directed by Terry Gilliam
screenplay by Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown

Criterion #51.

This is an old favorite that I’ve seen many times and endorse. I am mostly going to muse about the ending. Spoilers.

Gilliam says it’s a happy ending, which on the face of it is passive-aggressive sophistry. (“That’s right, if you felt as put-upon as I do, you’d think this is happy! Think of that! Just imagine how bad I must feel!”) On the other hand, he’s not wrong that Sam’s escape is legitimate on the movie’s terms. The movie’s two dreams — left (bureaucratic cog) and right (winged hero) — are equal and parallel. Forget the logistics of “Sam going to sleep and dreaming,” which the audience knows is just a mechanical device. Brazil is a diptych, a tapestry with two panels. The tension throughout is: how will these two dreams coexist? The ending is simply that Sam chooses the right and the camera chooses the left.

But cameras are privileged, in movies, so the slap-in-the-face punchline feels like a decisive vote for self-pity on Gilliam’s part, after 2 hours of a movie that sure seemed to be voting for exuberant creativity. His Munchhausen ends the same way… except then it doesn’t. Brazil really does end this way, but that’s not where its heart lives. Gilliam’s bitterness is always ambivalent, which can make it all the less sympathetic. If you know better, why don’t you know better? Underneath his giggling victim act, he’s actually an extrovert Romantic. He’s no shrinking Emily Dickinson, holed up with his notebooks and worry. Look at this big crazy movie! How can the guy who made this end by telling me that real life consists of being shackled and tortured in the 9th circle of hell? The answer is that he doesn’t really mean it, he’s just venting. Which is a frustrating place to end.

It’s the same as what I said about The Lord of the Flies — we can get a kick out of defeatism because we don’t actually believe it. It’s just spookhouse make-believe, Halloween. But Lord of the Flies is very single-mindedly Halloween, whereas Brazil taken as a whole is a full Mad Magazine’s worth of cranky glee, a wild grabbag. The final needle-jab of sarcasm is delightful as a single beat, but it isn’t necessarily the ending, and it’s claiming to be necessary. It’s supposed to be hard and angry and poignant. But couldn’t this all just as well have ended with the fold-in?

Maybe I’m giving the ending too much weight. But I’m not alone, since this is what Gilliam and the studio execs came to grief over. The bonus material relating to the fights with Universal fascinated me this time around, because I was shocked to find that the executives now sound pretty sympathetic to me. Wrong, but sympathetic. Underneath the battle of business is a battle of psychologies: Gilliam identifying fiercely with his ending of ghoulish self-pity, addicted to his own petty resentments; the executives unable to conceive of ghoulish self-pity as entertainment because their resentments are not petty: because for them this isn’t Halloween, it’s real. Brazil is a nightmare they cannot afford to have; it’s truly too close to home. For Gilliam it’s a nightmare he can afford to entertain, but that his bitterness refuses to allow anyone else to avoid. Both positions are defensive and nobody benefits from either of them. But Gilliam at least made a movie.

The 3rd disc of this 3-disc set is the outlandishly choppy “happy ending” studio edit. Gilliam’s movie of good faith hope that ends in bad faith defeatism is grotesquely forced to conform to Sid Sheinberg’s emotional outlook of unchallenged bad faith hope. This is the function of the standard Hollywood narrative: selling ourselves something we don’t actually believe deep down but are pleased to imagine that we believe because it seems to fit the bill. The real Brazil is something Gilliam really believes, topped off with something he is pleased to imagine he believes, perversely, because it’s such a downer.

But the good faith resolution — the real moral of the story — is, I think, there under the surface already. Sam’s escape would be a happy ending, if only the camera could be gotten to agree about its validity, or at least be agnostic. The studio’s request that Gilliam bring in clouds behind Sam in the final shot, which can be seen in the Universal version, is philosophically apt. But on the Criterion director’s cut, Gilliam reverted to the original shot: the credits roll over the torture chamber, unrelieved. Gilliam’s commentary track musings at this point exactly capture the knife-edge of his ambivalence. He seems to find himself saying, to his own surprise, that he thinks the clouds are great, that they are the correct ending… and then, apparently feeling self-conscious about contradicting his own choice, rationalizes by saying that he didn’t include them in this cut because one doesn’t need to see them: one feels what they signify even when they aren’t there. But in the very act of needing to talk this out, he seems to recognize that one doesn’t necessarily feel them. Only his ideal viewer will feel them.

Like all self-pity, his functions as a test: Are you the right kind of person? Will you be able to feel my real vulnerable emotion that I am expressing as its spiteful opposite? Can you tell that when I’m hopeless I’m actually hopeful? Gilliam doesn’t trust anyone who can’t tell. Except when he does.

Anyway, the passive-aggressive ending could very easily be purified if after the nasty reveal, we returned to Sam’s reality, with him triumphant and free. Why not?

The two dreams of the movie are one dream, to us. The movie tells us to embrace illusions and also to reject illusions. It loves fantasy and fears it. Is it good or bad to be lost in a hall of mirrors? Is it good or bad that life is an illusion? The correct dream answer is: both, always. In this respect, most of Brazil is right on the money: irreconcilably ambivalent. Like all the best movies, its narrative impulses eat each other and cancel out and meld and run wild, while its feelings roll ever onward. That’s art I can get inside. It’s only when this movie tries to get specific and say something that I resist it.

This was Criterion’s first really mega-super-deluxe-o set, with three discs, a fancy slipcase, a new director’s cut, and lots and lots of bonus stuff. It is, not coincidentally, also the very first DVD I ever bought. (I believe). At Tower Records in 1998. It marks the end of Criterion’s first phase of DVDs, design-wise, about which an entire tedious post to come — and thus it marks the end of my first phase of this project. I’ve watched 51 of these babies! Time to celebrate; stay tuned. It feels fitting that this last one is the one that’s been on my shelf, wherever I’ve lived, for the past 16 years.

Because the image on the old 1998 disc is “non-anamorphic” and Criterion’s later releases of the same set were much higher resolution, I figured I’d get the Blu-ray from Netflix to watch the main feature. But when it arrived it turned out not to be the Criterion edition but the Universal edition, with the original theatrical cut. So I watched that first, and then the director’s cut right after. No offense to Terry or to Criterion but the Universal version is a better movie. It’s tighter and flows better. The colors of the transfer are nicer, too, I think. But the Criterion bonus stuff is top-class. Nowadays they probably wouldn’t lean on “press forward to advance through these screens of text” quite so heavily, but for 1998 it’s excellent. Gilliam’s commentary is solid, the commentary on the crazy studio version is pretty astute, the two little documentaries are both good.

I particularly enjoy the relaxed video interview with the late Michael Kamen, the composer. This is a rewarding score that I admire. It’s thrillingly shameless — after all, how would restraint possibly serve this movie? It’s a big orchestra slopping all over the place and wrapping all the oversaturated fantasy in oversaturated musical fantasy to match. Much of the score is derived from squeezing the title song through Richard Strauss, but it’s really gloriously all over the map. Kamen is ready to savor every little thing, just like Gilliam, and it’s that willingness to really pursue self-amusement all the way to its limits that I find magnetic. I used to listen to this soundtrack album a lot in high school. It’s bizarrely put together and doesn’t make a lot of sense as a listening experience; yet at the same time, maybe for that reason, it is even more transporting than most soundtracks. It is another world, a weirdly two-dimensional one, on its own terms.

There is no real main title to speak of, and the end title is, of all things, a kind of nod to Black Orpheus, completely uncharacteristic of the rest of the score. So our selection is the signature cue, the one everyone remembers, the one you probably know as “Wall-E preview”: “The Office,” which Kamen says was inspired by Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter,” but obviously there’s a lot more going on here.

I don’t know if the marimba + electric guitar combo is original to Kamen or is lifted from some Esquivel arrangement or something, but it’s a stroke of orchestrational brilliance. More fundamentally, it is film-composerly brilliance to have recognized that in the vamp of “Brazil” was the potential to tease out this rising tide that would convey yearning and irony and hopelessness and inanity. The subtle poignancy of this cue encapsulates everything that Terry Gilliam is saying in the movie, and Kamen figured out how to say it efficiently and simply, all within the pre-existing song he was obligated to use. I spent many an hour as a teenager contemplating this cue and considering what it would feel like to have the aesthetic and emotional insight to realize that you could write this cue and it would work. That’s composing. I aspired to that and still do. Your track 51.

directed by Federico Fellini
story and screenplay by Federico Fellini and Tonino Guerro
opera texts by Andrea Zanzotto

Criterion #50. And the Ship Sails On.

You know he’s a big deal when this is one of his minor films.

Fellini’s late work seems to be generally thought of rather dimly, at least outside Italy. (“Late work” here means everything after Amarcord, which chronologically speaking is the entire second half of his career.) Several of the films seem to be completely unavailable on DVD. From my internet reading I don’t get the sense that there’s any very good critical reason for the neglect other than inertia of neglect.

It doesn’t surprise me that once things begin to be unfamous, reflexive skepticism would keep them that way. Like I said ages ago, “art” in the abstract tends to be assumed to be mediocre. If you just look at the list of an artist’s complete output — an artist you know nothing about — you may well feel some tickle of an inclination to think “how nice for him that he kept himself busy; a shame it’s all (probably) the same, all (probably) kind of blah.”

People tend to assume that their cultural exposure has been governed by an invisible hand of taste, and that if they haven’t heard of something, it’s probably not as good as the things they’ve heard of. This is the artgoer’s equivalent of “if you’re poor you must be lazy.” But it’s human nature. We ought to aspire to do better than to just run with it, though.

In E la nave va there are some aristocrats and artists on a luxurious ship. Various scenes play out. It all seems to be a dream. Everything is gently, sweetly unreal. One of the characters says he’s a journalist and seems to be our tour guide. There is an air of foreboding and also of quiet happiness. Eventually there is a sort of cataclysm and it ends.

That’s it!

There is some hint throughout, especially toward the end, that this is a socio-political Allegory of The Death of The 19th Century. That’s well and good, but it’s hardly a skeleton key to the movie; it’s just one of many layers on Fellini’s onion of subconsciousness. The feeling that this may all be some kind of metaphor or a critique is just another emotional thread in the dream fabric. (Critics who seize a movie like this by the allegory and then try to shake it into submission are just dreaming their own agitated sort of dream.) The archetypes of the 19th century and the looming significance of World War I are all crammed on this luxury liner together not as comments on a historical reality but simply as ingredients sloshing around in a certain part of the present-day imagination. At least of the imagination of a certain Italian filmmaker. And of mine too, because I too have seen A Night at the Opera.

I lay watching this in a very soft state of mind and found it thoroughly congenial. My only complaints would be that 1) it all ran a bit long, and 2) when the political material began to be more prominent toward the end I started to get the unfortunate impression that I was supposed to be watching more rationally and analytically. In retrospect I’m confident that impression was false, but I do think there’s something a little dramaturgically imbalanced in the second half. Though that’s also the nature of dreams. That was probably just a first-time thought that would not present itself on repeat viewings.

