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 Man From London

The films of Béla Tarr have always been haunted by film noir to one degree or another. Tarr's downtrodden characters plod miserably through gloomy, shadowy wastelands, getting tangled up in plots and intrigues that briefly distract them from the otherwise unchanging stasis of their lives. In The Man From London — an adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel that was already adapted for noir films twice in the 1940s — the influence of noir is as overt as it's ever been in Tarr's work, but tellingly it is not a drastic departure from the rest of his oeuvre, only a slight shift in emphasis that brings these subcurrents to the surface. It is, typically of his work, slow-moving and stunningly beautiful, shot in a high contrast black-and-white where light sources generate hot, blinding whites that threaten to burn through the frame, while the blacks of shadowy nights are dense and inky, and the characters in the film are, at various times, swallowed up by both the darkness and the light, both representing equal threats. As with all his films since Werckmeister Harmonies, Tarr's longtime editor Ágnes Hranitzky is credited as a co-director, but this too hasn't signalled much tangible change in his art; instead, it seems a way of affirming the paramount importance of editing to his films, presumably on the basis that in a film with so few cuts, each one must be vitally important.

This is a gorgeous, mysteriously moving film, its potent chiaroscuro images buttressed by the moaning organ drones of Tarr's frequent musical collaborator Mikhály Vig, as well as the expressive sound design in which every creaking, metallic, mechanical sound of the docks is amplified into a hypnotic percussive rhythm. The Man From London is often considered lesser Tarr, whatever that means, but this film finds the Hungarian master in as fine a form as ever despite its troubled production history. The one minor problem is the distractingly bad dubbing of the actors' voices into French and English, which seems to have been done with little care for syncronizing the audio to lip movements. Even this adds to the film's powerful sense of disconnection and alienation, as does the multilingual dialogue, which Tarr has said was his preferred audio for the film even though some early screenings aired with everyone dubbed into Hungarian.

In the gorgeous, atmospheric opening, the camera watches from the windows of a high tower at a dock where ships moor, letting off passengers who shuffle across to a railroad station nearby. A railroad worker, Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), sits in the tower all night, and the camera is aligned with his perspective, tracking in slow arcs around the interior of his tower room to take in the whole dock area. There's a voyeuristic thrill to this opening sequence, as Maloin, from his godlike perspective, sees things that he is obviously not meant to see. A man on a docked boat throws a suitcase into the darkness of a nearby pier, where it's picked up by a second man. The two men later fight, and in the struggle one of them falls into the water and never resurfaces, taking the suitcase with him. When the surviving man quickly leaves, Maloin climbs down from his tower with a hook and fishes the suitcase out of the water, discovering that it's full of money.


This opening sets the tone, patiently observing as these events unfold without fuss, the camera tracking past the windows to slowly sweep across the whole scene. Down below, pools of light and shadow are stretched out across the docks, with streetlamps casting bright ovals carved out of the darkness, figures melting in and out of the dark as they prowl around. Their furtive, secretive movements avoid detection, except of course for the near-omniscient viewpoint from which Maloin watches, a viewpoint that associates him with the voyeuristic audience, watching a typical noir tale of treachery and violence. It plays almost like a silent film; there's no dialogue in the entire first half-hour except for some distant, barely overheard murmuring. No words are needed, because these are familiar cinematic archetypes, carved in light and shadow, enacting a primal noir drama for an audience hiding up above.

The details of that pantomimed opening are later filled out, when the British private detective Morrison (István Lénárt) arrives, investigating the robbery of 60,000 pounds from his employer by a man named Brown (János Derzsi), one of the men Maloin had seen in the opening. It almost doesn't matter, though, because in typical fashion, Tarr is less interested in plot mechanics than he is in the mundane routines and boring lives that continue to trudge forward uneventfully even as this investigation circles inexorably around the events of that night. Maloin grimly watches as the inspector tries to figure out where Brown and the missing money have gone, while Brown himself begins stalking the dockworker, apparently suspicious that Maloin may have seen something or retrieved the suitcase.

The plot is extremely basic, stripped down to just the essentials, and in a way the only big events in the film are those that occur during that opening half hour; everything else is simply an elaboration of the consequences of that noirish template. In one scene, the opening sequence is virtually repeated, this time with the inspector moving around in the darkness below, trying to recreate the potential chain of events, cleverly working out how the two criminals had snuck the suitcase full of money past customs, and then discovering the corpse in the harbor. This reinforces the impression that the film's story is an archetypal template, a basic form — ordinary working man stumbles across illegally gotten cache of money — that can be repeated and restated infinitely. The story's familiarity and simplicity frees Tarr to confine the narrative to the background, focusing instead on atmosphere and on the protagonist's grim, lifeless existence. Tarr even has the violent climax play out offscreen, keeping his camera trained on a closed wooden door during Maloin's final confrontation with Brown, the camera shaking slightly as if in shivery anticipation of the outcome of whatever's happening, unseen, beyond that door. If the opening encouraged a voyeuristic perspective on distant events, this scene denies and frustrates that voyeurism, granting the characters the private intimacy to carry out the conclusion of their story without any prying eyes to observe.


What's interesting about the film's study of Maloin is that he hardly seems to want the money once he has it; even in the shot where he opens the briefcase for the first time, there's not even a flicker of emotion on his face as he stares down into the case, before the camera tracks around and then angles down to peer into the open case, revealing the money inside. He retrieves the money, then dries it out, with a mechanical lack of feeling, compelled to do so by the momentum of the plot and little more. Once he has the money, it hardly helps him escape his dull life, nor his clearly unhappy marriage to a woman (Tilda Swinton) with whom he does nothing but shrilly argue.

The only way in which he ever uses the money is to help his daughter Henriette (Erika Bók), who first appears in a fascinating scene in which Maloin, walking home with the money, stops to watch her sweep the floor in the butcher shop where she works. At first, the scene seems as voyeuristic as the opening, with Maloin watching as the girl in the shop bends over to sweep, her skirt riding up so that her ass is clearly visible to anyone on the street outside. When it's revealed that she's actually his daughter, the emotional tenor of the scene subtly changes, and he becomes angry at his daughter's careless flaunting of her body, angry with the work that makes her display herself like this. His reaction is almost as if he's discovered she's a prostitute, and later he protectively pulls her out of her job, then buys her a fur in a store where the pushy salesmen chatter in excited tandem at father and daughter until they decide on a purchase.


Notably, Maloin never tries to use his newfound money to escape his grim home life, nor does he deviate from his routine or begin spending wildly, the downfall of so many noir heroes in similar situations. Like many of Tarr's characters, he's trapped by a lack of imagination, an inability to see past the dull materiality of his circumstances, to grasp at something greater that occasionally seems to be lurking just beyond his senses. At one point, as he leaves a bar, he walks, without looking, past a surreal scene of several bar patrons playing an odd game, one of them balancing a pool ball on his forehead while the other lunges at him with a chair, both of them doing this strange dance to the wheezing sound of an accordion. The scene recalls the extended dance sequences in Damnation and Sátántangó or the living diagram of the solar system in Werckmeister Harmonies, scenes where the dullness of ordinary life is interrupted by outbursts of strange exuberance, moments of sensuality and celebration. Here, this dance is relegated to the background, a momentary diversion that the main character, locked into his private hell, barely notices.

