Four Alexander Kluge shorts, 1967-1973

Frau Blackburn, Born 1/5/1872, Is Being Filmed is a strange early short from Alexander Kluge, which blurs the line between documentary and fiction so thoroughly and so oddly that it's hard to know what to make of it at all. Ostensibly a straightforward portrait of the elderly title character, the film barely provides any information or context about who she is or why she's being profiled in the first place. Indeed, the woman doesn't have much to say: she speaks about some stiffness in her hands, holding up a crooked finger for the camera to see, but much of the rest of her dialogue is incidental. She putters about her house, showing off her fancy china and making coffee or tea, presumably for the filmmakers, who she addresses frequently, checking to make sure that she's saying what they want her to say. These fourth wall-breaking references to the people behind the camera suggest that much of this material is staged, not at all the naturalistic observation of an old woman in her home, but a concoction of the filmmakers, who are ordering her to pretend to grind coffee and to explain her ailments. "Is that enough?" she asks them at one point, after delivering a rambling monologue.

Then Kluge utterly shatters the artifice with the appearance of a man who, an intertitle informs us, claims to be a former RAF pilot. The very fact that the title is phrased this way, that he says he's a pilot rather than that he is a pilot, already casts doubt on the whole thing. And then Kluge films the man like a moustache-twirling silent movie villain, in leering closeups accompanied by cackling laughter that isn't synced up to the image at all. The man claims to want to buy earrings from the poor Frau Blackburn, but then he addresses the camera to say that actually he's just getting her out of her house so he can rob her. Kluge then shows the aftermath of the robbery, with the old lady reacting with understated alarm at the sight of all her broken china.

It's a puzzling, intentionally obtuse film that mocks the conventions of the documentary, particularly the supposed objectivity of the filmmakers, who in this case simply stand by and let Frau Blackburn get robbed, recording the results, not intervening even when they're directly told about the robbery beforehand. The film's editing is choppy and elliptical, cutting up Frau Blackburn's words into banal phrases, devoid of context, little bits of anecdotes and biography that mean all but nothing by themselves. Baffling, curiously funny, with an elusive effect that's difficult to shake despite its vagueness, this is a typically maddening and provocative early effort from Kluge.


Another nigh-inscrutable short posing as documentary biography, E.A. Winterstein, Fire Extinguisher is an even stranger early work from Alexander Kluge. The film purports to tell the story of the firefighter E.A. Winterstein, but it's difficult to tell exactly what that story is from the collage of non-sequiturs and loose ends that Kluge stitches together here. The film seems to be concerned, principally, with militarism, with recurring images of soldiers drilling in formation, throwing their rifles in the air and catching them again as they march. Other images show a toy war with little mechanical cars, driven by grinning toy animals, being bombed from above as they trace their repetitive circles along the ground. Finally, Kluge collages in leftover material from his debut feature Yesterday Girl, made two years earlier, along with a sustained portrait of that film's star, his sister Alexandra, posing with religious and regal memorabilia.

It's hard to know what any of this has to do with the titular Winterstein — who appears at times in a gladiator uniform, jogging around — and the elliptical voiceover does little to clarify matters. The narration is just as free-associative as the images, jumping from one subject to the next, occasionally hinting at the life of the title subject but only as part of a larger network of allusions to history, entertainment and philosophy. At one point, the narration compares Winterstein to various Hollywood stars, presumably because just like Clark Gable and Gary Cooper, this humble fireman appears in a movie. This is another example of Kluge intentionally conflating documentary and fiction, positing them both as part of the same medium, placing the purportedly nonfictional Winterstein in the same lineage as famous actors playing roles.

In this context, everything becomes suspect, all facts become malleable, and the narration says that among the roles that Winterstein will be remembered for is a part as a judge at the Nuremberg Trials. This suggests that even pivotal events of recent history are fodder for fictionalization and uncertainty, that there's a certain element of performance and role-playing in the enactment of history. Including Nuremberg in with a list of Hollywood actors' parts is indicative of Kluge's strategy of blending fiction with reality, tangling them together until it's difficult to tell them apart.


At the very beginning of Alexander Kluge's A Doctor From Halberstadt, the titular doctor, wandering through an airport, pauses in the corner of the frame and points tentatively offscreen, as though asking where he should go next. This kind of upfront acknowledgment of the artificiality of filmmaking, even documentary filmmaking, is by now very familiar from Kluge's work, and yet this half-hour short is, on the whole, one of his more straightforward portrait films. The doctor of the title is Kluge's own father Ernst, who really was a doctor from Halberstadt. Kluge observes his father on a trip to Munich, watching horses at a stable, aimlessly walking the streets, and visiting with his cousin, a judge.

The doctor recounts some horrible incidents he's witnessed in his career — presumably during the Nazi era — mixed in with banal chit-chat, photos from the doctor's childhood and past, and scenes of him trying to entertain himself alone on vacation in Munich. There's a real sense of loneliness in the shots of the doctor walking around Munich with nothing to do and nowhere to go, on a vacation but at a loss about how to enjoy himself in this strange city. The doctor occasionally displays a playful, almost boyish spirit, as in the shot of him skipping lithely over a puddle in the street or the scenes of him peering eagerly over a fence at the horses galloping around a track.

At one point, the doctor is telling a story about why he bought a car, describing a terrible crash he'd had one night on a slippery country road. After a while, the judge chimes in to clarify, saying that the doctor was riding a motorbike at the time, a detail that he obviously realized had been left out of the story and would confuse the film's audience, who would otherwise wonder what the doctor had been driving before he bought his car. This kind of metafictional playfulness crops up periodically during the film, especially in the film's last shot, a closeup of the doctor, who first looks directly at the camera and then off to the side, obviously at the direction of his son. As he looks off to the side, the doctor says, delivering the last lines of the film, "Shall I look over here? What is there to see? Rain, once again." It's the equivalent of "what's my motivation?", an actor wondering why he's doing what he's just been told to do by the director, wondering why this character he's playing, who is in fact himself, would want to look off to the side like this. It's a perfectly whimsical ending to a film that, typically of Kluge, gently teases its surface subject with submerged and difficult-to-access secondary meanings.


All of Alexander Kluge's baffling, idiosyncratic portraiture shorts seem to dance around the subject of World War II without quite touching on it directly, telling anecdotes about the wartime era or referring to it obliquely, but never as the central subject of the film. The subject is implied in every one of these portraits, though, if for no other reason than these people, real or fictional or some combination of the two, must have lived through the war, and Kluge's circumspection invites speculation about what these people might have seen or done during that period. This is especially true of A Woman From the Property-Owning Middle Class, Born 1908. The subject here is a woman, Alice Schneider, who has rebuilt her lavish lifestyle and her fine home after her original, even grander house was bombed during the war.

This film is connected in some inscrutable way with Kluge's earlier short Frau Blackburn, Born 1/5/1872, Is Being Filmed. Like the similarly named earlier film, this one concerns a woman who is displaying her collection of fine china for the documentarians, though Frau Schneider seems much more well-off than Frau Blackburn, and her collection is more expansive. Also reappearing from the earlier film is the sinister man who had robbed Frau Blackburn, and Kluge once again focuses on a closeup of the man's eyes and bushy black eyebrows. Here, though, this man seems more kindly than creepy, chatting amiably with Frau Schneider and offering her an interest-free loan rather than buying her china from her; he even helps her put away the expensive pieces, which she'd laid out on the floor in hopes of making a sale.

The film seems to rely on its intertextual connection to the earlier Kluge work for some of its meaning, juxtaposing the experience of this woman of means (her status is explicitly mentioned in the film's title, after all) against that of the comparatively average Frau Blackburn, who gets taken advantage of by the same man who is so solicitous with the richer woman. There's perhaps also a coded implication here about who made it through the war okay, ready to rebuild and reacquire, and who struggled along with very little in the aftermath of the war.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most moving and heartbreaking love stories in the cinema, an absolutely stunning musical masterpiece that sets its bright, colorful visual palette and sweet, soaring music against an increasingly bittersweet emotional range. Divided into three parts — departure, absence, and return — Jacques Demy's sublime musical is the story of a love affair haunted by the separation of war. Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) is a young girl madly in love with the mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), but their sweet, innocent affair is torn apart when Guy is called up into the army, sent to Algeria for two years. As in so many French films of this era, Algeria looms large, a tear in the fabric of life, an absence that's felt at home in the missing young men, the years of longing and waiting.

