Day For Night

François Truffaut's Day For Night is a love letter to the movies, a celebration of everything that happens on a film set, from the moment the director says "action" to the moment he says "cut" and everything that goes on around those boundaries, the personal dramas and business negotiations and constant attention to tiny details that all gets woven into the finished product of a movie. Truffaut himself plays a director making a movie, a melodramatic tragedy called Meet Pamela, and Day for Night is structured entirely around the production of the film within the film, with sporadic detours into the romantic dramas of the cast and crew, as well as the day-to-day logistical problems associated with making a movie.

The film is a love letter not just to the movies, but to a specific form of movies, the studio-bound big production. Truffaut at times seems to think he's making an elegy for a dead form of movie-making; his character, the director Ferrand, says in voiceover that this kind of movie is outdated, that from now on movies will be shot in the streets rather than on studio sets. Truffaut is offering a nostalgic look back at the movies made before the French New Wave came along, seemingly with the assumption that Truffaut and his compatriots had rendered these big productions and artificial sets obsolete. It's an elegy that, forty years later, seems more than a little premature, as Truffaut himself — who, whatever the merits of his work, hardly ever followed up on the radical promise of his shot-on-the-streets debut — should have understood very well.

Despite this misplaced nostalgia, the film is charming because it's so packed with the director's obvious love of the movies, his affection for actors, stuntmen, script-girls, props crew and makeup artists, even producers. There are countless little affectionate nods to the love of movies. The crew passes "Rue Jean Vigo" on the way to a shoot, there are references to everything from The Rules of the Game to The Godfather, and at one point Ferrand spills out a package full of books, all of them tributes to directors, including Buñuel, Hawks, Robin Wood's book on Hitchcock, even a book about Truffaut's fellow New Wave legend Godard, who had taken such a different path through the cinema, and with whom Truffaut had had a rocky relationship for years. (Godard, unsurprisingly, hated the film with its celebration of a studio-bound, craftsmanlike approach to the cinema, and the fallout from their angry letters about this film severed their friendship for good.)


Ferrand is also haunted by a dream of a boy stealing posters for Citizen Kane from a movie theater, a sign of how early in life the love of cinema manifests for these characters, and a nod to the director's continuing fascination with childhood. It's touching, even though Ferrand himself, haunted by dreams of cinematic greatness, hardly seems to be making an ambitious artistic masterpiece like Kane. Maybe Truffaut, whose own career was spotted with uneven, traditionalist love stories of the kind that Ferrand is making here, is suggesting that the charm and the pleasure of movies can be found in even some less satisfying and ambitious examples of the form. Just as Jean-Pierre Léaud's character, the actor Alphonse, is happy to go to the movies to see anything, Ferrand seems happy to be making a movie, any movie, and whether it's good or bad he'll be happy to have made it, to have created something from all this chaos and unpredictability.

Where Truffaut really excels, as always, is in honing in on little moments of searing emotionality amidst the chaos. On this set, everyone is sleeping with everyone, and while much of this plays out as typical bed-hopping farce, there's also genuine pathos in the on-set romances, particularly surrounding the production's lead actress Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) and Léaud's Alphonse. Alphonse spends much of the movie angrily pining for his girlfriend Liliane (Dani), who promises she's his but takes every opportunity to sneak off into a corner with other crew members, and finally leaves the set entirely with a departing British stuntman. Julie, trying to calm Alphonse down and prevent him from storming off the production, winds up going to bed with him, a mistake she instantly regrets when the needy, emotionally immature Alphonse (a very similar character to Léaud's Antoine Doinel) decides that he loves her and calls her husband to tell him so.

After the fallout from this has played out, the subsequent scenes of Julie and Alphonse together are infused with a somber gravity, the unscripted emotions of their private lives seeping into the script, sometimes intentionally as when Ferrand writes some of Julie's private words into the script for her character to say. One scene in particular, in which Julie walks with a candle casting a warm glow onto her features, staring straight ahead at the camera while Alphonse caresses her face, seems loaded with the emotions from the actors' offscreen affair, reverberating with the equally troubled onscreen relationship of their characters, who are supposed to be married.


There is also a great deal of emotional subtext surrounding two actors who are meant to represent the dying studio system, the old way of doing things. Severine (Valentina Cortese) was a once-great actress who now seems to be falling apart, constantly drunk on set and barely able to remember her lines or her cues. (Hilariously, she says she's used to working with Fellini in Italy, where dialogue is generally dubbed, so all she had to do was recite numbers while performing.) Scenes with her are repeatedly reshot, often becoming more and more disastrous with each take as she becomes drunker and more inconsolable over her failures. At one point, she laments that she's growing older, that her contemporary and costar Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) is still getting roles as dapper lovers, while she gets cast in thankless parts as the jilted wife. There's a feminist subtext here about the differential treatment of men and women in the movies, but Truffaut, typically, briefly hints at the idea rather than really developing it; he's interested in stories, not ideas, which is always what separated him most decisively from Godard.

Alexandre himself is the other old-guard actor who embodies the film's nostalgia for old ways of doing things. Throughout the film, he's continually relating charming anecdotes about old Hollywood, about the quirks of the star system and the gossipy behind-the-scenes chatter that flows through the movie industry. At one point, as he relates one of these anecdotes, Truffaut's camera drifts in, probing towards a closeup as this actor waxes nostalgic about the glamour and magic of movies and Hollywood stars. Soon after, Alexandre, this symbol of the old era, is dead, in an offscreen car crash that might be a nod to Godard's own tribute to moviemaking, Contempt. Indeed, Contempt is an interesting comparison point in general. Godard's film is seemingly more personal in its focus on the emotional torment and romantic drama that gets woven into the production of a movie — Truffaut's bed-hopping dramas are low-key and tangential compared to the searing power of Contempt's apartment argument centerpiece — but Truffaut's film is personal in a different way. It's personal in the way it communicates a deep love of the movies that goes beyond the particular quality, or lack thereof, of a particular movie, to extend to the whole process of making movies, good or bad, ambitious or straightforward, commercial or arty.

Indeed, this is a film about, and probably for, people who love the movies, and live the movies as well. Alphonse wonders if the movies or life are more important, but for Truffaut — as for Léaud, and in his very different way for Godard too — the movies and life are intimately interconnected. And the movies, which transmute life into art, perhaps have the advantage. In one of the film's best and truest lines, the script-girl Joelle (Nathalie Baye), upon learning that Liliane has run off with a stuntman, says earnestly, "I'd drop a guy for a film. I'd never drop a film for a guy." One suspects that Truffaut, for all the romanticism of his movies, feels similarly.

Requiem for a Vampire

Jean Rollin's fourth film, Requiem for a Vampire, was the director's most abstract and bizarre vision yet. Rollin's surreal, alternately eerie and ridiculous vampire movies had always worked according to their own distinctive anti-logic, but here, more than ever, he'd seemingly reached a new level of confidence that allowed him to eliminate narrative altogether, focusing exclusively on the languid establishment of a mood through his vibrant imagery. There's hardly even any dialogue at all, and long stretches of time go by with not a word being spoken. The result is a pure expression of the director's obsessions, a dreamlike series of disconnected scenes in which the film's two beautiful heroines wander aimlessly into (and then out of) a gothic vampire tale.

Marie (Marie-Pierre Castel) and Michelle (Mireille Dargent) are introduced in a nonsensical opening sequence in which they're dressed as clowns, fleeing from mysterious pursuers, engaged in a gun battle in which their male companion is killed. They burn the car, shed their clown makeup and baggy clothes for tiny skirts, pigtails and knee-high socks, and head off through the barren countryside. This prologue is never explained, but it sets the tone of casual absurdity that will drive the film. The film moves at a relaxed pace, the camera slowly tracking around from a distance as the two girls wander through high grass, coming across an overgrown cemetery where they curl up together under a gravestone, and eventually arriving at a stone castle that's populated with vampires.


