The Red and the White

Whoever says, with François Truffaut, that there's no such thing as a true anti-war film, has clearly never seen Miklós Jancsó's The Red and the White, a brilliant, harrowing war film that never even remotely falls into the familiar trap of glorifying war in the process of critiquing it. Set in 1919, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, the film depicts a series of skirmishes between Hungarian Communists, aiding the Bolsheviks, and the remnants of the Tsarist White Russian troops. These specific politics are hardly relevant to the film, however, because Jancsó seems far more interested in war as an abstract, in the absurdity and wastefulness of war. The film doesn't have a central presence, a protagonist or protagonists who the camera follows through their adventures; Jancsó doesn't even remain with one side or the other, instead fluidly shifting from one potential protagonist to the next, hardly even bothering to keep straight who's on which side as a series of bizarre, almost surreal vignettes create an atmosphere of confusion and pointlessness.

Jancsó's camera tracks smoothly across stark widescreen vistas, its movements suggesting the fluid way in which fortunes are reversed in the chaos of battle. The soldiers on both sides alternately charge and retreat, take prisoners and are taken prisoner, as the camera tracks this way and that. Prisoners are ordered to and fro, ordered to strip, to run, to line up, to line up again somewhere else. Some are killed, some are forced into games of sport, subject to the whims of sadistic commanders, others are stripped and told that they can leave; sometimes they're genuinely set free, and other times supposed freedom just leads into another game, another trap. There's no logic to all this, only the absurd rigor of military discipline, constantly arranging people into abstract groups, regimenting their lives and their deaths. People are picked at random to live or to die, most of them seemingly dying not in the heat of battle — which is rare and brief — but when they're toyed with, in post-battle boredom, by the victors.

Every victory is momentary, too, as Jancsó keeps underlining by constantly shifting from one side to the other. Sometimes the Reds seem to be winning, taking the White soldiers prisoner, but it's seldom long before more Whites will show up to turn the tide of battle yet again. To the people of the countryside, it hardly matters who's ascendant at any given moment, because no matter which side is dominant, the innocent civilians are subject to constant searches and harassment, the women always threatened with rape and assault, their only hope that there will be a stray honorable officer here and there among the troops.

Jancsó captures the fragmentation and absurdity of war in every moment of his film, alternating between long periods of stasis and confused bursts of violence in which it's seldom clear which side is which or who's winning. The countryside in which these battles are taking place seems largely empty, with big open fields dotted with farms and small wooden homes. The wide frame de-emphasizes any individuals: there are very few characters who survive more than a few minutes onscreen, and even when one of the soldiers momentarily steps into the foreground of the frame for an ad-hoc closeup, inevitably he's dead or melted back into the general clamor a few moments later. The closest the film comes to a conventional narrative is when Jancsó lingers for a somewhat longer stretch at a small hospital where a group of nurses shelter some fleeing Communists, refusing to divulge to the White soldiers who's who among the patients. One of the nurses (Tatyana Konyukhova) defiantly tells the commander, "there are no Reds or Whites here, only patients," a bold and rare expression of honor amidst all this vile pointlessness. Another nurse (Krystyna Mikolajewska) entertains a fling with one of the Reds — she doesn't need love, she says, seemingly just hungry for any human, sensual connection — but this brief hint of a conventional wartime romantic narrative is abruptly cut short by the arrival of the Whites, the abortive romance extinguished in the cruelest possible way, with Jancsó's camera remaining at an aloof distance from the violence, capturing the raw emotion of the moment from a slight remove. (Later, the Reds, oblivious to this cruelty, perpetrate a further injustice on the same woman.)


The war's absurdity is memorably captured in a surreal sequence where the Whites round up a group of nurses and bring them to a clearing in a nearby forest. The threat of violence hangs over the scene, but instead of shooting or raping the women, the soldiers bring out a band and order the women to dance together in the clearing, wearing fancy dresses provided by the soldiers, until finally sending them all home unharmed. There's no sense here, only inexplicable events and actions, outlandish expressions of war's total ridiculousness. Towards the end of the film, a group of Red soldiers strip off their uniforms and march, singing, towards a superior force of White soldiers, arrayed like human dominoes in neat rows on the field below. The men below remain static, allowing the charging enemy to pick off some of their number, the dead men falling and leaving gaps in the neat structure of the front line, before finally the surviving dominoes mow down all the approaching soldiers with a barrage of rifle fire. Jancsó observes this pointless exchange of deaths from above, peering down the hill from a distance so that the individual men are nothing but abstract shapes, identified only by the colors of their uniforms, part of a human formation, a human machine in which the individual parts are always expendable.

That shot, in which the opposing formations are clearly visible in relation to one another, is an exception here. Jancsó's framing often accentuates the confusion of war by shooting battle scenes so that the two sides are not in the same frame, and death enters unexpectedly from offscreen. The camera will often focus momentarily on a soldier only to have him suddenly die, with the opposing troops then entering from offscreen, the camera tracking over to accomodate the shift in perspective from one side to the other. There's no logic here, no strategy, and battles are often over as soon as they've begun, with one side being taken by surprise and slaughtered by the other, often while in the middle of the seemingly endless process of sorting out prisoners and enacting punishments and vengeance. The soldiers spend more time with that kind of administration than they do fighting. Both sides are constantly sorting out Hungarians from Russians, trying to identify who belongs to which nationality within the prisoners, but there's no consistency in how the two groups are treated, and the prisoners can't be sure if it's a death sentence to identify as Russian, as Hungarian, or, as often seems to be the case, if it doesn't really matter and they'll all be dying one way or another. In one early scene, the Whites sort out their prisoners in this way and then send the Hungarians home, which prompts one Hungarian who hadn't identified himself — presumably afraid of what it would mean to speak up — to belatedly come forward. By then, the Whites don't care, they tell him it's too late and herd him in with the Russian prisoners, who are then sent off to a cruel game that turns into a manhunt.

There's a clear sense here that these divisions — Red or White, Russian or Hungarian, citizen or soldier — are ultimately arbitrary and meaningless, as everyone is chewed up by the cruel anti-logic of the war. That's what makes The Red and the White such a bold war film, such a powerful statement. It's not tied to any ideology or any particular war, instead depicting the nonsensical wasteland into which war inevitably transforms any landscape, grinding up anyone in its path. The film follows the trail of death and destruction from one man to the next, allowing each man in turn to be the victor and the loser, the tormenter and the victim, the killer and the killed. Only rarely in all this is there any sense of right and wrong, of anyone able to maintain a strong moral center in the face of the absurdity and randomness that is war.

The Young Girls of Rochefort

Jacques Demy followed up his musical masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with a second Catherine Deneuve musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort, a delightful companion piece that continues the throughline of Demy's sustained examination of love, longing, and separation, a thematic current that extends back not only to Umbrellas but to Demy's debut feature Lola. This is a more conventional musical than Umbrellas; not all of the dialogue is sung, and the song-and-dance numbers here are overt breaks in the diegesis as they are in most musicals, and as they weren't in Umbrellas, where the music was smoothly incorporated into the quotidian so that everything was transmuted into song. Despite the differences, Demy, again working with composer Michel Legrand, has concocted another marvelous tribute to the Hollywood musical form, with bright, popping colors, energetic choreography, and musical numbers that burst out of ordinary reality with all the force and beauty of a dream, elegant movements that become dances, open expressions of emotion poured out through song. It's dazzling, colorful, and romantic, and though it's not quite as bittersweet or near-tragic as Umbrellas, that undercurrent of melancholy still drifts just below the surface vibrancy.