The film is an interesting type of musical in which every single line is sung, but it rarely feels like there's a proper song: instead, all of the dialogue is more-or-less naturalistic speech that's simply sung instead of spoken. Even the most banal lines, like Guy's interactions with customers and his boss at the gas station where he works, are liltingly timed to Michel Legrand's alternately jazzy and romantic music. This style can be somewhat distracting and artificial at first but it quickly comes to seem as natural as if the characters were simply speaking. By setting everything to song, it never seems as if the music is interrupting the diegesis, cutting off the naturalistic flow of life with a musical number. Rather, life itself, with all its joys and tragedies, its banal incidents, its great loves and great sadnesses, has been transformed into one big musical number, a 90-minute musical number that encompasses both the innocent sweetness of young love and the much more complex, melancholy, mysterious loves and losses that build up over the course of the years.

The first part of the movie, which is almost saccharine-sweet with its constant tender embraces and cooing declarations of love, ends with Guy and Geneviève being split apart as he heads off to the army and the war. At one point during their goodbyes, he says that he knows she'll wait for him, but Demy films it in a way that suggests exactly the opposite. Before that point, he'd captured the young lovers in a two-shot, huddling together in a booth at a bar, but then Demy pans right to focus on Guy's face as he stares off into space, away from Geneviève, saying that he's sure she'll wait. Because she's not in the frame, one is left to wonder if he's being presumptuous, demanding that she wait rather than letting her say it herself. Demy then pans back to Geneviève, who demurely agrees, but the damage has been done: Demy's cinematic separation of the lovers at this decisive moment has seemingly fated them to separation in life as well. The camera's graceful movements all but inform us: Geneviève will not wait.


This is followed — after a goodbye sexual dalliance in Guy's bed, next door to the room where his godmother, Élise (Mireille Perrey), lays dying — by the deeply romantic sadness of the lovers' parting at a train station. Demy's camera tracks backward as Guy backs away from Geneviève in the station's bar, a gap of negative space opening up between them, expanded by the camera's movement away from them. Then Geneviève desperately runs to fill that gap, but outside the process begins again, as Guy steps onto the train, which begins rolling forward, Demy's camera tracking along with it. Geneviève follows alongside it for a few more moments, repeating "I love you," but once she stops walking, both train and camera continue rolling along, leaving her ever further in the distance, her figure shrinking into the background as the train departs the station, smoke billowing onto the platform to further obscure her from view.

In Guy's absence, Geneviève learns that she's pregnant with his child, but over time she also realizes that, contrary to what she'd believed, she can imagine herself living without him. Earlier, when Geneviève was grieving over her departed love, her mother (Anne Vernon) told her that, "people only die of love in movies," a line that, since this is after all a movie, would seem to be freighted with tragic foreshadowing. But this is a movie that uses its deceptively artificial aesthetic to cut right to the core of some very real emotions, and Demy has something much sadder and more complex in store for Geneviève than the melodramatic convention of dying from a broken heart.

At the heart of this dazzling musical is the revelation that life is not often as neat as the movies, that the romantic ideals of musicals are seldom fulfilled as cleanly as Hollywood happy endings would imply. At one point, Geneviève sings, "I would have died for him. Why aren't I dead?" She looks right into the camera with a tearful, red-eyed expression, genuinely confused and hurt by the realization that her love for Guy has been fading in his absence, that she's been able to go on with her life and even entertain thoughts about another man, when before Guy left she'd sworn to wait for him forever. She'd imagined that life would be like a melodrama, that she couldn't live without her lover, but she finds that in reality, unlike the movies, memories can fade, life can go on, and there are endings that aren't quite happy, but aren't quite unhappy either, that the sadness and the pleasure of life can be tangled and intertwined so completely that it's difficult to separate one from the other.


The other man who enters Geneviève's life in Guy's absence knows this truth very well indeed. Roland (Marc Michel) is a successful diamond dealer and world traveler who becomes friendly with Geneviève and her mother after Guy leaves. Roland comes to the film several years after the events of Demy's first feature Lola, in which he got his heart broken by the title character of that film and set off on the adventures that apparently made him a rich man. He never forgot Lola, of course, as evidenced by the sequence where he tells Geneviève's mother about his past and Demy cuts away to a graceful circular pan around the market where Roland and Lola had last met in the earlier film. It's a melancholy callback, a metatextual sequence that suggests that film is memory, that to remember Lola is to remember the events and the locations of that other film, briefly weaving them into this new film. Roland's interactions with Geneviève and her mother also recall the earlier film, in that Geneviève's mother is obviously attracted to Roland — as a mother had been in the other film, while he pined over Lola — but Roland is infatuated with Geneviève herself.

Their love affair lacks the passion of Geneviève and Guy's love: Roland courts the girl by asking her mother for her hand in marriage, before he's even spoken much to Geneviève herself. It's a very unromantic affair, and Geneviève's decision to marry him seems to be more pragmatic than anything, influenced by his stability and the fact that he's not swayed in his love for her when he learns that she's already pregnant with another man's child. Their wedding is conveyed with a few economical shots, starting with a tracking shot through a bridal shop filled with mannequins in gowns, in the midst of which Geneviève, staring into the camera through the thin gauze of a white veil, seems as plastic and distant as the mannequins, her expression blank and unreadable. Demy cuts immediately to a very similar shot of Geneviève at her wedding, still staring blankly into the camera, then pulling back to a two-shot of the couple kneeling, their hands piously pressed together in prayer, an image of formally, religiously sanctioned love very different from the passionate clenches of Geneviève and Guy from the film's first section.

Guy also gets his own bittersweet ending, as Geneviève disappears for the film's final section and Guy finally returns from the war with a limp and a haunted expression, only to realize that his love is not waiting for him. Instead, he's gradually awoken out of his self-pity by the patience and caring of his godmother's long-suffering nurse, Madeleine (Ellen Farner), who Demy had repeatedly hinted was harboring a shy crush on Guy. It is perhaps telling that Demy establishes a visual parallel between Geneviève and Roland's wedding and the shot of Guy and Madeleine at Élise's funeral, also sitting side by side in a prayerful posture. As with Geneviève and Roland, this is not a relationship of great passion, and it might be thought that Guy is just settling for a second choice, but Demy intentionally leaves it ambiguous just how much or little he actually feels for Madeleine. This is especially true of the deeply affecting final scene, in which, years later, Geneviève and Guy finally meet again, at the snowbound gas station that Guy now owns and lives at with his wife and their son. It's a beautiful and mysterious scene, overflowing with complex emotions that mostly go unstated in the polite, slightly cool conversation of the former lovers. Demy masterfully resists resolving the tension or answering any of the questions left lingering about these two characters and their paths in life. Instead, they briefly meet and part, separating just as Guy's new wife returns, and Demy's camera drifts up and away, through the fluttering snowflakes, the gas station a little oasis of light in the darkness of the night, as though the happy domestic scene that now plays out is encased in a snowglobe.

Fahrenheit 451

It was a labor of love for François Truffaut to adapt Ray Bradbury's classic science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451: the director spent years raising the funding, and wrote the English-language script himself (with Jean-Louis Richard) with only limited understanding of English. That accounts for some of the film's strangeness — its dialogue is frequently awkward and its performances stiff — but not even close to all of it. It's a strange work all around, oddly jaunty and surreal, filmed with a jagged modernist style that only accentuates how uneasily it all fits together. It's a weird, and weirdly appealing, film that, for all its unsanded edges, memorably explores Bradbury's themes of knowledge, control, the media and the power of ideas.

Bradbury's story is of course very familiar. In a future society where books are outlawed and firemen hunt down readers, arrest them and burn their books, the fireman Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) is abruptly moved to curiosity about the books he's unthinkingly burned for so long. He begins surreptitiously gathering books, compulsively reading, gathering knowledge and rebelling against the order that he'd previously accepted unquestioningly. The film opens with the firemen silently, methodically going about their work. They arrive at an apartment and search it for books, finding them stuffed into every nook, including hidden behind the screen of a non-functioning TV set, a sly joke on the oppositional relationship between mind-numbing TV and stimulating books. The firemen exchange no words as they go about their work, throwing books into a pile to be burned. The burning itself is nearly ritulistic, as Montag dons his protective gear (the footage is reversed; he's actually taking off the costume), grabs a flamethrower, and sets the books on fire while a crowd silently watches. Afterwards, the shot of him taking off his protective suit is replayed, running forwards this time, and by bookending the scene with this same shot, played first in reverse and then normally, Truffaut enhances the subtle weirdness of the sequence as well as the ritualistic nature of the burning. Something seems off about the whole thing, as well it should.

Montag soon realizes that he is not truly happy with this job. He is inspired to question things for the first time by his budding friendship with one of his neighbors, Clarisse (Julie Christie), whose pointed inquiries about his happiness start Montag on his journey into self-doubt and recrimination, as though he'd just been waiting for some excuse to start tearing everything apart. He's certainly not contented in his life, which seems empty and hollow: when his boss asks him what he does on his time off, all he can think of is that he mows the lawn. His wife Linda (also played by Christie) sits at home ingesting one pill after another and watching her televised "family" on the wall screen, stupidly sitting in front of lifeless TV programs that make her feel included in the clumsiest, least convincing fashion.

