9/24: Broadway Danny Rose; House of Cards; Interim

The next stop on my trip through Woody Allen's 80s filmography is Broadway Danny Rose, which proves to be among his best, funniest, and most poignant films so far. The film is a nostalgic look back at the golden days of New York variety acts, and Allen plays Danny Rose a talent agent who specializes in the most marginal, strange, and washed-up acts around. This is a milieu that Allen was very familiar with from his own years as a stand-up comic, and this is essentially his love letter to a time in his life, the people he knew, and the whole atmosphere of the scene. To enhance the feel of nostalgia, not only is the film shot in black and white, like many of Allen's films from this period, but the story of Danny Rose is told as a series of reminiscences and funny stories by a group of comics hanging out in New York's famous Carnegie Deli.

The main story, following a series of vignettes which introduce Danny and his menagerie of oddball acts, concerns the Italian singer Lou Canova (the real lounge singer Nick Apollo Forte, who had never acted before) and his gangster moll, Tina (Mia Farrow). On a crucial night for Lou's slowly improving career, Danny has to go pick up Tina and spend the night pretending to be her date for the benefit of Lou's wife. Instead, Danny gets sucked into an increasingly wild series of adventures with Tina, with the mob hot on their trail the whole time. It's a lot of fun, and Woody milks as much humor as he can from his over-the-top stereotypes of Italian mob families. This is the one problematic aspect of the film, since this stereotyping could even be seen as rather mean-spirited, but it's important to remember that Woody's depictions of Jews are often equally negative and stereotyped, including in this film. It's a broad, sweeping humor, and in context it works beautifully. This is especially true because the stereotypes are balanced by some of Woody's most sensitive, complicated characterizations -- the relationship between his character and Mia Farrow's Tina is sweet, funny, and simultaneously both totally improbable and (because of the sensitivity of the leads' performances) totally believable.

Farrow is in rare form here, acting completely against all previous expectations in a part I never would have believed her capable of playing. Her Tina is crude, temperamental, spontaneous, funny, tough, and surprisingly intelligent behind her huge ever-present sunglasses and poofed hair. She sinks into this part like she was born to play it, submerging herself and totally taking on an unexpected persona. This film, more than anything, proves the scope and magnitude of Farrow's tremendous acting talent, as the wispy, sensitive actress transforms herself into a bouffant-haired, gum-snapping gangster's gal. Although Farrow unquestionably dominates the picture, there's a lot to love here. Allen is fantastic as well, exaggerating his own already exaggerated mannerisms for the portrait of fast-talking agent Danny Rose. The black and white NYC cinematography is gorgeous throughout, and there are several stellar scenes that will likely stick in my memory forever. The Thanksgiving dinner at the end of the film is foremost among these, and the atmosphere of the comics discussing old times at Carnegie Deli. Less poignant, but much funnier, is the chase scene through a warehouse filled with parade floats, which halfway through turns from suspense to farce with an entirely unexpected and hilarious twist. Broadway Danny Rose is a masterpiece in Allen's career, and it belongs in the company of his other bittersweet, nostalgic masterworks like Annie Hall and Manhattan.

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I also watched a pair of films from Kino's second Avant-Garde collection. These excellent sets have assembled a surprising number of remarkable experimental shorts from the early days of film, and though this second set hasn't proved as consistently high-level as the first, there are still plenty of treasures within. Joseph Vogel's 1947 House of Cards is an enjoyable but not particularly memorable surrealist exercise, in which a young man is haunted by thoughts of murder and violence — possibly one he himself committed, or one he only read about in the newspaper. In either case, the film is a stream-of-consciousness journey through the man's mind, with strange imagery and shadowy figures swirling across the screen. The film's strongest moments are a few scenes that bring to mind an avant-garde film noir — a title I'd previously thought only belonged to J.J. Parker's wonderfully bizarre Dementia (AKA Daughter of Horror). An early scene of (imagined? remembered?) murder is especially evocative, as both murderer and victim are cloaked in expressionistic shadows with only stray beams of light cutting across them. Vogel also uses several of his own lithographs and the memorable painting Survivors At Picnic, shot through warped lenses, to provide an eerie landscape for the inside of the young man's mind. Despite the strong visual interest, this film never really adds up to much, and several silly and puzzling symbolic constructions only distract from the work's serious tone -- like the ballet dancer, blind newspaper hawker, and fencers who all show up towards the end.

