10/15: Kenneth Anger shorts; September

Kenneth Anger's revolutionary half-hour film Scorpio Rising is the primary document on which his reputation rests; if he made nothing else, it's safe to say that he would still be remembered today, at least among cineastes, for this alone. Now that I've finally seen it, thanks to Fantoma's fantastic second DVD set of his work, I can easily see why it's so acclaimed. This is a wild, hallucinatory catalogue of American pop culture fetishes: leather, motorcycles, sex, death, Dick Tracy, James Dean, cops, and fascists. All this is overlaid with a selection of fresh-faced pop tunes, which both comment wryly on the on-screen imagery and to some extent define the pace of the editing rhythms, sometimes quickening to a jagged fast tempo, sometimes slowing down into stately, sweeping camera movements for a ballad.

The film begins with a fetishized, in-detail look at the mechanics of a motorcycle, all gleaming chrome and grease, reflecting light in hazy, washed-out bursts. Next up is a fetishized, in-detail look at the mechanics of the male body, hyper-sexualized in a series of scenes of bikers getting ready to go out, wrapping themselves in leather and chains and sunglasses. Anger is gathering the elements here, setting the stage for a tour de force of free-associative montage in which motorcycles and male bodies become the raw materials. Within this rapid-fire stream of associations, ideas, and startling images, there's more than enough to require many, many more viewings, and I have a feeling I'll be going back to this soon, as I did with my favorite few films from the first Fantoma set. But Scorpio Rising seems even more fraught with implications and ideas than even the best earlier films; this is the apotheosis of Anger's filmmaking to that point, the perfect expression of his aesthetics. James Dean looms large here, because he was, in his life and death, himself an expression of so much of what Anger wants to get across here. Dean, to many, was an epitome of American masculinity, an icon, though of course the fact that he was gay would've stunned 50s America. His appearance here, amidst 50s pop tunes and the ephemera of bike culture, is surely meant to raise these conflicting identities, the public/cultural and the private. Anger also raises a filmic eyebrow at comic books, selectively showing individual panels from several newspaper strips with a clear homoerotic subtext.

Anger takes the elemental components of American pop culture — the cult of movie stars, comics and their exaggerated cartoon characters, (heterosexual) love songs — and blends them together into a primal and warped expression of his own perspective on the culture around him. This culminates in an apocalypse of Nazi imagery, a leather-clad cop who transforms into a masked dictator, and an orgiastic gay Halloween party complete with death masks and 'cycles. The film's flow of imagery is at time dizzying, creating fleeting impressions and momentary connections that then drift away as the wild rush pours onward. It's fun, delirious, and absolutely demands more viewings, so I'll hold back any further comment until I revisit the film.

I also watched Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos, which feels like a definite companion piece to Scorpio. A 3-minute fragment of what would've been a sequel of sorts to the previous film, what survives is a light-hearted and gorgeously photographed vignette. Much like Anger's earlier Puce Moment, which was also an unfinished fragment, this is primarily a study in color. A series of loving close-up shots trace a fluffy white brush as it buffs the gleaming surface of an improbable souped-up car. If this is any indication, Kustom would have done for American drag racing culture what Scorpio did for motorcycles. As it is, it's a study in luminous pinks, pale blues, and the bloody red of the car's utterly ridiculous vaginal seat cushions, all set to the Paris Sisters' "Dream Lover" — which is as perfect an ode to the love of a car as you could possibly imagine.

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It's been a little while, but I'm now back on track with my Woody Allen chronology, and tonight I watched September, which seems to be one of his most thoroughly forgotten (and/or reviled) films prior to the 90s. I can't say I get the widespread hatred, though. The film refers back in some ways to his first real dramatic work, 1978's Interiors, though this is a much more satisfying film. In fact, I would venture to say that September is the film that Woody intended Interiors to be, succeeding where the earlier film sometimes stumbled, exploring very dark subject matter without descending too far into ponderousness, and most importantly treating the characters with much more warmth and sympathy. Whereas Interiors kept its characters at a deliberate distance, favoring objectivity but winding up with coldness — alleviated only by the wonderful scenes with Maureen Stapleton — September is much closer to its characters and infused with the autumnal warmth implied by its title.