I will not recount the contents because it’s a movie to be mused over rather than worked out and explained. Here for flavor is one scene: everyone stands around in the kitchen and watches intently while the “deepest bass in the world” does his trick of singing a note so low that it makes a chicken fall asleep. It makes the narrator fall down unconscious too, but they quickly pick him up and he’s fine and in good spirits.

This is, I guess, “surrealism,” but the official “surrealists” sort of stole that term for the flavor of their dreams. That Salvador Dali stuff always feels a little off to the icky side, for me. Fellini’s dreams are more like mine. Like my good ones anyway.

Here’s a quote from the director, vindicating my approach toward this movie. I didn’t find this until afterward:

I would like to have billboards placed on the cinema doors with the following wording: “There is nothing more than what you’ll see.” Or: “Don’t make any efforts to see what is behind, or you’ll run the risk of not being able to see what is in front of you.”

It’s a show. It’s a poetic auteurist show, not one that follows a set recipe, but its freestyling will be more or less familiar from your subconscious, if you let it be.

Signor Fellini is a very great artist, I say, for being able to draw such well-modulated dreaminess out of the great messy world of production reality: set-building and actor-wrangling and crew-direction and blah and blah blah. It is rare that so elaborate a production is put to so ethereal an end, or at least rare that the ethereal note survives the physicality of the production. In the movie there is a stinking rhinoceros on board the ship, representing (perhaps) the fantastic in the real and the real in the fantastic. At the end our narrator rows away with it, planning to live off its milk.

The artifice is part of the texture of the film: everything looks intentionally fake, in a pleasantly disorienting way, and our attention is repeatedly called to the deep strangeness in the very fact that this dream is so physical and real and made out of people and stuff at work in a studio. At the very end he goes all out and pulls back to show the studio and the lights the mechanism rocking the fake deck and the camera and the crew and, his face hidden by the camera, himself. But even over this the dreamy music continues to play. Even if I was wrong to say it about Nights of Cabiria, I know I’m right here: the spirit is simply that movies are dreams, life is a dream, we’re all on the ship and the ship sails on.

The flavor is sort of like Terry Gilliam meets Proust.

Or maybe David Lynch. And there’s some Chaplin and Marx Brothers thrown in. Plus at times it feels like you’re watching a movie about the Titanic. And/or an opera.

Pina Bausch is in it, not dancing. Barbara Jefford is in it, whom I was able to place (before the movie ended!) as Molly Bloom from the Ulysses movie. Odd that I quoted her in the last entry. The main narrator guy is played by Freddie Jones, who is apparently the father of Toby Jones.

One of the characters has clearly been intentionally made to resemble this painting.

I went online to read stuff people said about this movie but anyone who has anything to say other than that it’s underrated and a lovely piece of art seems mostly wrong to me. And I don’t want anyone to take away the half-asleep magic sympathy I felt for this movie so I stopped reading. Once I’ve posted this I probably won’t be able to help myself but read some more, though. I would watch this again someday.

Several of the lead actors are English-speaking only and had to be dubbed into Italian. The dubbing is very loose throughout, which serves to increase the dreamy effect and wasn’t a problem for me. But apparently (according to scattered comments online) the so-called “English dub” of the movie, as shown back in 1984 in the UK and apparently later on cable a few times, included the original audio in the actors’ real voices, and those who have seen it consider it the preferred version of the film. Criterion does not include this and I’m not sure it’s available anywhere. Criterion doesn’t include much of anything. Interestingly, since this release, they haven’t ventured to extend their catalog to include any of the other “obscure” Fellini items, even though this seems like ripe territory for “rediscovery.” Certainly for “repackaging.”

(Speaking of Criterion and its releases: hey, this is the 50th that I’ve watched! I’m going to do a little pointless celebrating of my grand achievement here, but not until after the 51st, for a dumb reason that I’ll explain when I get there.)

The music was done by one Gianfranco Plenizio (Nino Rota died in 1979). It’s almost entirely arrangements of familiar classical music (and a couple of “folk” items that I assume are at least partially traditional). The showpieces are two opera scenes, at the beginning and end of the voyage, sung by everyone on board, with new lyrics (including the title) set to bits of Verdi. But I couldn’t choose those because there are interfering sound effects and also I’m trying to avoid songs. The end credits are just Signor Plenizio playing “Clair de lune” with some odd editing, but it’s his own simple and dreamy take on it, and gives the flavor of the movie. So even though it’s not original music — in the strictest sense there is essentially none in the movie — this is what we’re going with. Track 50.

directed by Federico Fellini
screenplay by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli
additional dialogue by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Criterion #49. Nights of Cabiria.

This has all the hallmarks of “great film” status (“Great film” in the snooty international Cahiers du Film Studies sense, not the Academy Awards montage “Oh, Toto! Attaboy Clarence! I’m the king of the world! You’re a wizard, Harry!” sense):

1) auteurism, this being Fellini’s own script for a movie showcasing his wife, plus did I mention “Fellini”
2) intra-cinematic reference (to e.g. Charlie Chaplin)
3) meta-cinematic reference (a movie star and a magic show figure in Cabiria’s adventures)
4) opportunity to say “breaks the fourth wall”
5) black-and-white
6) not American
7) slow pace
8) centrist approach to satisfy partisans of naturalism (unglamorous people and places + an impression of unmanaged humanity) and romanticism (touches of magic realism + fabulist contrivances in the plotting)
9) already established as a “great film”
10) (is good)

I may sound cynical about this, but I’m not. I enjoyed the movie and wouldn’t want to strip it of its fame at all. I do sometimes want to strip halls of fame of their fame, though. And their halls.

Advocates of relatively marginalized art are usually too preoccupied by their marginalization to think straight. They want to do the public culture a service by trying to return good and worthwhile things to the light — as well they might, seeing as how much of what’s in the light at any given time is terrible. But they tend to go about it naively and ineffectually. They wish everyone else shared their tastes, but they don’t actually believe in manipulating people to bring that about — so they devote themselves to building shrines and halls of fame, and then polishing them brighter and brighter, rather than simply buying advertising space and insinuating themselves into people’s regular lives, which might actually do some good. Shrines and halls of fame are essentially defensive.

The people at The Criterion Collection, however — to their immense credit — actually do something quite genuinely constructive to rehabilitating great films with their Trojan Horse approach. They package! package! package! until their vacantly sexy product can attract the design-lust of the living, and then lo and behold some people are, they know not why, watching Nights of Cabiria again. Or, equally, something else. Obviously Trojan Horseplay places great responsibility on the curator. And thus by extension on the viewer. I could go on about Criterion and packaging and authenticity and my mixed feelings. Someday I will but it won’t be for a while.

Nights of Cabiria is about a good soul and whether she will be able to find kindness in the world. It is exactly a Charlie Chaplin movie, except that Chaplin was a very pure egomaniac and did not differentiate between the world being saved and the world learning to love him sufficiently. Fellini tries to work outside such illusions. Both this movie and nearly every Chaplin movie pose the same sentimental question: “Will this person be loved sufficiently?” But the philosophical extension of the question is different in the two cases. Chaplin egomaniacally implies that his film is asking “will the world ever be good and pure?” Fellini’s generalization is the more reasonable “will any person ever be loved sufficiently?” He is a less complete egomaniac and has at least some inkling that his audience is made up of individuals with their own problems.

This may sound dubiously psychoanalytic of me, but it’s explicitly what the second half of the movie is about. The pivot of the plot (such as it is) is that in a moment of spooky transcendence, Cabiria — outwardly already a lovable Little Tramp figure — is magically made to reveal her true purity and simplicity of soul in its complete nakedness. And after this moment of uncannily intense vulnerability, the audience is held in suspense about it for a very long time: has this been a good or a bad thing?

Well, to spoil the famous ending — I’m going to try not to be specific, but if you haven’t seen it you might want to do that rather than read this and the next paragraph — it is, of course, a mixed bag. The question left poignantly open at the end is how much the proportions of that mix matter.

The strength of art is to draw compelling philosophical equations where the rational mind would refuse them, and this is where the film earns its greatness, in my book. Fellini’s ultimate cinematic proposal is that there is a sense in which the proportions of pain and joy simply do not matter. There is kindness in life, and that is good; there is cruelty in life and that is bad. And he can put his finger on the bad side of the scale as heavily as he wants, and it is still in some sense balanced. In the art-sense of the film we feel the truth of this point of view, and the tears it draws are, I think, tears of recognition. Then the lights are immediately turned back on so that we can’t argue against any optimism but our own, because Fellini has already removed himself. This is a very sophisticated manipulation of the audience and a very generous one.

Incidentally: I want to be clear that my calling Chaplin a “very pure egomaniac” is not intended as a criticism. I think his movies (at least the famous Little Tramp ones — I haven’t seen any of the more transparently self-indulgent later ones) are wonderful as gifts to the ego in everyone, the part that says “I am pure, and all my problems arise from the world being impure.” As far as it goes, this is true and healthy and the movies let us experience the joy of that. The difficulty comes when we stop watching intuitively and emotionally, and start thinking critically about the man behind the curtain, as it were, the real guy wearing the fake moustache. Then we might realize that we aren’t so sure we like his self-aggrandizing manipulations. But that’s the fall from grace. In actuality we did like the manipulations. They are not harmful to us until we observe them.

A few minutes ago, I intended for this train of thought to stop at several further stations that I had in mind, but my mental slate just got wiped and one of those end-of-the-line barriers got set up. And something I’m learning is that straining to recall thoughts that have untimely vanished is about the most destructive thing I can do to my flow, so let’s just go on to the next thing.

(“Untimely” as adverb: some dictionaries say “archaic” but OED, and more surprisingly, Merriam-Webster, do not. Take that, readers.)

During viewing I thought: “perhaps the title Nights of Cabiria is meant to suggest that the successive episodes are her different dreams, reflecting and embodying her various fears and hopes and ambivalences, as real dreams do.” In part I thought this because I wasn’t yet clear on what level of realism vs. clown-show I was seeing. Later on, when I had grown comfortable with the style of the movie, I no longer needed this conceit to get me through, but it still worked. And afterward it still does. Maybe it only does because all movies are like dreams, or all art is like dreams, or all life is like dreams. But maybe it specifically does because Fellini had that in mind at some level, though I can’t find that documented anywhere. Anyway I’m putting it out there.

Nights of Cabiria seemed to me to be one of those works by male artists that says “women (my wife/girlfriend especially) and their souls and feelings are so wonderful and deep, which is to say that my eye for women and my awareness that they have souls and feelings is wonderful and deep, are you getting this, ladies? Check out my massive throbbing sensitivity to what you really are.” As Molly Bloom says: “yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is”. She says this because a man made her say it, in the course of his very flashy attempt to demonstrate that he could understand or feel what a woman is better than anyone.

