Violette

Claude Chabrol's Violette is a fascinating, ambiguous study of a young woman who might be a sociopath, a victim, or both. Based on the real case of Violette Nozière (Isabelle Huppert), who poisoned her parents in 1930s Paris, the film is curiously ambivalent about its titular anti-heroine. Huppert's Violette is impenetrable and deliberately contradictory. Sexy, desperate for attention and affection, disturbingly cool about her crimes and her violence, she's an intriguing character who's all but unknowable in the end. Violette is a willful girl who presents a charming, innocuous demeanor to her rather gullible parents, who buy her repeated and flimsy lies without much debate, while outside of the home she prostitutes herself — while vociferously resisting the label of a "whore" — and steals and lies habitually.

Violette switches between two very different looks throughout the film, embodying her contradictions in her appearance. At home with her parents, she wears no makeup and dresses in demure, youthful clothing. But once out of the view of her parents, she immediately puts on heavy makeup, coating her lips with bright red lipstick and painting her nails red as well. Her age is ambiguous, just like everything about her, since her childish clothes sometimes make her look like a little girl — albeit one with Huppert's already-world-weary face — while when she's made up she looks like she could be anywhere between twenty or thirty years old. The effect is especially disorienting when Chabrol cuts in flashbacks to Violette's childhood in which Huppert is made to look even younger, the effect somewhat disturbing and disorienting, a grown woman playing a child, as though even as a girl she was older than her age.

Outside the house, Violette dresses all in black, with a very distinctive look, a hat perched at an angle atop her curls, often all but obscuring her eyes so that only the red smirk of her mouth peeks out from beneath the shadowy brim. With her black furs wrapped tightly around her, her collar high around her face, she's often reduced to a few cartoonish features: the black-rimmed eyes, the bright lips, the rouged cheeks, a caricature of threatening beauty, the ultimate femme fatale, her sexiness infused with a sense of danger and darkness.


She's like a black widow, but there's also a sense of vulnerability in her, a closely guarded secret hurt. She accuses her father (Jean Carmet) of abusing her, but Chabrol makes it very ambiguous whether Violette was lying or not. In Violette's flashbacks, she remembers strange scenes from her youth that suggest her disconnection from her parents, and in one of these flashbacks her father is bouncing her on his knee, an innocent fatherly gesture made sinister by Violette's accusations. There does seem to be more than a hint of inappropriate desire between father and daughter, especially when he watches her bathing herself topless in the bathroom, just a thin, gauzy curtain separating them and failing to obscure her body from the eyes of her father. This incestual subtext is counterbalanced by some seemingly idyllic flashbacks to Violette's childhood, in which she fondly remembers her father as a shouting, waving figure flying by on the locomotive he drives, yelling out her name as he passes, his face stained with grease. At what point did Violette's life go wrong, at what point did this sweet girl, so excited to see her father, become the chilly, money-obsessed monster she is when she's older? By having Huppert play Violette even in these childhood flashbacks, rather than substituting a child actress, Chabrol adds a weird, unsettling vibe to the girl's memories that suggests something dark lurking unseen in her past.

Other than these hints and insinuations, however, Violette mostly just seems like an ordinary young girl with an ordinarily overbearing family. Her father is clueless and dotes on her, while her mother (Stéphane Audran) snoops through Violette's things and treats her with cynical suspicion. Violette is also involved with the handsome young Jean (Jean-François Garreaud), who she clings to desperately as her ideal man for undefined reasons, even though all he does is pump her for money and skips out on her at any opportunity. Violette seems desperate for affection, desperate for some kind of life outside her home and her family, and despite her superficially cool demeanor she's very clingy with the distant, obviously manipulative Jean.

Chabrol is gradually building towards the especially unsettling conclusion, which does little to clear up Violette's character, while setting her alongside a prison cell mate played by Bernadette Lafont, who'd been the sexy bad girl at the center of some of Chabrol's earliest films. The film's final narration, recounting Violette's eventual redemption, accompanies a shot of the girl staring blankly back at the camera, as though daring the viewers to judge her, to try to understand her, to probe the darkness and strangeness lurking behind those glassy, black-rimmed eyes.

The Shiver of the Vampires

Jean Rollin's The Shiver of the Vampires is a wonderfully strange, clever piece of B-movie trash/art, a film that revels in its nakedly exploitative eroticism and lurid atmosphere. Set in the modern day, the film nevertheless swaddles most of its characters in clothes that evoke both old-fashioned fancy dress and hippie attire, which gives the film a very strange feel in terms of period, as though it's outside of time, somewhere that the modern era hasn't truly touched. Indeed, its foggy graveyards and crumbling, towering stone castles feel like remnants of an earlier time, and when the newlyweds Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand) and Isle (Sandra Julien) first appear driving a car, it feels like a radical intrusion into the film's strange period vibe. It's a sublimely ridiculous movie that tweaks its voyeuristic perspective by having its hapless hero, Antoine suffer through a baffling sequence of encoded sexual humiliations at the hands of his beautiful new bride.

For some reason, Isle decides that the creepy old castle owned by her strange cousins (Jacques Robiolles and Michael Delahaye) is the perfect honeymoon destination. That's only the beginning of the couple's troubles, as Isle repeatedly pushes Antoine away, refusing to consummate their marriage. Isle, it turns out, is much more interested in the erotic pleasures offered by the emaciated vampiress Isolde (Dominique), who appears to the virginal bride by popping out of a grandfather clock or leaping dramatically out from the curtains behind Isle's bed — this is a vampire who really knows how to make an entrance. After one night with Isolde, the next night Isle again turns her husband away, banishing him from the bedroom, then excitedly strips down and goes looking for the vampire. When she doesn't find her undead lover, Isle embraces the clock instead, languidly wrapping her naked body around its cold wood, so like a coffin, as a stand-in for the chilly body of the lesbian vampire.

The film is devilishly clever in its examination of sexual frustration, as poor Antoine is continually blocked from access to his new bride, who apparently prefers a feminine touch. When Antoine spends his wedding night alone, while Isle is seduced by Isolde, he lays in bed with a large phallic torch hilariously standing in for his erection, angled up from between his legs. Later, the castle's two sexy sapphic servants (Marie-Pierre Castel and Kuelan Herce) stand over him and argue about which one of them will slip into bed with him; giggling, they decide they both will, but as soon as he wakes up, exaggeratedly rubbing his eyes as if convinced he's still dreaming, they jump out of bed and run naked and laughing out of the room, disappearing so quickly that he's convinced he might not have seen a thing. Meanwhile, the two fey vampire cousins have been having their way with a local girl, and gang up to rape the man-hating Isolde, while the servants writhe around naked in bed together: everyone but Antoine is getting some action, as he's left out of both the nocturnal supernatural conspiracy and the sexual games that accompany it.


Rollin's visual aesthetic renders this supernatural fantasy/nightmare in bright, unreal colors — the castle itself is often shown in cutaway shots where it's bathed in rainbow hues as though there are unseen spotlights shining up on it from the grounds — and shadowy, foggy haziness. The narrative is reduced to almost nothing: the newlyweds arrive at the castle, witness strange occurrences, wander through the moldy halls and decaying grounds, and Antoine occasionally makes half-hearted attempts to escape. It's a narrative perpetually suspended, and the whole thing has the texture of a dream, complete with its own loaded symbology. At one point, Antoine and Isle are strolling around the paths surrounding the castle, when Antoine abruptly shoots a dove. Isle, already transitioning into vampirism, is drawn to the dead bird and repeatedly brings it to her lips, finally resting its white body on the coffin of Isolde as an offering, bright red blood dripping over the wood.

This dreamlike film drifts along in this way, its images sensuous and erotically charged, really selling the draw of the undead, making the ease with which Isle is seduced away from her husband very understandable. There's a darkly comic vibe to the film, as well, particularly in the characters of the vampire cousins, who several times discourse in alternating lines on the history of their family, spouting pseudo-philosophical nonsense while trading lines, each one thrusting his head into the frame in turn. This film is a celebration of the surreal, the strange, the sexually polymorphous, as opposed to heteronormative marriage as represented, increasingly, by Antoine alone, without even his wife to support him. Even the servants, humans enslaved by the vampires, don't return to the normal, physical world after their joyful victory over the vampires: instead, in an extraordinary shot, Rollin holds a static view as the girls kiss and go dancing off in spiraling circles, disappearing into the darkness in the distance, their diaphanous gowns twirling around them, making them seem like spirits swallowed up by the night.

