directed by Seijun Suzuki
written by “Hachiro Guryu”

Koroshi no rakuin. The English title is Branded to Kill. But what, exactly, does that mean?

殺し, koroshi = murder, killing
の, no = particle comparable to “of”
烙印, rakuin = mark, brand, stigma

I’m guessing that what this adds up to is something comparable to “The Mark of Cain,” e.g. “The Mark of Murder” or “The Mark of the Killer.” The plot involves a professional killer who after bungling a job becomes himself the target of a killer. Something concise and ambiguous like “Killer’s Mark” that points up the circularity would be a good translation. “Branded to Kill” is not.

Criterion #38.

A sign of our cultural times: artist interviews full of “No, [the thing you just asked about] doesn’t have any special meaning. I just kinda did it, who knows why” — but presented as though this is our enlightening glimpse behind the curtain. (“Huh, think of that! He just kinda did it and it didn’t have any special meaning! A fascinating insight into process!”)

This is a minor symptom of the movement to embrace “low” as “high.” Twenty-first-century man sez: Comic books are art too! Wow Mr. Lee, when you invented the rich and worthy cultural text of Spider-Man, what was the thinking behind giving him no mouth? “I just kinda did it, who knows why.” Wow! Now I know it’s great art because it’s full of mystery!

I don’t think that’s entirely wrong thinking. If there is any single “the thing about art” about art, it’s that an explanation is no match for it.

But I do think it’s entirely wrong thinking to embrace the low AS HIGH. The artist interview is itself an artifact of a Romantic attitude that can only confuse the essence of Spider-Man. Or more accurately: the belief that an inquiry into intentions is obviously relevant… is a Romantic artifact. There’s nothing wrong with a little knowledge, but there is something wrong with the assumption that knowledge is always important.

The Criterion Collection makes me think about the importance of curation, by which I really mean context. I feel a little sad that those words now mean the same thing for film, because I don’t think museums have done our understanding of the visual arts any great good. The sterility and snobbery of “curation” are a little chlorine in your water. Clean clean clean! and it also doesn’t taste good any more. When I look at things like this I can’t help but fixate on the question “did the twit with the stamp have no sense of shame?” Children should be seen and not heard; go to your room!

But that’s common practice. The twit with the stamp is higher than a king. The Grand Federal Doggie pees on each item submitted to the Library of Congress to mark it; you should be so lucky!

Criterion wants to offer you the full Steve Jobs package: the product looks sleek because it is sleek because rest assured it’s been good and curated by the Grand Cosmic Doggie. You are so lucky, consumer! And of course we all know that for movies on DVD, that means a great pageant of the inquiry into intentions: artist interviews, behind-the-scenes, historical context, archival ephemera, accredited experts, information, information, information! You think you knew water, but you haven’t REALLY had water until you’ve had CHLORINATED water. It’s cleaner than the real thing!

This movie — there we go — this movie is a Spider-Man with no mouth. There are several interviews on here wherein surprise surprise, they just kinda did it, who knows why.

It’s screwy. My feeling is that the screwiest art usually emerges out of some sort of folie à deux situation (but more than deux, e.g. a folie à Japon situation) – nobody has to try to be screwy because everyone present has already mutually embraced it. Sometimes with a grin, sometimes with a straight face. I think this movie was made in a spirit of fun, but a screwy one. The main thing is that the premises of this movie’s screwiness are well outside and beyond the movie. It is not authorial in the Romantic sense. For those of us watching it, the important thing is not how much we know about where it came from. Much more important to me is where I am and how it’s coming at me.

Criterion puts it in a numbered box and sells the box. But that’s exactly where it’s not coming from. And this is where “it’s kind of amazing!” comes in. If there is no natural order to culture and we have to depend on curators to keep things in view, there’s no longer any assurance that we will be exposed to things that don’t merit curation. And yet we want them around. High vs. low was never part of our emotional reality. So we rig up a bullshit case to convince the curators to stock regular old crap, because “it’s actually kind of amazing!”

This is why I disliked the ultimate message of Ratatouille. The soulless snooty critic is reminded of his soul, reminded of the emotional reality of food rather than the sterile context of pass/fail high/low pretension that has killed the joy of life. So then HOORAY he writes a positive rather than a negative review within the sterile, pretentious context and thus validates the hero within the sterile, pretentious context. Whew! Don’t worry, kids, your dad was wrong to yell at you that you’re wasting your life, because the reviews are in and it turns out your beloved Spider-Man belongs at MoMA after all! Videogames belong in the Smithsonian! It turns out that your authentic self isn’t embarrassing after all because it’s KIND OF AMAZING! You go girl! Let your freak flag fly, in the manner of e.g. Lady Gaga! She’s not afraid to be real!

The original Criterion essay on this movie is by John Zorn. It’s short, and the gist is, “I happened to see this on TV when I was in Japan and I had an experience with it.” That was the most genuinely useful, appreciation-deepening thing that was offered to me in the entire package. (And it’s not in the new package.)

The movie is a gangster movie, sort of, but it’s off its own rails. It’s brazenly incoherent. I could list the crazy details but that would feel like telling a lie, the lie being “it sure makes an impression when this crazy thing happens!” Not necessarily so. My actual experience was sort of furrowed-brow bemusement, and a shrugging acceptance. I have other things to worry about than why this contract killer in an old B-movie has a fetish for rice-cooker steam, or whether I think that’s interestingly weird. It was a little interesting; not that interesting. (Rice cooker product placement, one of the interviews implies, for what it’s worth.) If I had been in a hotel in Japan and this had come on TV I’m sure the experience would have been much, much more intense.

Criterion callbacks: The story here, such as it is, is a close relative to The Killer. The artistic value is a close relative to The Naked Kiss. My thoughts there basically apply here.

Best thing on the disc was the amusing contemporary interview with star Joe Shishido, who talks candidly about his unfortunate cheek implants. (They seem to have been removed at some point in the intervening years.) In the middle of answering a question — sort of — he suddenly pulls out a prop gun and shoots it, which is one of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen in an artist interview. Take that, curators!

One thing I can say unreservedly that I enjoyed is the 60s-cool score by Naozumi Yamamoto. Harpsichord and harmonica, baby.

The music that opens and closes the movie is a bluesy song about a killer. I’m not sure that vocals suit our purposes, especially what with the spoken interludes, so here instead is a cue from the middle of the movie, a hummed version of the same tune. Preceded by a sting for a dead body, natch. Track 38.

directed by Terry Gilliam
written by Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam

Criterion #37.

In E.T. (1982):

Elliott: You can’t tell. Not even Mom.
Gertie: Why not?
Elliott: Because, uh… grown-ups can’t see him. Only little kids can see him.
Gertie: Give me a break!

This would seem to be an early example of kid culture having knowingness and eating it too. But it — and E.T. as a whole — plays well because it feels what it preaches. E.T. is a classic because it does not condescend to the idea that the emotional life of a child is glorious; it simply plays it straight, makes a movie of it.

Elliott is trying on adult shoes here. He is constantly fed this kind of crap, and now with that dangerous principle of emotional logic (“do unto others as was done unto you” – this principle needs a name) is playing the adult role as he understands it. Garbage in, garbage out. But he’s still young enough that when she rolls her eyes he instinctively bows before the force of truth and changes tack. A real adult would angrily redouble the bullshit in the face of such purity. Adults feel subconscious shame that they are spewing garbage, which is why it’s so easy for kids to see through them.

The scene is rich because the very movie to which it belongs is feeding us something superficially quite similar (although it is essential to the emotional meaning of E.T. that adults can see and feel him, that he is simply there and real), but unlike Elliott’s lie, the movie earns our trust and belief, in no small part through exactly what this scene exhibits: unflinching ease with the fact that part of being a kid is knowing shit from Shinola. Gertie’s dismissal is not a cynical counterbalance to her innocence; it is an essential piece of it.

Yes, the emotional life of a child is glorious, and an important part of that emotional life is the sniffing out of pandering bullshit. In fact, I’m finding that open disdain for the absurdly obvious gap between feeling and pseudo-feeling is proving to be my surest Proustian hook back into that life. Right, that’s what childhood felt like! “Stop telling me lies about magic, because you’re distracting me from magic.”

And yet, like I said, here’s Elliott trying out bullshit, seeing what it’s worth. Another reason E.T. doesn’t feel like pandering is because it does not exempt the children from simultaneously being adults-in-training, with all the bluster and pettiness that entails. Even E.T. himself, the “thou” to Elliott’s “I,” is not exempt from playing at ugly adulthood, drinking all the beer he finds in the fridge and then watching John Wayne on TV, the patron saint of self-satisfied pig-in-a-poke grown-up-ness.

