L'eclisse

The typical descriptions of Michelangelo Antonioni's great L'eclisse make it sound like an unbearably dull affair, a true product of the 60s art film era. It's about "alienation," right? And disconnection, and the isolation of people from one another in the modern age. Given the typical critical wisdom surrounding Antonioni and this film, one could be forgiven for expecting a bracing, obtuse, rather chilly affair, a humorless intellectual statement that maintains its distance from its characters. Upon seeing the film, of course, one begins to suspect that this is an instance of too much critical discourse threatening to smother the life out of a vibrant, complex work of art. L'eclisse pulses with energy and beauty, with the formal ingenuity of Antonioni's images, which have a lush, sensuous quality. This is a film about the disconnected modern era, yes, but much more importantly it's about the people who have to live in this age, people who aren't willing to take alienation and lack of communication as a given, who fight against the sometimes suffocating constraints placed upon their lives.

Specifically, it's about the lovely Vittoria (Monica Vitti), who breaks up with her lover Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) in the film's extended opening set piece, which masterfully creates tension solely out of the manipulation of space and movement. As Vittoria and Riccardo pace around his apartment together, they are engaging in a dance of disconnection, their words flying past unheard even as their bodies clang off one another whenever they're on the verge of coming together. Antonioni accentuates these disjunctions with his camera, which purposefully creates jarring angles within which the quarreling lovers are awkwardly fitted. At one point, an abrupt cut pushes the lovers out of the frame almost completely, so that a large gray lampshade fills most of the empty space, until Vittoria turns away from Riccardo to face the camera again. It's a great, raw scene, all abstracted motion and hard lines, but its rigidity is contrasted against the equally wonderful sequence in which Vittoria commiserates after the breakup with her girlfriends Anita (Rosanna Rory) and Marta (Mirella Ricciardi). At the apartment of Kenyan native Marta, Vittoria is delighted to study the photos and memorabilia of the other girl's homeland, and she and Anita playfully dress up as blackface natives and dance to the rhythms of an African drum music record, their snaking limbs making fluid "S" shapes in the air.

Despite the racial obliviousness of these middle-class Italian women — Marta puts a stop to the game, seemingly offended, but then derisively calls the blacks she grew up with "monkeys" — they're trying to have fun, and Vittoria at least possesses a genuine spirit of intellectual curiosity, a desire to absorb learning from her surroundings, to learn about other people. She's a woman who will randomly follow strangers on the street to see what they'll do, or who will be suddenly struck by the quality of a person's face. She has a playful, whimsical spirit, a perhaps unconscious desire for something more that drives her to leave Riccardo at the beginning of the film. She's a product of her time and her culture, and she shares the flaws of her milieu, but she's also a spirited and independent woman who isn't willing to settle for the dreary existence that's seemingly plotted out for her: a discontented marriage, like her friends have, to some man who's perpetually away on business.

She's more in touch with the world: a night-time chase through the streets for her friend's lost dog leads to a wonderful shot of her laughing, unguarded, as the dog walks on its hind legs away from her. Later, she's drawn to the clanging sound of tall metal poles bouncing off each other in a strong wind; she has a sensual sensibility that appreciates the urban poetry of these subtle moments. Antonioni is, like Vittoria, attuned to the sensuality of the world, to the puffed cotton wisps of a cloud bank or the ripples spiraling out from a finger as it breaks the surface of stagnant water. His images reflect engagement with the world, even when he isolates Vittoria in pale gray expanses of nothingness that visualize her loneliness and alienation. He's able to find beauty even in a construction site lit by street lamps, in a splinter of wood floating in a barrel filled with rain water, in the abstract lines of an apartment block set off against the vast empty sky.


Despite her free spirit and thirst for more, almost immediately after breaking up with Riccardo, Vittoria finds herself being drawn into the orbit of the stock trader Piero (Alain Delon), a driven, intense young man who spends his days in the relentlessly fast-paced world of the stock exchange, where he shouts into phones and races back and forth across the office's floor placing frantic buy and sell orders. He's completely immersed in the world of money all day long, and is sometimes just barely able to peek his head above the water by night. Vittoria meets him because she goes to the stock exchange to see her mother (Lilla Brignone), who spends all day there as though playing a game — she's a precursor to those old ladies who today would be found sitting in front of a Las Vegas slot machine for endless hours at a stretch. Vittoria has nothing but contempt for this world, and she's pushed away whenever Piero can't resist talking about his new car or the money he's made or lost in the course of the day. And yet she also feels a strange attraction to him, a slowly sparking connection.