The most intriguing inclusions in Kino's second Avant-Garde collection are four early films of Stan Brakhage, including his very first film, shot when he was just 19. These films provide a very different image of Brakhage than most experimental cinema fans will be aware of from his more well-known later works. While Brakhage later eschewed narrative and, eventually, even representation, these early films betray the influence of neorealism and the French poet/filmmaker Jean Cocteau. For the most part, they're only interesting now for the occasional glimpses they give of the highly original filmmaker Brakhage would soon become. There are flashes of his obsession with light and foliage, and in these more narrative-based films, an impatience with the central plot and a recurring interest in adding details from outside the main action (leaves on nearby trees, landscape shots, light reflecting off water). The Way to Shadow Garden is the only one of the four that can stand up today as a good film in its own right, and it is not coincidentally the one closest to the work which Brakhage would later become known for — particularly its semi-abstract second half, which shows the film's protagonist in the midst of a lush garden, eerily converted into negative-image with high-contrast light streaming everywhere.

Interim, on the other hand, is the least interesting of these works, and its only real place now is as a historical curiosity. It was Brakhage's first film, a student work with a simple non-story: a boy goes walking, meets a girl, kisses her as they shelter from the rain, and then parts from her. It's also the only Brakhage film where he doesn't handle the camera himself, as the cinematography is credited to Stan Phillips (probably a fellow student). The film has a few conventionally pretty shots and maintains a charming, lilting rhythm through the editing and the use of piano music by a then-young James Tenney. But as a Brakhage film, there's not much there, even as far as hints of the future. This is a pure neorealist work, and it would clearly take Brakhage a few more stabs at filmmaking before he would really come into his own voice.

9/23: Zelig; Love is Colder Than Death; Chocolat; Detour

Zelig marked a very unexpected departure for Woody Allen, who had ended the 70s with a series of increasingly introspective and psychological films that seemed to directly reflect his own modern Manhattan milieu. Then, following 1980's Fellini tribute Stardust Memories, he retreated to work on two new projects simultaneously. One was a farcical period piece based on the work of Bergman, Shakespeare, and Renoir (A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, as already discussed), and the other was a faux-documentary set in 1920s, about a man who transformed himself to be more like whoever was around him. Allen himself plays Leonard Zelig, one of his most memorable, inventive, and deeply symbolic characters. Zelig was so chronically insecure, and so eager to fit in with a world that seemed to hate him, that he developed a "condition" whereby his personality and physical appearance would alter in response to whoever was around him. For a time, he is happy to blend in everywhere — he poses as an aristocrat, a black jazz man, a Yankee baseball player — but his talent is soon discovered and he is placed under medical scrutiny.

Allen was committed to making this project appear to be a true documentary, and to that ends he filmed with 1920s equipment and lighting, scratched the negatives, and in some cases inserted himself, with a blue screen, into vintage footage of Babe Ruth, Adolf Hitler, and other 1920s famous figures and moments. This latter technique, of course, is predictive of its much later use in Forrest Gump, which also had a symbolic character passing through the moments of history via blue screen magic. The difference is that the later film is deeply nostalgic, sentimental, and conservative, whereas Woody's is witty, intelligent, and much deeper than its surface laughs would indicate. It also presents a diametrically opposite idea about life to the one found in Gump — where Gump excels by blindly obeying what people tell him, Zelig only comes into his own when he develops his own personality and stops trying to be like everyone else. As the film itself points out, in documentary voiceover, Zelig is a lightning rod for all sorts of metaphorical interpretations. He is the prototypical Jew, desperately trying to assimilate in his home culture. He is, more broadly, the American immigrant, also forced to smooth out his differences in favor of the conformity of the wider culture. And, as the film's final segment drives home, he is the average man unable to express his own opinions and ideas for fear of ostracism. In the film's last 20 minutes, when a distraught Zelig finds himself in Germany, happily adapting himself to the Nazis around him, the film makes it clear that conformity is at the root of fascism and oppression. Zelig started out on this path because he was afraid to admit he hadn't read Moby Dick when someone asked him; eventually, his conformity led to him "fitting right in" in the early days of fascist Germany.

