The Wonder Ring/Reflections On Black/Sirius Remembered

Stan Brakhage made The Wonder Ring at the request of fellow avant-garde filmmaker Joseph Cornell, who wanted to document the Third Avenue elevated train in Manhattan before it was torn down. The resulting film is a silent testimony to the strange beauty to be found in even the most blighted urban relics and the dignity of the people who inhabit them. There's even something spiritual about Brakhage's images of trains and the people riding them. Seen through Brakhage's eyes, the girders of the train platforms become stained glass windows with bright light streaming through the geometric spaces between the steel beams. A simple train journey through the city becomes a ghostly ride through an amorphous realm where people and places seem to be perpetually in the process of fading away. Brakhage achieves evocative superimpositions through the reflections of figures and buildings in the train's windows, strange hybrid compositions where reflections and refractions bring together disparate spaces into a single composite image. Brakhage points his camera out at the city through the warped glass of a window as the train slowly rumbles along, and the resulting images of the buildings outside seem to waver and morph as though the city was underwater, the train a submarine passing through the rippling waves.

The effect is dazzling and hypnotic, an unforgettable experience that creates a work of great beauty, overflowing with nostalgia for something that's not even gone yet. There's great sadness in this film, a sense of loss that's communicated by all those ghostly figures, traveling around the city in an eerie haze, their forms blurry, superimposed over one another and over the landscape around them. Brakhage's images are cloudy but also somehow precise, a tension that manifests itself beautifully when, late in the film, his camera focuses on a train window where the dirt and scratches on the glass create striations in the glass, little furrows of yellowish grime or scratched markings. The view through this glass is obscured, and everything outside is blurred and warped by the marks, but Brakhage renders the marks themselves with crystalline clarity, as though these obstacles are the point rather than the view they are ostensibly blocking. Brakhage focuses on the minutiae in order to examine the world and all its objects with an eye towards the beauty, pathos and resonance of even the simplest and most utilitarian of structures. This train line had outlived its usefulness to the city's planners and leaders, and as a result it was being erased, but Brakhage, in looking at this soon-to-be-ghost, locates the aesthetic beauty that goes beyond mere utility.


Reflections On Black is a thoroughly uncharacteristic film from Stan Brakhage, though it is characteristic of his early psychodramas, made in the early 1950s before he moved away from even the suggestion of narrative to explore more abstract and purely visual realms. This film is especially unusual in that it is overtly informed by genre in a way that Brakhage's work almost never was. The title of Reflections On Black reflects Brakhage's interest in studying the absence of color and all its implications, but in retrospect it almost seems as though the film is reflecting on black as in noir, presenting a distilled essence of the film noir in these portraits of emotionally troubled couples in shadowy spaces. Brakhage's film, made during the era in which the film noir (though not yet named as such) dominated Hollywood B pictures, provides an avant-garde corollary to the shadowy tragedies proliferating in the mainstream. The film opens in abstraction, alternating pure black frames with images of shadowy figures moving through shadowy exterior spaces, evoking B movie cinematography and the iconography of the trenchcoat-wearing mystery man.

From there, Brakhage moves into a more concrete scenario, a wordless story of a man cheating on a woman with another woman, only to be discovered in the act by the other woman's other man. It's an archetypal scenario, barely developed, a template for Brakhage's shadowy study of this familiar plot. As in his other psychodramas, the narrative is melodramatic and emotionally basic; his real concern is finding a visual language to convey the intensity of the emotions at the core of the story. It's no wonder, in retrospect, that he quickly abandoned narrative more and more in subsequent works, since the vestigial plot is so clearly not what interests him. Instead it's all about the gestures, the quiver of lips, the flailing of hands, the slow, almost mechanical motion of two lovers descending into bed together as though falling in slow motion.

The film's soundtrack, provided by Brakhage, is a musique concrete sound collage of piano, industrial clatter and hum, children's voices, and other noises and musical fragments arranged into an abrasive accompaniment to the shadowy images. Sound was another element Brakhage would soon largely abandon in stripping the cinema down to what really interested him, and it's telling that here the soundtrack, like the plot material, seems extraneous and unnecessary, added on because it was expected rather than because it really changed anything. What really matters here is the primal way in which Brakhage riffs on this stereotypical B movie situation, climaxing with a mysterious and haunting shot in which the man's eyes are scratched out with a rapidly fluctuating blur of white lines drawn directly on the frame, as though Brakhage was suggesting the way in which his later, more fully developed cinema might explode unexpectedly out of this early ancestor.


Stan Brakhage's Sirius Remembered is a film about death, about the material facts of it and, perhaps, about the possibility of spiritual transcendence hidden within it. The film's images consist solely of footage of a dead dog lying in the woods, first surrounded by brown-hued fall decay and then in winter snow. The images are rapidly edited together into a repetitive, looping framework so that the film conveys the impression of death from many angles rather than ever lingering on a single view or a single perspective. The image of the dog's black, unseeing eye does recur repeatedly, however, alternately centered within the image so it disconcertingly seems to be staring out of the film, or placed in a corner so it slyly glances up or down at the rest of the image. Sometimes, the eye seems to be staring out of the frame from within the clutter of superimposed imagery that surrounds it and frames it. The fast pace of the editing places the emphasis on the passage of time, the blending of one season into another, the slow process by which the dog's earthly remains begin to return to the soil.

As is often the case with Brakhage, this film is all about texture, as the camera whips across the surface of the dog's hair, visually rhyming it with the tangle of twigs and leaves surrounding the body. At one point, the camera repeatedly pans upward, from the dog lying amidst the browning foliage to the pale blue sky with a few bare treetops reaching up. The movement suggests the passage of the spirit out of the earthly plane, away from the rot of the earth towards, well, something: heaven, transcendence, the spiritual plane. The effect is not as visceral (in any sense) or as provocative as Brakhage's aesthetic, inquisitive approach to death in films like The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, but Sirius Remembered is still an interesting and formally compelling short that attempts to encapsulate death, to document the materiality of death while acknowledging the limits of such an earthbound perspective.

Les Cousins

Claude Chabrol's second feature, Les Cousins, is, like his first film Le beau Serge, a study of opposites and dichotomies: urban/rural, innocent/worldly, intellectual/physical, sheltered/experienced. In Chabrol's first film, a bookish young man returns home to the small town where he grew up and finds that his childhood friends have grown hard and mean in the years he's been gone. In this second film, the roles are reversed: Jean-Claude Brialy, who played the naïve intellectual of Chabrol's first film, now plays the decadent Paul, whose country cousin Charles (Gérard Blain, who played the tough, drunken Serge in the earlier film) is coming to visit. Charles' arrival in Paris, to go to school in preparation for a big exam, introduces him into Paul's wild, extravagant lifestyle. Paul first appears in a long dressing gown, gesturing boldly with a cane, delivering grand orations, with his older friend Clovis (Claude Cerval) hanging around nearby, seeming equally decadent and strange. The relationship between these two men initially seems homoerotic, and that doesn't entirely change when the orgiastic atmosphere of Paul's lifestyle becomes fully apparent. The unworldly Charles seems to have landed in the company of people whose pleasure-seeking approach to life is very different from his own stolid work ethic and dependability.

The true nature of Paul and Clovis is quickly revealed in an early scene in which one of Paul's former conquests shows up at the apartment, tearfully telling Paul that she's pregnant and has just confronted her parents with the revelation. Paul and Clovis cluster around the girl, one leering over each of her shoulders, and Chabrol's tight compositions position them as opposite voices perched like an angel and a devil on each shoulder. In fact, they're two devils, both of them pressuring her to get an abortion, with the confused girl looking back and forth between them, helpless, unable to resist their insistence. Paul, with his satanic beard and cool, suave manner, seems especially like a vision of the devil as a perpetual seducer, a conscience-negating voice whispering in one's ear, luring the unsuspecting into his lair. He's not content living a life of dionysiac excess himself; he's a kind of recruiter for the cause, and he's not satisfied unless everyone around him seems to be having as much fun as he is.

Maybe that's why Paul's parties seem so loud and desperate. Everyone's always shouting and screaming and laughing too loudly, there's always some grandiose entertainment (like a bare-chested escape artist who sings operatically throughout his act), and Paul himself struts around putting on Mozart and Wagner records or declaiming theatrically in German. Indeed, there's something Germanically shrill about Paul and his scene, and Paul's games of dress-up also flirt with fascism and militarism, which seem to fascinate him, as does the unloaded revolver that he likes to aim at people, clicking the trigger on its empty chambers. It's as though, if there isn't a constant din, if everyone isn't making noise at the tops of their lungs, then no one's having any fun. That's a problem for Charles, who just wants to be left alone to study in quiet. Charles has his own insecurities, and he doesn't seem to realize that Paul's flashy exterior hides the hollow emptiness that might be glaringly obvious at these parties if anyone would ever shut up for even a second.


