to be his sister and filing a complaint detailing Johnny's incestuous feelings and sexually aggressive behavior towards her. At first, Johnny's plan works just as he and Dr. Fong had predicted. He gets admitted to the mental institution and even makes some progress in his investigation. In the process of trying to get information from the three witnesses to the murder--one a young soldier who fancies himself a Confederate general, another a student who has been so shaken by the experience of being the only black at his university in South Carolina that he has assumed the identity of a Ku Klux Klan member, the last a nuclear physicist who was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb but who now has the mental capacity of a six-year-old--Johnny himself begins to have doubts regarding his own sanity and whether he'll even be able to crack the case, for he is only able to get anything from the patients in their fleeting lucid moments. The scenes that take place in the mental institution, which make up the heart of the film, are unrestrainedly disturbing and among the most powerful in any Fuller film. While filming some of the recollections of the patients, he inserts some color footage which provides a marked contrast with the claustrophobic mood of the rest of the film, conditioned as it is by the pale walls, shiny floors, and unending corridors of the mental institution. By cataloguing one man's immersion into the fragmented and subconscious side of life, Fuller also taps into the psyche of a nation whose very foundation was (and, to the extent that the film is still an accurate portrait of modern industrial society, continues to be) threatened by countless evils of its own making.

On Certainty (Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1969)

2009-05-15T19:32:00.011-05:00

There are, I suppose, certain inherent dangers in trying to write anything (even something as flimsy as a blog post) about Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially for someone who is just getting interested in philosophy. Nevertheless, perhaps I can mitigate some of these pitfalls by stating as simply as possible the reason I happen to be setting down some thoughts about this most venerable of philosophers: I like the guy. I mean, I'm still working my way through the Philosophical Investigations (1953) and I couldn't very well venture to say that I've got anything like a firm grasp on all of his ideas (most of them directly dealing with the philosophy of language and mind but by extension with the whole of philosophy, from metaphysics to aesthetics), but I must say he is a very intriguing figure. Instead of trying to back up this claim with something of a summary, I will direct you to two very diferent sources: the first is a forty-minute TV program in which John Searle gives a succint overview of Wittgenstein's philosophy; the second, and much more interesting for the purposes at hand, is Derek Jarman's 1993 film Wittgenstein, which in its glorious seventy-two minutes manages not only to paint a fascinating and touching portrait of Ludwig (both as a precocious young boy and later as a troubled genius finding his way in and out of Cambridge) but also features various actors (among them Tilda Swinton) portraying the important figures in his life, namely Betrand Russell, Lady Ottoline Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and of course the whole Wittgenstein clan. (As a sidenote I should mention that I look forward to reading Alexander Waugh's recently-published The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.)

Finally, I'll conclude with some of my favorite excerpts from Wittgenstein's On Certainty (1969):

383. The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well - and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

467. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."

471. It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.

La invención de Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1940)

2009-04-12T19:29:00.010-05:00

ONGOING

My indecisiveness rears its ugly head yet again. Since writing the previous post, I've changed my mind regarding the subject of my final essay. It was set to be on Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963), but, partly inspired by my recent revisiting of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), I've decided to take on Adolfo Bioy Casares' 1940 novella La invención de Morel (The Invention of Morel is the English title) instead. I'll still finish reading Rayuela and probably post something about it along the way (the book's length sort of lends itself to that). For now I haven't got much else to say, so I'll just direct you to the worthy introduction [PDF] by Suzanne Jill Levine from the 2003 New York Review of Books edition. And here is an essay from Senses of Cinema written by Thomas Beltzer on the possible connection between La invención de Morel and Last Year at Marienbad. Oh, and given that I just discovered Louise Brooks' work not long ago, I find it really interesting that Bioy Casares based one of the characters of his novella on her. (And I commend the NYRB for choosing an image of her for their cover.) Not that I blame him; she's really something.