The slow, halting courtship between Vittoria and Piero is warm and human and touching, marked by hesitations and withdrawals and false starts. Antonioni is a master at portraying the difficulty of love, the incredible psychological and sociological obstacles to forging a connection between two independent beings. But what's too often overlooked is the hope and beauty that are also contained within his vision of the world: despite the difficulties, despite the seemingly insurmountable barriers separating us, we frequently do make connections, if only momentary ones. The playful wrestling and cuddling of Vittoria and Piero, their stylized come-ons and maneuvers, are a dance of desire, a response to the hard-edged dance of disconnection between her and Riccardo in the film's opening minutes. In contrast to the earlier scenes, the love scenes with Piero often dissolve into frantic, messy movements, uncontrolled and passionate — two reserved people letting go with one another.

There is, of course, a sense even at the height of their love affair that this cannot work in the long term. One knows instinctively that there is little room in Piero's busy work schedule for true, enduring love, and that Vittoria will not have the patience of Piero's less serious old girlfriends for his habitually broken dates and long, unpredictable working hours. And yet Antonioni allows the couple their moments of happiness, then lets them drift out of the film altogether. The final seven minutes of the film are a poetic, dialogue-free collage of quiet, unassuming street scenes from around the city, scenes of urban life going on, no matter what the fate of this one couple might be. This is a sublimely humanist statement, a refusal to give his attractive movie star couple their proper denouement, focusing instead on the ordinary people who get on and off of buses, reading papers, walking to or from work, sitting in a park. Antonioni even includes a clever joke halfway through, a shot of a blonde woman's head from behind, briefly giving the audience the impression that Vitti's character has returned, until the woman turns around, revealing someone else altogether. The main couple are represented again, symbolically, only in the penultimate shot, a haunting nighttime image of the construction site where they planned to meet, empty and desolate, lit only by a single street lamp, perhaps the site of an unkept date, the onset of their disconnection.

Films I Love #11: I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi, 1962)

Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati is a deceptively simple film that is stunning in its effect. Its minimal story concerns the construction worker Giovanni (Carlo Cabrini), who is forced to leave behind his home town and his fiancée Liliana (Anna Canzi) in order to find a better job in a different part of the country. After an opening dancehall scene that is surprisingly static and formal, the film shifts subtly back and forth between Giovanni's tenure in the south of Italy, and his memories of his troubled engagement to Liliana back home. Long stretches function almost like a silent film, capturing the quiet and stillness of rural life, as well as evoking the loneliness and isolation of Giovanni, alone in an unfamiliar place, far from his family and those he loves. Olmi's lush, textured images are so classically beautiful as individual frames that it's easy to forget the perfect control and crispness of his editing rhythms. These sumptuous visuals capture the forlorn beauty of the rural landscapes that Giovanni wanders through, even finding cause for wonder in such unlikely images as a nighttime work site, where showers of sparks from welding torches are transformed into an unearthly fireworks display.

The accumulation of detail and incident is slow and deliberate, gently nudging the protagonist towards the realization of how deeply he misses his fiancée and how much he values their relationship. In the final twenty minutes of the film, the couple begin exchanging letters, which are read aloud in voiceover. This sudden outpouring of open, sincere communication has an energizing effect in contrast to the rest of the film's quiet and reserve. And despite the romanticism of this central relationship and the beauty of Olmi's images, the film also serves as a subtle Marxist critique of the alienation of labor, the economic pressures that uproot workers from their homes and their families in search of increasingly scarcer and lower-paying jobs. Like most great political films, I Fidanzati locates its politics squarely in the personal, in the dramas of separation and love that drive its central couple.

Kill, Baby... Kill!/His Girl Friday/The Trouble With Harry/The Seven Year Itch

The first scene of Kill, Baby... Kill! is as powerful, visceral, and over-the-top as its title might suggest. The film opens abruptly, as though in the middle of a scene, with a woman running away from a large castle, screaming "No! No!" She runs towards the camera, which alternates between askew closeups that emphasize the terror in her eyes, and long shots that situate her fleeing form in the gloomy darkness of the castle's front lawn. The woman runs into a nearby building, then stops as though transfixed in horror by the sight of a spiked grating below her — which she soon enough leaps to her death by impaling herself on it. It's a harrowing, mesmerizing, intriguing scene, one that promises a great psychological horror film in the making.

