The Eye of Vichy

Claude Chabrol's The Eye of Vichy is a fascinating documentary that collages together newsreel footage and propaganda films from the Vichy era in France. This compilation of materials shown in French theaters between 1940 and 1944 is presented almost without comment. A narrator introduces the film with a condensed history of World War II leading up to the invasion of France and the establishment of the Vichy regime, and thereafter the narrator mostly falls silent except for providing occasional snippets of historical context. The film is thus constructed primarily from Vichy's own transmissions, the propaganda and slanted news shown to French citizens during the war. As the text at the beginning of the film says, this is France not as it actually was during this period, but as the government wished people to think it was. This is a montage of primary sources that lays bare the lies and distortions that served as a cloak for the Vichy government's sinister collaboration with the Nazis.

Much of Chabrol's fictional oeuvre is concerned with probing the pathetic absurdity and ugliness of the surface presented by bourgeois culture; his films simultaneously document the appearance and the filthy reality underneath. This documentary, otherwise so different in form and content from the rest of Chabrol's work, actually has a similar thematic focus, using the Vichy regime's self-presentation to pick at the ugly truths that are never quite obscured by the gloss of propaganda. One of Chabrol's guiding principles in his films has always been that one can tell a lot about a culture by the lies it tells (about) itself, which is why he has always been so successful in deconstructing and ridiculing bourgeois culture. Here, he turns that same incisive eye for the significance of lies on an entire government founded on lies. This seemingly straightforward presentation of those lies, with only limited overt commentary, reveals a great deal about the workings of Vichy France.

Much of the propaganda collected here is of the usual sort, idealizing and idolizing the new rulers of France — even if sometimes they're replaced, without ceremony, weeks later — and presenting rosy depictions of Franco-German harmony. One particularly twisted piece, intended to discourage French dreams of liberation, is a cartoon in which the Allies are depicted as Mickey Mouse, Popeye and Donald Duck, planning to bomb France while the British broadcast duplicitous messages of peace. Chabrol mostly lets the material stand on its own, only occasionally correcting the particularly subtle lies. The propaganda is so crude and obvious that, for the most part, no comment is needed.

At times, the propagandists can even be startlingly open about the horrors of the situation. One newsreel speaks of Resistance fighters killing two French officers, and says that 50 men have been killed in reprisal, and that 50 more will be killed tomorrow if the culprits aren't caught. It's so offhanded, so casual in the way this propaganda piece admits to mass killings — and who did they kill, exactly? Obviously, in the name of inspiring fear, the regime sometimes admitted to its own violence and repression.


Indeed, one striking feature of this footage is how often the propaganda echoes, almost subconsciously, the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their allies. The newsreels repeatedly show trains running between France and Nazi Germany, but of course these are not the trains loaded with Jewish prisoners, destined for the concentration camps. Instead, the films show trains leaving for Germany full of French unemployed people, supposedly going to Germany to work, waving goodbye with a smile as the train rolls out of the station towards the east. The trains also bring back French prisoners of war from Germany, with sentimental scenes of returning soldiers embracing their wives, childrens and dogs. In another sequence, made shortly after Germany's invasion of Russia, the French propaganda abruptly turns on the Bolsheviks with an exposé of a Soviet embassy in Paris, revealing the hidden passages and peepholes and, chillingly, some seemingly innocuous stoves that the news announcer compares, apparently without shame or irony, to crematorium ovens.

Later in the film, in one of the few overt examples of Chabrol's editorial commentary, Chabrol juxtaposes images of happy French children heading to the countryside on vacation with a dry recounting of the numbers of Jewish men, women and children arrested and shipped to camps during the same summer. The sequence continues with a documentary on the wartime gas industry in France, and another on the recycling of hair from barbershops into raw material for clothes. The narration continues to explain what the films, of course, do not, that during this period Jews were being sent en masse to Auschwitz for "immediate extermination," their bodies burnt up in ovens, their heads shaved, their possessions stripped and stolen from them before their deaths. The sequence is chilling, with the dispassionate voiceover probing the unspoken truth that Vichy hid in favor of these dry industrial documentaries, the imagery of which is nevertheless eerily resonant with the real state of things.

Another informational piece collected here celebrates the destruction of old, pre-war films to make shoe polish and nail polish, showing images of pre-war film stars melting down, piles of film stock being thrown into processing machines that turn them to muck. That disregard for celluloid must have especially galled the cinephile Chabrol, but more than that it represents an antagonistic perspective towards history and culture, a wish to erase the truths of the past and replace them with the new, manufactured history of the Nazis and Vichy. The new authoritarian regimes of the fascist block exerted complete control over the image, and any images that could not be controlled were simply destroyed. Chabrol's film is a potent and informative rejection of that ethos: rather than destroying the images of this hateful past, he assembles them into a historical record of repression and denial, incontrovertible evidence that some might like to see burnt up, recycled for consumer products. If Vichy tried to erase the past and lie about the present, this film presents these images for all to see, preserving rather than destroying the past.

Four Agnès Varda shorts, 1957-1968

In Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux, Agnès Varda sets out to document and discourse upon the architecture of various Renaissance-era castles, but her playful sensibility and constant digressions make this anything but a conventional documentary. This is apparent right from the opening credits, which whimsically sync up the movements of a trio of gardeners with the jazzy score by André Hodeir, pairing sweeping rakes with brushed cymbals. The voiceover mostly recounts facts about the reigns of various French kings and the castles they built, the renovations that were added to them over the generations by subsequent rulers. Often, though, this narration is interrupted by excerpts from poems, since the narrator is easily distracted from the succession of kings and castles by the stories of the poets who wrote within these walls or served these kings, and Varda's camera frequently wanders off the beaten track into the surrounding woods and gardens to admire the cool orange light of an autumnal glade or the geometric maze of an elaborately laid out garden, still immaculately maintained by the gardeners who seem to excite much of Varda's visual interest. It's as though the film keeps subverting its royalist history with anecdotes about artists and laborers, taking the focus off the upper-class, the big names of history, to focus on ordinary people and obscure poets.

The images are idyllic and pretty, capturing the charm of rural France surrounding all the photogenic ruins of the past. The film was commissioned by the French Tourist Bureau, and those origins are apparent in the scenic imagery of the countryside and the informative narration, but Varda can't play it straight. The narration relates the facts but has a flippant tone that suggests it's all read with a sly, skeptical smile, and the constant digressions suggest that Varda's wide-ranging interests can't be contained by her ostensible subject.

She finds an old man painting the castles and for a while focuses on his charming, rough canvases more than the actual scenes he's painting. At the site where Joan of Arc gave her famous prophecy to the Dauphin, Varda's camera dramatically pans upward at a key moment in the voiceover, a visual punctuation to the narrative. Gardeners occasionally stroll through the frame, making gnomic comments about trees or architecture. Fashion models in glamorous gowns, carrying shopping bags full of expensive clothes, wander through the ancient grounds, evoking the fashionable, idle women who once inhabited these lavish palaces. It's sensual and eclectic more than factual, anything but a dry tourist guide to the region.


Du côté de la côte is a satirical, mocking documentary about tourist season on the French Riviera. Agnès Varda's examination of the coast, packed with tourists from all over, emphasizes the absurdity of it all, poking gentle fun at the trendiness and crowdedness of the region, the superficial qualities of tourism. A bright, colorful, lively short, it provides a vibrant overview of the charms of the Riviera, both its genuine beauty and its kitschy tourist trap nonsense, the real historical foundations sitting side by side with imported, readymade exoticism, buildings made up to look like Asian temples or Russian palaces, all coexisting along the same sun-swept coastline.