It's important to emphasize that despite these deeper implications, Zelig is a very funny film. Woody's attention to detail allows him to flawlessly recreate the texture of the 1920s, as filtered through documentary techniques. And he packs every inch of this imagined past with all manner of gags and jokes. The documentary format allows him so freedom and looseness in his narrative, a step back from the tighter storytelling of his relationship comedies like Annie Hall. Structurally, this film looks back more to Woody's earliest era, when films like Bananas were essentially just collections of loosely related scenes whose primary purpose was to get the joke across. The disparate scenes come fast and furious here, with a crackling pace that makes the film seem a lot denser and longer than its slim 79 minutes. This is classic Woody, a wonderfully sophisticated film that approaches weighty ideas with a quick wit and lightness that truly sets Allen apart among comedic directors.

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Even as I continue my odyssey through Woody's oeuvre, I keep returning to Fassbinder's equally massive filmography. Tonight it was his very first feature, 1969's Love is Colder Than Death. What's remarkable here is that Fassbinder seems to have come out fully formed, not only exploring many of the themes and ideas which would have continued importance for him throughout his career, but in full possession of the aesthetic means to express those ideas. True, he had directed a number of stage plays (including this one) before turning to film, but he clearly adapted to the cinematic medium with ease. Fassbinder himself plays the lead, Franz Walsch, a petty gangster who lives with his prostitute girlfriend Joanna (Hanna Schygulla), and whose life is disrupted by the arrival of his friend Bruno (Ulli Lommel). Bruno's quietly magnetic personality clearly attracts both Franz and Joanna, and together the threesome embark on a violent crime spree before a jealous and distrustful Joanna betrays Bruno to the police.

The film is bathed in the aesthetics of the French New Wave, which was an important early influence on Fassbinder's work. He even dedicates the film to French directors Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Marie Straub, and the unmentioned Jean-Luc Godard seems an especially important influence here. There's more than a little similarity to Godard's own debut feature, Breathless, which also featured a matter-of-fact deployment of violence and a distancing deconstruction of Hollywood gangster cliches. Lommel's character, in his cocked fedora, trenchcoat, and dark sunglasses, looks like he stepped right out of a French gangster movie, maybe Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai from 2 years prior. But despite these similarities and a clear lineage of influence (Hitchcock also comes up, with a reference to the cop from Psycho), Fassbinder's style is, on balance, wholly his own. The film's editing has an odd, halting quality to it. Scenes stretch on for a long time with very little happening, remaining static, then suddenly there will be a flurry of activity and a rushed line, and the scene clips off abruptly, as though Fassbinder was suddenly reluctant to linger any longer on this moment. Because of this, the film tends to alternate between engagement and distancing, with long static takes keeping the viewer at arm's length from the characters before a sudden outburst of emotion or activity draws the audience back into the story — and just as suddenly, it's over and on to the next scene.

Just as Fassbinder's proficiency with the dialectic of distance/emotion is fully formed at this early point, he's also already exploring his interest in the power dynamics of relationships and the ways in which outside forces impinge on the individual. There's also a strong undercurrent of repressed homosexual desire here, another theme that would run through the subtext in many of Fassbinder's less overtly "gay" pictures. This is a remarkable debut, a glimpse at the future Fassbinder and a wholly satisfying film on its own merits as well.