The climax is a showdown between Antoine and the vampire cousins, returning to the same bleak, apocalyptic beach that served as an otherdimensional realm at the end of Rollin's previous film, The Nude Vampire. Here, the beach, with the waves breaking against the rocky shore, serves as a grim backdrop for an anticlimactic conclusion in which Isle makes her choice and Antoine must watch as his wife engages in a suicidal, incestuous menage a trois with her cousins, while all he can do is impotently fire his pistol in the air, having no effect on these supernatural beings. The allure of the grave and of death ultimately wins out over the possibility of normality, marriage, a return to the ordinary world. Those things no longer hold any appeal for Isle; Antoine is the film's sole representative of normality, which is why in the end he's left alone and unfulfilled, shut out of the sensual, appealingly weird world of death and undeath. It's a neat trick that Rollin pulls off here: although humanity technically wins in the end, it's obvious that gay vampires just have so much more fun.

The Wild Child

François Truffaut had, from his very first feature, his famous debut The 400 Blows, been very interested in childhood and the experiences of a child in a world governed by adult rules. The director's 1970 film The Wild Child returns to that theme and to the territory of childhood, albeit from a very different angle. Based on a true story, the film deals with a young feral boy (Jeanne-Pierre Cargol) who is discovered in the forest in 1798, running around naked, covered in dirt, fighting and biting and scratching like an animal when he's captured by some rural folk. The boy can't speak, has no understanding of language, and has apparently never experienced the socialization of being around other people. Totally isolated and wild, the boy, eventually dubbed Victor, is a case study for what humanity is like in a natural state, without the accoutrements of language and social behavior that society has created.

Dr. Jean Itard (Truffaut) hears of the boy and decides that he will take Victor into his own home, placing him in the care of his housekeeper Madame Guérin (Françoise Seigner) and trying to teach him language, trying to educate the boy and bring him into human society. It's another opportunity for Truffaut to study the rebellious spirit of a boy's resistance against societal rules: the film is dedicated to Truffaut's one-time child star Jean-Pierre Léaud, and one can easily see in Victor a trace of the same wild, anti-authoritarian qualities that Truffaut so admired in Léaud in The 400 Blows.

And yet The Wild Child possesses very little of those qualities. By this point, just over a decade after Truffaut's debut feature, the director who'd started out shooting rough and raw footage in the streets and decrying the "tradition of quality" cinema that had preceded the French New Wave, had himself been absorbed by that tradition, making films far more polished and conventional than one would have expected after his debut. In contrast to the unpredictable energy and enthusiasm of The 400 Blows, The Wild Child is somewhat dry and smooth, the sharp edges sanded away. Victor is a far wilder figure than Léaud's Antoine Doinel, but the film doesn't really do justice to his wildness, his unconventionality, his complete separation from human society. The result is a film of interesting ideas that's somewhat dull in its execution. Néstor Almendros' stark black-and-white cinematography is crisp and clear, but the film's more restrained tone clamps down on the poetic emotionalism of Truffaut's earlier portrait of uncouth childhood.


Most of the film is narrated by Truffaut's Dr. Itard, reading excerpts from his medical journals about the boy, which contributes to the clipped, clinical tone of this material. The film also moves at a very brisk pace, the long and arduous process of socializing this boy condensed to a highlight reel, complete with old-fashioned iris-in/iris-out effects to transition between scenes, a cutesy flourish that's completely at odds with the no-nonsense rapidity that otherwise characterizes the film. Truffaut makes the process of adapting this boy from a frenzied wild child into an at least superficially civilized kid seem like it happens quickly and incrementally, each new triumph of progress ticked off before moving on. Tellingly, he also cuts the story off before the sad conclusion of the real tale: in real life, Dr. Itard gave up on Victor soon after the events of this film are over, and Victor never progressed beyond the rudimentary fragments of language he's picked up by the end of the film. He spent the rest of his life in an institution, just as Itard's rival doctor had suggested at the beginning of this film. Truffaut elides any hint of this conclusion, choosing to end on a more ambiguous note, Victor having just returned from running away to resume his education with Itard. The ending hints that he could learn more, could actually become socialized and learn to speak, even if he still harbors a longing for the freedom he enjoyed in his former life.

That trace of melancholy about the loss of freedom is the film's strongest element, a cross-current to the unwarranted optimism implied by the ending. Cargol delivers a touching, raw performance, embodied entirely in his face, without recourse to any verbal expression other than a few grunts and a few hesitant words. He seems to long, viscerally and intensely, for the wilds of nature, and though he eventually accepts wearing clothes and eating with utensils and participating in Itard's language and alphabet games, he's still connected to nature. He'd rather stare out the window than watch his instructor. He'd rather run through the fields or stick his head out a carriage window like a dog in a car than play more of Itard's endless matching and memory games. One of the film's more provocative questions is the idea of whether the kid was actually better off not being discovered, if he was happier living wild and free without any attempt to fit in with a society that he'd never even known existed. It's at moments like this that Truffaut's poetic sensibility comes to the fore, in images of Victor running off through a large open field, escaping from the rules and restrictions of a world that he still doesn't fully understand, an image that strongly evokes the closing sequence of The 400 Blows, with Antoine Doinel escaping to the beach.

The Wild Child has periodic moments like this that reveal Truffaut's interest in this story and the ideas he wishes to explore through this wild boy's life. On the whole, however, it's a routine and undistinguished take on an inherently interesting subject, bolstered by its unique resonances with Truffaut's prior work. For a film that raises the question of whether its protagonist might have been better off living his life outside of society, it's a rather staid and conventional work that never truly does justice to the wildness at its core.

The Nude Vampire

One pretty much knows what one is in for with a film titled The Nude Vampire, and Jean Rollin's second feature (his first in color) certainly delivers on the promise of stiff acting, absurd plotting, and blatantly exploitative sequences that offer little besides titillation. What's notable about this film, though, is that it's also sensuous, moody, chilling, and strangely poetic, a trashy B-movie with copious nudity that intermittently becomes something much stranger and more mysterious. It's a very visual film, its dialogue sparse, and what little there is of it mostly silly and inconsequential. It's the images that matter, images of a surreal, unsettling strangeness — unsettling because Rollin's aesthetic is so matter-of-fact, making the supernatural and the bizarre seem utterly quotidian.

The film's visual emphasis is confirmed right from its extraordinary opening sequence, in which it takes nearly ten minutes for anyone to say a word. Instead, Rollin simply delivers one mysterious, outrageous set piece after another. Cult scientists in red hoods strip a girl wearing a similar hood and inject her with color-coded chemicals that drip into beakers around the lab. The bright chemicals look like dyes prepared for Easter eggs more than scientific solutions, but no matter. The pacing is slow, almost narcotized, and Rollin cuts between steady, silent closeups: the red-hooded men, their eyes peering out through thin, ragged slits in their cloth hoods, the beakers and scientific equipment around the room, the girl's eyes peering out from behind her own hood. In the next scene, a girl (Caroline Cartier) in a gauzy orange dress, naked beneath the thin, translucent material, runs through the darkness, pursued by men in animal masks. This sequence is evocative and beautiful and creepy, the girl and her pursuers casting elongated shadows on the blank walls of the buildings, Rollin making excellent use of wide expanses of negative space with the girl trapped between these monstrous shadow-creatures. The deliberate pacing only adds to the creepiness of it all, with Rollin frequently cutting in inscrutable closeups of the men in their gaudy, sinister masks.

The girl is soon cornered by these masked men and shot, and the scene is witnessed by Pierre (Rollin's half-brother Olivier), who escapes and follows the masked men back to a mansion, which he decides to investigate. His inquiry leads him — in a sequence that prefigures Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut — to a suicide cult that seems to be connected to his father Georges (Maurice Lemaître). The plot never even remotely makes any sense, but it doesn't really need to: Pierre just wanders around, stumbling into trouble, witnessing what seems to be a war between his father and some mysterious supernatural beings, who are struggling over control of the girl in orange, who's not dead, it turns out, because she's supposedly a vampire. There are countless absurdities along the way, like the fact that when Pierre calls his painter friend Robert (Pascal Fardoulis) for help, Robert first dresses up in a tuxedo before going to get his friend.