Much of this is a matter of color, light, and movement, as embodied in the two films' aesthetics and cinematography. Both films are chamber dramas, set mostly in the restrictive space of a single house (in the case of September, the camera never leaves the house at all). And both films begin similarly, with shots of the empty house. But even from the very beginning, September exudes a very different aura. Where Interiors began with a static shot, with a cold gray palette that rarely changed throughout the film, in this film the camera is gliding along from the very start, and the house is open, cheery, filled with a golden autumn light streaming in the windows. And if the house in Interiors was truly silent and dead at the beginning of that film, this house is filled right from the start with voices wafting through it, and the camera glides around corners until it finds the source. None of these distinctions, though, are meant to imply that September is a particularly happy movie, in spite of the welcoming warmth of its opening; it's one of the most gut-wrenching dramas imaginable, every bit as despairing in its way as Interiors before it.

While Interiors is about stasis and glaciation, September is about, at least, the hope for change. As a result, all the characters are constantly moving here, and the camera with them, framing them together, then documenting their separation and isolation. Even in the first scene this happens, as the camera tracks around to find Stephanie (Dianne Wiest) and Howard (Denholm Elliott) sitting together on the couch. The camera frames them together for a few moments, until she gets up and walks away, leaving him alone. The camera then tracks in for a close-up on Elliott, emphasizing his loneliness and isolation, tightening the frame so that where once there were two, there's now one. Right away, Allen is hinting at themes of loneliness, disconnection, and longing for love, and this use of the camera frame to form and then dissolve couples is a key undercurrent in the film. All of the characters staying at this country house are grouped around Lane (Mia Farrow), who's convalescing after a suicide attempt. She's trying to recover some shreds of her life, after a failed relationship pushed her over the edge. But her current infatuation with her tenant Peter (Sam Waterston), is doomed since he loves her married friend Stephanie, while Howard actually loves Lane but realizes that she doesn't return the feelings. Further complicating matters is the presence of Lane's vibrant but totally selfish mother (Elaine Stritch) and her new husband.

The film initially looks at this complicated network of relationships with the same hint of distance that was present throughout Interiors, and I was at first as put off by it as I was in the earlier film. But pretty soon things change during the lengthy blackout scene that forms the film's core. During a heavy rainstorm one night, the electricity goes out and the characters are trapped inside in a candlelit gloom. It's one of the most beautifully understated and rich sequences in Allen's filmography, with a melancholic aura hanging over every interaction. At this point, the film settles into a comfortable intimacy with its characters, the camera gliding around them familiarly, probing delicately at their psychological nuances and emotions. This is especially true of the incredible scenes between Wiest and Waterston, as their mutual flirtation blooms into lust and affection. These are two great actors, especially Wiest, who is never less than dazzling in any role, and their conversation crackles with depth and intelligence, putting as much force into what's unsaid, or what's said only through glances and smiles, as what they actually say aloud. This is Allen at the peak of his writing prowess, and gifted with two actors who can do real justice to the material. Elaine Stritch also gets some wonderful dialogue, particularly a lengthy monologue on aging and regrets which she delivers sorrowfully, half to her mirror and half to her daughter. Not all of the writing is quite as high quality, and the script occasionally lapses into cliché or melodrama, but on the whole this is a fine film, elevated by its masterful performances and the fluid, suggestive camerawork.

10/14: Blind Chance; The Naked Spur

Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance is a powerful political fable that provides an early glimpse at the unique style that would later lead to acclaimed international successes like the Three Colors Trilogy and The Double Life of Veronique. As with the later films, Kieslowski displays a deeply erotic, sensual sensibility and a warm humanism that inflects every facet of this complex film. He also shows signs of the spiritual outlook and interest in fate and overlapping chronologies that is especially prevalent in the films he's best known for. Blind Chance begins with a brief, elliptical precis of the early life of Witek (Boguslaw Linda), starting with a few childhood scenes, his first love, his days in medical school, and finally the death of his father. Many of these earlier memories will later be shown to be false or at least incomplete, hazily remembered scenes from the distant past that have taken on iconic status in Witek's mind even if the particulars aren't quite accurate.