This is an exuberant fantasy of love and separation, a film in which nearly everyone has an ideal love, someone they may not even have met, or who they only glimpsed briefly, but who is clearly meant for them, destined to be the great love of their lives. The plot is thus a tightly constructed framework of missed connections and improbable coincidences, constant chance meetings and chance misses in which these would-be lovers careen around Rochefort, searching for love and sometimes colliding with it, or nearly colliding with it and passing by none the wiser. There's very nearly no plot beyond this maze of love and desire, the connections between the characters defined by who loves or lusts for whom, who's destined for whom. At the center of the maze are the twin sisters Delphine (Deneuve) and Solange (Françoise Dorléac) and their mother Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux, the only performer in the film whose voice isn't dubbed for songs). The sisters each have an ideal man who they're searching for without having met him; love for them, as for most of these characters, is an idea before it's a reality, a very romantic Hollywood musical concept. They know exactly what the man they love will be like, and they're simply waiting for their dreams to take shape in reality.

For Delphine, her ideal man will be a sensitive, poetic artist and intellectual, which perfectly describes the sailor/painter Maxence (Jacques Perrin), who just so happens to have painted a portrait of his own ideal woman who looks exactly like Delphine. Throughout the film, these two never meet, though Demy has great fun arranging near-collisions and coincidences that place them just seconds apart, their meeting always imminent — a word that Maxence turns into a pun that he delights in trying out on everyone he meets — without ever actually taking place. That's one source of the film's melancholy, this sense that there's a great love out there for everyone, a soul mate, but that their meeting might not be fated, that in fact fate and chance might conspire to keep them apart rather than bring them together, the precise opposite of the meet-cute conventions of the movie romance.


There's a remarkable shot that prefigures the melancholy of Delphine's story, suggesting that her tale will be streaked with sadness even before she's properly introduced. At the beginning of the film, a carnival is setting up in the main square, the carnies dancing through their preparations, turning their work into choreography. As this number comes to an end, a plaintive, minor-key piano motif slowly replaces the more upbeat tune that had accompanied the choreographed carnies. As the piano melody takes over, the camera begins swooningly drifting upwards, following a few of the carnies as they walk away from the fair ground, and the camera tracks away from them and up towards a window where little girls can be seen practicing ballet. The camera floats through the window and into the studio, where Solange plays the piano while Delphine gracefully strolls between the dancers, instructing them. The combination of the melancholy piano music with that evocatively graceful shot immediately communicates a sense of deep emotions being stirred up, and even though the sisters soon launch into their charmingly upbeat signature tune, that plaintive tune still lingers over them.

That's not the only darkness drifting through the film. As in many of Demy's other films, sailors and soldiers are important figures because war is constantly lurking in the background; as Yvonne says while reading the newspaper, "trouble is everywhere," suggesting the outbreak of war and violence, likely in Algeria, which had so poignantly haunted Umbrellas as well. A café patron says that the soldiers who march in rigorous formation through the streets would "shoot us like rabbits," a rather morbid thought that's contradicted by the presence of the sensitive sailor Maxence, who's consumed by his poetry and his paintings and indifferent to the military maneuvers, simply counting the days until he can return to civilian life. He clearly doesn't belong in the Navy, and one fears for him, fears that he won't be able to escape unscathed.


The many stories of lost loves, missed connections and aborted affairs here are darkly mirrored in the story of an ax murderer who killed a woman he'd loved and longed for many years, suggesting one much more grisly possible outcome for these tragicomic love stories. There's also more than a hint of violence in Delphine's affair with the gallery owner Guillaume (Jacques Riberolles), who tries to force her to marry him even though she says she doesn't love him. Guillaume sinisterly makes his abstract, Pollock-like paintings by shooting at bags of paint dangling over a canvas — when Delphine breaks up with him, he suggestively fires at the black bag — and at one point he turns his pistol on Maxence's Delphine-like portrait of the "feminine ideal." It's easy to imagine Guillaume one day moving beyond such symbolic violence and enacting another variation on the ax murderer's revenge for his jilted love.

Despite this undercurrent of violence and ugliness, the film remains relentlessly bright and sunny, its colors unreally bright and clean, this town a place where even an ordinary stroll down the street becomes a lighter-than-air dance for these hazy-eyed romantics. Solange's destined true love is the composer Andy (Gene Kelly), who she meets on the street by chance, holding a loving glance for a few moments before they separate. Kelly's presence here is the surest sign of Demy's love and respect for the Hollywood musical, and he gives the American actor and dancer two of the film's most dazzling dance numbers, which together encompass the full circle of the film's rapturous approach to love. In the first, after meeting Solange for the first time, Andy is so excited that he spontaneously erupts into an exuberant song-and-dance number, skipping through the streets, engaging in impromptu choreography with passersby, and leaping up onto his car — a white convertible like the one in Lola, since Andy is this film's version of a beloved Demy trope, the masculine presence who's intrinsically linked to his car. It's an exhilarating performance, pure emotion translated into motion and music, the essence of the movie musical. At the conclusion of the film, when he's finally reunited with Solange, their love again takes the form of a dance, a graceful and fluid interplay of separation and togetherness that teases the embrace, the kiss, that finally marks the conclusion of this courting dance, before the couple walks away wrapped in each other's arms.

Fittingly for such a romantic, emotional film, it closes with a happy ending several times over, even if it never quite delivers on the inevitable union of one of its potential couples, just dangling the possibility, tantalizing with it, hinting at it several times before coming just close enough to the actuality of it that the mere continued possibility is exciting in itself. It's a wonderful film, bursting with life and joy, tempering the bittersweet emotions of Demy's previous Umbrellas of Cherbourg with the pleasures of love in its anticipation and its fulfillment.

Bonnie and Clyde

Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde is well-known as one of the first films to bring a new, tougher sensibility to mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, a sensibility that would come to define the new American cinema as the 60s transitioned into the 70s. It is an openly violent and sexualized vision of the famous criminal couple, testing the boundaries of screen representation. This is apparent right from the opening scene, in which Faye Dunaway's Bonnie lounges around naked in her room, then sees Warren Beatty's Clyde outside trying to boost her mother's car. Penn's camera does a clever little dance insuring that Dunaway shows plenty of skin without really revealing anything, as jagged jump cuts slice away whenever her motion within the frame threatens to bring her nudity across the line of acceptability. The jump cuts also stagger a closeup of Bonnie's face as she pounds on her bedpost in frustrated boredom; the jittery editing of this scene both enhances the sense of the character's anxiety and calls attention to the teasing nudity. It's an announcement that the film is going to be all about pushing boundaries, toying with the kinds of things that would have been censored in earlier eras. Penn's jump cuts also announce the influence of the French New Wave on this new Hollywood aesthetic — and indeed, both Truffaut and Godard had been associated with the film before Penn took over as director — but the bigger influence seems to be the simple desire to do things that wouldn't have been possible just a few years earlier.

The result is that Bonnie and Clyde is both startlingly modern and very of its time. Its modernity is most apparent in the performances of Beatty and Dunaway, who carry the film and bring edge and grit to their romanticized gangster characters. Beatty's Clyde Barrow is a slick, sly hood, a small-timer who projects an image far above his station, radiating an effortless cool that's easily punctured whenever he's in a tight situation, when he sweats and grits his teeth in fear. As Bonnie tells him early on, he makes a good sales pitch, but inside he's actually got nothing to sell. As for Dunaway, her Bonnie Parker is a potent screen presence, all raw sexual energy and barely controlled smolder. The film throws her and Clyde together almost instantly, without introduction, and her first few minutes in his presence are an absolute joy to watch. They walk down the street together, exchanging playful banter, Dunaway swaying girlishly, as though she's a Southern belle being courted rather than a small-town waitress flirting with a criminal stranger. Bonnie watches Clyde with mild suspicion but, more than that, a predatory desire. She eyes him voraciously, wrapping her lips around a Coke bottle and pensively tonguing the bottleneck: it's a provocative and exhilarating image, promising a film that really embraces this naughty, playful approach to these famous bank robbers.