It's a nutty, outlandish movie, and a very trashy one. The action periodically comes to a halt for Rollin to deliver scenes of blatant titillation that are as woodenly staged as everything else in the film, which renders them almost as unsettling as the horror set pieces. At one point, there's an extended sequence in which a naked girl models for Robert, caressing her breasts with fingers capped with long golden nails, and it just goes on and on and on, punctuated with periodic cutaways to Robert's leering face in an uncomfortably tight closeup that accentuates his exaggeratedly pervy expression. Rollin has the instincts of a pornographer mixed with the sensibility of a visual poet — certainly not a verbal poet, though — and he often stages scenes from odd angles that seem intended primarily to provide a voyeuristic glance up a girl's dress.

But these obvious softcore flourishes are really the most boring aspect of the film, so obviously catering to simple titillation that the images fail to be even remotely exciting, in any sense. Rollin's eroticism is more memorably embodied in the pair of twins (Cathy and Marie-Pierre Castel) who serve as Georges' servants and seem to exist primarily to dress up in a succession of outrageous sci-fi fetishism costumes. In one scene, as Georges talks on the telephone, he idly plays with the girls' clunky, bizarre costumes, seemingly as a substitute for the bored doodling that most people do while on the phone. The twins are eerie and strange, like almost everything in this movie, and later they become perfectly synchronized, hand-holding avenging spirits, their faces smeared with blood as they relentlessly pursue their victim through a graveyard.

The film is rough and uneven and obviously has no budget — not even for effects; when one woman holds a pistol to her head and shoot herself, it's totally bloodless — but Rollin turns this necessary minimalism into an asset. It's a very stark film, set in dark, empty urban streets and rural estates that tower imposingly over the tiny figures of the characters in sweeping long shots where everything is covered in fog or darkness. The soundtrack is fairly minimal too, with long periods of near-silence occasionally interrupted by some stiff dialogue or a fragment of scraping strings from Yvon Serault's score.

Within this minimalist context, Rollin makes the supernatural seems utterly concrete and physical. When Pierre's father is attacked at the climax by a group of supernatural beings, they parade towards the camera looking like a band of hippies, led by a kid who's obviously (and comically) struggling to hold a black flag aloft. Similarly, when Pierre enters a chateau where he hopes to learn the secrets he's been chasing, he's confronted by a calm, utterly normal old couple who usher him towards his fate. After Pierre is gone, Rollin stays with the old couple, who seem lonely and slightly melancholy, always waiting in this empty house for visitors seeking answers, always left alone again when they depart. The camera tracks away from them, pulling back to emphasize their loneliness, a moment of surprising emotion, one sign of the strange sadness that lingers at the fringes of this film. Rollin has a feel for such quirky moments, like when two of Georges' assistants walk away through a field in a long shot, chatting, and refreshingly seeming as baffled about what's going on as the audience likely is.

Providence

Editing is the key to the cinema of Alain Resnais, the crux of his work. Through the cut, the filmmaker controls the flow of space and time, controlling what's seen and not seen, where a scene starts and where it ends, and few other directors have made this truism so explicit in their art. For Resnais, this process has often been a cinematic analogue for the workings of memory, for the self-editing capacity of the human mind. This is especially apparent in Providence, his first English-language film, in which the dying writer Clive Langham (John Gielgud), suffering in agony from the cancer tearing him apart, constructs an elaborate and surrealistic narrative involving his relatives. Clive is reconstructing his past, casting his son Claude (Dirk Bogarde), his bastard son Kevin (David Warner), and Claude's wife Sonia (Ellen Burstyn) in a strange drama of adultery and psychological abuse, imagining them suffering emotionally as he's suffering physically, imagining them as cruel and petty and vile.

And it's editing that allows him to do this. The film's opening is a disorienting flow of seemingly disconnected scenes and images, gradually taking shape as Clive's voiceover intrudes, commenting on the action, shaping it into the form that he wants to. There's an obvious connection between Clive's narrative direction and the role of the filmmaker. Clive begins speaking over the images, banishing certain images and characters from view, expressing his appreciation for other moments, waffling over what he wants to see next. He frequently loses control of the narrative — Kevin enters a room instead of Claude, a door is sometimes located down a long stairway and sometimes on level ground, a soccer player described as Kevin's brother sometimes jogs into the scene without warning or purpose — and has to start again, to shift the scene, his words demanding a cut, a change of scene, a restructuring of the images. He sometimes speaks from off camera, giving directions to the "actors" in this narrative, suggesting lines that they then repeat; in one hilariously disjunctive moment, Sonia opens her mouth to speak and it's Clive's dubbed voice that comes out, a reminder that the characters in a film are simply giving voice to ideas and words decided upon by a screenwriter (British playwright David Mercer in this case) and a director (Resnais).

Indeed, at some points Clive, through his imagined characters, sometimes seems to be directly parroting the voice of Mercer and/or Resnais. In one of the most telling moments, Clive says, monologuing over a love scene between Claude and his mistress Helen (Elaine Stritch), "It's been said about my work that the search for style has often resulted in a lack of feeling... However, I'd put it another way, I'd say that style is feeling, in its most elegant and economical expression." That's a pretty apt summary of Resnais' work, which is far more emotional than it's often given credit for, the emotion arising from the rigorous application of formal structures. The style of this film is ravishing, too, with an understated elegance that sometimes gives way to bursts of surreal but subtle stylization. In particular, there's a certain veranda where the characters sometimes meet and talk, the background changing from one patently artificial matte painting to another depending on the mood and context of their talk: a gorgeous, perpetually sunny seaside with painted waves for evocations of childhood pastoral perfection, and a gloomy, cloudy backdrop of grim little houses stretching off into the distance when childhood memories are far from the mind.


It gradually becomes clear over the course of the film that Clive's impressions of his family are not to be taken at face value. His narrative at times seems to tear apart as the characters stop playing their parts, instead voicing complaints and recriminations addressed, not at each other, but at Clive; it's as though the author's creations are refusing to play their parts, turning on their creator to express the bitter, unhappy feelings haunting this bitter dying man. He seems to be projecting his own failings and his own guilt onto his relatives, creating a narrative that contains, coded within it, the real anguish he feels over his cruelty towards his wife and son, his guilt about his wife's suicide, his regrets about the philandering he did while she was still alive. His wife appears several times, trapped in a concentration camp guarded by soldiers who are rounding up civilians and killing them, and his wife is also echoed in Sonia and Helen, both of them physically similar to the woman Clive loved, both of them suggesting the Freudian resonance between wives and mothers, lovers and mothers.

That imagery of war, terrorism, and concentration camps haunts the film, appearing as psychic tears in the story Clive is constructing, a war felt in the gunfire and explosions that pop and crack in the background of the soundtrack, only occasionally commented on by the characters, who mostly seem to have internalized and grown accustomed to this constant state of violence and breakdown. It's a potent metaphor for the way in which a lifetime of cruelty towards others gradually begins to seem like background noise, the scars healed over, the emotions flatlined to a constant dull throb of misery. Clive is a man trapped by his past and his own miserable persona, so that even his deathbed fantasy is dripping with spite for the people in his life. The film's final twenty minutes, which represent an abrupt shift in tone, suggest that Clive's entire narrative is populated with twisted versions of his family who represent only reflections and projections of himself, nothing like the mostly happy, well-adjusted people who appear at the end of the movie, representing perhaps the reality of Clive's family or maybe only his more optimistic vision of them, with his bile replaced by genuine, if still rather cranky, love.

This is yet another complex, provocative masterpiece from Resnais, another in the long and pretty much unbroken chain of deliberately constructed, fascinating experiments that he'd been making since the start of his feature film career. The film's structure provides both a clever metaphor for the workings of the cinema and a stunning examination of death and memory: "feeling, in its most elegant and economical expression," an enthralling film in which its style and its formal framework lead the way to its potent insights about the mind and the creative process.

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.

Bleak Moments

Mike Leigh's films have always been concerned with how ordinary people live their lives. His intense, emotionally forceful dramas deal with the everyday incidents, the struggles and minor pleasures, that constitute the lives of the kind of utterly typical working class people who don't often appear in the cinema. This focus is apparent right from his very first feature, Bleak Moments, which lives up to its title with a series of snippets cut from the life of the secretary Sylvia (Anne Raitt). Sylvia takes care of her mentally handicapped sister Hilda (Sarah Stephenson), and the two sisters live a lonely and mostly isolated existence, Sylvia sitting alone, drinking glass after glass of sherry, this uneventful life only occasionally punctuated with awkward attempts at dating and companionship. Sylvia has a boyfriend, Peter (Eric Allan), a repressed and stuffy teacher whose interactions with Sylvia are strenuously polite, marked by long awkward silences and a complete absence of physical intimacy. In many ways, she seems more taken with the equally awkward but much warmer Norman (Mike Bradwell), a young and somewhat grungy guitarist who rents Sylvia's garage to print copies of the literary magazine he works for.