But what turns out to be most important is the death of Witek's father, who had pushed his son into medical school. With his dying words, he tells his son that he is not bound to complete this path, that he need not do what he doesn't want to. He sets Witek free. This moment is the crucial one for Kieslowski, the moment of seeming freedom, because this film is in fact an examination of just how much freedom we do have as humans, and how much of our lives are determined by forces outside of our control. At this moment, Witek decides to leave Lodz, where he is studying, and catch a train to Warsaw instead, perhaps in search of his old teenage love, or maybe just for a change of scenery to decide where his life should go from here. After this point, the film takes on a three-part structure, with each section subtly altering the events at the train station, causing great shifts in Witek's life as a result. In the first iteration, he catches the train and falls in with some dedicated Communists who wish to change the current political system from within it. He joins the Party as well and shows promise, but becomes disgusted with this life after his girlfriend, his old love who he's reunited with, is arrested for dissident activities and rejects him. In the second section, Witek barely misses the train and winds up in a violent altercation with the station guards. He's sent to a work camp, where he meets some anti-Communists and becomes involved in their movement. In the third and final segment, he simply misses the train, returns to med school, marries a fellow student who he loves, and has children with her.

As always, Kieslowski is a masterful moral filmmaker, but never a moralist, because his work examines morality and the consequences of choices without heavy-handed preaching or over-determined meanings. What's interesting about Kieslowski's treatment of fate is that, while Witek's immediate situation is essentially a matter of chance — whether he catches the train or not — his reactions, choices, and moral fiber remain his own to form in response to his surroundings. Whether he is within the Party, against it, or trying to stay completely neutral in political matters, he tries to stay true to his own conception of the good and moral. What changes, from context to context, are the external pressures on the individual, the information he learns or doesn't learn about the world around him, and the events which might lead him in one direction or another. Kieslowski seems to be interested in the ways in which, with fate and chance dictating the broad outlines of our lives, we can still be moral and responsible with respect to the everyday decisions and choices we make, and so might help shape our own fates. Though this film is often thought of as three different possible lives based on a single chance event, it's actually much more complicated than that. Witek can't choose whether to catch the train or not, but he does make dozens of decisions afterwards, all of which equally help to determine his life, though the repercussions of his choices stretch out in directions he couldn't possibly predict. If fate and luck (or God, who Witek turns to in one episode but not the other two) hand us the raw materials of a life, it's up to the individual to craft those materials by making moral choices.

In the context of troubled 1980s Poland, such moral choices were naturally for Kieslowski also a question of Polish politics, and the film was so openly political in its presentation of Communist power abuse that it was suppressed for 6 years. More subversively, the film emphasizes the capacity for choice and individual morality in situations which are in many ways beyond the individual's control. In that sense, there is a real continuity between this early film and Kieslowski's later work, which may be more visually flashy but contains the same humanist, morally inclined spirit.

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Another filmmaker with a distinctly moral perspective in his films was Anthony Mann, the premier stylist of the American Western. The Naked Spur is the third entry in Mann's run of Westerns starring James Stewart, probably the best run of Westerns ever to come out of Hollywood. Mann's hard-edged look at the American frontier, and his unconventional conception of the Western "hero" — the quotes were often required for Mann's leads — found their perfect realization in Stewart. In Mann's films, he inevitably positioned Stewart's character as a morally ambiguous, distanced figure acting out of self-interest rather than any moral imperative. Here, Stewart plays a former rancher who was betrayed by his girlfriend and lost his land. In order to get it back, he becomes a bounty hunter, tracking down a murderous local outlaw (Robert Ryan) in order to bring him in for a reward. Along the way, Stewart unwillingly takes on two partners, an amiable old gold-seeker (Millard Mitchell), and a corrupt ex-cavalryman (Ralph Meeker). When the trio manage to capture Ryan (and his companion, Janet Leigh), the outlaw begins playing them off each other, awakening instincts for greed, lust, and hatred in the three men.