I bring this all up because E.T. seems to me the ideal archetype of the “kids know what adults don’t” movie. It has its head on straight, including about this potentially touchy issue, the fact that being a movie makes it a very adult artifact. It seems to me that the exchange above is not a lampshade; it’s artistic self-acceptance, the very opposite of self-consciousness. The E.T. screenplay alludes to Peter Pan but it is not Peter Pan; it does not dangle “never growing up” over our heads as a magic possibility to make us cry wussy grown-up tears of shame. Or rather it does, briefly, but in the end it does not endorse them: the part of E.T. that makes me cry is when Michael, feeling old, curls up to sleep in the toy closet as E.T. dies; he can’t figure out what to do other than make a futile, merely ceremonial gesture of love for his lost childhood. My tears, I am realizing now, were never for childhood/E.T./innocence — which are indeed resurrectable as per the movie — but for the feeling of impotence that has reduced Michael to nostalgia. Nostalgia exactly because he’s distorting the thing he’s nostalgic for; it is indeed something “only little kids can see.” What is there to do but cry in the closet? I know those feelings well, and feel for him, and I don’t resent the movie for making me tear up in this way, but the important thing is to recognize that to this the movie has already wisely said: Gimme a break!

Anyway, this is all my roundabout way of saying that the “kids know what adults don’t” trope is really about emotional honesty. The magic things that only kids encounter — be they aliens or talking animals or magic portals or mythical whatevers — represent things that are simply true and real and obvious. Such as feelings. Or details. Or the intensity of sensory impressions. Or the strange and mysterious mental phenomena that tangle the three together.

And, as in E.T., part of getting that childlike emotional honesty right is remembering what it’s like to know — immediately, tactlessly, comfortably — when adults get it wrong.

Time Bandits is Terry Gilliam “doing” childhood. Like Spielberg he is doing it uncynically (or at least like Spielberg prior to his 1989 divorce, which, quickie psychoanalysis, in recapitulating his parents’ divorce tarnished his sense of immunity to adult bullshit and opened the door to making the anti-E.T.: the rampantly self-pitying, calculated, impotent Hook. I suspect/project that the reason Hook sucked was because he was secretly distracted by self-fulfilling anxiety that he had suddenly grown up after all, and was faking his “eternal child” thing.)

Sorry, so, Time Bandits is adult Terry Gilliam’s take on what adults can’t see. They can’t see imagination, silliness, fantasy, play, cleverness, faraway lands, the joy of a big anarchic mess o’ stuff. Of everything. All the stuff on the floor in a boy’s bedroom, or in an illustration in a history book, or in a weird dream; why don’t parents care more about all that great stuff? This is to him the essential childhood question. Looking at his work it isn’t hard for me to imagine him as a child for whom this would be the essential question. And that truth comes through; this is very clearly a movie made from within this attitude and in the belief that the attitude is a pure and important one and in itself justification enough for a movie.

And yet my Gertie-meter went off a bit. But in the opposite direction from usual. Rather than playing the sad-wise adult who knows that childhood is a fairy’s tear that falls but once, boo-hoo, he plays the stubborn-angry teenager who knows all too well that adulthood is a big smarmy scam. In the middle of a celebration of the power of the unbridled imagination, satirical cynicism strikes a wrong note, one that a child knows only belongs to the curdled posturing of grown-ups. Imagination is great, so why are we hating on modern society? Or grown-ups? Who would waste their time hating grown-ups? Only a kind of grown-up.

At the end, rather shockingly, he has the protagonist boy’s house burn down and his inattentive, hopelessly materialistic parents actually explode when they encounter the dangerous vitality of the fantasy evil with which their son has been contending. The final beat is presented as a slyly melancholy one; uh-oh, now he’s got no home or family and has to contend with… life! Is that going to be the good kind of life, with dwarfs and derring-do and complete freedom of action? Or the bad kind where you watch idiocy on TV and cover all your furniture in plastic? It’s up to him!

Well, that’s all well and good for middle-aged Terry Gilliam, but for actual kids there is something off-key about the way that ending disturbs — specifically that it clearly knows it’s doing something wrong, something kids don’t deserve to have to see. Why? “Unto others as was done to you.” Yes, it’s human, but it’s not a good policy for art-making.

So that’s the problem; it’s a movie that doesn’t waste its time trying to “work” in any humdrum traditional way — it puts all its money on innocence and magic — and yet it hasn’t entirely washed out its soul. That said, there’s lots of fun stuff here. Gilliam stands almost alone in his willingness to bring a spirit of play to every aspect of movie-making, rather than reserving a few dimensions for ego (or anxious timidity). Imagery that seems to plug directly into the giddy freedom of making imagery is oddly rare in cinema. Even when his movies don’t work, I can’t help but feel that I am in the company of a vital creative attitude, and thus that I am somewhere worth being. Unlike most movies, his movies feel healthy, like you can breathe the air, feel aware of your body while you watch them. On the other hand there is that nugget of spite in all of them. Why didn’t they love me more, dammit?

A lot of it is on the table in this interview. Gilliam actually mentions E.T. He says he thinks the movie would have been better if the creature had been uglier, with narrow eyes, so that the kid had to learn to love it. “It should have been difficult to love E.T.” This is Gilliam’s prescription for everyone else, for all the Americans who lapped up the movie without reforming their hateful ways. He understood the movie fine, because he already loves his inner child — but to everyone else he’s apparently ugly. They could use a primer on loving him!

Time Bandits has a loving father figure in it — Sean Connery as Agamemnon! — but he is betrayed and left behind. At the end he reappears for a split second as a winking fireman, driving away from the rubble of the boy’s former home. Is all love and comfort a tease? Terry hasn’t worked that out yet, quite.

This is a pretty well stuffed homemade toy chest of a movie, but a scary one, and a lonely one. The former issue would have been a bigger deal for me as a child, but that’s because I was a well-adjusted child and could afford to be terrorized by ghouls. The latter is a more significant artistic failing.

I’m very glad to have seen it. There are several really wonderful moments in this movie, things completely pure of any resentment. When, in the middle of a desert, an invisible wall shatters and reveals a vast looming fantasy castle of evil, it is absolutely thrilling. There is, haphazardly, real imaginative joy on the screen. And then there’s other stuff too.

Score is by Mike Moran, the fantasy synths you might imagine for 1981. Main Title.

I watched this on Netflix, where it can be streamed in high quality. But of course the compulsion here is to watch the CRITERION version, and that meant waiting nearly a month for the single copy in the New York Public Library system to pass through three holds and finally reach me. By which point I had already written all of the above. And even this paragraph, because I got that impatient. So, do I have anything extra to say having heard the commentary track? (and the behind-the-scenes galleries??) :

Eh. It’s a pleasant, personable commentary, with an emphasis on how things were achieved on the cheap. But after all this wait it was bound to be underwhelming. I really just wanted permission to post. Permission granted.

Here’s what I do want to add, now that I’ve been forced to wait, and thus given the opportunity to read all the above through new eyes: art is a very personal business, for the makers and the viewers alike. I don’t think any of us have a choice about that. So let’s please try not to pretend that there’s any way of doing this that isn’t very personal. I don’t know if what I said was right; all I can do is swear that I meant it.

My concerns now (i.e. loneliness being a greater problem than scariness) are just my concerns now. My goal is to be a person to whom any attitude seems artistically viable because I am already fine, because I have other ways of getting what I really need from my fellow man. I want to get back in the mood for games.

directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi
based on the novel by Georges Arnaud (1950)

Criterion #36, The Wages of Fear.

Two trucks leave a made-up town somewhere in South America. Each is carrying a load of nitroglycerin that will explode if jostled. Each truck has two drivers. One pair of drivers has been established as more protagonist-y than the other. This is a gritty adventure movie from 1953. What happens?

1.
a) Both trucks eventually explode.
b) Neither truck explodes.
c) One truck explodes almost immediately.
d) One truck explodes near the end.
e) None of the above.

2.
a) All four men eventually die.
b) All four men live.
c) Only one man dies.
d) Only one man survives.
e) None of the above.

3. Under the constant threat of sudden death…
a) …the men devolve into petty, bestial conflicts with one another.
b) …the men find a camaraderie that allows them to transcend their differences.
c) …one man loses his mind, one becomes vicious, one becomes stoic, and one becomes heroic.
d) …nothing changes, because all men everywhere are under the constant threat of sudden death.
e) None of the above.

(This is a tough quiz, right?)

The point is, you really don’t know. The old narrative-necessity objection — that it’s not really suspenseful when James Bond is being held at gunpoint because the hero can’t get killed — doesn’t apply here. By the time the trucks set out, half the movie has already gone by, and it has become very clear that this is not a standard-practice action movie in pacing or attitude. A sense of cynicism pervades. And so even the most outrageous possibility — that both trucks will blow up right away and everyone will die — is feasible.