Rayuela (Julio Cortázar, 1963)

2009-03-29T16:59:00.007-06:00

ONGOING

I'm writing (or, more accurately, attempting to write) about Julio Cortázar's 1963 novel Rayuela (Hopscotch is the English title) for the final essay of my literature class. I'm only twelve chapters in so far, each being only a few pages long, and I just wanted to jot down a few thoughts I was having about it before I forget them.

First of all, Cortázar gives his readers two options for reading his book: they can either read the first fifty-six chapters in order and leave the remaining ninety-nine alone or go through it in the order he suggests, which jumps back-and-forth between different parts of the novel. Right now I'm taking the first route--and these fifty-six chapters are themselves divided into two sections, "Del lado de allá" and "Del lado de acá"--and more than likely I will read through the parts of the third section ("De otros lados") in the same manner. Second, the two epigraphs deal with the idea of imparting a lesson before it's too late for it to mean anything, which ties in with Cortázar's temporal preoccupations and rather specific ideas about the nature of time. The first twelve chapters themselves are quite enjoyable, some of them narrated in the first person by, presumably, Oliveira, an Argentine expatriate living in Paris in the late-1950s (Cortázar himself having made the same trip in 1951); others are told by a more detached nameless narrator who recounts the activities of Oliveira, La Maga, the Uruguayan girl he's involved with, and his group of friends that call themselves el Club de la Serpiente. Traces of the fantastic abound in certain chapters of Rayuela, as in the part that seems to equate Oliveira and La Maga's lovemaking with something like W. B. Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" (1928).

Terribly intriguing stuff, I'd say.

An excerpt:

(p. 51)

Toco tu boca, con un dedo toco el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez tu boca se entreabriera, y me basta cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca que deseo, la boca que mi mano elige y te dibuja en la cara, una boca elegida entre todas, con soberana libertad elegida por mí para dibujarla con mi mano en tu cara, y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja.

Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion, 1970)

2009-03-17T13:07:00.008-06:00

This being my first entry about a book, I guess I should point out that I'm not trying to write anything resembling serious literary criticism; rather, these will be brief impressions normally written immediately or shortly after having finished a book, and if my movie "reviews" at times seem disorganized and scattered, get ready.

***

Up until now I've only read Joan Didion's nonfiction; I found her 1979 collection of essays The White Album particularly interesting, given the breadth of topics she discusses: everything from migraines to the water system to Doris Lessing, all of it seen through the lens of the 1960s and its aftermath. Her political writing, particularly 1983's Salvador and 2001's Political Fictions, is also worth mentioning. Nevertheless, I think I can safely say that her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays is the best example of Didion's cool intelligence and simply contains some of the finest and most precise prose I've read. Play It As It Lays is a fairly slim book at 214 pages, which are divided mostly into two to three-page chapters, brief snapshots in the life of Maria Wyeth told, as the author described in her Paris Review interview, not by "an omniscient third but a third very close to the mind of the character."

Maria ("pronounced Mar-eye-ah," as she makes clear in the opening section named after and narrated by her) is an actress in Hollywood living in a Beverly Hills home paid for by her director husband Carter Lang. If Didion's scathing indictment of Hollywood and the movie business is every bit as ruthless as Wilder's in Sunset Blvd. (1950), imagine that kind of material as done by L'avventura-era Antonioni and you begin to understand what the author is up to. All in all, it's a powerful, at times frightening read but definitely a major work by one of the most important American writers of the last fifty years.

P. S. I really want to see the 1972 Frank Perry film based on the book. How come it hasn't been released on DVD?

An excerpt:

(p. 210)

Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is "nothing." Now that I have the answer, my plans for the future are these: (1) get Kate, (2) live with Kate alone, (3) do some canning. Damson plums, apricot preserves. Sweet India relish and pickled relish. Apple chutney. Summer squash succotash. There might even be a ready market for such canning: you will note that after everything I remain Harry and Francine Wyeth's daughter and Benny Austin's godchild. For all I know they knew the answer too, and pretended they didn't. You call it as you see it, and stay in the action. BZ thought otherwise. If Carter and Helene aren't careful they'll get the answer too.

Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)

2009-03-12T01:17:00.004-06:00

Through some mysterious twist of fate, in the last three years since I first saw Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) on the same evening, I’ve seen the sequel something like eight or nine times without revisiting the original even once, the result of this being that, because Sunset has become one of my all-time favorite movies, I began to wrongly suspect that, for all intents and purposes, Sunrise was little more than the charming introduction which allowed Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy to make their real film, an unparalleled and gorgeous exploration on the passage of time. Needless to say, I was sorely mistaken, since it is precisely to the extent that Sunrise is different from its sequel that it can be recognized as a masterpiece on its own right. For one thing, in this film, given that the characters are just beginning to learn about one another, they are not quite as absorbed with their encounter as the reunited lovers of Sunset, so the city of Vienna and its dwellers make their way into their private world in ways that reveal quite a lot about what Linklater and company are up to. I’m referring particularly to the palm reader and the street poet, two characters whose respective scenes wouldn’t be out of place in any number of carefully-conceived romantic works of art, and Linklater lets them play out with beautiful ease and all the emotional weight that they require, but then, in this film so concerned with the nuances of conversation, Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) go on to deconstruct the experience and discuss each other’s reactions. So it’s not as in Waking Life (2001) where we can hear the guy on the bridge with the wild hair talk about Lorca’s advice to dreamers and simply move on to the next sequence, we have to think about the scene’s place in the movie and as a result our own expectations from romance in the real world. It’s a fitting strategy for a film whose protagonists are generally so curious and skeptical. However, this isn’t to say that the film isn’t also achingly romantic; one couldn’t possibly make that claim with all the truly beautiful and intimate moments to be found throughout the Viennese night. All in all, Before Sunrise is more than just a great film. For me it’s an overwhelming experience about what it’s like to be alive in the world; more than that, it’s pure magic.

Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)

2009-03-12T00:25:00.002-06:00

More than any other of Richard Linklater’s films, with the possible exception of Before Sunset (2004), 1993's Dazed and Confused is a great film to revisit. From the opening shots in the school parking lot, set to the tune of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” everything falls into place, and all you can do is go along for the ride. The film covers the last day of the 1976 school year and the night that follows, and it deals with the lives of an assortment of characters, never really settling on a particular storyline. But it must be said that the previous statement is meant as an absolute compliment, as it is when talking about the best of Altman, particularly his 1975 masterpiece Nashville about a weekend in the titular city. If Linklater shares some of Altman’s talent for interweaving the lives of a large number of characters in a natural and altogether cinematic way, he differs from him in the way he approaches the material, which is to say that he lacks some of the older master’s deep cynicism. Dazed and Confused is, no doubt, a film bound to be tinged with nostalgia, at least to some extent, but, like the best works that try to recreate past decades (and I’m really thinking more about a brilliant TV show like Freaks and Geeks rather than George Lucas' highly uneven American Graffiti [1973], a film often mentioned in discussions about this movie), Linklater’s panorama of the 1970s could conceivably work just as well as a movie about young people living in the early 1960s or the late 1980s. There’s something about the way Linklater carefully observes the small moments in people’s lives which goes beyond any specific time and place, the evidence of this being that I, someone who wasn’t even old enough to see Dazed and Confused in theaters, could find so much about my own high school experience on display here. All of this and I haven’t really said anything about the film itself, but it’s probably just as well. See it.

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1941)

2009-01-27T16:45:00.003-06:00

An inexplicably underrated comedy by one of the great American directors, Preston Sturges's Christmas in July (1940) has all the wit, humor, and grace of his more well-known masterpieces like Sullivan's Travels and The Lady Eve (both from 1941). At a brisk sixty-seven minutes, the film is also a terrific example that the best comedy is to be told as economically as possible, everything trimmed out of it but the absolutely essential (see: Duck Soup [1933]).