Rollin's heroines are inquisitive and bold, and they prowl through the castle like a pair of sapphic Nancy Drews, peeking around corners with their eyes wide, investigating these ruins, pausing only briefly to roll around naked together in bed. They come across a strange tableau in which skeletons in robes have been arranged around an altar, with a vampiress (Dominique Toussaint) sitting nearby, playing the organ and leering at the girls with comically large fangs sticking out over her lips. Even when the girls begin fleeing from the vampires and their savage, caveman-like servants, the pace remains narcotized and unsettlingly slow: a chase sequence plays out clumsily in a long shot in which the girls seem to be traipsing casually through a field of flowers while the vampires slowly advance in the distance. Rollin leaves large gaping ellipses that create a subtle sense of disorientation: after one caesura, the girls appear staring numbly ahead, vampire bats affixed to their necks, and then after another cut the bats are simply gone and the girls are left with twin red marks on their necks.

Rather than telling a story, Rollin seems to be working out his symbolism and fetishism of the vampire mythology at a purely primal, sensual level. The leader of the vampires keeps women chained in the basement of the castle, where they're raped and bitten by the vampires and their servants in an over-long and very gratuitous sequence, bathed in red colored lights as the women writhe around on their chains, culminating with a vampire turning into a bat to nestle in the pubic hair of one of the women. Rollin revels in this kind of outlandish imagery, celebrating the gothic sensuality of the vampire legend. During the arcane rituals at the film's climax, a vampire plays the piano in a graveyard while the two girls are led off one by one to be "initiated" by the male vampire, who can only transform virgins into his kind.


The film is a riff on sexuality and virginity, presenting a warped vision of the sexuality often associated with vampires. The two heroines, set to be inducted into vampirism, react in very different ways: while Michelle gives into her new vampiric thirsts, luring a man to the castle by stripping for him before she feeds on him, Marie finds a man as well but just has sex with him and then hides him away, telling the vampires that she couldn't find a victim. Rollin is reversing the usual hypocritical puritanism of so many horror movies, in which women who have sex are inevitably consumed by the movie's evil in the end. Here, it's the virgin who's corrupted, who gives into vampirism, while Marie, because she's no longer a virgin, retains her humanity and refuses to drink blood. Rollin isn't really interested in the love story, though, and at the film's climax, Marie's lover abruptly (and rather comically) gets sick of all this supernatural weirdness and runs off, leaving the two girls to escape together, reunited after the split caused by their different attitudes about vampires and sex.

That's a typical happy ending for Rollin, the girls wandering off into another adventure, leaving behind the rather melancholy and self-destructive vampires in their decrepit graveyard. Throughout the film, the girls flirt with the supernatural, with death and decay, and experiment with their sexualities, and then reaffirm their friendship and leave the darkness and the blood behind, presumably to return to their "ordinary" lives of dressing like clowns while engaging in shootouts and high-speed car chases.

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.

High Plains Drifter

Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter is a rotten, ugly, disgusting movie, a descent into Hell in every way. It is a disturbing moral vacuum of a movie, a vision of complete societal breakdown that wallows in non-stop muck and grime for most of its running time. It doesn't start that way, though, as the opening sequence introduces Eastwood's unnamed drifter in a way that quite consciously recalls the spaghetti Westerns he made with Sergio Leone in the 60s, the films that established Eastwood as a Western icon. The opening is slow and methodical, as the drifter — he's credited as "the stranger," and remains one throughout the movie — rides over lush green countryside into the town of Lago, entering the town through a cemetery, the gravestones of which are highlighted in the foreground of the shot as the horse stomps between them, a staggeringly obvious premonition of what's to come. The setting itself is unique, a seaside town (shot in California) that surreally looks like a ramshackle Western way-station on the edge of a beach. The music sets the tone, too, an eerie whining drone that evokes Ennio Morricone's Leone soundtracks with more of a sinister edge; one isn't sure if a flying saucer is going to land or if a lot of people are simply about to die or, perhaps, if a ghost is riding into town.

Once the stranger enters the town, Eastwood puts the emphasis on the repetitive sounds of the town, as everyone simply stares silently as the rider passes by. There's no dialogue, only the rhythmic chuff, chuff, chuff of the horse's hooves kicking up dust on the dry road and then, when the stranger dismounts, the clang of his spurs and the hollow reverberation of his boots on the wooden planks of the saloon's front steps. After this evocative opening, which so thoroughly sets the scene and suggests that this film is a self-conscious response to Eastwood's spaghetti Western background, the film's story kicks into action and it becomes clear that, if this is a response to the spaghetti Western, it's strictly in negative terms. It's as though Eastwood set out not only to deconstruct his screen persona, but to drag it through the mud and totally destroy it, to tear it into shreds.

This stranger is recruited by the people of Lago to defend against a trio of outlaws who are returning to exact vengeance on the townspeople for sending them to jail, a familiar setup derived from multiple Western antecedents. Throughout the film, flashbacks and contrived dialogue scenes fill in the details of the town's past, suggesting that it's an utterly corrupt place with some very dark secrets. Eastwood's stranger appears to nudge this vile place a few steps closer to the abyss, acting as a kind of moral arbiter and judge of these disgusting, cowardly people, even though this stranger is equally monstrous. In particular, the film's attitude about rape is absolutely unforgivable and horrifying, as several scenes suggest that not just one but two women are forced into sex with Eastwood's character and wind up enjoying the rape and even in some ways actively pursuing the drifter. It's played, more or less, for laughs, as when one of the women returns to, quite understandably, take a few shots at the drifter for what he did. The stranger asks why it took her so long to get upset, to which the stranger's midget sidekick (Billy Curtis) replies that maybe she was just upset that he hadn't come back for more, which is a pretty appalling laugh line by any measure. Eastwood's character is portrayed as such a smirking badass that these women, though initially resistant, come to enjoy his attentions even when he forces himself on them. It's despicable, and makes it especially hard to take too seriously the film's moralist judgment of the other characters for their various hypocrisies and sins.


Indeed, by the end of the film the whole town has descended, quite literally, into Hell. Eastwood's drifter, using his position of power as their only defender to take control, reorganizes the town, orders all the buildings painted red, and paints over the town's name on the sign outside town with the inscription, "Hell." Yeah, it's not a very subtle movie. There's a kind of awful impact to many of the film's images, particularly when Eastwood exploits the slightly surreal setting of this beachside Western town. In one scene early on, Eastwood strides through the town and the camera tracks along with him, the bright blue of the sea shining through the glass whiskey bottle that the stranger is taking swigs from. Later, the town becomes truly hellish, with all those red buildings and flames everywhere, with the stranger himself as a kind of devil pronouncing his verdict on nearly everyone in the town. It's almost beautiful in its horrible way, especially when Eastwood's familiar silhouette is framed in black against the bright orange flames.

The film betrays a sadistic, nasty-minded sensibility, assaulting the audience with horrific images like a lengthy flashback (repeated several times) of a man being whipped to death in the center of the town. Each time the scene recurs, it goes on for an uncomfortable amount of time, with an emphasis on the sound of the whips thumping into flesh, while streaks of bright red movie blood run across the dying man's face and torso. The townspeople all look on, passively allowing this horror to happen, and Eastwood's aesthetic forces the audience into a similar passivity, forced to endure the sounds of the whips drawing blood for what seems like an endless span of time. Eastwood wants to rub the audience's faces in the violence, like a cinematic punishment, but he repeats the whipping sequence so many times, and lets it run for so long, that it goes beyond grating into simply boring.