In the course of this moody 1966 giallo, director Mario Bava rarely again achieves the same visceral impact as those opening minutes, though what the film lacks in chills it makes up for in atmosphere and the dazzling, garish cinematography. The story of Bava's film is a classic ghost yarn, of a young girl who was killed and has since haunted and cursed the residents of the town in which she died. A doctor (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) and an inspector (Pierro Lulli) arrive in the town to investigate this latest murder, to which they were alerted by the note the unfortunate woman wrote before her death. The story, obviously, is the stuff of countless other horror films, and frankly many of those others handled the scares much better. Bava, on the other hand, hardly seems to be interested in frightening his audiences so much as impressing them with the lurid quality of his visuals. The flashy camerawork is constantly calling attention to itself, with rapid zooms and pans disrupting the fluid flow of the cinematography. When the local constable (Luciano Catenacci) is first introduced, Bava brings him in with an exceedingly fast zoom onto his sinister, bald-headed countenance, accompanied by a dramatic theme on the soundtrack. The sudden emphasis suggests that this man will be tremendously important to the plot, maybe even the villain himself; the fact that he barely appears after this scene is not nearly as important as Bava's willingness to make anything and everything a matter of such visual sturm-und-drang.

In a later scene at the local cemetery, Bava again plays with such conventions of camerawork and emphasis, with a bizarre swinging zoom that focuses in, then swoops back out again, on a faraway tree stump chosen seemingly at random. Is the stump important? Or is the camera itself important, indicating the movement of something that could explain the creaking noise heard on the soundtrack? It turns out to be neither — in fact, Bava is just using this unmotivated camera movement as a distraction, and after several zooms in and out, the legs of a girl hanging down from above suddenly swing across the frame at a perpendicular angle to the movement of the camera. Once again, this moment isn't even remotely explained or returned to later, and the presumed corpse is never discovered, but it's a striking and memorable shot anyway. Bava routinely disregards the machinations of his silly plot in favor of such visual grandeur, which is inscribed into every frame of the film. The camera is constantly darting around to ascribe overblown importance to random bits of mise en scéne, like the portrait of the dead girl that Bava zooms in on, then further draws attention to the plaque underneath that lists her lifespan as 1880-1887, a fact that might've had more impact if Bava ever bothered to establish the year in which his film takes place. It doesn't really matter though, since we get that he's just making the conventional gesture towards the "spooky" fact that the little blonde girl who we've seen wandering around the screen singing eerie songs is in fact a ghost, as if we couldn't have guessed.

It's hard to take too seriously a film that puts so little stock in its own premise, but Bava clearly takes such pleasure in the lurid colors and composition of each frame that Kill, Baby... Kill! winds up being a lot of fun anyway. With its striking aesthetics and some great kitschy performances, especially from Fabienne Dali as the local witch who tries to fight the curse, this is a classic of gothic horror in spite of its silliness and lack of scares.

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His Girl Friday is a perfect screwball farce from Howard Hawks, built on a model of steadily escalating insanity, with Cary Grant orchestrating the entire maelstrom as the quick-witted and scheming newspaperman Walter Burns. This is a typically great comic performance from the always reliable Grant, who handled the fast-paced dialogue of a Hawks screwball like no other actor. Here he's playing opposite the similarly sharp Rosalind Russell as his ex-wife, the former reporter Hildy Johnson, who has returned to his life only to politely inform her ex that she's remarrying, to the slightly dopey but sincere insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). Obviously, Grant isn't going to stand for this, and he immediately begins concocting as many schemes as he can think of to prevent Russell and her new fiance from leaving on the afternoon train.

The film crackles with the strength of the Grant/Russell pairing, and their verbal sparring is unfailingly hilarious, as well as indicative of the underlying dynamics of their relationship and failed marriage. They originally split up because Russell was discontented with their unstable life, with the lack of any traditional lifestyle or comforts — their honeymoon was spent covering a coal mine story instead of anything more romantic. Her new husband is thus much more stable, as well as more romantic and conventional. While he tells her that "even ten minutes without you feels too long," Grant consistently disregards all propriety and even forgets to hold doors for her, letting them slam in her face behind him. Bellamy knows how to treat a lady, while Grant does not. But the script's central question is whether Russell is actually a "lady" at all, and as usual in Hawks' films, the answer is an emphatic (and ecstatic) "no." The film posits a dichotomy between the ladylike option of being a housewife, having children, and settling down, and the more vigorous and non-traditional option of continuing to have a career, working in the company of men as part of their fast-paced world. Clearly, Russell belongs in this world, and Grant's manipulations mostly center around his attempts to bring her back into the world of journalism, if only for one story, knowing that once she's gotten the taste for it again, she'll be back for good. Indeed, it's not too long before Russell is stationed at a press room phone, barking out stories and hot tips, and it's obvious that this is where she belongs, comfortable in a man's world and not playing wife to anyone, even if sometimes that's what she thinks she wants.