At one of these parties, Charles meets his cousin's friend Florence (Juliette Mayniel) and falls immediately, passionately in love with her in his naïve way. She seems touched and charmed by his earnestness, his complete honesty and openness. When they walk outside, leaving behind one of Paul's frenetic parties, Charles spills his guts to her soon after their first meeting, telling her about his love for her, about his sheltered country life, about his insecurity and feelings of inferiority in comparison to his more outwardly confident, social cousin. Florence is obviously drawn to Charles, though, despite his clear difference from her own social scene. Chabrol captures her talking to him with shining eyes, smiling and reassuring him, both of them bathed in shadows in the night. It's a very romantic image, which is why it's so startling when, in the film's second half, Chabrol cruelly subverts and undermines this moody romanticism.

When Paul finds out how seriously his cousin has fallen for Florence, and how seriously she's taking this blossoming affair, he sets out to push them apart, apparently merely because this kind of seriousness has no place in his life of parties and casual dalliances and drink-fueled orgies. In one scene, Clovis uses his persuasive, insistent voice to push Florence and Paul towards one another, standing between them as they move closer and closer together, his words urging them towards one another, urging Florence to abandon her brief dream of forming a more stable romantic relationship with the kind, innocent Charles. Instead, she reaffirms her commitment to Paul's promiscuous lifestyle, briefly settling into an affair with Paul and then discarding him to move on to someone new. Lounging around the apartment with Paul, sunbathing in just her panties, Chabrol traps her between the metal bars of a railing that makes it look as though she's in prison. She's a vision of languid sexuality and sensuality, but she's in a cage.

All of these characters are. Chabrol's aesthetic is already developing into the subtly stylish, clinically observational style that characterizes his mature work, in which he examines the pretensions and follies of the bourgeoisie. His camera glides in slow, creeping circles around these characters, a predatory crawl that makes them seem hemmed in on all sides. At a key moment late in the film, when Charles is nearly overwhelmed by the conflicting pressures weighing down on him, the camera spins in a dizzy circle around his room, reflecting the ways in which his whole value system has been utterly disorientated. Despite the thematic continuity and casting overlap of Les Cousins with Chabrol's first film Le beau Serge, Les Cousins already feels like more of a proper Chabrol film. It's an unsentimental film that dissects both the freewheeling amorality of people like Paul and the working class optimism of Charles. The former squanders his bourgeoisie privilege and intelligence (he aces his exams without studying, while the harried and distracted Charles fails even after all his hard work) and the latter is unprepared for the cruel truths of a world that doesn't conform to his idealistic hopes.

He Ran All the Way

He Ran All the Way is an emotionally and narratively incoherent film that is, nevertheless, compelling in its raw examination of a family under pressure and a man without a family falling to pieces as he realizes just how unloved he really is. Nick Robey (John Garfield) is a loser with no real connections in the world, and no real hopes. The opening shot is a pan across Nick's messy, cramped apartment, finally resting on the bed where Nick thrashes around, yelling in his sleep, haunted by nightmares of endlessly running. He's woken by his mother (Gladys George), who obviously has not the least bit of affection for her son. She berates him for being so lazy, sleeping until nearly noon when he should be out looking for a job, and they get into a nasty argument that climaxes with her slapping him. This is a portrait of a totally unloving mother/son relationship; every time Nick calls her "mom," he spits the word out with such contempt that he makes it sound like a slur, a hateful curse. From the beginning, it's apparent that this is a man who has nothing.

Nick soon tries to pull off a payroll robbery with his weaselly friend Al (Norman Lloyd), but the plot of course goes wrong, Al is wounded and captured, and Nick shoots a police officer while escaping. There follows one of the film's most visually potent sequences, as Nick wanders through a series of desolate urban landscapes, living up to the film's title and fulfilling the prophecy of his nightmare about killing a man and being forced to run constantly. Director John Berry and cinematographer James Wong Howe perfectly capture that sensation of being alone in a dismal world, a never-ending flight from unseen pursuers who might be lurking around any corner. The images isolate Nick in his surroundings, until finally he manages to lose himself in the crowds at a pool. That early sequence of Nick on the run is important, because after Nick meets the innocent Peggy (Shelley Winters) and gets her to bring him home with her, the film settles down into a claustrophobic cabin fever drama with the paranoid Nick imprisoning Peggy and her family in their own apartment.

Howe's shadowy noir imagery is so eerily beautiful in the exterior shots that it's almost a shame that the bulk of the film is spent cooped up in an apartment from that point on, but Howe and Berry are equally adept at conveying the tight spaces of the few rooms where Nick imprisons Peggy, her parents, and her little brother. Unfortunately, though Garfield delivers a relentless, grim performance as the cornered, pathetic Nick, the film's narrative and characterization leap haphazardly around, making a hash of what could have been a thematically resonant study of family and love. Nick's initial come-ons to the sheltered Peggy are so schizophrenic that one wonders why she spends a minute with him; he's at best distracted and at worst seems sociopathic and nasty, and yet despite some initial resistance she invites him back to her family's apartment and awkwardly flirts with him.


Peggy is a pathetic character, weak-willed and malleable, a caricature of the good girl who doesn't know anything of the world or sex. It's kind of laughable when, late in the film, she makes an attempt to dress sexy and seduce Nick, who is also something of an idiot (or else just desperate for love) and seems wowed by her gussied-up look even though, it must be said, she basically looks exactly the same as she always had. There's an interesting idea here, no doubt about it. Nick is a guy with no connections: his only friend sells him out and gives up his name to the police, making his situation even worse, and when he tries to contact his mother she wants nothing to do with him. Nick doesn't care about anyone or anything, but his confrontations with Peggy's father Fred (Wallace Ford) are interesting as the collision of two totally different archetypes. Fred is a family man and a religious man, and all he wants out of life is to be left alone, to work, to spend time with his family. When Fred asks what Nick wants out of life, all Nick can do is wave a handful of money in the other man's face, as though this grubby handful of stolen bills is a substitute for the happy family life that Fred has.

The film's development of this theme is haphazard at best, and the long middle section of the film quickly enters a holding pattern in which nothing much happens. The tension merely remains static, neither building nor receding, and the family tries to go about their lives as best they can while Nick endlessly dithers. The script sometimes becomes almost comical in the heavy-handed lengths it goes to reinforce the family theme. In one scene, Nick buys the family dinner, but the mother cooks a stew for her family, and they all eat that while ignoring the comparatively lavish feast that Nick has set out for them. He then tries to force them to eat at gunpoint, and a very unlikely standoff occurs, with the father delivering a forced speech that feels much more like the script setting out its principles than like anything a man in this situation would actually say.

The ending is especially incoherent, as Peggy sometimes seems to be tricking Nick into thinking she loves him, and sometimes seems to be actually feeling something for him. There's a moment when Nick, thinking he's been betrayed, pulls his gun on Peggy and nearly shoots her, and the script treats this as though it's a revelation — "you were going to shoot me," Peggy sputters, unbelieving, as though Nick hadn't been consistently nutty and violent throughout the film. Either the girl is truly dense or the script is simply inconsistent in its portrayal of this unlikely quasi-romance. Nick, for his part, really is just dense, or really so desperate for someone to care about him that he'll accept even the most unconvincing declarations of love. In spite of all the film's narrative holes and half-realized characterization, though, the ending really is potent and emotionally raw. Nick is forced to confront, on a rain-slick, nighttime noir street, the reality of his complete worthlessness and disconnection. He ends the film literally staring into the light, having gained a measure of self-awareness about his own role in pushing away anyone who might care for him with his distrust and anger and brutality. It is, of course, a realization that comes far too late for him.

Films I Love #53: Touch Of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

Orson Welles' 1958 masterwork Touch of Evil came late in the generally accepted timeframe for the first wave of film noir, a form that especially thrived in the 40s and early 50s, but it is undeniably one of the pinnacles of the genre. It's a movie that's fraught with contradictions and compromises, like many of Welles' films, so often subject to meddlesome studio interference, multiple versions and budgetary constraints. It is on the one hand tightly, even meticulously, constructed, with each shot staged and composed as though for a photograph or a painting. Few directors controlled foreground and background as effortlessly as Welles, and nearly every shot features elaborate relationships between figures and objects, creating unforgettable visual resonances. And yet despite this formal rigidity, the film feels loose and spontaneous, as though all its complex compositions were simply fortuitous accidents. Its soundtrack is obviously overdubbed, which only enhances the artificality of Welles' aesthetic; voices seem to be at some remove from the people supposedly speaking, their voices drifting in through the dense fog that enshrouds the tiny desert town where the film is set. The plotting is also rough and ragged, dealing with various intersections and intrigues along the Mexican border following a car bomb explosion. The corrupt and corpulent American detective Quinlan (Welles) investigates, but his attempts to wrap the case up quickly, possibly even pinning it on the wrong guy, are hampered by the suspicious Mexican narcotics officer Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston, thoroughly if entertainingly unconvincing as a Mexican).