I think this must be why people love this movie. Because it’s that rare suspense movie that actually feels dangerous. At least for a little while, it holds a genuine threat over the audience’s heads, with no narrative or philosophical safety net. Yeah, maybe everything really will go terribly wrong. Maybe it does!

I’m not sure how charming I find that, though. Given its very high repute, I was surprised to find the movie as unwelcoming as it is. Sure, I got caught up in the rhythm of “uh-oh!” “uh-oh!” “uh-oh!” that it sets in motion, but was I really having fun?

This is stupid but I’m allowed: I thought several times of Jaws, because the movies have certain formal similarities. (Both are split down the middle into two halves, the first half taking place in and around a community and the second half on a manly expedition away from the community; the second half in both movies is focused on very mechanically-inclined action, i.e. the kind that plays out through a lot of logistical close-ups that clarify where a rope is tied, what’s moving in which direction, what’s pushing against what, etc. And this mechanical action functions as the “work” around which we get a study of the varieties of manhood and manliness.) This silly comparison really accentuated for me how ostentatiously grueling this movie was. The first half of Jaws gets us to enjoy the place we’re spending our time, despite the horror; the first half of The Wages of Fear just wants us to feel how slow, sweaty, and demoralizing it is to be there. The second half of Jaws sets the physical suspense to lively music and makes it implicitly joyful; the second half of The Wages of Fear just wants to use it to scrape our nerves.

I can recognize that this is very effective and influential mechanical action. Duel couldn’t exist without this, nor could Speed, nor could any number of movie sequences where the rope is tied to the thing and uh-oh. And I can always enjoy that — a child watches first and foremost for kinetics, after all, and Roadrunner cartoons remain near the core of what movies are made of. But ultimately I prefer my action more dancelike, more amusing, more Douglas Fairbanks. More gay. Why else make action? This was so clenched and testosteronal. After a certain amount of backstabbing, broken bottle fighting, woman-hating, and friend-killing, I could have sworn the message of the movie was “men are the worst!” but I fear that it’s actually “men are men, men are hard, life is hard, everything is the worst.” I don’t agree with that and I don’t need it. It’s one thing to flirt with it for kicks like Humphrey Bogart but then turn around and wink. It’s another thing to rub it in like a sweaty, angry, nihilist challenge.

Here, though, Humphrey Bogart is played by Yves Montand of all people, which seems like it would be the epitome of faux-manliness. And Clouzot himself wasn’t a war hero or anything, he was an aesthete who had spent four years in a sanitarium. But it doesn’t matter; the real ethos of the film is grim and violent. It’s not a game. (And Jean Gabin turned down one of the roles because the character was too cowardly! In this crowd, you gotta keep it manly.)

Of course — not to spoil anything — the ending, and the seemingly extraneous presence of Vera Clouzot as the pretty, hapless female, could suggest a different message: “These men are anti-heroes. Their testosteronal attitude is all wrong. They should have seen the beauty in the world, been kind to women and to each other.” But the action makes that hard to buy. Action is action! A rope tied to a truck is unambiguous. We live through it with these guys. When it goes well for them we are relieved; when it goes badly we are pained. The guy commenting on Diabolique talked about how the audience is gotten firmly “on side” to sympathize with the murderesses; it’s not real morality that matters so much as movie morality. This movie tries to be even more cynical than to play by those rules. Here, the first half is spent making sure we’re not too far on anyone’s side. Then suddenly the second half is spent contending with THREATENING ACTION that cannot be watched without sympathy. Then we wrap it all up with a bow of dismissal. The upshot is I didn’t know what to care about.

The movie absolutely has atmosphere though. Portraying oppressive heat on screen is always a challenge. I was impressed by the opening here, which does it very effectively without gimmickry. The first half is probably too long and static but it is undeniably strong scene-setting; it’s like every Hollywood “exotic hellhole full of expatriates” movie, except this time genuinely grim and despairing, and with a tad of sardonic anti-Americanism, something you didn’t get a lot of out of Hollywood in those days. Again, it’s a Humphrey Bogart movie, but in a world where everything is awful.

I’d probably watch it again if it were on TV. Now that I know what happens, I can just siphon off the atmosphere.

There’s no menu screen above because again I saw it on Blu-Ray, and they make it impossible to capture the menus off Blu-Rays. And by some fluke dvdbeaver fails to pick up the slack on this one. The menu screen looked like a menu screen. (I know it would probably be more interesting and make for a prettier layout for these Criterion entries if I put the cover art up there instead of the menu screens. But this is what I’ve been doing, so this is what I’m doing.)

Bonus features blah blah blah, fine.

Music is by Georges Auric again. Again, Clouzot’s not much for music; we basically have a main title and then a few bits of source music that may not be by Auric. This album reports that he did indeed arrange the final cue, but it’s not original. The main title is his only real compositional contribution. It’s good — a percussion landscape like hot sun and desperation. The middle section seems to confuse South America with Spain but no matter. Track 36.

directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi, with René Masson and Frédéric Grendel
after the novel Celle qui n’était plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (1952)

Criterion #35.

The title of course means basically “The Diabolicals” (assuming there to be such a noun). Clouzot stole it from a book by Barbey d’Aurevilly whose title is generally translated as “The She-Devils,” which can work for us too. Or just “The Devils.” (Google Translate interestingly gives “Evil.”) The novel upon which this was based was first published in English as “The Woman Who Was No More,” but then after the movie as “The Fiends.”

The English title of this movie has always been Diabolique, which is fascinating. A French title has been translated into a “French title” for American consumption, where part of the Frenchiness of the new title is that it is coyly adjectival — which the actual French title isn’t. Or perhaps that’s just a byproduct of a different logic: English has subsumed “-ique” as “French affect,” but not “Les.” “Les” would mean you were actually speaking a foreign language. But the title Diabolique is simply très chic — très Frenchique!

Apparently Les diaboliques was so popular on the arthouse circuit in the U.S. that it was subsequently picked up for mainstream distribution, which is obviously a rarity for foreign films. Had it gone to the mainstream first, it seems more likely that the title would have eschewed Frenchness altogether. (Maybe something like “Murder Is For Girls.”)

Is there a list of all the foreign films that have had full-scale U.S. distribution? e.g. in the past two decades, Life is Beautiful, Amélie, and The Artist? Etc.? I’d be interested to see such a list but I can’t find one online, which surprises me.

Here’s what I will venture to say about Diabolique: it is a suspense movie. For about half of it, I thought it was an unusually narrow and pure suspense movie, more like an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” — pared-down, lacking in the particulars that would make it stand out as a full-fledged movie. But eventually I realized that it seemed that way only because it has been so tremendously influential. It’s actually very particular. It’s a bit like The Lord of the Rings: if you read it and go “yeah, so it’s just another one of these books with magical elves and stuff? Like World of Warcraft or something?” you’re reading it historically wrong, and thus aesthetically wrong. I got my head around the real Diabolique by the end. It’s obviously very important.

Even though I knew 1) it had been influential, and 2) it was “Hitchcockian,” I genuinely didn’t know what was going to happen. Is it one of these or one of those? Or one of those? The answer is, it’s Diabolique, and once you’ve seen it you’ll know which other movies you’ve seen have been ripping it off. Many.

That kind of “which plot am I watching?” uncertainty isn’t really very different from the “naive original audience” perspective. The important thing is that you don’t know. Suspense!

Wanting not to spoil a movie for my readership is at odds with my spiritual goal of writing with myself as audience, so I’m going to break away from this stuff.

* Difference between Clouzot and Hitchcock is the difference in attitude taken toward the gamesmanship, like the difference between the stage personas of two magicians (which alone can make the same trick feel like two fundamentally different kinds of magical phenomena). Hitchcock wants you to notice his control over you. Clouzot sometimes just wants to use it. Being manipulated without a wink can be a more ambiguous experience. This is probably just a question of social style, but I think I side with Hitchcock here. It might be more childish to be constantly winking but some things are meant to be childish. If we’re going to find depth in these kinds of stories, it’s going to be through their resonant qualities, not through any kind of reality in our experiences of them. As for example Vertigo, a movie that has thematic depth without refraining from operating like a machine. Plot, as I’ve said, has its own characteristic capacities and tendencies, and these are plot movies we’re talking about.

* But the distinction between the two directors is minor. The styles are certainly related. And a big part of the difference in tone may simply be the lack of music in Diabolique, which provides a lot of the deadpan affect (and thus the implied winking) in Hitchcock. See below.