These sexual politics may drive the plot and its underlying themes, but it's the film's glistening comedic surfaces that really propel it forward and keep the viewer utterly rapt. In addition to the central Grant/Russell rapport, each of them gets to try their quick wits and verbal dexterity against a seemingly never-ending variety of straight men. If Grant and Russell are roaring through life at triple speed, everyone else in the picture seems to be coasting along in a lower gear, and the script takes great joy in the way this comedic duo tears into everyone around them. The dim-witted city sheriff Peter B. Hartwell (Gene Lockhart) gets a lot of this abuse, especially concerning his middle initial — "the B is for brains," Russell quips, after recounting how the sheriff allowed a murderer to escape by handing him a gun so a psychologist could watch him re-enact his crime. All the other cops and reporters on hand also get their time as the butt of these jokes, as does Bellamy as the luckless would-be hubbie who keeps winding up in jail due to Grant's hijincks. But best of all is Billy Gilbert in a hilarious cameo as a ludicrously dumb state lackey delivering an important message — his quick tongue and flawless timing are put to brilliant use as he stammers his way through a number of conversations in which he clearly has no idea what's going on.

Hawks' characteristic overlapping dialogue, everywhere present throughout this film, is also used to especially great effect in the many scenes involving telephones. In many ways, this could be called a telephone comedy, although it is not, as this might imply, a film in which the characters often talk to each other over the phone. Rather, most of the phone scenes in the film involve many people in the same room, all yelling into different phones at different unseen and mostly unknown people on the other end. Hawks handles this kind of chaos very well, and there's a particularly noteworthy scene where a bunch of reporters are returning, in dribs and drabs, to send their latest updates back to their papers. Hawks simply sets up at the end of the press room table and waits for the reporters to return, which they soon do, forming a sort of musical round of voices as they each step into the frame. One comes in, begins his report over one phone, then another fills in the space to his left and begins a different report, then another just as the first one is leaving. This babble of voices, telling different, often wildly contradictory, versions of the same story, is a recurring theme in the film, and Hawks always makes sure to carefully situate these different voices within the frame as well. In a later scene, Grant is calling his paper from a phone in the right foreground, while to the left and behind him Russell attempts to conduct a conversation with the police to locate her arrested fiance and his mother. The competing voices of the soundtrack are thus reflected in the tension of the halved frame.

This is a flawless comedy, with Hawks leading his stellar cast through a typically fast-paced, non-stop barrage of witty wordplay and comic scenarios. The dialogue crackles with energy and verve, and the performers stand up to the task in every way. The classic screwball era may well have provided some of the best comedies of all time, and His Girl Friday is one of the best of the best.

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While Alfred Hitchcock is an acknowledged genius of the thriller and undeniably a giant of Hollywood film, his comedic talents are still viewed, unfortunately, as somewhat secondary. Not only were his thrillers frequently padded with subtle humor and sexual innuendo, but he also made the much-maligned but utterly charming To Catch a Thief, and my personal favorite Hitchcock film, The Trouble With Harry. This quirky, totally strange comedy takes a familiar thriller subject, the dead body found mysteriously in the woods, and disarms its menace by having the people who find it — a motley assortment of cheery New England rural folks — treat its sudden appearance in their lives as a small bother at worst, a minor distraction from what really is, after all, a rather pleasant day. That these gentle souls are so unperturbed by the corpse in their woods is the film's essential joke, a single gag that's stretched out with such droll wit and total commitment to these bizarre personalities, that the film becomes absolutely irresistible.

It all starts when Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) stumbles across the body of Harry lying in the woods, and he believes that he accidentally shot him while rabbit hunting. He is mildly distressed about the possibility of going to jail, so he resolves to bury the corpse, but before he can, seemingly the whole town stumbles into the area. There's a kindly old maid (Mildred Natwick) who just politely asks him what's the trouble when she comes across him carrying the body by the legs, a bookish professor who nods and apologizes to the body when he trips over it, the lovely Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine), who seems outright overjoyed when she sees the dead body (because it's her husband, naturally), and the local artist Sam (John Forsythe), who decides to sketch the corpse. What ensures from this point is a subtly hilarious but outwardly deadpan farce, in which these people, for various reasons and motivations, keep burying and then digging up again the unfortunate Harry, who seems to be causing a great number of complications even after his death. This all takes place in the cheery sunlit setting of autumnal New England, which Hitch captures in a static but sumptuous visual style that makes each exterior shot look like a postcard — the film's rich orange and red hues serve as a perfect contrast to the gallows humor and casual disinterest in mortality that these characters evince.