Eastwood's character, though a sociopathic monster and a rapist, is the film's moral center, which says a lot about what a morally bankrupt movie this is. He's meant to be the voice of conscience who rides into town and exacts vengeance on these people who once stood by and watched while a man was killed. The revenge theme provides a justification for everything that happens subsequently, especially since the finale draws an explicit link between the unnamed drifter and the dead man, even suggesting, as the stranger fades away into a hazy mirage in the desert, that he's the reincarnation of the noble murdered man. The film keeps implying that, while what the stranger does is despicable, in some ways these people deserve what they get, that they were asking for it. That's precisely the film's attitude about rape, for sure, and what the stranger does to the town as a whole is akin to rape as well, the violation of the community as an entity. The stranger comes into town and rapes, not only the women, but the town as a whole, and the film suggests that maybe this is alright. The filmmaking frames most of the stranger's behavior as a big joke, with Eastwood's self-satisfied smirk as the rimshot following the punchline. Eastwood encourages the audience to laugh along with the stranger as he humiliates, punishes and torments the townspeople in revenge for their own horrible deeds.

Don't Look Now

Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now is a chilling and mysterious film, a ghost story in which John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) are haunted — literally or figuratively, it hardly matters — by the drowning death of their daughter Christine. Shaken by the tragedy, they close up their home and move to Venice, where John engages himself in his work as an expert on restoration, working on a crumbling church, while they attempt to put the memories behind them, to go on with their tragically changed lives. Instead, their grief and their fear are only intensified, magnified by the grotesque Gothic atmosphere of the city itself, with its shadowy mazes of corridors and its dark, dank waterways that hide the corpses of murder victims, as a killer stalks the city, dumping bodies into the canals to be dredged up as reminders of the watery grave the couple's daughter was lost to. If it seems like an almost absurdly bad idea to get over the drowning death of one's child by moving to a city in which water is omnipresent, the film very quickly makes it seem even worse, like a fatal mistake.

The city of Venice becomes a place of ancient, creeping terrors. John's work forces him to delve into the past, to restore the decayed artifacts of history to their former glory, which means that his work is a poignant metaphor for what he is utterly unable to do in his own life. Against the permanence of death is juxtaposed the work of restoration, of creating modern-day replicas to imitate the past. Several times, John repeats, like an angry mantra, that his daughter is dead, reinforcing the finality of it, the inability to reverse that event the way he's able to reverse the decay of a church's mosaics and statues by filling in the missing places with tiles fabricated to resemble those of the past. The past seems to taunt John: at one point, hoisting a gargoyle up onto the façade of the church, he comes face to face with the grotesque creature, its yawning mouth close to his face, as though poised to hungrily kiss him. He is uncomfortably intimate with the past, with its horrors and its ugliness, and this moment will reverberate in the film's startling ending, as though it was a premonition of John's eventual confrontation with the face of evil.

Laura deals with the tragedy in a different form, strangely comforted by the intervention of a blind psychic (Hilary Mason) and her sister (Clelia Matania). The psychic tells Laura that she sees Christine with them, that the little girl is sitting between her parents, still in the red raincoat she drowned in, happy and laughing as though nothing had happened. It's against this possibility — and the warnings and prophecies that the psychic says the little girl is delivering to her parents — that John offers his repeated and insistent reminders that their daughter is dead, that she is gone for good, that no messages or omens can come from beyond the grave. John, an engineer and a man of books, is rational and worldly, even though his work requires him to come into contact with the sublime and the spiritual on a daily basis. The grandeur of the churches, the sinister menace of the gargoyles, the fragmented images of spiritual scenes in various states of disrepair, these signifiers of the otherworldly do not touch John beyond the physical, tangible necessities of his work.

The strange atmosphere of this film is enhanced by Roeg's associative editing, which often brings together discrete places and actions with parallel editing rhythms. In the crisply edited opening minutes of the film, Roeg cuts back and forth between John and Laura inside and their two children, playing outside by the small pond in the lush green space around their country home. The editing connects parents and children, as a gesture begun by the daughter (throwing a ball) is completed by John as he throws a projector slide to Laura. The editing subtly injects a sense of creeping dread into the sequence, particularly in the visual rhymes between the daughter's bright red raincoat and the mysterious figure in red who John finds in one of his slides of an Italian cathedral. Roeg quietly calls attention to the subtle strangeness of this figure, even creating a split screen effect by placing the slide, projected on a screen, on the right side of the frame, with the black border of the screen separating the image from Laura, seen from behind, reading by the fire. A little later, when John spills water on the slide, the red runs, like blood tracing a curved path across the slide, spreading out across the image, which triggers John's abrupt certainty that something terrible is happening outside.


The inexplicable, slowly building sense of dread established in this opening sequence gradually seeps throughout the entire film; the menace seems to emanate from nowhere and everywhere, creating an un-centered feeling of terrible things lurking just below the surface. Something just seems off about everything, from John's employer, a bishop (Massimo Serato) who projects the aura of an Old World gangster, to the police investigator (Renato Scarpa) who John goes to see when he believes that his wife has gone missing, kidnapped by the psychic and her sister. The inspector listens to John's concerns with abstracted disinterest, absentmindedly doodling on a police sketch until the drawing resembles a monster — and looking out the window and actually seeing the sisters who John is trying to find. These kinds of weird scenes contribute to the sense that the film is just weird at its core, that there's something unsettling and horrible in the very air of the film, in the space between the characters, in the odd disjunctions of the editing. At one point, Roeg inserts a scene of the psychic and her sister in their room, cackling hysterically like a pair of witches, a scene that is otherwise completely unmotivated, which simply adds to the unresolved horror that Roeg is developing here.

That horror is interrupted by a very explicit and surprisingly tender love scene that suggests that the couple's grief may yet be healed, that the sense of approaching doom may yet dissipate. The sex scene is cut together with shots of the couple dressing afterward and getting ready to go out, the shots alternating quickly. A shot of sex, passionate and intense, then a shot of one of them putting on their clothes, or Laura putting on her makeup, smiling as she remembers their earlier romp: two different visions of domestic tranquility, blended together into a portrait of marital love in bed and out. Time becomes fluid, and through the magic of the editing these obviously separate activities are brought together as part of the same sequence. In a later scene, when Laura is with the psychic, who's trying to contact the couple's daughter, Roeg cuts together this scene with shots of John searching for his wife, and the cuts give the impression that the couple is looking at one another even though John never finds his wife. If the sex scene's editing suggests intimacy and domesticity, this scene suggests exactly the reverse, creating only the illusion of connection while the couple remains hopelessly separated, a prediction of the miscommunication and geographic dislocation that marks the second half of the film.

At times, the odd tone of the film even spills over from discomfort into offbeat comedy. When John walks into the police inspector's officer, Roeg films the large, mostly empty room from John's perspective, with the inspector behind his desk with a lamp positioned so that its shade seems to be taking the place of his head, until the man peeks around the corner and greets John. It's such a surprisingly playful image, particularly in light of the disconnected tone — as though the two men are talking past one another — of the subsequent scene. Roeg also builds some peripheral comic business around the employees of the hotel where the Baxters are staying. In one scene, John arrives back in the room to find a maid using the toilet in the room, then apologetically placing a magazine back in a stack by the door, shrugging as she walks by. There's also the hotel manager who's always chattering in Italian, sometimes seeming to make fun of the Baxters to his staff while remaining solicitous to their faces.

Such diversions in tone only contribute to the film's kaleidoscopic spiral into madness, which culminates in the frenzied editing of the creepy climax, in which memories and moments from throughout the film are collaged together in a way that suggests that answers are popping into place, even though in fact the mysteries all remain intact and are even deepened by the unpredictable conclusion. Roeg's film resists easy answers, fragmenting the narrative with the editing and allowing a languidly drifting sense of fear to wind through the film like the fog that churns underfoot during the climactic chase through Venice's back alleys. This eerie, haunting film never explains or resolves its many mysteries, leaving only an intangible horror that lingers long after the film is over.