Varda finds plenty of delightful, silly, striking images in her tour along the coast. The narrator opens the film by saying that they're not going to focus on the natives — "we'll leave them to the ass and the ox," he says, as some old peasants stroll by with farm animals — but rather on the tourists, and the camera immediately begins panning across a line of sunbathers in tiny bathing suits, before pulling back to show a whole beach crowded full of reclining bodies, with hardly an inch left to move or walk around. Varda finds some photogenic sunburns, peeling skin, demarcation lines with lobster-red flesh above and pale white below. At one point, she holds a deadpan funny shot of a little boy staring intently at his middle-aged mother's butt crack as she lays on her stomach to sun-bathe.

Spliced-in images of Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot suggest that all these tourists are searching for glamour, trying to fulfill movie dreams of high-class luxury that are otherwise unattainable, acting like movie stars relaxing at the shore. Varda also subtly undercuts the touristic impulse and its superficial approach to the real, rich history of the region, which has hosted great names of art and culture throughout the centuries. Even museums are ripe for mockery: the narrator says that "Cro-Magnon man received homage," and Varda accompanies the words with an image of a dog rooting in a museum display of a skeleton, pushing the skull around with its nose. Ultimately, Varda finds the real essence of the Riviera in a deserted rocky island, an Eden, devoid of people except for a pair of naked sunbathers, quiet and truly blissful in comparison to the manufactured, commercialized bliss peddled all along the more populated areas of the tourist coast. The camera's sensuous gliding in this final section says it all, evoking the peace and tranquility of this natural beauty without all the people around to screw it up.


Elsa la rose is Agnès Varda's affectionate chronicle of the love between the writers Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. The couple had met in 1928 and married in 1939, and they were old and contented when Varda filmed them together in 1965 — five years, as it turned out, before Elsa's death. It's a very sweet film, a tribute to a love that had lasted a long time and been immortalized in many of Aragon's poems. In striking black-and-white cinematography, Varda captures the couple at their home, talking about their lives together and their shared memories. Varda weaves in Aragon's poetry as well, narrated by Michel Piccoli, to bring together these images of enduring love with the art that had so often arisen from that lifelong partnership.

Varda's loving portrait of these two aging writers includes an interesting examination of the relationship between life and art. Elsa discusses how she feels about being the subject of so many poems, what she thinks about so many people reading her husband's descriptions of her youth and beauty, so that in many readers' minds she is forever frozen at the age of 20, young and pretty. Varda keeps cutting back and forth from images of the writers the way they look now and images of them from old, faded photographs, their pasts and their youths jutting up against the present as they tell their stories.


In 1968, Agnès Varda traveled to California to make a documentary about the Black Panther Party, focusing especially on a rally to free Huey P. Newton, who'd been arrested for killing a policeman. In the resulting film, called simply Black Panthers, Varda and her crew interview the Panthers and their supporters at the rally and surrounding events, trying to present a portrait of the group's ideas and politics. Most eloquent and interesting is Eldridge Cleaver's wife, Kathleen, a high-ranking communications officer in the party, who speaks to Varda's crew about the importance of embracing black ideals of beauty rather than trying to straighten one's hair or lighten one's skin in deference to white ideals of beauty. Varda seems especially fascinated by the seeming gender equality within the party, the opportunity for women to take on important roles in this political struggle, though a jailhouse interview with Newton himself reveals some strange remnants of old attitudes, as he says that women have "duties" within the party and then hastens to add that he doesn't mean sexual duties.

Interestingly, though Varda is obviously sympathetic to the Black Panther cause and the radical politics of the movement in general, the film maintains some skepticism regarding the way in which the drive to free Newton seems to skirt around the issue of whether or not he actually did what he's accused of. The film crew asks many of the rally attendees some pointed questions about Newton's guilt or innocence, about what kind of defense is being mounted to prove his innocence, and the narration points out that no one seems to care, that whether or not he actually killed someone or not seems to be immaterial. His prosecution is considered solely in political terms, with no attention paid to the facts of the case, and it's to Varda's credit that she doesn't just accept this at face value but continually questions it within the film.

The film's coda recounts the verdict that Newton was found guilty of manslaughter, but given a lighter sentence than expected as a compromise between those who wanted him freed and those who wanted him to get the death penalty — a compromise that satisfies no one, the voiceover points out. Varda then describes how two angry policemen responded to the verdict by shooting out the windows of a Black Panther headquarters, shooting the photographs of the party's leaders in the windows of the office. This is an expression, the voiceover says, of "the magical act of killing the image, usually attributed to so-called primitive and non-white people," a strange irony in which these enraged white policemen enact a superstitious, almost voodoo-like ritual as a symbolic revenge, a symbol of their hate and anger. That's a fascinating analysis, one that, typically of Varda, gravitates towards the symbolic power of images and the importance of the image in defining politics. Thus her images of the shattered glass windows and the photos riddled with bullets are crucially important as reminders of the systemic violence and atmosphere of hate which surrounded the Panthers and created the necessity for their struggle in the first place.

Maurice Pialat's Turkish Chronicles

Though Maurice Pialat began making short films and documentaries in 1951, at the age of 26, it wasn't until 1968 that he completed his first feature, L'enfance nue. The years before this were a long period of experimentation, using whatever materials he could get with limited means to create a series of rough amateur works that both presaged and overlapped with the nascent French New Wave. This period was capped off by the director's 1964 trip to Turkey, where, using spare reels of film stock taken from Alain Robbe-Grillet, he made a series of six fascinating, poetic documentaries about the country. These Turkish films, each of them around 10-15 minutes long, represent the finest accomplishment of Pialat's early work, with the director turning his keen cinematic eye and feel for observation on this foreign land, its culture, its architecture and its history.

All of Pialat's Turkish films are uniquely interested in the country — especially Istanbul — as it was, not just as it is at the precise moment that Pialat is filming it. History informs these films in a big way, with the voiceover narration (which incorporates excerpts from various authors) introducing tension between the images of the modern-day city and the descriptions of incidents from its long and rich history.

The first film in the series, Bosphore, is also the only one that was shot in color, presumably because most of the stock that Pialat could scrounge up was black and white. Pialat makes good use of the color here; this is a strikingly beautiful film where each composition is richly layered and perfectly balanced. In the Istanbul harbor, boats drift by while a bright green flag flutters in the breeze in the foreground. Rippling light patterns are reflected off the water onto the red-brown wood of a ship's hull. Pialat foregrounds distinctively misshapen trees with the city stretching out beneath these bursts of green, a tightly coiled maze.

Most memorable of all are the hazy, foggy images of the Istanbul harbor, with black silhouettes of ships drifting through the thick air, shadowy figures working on the shore, while the voiceover speaks of "ghost ships" gliding through the fog. This port connects Turkey with the rest of Europe via ferries that continually make the trip back and forth. Turkey is in a unique geographical position, straddling Europe and Asia, bordering both southern Europe and the Middle East, and Pialat offers up hazy, almost mystical images of the port that provides these connections. The history of Europe's interactions with Turkey are a major subject of these films, drawing a contrast between Turkey's current place in the world and its ancient status as the center of the Ottoman Empire, which at one point represented a threat to Europe and a major flashpoint in the ongoing conflict between the forces of Islam and those of Christianity.

These themes are introduced in outline here; whereas the other Turkish films tend to be tightly focused on a single event or theme, Bosphore serves as an overall introduction to the series, a portrait of the city as a whole. At one point, Pialat draws a visual and verbal comparison between the minarets of Islam and the towers erected by the oil industry, suggesting an implicit connection between the two aspects of the Middle East most often emphasized by foreigners to the region. More than that, though, he's bridging the gap between past and present, between the old world of the Ottoman Empire and the new, modern world of industry, international trade and communion with Europe. Towards the end of the film, Pialat holds a long, arcing tracking shot from a boat as it glides past an ancient, crumbling cathedral surrounded with wooden scaffolds, a city's heritage under construction, the beauty of the old world peeking out from beneath the façade of modernity, the old and decaying being restored to some semblance of its former glory. It's an elegant encapsulation of the film's themes: the old restored, through modern means, to resemble a modern conception of what it might have looked like when it was new.