Indeed, the film is a subtle satire of small-town life, as well as a certain provincial mentality that cares for little outside of oneself. Hitchcock both celebrates and mocks this mentality, but for the most part the film is a loving tribute to these people, who casually resist all authority — represented in the film by the bumbling local constable, who's paid by the arrest and thus makes every effort to find even the pettiest of offenses — and likewise strive to maintain their sheltered provincial existence from even good intrusions of the outside world. The struggling artist Sam is remarkably indifferent to monetary success. When he gets a chance to sell his paintings, he declares them priceless and instead of asking for money, requests that the buyer fulfill the wants of his friends: strawberries, a chemistry set, a new cash register, a shotgun and hunting outfit, a hope chest. This selfless act of kindness and bigheartedness belies the idea that these people are entirely self-centered and careless, and in this context their disregard for Harry's body takes on its proper significance.

It's a film in which death is merrily shrugged off so that life may go on for the living, and it's no coincidence that Hitchcock implicitly counterbalances death with sex. The burying of Harry becomes a mere pretext for the development of two new romantic relationships, and this burgeoning love is reflected in the film's depiction of sensual beauty in its many landscape shots. The film is also loaded with clever sexual innuendos, just barely disguised, and I will never cease to cackle with glee when Forsythe tells Gwenn: "don't you realize you'll be the first man to cross her... threshold?" Hitch was clearly having a lot of fun with this subtly naughty material, and all the actors seem to be in on the joke and having a ball as well. It's a riot, a gorgeous ode to rural autumns, and a celebration of the simple pleasures of a life in which death is just a minor mishap, easily forgotten with some tea and blueberry muffins.

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Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch has, seemingly, an airtight premise: take a dumpy middle-aged married man (Tom Ewell), send his wife and kids away for the summer, and put the stunningly gorgeous Marilyn Monroe upstairs from him as a constant source of temptation. The results should be both hilarious and sizzling, by all rights, and they are, at least whenever Monroe herself is onscreen. But for too much of the film, she's not, and large portions of the film focus solely on Ewell, whose paranoid fantasies, neuroses, and wild flights of imagination are mildly amusing at times, but more often just tedious and clunky. The film opens with an equally unamusing vignette with some Indians providing an old-time parallel to the main story, and a painfully unfunny narrator who thankfully disappears early in the film. Ewell spends much of the film by himself, talking incessantly despite the fact that no one else is around, and the film never adequately explains why this man feels the need to narrate every little thing he does, other than to keep some dialogue moving. It's also a mystery why, given Monroe's breathless and hilarious performance as the sweetly naïve and ditzy girl upstairs, and the surprisingly great chemistry between her and Ewell, the film keeps her offscreen for so long.

However, whenever she's around, the film sparkles and sizzles in exactly the way it should. Her introduction is a fabulous half-hour scene in which Ewell, tortured by guilt but nevertheless taking advantage of his wife's absence, invites her to his apartment for drinks. Monroe's character, unnamed and archetypically called just "The Girl," is indeed like an elemental force of nature that blows into Ewell's life with little regard for conventionality or ordinary social relations. Monroe's character is deliriously unmindful of her own sexuality, thinking nothing of appearing naked on her balcony or blithely announcing that she keeps her panties in the freezer during the summer. Her every move and utterance seems calculated to attract attention — as, indeed, the real Marilyn probably constructed her breathless, carefree persona — but her character is simply doing and saying whatever comes into her airy head. "Do you drink?" Ewell asks her at one point. "Oh yeah, like a fish," she burbles, but then is unable to come up with an acceptable drink and finally asks for a "big, tall" martini. Her character is pure Id, a wonderfully ludicrous male fantasy congealed on the screen in all her vivid reality. Ewell's character is given to wild daydreaming and fantasies, but he's incapable of dreaming up anything crazier than the real Marilyn as she appears here. In his imagination, she's pretty much just like she actually is in both his reality and the reality outside the picture, a reality that's acknowledged towards the end when Ewell yells out, "What blonde? Maybe it's Marilyn Monroe!"

This line is indicative of just how much the film is actually about the mystique of Marilyn, rather than about any character played by her. Marilyn's character here is sexual desire, abstracted and idealized — she's not a particular instance of the sex goddess but the Ur-goddess, the libidinal being on whom all others are based. In her raw simplicity and bubbly good humor, she's the spirit of pure, innocent sensuality and desire. As long as she's onscreen, The Seven Year Itch is a comic gem, but in the long stretches when she's nowhere to be found, it's a dull and awkward bore where even the jokes fall flat. Maybe that's part of the point, though — Ewell's character is a boring slob, a nobody, animated and brought to life only in relation to the radiant brilliance of Monroe, who burns bright but too briefly in this film as in life.