This is one of several points at which Tarr hints at something stranger and grander just outside the border of the main character's circumscribed sense of reality. The way the high-contrast photography renders light as an incandescent and impenetrable whiteness similarly suggests something beyond, an almost spiritual dimension to this otherwise prosaically grounded story. In one rapturous shot, Maloin's wife opens the glass doors leading out to their balcony and steps out into the bright light that swallows her up, nearly erasing her black-clad form in a suffusion of light, pouring over her and flooding the center of the frame with this blinding nothingness. When she then closes the shutters, the room is smoothly plunged into darkness, the light chased away by shadows; it's a beautiful and mysterious shot that suggests the ways in which these characters are closed off from light, hope, spirituality, anything that might fend off the darkness and shadows. The light is also tinged with a sense of danger, though, as though these people might burn up if exposed to its brilliance for too long. In the film's mysterious final shot, Brown's silently suffering wife (Ági Szirtes) simply stares straight ahead until the white light absorbs her, the image fading to a plain white nothingness before the credits roll.

Sátántangó

Béla Tarr's Sátántangó is an extraordinary film, gorgeous and haunting and full of unforgettable images. Even at seven-and-a-half hours long, the film is never less than enthralling, and each deliberately framed and choreographed shot is jaw-dropping, even when nothing much is actually happening within the frame. Though Tarr isn't very concerned with narrative, there is a story of sorts here, a loose one divided into twelve chapters that overlap one another chronologically and show the same scenes from different points of view as different characters' stories intersect over the course of a couple of days. The film is set in a tiny rural Hungarian village at the start of the autumn rainy season, which the villagers are now prepared to endure, miserably, until springtime. The town is grim and ugly, a few crumbling buildings spread out across the barren, dismal countryside. The place is soggy and knee-deep in mud, and it's constantly pouring, rain streaming down the grimy windows and soaking the villagers whenever they trudge through the muddy fields that surround their homes. As the film opens, the villagers have sold off their communally owned cows and are planning to split the money and abandon the village, all of them heading off to their own personal escapes.

Naturally, they're all scheming against each other, some of them planning to steal all the money and escape on their own, until their plans are all disrupted by the return of Irimiás (Mikhály Vig, who also provides the film's eerie, minimalist music), a messiah-like con artist who'd been reported as dead a year and a half ago, but who had really been in prison with his friend Petrina (Putyi Horváth). This duo's return to town disrupts all the villagers' schemes, filling them with mingled hope and fear: they know that Irimiás will have some grand plan for their money, but it's not clear if they welcome this opportunity to be shaken out of their ruts or mourn the likely loss of their long-awaited windfall to the rogue's latest brainstorm.

This tense anticipation dominates the film's first half. Irimiás and Petrina do appear in one sequence early on, but other than this, they're spoken of more than seen for the first several hours of the film. Tarr observes how the villagers await the arrival of the mysterious duo, going about their dull and listless lives in the meantime, boiling over with frustration and confusion as they wrestle with their feelings about the returning troublemakers. Tarr's preference for long, unbroken takes — either static or slowly tracking — enhances the elongated expectation. The film is "about" its duration as much as anything, about the way time passes, about the long dead moments and empty spaces that make up a day. The film's epic seven-and-a-half hour length places the viewer in the same position as the villagers, enduring long periods of stasis and nothingness, long temps mort accompanied only by the buzzing of a fly or the loud, repetitive ticking of a clock in a depressing local bar.


The film opens with a long shot of a field of cows, the soundtrack dominated by their mooing and a droning tone in the background. Eventually, the camera begins to track sideways, away from the field, gliding along past a long wall, examining the crumbling plaster and cloudy, filthy windows that offer no view into the rooms inside. The camera's movement is slow and steady, and when it finally reaches the end of the wall, it looks out again at the cows, milling around in a courtyard in the distance, watching until they all wander away, out of sight around the corner of a building, leaving behind only a chicken strutting across the muddy open space until the image fades to black. It's a fitting introduction to the patient, unshowy aesthetic of Tarr's epic, its careful observation of the minutiae of daily life and its attentiveness to the matter of time.

Later, Irimiás and Petrina wait in a town office, and Irimiás comments that there are two clocks, neither of them correct. He poetically connects this temporal confusion to the "the perpetuity of defenselessness," before adding, "We relate to it as twigs to the rain: we cannot defend ourselves." That's the essence of Tarr's perspective on time, this relentless forward flow that cannot be paused or halted, that is always charging onward regardless of what's happening in any individual life. The emphasis on the passage of time is so essential because one of Tarr's key themes here is stagnation: time passes, and yet nothing happens, everything remains the same, the people of this town continue to wallow in misery and boredom, to simply pass the time.

Futaki, dreaming of fleeing the town with his share of the money, wants only to rent a farm where he can do nothing all day, only watch "this fucking life" go by while he soaks his feet. When Irimiás and Petrina return to town, their young hanger-on Horgos (András Bodnár) fills them in on what the town is like now — which is to say, that nothing's changed, that everything is exactly as it was a year and a half ago when they left. In this context, Tarr's deliberately eventless static views and snail-paced tracking shots accentuate the numbing, narcotic pace of everyday life in a place where nothing happens, and where even the wildest dreams of the inhabitants are boring and routine.


At other times, though, Tarr finds strange beauty and even heroism in the mundane. A drunken old doctor's (Peter Berling) trip to refill a jug of fruit brandy becomes an epic journey across the wasted countryside of the village. He staggers and stumbles through the muddy fields, the rain pouring around him, the soundtrack composed only of his heavy breathing, his raspy coughs, his burps, and the plodding steps of his feet, sticking in the mud that covers both the roads and the fields. As it gets dark, the doctor's form is increasingly hidden in the unlit night, his silhouette occasionally highlighted against the distant lights of a house or the local bar. As the doctor approaches the bar, wheezing accordion music can be heard, the first hint of the drunken revelry that will play out in later scenes inside the bar. The doctor just passes by, though, staggering into the woods, glimpsing the dark trio of Irimiás, Petrina and Horgos purposefully walking by on the nearby road. Tarr makes this simple journey across a small distance seem epic, overwhelming, taking every ounce of will and strength from this unhealthy, unhappy old man. That's another aspect of Tarr's extended duration: this is an epic of the everyday, an epic of short distances, because this town and its muddy, pathetic territory is the full extent of what these people know, it is the setting for their entire lives and thus it must be epic, because everything they are and everything they do plays out here, and a trek to get some alcohol can seem as important as Odysseus' journey home, while a short cigarette break with some plump prostitutes takes the place of Odysseus' many detours and obstacles on his way back to Ithaca.