These TV programs are hilarious and unsettling, with actors periodically turning to face the camera and directly address the viewer by name, asking a question while a red light beeps to signal the need for user input. Truffaut cuts in for jarring closeups of the actor, staring out at the viewer, an angry expression on his face as if he's impatiently awaiting an answer. The funniest part is that the show eventually carries on again no matter what the audience says, but Linda still eagerly plays along, desperate for the aura of importance and participation that these farcical, content-free dramas give her. It's a biting and still relevant satire of television's ability to substitute for real human relationships and the deeper substance of great literature.


The film's style reflects the flatness and emptiness of this society, with gray suburban sprawl and conformity occasionally broken up by splashes of bright primary colors — notably the glistening, foreboding red of the fire engine, which thrusts down the streets towards the next dissenter's home, accompanied by wailing sirens and the pulsing strings of Bernard Herrmann's theme. Truffaut's method of depicting the future is similar to that of his peer Godard's in Alphaville: he simply films the present in such a way as to maximize and emphasize its alienation. Cinematographer (and future director) Nicolas Roeg gives the film a flat style very far from the gloss and shininess with which futuristic societies are generally depicted in the cinema. Rows of identical houses line ordinary suburban boulevards, and people emerge, obediently, only when ordered to by authorities, as they do towards the end of the film, everyone stepping out on their neatly manicured front lawns to help search for the fugitive Montag. Interiors are crisp and modern, the walls bare and boring, the decoration minimal. The fire house itself is the brightest, most colorful location, with its bright red walls and the threatening red blast door from which the fire engine periodically emerges on its grim missions.

Even Truffaut's approach to futuristic technology is straightforward: about the most obvious sign of advanced technology is the firemen's pole, which they can somehow slide up as well as down. This lo-fi special effect — Truffaut simply reverses the film, of course — is one of the film's whimsical but oddly unsettling flourishes. The image of firemen casually gliding up the pole, ascending like angels towards their quarters after a kerosene-soaked day of work, is comical and chilling in equal measure. At a key moment in the film, as Montag becomes alienated from his work and begins to feel the lure of books, technology begins to betray him: the automatic door of his house refuses to open for him, and he finds he cannot slide up or down the pole but must trot, undignified, up and down the nearby spiral staircase, a disused relic of an earlier era much like the books he's tasked with destroying. His boss takes this lack of communion with technology, this symbolic disconnect from the modern era, as a moral failing: "something wrong between you and the pole?" he asks in an insinuating tone.

Something is very wrong, indeed. The film's unsettling vision of the future reaches its horrible climax with a harrowing sequence in which an old woman allows herself to be set afire rather than leave behind the books she loves so much. She stands in the center of a pile of books thrown to the ground by the zealous firemen, turning in circles and smiling beautifically as the flames approach her. The image purposefully evokes the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, another woman destroyed by fire for advancing ideas that challenged the status quo.


In other places, Truffaut achieves disorienting effects through somewhat clumsy, purposefully off-kilter aesthetics. Towards the end of the film, he inserts a laughable special effect shot of four flying men searching for Montag, crudely pasted in front of a landscape. It's the funniest moment of the film, a deliberate middle finger directed at Hollywood sci-fi's obsession with slick effects and glossy surfaces rather than ideas. Elsewhere, Truffaut employs equally shoddy (if less hilarious) rear projection as Montag and Clarisse ride the monorail that takes them out to their suburban neighborhood — the glaringly fake cut-and-paste job of these images recalls Truffaut's idol Hitchcock, who also often exploited the fake quality of these kinds of effects.

Even the stiff, uncharismatic performances add to the film's sense of alienation. Truffaut was especially unhappy with Werner's robotic performance as Montag, but Werner's uninflected line readings and deadened expressions contribute to the sense of a man, and a society, cut off from real feeling, while the actor's thick German accent, along with the grim black uniforms of the firemen, underlines the implied parallels with Nazism. Christie plays two parts here, portraying both of the women in Montag's life, but her performance is similarly flat, and there's little difference between the solipsistic, lazy Linda and the mentally engaged Clarisse. The decision to have the same actress play both parts is suspect in the first place: the point is that the women are very different, that they represent entirely opposite ideas of life and relationships for Montag. Having the same woman play both of them, with little apparent difference in personality, suggests only that for the filmmakers, all women might as well be the same.

Such baffling and offputting aesthetic choices dominate and define Truffaut's take on Bradbury's tale. It's a flawed movie in many ways — even Truffaut himself was unhappy with the affectless performances and clunky dialogue — but it's also a fascinating one. The surreal beauty of the film's imagery is a big part of its appeal: it looks like a garish comedy, is acted like an inscrutable arthouse drama, and is overflowing with sharp-edged satire. Best of all is the poetic ending, which shows Bradbury's "Book People" wandering the countryside outside of town, mumbling the words to the books they've committed to memory, their voices overlapping in a babble of memorized literature. It's a moving and mysterious sequence that provides the film's best tribute to the power of words and the human will to preserve ideas and knowledge at all costs.

The Saragossa Manuscript

Wojciech Has' The Saragossa Manuscript, based on the novel by Jan Potocki, is a delightful, dizzying film that, over the course of three rapidly paced hours, unfurls a series of interconnected stories in which truth, fiction and fantasy deftly change places over and over again. It's a story of magic and poetry and fiction, all of it built around the manuscript of the film's title, a book that contains stories, and stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories, each new tale flowing out of the others, overflowing with wit and imagination and mystery.

The opening scene sets the tone. A soldier walks dramatically across a courtyard, as his fellow soldiers charge past, on foot or galloping on horses, running into battle. Mortars explode around them, the soundtrack is filled with screams and shouts, and men fall and die. One man falls right next to the first soldier, apparently shot, but when the first soldier walks over to the corpse, the dead man leaps to his feet, grabs his rifle, and leads the retreat as the rest of the army suddenly reappears, running away. Finally, the first soldier, who had previously cowered behind a wall during all this fighting, shouts to rally a charge as his fellow men run in the opposite direction, but his spurt of bravery lasts barely a few seconds before he ducks into a nearby building. It's a surreal, comical scene that deflates the supposed honor of warfare, compressing the entire span of a bloody battle into an absurdist farce lasting less than a minute.

This soldier, as it turns out, has little to do with the rest of the film; he's merely the first of several portals leading progressively deeper into the film's labyrinth of stories. The soldier holes up in an inn, where he discovers a thick book filled with lurid drawings and wild tales written in Spanish, the manuscript of the film's title. Another soldier — from the opposing army — soon joins him and together they begin reading from the book, which the enemy soldier says tells the story of his own grandfather. Has never returns to these two men, huddled around the book. They escape from their present, from the building crumbling all around them beneath the barrage of explosions, and disappear into the stories contained in the book.


The first part of the film is focused on the story of Alfonse Van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski), a captain of the guard trying to travel to Madrid. His journey is interrupted by mystical events when he encounters a pair of Muslim princesses (Joanna Jedryka and Iga Cembrzynska) who seduce him and then leave him the next morning to awake atop a pile of skulls, lying on the ground beneath a pair of hanged outlaws. Alfonse is haunted by ghosts and visions, and seemingly trapped in an endless loop. Every time he tries to set out on his adventure again, he passes through the same craggy, barren territory, but can't seem to get away from the haunted country inn where he spent his night with the two mysterious women. He's beset by phantoms, arrested and tortured by the Inquisition (who lock him in a tremendous horned metal mask), rescued in a chaotic swashbuckling battle by outlaws, and is finally whisked away to a nearby castle to regroup while listening to a series of stories and adventures that lead further and further away from Alfonse's own narrative.

Has shifts tones admirably throughout the film. The film is often farcical and satirical, mocking the pretensions of religion and the stiff nobility of the aristocratic class. Alfonse's father is a nobleman who obsessively fights duels to defend his honor against imagined slights. At one point, Alfonse says his father fought ten duels in a single day in order to avoid an argument; a good thing he did it, Alfonse says, with seemingly genuine relief, or else there would have been an unnecessary argument. In one of the film's most broadly comic segments, the elder Van Worden interrupts another lord's dinner to lead him outside for a duel over a frivolous matter. The two men walk slowly, bowing to one another at every corner, and then finally meet for a duel; Van Worden gets stabbed, retaining his courtesy all the while, and the other man excuses himself to return to his meal.

The film's battle sequences are also comic, and obviously artificial; they feel like boys' games of swordplay, deftly choreographed with people running in and out of the frame as Has' camera pans fluidly to track the fighting. The stark black-and-white cinematography is also well suited to the more gothic horror touches, though much of the film's magic, as in the later work of Jacques Rivette, turns out to be largely play and gamesmanship. Has continually subverts the drama of his own film, as in one sequence where Alfonse visits a chapel where a man possessed by demons is attended by a priest. The possessed man initially seems quite frightful and horrifying, but when the priest orders him to tell his story, his screams and squeals seamlessly give way to a mannered, soft-spoken voice as he politely explains how he came to be possessed in this manner.