Norman entertains Hilda with his guitar playing and his goofy songs — mostly cleansed of the drug-obsessed lyrics that he sings when he's alone — and his conversations with Sylvia are tentative but strangely charming, two shy people hesitantly chatting and joking and learning about each other. In contrast, Peter is a joyless bore who Sylvia seems to cling to only because she has almost nobody else, because she's so desperate for some kind of connection in her life. The film's epic centerpiece is a very long sequence in which Sylvia invites Norman in to play guitar for Hilda, before being joined first by her abrasive co-worker Pat (Joolia Cappleman) and then by Peter, who's coming over for a date. The cozy pleasure of Norman playing guitar for Hilda and Sylvia — Leigh shoots the trio in an intimate arrangement that suggests a family — is soon disrupted by the arrival of these other people, and this impromptu party becomes a tense and painfully awkward affair. At one point, Leigh brilliantly cuts between closeups of all the people in Sylvia's living room, all of them silent, casting shy glances at one another, opening their mouths as if about to say something and then stopping, smiling nervously or clenching their teeth. This goes on for quite a while, and the rapid rhythm of this closeup montage accentuates the silence and the awkwardness. It's both maddening and, increasingly, bitingly hilarious.

This scene leads directly into an equally dismal date with Peter, as Pat takes Hilda over to her place for the night, while Peter and Sylvia go out for Chinese food. The couple obviously has nothing to talk about, and the grim atmosphere of this empty Chinese restaurant — the only other customer is a solitary man who stares sinisterly at the couple all night — only adds to the miserable mood. Peter argues with the abrupt, rude waiter, who seems to be in a hurry despite the empty restaurant, and who gets mad when they try to order by the name of the dish rather than the numbers on the menu. To top it all off, Peter reveals himself as cheap, ordering dishes for the two of them to split rather than letting Sylvia order her own food. Leigh's feel for subtle mise en scène reveals itself towards the end of this sequence, when, as the couple prepares to leave, the waiter stands in the background, shuffling through the meager change left behind as a tip and casting dirty looks at Peter.


This torturous date isn't over, though, and it continues back at Sylvia's place, where the halting conversation continues and Sylvia gets drunk on sherry, working up her courage to seduce the seemingly asexual Peter. His prim manners are memorably skewered in a subtly funny shot of him sitting down with a full cup of coffee, carefully balancing the liquid, pausing for a moment to let it steady, and then slowly crossing his legs. In contrast, Sylvia, though she's also shy and quiet, is much less repressed; she can be playful, and there's a hint of mischief in her frequent smiles. She's also lovely, and Leigh makes this a very sensual scene for Sylvia, her pale face floating in the darkness, her bare legs pulled up under her as she lounges on the couch, her posture an invitation for Peter to come sit next to her. Peter is oblivious, though, blathering on about Marshall McLuhan and language and design. Finally, in an extraordinary moment, Sylvia, flushed with sherry, tentatively tries to shame him into intimacy: "if we were able to... touch each other... it wouldn't be so bad."

Leigh's direction of this sequence is remarkable, drawing out the almost unbearable tension between Sylvia, yearning for any kind of intimacy she can get, and Peter, so stiff and repressed that he's all but incapable of responding. Leigh gets phenomenal performances from everyone in the cast, but especially Raitt, who infuses Sylvia with layers of churning emotions beneath her shy surface. Despite the film's title and the generally grim tone of it all, Raitt doesn't play Sylvia like a woman defeated. She's sweet and kind, and she cares for her sister with tenderness and genuine love. There's a playfulness to her that comes out especially with Norman and Hilda, the former in a delightful scene where she teases him by offering him a meager snack of five nuts, apparently all she has in the house for an unexpected guest. Later, as though to emphasize the difference between the two men in her life, she repeats the joke with Peter during their horrible date, but he simply stares at her blankly, uncomprehending. Also fascinating is the one scene where Peter and Norman actually talk to one another, and Peter unconsciously falls into his schoolmaster persona, questioning the young burnout and making disapproving sounds after every response. It's obvious that Peter is the kind of stern, out-of-touch teacher who doesn't understand young people in the least, which is confirmed by the scene towards the end of the film that shows him at school, telling a fellow teacher that third-grade kids have no sense of humor — which of course is pretty rich coming from him.

Leigh's feel for acting is already obvious in this first feature, which was adapted from his own stage play. These actors communicate so much through the nuances of their performances, the way they interact, the long and uncomfortable silences they leave hanging. But Leigh also already displays a keen cinematic imagination that's sometimes overlooked in the focus on his facility with actors and his realistic sensibility. His visuals are unshowy, but he has a strong grasp of cinematic space that especially plays out here in the way he uses the layout of Sylvia's home, with a kitchen connected to the parlor by a small square window. Sylvia is often framed through that window, separated from the people she's invited into her home, and at times she intentionally uses that distancing device to cut herself off from the infuriating Peter. Bleak Moments is a fine start to Leigh's career, a typically sensitive, humanist portrait of suffering and sadness that's as attuned to the subtle pleasures and small hopes of an ordinary life as it to the bleak moments of the title.

The Castaways of Turtle Island

It took the criminally overlooked New Wave auteur Jacques Rozier a decade to follow up his debut Adieu Philippine with the charming Du côté d'Orouët, but only three years later he'd completed his third feature, The Castaways of Turtle Island. This absurdist, whimsical comedy of tourism and European exoticist fantasies is quite different in tone from Rozier's charming but melancholy first two features, though it shares with them a fascination with escapism and seaside vacations, a love of the sun and the ocean, and a tendency to see in the bourgeois holiday an expression of desperation. Ridiculous, alternately satirical and goofy, and beautifully shot, this is yet another fantastic film from this nearly forgotten French master.

The premise is absurd right from the start, though Rozier, never one to rush his films or overload them with narrative, takes his time getting to the actual story. The film opens with a leisurely character study of the Parisian travel agent Jean-Arthur Bonaventure (Pierre Richard), a dreamer who, during the opening credits, stares into a lamp in his apartment and imagines a beautiful black girlfriend for himself. He's bored of his routine, of his job, of his fiancée (who never even appears in the film, she's so irrelevant), and he wants to escape. As his name already suggests, he wants adventure, a romanticized retreat from his prosaic life. And adventure, for him as for so many white Westerners, means the exotic, the foreign, the non-white, so he fantasizes about having an affair with a black girl, and sure enough the girl he's imagined turns out to be real, and offers to have sex with him virtually as soon as they meet, a sure sign that Jean-Arthur is still immersed in his fantasy, turned on by the otherness and the unlikeliness of this affair.

Soon, Jean-Arthur and his friend Joël (Maurice Risch) decide to take this exoticist fantasy to the next level, and this is where the film's real plot kicks in: they concoct the idea of a tourist package that has no package, no plan, just a trip to a desert island where the vacationers will have to "fend for themselves" like Robinson Crusoe. The agency's owners love it because there's no overhead and a huge profit margin, and soon Jean-Arthur, together with Joël's brother Bernard (Jacques Villeret), is haplessly leading a troupe of tourists on a Caribbean adventure. Bernard, AKA "Little Teddy," is the Sancho Panza to Jean-Arthur's Don Quixote, calmly trudging through this increasingly absurd adventure as Jean-Arthur gets more and more into the spirit of this retreat from civilization, forcing ever more ludicrous restrictions onto the tormented tourists, who had just wanted a relaxing holiday in the sun and instead find that they're marching through the jungle hauling their luggage and enacting a shipwreck fantasy in which the dictatorial Jean-Arthur throws their bags overboard and demands that they swim to shore with nothing but the clothes on their backs.