There is an obvious political dimension to the film, as well. Tarr had wanted to adapt Lázló Krasznahorkai's novel since the 80s, but he had been unable to do so because of the threat of censorship from the Hungarian Communist government. It doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that the film is a bitter satire of the failures of communalism, exposing the ways in which, while supposedly working communally towards a common purpose, people remain atomized and isolated, concerned far more with their own selfish interests than those of the group. Irimiás himself is the most obvious symbolic representative of Communist ideas. He calls himself "a servant of a great cause" and organizes people for his schemes, but the dreams of communal success that he stirs up in others are simply smokescreens for his cons and tricks. He says he's bringing people together but he actually tears them apart and scatters them, breaking up their community under the guise of rejuvenating it. The idea of working together for a common goal is a lie, a ruse, a distraction from the essential miserableness of these people's lives. They have no sense of real control over their lives — they are defenseless, a theme that percolates throughout the film — and Irimiás' grand rhetoric gives them an illusion of power, however misguided. Really, they are defenseless before him as well.


One of the film's most notorious extended scenes is the one where a young girl (Erika Bók) tortures a cat and then kills it by putting rat poison in milk. She feels hopeless, bored, abandoned, by a family that doesn't seem to care about her much, and she takes out her own torment on her defenseless pet before killing herself as well. It's an uncomfortable sequence to watch, and not only because of its implications for the characters and themes. Tarr insists that the cat was treated humanely and not truly harmed, but it's still discomfiting to see the girl flail around, swinging the cat around with her, then trapping it in a net and shoving its head into a bowl of milk. Such moments in a fiction film always shatter the illusion of a story being acted out. It's too real, and too cruel, forcing one to think not about the cruelty of this girl, whose feelings of impotence lead her to assert her power over a defenseless animal, but the cruelty of the filmmakers who demanded that the scene be shot in this way, that these things should be done to a real, defenseless living thing.

The penultimate chapter of the film resumes the commentary on the political dimensions of Irimiás' actions. This segment consists entirely of two bureaucrats translating Irimiás' vile, hateful letter about the townspeople into more discrete and official language. Nothing can be said directly, so they have to come up with euphemisms for everything, replacing "fat sow" with "overweight," and "wrinkled worm, filled with alcohol" with "elderly alcoholic, short of stature." This sequence is rich in bitter humor, mocking the bureaucratic circumspection of these office drones while also revealing the full extent of Irimiás' deceitfulness. At the same time, Tarr focuses on the humanity of the bureaucrats, whose work — cleansing language of its richness and idiosyncrasy, reducing words to a generic gray pulp — wears them down daily. They take a break from their work at one point, sitting down away from the typewriter to have a snack, eating in silence. While they eat, they drop their businesslike demeanors, and suddenly they are just men, requiring a break from the soul-numbing stupidity of their work. When they're done eating, unfortunately, they must return to the typewriter.


Tarr often enlivens the film with subtle, bittersweet humor like this. One key sequence is the lengthy drunken dance where the townspeople, anxiously awaiting Irimiás' arrival, clumsily dance and grope one another. The scene lasts around half an hour, with the repetitive accordion music wheezing out its incessantly bouncing melody, as the revelers sway and careen off one another awkwardly. The cast was really as drunk as they seem to be onscreen, lending an air of verisimilitude to their staggering steps and lunges at one another. They seem angry one moment, joyous the next, their minds clouded, erasing themselves in this celebration. In the chapter title that precedes this segment, Tarr deems the dance the "sátántangó" from which the film takes its name, and indeed there's something apocalyptic and desperate about everyone's flailing about, their wild abandon. But it's also amusing and powerful, a rare moment of celebration in the lives of people who don't often have much to celebrate. At one point, the camera pans around the room and finds one married couple eating from opposite ends of a cheese bread, devouring it like Lady and the Tramp romantically eating spaghetti together, a hilarious and ridiculous image, if also a grossly romantic one.

Petrina is also a rich source of comedy, playing a dopey comic foil to the messianic Irimiás, even in terms of appearance. While Irimiás is striking and foreboding in his dark trenchcoat, Christ-like beard and fedora, Petrina looks like a dumpy reject from the Three Stooges, a woolen snow cap pulled down tightly over his egg-shaped head. In a mysterious scene late in the film, Irimiás, Petrina and Horgos are walking along a road through a sparsely wooded area. Suddenly, Irimiás stops and falls to his knees in the middle of the road, staring forward as though overcome with sublime religious awe. He watches as a cloud of fog rolls past, obscuring a ruined building, then blowing away in the wind. Tarr never explains this moment or the image that prompts Irimiás' awe; it's left as a beautiful and eerie image of the huckster being overcome, momentarily, by seemingly genuine sentiment. Then Petrina breaks the mood, as the trio walks away, by irreverently asking, "you've never seen fog before or what?"

Irimiás is often associated with nearly mystical, awe-inspiring incarnations of nature. In one of the film's best shots, Irimiás and Petrina walk along a road through town as garbage flies along the ground around their feet, the wind whipping paper, cardboard boxes and other debris through the narrow path between houses. It's another somewhat apocalyptic image that's strikingly beautiful as well, capturing the stark, weather-beaten conditions of this town, but also making even this barrage of trash seem graceful and elegant.


The film is packed with gorgeous, unforgettable images like this, like the remarkable shot that keeps circling around the sleeping figures of the townspeople in the manor they've moved to at Irimiás' behest. As they sleep, and the camera twirls, the voiceover recites the dreams and nightmares of the villagers, haunted in their rest by strange visions, confused erotic fantasies, and fantastic hopes. It's a deeply affecting extended shot, because Tarr's film is all about the hopes and dreams of these ordinary, downtrodden people — and the ways in which those dreams are destroyed and corrupted by the cruel world they inhabit and the societal strictures that govern even their most secret dreams.

In the film's devastating final chapter, those dreams seem to take tangible form, writing a surreal nightmare onto the landscape of the territory as Tarr returns to the elderly doctor. He once again wanders off into the landscape, but this time, instead of stolidly plodding through the muddy fields in real time, he gets swallowed up by a strange vision, chasing the distant sound of bells to a wrecked church where a mysterious and cadaverous-looking man repetitively rings a bell and shouts. It's a strange and unsettling end to a remarkable film, and the final shot, in which the doctor slowly removes every trace of light from the image by boarding up his windows, chronicles the slow process by which the film disappears into the nothingness from which it came.