As Christmas in July opens, a young couple (skillfully played by Dick Powell and Ellen Drew) is on the roof of a New York building listening to the radio, when the announcer lets on that he's about to name the winner of the $25,000 Maxford House Coffee Slogan contest, which Jimmy (Powell) has entered. Down at the radio station, they tell the announcer (the wonderfully expressive Franklin Pangborn) that the jury is having a little difficulty picking a winner, so the program ends without any resolution. Back on top of the building, Jimmy and Betty (Drew) argue about the chances of him being named the winner when the jury actually decides. He thinks that the contests he has lost (three to be exact) guarantee that his slogan--"If you can't sleep at night, it isn't the coffee, it's the bunk"--will take the big prize. She admits she doesn't get it, but tries to be encouraging anyway. To make a long story short, something Sturges certainly does in this film, a few of Jimmy's co-workers send him a phony telegram telling him he's won, which thrills not only him and his young gal, but also his boss (Ernest Truex), who gives him a raise and a brand-new office once he hears the slogan. Needless to say, it all works beautifully for a while, and Jimmy and Betty buy gifts for everyone in their working-class neighborhood, but this being a Preston Sturges film, and Dr. Maxford of Maxford House Coffee (Raymond Walburn, easily the most hilarious person in the film) being nobody's fool, eventually, like the film, it all must come to an end.

Sturges, a supremely intelligent filmmaker in addition to his more obvious comedic talents, in Christmas in July paints a picture of capitalism, not as simply a horrible thing that's to blame for all the world's ills, but as a system with inherent injustices that generate a lot of unhappiness on good and sincere people like Jimmy and Betty. But this is also a world in which generosity and kindness can shine through in spite of everything, and it's because of Sturges's deep compassion that the moment when Jimmy hands a doll to a girl in a wheelchair doesn't seem at all trite or opportunistic, but instead as the very heart of why we care for this character. Immediately thereafter, the film's hilarity continues. This combination of grace and cheerfulness is all too rare even among the best films.

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

2009-01-25T12:48:00.006-06:00

By Ingmar Bergman's standards, Persona (1966), the most famous of all his films, is experimental in its use of the medium. For an artist best known for the theatricality of his films, with their spare mise-en-scène and emphasis on dialogue, Bergman's techniques here--beginning with a disorienting opening sequence that's like something out of Buñuel--are certainly peculiar, but as Andrew Sarris rightly pointed out in his review of the film for the Village Voice in 1967, "students of Stan Brakhage are more likely to yawn." All of this is to say that Persona, for all of its "Pirandellian pyrotechnics," as Sarris calls them, is first and foremost a film about what its two characters say or don't say and the position of their faces within the frame when they say or don't say these things.

We first encounter the two characters in a clinic of some sort. Alma (Bibi Andersson), a nurse, is asked to take care of Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), an actress who after a performance of Electra had a nervous breakdown and has since given up talking. The doctor of the clinic suggests that they both go stay at her summer house. Once there, Alma, confronted with a troubled woman whose silence masks some deep agony that neither of them fully comprehend, talks and talks and talks: first in vague platitudes ("I think you should be of importance to others," she says) then in achingly personal anecdotes (the memorable recounting of an orgy on the beach). Throughout these carefully-observed scenes, filled with shadows and puncutated by bursts of eerie music, Bergman builds his characters' personalities little by little, until eventually he starts pulling it all apart with equal exactness, blurring the line between the performances of the two actresses as they discard old roles and take up new ones.

Persona, in addition to being a great film, paved the way for some of the most interesting works by two contrasting directors, Robert Altman and David Lynch. In their 3 Women (1977) and Mulholland Drive (2001), respectively, they take up Bergman's subject--the curious psychological implications of the relationships between women--and ground them in very different settings. Bergman's film, deceptively simple and incomparably exquisite, is truly unforgettable.