The loose, rambling plot allows plenty of room for entertaining diversions, as well as for subplots focusing on characters floating at the periphery. Among the many fantastic performances, Janet Leigh is languidly sexy as Vargas' wife Susie, who he continually places in harm's way with oblivious ease while he dedicates himself wholeheartedly to his work. Welles also lingers with the character of Tanya (Marlene Dietrich), a former flame of the washed-up Quinlan, who has declined so far by now that she doesn't even recognize him anymore. There's also a memorable cameo by Dennis Weaver as a twitchy, goggle-eyed motel manager, the kind of surreal touch that often makes the film seem like a bizarre nightmare. With this film, Welles took a rough B-movie plot and elevated into a grand and mesmerizing epic, a morality tale about corruption and self-righteousness.

Gion bayashi

At the heart of Kenji Mizoguchi's Gion bayashi is the effect of changing sexual politics coming into contact with the traditional role of the geisha in Japanese culture. The film represents a dialectic between the traditional understanding of a woman's place as submissive and obedient and more modern attitudes regarding the ability of women to define their own desires and their own lives. Mizoguchi's film suggests that the reality of the world lags well behind these changing attitudes, as many expect the old ways to continue unchanged. This is a film, above all, about sexual exploitation, and it candidly examines the many ways in which women are exploited by the male-dominated society in which they must live. Eiko (Ayako Wakao) decides to become a geisha as a last resort: her mother was a geisha, and when she dies, Eiko is left with no one but an uncle who takes her in only on the condition that Eiko should sleep with him. Fleeing her uncle's sexual advances — forced upon her from a position of power and control — Eiko goes to the geisha Miyoharu (Michiyo Kogure) and begs to become a geisha. Miyoharu agrees to train the young girl, even though it would be at her own expense, because she sees that Eiko has nowhere else to go. The two women soon become embroiled in a complex set of pressures constricting them and limiting their choices, as they become pawns in the business plans of Kusuda (Seizaburo Kawazu) and Kanzaki (Kanji Koshiba).

The film's plot is relentless in documenting the pressures weighing down on Miyoharu and Eiko, as women whose sole role is to be desirable and solicitous, to tend to the needs of men as objects of beauty. Kusuda is a powerful older businessman who loves to be surrounded with young girls. He plays games with a harem of geisha like a little boy, running around and pantomiming baseball gestures, but he takes an especial liking to Eiko as soon as he meets her. Kusuda is also using Miyoharu as a tool in his attempts to get a lucrative contract, since the mid-level minister Kanzaki — who has the ability to make a decision on a business deal affecting Kusuda — falls in love with Miyoharu. Both women thus becomes objects in this business deal, ornaments to the negotiations between Kusuda and Kanzaki. The film carefully establishes the stakes, as Miyoharu and Eiko are manipulated into place by the powerful Madame Okimi (Chieko Naniwa), whose favor is necessary to find work as a geisha.

Miyoharu and Eiko are the only decent people in the film; everyone amassed around them is out to use them or exploit them in some way, especially but not only the cartoonishly lecherous Kusuda and Kanzaki. Eiko's father (Eitaro Shindo), an ailing and struggling storeowner, refuses to support his daughter, washing his hands of her and leaving her to either live with her sexually predatory uncle or to struggle wherever else she can. Later, however, when Eiko becomes a successful geisha renowned for her beauty, her father comes crawling around, begging Miyoharu for money, pathetically telling her that if she doesn't lend him some money he'll have no choice but to kill himself to escape his debt and his failing business. He tells her that he feels entitled to a share of his daughter's earnings — this despite his refusal to support her during the girl's training period to become a geisha, when Miyoharu was forced to borrow a great deal of money to establish Eiko as a geisha. Okimi, as well, is exploitative and predatory, with an old-school understanding of a geisha as basically a prostitute. Eiko resists the idea that she has to take on a "patron," and so does Miyoharu; the two women have more modern ideas, primarily the idea that they don't have to sleep with a man they don't like. This is anathema to Okimi, who tries to maneuver the two women into keeping Kusuda and Kanzaki happy.


The film's story is thus naturally melodramatic, with the character types deliberately exaggerated to maximize the horrors these women are subjected to. Mizoguchi's style, however, is low-key and unobtrusive, and the contrast between the direct, observational realism of his style — which captures in its delicate way the simple day-to-day lives of these people — and the passionate melodrama of the narrative creates a pleasing tension in the film's aesthetic. Mizoguchi's style doesn't call attention to itself, but in subtle ways he's constantly accentuating the film's themes, crafting striking compositions that guide the eye to the power relations that are at the heart of the film. One of the most suggestive images comes when Miyoharu, realizing that she has no choice if she wants to support herself and Eiko while keeping the younger girl pure, finally gives in and agrees to spend the night with Kanzaki. When she goes to see him, he's lounging on his belly on the floor, reading, and Mizoguchi shoots him from above, with Miyoharu towering above him as she walks in. The composition superficially suggests that the power relations are in favor of the woman, but the man's languorous pose and the gaze of entitlement he gives her as he says he's been expecting her work against the composition to suggest that in fact it's the man, languidly doing nothing and waiting for the woman to come serve him, who's in control here. The next shot, in which Miyoharu silently goes off into the corner to undo her complicated geisha robes and sashes, reinforces this impression. The geisha is a servant for the rich, and this scene subtly parallels Miyoharu's obsequious behavior with the many scenes of servants catering to the women throughout the rest of the film. If elsewhere the geisha is respected and served, treated with dignity, in the privacy of the bedroom she's expected to be a servant.

Mizoguchi's style is similarly effective in the scene where Eiko first hears that Miyoharu has spent the night with a man. Mizoguchi stages the scene in a single shot, from just outside the door of Eiko and Miyoharu's home. After Eiko hears the news, the door is closed, inserting a wooden grate over her, obscuring her reaction to the realization of what has been necessary to provide for her. The static shot, and the grating layered over it, simultaneously distance the viewer from Eiko's reaction and call attention to it. Mizoguchi's formalism is more restrained, more subtle than that of his contemporary Yasujiro Ozu, but there's still a clear sense of a constructed world in this film, not only in the artificial contrivances of the script but in the gentle aesthetic sensibility guiding the material. Ozu is an inevitable comparison here, since the theme Mizoguchi is addressing — the conflict between tradition and modernity in a changing postwar Japan — was Ozu's essential theme throughout his postwar work. In comparison, though Ozu is the bolder stylist, Mizoguchi is more overt and melodramatic than his peer, approaching this story as a big theme to be worked out, a message to be communicated, which is very unlike Ozu's method of allowing his themes to gradually emerge from the texture of ordinary lives. If in Ozu's films tradition and modernity are simply part of the fabric of everyday life, in Gion bayashi the script establishes these conflicts in broad strokes and constructs scenes and dialogues obviously intended to bring out one point or another.

This message-oriented perspective is sometimes grating and overbearing, but more often the delicacy of Mizoguchi's aesthetic and the warm, natural performances of his leads prevent the film from becoming too didactic. There's a tenderness and warmth between Miyoharu and Eiko that becomes more and more powerful the more the women suffer together, culminating in the late scene where Miyoharu tells the younger girl how much she loves and cares for her. Mizoguchi deliberately leaves the nature of this love ambiguous — Miyoharu doesn't say she loves the other girl like a daughter — because it's a multilayered bond that encompasses mother/daughter loyalty, friendship, and even a hint of attraction in the way he frames the two women so close together, their heads bowed toward one another in their shared grief. The film ends with them walking down the street together, side by side; in a world amassed against them on all sides, conspiring to sabotage the independent lives they desire, they can ultimately only count on one another.