The Saragossa Manuscript

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Diabel

Andrzej Zulawski's Diabel (The Devil) is a messy, baroque, jagged film, all sloppily chopped up and ragged, dripping in blood and grime. It is unrepentantly, unceasingly ugly and vile, wallowing in the filth and degradation of a world in which morality and ideals mean little, and in which everyone seems either half-mad or already fallen into the abyss of insanity. The film opens with its chaos already in progress, at a convent that is being stormed by soldiers. Everywhere, women are screaming, fires rage, gunshots ring out, and the whole place seems more like a mental asylum than a home for nuns. Zulawski is thrusting the audience into the middle of things, signaling that this will be a film of madness and horror, and this bracing introduction is stunning and effective, even if eventually the unrelenting hysterics and shrill pitch of the film will become more tiring and numbing than harrowing. Into this chaos wanders a mysterious man in a long black cloak (Wojciech Pszoniak), who kidnaps a nun (Monika Niemczyk) and breaks a political prisoner named Jakub (Leszek Teleszynski) out of a holding cell in the convent. Jakub had been arrested as a conspirator in a plot against the monarchy of Poland, a leader in an apparently failed revolution, but now the mysterious stranger urges him away from the convent, back towards his home, accompanied by the nun.

When Jakub arrives home, however, he finds only madness and devastation. His sister is insane and is apparently betrothed to their half-brother Ezechiel (Michal Grudzinski). His father is dead, having committed suicide in disgrace and insanity; Jakub is told that in the old man's final months, he'd mistaken his daughter for his wife and raped her many times. Jakub also finds that his mother (Iga Mayr), who'd long ago abandoned her family, was living nearby as the madam of a brothel. The final injustice is the realization that Jakub's fiancée (Malgorzata Braunek), believing him to be dead after his arrest, had married his former best friend, one of his fellow conspirators in the revolution. Everyone in the film seems to be mad or half-mad, possessed by horrible spirits. The film is shrill and loud, with a hectoring, hysterical tone. The performances are pitched in only one key: everyone is constantly screaming and crying, tearing at their clothes, falling to the floor and thrashing around, shivering and shaking, laughing like lunatics. It's as though the whole world was an insane asylum — or as though Zulawski had assembled a cast of epileptics to act through seizures and convulsions. What's compelling for fifteen or twenty minutes quickly becomes exhausting; everyone Jakub meets acts in the same dazed, distant manner, then falls to the floor and thrashes around while screaming.

Although it's obvious that Zulawski is trying to create a portrait of a world gone mad, seen through the eyes of a man who finds only degradation and horror everywhere he goes, the uniformity of the film's tone and the repetitiveness of its incidents quickly become boring. Zulawski can only eke so much shock value out of his bloody, horrible scenarios, as the stranger leads Jakub on a guided tour of the wasteland that has become his life. The man urges Jakub to wallow in this devastation, and to react to it with murder, using a razor provided by the man at key moments. It is obvious, from the film's title, that the stranger is a metaphorical devil perched on Jakub's shoulder, always showing up whenever Jakub needs a little push to commit the next atrocity, always providing another little nudge towards evil and sin. The stranger wears Jakub down until he is totally weak and defeated, unable to resist any act — and it is only then, in one of the film's cleverest conceits, that the stranger reveals the very base, very human motivations behind all this horror and ugliness.


This very human devil is, in fact, the most interesting aspect of the film. He is a sniveling, cowardly figure, not at all intimidating or frightening. He is jittery and nervous, like the low-level clerk he's referred to as at one point. He is a servant rather than a leader, an anxious fly buzzing obsessively around Jakub's head, whispering in his ear, planting seeds of ideas and letting them sprout into actions. Zulawski cleverly does not give this "devil" too much power, does not make him imposing. He is a base, pathetic creature, a parasite who feeds on the weaknesses of others — and he finds plenty of weakness to satiate him. Towards the end of the film, the aimless Jakub asks if the world is really so ugly as he believes it to be, or if it's actually beautiful. The stranger praises the world's beauty in ineffectual terms, then purports to demonstrate its beauty through dance — but his dance is as spastic and chaotic as everything else in the film, a lame testament for the world's beauty from an ugly, pathetic man. The film puts little stock into art in general: Jakub comes across a troupe of performers and actors, but they are predatory and aggressive, with the troupe's gay leader trying to rape Jakub. The troupe's performance of scenes from Hamlet only mirrors back to Jakub the themes of betrayal and familial dysfunction that he finds everywhere he turns in his own life. Later, he says he finds comfort in the arms of the woman who plays Hamlet's mother in the play, but this is a short-lived pleasure that ends in more violence, and in any event it can only be linked to Jakub's own incestuous "punishment" of his own mother.

There is, doubtless, an allegory hidden within this film somewhere, if one could dig through its layers of blood and dirt. It is a film about the corruption of humanity, about how an idealistic young man who wishes to fight for his dreams is instead twisted into an instrument of violence and terror, serving interests contrary to his stated ideals. Zulawski apparently intended the film as a response to a very specific incident involving student riots in Communist Poland, but it can just as easily be taken as a general statement on the destruction of ideals through temptation and exploitation.

That is, if one can get past the film's exhausting hysterics. Zulawski conveys the disconnection and dazed state of Jakub effectively through his fragmentary editing, through which the young man often seems to be leaping spasmodically from location to location: one moment he might be in a springtime forest, the next passed out on a snowy hill. This disjunctive editing is effective at adding to the film's destabilizing feeling, and also lends a supernatural aura to the film's "devil," who often seems to appear out of nowhere, always in the right place. The editing winds up being one of the film's most compelling elements, however. Diabel as a whole is simply too shrill, too repetitive, too silly in its theatrical overacting and constant fits of contrived "madness." It opens in insanity and maintains the same fevered pitch throughout, which over time dulls whatever effect Zulawski was going for. Diabel is sporadically interesting, often visually provocative, but ultimately inconsequential.

Man Is Not a Bird

Man Is Not a Bird was the first feature film of Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, who later achieved cult acclaim for the sexual surrealism of WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie. In this debut, the themes Makavejev would explore in those later films — the double-edged sword of sexual liberation, totalitarianism, Communism, the tense relations between men and women as caused by social structures — are expressed through much more conventional means. The film provides a hint of the origins of Makavejev's sensibility in social realism and pseudo-documentary observation. There are early traces here of the irreverent perspective on sex and politics that would appear in Makavejev's later films, though here his satire is understated and subtle, ingrained within the framework of a loose narrative centered around two different working men. One, Rudinski (Janez Vrhovec) is a famous foreman renowned for his expertise in finishing jobs ahead of schedule, while the other, Barbulovic (Stole Arandelovic), is a lowly menial laborer who quarrels with his wife (Eva Ras) and his mistress alike.

The gulf between these two men, both laborers under the Communist system, is the gulf between the boss and the mere worker, but even Rudinski, so well-respected and famed, is subject to orders from above. He is as much positioned within a rigid hierarchy as the less fortunate Barbulovic. The film is all about power and the structures that control and shape lives. To this end, Makavejev opens with a scene of a hypnotist delivering a speech about the power of his craft, his ability to overcome people's innate beliefs and superstitions with his own control. Then Makavejev displays a very different form of control by cutting to a Communist Party manager giving orders over the phone, and then still another form of control when he shows a voluptuous nightclub singer arousing a roomful of drunken man into a frenzy of violence and spontaneous clamor simply by grinding her hips, shaking her ample breasts and suggestively licking her full lips. These scenes, each one exploring a different way in which people lose control over their lives and actions, establish the film as a kind of treatise on control and power, on the loss of self that occurs in both sexuality and under oppressive governmental regimes.