It's obvious that the film is a manic parody of the touristic impulse, explicitly connecting this kind of exotic Western tourism to the evils of colonialism. When Jean-Arthur and Bernard first arrive on one of the "desert islands" they're exploring, Jean-Arthur plants a flag and claims the place like an old-school colonialist, declaring it a property of France and promising to import slaves to work the land. Bernard then declares it a republic instead, says they'll free the slaves and set up hotels and casinos, and make a huge profit — which will, he disingenuously insists, help the natives and former slaves as well, since "everyone is free to invest their capital." Obviously, this capitalist tourism is just a different kind of colonialism, a friendlier way of exploiting picturesque, "exotic" locales for the benefit of Europeans. The film is a prolonged reductio ad absurdum in which Rozier ceaselessly mocks these clueless urban Westerners who have romanticized the exotic islands of the Caribbean and decided that they want what they think will be a glamorously "authentic" tropical adventure.

Rozier's films have a tendency to get quietly sad and contemplative in their final acts, and though The Castaways of Turtle Island never quite sheds its weird sense of humor, it does slow down momentarily for a gorgeous, meditative sequence in which the group finally arrives at their ultimate island destination, and night descends slowly around them. Most of the group has stayed behind on their boat, while Bernard has gone ashore with Julie (Caroline Cartier), one of the most practical and citified of the tourists, and Jean-Arthur, enraged by the group's resistance to his latest looney demand, tries to swim to the island by himself. Rozier beautifully captures the moody descent of night onto this tense scene, the sun glistening at the horizon, everything turning shades of purple and blue, Bernard and Julie silhouetted against the water, watching as Jean-Arthur flounders around in the currents.

Indeed, for all his mockery of the touristic impulse, Rozier is very attuned to the natural splendor and sensual pleasures of these Caribbean vacation destinations, and the film is consistently lovely: one feels, in Rozier's images, the cool rush of the breeze, the bouncing and swaying of a boat on the ocean, the warm and wet atmosphere of a jungle path winding around towards a majestic waterfall. This is a beautiful, savagely funny, often bizarre film, a comic adventure that adds another dimension to Rozier's small but incredibly impressive oeuvre.

Hôtel Monterey

Hôtel Monterey was one of Chantal Akerman's very first films, a completely soundless documentary about a New York City residence hotel populated mostly by old people. The film is formally minimal and even simple: one silent, (mostly) static shot after another of scenes from around the hotel, images of lobbies, elevators, corridors and rooms, sometimes with people moving about, sometimes entirely unpopulated. Akerman maintains a somewhat remote and aloof perspective, shooting people mostly from a distance, often in static poses where they sit facing the camera, sometimes even staring into the lens. At other times, Akerman seems to be eavesdropping, watching a woman's sleeping form from a discreet angle through a door that slowly swings closed as the camera sits still, stoically observing. In another shot, a pregnant woman sits in a chair, holding her large belly, and Akerman shoots her through a doorway, framed through the telescope of the narrow hallway and the door.

There's something faintly surreal about the film, despite Akerman's simple observational stance. The colors are bright and garish, from the sickly yellow of the walls in the corridors to the rusty red of the bedspreads in the rooms to the floral print curtains that hang from the windows. Akerman shoots these images so that light sources become hot and blindingly white, casting streaks and halos of pure white light along the walls, while the shadows are thick and black, grainy empty zones in which anything might be lurking. This high-contrast style renders the hotel ineffably spooky — eight years before The Shining, Akerman uses formally rigid compositions and lurid color schemes to render a hotel as a site of unsettling strangeness and vague mystery.

Often, Akerman holds her shots for a long period of time without anything happening or changing. The camera gazes at a forked corridor as, to one side, an elevator occasionally flickers to life in the darkness with a shadowy form entering or exiting, while the other hallway is mostly cut off from view by the angle of the shot, subtly and unnervingly suggesting that anything might be happening just out of view, just around that corner. The camera only starts moving towards the end of the film, but once it does, its slow tracking only adds to the impression of a silent, abstract horror movie that has no monster, no villain, only one creepy hallway and dark corner after another. At one point, the camera plods slowly down a shadowy corridor, tracking until it reaches a dark and grimy cul-de-sac by an exit sign, briefly pausing in the near-darkness against the wall, then backing away, slightly faster than it had approached, as though the camera was retreating, spooked. Akerman then repeats the movement, though this time a window is identifiable in the darkness at the end of the corridor, revealing a glimpse of the city lights and traffic outside, a hint of the outside world that otherwise barely touches this hermetic interior.


Akerman's style suggests not only the rigidity of Kubrick but also David Lynch's love of edging around dark corners, revealing the strangeness of ordinary reality. This film certainly prefigures the casual oddity of Lynch's work, the habit of taking prosaic locations and using the camera's probing gaze to make them portals into weirdness and unreality. Akerman's camera insistently tracks down the hotel's corridors, and statically examines its walls, its elevators with their blinking lights, its minimally decorated rooms and its wizened occupants. The people barely figure into the film, though, only occasionally serving as the focus of a shot or drifting through the shadows, hardly even visible. The hotel often seems eerily unpopulated, and it's the building that Akerman is really documenting rather than the people in it. The film is structured as a trip upwards through the hotel, starting in the lobby and then progressing upwards, floor by floor. It ends on the roof, where Akerman's camera drifts in a slow pan around the surrounding skyline or looks up at a sky so cloudy white that she's able to insert a few frames of white leader to partially obscure a cut.

Hôtel Monterey is an enthralling and original documentary, with no commentary, no sound at all, relying entirely on its evocative and mysterious images to communicate the sense of life in this hotel. The effect is disarmingly hypnotic and powerful.

Stavisky...

With Stavisky..., Alain Resnais has made a film that seems to be all about appearances and surfaces, but uses its glossy, charming — but ultimately tragic — gangster story as a way of exploring questions of identity and politics. The story of the conman Stavisky (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who reinvents himself as the sophisticated financier and businessman Serge Alexandre, takes place in the crucial years of 1933-1934, a period of slowly increasing tension in the lead-up to the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The film is based on real events that inspired right-wing riots on February 6, 1934, leading indirectly to the gradual loss of power by leftists and socialists within the French government. The film was written by Jorge Semprún, who had also written Resnais' La guerre est finie in 1966; like that film, Stavisky... engages with European fascism and leftism through questions of identity and personality. Stavisky/Alexandre is a man of many names, many identities, a small-time crook who has put his past behind him and become a well-respected member of society, dealing with high-ranking politicians and businessmen, coming up with grand plans that would impact the entire world economy. Stavisky is hiding from his past, at times acting as though the man he was is someone else entirely, with no connection to his present self at all.

Resnais connects this denial of self with the question of Jewish identity during a time of steadily increasing anti-Semitism in the years before the Holocaust would begin in earnest. Stavisky is a Jew, and a self-denying Jew, just like his father, who had entirely repudiated his faith. But he's self-denying in an entirely different way from his father, who had always advised him to be "average," to let people ignore him; Stavisky doesn't believe in this advice. As one of his employees says about him, "He wanted the world to talk about him. He should have wanted it to forget him." Stavisky's grand plans only draw attention to him, make him a target, impossible to ignore or to forget. In this, he is compared to a refugee German actress (Silvia Badescu) who he sees giving an audition in his theater: she stands up on stage and announces that she is a Jew, that she has fled from Germany. She is announcing her identity up front, hiding nothing, very unlike Stavisky, whose Jewish roots are deeply buried beneath layers of alternate identities and invented names. Perhaps that's why he's so moved by her, although their stories only intersect briefly. He sees in her a pride and a strength of character that, despite all his bravado and his smiling confidence, is utterly missing in him because he can never truly be himself. And yet Stavisky, in his own way, also refuses to be "average," refuses to hide or to congenially assimilate into society. Instead, he places himself out in the open, using the connections he builds to ingratiate himself into polite society, politics and the inner workings of the world economy.