* I watched the first half of this while I had a fever. It fit, but after a point I thought maybe it fit too well and this sort of movie was never meant to have such a bodily power. The second half I watched a little later when I felt somewhat better. “Murder can be fun,” as Hitchcock said, but only if you’re not dying. The same goes for suspense, and fever is a kind of suspense. Once when I was home sick as a kid and watching The Princess Bride for the Nth time, the scene with the life-sucking torture machine suddenly became overwhelmingly nauseating and I ended up throwing up. Just another tick to put on my new chart that proves that empathy is overrated as a mode of experience.

* Criterion reissued this one with improved everything in 2011. There were plenty of the old one but only one copy of the new version in the library system. I got that one brought across town for me and I think it was well worthwhile. Sound and picture are very good, and I genuinely enjoyed one of the bonus features, an interview/musing by this guy where he cheerfully hits on what felt to me like all the right points about the status of this movie. Interesting to juxtapose his mode of critical commentary with the typical “film scholar” voice in the actual commentary track (which is only 45 minutes long, to an abbreviated version of the movie). She says mostly reasonable and relevant things, but her manner and language are false and sad in all the ways that the nerdy guy’s obvious enthusiasm is true and happy. Isn’t this distinction I’m making a very simple thing that even “the academy” could find it in itself to respect and honor?

* There’s also an “introduction” speech by a guy who wrote a book about Clouzot or something. That has a genuineness to it also but he’s less engaging and rides the line between being objectively informative and venturing his own opinions much less comfortably than the guy I liked. Perhaps my distinction of truth and cheer vs. fakery and tension derives from a distinction in how the speaker rates the significance of his or her own thoughts. People who are confident that it’s their right to think and talk will not try to pass off their opinions as anything but what they are. People who are less confident will often try to phrase their thoughts in ways that remind them of facts, or slip them in between facts to show that they deserve to be said. Scholarship seems to consist in great part of people using learning and language as a defensive coat of armor for the battlefield rather than as a glorious ceremonial coat of armor for a coronation. If you see what I’m saying.

So for I think the first time since The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock!) we have a bookend score, with a main title and a finale and no other music. It’s by Georges Van Parys, and to my ears at least is very Parisian, post-Honegger. It’s the sort of music that seems to want me to imagine what the score looks like. I can imagine it. (“Editions Choudens” it says, so I can even picture the type style.) It probably took him an hour to compose and an hour to orchestrate. If that. I don’t know how well it matches this movie (or to what degree a viewer perceives it as actually a part of the movie!) but it hardly matters: it’s very bold, unsettling stuff for opening titles and then it goes away. What else is it supposed to contribute?

Actually, let me correct that. When music emerges as we iris to black at the very end, there is a sense that the single big wink of the whole movie is descending. This is what I meant about the difference from Hitchcock and its relationship to the music — only when this music shows up do we hear unambiguously from the voice of the director, of the film itself. We go the whole length of the movie before he shows up to grin this weird “mwah-ha-ha” grin. So is this music what this movie is? I guess so. It’s playful in how dreadfully discordant it is. Here’s the whole score: Track 35.

directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
written by Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky and Andrei Tarkovsky

Criterion #34.

This is the movie you know as Andrei Rublev. Regarding the title, however:

The film was shot between 1964 and 1965. When Tarkovsky completed editing in 1966 he had given it the title seen in the frame above, which says “Strasti po Andreyu,” meaning “The Passion According to Andrei.” But this version was never shown. It was rejected by the Soviet authorities, who demanded cuts presumably relating to religious content, violence, nudity, and general un-Sovietness. Tarkovsky returned to editing and prepared a new version, 18 minutes shorter and altered throughout. In the process he retitled it simply Andrei Rublev. (Perhaps in response to Soviet discomfort with the explicitly Christian title.) This shorter version is the film that found its way into the 1969 Cannes film festival and was finally released a few years later.

Unlike every other release of this film, the Criterion DVD proudly offers the suppressed first version, reportedly sourced from a print that Martin Scorsese obtained on a visit to Russia. (The rumor online is that one of the editors had kept a copy of the suppressed version under her bed for 20 years and that Scorsese “smuggled” it out of the country.) Prior to the Criterion release of this material, it seems that this longer cut may never have been seen publicly.

So as titles go, the present film is pretty clearly called The Passion According to Andrei. But the packaging would have it that this is simply the preferred version of the film universally known as Andrei Rublev, which is accordingly what Criterion calls it. The back cover of the DVD makes clear that they are trying to have it both ways: it prints both titles as though the former were some sort of subtitle to the latter.

If you see this movie anywhere other than on this Criterion DVD, you will see a movie that is 18 minutes shorter, and which, significantly, omits or truncates some of the most shocking images seen here. (You will also see much sparser and less accurate subtitling, Criterion wants you to know.) That version, the standard version, is in fact viewable online for free, beautifully restored in very high quality, here + here, courtesy of Mosfilm, which is pretty cool of them. However, having just sampled a few minutes I will note that the sound mix is noticeably different and there seem to be all sorts of tiny editorial alterations throughout; so despite seemingly being 95% the same, it manages to have quite a different “feel.” And the feel counts for much of what I got out of this movie.

The image quality on the Criterion disc, taken as it was from that “smuggled” print of the long version (possibly the only surviving copy?), is decidedly suboptimal, especially compared to the crisp restoration linked above. There is a murky, low-contrast fadedness to the black & white tones, and a general ghosting/halo effect. When it started I was afraid that the whole thing was going to be distractingly milky and thin. But as it turned out, the spirit-photograph quality of the image was entirely suitable to the soft, dreamy flow of the movie. Or at least it made itself into a compelling whole for me.

This movie is long. The “short” version is 186 minutes. The version that I watched is 204 minutes. Yes, The Ten Commandments and some other Hollywood monstrosities are longer than that, but this is surely the longest “art film” I’ve ever seen. Knowing what I was in for, I adopted a soft, accepting frame of mind and let myself drift without judgment. This turned out wonderfully and I recommend it. It may well be that all movies respond well to being viewed in a trance state, but this one seemed particularly to welcome and reward it.

The film exudes such composure and purity that it isn’t clear how it could have been actually made, given all the business and complexity that goes into shooting a film, which usually leaves a clear mark. The staging, camerawork, and acting almost never have that telltale aspect of cleverness and contrivance that feels like the essence of direction (and thus of moviemaking); here things seem just to be happening as they will, and yet beautifully. That’s the aspiration of many a humanist art film, of course, and I’ve certainly seen some that manage to avoid any sense of being calculated, but it’s almost always at the expense of basic cinematic appeal; such movies tend to be loose, limp, and give the impression only of having traded one kind of phoniness for another much less useful kind. Not so here. I don’t really know how he achieves it (well, art, taste, and skill is how) but Tarkovsky’s style is exactly what arthouse film should be: the material is poetic and open, but the staging and photography are endlessly crafty and compelling. And not in some arid, schematic, intellectual sense, but in a real, engaging, cinematically viable sense. The camera is almost always in motion, and all of the camera-movement devices — pans, zooms, tracking shots — have that inevitable, intuitive quality that gives them each their particular magical meanings. The style has a wonderful sense of flow, like a river of imagery.

I don’t know how much all that is just a description of the peaceful frame of mind I assumed while watching. I think “only somewhat.” A quote from Ingmar Bergman is included in the DVD liner:

My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly I found myself standing at the door of a room, the keys to which, until then, had never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. … Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.

That very much matches my sense of what I saw and encourages me that I didn’t simply zone out and then experience the movie as an aspect of that zone. But it is certainly in keeping with the zone: it is deeply unanxious filmmaking. It is “painterly” in the proper sense of the word, i.e. not meaning that it indulges in lavish decorative visuals, but rather that unlike most film, which draws primarily on the arts of the theater (and of the printed page), it genuinely draws on the visual and emotional language of painting. And incorporates the dimension of movement as an organic component of that language. There is movement in the frame so that there can be stillness in the mind. Or so.

This is all appropriate because the movie is ostensibly about a painter, though the action has very little to do with his painting, and often very little to do even with Andrei Rublev himself. The film is episodic and oblique and philosophical. It leaps around in time and place. It is broadly about life. I was reminded of Tree of Life, and of what else I’ve seen of Terence Malick. Obviously the influence goes the other way there. Whereas despite Bergman’s quote about Tarkovsky’s influence on him, The Seventh Seal, to which Andrei Rublev bears family resemblance in several aspects, precedes it by 9 years. Also, the emphasis on very long takes of the camera gliding dreamily through space reminded me, of all things, of Terry Gilliam. That uber-grandiose pullback shot from Baron Munchhausen that I’ve mentioned before is, I now see, the wacky comic-book descendant of several equally spectacular shots here. Unlike most philosophical arty films, the scale here is often very grand, with a horde of warriors on horseback, or shots that take in acres of landscape filled with hundreds of well-placed figures.