This genre is of course generally associated with Woody Allen… but I personally think of Steve Martin as its most embarrassing practitioner, with screenplay after book after play showcasing his sensitive understanding of the real literature-worthy feelings of women who, y’know, happen to be his type. Am I the only person who thought of this as horribly transparently no more than the output of an ingrained denialist compulsion to convert idle sex fantasies about hot girls into “real” “consideration” of their “particular inner lives”? I mean, look at the damn cover! And of course Steve Martin played the “guy in the me-Steve-Martin role in this sex fantasy” in the movie. (I admit, I didn’t read it or see the movie. I did read one of his later books. As I recall it too had a hot girl with a lot of inner sadness in it.)

I’m not saying that the thought “hey, I’m objectifying that person, but I don’t want to be like that: let me try to think more fully and empathetically about them” can’t ever yield fruit. I’m also not saying that the thought “hey, I’m objectifying that person and I love what I’m seeing and I’m going to write it down as art” is problematic. But I do squirm at the bad faith of “I agree that objectifying someone is insufficient but don’t worry, this can’t possibly be objectification because it has feelings in it. Look where I say that ‘she sighed with loneliness when men would ogle her long, toned legs.’ Look where I say that ‘her tasteful miniskirt kept riding up uncomfortably over her girlish, too-skinny thighs!'” If we’re reading about people as people and not people as bodies, why the obsession with appearances?

Though Steve Martin has walked the walk, in that particular respect, by descending into some kind of sad facelift spiral, so what do I know.

I guess all I’m really saying is that “depth” can also be an object, “sincerity” can be a fashion, and “sensitivity” can be a ploy. I would never hurt you, girl. (Aw shit you’ve just been v=dQw4w9WgXcQ‎’ed!) And I get uncomfortable during “Girlfriends: so full of human depth!” movies because some part of me feels like I’m being very slowly v=dQw4w9WgXcQ‎’ed.

Related: I have always been very nervous about attempting to write fiction about fictional people — and not just the hot ones — because I fear that all my “imaginative empathy” will just sound like Steve Martin’s writing: like someone who desperately needs to believe that he is sensitive, far more than he actually is sensitive. What causes that effect? Overthinking, and if you’re asking about it, it’s already too late. Damn! Try again later.

ANYWAY, let’s go back to Woody Allen, who like I said is a more common point of reference for the “dig me digging my girlfriend” genre. Maybe I’ve just got Woody Allen on the brain because Nicholas Kristof recently ran this provocative piece asking everyone what their favorite Woody Allen movie is — it’s been a while but I think mine may still be Love and Death. Thanks, New York Times, this was fun! — but Nights of Cabiria seemed to me like the ideal “why my girlfriend is cool” movie Woody has been trying to make for years. When I saw Amarcord I also got a strong sense of the extent of Woody’s debt to Fellini. Confirmed: it is a large extent.

In Fellini’s defense on this count, if a defense is needed: what Giulietta Masina is doing here is real performance, not just a kind of relaxed self-exposure a la Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (which, to be clear, I like). But, as some pretentious clowning instructor (or for that matter Charlie Chaplin) might say: the essence of clowning is truth — real, if stylized, self-exposure — and of course what charms and endears us about Cabiria is her aura of humanity and spirit, not her specific “persona,” and that cannot be falsified out of whole cloth. (I know it is theoretically a big deal that this is a movie about a prostitute, but she’s only as much a prostitute as The Little Tramp is homeless, which is to say only slightly more than Donald Duck is a duck.) It is a movie meant to win Giulietta Masina awards for being lovably wonderful, as it did.

Again the train hits a barrier and wonders where it could possibly have been going. I swear it was somewhere else. But look at that beautiful expanse of uninhabited snow out there, with no tracks to be seen. Let’s get out of here.

Nino Rota is really very very good at what he does. His thing might seem limited and repetitive — if you listen to a “Best of Nino Rota’s Movie Music” album you might well feel that you’re just listening to a single cohesive album — but is actually exquisitely nuanced. The Amarcord theme and the Notti di Cabiria theme may sound like very similarly catchy little sentimental tunes in basically the same popular style, but if they swapped movies they wouldn’t work at all. The poignancy of one is not the same as the poignancy of the other: it’s a slightly different station at a slightly different volume at a slightly different time of day. In both cases the whole meaning of the film depends on the music, and he manages to get it exactly right.

Having on a few occasions been in or near the trenches when such musical choices are being hammered out, I know that this aspect of dramatic composing, getting the meaning exactly exactly right, is the subtlest and most important. John Williams used to say in interviews that the hardest part was getting the little motives on which the whole score was based to be exactly what they needed to be as signifiers, and that in more than one instance he had to work through many tens of almost-identical variants of the same few notes, trying to sniff out the right one. (Having them go on to be megafamous was surely vindicating. I think in the confidence of old age he may no longer spend quite as long as he might.) Nino Rota clearly had a special knack where he could get the dimension of meaning just right, and then execute it with such nonchalance that it would sound genuinely effortless, like it might just be a pre-existing track. I don’t know if he had to work at it or if it just came to him.

At the very end of this film, when the orchestra emerges in full force to bring down the curtain, we can’t help but notice that the score has known exactly what it was doing all along and has earned the feeling we’re feeling. It’s a very smart score that turns what might otherwise seem like a small and erratic movie into something cohesive and strong and moving. Here are the main titles: Track 49. (The themes that are “popular” here later appear arranged as “classical”; the themes that are “classical” here later appear arranged as “popular”.)

directed by Marcel Camus
screenplay by Jacques Viot
inspired by the play Orfeu da Conceição by Vinicius de Moraes (1954)
adaptation and dialogue by Jacques Viot and Marcel Camus

Criterion #48: Black Orpheus. In Portuguese, shot in Brazil, directed and produced by Frenchmen and considered a French film.

If you don’t know what this is, you can go to the Criterion site and press play to watch the preview. It gives a good sense.

I think the aspect of “blogging” that is most artificial to me — and accordingly the least fluid element of my writing — is form. Thoughts are not the same thing as a cohesive essay. In grooming the former to pass as the latter (like Henry Higgins), I feel that I am wasting my time and mental energy on fakery. Fakery ought not to be any part of this. If I wrote in drafts, on a second pass I would no doubt be inspired to impose some form of my own invention, but I really want to do these in one shot. That’s the nature of the exercise. And in one shot I’m not going to be thinking formally, because, as I said, thinking isn’t inherently formal. Mine isn’t, anyway.

Furthermore I’m a bit skeptical about the ideal of the “cohesive whole”; I think it’s overemphasized generally. I’m going to make an effort to remain more authentic to my inner parataxis. (Yeah that’s right, parataxis.)

I make and fail this pledge pretty regularly.

On occasion here I have criticized works of art for not living up to an idealistic standard: that they should aim to be of spiritual/emotional/psychological benefit to their audience. This movie decidedly meets the standard. It is joyous and vibrant and celebrates life as being full of color and feeling.

Everything else about it is secondary. The mythological scheme that’s supposed to impart epic significance is actually completely gratuitous. Color and light and music already impart all the epic significance needed; that’s how movies work. (Color and light and music plus the freedom to stare at people’s faces with impunity.) In fact, in every respect other than vibrancy, this movie is pretty flimsy stuff. But that’s no criticism at all.

Actually, for me the value of the Greek overlay flowed the other way; the ecstatic immediacy of the movie’s fabric of music and dance and festivity gave me a new sense of what myth is.

Recently watching Fishing With John and a while ago watching Shock Corridor, I thought about the distinction between private home movies and creative work for public consumption, because in both of those cases that distinction was partially erased, to unusual effect. The spirit of Black Orpheus is also closely related to the spirit of private vacation footage, but in the more familiar mode of travelogue: here are some of the stimulating sights and sounds of X locale.

Perhaps it seems that what mainly distinguishes something like To Catch a Thief from your grandparents’ home movies of their trip to Europe is budget and camera skill, or degree of fiction. But what really makes the difference, I think, is the outlook that governs the photography (and is thus embedded in the film). The thing about To Catch a Thief‘s traveloguing that makes it unlike home movies is not the fiction per se but the fact that its camera’s-eye-view of the Riveria is commercially calculated and thus impersonal. Whereas any home movie is through-and-through an expression of its maker’s particular spontaneous sense of the world.

And this sense of the world is not diametrically opposite to fiction; on the contrary, many people — me and John Lurie included — have, in the act of capturing a stimulating “real” travel experience, been aware that their spirit of present wonder is already closely proximate to fantasy and figured “why not add some fiction to this?” Make-believe seems to have an organic place within that kind of joy-in-where-you-are.

All home movies are already a kind of make-believe, a nourishing kind based in the deep interpenetration of the imagination into one’s happiness. (It sounds like I am doing an impression of Gaston Bachelard, but it just came out that way.)

In fact you could say that vacations, even before you film them, are already a form of narrative fantasy. (Come to think of it I think that was the subject of a pretty good literature lecture I heard in college.) The use of a camera is in this sense just a way of giving perceptible form to the imaginative world in which one is already living. Which sounds to me like a definition of the function of art. So I see this overlap of the private/documentary and public/drama impulses as basically good and healthy.

Black Orpheus is overtly rooted in the joyful self-mythologizing impulse of the tourist, but it also encompasses classical myth. And then within its fictionalized travelogue of Rio’s Carnival (itself already a ritual of fantasy) it includes footage of an apparently real Umbanda ceremony, which, intercut with the actors, is made to serve as part of the fictional mythological story. This stew of reality and fiction was touching and stimulating; it revealed to me that religion, superstition, narrative, myth, exoticism, tourism, and self-image are all part of the same lump of imaginative feeling. And that this lump is none other than the same source that gives meaning to dance and music, a well of feeling with which we are all intimately familiar. (If Bachelard had written a book on travel I imagine he would have expressed this, but better.)

In the Disney conversation about Saludos Amigos, I said — yes that’s right, the authorial voice of these solo entries is the same BROOM who participated in the Disney discussions! — that I was pleased by the idea that a frothy travelogue could serve a propagandist political function. I find the very notion of the government adopting a Good Neighbor Policy heartwarming and politically attractive. It is the most honorable possible mode of leverage for the political manipulation of the public, and a grossly underused one: trying to make people happy about things that it would benefit their government (and the world at large) for them to be happy about.

All such policy is now of course utterly utterly defunct. I suppose presidential campaigns do a little of that sort of propaganda of positivity, but with such transparent ulterior motives and on such a petty scale that in the long term it only increases public cynicism. I’m talking about long-term subtle propaganda campaigns to get Americans to, say, think of the middle east as a fabled land of natural wonders and cultural glories. And of course vice versa, to send Pato Donald over there with a few benign skits to introduce our Iranian friends to the mystique of the Grand Canyon and the Space Needle, or whatever. It’s a piece of the international cultural landscape that is painfully lacking.