In the second half of the film, Alfonse's story is pushed into the background as he stays at a castle where he listens, along with some companions, to the nested stories of the gypsy Avadoro (Leon Niemczyk). Avadoro's stories of his "youthful adventures" lead inexorably inward, further and further into a maze of stories. He tells a story in which he soon enough meets a character who tells him a story, and that story too leads to a point where someone begins telling a story, until the (multiple) framing stories are nearly forgotten. Has cleverly keeps breaking away from these intricate stories to remind the audience what is going on, and at one point Alfonse, an audience surrogate trying to absorb all of this, counts off on his fingers who's telling stories to who, trying to make sense of the multiple layers of fiction and artifice.


The film nests stories within stories within stories, erecting complex structures that burrow further and further away from reality, into the past, into ghost stories and tales of demons and devils and, especially, stories of love and romantic scheming. The film's text repeatedly comments, self-reflexively, on all these metafictional layers. At one point, when Avadoro interrupts his story of a nobleman haunted by a friend who died in a duel, the listeners comment that he has a real mastery of the storytelling arts, that he understands how to leave a story dangling with suspense. The layered structure contributes to the sensation of being haunted, of passing from one absurd situation to another while losing one's grip on concrete reality. "I've lost the feeling of where reality ends and fantasy takes over," Alfonse says, to which Rebecca responds, "you meant to say: poetry." At moments like this, the dialogue is very self-conscious, commenting on the story itself and the nested structure of the film, suggesting that as much as anything, this is a film about storytelling, about fiction and poetry.

These breaks in the storytelling that dominates the film's second half also provide an opportunity for Alfonse's companion Pedro Velasquez (Gustaw Holoubek) to discourse on mathematics and philosophy, which he sees as interconnected. His philosophical musings punctuate Avadoro's occasionally interrupted story, and at one point he suggests that poetry — as found in the gap between empirical mathematics and a complete understanding of the world — is very close to life itself. Perhaps he's suggesting that this film's endless web of stories, packed with mystery and romance and unresolved absurdities and strange coincidences, is really not as wild as it seems, but is in fact an accurate depiction of the absurdity and strangeness of real life. Or maybe not.

After all, the film is also satirically cutting, as in its depiction of a paranoid religious penitent who's easily frightened and moved to fits of self-abnegation such as hairshirts and flogging. And the film keeps suggesting prosaic, worldly sources for its mystical and supernatural elements, only to upend those practical explanations for further intimations of the otherworldly. One of the film's funniest stories is the tale of the woman who, despising her older husband, concocts a series of seemingly supernatural incidents to convince him that he's being haunted from beyond the grave. Her giggling confession to a lover of what she's doing is delightful, as is the story-within-the-story in which she runs around the house making ghostly voices and leaving tricks to frighten her husband. But the story is left hanging on a much more sinister note that suggests that not everything can be easily explained, and that the frivolous can soon turn deadly.

The Saragossa Manuscript is a witty, irreverent film that's equally deft with the sublime and the silly, with sketch comedy lunacy and poetic ruminations on love, philosophy and the supernatural. It starts out as a physical journey, a historical epic road movie, but it becomes a journey of the verbal, a journey into the past and into the fantastic through stories and storytelling. In that it's connected to antecedents like One Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales, other classics of storytelling that are stories and also about stories.

Martin Scorsese's early shorts

What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing In a Place Like This? was Martin Scorsese's first short student film, and like most student films it's an indication of promise rather than a real statement in itself. The film takes a nothing premise — a writer named Harry (Zeph Michelis) becomes obsessed with a photo and finds himself unable to write any longer — and attempts to articulate the story in the most jazzed-up, stylistically vigorous way possible. The short proceeds at a rapid pace with Scorsese using successions of briskly edited still images, frequent cutaways, stop motion sequences and any other trick he can think of to illustrate Harry's rather simple story. The result doesn't amount to much more than a demonstration of Scorsese's love for the stuff of filmmaking, his fascination with editing especially. He manages to give the film a jerky, frenetic momentum that propels the film along through its innocuous, basic plot while Harry's voiceover cheerily announces each new plot development with manic intensity.

Probably the best sequence is one in which Harry watches TV late at night, surrounded by darkness, the glow from the television set casting just a small circle of pale flickering light around him. The sets are purposefully minimal, obviously, but at moments like this Scorsese makes the most of his low budget by turning austerity and simplicity into virtues. The dialogue on the soundtrack comes from King Kong, which Harry is watching on TV, and the conversation about the mysterious monster in the jungle sets the mood of dread as Harry's eyes slowly creep sideways to glance at the photo that so fascinates him. The film is much too jumpy and exuberant to be a horror movie, but Scorsese does indulge a few moments of horror movie paranoia like this, as well as in the handful of shots that focus on Harry's paranoid, widened eyes.

The short isn't exactly memorable or enjoyable beyond its relationship to Scorsese's later career, and as a comedy it's pretty unfunny, but it's an early example of Scorsese experimenting with form and using style to tell his stories.


It's Not Just You, Murray! was the second of Martin Scorsese's student films, made when he was at New York University in 1964, and it's a charming, self-consciously witty gangster picture that shows the young filmmaker already developing an interest in the milieu and the kinds of characters that would drive some of his most famous later films. Unlike his previous short, it's also lightly enjoyable for its own sake, not just as evidence of a director developing his nascent craft. The film is a mockumentary about the gangster Murray (Ira Rubin), who got his start in the Prohibition era with his good friend Joe (San de Fazio). From Murray's point of view, Joe is his greatest friend, and the two of them have built a great life together, but Scorsese repeatedly undermines Murray's narration by showing Joe betraying his partner, running away and leaving him to the cops, seducing Joe's sexy wife (Andrea Martin). It's all played for broad, winking comedy, and the playfulness of the camerawork calls constant attention to the short's meta-aware status. In the opening shots, Murray leans forward, winks at the camera, and then guides the camera to look at his expensive clothes, gesturing to each item while naming its price, then impatiently urging the camera to return to his face.

Scorsese is obviously having fun here, and if the humor is often obvious (a shot of the Lincoln Memorial zooms in to reveal "made in Japan" carved in the stonework) there's real charm in the short's fast pace and loose, jittery sensibility. The running gag of Murray's Italian mother constantly serving him spaghetti initially seems tossed-off, but the film's biggest laugh turns out to be the scene where the mother visits Murray in prison and feeds him spaghetti through the grating, squeezing the fork through with some strands of pasta hanging off. In one lightly comic sequence, Murray's nervous, stuttering voiceover rattles off all the businesses in which he and Joe had an impact, making their work sound legitimate while the images show the gangster duo collecting bribes, calling in hits, selling guns to Arabs, and leaving corpses strewn behind their path.

That's Scorsese's primary technique here, developing a disjunction between the voiceover and the images that illustrate it. It's especially satisfying to witness the contrast between the smug, self-satisfied Murray, who loves to show off his wealth and success, and the actuality of his pathetic life: his wife is clearly cheating on him and his kids look like Joe, which he comically tries to shrug off towards the end of the film, trying to twist even that indignity into a positive. It all ends with a goofy low-budget reference to Fellini's 8 1/2, but even then the hapless Murray can't be the center of attention, as Joe steals the spotlight from him even here. It's Not Just You, Murray! displays only flashes of the mature Scorsese style, as one would expect from a student film, but it does demonstrate the young director's passion for his chosen medium, his love of style. That stylistic energy would be wed to darker and more substantial subjects in later years, but the humor and verve here unmistakably remain at the root of the director's work.


The Big Shave is both the simplest and most straightforward of Martin Scorsese's early student films, and the most fully realized. It is a simple but provocative idea realized in a raw, direct way, abandoning the playful formal pyrotechnics of his previous shorts for a powerful, primal statement of anger and anguish. The film opens with briskly edited closeups of various fixtures and details in a shining white, pristinely clean bathroom: glistening, polished metal faucets, clean white linoleum, a sink with a few clear droplets of water clustered around the drain. Everything is neat, in its place, seemingly untouched. A young man (Peter Bernuth) then enters the bathroom, takes off his shirt, lathers up his face with foam and begins shaving. This is all set to the upbeat music of Bunny Berigan's 1939 jazz tune "I Can't Get Started," which lends a quaint aura to the film to match its visually pure and unstained setting.