The 400 Blows

François Truffaut's first feature, The 400 Blows, is one of the seminal and defining works of the French New Wave, and with good reason. This stripped-down story of a misbehaving Parisian boy is deeply moving, warm and funny, a profound and enduring humanist statement. Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a young boy who, struggling against his parents' indifference and his teachers' authoritarianism, continually gets in trouble at school and at home. His parents are familiar types: his mother (Claire Maurier) a middle-aged beauty clinging to her youth and sexiness, alternately scolding and coddling the confused Antoine, and his father (Albert Rémy) a joker, a goofball, forever stalled in middle management at his job due to lack of education. The family lives in a small apartment so cramped that Antoine can't even fully open the door to his room, since the bed blocks it; he can crack the door only enough to barely squeeze out.

Antoine's mother is introduced coming home from work, taking off her stockings, stretching her legs so that her skirt rides up, as she wearily scolds Antoine for forgetting to do some shopping for her. Truffaut emphasizes her sexuality, her bare legs and the curves beneath her tight sweater, juxtaposing her womanly vivaciousness against the aura of an exhausted working woman and a frustrated, ill-tempered mother. As soon as Antoine runs out the door on his errand, she admires herself in a mirror, posing as though for photographs, reflecting her self-centered interest in herself over her son. Antoine's father, meanwhile, jokes and laughs with his son, but he's equally frustrated with Antoine's inability to behave or do well in school, and his lighthearted demeanor is often shattered by bouts of anger and discipline. Antoine is living in an unstable and unhappy home. His father's jokes only irritate his mother, especially since the banter often has a sarcastic undercurrent that suggests he thinks she's unfaithful — a suspicion that proves to be true, as Antoine finds out later when, cutting school one day, he sees his mother with another man. The relationship between mother and son becomes one of strange complicity, as the mother tells Antoine that they'll each keep "secrets" between themselves: she doesn't mention what he saw, but it's obviously on her mind.

The issue of class is developed further when Antoine goes to stay with his school friend René (Patrick Auffay), whose family is rich and lives in a tremendous house with so many rooms that Antoine can hide in one without anyone ever finding him. Antoine is stunned by the size of this house in comparison to his own family's cramped apartment, but the family relations are remarkably similar: René's mother and father hardly see each other and are rarely even home at the same time. The kids are basically left to themselves, and they respond by doing whatever they want, trying to become independent. In practice, though Antoine talks of getting a job and supporting himself, the kids mainly steal whatever they can get their hands on, go to the movies, and run through the streets of Paris without aim.


The film reflects this juvenile aimlessness in its loose, off-the-cuff aesthetics. Shot largely in the streets of Paris with the fast, low-budget methods that would become one of the defining characteristics of the early New Wave, The 400 Blows captures Antoine's yearning for freedom, the playful spirit of fun that drives these kids. In one memorable sequence, Truffaut's camera follows the class, often from a high angle, as they're led on a jogging expedition through the city by a gym teacher. As the clueless teacher jogs at the front of the line, the kids behind him peel off and run off together until there are only a couple of students actually following the teacher anymore. In another sequence, Antoine and René sit in the cinema, captured in a two-shot that fixes their enraptured gazes, their hypnosis by the screen, their eyes wide and staring, much like Truffaut and his friends of the time, all of them compulsive moviegoers who would, like Antoine, rather hole up in a movie theater for hours at a time than engage with the responsibilities and troubles of the outside world.

The cinema also figures in the one sequence that shows Antoine and his family actually in harmony, enjoying themselves for a change — a fleeting moment of pleasure built on Antoine's lies. The family plans to go out to see Paris Belongs To Us — later the first film of Jacques Rivette, at this point actually still embroiled in its troubled shoot — and their night of laughter and good humor provides one of the few happy memories of family and home life that Antoine will ever have. His parents seem happy, flirting with one another and laughing, and on the way home Antoine sits in the back seat of the car, between them, laughing at nearly everything they say, not because it's funny but because he's so happy to see them like this, a rare occurrence in this family.

This brief, cheerful interlude remains an oasis in the desert of Antoine's life, as he continues to act out and lie, to steal and cheat, and eventually his parents simply give up on him, relinquishing their care for him and sending him to a juvenile detention center after a night spent in jail along with criminals and prostitutes. It's all leading towards the film's famous finale, an extended tracking shot of Antoine running along a beach, playing at the water's edge, and then that iconic final freeze frame of Antoine looking into the camera, his eyes uncertain, searching. He's reached the end of the world, perhaps, the place where the land falls off into the water — and also the place he'd dreamed, childishly, of running away to with René, to start a boat business and make their own way in the world — and now he looks back toward the camera and beyond it, as though wondering where he's going to go next. It's an extraordinary image, impossible to forget, the endless ocean behind Antoine simultaneously conveying limitless possibilities and nowhere left to run. Léaud's obviously deep identification with this character helps to communicate the intensity of his confusion and uncertainty at this point. Léaud, so young here, so fragile and also so bold and swaggering, would eventually grow up onscreen in the films of the New Wave, and it seems to be that future he's looking towards, trying to imagine who he'll be next, what films he'll live next.

Le beau Serge

Claude Chabrol's first feature, Le beau Serge, was also in many ways the first feature of the French New Wave, or at least the first feature to be made by the small group of critics from Cahiers du cinema who eventually became the seminal filmmakers of the New Wave in the 60s. Chabrol's debut isn't as formally audacious or startling as the films to follow, from him and his peers, but it is a rough, raw, amateur film, ragged at the edges and seething with bleak intensity. It's the story of François (Jean-Claude Brialy), who returns from college to his small home town to recover from a debilitating illness, and who finds that much has changed in his absence. The people he once knew seem to have settled into depressing and unsatisfying lives, particularly his former best friend Serge (Gérard Blain), who has become an alcoholic good-for-nothing, stumbling drunkenly through town with his equally pathetic father-in-law, Glomaud (Edmond Beauchamp).

But Serge and Glomaud are only the worst cases of a general misery that afflicts the whole town: everyone seems beaten down, hopeless, from the lousy town doctor, who basically just watches over deaths and failed treatments, to the priest who's long ago given up on even trying to help anyone. François, who left the town for college, for better things, and returned only to rest and recover after his sickness, finds that those who didn't leave the town have been weighted down by the lack of options here, by the emptiness and the desolation of this town with nothing to do.

Though this is François' story, and it's told from his perspective as an outsider returning, Serge, as the title character, is the true center of the story, the magnetic core that everyone else is subtly and disastrously attracted towards. Blain plays Serge like a Gallic James Dean, in his leather jacket, his unshaven face, his cocky bad boy attitude and self-conscious cinematic poses. Later New Wave films would turn again and again to the American cinema for these kinds of recycled bad boys, these posing toughs copping their attitudes from Hollywood films, but Serge is a more authentic incarnation of the form than most. Jean-Paul Belmondo, in Godard's Breathless, seems like a wannabe Bogie, too small and insecure for the role he's trying to inhabit — which is, indeed, part of the point. Serge is different, in part because he's got not only Dean's cockiness and his sneer but also his vulnerability, the sense of a scared little kid hiding behind the leather and the tough expression. One thinks, almost inevitably, of Rebel Without a Cause, of the urgent and desperate desire for family and security that runs through that film. As with Dean's Jim Stark, Serge doesn't want to act like this, he doesn't want to be this pathetic drunk trying to act cool and tough, he's simply erecting defenses against the pain of his loneliness, of his unexpressed longing for a family, for love, for something, anything, more.


As François learns upon his return, Serge married Yvonne (Michèle Méritz), Glomaud's daughter, after getting her pregnant, but the baby was born with something wrong with it and quickly died. Now Yvonne is pregnant again, but Serge knows that things won't be any better this time, that it's too much to hope for a healthy child, for some normality and happiness. Instead, he accepts as "normal" the dissolute life he's been leading, and the miserable circumstances of this town where nobody really strives for anything better. François, for his part, thinks he can help, but really he just looks down on Serge, and on this whole milieu, with condescension and pity, as though from above the fray — while at the same time getting tangled up with Yvonne's younger sister Marie (Bernadette Lafont), well-known as a local tramp who switches boyfriends every day. François obviously likes to see himself as better than his former friends and peers, as well-situated to drag them out of their ruts, but his condescension only drives them away even as he gets pulled into a tawdry story of his own.

Chabrol tells this story, which is often melodramatic and despairingly bleak, in a direct, raw way, shooting mostly in the streets of the town and the surrounding countryside, seemingly in natural light. When he shoots interiors, they seem cramped and claustrophobic, and especially when more than two characters appear in a shot, the compositions are often full to bursting, as when François visits Serge's home for the first time and Marie and Yvonne gather around the two men as they catch up. The film is loose and ragged, a film made on the fly, with the feel of real places, real squalor and real desperation. It's obviously indebted to the Italian neorealist movement so admired by the Cahiers critics when they were just starting to make their own first films, and it looks forward to the looseness and amateur aesthetics of the other early New Wave features. The only unfortunate throwback to traditional aesthetics and traditional movies is the score, a jarringly inappropriate old-school movie score with cues intended to arouse bathos or suspense or cheeriness depending on the scene. Such emotional hand-holding seems like an artifact here, in a film that is otherwise quite bracing and unsentimental, a film that makes a mockery of its protagonist's moral certitude and fumbling attempts to make things right.