11/8: Wheel of Time; The Flowers of St. Francis

[This is a contribution to the Film + Faith Blog-a-Thon hosted by Strange Culture.]

It would be very possible to argue that Werner Herzog's entire body of work, in both fiction and documentary forms, has been a sustained treatise on the nature of faith. Whether it's Fitzcarraldo's faith in man's ability to do the impossible, or the faith of the conquistador Aguirre in the existence of a city of gold, the characters and situations that Herzog has presented have almost always involved a leap of imagination beyond the confines of ordinary, observed reality in search of a deeper truth. Thus, it's strange that Herzog has made so few films explicitly about actual religious faith, and that the handful he has made — God and the Burdened, Huie's Sermon, Bells From the Deep — are mostly among his least known films, though by no means his least. Wheel of Time also deals explicitly with matters of faith, specifically the Buddhist faith as practiced in Tibet, India, and Austria.

Wheel of Time finds Herzog in his most straightforward documentary mode, eschewing the flights of fancy he so often allows into his documentary work as part of his search for the "ecstatic truths" behind observed reality. He's chronicling the celebration of an important Buddhist ritual at Bodh Gaya, India, said to be the place where the Buddha achieved his enlightenment. Herzog presents his footage with little of his usual mythologizing, mainly because the film doesn't really require it; the reality of these people is already perfectly suited to Herzog's obsession with extreme leaps of faith, even without his elaboration. Herzog's voiceover thus simply provides a largely objective commentary on what we're seeing on-screen. These commentaries are usually not to be trusted in Herzog's films. In Lessons of Darkness and Bells From the Deep, for example, the voiceover often invents fanciful explanations for what's happening in the images, but here Herzog's narration has more of a straightforward anthropological feel to it.

The images, though, are anything but straightforward. Herzog has captured some of the most compelling real-life imagery of pure religious faith I've ever seen. No one who's seen the remarkable spectacle of Buddhist pilgrims making their excruciatingly slow progress to Bodh Gaya, bowing and prostrating themselves flat on the ground in between every single step, can doubt the intensity of their religious conviction. I was, quite simply, overwhelmed. The actions of these people, unable to take even a step without being compelled to humble themselves upon the ground, could only suggest the workings of a mind and experience of life totally alien to my own. In this single image, Herzog has managed to capture the ultimate expression of pure religious devotion, faith taken to its utter extreme, a total submission of human existence to the ego-less pursuit of spiritual values. Herzog seems to sense that this is a moment for awed silence, and after briefly introducing the pilgrimage, he falls silent and allows the images their own haunting power. These images encompass the pathos, mystery, and even humor of the situation, as in the scene when two pilgrims cross a shallow pond strewn with rocks, and go to great pains to prostrate themselves awkwardly across the stepping stones without getting wet.

Herzog's film as a whole similarly balances the emotional textures of this religious milieu, delving deep into the mysteries of a faith so intense that it can only baffle and entice the non-believing observer. Wheel of Time may not be Herzog's flashiest or most stylistically perfect film, but it does an excellent job of exploring its subject and bringing some sense of the Buddhist religious experience to the screen. As Herzog himself says towards the end of the film, the central mystery of this experience — the internal image of the "mandala" that every believer carries inside — necessarily escapes from the camera. It's a curious documentary in which the very essence of the film is an unfilmable abstract concept, but if anyone could pull this off, it's Herzog.

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Roberto Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis provides a very different but also compelling image of an impossibly strong faith. Rossellini's life of the saint is presented in an elliptical tale that, with its anecdotal structure and lengthy chapter headings, seems very much rooted in literature as well as film. The film itself is an interesting form of extreme stylization disguised as realism. Much has always been made of the fact that the roles of St. Francis and his followers are all played by genuine monks, not professional actors, and the drab, simple outdoors scenery enhances the feeling of a realistic portrayal. The realism, however, ends there, at essentially the most surface level. In every other respect, Rossellini stylizes, simplifies, and exaggerates his portrayal of Francis and his followers in order to tell his story and make his points in the broadest possible strokes. The Franciscan brothers are presented as a band of holy fools, willingly making themselves naïve to the world and its workings in order to humble themselves before God.