One thread within the film is the domination of women by men. Barbulovic's cowed, subservient wife is constantly berated by her husband, who expects her to obey his every order, to prepare dinner for him, and above all to be silent, never to question him. What's unstated but very much present in this relationship is the idea that Barbulovic, who is on the bottom of the chain of command in every aspect of his life, needs this sense of superiority and dominance at home. At one point, a tour guide is leading a group of schoolchildren around the industrial site where Barbulovic works. The tour guide praises Barbulovic as one of the best laborers, but in the same breath implicitly puts him down for not being a "mental" worker with an office job; the unspoken subtext is that this worker doesn't have to use his brain, or perhaps that as a mere laborer he doesn't really have a brain worth using. It is in cruel but subtle ways like this that the state keeps its people in line, convincing them that they have their place and that they dare not try to rise above it.

In this atmosphere, Barbulovic needs to feel as though he has someone to order around the way he is ordered around at work. It is in this way, perhaps, that the dynamics of power and control corrupt and infiltrate the realm of sexuality and relationships between men and women. Within a society where people are rarely able to feel much sense of self-determination in anything they do, they enact dramas of sexual domination and exploitation instead. So Barbulovic insists on his wife's acquiescence to his philandering, his naked betrayal of her: he even gives away her dresses to his mistress. As it turns out, his wife is not so meek, and she assaults his mistress on the streets and decides that she is no longer going to give in to the "hypnotism" by which men keep women under their thumbs. By the end of the film, this mousy, shy woman is seen with a new man, laughing and drinking with him, having realized that men need not be the only ones to cheat or abandon their spouses.


The other story running through the film is the romance developing between the older Rudinski and the young barber Rajka (Milena Dravic). Rudinski, like Barbulovic, is trapped by circumstances and powers beyond his control. He is famed as a great employee and a great manager, and as a result he travels everywhere, never staying in one place for very long, always laboring under pressure to get things done as quickly as possible and move on to the next place, the next job. His is a life dedicated to work, with little room for developing meaningful relationships. Thus his romance with Rajka, as passionate as it is, seems doomed from the start: he knows that he'll have to move on sooner or later, leaving her behind as, no doubt, he's left many others behind in the past. And even though he reassures her with various promises — even telling her he'll take her with him when he goes — she seems to know as well as him that this is a temporary arrangement, a temporary love. And so she never quite convincingly fends off the advances of local boy Bosko (Boris Dvornik), a lecherous ladies' man who counts off his amorous conquests with notches on the steering wheel of his truck. She knows, perhaps, that when Rudinski is gone she'll have to settle for a different kind of romance with a more geographically convenient object of affection.

Makavejev is exploring, in many different contexts, how little control these people (like all people, in some ways) have over their lives, how much they are at the mercy of outside forces. Throughout the film, he inserts digressions with a Communist party official who never seems to leave his office, but whose edicts over the telephone have wide-ranging consequences. At one point, he is able to tell a group how to vote on an upcoming decision; "we decided how the Communists would vote, and thank God you're all Communists," he exclaims. The people at the bottom get whatever the ones at the top decide to hand down. For his dedication and skill, Rudinski gets an elaborate party at the climax of the film, a lavish celebration where he gets a medal and a handshake, small compensation for his total commitment to his work, while an orchestra plays Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. (In a hilarious scene, the orchestra accidentally wanders into a working area, where they're beset by showers of sparks, the dress of one instrumentalist catches on fire, and the site foreman responds to the orchestra's alarmed chatter about the Ninth Symphony by saying, "we don't produce such things here.")

The film's finale escalates towards a complete breakdown in the relationships that had developed throughout the film. The orchestra's bombast is set off against Rudinski's post-celebration depression, as he throws a bottle of liquor and shatters a mirror; Makavejev freezes the image of the shattered glass, capturing the moment of destruction in a still frame. This freeze frame is matched by another that caps a love scene between Rajka and Bosko. The pair have sex in Bosko's truck and then follow it with a joyous sequence in which Bosko playfully sprays a hose at the truck's window while Rajka presses herself up against the glass, making faces and splaying her fingers as the water cascades across the windshield. Makavejev freezes the image of Rajka's hand on the glass, a moment of sexual and sensual fulfillment that he treats with as much import as the moments of desperation within the film. One could argue that, while the men in the film remain trapped by work and responsibility, the women achieve some measure of independence by striving for sensual pleasure rather than romance or stability; just as the pain of Rudinski's depression lingers in a frozen image, so too does the freeze frame of Rajka's hand aginst a sheet of water allow this ephemeral moment to linger, to endure beyond its brief duration.

This is an early indication of Makavejev's later, more fully developed dichotomy of sex as containing the potential for both destruction and for radicalism and self-fulfillment. This film lacks the freewheeling spirit and sense of play that runs through Makavejev's later works, but its near-documentary commitment to prosaic reality, to the drab exteriors of industrial communities, makes it a promising, satisfying debut nonetheless.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a poignant, surreal Freudian fantasy in which a young girl's transformation from child to adult through the onset of puberty is expressed as a nightmarish fantasia, a dreamlike fairy tale populated with vampires, uncertain parentage, transformations from one state to another, grisly violence and lurid sexuality. Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) lives with her forbidding grandmother (Helena Anýzová), retaining her child's sense of curiosity and good humor despite the austere circumstances of her upbringing and the religious seriousness of her pale, corpse-like grandmother. Director Jaromil Jireš depicts Valerie's grandmother in thick, pasty makeup that gives her a wan appearance, as though she was already a ghost with no corporeal presence. There is an opposition here between those who embrace the sensuality of the world, like the curious, open-minded Valerie, and those who deny it and castigate themselves for supposed sins of the flesh.

Valerie is very much out of place within this atmosphere of Christian guilt. She spies on young women bathing in a lake, watching as the women's white clothes are soaked through, and they kiss and play strange sexual games; one woman puts a slithering, writhing fish down her shirt, letting it slide around between her breasts. As Valerie walks home after seeing this outrageous erotic fantasy, a few drops of blood fall on a white flower, signaling the girl's first period and thus her transition from girl to woman, setting her off on a journey she only half understands. Her grandmother takes the news disapprovingly, but is even more dismayed when Valerie points out a sinister stranger who her grandmother seems to know: a man (Jirí Prýmek) dressed in a black cloak with a pale white face and horrible crooked, pointed teeth. He hides behind a weasel mask and keeps with him a servant named Eagle (Petr Kopriva), who generally obeys his orders but revolts when it comes to Valerie, with whom he forms a nearly instant camaraderie. This sinister man is a monster, sometimes called Weasel, or Richard, or the constable, or the bishop; he is apparently many different men, possibly Valerie's father, a former lover to Valerie's grandmother and/or her absent mother. He is the devil, or a demon, or the vampire of Murnau's Nosferatu (with whom he shares an especially close resemblance with his bald white dome and pointed ears), or a metaphysical incarnation of the missing man who begat Valerie and then vanished from her life. Whoever he is, his attempts to gain control over innocent young Valerie, who possibly holds the key to his eternal life, send the young girl on a strange adventure through multiple planes of reality.