The film certainly does have a propulsive, invigorating energy, especially in Dunaway's best moments, like her posing for a photograph with a pistol and a cigar borrowed from Clyde, or her passionate tongue-kissing with a captured Texas ranger who had been hunting the gang. At times, Dunaway seems to be driving the film all by herself, projecting a magnetic intensity that threatens to overwhelm anything else that happens to be going on in the frame with her. Even Beatty's manufactured cool can't compete with his costar's raw power.


As much as these performances bring to the film, Bonnie and Clyde is flawed from conception, since it romanticizes and mythologizes the titular couple pretty much from the word go. For all the undeniable modernity of the film's gunfights, the film is still seeped in corn and sentiment, like all the rustically impoverished caricatures who the couple encounters along their journey. These representatives of the lower class are ostentatiously intended to symbolize the duo's nonconformity and fight against the banks and the authorities. In fact, the film seems to take this nonsense mythology at face value, while also making Dunaway's Bonnie veer into unfortunate feminine hysteria that's inconsistent with her character's harder edges. Nothing Dunaway does can completely overcome the straitjackets placed on her character by the script, which makes her cling pathetically to the sexually disinterested, possibly impotent Clyde. True, in the later stretches of the film, Bonnie betrays a longing for a different life, but it's still unfortunate that the film doesn't have more of a perspective on her character's attachment to Clyde, which is simply taken for granted rather than truly developed or explored.

As a result, the film is most notable, beyond its noisy, bloody gun battles, for the subtleties of its performances. In one scene, Bonnie and Clyde and their gang pick up a young couple after stealing their car, and drive around with them, turning an initially threatening situation into a fun, free-spirited drive. But then, when the man announces that his profession is an undertaker, Bonnie abruptly demands that they kick the couple out of the car. A troubled expression flashes across her face at this moment, and it's clear that there are multiple layers to this brief scene: not only is Bonnie envisioning her own likely death, but she's perhaps sensing that this young man and his girlfriend were getting sucked into the dangerous orbit of the gang's criminal activities. There's a sense that Bonnie saw her own seduction into crime being repeated, and didn't want to see more innocents corrupted and transformed by this violent, criminal life.

Penn also gets a marvelous performance out of Gene Hackman, as Clyde's brother Buck. Hackman is loose and jovial here, the kind of guy who likes to slap his buddies on the back and eagerly tells his jokes over and over again whenever he thinks he has a new audience; the kidnapping scene's funniest moment is seeing the kidnapped couple laughing over Buck's favorite joke, as the rest of the gang glumly overact their boredom with the punchline. But there's also a deeper subtext to Buck's bonhomie, witnessed in an early scene when he's first reunited with Clyde and his initial enthusiasm slowly fades as he realizes that he actually has nothing in common with his outlaw brother, nothing to talk about. Instead, the two men sit in awkward silence for a few moments, with Buck hooting and hollering, trying to drum up some excitement about all the fun they're going to have together. Then, a moment later, "what are we going to do?" Michael Pollard, as the gang's slightly slow-witted hanger-on C.W. Moss, is equally good, bringing sensitivity and pathos to his hero-worshipping third wheel. Only Estelle Parsons, as Buck's wife Blanche, is grating and aggravating, turning her character into a shrill caricature of weak femininity, another sign of the film's dismal perspective on women.

On the whole, Bonnie and Clyde is driven by the quality of its performances, by the multiple layers and nuances these actors bring to their legendary characters. The script isn't always as satisfying, and Penn's handling of this material often turns the true bank robbers' story into artificial hokum. When Bonnie first realizes that Clyde isn't a "loverboy," the script pours out a load of bullshit about how Clyde nevertheless saw something special in Bonnie — Bonnie buys it, which is realistic enough considering her insecurity and desperation to escape her small-town ennui, but Penn seems to expect the audience to buy it as well, to see this tale as a tragic love story. At its worst moments, the film verges on melodramatic myth-making, but its better instincts often win out, bringing dark wit and bracing violence to this distinctly American story of greed, adventure-lust and the romanticization of antiheroes.

Don't Look Back

D.A. Pennebaker's seminal documentary Don't Look Back remains the startling work it was upon its release: not only a revolutionary cinema verité approach to a rock tour, but one of the most intimate glimpses possible of the perpetually elusive Bob Dylan. The film was made on Dylan's 1965 U.K. tour, a pivotal moment in his career, as he began to move away from the folk movement from which he'd emerged. He'd just released Bringing It All Back Home, which featured rock instrumentation on its second side, a source of some controversy among his rabid folkie fans — at one tour stop here, a couple of young schoolgirls nervously tell him that it doesn't sound like him, that it sounds like he's only goofing around. In fact, it was no joke. This would be Dylan's final acoustic tour, and when he returned to England in 1966 it was for the electric tour that yielded one outraged fan's accusing cry of "Judas," a legendary moment. Pennebaker couldn't have known all this was coming, but it must have been apparent that Dylan was poised on the brink of something. The film captures an artist in flux, trying on different identities, experimenting with a playful sensibility that sometimes bleeds over into perversity and willful obscurity.

What Pennebaker's restless camera captures, more than anything, is a man whose personality is always shifting; Dylan is almost always performing in some way, always trying on different guises, covering up what he's thinking with strings of non sequiturs, turning interviews back on the interviewers with probing, unanswerable questions of his own. Pennebaker's handheld camerawork is perfectly suited to examining such a slippery figure; when Dylan bobs and weaves, figuratively speaking, the camera is with him, subtly zooming in to probe the intricacies of his face, his expression, trying to reveal what might be hidden behind his ever-present dark sunglasses. What Pennebaker seems to find is a guy who contains multitudes, who's many different things at different times. In unguarded moments, he sometimes seems like a kid — Dylan was 24 at the time — hanging out with friends, goofing around, telling jokes. At one point, listening to a jazz band, Dylan and several friends don dark glasses and snap their fingers, aping beatniks, laughing as they drop "hip" phrases. The Dylan who appears in interviews is someone else altogether, confrontational and aggressive and gnomic in his pronouncements. In one of the film's most prolonged scenes, a British journalist comes into the dressing room before a show and finds himself drawn into a battle of wits with Dylan and his friends, who are constantly challenging the guy, asking him questions about himself, basically asking him to defend his very existence to them.

It's amazing, and reveals a certain antagonistic streak in Dylan, a tendency to go on the attack, to prevent anybody from understanding him or pinning down anything about him. Pennebaker, by simply observing, by letting his camera unobtrusively weave through the scene, getting a rough fly-on-the-wall perspective on the singer, arguably understands much more than almost anybody else who Dylan encounters over the course of this film. He gets Dylan's need for mystery, for myth, and recognizes it as a bit of an act. He's also perceptive enough to see a different Dylan, the charming, bashful young boy who's so polite with an older British woman who comes to pay her respects, enthusing about his songs and earnestly asking him to come stay at her country mansion. There's a moment, towards the end of a particularly ornery and provocative "interview" with a reporter from Time magazine, when Pennebaker's camera zooms in on Dylan's face, capturing the bemused, playful smile dancing across his features as he answers a few questions. It reveals his famed aggressiveness towards the press as a bit of a joke, a put-on, a game to create a certain persona — Dylan's having fun with it, enjoying the clash as a sport.