World on a Wire

World on a Wire is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's mind-bending sci-fi epic, a two-part, over three-hour examination of the nature of reality, thought and perception. Based on Daniel Galouye's sci-fi novel Simulacron 3, the film is concerned with the creation of simulated computer worlds, populated with synthetic, programmed beings unaware that they're living in a virtual reality rather than a tangible flesh-and-blood world. Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) is appointed to become the technical director for this "simulacron" computer system after the project's previous administrator seemingly has a mental breakdown before dying in an accident. Almost immediately, however, Stiller is subjected to tremendous pressures and odd incidents relating to the computer and the company he's working for. There's some kind of industrial intrigue going on — the company's director, Siskins (Karl Heinz Vosgerau) wants to use the computer to benefit his corporate friends — and bizarre events make Stiller doubt his own sanity. A man (Ivan Desny) tries to tell Stiller about the strange circumstances of his predecessor's death, only to disappear into thin air — and soon enough, no one even remembers that this man ever existed. Stiller experiences other strange visions, and is beset by crippling headaches almost constantly, quickly developing a paranoid outlook that encompasses nearly every moment of his day and everyone he meets.

It's obvious enough where all of this is heading, even before Fassbinder explicitly states the twist in the final scene of the first part. Yet the film's careful study of the layers of reality remains engrossing, because Fassbinder's visual mastery is at its highest level here. There is little in the plot to justify the film's length, and the characters are, for the most part, doll-like ciphers prone to staring emptily into space, posing within Fassbinder's meticulously arranged compositions, caught in frames of mirrors, remaining static as the camera turns circles around them. Fassbinder underlines the film's central theme of perception by continually distorting and reflecting his images, emphasizing how what we see is dependent on the angle from which we're looking. In the film's opening scenes, Stiller's predecessor Vollmer (Adrian Hoven) accosts two government representatives, asking them to look at themselves in a handheld mirror and describe what they see. They are not really themselves, he says, they are just images, images imagined by other people. Even beyond the film's sci-fi premise, this idea resonates: each person is the culmination of images created and maintained in the minds of others, and what we see when we look in the mirror is not necessarily what others see when they look at us.


To this end, Fassbinder inventively packs his film with mirrors and distortions. In his melodramas, such devices are stylized routes into character, picked up from Sirk, a way of positioning characters in abstracted relationships to one another, capturing two reactions in the same frame. Here, the perpetual mirroring emphasizes how fragile vision is, how easily it is subjected to distortions. When Stiller goes to see Siskins one afternoon in the latter's office, Siskins has a tremendous glass funnel perched on top of his desk. The curved glass distorts Siskins' face, rendering him at times multi-eyed and blurry, almost insectile, his smirk stretched out so that it seems to stretch across his entire face. It's a subjective image of Stiller's boss, a collection of attributes rather than a coherent image of a face. In the reverse shot, when Fassbinder turns the camera onto Stiller instead, his face is reflected in the shiny surface of the desk, but chopped in half, only his eyes looking out hauntingly as though trapped within this reflective prison, his mouth and the lower half of his face cut off by the desk's edge. The boss is distorted and magnified, his all-seeing eyes multiplied, while the employee is made voiceless and trapped; the mirrors don't lie.

Unless, sometimes, they do. Later Siskins visits the computer lab — with its funhouse mirror walls and clusters of TV screens — to watch a computer doppelganger of himself perform a song-and-dance routine as programmed by Stiller. Fassbinder frames the image so that we see the the TV monitor, and Siskins' warped reflection next to it, and layered on top of this, Siskins' back as he watches the screen. It's a man and, essentially, two false doppelgangers of himself, one computer-created and one a blurred reflection of himself stretched out across the wavy surface of the wall. Still another form of mirroring exists in the scene where Stiller goes to visit his sick secretary Maya (Margrit Carstensen). She is lying down, looking at herself in a mirror to put on lipstick, but because the mirror is two-sided, the side facing the camera actually reflects the offscreen Stiller. One side of the mirror then presumably shows her, while he appears in the other, so that the mirror becomes a link between them, their reflections joined like the image of Janus, two sides of the same head. The mirror divides and distorts, it reveals the truth, it connects people and shatters the illusion of a smooth, tangible reality. When Vollmer dies at the beginning of the film, he is seen through a sheet of cracked glass, as though reality itself has been broken by his departure from it.


Fassbinder makes these examinations of sensation and perception the film's true focal point. The ostensible thriller plot is inert, and the corporate intrigue simply seems irrelevant, to the point that when Stiller finds out the answers to questions relating to the corporate politics, rather than the more metaphysical mysteries he's really interested in, he simply laughs. There is an analogue here for those religious and philosophical ideas that insist that the world is essentially an illusion, or at best a warm-up for the afterlife. If the world is not real, or is only a secondary stage of reality, if the "true" life is on a higher plane of reality, it renders the physicality and events of the world somewhat moot. Once Stiller begins to believe that his world is only an illusion that's secondary to another world, he ceases to care about any of the things had previously occupied his attention: job, friends, love, even life and death itself. Does the world become irrelevant in comparison to the idea of Heaven? This would explain Stiller's "ascent" at the finale of the film.

So Fassbinder makes the whole film one big visual metaphor, his camera moves mapping out Stiller's quest for truth. During a meeting with Siskins and a government official, Stiller wanders around the large space of the office, swinging around on a chair in the foreground, then flinging open a pair of unusual double doors, the kind usually seen between neighboring suites in hotels. Finally, he appears again at the rear of the space, visible only from a distance in a mirror. It's like he's constantly searching, always peeking behind the doors, into closed-off rooms. He does a lot of spinning around in chairs too, like a bored and restless kid, eager to discover something new, or simply a man who wants to see the fullest possible 360-degree view of his surroundings. In one of the film's most playful scenes, Siskins and Stiller conduct an entire conversation while they're both spinning around in their chairs, rendering office politics goofy and funny.

These oddball touches, like a dance club populated with muscular Arab models and topless dancers, give the film its distinctively surreal Fassbinderian aura. It's a weird and disjointed film, perhaps a little repetitive, padded out with multiple scenes of Stiller trying to explain his theories to skeptical listeners. But the characters, flat as they are, make an impact, because Fassbinder has developed such a versatile troupe of actors that even when most of them are just making token cameo appearances (Eddie Constantine as a dapper but sinister businessman; Kurt Raab as Stiller's bald, oafish office rival; El Hedi ben Salem as a quiet, sensitive bodyguard) they are vivid and memorable. This is a fascinating experiment from Fassbinder, transplanting his usual cast and his Sirkian aesthetic strategies into the unfamiliar genre of the sci-fi thriller, with very compelling results.

Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave

Alexander Kluge's Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave is a film that probes just how difficult it is to understand the complex workings of politics and society, and to make a difference, when society and its structures are designed to eat up so much of a person's time and energy. The film's title itself implies as much: Roswitha (Kluge's sister and frequent star Alexandra) is the "domestic slave," a housewife who must divide her time between caring for her three children and her verbally abusive husband Franz (Bion Steinborn) and working to provide for them, leaving little time for thoughts or concerns outside of family life. The film is divided roughly in half, reflecting two different definitions of Roswitha's "part-time work." In the film's first half, she works as an illegal underground abortionist since Franz has no job and she must support the family. In the second half, after Roswitha's practice is shut down and Franz is forced to get a job, she becomes involved in social and political matters, trying to learn about the world outside her family. Her part-time work thus shifts, over the course of the film, from the need to provide for her family's physical and material needs, to the freedom and time to develop her own thoughts and ideas independently of the family. It is seen as an essential trade-off: when Franz isn't working, he's free to read and think, to study with no clear purpose in sight, but once he has to get a job he all but disappears from the film. By the same token, when Roswitha stops working, her mind becomes active and engaged, and she has time to develop an interest in things happening outside of the home, outside of her immediate scope.