Jireš depicts Valerie's adventures with a casual surrealism that is constantly disrupting the flow of reality. Characters die and are reincarnated without explanation, while others transmute into multiple forms and multiple personalities, seemingly warped by the strange power of Weasel or Valerie's imagination. As Valerie hovers on the cusp of womanhood, she is beset with multiple possibilities, multiple incarnations of her oncoming sexual awakening. As befits this unstable, uncertain transitional phase, her exposure to sexuality is sometimes fascinating, sometimes horrifying, sometimes merely puzzling. She is pursued by the priest Gracián (Jan Klusák), another religious hypocrite who promises her he'll tell her all about her father and mother but instead merely tries to seduce her, dancing towards her baring his grotesque teeth and pulling his robe down from around his neck to reveal the necklace of bones at his throat.

The veneer of normality is very thin here, and the priest might become an animalistic rapist at a moment's notice, just as the "missionary" in the pulpit, lecturing about the sanctity of virginity and the way innocence is spoiled by sex, might be Weasel barely in disguise, his white face painted dark blue beneath his robes. There is something disconcerting, though, about the way Jireš' camera sometimes seems to be ogling Valerie and the real teen actress who plays her, who spends much of the film in various states of undress or carefully arranged disarray. There are times when Jireš seems unwittingly complicit in the sexually voracious leers of those who pursue Valerie.

Despite this unsettling feeling, the film is a sensual phantasmagoria, exploring the strange netherworld opened up at the junction point between childhood and adulthood. Jireš marries his dazzling imagery to a continually shifting score (written by Lubos Fiser and Jan Klusák) that encompasses tinkling music box circularity, jaunty folk melodies, and haunting religious choral hymns. This mix of disparate musical moods and sources mirrors the film's uneasy blend of fantasy with a child's eye view on reality. The film's unsettling surrealism is perhaps a perfect visual expression of a preteen's insecurity and uncertainty: she is beginning to understand certain things, to be disabused of her innocence, but she her perspective is still slightly askew, without an adult's certainty about how the world works and what her experiences might mean. Valerie is starting to be exposed to the adult world, and what she sees looks grotesque and perhaps even evil: thus one interpretation of the film is as a wholly subjective perspective on Valerie's dawning realizations about her family's complicated sexual history and the hypocrisy and distasteful behavior underlying the seemingly respectable Christian folk around her.


Valerie, however, is ultimately triumphant because she manages to maintain her honor and her innocence even as she transitions towards adulthood. She is not corrupted by the adult things she is learning about, but instead confronts them directly. She resists the priest's advances and struggles to understand the nature of her developing relationship with Eagle: are they brother and sister or prospective lovers? This relationship especially could indicate a new perspective forming, a transitional state between the innocence of childhood, when everyone, boy or girl, is merely a friend, a platonic sibling, and the new sexual awareness of maturity, when relationships between boys and girls are fraught with sexual tensions and the possibilities of less platonic affections. Valerie is still polysexual, unattached to any particular conception of herself or her sexuality. At one point, she goes to bed with the young bride Hedvika (Alena Stojáková), and Valerie's innocent affection ("I've never had a girlfriend before," she exclaims excitedly), her kisses and embraces, cure the other woman of the vampiric affliction she'd been suffering, which had been slowly draining the life from her. Valerie, in her innocence, is a powerful figure; hers is a spiritual innocence, like that of Joan of Arc, to whom she's implicitly compared in the scene when Gracián, in a fervor of religious hypocrisy, sentences her to be burned at the stake for supposedly trying to seduce him.

With its striking surrealist imagery, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a haunting, magical film, a film alive with a sense of forbidden sexuality and transformation. It's a deeply strange film, constantly subverting narrative clarity and demanding that its images be taken as metaphors rather than at face value. Valerie's grandmother makes a deal with the Weasel for eternal youth, and returns as a sexy vampire who sucks the life out of the men she beds, but by the film's end she's been restored to her former dour, pale-faced self; perhaps her vampiric incarnation was only an expression of her domineering influence on Valerie's life. The ending is similarly ambiguous, as Valerie wanders with a mischievous smile through a riverside bacchanalia, summoned with a wave of the hand from various revelers to join in their orgiastic sexuality, but she simply strolls through their midst, no longer threatened by the man in the black robes, or her grandmother, or even by the frightening and longed-for specter of her missing mother. Instead, she simply finds her way to a white, frilly bed in the center of a clearing and goes to sleep, initially surrounded on all sides by a circle of partiers but then framed in isolation within the spacious clearing for the film's final image. This image suggests that Valerie has maintained her innocence and purity of spirit against the temptations and horrors of the world, and gone back to sleep with the ease of a child in her cradle.

Films I Love #27: Three Colors: Blue (Kryzysztof Kieslowski, 1993)

Blue, the first film in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy, is a gorgeous, understated film about the grief of a young woman, Julie (Juliette Binoche), after losing her husband and daughter in a car accident. It's a tender, quiet, meditative film, chronicling Julie's withdrawal from, and subsequent reemergence into, the world. The film is richly sensual, tracing the ways in which the sheer physicality of life draws Julie slowly, inexorably out of her introspective despair. In the devastating absence of those things that had previously given her life its meaning, Julie finds comfort and then a new kind of meaning in the sensual experience of the world, in the simple enjoyment of ice cream and coffee, in night-time swims at a pool of an unearthly deep blue, in the feel of golden sunshine warming her face on a nice day. Kieslowski experiences these things with Julie, luxuriating in the texture of coffee soaking up into a sugar cube or the crystalline blue of the wind chime ornament hanging in her room. It is a haunting, gentle film, driven as much by moods (and emotive classical music) as by incidents. Its plot meanders casually in the background, affecting Julie in quiet ways but never disturbing the film's surface calm.

Damnation

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr is often compared to Andrei Tarkovsky, with whom he undeniably shares a certain Eastern bloc minimalism, an extreme formalist austerity expressed in a languidly moving camera that creeps through one long take after another. Tarr's images, as gracefully slow and dark as a molasses river, owe a great debt to Tarkovsky, and his film Damnation is in some ways an extension of the moody black and white opening scenes of Stalker drawn out to feature-length. In other ways, however, the more salient reference point for Tarr is perhaps Michelangelo Antonioni, who like Tarr was arguably concerned with the aestheticization of boredom, lending a certain sleek, awful beauty to the utterly dull and drab. Tarr, despite his film's references to scripture and an apocalyptic atmosphere of doom hanging over his characters, lacks Tarkovsky's overt spirituality. He's more concerned with reality, with simply staring at a scene for long enough that the viewer has time to be enthralled, bored, mystified and provoked in succession by the image. Tarr's seemingly endless takes, his extreme patience for letting a scene's natural rhythms play out — a static view held for an uncomfortably long time, a camera that creeps in a slow sideways pan to reveal the blank expanse lurking around the corner, the way that characters step out of a shot only to be picked up again, long minutes later, when the camera's slow glide finally catches up to them somewhere else — encourage a depth of focus and concentration on the material reality onscreen. This is not always true of Tarkovsky, who despite the superficial similarity in aesthetics was often reaching for something beyond the surface image, but it often is the case with Antonioni, who saw truth and beauty and depth, paradoxically, in surfaces and appearances.