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)

2009-01-01T21:44:00.002-06:00

Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) opens with the close-up of an eye, calling to mind a similar shot at the beginning of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), but unlike that sequence, which also includes a series of brightly-colored swirls and spirals, this one serves as the first proper shot of the film and the introduction of the protagonist, a young, beautiful, and absent-minded manicurist named Carol (Catherine Deneuve) who is startled when the woman she is attending to asks her if she's fallen asleep. Soon we see Carol walking down the streets of London to a restaurant, same distracted look on her face, and Polanski frames these shots either extremely close to her face or from enough of a distance so we can see the various men who stare and call out to her.

A handsome English boy, Colin (John Fraser), spots her through the restaurant window and comes in to sit with her. He tries to make conversation, offers to take her to a different restaurant ("You can't eat stuff like this!" he says, looking down at the fish and chips on her plate), but all that Carol manages to say in return with her noticeably limited English (she's Belgian) are a couple of vague responses. After work Carol goes home to the apartment she shares with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), whose accent is much less pronounced. They talk in the kitchen while Helen gets ready to cook a rabbit. Carol, somewhat distressed, asks her if she's really going away with her boyfriend for two weeks. From the opening shot of the eye up to this scene, nothing much has happened (that is, there's not yet an established narrative or plot), but Polanski, by the way he frames Carol's peculiar behavior--her daydreaming at work and while she walks home, the way she talks to Colin, her contempt for her sister's boyfriend and the fact that he's taking her away--is building, however slowly and carefully, a frightening portrait of a fractured psyche.

Deneuve, whose most characteristic roles during this period included being Jacques Demy's muse in pastel-colored musicals like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), succeeds in this role by holding back, letting Carol's eventual collapse surface in suggestive gestures and glances, all captured in the stunning black-and-white photography of Gilbert Taylor. Just as integral to the illusory mood in a film where the line between real and imagined horrors is all but erased is the soundtrack, sometimes filled with the ominously upbeat jazz of Chico Hamilton, at others everything is silent save for the ticking of a clock in the apartment. Repulsion, Polanski's greatest achievement, if not scary in the rather empty way most horror films are, is an unforgettable visceral experience and without a doubt one of the most unnerving films ever made.

My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969)

2008-12-28T14:00:00.003-06:00

Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's, a personal favorite, is a singularly lovely and infinitely rich film. Made in 1969, the third of his Six Moral Tales, despite the title Rohmer gave to the series of films beginning with 1963's The Bakery Girl of Monceau and ending with 1972's Love in the Afternoon, is not a moral tale in the sense of having a specific lesson to teach. The film, instead, takes the time to carefully observe the actions of its characters, particularly the protagonist (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a thirty-four-year-old engineer who recently took a job at the Michelin plant in Clermont-Ferrand. In the first few scenes, we see him--the character's name is never mentioned, so we'll just call him Jean-Louis--attend mass (he is a practicing Catholic), where he catches a glimpse of a beautiful, blonde girl (Marie-Christine Barrault), and at that moment decides that she's the one he's going to marry.