I've never been especially sympathetic to the idea that God demands this kind of withdrawal from his truest devotees; if God exists, and he created the world, it logically follows that he should want us to live in it and not deny our senses or our involvement in worldly affairs. This is why Francis, like the prostrated Buddhist pilgrims in Wheel of Time, is a figure antithetical in many respects to my way of thinking. Nevertheless, the beauty of Rossellini's film lies in the fact that it doesn't require the viewer to subscribe to Francis' viewpoint in order to understand and appreciate him. Whereas Herzog's film keeps the viewer deliberately at a distance from Buddhism, explaining it to some degree but preserving its mysteries, Rossellini draws us close to Francis, inserting us forcefully into his world. It's a world that's sometimes poignant, sometimes absurdist, sometimes almost childlike in its naïveté. The adventures of the hapless Brother Ginapro and the simple-minded old man Giovanni, especially, have a richly comic air that lends to the film a real humor and absurdity.

In the film's most heavily stylized sequence, Ginapro finds himself in a village which has been sieged by the conquering army of Nicolaio, a massive Slavic tyrant who's encased in clinking armor so unwieldy that he can barely even see out of it. The encounter of the genial, scrawny Ginapro with this towering pile of scrap metal is one of the film's most hilarious scenes, so much so that even the very real threat of death hovering over the scene is nearly forgotten. In any case, Ginapro's simple humility and graceful acceptance of whatever life hands him finally cows the tyrant, who (somewhat unbelievably, it must be said) promptly decides to withdraw from the town.

Rossellini's film is a compelling portrait of the power of extreme faith to be used as a force for good and peace. In this film, St. Francis and his fellow brothers are icons of pure good, so innocent they can barely even conceive of an evil deed, their lives an endless cycle of giving to the poor and preaching the message of Jesus to anyone who will listen. In fact, the film's extreme stylization goes a long way towards draining much of the humanity out of these characters, making them purely symbolic constructions of an untarnished good that could scarcely exist in even the greatest of saintly men. Reduced by Rossellini's symbolic system, the brothers become either comic clowns or beatific saints, but they could rarely be said to act like flesh and blood men with real human feelings or minds. This is, perhaps, the point, that there is potentially a plane of existence cut off from normal human concerns. St. Francis and his followers seem to have reached this plane, not by reaching higher as one might expect, but by simplifying themselves, reducing themselves to a primal state of existence without cares or connections to society at large. It's an interesting and deeply moving film, and the issues it raises about faith and its relationship to the world deserve much further thought.

9/30: Lifeboat; Amarcord

Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat is an unusual film for the director in many ways. As opposed to his usual freewheeling thrillers, with locales stretching across the world, the action here is confined to the titular lifeboat after a US freighter is sunk by a German U-boat during World War II. The lifeboat gets filled up with rescued passengers from the freighter, and then they take on one last unexpected survivor: the captain of the German U-boat who sank them. The confined locale gives the film a bit of a stagy, theatrical feel to it, and the fact that Hitchcock is able to turn a bunch of talking heads on a boat into a taut, compelling entertainment is tribute enough to his genius for suspense. Which is not to say that it's a totally successful effort, because it isn't. Part of that problem has to lie with the script, which was adapted from a story by John Steinbeck. Its assortment of characters — a communist laborer, a factory owner, an upper-class journalist, a black porter, a nurse, a navy grunt — is too contrived, too much a cross-section of society. And its wartime propaganda sits a bit heavily at times, especially in the ending, which seems rather confused in its message. Either the script, or Hitchcock himself, seems unsure of whether or not the film should be wholeheartedly embracing the characters' blanket condemnation of Germans. There's a strange distanced vibe to the violent outburst at the film's complex (I won't ruin it for you), in which Hitchcock seems to have stepped back from the action in order to keep things objective. He also films it from behind, so that the violence itself isn't seen, and the camera appears to be questioning the validity of what it shows. The ending, unfortunately, erases a lot of this ambiguity, fully endorsing a patriotic message without the earlier shadings of moral ambiguity that had bubbled up periodically throughout the film.

It's as though, somewhere within this, a much more interesting film about patriotism, wartime violence, class, and race were struggling to get out, but the era and the actual real-life war prevented any such nuanced look at the issues. As a result, the film's tokenist look at race is patronizing and falls neatly into place with contemporary stereotypes — something for which Steinbeck himself was reportedly enraged at Hitchcock. The character of the porter, Joe (Canada Lee), is yet another example of the Hollywood "magical Negro" figure, with the recorder he plays and his background in pickpocketing and his willingness to continue playing the servant even in extraordinary circumstances. He's unsurprisingly also the film's voice of religion, and is given a scene in which he intones a hymnal for the burial at sea of a drowned baby. It's one of the film's most striking images, with high-contrast lighting producing textured silhouettes, but it also completes the picture of Joe as a quasi-mystical figure, which makes it much easier to forget him slaving away in the background for the rest of the film.