Damnation is all about surfaces, too, all about the material substance of life for a rather ordinary man in a drab, lifeless, perpetually rainy Hungarian village. Karrer (Miklós Székely), growing old and alone, is disconnected from life, aimlessly wandering through his town's muddy, puddle-filled streets. He hits five bars in a single day, drinking his way through his declining years, monosyllabically grunting his way through conversations with a loquacious bartender (Gyula Pauer). He finds some peace and comfort in his desire for a singer in one of these bars, the very Lynchian Titanik with its neon sign above a simple blank storefront. The unnamed singer (Vali Kerekes) unfortunately has a husband (György Cserhalmi), and Karrer wants only to get this man out of the way, to be able to spend time with his lover, who despite her fickle transitions from solicitous to dismissive and cruel, represents his only real reason for living. This simple description of the film's story is not, however, a summary; it is, more or less, the complete content of the narrative. Tarr spreads this narrative material out so sparsely that it nearly threatens to vanish, to evaporate along with the rain that's falling almost constantly in this town. The story has no forward momentum, no detail, because its characters are so iconic, so minimal: even Karrer is little more than the sum of his damp trench coat, his thin, uncontrolled wisps of hair, the hard stubble along his cheeks, the shadows that make his eyes so difficult to read.


Tarr is not concerned with deep characterization here, and Karrer remains as much of an enigma as any of the other characters, most of whom go either unnamed or introduced so casually and obtusely that they might as well not have names. Karrer opens up only once, during a long and heartfelt monologue in which he tells the singer that she is the only one who inspires him to speak, the only person who convinces him that communication can be worthwhile — and yet what she inspires him to relate, as it turns out, is mostly a lengthy description of an old affair, a time when he tormented and ridiculed one of his lovers until she committed suicide. Why he tells this story — either to the singer or to the film's audience — is unclear, except as evidence of his profound lack of ordinary morality, his total disinterest in the vast majority of his fellow human beings. Tarr presents this shocking monologue with his characteristic straightforwardness, with a direct, unmoving single take of Karrer and the singer sitting at the breakfast table, while above the ubiquitous mining cars, hauling coal from a nearby mine, creak by on overhead cable lines. Tarr seems as interested in the rhythmic, mechanical sound of the cable cars, or in the bemused expression of the singer as she munches her breakfast, as he is in the actual content of Karrer's speech. This scene should be startling, horrifying, emotional, something; Tarr places it at such a cold, static distance, however, that it's simply numbing, just another unpleasant tangent in the story of an unpleasant life.

For much of the film, in fact, Tarr seems totally unconcerned with pleasure of any kind, perhaps because there's so little to be found in Karrer's life. Even lovemaking is boring, just something to do to fill the time, and in that respect no better or worse than Karrer's far more common habit of hanging around behind walls on rainy afternoons, voyeuristically peering out into empty space. When Karrer and the singer are having narcoleptic sex at one point, Tarr's camera grows bored and wanders off in a 360-degree spin around the room instead, crawling over the surface of the objects in the woman's room; when a mirror catches sight of the couple for an interval in the camera's radius, they seem to have just barely picked up the pace a little, so that from a distance it might even be thought that they were actually enjoying themselves. Tarr's camera simply meanders on, past the mirror to linger on the rest of the room. The film has a similar attention to sounds, to the scrape of Karrer's razor on his wiry stubble, the mechanical loops of the mining cars, the various sounds of the rain falling in puddles, on roofs, on already-damp ground, or dripping in sheets from off windowsills. The town's music also plays a crucial role in the intricate, carefully designed soundtrack, with the phlegmatic wheeze of the accordion and the sleepy pseudo-jazz of the bar bands adding to the general atmosphere of intense ennui.

The film is intimately involved with its location, with the objects and atmosphere of its place, in ways that it is not with any of its actual human characters, who serve more symbolic functions. Tarr betrays little interest in their individual psychologies. It is a cliché to say that the town itself is a character; perhaps not as much of a cliché to point out that in this film, the town is the only real character. Tarr is tracing out, through Karrer, the story of all the town's inhabitants, charting the town's moods, which based on the amount of rain that falls and the mud and muck it produces, are mostly black, foul moods. The references to Biblical plagues and destruction sent down from God do not mark out Karrer as Lot or a similar figure of Biblical misfortune; it is more likely the town itself is Gomorrah, smote for the sins of its inhabitants, plagued with gray ugly weather and congenital ennui and smileless faces. At one point, Tarr pans across a blank exterior wall that is every so often interrupted by a door. Inside, crowds of people, their hard faces as expressionless as the wall, stare disinterestedly out at the pouring rain.


And yet, strangely enough, Tarr's vision is not entirely bleak, not as long as he has room for such images of surrealistic joy as the long shot of a man dancing manically in the rain, playfully splashing in puddles and creating rhythms with the slap of his shoes on the watery ground. The film culminates with a group version of this solitary celebration, a typically languid and pedestrian dance that nevertheless offers the film's sole vision of community solidarity, of fun and pleasure. It is a moment of respite, an escape from the utter nothingness that is life for these people, a chance to seize something good. Tarr does nothing to make this moment extravagant, shooting it from the same anesthetized distance with which he captures the more prosaic events of the rest of the film. The image is static, the perspective as disinterested as ever, and yet the light and motion within the frame, the sense of measured excitement and understated happiness that's as close as these people get to celebration, communicates that this is a special moment for the village.

This vision of communal togetherness is tempered by the film's overall doom-laden atmosphere, and by the especially bleak tone of its denouement. Betrayed by his lover, Karrer betrays his friends in turn, and in an image of startlingly direct symbolism, literally descends to the level of a dog, getting down on all fours and barking and snapping at one of the mangy, ferocious-looking black mutts that roamed the town's rainy streets throughout the film. Forsaking his fellow humans and the shabby but nonetheless sincere solidarity they offer him, Karrer chooses to isolate himself for good, becoming in the process less than human, an animal fighting only for itself. This ending suggests Tarr's overriding philosophy of humanity, his belief that what truly separates us as a species is not any of the ordinary signifiers of human uniqueness, as important as they can be — not our capacity for speech or complex thought, nor our ability to build and design (industry serves as a grim backdrop in this film, not a sign of progress), nor the institutions of government and order we create, which Karrer ultimately turns to only as a hypocritical tool of revenge — but our ability to socialize, to form true connections, to exist as true communities rather than mere packs of wild dogs. When this communitarian impulse breaks down, when the bonds of human connections are severed, then humanity, like its symbolic representative Karrer, descends to growling in the streets, running mangily through the harsh elements with no protection and no hope.