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This must've been a good day for first films, because I also watched Chocolat, the directorial debut of Claire Denis, surely one of the finest of today's filmmakers. Denis, like Fassbinder, also seems to have come out fully formed in her debut, although for a different reason — before directing Chocolat, she was an assistant on the sets of directors like Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, and Costa-Gavras. This background shows on her self-assured debut, which flows with the smooth and deliberate pacing of a seasoned professional who knows what she wants to say. Denis today is known for her collaboration with Agnes Godard, who became her regular cinematographer only shortly after this, and served as a camera assistant on this film. The cinematography here lacks some of the visual flair that Godard brought to Denis' films, but the imagery of northern Africa is undeniably beautiful anyway, and moreover has the same sense of carefully modulated time that is present in all of Denis' work.

Denis' films always have a surface calm and quiet that belies the often intense emotions boiling away beneath that surface. This is certainly the case here, as Denis probes into the racial tensions inherent in late-colonial Africa. The film concerns a French colonial governor and his family living in Cameroon, and in terms of plot, Denis fans shouldn't be surprised to learn there isn't much there. The governor is often gone, leaving his beautiful wife and young daughter to fend for themselves, watched over by their black manservant Protée. There is plenty of incident, presented with Denis' typical elliptical editing, but not much that ever adds up to a story in traditional terms. Instead, Denis allows the simmering erotic desires and the tension of the racial divide slowly come to a head without ever quite erupting as you might expect. Denis never lets her story verge into melodrama, and she never makes her points overtly — everything here exists in the subtext, since the surface is exactly the placid and formal milieu required by this colonial upper-class setting. And what a rich subtext, in which sensuality, racism, and colonialism intrude subconsciously upon every aspect of daily life, upon every interaction, no matter how trivial or seemingly innocent. It's a dazzling debut, and like all of Denis' films, it's much easier to enjoy than it is to talk about — her way of presenting her ideas is so subtle, so gentle, that they almost seem to seep into the viewer without notice.

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Finally, the last film of the evening was Edgar G. Ulmer's B-noir Detour, a fine example of the kind of gritty, true B pictures that were so common in the 40s and 50s. The film is a lean 68 minutes, obviously designed to precede a more expensively produced main feature, and these humble origins show in every inch of film here. Nevertheless, despite the cheap sets, rough transitions, and shoddy back projection, there's a raw energy and vitality that elevates it above many of its contemporaries. The story is simple, following the innocent and gentle-natured Al Roberts (Tom Neal) hitchhiking across the country to meet up with his girlfriend in California. Along the way, he's picked up by a shady bookie, who promptly dies when he falls asleep and falls out of the car. The hitchhiker knows he'll be blamed, so he hides the body and takes the dead man's car and identity, planning to ditch both once he can get to a big city and disappear. His plans are disrupted, though, when he himself picks up a woman hitchhiker (Ann Savage), who happens to be the same woman who was picked up previously by the dead man.

She of course knows that Roberts is not who he claims to be, and she uses this knowledge to take control of him, taking all the money he got from the dead man and keeping him prisoner in an apartment they rent together. Savage dominates this film, delivering a performance of totally uncompromising fierceness. Her character is the ultimate femme fatale, driven by greed and a total disregard for others. When she first rounds on Roberts with her accusations, it's a truly terrifying scene, as her flashing eyes and sneer seem ready to rip him to pieces just with a look. Neal can't do much to compete with this scenery-chewing tour-de-force, but he ably portrays his character's innocence and sad resignation to his fate; his sad eyes convey depths of emotion whenever the camera closes in on him. This is no masterpiece: its plot is sometimes slack or frankly unbelievable, and its aesthetics are ragged and uneven. But in terms of pure energy and mood, it's hard to top this.