However, the film's mood is broken as the man continues shaving even after his stubble has been clipped away. Streaks of blood begin to appear in the white foam caked on his cheeks, and soon each stroke of the razor leaves a long trail of blood on his skin, dribbling over his lips and down his neck. The effect isn't especially convincing, but it's chilling anyway, especially when at the end of the film the man slowly and deliberately draws the razor across his neck, slitting his throat while, disconcertingly, retaining a vacant, slightly bored expression, staring down the camera even as thick blood pours out of his neck and onto his chest. The last shot is, in its way, even more unsettling: a shot of the sink, stained red, as the man's hand, shaking a little, gently places the bloodied razor back on the edge of the sink, before the whole image fades to the red of the ending titles.

Those final titles provide the obvious clue to the film's meaning, as Scorsese ends the laconic title card with the direct slogan "Viet '67." It's an almost Godardian gesture, especially in the use of all that bright red fake blood, and the film is a radical political protest, a statement of anger at all the violence and wasted lives of the war. The young man in the film is just about the right age for the draft, just about the right age to be a soldier, and Scorsese's film seems to suggest that what war means for young men like this is death, pure and simple. The methodical nature of the violence in the short is an analogue for the war machine that tears apart men like this with that same casual disregard for their lives and their bodies. It's a horrifying and nastily effective short, an early precursor of the bloody end of Taxi Driver, and a bracing but indirect political statement.

Je t'aime, je t'aime

Alain Resnais has always been concerned with time and memory, and his best-known films revolve around these themes with almost obsessive dedication, as though locked into compulsive loops in which the same ideas recur with rhythmic regularity. The signature cinematic technique of his art is the edit, the cut, which is quite natural for a director so concerned with time. The art of montage is the art of arranging and controlling the flow of time; the editor shapes the raw material of a film, deviating from the linear progression of the shoot to arrange the scenes and shots in ways that express ideas, or tell stories, or create emotional juxtapositions between images. Editing reaches its apex as an expressive form in Resnais' art, and especially in Je t'aime, je t'aime, a film whose structure very cleverly mirrors the editing process, embodying the art of editing in the film itself. It's one of Resnais' very best films, a sci-fi time travel masterpiece in which the publishing executive Claude Ridder (Claude Rich), after recovering from a suicide attempt, is enlisted by a secretive research firm for a potentially dangerous experiment. The anonymous, unnamed scientists want to send Claude back in time as their first human research subject, reasoning that since he hadn't wanted to live, he didn't have much to lose if the experiment went wrong.

This experiment is supposed to send Claude exactly one year back in time, and he is supposed to remain in this time for exactly one minute before returning to the experimental chamber, a cushy, womb-like enclosure that from the outside, absurdly, looks like a misshapen brain or a vegetable or a hybrid pileup of curved human body parts. Instead, Claude becomes unmoored in time, blinking in and out of the present (another editing trick, that) and reliving a shuffled series of moments from throughout his life. Moments in time become unpredictably, randomly pulled out of context, so that Claude's life flashes before his eyes — and our eyes — out or order. Key moments are repeated, scenes are cut off abruptly and may or may not be continued or expanded later, surreal visions that might be dreams butt up against real memories, and several dramas and mysteries slowly emerge from this fragmented view of Claude's life.


The focus of his memories is his wife, Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot), whose death triggered Claude's own suicide attempt. The couple's troubled relationship dominates the memories that Claude relives, leaping non-chronologically from their first meeting to the later unhappy stages of their relationship to its possibly violent ending. They meet, they fall in love, they argue. Claude is unfaithful and Catrine is perpetually depressed, and it seems like far from an ideal relationship, although the fractured chronology makes it difficult to tell if the couple's relationship started in one state and progressed towards another, or if they were continually bouncing back and forth from better times to worse ones. The shuffling of narrative chronology eliminates the linearity from a person's life, so that each individual moment stands on its own, the moments of tenderness (the sweet love scenes in which the couple exchanges loving words) and the moments of cruelty and darkness (the scene where Claude casually confesses his infidelities while saying he still loves his wife).

Cause and effect are blurred, to a degree, so that it's no longer possible to think of one scene leading into the next, and the lack of clear indicators of time and place means that the order in which things occur is frequently unclear except when the dialogue drops enough contextual clues to figure it out. But if time travel makes Claude's life a puzzle, it's obvious that Resnais doesn't mean for the audience to reassemble the pieces: there are too many pieces missing, too many that don't fit, too many gaps. There is a genuine mystery here, some uncertainty revolving around how exactly Catrine died, but the mystery is not the point: the core of the film is the emotional intensity of re-examining one's life, rifling through the archives of memory and finding all these moments and images that evoke nostalgia, or regret, or happiness, or despair. The way things fit together in the end hardly matters; Claude already knows how things end, even if the audience doesn't quite yet, and his experience of his life as an out-of-order flow of scenes both banal and earth-shaking is what the film is all about.


The mystery is also largely rendered irrelevant by the sense that the film is really exploring the distorting effects of memory, the ways in which memory can lie and obscure rather than revealing the truth. Resnais is concerned with the selectivity of memory, and for much of the film several key scenes are occluded, perhaps because Claude is on some level subconsciously directing the images that flash before his eyes. At other times, it seems like his memory is rebelling against the staid confines of reality, creating surreal disjunctions and weird interludes that suggest that not only can memory lie, it can go mad.

In several scenes, dreams filter into reality, as when Claude remembers a sexually charged encounter with a beautiful woman, and the woman appears, stretching her shapely leg up into the air, in a bath tub that's ludicrously placed in the middle of Claude's office. That woman appears again later in a scene that's presumably the source of Claude's erotic dream/vision, but the "real" scene has a similar absurdist visual sensibility, since the woman appears twice, reflected in mirrors on either side of Claude as though he were being asked to choose between two identical women. Indeed, he occasionally does seem to confuse his many women, as in a scene where the woman he's in bed with shifts between cuts from Catrine to several other women before settling back into his wife again; the bed and the room change as well, as Claude's mind mashes together different scenes with women from throughout his life, his erotic adventures all blending together. Other scenes are utterly inexplicable, ripped out of context as surreal intrusions of the subconscious: a man drowning while speaking on the phone, a short figure in a suit and a green reptilian mask who walks alongside Claude without saying a word.

The film also shuffles the chronology of Claude's career at a publishing firm, where he progresses from working in the mail room to a mid-level office drone to an executive position. The scenes of work are almost always deadening and numbing, and though Claude's progress upward through the company is not presented in a linear fashion as he skips from memory to memory, it gradually becomes clear that the only time when he was actually happy or contented at work was in the stock room, mindlessly stacking magazines for shipping. The more responsibility he gets, the higher he rises, the more miserable he becomes. At one point, he sits at his desk with glazed eyes, musing about how slowly time passes, how it seems like it will remain the same time forever — a memory that acquires a very different resonance when shuffled into Claude's jaunt through the past. In another scene, Claude sits at a desk working while men in business suits are clustered around him, commenting disparagingly on his ability to finish the project he's working on. With the dark setting and the shadowy figures arranged around the desk, towering over Claude, it's staged like a nightmare, a paranoid fantasy of workplace pressure, another expression of Claude's subconscious rather than a literal memory of something that actually happened.


The film's more surreal diversions confirm that Resnais has a sense of humor about this sci-fi material, deliberately skewering the conventions of the genre in the deadpan scenes leading up to Claude's experiment. The scientists take him on a tour of their facility, showing him a mouse that they insist has successfully traveled in time, though they joke that they can't be sure since the mouse can't talk; how short-sighted, Claude says, they should have taught the mouse to talk first! The mouse, who accompanies Claude on his own time travel trip in a plastic bubble, shows up at random in Claude's memories, scurrying across the beach while Claude and Catrine lounge in the sand.

The mouse is a physical manifestation of the unreliability of memory, as it scurries into memories where it previously hadn't existed, its presence distracting Claude from the moment; is the mouse actually changing the past, or only changing Claude's memories of the past? Another animal, the cat that Catrine and Claude keep as a pet, appears, it seems, only when Claude remembers that it exists. Suddenly, once the cat is mentioned, they have a cat. The memory that they have a cat seems to shift the cat into existence, or back into existence. It raises the question: can something be said to exist, or to have happened, if we don't remember it? It's as though memory is populating and creating the world through its functioning. Claude's wartime memories, which similarly seem to be unreliable, are an interesting and unresolved undercurrent in the film. He refers several times to his experience in the army during World War II, which contradicts his frequent assertion that he dislikes guns and doesn't know how to use them — but then again, his chosen method of suicide also contradicts this statement. In a very puzzling scene that's unconnected to virtually everything else in the film, Claude runs across an old man who, he claims, gave Claude fake documents and a new identity during the war. The old man protests that he doesn't remember Claude, and says that it's impossible, that he too got a new identity during the war. It's a very mysterious scene, suggesting that there's a lingering mystery in Claude's past, even in his identity. Is memory really so fragile, so malleable?