Probably Disney (for one) has been approached with this sort of proposal in the last 50 years but said “no way,” because the risk of being seen as government pawns, or even just meddling in foreign policy on their own dime, is far too toxic for the shareholders in this day and age. Understandable.

I bring up politics at all only reluctantly. This film could be taken as a Good Neighborly fantasy (not that the French filmmakers are exactly neighbors to Brazil, but we’re all planetary neighbors, right?), or it could remain just a human fantasy, which is all that is actually captured on the film, and is what a good vacation is. (At least in my mind. Politics are abstractions but the blue of the sky and the good warm air are not.)

But. I bring this up because the DVD (and apparently the discourse at large about this movie) is full of another way of “politicizing” it, which really irks me. Basically the gist is: this is a movie set in the favelas, the slums of Rio, which are in reality no bossa nova love poem but a vast nightmare of poverty and crime and hopelessness. If you saw City of God you can understand that the lyrical vacation fantasy of this movie is to say the least highly inaccurate, even for 1959. The critique writes itself, right? Naturally, this movie is irresponsible, offensive, whitewashes a serious issue, tells unconscionable and condescending lies about Brazil and blackness for the amusement of foreigners, blah blah blah. It is a Song of the South of Rio. (My summary of the criticism; nobody actually says that in so many words.)

Now, to be clear, everyone on the disc who brings up this point of view then dismisses it. The film, they essentially say, is an outsider’s exoticist distortion of Brazil, but a forgivable one, especially in light of what it did to promote real Brazilian music (see below). But I say that even in entertaining the criticism in the first place, we hurt ourselves. This film does not require forgiveness. The impression given by the people in the documentaries and such — essentially all of whom like the movie! — is that liking the movie may be a kind of error, but they have made peace with the error. That makes me mad. Either it’s an error or it’s not, and if it’s not an error, why are you all talking about it?

The critique is senseless to begin with. It is based on a guilt that has no political source and no political end. Of course this movie is a lyrical fantasy. It could not be more explicit about it. That it derives from a tourist’s exoticist raptures does not actually complicate that; all fantasy is exoticism and all rapture is irrational and inexact. Being angry about this is like being angry that back in Nagasaki the fellers do not chew tobaccy and the women do not wicky-wacky woo, because that was always racist and inaccurate and furthermore the fellers and women were all later incinerated and the song is thus in poor taste. The bonus features here keep returning to the angle that “well, yes, but the song remains catchy nonetheless.” There is no nonetheless. The bomb has no bearing on the catchiness, period.

The most hateful thing that politicization does is deny that there is any such thing as politicization. “Everything is already inherently political; it’s for us to come to terms with that.” This is vile sophistry. Nothing is inherently anything. The power to choose one’s perspective is equally the responsibility of those who choose the perspective of pooping at parties.

This perspective requires vigorous defense instead of the implicit free pass it is constantly given, because despite its obvious good intentions, it is truly unclear what good it actually does, whereas it is very clear what ill it does: it puts everyone on a defensive footing about everything. And then that gets put in the bonus materials on my DVDs and brings me down from a state of general dreamy transport into a state of rationalization and qualification.

Here’s my defense of my position: I believe that people naturally do good to one another when they have 1) freedom to choose their actions and 2) a feeling of unthreatened well-being. The scolding guilt of moral obligation can only diminish both of these prerequisites. Going to a happy party makes people more likely to do good afterward; being told “enjoy your party but just don’t forget to keep in mind that you are always, passively or indirectly, the cause of suffering in others, and that the greater your pleasure, the more shameful your sin” only makes that less likely to happen. Plus it’s blatantly untrue. Suffering that occurs simultaneously with pleasure is not caused by it. The starving people in China very truly do not care whether you finish your broccoli. Morality is paratactic, not hypotactic. You heard me! Take that!

After reading this you might ask, “Well, what about Song of the South then? Are you really okay with that?” To which I say, testily, “I don’t understand the question.” Am I okay with the movie having been made? Sure. Am I okay with people being so offended by it that they wanted it taken out of circulation? Sure. Am I okay with the distributor complying? Sure. But: am I also okay with people not being offended by it? Yes. I am okay with myself not being offended by it. If it weren’t so boring I might even enjoy it. (Song of the South, that is. Black Orpheus I did enjoy.)

What I am not okay with is people being not okay with me not being offended by it. I don’t think their claim that such censure serves a philanthropic purpose holds any water. This is the thrust of my argument.

However, my being “not okay” with censorious zeal is only another spiritual hurdle for me to go over (or is it under?). The more okay with such people I can be, the better my life will feel. I’m in the process of inching under.

In brief: Intolerance of error is not equivalent to, nor nearly as valuable as, love of truth. The former is frequently counterproductive, the latter never.

This movie was made with real love of a form of truth. Any “errors” bob harmlessly in the wake of that forward impulse.

Furthermore I declare that: Marcel Camus is neither the same person as, nor any documented relation to, Albert Camus.

Boy, I really didn’t say much about Orfeu negro but it just worked out that way. I’m allowed.

It’s pretty like a postcard. Haven’t you ever wanted to live and love in a postcard? Well, I have.

It’s actually remarkably like a live-action version of one of the Disney good neighbor movies. Which is the sequence where the buildings all dance along? (I think it’s “Os Quindins de Yayá”.) That spirit is exactly captured in the opening scenes here.

It also goes on a bit. As a kid I would have found it terrifically dull and disingenuous. I would have felt that I was being pandered to with supposed “beautiful people” and their supposed “beautiful story,” just another bout of flaccid cultural fawning, all endless dance sequences and no real bones to it. But I am old and mellow enough now to know that not all dullness is an error and not all faux-naivete is hypocritical or pandering. The goodwill and good color carried me happily through.

Hey, don’t blame me, I’m just a guitar.

I had intended to link to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infamous Carnival in Rio video somewhere in this entry as a joke, but I just watched the clip (for the first time in years) and it made me feel so uncomfortable that I can’t in good conscience impose that on you.

The music is the glory of the movie. The best bonus feature is two guys who know what they’re talking about explaining what bossa nova is and isn’t, where things stood when this movie came out, and tracing Jobim and Gilberto’s path through this movie’s soundtrack and beyond. I wish that feature had been longer. The worst bonus feature is a full-length French documentary where they go to Rio “in search of” the movie today, with nothing particular to say and a lot of boring footage to say it in, cut together very badly. I’ll admit that as I type this I still haven’t watched the last 20 minutes of it, but I promise will before I click “publish”!

Anyway, the music is almost constant in one form or another, and is overtly the soul of what the movie has to offer. The atmosphere of the middle section of the movie almost exactly the same as that of bossa nova: i.e. waking in a warm breezy beach house. There is also some genial raucousness for scenes of the eager crowds, and of course a couple of more intimate mellow-voiced love songs. It’s all buoyant and evocative; it’s no surprise that the soundtrack was a big seller and sparked the bossa nova craze.

There is a main title song (Jobim’s “A felicidade”) but there are sound effects all over it. Then in the middle there’s “Manhã de Carnaval” by Luis Bonfá, which is generally thought of as the breakout hit from the score and accordingly gets called simply “Black Orpheus” on a lot of jazz albums. But if you’ve seen the movie you’ll probably agree that the selection has to be the wonderful finale, the “Samba de Orfeu,” also by Bonfá. The ecstatic poignancy of the ending, with the children’s voices, has been widely imitated and for good reason. It’s not quite the same without the visual but it’s still very charming. Track 48.

Okay, I watched the rest of that pointless documentary. If I’d been the Criterion producer I would have tried to extract only the brief bits of interviews with the original cast and crew, which are probably no more than 10 minutes. Seeing the guy who played Orfeu in 2005, bald and overweight but still with a great smile, is obviously a desirable bonus feature. (He has since died.) I wonder if they tried to do that and the filmmakers said “we will only give you permission to include the film intact.” Because as a whole it’s really not up to snuff, certainly not up to 88 minutes of snuff.

directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg
written by Nikolaj Frobenius and Erik Skjoldbjærg

Criterion #47.

This is a Norwegian movie but unfortunately I don’t get to play with Google Translate because it’s already called Insomnia (instead of, say, Søvnløshet, thanks Google Translate!). Probably this was done with an eye to the international market. Perhaps it’s also a case of the Diabolique effect, where a foreign-y name makes something feel even more dangerous and fantastico.

The movie takes the standard setup of moral-slippage noir (i.e. the detective/hero himself does very bad things) and gives it a nice jangly quality by associating it with sleep deprivation (which he suffers under the endless daylight above the Arctic Circle). In most such movies, alcohol or drugs serve the same function, but this is better: insomnia is ostensibly involuntary, a form of natural friction against the world, and thus makes it harder for the audience to blame the protagonist for his plight. We are denied any easy way to stop identifying with his increasingly dissociative immorality, and are forced to slog through it all with him, queasily. That form of guilty queasiness is the point of this subgenre. Of course, just seeing any movie where the protagonist breaks the moral code is already automatically queasy, but for the distinctly rancid flavor of noir, the film must be clear that its point of view is not clucking disapproval; it can’t afford to be because there are even worse monsters out there. As there are in this movie.

You can say something about how setting “noir” in excessive light rather than excessive shadow is some kind of provocative inversion, and I don’t doubt that that was part of the conception of the script, but speaking as an audience member, that feels a little pat and overstated to me. I never insisted on those shadows; people just kept putting them there. There have been fatalistic movies with bright lighting for years. The thing to note here is not that “noir means black but this movie is not black!!!” but rather that the beauty-slash-insinuating-hostility of the far north has been cleverly made to serve an alienating role just as well as the beauty-slash-insinuating-hostility of the city. There’s a version of this movie to be made in every setting. And I will want to see it! I generally like any movie that finds a way to reveal how scary and unwelcoming some particular locale already is. The suburbs, the forest, the desert, the hospital, the ruins, the library, whatever.

(Twin Peaks takes nearly the same premise and the same characters and the same setting — you will think of it while watching this — but then uses all the implicit emotional leverage to go no place in particular. Which is part of its charm: it has all the pieces in place to show us that the world is terrifying and hostile, but like real dreams, instead it shows us all our different feelings: scary, stupid, confused, and soothing, all muddled together. This movie, by contrast, goes on a murder investigation in the north with a real single-minded purpose. The character’s mind is drifting but the movie is wide awake.)

Mr. Skjoldbjærg understands how all his genre concepts are supposed to work and has everything pretty well in hand. I would say that’s what I enjoyed most here: the sense that someone intelligent had thought through all the stuff under the surface that makes these movies go, and that I could just focus on what was there. (I recently rewatched Blood Simple, with which this has a couple of secondary genre features in common, and felt the same way: its greatest strength is that it knows why it’s doing these things.) What’s there in Insomnia is sometimes a little ordinary or a little stilted, but fundamentally it’s reliable.