If Pennebaker's film is enlightening about Dylan the man, it remains even more worthwhile for its portrayal of Dylan the musician. In rehearsals, in ad-hoc jam sessions at house parties, on stage, in loose songwriting sessions at a piano, Dylan always seems utterly focused, utterly alive, never simply tossing something off. His energy and passion for his music is obvious. If the public Dylan was always changing, always playing games, there's something dead-serious about Dylan the musician, which made that schoolgirl crack about Bringing It All Back Home kind of sting; he shrugs it off with a joke but the annoyance shows through anyway. The film is alive with Dylan's music, with snippets of concert footage; he rarely gets to play a whole song through, but Pennebaker collages together more than enough music to capture what it was like to see Dylan live on this tour. He sings through the first three verses of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" at one point, and Pennebaker films it in a closeup, because Dylan's face is very much alive when he sings, seething with the bitter irony of the lyrics. Dylan's best songs hurt, they're dangerous: the story of rich tobacco farmer William Zantzinger and poor maid Hattie Carroll is unforgettable to anyone who's heard it, because Dylan doesn't just tell the story, he brings its images to life, and he infuses it with the depth of his own outraged emotions. When he sings this song in Pennebaker's film, his face communicates everything that the lyrics do, the heartache and acute sense of injustice.

What's remarkable is that this is true even of Dylan's more elusive later songs, after he abandoned this kind of topical rant. The film closes with an equally heartfelt rendition of "Love Minus Zero/No Limits," one of Dylan's best songs from this era. Its poetic evocation of love isn't direct or representational like Dylan's earlier songs, and its images are figurative rather than visual, but it's obvious that it is no less deeply felt, that its emotions well from somewhere deep inside. The final moment of music in the film, the penultimate shot before a chatty, informal car ride, is accompanied by Pennebaker's most ostentatious camera move in the whole film. The camera, behind Dylan, floats aloft towards the high rafters of the theater, looking down at the musician within a small circle of pure white light at the edge of a dense darkness, and then the camera looks up, out at the house lights as the final notes of the harmonica fade away. It's a gorgeous moment, as mysterious and strangely poetic as anything in Dylan's songs. Pennebaker has a lyrical sense that's sometimes lost or ignored in his frenzied, off-the-cuff backstage camerawork, but that's readily apparent in his soulful closeups and the more formalist austerity with which he films Dylan's concert appearances.

Pennebaker is equally interested in Dylan's musicianship offstage, in the way any gathering with his friends might suddenly burst into song, with Dylan or Joan Baez or anyone else who happens to be around. (Though an interlude with Baez where she sings a few Dylan compositions inadvertently winds up as further proof of Dylan's artistry; despite her lilting, lovely voice, there's no escaping just how boring Baez is, how flat and lifeless her performance is, how lacking in Dylan's crucial energy and passion.) Pennebaker also evinces some curiosity about the character of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman, who with his bushy black eyebrows and big glasses and noncommittal expression is in some ways even more gnomic and inscrutable than Dylan himself: who knows what this guy is thinking? There's an enlightening scene where Pennebaker films the merciless negotiations Grossman conducts with several British promoters for a few shows, hammering away until he gets the tremendous sum he wants for Dylan. Throughout it all, Grossman shows no expression, no trace of anything; he's almost creepy, like a mob boss delivering ultimatums.

The point of the scene is obvious, of course, Pennebaker's not-exactly-revolutionary suggestion that it all comes down to commerce, that beneath all the artifice, on at least one level, Dylan's just another pop star. He's what the kids are listening to this month instead of the Beatles, as one newspaper article has it. That's part of it maybe, but Pennebaker seems to know it's only part, that there are many parts to Dylan, which is why Don't Look Back is structured as such a collage of public and private, performance and backstage, "in character" and out, rock star and folk singer and pop idol and just a guy enjoying himself and doing what he wants. All of these things are in Dylan, and all of these things are in Pennebaker's film as well.

Anticipation

[This review of a largely unknown and unavailable Jean-Luc Godard short is presented here as a plea that The Criterion Collection should include this film as an extra on one of their forthcoming Godard DVDs. It would be a very timely and appropriate inclusion for any of the Godard films that Criterion currently plans to release. If you're interested in seeing this film, write to them and tell them about it.]

Anticipation was Jean-Luc Godard's contribution to the multi-director anthology film The Oldest Profession, a collection of shorts on the theme of prostitution, with contributions by Claude Autant-Lara, Philippe de Broca and other minor French filmmakers of the time. Needless to say, Godard's segment stands out. He filmed his contribution in late 1966, not long after finishing 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, with which it shares some commonalities in theme and style. But the film Anticipation resembles more than anything else is Alphaville, Godard's futuristic take on a society that has forgotten about love. In this short, the space traveler John Demetrius (Jacques Charrier) takes a break from his interstellar journey on Earth, where the solicitous planetary government — a Soviet-American alliance, confirming that this is the distant future — provides prostitutes for all travelers who request them.

The film thus opens with a wry sequence in which Demetrius sits in an airport lounge thumbing through a catalogue of pornographic pictures, in order to choose his companion for the night. Across from him sits a young female traveler, looking through a catalogue of her own for a male prostitute. The two travelers keep casting sly sidelong glances at one another, as though appraising the other in relation to the images in the magazine. It's a sharp commentary on the increasing distance between people in a culture dominated by images, in which actual flesh-and-blood human relationships are forced to compete with glossy simulacra and media fantasies. This becomes even more apparent in the rest of the film, in which Demetrius interacts with a pair of prostitutes, neither of whom can quite satisfy him. The first girl (Marilù Tolo) is pliant and willing, stripping for him in a businesslike way and preparing for bed. But he discovers that she is unable, or unwilling, to talk, to murmur even a word to him, instead lying there inert, another incarnation of the robotic women from Alphaville.

Enter Anna Karina, Godard's ex-wife in her last role with the director (even though the feature Made in USA is usually given that credit, evidence of how sadly forgotten this great short is). Here she's playing the prostitute Natasha, who's provided to Demetrius after his complaints about the first girl. Unlike her predecessor, Natasha can talk, but it soon emerges, to Demetrius' consternation, that that's all she's able to do. It seems that the division of labor has been applied to prostitutes, who are now super-specialized so that some of them are skilled in the physical acts of love, and some of them are skilled in expressing love verbally. No one in this futuristic society brings the two acts together as a unified whole, since love itself has been thoroughly suppressed, presumably along with the other emotions. This is a witty premise, and Godard builds a very flippant conceptual sci-fi piece around it. One of the best moments is the bizarre and hilarious sequence in which Natasha and Demetrius spray one another's mouths with water from an aerosol can, a fetishized sexual display in a culture where such mechanized rituals based around consumer products provide the only possible connections between people.


In fact, the alienation of people from each other is the film's key theme, as is the increasing compartmentalization of lives: love and sex are separated, conversation and meaning amputated from one another. Natasha speaks, but she does not mean what she says. Without deeper feelings behind them, her words are empty signifiers, suggesting a love that simply isn't there. For Godard, about to plunge at the end of the 60s into an in-depth consideration of semiotics and language in films like Le gai savoir and his work with the Dziga Vertov Group, this is a hint of things to come, the fascination with the relationships between language and meaning, between gestures and ideas.

It was also meant to be a glorious formal experiment, although Godard's intentions have often not been preserved in presentations of this film. The original American release version was a dubbed and censored travesty coated with an orange filter, while the only current way of seeing the film (sourced from an unsubtitled Japanese DVD) provides an uncensored and unaltered monochrome print that nevertheless does not preserve the radical formal interventions that Godard intended. The film as he originally conceived it was to have been printed with an alternating set of colored filters layered over the image, much as he had used during the infamous Brigitte Bardot nude scene that opened Contempt (this would certainly explain the female narrator who periodically intones colors as though signaling a filter change). Furthermore, Godard apparently planned to manipulate the images so that the characters would often appear as blurred, indistinct shapes, further accentuating the alienation and disconnections of the narrative.