Byzance is a bleak, melancholy film about the history of religious conflict and conquest that characterized the relationship between the Middle East and Europe for so long. It is specifically about the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II and his defeat of the Byzantine Empire at Constantinople in 1453, pushing the Roman Empire's reach back from the borders of the Middle East. The sounds of cannon fire, military drumming, and battle cries accompany the images of modern-day Istanbul, as the voiceover (assembled from texts by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig) describes the battles and military maneuvers that led up to this decisive moment.

This film is about the ways in which history can be seen as a series of erasures, one event building on top of the others in never-ending layers to create the present. Pialat shows an Islamic mosque that, the voiceover says, was once a Christian cathedral, until the city was conquered, the church's Christian mosaics whitewashed from its pillars, the cross taken down from atop the dome, repurposed by the conquerors for their own religion. The victors get to define what lasts and what doesn't, what gets passed down to future generations and what gets wiped away, never to be seen again.

Istanbul is of course a perfect site for this kind of inquiry, since it has had such a long history of change and reversals, conquest and repurposing. Even the city's name is fluid, and Pialat shifts constantly (not just here, but throughout the Turkish series) between calling it Istanbul, Constantinople, and Byzantium, the name of the city before Mehmed II sacked it and absorbed it into his own empire. Pialat is acknowledging that his images represent only the top layer of history, the accumulated sediment of many centuries that has built to this precise historical moment, to this particular image. The film's final image is an especially poignant examination of the ways in which time shapes and reshapes a place's character, through processes both natural and human. Right at the end of the film, Pialat tracks along a wall of stone faces, starting with some that have been relatively well-preserved and gradually panning until the wall is increasingly smooth, the details of the faces eroded and erased, their features blank, lost to history.


La Corne d'or is mostly concerned with religious ritual, examining the mosque (and former cathedral) discussed in Byzance. As a contrast against Istanbul's status as a center of historical religious conflict, Pialat — drawing here on texts by the French poet Gérard de Nerval — also describes the city as a place of strange ethnic and religious harmony, with representatives of various cultures and religions living in close contact. He emphasizes the city's hybrid culture, its blend of Southern European and Arab influences, reflected in both its people and its very construction.

Pialat seems fascinated by the architecture of Istanbul, and in this short especially he's expressing his love for the look of the city, its sprawling density and complexity. He composes several crisply edited montages that examine the city's architecture from multiple angles and perspectives, observing closeup details and cutting from there to the macro structures that form larger geometric patterns stretching out across the city. Pialat's images emphasize the design tension in Ottoman architecture between hard geometric lines and rounded domes, simultaneously suggesting rigidity and fluidity, contributing to the city's fractal-like networks of tightly packed buildings.

Of course, this density is also a reflection of the poverty that afflicts many of the city's people. At one point, the voiceover compares Istanbul to a stage set best admired from afar, without peeking backstage, because its rigorous beauty and historical richness obscures the poverty that is rampant in many of its neighborhoods. This passage has the feel of a self-correction, with Pialat acknowledging that his romantic, poetic images of the city's beauty risk obscuring some of the human dimensions of the people who live there.


Istanbul is probably the most conventional documentary of Pialat's Turkish series, providing a general profile of the titular city, its different neighborhoods, and the different cultures and ways of living that coexist within its sprawling borders. As the other films in the series also suggest, Pialat sees Turkey, and Istanbul in particular, as a junction point between Europe and the East, between the old and the new, between history and modernity. That's the subject of this film as well, capturing the way that modern Istanbul is split between sections where it looks just as it did in Ottoman times, sections that are more European in character, modernized industrial districts, markets that have one foot in the old world and one in the new. In one early shot, Pialat captures the city at night, bathed in neon, crowded with cars that speed recklessly through streets not meant for such traffic, its modernity coexisting somewhat uncomfortably with all the ancient architecture and other reminders of its historical roots.

At one point, Pialat explores a market that was once the greatest in the world until an earthquake devastated it. This somewhat melancholy segment describes how the market was rebuilt in 1889, and now looks like a typical mall, full of cheap junk for tourists to buy. The voiceover says that, to really know what this grand market was once like, one can only rely on the romantic accounts of ancient travelers who witnessed it firsthand. The narration then falls silent as Pialat's camera observes the somewhat chintzy reality of the modern market, so different from its former glorious reputation. It's a subtly sad and ironic commentary on the limitations of the modern world: the supposed advances of progress don't always lead to something better, and the cost of Istanbul's place in the modern world is the loss of some of the things that once contributed to the city's distinctive character.

Pialat also comments upon the intrusion of a Western conception of sex: nudie magazines with naked women smiling from the newstands, large billboard advertisements with women in their underwear, selling sex to men, and burlesque shows with dancers in skimpy outfits, belly-dancing to Arab music, somewhere between a traditional performance and a strip show. This is probably the most explicit sign of the changes wrought in this culture by contact with the West: in a culture where women are only just starting to earn some independence, and many still wear veils and traditional garb, this highly sexualized, lurid imagery is nevertheless already starting to appear everywhere.


Maître Galip is the most poetic and powerful of Pialat's Turkish Chronicles, using the poems of Nazim Hikmet to accompany a series of evocative images of ordinary working class people in Istanbul. This was the film that Pialat himself claimed was the most complete realization of what he was aiming for with his Turkish documentaries. It's not difficult to see why this was his favorite: here he abandons the historical commentary and documentary observation of the other shorts in favor of an emotional emphasis on the lives of the poor and the unemployed.

The film's final section is accompanied by a poem in which the title character, Mr. Galip, wonders, at various points in his life, why he can't go to school, why his family's so poor, why he must work so hard in his father's shop, why his father has to close his shop when bigger factories are opened up in the town, and why he's perpetually out of work. It's a moving account of the struggles of the lower class that's as universal as it is specific to Istanbul or Turkey. At the beginning of the film, the narration starts with the local, observing how many factories are in Istanbul and yet how many people are out of work, then wonders how many factories are in the world, and how many men have no jobs everywhere.

In the final part of the film, as the narration walks through the stages of Galip's life, Pialat accompanies the lines with images of children, then teens and young men, and finally older men for the part of the poem when Galip realizes that he is 52 years old, two years older than his father was when he died, and yet no better off than previous generations, who also struggled in poverty. Pialat uses a lot of closeups throughout this film, strikingly composed images that focus on the faces of random people encountered in the streets.

As with the segment on the commercialized market in Istanbul, this film is dealing with the sadder fallout of modernization, as old family businesses shut down, replaced by factories where jobs are unstable and men are continually being laid off, their functions no longer necessary. The film is so striking because of the juxtaposition of Hikmet's poetic ruminations on unemployment and poverty with Pialat's crisp images of rundown neighborhoods and men stooped with hard labor. Pialat's pride in this film is well-justified: it is undoubtedly the best of his Turkish documentaries, dealing concisely and movingly with the human toll of the meeting between Europe and the East that Pialat sees in Turkey.


Pehlivan focuses on a three-day wrestling competition, an ancient tradition that dates back over a thousand years to the time of the Ottoman Empire, originating in the games the soldiers would play to entertain themselves in between battles. Maybe that's why there's more than a hint of homoeroticism in the way the wrestlers oil themselves up with grease, making sure to cover every inch of their bodies so that their opponents will be unable to get a grip. Pialat's closeups emphasize the men's muscular bodies jammed together and sliding off one another, posed in intimate, twisted arrangements, struggling desperately for a grip on each other's bodies. Arms are jammed down pants, one of the only places there's some potential for a handhold, and the whole thing is very suggestive and sensual, a form of intimate male contact that's sanctioned as a show of strength and masculinity.