When I watched this, as it turned out, I wasn’t quite in that playful mood where one can really relish rancidity, but it was done well enough that I wasn’t put off it. I can always make good use of the clean whites and simple self-assurances of European thrillers. This felt a little like some imported TV a la “The Killing.” Good bleak fun, if a little emotionally cool, and sometimes that cool is as pleasant for me as it obviously is for Europeans.

I think that’s about all there is to say. It’s a 1997 neo-noir crime movie with some mild arthouse crossover potential because it’s foreign and its touches of personality feel distinctly un-Hollywood. But they’re just touches. This is the kind of secretly-completely-commercial movie arthouse cinemas make their money off of.

Hey speaking of Hollywood, how would you like to see this movie done right, if you know what I mean. I mean AMERICAN for crying out loud, 2002-style! Where instead of Stellan Skarsgård we get, say, Al Pacino (it’s still only 2002 so don’t worry, he promises he will do at least 5% of the necessary work to differentiate the character from “Al Pacino”); and as the other cop, obviously America’s 2002 platonic semi-sweetheart Hilary Swank; and as the creep, get this: Robin Williams! His agent’s been telling him he’s got an image problem from all that saccharine and needs to play some villain roles ASAP. And the guy who did Memento can direct, since that was sort of the American equivalent movie. Except now this will be the American equivalent movie. It will be so equivalent that it will be called Insomnia (2002). And it will be exactly the same. Except in Alaska. And except that where the original felt like it had a certain hungry-young-director’s-original-idea fire behind it, this will feel like it has some rising-young-director-trying-to-live-up-to-expectations-with-a-bigger-budget can’t-afford-to-risk-a-fire behind it.

I saw it at the time, not really taking in that it was a remake. It made a middle-of-the-road impression and then I forgot pretty much everything about it other than the title’s premise.

Skjoldbjærg, upon seeing what had been done to his movie, was apparently surprised at how literal a remake it was. He made a public statement about being grateful that it had been done so conscientiously, but I have to wonder if he wasn’t actually disappointed. For this they had to make it again?

After watching the original I watched a few clips of the remake on youtube. Comparing this (link will surely be taken down soon! turn on English subtitles) to this made me reflect on all the needless fat and indulgence of the American standard practice, at least of this era. They write lines that might be said, they get coverage of what they might need to see, and then they edit it (particularly badly in this case). All the technical craft (yes, sure, even of the acting) is admirable in itself, and yet why? Why is anyone doing this? In the Scandinavian original I get the sense that the creatives and the crew may not be quite as expert but I have no doubt that they have a real clear sense of purpose, logic, rationale, meaning. By comparison there is something psychologically masked and avoidant about the Americans, both in front of and behind the camera. Our priorities are more profoundly compromised.

Music is by Geir Jenssen. Who? Oh, sorry, you surely know him as ambient electronica artist Biosphere (redirected from Geir Jenssen). He lays down some of that signature Biosphere sound, which I guess is sort of like underwater dial tones. And underwater heartbeats. Generally the score is quiet synthetic soundscaping, just at the very edge of what one would consider music rather than sound design. It’s effective and appropriate to the tone, but also kind of arty in its subtle way, and is one of the things that helps keep the movie feeling European enough for the arthouse.

Our selection has to be the end credits, the only place where the score really goes for it and has an ordinary beat, like humans use. Some listeners might feel that this track kind of puts the Euro thing over the top, but don’t worry, by the time you hear this the movie is already over. Actually I think it’s pretty good for what it is; the icky disco of it feels about right for the sleep-deprived moral moonscape where things end. Track 47. Warning: this begins with the trunk slamming shut.

directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel
screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman
from the story by Richard Connell

Criterion #46. Moving right along.

Check out this list of the Top Ten Most Dangerous Games Ever: you won’t believe what’s at number one!

We all already know the deal with the story. The deal with the movie is that it is a companion piece to King Kong, made by some of the same people with some of the same actors on some of the same sets at some of the same time. But this came out first, as of course it had to, seeing as it’s much dinkier.

This is like a 63-minute pulp cover illustration. Hold on to that dagger and that woman in tattered clothes! Keep holding on! Just a little longer!

Why is there a woman in a brutal man-on-man story like The Most Dangerous Game? I think you know why. The funny thing is that they easily get away with it. I was struck by how readily any scenario could be converted into a sex fantasy. “It’s Moby Dick… but there’s this girl there…”

Fay Wray is in full “can’t-help-it-I’m-just-drawn-this-way” Marilyn Monroe mode here, faux-cluelessly offering herself up in ways that seemingly have nothing to do with the Thrilling Tales business going on around her. But the movie knows what’s really going on, and it’s a little skeevy. Count Zoloft doesn’t just want to hunt the most dangerous game; he wants to hunt the most dangerous game, AND THEN AFTER HE HAS KILLED, “LOVE,” which is why Fay has to flee into the jungle alongside Joel McCrea and get her dress all wet oops.

The classic heartwarming image of a nubile beauty being carried off to be raped by a muscular beast appears here on the wicked Count’s tapestry (+ shock chord from Max Steiner!) as well as carved into his door-knocker, see title screen above. The same image at its most iconic and extreme of course forms the centerpiece of King Kong, wherein the logistics of rape per se have been transcended, in pursuit of whatever is really driving Merian C. Cooper and friends.

(Personally, my one gripe about King Kong has always been that the ape-to-girl size ratio ought to have been just a little bigger. I suspect that my kindred spirits Messrs. Cooper and Schoedsack were secretly of the same mind. Hopefully if they ever remake it again, this time there will be a scene toward the end where the ape eats a magic berry that makes him get four or five times larger, and at the same time the girl goes through a miniaturizing ray. In the interest of promoting discussion of this and related matters I have purchased the domain www.apetogirlratioforums.net, where a respectful community of like-minded enthusiasts can share speculative fiction and Photoshop work. Message me for an invite.)

Okay, I’ll be honest: I’m not really skeeved at all. This is all perfectly cozy stuff. It’s actually sort of heartwarming to me that something as nakedly pervy as King Kong is an international treasure without a smidge of shame associated with it. Pulp fantasies of virility like those on show here never really threaten me; I picture a confused Norman Rockwell kid with glasses thumbing through a comic book, eyes wide. I guess I could picture Nazis but I don’t and really why should I? If you’re female, your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Anyway I’m not interested in doing a real analysis of the ideas of masculinity or post-colonialism or Americanness or sex or whatever here. I only am interested in being goofy and meeting my quota of one (1) entry on this movie. So far so good.

This movie reminds me of the world of my grandfather. I remember, once when I was 8 or so, hearing my grandfather make reference to Mighty Joe Young — thereby teaching me that there was more than one giant gorilla movie — and in that moment being struck that he came from, and still mentally lived in, a world that was just irredeemably grandfathery, the same world from whence came the endless stacks of National Geographics that used to be ubiquitous under coffee tables the world over. “Mighty Joe Young,” seriously? And “Gunga Din”? Why did everything “exciting” have to sound so cornily stupid and pseudo-ethnic back then, and why couldn’t people like him hear how it sounded? But that sincere dedication to adventure-corn was also heartening, the way all grandparental things eventually are. I ended up permanently borrowing “Kon Tiki” and “Aku Aku” from his bookshelf, recognizing that such a world might actually be a nice place to spend some mental time. And so, at several removes, the problematic legacy of Rudyard Kipling lives on. Like I said, I’m not interested in coming up with a cogent critique here; just making some personal associations.

The fog in this movie is grade-A fog. In a movie like this that’s important. Ditto the foliage. The shot when a rock falls into a chasm (you know, to help you imagine a person falling in) is a grade-A rock-falling-in-a-chasm shot. The heavy door that mysteriously swings open to the mysterious fortress is a grade-A heavy door. There’s a pretty good point-of-view shot of running through the jungle. When the Count says that he will “take care” of his guest, and Fay looks back at him, there’s a wild crane-zoom all the way across the room into his madman face (with whooshing music to match), which is — well, a little bumpy, but the enthusiasm more than makes up for it. When the ship crashes there’s a satisfyingly prolonged explosion. This-all is what we’re here for, and they deliver. That and a girl.

One thing I would have liked… oh forget it. Seriously, forget it. I am perfectly happy with what I got. Service 5, Food 5, Would come again. (I don’t actually have to come again. It’s just nice to be nice on the survey. They work so hard, you know.)

Watching a movie like this is like eating an egg-salad sandwich. I like an egg-salad sandwich sometimes.

(Yes, I know Pee-Wee Herman put a gag about hating egg-salad sandwiches in his second movie. I was offended by it.)

Max Steiner is the egg-salad sandwich of composers. He sure did know how to make any movie sound, and thus feel, like every other movie. That’s undoubtedly a very valuable skill for a studio to have on staff but I’m not sure it’s exactly an artistic skill. If it weren’t for his totally by-the-books score, this would probably seem more overtly like a B-movie with a few fancy effects. With the music it seems like another certified bauble from the bauble factory, one more red ball that came rolling down the line into the machine that drops a cherry on your sundae.

As far as I could tell, there’s really only one theme in the movie, a simple “ominous” motif based on a hunting call that’s played over and over and clearly meant to signify the Count and his dangerous clutches. The most delightful thing about this score and possibly about this movie is that Count Zaroff is — in addition to being a Count, a Russian, a recluse, a refined host, and a madman — a pianist, with a nice grand piano in his fortress. In the final scene of the movie, having returned from (he thinks) killing our hero, with Fay Wray captive in his rooms, we suddenly cut to him in a robe at his piano, having put off rape to first play “Count Zaroff’s theme” in the finest hotel-lobby manner.

As you can hear, that gets cut off by… uh, action. He actually plays a complete arrangement earlier in the movie, but under a dialogue scene. If I were comfortable with including dialogue scenes, I would of course make this our selection.

But, with some reluctance, I think the only proper representative of the score has to be the standard, the main title, which in classic Steiner sandwich style only gives us a few bars of the big theme before settling into some certified bland scene-setting music for the ship on which our story begins (+ nautical bell). The most interesting thing here is the pre-title lead-in, with an onscreen hand grabbing the door knocker by the maiden and giving three good audible knocks, one for each sundae. Track 46. The hand represents the audience, of course, seeking entry to the world of danger. Your wish is granted!

I wrote all that before listening to the commentary because I was afraid that it might put serious thoughts in my head and spoil the spirit of the thing. Now I’ve listened.

Here’s something commentarian Bruce Eder mentions in passing:

The location shooting for The Four Feathers brought Cooper and Schoedsack to Africa. It was while they were shooting that Cooper had become fascinated with a colony of baboons living by a river, and this led him to start looking into stories he’d heard about a group of giant apes. It was an idea that hooked into a story he’d conceived in childhood of a giant ape carrying off a woman. Cooper discovered that the giant apes that he’d heard about were simply very large, not the outsize creatures he’d hoped for.

Italics mine, in accordance with the www.apetogirlratioforums.net style guide.