Even in the monochrome version of the film, Godard's formal interest in this material is preserved in the final moments, in which Natasha and Demetrius tentatively rediscover the lost art of the kiss, which is both communication and lovemaking and thus sidesteps Natasha's limitations against performing physical acts of love. It's a wonderful conceit, on a par with the rediscovery of the words "I love you" as the key to Alphaville's finale. Godard sees hope and possibility in communication and genuine interpersonal connections, and he celebrates this connection by briefly strobing to full-color shots of the couple kissing and then a closeup of Karina smiling shyly at the camera as the film ends. On the soundtrack, the tranquil, robotic female narrator finally loses her cool, desperately repeating, "negative! negative!" In one of Godard's chilliest works, this kiss is another profound romantic gesture, maybe his last until rediscovering sensuality in the 80s: love conquers totalitarian control, and a kiss proves a more powerful form of communication than any government propaganda.

Films I Love #21: Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)

Play Time is one of the most exuberant, free-spirited, formally playful tributes imaginable to the spirit of invention and humor that leads people to make their own fun in the most unlikely of contexts. Director Jacques Tati constructed a formalist masterpiece in which characters, story, and dialogue are all but absent. The film takes place in a gray urban center, a prototypical modern city — it's meant to be Paris, but it hardly matters, because as Tati notes in a sly joke involving some travel posters, globalization and industrial progress are eliminating the differences between cities. As a group of American tourists arrive, taking snapshots of office blocks while ignoring the historical Paris landmarks (which show up from time to time as ghostly reflections in highly polished windows), Tati's Monsieur Hulot character wanders aimlessly through a corporate maze, baffled by the antiseptic neatness he encounters all around him. With the film's spare dialogue almost entirely relegated to the level of background chatter with little meaning, Tati allows his images to carry the film's subtle but often hilarious humor. A businessman's precise, choreographed movements take on syncopated musical rhythms as he goes about his routine. The white flaps on a nun's habit flutter like the wings of a seagull as she walks. An apartment block is turned into a cutaway Brechtian stage like the kind Godard would later employ in Tout Va Bien; Tati uses this setup for a series of deadpan, entirely silent gags about the conformity and complacency of modern families, who settle into box-like homes and stare at their walls to watch TV.

But the film's centerpiece is undoubtedly an extended sequence set at the opening night of a high-class restaurant where the staff and designers are still putting the finishing touches on the place even as the first customers arrive. As the night goes on, the restaurant's fancy façade begins to disintegrate, as one mishap after another shatters its fragile and counterintuitive construction: the stylish chairs leave crown-shaped indentations in the customers' backs; the wooden designs above the bar block the view between the bartender and his patrons; the air-conditioning unit is located in a huge pillar that is perpetually in the way of the maître d'. Finally, Hulot himself triggers the worst of the disasters, accidentally pulling down a large section of the ceiling, which has the effect of sectioning off one area of the restaurant into an ad hoc VIP section with a boorish American tourist playing bouncer. The more the restaurant falls apart, the more the people there seem to enjoy themselves, and the staid, ordinary dinner transforms into a wild, frenetic party with a packed dance floor and little pockets of merry-making scattered around the room. Tati captures everything with his long shots, packing the frame with people, all of whom have little bits of business and subtle sight gags: there's too much to focus on at any given moment, since literally every shot is packed with visual humor and miniature narratives playing out on the fringes of the image. The cumulative effect can't help but put a grin on anyone's face, as these anonymouse city-dwellers take such great delight in subverting and destroying the pre-packaged entertainment parceled out to them, instead making their own fun by playing in the wreckage of the modern world.

Point Blank

With his snub-nosed mug, intense squint and purposeful stride, Lee Marvin is an archetypal screen tough guy, an image of brutality and stoicism carved in unflinching stone. In John Boorman's pulpy neo-noir Point Blank Marvin plays Walker, a mystery man whose first name is never revealed — always a sign of a true movie badass, for some reason. Walker is betrayed by his wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) and his best friend Mal (John Vernon) when the three hold up a money drop from a big crime syndicate. Mal and Lynne take the money, including Walker's share, leaving him for dead, but apparently not dead enough. Walker, of course, spends the rest of the movie single-mindedly pursuing Mal and the crime bosses above him. It's not about revenge, exactly, since Walker doesn't stop after he's offed Mal, and it's not even about the money, even though every time Walker's asked what he's after he simply repeats "my ninety-three thousand" as though he's a robot with a voice loop. It seems more like Walker, having lost his wife and best friend and any semblance of a life, just has nothing better to do than stomp through the defenses of mobsters and crooked businessmen, pounding on their bodyguards and gruffly demanding payment.

This is, then, the story of a man completely divorced from the world and from ordinary morality, a man consumed by a purposeless quest whose only real goal is to give him an endless supply of targets, of people to hurt. Boorman brings to this bleak, violent tale a cool, distant style deeply influenced by the hip gangster fetishism of the French New Wave, and especially the early 60s films of Jean-Luc Godard. In a perfect demonstration of the circularity of influence, Boorman imports back into the US the kind of stripped-down, alienated gangster thug who Godard had adopted from his own influences in American genre films of the 40s and 50s. Marvin's Walker is the noir hero twice removed, which perhaps explains his generic qualities, his ironic distance. He's certainly not Bogart, but nor is he Belmondo, aping the affectations of Bogart: he's something much simpler, a copy of a copy who retains only the crudest, most essential features of the original, with none of the nuance or sensitivity. He's a tough guy, but not a man of honor, a scrappy fighter not above kicking an opponent in the balls or slapping around a woman. Walker's hardly a hero, stoically and expressionlessly killing his way through the line of men separating him from a payoff that wasn't even his to begin with; he feels he deserves it by virtue of the fact that he stole it.

The only indication that Walker feels anything besides this blinkered obsession with the money that's owed him is, not in Marvin's stony mug, but in the poetic editing and sound design that allow past and present to flow into one another. Boorman switches fluidly between perspectives, cutting together scenes from Walker's initial betrayal, his later encounter with his wife, and various other incidents. This editing is often gestural: a stylized movement, the sweep of an arm or the act of peering through a curtain, will activate an associative cut to a similar movement in some other time and place. Thus Boorman's editing allows, especially, for a continuity between the dead Lynne and her sister, Chris (Angie Dickinson), who helps Walker with his mission by offering herself up to Mal, distracting him at a crucial moment. At one point, during a love scene, Boorman cuts between virtually every possible variation on the couples involved: it's Chris and Walker in bed together, but as they roll over they become Chris and Mal, Lynne and Mal, Lynne and Walker, suggesting that for Walker he and his traitorous friend are interchangeable, and all women are the same.


This would be a blunt, ugly film — and it often is anyway — if not for the cool, detached humor that Boorman brings to it. Sneaking up into Mal's apartment, Walker takes an elevator while the bodyguards are distracted by a ruckus across the street; the elevator door opens behind the guards, revealing a patient, stoic Walker, calmly waiting for the door to close again. Walker's break-in is also assisted by a pair of gay guys in an apartment across the street, who are all too eager to tie themselves up and please their captor. There's a sly, deadpan humor in all of this, a sense that Boorman is subtly undermining his merciless and seemingly unstoppable hitman. This is never more obvious than in the over-the-top scene where an overwrought Chris beats frantically on the unmoving Walker, then proceeds to run around the house turning on all the appliances and the stereo, her mocking voice coming to him over an intercom. She calls him pathetic, sad and misguided, a relic who should just lay down and die, and hearing her detached voice floating through the house, it's hard not to see her words as the director's own perspective, his condemnation of his creation.