These are the pehlivans, which the narration says means "wrestler, paladin, knight," all three meanings implied by the same word, connecting this sport showcase to the very real battles and conquests described in the earlier shorts in the series. Pialat contrasts all this "male exhibitionism" against the accompanying strip shows where curvy gypsy girls shake and dance in barely there bikinis, allowing their clothes to shake off their bodies, flashing the audience, smiling the whole time, while the men hoot and whistle. It's a pretty provocative parallel that Pialat is drawing here, suggesting that male sexuality and female sexuality have found very different culturally mandated outlets that nevertheless are somewhat similar in providing opportunities for the admiration of the human form. Just as the men display their muscular physiques when they wrestle, dressed only in their identical black, oiled-up pants, their bodies glistening as they roll around in the grass before a large and appreciative audience, the women display their bodies in a show that's framed quite differently but amounts to the same thing. As in many cultures, the male displays require some macho justification, while the women's shows are transparently sexual in nature, but the suggestion is that sport of this kind is just sex in disguise.

Four Maurice Pialat shorts, 1951-1958

The early work of a director is often an instructive glimpse into the development of the sensibility that would go on to inform his or her mature works, suggesting the auteur's concerns and style in nascent form. With the early shorts and documentaries of the French master Maurice Pialat, it's more the case that these experiments and sketches suggest various paths not traveled in his later work. These rough amateur works only rarely display traces of the emotionally explosive, improvisational sensibility that would characterize Pialat's later work. There's a diversity of styles and concerns on display here, suggesting a young filmmaker trying out anything he could think of while trying to discover his own style.

Pialat's first film was the 8-minute short Isabelle aux Dombes, shot in 1951 when the director was 26 years old. The film is an entirely silent montage of documentary footage, ragged experimental techniques — mainly some negative-image inserts — and symbolic psychodrama that's surprisingly not too different from the work that Stan Brakhage would begin making just a year or two later. A car speeds through the countryside. A horse chews amiably in closeup while a thick carpet of flies crawls and flutters all over its face, even clustering around its eyes. A bird flies backward, the image reversed, and then Pialat cuts abruptly to an image of a dead bird hanging from a power line.

Images of death proliferate throughout the film, and what started as a loose documentary soon becomes an eerie psuedo-horror piece that's obsessed with death and decay. The woman seen as a car passenger at the beginning of the film is soon stalked by a mysterious man, chasing her in negative-image, and then she reappears as an avatar of death in a black robe, her figure reflected in a wavering pool of water. In blurry, creepy images, her eyes are scarred over by tissue that blinds her, her lips moving silently, repeating some incantation. By the end of the film, she resembles Charon, rowing across the river Styx, an avatar of death. The film is vague and mysterious in its meaning, simply evoking a creepy atmosphere through the grim, stark images and the way Pialat jams them together through his choppy editing.


Maurice Pialat's second film was the relatively straightforward documentary Congrès eucharistique diocésain, very different in tone and style from his bleak, jarring first film. The film consists entirely of documentary footage shot at a small-town religious festival, with occasional cutaways to observe the rolling hills and flowers of the surrounding country. Pialat's montage is loose and free-associative, mixing together snippets of various ceremonies and sacraments with these natural interludes as well as more off-the-cuff moments in which people stand around, chatting and laughing. These latter images are the most suggestive of later Pialat, already reflecting his interest in what happens outside the officially sanctioned moments, when ostensibly nothing is happening and people are just exchanging idle pleasantries and gossip.

The editing too is striking, with the same choppy fast pace and free-associative rhythms that characterized Isabelle aux Dombes, though not used to the same disorienting effect. The repetitions and cuts here are gentler, just creating a unified portrait of events and little moments going on at various points during this ceremony.


The biggest surprise of Maurice Pialat's early work is the 1957 short Drôles de bobines, a goofy tribute to silent comedy, complete with old-timey jazz score, intertitles, and slightly sped-up movement. It's quite possibly the last thing one would expect from Pialat, a thoroughly silly romp with plenty of broad physical comedy, and lots of people running around, throwing themselves in front of cars, performing pratfalls. It features an ever-expanding cast of stereotypes and caricatures: a hapless old lady, a foppish upper-class snob, an Arab dignitary with a turban, a priest. It starts out pretty dire and boring, but the more manic and crowded it becomes, the more it starts to display a weirdly warped sense of humor that has the old lady fencing with a painter, the Arab spitting his drink in the old lady's face, the priest getting stabbed in the ass while delivering a sermon, and multiple people continually coming close to running off the roof of a building in the course of their frenetic racing about.

It's nonsensical and slight, but it winds up being a pretty lively and clever tribute to silent-era comedy, Pialat nodding to an influence that doesn't especially show up in his later work but nonetheless must have been an important point of reference in his early love of the cinema, much as it was for the filmmaker-critics of the somewhat younger Cahiers du cinema generation.


L'ombre familière is the first really interesting film that Maurice Pialat made in his early career. This creepy, strikingly composed short is a ghost story without an actual ghost, an eerie film about death, love and creativity set to a droning sci-fi score. The wife (Sophie Marin) of the painter Robert (Jacques Portet) is deeply shaken up by a visit from Robert's filmmaker friend Alexandre (Jean-loup Reinhold), who stays in their country home for a day, wanders around a deserted pool in the forest with the couple, and then returns to the city to commit suicide.

The short's narrative is conveyed through voiceover rather than dialogue, which was also a common trick of the early French New Wave shorts to get around the inability of these young filmmakers to shoot with synchronized sound. With its rambling, poetic narration and elliptical, at times almost abstract, narrative, this short recalls the work of Alain Resnais or the early shorts of Jean-Luc Godard, and though it's very different from the work Pialat would go on to do, it's very compelling in its own right. Perhaps most interesting is the implication that filmmaking, and creativity in general, is a dangerous act that can involve probing to the core of emotions better left undisturbed — an apt description for Pialat's own intense, draining process in his mature work.

The film is replete with images of reflections: Robert and Alexandre facing one another from opposite sides of a glass divider, one reciting lines and one directing, two aspects of the creative process cut off from one another and yet joined together, overlaid, within the glass, which serves like a projection screen on which their images, their shadows, can interact. Thus film both divides and brings together, cuts people apart and creates something new from their combination. But at the same time there's an element of willful erasure in creativity, as well. At the end of the film, the wife's voiceover discusses creating a film set in the abandoned pool, not as a way of remembering the friend they'd spent a day with there, but as a way of forgetting him, of transmuting whatever passed between them, the strange love triangle and the recrimination over his death, into an artistic statement that's ultimately separated from the real intensity of those memories.

Four National Film Preservation Foundation shorts

[This post is a teaser for the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running from May 13-18. This year, hosts Marilyn Ferdinand, Farran Smith Nehme and Roderick Heath have dedicated the week to Alfred Hitchcock, whose early (non-directorial) work "The White Shadow" will be the beneficiary of any money earned during the event. The following post provides capsules for some of the films currently screening at the National Film Preservation Foundation website's Screening Room. Be sure to donate!]

Ramona is an early D.W. Griffith one-reel short, an adaptation of a novel by Helen Hunt Jackson that dramatized the mistreatment of Native Americans throughout history via an inter-racial love story, not the kind of message movie that one would associate with the future director of Birth of a Nation. A young Spanish girl named Ramona (Mary Pickford) falls in love with a Native American improbably named Alessandro (Henry B. Walthall), with predictably tragic results. The young couple elopes, fleeing her disapproving family, but everywhere they turn, they only encounter "the whites" who keep pushing the Native Americans aside, claiming, "this is our land!" wherever Alessandro and Ramona show up.