Elsewhere, he works on mathematical problems, chats with his colleagues about their plans for the winter (Christmas is near as the film opens), and picks up Pascal's Pensées at a bookstore. The next night or so, he runs into an old friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), as he enters a restaurant. They haven't seen each other in fourteen years, and the conversation teasingly ranges from the probability that the two of them would meet in Clermont-Ferrand (Jean-Louis explains that it is impossible to calculate since neither of them knows where the other lives or works) to the modern relevance of Pascal's Wager, which, as a Catholic, Jean-Louis dismisses as mathematical hope, while Vidal, a Marxist philosophy professor, takes as cue to assume that history is not meaningless. It is at this point that I should interject with something of an assertion that, despite the way that I am describing the "action" of the film, My Night at Maud's is never monotonous or uninteresting. Rohmer famously cares a great deal about the dialogue in his films, but that doesn't mean he's any less attentive to the visual aspect of his work than, say, Bresson. For one thing, Néstor Almendros's luminous black-and-white photography turns the city of Clermont-Ferrand and its surrounding provinces into a distinctly cinematic space that is always a marvel to look at. Also, Rohmer's ability to craft scenes of considerable length is something deeper than just a good ear for narrative and dialogue, as is importantly the case with the centerpiece of the film, an extraordinary, forty-minute sequence on which the success of the film hinges. After midnight mass on Christmas Eve, Vidal convinces Jean-Louis to accompany him to the house of a friend, the charming and enigmatic divorcée Maud (Françoise Fabian), a pediatrician every bit as articulate as her two guests. The three, while also taking the time to drink and eat dessert, mostly converse; about Jean-Louis's Catholicism, which strikes both Vidal and Maud as a bit odd, about Pascal, whom they've all read but understand in different ways, and about love affairs, both of the past (Vidal recalls Jean-Louis's mistresses) and the present (they both assume, correctly, that Jean-Louis is in love at that very moment, probably with a blonde). The brilliance of this scene and of the film as a whole is to be found, perhaps, in the fact that none of these three subjects--religion, philosophy, love--is mutually exclusive. In My Night at Maud's, the matters of the spirirt, the mind, and the heart can't ever be truly separate (as Jean-Louis makes explicitly clear several times); they have to coexist in the same person and inform his or her decisions at any given moment.

After spending the night at Maud's (and I don't think I'm spoiling anything by mentioning that nothing happens between the two), Jean-Louis runs into the blonde, a twenty-two-year-old biology student named Françoise, and they agree to go out to lunch together the next day after mass. Now, it's already enough of a coincedence that he ran into her not long after leaving Maud's apartment, but that same day, after coming back from a trip to the mountains with Vidal and Maud, Jean-Louis sees Françoise again and he offers her a ride home, which, as it happens, is close to where he lives. Jean-Louis, a believer in some sort of predestination, often remarks that his choices have always been easy, that he's been lucky in this sense. Without saying too much about the way the rest of the film plays out, I should mention that this interaction between chance or luck and the choice to live one's life according to rigid moral stances makes the ending of the film one of the most moving I've ever seen.

Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)

2008-12-25T13:25:00.001-06:00

James Marsh's engaging documentary Man on Wire (2008) tells the story--and what an incredible story it is!--of tightrope walker Philippe Petit, a jovial and animated Frenchman who recounts his experiences with such vividness that he brings them to life with just as much force as Marsh's consistently striking images. The film focuses on one particular instance of Petit's career: the dense and foggy morning of August 7, 1974 where he, after having broken into the World Trade Center with his collaborators the previous night, proceeded to walk back-and-forth for some forty-five minutes on a wire suspended between the two towers.

The structure Marsh utilizes in Man on Wire is quite simple, but suitable for his purposes here. In addition to recounting the events of August 6 and 7 with precision and detail, he includes in the first part of the film background information about the construction of the World Trade Center (which Petit first became aware of while in a dentist's office at age 17), as well as of the past conquests of Petit and his associates (including Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbour Bridge). Most miraculous, perhaps, are the depictions of the interactions between all of the people involved in the planning of le coup--a young, enthusiastic group drawn into and enthralled by Petit's vision. Marsh's use of footage from the time (some of it in color, other in black-and-white, all stunning) bring to his interviews the added dimension of all the years that have passed.

Petit's was truly an amazing achievement, and one from which Marsh fashions not only a loving and witty tribute to the unparalleled artistry of his subject, but also a very moving rumination on the wonders of the human imagination.

Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)

2008-12-24T16:08:00.003-06:00

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008) opens with a tracking shot following its title characters--the one a lonely drifter beautifully played by Michelle Williams, the other her dog--as they make their way across a field in an Oregon town. There is some light humming in the background, and this is one of the only moments of pure joy in a film that is otherwise interested in cataloguing Wendy's dire economic situation. After she tells a few people gathered around a fire in that same field that she's heading to Alaska ("I hear they need people there," she says), one of them, a guy with a painted face named Icky (Will Oldham), mentions a fishery up there that she should visit. She spends the night in her car, only to be waken up by the parking lot security guard (Wally Dalton), who tells her that she can't sleep there. Her car, meanwhile, won't start.