That question is at the heart of Je t'aime, je t'aime. The film's minimal sci-fi story provides a framework and a clever conceptual container for Resnais' consideration of the nature of memory. As Claude hurtles through time, each memory he encounters might or might not provide additional context for the scenes that surround it, sometimes completely altering the understanding of another memory or casting other memories in a different light, at other times existing independently as self-contained stories or scenes. It's a film that acknowledges that a life can seldom be completely understood, and that the retrospective filter of memory can provide many different vantage points on that life. Its construction, a parallel for the process and artistry of filmmakers, suggests that we're all filmmakers and artists in our own minds, that the life stories we construct for ourselves are mental films, scenes projected in endless loops, moments edited together into semi-coherent assemblages that don't tell stories so much as replay emotional highlight reels.

Red Desert

Michelangelo Antonioni is the cinema's greatest chronicler of the modern era's disconnection and dehumanization, of the existential dilemmas created by the modern way of life. His first color film, Red Desert, is yet another entry in his peak period's run of intense, stylistically profound variations on that signature theme. The film is set in a modern industrial zone, not an urban center but a desolate country harbor colonized by smoke-spewing factories, massive ships that drift by in the omnipresent fog, oil drilling platforms out in the ocean, barely visible from shore. The landscape of the region is a cold, foggy, smoke-filled wasteland, a bleak territory of small mud-puddle lakes with sleek black surfaces, chemicals glistening in multiple colors, green scum leaving behind a thick crust on the shore. It's always overcast. There's always a thick fog hanging in the air, making everything fuzzy and gray. The credits roll over a series of out-of-focus shots of the region, of smokestacks and gray factory buildings and grim landscapes that nearly look post-apocalyptic in their indistinct desolation. The first in-focus shot, after the credits, is a closeup of a plume of fire erupting from a factory smokestack. The symbolism could not be more obvious: this is Hell, a strange Hell where the air is cold and the only heat comes from the factories' never-ending industrial processes, from the burning of chemicals.

Wandering through this landscape is Giuliana (Monica Vitti), her crisp green coat a striking contrast against the colorlessness of the land around her. She seems to be dazed, utterly lost, acting in inexplicable ways. She's walking with her son, but seems to keep forgetting about him and leaving him behind, letting him wander off by himself, then belatedly remembering that he's with her. As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that she's losing her mind, a not so surprising state of affairs in a place like this. Giuliana's husband, Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), is an industrialist himself, a manager at one of the local factories, so in a sense the environment that's poisoning Giuliana is in part created by her own husband, who doesn't seem to understand his wife at all. Ugo seems to think of his wife's odd behavior and increasingly obvious depression as inconveniences, minor female hysteria that would go away if only she'd stop thinking about it. He is constantly away on business, leaving her alone, and when he hears that she's been in a car accident and is in the hospital (an event that happens before the start of the movie but lingers over everything that happens subsequently), he doesn't even return from a business trip once he learns that she's going to be alright.

Initially, it seems like Ugo's friend Corrado (Richard Harris) might be able to wake Giuliana out of her misery and aimlessness. He takes an immediate interest in her, really looking at her and trying to engage with her in a way her husband doesn't. They begin to seem like a couple, as wherever they go, Corrado walks with her at her meandering, dawdling pace while her husband impatiently strides ahead, all business. Corrado is also involved in industry, but unlike Ugo he seems conflicted by his work; he's been in many different businesses, always moving from place to place, simply abandoning his life and starting anew somewhere else. In one early scene, Ugo makes calls around to several factory managers he knows, trying to find workers for Corrado's newest project. Antonioni cuts to each place Ugo calls in turn, emphasizing the similarities between them: wherever he calls, smoke spews in the background, the clatter of industrial machinery nearly drowns out the conversations, huge pipes and banks of electronic devices with blinking lights and gauges dwarf the human workers. This is industry, this is progress, making every place the same, erasing the distinctions between places to install a uniformly sleek and gray modern façade that covers up one place after another. Maybe that's why Corrado is never satisfied no matter where he moves; each new home, each new city, is modeled on the old one.


If Ugo is indifferent to the costs of modernization — even laughing at a story of a restaurant customer who complained about fish that taste like petroleum — Corrado seems to feel a small measure of the discontentment that affects Giuliana so dramatically. In a meeting with his new workers, towards the end of the film, Corrado's gaze wanders over the workers' faces but drifts away from them towards the stacked crates behind them, towards the cracked paint on the walls of the warehouse. Antonioni's images create the impression that in this environment, the faces of the men, often filmed out-of-focus, are simply another part of this inhuman landscape, and the gaze inevitably glosses over them to look at the surroundings instead. It is a glimpse of how Giuliana sees her world, as a place where humanity itself is being effaced by its own creations, by its piles of consumer goods and the massive factories dedicated to their production.

Antonioni's aesthetic constantly reflects this dehumanization and destabilization. The ugly gray surroundings of the area are reflected in Antonioni's bleak, strikingly composed images, in which the color seems to have been drained out of almost everything, leaving behind pale, washed-out hues. Often, the background is made blurry and abstract, isolating Giuliana from her surroundings, so that her crisply focused face is contrasted against the out-of-focus haze of factories and industrial parks. The omnipresent fog adds to that hazy feeling, especially in a scene by the docks when Giuliana, Ugo and their friends run through the fog, disappearing into the gray tendrils that wrap around them. Standing in the fog, the people seem to be fading in and out of view, partially obscured, their expressions unreadable due to the filtering overlay of the fog. Giuliana faces her friends and her husband and sees only the uncomprehending blankness of their faces; they seem separated from her by an uncrossable gulf.

This is a potent depiction of a world in which human connection seems impossible. At best, there are cheap and tawdry facsimiles of connection, like a party that Giuliana, Ugo and Corrado go to with some friends, where everyone talks incessantly about sex and the whole thing seems constantly on the verge of breaking out into an orgy. The orgy never happens, though, in part because all these upper-class blank slates seem too lazy, too bored, even to really have sex — their lascivious but empty chatter is contrasted against a young working class girl who says she'd "rather do certain things than talk about them." But talk is all these bored bourgeois can muster. Even Giuliana's interactions with the men who love or want her seem oddly impersonal. Her husband, who ignores all her concerns and doesn't seem to know what to make of her depressed manner, paws at her and kisses her while she sobs and moans; unable to understand her pain, he tries to smother it with sex, not getting — or not caring — that she isn't likely to be soothed in this way. Ultimately, Corrado can only resort to the same solutions; when Giuliana comes running to Corrado for help late in the film, he takes advantage of her confusion and sorrow by taking her to bed, caressing her and stripping her while she cries, alternately pushing him away and seeming to pull him closer. Her isolation and anguish is so intense that she needs some companionship, some comfort, but none of these men can offer it to her in any real and lasting way.


After Giuliana and Corrado make love, the hotel room, which had previously had white walls, is suddenly painted a pale pink, and even the coffee cups on the bedside table are pink, as though the whole room had become a womb of flesh, encompassing the lovers, as though their skin-on-skin contact had begun to spread to the objects and constructions around them. This is a film about how environments and surroundings affect human relations and psychology, but the reverse is also true: modern people create the environments in which they live. Just as it's humanity's obsession with progress that leads to industrial expansion and pollution, this scene reflects the wish that human connection, however fleeting, could counteract the suffocating and alienating effects of the world. Instead, sex and "love" only offer up more pain and disappointment. Even motherhood is unsatisfying to Giuliana, whose son is virtually a mute prop, as disconnected as his mother, and who already shows signs of his mother's unpredictable responses to this alienating environment.

There is at least one beacon of light in this desolate world: the human imagination and the capacity for hope, the capacity to dream of a better world. At one point, trying to keep her son entertained while he's ill, Giuliana tells him a story, but it's no light bedtime story. It's a haunting parable of unspoiled natural peace and the constant threat of disruption that arises from human presence. In this story, there's a beautiful beach with pink sand and clear, blue water, and the only person around is a young girl with darkly tanned skin who swims in that bright blue water and lounges on the beach all day, as long as the sun is out. The style of this sequence differs drastically from the rest of the film, as the bright colors and clean, bold images contrast against the drab tones and fog that persist outside of this dream world. As Giuliana's voiceover describes the beauty of this place, the images present an idyllic paradise, totally unspoiled, no human activity except for the girl's unhurried, isolated enjoyment of the place's beauty. The only sound is the water lapping up on the shore, a hushed whisper accompanied by Antonioni's remarkably sensual closeup of the tiny waves lapping up against the shore, kicking up swirls of pink sand that turn the crests of these wavelets a pinkish hue.