It's this domain of privilege and power that serves as the film's milieu. The film is set almost entirely in fancy hotels, glitzy seaside casinos, resorts for the idle wealthy. The camerawork of Sacha Vierny accentuates the shiny, colorful veneer of these surroundings. The camera drifts lovingly over the facades of these pleasure palaces — although Stavisky, who says that happiness is momentary and pleasure permanent, would likely not call them that — and revels in the excess and grandiosity of this lifestyle. Jewels glitter brightly, sparkling with stars of white light. The women, like Stavisky's beloved wife Arlette (Anny Duperey), are dressed in fine furs and sleek dresses, their made-up faces surrounded with shimmering jewels. Everything is glamorous and draped in riches, even in the midst of the Great Depression, which hardly seems to have touched the social circles that Stavisky operates in. The lively Stephen Sondheim music makes the film seem like a musical with no real musical numbers, just the sprightly accompaniment of Sondheim's jaunty melodies and romantic string themes. Alexandre puts on theater productions, giving the public garish spectacles to distract from the real conditions of the world for ordinary people. As his employees tell him, no one wants frugality in their entertainment, they want to be entertained and delighted by everything they don't have in their own lives. The film is dripping in ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege, set in a fantasy world that seems entirely disconnected from both the poverty of most people and the brewing political turmoil that would throw the entire world into chaos and horror by the end of the decade.


That turmoil rarely intrudes in obvious ways into the world that Stavisky has built for himself, and yet he's surrounded by signs of what's to come. He has associates and friends on both sides of the political spectrum, especially among rightists like the charming, cheerful fascist Baron Jean Raoul (Charles Boyer), who wants to replace France's parliamentary government with a National Union comprised of wealthy, influential society people. Stavisky also nurtures his connections with Juan Montalvo (Roberto Bisacco), a Spanish exile who's gathering funds and weapons to trigger a civil war back in his native country. Stavisky involves himself in wild schemes, financed with fake bond issues, to rejuvenate the world economy and end unemployment, but the real future is to be found in the plans of his friends, who plot against the left with the help of this disguised Jew, who barely thinks about the political consequences of his associations. He says that he remains neutral, that he'll support whoever is in power and forge connections on both sides to cover himself in any eventuality, but he never seems to grasp the deeper implications of the platforms that these polite fascists are really pushing for.

The film's political subtext also involves the parallels and connections between Stavisky and the exiled Leon Trotsky (Yves Peneau), who arrives in France in the opening scenes of the film. Resnais then cuts from Trotsky's motorcade to an image of Stavisky/Alexandre descending in an elevator in one of his posh hotels. Just to underscore the point, Resnais cuts back and forth a few times, stuttering the image between Trotsky's car and Stavisky in his elevator; the hotel scene is accompanied by lushly romantic strings, while no music plays over the images of Trotsky. This montage at first seems like a simple joke, juxtaposing the arrival of this important political figure with the lavish lifestyle of the conniving gangster, but the parallels between the two men go deeper than that. Both are Russian Jews in exile, and by the end of the film, the failure of Stavisky's criminal schemes will have catapulted the rightists to power and endangered Trotsky's position in France. Throughout the film, Stavisky's showy existence and denial of his roots is contrasted against Trotsky's quiet maintenance of his beliefs and his low-key engagement with the radical politics of the era.

Although the film's surface period evocation is flawless — the art direction is sumptuous and detailed — Stavisky... is far from a typical period epic. Resnais, as he often does, uses non-chronological editing to fragment the narrative, weaving together flashbacks and flash-forwards that foreshadow and then outright depict Stavisky's downfall and death while he's still at the height of his power. In one key sequence, Stavisky goes walking in the woods, visiting the house where his father, embarrassed of his son's criminal record, committed suicide. As Stavisky prepares to leave the site, Resnais cuts in for a surreal closeup of a dead mouse that Stavisky steps past without seeing it, a symbol of the doom that he can't see coming. (Later, a white ermine frolicking in the snow serves as a prelude to Stavisky's actual death; Resnais loves playfully using animals as mysterious symbols like this.) The film's interpretation of the real-life Stavisky Affair suggests that the title character was unwittingly responsible for many of the failures of French leftism in the pre-WW2 era, haplessly paving the way for the Vichy regime and the victories of French fascism.

The Domain of the Moment/Duplicity III/Murder Psalm

Stan Brakhage was always acutely aware of time in his work, even if only to disrupt it through layering and superimposition, the tools by which Brakhage frequently undercut the passage of time. Time works strangely in Brakhage's work: his editing is often fast, even frantic, and an image can last barely a second or two before being replaced with another, so the films seem to move very quickly, propelled forward by the perception of great speed. And yet time is also stretched and warped in his work, elongated through repetition so that a single moment can recur as Brakhage loops back to it again and again, returning obsessively to the same images and thus to the same moments in time. His layering, too, extends the sensation of time by erasing the distinctions of linear progress; all things happen simultaneously in his films, so that a Brakhage film becomes a timeless domain where one image follows another in space (the physical space of the film strip, on which in his later work Brakhage often painted or scratched directly) but not necessarily in time since the relationships between images are so blurred and destabilized. Time for Brakhage is malleable, no mean feat in a medium where time is precisely counted in twenty-fourths of a second.

Perhaps this accounts for the title of The Domain of the Moment, which is divided into four segments, each of them focusing on a different animal or animals from among Brakhage's pets. Animals, Brakhage seems to suggest, live in the moment, unaware of the passage of time, their lives built around repetition and instinct. Could there be any more perfect subject for one of his films? Brakhage opens the film with evocative, warm and beautiful images of a baby bird hesitantly staggering through some stalks of grass, pecking at food, crawling over a man's hand, running back and forth in a tank. The images are sensual and suggest the timeless, pattern-based routine of an instinct-driven animal, eating and playing and moving around, repeating the same actions over and over again. To reinforce the impression of experiencing the world as an animal, Brakhage maintains a low-to-the-ground camera that crawls among the stalks of grass with the bird, rarely showing the animal directly but instead capturing its feet, the fluffy textures of its feathers, the spikes of grass surrounding it. The intimate camera gives the impression that this scale is all there is, that a whole world is found in the modest artificial environment where the bird lives; the foliage around it is a jungle, the thin layer of dirt the earth, everything on the scale of a tiny creature.

Brakhage adopts a similar perspective for his examination of a hamster, then films an encounter between a shaggy white dog and an apparently domesticated raccoon, capturing the hesitance and lingering sensuality of the moment by endlessly drawing out the first moment of contact, with the raccoon lurking in the dark and the dog facing it expectantly. The bristly, spindly fur of the raccoon and the shaggy pile of the dog provide a study in textural contrasts, a theme carried over into the final section in which Brakhage films a snake. Its coiled, scaly body forms neatly geometric spirals that Brakhage then abstracts by blurring and overlaying them, turning those cleanly defined forms into a field of hazy rounded surfaces, sleek but finely textured at once, glistening slightly with light. Brakhage occasionally breaks away from his images of animals for painted segments that provide a very different example of sensuality and in-the-moment experience. It is as though Brakhage is acknowledging his metaphor here, making explicit the connection between his approach to art as a visceral, out-of-time experience, and what he imagines must be the similar experiences of animals with their instinctual consciousnesses.


Stan Brakhage often included images of children in his films as icons of innocence and play. His movies about children — his own and those of friends and family — reflect the spirit of domesticity and familial closeness that often runs through his work. Many of his films, as avant-garde as they are in terms of technique, have some resemblance in terms of themes and concerns to home movies, documenting private family moments, things happening around the house and in the community. Duplicity III is the culmination of a series of films titled Duplicity and Sincerity, made from 1973-1980. Duplicity III opens with images of children putting on costumes, getting ready to go trick-or-treating, which immediately suggests one meaning of the title: games, play, masking one's identity as an expression of childlike imagination. Later, he shows children dressing up for a school play, another outlet for imagination and games of "let's pretend." Often, the children are dressed as animals, and Brakhage overlays images of real animals, blurring the boundaries between signifier and signified, blending the coarse hair of a dog with a child's hair so that the two are difficult to separate. This juxtaposition suggests that a part of childlike play involves getting in touch with animalistic nature, playing at wildness and non-humanity.

There's also an element of theatricality in these games, which is especially obvious at the end of the film, when Brakhage superimposes ghostly silhouettes of kids playing parts on top of a plush red curtain on a stage. (But first, he superimposes a deer onto the stage, as though it too had a role to play as one of the original images from which all this dress-up is derived.) In his images of school plays, Brakhage is akin to a home movie documentarian, capturing childhood moments that would only be of interest to a parent. But Brakhage is not documenting a particular child's Halloween preparations or school play, he's using these images in a more abstracted way as general signifiers of childhood, and especially of the child's tendency to play with identity through disguise and role-playing. The specificity and personal significance of the home movie is expanded, in Brakhage's work, into ruminations on universal experiences and states of being.