What Kluge is interested in here is how segmented people's lives are, how people are forced, by society's demands, to split up their lives between home and work, unable to reconcile these two separate areas. Early on, the narrator intones, with deadpan irony, "to afford more children of her own, Roswitha carries out abortions." Roswitha, of course, doesn't see the irony, doesn't understand the profound contradiction between work and home contained in this simple statement. This announcement is followed by an extraordinarily detailed abortion scene, after which, once she's dumped the tools and the little blood-encrusted fetus into a metal pan, Roswitha takes a sip of tea and offers her patient a shot of liquor. It's all so casual, so offhand; it's obvious that Roswitha turns her mind off during these procedures. She's not in this profession for radical reasons, she's not doing it to help the women who come to her (though that's part of the rhetoric she uses when talking about it), she's doing it as a way to provide for her family, as a job like any other.

This all changes once police interest forces Roswitha to drop her profession, and Franz goes to work for the family instead. Roswitha, along with her friend Sylvia (Sylvia Gartmann), becomes involved in politics and social issues, though they aren't quite sure where to start at first. Their journey into these issues ranges from a distanced observation of official announcements and policies, to analysis of media reports, to trying to find understanding through art (they memorize a Bertolt Brecht song from a record), to finally becoming directly engaged and seeing things for themselves, hands on and face to face. It is, in essence, a journey into the world, struggling through the barriers and layers of representation erected by society, heading back into the direct experience of reality. Roswitha finds no satisfaction on an official tour of "the social situation," accompanying some politicians (almost all white, older men) as they spout rhetoric and she simply watches silently. She also finds no answers in the newspapers, because she quickly realizes that what she considers important issues — matters that directly affect people's families and children, matters that affect working conditions — are of no interest to newspaper editors, who reserve the front page for staid political news. Roswitha and Sylvia wind up storming out of a newspaper's office, enraged by the editors' inability to care about real people and their struggles.


Roswitha's struggle to understand, to have an impact on the world, eventually leads her to more direct, radical political engagement, trying to excite workers into revolting against unfair practices. Her engagement has its roots, as does everything for her, in the family: her husband's company is rumored to be shutting down its plants and moving to Portugal for cheaper labor, so she fears her husband will lose his job. From here, Roswitha becomes involved in labor and union negotiations, engaging in increasingly radical acts. She breaks into the company's offices looking for proof that they're going to move to Portugal, she distributes pamphlets to the workers, she meets with union leaders who seem to lack her passion and prefer a slow, steady approach. Finally, she goes to Portugal herself and sees the building site, with crates clearly marked with the company's name; she has her proof, because she has seen it with her own eyes. Kluge films this as a moment of peace and, almost, transcendence. There is a sublime hush as Roswitha stands in front of the crates overlooking a grassy field where, presumably, the new factory is to be built. This is the moment when Roswitha has come back into contact with reality, experienced directly and without mediation; she has seen it for herself rather than relying on documents or rhetoric or newspaper accounts or conflicting rumors. It is difficult to get to this point, Kluge stresses, but very much worth it; afterward, Roswitha smiles with genuine satisfaction, even before she knows if her work has actually made any difference. It hardly matters as much as the fact that she has shed her reliance on others and experienced something of significance for herself.

The balance between this engagement with the world and the demands of family is at the heart of the film. The idea that one's family is all that matters — stressed as a supreme value of society — can, for Kluge, actually be an impediment to caring about or understanding the wider world, to embracing and feeling empathy for the needs and problems of all people rather than just one's immediate family and friends. And yet Roswitha's social and political activism originates with the family: she is driven to make things better for her family, and to do so she must become involved in matters outside of the family. It is a central and irresolvable paradox, one that Roswitha never quite overcomes. For one thing, no matter how much she learns in her new ventures, no matter how much she accomplishes, she is never able to throw off the oppressive influence of her unappreciative husband Franz, who remains nasty and judgmental to the end.

Still, Roswitha is clever and inventive in making a place for herself outside the home, using her ingenuity to circumvent the strictures of a society that doesn't have much use for a woman outside of the home. In one of the film's funniest scenes — and as always with Kluge, there's a certain absurdist humor at work in his socio-political satire — Roswitha is confronted by police seals placed on the locks of her clinic. The seals read, "any unauthorized person tampering with these seals will be prosecuted," but this won't stop Roswitha. She pays a man for his dog, and lives up to the letter of the law, if not its intent, by having the trained dog open the door with its paws; thus, no person tampered with the seals. It's hilarious and absurd, and in many ways absurdity is what's required for someone who wishes to move within the confines dictated by this social situation.

To this end, Kluge structures his film as a collage, incorporating paintings, clips of old movies, and interludes taken from children's storybooks, all of these inserted elements commenting obliquely on Roswitha's story. At the pivotal moment when Roswitha makes her decision to become involved in matters outside of the family, Kluge inserts a montage of shots of the wind blowing through branches or causing ripples in water: grainy and damaged images from older movies, poetically suggesting a change in the air. Some of the other film clips come from war movies, including one in which a soldier says that he can do anything, that's he essentially limited only by his lack of knowledge about foreign languages. These clips suggest that Roswitha lives in a man's world, where political matters are often decided by strong-willed men on distant battlefields, far from her prosaic world. Kluge similarly uses art and culture to define Roswitha's place within a long and perhaps overbearing cultural legacy: snatches of classical music frequently score scenes, while paintings show women as always being in the home, caring for children, doing domestic chores. Culture and society show no other options; Roswitha has to create them for herself.

Les noces rouges

[This is a contribution to the Claude Chabrol Blog-a-Thon currently running at Flickhead from June 21 to June 30. For ten days, Flickhead will be dedicated to the works of the French New Wave master, and I'll be following along with many reviews of my own.]

To watch the films of Claude Chabrol is to become aware of the boredom and triviality of everyday life — and not just aware, but acutely sensitive, attuned to the daily, all too ordinary frustrations of strangled communication and deadened sensual impulses. His characters often seem to be sleepwalking, going through the motions, stoically living out clichés and genre conventions rather than thinking for themselves, acting for themselves, crafting a genuinely new and satisfying existence for themselves outside of the norm. Such is certainly the case with the central characters of Chabrol's Les noces rouges, who live out a generic tragedy and then, when it's all over, when everything has come to its predictable and devastating end, they admit that they never considered the alternatives, that it never even occurred to them that they could do anything else. Of course not; they are characters in a film that is, at least superficially, a thriller, and their actions are constrained by convention. Like puppets, they act out their predictable drama, murdering and deceiving in order to get what they think they want. This is all they can do. Chabrol's genius is to constrain his audience as well; it never occurs to us, watching the film, that there are any other possibilities, that there is anything outside the world we see onscreen. Thus the film's final lines are stunning in their anticlimactic brilliance, a shock to the system: you mean this didn't have to happen this way? Chabrol, for his part, delights in tricking us this way, but also despairs at the blindness and shortsightedness of those unwilling or unable to think for themselves.

The film's central couple is the small-town deputy mayor Pierre Maury (Michel Piccoli) and Lucienne Delamare (Stéphane Audran), the wife of his boss, the mayor Paul (Claude Piéplu). Pierre and Lucienne are desperately in love, or at least that's what they think. Actually, they hardly say a word to one another that isn't about sex or waiting for sex or planning to have sex. When they meet for a rendezvous, they rush at one another, violently pawing at each other's bodies, mashing their lips together, biting each other. They are passionate, nearly nymphomaniacal in their desires, and their love sessions are almost comical in the extremity of their lust. It's like watching a fierce bumper car battle between Piccoli's slightly bulky, barrel-like torso and Audran's slender, shapely frame. But for the sake of movie conventions, they're in love, and this is what love looks like, ungainly and unrestrained as it is.