If the score is the most traditional aspect of Le beau Serge, the one element that captures Chabrol still looking backwards to other movies and established traditions, the film's stunning final sequences point the way forward to the more revolutionary films to come. In these final scenes, François wanders the streets of the town in the dark, with a flashlight providing the only unpredictable, minimal light, searching for Serge as Yvonne is going into labor. The darkness is complete with the exception of the small circle of light surrounding François, and Chabrol makes no compromises to leaven the darkness. These scenes are dark and frantic, shot with the flashlight sometimes shining directly into the camera, the action unclear, just dark figures stumbling through a black night that seems to be all but strangling the sad light of the flashlight. Chabrol heightens the intensity by cutting in a series of absolutely devastating closeups of Yvonne in labor, crying out her husband's name, her face turning to look into the camera, or more precisely, to look past the camera, as though hoping to see the unreliable Serge there, somewhere beyond the claustrophobic confines of their disorderly hovel.

Le beau Serge is a promising debut, both from the nascent New Wave and from Chabrol himself, who would soon sharpen his sensibility into something truly cutting, but who already draws some blood in this first film. It's a raw, unflinching portrait of largely self-inflicted suffering, a portrait that reaches its climax in François' rejection of Marie, which causes her, in turn, to throw herself at Serge and gloat over Serge's savage beating of his former friend. It's part of the film's emphasis on the cyclical nature of these kinds of stories, as François repeats his friend's mistakes in the course of trying to correct them. There's a strangely intimate bond between Serge and François, an attachment that borders on obsession and even homoeroticism, particularly when François sleeps with Marie for the first time and then, as pillow talk afterward, intuits that her first time was with Serge, a fact that seems to fascinate him. This fascination eventually leads to the aura of secular sacrifice in the film's finale, though the final shot, a joyous closeup of Serge that then fades into an abstract blur, suggests that this momentarily optimistic conclusion may yet give way to even more repetitive cycles of suffering and despair.

Johnny Guitar

Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar is a fantastic, lurid Western, a drama of sexual repression and desire played out with bullets and lynchings, the struggle for power between two rival women exploding into a bloody, bleakly beautiful morality tale. The film's central struggle is the battle of feminine strength between Vienna (Joan Crawford) and Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), two driven women with diametrically opposed personalities. Vienna takes what she wants, and through her strength, her determination — and, it's implied, her willingness to use her sexuality as a tool when she needs to — she's put together a saloon that's isolated right now, in the middle of nowhere, but that will soon be at an important hub on the expanding railroad that's scheduled to run right through Vienna's territory. She's made her own way in the world, and now all she needs to do is sit in her lonely saloon and wait for the railroad to come, bringing with it the people who will make her rich. Emma is also a woman with power and money, but it's not her own; her family owns a bank and has power in the nearby town, which means that the men of her family have gotten Emma what money and prestige she has. More crucially, Emma differs from Vienna in her sexual confidence and security; Emma wants the quasi-outlaw known as the Dancing Kid (Scott Brady), though she'd never admit it, and Vienna has the Kid but doesn't really want him. Emma's jealousy, and the sexual repression that causes her to deny her obviously overwhelming desires, creates the fierce rivalry between the two women, a rivalry that will eventually be stirred up into a conflagration, both literal and metaphorical, that threatens to turn everyone in its path to ash.

Into this tense situation rides the drifter Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), who at first seems like a detached stranger. Johnny Guitar rides into town, and into the movie that bears his name, not as an actor in this drama but as a witness: he sees, much like the audience, the railroad company setting off dynamite, and he sees, from a distance, a stagecoach getting robbed, and then he rides up to the lonely saloon in the middle of nowhere, isolated in a swirling dust storm. He's a witness, an audience, watching from a comfortable distance, just as the film's audience watches over his shoulder. When he then enters the story, it's as though he's breaking out of his passivity, abandoning the position of the observer to engage with the action and to try to change its course — reflecting the fantasy of engaging so deeply with a film or a work of fiction that one becomes a part of its world. It's fitting that Johnny's entry into the drama at the saloon is his interruption of a shot glass in its rolling path towards the edge of the bar. He steps into the frame, with a tea cup held daintily aloft, and catches the glass just as it drops off the bar, irrevocably changing what had seemed inevitable, introducing an unexpected element into the proceedings. He's no longer the audience, passively looking on with a drink in his hand; now he shuttles between the two sides of the confrontation in the saloon, tweaking them both, acting as the wild card who's entered the story from outside it. Later, during a bank robbery, Johnny will revert to his audience role: "looks like I got a front row seat for the show," he quips to the robbers, lounging against his cart, his hands in his pockets. He's a study in passivity versus action, and for long portions of the movie he disappears altogether, incidental to the real emotional and aesthetic core of this movie.


Vienna, on the other hand, is pure action, and though the film bears Johnny's name, it's really Vienna's movie — and Emma's. As Vienna finds herself caught up in the Dancing Kid's ill-advised plan to belatedly live up to his unearned reputation as an outlaw and robber, Emma stirs up the entire town into a fearsome but aimless lynch mob that's ostensibly searching for the bank robbers but is in fact, under Emma's direction, being aimed like a weapon towards the bitter woman's sexual rival. The entire mob, still dressed in black from a funeral, swarm on their horses through the bleak surroundings, spurred on by the black-cloaked Emma, who's like an avenging harpy with her teeth bared, snarling and insinuating, goading the men into terrible action, her face flushed with rage and vindictiveness. And when she gets her way she can't help but grin, the grin of the damned, an evil but joyous grin, girlishly skipping as she spurs on her followers towards death and destruction. Ray makes her a monster, a demon in black, her mourning shawl dropped from her head at the very beginning of the chase, the purpose — or the justification — for all this chaos almost immediately forgotten and replaced with a feverish sexual hysteria.

It's a mad film, but its intense emotions are carefully controlled within a very rigid and powerful aesthetic framework. These oversized emotions, these bold feelings and words freighted with meaning, are straining against the boundaries of the Academy ratio frame, against the very form of the film which seeks, in vain, to hem them in. This tension is embodied in the jarring leaps between natural splendor and studio artificiality, necessitated at least in part by star Joan Crawford, a solidly artificial actress who refused to be filmed in closeup in nature. That might be a crippling limitation for a Western, except that Ray makes it into a weird virtue, adding to the impression that Vienna is always in control while Emma spirals into deranged hysteria. Vienna's saloon is cool and clean, almost clinical, its color scheme a uniform reddish brown, its large, high-ceilinged rooms almost always empty. When Vienna is filmed in closeups, they're glossy, beautiful images, the light shining almost entirely on her face so that her head glows like a spotlight in the dark void around her, the shadows falling so closely around her face that at times, when she moves even slightly, the lower or upper portion of her face melts into the shadowy surroundings.

Moreover, Vienna — or Crawford — carefully coordinates her costume changes to augment her surroundings. It's even made a material part of the film, as she's forced to change out of her bright white dress during a night-time flight from the posse, who are more sensibly dressed in their funereal blacks to blend into the darkness. With the change, Vienna opts for dark blue pants to blend into the Hollywood night, and a red blouse that initially seems as ill-advised as the white dress until one sees Vienna positioned amidst the similarly reddish studio rocks of the surrounding countryside. In the wild, she'd stick out absurdly; in the garish studio West where she's most comfortable, she's a chameleon.


Obviously, color and costume are very important to this film, from Vienna's color-coded outfits to the black suits of the mourners who comprise the posse. The posse is constantly arranged into densely packed compositions in which they crowd the frame, forming threatening triangles aimed at Vienna, often with Emma at the point. Towards the end of the film, with the threat dissipated, that triangle will reverse, at last pointing away from Vienna, grouped around the dead and the survivors, providing a corridor for Vienna's exit. The awful geometry of sexual repression had closed in on her, but by the end of the film the geometry reconfigures to provide a way out. All of the artifice, the blatantly fake sets that Ray makes no attempt to integrate convincingly with the naturalistic outdoor scenes, contribute to the impression that Vienna, with her melodramatic persona, her expressive eyebrows and bright red lips, is a kind of mythic figure, with Emma as her opposite number. The two seem to be locked in a bigger-than-life combat, like two goddesses who have come to Earth and penetrated the usually masculine realm of the Western as the grounds for their confrontation. Indeed, during the grand finale, the men make a big point of calling off their own battles: all the men stop shooting to allow the two women to have their final showdown and shootout, an almost unheard-of gender reversal of the usual Western climax.