The acting is extremely over-the-top: when Ramona is trying to resist her attraction for Alessandro, she sees him playing a guitar, listens briefly, and then recoils in terror, running away with her arms in the air, and throws herself down at an altar to pray. If a title card hadn't already prepared viewers for the fact that she was going to fight against her growing love for the young man, one would be hard-pressed to guess just why she was so suddenly hysterical. There are horror movie heroines who react more sedately to the sight of invading alien monsters. There's lots of hand-waving and dramatic gesticulating here; Ramona's mother (Kate Bruce), reacting with horror to her daughter's dalliance with a Native American, seems to have abruptly contracted epilepsy, her hands shaking and flailing about, locked into claws as she points in random directions all around her head. Most of the cast just runs around through every scene with hands raised, pointing dramatically off towards some unseen point beyond the camera.

This histrionic acting style aside, the film is well-directed, and Griffith's staging within the static frame is impeccable. He frequently frames some foreground action against a dramatic natural backdrop of hills and mountains stretching off into the distance, contrasting the human-scale romantic story against the imposing grandeur of the landscape, as though suggesting that this one little story is part of a grander historical struggle. One scene that suggests this especially well is the one where Alessandro's village is destroyed by white settlers who are driving off the natives. Griffith's camera is angled down from a high cliff, looking down at the village in the valley, mostly obscured by clouds of smoke as wagons rush by and the slaughter commences. In the foreground, Alessandro throws his arms around in despair and tears at his hair as a few white cowboys run past with guns drawn, casually killing another Native American man as they pass. These striking compositions provide some interest in an otherwise rather slight film that rushes through its narrative as a series of clipped moments, seemingly under the assumption, very reasonable at the time, that virtually everyone in the audience would have been familiar with the story already.


The Lonedale Operator is a one-reel Western actioner directed by D.W. Griffith and written by future Keystone mastermind Mack Sennett. The film demonstrates Griffith's famous development of suspense-building, cross-cutting action montages, in this case built around a simple scenario of a train station payroll robbery. A young girl (Blanche Sweet) takes over telegraph duties for her sick father, while a pair of criminals plan to steal the payroll bag that's been dropped off into her care. The first half of the very short film builds a little character through some flirtatious sparring between the girl and a train engineer who's courting her, and then the second half settles into a propulsive editing rhythm as the crooks try to break into the telegraph office.

Griffith cuts quickly back and forth from the girl in the office, sending out a message for help, to the criminals trying to break down the door outside, to the engineer rushing to her rescue on his train. The rhythm of the editing gradually speeds up as the criminals get closer to breaking in and the train gets closer to the station. It's a simple but effective way of ratcheting up the tension. The payoff is a nice last-minute gag in which the crooks break in before the rescue party has arrived, but the clever girl manages to outwit the robbers by making them think she has a gun. The ending defuses all the tension with some low-key humor, having the robbers exaggeratedly bow to the girl once they realize they've been outsmarted, and this resolution hints at Sennett's comedic sensibility, abruptly replacing the sense of impending danger with a witty sight gag.


Robert C. Bruce was a premiere director of what were known in the early cinema as "scenics," short documentary travelogues from exotic locales. Bruce's Tropical Nights is a prime example of the genre, the first film released from a 1920 expedition to the Caribbean, where he traveled through the islands and shot numerous brief, poetic, beautifully photographed little slices of reality.

The film is purely about the sensory experience of a locale, presenting one gorgeous, blue-tinted image after another of this tropical island paradise. The photography is lovely: trees swaying in the wind, scenic vistas looking out over the ocean, moonglow rippling on the water, dramatic storm clouds gathering on the horizon, but never any rain. The prosaic title cards only interrupt the poetic flow of these images with bland objective descriptions. Bruce's images hardly require the accompaniment, because there's obviously a keen photographic sensibility to these static views of beautiful natural scenes. People only occasionally enter the shot, but when they do they're often looking off in the same direction as the camera, as awed as the photographer by these lovely views. The presence of these spectators within the film merely confirms the "hey look" attitude of the film, which builds a contemplative mood as it chronicles the progress of the moon across the sky, the gentle flow from sunset to sunrise, with nothing but moody blue beauty in between.


Keystone comedienne Mabel Normand was a prolific comic actress in the silent era, and in 1914-15 she made the transition to director as well, making her one of the earliest female directors in Hollywood. Won In a Closet was her second directorial film (her first is presumed lost) and it's a madcap, silly farce that displays the fledgling director's likeably goofy screen presence and her feel for slapstick. The fluffy little story of Mabel's romance with a dopey-looking neighbor (Charles Avery) is just set-up for the extended sequence where her father and his mother get trapped in a closet together, prompting a ridiculous series of misunderstandings and slapstick pile-ups.

The slapstick is all but completely unmotivated here, with little connection to reality: everyone's just constantly running around, falling on their asses, colliding into each other for no apparent reason, and Normand herself switches on a dime from a sweet, coy young lover to a manic hysteria case. It's all pretty silly, of course, but there is one nice shot along the way, an inventive split-screen in which Mabel and her boyfriend walk towards one another, the two sides of the screen eventually coming together when they wind up on opposite sides of the same tree. That shot suggests a witty visual sensibility that matches Normand's charming screen persona.

Hôtel Monterey

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

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

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


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

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

American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince

In 1978, Martin Scorsese followed up Taxi Driver and New York, New York by making American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, a short documentary about a man who had appeared as an actor in small parts in both of Scorsese's previous fiction films. Prince had had an active life: he was a road manager for Neil Diamond for several years, and had been a heroin junkie as well, though by the time this film was made he was apparently clean. Years of hard living are written on his gaunt, drawn face. He's a distinctive character, with nearly skeletal features, brown and rotting teeth, bulging eyes, and a nervous, jittery manner. He is also an oddly compelling storyteller who recounts, in his cracked and agile voice, various alternately hilarious and harrowing stories about his family, his drug use, his experiences in his many odd jobs, and his encounters with crime and the law.

The film's style connects American Boy to Scorsese's other great documentary of the 70s, Italianamerican, his ode to his parents and the Italian immigrant communities they grew up in. The content and tone of the two films could not be more different, but in terms of style and approach there is considerable overlap. The two films demonstrate above all Scorsese's love of talk, his appreciation for people who can tell stories about their lives in ways that are both entertaining and enlightening. As in the earlier film, in American Boy Scorsese doesn't do anything flashy or distracting, he simply trains his camera on his subject in a casual, comfortable setting and lets Prince talk at length. Scorsese himself is often on camera, just hanging out in the corner of the frame, listening to Prince's stories with genuine interest. The film was shot in someone's living room, with friends gathered around as if for a party; people are frequently glimpsed drinking and laughing in the background. Obviously, this is the kind of context in which Prince is used to telling his stories: he comes off as someone who delights in telling shocking or funny stories to get a reaction out of people at parties. The film gives the impression that Scorsese and his friends have long been listening to Prince telling his stories, and finally decided that it would be a good idea to capture this unique personality on camera.

Prince's stories are often funny, though there's a real note of sadness that coasts along beneath the surface. He speaks about a friend who he didn't know was an alcoholic, and a party on the friend's boat where Prince filled a pitcher with vodka and served it to his friend as "water" in front of all the friend's family who were trying to keep him away from booze. The story climaxes with hilarity (the friend crashes the boat into a sandbar and tries shooting off flares to alert passing boats, but "it was the fourth of July; everybody applauded!") but at the same time there's no escaping the melancholy and self-destruction that drifts through so many of Prince's stories, about himself and those around him. Some of these tales are truly harrowing. He visits a drug den and is so oblivious that he actually sits on a dead man without realizing it, but what's really chilling is his casual attitude about it, even now, while retelling the story. It suggests a man who is very used to death and waste, as does his insistence even now that if he has to die, the best way to go is with a drug overdose. "You just get higher and higher and higher and higher and higher..."