Despite this passionate affair, Lucienne is held back by Paul, who is often out of town and interested only in his ambitions but nevertheless gets in the way of her complete happiness, while Pierre is held back by his sickly wife Clotilde (Clotilde Joano), a depressed and depressing woman who seems to be slowly fading away from the world by will. It's obvious what's in store, at least in the broadest sense. After all, what always happens in movies to those unlucky enough to be married to straying spouses? But Chabrol does not focus on the expected plotting and double-crossing and foul play. He's more interested in the substance of daily life. So he observes, in patient silence, the numbing dullness of Pierre and Clotilde's dinner table, as they sit quietly, slurping soup, not talking to one another. He observes too the nighttime activity at the Delamare home, where Lucienne and her daughter Hélène (Eliana de Santis) watch TV, the bluish light flickering over their stony faces and blankly staring eyes. Chabrol understands boredom, understands routine and disinterest and unthinking time-wasting. These moments of emptiness are an especially vivid contrast against the messy, emotional, awkward passion of Lucienne and Pierre's many trysts.


Chabrol, that old romantic at heart, seems to enjoy the goofy, childish pleasure that these two middle-aged burnouts take in one another; they'd both seemingly given up on life, gotten used to their own personal hells and settled in to simply exist, to survive from day to day. But when they're together they wake up, they have fun like teenagers. In the evenings, they sneak into a local chateau, a tourist destination during the day, and make love in the antique beds scattered about the premises, popping champagne bottles so that a shower of foamy bubbles sprays across the face of a priceless old painting. Later, when Pierre is at work as a member of the local government, he listens with an exaggeratedly innocent look on his face as several citizens complain about the "kids" who deface the chateau and use it as a meeting place for sexual trysts. Pierre and Lucienne are like kids together, enjoying themselves and each other, hiding naked in the bushes after one close call, giggling and cuddling together even as they recover from almost getting caught by a passing boat.

Of course, this idyll cannot last, and it is disturbed most thoroughly by Lucienne's husband Paul, a bizarre caricature of a pompous politician. Chabrol loves dealing with caricatures, with exaggerated types, with the ultimate example of a form he despises. Paul is every bit an overblown type rather than a full character, much like Jean Yanne's equally despicable Paul in Que la bête meure. He serves the same role as that earlier Paul, a convenient target for the main characters' hatred, a man drained of every ounce of decency. With his cackling, high-pitched voice and cheerful amorality, this Paul is strangely sinister, all the more frightening because he never lets his courteous, strenuously polite façade drop. He smiles and shakes hands and speaks about friendship and happiness, even as the subtext of his words carries a more subtle threat, a subdued and implied indication of the consequences for crossing him.

One interesting element of Chabrol's work is the way the same names recur again and again from film to film. The names Charles, Paul and Hélène weave all through his work of the late 60s and 70s, the names rotated and shuffled around into various configurations of husbands, wives, lovers, killers, victims. Les noces rouges introduces an interesting wrinkle into this conceit in that Stéphane Audran for once does not play the role of Hélène, the name she was almost always given in her films of this period for her then-husband Chabrol. Instead, the name passes on to the daughter of Audran's character, with whom Lucienne shares a strange, conspiratorial chemistry. When they're together around Paul, they smile slyly, as though sharing some secret together, privately making fun of Lucienne's husband (who isn't Hélène's father but her stepfather). There's also a stunning scene towards the denouement of the film in which mother and daughter mournfully place their heads together, accentuating the striking similarities between the two actresses, who really do look like they could be related. One senses that Hélène will grow up to be like her mother, discontented and unimaginative, still staring blankly at the TV. This generational continuity gives meaning to the shifting of names, Chabrol's eternal Hélène reincarnated in a younger form, the cycles of boredom and infidelity and violence and betrayal all starting anew. This impression is omnipresent in Chabrol's work: the paradox that while the cycles of bourgeois stupidity and violence are endless, escape would be simple if only one of these hopeless, dead-eyed people would make a different choice, would break the cycle, would stop thinking in such circumscribed terms.

More thoughts on the Society of the Spectacle

[This post is a contribution to the Politics & Movies Blog-a-thon, running from November 4-9 at The Cooler.]

As a follow-up to my recent post on Guy Debord's film Society of the Spectacle, I have been reading Debord's 1988 essay "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle," an extension to the earlier book and film, as well as an update which amends Debord's ideas in relation to changing social conditions. In general, this later essay is much more pessimistic than the earlier works, as Debord seems to have concluded that by this point the spectacle has definitively won: it is everything and everywhere, and virtually no means exist to question or effectively rebel against the established social and economic order of the world. He addresses his essay to some "fifty or sixty people" who might be interested, among whom he guesses that roughly half will in fact be those who wish to maintain the spectacle. One can hardly blame Debord for his despair, since his 1967 pronouncements and predictions have seemed increasingly prescient and relevant in the face of an expanding globalist economy and a media who do nothing to question or even call attention to its hegemony.

One of Debord's comments in this essay seems especially relevant to the state of the world today, so much so that I felt I really had to post this here. Keep in mind that this was written in 1988.

Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

I post this primarily as a reminder that, though Debord's theorization of an international "spectacle" which secretly controls the entire world can sometimes seem a bit abstracted or far-fetched, there are obvious and tangible implications for his ideas in the real world. The P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and the invasion of Iraq being the two most blatant ones occurring to me after reading the above.

Society of the Spectacle

[This post is a contribution to the Politics & Movies Blog-a-thon, running from November 4-9 at The Cooler.]

The arguments of the Situationist Guy Debord, as radical as they were at the time he first made them, might today seem somewhat familiar and even blasé, on their surface at least: culture is a distraction from material reality; it is in the interests of societal elites to keep the masses docile; workers are alienated from the results of their labor in industrial society. To some extent, these ideas have been thoroughly absorbed into radical and leftist thought in the 40 years since Debord first published his seminal 1967 tract Society of the Spectacle. And yet, there is a sense that the full implications of Debord's radical understanding of the conditions of reality has hardly been understood or acted upon. His dense, dialectical book, and the film of the same name that he made in 1973, posit an approach to cultural reality that can best be thought of as political science fiction. In examining the "spectacular" foundations of modern life, Debord acknowledges and discusses the usual meanings of "spectacle" — entertainment, advertising, consumer fetishism, the commodification of sexuality — but goes even further by suggesting that the visible world itself has become the spectacle that blinds us to the true state of things. Debord's spectacle is a politicized proto-Matrix vision in which invisible forces conspire to create an artificial reality that is utterly committed only to its own continuation. The society of the spectacle is the world itself and everything in it, a mass delusion in which virtually everyone is imprisoned, an endless cycle of repetitious labor and the empty ritual "pleasure" of vacations or weekends.

The book The Society of the Spectacle was first published in 1967 and a year later became a key text of the May 1968 student uprisings in France. It is a complex, dazzling polemic, with a distinctively French dialectical wit and a proclivity for punning language, reversals of meaning, and contradictory ideas. For Debord, contradiction is a holy grail: the spectacle that we all live is built upon a foundation of irreconcilable opposites, and to see these contradictions is to understand the absurdity of modern society. The film version, made six years later, is Debord's attempt to illustrate his text, further develop his ideas, and provide concrete visual examples of the kinds of things he wrote about. The film is also something of a valedictory for the events of May 1968, a celebration of the "formless" revolt that Debord sees as the first step in truly overthrowing the oppressive conditions of modern culture.


The film's presentation of Debord's ideas about the spectacle follows closely from the form of the original book, which consists of 221 numbered paragraphs that each present a fully formed idea. The book's structure is additive, the individual theses somewhat isolated from one another, and yet also building upon the precepts and concepts laid down in the book as a whole. The film compounds this fragmentary structure by excerpting liberally from the text, recontextualizing Debord's words as elements in the film's ever-present voiceover. This narration rarely goes silent, its rapid pace and profusion of contradictory ideas approximating the dense texture of Debord's prose, which insists on unerringly precise definitions. "The spectacle is not a collection of images," he says towards the beginning of both book and film, "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." These "is"/"is not" dialectics appear frequently; Debord defines his ideas by first limning their boundaries, declaring what they are not before tracing what they are. His precision can be exhausting, and it is hardly possible to exactly follow his argument at all times upon seeing the film for the first time, even with prior knowledge of the source text — one can only imagine the foundering of someone seeing the film without any sense of its context and origins. Debord's words work better in print than in film, available to extended study instead of flying by at a steady pace. To some extent he sacrifices the clarity of his writing by translating it to a different medium.