Still, Point Blank is basically all about its gangster chic cool, the icy nihilism of Marvin's single-named killer with his silver hair and quiet determination. This killer is the essence of the film, so much so that at the end he doesn't burn out in the expected hail of bullets, nor does he get what he has been ostensibly fighting for all along; instead, he simply melts away into the shadows, as though diffusing, spreading his spirit everywhere. He's thus as present in the final silent shots of Alcatraz island as he is in the many widescreen closeups where his harsh features float in a field of blank nothingness.

Privilege

[This was originally posted at the online journal Bagatellen, where I write about both film and experimental music. This review is also archived there.]

In 1967, Peter Watkins was best known as a political provocateur who had been more or less banned from the BBC after stirring up a storm of controversy over his brutally honest semi-documentary, The War Game. The film was a savage, relentless demonstration of Britain's frightfully low level of preparedness for a nuclear assault, and more broadly a denouncement of the whole ludicrous idea that a country ever could prepare adequately for the horrors of nuclear weapons. Watkins lost his TV platform as a result, but he had established a reputation as an uncompromising maker of political and historical documentaries. Few could have expected that his first non-BBC film would be a bizarre, visually lavish piece of pop science fiction about a near-future rock star whose image is manipulated by the government, organized religion, and various powerful businesses to control the youth of Britain. Privilege follows the story of the singer and teen idol Steve Shorter (Paul Jones), who rises to fame on the strength of a violent, masochistic stage show in which he is beaten and abused by police officers, locked in a cage, and handcuffed so tightly that his wrists become raw and bloody. Somewhere in there he sings a bit, the obviously overdubbed and flatly unmusical voice perfectly matching this uncharismatic star's blank eyes and hopeless expression.

This image is perfectly calibrated by Steve's handlers to turn him into a "safe" outlet for teenage rebellion. Watkins' film predates the mass-media packaging of the punk movement by over a decade, but already he recognized the potential for music and celebrity to be exploited as a means of control. When the film opens, Steve is being used to channel destructive and rebellious impulses into venues where it will be harmless to the status quo. This is already a potent social critique, but Watkins soon goes further, imagining an elaborate conspiracy that manipulates and manages Steve to such a degree that he is used to establish a megalithic Christian/nationalist conversion of the British youth, indoctrinating them into the worship of God and country through the celebration of a pop star. The film's imaginings become increasingly absurd and wild as it progresses, but Watkins presents each new wrinkle in the plot with a disarming matter-of-factness that puts the audience in Steve's position: unable to effectively protest or react, simply sputtering at the absurdity of what's going on. The people around Steve are all heavily caricatured manipulators, none more so than his manager Alvin (Mark London), who hilariously tries to demonstrate his charity by saying that, when Steve gets a haircut, they do not sell the clippings but donate them.

Even funnier is a ridiculous scene where Steve is enlisted to do a commercial for apples, as a public service to help over-producing apple-growers unload their excess fruit on the populace. Watkins employs his signature mockumentary style throughout the film, directly addressing characters via an off-screen interlocutor. When the commercial's director answers one of these interview questions by expressing a desire to make an "existentialist" TV ad, Watkins cuts away immediately from the director's face to a surreal shot of a man in an apple costume walking through a field. This fruit with legs gradually joins up with two more, one of whom is carrying an umbrella, and Watkins holds this uncomfortably funny shot while the director's pretentious musings continue on the soundtrack. The film's style, including its habit of employing interviews that break the fourth wall of the fiction, is typical of Watkins' color films, with a bleached-out palette and a tendency to over-saturate the scene with light. Throughout, Watkins frequently populates his sets with bright spots directed head-on into the camera, an effect that contributes to the film's fuzzed-out aesthetics. The rambling, discursive form of the narrative is also typical of Watkins, though it is more tightly and traditionally plotted than later masterpieces like Edvard Munch, with its disjunctive time-shifts and fragmented editing.


In other ways, though, Watkins is in unfamiliar territory here, and his satire of popular culture is not always as sharp as when he takes on subjects he's more comfortable with. In particular, he makes some basic misunderstandings of the nature of celebrity that soften the blows he's trying to deliver. At one point in the film, the egotistical investor Andrew Butler (William Job) delivers a soliloquy about the stupidity of the mass public, their susceptibility to manipulation and their inability to think for themselves. To some extent, Watkins is guilty of holding the same point of view: he drastically overestimates the sway that popular figures can have over their audiences, believing that the screaming idol worship of rock concerts can be easily transferred into deeper socio-political realms. Watkins apparently drew much of his insight into celebrity from watching and re-watching the Paul Anka documentary Lonely Boy (included on New Yorker's DVD of Privilege), and his surface-level understanding of the phenomenon unfortunately shows through. When a conglomerate of government officials, business interests, and religious leaders conspire to transform Steve from a counterculture rebel into a God-fearing, flag-loving good boy, Watkins depicts Steve's audience as going along en masse. Watkins seems to miss the basic fragility of celebrity, not getting that the teen girls crying and screaming over a rebellious outcast wouldn't accept his abrupt one-eighty so uncritically.

Despite the imprecision of some of the satire, for the most part Privilege holds up as a remarkable, and remarkably odd, send-up of pop culture and its sometimes messianic marketing. Watkins' love of confrontational cinema leads him to stage the film's climax, the performance where Steve unveils his new religious faith and "repents" for his crimes, as a Wagnerian combination of the Olympic ceremonies, a rock concert, a Nazi rally, and an overblown religious celebration, in an era before megachurches even existed. He's most obviously inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will, here translated into the neon brightness of a pop culture happening. Watkins stages this event as a dazzling and horrifying sensory overload, with burning and lit-up crosses, a hilariously out-of-time marching band, flag-bearers with disturbingly fascist symbols held aloft, and a giant blown-up photo of Steve looking like he's about to throw up. The film is an exercise in absurdity that asks its audience to see themselves in sheep-like people, and in their ridiculous situations. At the time, this was too much to bear, and the film was widely panned and has been nearly forgotten ever since. New Yorker's DVD resurrects the film from this undeserved obscurity, allowing for its re-evaluation both as part of Watkins' now critically praised oeuvre and as a document of its period. In retrospect, looked back on from a time of ubiquitous celebrity, with powerful commercial interests pulling the strings, Watkins' lurid, overblown satire unfortunately doesn't seem nearly as implausible as it once did.

Two Or Three Things I Know About Her

Two Or Three Things I Know About Her marks a crucial stage in the career of Jean-Luc Godard. It is perhaps the first film in which he explicitly elucidates and rigorously develops an idea that had been present, in more or less implicit form, ever since he started making feature films, and which would finally become a guiding principle of his filmmaking with his late 1960s turn to political radicalism. The idea that there exists a democracy of images, that one image is no more or less valid, interesting, and worthy of note than any other possible image, is in direct contradiction of so many of the norms of modern culture that, even today, it remains a radical statement. Godard's assertion that stories and characters can be abandoned to study the leaves on a nearby tree, or the swirling rings stirred up by a spoon in a coffee cup, is radical because it steps away from the conventions of Hollywood film and the aspirations of classical art alike; both of these venerable cultural institutions aim to create images that are potent, memorable, and intrinsically interesting. Godard, who had always recognized that boredom could be just as "interesting" as activity, here goes even further, positing still more unconventional equalities: between narrative and abstraction, between beauty and the prosaic, between reality and fiction, between people and objects, and, in a clear forerunner of his later films, between sound and image.