This is a film about youth, or more precisely, it's about youth as idealized by adults. That's why the images of kids at play are so bright and joyous: at one point Brakhage shoots a little girl's hair with light shining through it so that she seems to have a frizzy halo floating above her head, making her look angelic in the sunlight filtering through her blonde hair. The pacing of the film is slow and sensuous, with a lot of leisurely cross-fades between images, layered atop one another. This layering and multiplication of images is another way in which Brakhage makes his personal documents universal, resonating far beyond a portrait of particular childhood memories. By blending together fragmentary scenes of children at play, mashing together different times, places and people, Brakhage takes the emphasis off of the individual image and puts it on the relationships and commonalities between images, the sensual qualities of light and color, the thematic continuities that drive each work.


In Murder Psalm, Stan Brakhage focuses on a largely abstract and elliptical depiction of the mysterious impulses that lead to violence. Much of the film is composed of sequences seemingly recorded off of a TV set, from news broadcasts or movies, the colors of the images dull and muted, caked in static and fuzz, so that only the vaguest outlines and impressions of the underlying image still show through. Brakhage seems more interested in the textures of the static and the flickering lines that pulse across the TV screen, so that the image beneath becomes subliminal, a projection from the unconscious. These hazy, unclear images are interwoven with outbursts of cheerful cartoon violence, clips from science lectures regarding the brain, autopsies that reveal the bloody reality beneath the skin, and a wordless psychodrama in which children wander through the woods, stare into a mirror, play and fight, nursing darker feelings beneath their childish innocence.

This is powerful stuff, slowly building a sense of dread and violence without overtly depicting the titular act of violence. The murder of the title seems continually on the verge of happening, burbling up from an unconscious mind full of images of wartime devastation, criminals and soldiers, and a child's casual, laughing cruelty towards other children. The images of brains, both models and real ones removed from dissected corpses, suggest that the origins of violent impulses arise in the mind, but the corporeal reality of the brain, bloody and covered in deep furrows, does little to probe the enigma of those violent thoughts. Thus the autopsy might diagnose the physical cause of death, but the tumultuous churning of the mind, overloaded with visual stimuli and a rush of conflicting ideas, is more elusive; the solidity of the brain barely hints at the mad processes that can go on within its neural pathways.

It's left to Brakhage's flood of imagery to suggest this violent, emotionally complex inner life, capturing the dark and murky thought process of an individual overtaken by thoughts of violence and murder. Brakhage, as usual, uses the title of his film to shade and inform the images that follow it, but this would be an undeniably dark film no matter what. Its darkness arises from the degradation of its images, the muddy, ugly quality of most of these images. Occasionally, scenes from everyday life shine out with crystalline clarity, but more often everything is vague and abstracted, the colors dull, the figures and settings obscured by the fog of TV static. Even the painted sections are wan and pale, restricted to lifeless grays and browns and dark blues, the paint thickly caked and shivering in abstract patterns that mimic the TV static. Many of the photographed segments are similarly dulled, bathed in a flat red filter that recalls not fresh blood but the caked, rusty scrapings of very old blood, evidence of an ancient murder only discovered many years after its occurrence. For Brakhage, this deliberate denial of the beauty and freshness of images is itself a form of violence, a visual equivalent of the sapping of life; the deadened colors and erasure of images in static is a filmmaker's act of murder.

Bush Mama

Bush Mama is director Haile Gerima's raw, potent depiction of poor black life in 1970s Los Angeles. Shot in grainy black-and-white, the film is a blend of near-documentary street scenes, raw amateur acting, and avant-garde techniques. The loose narrative focuses on Dorothy (Barbarao), a jobless woman who subsists on welfare to raise her daughter after her husband T.C. (Johnny Weathers) is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. With nothing to do and no hope of finding a job — she waits in the unemployment office for hours only to be told there's nothing for her — she simply wanders the neighborhood, reads letters from T.C., and talks with other neighborhood women. She's pregnant with her second child, but because she's on welfare and her husband isn't around, she's under constant pressure from government officials to have an abortion. The letters she gets from T.C. reflect his increasing radicalization and his desire to overthrow a system that seems stacked against blacks in so many ways. She hears some of the same ideas around the neighborhood, particularly from a woman who brings her radical posters from rallies, depicting an African woman with a baby on one arm and a gun in her other hand (the "bush mama" of the film's title) and another poster showing the hole-filled body of a man who'd been shot 25 times by the police.

Dorothy doesn't really understand these radical ideas, though she feels some sympathy for them on a gut level. However, she's often swayed by the brash Molly (Cora Lee Day), who has nothing but mockery and contempt for radical ideas about "togetherness" or African identity. Over the course of the film, in between scenes of ordinary domestic life, Dorothy grapples with this debate over radicalization, vacillating between those who want to do something to fight an oppressive system and those, like Molly, who can't think beyond the day-to-day. By the end of the film, Dorothy, facing the camera in front of the poster of the African mother, has been fully awakened — through a harrowing and horrific series of events — to the necessity of systemic change. She's been radicalized, and to reflect this transition she's finally removed the bushy wig that she wore throughout the film, revealing the sparse, tightly coiled dreadlocks hanging off her scalp underneath. The symbolism is obvious: she's no longer hiding anything, she's embraced her true self, which is why Gerima shoots her in closeup with the "bush mama" poster behind her. He racks the focus, so that first Dorothy's face is in focus, and then the poster is, and then he freezes the shot, while on the soundtrack Dorothy reads a passionate letter she wrote to T.C., telling him that she's finally ready to hear and understand what he's been telling her.

Gerima relates this tale of one woman's gradual awareness of her place within a larger societal struggle with a loose, eclectic style. The film has an elliptical collage structure in which conversations, monologues addressed to the camera, and everyday moments are stitched together with connective scenes of Dorothy walking around the neighborhood or sitting at her window, lost in thought. The soundtrack is also a collage, combining snippets of dialogue and music into an associative portrait of ghetto life: bits of dialogue or radio broadcasts are looped and repeated, and the occasional song with lyrics reflects the events of the narrative. The opening of the film consists of several minutes of slice-of-life footage from around the neighborhood — the police arresting a man, people walking, a purse-snatching kid — accompanied by a dense soundtrack of street sounds, pulsing music and loops of detailed questions excerpted from welfare interviews.


Throughout the film, there are sporadic bursts of violence — men being beaten or shot down right in the streets by the police — that seem as ordinary as anything else that happens in the streets. It's just another part of the backdrop, not exactly accepted but certainly expected. Again, Gerima shows some progress in Dorothy's reactions to these events, so that by the end of the film, the sight of a black man being gunned down in the street outside her home causes her to bury her head and sob, whereas earlier she'd shown little emotional involvement at all in these routine bursts of violence. These scenes are also setting the groundwork for the absolutely devastating final act of the film, in which the violence of the streets and the police directly infiltrates Dorothy's home.

This is an intense and emotionally draining film that's all about the toll that systemic racial oppression and poverty take on those who live within this system. Some of the most poignant, poetic moments come from T.C.'s letters to Dorothy, which he reads aloud while facing the camera, speaking to the audience as though addressing Dorothy. In one of these letters, he laments the way that prison is sapping the vital, lively parts of his personality that he once treasured: "every time I crack a joke, to test if that part of me is still alive, I never can make it." Even humor is destroyed by the injustice that families like T.C. and Dorothy's must endure. It's especially cruel that T.C. is arrested, early in the film, right before a promising job interview that they'd hoped would finally change things for their family. One moment, T.C. and Dorothy are enthusiastically talking about finally having some money, maybe being able to move somewhere nicer, and then Gerima cuts to T.C. being led through the prison by a guard. The circumstances of his arrest, which are predictably unfair, aren't explained until the very end of the film, which only enhances the sense of how arbitrary it all is.

Gerima's greatest accomplishment with Bush Mama is making a deeply political, angry, even polemical film that rarely feels like merely a collection of slogans. The film's politics are rooted in the circumstances of everyday life, in the injustices that occur daily in poor black neighborhoods. The film has a real political/social message to send, contained in its dialogues and monologues about black togetherness and radicalization, but it delivers this message primarily by focusing on the tangible emotional and physical effects of racial prejudice, police violence, and systemic poverty.