From then on, Wendy, facing one perilous situation after another (she gets caught shoplifting, she loses her dog), wanders around town in escalating desperation. Reichardt captures it all in brief, observational moments, and it is this lack of pretense that ultimately makes the film so moving and in many ways heartbreaking. On another level, even as Wendy and Lucy works remarkably well as an intimate portrait of its place (the Pacific Northwest) and time (now), it also subtly evokes aspects of American mythology that have been dwelled on by artists as diverse as Jack Kerouac (On the Road [1957]) and Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man [1995]). Yet, what makes Reichardt's project all the more interesting and layered is that while she's in some sense dealing with the idea of the frontier in a very topical manner, she's doing so by harking back not only to an American tradition, but to that of Italian Neorealism, and I'm thinking specificially of films like Vittorio De Sica's post-war masterpiece Umberto D. (1952), another work about living without a sense of economic stability.

Reichardt's deep awareness and unquestionable talent have allowed her to craft a film that is honest, patient, and calm. Williams's amazing and restrained performance forms, in Wendy, a character that never feels inauthentic. There's a beautiful moment toward the end of the film where the security guard, who has come to care for and help Wendy more than anyone else, hands her seven dollars and tells her to take it without arguing. The look on Wendy's face there, filled with such gratitude by this gracious gesture after so much despair, is a much more eloquent statement about the film than I could write.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (Bill Meléndez, 1965)

2008-12-24T13:30:00.004-06:00

The 1965 TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas is such a staple of the holiday season that it seems more than a little arbitrary, not to say fruitless, to try to weigh in with an opinion about it. Everyone has seen it countless times, which means that unless you're writing a polemic against it (and, for the record, I'm not), there's really not much anyone can do by way of recommending it. With that said, I still feel it's useful to say something about the way this beloved, twenty-three-minute animated short from more than forty years ago can tell us something about the world today, or at least with regard to how we watch movies.

As created by Charles M. Schultz, the Peanuts comic strip is even more ubiquitous than the TV specials (of which the Christmas one is undoubtedly the finest) it spawned. The spirit of the original source material finds it way into A Charlie Brown Christmas through the screenplay penned by Schultz, with its dispersed yet poignant dialogue setting the pace for the action. The story, such as it is, deals with Charlie Brown feeling disillusioned by his lack of enthusiasm for Christmas, a celebration he admits to not fully understanding. He gives psychoanalysis a shot, paying Lucy a nickel to help with his crisis, but all it gets him is a laundry list of phobias, leading him to conclude that he is afraid of, well, everything. Sensing that Charlie Brown didn't really get his money's worth, Lucy goes on to suggest that he should direct the Christmas play at the school, a position he happily accepts. Now he'll finally have the chance to do something worthwhile, something to take him away from the crass consumerism he's surrounded by--even his dog and his sister have been swept up by this wave.

Underscoring Charlie Brown's struggles with his views on Christmas is Vince Guaraldi's timeless jazz recording, equal parts elegant holiday cheer and painful childhood nostalgia. It's no wonder Wes Anderson used one of these tracks (the vocal version of "Christmas Time Is Here") in the lovely ice cream parlor scene in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) between Royal, the distant father, and Margot, the troubled daughter. And, in the end, it's this sense of achingly beautiful sadness--accentuated not only by Guaraldi's music but by the characteristically simple visual style of the film as directed by Bill Meléndez--that stays with the viewer long after Charlie Brown and friends have fixed up the flimsy Christmas tree he had picked out for the play. The film, by not looking to preach tired old values in the most crude and obvious way possible or even fool us into giving up our money at the box office to sit through another vapid hundred-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster, reminds us of the pleasant and noble things about Christmas, which is to say, those that have nothing to do with Christmas as such whatsoever. In short, A Charlie Brown Christmas is a film even a secularist can love.