9/21: A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy; Gods of the Plague

Tonight I watched films by two directors who I've been somewhat methodically exploring on DVD. With Woody Allen, I've been more or less going in chronological order through his career, starting with his directorial debut Take the Money and Run and ending up, tonight, with A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. I got hooked on Allen with Sleeper and Love and Death, and only became more enamored of his films as they became more serious with his next four films. This film, released in 1982 after an uncharacteristically long 2-year gap, represents something of a step back from that seriousness. It's a remarkably light film for Allen, who even in his earliest films tended to temper his humor with elements of sexual dysfunction, neurosis, and death-obsessed philosophy. Some of that is here too, but treated with a much lighter hand than usual, a farcical tone that makes even the potentially dark moments seem breezy and inconsequential. Woody's obsession with Ingmar Bergman has often been credited for his turn to increasing darkness, especially in the bleak drama Interiors, which drew on Bergman's funereal Cries and Whispers as a primary influence. Here, Woody turns to a much different Bergman, the young Bergman who made the partner-swapping romantic farce Smiles of a Summer Night.

Woody's film uses the basic premise from Bergman — three couples meet at a country villa and promptly become mired in complex romantic entanglements — and a few incidents, notably the memorable suicide attempt. But the title of this film also points to another source, and the spirit of Shakespeare's light supernatural/sexual comedy is very much alive here as well. The woods around the villa are seemingly haunted by spirits, and one of the central themes is the dialogue over whether there's nothing beyond the material world (as advanced by Jose Ferrer's snobbish professor) or whether there's more to the universe than our senses can detect (mostly argued by Woody himself). There are also nods to Renoir's Rules of the Game especially in Ferrer's character, who engages in a hunting expedition that's a warped mirror of the one in Renoir's film. Allen is notoriously hostile to the country, so it's rather clear that when he decided to make an ode to the country, he couldn't directly capture his own feelings on the subject. So he turned instead to what must be his own favorite artists' takes on the country. The result is an idyllic portrait of rural life that's very much artificial, centuries of artistic expression on the country filtered through a single consciousness.

It's also great fun, and Woody elicits some of his most charming performances from other actors. Maybe it's because this is the first film in which Allen really took a back seat rather than a central role, or maybe it's because his role is much more understated and less scene-stealing than usual, or maybe it's just that all the actors are working at such a high level. Whatever the case, this is very much an ensemble acting showcase. Julie Hagerty is particularly great as the lusty nurse Dulcy, and she quietly steals every scene she's in with her wide-eyed frankness and tossed-off jokes. Allen also uses the rural location as an excuse for some of his most dazzlingly beautiful cinematography, punctuating the film with quiet forest interludes and mist-clouded moons. Not the best Woody Allen film by any means, but a nice subtly funny one with plenty to recommend it.

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I've been taking a far less organized approach to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the German director whose filmmaking career lasted pretty much just 13 years, but who managed to squeeze over 40 films into that period. My viewing of his films has been somewhat haphazard, mainly because my introduction to Fassbinder consisted of a slow process of getting used to his offputting aesthetics over the course of several films. My first few exposures to his work weren't exactly pleasant, though clearly something kept drawing me back until it all finally clicked with In a Year of 13 Moons. Now, the imminent release of a Criterion box set of Fassbinder's 15-hour TV miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz, by many accounts his definitive masterpiece, has given me a good excuse to catch up on the remainder of his filmography that I have yet to see before tackling that. The bulk of the films I haven't seen yet (at least, those available on DVD) are from his early period, which is curiously complete in the digital medium.

Before his first encounter with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, which resulted in The Merchant of Four Seasons and a string of other acidic melodramas, Fassbinder's primary influences were Brecht, Godard, and Hollywood genre films, possibly filtered through German imitators. Gods of the Plague was his third film, and it's very much a Godardian deconstruction of the film noir genre. Curiously, it's also a highly effective noir on its own merits; it simultaneously deconstructs and fulfills the genre's conventions. As with most of Fassbinder's films, this one concerns a group of characters who simply cannot abide by the mores of society. Harry Baer plays Franz, a recently released ex-convict who falls back in with his old girlfriend Joanna (Hanna Schygulla) before drifting off and forming a bisexual threesome with old pal "the Gorilla" (Gunter Kaufmann) and a new lover (Margarethe von Trotta). The trio lives off loans and Margarethe's meager savings for a while, dreaming all the while of cutting off to a deserted island just for the three of them. Their ambiguous triad relationship, and their utter disconnection from the economic system, make them typical Fassbinder heroes — sexually, socially, and economically, they just don't fit in. Their dreams of escape are patently ridiculous, but they nevertheless try, and their ultimate doomed end in a botched supermarket robbery (betrayed by Franz's jilted lover Joanna) is as sad as it is perfunctory.