Basically the commentary is of the historical lore + mild thematic analysis sort, which suits me fine. It reminded me to acknowledge that for every egg salad sandwiches, there was a time before egg salad sandwiches; egg salad sandwiches needed to be invented. I grant everyone involved — screenwriter and composer especially — that this may well be one of the founding egg salad sandwiches of the modern sandwich era. It’s certainly a tighter and more commercial piece of pulp than its much-better-loved contemporary, Dracula, which has a little too much dry yolk, not enough mayo.

As far as the analysis goes, it’s fine: mostly to do with Zaroff’s place in the development of the archetype of the psychopathological villain. My mind still being fixated on the Molly Haskell idea about what forms of self-suppression are being endorsed by movies, I can’t help but see Zaroff’s libidinous and intellectual individuality vs. Rainsford’s all-American blandtastic nonentitude as part of a similarly lamentable scheme. The Merian C. Coopers in the audience, dreaming of their secret inner giant ape, are titillated, and then told no, it’s better to be a cipher in a nice shirt rather than the absolute monster you’d be if you went in that direction, you know the direction I mean. That’s the way to get the girl: be the nobody! It’s the noble thing — the only thing — to do.

Final cranky note: after I write these up I occasionally stop by the reasonably well-linked-to Criterion Contraption blog, where, from 2004 up until a couple years ago (when he sort of let it peter out around #115), a guy was taking this same trip. Roger Ebert wrote him up and he got attention from various other sources, I think including the Criterion website at one point. In this instance I happened to compare notes with him when I got to the horizontal line above, before listening to the commentary. I’ve always thought his take was a little low on personality, with its emphasis on screencaps, but only now has it become clear to me, with no small irritation, that 95% of what he writes is simply regurgitated insight from the auxiliary materials in the package. In this case, I read about this guy’s respect for the complexity of Zaroff’s psychology given the time period, the character’s relevance to future villains with particular reference to The Silence of the Lambs… and then found today that, lo and behold, this is all Bruce Eder’s analysis from the commentary, point for point. So is pretty much everything else in that “blog entry.” And, I realize, so has it been in many of his prior entries that I’ve read. Hey, that’s not cool!

Say what you will about what I write here, I am for sure making it all up.

Why do I give a crap about this guy? Well, yes, obviously in part for hey-what-about-me reasons (he gets hired to write film criticism for Slate now based on this schtick???) about which psychology trust me I don’t need any advice, I’m on it… but also for less embarrassing reasons relating from my ongoing irritation with the attitude of many of the commentaries and the whole apparatus around “talking about movies” in general. Plagiarism is a symptom of extreme anxiety which can be a dangerous contagion. Everyone making these mealy-mouthed commentaries is transparently trying to avoid the giant ape in the room which is why they love movies in the first place and is the really the main thing worth sharing. The problem is it’s often to do with, yes, their weird fetishes, vulnerabilities, whatever. Better to beat around the bush by talking about historical chains of influence, or better still, paraphrase someone else’s bush-beating. Well, I hate that. I want someone to tell me to look right directly at the cleavage, if that’s the point of the movie. That’s the only way to better my experience.

Whatever it may sound like, it is in fact the bravest possible thing when I can volunteer something like: the foliage in this movie is great and gives you a great make-believe-jungly feeling, like Maurice Sendak. That might be pretty weak stuff but I swear this is the direction I have to strive to go (with my machete). So I am pissed that Mr. Criterion Contraption got credit for his plagiarized pseudo-musings not solely because I envy credit, but because I want to live in a world where people aren’t so attracted to the reassurances that anxiety constructs to shield itself. But I’m not and I have to deal with that. I’m dealing with it.

That horizontal line keeps this part of the entry nicely quarantined from the cheery part above.

written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Criterion #45. Moving this along because it’s good to watch movies.

Iranian! Foreign language, foreign script! It’s been a while. Let’s dig into this.

First off, what is the name of this language? I thought it was correct to call it “Farsi,” but some investigation leads me to understand that for an English speaker like myself that would be needlessly affected, like calling German “Deutsch,” and that I should just call it “Persian,” which is all that “Farsi” means.

(And, for good measure: “Farsi” is actually only an Arabic modification of the original Persian word for Persian, “Parsi.” The political history is apparently such that nowadays Iranians generally call their language by its Arabic name, “Farsi,” with a kind of footnote “but the correct word is Parsi.” Anyway, the point is, that needn’t concern us in English.)

(P.S. And in case any of you dreadfully ignorant Americans need reminding, as I very very obviously do not and did not, Arabic (spoken in Iraq and westward) and Persian (spoken in Iran and eastward), are completely unrelated language groups, but after the Arab conquest of Persia in the 600s, Persian speakers adopted Arabic script, and thus modern Persian is written using a close variant of the Arabic alphabet. I pity your Western ignorance for needing to be spoonfed this very basic information about the world around you. For shame. I for one clearly had this all well, well in hand prior to googling it and reading Wikipedia.)

(P.P.S. But seriously: I think I would have basically gotten it right if asked nicely. But now that I’ve looked it up we’ll never know.)

So here is our title: طعم گيلاس …. If you copy and paste those letters and fiddle around with them you’ll see what fancy stuff your computer is ready to do with Arabic/Persian script. The letters automatically jump into right-to-left order when you link them up, and switch shapes on context (with different forms depending on whether a letter appears at the beginning, middle, end, or isolated). They feel a little sticky and alive and unpredictable. We Latin alphabet users don’t get to see that kind of magic in our ordinary typing. Savor it! And apparently the computer also knows something (though not everything) about what order to put the words in, because once it picked up on the Persian I had a heck of a time getting “(1997)” to show up to the RIGHT of the title. The cursor jumps around in weird ways when it thinks you want to go right-to-left for a while. Even just selecting the text is weird. Try it, it’s fun.

Obviously this font size is inappropriately small for Persian. Luckily, none of is are actually reading what it says.

Okay, okay, let’s get to it.

طعم = ta'm (the ' is a glottal stop, the first sound in “uh-oh”) = Taste
گيلاس = gīlās (the macrons just indicate long vowels) = Cherry

The romanization on Wikipedia is Ta'm-e gīlās…. The romanization on IMDB, which seems to have been distributed at the time of the film’s release, is Tam e guilass. (I speculate that the “gui” may be an artifact of its appearance at Cannes, where French speakers would have needed the “u” to make clear that this was a hard rather than a soft “g.” Yes?) As far as I can tell the “e” particle is just contextually implied.

So word for word this would be “Taste of Cherry” and this is indeed the English-distribution name of the movie. But as far as I can tell from google translate, written Persian doesn’t generally use articles or distinguish plurals, so “The Taste of Cherries” might be equally valid. It’s certainly more the implied title of the movie. (Subtitle for the relevant line of dialogue is actually “the taste of the cherries” — though I’m not sure the spoken phrase is identical to the title; I can pick out “gīlās” but not “ta'm”.) “Taste of Cherry” seems to me a bit needlessly gnomic and foreign-film-ish.

And this all ignores the ellipsis, which seems a rather significant feature of the title. “Taste of Cherry…” doesn’t really make any sense, since the phrase is semantically too abstract to sustain any sense of time. But “The Taste of Cherries…” is sensible enough. If a little cheesy. I don’t know what to google to find out whether ellipses indicating lapses into reverie are equally cheesy in all languages. But cheese isn’t my problem, it’s Kiarostami’s. I put it to you that the name of this movie is: The Taste of Cherries…

Now that’s overwith, we can finally get to the part where I say something about the part of the movie that isn’t the title.

First I will let Mr. Kiarostami say a few words on his tastes, taken from the disc’s sole bonus feature, an interview:

I don’t like to engage in telling stories. I don’t like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don’t like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. Those are the things I don’t like in the movies. I think a good film is one that has a lasting power. And you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand, there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don’t like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films that are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater… Some films have made me doze off in the theater. But the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kind of films I like.

I include this because it is a sort of manifesto for a certain kind of moviemaking, stated bluntly, and in a way, everything I have to say in response to this movie can be said in response to this, its rationale. (This allows the reader who has not seen the movie to engage more directly. You see? Very considerate of me.)

Though I guess such readers will need me to say outright: I thought Taste of Cherry (yeah, whatever) was indeed the sort of film he likes, the sort of film he wanted it to be. It is unapologetically slow and quiet and subdued. It introduces a situation revolving around isolation and the contemplation of suicide, and then lets the mood and meaning of that situation seep into the lyrical but simple imagery of a man driving around in a mostly barren Iranian landscape of grassless dirt. One is lulled, if not to sleep, at least to a peaceably bored calm. The muted grinding of tires on gravelly roads is as soothing and meaningless in a movie as in real life. It only took a few minutes for me to understand why it was going to be okay for a full-length movie just to consist of slowly driving around: for the same reasons that people enjoy actually slowly driving around.

And what are those reasons? I can’t help but return to the subject that has preoccupied me (to say the least) for the past year or two: the condition of being a brain, and the care and feeding of brains. (Or “minds,” if you prefer.) What kinds of things do minds like? One point of view would be that there are two distinct sorts of things, and Kiarostami lays out them out side by side in his quote above: one is to be stimulated, and one is to be unstimulated.

Another point of view takes a step back and says there is really only one thing that brains like: to be stimulated and unstimulated in equal measure. Balance. One can imagine some ideal median degree of stimulation, but in practice this is an impossibility and what one really aspires to is something like a well-modulated steady wave of stimulation alternating with unstimulation. My sense, in fact, is that the alternation is part of what brains like, just the way people enjoy swinging on a swingset more than they enjoy sitting at rest on a stationary swing.

When I was younger, my patience for “art movies” like this one was quite a bit shorter than it is now. I definitely had a good open mind about such things: I wasn’t particularly prejudiced, culturally, and I was certainly very much game to be transported into a meditative state if that was what a movie had to offer. But whenever it became apparent to me that a movie (or any sort of art) wasn’t going to prescribe anything in particular for me to do with my mind while watching — that I was under only very lax supervision by some kind of Montessori hippie movie — I would spontaneously feel that I had better things to do and think about. Encouraged to let my mind wander as I liked, I would accordingly do exactly that, and it would eagerly wander away from this lazy movie, toward things I cared about.

As I got older and more defensive, more intrinsically interested in picking apart the mysterious fallacies and hypocrisies of human society, the peculiarity of such movies would hold my attention even when the movie didn’t, and my wandering attention would drift outward, to think about the movie as an artifact, about the people who made it and were showing it, and about the dubious “artsy” attitude that had thought there was some virtue in confusing watching-a-movie with not-necessarily-watching-a-movie. I grew cynical: such films didn’t really want me to freely have my own thoughts; they wanted me to have the thoughts they intended, but they also wanted to congratulate themselves, and wanted me to congratulate myself, for my arriving at those thoughts freely, without coercion. Or rather, pretending in bad faith to arrive at them freely, while actually secretly following the filmmakers’ breadcrumb trails of high-intellectual clues, which generally led nowhere all that great: just to a big crumbling piece of stale bread. High art wanted to have its cake and eat it too: no prescribed experiences, but exceptional experiences nonetheless.