Indeed, this Western is actually a melodrama in genre drag, especially since Vienna keeps switching back and forth between long, flowing, feminine gowns and more manly gunslinger clothes. Her counterpart, Emma, on the other hand, remains in her funeral black for the bulk of the film, and in contrast to Vienna's carefully lit studio closeups, Emma is captured in increasingly frazzled states of derangement and disarray. As Vienna maintains her self-possession even in her moments of the most melodramatic emotional excess, Emma snarls and spits like an animal, her hair growing disheveled around her head, her teeth constantly exposed in a smile that looks like a grimace.

McCambridge, like Crawford, delivers an intense and raw performance in a film that's full of them, surrounded by other memorable performances from actors like Ward Bond, Ernest Borgnine and John Carradine, all of whom turn in appropriately gritty and meaty performances, and all of whom get their moment to shine. Carradine's Tom, who works in Vienna's saloon and mostly goes unnoticed by everyone, gets a surprisingly moving final scene that abruptly brings him into sharp focus. Ironically, only Hayden, as the title character, is stiff and uncharismatic, not quite getting into the melodramatic spirit of things. It hardly matters, though, because this is a Western where the women are, for a change, at the center of it all. What makes the film great is that Ray, while indulging the excesses and the weird humor of this story at times, also takes it very seriously, infusing every frame of the film with the potent sexual and gender subtexts that drive it to ever greater heights of emotional intensity and aesthetic overload.

Les maîtres fous

Les maîtres fous is one of the French director Jean Rouch's ethnographic accounts of Nigeria under European colonial rule. The film is a bizarre and unsettling chronicle of the Hauka movement, a quasi-religious Nigerian sect in which the members enacted rituals where they are "possessed" by various archetypes of European colonialists. Rouch devotes most of his film to a document of one of these rituals, complete with a voiceover that purports to identify the various forms that the Africans are taking on: the General, the Governor, the Doctor's Wife, and other positions of military and political power within the European ruling authorities. While Rouch's narration maintains its deadpan, unruffled calm, the contortions of the ritual become increasingly ecstatic and unhinged, as the celebrants foam at the mouth, spasm and dance spastically, sacrifice a chicken and a dog, and lick up the blood from these sacrifices until their faces are smeared.

What makes the film so odd and challenging is the juxtaposition between its relaxed narration — which affects the soothing tones and distanced objective pose of many ethnographic documentaries — and the lurid, outrageous imagery of the ritual itself. Rouch's perspective is odd, too. His narration makes the claim that the ritual is intended to be a parody of the colonial occupation, that the Nigerians are channeling their disdain for their white masters into exaggerated, stylized appropriations of the Europeans' rites and and dress and manners. He might be right. But it's hard to know just how seriously to take Rouch's claims, as again and again his narration seems less like the result of informed research and more like a series of fanciful descriptions of observed behavior. His voiceover has a searching quality that makes it seem as though Rouch is trying to form a narrative based around the images he's gathered, and this impression complicates the film considerably.

Rouch is reading a great deal into the psychology of the film's subjects, and it's questionable how valid his conclusions are. Is this ritual a defense against mental illness, as Rouch claims at the end of the film? Is it a way for the colonized Nigerians to cope with the stress of their daily confrontations with industrialized Western society, or to deal with their status as indentured laborers for the whites? It's hard to tell, but Rouch's narration, with its loose interpretations of various gestures, doesn't exactly inspire confidence. At one point he puts words into the mouth of a man swinging a chicken back and forth, suggesting that the gesture is of great religious significance when, by all appearances, it's simply idle motion. Such questions about the film's faithfulness to the intent of these rituals are constantly raised, though Rouch's authoritative narration seems calculated not to encourage dissent.


There's also more than a hint of exploitation in Rouch's portrayal of Africans engaged in bloody, wild rites that not only appear as irrevocably exotic to Western eyes, but are explicitly compared to mental illness in the film's text. Rouch is portraying his African subjects as wild men, literally foaming at the mouths, the lower halves of their faces covered in white spray as they vibrate, roll around on the floor, walk with a jerking, frantic stride that truly does make it seem as though their bodies are being propelled around by some external animating spirit that jerks them around like puppets on strings. The images are, undeniably, darkly fascinating, and often horrifying as well, particularly when the celebrants ritually sacrifice a dog and then cook up a stew with its entrails, taking hungry bites out of its head and fighting to get the "best" scraps of the slaughtered animal. One man, picked out for a closeup twice in the film's half-hour, rocks back and forth, his face smeared red with blood from the feast.

Rouch continually locates such provocative images, tracing the progress of the ritual from its tentative beginnings to the point when numerous participants have been "possessed" and taken on these alternate personalities. Rouch's narration wryly notes the appropriation of English and French modes of dress and rituals, but this too is a problem. When Rouch says that the Nigerians are holding a "roundtable conference" on the subject of whether to cook the dog or eat it raw, his voice maintains its steady, even keel, but there's an obvious note of sarcasm and irony in the counterpoint between the colonialists' ceremonies and military discipline and the crudity of the Nigerians imitating their oppressors. Rouch even inserts footage of British and French soldiers on parade, and European aristocrats in their fancy cars, to further solidify the comparison.

Intended for European audiences, the film condescends to its subjects, presenting these rituals with an unmistakable tone of "hey look at these weird Africans," even while the subtext of Rouch's narration points at the exploitation of the African people by their colonial overseers. This adds up to a very conflicted film, simultaneously poking fun at colonialist pretensions and perpetrating the stereotype of the violent, superstitious African primitive. It's obvious that Rouch, who lived and worked in Nigeria for a long time and had a definite anti-colonialist bent, meant well, but Les maîtres fous, despite its compelling, raw imagery and the interesting ideas it explores, can't get over its tonal inconsistencies.

Three 1950s avant-garde shorts (Belson Shimané, Broughton, Kirsanoff)

Odds & Ends, by Jane Belson (later Jane Conger Belson Shimané), is a goofy little avant-garde pastiche, a collage of found travel footage with Belson Shimané's own abstract animations, both painted and created with paper cutouts. The imagery is a dazzling and abstract blur: people having fun on exotic beaches and boats, fragments of vacationers walking through bland hotel corridors, images of elbows and legs, disconnected body parts, mixed in with smeared paint and gyrating geometric patterns that look like paper snowflakes of the kind made in elementary school art classes. The whole thing has a rough and offhand aesthetic, as though it was stitched together from whatever was at hand, which it probably was.

The images never quite come together into a coherent whole, but the wry, deadpan narration by Henry Jacobs makes one suspect that incoherence is part of the point. Over a background of stereotypical hippie bongos, Jacobs patters on about jazz, poetry, entertainment, grant subsidies, professional careers, and other matters of art and commerce. His speech is freewheeling, strung together with the phrase "on the other hand," which he repeats every few moments to segue from one contradictory point to the next. He's talking about spontaneity versus forethought, art versus entertainment, meaning versus abstraction, and his narration seems to have nothing to do with the images of Belson Shimané — which is, again, the point. As Jacobs talks about the disconnect between jazz and poetry when the two are put together, he says that sometimes when two things are combined, they seem to have little to do with one another, and people don't know what to think as a result. He might well be talking about the film itself, as his narration meanders on, utterly independent of Belson Shimané's rough collage, two things existing simultaneously without really interacting or connecting to one another.

The result is playful and silly, and Jacobs' self-aware narration earns a few laughs at the expense of avant-garde pretensions, particularly when he imagines making a living by delivering crowd-pleasing unions of jazz and poetry, connecting with a broad public through these peripheral artforms. Odds & Ends is, true to its title, a neat little collection of wry observations and charmingly amateur images.


Four in the Afternoon, by the poet-filmmaker James Broughton, is a suite of four vignettes, each one built around one of Broughton's sing-songy, nursery rhyme-inflected poems, which appear periodically on the soundtrack. Each segment concerns the somewhat elusive search for love. In "Game Little Gladys," a girl skips rope and sees images of ten men who might someday be her husband. In "The Gardener's Son," a young man lounges around, working in a garden and spying on (or seeing visions of) women frolicking in the fields. In "Princess Printemps," a princess is comically pursued by a would-be suitor, but is never caught. In the final segment, "The Aging Balletomane," an old man sees a vision of a young girl dancing on a pedestal, though she disappears every time he reaches for her or tries to approach. The film, though made in 1951, feels in many ways like a lost artifact of the silent era, as it appropriates the rhythms of silent comedy in its bursts of sped-up motion and its exaggerated, gestural, dialogue-free performances. The only sound is provided by the sprightly orchestral music and the occasional reading of excerpts from Broughton's poems.