However, the film of Society of the Spectacle is hardly just a transposition of the book, and Debord's unique conception of the cinema creates a wholly new artwork from his source material. One would expect a writer with such a thoroughly developed ideology of images to think long and hard before creating his own images, lest he accidentally contribute to the spectacle he sought to undermine. Indeed, the structure of this film reflects a careful consideration of the way that text and images flow into one another, creating a commentary on images, representation, and the spectacle of culture. In this respect, it is instructive to compare Debord with another French veteran of May 1968 whose films reflect upon the relationships between images and reality: Jean-Luc Godard, of course. Godard and Debord were loose contemporaries, but they had little direct interaction, and to some extent they were opposed: Debord's Situationist International, always concerned with defining in-groups and out-groups, declared Godard to be an insufficiently radicalized reactionary. The reason for this denunciation might very well lie in the different approaches the two men took to treating images in their work.

Debord's concept of détournement — a word the Situationists coined to describe the recycling of artistic elements in a new context to express a different meaning than the original artist — is subtly different from Godard's approach to pastiche and genre homage. Whereas Godard incorporated references to literature and Hollywood film with a satirical or polemical edge, making them his own, Debord's cut-and-paste quotations are generally left whole, appropriated without authorial comment. Debord frequently inserts intertitles or on-screen text (a very Godardian touch) that either print material from his book or cite other works, sometimes with attribution (Marx, Toqueville) and sometimes without (a passage of Shakespeare's Richard III). At several points in the film, he excerpts at length from films by Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, and others, simply allowing these ragged chunks of other films to exist, if somewhat uncomfortably, within his own. There is rarely any satirical perspective in these insertions, or even any direct correspondence with the narration. The point is simply to co-opt the spectacle, to put its images in a context where the spectacle is continuously undermined, where the contrast between the spectacular and the non-spectacular can become clear. To a similar end, Debord appropriates fashion photography and bits of soft-porn sexual images, spectacular images whose function in society is obliquely described by the voiceover. When Godard would include sexual images in the work of his radical period — as he did most radically in the abrasive Numéro Deux — his presentation of sexuality often aggressively deconstructed and defused the expected reactions. This is not the case with Debord, who allows unaltered images of commercialized sexuality to exist within the fabric of his film, trusting in the contradiction between image and text to awaken thought instead of visceral reaction. It's not always a successful tactic, since the directness of sexual images makes them particularly resistant to such attempts at recontextualization, but it is also a logical outgrowth of Debord's fundamental principles. To do more than simply show images and speak about them would be to risk becoming spectacle.


Indeed, this danger is explicitly acknowledged by Debord, in a prescient segment on the commodification of dissatisfaction. To illustrate this section, Debord chooses images of teen rock n' roll bands, their sexualized contortions and pseudo-violent spasms standing in for a more meaningful rebellion against the spectacle. Debord's basic point is that the spectacle is, at this point in history, the totality of life, and that anything can be co-opted or absorbed by this overwhelming force. In rock n' roll, youthful dissatisfaction with the conditions of life is packaged, given a concrete form and thus made salable. Revolution is channeled into loud music and sex idols, and the youth gather to witness a rock concert rather than to form a revolution. This is why Debord sees salvation in the formless, the literally unspeakable or inexpressible, that which cannot be commodified and sold to the masses. A counterpoint to youth rebellion as a commodity is proletarian revolution itself as a commodity, a reality that exists in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In one of the film's most devastating and dense scenes, Debord's voiceover describes the creation of the bourgeoisie spectacle in a nominally anti-bourgeoisie context, as footage of Stalin giving a speech plays out silently. For Debord, Stalinist oppression is quite possibly the epitome of the spectacular society, an absurd illusion in which Soviet officials must simultaneously inhabit contradictory identities: as proletarian revolutionaries and as totalitarian bureaucrats. This creates a paradoxical government whose representatives can never totally inhabit either of these opposite poles, instead vacillating between public statement of proletarian ideals and private membership in a governmental structure whose elite nature contradicts the aims of the proletariat.

This is a potent example of the illusions and disjunctions that exist at the heart of contemporary reality, and Debord's intellectual clarity and rigor help to unearth and explore these spectacular manifestations. One can assume, from the way he uses footage of Mao shaking hands with Nixon and Kissinger as an illustration of international interconnectedness, that Debord sees all the world's governments as equally culpable in holding this spectacular veil across the eyes of the masses. For Debord, to engage in more specific political critique would be to miss the point, since the world's problems are not limited by locale or government but are foundational, inscribed in the very makeup of our society. His film was radical and surprising when it was made, in 1973, and it remains today an eye-opening examination of global power, control, and oppression.

Turkish Delight

Paul Verhoeven's Turkish Delight is, it seems, the notorious Dutch director's idea of a Hollywood-style love story. Boy meets girl, they fall in love almost immediately, they marry. This is a very basic narrative, except that Verhoeven is determined to undermine, question, and indeed vomit all over the expectations, generic conventions, and emotional limitations inherent in this kind of story. For one thing, the boy/girl story as described above is not the entire arc of the film, as it would be in most romantic comedies. The film opens with a lengthy sequence of disturbing violence and sexuality, a raw, rapidly edited assault on the senses that establishes the protagonist, Erik (Rutger Hauer) as a thoroughly unlikeable, vicious, frightening, possibly murderous lecher. And the film ends with a long descent into tragedy and melodrama, in which this despised figure becomes instead an object of sympathy and surprising affection. The rom-com arc, complete with the "cute meet" (she picks him up as a hitchhiker), thus forms only the film's central segment, sandwiched improbably in between much darker territory. Verhoeven's major theme here is mortality, which makes it fitting that his narrative continually bypasses any and all conventional "endings," driving home the point that movie endings are at best artificial, at worst deceptive.

The film's structure sets up certain expectations right from the start. It opens with Erik at his self-destructive worst, wallowing in his trashed apartment and engaging in violent fantasies even as he has rough, dismissive, demeaning sex with countless women who he picks up casually on the streets. The film then flashes back two years, to the start of his relationship with the lovely Olga (Monique van de Ven). Conventional plotting expectations would lead one to believe that this story will, in true circular fashion, lead directly back to the opening scenes, which would promptly resolve themselves along with the film. Verhoeven, though, has no interest in convention except as something to subvert and twist. Not only is the flashback mid-section much more involving than one would expect, with a sweetness, warmth, and emotional complexity barely imagined from the opening, but by the time Verhoeven brings the narrative back around to the opening segment, the story is not brought to a hasty conclusion, but keeps going long beyond this expected ending point. Verhoeven sets up a kind of "origin of tragedy" story, in which events in a flashback lead up to a miserable present briefly glimpsed at the beginning of the film. It's a conventional cinematic storytelling device, one which Verhoeven subverts by extending the film long after the flashback catches up with the present again, pushing the characters through still more emotional states, more scenarios. By doing so, Verhoeven rejects artificial plot constraints and makes his film more like life itself, in which chains of causality are not so neat, and in which the messiness of living and relationships often spill over in unexpected ways.