These are true Fassbinder heroes, but they're also noir heroes, trapped by circumstances and pushed towards an ugly fate. And Fassbinder makes his characters' connection to the genre totally clear by indulging in some wonderful noir set-pieces; night-time vistas where the shadows overwhelm the figures and only slim bars of light cut across the imprisoning gloom. The noir lighting, fittingly enough, originated in Germany in the first place, when expat cameramen like Karl Freund exported expressionistic lighting effects into American film in the 40s. Fassbinder brings the lineage right back to its roots on German soil, giving his deconstructive work another layer of meaning on an aesthetic level. In fact, the camera work throughout this film is an early indication of Fassbinder's gift for fluid, constantly moving cinematography. There's nothing too flashy here yet, but there are plenty of the horizontal pans so characteristic of Godard, giving the film a forward motion that its characters utterly lack. This point is driven home by contrasting such gliding shots with static tableaux in which the characters languidly lounge around. This is an excellent early example of Fassbinder's immense talent. His aesthetics are still evolving at this point (though this is certainly an aesthetically fulfilling film in its own right) but his enduring themes and concerns and prototypical characters were present right from the very beginning.

9/20: Les Carabiniers

From Godard's 1960s run of films stretching from Breathless to Week-end, possibly the least well-known is his 1963 fifth film, Les Carabiniers. There's possibly a good reason for that, though. I'm of the opinion that Godard didn't make a bad film in this period from 1959-1967, but Les Carabiniers is the least fully formed of these movies, more of a transitional work in which Godard could experiment with form. Taken on its own merits, outside of the canon of Godard's 60s filmography, it's a bit boring — especially the lengthy postcard-viewing scene which forms its climax — and its ideas work far better on paper than they do on the screen.

It's only as a part of Godard's 60s work that Les Carabiniers takes on greater significance. Many of the political ideas which would come to dominate his filmmaking as the decade wore on received their first, tentative airing here. The film follows two peasants who are enticed, by promises of wealth and power, into joining the King's army and going to war. The bulk of the film, after they enlist, shows their wartime exploits, with scenes of carnage and violence alternated with text screens showing the soldiers' letters to the women waiting for them back home. The letters flippantly and casually describe rape, pillaging, mass executions, and battles, then offhandedly add that "it was a nice summer nevertheless." The film's premise — that war is an exploitation of the poor for the goals of the rich — clearly originates in Marxist thought. This becomes especially apparent in a scene where the soldiers come across a young woman who berates them for not understanding the role they play in the class struggle. Of course, they execute her, though not without hesitation.

Les Carabiniers bogs down a bit in the prolonged symbolic scene where the two young soldiers, freshly returned from war, show the women the spoils of war: a suitcase full of postcards cataloguing the full contents of the world. The satirical point is obvious, but the scene drags on too long without much of Godard's characteristic wit and subtlety. There are flashes, though, even here, in references to Felix the Cat and Rin Tin Tin. But this scene mostly demonstrates the problems of this early film from Godard. Its ideas are continually interesting and indicative of the director's future areas of examination: war, capitalism and socialism, the proletarian classes, the strained relationships between the genders caused by social and political forces. These ideas, though, aren't realized with the precision and depth and visual brilliance that Godard would bring to bear on his later efforts. Les Carabiniers remains primarily interesting as a transitional work, a deconstruction of the war film genre just as his other films from this period deconstructed noirs, musicals, and spy thrillers.