Each segment is brief and minimal, examining a simple idea in a fairly direct way, and the film as a whole is pretty slight and forgettable, with Broughton's fey poetry and whimsical sensibility often failing to make much of an impression. That said, there are some striking images along the way, images that reveal the poet's visual sense. In "The Gardener's Son," Broughton shoots a tiled walkway in an angled closeup that creates the illusion of depth in the distinctive patterned tiles, so that it briefly seems as though the tiles are actually a staircase. It's then disorienting when a bare foot suddenly steps into the frame, recontextualizing the image so that the tiles no longer seem to be raised or layered, but are revealed as a flat surface. It's a wonderful and playful optical illusion. "Game Little Gladys" evinces a similar concern with geometry and patterns: an early shot shows the girl descending a staircase from her apartment, and Broughton inserts a shot that shows the criss-crossing stairs arranged into a distinctive shape on the side of the building. When the girl skips rope later on, the courtyard where she's playing is filmed in such a way that it seems to consist of several oddly disconnected spaces, with Gladys appearing first in front of an ordinary brick wall, then in a concrete yard dotted with weird trapezoidal protrusions.

There's also a peppy poetry to the image of the princess and her suitor chasing one another, alternately in sped-up Keystone Kops double-time and a weightless, running-on-the-moon slow bounce. Broughton is clearly not just a poet-turned-filmmaker, interested only in words, but an artist who's truly attuned to the poetic visual possibilities of the medium. If Four in the Afternoon is ultimately a minor work, it's at least often an enjoyable one.


The Russian emigré Dimitri Kirsanoff, who had a remarkable if often overlooked career as a filmmaker in France, made The Death of a Stag as a commissioned work late in his career. The film's status as a commission is apparent during the introduction, in which a painting of a hunting party is shown along with a voiceover describing the proud French tradition of the hunt and its endurance throughout the ages. It has the flat tone of an industrial documentary or an educational film. Kirsanoff then sets out to utterly ignore this introduction, instead making a typically poetic and striking document that, rather than confirming the timelessness of this rich man's tradition, reveals the hunt as a rather pathetic artifact of another time, an absurd rite with silly costumes and bracing violence at its core.

Kirsanoff's editing is crisp and fast-paced, observing the preparations for the hunt, watching the bourgeois men and women stand around, eating and chatting, smiling and laughing, as packs of dogs congregate, ready to be unleashed for the start of the hunt. The hunt itself is over quickly; the bulk of this brief twelve-minute film is spent simply watching the hunters engaging in the social rites that seem to be the real point of this whole exercise. Kirsanoff's montage is quick but gives the impression of lingering on certain key details: a man taking a bite of an egg then casting a shy sidelong glance at the camera, the dogs licking one another, the tops of bare, leafless trees swaying in the breeze (a favorite Kirsanoff image), two laborers chopping at a tree, the necessity of their work not interrupted by the frivolous country play of the rich folks partying nearby.

The climax of the hunt itself is actually an anticlimax, an unforgettable image of the titular stag surrounded on all sides by barking dogs and the men in their foppish rifles. Kirsanoff holds the image for a long few moments, capturing the utter absurdity of this very unsportsmanlike method of hunting, and then a single rifle shot cracks and the stag falls into the water, with the dogs instantly swarming onto it. The dogs are used as a symbol for the violence barely contained by the appearance of civility. The soundtrack, with its brassy horns and jaunty hunting music, is occasionally infiltrated by the barking of the dogs, subtly blending in with the horns. Later, the hunters present the dogs with a banquet of entrails and spare hunks of meat from the killed animal, unveiling the feast with great pomp and ceremony, as though it's another of the codified rituals surrounding the supposedly great tradition of the hunt. The dogs' subsequent feeding frenzy, leaping on the pile of organs and meat and fighting one another for a chunk of the spoils, belies the civilized façade of the bourgeois hunters. This fascinating little film is another glimpse into Kirsanoff's clear-eyed perspective, his ability to use his deceptively simple but always poetically rich imagery to cut to the core of whatever he's filming.

The Sound of Fury

[This is a contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir), the second Film Preservation Blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. The blogathon has been organized for the benefit of the Film Noir Foundation, who do important work to restore and preserve the noir heritage. Please consider donating to the Foundation during this week. The blogathon will run from February 14-21, and during this time I'll be posting about some noirs to raise awareness of the blogathon and its worthy cause. The film I'm writing about today is the actual film that is going to be preserved and restored due in part to the efforts of this blogathon; every dollar contributed through the blogathon donation link will go to restoring this film.]

Cy Endfield's The Sound of Fury is based on the same true story as the Fritz Lang-directed Fury from fourteen years earlier, and both films are concerned with the mob mentality of lynchings and revenge. The films approach this story from very different angles, though, and they wind up being completely different films with somewhat overlapping themes. In Endfield's film, Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) is a struggling family man with a pregnant wife (Kathleen Ryan) and a young son. Tyler is determined to find a job, but in a depressed economy he's not having much luck, and all his prospects come to nothing. When he returns to his home after a failed job-hunting trip, it's heartbreaking to see the hope and joy in his wife's face when she momentarily thinks that he's found something, as though she's been restraining her worries for so long that they finally burst out in a brief burst of hope. As in Lang's film, economic pressure is at the forefront here, straining what would otherwise doubtless be a good relationship, but unlike in Fury, Tyler is not an innocent man. Tyler cannot resist the temptations of crime, not when he can't find any other job, not when his wife breaks down crying at their kitchen table because they don't even have the money to buy groceries and they're quickly running out of credit. So when Tyler meets the smooth-talking Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), initially thinking that he's being an offered a straight job at last, he decides to become Slocum's accomplice on a series of gas station holdups.

This is an archetypal noir scenario, the basically decent man who's corrupted by his circumstances. What's interesting about The Sound of Fury is the sympathy that's developed for Tyler, even as he willfully abandons his decent suburban life in favor of an escalating crime spree. He increasingly exists only at night, leaving behind his home and the daytime, spending his nights behind the wheel of a getaway car, watching Slocum rob gas stations and return to the car with fistfuls of bills. Endfield captures this ordinary guy's moral degradation with a direct, emotional style, contrasting Tyler's guilty conscience and hesitation against the smirking, sinister Slocum. Bridges seethes with intensity here, initially coming across as simply a cheery huckster — and something of a dandy, admiring his muscles in a mirror as he smears on cologne and puts on his silk shirts — who eventually reveals much darker undercurrents. The first scenes between Slocum and Tyler are staged like a seduction, as Slocum takes Tyler back to his apartment, where he shows off his wealth and his muscular torso. It almost seems like a gay come-on, but really what Slocum wants is to lure his prey into being his accomplise.

The darkness lurking beneath this dandy persona comes to the fore when Slocum hatches a plot to bring the duo's criminal partnership to the next level by kidnapping a rich man's son and holding him for ransom. The kidnapping is one of the film's best sequences, a tense and shadowy nighttime set piece as Slocum and Tyler kidnap the rich young man and try to stow him at an abandoned military base while awaiting the ransom's delivery. Of course, the plan goes wrong almost instantly, and Slocum reacts with a horrifying act of violence, fully revealing the raving evil that had been lurking just beneath the surface of his slick gangster image. Tyler tries to stop his partner, but when he fails Endfield frames Tyler in the foreground, his head in his hands, sobbing in despair and weakness, as in the background Slocum pounds a rock, brutally and repeatedly, onto the head of their victim.


The film also deals, like Lang's, with mob violence and the threat of lynchings. Throughout the film, Endfield occasionally intersperses Tyler's story with scenes involving the reporter Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson), a yellow journalist who believes that he's performing a valuable public service by stirring up public sentiment and appealing to the public's most virulent emotions. Stanton's editor convinces him to drum up circulation by exaggerating Slocum's scattered gas station robberies into a massive crime wave perpetrated by a vicious criminal gang. This is only the start of the newspaper's complicity in creating a public atmosphere conducive to punishing the criminals in the most violent possible way. As in Fury, these scenes are extremely didactic, hammering home the point that the justice system shouldn't be subverted, that innocence is presumed until a fair trial proves guilt, that journalistic sensationalism inflames ugly emotions by appealing to the worst in people. Stanton's friend (Renzo Cesana) provides the moralistic voice delivering these sentiments, lecturing his friend — and the audience — about the importance of fair trials and the dangers of the media's influence. Such concerns seem almost quaint now, in an era of widespread media saturation and sensationalistic coverage of everything and anything, but this film presents exaggerated newspaper headlines as though they're capable of tearing apart the fabric of the world.