The movie ends with exactly the same gesture that I found affecting in the novel of Doctor Zhivago. For many reasons it’s even more affecting here, especially if you’ve been lulled into a state of dreamy receptivity and thus emotional openness, as I had been. After 3 hours you probably will be.

(The content of this movie, mind you, is not itself soothing. There is some really horrific medieval cruelty, culminating in a central long sequence of a town being sacked and people being tortured and slaughtered. There are also a couple of hard-to-watch shots of animal cruelty, some of which are apparently simulated, but one of which is most definitely the real suffering and death of a horse (confirmed on Wikipedia!). That’s hard, shocking stuff.)

Basically, this was high art and I welcomed it. It is made with a very deep intuition for the medium, luxurious to watch. It is tonal and the tone it sustains is a very worthy one. If it has a message, I would say the message is “Life is much bigger than good and evil, kindness and cruelty; so should art be. So do what you can do.” A good message. Also, understand that it does not have a message. It is a piece of art made to be reflected upon.

The film has a very fine score by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov, as sensitive and essentially cinematic as the camera style. The score is used sparsely and to excellent effect; whenever it is present it is lovely and well-judged. It only really breaks out at the end: the finale that I alluded to a moment ago is accompanied by a big extended piece for chorus and orchestra. It stands alone and is by far the most musically ambitious piece in the score, so I think it has to be my selection. I was a little reluctant about this choice because it’s almost a spoiler to hear this, the catharsis, without earning it over the course of the movie. But I don’t think spoilers can apply here; heard out of context I certainly don’t think anything is actually “spoiled.” This track is also longer than all our other selections, but that seems appropriate since this is the longest movie yet. (Oh no wait, Seven Samurai was longer. Well, that had a long musical selection too.)

So here is the Finale, our track 34. The transcendental 2001-like effect should be apparent. This is a movie that is about big things and this is the revelatory sound of big things. (As heard on this wobbly old print.) It is, I think, worth taking a moment to note how well this is achieved here and then to reflect on the dreadful ineptitude with which the “epic” effect is attempted in offensive caricature by every stupid comic-book movie score of the present day.

The disc has some intelligent quasi-scholarly commentary, but only on selected scenes, which is a little annoying to have to search and find. It also has some clips from interviews with Tarkovsky, which are very good.

I very much look forward to more Tarkovsky. Criterion’s not going to come through for me until #164, but on my own authority I might well resort to Mosfilm’s youtube selection, where several others are available.

Sorry this entry was long and dull. Sometimes they come out that way. And the work necessary to now make it short and dull does not appeal to me.

directed by Robert Flaherty

Criterion #33.

This is by far the best of the Nanook series, though Nanook Out West and Nanook Makes a Mistake are pretty good too. The plot is much as you’d imagine: Nanook gets up to his typical hijinks (walrus hunting, igloo building), with crotchety old Mr. Jenkins as the butt of most of the humor. This is the episode from which we get the expression “What a Nanook!”, nowadays used to describe anyone who spears a seal to death through a hole in the ice.

As usual, the songs are a bit corny.

There may or may not be a really stupid joke somewhere on this page. Sorry everybody, just trying to be like “Nyla — The Smiling One.”

My primary reaction during Nanook is a thought that will be hard for me to put into words. But here goes: The way things actually happened wasn’t necessarily the right way or the best way, but people want to believe it was. It probably sounds like I’m talking about the issue of documentary realism, but I’m talking about the status of this movie itself. This is the first documentary feature, very influential, fine. It is not unwatchable garbage. You get to see an Eskimo build an igloo, etc. It’s interesting for what it is. But in an alternate history, might the first documentary feature have been much, much better than this? Yes.

I guess I had this thought because with documentary material, the conflation of significance with distinction tends to be even more treacherous. How much of our boredom is appropriate to blame on Flaherty? After all, the only claim here is very basic: everything you’re seeing happened and was shot on film, in a faraway place you’re unlikely to visit. True, and valuable. (On the level on which this film works, the accusations that it was “staged” seem to me mostly irrelevant. We can see very well that the packaging is 20s newsreel exoticism, which as an authorial voice is a well-known huckster; we watch not for that voice of the intertitles but for the the voice of the film itself, which cannot tell a lie. This light actually reflected off these people and this snow, and passed into the camera.)

But the purity of “it happened and now you can watch it” is nothing new — it’s the foundation, the origin of the film medium. That’s what all the Edison films were. It’s still going strong. The thing Flaherty is getting credit for here is making film-as-reportage feature-length and giving it editorial heft and flair. Those are things this movie does only very clumsily. But the movie is celebrated because it’s the one, and because the essence of what we’re celebrating is basically beyond criticism. Well, I’m criticizing.

Nanook is interesting as such. The key words being AS SUCH. All things are as such but some things are more as such than others.

I had seen this movie once before, in fifth grade, when it was shown I guess as part of our school’s neverending “unit” on Native Americans. It turned out that I recognized a few images, but mostly my memory was that it seemed strange at the time that this obvious antique was being shown to us as though were still suitable classroom material — it still seems strange, in retrospect. And that the class had been utterly scandalized by the appearance of naked breasts — combined with the ancientness of the film, it seemed that something very obviously wrong had been inflicted on us; some kind of filter in the fabric of school had clearly broken. On this viewing I was surprised to find that the breasts in question are very hard to see and onscreen for less than two seconds. Not to a fifth grader!

Music here is original to this release (or to a recent prior Kino release), and is by Timothy Brock, performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra. I haven’t spent a lot of time in Olympia, but next time I’m there I know not to go hear the Chamber Orchestra. Brock’s composition itself is quite dull — I get that this movie is a thankless assignment but spinning out 75 minutes of obviousness to match is insufficiently bold, I think — but the real problem is the first violin, who simply cannot play in tune. (Not that the other players are that much better.) Since the entire score is effects-free, I could have chosen pretty much anything. I’m giving you the 30-second cue corresponding to the close-ups introducing Nanook and Nyla. This is the “Nanook theme.” For us, it’ll do. Track 33.

I went in search of the 1947 score by Rudolf Schramm, which is the one I must have heard in fifth grade, but I can’t find it online. However you can listen to an interesting 1976 score by Stanley Silverman here — in a Copland style, but not the one you’d think.

directed by David Lean
screenplay by David Lean and Stanley Haynes
after the novel by Charles Dickens (1838)

Criterion #32.

A movie like beautiful illustrations. Some of the richest black-and-white tone I’ve ever seen, like a charcoal sketch. Even in the title screen above you can see it. The opening storm sequence, with its few bold expressionist strokes, is as fantastical as anything off the Alexeieff/Parker pinscreen.

But of course, this sort of thing alternates through the film with the rather conventional dialogue scenes. That’s the David Lean way, it seems: like an old N.C. Wyeth edition, there are always a few wonderful “plates” but in between it’s no different from any other grown-up book without pictures. (That’s unfair to David Lean, grown-ups, books, and me, but you get the idea.)

If you aren’t aware, Oliver Twist is a beloved story about a meek little boy born into a horrible world of child abuse from which the only escape is deus ex machina. The plot basically consists of a small child suffering, and then getting away only to find himself suffering in some new way. I know this is a classic case of critic’s toothache syndrome, but on the day I watched this movie I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why that’s a story people enjoy. (I just coined “critic’s toothache syndrome” but surely the meaning is clear.) Dickens meant it as political propaganda; it’s not all that different from those magazine ads with a big third-world harelip. Come on guys, I was reading that!

Except with Oliver Twist Dickens isn’t just throwing it in your face; he’s drawing you in with his whole voluminous bag of manipulation tricks. The whole time, we’re compelled into heartily root-root-rooting for this poor little kid not to get abused any more. “Yeah, run away!” “Yeah, beat up that mean kid!” “Boo, adults!” “Boo, London!” “Boo, world!”

Toward the end I realized that my problem was mostly the result of failing in my quest to watch everything like a kid. It all would have gone down smoothly enough if I had only “empathized,” which is a pleasant form of playing along, rather than empathized, which is grueling and a waste of time.

But whether it was the movie or the toothache I don’t know. For all I know it might actually have been the movie. Beth watched it with me and she said she felt worn out for the same reasons. But of course that’s her way. It isn’t always mine, or at least so I thought.