Though Scorsese tries to stay out of the way, for the most part, it's obvious just how much he's guiding the film's progress in subtle ways. Despite the film's off-the-cuff aesthetic, Scorsese doesn't make any attempt to disguise the more manipulative and artificial aspects of the film. In the film's opening minutes, as in Italianamerican, he leaves in his banter with the technicians and camera operators and on-camera subjects about when they're going to start filming, leading into the film proper with an acknowledgment that this is a film, that it's not as spontaneous as it seems. Prince himself arrives early on, apparently to the surprise of Scorsese's actor friend George Memmoli, who promptly gets into a prolonged wrestling match with Prince that raises questions about how much here is being scripted versus how much is pre-planned.

There are other touches of Scorsese the filmmaker here and there, like when he addresses the editor with a note to cut something out of the finished film — though of course it's ultimately left it. But the artifice becomes especially obvious in the film's final scene, when Prince discusses a phone call with his father that apparently moved him a great deal. There are suggestions throughout the film that Prince loves his family very much; in the early scenes of the film, he talks about them with real affection and nostalgia, remembering funny and vivid scenes from his childhood, appreciating the obvious strength of his parents in particular. Scorsese's decision to cut in happy home movies from Prince's boyhood is obvious as a way of reinforcing the contrast between the happy, innocent kid in those movies and the troubled addict he later became, but it's also a way of connecting the boy with the man in deeper ways. It's a humanistic gesture that rejects the too-easy judgmentalism of those who would likely condemn Prince for his drug use and his wild life. In the final scenes, Scorsese seems to be probing for some sign of the boy still residing behind the man's nervous laugh and wide eyes. He has Prince tell the phone call story three times on camera, coaching him about what to say and how to say it, reminding him of details he'd left out, trying to reach the real essence of what Prince feels about his father and his family. It's remarkable because while this approach lays out the fact that the filmmaking is manipulative and not naturalistic, each successive iteration of the story really does seem to tap a little deeper into the emotion of the story. It's as though, in retelling it, Prince is slowly letting his guard down, moving away from the persona he uses when trying to entertain people. He's clearly moved by his father's understanding and tacit forgiveness, and though he doesn't quite verbalize it the emotions show through anyway.

American Boy hints at just how much of Scorsese's thematic and character material he has always found in the real people he knows. Steven Prince is a perfect Scorsese character, a haunted man with a real self-destructive streak, a charming but troubled figure who's stumbled through violent episodes and darkly comic vignettes with a certain amount of casual disregard for the insanity of life.

Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers

Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, the documentarian Les Blank's goofy, eccentric ode to garlic in all its forms, isn't quite an informational piece about garlic, though it does include some history and scientific info about the "stinking rose," nor is it a how-to-cook-with-garlic feature, though there's some of that, too. Instead, it's a loose and appropriately earthy film that takes more of a free-wheeling approach to garlic as a tasty seasoning but also as a symbol for traditional ways of life, as a route into conversations about modern agrarianism and mass farming, and as a way of articulating a certain attitude towards life. That attitude is, of course, one of freedom, self-confidence, a rejection of the "puritanical" American value system. One of the people Blank interviews, the founder of a garlic appreciation society, who wears a floppy hat shaped like a head of garlic, speaks passionately about how garlic represents an enthusiastic embrace of life and a lack of fear about social niceties. Again and again Blank's garlic enthusiast interviewees characterize garlic as rooted in traditional values, as representing the opposite of "civilization." One man speaks of a 17th century food critic who opposed garlic and advocated for bland dishes, and the contempt in his voice is palpable. "Can you imagine eating dinner with that guy?" he asks, his red-rimmed eyes growing shifty and widening in horror.

For his part, Blank remains slightly aloof from the goofier passions of particular interviewees, instead embracing the value of garlic as something wild, untamed, in opposition to the increasing conformity and self-consciousness of modern society. Blank plays back a mouthwash commercial that emphasizes the fear of garlic breath, and several of the garlic lovers in the film have adopted a slogan in response to such campaigns: "fight mouthwash, eat garlic." Garlic represents tradition as opposed to modernity and social niceties, and it's through this theme that Blank touches on the shift in farming from small-level agrarianism to the corporate mega-farms that today dominate vegetable production. The film was made in 1980, and it's somewhat sad to see the various advocates of small, independent farming, still believing that it's possible that the corporate model might not win out.

One farmer who Blank interviews grows only a little garlic and admits that he's not a garlic fanatic, so he seems to be in the film mainly because he's the most eloquent proponent of small-scale independent farming, with everything grown organically without use of pesticides. Today, the idea seems quaint and it probably did then, too, but despite the farmer's relative disinterest in garlic Blank suggests that garlic is the ultimate symbol of this kind of do-it-yourself agrarianism. His many shots of garlic dishes being prepared emphasize the work that goes into preparing garlic: peeling it, separating the cloves from the head and often chopping them or mashing them into tiny bits. This work, this intimate hands-on connection with the stinky, messy food, is part of the pleasure of cooking and eating. Garlic thus becomes a symbol for a larger idea about resisting corporate pre-packaging, resisting the lures of ease and convenience that alienate people from the processes of farming, cooking, and even eating itself. Perhaps to reinforce this point, Blank makes the morbid joke of showing some piglets suckling at their mothers, then shortly after shows the dead pigs being sent to a restaurant and prepared. Many of the dishes being made don't do much if anything to divorce the meat from the animals that produced it: the pigs are cooked whole, as are many fish, their mouths stuffed with whole heads of garlic.


Blank, typically, is just as interested in the folk music that surrounds the food festivals where these garlic-heavy foods are prepared and served. A Spanish man shows how simple sandwiches of garlic and tomatoes nourished poor people during times of strife in his home country, then dances and sings to the accompaniment of vigorous flamenco guitar, snapping his fingers and holding aloft a wreath of garlic. Numerous other folksy bands are represented as well, their music accompanying the many scenes of Blank documenting how a particular garlic dish is prepared. Blank's willingness to divert from the film's primary subject injects his own personality, his own enthusiasm, into the work; he even opens the film with a gap-toothed woman (another of his obsessions) telling a story about how much her mother despised garlic. The woman is Irish-American and suggests that garlic isn't typically an Irish herb, but the rest of the film is pretty inclusive in documenting how different cultures and types of cuisine use garlic: in Italian and Chinese cooking, in pesto sauce, in barbeque, to stuff chicken, to cook fish or squid, or even in some cases on its own, as in the baked whole garlic head that's served at one garlic festival.

The film is often funny, and Blank seldom misses an opportunity to point out an idiosyncratic or silly detail — like all the T-shirt aphorisms about garlic or the stand at one festival selling a "pet garlic" on a leash for some unfathomable reason — but he never seems like he's mocking his subjects. Like his friend and peer Werner Herzog (who appears here speaking about his film Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, seemingly baffled as to why Blank is asking about garlic) Blank seems to enjoy enthusiasm and passion for their own sakes, and his interest in the ephemera of garlic is contagious. He spends a great deal of time simply admiring the preparation of delicious-looking garlic-heavy dishes, until the distinctive odor of cooking garlic nearly seems to waft out of the screen. But more than that Blank suggests that what we choose to eat, and how we think about food, is a big part of what defines our identity. Thus garlic becomes a symbol for independence, playfulness, love of life, and the earthy hippie values of previous generations, still then just barely hanging on. Blank's film embodies these qualities and celebrates them, finding a great deal of metaphoric complexity in a simple herb.