A Game With Stones/Punch and Judy/Historia Naturae (Suita)

A Game With Stones is essentially a very early trial run for Jan Svankmajer's later pessimist masterpiece Dimensions of Dialogue, rehearsing the themes of human evolution and self-destruction that would be so eloquently and powerfully stated in the later film. This earlier stab at similar material is, unsurprisingly, rougher and broader, though it has the same relentless, rhythmic drive as so many of Svankmajer's animations. Also like many of the director's other films, the structure is rigidly divided into distinct sections, each one representing a progression from the last, a variation on the kinds of "games" that can be played with the titular stones. The film utilizes a very simple set-up: every few hours, a spigot regulated by a clock (whose ticking provides a metronome-like soundtrack to the film) drips out a few stones into a bucket dangling below the clock. Once in the bucket, the stones enact a series of ritualized, dance-like movements, increasing in complexity with each iteration, before the bucket turns over, dropping the stones on the ground. As a metaphor for human existence, it's blunt and obvious, not to mention disarmingly negative: the rocks, inanimate stand-ins for the world's inhabitants, end their brief moments of play and experimentation by getting tossed into the discard heap without ceremony.

The first group of rocks, a black stone and a white stone, enact only the simplest of permutations, subdividing into smaller pebbles and arranging themselves into neat rows of alternating colors, or else dividing the screen in half vertically between black columns and white columns. Each time the spigot dispenses more stones, there is more diversity of colors and textures, as well as more variety in the kinds of movements and patterns that the stones engage in. There is something increasingly sensuous, even sexual, about the subsequent patterns, with stones rubbing against one another, sometimes seeming to birth torrents of smaller rounded stones from the frictive collisions of the larger rocks. Soon, the rocks form into humanoid shapes, complete with exaggerated external genitals and breasts, while Svankmajer simultaneously delves inside the body, creating patterns of skeletal systems and internal organs that seem to be pulsing, breathing like lungs taking in air. Having achieved this humanoid form, the rocks then begin pushing towards destruction. In the next segment, an obvious precursor to the mutually devouring automatons of Dimensions of Dialogue, the rocks are crushed into thin silt, filling the screen like the accumulated rock layers that make up the fossil record below the Earth's surface. This already suggests the destruction, the passing of humanity into history, and Svankmajer drives the metaphor home by creating human faces from out of the rock dust, faces that alternate between tenderly kissing and violently absorbing one another.

The final sequence brings this progression to its logical conclusion. Here, the playful games and interactions of the stones become truly violent and destructive, with fierce collisions resulting in cracked and shattered stones. Svankmajer's editing, brutally fast throughout the film, reaches its apogee here, with brisk, visceral cutting that accentuates the violence of this final game. The end result, the destruction of the bucket that holds the stones and thus the disruption of the cycle, is apparently Svankmajer's vision of apocalypse, an apocalypse for which the world's inhabitants must take full responsibility. Of course, despite this bleak symbolic message, Svankmajer's animations retain a certain whimsical appeal, a playfulness and sense of visual excitement that is never quite submerged by the director's thematic darkness.

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The inappropriately named Punch and Judy — it's actually a duel between famed hand puppet Punch and the lesser-known Joey — is one of Jan Svankmajer's absurdist puppet animations. It's a darkly hilarious piece of mimed theater in which the two protagonists repeatedly beat on each other with wooden mallets after a failed transaction involving the attempted barter of a guinea pig. Svankmajer creates a bizarre tension by having the puppets argue over a live animal, which sits calmly and stoically on the film's stage, munching at a tub of grains while the puppets engage in their manic battles all around the blank-eyed guinea pig. This generates friction between the artificial constructs and organic elements in the film, with the latter also including the hands of the puppet master, which are seen slipping into Punch and Joey's limp forms at the beginning of the film. By framing the film explicitly as theater, with a proscenium arch and stage, Svankmajer sets up expectations for a stately, mannered piece that maintains its distance from the action.

Instead, the first shot after the stage's curtain is abruptly pulled up is an extreme closeup of the guinea pig's face, so close that its beady eyes and buck teeth are blurred and its long brush-like hairs seem to be rubbing against the camera's lens. It's Svankmajer's deliberate — and hilarious — way of disrupting the theatrical presentation of the film, and he proceeds to further break things down with the frenetic pace of his editing. The extended fight between Punch and Joey is hysterical, seemingly chaotic and yet actually controlled by a very tight structure. Svankmajer even Mickey Mouses the score, synchronizing the duo's mallet hits with orchestral blasts and drum kicks, giving a syncopated quality to the film's rhythms, the beatings providing the rhythmic propulsion for the breakneck pace of the editing. Throughout it all, as the puppet duo commit increasingly horrible acts on one another's bodies, taking turns "dying" and being shoved into a coffin, the guinea pig sits there stoically chewing, oblivious to everything that's happening around it. There's an interplay between several layers of reality here: the puppets in their collaged theatrical world, the guinea pig wandering independently through this world, the unseen puppet master controlling the puppets from beneath the surface, and of course Svankmajer himself, overseeing it all. Most of all, though, Punch and Judy is simply a wildly entertaining farce, a demented piece of puppet slapstick.

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Like Punch and Judy before it, Jan Svankmajer's Historia Naturae (Suita) relies upon the intersections and relationships between multiple layers of reality and representation. The film is another of Svankmajer's structuralist pieces, in which the structure of the film and its rigid division into segments informs the symbolic content underlying the director's always dazzling animations. He also continues to mine his obsessions with evolution and categorization, dividing the film according to the classifications of lifeforms. Within each segment, Svankmajer cuts rapidly between a variety of different forms representing fauna of increasing evolutionary complexity: crustaceans, insects, reptiles, birds, lower mammals, simians, and finally of course humans. For each of these lifeforms, Svankmajer assembles a dense montage that consists of live specimens, fossilized or taxidermied remains, skeletal forms, and drawings of various kinds, both scientific and artistic. The result is an animated summation of biological diversity that also incorporates the diversity of means of representation, ranging from the sketchiest of drawings to the corpse of the creature in question, to the actual living beast itself. All of this material is stitched together into a complex pastiche, bringing to life the drawings and skeletons and taxidermic remains to roam around on equal footing with the living, breathing animals they represent.

Svankmajer also separates each section from the next one with a recurring image, a closeup of a mouth, eating and chewing a piece of steak. This repeated divider serves as a reminder of the food chain, but lest the audience start feeling too superior about their place in the pecking order, Svankmajer ends the film by changing things up a bit: instead of a human mouth he animates a skull chewing a piece of food, finally placing humans on the same level with the rest of the lifeforms in the film, as susceptible to death and decay as any other being. This is bleak stuff, but even if the repetitive structure sometimes gets a little tiresome here (as it does not in Svankmajer's best structuralist animations), there's still plenty of eye candy to keep things interesting throughout.