To this end, the people in the film are subsumed by the images, their role in the film reduced by the way that Godard positions them within the frame, often with just their heads poking up from the very bottom of the image, silly bobble-head dolls disconnected from their rarely visualized bodies. Even the closeups promulgate this reduction of the human role, with the people's faces rendered faintly ridiculous by their constriction within the tight Scope boundaries. For these shots, Godard treats his frames like a French flag (the bright primary colors of which define the film's visual palette as well), divided into three equal areas, a head in the center surrounded on either side by equal portions of dead space. The image is one-thirds face, two-thirds nothingness, and the flatness of the compositions suggests a profound equivalence between the person and the nothing. It is not only that Godard considers a person and an urban landscape equally interesting, but that he sees them as reflections of one another; he finds one in the other. Forced to choose between describing the movement of leaves or the state of his main character, he flippantly uses the same word for both: they each "tremble" on a cold day. Godard introduces his heroine first as an actress, Marina Vlady, and only secondarily as the character she plays, the bored housewife and part-time prostitute Juliette Jeanson. Even the title creates these kinds of equivalencies: immediately after the words appear, Godard inserts a second title card that identifies "her" as Paris. Only secondarily, again, does a voiceover link the word "her" to the woman at the center of the picture, either Marina Vlady or Juliette.

This is the most narratively destabilized of Godard's 1960s films, in that narrative is allowed to simply fritter away. In Weekend, Godard at least gave the narrative enough respect to acknowledge that he is destroying it: the destruction of narrative becomes, itself, the narrative of the film. Here, the narrative is simply missing, as profound an absence as the mostly unfilmed bodies of the characters. When Godard's voiceover explicitly notes that he is taking a detour from the narrative in order to film a tree instead, the only possible response is, "what narrative?" Juliette has a cipher of a husband (Roger Montsoret) who listens to voices coming over the radio and takes notes, a modernist version of Jean Cocteau's Orphée who, instead of hearing poetry, hears Lyndon Johnson apologizing in a paraphrase/thievery of a 1966 Jules Feiffer comic strip about the president's "heavy heart" and unwilling bombings. She also has a pair of unruly children, a number of nearly anonymous friends, and a succession of johns with whom she never seems to consummate any transactions. That is to say, there is a lot of activity surrounding Juliette, and a lot of related characters, but is there a narrative?


What Godard offers in place of a narrative is talk, and lots of it. Not that he trusts language in itself, and one of the film's purposes is to question the stranglehold of words over things by the repetition of basic philosophical quandaries involving the naming of objects. How do we know what blue is? How do we describe a thing when everyone sees it in a slightly different way? Godard's examples are trivial — a blue shirt and a magazine seen from various angles — but his intent is entirely earnest, a desire to question even basic assumptions and thus trigger deeper thought. This questioning is achieved by fragmenting the formal unity of the film and initiating discourse on all planes of reality. Characters talk to one another, they talk to themselves, and they break character and talk directly to the camera, often while in the midst of performing the banal routines that constitute the film's only real narrative: washing dishes, putting the children to bed, shopping. Godard also talks within the film, and quite a lot, providing a whispery voiceover that sometimes comments obliquely on the action and at other times takes off on tangents of its own.

The same is true of the characters' conversations and monologues, which range freely over a wide variety of topics, from the alienation and boredom of ordinary life in an industrial society, to new designs for dresses, to the idea of courage. The talk is fast-paced and allusive — not to mention elusive — and in one scene Godard flips back and forth between two distinct conversations going on in a café, blending them through a precise shot sequence that leads from a participant in one conversation to a participant in the other. It's as though a baton has been handed off in a relay race, and the other speakers take up their turn before passing things back to the original duo. The scene is further broken down by the interjection of a third duo, who simply read random quotes aloud from a prodigious stack of books. For Godard, the exact content of all this speech is not nearly as important as its existence, the possibility that this accumulation of language might paradoxically provide a way to break through language's barriers. This hope leads Godard to another of his radically destabilizing equivalences, the privilege he grants to quotation as being on par with "original" statements. Certainly, the film quotes freely, not only from books, cinema, commercial culture, and comics, but from Godard's own previous films. The bar where the prostitute Juliette goes to hang out, with its pinball machine and large glass windows, recalls another bar and another prostitute, from My Life To Live, while the bedroom conversation between Juliette's friend Marianne (Anny Duperey) and a loutish American war photographer (the producer Raoul Lévy) is like a politicized Breathless in miniature.


The film also looks forward to Godard's future work, not only in the increasing abstraction of the narrative, but in the way he explores the themes of family, sexuality, and work in a politically radicalized context. In that respect, the film it most resembles in Godard's oeuvre is Numéro Deux, for which Two Or Three Things seems to be both a foundational primer (even providing the later film with its central metaphor of the human form as landscape) and a sexually tamer mirror image. This film's chasteness about the body, which is literally cut off from the characters for most of the film, reflects the impossibility of an honest discourse about sexuality in a context where sex has been transformed into a commodity. The film's final image, of a grassy field in which consumer products have been arranged in complex geometric patterns, suggests the maze that consumerism has made for genuine expression, trapping nature within its rigid borders. Godard makes every effort to free himself from this maze, but his treatment of sexuality is much more rigorously developed by the time of the later Numéro Deux, perhaps influenced by the additional participation of Anne-Marie Miéville. That film has none of the lasciviousness with which Godard's camera eyes a young beauty taking a bath, in a scene that purports to literalize commercialism's intrusion upon privacy and sensuality — a meter reader cheekily walks in as the girl is drying herself — but actually documents only Godard's continuing fascination with the female form.

It's a unique but telling moment in a film where the director otherwise purposefully denies himself, and his audience, these kinds of fleshy pleasures. He has made a film about prostitution which focuses on the transaction, the commerce, but never on the unseen sex. The film's scenes of prostitution are lengthy and deliberate stripteases in which the girls are mostly not actually seen taking off their clothes; Juliette especially just stands off to the side talking, to herself or the camera, rather than actually getting intimate with her clients. She's a sexless prostitute, precisely because money drains the sex even from sex itself. The American photographer (recently from Vietnam and tired of seeing so many "atrocities") forces Juliette and Marianne to enact bizarre rituals in which they put bags over their heads and run past each other repeatedly. Godard cuts from this sequence directly to a shot of construction cranes maneuvering against a pale blue sky, and the metaphor is obvious: commerce transforms sex into just another industrial commodity, a set of mechanical maneuvers that must be completed in order to enact a process. It's a theme Godard would return to, in an even more convoluted and hilarious way, in Sauve qui peut (la vie) some years later.

If Godard's distractions, detours, and abstractions here have a powerful political point to make, it's also important to note that to some extent Godard is embarking on a strategy of detours for their own sake. There are so many detours here that it's frequently difficult to remember what, if anything, is being detoured from. It's impossible to deny the obvious pleasure that Godard takes in these abstractions, as when he cuts between a closeup of Juliette and an increasingly zoomed-in view of a cup of coffee: quick, perfunctory shots of the film's star, followed by long, lingering gazes into the depths of the coffee, finding odd spiraling patterns like galaxies and bubbling supernova fissions within the liquid's smooth black surface. Each subsequent shot pushes deeper into the cup, starting from a shot where the blue-green rim is still visible and then leaping headfirst into the abstract void where the swirling patterns within the black become an entire starfield filling the screen. A shot towards the end of the film, where Godard finds volcanic depths and star explosions in the pulsating flame of a cigarette tip, is similarly loving and intense. These moments, as much as any of the film's figurative images of either people or objects, indicate Godard's profoundly political conception of the image as a liberating tool. Just as his cinema is increasingly freed from conventions of all kinds — both progressive and reactionary — so do his abstract visuals suggest a similar freedom for the viewer: the freedom to forget about the idea of a story or a character or even of a film altogether, and to simply stare into a coffee cup for a while, letting its spirals lead your thoughts where they will.