It seemed to me impossible for such art to justify its existence in preference to such superior unprescribed experiences as, say, looking at a tree, or looking at a kaleidoscope. Or looking at nothing and letting the mind wander. I can have all the rewarding thoughts I want with my eyes closed. So who needs authors if they’re not going to author an experience? Only god can make a tree so give me a freaking break, am I right? The Empire Strikes Back made more sense to me than the likes of Le grande illusion not because my mind was so dulled and stunted that I could only find enjoyment being strapped into a rollercoaster, but rather because my imagination was so free and strong that I could only recognize a rollercoaster as genuinely having determined or even demarcated my experience in any way worth naming.

And I still stand by the legitimacy of this point of view. When Kiarostami speaks derisively of movies that “take you hostage,” I find that unsympathetic and wrong. Being manipulated is one of the great pleasures in life; being stimulated is one of the two great pleasures of the mind.

But nowadays I also understand the sense behind movies that cater to the other great pleasure. I finally see the real purpose of all that Montessori art. They were not for people with unfettered imaginations. They are for people whose minds are already full, who have made a habit of overthinking, and for whom the “unstimulation” offered by a tree or a kaleidoscope is something — crazy as it sounds to a child — that has come to seem rare and precious to them. Since they can’t always see the world through their thoughts anymore, they desperately want to be offered the world directly, by other people, by artists. The target audience for a Taste of Cherry is people who go “ah!” when there is quiet because they have come to expect no quiet.

This is generally called “being an adult” but I resent that. People can use their minds however they choose at any age and the number of available trees to look at is the same for adults as for children.

I understand a “down-time” movie now much as I understand a “guided meditation,” which also would have baffled me as a child, as it should. There is something quite sad about having gotten to the point where one feels comfortable being oneself only when being guided to it by someone else. And this is what art films are. But the state of mind in which one is desperate to be granted the right to inattention by the thing you are compulsively paying attention to is very real. It is for this state of mind that such movies are designed to work, and having unfortunately attained that state of mind, I can attest that they do work, and are moving as such. At least this one was.

It also begins to make sense to me that such movies are often associated not just with the ambitions of high intellectuals but also with the political cinema of poor or oppressed populations. The mind that is constantly enmeshed in a struggle against overwhelming problems is a mind that will by force of habit not be able to help but fill in blanks, and thus will seek an art of as many blanks as possible, in the hope that at least some will manage to remain blessedly blank even after the mind gets a stab at it. I have come by my anxieties wholly apolitically, of course, but the principle is the same.

It’s tempting to say that I hope for the day when I will find these movies pointless again, when I’m no longer anxious enough to need to be fed boredom. But actually, in having come this far down the path of overstimulation and gotten to personally comprehend the value of naptime cinema, see what its deal is, I have divested myself of my old cynicism that art-house calm is affectation, or that what’s being asked of me is to fake freedom but actually follow the leader. And the cynicism was the only reason I didn’t like such movies. Without that cynicism they may well be no better than looking at a tree, but also no worse. And I like letting my mind wander. I am actually perfectly content to let my own imagination be the form and substance of my experience, and why shouldn’t that be part of the public culture of going to the movies? Or any other part of society?

In retrospect I do wonder now if my skepticism about Montessori attitudes was exactly the damage done to me by public school, was exactly the stunted Americanized attitude that it’s said to be. Undoing that sort of damage means realizing that I like being given free rein, in all things, including movies. Why not?

They are there for me to watch. When you put this disc in your DVD player you can see a golden-brown world of dirt. That sounds, like so many things, good. And even better: it is a world that wants to be seen, that was made to be seen. I don’t expect ever again to doubt the value of that. There will always be occasion for the gentle downswing of my mind’s stimulation cycle.

[In sum: there is nothing wrong with manipulative, hostage-taking, overstimulating movies. But there is something wrong with disdain for the opposite. The big cultural/socio-psychological problem is partisanship for one or the other. People like Kiarostami (as self-represented above) just contribute to polarization when we really need integration.]

Interestingly enough, when this movie first came out, Roger Ebert caused a stir by writing a one-star review, saying that he thought more or less what I gave as my childhood attitude, above. That the movie was an emperor with no clothes, pretending to profundity by being ostentatiously boring and empty and wasting the audience’s time. All points of view are subjective and thus legitimate and I’m sure in that moment it seemed that way to him. But I can’t imagine the post-surgery meaning-of-life waxing-blogosophical good-ol’ Unca’ Ebert of 10 years later being at all impatient or cynical about this film. He was all about letting his mind wander; he was all about the taste of cherries. Wake up and smell the taste of cherries. Life is just a bowl of the taste of cherries.

I enjoyed it, and I benefited from the time it gave me. I thought about what it was about, and about myself, and about the world. I was moved when it seemed to be moving more or less in synchrony with these thoughts, which was most of the time. It seemed in fact to be about… the issues above, the privations of thought and the relief of the unthought of the sensory world. (It is of course characteristic of the unstimulating art movie experience that whatever you are inclined to think about seems to be wahat it really is about. But in this case, y’know, I think it really was.) On the movie’s small, quiet scale, I felt a slow trickle of feelings of tension and apprehension, and nuances of real discomfort, comfort, hope, and hopelessness. Toward the end I realized that the steady trickle had accumulated a small but real quantity of feeling, and that the filmmaker might be playing a long game where he would end by suddenly flushing it, which might well make me well up or feel horror or joy or something. And after spending an hour-and-a-half in slow time, I was prepared for him to give me one meticulously prepared shove into bigger feelings.

Well, that’s not what he did. This movie ends with a high-concept coda, in which the possibility of cashing in the accumulated emotion is pointedly set aside, apparently on principle (again, see filmmaker statement above). Instead he shows us [spoiler redaction, if this is a spoiler, though maybe it shouldn’t be]. A lot of the discussion of this movie focuses on coming to terms with the anticlimactic jolt this gives the audience, and its possible significance. Certainly in the first few minutes after viewing that’s what was on my mind. But then I came to terms with it, and the terms are: it’s not really that important to the movie. If you’re suddenly startled by someone being near you because you were wrapped up in a book, it might take a while for your heart rate to come down, but hopefully it doesn’t take nearly as long for you to realize that what happened to you wasn’t actually very interesting. The ending isn’t really all that interesting.

There was no music at all (in one scene there was some very faint and scratchy music on a radio but completely under dialogue) and among my peaceful thought processes was “I wonder what I will do about the music selection; maybe I’ll just take some of the ambient driving sounds that make up so much of the soundtrack.” But then a-ha, at the very very end some music starts up and runs through the credits. It’s immediately recognizable as Louis Armstrong playing “St. James Infirmary Blues” (used without credit and, I wouldn’t be surprised, without paying for it), but something is odd. It seems to be two different performances being played simultaneously, or different parts of the same performance. The effect is a little eerie but, while watching the movie, pretty subtle. I’d say it was done to foil the copyright robots on Youtube except this was 10 years before anyone even considered being a tube.

At least some of it, I’ve determined, is from his 1959 studio recording on “Satchmo Plays King Oliver” (though from an “alternate take,” not released until 1979?), but it has been chopped up and shuffled around to skip the vocal. (Maybe the double-exposure effect is just done to help disguise all the splices?) And that 1959 recording ends on a high note, whereas this ends on a low note, so I can’t for the life of me figure out where the latter part of this track comes from. Nobody online has done this detective work and my patience ran out after a while.

Anyway, here you go, track 45. It starts under the last line of dialogue but it seemed better to get the beginning of the music than avoid the few seconds of talking. I faded in as a compromise.

Sometimes the faster I write the longer they get.

written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Criterion #44.

Not just any Red Shoes but The Red Shoes. My movie literacy has gone up one point.

I already said my bit about the reassuring embrace of Technicolor here, but this is obviously the better place for it. This is one of the most Technicolor movies ever made. The virtues and effects of this movie are exactly the virtues and effects of its palette; it is, like The Wizard of Oz or Fantasia, an incarnation of the spirit of Technicolor.

Much of that Technicolor worldview is nourishing to me, and makes me envy and admire the people of the past, whose heads were so naturally full of such simple, sturdy stuff. But those heads had other sorts of stuff in them too, older stuff, equally characteristic of their era but of no particular value to me. Some such stuff was in effect here. I refer in particular to operatic doom, which provides both the obsession and actual outcome of The Red Shoes. We’re on the same spiritual-aesthetic plane as Fantasia, but tilted downward; instead of a dreamy optimism, we get a dreamy fatalism. The movie’s trajectory of doom makes sense to me only as a well-worn formula; by the story logic there is no actual tragic necessity. And, to my mind, neither is there any tragic necessity in the aesthetic logic either, even though that is clearly the filmmakers’ intention.

“To my mind” is an important caveat in such matters.

Beth and I recently read (in this enjoyable anthology) Molly Haskell’s essay on “The Woman’s Film,” which I recommend. Haskell observes that the tear-jerking scenarios found in “weepies” offer wish-fulfillment fantasies that reveal their audiences’ psychologies… but they only offer wish-fulfillment in its most conservative form, which tends to perpetuate rather than alleviate the audience’s problems. Women who feel trapped by the constraints of their social roles find a validating outlet for their feelings in exaggerated cinematic images of those feelings, e.g. movies about grand women who make grandly painful sacrifices… but being gratified by images of the poignant nobility of suffering only reinforces the oppressive paradigm, in which being trapped is in fact inescapable, necessary, and right. People will pay to be reassured that their resentments are necessary; they will not pay to be shown a way out, because that will entail feeling shame. (My summary.) This is her feminist thesis and it’s a good one. I only summarize it here because I want to invoke the general principle, which lingered in my mind while coming to terms with The Red Shoes.

I don’t think the illogical doom of the ballerina in this movie is based on the exact same oppression as “the woman’s film,” but it is based on that same principle: that some particular mode of suffering has gotten baked into a paradigmatic necessity. I am forced to think about this, rather than feel it, because I psychologically don’t need it, and thus don’t get it. The filmmakers expect it to seem inevitable and necessary to the viewer, and it just doesn’t. “Why doesn’t she just, y’know, not kill herself?” I want to ask, at exactly the point when I’m supposed to feel a horrible ache welling up inside me. I’ve certainly felt pre-programmed pangs of recognition in all sorts of other movies, movies that have more to do with my own stuff. But the secret ache behind this particular storyline (trope-line) obviously comes from another kind of life, one that hasn’t been mine.