Italianamerican

Martin Scorsese's Italianamerican is a charmingly off-the-cuff documentary that captures the director's parents, Catherine and Charles, talking about their lives and the lives of their own immigrant parents. The film is an utter delight from start to finish, full of the wit and vitality and obvious love of talk that these people bring to their unscripted conversations about the past and the lives of Italian immigrant communities in New York. Scorsese set the film in his parents' own home, where they're totally at ease, not tempering their effusive personalities a bit for the camera. There is no artifice here, no attempt to disguise the fact that a movie is being made. In the opening scenes, Scorsese shows himself walking around the living room, then stepping behind the camera to watch his parents hash out where they're going to sit on the couch (a running gag is built around Catherine's jokes about Charles not wanting to sit too close to her). Scorsese then tries to coach his mother into giving him an introduction about the tomato sauce recipe she's going to prepare on camera. Instead, she asks him again and again what he wants her to do, and then, in a very funny moment, tells him what he should say, unable to resist acting like a mother, giving filmmaking advice to her son the director. Scorsese finally nudges her into actually demonstrating the sauce recipe, and the camera follows her into the kitchen, where she jokes about the hard meatballs of some of her friends — "you throw them against the wall and it cracks" — and then laughs abashedly, saying she shouldn't be talking that way.

Scorsese leaves it all in, letting the seams show. Later on, as he and his parents converse around the dinner table, they eat pasta and drink wine as though it's just an ordinary meal, as though the camera just happens to be there. At one point, Scorsese's hand reaches into the frame from behind the camera with a fork to pick at a bowl of salad on the table while his parents talk. It's all so casual and offhanded, adding to the atmosphere of family closeness.

The setting is perfect, too, an obviously cramped but homey apartment that, it gradually emerges through Catherine and Charles' stories about their childhoods and their early years as a couple, is actually an upgrade for them. Catherine talks about living in an even smaller apartment — only three rooms — with her parents, nine siblings and, eventually, her aunt and uncle and their child. They made the most of the space, too. Catherine talks about how they even used to make wine in her family's apartment, keeping the barrels of fermenting grapes in one of the rooms where they slept. She looks around her as she talks about this, as though imagining how they managed to fit so many people and do so much in such a small space, and a sad, wondering smile crosses her lips. It's wonderful: there are so many shots and moments here where one can see Scorsese's parents mentally returning to previous eras, their eyes shining with the reminiscences, fondly smiling as they remember how their lives used to be.


Through their funny, charming stories, there emerges a portrait of the Italian-American experience in New York, and indeed the experience of all lower-class immigrants struggling to make lives for themselves in a new land. The cramped apartments, the large families, the kids working as soon as they're old enough rather than continuing in school, the wife supplementing her husband's income with sewing, the cooking, the sense of community: it's all told with such obvious love and tenderness and joy that the hardships and struggles don't seem nearly as important as the love of life and the hard-working values of these people.

Scorsese obviously knew what he was doing in choosing his own parents as his subjects. In front of the camera, they are surprisingly loose and open, bantering and bickering with one another, laughingly ribbing one another the way only a long-married and still close couple can do. They have a real way with words, an intuitive verbal skill that makes them an absolute delight to listen to. Their stories are, in some ways, about poverty and immigrant slums, but their tone suggests only happy memories, and above all an abiding respect for the values embodied by previous generations, values that they strive to carry on in their own lives. It's a vivid portrait of this lifestyle, achieved almost entirely through their evocative words; Scorsese occasionally cuts in archival family photos, but mostly the camera remains trained on Catherine and Charles. This is a verbal movie, a movie that celebrates the art of storyelling and the personalities of the people telling the stories. Catherine and Charles represent a particular way of life, and their way of talking, their relaxed, self-confident way of being, will be familiar to anyone who has ever had parents or grandparents from similar backgrounds. They embody traditional gender roles — at one point, Charles jokes that while everyone knows men are better cooks than women, cooking is simply not the man's job — but at the same time they have great respect for each other's hard work, and they spar and joke with one another as obvious equals. The way they take turns telling stories, filling in details, occasionally stubbornly disputing one another on facts, suggests their level of comfort and familiarity with one another.

Italianamerican is a remarkable documentary that emphasizes how vital and exciting a simple, well-made film can be just by placing compelling subjects in front of the camera and letting their stories slowly emerge. The disarming casualness of the film adds to its effect, keeping the Scorseses in their own home, interacting with their own son as their son rather than as the man behind the camera. The film's brilliance could only be produced by this intimacy and familiarity. It is a truly homemade film, and a film about homes, about families, about heritage and history.

Close-Up

Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up is a marvelously compelling documentary that, in the process of following the trial of a poor man accused of fraud, winds up delving into the nature of art and the relationship between fiction and deceit. The film is built around a real incident, the case of Hossain Sabzian, who impersonated the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf in order to ingratiate himself with the Ahankhah family, pretending that he was going to film a movie in their home with the family as actors. The family was initially trusting but came to suspect him more and more, finally exposing him by inviting over a friend of a friend, the journalist Hossain Farazmand, who knew the real director by sight and instantly recognized that Sabzian was a fraud. Kiarostami's film is partially a documentary of the resulting trial, and partially a reconstruction — using the real participants in the events as actors, including Sabzian himself and the family he conned — of the events preceding Sabzian's arrest.

The film opens with a re-enactment of the reporter taking a taxi to the Ahankhah house to arrest Sabzian. Farazmand and the taxi driver sit in the front, while two soldiers sit in the back, and during this lengthy opening sequence the men chat casually, talking about the case they're going to deal with, about film, about journalism, and about incidents from Iranian history that happened in the areas they pass through. The conversation is casual and seems unrehearsed, though this is a re-enactment of the real events that led up to Sabzian's arrest. Once the cab arrives at the house, Farazmand goes inside, but Kiarostami's camera remains in the cab, observing as the driver chats amiably with the two soldiers in the back seat, asking them about their families and their homes. Then the soldiers go inside too, and again Kiarostami remains outside with the driver, as the man gets out of the car, picks up some flowers from a pile of trash, sniffs the flowers, and kicks an aerosol can so it rolls noisily down the street. The can rolls along the concrete, and Kiarostami's camera pans after it, eventually following it as the can starts to drag sideways across the ground in an unnatural movement, presumably pulled along by an unseen string from off-camera.

In this way, the subtle naturalism and observational aesthetic of the opening scenes gives way to a sense that things are being tweaked by the filmmakers, that not everything is necessarily as it seems. It's a reminder that the film's re-enactments are only playing at realism; they are in fact carefully arranged and scripted, based on real events but not in themselves "real" or unmediated. The naturalism of the opening is further deconstructed when, after Sabzian's arrest, the reporter remains behind, frantically running from door to door in the neighborhood to ask to borrow a tape recorder. The scene is farcical and surreal, as Farazmand rings doorbells at random, introduces himself, and asks for a tape recorder. One starts to wonder what kind of reporter shows up for a big story like this, planning to do an interview, and then has to beg for a tape recorder from complete strangers. It's comical and strange, especially when Farazmand finally gets his tape recorder and goes scurrying off down the street, pausing just once to give the aerosol can lying in the road a savage kick that sends it flying into the air, coming down and once again rolling along as the reporter disappears down a side street. As the credits finally roll, ushering in the meat of the subsequent film, concerning Sabzian's trial, Kiarostami leaves the audience to wonder about this strangely unprepared reporter, about con men, about reportage, about lies and fictions.


The images of the trial itself, captured in grainy footage that contrasts against the crisp, clean images of the re-enactments, are focused on Sabzian and his explanations for what he did. Kiarostami had remarkable access in the surprisingly relaxed courtroom where the trial takes place — or else not all of the trial footage is genuine, which only further blurs the film's interesting perspective on reality versus fiction, truth versus lies. Kiarostami seems too involved, too active in the trial's progress, for all of this footage to be real, unless Iranian courts are significantly less controlled than Western courts. The judge sits across the room, asking questions of Sabzian and the Ahankhah family, but for the most part Kiarostami's camera remains focused on Sabzian's face. At the beginning of the trial, Kiarostami explains to the defendant that this camera has a close-up lens and will remain trained on Sabzian, to capture his reactions and to provide him with a way to speak his mind and make his ideas clear. Kiarostami is making explicit what this film is about: he wants to give Sabzian an opportunity to express himself, to help others understand why he did what he did. During the trial, Kiarostami frequently even intervenes (or seems to intervene) in the proceedings himself, asking Sabzian direct questions and prompting the defendant to speak at length about the feelings and ideas that were behind his actions.