The depiction of class is equally superficial, a paper-thin contrast between angry Communist worker Kovac (John Hodiak) and the glamorous reporter Connie (Tallulah Bankhead, in a performance of sultry majesty). Here, the blame can't be laid on Hitchcock, but presumably on the original story. Steinbeck was a socialist himself, and it's clear that he saw the dialogues between Kovac and Connie (and, to a lesser extent, the factory boss played by Henry Hull) as a perfect opportunity to reveal class tensions. But it's equally clear that the script looks at these tensions in only the most basic ways, and the dialogue along these lines never gets much further than a Marxist primer, with no subtlety or true exchange of ideas. Still, the film isn't a total flop by any means. Bankhead, as already mentioned, turns in a wonder of a performance, stealing scenes left and right with her laidback sensuality, and the rest of the cast holds up admirably with the sometimes clunky script. And the suspense is sustained beautifully, of course, even if the supposed mystery — the German captain's intentions — is never really a subject of much doubt from the audience's POV. Ultimately, this is a decent if uncharacteristic Hitchcock thriller, somewhat bogged down by thematic issues.

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Fellini's Amarcord is a late masterpiece from this director who excelled at translating the figments of his imagination onto the screen. Nowhere is that more apparent than here, in which the entire film is a loosely connected series of vignettes presenting an extremely exaggerated, phantasmagoric image of Fellini's memories of his childhood home town of Rimini. This is in many ways a continuation of the kind of circus atmosphere that proliferated throughout 8 1/2, except in that case the circus revolved around one central figure, the frustrated director played by Marcello Mastroianni. Here, there is no such central character; the town itself is the main character. The story, such as it is, is just the passing of a year in the town's life, following the change of the season and relating anecdotes about many of the residents. The film both opens and closes with the swirling of the "lemone," the yellow wisps which for this town signal the end of winter and the onset of spring. In between, all sorts of things happen, and things change, but there's not a real sense of narrative; it's all just part of the fabric of the town's life. This impression is heightened by the presence of a running commentary on the town's ancient history by a lawyer and local historian, who speaks directly to the camera from within scenes. Other characters periodically address the camera, too, giving the impression that there is some kind of journalistic documenter surveying the town — Fellini himself, maybe.

But this documentary facade does nothing to improve the film's sense of reality. Quite to the contrary, these acknowledgments of the camera serve much the same purpose that they do in early Godard, to disconnect the film from reality. Not that that disconnection isn't apparent everywhere in Fellini's work here. Even more so than in any of his earlier films, everything here is subsumed by the swirling circus atmosphere, with Nino Rota's bouncy score driving along scenes of chaotic celebration and angry arguments alike. Even a ritualistic fascist rally, complete with a giant Mussolini head made of flowers, is filmed with the same over-the-top energy and vitality, demonstrating how easily the townspeople's vibrant personalities could be absorbed by the Mussolini machine. The fascists provide an ugly underbelly to the film as a whole, especially in a chillingly underplayed scene in which they force a local socialist-sympathizer to drink castor oil, a common punishment doled out by Italian fascists. Their malevolent presence in the town is an occasional chill wind through the otherwise pristine village of Fellini's reminiscences.

In many ways, this is a true Fellini primer. All of his obsessions are on display here, exaggerated to mammoth proportions. There's Volpina, the ridiculously over-acted local tramp who seems to exude animal sexuality from her every moment. Her leering and fidgety movements go well with clothes that somehow seem like they're in danger of simply peeling away from her body at any moment. This is Fellini's image of sex, which always has a healthy dose of the perverse to it, of the crazy even. The lunacy is accentuated by the character of Teo, a mildly retarded man who one day snaps, climbs to the top of a tree, and begins screaming out "I want a woman" across the fields. He's only brought down — of course, since this is Fellini — by the arrival of a midget nun. There's also the wonderfully hilarious scene in which the young boy Titta receives his sexual initiation at the teat of the buxom grocery store woman, who bares her massive breasts (speaking of mammoth proportions...) and orders him to suck. For Fellini, childhood is a garbled mix of sexual obsessions, school pranks, eccentric grown-ups looming large, and the occasional numbing censure of religion or discipline-minded adults. His gift is transforming the hazy, time-distorted memory of these things into a sublime, ecstatic celebration of all the little moments of life, transformed by reminiscence into events of epic importance. His film even contains some wry comments about this process of storytelling, in the character of Biscein, who tells wildly exaggerated tales of seducing Arab concubines and travelling to America. In so many ways, Fellini is Biscein, and it is through the warped lens of his memory and imagination that we can see the life of this town and its amazing people.