I wished for years that I could get into opera, because in every aspect other than that opera-y quality it seems like something I would really love. But by now I have come to recognize that no matter how much I school myself and open my mind to it, I’ll never get to where real opera fans are, because that opera-y quality reflects important psychological underpinnings for what goes on at the opera, on and off the stage — and I must accept that it, whatever it is, is not deeply true for me in the way that it genuinely is for its target audience. The question is: what sorts of doom feel necessary, what sacrifices have trapped the audience member in his or her own life? Opera’s baggage clearly has something to do with social roles, if not quite with as narrow a focus as “The Woman’s Film.” I think in the era when these tropes formed, homosexuals and artists and, generally, sensitive men and forceful women (= tenors & sopranos) all felt stuck under the cruel thumb of the social code, just like the oppressed housewives in Haskell’s piece, and thus couldn’t help but identify, unconstructively but sincerely, with doom after doom, penance after penance, consumption after suicide, flung from the parapet until the cows come home.

In fact I would imagine that almost everyone in the 19th century felt to some degree trapped between the intimate encouragements of Romantic art and the restrictive Victorian public reality. (I’m working this out for myself but I recognize, sideways, that this is very well-trod ground for cultural theorists. If you want to read (and then shrug at) an academic treatise on what opera is really about, sociologically speaking, I think pretty much every university publisher has a book for you.)

So I can understand historically. But I can’t feel it. For my psychological part, I feel like I am a pretty good person as I am; all my sacrifices to social pressures have always felt all too contingent and dirty, not the least bit necessary or noble. Not to say I haven’t made them. But I don’t generally get a lot out of operatic tragedy because it doesn’t feel to me like real catharsis; real catharsis would let me cry about the false premises. Tragedy implies the existence of those damnable Fates ruining everything. What Fates? Premises all. My enemies are all people and/or premises. Plus death itself, natch.

I do admire, in the dry sense of the word, that Powell and Pressburger were able to genuinely and classily carry these sorts of ideas intact from the high and hoity world of opera (and, yes, yes, more to the point, ballet) over into film. Their movie at least doesn’t feel quite as kitschy-clueless as the same plot does when it appears in Hollywood movies; here it feels like there is some real expressive continuity with the cultural world the movie is about. It feels distinctly well-pedigreed. And outside of the dubious tragedy, I actually found that very gratifying. In fact even the dubious tragedy I can appreciate for its aura of sincerity. One feels this movie has been made in exceptionally good faith.

The opening moments, when eager young music students bound into the balcony seats to see their teacher’s ballet score, seemed wonderful to me: invigoratingly genuine and unapologetic about taking this world and these passions seriously. It gave me opportunity to reflect on the anxieties that attend all my enthusiasms, and so many others’ today. “Elites” have to contend with being “elites” one way or another; even to those who detest it, the Marxist critique hangs in the air and must be swatted away. Here there was no swatting because there was nothing to swat at: the movie really is about the ballet, the ballet, the wonderful ballet! Having to die for art is a bit silly, but being passionate about it is not, and before the movie gets silly it is not silly at all. Valuably so.

The movie has all the polish and ease of Hollywood product but is decidedly well-bred at the same time, a combination that is, to this American viewer, disarmingly rare. British films seem so often to fall too far to one side or the other of the Atlantic stylistic divide. (Though I guess I also admired The Long Good Friday for getting it right.) Moira Shearer is, in a way, the embodiment of the same unexpected combination. She certainly looks and sounds like a “movie star,” and yet she also seems genuinely relaxed and confident and educated and entirely unbrittle.

That sense of ease, and of place and color and texture, is plenty rewarding enough. I would have loved this movie to have exactly the same atmosphere but no plot. No rise and fall, no love triangle, no tragic choices. Just what it’s like to be in the business and put on a ballet. A few passing hints of darkness would have meant far more to me than explicit doom. The centerpiece of the film, the otherworldly “Red Shoes” ballet, is already intended to be read as a compressed dream-parallel of the real characters’ lives. Great! That’s enough then. All the filmmakers’ ideas about the sacrifice and obsession of art would have come across just as clear even if they had only been delivered surrealistically in the ballet. The sequence is as great and striking a thing as they say, lush and weird and cared-for, a cousin to the brief Dali dream in Spellbound and clearly the source for many dream ballets to come. To my taste, that should have been the one window through which the winds of doom blew across the face of this movie. That is the real nature of art, after all: it is the window. I wish the filmmakers had been content to keep the functions of the frame and the centerpiece separate.

Or else let them bleed more thoroughly together and have the whole story be blatantly run through with surrealism and menace. In fact perhaps this is the better critique. The commentary talks about the movie as a Hoffmann-esque fairy tale. If that were how it really played, my tolerance for doom would have been much broader, since in fairy tales, doom seems like an expression of general fear rather than specific angst. It is the relative Hollywood-naturalism of the main story (up until the last few minutes) that makes the tragic outcome seem like something self-pitying and psychological. (The commentary eventually says that the film “goes a middle route,” which is exactly my complaint.)

To summarize: I’m always game for a dream of rich color, and this is a very fine one, but it’s too obviously not my dream. If I dreamed it I would suspect I’d been Incepted. I will gladly watch the ballet sequence again any time I come across it. The rest I can certainly get something out of but not quite as much as I wish.

Debra Messing and Walt Disney are both very appealing and give the movie its natural magnetism. Zeppo is fine I guess.

Robert Helpmann, whose presence really rubbed me the wrong way in Henry V, was just as unpleasant here. I get a very nasty, vain vibe off of him. Reports are that he liked to be mean to everybody, confirming my impression. I know it’s a gay “type” but that doesn’t mean it’s not also a hateful type. His ballet choreography is good enough — Moira Shearer says something similarly unenthusiastic in her interview. Apparently he was a moderately big deal.

The presence of the real Léonide Massine forms a strange bridge between the actual world of the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, De Falla, Prokofiev — which in my mind is faraway and long-lost and classy — and the world of Hollywood, the cowardly lion and Cary Grant, which lives on in a perpetual and cozily garish present. How anyone could have wandered from one to the other is beyond me. Like that clip of the guy on “I’ve Got a Secret” who witnessed Lincoln’s assassination (the real Lincoln). Massine just looks like some guy, some guy who’s not above playing movie make-believe.

Criterion has done their standard nice job. Netflix twice sent me the old 1999 disc instead of the listed 2010 edition, but I wasn’t going to miss out on the fancy restoration, so I waited until I could get a library copy. I’m glad I did. The color is lovely and the color is the point. Commentary is a hodgepodge of interview materials with a host, but very well assembled and consistently interesting.

Martin Scorsese is all over the extras, telling us in various ways how much he loves the movie. It makes sense to me that he would. But it’s also a little odd to think about him deeply identifying with a ballerina. His comments all reveal his sensitive eye and cinematic sense; I would gladly listen to him do a commentary track on any movie. Here is his much more concise (and positive) way of saying, in the commentary, more or less what I’ve said above:

“…in a funny way, the love story, for me, is almost just a device. Really just a device to hinge all these—— this recreation of a world, where, as Michael [Powell] put it, “art is worth dying for.” I don’t know if I’d agree with him, but… that’s what the film’s about apparently. I didn’t know that. I—— [begins laughing] He told me that once! [stops laughing] But it’s great to have that kind of passion. I think it’s great to have that kind of passion, if you agree with it or not, that art is worth dying for. For filmmakers to get together and concoct this and perpetrate it onto the world, at that time, is fascinating. The guts and the risk that they took. Especially after World War II. What I like about it sometimes: it seems out of control, that their emotions are out of control. Not the characters but the people who made the film. That the passion is out of control and I think that’s something that’s very rare. Something very rare is created when that occurs.”

Bizarre bonus feature is a full-length audio track of Jeremy Irons (!) reading the novelization (!) written by P & P themselves much later, commissioned by Avon Books in 1977. I’ll admit I didn’t listen to the whole thing; it seems like a decent enough novelization. Jeremy also reads the original Andersen tale, which I had not read before and which unsurprisingly merits a Yikes.

So, music. This is of course one of those movies where the score is really built into the action – i.e. where there’s a composer character who writes music that we hear, plays it on the piano, etc. In the first couple decades of sound film there was a lot of that sort of thing, but I think this is the first in the Criterion Collection to go there (unless you count Spinal Tap and “Lick My Love Pump”). Score is by Brian Easdale, pretty much known only for his Powell & Pressburger scores and for this one in particular. From what I’ve heard of his music, he was a real talent, as good as the much bigger names in film music, and with a touch of the high in his technique that goes a long way.

Though it is so very, very long, our musical selection simply has to be the ballet, which is one of the most significant “classical compositions” in all of film scoring, and perhaps the single best diegetic work of art (“opus Hollandaise”) in any movie. (I could swear this subject had been discussed long ago on this site but I can’t find it right now.) This ballet seems to me comparable in quality to the most renowned “real” American and British ballets of the same era, including the two by Bernstein that have always been favorites of mine… but the use of ondes martenot, quite a few shock chords, and some shameless “dream sequence” special effects (wind machine!) also give it a distinctly cinematic sound, as much a relative of Rosza and Spellbound as of Bernstein et al. A sort of perfect amalgam of a “cinema-ballet” style.

So I guess disc 2 of our Criterion soundtrack anthology will have fewer tracks on it than the first, because this one runs 15 minutes long. Here it is, track 44. This is Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

The recent commercial recording gives a movement breakdown. I don’t have access to that recording so this is somewhat speculative, but based on their timings I imagine those movements begin at these times in our original track (+my summary of the action):

0:00 I. Allegro vivace [The shoemaker / The girl and the boy / She wants the shoes / She gets them]
2:28 II. Allegro moderato e molto ritmico [Dance of the shoes / Nightlife]
3:50 III. Poco più mosso [Dance hall / The scene dissolves]
5:13 IV. Lento tranquillo [The girl heads home / The shoes won’t let her]
6:05 V. Largo [She is trapped / Into dream landscape / Pas de deux with newspaper]
8:09 VI. Presto, quasi cadenza [The shoemaker reappears / Lost in an underworld / Alone]
10:14 VII. Allegro assai [Ballroom / Pas de deux with lover / Waves of applause]
12:41 VIII. Sostenuto [Church / She is forbidden to enter / She tries to cut off the shoes / She is danced to death / The shoes are removed / The shoemaker retrieves the shoes and offers them to the audience]

The piano score was published in 1950 but it’s quite rare. They did play this at the Proms a couple years ago.

You know, watching that yet again just now to type up the action, I feel like I must say: the sequence is really very good. A warm, spooky embrace. At the moment when the hopelessness peaks and the camera begins to pull back (at 9:30 in the mp3) I consistently get a little rush of I-don’t-know-what-emotion-this-is emotion. That’s the supreme form of aesthetic experience, I think. This movie has a lot to offer. Maybe I’ll grow to accept the rest of its embrace, on its own terms, on subsequent encounters. But for now I’ve watched it enough.

Sentences are not forming very well for me right now and this whole overlong entry comes from the tedious rather than the breezy part of my brain. I’m not at all pleased with what I’ve written here. But I’m just going to move on to the next movie rather than wait around for a breeze. All in good time.