Du côté d'Orouët

Jacques Rozier is one of the unfortunately forgotten filmmakers of the French New Wave. He finished his debut film, the excellent Adieu Philippine, only with difficulty and some monetary help from his friend Jean-Luc Godard, and afterwards he wouldn't make another feature for over 10 years. His second feature, Du côté d'Orouët, is, like his debut, a charming and moving depiction of young people on vacation. Ambling and nearly plotless, the film meanders through two and a half hours of beachside antics as three friends — Caroline (Caroline Cartier), Joëlle (Danièle Croisy) and Kareen (Françoise Guégan) — take their September vacation in a seaside cabin owned by Caroline's family. It's a relaxed and simple film, and also a really beautiful one, progressing slowly and organically from carefree goofing around to the rich and subtle emotional complexity that begins to develop later in the film. Rozier is paying tribute to the joys of youth, the pleasures of a month-long escape from the day-to-day mundane slog of work and normal life, but as in Adieu Philippine there's a subtle undercurrent of melancholy that, as the film goes along, is increasingly laid bare beneath the surface giggling and good times.

This somewhat more serious subtext is first hinted at early in the film, soon after the three girls first arrive at their summer villa. They've been laughing and goofing around nonstop throughout the whole trip, even laughing breathlessly all through a steep climb up a sand dune, lugging their suitcases step by laborious step up its slippery slope. Then they arrive at the house, throwing open its shutters to let in the slightly chilly September sea breeze, and Caroline and Joëlle go running off to look at the rooms upstairs. Kareen walks by herself into a side room, suddenly quiet and introspective: she was childhood friends with Caroline, and the two girls used to spend summers here when they were very young. This is the first time she's been back since then, and a flood of memories come pouring in, bringing her back to her girlhood. Suddenly, Rozier cuts in for a series of probing closeups in which Kareen's face fills the screen, and she looks into the camera and whispers her thoughts about being suddenly overcome by nostalgia, recognizing all these little details from her childhood vacations. It is the only moment in the film when Rozier breaks the fourth wall like this, and the only moment when he so directly and intimately reveals the inner thoughts of these young women. The effect is all the more striking for its status as a solitary stylistic break in the film's aesthetic, a lone moment in which the intensity of emotion necessitates total unguarded honesty and confession. Later, the women will keep their emotions more veiled as they throw themselves into a month of fun and laughter and silliness.

They're joined on this vacation by Joëlle's boss Gilbert (Bernard Menez), who is obviously attracted to Joëlle and surprises them by showing up in the town where they're staying, then tagging along and eventually pitching his tent right in their garden. His presence provides the first hint of fracture within the group, as Joëlle, who's all too aware of his interest in her, doesn't want this tension on her vacation, while the other two girls just delight in tormenting and mocking Gilbert, who at first seems slightly stiff and serious around the giggly girls. Gilbert provides the comic relief initially, as the butt of their jokes — they wake him up one morning by playing cacophonous music on a trumpet and drums right outside his tent, then entangle him in fishing nets — but he becomes a more poignant character later in the film. He hoped to finally form a relationship with Joëlle on this vacation, but instead the girls treat him like a servant, having him fetch things for him while they sunbathe, or leaving the dishes for him to wash while they run off to the beach.


In one sequence towards the end of the film, Gilbert and the girls return from a fishing trip with a big fish, which he prepares for an elaborate meal. Rozier, whose sense of pacing is always unhurried, spends several long minutes with Gilbert as he cooks, swigging wine and looking a little tipsy when Rozier captures him in closeups. He is putting a lot of effort into the meal, juggling large pots on a crowded stove with only two burners, carefully slicing up the fish, preparing vegetables and sauce to go with it. After all this preparation, the meal is received with lackluster indifference, as Caroline and Joëlle, exhausted from a long day of fishing, pick feebly at the food before falling asleep right at the table. Joëlle, additionally, is withdrawn and upset because Kareen has earned the attentions of the sailboat-owning Patrick (Patrick Verde), who Joëlle herself had wanted. Kareen's absence from the table, out on a date with Patrick that's gone way later than they'd expected, hangs over their uncomfortable silence, and at times Joëlle seems on the verge of tears while Gilbert gamely tries to lighten the mood and encourage the girls to eat. Instead, they sleep and the next morning Joëlle, who seems to realize how desperately Gilbert wants her to like him, can barely meet his gaze.

The film acquires a great deal of poignancy by its end, though the shift is mood is subtle and gradual, and doesn't really come until the film is nearly over. Earlier, it's all charming days in the sun, aimless days with nothing to do but chat, argue over what to eat, go on little trips that never lead anywhere. The girls have fun dressing up at home, pretending like they're going to go to a nearby casino they've seen signs for, dancing goofily in wooden clogs. When Gilbert finally does take them to the casino, dressed in a tuxedo and fussing with his bowtie, the casino turns out to be a converted and rather ramshackle farmhouse located in a muddy field. A sailboat expedition with Patrick is more successful, and Rozier spends a great deal of time watching as Caroline and Joëlle hang on through the waves, leaning off the boat to keep it from tipping, laughing and screaming the whole time, while the camera rocks and shakes with the waves.

The film's style is loose and verité, unobtrusive but nonetheless striking. Rozier shot in ragged, grainy color, in the Academy ratio, which gives the film the look of home video vacation footage. Its looseness is appealing, though, and there's an offhanded beauty to many of Rozier's shots. His images, in their unforced beauty, capture the sense of a late-season beachside resort where the vacation traffic is slowing down, most people starting to leave for home just as the girls arrive. It's windy, maybe a little chilly, and the beaches are usually all but empty except for the three girls and a few other stragglers. The season is integral to the film's sadness, a part of the sensation that things are winding down, that this isn't quite the peak, and by the end of the film, as all the local businesses are being shuttered for the winter and the boardwalk is even more desolate than ever, the melancholy becomes almost overwhelming.


This sadness is especially apparent in the character of Joëlle. Rozier never gives her the moment of unguarded confession that he gives to Kareen early in the film, but her sadness slowly shows itself anyway. At one point, after the group has gone horseback-riding and returned home for dinner, Joëlle silently observes as Kareen and Patrick whisper conspiratorially across the table from her, quietly making plans for the next day. Rozier shoots across the table, over the shoulders of Kareen and Patrick, framing Joëlle's face between them as her sad eyes dart back and forth between them. Gilbert praises Kareen's riding skills, and Patrick agrees, saying that she's so light that she almost flies. It's an offhanded remark but Rozier's emphasis on Joëlle captures how much it must sting her; throughout the film, she been very self-conscious about weight and dieting, and the compliment to Kareen feels like a slap to her. All of this plays out very subtly, without anything overt being said. It's simply Rozier's acute concentration on Joëlle's face, his attention to her unspoken emotional state, that makes this little moment and others like it hit so hard.

The film's final half hour uses the end of the summer holiday as a metaphor for the other endings and missed opportunities that underscore this elegiac conclusion. First Gilbert leaves, sick of being treated like "an imbecile," and then Kareen leaves as well, having quickly grown tired of her brief fling with Patrick. Only Caroline and Joëlle remain at the end, sulking through the cold final days of vacation, closing up the house and returning for home and work in a downcast mood. These scenes are gray and overcast; winter is coming, chasing them away from the beach, away from the freedom and irresponsibility of summer. There's a sense of loss in the film's final act that's hard to pin down. Is it that these women are on the verge of having to grow up for good, to leave behind the girlish fun that Kareen remembers from her childhood and which they're recreating here? Is it the sense that soon they'll get married and settle down? Or is it simply that now, as another girl says at the very end of the film, they have to wait 11 months for their next taste of this freedom and adventure, as now they return to the work and routine of the rest of the year? Whatever the case, it's an affecting coda, as the haunted-looking Joëlle watches Gilbert, who has now given up on her, flirt with another girl, talking about vacation plans for next year.

Du côté d'Orouët is a sweet and ultimately sad movie that builds a great deal of emotional richness from what initially seems rather simple. The sadness in the film is not as explicit or as specifically defined as Rozier's first film, Adieu Philippine (in which a vacationing young man was poised on the brink of military service in the Algerian War) but there's nevertheless a sense that Rozier sees the summer holiday as an opportunity to examine, simultaneously, the joys and the anxieties of youth. The vacation is a metaphor for youth itself: sunny, fun, consequence-free, but always finite, always with an end point after which the vacationers will have to return to the real world, to work and responsibility and seriousness. That constant awareness of the end, which at first seems so distant and soon comes to loom very close indeed, is what makes the film so poignant, so bittersweet, so joyous and so melancholy.