These close-ups of Sabzian are astonishingly moving, especially since the defendant's words reveal that he was no simple con man, that he was not trying to bilk the family out of money or otherwise exploit them. He did what he did, he says, because it made him feel respected. He is a poor man, divorced from his wife because of his inability to provide for his family very well, and he still struggles, constantly in and out of work, living a very poor and simple life with few real pleasures. His only pleasure, it seems, is the stimulation provided by the cinema, by art: he goes to the movies, especially the movies of Makhmalbaf, and finds a voice dealing with the kind of "suffering" that he himself feels in his own life. He is especially moved by the director's film The Cyclist, about which he says, "It says the things I wish I could express." With Kiarostami's prodding, the trial becomes a discourse on the purpose of art, the ways in which art can reach into people's lives in surprising ways. It becomes obvious that Sabzian impersonated Makhmalbaf because he wanted to feel as though he could reach people in that way, that he could express the things he feels with such clarity and beauty. As he struggles to express himself, to explain his actions, the subtext is the idea that art communicates. Sabzian's halting but often poetic descriptions of his "suffering," his poverty and feelings of uselessness and desperation, are a form of art, shaped and crafted by Kiarostami in turn.

The film is not only a commentary on the purpose of art but a subtle piece of social commentary as well, suggesting the hopelessness of poverty and unemployment that affects so many people. Even the Ahankhah family, who seem reasonably well-off in their large house, are not unaffected, as they have two sons who went to school for engineering, only to find that neither of them could get a job in the field after graduation. Instead, one son works in a bakery and the other is still unemployed. Sabzian's inconsistent work and constant struggles with money are even more extreme, and in court one of the Ahankhah sons, forgiving the defendant at the end of the trial, says that he blames "social malaise and unemployment" for Sabzian's actions. Kiarostami doesn't draw quite that straight a line between cause and effect, but it's obvious that he too thinks that this odd story is at least partially about class and economic hardship. Sabzian didn't commit his crime for money, even though he did borrow some money from the family at one point. He wanted to be Makhmalbaf not to get money, but in order to escape from his pathetic real life. He was playing a part and relishing the attention and respect he earned from the family who believed him to be a famous artist.

As he says himself at the end of the trial, at Kiarostami's prompting, he was more of an actor than a director, though. He was playing a part, he says repeatedly, and the structure of Kiarostami's film reinforces the connection between lying and acting, between the art of fiction and the art of the con man. The re-enactments in Close-Up, bringing together the real participants in these events to play out their scenes again, insert a further layer of fiction and artifice. In the reconstructions, Sabzian is playing at playing, pretending to pretend, while the rest of the actors are engaged in the same deceit. They play at reality, staging seemingly casual conversations that in fact are anything but unmediated. It is the flipside of the film's idea that art can reveal truths and speak to people about their own lives: art is also lying and pretending, and in that sense Kiarostami's film makes a very moving, strangely beautiful artist of Hossain Sabzian.

Gente del Po/N.U.

Michelangelo Antonioni, like many directors who later became known for their fictional features, started his career making documentary short films. His first was Gente del Po, shot in 1943 but not finished and released until 1947, its production hampered by problems with damaged and partially destroyed negatives. Despite this troubled history, the film is a beautifully shot document of the people who live their lives along — and on — the Po river, working as farmers or living on floating barges. The film's stark black-and-white images capture the physicality of this land, of the lives that are set within this often tumultuous landscape. The voiceover, spoken by a female narrator, is generic and banal, and doesn't have much to say beyond the most prosaic descriptions of these people's lives and occupations, as farmers or barge-dwelling laborers. It's the images that tell the real story, expressing the beauty and the harshness of this land and the work that's done in it.

Antonioni's visual sensibility is obviously already striking even in this first documentary. In one shot, he captures a woman walking home and frames her as a small figure against a massive, empty sky, with a tall, thin tree stretching up towards the sky above her. The shot, framed from below, looking up towards the woman and that blank gray sky, prefigures the distinctive compositions of Antonioni's later features, in which he also often framed his characters within landscapes that seem to tower over them, as expressions of their alienation and isolation. In another shot, he shows a young man going to court a girl by the riverbank, and he shoots the girl from behind, looking out at the water, only to turn around as the guy steps into the shot and sits down beside her. These little bursts of narrative suggestion belie the film's documentary construction; it's apparent that Antonioni, already possessed by the urge to tell stories and explore his characters' psychologies, was forming little narrative vignettes around the lives of these real people.

As a result, Gente del Po is an interesting debut, a rough but potent first short from a director who would later explore similar themes — like the effect of environment and occupation on people — in more depth. The film is ragged, with its routine narration, generic music and the abrupt ending necessitated by Antonioni's problems with his footage, but in its brief span it points the way forward to the ideas and aesthetics of the director's subsequent career.


N.U. is a more modest and simple documentary from Michelangelo Antonioni, a film about the workers of the Netezza Urbana, the department of sanitation: the street-sweepers of Rome. The film has very minimal narration, just a short blurb announcing its purpose at the very beginning of the film, describing the work of the street-sweepers and making the banal point that, though nobody pays attention to them, they are in fact integral to the city's activity. Antonioni then stages a series of quasi-documentary scenes of the street-sweepers at work. As in Gentle del Po, there is, already in this commissioned documentary work, a hint of narrative structure, a suggestion that Antonioni likes to look at the world and tell stories about what he sees. These scenes have the feel of a childlike imagination playing a game: watching ordinary people and imagining what private dramas they might be experiencing. A man and a woman, obviously a bourgeois couple of the type that Antonioni would later probe and psychoanalyze so incisively, walk down the street, arguing with each other, and as the woman walks away the man stops to angrily tear up a piece of paper and throw it on the street. As he runs to catch up to the woman, grabbing her arm and continuing their argument, a street-sweeper stoically sweeps up the shreds of paper into his shovel, dumping them into his garbage can. As the couple walk away in the background, taking their story elsewhere, a bum walks up and talks to the street-sweeper.

The staging of scenes like this in no way feels like a documentary; there's no looseness in Antonioni's compositions, nothing that suggests that this is unscripted reality. He may be shooting on the streets, capturing real people at work, but already his urge to impose his own will, his own vision on these images is apparent. He was never cut out to be a true documentary filmmaker. In one shot, his camera pans towards a small wooden shed, the door of which swings open as though in the breeze precisely at the moment that the tracking shot ends; a newspaper rustles inside, and eventually it's revealed that it's not the wind producing this motion but a homeless man who had been spending the night in this shelter with blankets of paper. Such images, so obviously arranged and choreographed, wind up working against the sense of ordinary reality that the voiceover pays tribute to: this is not a straightforward document of street-cleaners and bums but a carefully arranged series of images and stories.

The film ends with a sweepingly romantic image of a solitary street-cleaner walking home after work, a black silhouette in the darkening evening, the city stretched out around him in a long shot that perfectly captures the urban romanticism of this image, very unlike later Antonioni but not unlike his noir-influenced feature debut Story of a Love Affair, which he would make two years later. The image also recalls Charlie Chaplin's Tramp figure, a suggestion that the romanticized homeless people and laborers of this film are derived from the example of the movies as much as from real life. Antonioni, making these small documentaries to observe the lives of ordinary people, was already crafting the foundation for the films he'd make as a mature filmmaker, already laying the groundwork for a cinema dealing with people and their surroundings, with the importance of work in modern society, and with the isolation and alienation of the individual in a society where individual lives are increasingly marginalized, like the ignored street-sweepers and bums of this short.