Alec Guinness with a false nose is Fagin the horrible horrible Jew, though unlike the novel the script does not explicitly indicate that he is Jewish. I mention it only because there it is and it was apparently controversial on the original release (Criterion boasts that they are restoring 12 minutes of his performance that were excised for later releases). I certainly don’t take it personally nor do I think that a movie like this poses any real danger in the present day, which is not to say that this isn’t fine material for forming a nice ugly stereotype if shown to the right people at the right age. But what isn’t? Certainly everyone else in Dickens is. I feel like my current mildly enlightened, mildly bigoted perspective on the varieties of man is really just a heap of stereotypes that have been subjected to erosion. Isn’t that all anyone has to work with? I have Fagin in there just like everyone else.

Robert Newton as Bill Sykes oddly gets top billing. Apparently this is the role that “made” Alec Guinness, to some degree anyway, so his name wasn’t yet a selling point. In fact the preview introduces him by explicitly reminding you that you saw him in Great Expectations, and which one he was, saying something like “who could forget Alec Guinness?”. The kid in the title role does a fine job though it’s mostly one of looking pathetic. He is clearly the prototype for the casting of Chocolate Factory Charlie. Kay Walsh shrieks a little too hard, is a little too pretty and put together for the part, and is David Lean’s then-wife so it all fits together. Francis L. Sullivan continues to have the biggest face in movies. Speaking of which, this funny face was in there very briefly and I racked my brain trying to figure out where I’d seen it. Peter Bull, a quintessential “hey it’s that guy.” Having looked him up, I think Dr. Strangelove must be my answer.

The music is that rare thing: a movie score by a famous “serious” composer. Well, as famous as Sir Arnold Bax, anyway. It has the standard strengths and weaknesses of the species: it is significantly classier and more aesthetically refined on its own terms than most movie music, and it is also never entirely apt. Film scoring is a special skill and it’s not necessarily a very arty one. This isn’t an exceedingly arty score but it’s arty enough to miss the mark. Or rather, to stubbornly set a mark that isn’t quite the same as the film’s mark.

My music selection here is a little unorthodox SO BRACE YOURSELVES. I’ve chosen a cue from the middle of the movie that has a fair amount of foley throughout (doors shutting, crying, a rooster crowing, etc. etc.) even though this movie offers a standard Main Title with no such offending sound effects. The reason is that the Main Title music doesn’t give much of a sense of the distinct voice of this score, nor does it offer the main theme in a clear and direct way. Whereas this cue (known on the soundtrack as “Oliver’s sleepless night”) does. This cue also features the concertante piano that is a particularly distinctive occasional feature of the score (played by Harriet Cohen, with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Muir Matheson). Choosing this cue over the Main Title seemed inevitable to me after I saw that the short concert suite Bax put together from the score has this cue as its first movement and gives it the title “Theme.”

Without further ado: here it is.

These are the sounds of Oliver having been sent to his room in the undertaker’s house (where he sleeps under a coffin) closing the door, crying to himself, and then later, at dawn, sneaking out before anyone wakes up and running away to London. The piano concerto texture was reportedly suggested by Lean himself as a way of suggesting Oliver’s delicate soul against the whole cruel world. In absence of the picture it sort of does that. With the picture it starts just to seem like some odd classical music is playing. Occasionally to interesting effect, occasionally not.

directed by David Lean
written by Charles Dickens
adapted for the screen by David Lean, Ronald Neame, and Anthony Havelock-Allan, with Kay Walsh and Cecil McGivern

Criterion #31.

I sometimes have to crop out black borders on the frames that I grab; depending on the aspect ratio and the way the DVD was created, the movie image doesn’t always go all the way to the edge of the screen. Since title frames are often mostly black, which can make the edges hard to detect, I often also grab a frame from elsewhere in the movie just to determine the correct frame size, and then apply that to the title card. I say this because you’ll notice in the frame above there seems to be a black border that looks like ought to be cropped, certainly on the right and left and maybe on the top and bottom too. But when I went to compare to the rest of the DVD, to my surprise I found that apart from these opening credits, the movie completely fills the frame. You’ll also notice that the title looks kind of crooked, has terrible contrast, and is all ghosty. This is all to say that something is wrong with the titles on this disc, as though they couldn’t find a good source for them. Or else they just screwed up somehow and forgot to do their own crop.

Even the version at archive.org has cleaner titles. Of related interest: you can watch this movie at archive.org.

This is very cozy, trustworthy movie in the old tradition. I am pleased to report that I am still able to watch this sort of thing with no analytical impulses whatever. A lot of craft had to go into a movie like this and I am delighted to find myself in the luxurious position of simply being its beneficiary, rather than running some kind of surrogate production company in my head like an anxious understudy.

We, the audience, ought to be like Pip if we can, living on someone else’s dime and not having to know whether our benefactor is a crazy old lady or a filthy old man. I can say this because this disc had no commentary or extras. I say huzzah for that: it was just a movie!

Part of the reason I can retain the serenity not to “think” about a movie like this is because it’s the sort of movie that I’ve seen since I was a child and so its shortcomings are of the sort that I long ago learned to tolerate. Or rather that I learned to perceive as mysterious, part of an adult world of sense that wasn’t yet mine. Boredom in those days was neither my fault nor the movie’s; it was explained by my youth and unworldliness, so all was forgiven — of me and of the movie.

I daresay that when I was young I would have been much too bored by this movie to watch it all the way through. But that doesn’t mean I would have “disliked” it. One good image was a perfectly acceptable harvest in those days. This one has quite a few good sturdy images, starting with the graveyard scene at the very beginning. (I think I probably would have been spooked by that scene and also disappointed by the fact that the movie doesn’t make good on its implicit promise to be about spooky stuff. Books and movies were constantly pulling this sort of stunt when I was a kid. Where’s my portrait with moving eyes, dammit?)

Incidentally, I would have been bored because of what I might now say is a great strength: that it’s so true to the long-scroll/fine-brush quality of Dickens. Simultaneous commitment to the pleasures of intricate plot and to scene-painting — to the horizontal and the vertical, as they say in music — felt to me then like contradictory impulses. Delaying the answer to a mystery with a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with the mystery felt like abuse, or simply like an error, one that adult storytelling constantly made. I had no interest in pushing and popping while processing a plot. Adults are much more accustomed to stack management as a matter of course and like to feel that it enriches things. As to which attitude is correct, I’m ultimately agnostic — I’ve certainly learned very well how to savor the Dickensian method (the function of the “retarding element“), but straight-ahead no-background storytelling still feels pure to me — but I definitely prefer to be in a place where I can see both my possible attitudes equally. An old fashioned movie like this is the perfect way; images are by their nature straight-ahead even when the movie tries not to be.

This is how a Dickens movie should look and feel. The art direction was perfect. I see that I’m not the only one to feel this way about this movie. Another thing I am not the only one to feel is that the first half hour, with young Pip and Estella, is more satisfying than the rest, with grown Pip and Estella, because the adult actors aren’t as compelling. I didn’t mind so much that John Mills is clearly much much older than his character, but I did mind that Valerie Hobson is simply not a worthy successor to Jean Simmons in any department. (Valerie Hobson was, for what it’s worth, the producer’s wife, so who knows what David Lean might have thought. Probably everyone knew very well that she was the wrong choice. The movie is sort of designed not to rely very much on the adult Estella.)

Music, very comfortably done in the expected operetta/Hollywood style, is by Walter Goehr, better known as a conductor. Here’s the Main Title, your track 31 (disc 2 track 1!). This doesn’t really do the score justice; there’s quite a bit of music and some other cues are better and more original, but this is the title! It’s the big theme and that’s how it has to be. Sorry that the clarinets don’t keep it together in this take, but you know how rushed recording days can be.

More of the same to follow in #32.

directed by Fritz Lang
written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang

Criterion #30. Hey, 30!

30. The commentary is annoying. It’s two academics, one of whom continually babbles the very worst sort of aca-double-talk, and the other of whom basically says “ibid.” It just so happens that I took a distribution requirement course from this very same double-talker back at Large University — my only official dip into Film Studies. I’ve said this about other commentaries but of course this time it was especially true: the bullshit brought me back. This stuff serves an important role in preventing me from judging my past self harshly. Why couldn’t I have been more engaged, retained more, taken school more seriously? I’ll tell you why: because they talked like this.

29. When did it become standard for insecure academic bullshit artists to tart up their circuities and truisms with meaningless, weak-blooded wordplay? A la “in this dialectic, to interrogate is to derogate, so to say.” (Or “Dis/course is stupid, I wish I hadn’t taken it.” Joke.) By the time of my graze with the Academy, this sort of thing seemed well entrenched, at least on the “Theory” side of things. I (we) always rolled our eyes at it as though it were a new sort of inane fad but I now wonder if it wasn’t already decades old. Someone somewhere was originally responsible for this, and someone nearby was responsible for endorsing it. I am disgusted with them both. (But in this dialectic, is not disgust a disguise, so to say?)