In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2007)

2008-12-14T14:50:00.008-06:00

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough."
- Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro" (1913)

José Luis Guerín's lovely and mysterious film In the City of Sylvia (2007) is in many ways primarily concerned with the act of seeing people. Not only does the main character--a handsome, long-haired remnant of the Romantic era played here by Xavier Laffite--spend the first part of the film sketching various women at a cafe in the European city he's visiting (Strasbourg) and the second following one of them around town, but at times the camera itself appears to be just as captivated simply watching people, taking in all of their mannerisms with such attention that it becomes difficult to draw any distinctions between an objective and subjective gaze.

The film opens with a series of static shots of a hotel room: an unmade bed; a nightable littered with various objects; and a window with a faded white, slightly cracked frame that is characteristically European. A title card reads 1st Night, but the first time we see the main character is the next morning, as he's sitting on the bed, legs crossed, pencil in hand, staring off into space. A minute or so passes before he scribbles something in his notebook. He makes his way out of the hotel and walks around, intently looking at his map, as though he's searching for a very specific location, and ends up sitting down at a cafe that is largely empty--another woman sits two tables away from him reading a paperback book and dozing off, and he calls out to her ("Excuse me? Are you from here?"), but she doesn't respond. The next day he returns to the cafe, but this time all of the tables are filled. This first extended sequence is something of a magnificent film in and of itself. Guerín lets us observe all of these people, sometimes from the point of view of our hero, who sits in a corner sketching, but also in a much freer way wherein we are able to take in the sheer beauty of the scene (including some evocative music and elegant use of slow-motion) as well as some of its quiet comedy (there's a running gag where the waitress keeps bringing people the wrong orders).

After spending some time staring, drawing formed but vague sketches of several women, our hero zeroes in on one particular woman (the extraordinarily beautiful Pilar López de Ayala), the one he may be looking for, who he sees through a glass window into the cafe. She gets up to leave and he, spilling his beer while getting up in a terrible hurry, decides to follow her. He does so for the next twenty or so minutes, the heart of the film, and Guerín films it all in a knowing and otherworldly manner. The use of Steadicam is quite astonishing, calling to mind the best of the work of Béla Tarr. Natasha Braier's photography is also inspired, turning the city of Strasbourg into a gorgeous labyrinth at once familiar and utterly fantastic. Most notable, perhaps, is the intricate sound design. Little by little, the sounds of shoes hitting cobblestone streets, cars and the metro zooming by, and the accordion of a street musician form a kind of street symphony that goes a long way in giving Guerín's film its form.

From the time we realize that our hero believes he knows this woman (at one point he calls out "Sylvie"), a certain tension arises regarding when or if he'll get to actually talk to her and find out whether or not she is, after all, the woman whose city he is in. But since Guerín seems to be making a more general statement about male obsession (a subject tackled in a brilliant, albeit different way in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo [1958]), this isn't a film where there could be any resolution. What there is, however, is a slight change in our hero. He eventually does directly confront the woman, only to find that she's not the Sylvie he met in Strasbourg six years prior, although it's clear to us that while he's disappointed, he's also fascinated by this mysterious woman. That night he goes to the bar where he had met Sylvie, one last, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find the girl he's after, and the next day he sits at a metro station near the cafe, looking over his sketches (some of which, importantly, are of the "fake" Sylvie).

Ezra Pound, in that short poem with which I began this piece, describes an image, that of a man who has seen several beautiful faces and is trying to find the words to describe that sudden emotion, for this is what the artist does. He keeps his distance and, to use Pound's phrase, finds a way to get this through "in little splotches of colour." Our hero, after having directly followed his muse through streets and alleys, recedes into the state of an artist. Sitting at the metro station, just as Pound did all those years before, he sees the girl again, and for a moment it's clear that he's contemplating getting up and starting all over again, but he remains sitting. The wind blows through the pages of his notebook, through his writings and his sketches and the maps he has drawn, everything he's worked on there in Strasbourg during those last three days, and he knows that whether or not this is Sylvia's city, it will always be his.