This is not the only way in which Verhoeven's film is messy. The director has a fascination with bodily processes, with sensuality in all its forms, and at its most giddy moments the film is one of the most potent, irresistible tributes to the pleasures of the sensual life. Erik's love scenes with Olga, in stark contrast to the often brutal ones with unnamed women earlier in the film, are surprisingly tender, passionate, and even sweetly romantic in their own crude way. Verhoeven doesn't shy away from such things, batting his eyes coyly as conventional rom-coms do, but splatters the screen with the messiness of human bodies smashing against each other. His idea of sweetness is often shot through with crudity, with rage, with sadness, with humor, scatological and otherwise, and even sometimes with violence. The romance of Erik and Olga is troubled by many things, not least of which are Erik's budding misogyny and temper, Olga's flighty nature and attachment to her shrewish mother (Tonny Huurdeman), and the fact that these two really don't even know each other by the time they get married. This last bit is something of a subversion of rom-com conventions itself, in that Verhoeven presents a dramatically truncated version of the love story arc. Olga and Erik are fucking and declaring their love within less than a minute from the time they first appear onscreen together. Their whirlwind romance happens so fast, in such a blur of images and short scenes, that it isn't until the wedding is over and the couple is left alone together, that the audience begins to realize the extent to which they are ignorant of everything about each other. They came together on the sheer force of physical, sensual attraction, and everything else is somehow incidental.

As a result, the film's best scenes are the ones in which Verhoeven documents the heady but not frictionless early stages of this relationship. A scene where the pair walks across the beach at sunset parodies and mirrors similar scenes in countless other love stories, but Verhoeven films it with such energy, with such reverence for the colors of the sky and the running, laughing silhouettes of the lovers, that it is a poignant and powerful moment nonetheless. Even better is the scene where a lovers' quarrel turns into a reconciliation in the middle of a downpour, the couple sitting on the curb in the middle of the rain, their clothes soaked through, laughing and drinking wine and embracing. Its the kind of genuine, sensual moment that can be seen in diluted form in countless films; Verhoeven gives the scene its rightful power by allowing the actors to really stretch out with a range of emotions, from rage and overpowering sorrow to the most ebullient joy. This emotional openness, so often leveled off and subdued in Hollywood variations on this plot, gives scenes like these the joy and beauty that they should have in a love story.


Verhoeven is a director who thinks emotionally in terms of his images, and his characters often express their emotions not only through the subtleties of performance, but in physical, visual ways. In a stunning scene where Erik learns that Olga is cheating on him, at a drunken dinner party worthy of Fassbinderian melodrama, the orange hue of the lights turn the entire assembled cast into an undifferentiated mass of laughing faces, all subtly ridiculing Erik right to his face, flaunting his lack of control over Olga's desires. At the end of the scene, Erik stands and literally vomits all over his wife and mother-in-law, spewing his emotional reaction to their betrayal in the most physical way possible. This visceral fascination with bodily processes and waste carries over throughout the film, as defecation recurs as an image again and again. In an earlier scene, Erik picks through Olga's feces to reassure her that she is not bleeding; this is, again, Verhoeven's idea of tenderness and love, a love that doesn't even flinch at getting down and dirty with the waste products from the lover's body. Shit is also a harbinger of death, though, its red color signifying for Olga that she may have cancer like her mother did. When her father (Wim van den Brink) is dying, the extent of his sickness is signaled by the bodily fluids, shit and piss, all leaking through the bottom of his soaked-through bed into metal pans arranged below, filling the room with a stench of death.

Later in the film, Erik watches his mother-in-law's dog take a shit by a tree stump, after which the old lady dutifully wipes the dog's rear with a tissue, in a scene that seems entirely unmotivated beyond its exposure, yet again, of the universality of bodily processes. No matter the differences, Verhoeven seems to be saying, in these crucial ways humans and dogs are exactly the same: they eat, they shit, they fuck, they die. To this end, animals comprise a small but important role in the film. There's also a dog who eagerly licks up the fluids left behind when, at Erik and Olga's group wedding, one of the brides goes into labor and has to rush off, leaving behind a puddle and a bloody stain down the back of her white dress. And after the couple's breakup, Erik cares for and rears back to health a seagull who he accidentally hits with his car, a process that includes the decapitation and gutting of fish for food, which Verhoeven shows in closeup of course. These images are given a nearly equal footing with the film's depictions of equally messy and sloppy human body functions, emphasizing the continuum of nature and our place in it.

This includes, of course, mortality, and Verhoeven doesn't flinch away from candid depictions of death and our reactions to it, any more than he does from sex or scatology. In that respect, the long sequence that deals with the death of Olga's father is one of the film's most important stretches, with Verhoeven's typically earthy interest in the process of dying, and his wry, darkly comic commentary on the ways in which bourgeoisie society attempts to deal with death. In this, as in many other respects throughout the film, Olga's mother is Verhoeven's main vehicle for his satirical jabs at the hypocrisies and moral blind spots of polite society. In a hilarious and ridiculous scene, this woman has many pictures taken of her husband as he lies in his coffin, then asks for one more, posing by his side and mugging for the camera as though they were just a couple of tourists getting their picture snapped. The ridiculousness of this scene is compounded when it transpires that this last snapshot, printed up in tasteful black and white, is handed out at the end of the funeral service as a souvenir. Of course, it's Erik who angrily rejects this disrespectful offering — he prefers more meaningful and earthy souvenirs in general, snipping bits of hair, pubic or otherwise, from all his sexual conquests — and it's Erik who also seemingly senses the greater significance of the funeral service itself. In the midst of it, when the coffin is solemnly descending into the floor on a mechanical lift, he imagines Olga's father, a fun-loving and energetic old man, perched on top of the coffin in his armchair, belting out a song and drumming his hands on the side of the chair. Erik, a sensualist to the last, recognizes that a funeral for such a vibrant man should never be turned into such a maudlin, dreary affair.

If this is one side of Verhoeven's examination of death, the other is the fascination with death's imagery, and especially the idea of decay and recycling, as epitomized by images of both maggots and trash. The maggot's role in death is first broached in an early scene where Erik is commissioned as a sculptor to create religious statutes, including a representation of Jesus' resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. Erik carves this statute with such realism and such attention to detail that visible on Lazarus' legs are the maggots crawling from his dead flesh. When confronted with this excessive detailing by the irate project supervisor, Erik refuses to change his work, declaring that Lazarus was dead, and he was only being true to the reality of what would've happened. Later, Olga receives a call that her father is dying, interrupting a playful love scene with Erik in which he'd been rubbing a bouquet of flowers across her naked chest. After the phone call, when he lifts the flowers from her skin, they leave behind a trail of writhing, squirming maggots and worms slithering across her breasts. The worms recur again, after Olga leaves and Erik is wasting away in his apartment, where open jars and pieces of meat fester and teem with maggots. And just as the maggots represent the recycling processes at work on dead flesh in nature, the film's final shot presents the man-made equivalent, the recycling of the trash heap and the grinding gears of a garbage truck, mashing up the last remnants of a life lost.

Turkish Delight is, as I've come to expect from Verhoeven, an incredibly complex film in the way it deals with its characters and their emotions. It's a film that virtually challenges the audience to find a proper reaction, and the emotional tenor changes so frequently that one can never stabilize one's response. The "proper" reaction is exactly what Verhoeven intends to subvert, along with the easy judgment, preferring a more spontaneous, visceral response. This film requires thinking with the gut as well as the brain. Erik in particular is a very problematic and complicated figure, a despicable man in many, many ways — he even commits a shocking rape — but he's also at times a remarkably sympathetic character, especially in the film's final act, in which his demeanor mellows from overpowering rage and brutality into melancholy and quietude. The fact that Verhoeven stays with the narrative to this point, that he allows his characters to keep going beyond the circumscribed arcs of conventional love stories and melodramas into richer emotional ground, is the most obvious evidence of the film's commitment to its program of subversion. The contrast of emotions, the wild tonal shifts from dark comedy to harrowing violence to warm and sexy love story to tear-jerking tragedy, keep the audience constantly off-balance. It's a stunning film, shocking even more for its raw, messy emotionality than for the copious sex and nudity spread across its frames.