28. Anyway, the guy does a bit of that, and he certainly did it back in the day. But mostly what he does is say dull things (or semi-things) of dubious validity in an evasively longwinded way. Beth said the commentary lowered her opinion of Large University. Well then, that needed to happen.

27. Fritz Lang’s immortal film M has no musical score whatsoever, which throws a mini-wrench in my mini-works. How am I supposed to come up with a track for my megamix? Well, I did what I could, see below. But first let me address the issue of the no music. This is Lang’s first sound film. He apparently strongly resisted sound for a year and a half, and then wrapped his head around it and made this. The use of sound here is aggressive and purposeful. Off-screen sound effects are used very overtly to create a sense of space, or to create a sense of a modern city where e.g. car horns punctuate conversations. Harsh screeches and whistles are used to jar us in moments when the characters feel jarred. Peter Lorre as the killer is marked by his whistling, off-screen and on. And most notably, several sequences play in absolute silence. This is a very peculiar and stark effect that feels almost unique to this movie. The only other “completely silent” scene I can think of is the mirror sequence from Duck Soup. Anyone else?

28. But: one of the many extras on the disc is a gallery of still images, among which is something called “original German program” from the UFA-Palast am Zoo, the theater where the film premiered. Above the cast list it announces: “Vorspiel zu dem Film: ‘M’ / An der Wurlitzer Orgel: Billy Barnes”. Then follows the credits of the film (which incidentally do not appear in the film itself.) What this makes clear is that Billy Barnes (an American, oddly enough) played an organ prelude before the movie, as was common in the days of the silents. What it leaves ambiguous is whether or not he continued playing during the movie, which was, of course, also common it the days of the silents. It seems entirely plausible to me that in the earliest days of sound, a filmmaker might have assumed that music would always be performed live, and that the synchronized soundtrack was just for dialogue and diegetic effects. This, I thought, would certainly make sense of the silent sequences in M, which are generally scenes of suspense or of scale, both of which are occasions where films tend to lean more heavily on music. This train of speculation appealed to me.

27. However, after some Google-research I can’t find any mention of the notion of an accompanied M at all. A moderately strong case against my speculation about an organ score is the fact that M has been shown with no music for many decades, during which time Fritz Lang and others (e.g. the editor Paul Falkenberg, who is heard on the disc making commentary during a screening in the 70s) had plenty of opportunity to protest, to remind the world that musical accompaniment had been assumed. Seeing as they seem never to have done this, I guess it’s unlikely. On the other hand, the excellent through-composed original score for Metropolis simply disappeared from use for many decades even though its existence was no great secret, and Lang seems not to have protested that either. So I have to wonder whether this simply was a matter where nobody cared enough, and whether Lang, a notorious self-revisionist, didn’t mind getting credit for the very bold effect the silence happens to produce in the absence of music.

26. All I’m saying is, next time you watch M, try imagining that it is designed to accommodate live music, and tell me whether not it seems feasible to you. It does to me.

25. What then are we going to put on our all-Criterion soundtrack album? I’m afraid it has to be this, obviously the “theme” of M if there is one: Track 30. Trivia from the disc: Lorre couldn’t whistle, so this is the writer (Lang’s wife and collaborator) Thea von Harbou dubbing him. The disc also shows that later re-edited reissues of the movie with credits added accompanied them with an orchestral version of “Hall of the Mountain King.” It’s not at all appropriate for the film as a whole but it’s nonetheless the only real choice.

24. Having reached 30 tracks and (by my calculations) 70 minutes of music, I’m declaring disc 1 of this soundtrack mix complete. Time to burn it and get ready for disc 2.

23. I know, there are no discs anymore, but these gargantuan playlists you can buy online now with many hundreds of tracks give me a little bit of an agoraphobic feeling. It’s good for things to be bounded.

22. For your convenience, and to encourage actual relistening:

My top marks so far would go to:

4. Amarcord
5. The 400 Blows
10. Walkabout
20. Sid and Nancy
21. Dead Ringers
25. Alphaville
26. The Long Good Friday

And maybe a few more. Movie music is fun.

22. This was my first in my Criterion project that I watched on Blu-ray. Yes, high definition is definitely better than not. But here’s something I’ve only just now learned: getting a screenshot of a DVD menu is no problem, but getting a screenshot of a Blu-ray menu is a pain in the ass. Blu-ray menus are programmed in some kind of Java variant and are not currently fully implemented in any free software. When you play the disc you just see the background video loop with no visible menus. And the commercial software players never want to let you take screenshots. I struggled for a while and then just ended up grabbing the above menu image from dvdbeaver, who seem to have figured out how to do it. I assure you it looked exactly like that on my copy too.

21. Pretty interesting, right?

20. Apart from the commentary criticized above, the supplemental features are great. The jewel is William Friedkin’s filmed 1974 interview with Lang. There’s also the aforementioned Paul Falkenberg audio, recorded at the New School in the mid-70s, which is genuinely interesting — part of the pleasure being hearing the New Yorky voices of the students and imagining the whole milieu. Then there’s a sort of “sweding” of M by Claude Chabrol for TV in the 80s, followed by an interview in which he talks about the experience and about Lang’s technique. While not much to watch, this “remake” turned out to be really helpful to me in seeing the film as others have seen it, in all its iconic splendor. In picking the shots he wanted to remake, and inevitably exaggerating some aspects and disregarding others, Chabrol showed me what M is, not in itself, but in the culture and in people’s impressions, which is ultimately maybe of more interest. Or at least of separate and equal interest. It was almost as good as seeing a bit of it parodied in Looney Tunes or on The Simpsons.

19. There’s also a featurette about the “physical history” of the film, the ways it was recut, remade, lost, misused, and then misrestored. Leading, it is implied, up to this newly ideal version, from 2004.

18. Except! I actually saw M in the theater just a week before sitting down with the Criterion disc, because it’s now in distribution in a new and improved restoration that apparently is 7 minutes longer, reincorporating material not seen since 1931, etc. etc. I racked my brains on watching the Criterion disc to try to remember what else had been in the new version but couldn’t. I think maybe there was a little more to the scene where people on the street harass an innocent old man, but that’s all I can come up with. However I did have the impression of the image having been even cleaner and more stable in the new restoration. A tough thing to hold in the memory accurately and compare.

17. Seeing it with a live audience was interesting, though. All the tenser and stranger when it would go dead silent.

16. I like this countdown thing I’m doing, because it shows me when I’m going to be done.

15. But 30 was clearly too many.

14. Am I right, folks?

13. So, M.

12. Stephen Dedalus thinking back on his adolescent ambitions: “Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? Yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W.”

11. You’d think Sesame Street would have jumped at this one. (Except for the pedophile/murderer thing.) But come on, this movie really is brought to you by the letter M! I guess they never did The Scarlet Letter either. (Or The Story of O.) So many missed opportunities.

10. This is a very peculiar movie. As Chabrol’s riff made clear, its great impact was visual and atmospheric; it’s basically the founding document of film noir. Trench-coated underworlders slinking down shadowy streets! But looking back at it from our post-Raymond Chandler perspective, what stands out is just how little it actually conforms to those expectations. It’s just not really one of those movies. It’s actually a free improvisation on an “issue” movie, the issue being, well, serial child murder. (And more generally, child safety.) There had been several well-publicized murder sprees in Germany in the late 20s, so this was a highly topical sort of luridness. From this theme Lang basically spins off a meandering, ambivalent portrait of society and the ways it flails about trying to rid itself of a madman.

9. The thing that makes it so peculiar is that nearly every character in the society except for the murderer is depicted with a certain degree of playful cynicism. (As for example the hilarious shot of the head detective’s bulging crotch as he slouches sweatily in his chair.) But Peter Lorre’s character is, apparently, too troubled and weird and compelling to require any such commentary from the camera. The upshot is that the murderer comes off as being handled with greater sympathy than the world around him, even as it’s clear that his crimes are absolutely evil. This gives the strange impression that overlaid on this story about a society trying to cure its ills is another kind of story, the kind that’s usually about an artist, an outsider who lives in a way that is spiritually beyond those around him.

8. The uneasy juxtaposition of these two molds for the “outsider” story is essentially what Lolita plays on: the full, sensitive soul who feels misunderstood by a vapid world might well be a really horrible creep. Hans Beckert, the murderer here, is hardly a “full sensitive soul,” but his emotions are deeper and his psychology more layered than anyone else in this movie. The scene where he sadly makes a monster face at himself in the mirror establishes him as self-aware in a way nobody else in this world is. And his shrieking monologue at the end is chilling in part simply because it’s about psychology, and who would have thought anyone would dare “go there” in this sort of movie?