Chaotic Bodies: The Firemen's Ball Beauty Pageant (part 2)

At the Film of the Month Club, I have now posted part 2 of my visual essay about the beauty pageant sequence of The Firemen's Ball, the first part of which is here.

Continue reading part 2 at the Film of the Month Club

Chaotic Bodies: The Firemen's Ball Beauty Pageant (part 1)

In The Firemen's Ball, Miloš Forman makes extensive use of a very crowded mise en scène in order to make his points about the absurdity and chaos of collective action in socialist societies. His frames are frequently packed with people, often moving rapidly and creating chaotic compositions that reveal isolated body parts and motion-blurred imagery. And yet, although Forman is attempting to capture the sense of chaos, his compositions still have a certain formal logic to them that defies their snatched-on-the-fly quality. This is especially true in the film's sublime beauty pageant sequence, a hilarious set-up in which the contestants all flee while the men in the audience attempt to capture them and, eventually, begin dragging entirely unrelated women on stage as well. This scene is particularly well structured despite its chaotic appearance, and Forman's formal and thematic concerns show through even in the most seemingly tossed-off visuals from this sequence.

Continue reading at the Film of the Month Club

The Firemen's Ball

[This is cross-posted at the Film of the Month Club, where this film is July's title, selected for discussion by Marilyn of Ferdy On Films. I am posting this general review both here and at the Club blog, and I will also be writing some more specifically focused posts on the film throughout this month, especially for the Club.]


Made just before he left Czechoslovakia for the US, The Firemen's Ball was director Miloš Forman's first color film, his final film in his native country, and also the reason he had to leave his country in order to continue making films. It's easy to see why. The film is, quite obviously to both modern audiences and, apparently, Czech censors, a thinly veiled critique of the Czech Communist Party and, more audaciously, of the very idea of collective action that underpins socialism. This is a deadpan, hilarious satire, documenting a single night at a small-town party organized by the local fire brigade, honoring their retiring chairman on his eighty-sixth birthday (they missed honoring him on the more meaningful eighty-fifth, a year earlier, in the first of many fumbles committed by this incompetent assemblage). From the very beginning, even before the credits, Forman sets the scene for the idiocy to come, as the firemen accuse each other of stealing the prizes from the night's lottery fund, and set fire to the banner that was to hang above the hall during the ball. The fact that they're unable to even operate the equipment to put out this small-scale blaze is both the first comment on the extent of their incompetence and a bit of foreshadowing for the film's surprisingly poignant climax.

Of course, things only get worse from here. These are men who can manage to screw up the process of selecting beauty contest participants in what seems to be a ballroom positively crammed with attractive young women. Their chosen finalists are either aggressively plain or exaggeratedly awkward, like the girl who pads her bra to such an extent that her dress seems to be held away from her body on tent posts. Forman simply lets absurd scenarios like this play out in natural ways, sticking with this anonymous and ridiculous committee as they bungle their way through every aspect of the party's planning. Over the course of the evening, the table piled high with lottery gifts is slowly emptied by multiple (and unseen) thieveries, young couples copulate under tables, the chairman seems senile and lost, and keeps executing a slow, stately walk towards the stage at completely inappropriate moments, and the beauty contest itself falls apart, in one of the film's most hysterical scenes, when the contestants all get cold feet and begin fleeing.

Forman stages all this in an atmosphere of rapidly escalating chaos, as the party spirals completely out of control. His camera is intimate, casual, and perfectly attuned to the spirit of anarchic insanity running throughout this room. Indeed, Forman often seems to be taking gleeful pleasure in the lunacy going on everywhere. His mise en scène encompasses, essentially, two different visions of collectivity: the ordered committee action of the party organizers, and the wild, unfettered anarchy of the party itself. For Forman, both of these possible outcomes are equally absurd, and both are clearly tied to aspects of Communist society — just as the fire brigade stand in for the Communist Politburo, the partygoers are the proletariat, trapped within an absurd situation with absurd leaders, and forced by these circumstances to act in dishonest and despicable ways. This is a system that privileges dishonesty. Confronted with the fact that all the lottery prizes have been stolen, the fire committee decides that the people who didn't steal will just have to think of it as if there was a lottery and they didn't win. After all, everyone bought tickets; those who stole the prizes were simply the winners. When one of the committee members has an unusual attack of guilt and is caught attempting to return a stolen prize, his comrades are angry at him, not for stealing (that's expected), but for trying to return the prize, thus damaging the reputation of the fire brigade.


Forman's framing of the fire brigade inevitably enforces the point that they are nominally in charge but crippled by their indecisiveness, incompetence, and corruption. The group is almost always photographed together, seldom with the members isolated from one another for any length of time — the exception is when the one member has his moment of repentance. Most of them are not even given names. They are anonymous figureheads, an idealized group that acts together with no trace of individuality. Or so goes the Communist theory, Forman seems to be saying wryly. In practice, his head-on depictions of these men, massed into groups, projects an image exactly the opposite of the unity and collective action that is the ideal of socialist politics. As they cluster into tight formations, staring tentatively and fearfully at the camera, they look lost, like scared individuals trying to hide within the safety of a larger group. Forman's perspective, his deadpan camera angles and his objective distance from the assembled old men, gives them a pathetic quality that's heightened, not lessened, by their collectivity. It's this subversive questioning of collective action that is most radical in Forman's film, and is probably what the Czech censors responded to the most ferociously, even if it only registered with them subconsciously.

Not that "the people" make out any better here. The leadership may be idiotic, but the people they're leading are stubborn, unwilling to be led, and forthrightly dishonest. If Forman's vision of committee leadership is marked by its static angles and clustered compositions, his party scenes have a wildness and spontaneity that presents the reverse of this rigidly absurd group leadership. These scenes are chaotic accumulations of bodies whirling and flying past, often broken down so that only body parts can be seen. Individual shots focus on the legs of the dancers, or their arms and torsos in the midst of a frenetic riot, or their amassed heads in a sea as they listen to a speaker on stage. Best of all is the complete breakdown of order that accompanies the beauty contest, as the contestants run away and the crowd quickly degenerates into chaos, with crowds of guys attempting to corner the women and drag them on stage, throwing girls over their shoulders, even roping in girls who hadn't been in the contest to begin with. It's a masterpiece of completely unrestrained society, "the people" breaking loose of their inept masters and having fun watching the destruction of their social order. But Forman's editing in this scene is also surprisingly crisp, his images maintaining the perfect economy of his more structured compositions even when the stampeding revelers seem to be disrupting any semblance of order. Forman's portrait of disorder is perfectly conceived, achieved with a natural sense for visual rhythms and purely visual humor.

The Firemen's Ball is a delightful film, but also a film with a very serious heart beating beneath its surface humor. As the film's climax reveals, the incompetence of the fire brigade, which seems so comical in the context of a disastrous party, can also have serious consequences when applied to real world matters. When these bumblers are placed in charge of not a beauty contest but of public safety, the true extent of their bumbling, and its horrifying results, becomes readily apparent. This is why the sequence of the old man's house burning, placed where it is within the film, is so heartrending. As Forman cuts precisely back and forth between shots of the consuming, brilliant fire and the emotional faces of the observing crowd, the hopeless non-efforts of the firemen to extinguish this blaze are not funny, but incredibly depressing. The same could be said of the later scene where the committee members even bungle the presentation of an award to their former chairman, who is now dying of cancer. This old man's quiet dignity and patience in the face of the evening's many disasters make a mockery of the committee's ham-fisted attempts to honor him. A decent man in a corrupt system, he is entirely out of place here, and he becomes a victim as a result. This is a hilarious film, but its humor is cut with bitter satire, with a deep disgust for the absurdities of the political system of Czechoslovakia at the time.