This idyll is interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious boat, unpopulated by any visible human crew, which simply turns into the inlet, seems to look around, then sails away. It is an obvious indication that this isolated place could be spoiled at any time, that the big ships of industry, so inhuman and strange, could pull in at any time, muddying up that crystal-clear water, spewing filth to cover up the delicate pink of the sand. After the ship leaves, the story goes, the whole cove sings as a kind of beautifully sad warning, or a protest, a song of heartache and fear. As Giuliana's voiceover says that the cove was like a living being, Antonioni films the curved pink rocks surrounding the water like a woman's body, admiring the glistening accretions of sand and crystal in these rocks, admiring their graceful curves that at times look like a woman's breasts or the curve of her hips. In this deeply affecting parable, this place of natural beauty becomes a woman, welcoming and pure, whose beauty is threatened by the rape of industry.


That story is a vision of the world's beauty that seems far removed from reality as Giuliana knows it — but not from reality altogether. It's the world as it could be, and the world as it still is in some places. The mere possibility of this fantastic beauty, of this total communion between humanity and nature, is enough to soften the hard edges of industrial existence. Another scene, earlier in the film, seems like a slightly surreal dream but with a much less optimistic message. Giuliana wakes up in the middle of the night and finds, in her son's room, a grinning robot running back and forth on autopilot, crashing backwards into the wall and then running up against her son's bed, grinning all the while. Giuliana turns off the robot, which remains in the lower left corner of the frame, staring at the camera with glowing eyes, as she checks on her son. When she leaves and shuts the door, restoring the room to darkness, those glowing eyes are all that remain, two yellow orbs floating in the dark, an eerie mechanical stare watching over the sleeping boy.

That image is indicative of the film's general tone of industrial malaise. The soundtrack buzzes and hums with the sounds of machinery, the high-pitched subliminal whine of power transformers, these real sounds matched in the low-key electronic score of Vittorio Gelmetti, which burbles up every so often to further deepen the sense of anxiety. Antonioni carefully calibrates every aspect of the film so that each image becomes an expression of the characters' isolation, and the weight of the world that they feel so acutely. The scenery is almost studiously bland and gray, sometimes literally, as when Giuliana sees a fruit vendor whose wares are all painted gray, as though covered in a layer of ash. In Corrado's hotel, the whole lobby is a clean, clinical white, even the plants, their white stalks emerging from white soil and white pots. Antonioni has crafted a precise and deeply affecting portrait of the destruction of the human soul in the metal jaws of industry — and the nature of the continuing psychological and physical struggle against the oppressive environs we've created for ourselves as a society.

Le Trou

Jacques Becker's final film, Le Trou, is a thrilling and powerful prison break drama that chronicles, with narrowly focused concentration, the attempt of a group of cellmates to break out of jail by tunneling beneath their cell into the sewer system. The film is stark and economical, with no intrusive music on the soundtrack, no elaborate plotting, and a bare minimum of character detail. Becker includes what he absolutely has to in order to tell his story, and strips away all the excess fat, leaving only the raw, vital essence of the prison break saga. The characters are generic, with no real back stories. The initial schemers in the escape plan are the experienced prisoner Roland (Jean Keraudy, who participated in the real life escape on which the film was based), Manu (Philippe Leroy), Geo (Michel Constantin) and Monseigneur (Raymond Meunier). The only information provided about any of them is that all of them are facing long jail sentences, and one or two of them could potentially be sentenced to the death penalty. Becker doesn't provide any information about their crimes; it's obvious that they're career criminals with violent pasts, and that they have a very strong incentive to escape or else at best they'll be spending the rest of their lives in prison.

This tight-knit group is disrupted by the arrival of Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel), who's moved into their cell from a cell block that's being repaired. The men accept him after initially sizing him up, and after some debate and uncertainty they inform him of their plan and include him in the escape attempt. Gaspard, nevertheless, is very different from the other men. He is not a hardened criminal but a man who has been unlucky, who has been placed in this situation more or less by accident. He was in a quarrel with his wife where she pulled a shotgun on him, and in the ensuing struggle she was wounded. Jealous over Gaspard's affair with her younger sister, the wife filed charges of attempted murder against him. Obviously, although he too is potentially facing a long stretch in prison, Gaspard is in a very different situation from the other men, and they remain somewhat uneasy around him, slightly suspicious of him even as they proceed with their plot.

Their plan involves digging a hole in their cell that will eventually lead through some underground passages to the sewer system. Once they gain access to the sewers, they find that it's necessary to dig a second and much larger hole to get around a concrete obstruction blocking the sewer tunnel. The tension in the film is sublime and at times unbearable. Every physical action becomes an exercise in suspense. When the prisoners first begin digging the hole in their cell, Becker holds a closeup on the growing hole itself, with the prisoners clustered around it, taking turns using a small piece of metal to crack the concrete floor.

The sequence plays out nearly in real-time, with the concrete shattering into small chunks, the sound of the hammering and the clinking together of the rocks and debris amplified on the soundtrack. The prisoners are hoping that the noise blends into the general clatter of the prison, where everyone is working during the day, and the lengthy, intense sequence emphasizes the hard work of breaking through the floor. The accumulation of tension through the nearly dialogue-free emphasis on manual work recalls Jules Dassin's Riffifi, another film in which the patient observation of physical processes is integral to the film's effect. The audience must wait with the men, anxious that they'll be caught at any moment. Every similar sequence of physical labor is extended with similar patience and intensity. A scene in which two of the prisoners file through a metal bar is achieved with time-lapse rather than in real time, but the effect is the same. The prisoners pause after every twenty filing motions to listen for guards, at which point the camera pans upward from the bar and the small slit in it to the face of the prisoner, his eyes alert, holding his breath as he listens for a sign that someone might be approaching.


The whole film is similarly tense, with an emphasis on time passing, on sand filtering through the makeshift hourglass the men create with two glass bottles and a handful of pilfered sand. Becker resorts to time-lapse sequences when he needs to, to show the hole in the sewer slowly widening, getting scooped out more and more as the men dig night after night. More often, events play out in something like real time, especially the lengthy scouting expedition when Manu and Roland first explore the area beneath the prison, searching for their way out. During this scene, the action proceeds at a deliberately slow pace as the men creep through the underground passages in the dark, dodging patrols by the guards, the only light coming from the small flame they construct with a bottle of ink. Becker often shoots down the dark corridors, that small light receding, the figures of the men getting swallowed up in shadows as they vanish into the distance.

The film's aesthetic is minimalist and claustrophobic, rarely leaving the confines of the prisoners' small cell or the tunnels beneath the prison. One exception is a very brief scene in which Gaspard gets a visit from Nicole (Catherine Spaak), his wife's sister and his lover, a scene shot entirely in glossy closeups with a wire screen overlaid on their faces, separating them. It's a brief glimpse of the outside world, a beacon of hope that confirms that Gaspard is not like the others, that there's a chance for him to get out of this situation through ordinary means, without tunneling into the ground. Gaspard, it seems, is going along with the men to some extent because he feels accepted, like part of a group, working towards a common goal. The men are self-sufficient and close in every way, sharing everything they have with one another, totally trusting one another to carry out this plan. Gaspard, seeing them work together and joining them in this work, is moved by the closeness of the group, by their spirit of stoical cooperation, their manly code of honor. As Monseigneur says at one point, a man should be totally self-sufficient in this way, even asexual; he says that men should stay away from women, and when a fellow inmate makes a knowing joke in response, he adds "no men either." This group of prisoners has formed an insular society of their own, closed off from the outside world, calmly and methodically executing their plans with a precision that can only come from total focus and determination.

Becker exhibits a similar focus in his filmmaking. Le Trou is a single-minded examination of the preparations for the escape attempt, with very little surrounding material. Even the portrayal of day-to-day prison life isn't overloaded with excess detail, presenting a barebones vision of ordinary prison routines. Rather than emphasizing the injustices of prison life, as many prison dramas do, Becker provides a few small examples of the kinds of petty inconveniences and invasions of privacy that prisoners deal with: random searches, the constantly alert gaze of the guards, the occasional hassle from a stricter guard. For the most part, though, the conditions in this prison aren't especially harsh, and it's the basic sense of confinement, and the threat of long years of similar restriction, from which these men wish to escape. That's what makes this film so simple but undeniably powerful, capturing with patience and an acute grasp of physicality the experience of prison and the mechanics of the breakout preparations. From its slowly building opening to its startling conclusion, Le Trou is a stunner of its genre.

Stolen Kisses

Stolen Kisses is the third installment in the series of Antoine Doinel tales that François Truffaut inaugurated with his debut feature The 400 Blows. The film opens several years after Truffaut's last visit with Antoine (played as always by Jean-Pierre Léaud), in the short film Antoine and Colette. As with the gap between The 400 Blows and that short, several years are left as an ellipsis between installments, with the effect that each new film in the series is like catching up with an old friend, learning what he's done and where he's been in the intervening years since his last appearance. Since Léaud grows up on screen with his cinematic counterpart, it's also a way of catching up with the actor, seeing how the fourteen year-old boy from The 400 Blows has matured into an independent young man with a vibrant, eclectic life both onscreen and off. When Stolen Kisses opens, Antoine has been in the army for three years, and at the very beginning of the film he's in a military prison, awaiting his release from the army after a troubled career as a private. During his exit interview with a superior officer, the man rattles off a list of Antoine's offenses, including all the bases where he'd gone AWOL, and Antoine smiles at each one, as though fondly recalling happy memories of what he'd done during each of these infractions; a whole history is suggested in those smiles.