7. The philosophical effect at the end is excellent — you get drawn into the debate (“How do you solve a problem like M?”), become convinced that it is indeed an ugly and difficult subject with no satisfying answer, and feel temporarily relieved when it gets turned over to THE LAW. And just as that relief wears off, seconds later (“Wait, what is the law going to say?”), the movie swerves away and leaves you stuck there with an accusing finger pointed at you: you shall get no relief. There is no ultimate relief and no ultimate authority in this business of being a society. You have to live by what you believe, all the time.

6. And yet there are also long passages of the movie that don’t have much to do with the big message, with noir, with anything. It just gets caught up in its own goofy plotting. Why does the scene where the criminals are discussing plans have to go on and on? What are we supposed to make of the extent and duration of the sequence where the entire criminal underworld trashes an office building in search of the murderer?

5. As with some other very early sound films, the versions for foreign distribution actually involved some reshoots. The disc contains “the English version,” only recently rediscovered, which is very shoddily done and which I’ll admit I didn’t watch all the way through. It’s mostly just a cloddish dub, with a few replacement shots of printed text and a few dialogue scenes of the police redone with terrible actors. The only real reason anyone would want to watch it is that it features Peter Lorre himself doing his monologue at the end in English. But it’s clear that he’s in a completely different frame of mind on a different day, that Lang isn’t present, and that he’s just phoning it in, if not downright sabotaging it. He also did it in French, which you can watch in one of the extras. Similarly low-energy.

4. Four left, huh?

3. For all that I’m saying it’s an unusual movie and I don’t entirely know what to make of it, it’s very clear why it’s a renowned classic. It has force. You feel Lang’s complete control and cinematic sense of purpose in every shot. That a movie shot this way is eccentric in substance just makes it all the richer for rewatching. This is the stuff Film Studies are made of.

2. I’m not necessarily endorsing that. I also like films that do one thing, excellently. In fact I think I prefer them. Who needs a rich text when you can go to the movies?

1. But I did enjoy this.

0. Done.

directed by Peter Weir
screenplay by Cliff Green
from the novel by Joan Lindsay (1967)

Criterion #29.

(I needed to take some time to really separate the names “Peter Weir” and “Nicholas Roeg.” These guys have absolutely nothing to do with each other other than that each has an unusual four-letter last name and each has made at least one spooky movie about Australia, but that seems to be enough for my brain to mix them up. Key points: Nicholas Roeg is not himself Australian; Peter Weir is. Nicholas Roeg’s career since the 70s has been almost entirely eccentric whereas Peter Weir became increasingly commercial. Nicholas Roeg: Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Witches. Peter Weir: The Last Wave, Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Master and Commander. These guys have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

I’ve now taken the time. This will not be a problem again.)

I bet you’re reading this because you want to know what happened to those girls who mysteriously disappeared at Hanging Rock! Sorry, guys, I don’t know.

Oh fine, I’ll tell you. They passed out of objective time and into dreamtime, transcending the logic of narrative just as the trance of the sensual transcends the rational mind. (Whew! Case closed! What a relief to wrap that one up.)

Thing is, if you’ve seen the movie you already knew that. And yet you still probably felt like there was a mystery here. That’s the point. The point is that just as the irrational can never be reconciled to the rational, a movie can shout and shout “This movie is about the irrational!” and people still won’t be able to stop themselves from writing that this film, ahem, “raises more questions than it answers.”

That’s not true in the most important sense; the movie makes its intentions very clear. It rather belabors the point, in fact. The first 30 minutes are something special and lovely indeed but after that it does tend to go on. (Not that I particularly minded — possibly because I had been so soothed already. Which suggests a good rule of thumb for filmmakers: if you start your movie with a hypnotic induction, the audience will be very forgiving of the rest.)

I picture a sign in a hotel lobby: “WELCOME QUESTIONS WITH NO ANSWERS CONFERENCE!” I did not find this movie mysterious as a movie; it was well marked. It was about mystery. It basks in it and then shows us characters struggling to come to terms with it one way or another, which is of course what cannot be done. They resist it at their peril. But there is no “it.” Non-being.

The idea of a horror movie about calm pleasantness, about the cosmic menace implicit in all experience, thrills me and whispers very close to my heart. This is only partially that, but when it was, it felt precious to me. The first section is sort of like Vermeer as horror. Or more on the nose would be Pre-Raphaelite stuff, which often seems to be deliberately cultivating those undertones. (A reproduction of this one is shown briefly in the movie.)

Don’t come telling me this movie is an allegory about sexual awakening. I am so sick of that shit and I will fight you. I pity the people for whom sex is the only form of mystery they are willing to acknowledge, and even then only as a kind of conspiracy to be unmasked. But pity shades pretty readily into resentment because these sorts of people will never stop trying to get you to see what they see and “admit it! admit it!” They should take note that there is a bad guy in this movie, but it’s not some Moby-Dick of the universe gobbling up unsuspecting girls; it’s petty headmistress Ahab who suppresses her awareness of the numinous and ruins lives. Don’t be like her! Don’t come springing your shit on me.

Also, the movie tells us several times over that the girls who returned from the rock were QUITE INTACT. The smug hypocrites with their “duh it’s about rape” T-shirts (pulled over their straw bodies, yes) probably think that this only confirms the centrality of sex to the meaning of the movie. If anything, it works the other way — the girls’ virginity is only one of many metaphors to access the essential. The girls are QUITE INTACT compared to these provincial doctors who needlessly clinicalize the cosmic. This movie is in fact a rebuttal to all the “duh it’s about rape” that goes on out there. I’m all for it. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who wants to stand up for Lewis Carroll and poor Alice; I feel like this movie was on my side. For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

I can’t help but see this movie in terms of a right brain/left brain model (lame as that is). The left brain wants to know the right brain but it cannot, it can only make way for it or stifle it. Sex is just one of the things that cannot ever be dragged out into the light; the more you theorize it and politicize it and write film criticism about it, the more you are actually writing about something else. Sex and love are threads in the movie because they are very much mysterious and sensual and unnameable in essence, just as is seeing a bird, smelling a flower, worrying about a weird rock, feeling flattened by the depths of time, and spacing way way way out. Maybe so far out that you disappear forever, as you one day will. If you insist on calling that “the budding sexuality of young girls living under Victorian repression,” I can’t stop you, but I wish I could.

Having railed like this I hope I’m making clear: the movie most certainly is about the budding sexuality of young girls living under Victorian repression. It’s just about many other things equally and equivalently, so I distrust anyone whose impulse is to headline that one, since that’s the one that has been most begrimed by overuse and bad faith. It’s mental kitsch.

I enjoyed the movie.

There’s nothing else on the disc other than the trailer, which was silly.

As with Alphaville I feel a little dirty about having mucked with the music. But I had to. I have a lot of criteria for the sample track I pick – it needs to be original to the movie, musically self-contained, and essentially unsullied by dialogue or sound effects — and though opening or closing credits will usually fit the bill, it’s not a sure thing. Picnic‘s opening is set to panflute music that 1) has dialogue over it and 2) on investigation I learn is actually a licensed track rather than original (apparently because Zamfir refused to record anything new for the movie. Yet he still managed to get better billing than the film’s actual composer. We see “FLÙTE DE PAN Played by GHEORGHE ZAMFIR,” which stays on screen while a second credit fades in lamely below it: “Additional Original music Composed by BRUCE SMEATON.” Kudos to Zamfir’s lawyers. Smeaton’s credit is unfair and misleading since it suggests that Zamfir’s contribution is also original, which it is not. Yes, there’s not a ton of Smeaton’s music but that still shouldn’t make the word “additional” necessary.)

Meanwhile Picnic‘s end credits are the Emperor Concerto. Used very effectively, as is the other classical music that appears on the soundtrack. But to put it here would betray the spirit of this exercise in scrapbooking.

So that leaves us with Smeaton’s original score, of which there’s really only one cue of any musical significance. It’s used twice in its entirety (and elsewhere in part) but both times there are sound effects, which I’ve permitted here in the past, and dialogue, which I haven’t. So after much handwringing I decided to just do some crossfades between the two to eliminate the dialogue, similar to what I did for Alphaville. This is apparently called “The Ascent Music.” It plays first during the pivotal scene, as the girls are working their way up the rock, and mostly that’s the one you’re hearing. Here it is, your track 29.

This music is somewhat ahead of its time, it seems to me. Or maybe just transitional, pointing from the Michel Legrand vein of 60s moodiness toward the new-age/sentimental-minimalist washes of the 80s and 90s.