As a result, the film's climax takes on a hysterical tone as the jail where Tyler and Slocum are being held is surrounded by a massive angry mob, eager to pull the two criminals outside and enact mob justice without waiting for the courts. The soundtrack becomes shrill and deafening, dominated by the crowd's screams and the frazzled rants of Slocum as he rattles around in his small jail cell. The contrast between the resignation of Tyler — who knows that he's done wrong and feels crippling guilt as a result — and the caged-animal rage of Slocum creates a compelling tension in the scene, even beyond the slow-building tension of the mob gathered outside. The roar of the crowd, the constant noise clattering on the soundtrack, abruptly cuts off for the quiet finale as, nearby, the sheriff and the newspaper reporters wait helplessly as the crowd drags Slocum and Tyler away to be killed. The eerie silence of the scene is shattered twice, with a distant cheer like at a sporting event, one cheer for each man who's dying. It's a chilling scene, with the seeming joy of the crowd contrasting awfully against the horror of what they're celebrating.

Also very compelling are the earlier scenes in which Tyler and Slocum, before they're caught, go out with two girls, Hazel and Velma (Katherine Locke and Adele Jergens), as cover for their mission to mail the ransom note in a neighboring town. The justification for this outing is narratively flimsy, but what's fascinating about it is how Endfield briefly pulls the focus off of the main story to focus on these two girls, who know nothing about the kidnapping plot and simply think they're going out on a fun date. Velma is Slocum's long-time girl, a statuesque good-time girl whose relationship with this unpredictable sociopath is as volatile as expected, alternating between steamy passion and bouts of anger and mutual violence. Hazel is very different, a shy and lonely woman who says she's saving herself for marriage, and who immediately clings to Tyler despite his brooding manner. The scene where the two women prep for their date, chatting and exchanging their hopes and dreams about the happiness and glamour they'd like to experience, is an interesting moment precisely because it's so peripheral to everything else that happens, an acknowledgment that these characters, who would be mere plot devices in any other movie, have lives and dreams of their own. (Interestingly, the two girls are much more thoroughly developed than Tyler's weepy, melodramatic wife, an utterly boring personality vacuum.)

In the end, The Sound of Fury is a fine noir that chronicles the descent of a normal guy into crime, driven there by economic desperation, and though the film is unflinching in examining the consequences of Tyler's weakness, it's also a bold plea on behalf of justice and order, a rejection of the bloodthirsty drive for revenge. Endfield's film is very much deserving of the restoration effort being conducted by this blogathon and by the Film Noir Foundation. As one can no doubt see from the screen captures included with this post, the film, with its heavy blacks and dark atmosphere, is definitely in need of a restoration so that one could descend, with Tyler, more completely into the inky blackness of his sad fate.

The Big Heat

[This is a contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir), the second Film Preservation Blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. The blogathon has been organized for the benefit of the Film Noir Foundation, who do important work to restore and preserve the noir heritage. Please consider donating to the Foundation during this week. The blogathon will run from February 14-21, and during this time I'll be posting about some noirs to raise awareness of the blogathon and its worthy cause.]

Fritz Lang's The Big Heat is a dark, tough noir, an intense crime thriller that moves at an unrelentingly brisk pace as it delves fearlessly into the darkness of its story. It is a remarkably adult film, never wincing away from the seedy truths at its core, and for the Hollywood of its era — even in the gritty world of the noir — it especially stands out. Its dialogue is taut and punchy, dealing candidly with this world of corruption, adultery, death and disfigurement, and the sad fate of "that kind of girl." The film focuses on the scrupulously honest cop Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), a guy with such a highly developed sense of morality that he never thinks twice about doing the right thing. When the suicide of a highly positioned police officer starts stirring up some ugly suspicions, Bannion charges into the middle of the case, even when it becomes apparent that there are some very powerful people above him who would like the whole matter to be put to rest as quickly and cleanly as possible. Bannion can't go along with that. He's got a kind of brute force morality that drives him forward, pushing at the people who'd like him to simply go away — including the dead cop's widow, Mrs. Duncan (Jeanette Nolan) and the gangster Lagana (Alexander Scourby), a powerful man with connections that run deep into the police force. Bannion doesn't have the smarts to conduct his investigation quietly or subtly, so he just keeps forcing himself on underworld contacts and on Lagana himself until someone decides he needs to be dealt with.

Bannion is setting himself up for tragedy, and of course he gets it. The film goes to some very dark places, but before it does, Lang takes pains to establish the stakes for Bannion: a very happy home life with a lovely wife, Katie (Jocelyn Brando), and a daughter. The early scenes of Bannion and his wife at home create a contrast against the darkness and corruption he encounters at work. Bannion is scraping by on a cop's salary, always conscious of the tight budget his family has to maintain, and his conversations with his wife about money set him apart from the dead Duncan, who'd transcended his cop's salary by serving on a criminal's payroll, at least until his conscience caught up with him. Moreover, the scenes between Bannion and Katie serve as a tonal contrast; these scenes are syrupy and romantic, dripping with pathos and big goopy closeups, and the bright, clean light of the Bannions' home makes it look like a cheery sitcom set as opposed to all the shadowy hotel rooms and seedy bars where the corrupt and the crooked do their deals. The couple has a light, flirtatious relationship, rooted in concrete details like Katie's habit of taking a sip of her husband's beer or polishing off his whiskey, or their gentle sparring and coded sexual banter as she prepares dinner. Their romance is pure and good, but it's obvious from the beginning that Lang is establishing this foundation for Bannion only in order to disrupt it in some way.

When the disruption finally comes, it's one of the film's most chilling scenes, a shattering break in this domestic bliss that comes just as Bannion is telling a story to his daughter. The remainder of the film ventures even further into darkness, as Bannion becomes obsessed with breaking up the ring of corruption in his city, following the chain of crime towards the men who pull the strings from behind the scenes. He particularly becomes concerned with Lagana's right-hand man, Vince (Lee Marvin), a sociopathic tough guy who takes his anger out on women more often than not. Vince has a bouncy, cheery good-time girl, Debby (Gloria Grahame), who drunkenly mocks Vince's eager obedience to Lagana, but is still happy to profit off the illegal gains from her man's shady activities.


Like so many of the best noirs, The Big Heat is about pain and rage, about revenge and justice. Lang focuses intently on both the violence and its ugly consequences, particularly when the psychopathic Vince goes too far with Debby. Vince is a brutish character, played with chilly intensity by Marvin, whose tight-lipped, stony expression perfectly captures the casually sociopathic violence of this killer. In one crucial scene, Vince utterly loses his cool and assaults Debby with a coffee pot, perhaps a nod to Raymond Burr in a similarly unhinged performance in Anthony Mann's Raw Deal.

Grahame is even better as the hard-drinking party girl who's eventually forced to sober up and face the ugly reality of the life she'd been living. As with the use of Bannion's relationship with his wife, Lang develops a contrast between the playfulness of Debby and the crude nastiness of Vince. There's also a contrast between Debby in the first half of the film and the increasingly pained, pathetic Debby in the second half of the film. Debby goes from a character of light — dancing around in Vince's well-lit apartment, cracking jokes and admiring herself in a mirror — to a woman who's afraid of the light, who wants to hide in the shadows instead. The film cleverly exploits these dichotomies between dark and light, and it's especially interesting that Lang reverses the motif for Debby. When she's in the light, she's living a corrupt life as a thug's moll, enjoying her decadent ease with dirty money paying for her shopping trips and keeping her supplied with liquor. It's only when she's swallowed up in shadows that she sees things with some clarity. It's fitting, then, that she spends the second half of the film divided in half, her face half-covered with a white bandage, the other half of her face often bathed in the richly textured shadows of Lang's images. Debby is divided between a fun, mostly carefree past that now seems lost forever, and the knowledge of the ugliness on which that life had been built.

The Big Heat is a powerful film, a stark examination of the tremendous difficulty of maintaining honor and morality in a corrupt world — an examination of the risks of speaking truth to power, and the slim rewards. In the film's final scene, Bannion has returned to the daily routine of police investigation. There is no glory, no real reward, only the resumption of relative normality, minus the horrible costs he'd already paid. That's part of what makes the film so bracing and affecting and even, despite its glossy aesthetics, somewhat realistic in its portrayal of corruption and the cost of honesty.