It's a loving and playful re-introduction to this familiar character, an assurance that though Antoine has grown older he's still a charming misbehavior, a defiant young man with little tolerance for authority. Even more telling, perhaps, is what precedes this scene, an opening image which on the surface has no real connection to the rest of the film. During the credit sequence, Truffaut films the building that housed the then-closed Cinémathèque Franèais, which at the time of the making of this film was embroiled in the Langlois affair, when the firing of Henri Langlois, the Cinémathèque's longtime director (and mentor to the Cahiers du cinema group of filmmakers and critics), triggered student protests and riots demanding his reinstatement. Truffaut and Léaud were both on the frontlines of these protests, with the latter making fiery speeches on Langlois' behalf in front of that very building. Some text during the titles of Stolen Kisses dedicates the film to Langlois, but the film itself has only the most tenuous of connections to Langlois or to the protests and politics bubbling up around him at the time. The protests over Langlois' departure from the Cinémathèque would eventually seem like a precursor to the broader student riots of May 1968, but these political questions linger only at the edges of the film.

The Langlois affair is mentioned explicitly, once, by the parents of Antoine's sometime-girlfriend Christine (Claude Jade), who describe it in vague and slightly bemused terms, reflecting the generation gap between the older generation and those who, like Truffaut and Léaud and their associates, grew up with the Cinémathèque and with Langlois' tutelage. But Antoine and Christine are equally abstracted from the events; Christine gets off from school when boycotts break out at her university, and she uses it as an unexpected vacation, going skiing with her friends. Antoine, for his part, is totally unaware of any of it. Later, Christine mentions to him that some of her friends are involved in protests, but Antoine, absorbed in his job, barely listens, and that's the extent of the film's engagement with the political upheavals sweeping France at the time. It's a curious decision, this abstraction from the politics of the time, especially since both the director and the star were so heavily involved in the events in their personal lives. It's as though Truffaut is asserting, with his casual integration of the politics at the fringes of a politically content-free film, that he intends to keep his cinema somewhat separate from the upheavals of the time — a pointed rejection of the very different path taken by Jean-Luc Godard, and the increasing split between the two filmmakers and former friends. Truffaut's film makes a token nod to the politics, to the concerns that so occupied both Truffaut and Léaud off the set. Godard could not make such a separation between his politics, his life and the films he made, but Truffaut, it seems, could.


Instead, Stolen Kisses is largely concerned, like Antoine and Colette, with Antoine's romantic adventures, in this case especially his on/off relationship with Christine, with whom he has a relationship that mirrors his friendship/affair with Colette, even including his closeness with the girl's mother and stepfather, who are like surrogate parents for the adrift young man. In addition to the relationship with Christine, the film also traces Antoine's visits to prostitutes (including his very funny encounter with a pair of them early on) and his fascination with Fabienne (Delphine Seyrig), a beautiful older woman who's the wife of the shoe store owner Tabard (Michael Lonsdale). He meets this latter couple while working as a detective for a private investigation firm, one of several jobs he takes during the course of the film. Antoine is an inept detective, perhaps because his example is the movies: in one of the film's funniest scenes, Antoine, excited over his new job, follows a random woman on the street and acts so suspicious that she detects him almost instantly. His exaggerated cinema detective routine — hiding his face behind a newspaper, ducking behind trees, weaving back and forth behind his chosen target — is derived entirely from the language of detective films, with a heavy parodic spirit in the way he executes these maneuvers.

Indeed, Stolen Kisses is a comedy in a way that, for all the humorous moments in both The 400 Blows and Antoine and Colette, neither of the first two Antoine Doinel films were. This film often seems to be built around sketches, bits of comedic business like Antoine's introduction to the detective Henri (Harry-Max), in which the detective cons Antoine (in an short-lived job as a hotel desk clerk) into helping him get proof for an adultery case. The scene is pure antic slapstick, albeit somewhat clumsily staged, with jarring cuts and a kind of forced cheerfulness as the woman in the case sits in bed topless and the men yell at each other. Truffaut's comedy often seems forced and off-key like this, particularly in the scenes involving one of the detective agency's other clients, an obviously gay man who enlists the agency to track down his former boyfriend, a magician. Truffaut makes the gay man an object of mockery, emphasizing the way the agency's owner sees right through the man's explanation that he wants them to find his "friend." Later, when the detectives tell the man that his "friend" is now married with a pregnant wife, he loses it, assaulting the detectives and eventually getting carted away. (The best part of that scene, though, is Léaud's possibly unscripted sudden fall off camera, tripping over an unseen obstacle in the midst of the chaotic scene.) The gay man provides comedic relief, his heartache over his breakup an object of derision and implicit mockery — a stark contrast to the treatment of Antoine's naïve romanticism and obsession with his amour du jour in this series.

The film is more compelling in its comedy when it comes to Tabard, the shoe store owner who hires the agency, he says, because even though he's a very successful businessman and, he thinks, a decent guy, he believes that everyone in his life, from his employees to his wife, actually hates him. Even in his first interview, he gives a first hint as to his true character, casually letting slip his racist sentiments even while insisting that he doesn't discriminate against anyone in his store — even Arabs and Chinamen, he says, not realizing that he's revealing more clues than he thinks. It gets better. Antoine gets a job in Tabard's store to observe the store owner's (nasty) interactions with his employees, and becomes obsessed with Tabard's wife Fabienne. Tabard is a jerk with his wife, too, and it's obvious that she looks at him with barely veiled contempt and annoyance. When Tabard says that he once painted houses, his wife, with a girlish smile, jokes, "like Hitler." Tabard slams down his fork, obviously angry, but the way he phrases his response, it almost sounds like he thinks she insulted, not him, but Hitler, by calling the dictator "a housepainter." "Hitler painted landscapes," he says indignantly, with the air of a man tired of hearing his hero slandered. The portrayal of Tabard as a silly fascist who wonders why nobody likes him is the film's richest vein of comedy.


In a way, the structuring of Stolen Kisses as a comedy robs the film of the depths conveyed by the earlier Antoine Doinel stories. In this film, Antoine is almost a bystander in his own story, observing the action and the weird characters around him but staying curiously uninvolved — which also works as a metaphor for the film's lack of political involvement. Antoine is almost a placeholder in this film, the strong emotions he displayed in the earlier films somewhat dimmed, held at a distance. The film is about Antoine's slow realization that he has to finally grow up, and in the final scene — having reconciled with Christine and proposed to her after a fling with Fabienne — he comes face to face with a romantic, passionate young man who wildly declares his love to Christine, who calls him "crazy." Antoine, one senses, would recognize himself in this fiercely romantic and impetuous man, and as Antoine walks away with Christine at the end of the film, disappearing down a tree-lined boulevard, he's leaving behind that iteration of himself. It's a powerful conclusion, but not one that's organically developed in the rest of the film, as Antoine simply shuffles from one job to another with little indication of what he's feeling on a deeper level, beyond his desire for one woman or another.

Even so, the film is at times charming, and the eccentric characters who populate the detective agency provide a real source of entertaining diversions. The heart of the film, though, is Christine, and Claude Jade's sprightly performance, radiating girl-next-door charm and poise, makes her a compelling character. When she decides she wants Antoine back, and devises a simple ruse to bring him back to her, the mischievous smile on her face communicates everything one needs to know about her. Truffaut also stages a lovely scene in which the reunited lovers communicate entirely in short notes to one another, culminating with Antoine proposing to her and declaring his love, all accomplished silently, just watching the faces of the actors as they play this little game of non-verbal love. Delphine Seyrig's performance as Fabienne — which climaxes with an absolutely wonderful and meandering speech she gives to a silent, slightly frightened Antoine as she seduces him — is also great, and in many ways the two women overshadow Antoine, and Léaud, in his own movie.

It's sometimes a problem that Antoine seems peripheral to his own story, but the emphasis on the two women he loves restores some of the energy and richness that's otherwise lost here. The film is sometimes funny (Antoine trying out for a job as a stock boy, ineptly wrapping a package and getting the job because the owner wants a detective in house) and has clever flights of fancy like the sequence where a letter is tracked from the post office through the underground pneumatic tubes of Paris to its eventual destination, but on the whole it's an uneven third visit with Antoine Doinel, not nearly as satisfying or consistent, or as deep, as the first two entries in the series.