As far as the narrative goes, Mann's construction is as always taut and engaging. This is the second time I've seen The Naked Spur, and it's just as enjoyable to revisit it with all foreknowledge of its twists and turns. It's also illustrative of Mann's preoccupation with the idea of the reluctant hero, who is forced by circumstance and outside forces to, eventually, make the moral choice in spite of all his instincts. In this case, Stewart plays a man damaged by his past, seething with rage and ready to do just about anything to get back even a shred of his lost life. He gives a remarkable performance, in one of his first darker roles, allowing him a much greater range than the straightforward good guy he usually played prior to this. When he speaks of ranching, his voice takes on a wistful, nostalgic tone, a stark contrast to the clipped, abrupt manner he otherwise has. He is a man determined to overcome his basic peaceful, domestic ways just this once, in order to earn back the old way of life he loved so much. But as the pressures accumulate and the cost of bringing Ryan to justice become ever greater, it becomes harder and harder for Stewart to accept trading a man's life, even a murderer's life, for a sack of gold.

For Mann, violence and death are always common in the American West, and they're presented with a straightforward brutality that is all the more shocking for its casual presentation. There's nothing here that has quite the visceral punch of the infamous hand-shooting incident in The Man From Laramie, but the action scenes do have a raw energy that's lacking in other Hollywood films of the period. When someone gets hurt in a Mann film, you know he's hurt, and when Stewart gets shot in the leg early on, he limps and suffers all through the rest of the film. Mann's heroes are never the impassive John Wayne type, stoically facing everything; Stewart cries, breaks down, yells, slumps over his horse in agony. Against this very real violence, Mann offers a vision of domesticity and hope for the future, which here is largely contained to Stewart's infrequent references to his ranching days. The usual Hollywood vision of the West was contained to gunfights, outlaws, and Indians. Mann was always even more interested in the ways that the people of the time made lives for themselves amidst harsh conditions, carving out a niche of relative security and contentment from the wide-open landscape. This is a true classic of the Western genre, and one of the finest achievements of the Mann/Stewart pairing.

10/12: Rebel Without a Cause

Rebel Without a Cause is today the movie for which James Dean is most fondly remembered. Even those who wouldn't even be able to tell you the least detail about the film's plot have probably heard the name and would recognize Dean's iconic appearance in the film, with his white t-shirt and bright red jacket. It's the kind of film that has in many ways been removed from the cinematic realm altogether, catapulted into the environs of pop culture, its actual qualities as a film largely disregarded in the fuss over Dean's legend. This is in some ways understandable; after all, Dean's legacy in the movies rests on just 3 roles, and neither of the others has quite the swagger and energy of this one. But it's shame in that there are probably few people nowadays who can come to this film without the weight of that legacy hanging over it, to appreciate the film on its own terms.

For me, the film is interesting not so much for Dean, but for director Nicholas Ray, whose In a Lonely Place I'd place among the best few films of the 50s. Rebel, made 5 years later, is not quite on the same plane as the earlier masterpiece, but it's still a fine film. The film introduces Dean, as the high school delinquent Jim Stark, drunk and stumbling into a fall so that he lies across the frame, his head towards the camera. As the credits roll, Dean plays with a toy monkey lying on the ground and passes out, a fitting introduction for this deeply troubled character. What's interesting about Dean's legacy is that he's often thought of as an archetypical tough guy, but his character here is sensitive, frustrated, lonely, and vulnerable. His constantly bickering family is the root of his troubles, and he comes across as desperate rather than tough. In this film, the insouciant posing and flippant attitude for which he is remembered come across as an act, a cover-up for his inner turbulence and lack of self-confidence.

For the first half of the film, this psychological aspect of Dean's tough-guy character is presented with a somewhat heavy hand, especially in the scene at the police station which opens the film. The script sometimes seems to have little faith in audiences to figure out those kinds of insights for themselves, and Dean's problems are initially spelled out in very obvious ways. His father (Jim Backus) is emasculated and unable to stand up to his wife (Ann Doran), who browbeats both him and Dean and refuses to tolerate even the least sign of family strife. She has carted the family around the country over the years, making them uproot and move every time a problem confronts them; she wants to be continually starting fresh, erasing the past and hoping that things will be better this time. In this repressed, unstable family environment, with no support or true communication, Dean naturally acts out and drifts into bad situations. But the main reason for his lack of confidence is the absence of a real father figure in his life. His father is early on established as a wishy-washy coward unable to stand up for anything or even to express his own opinions, especially to his wife. His father's cowardly streak is presumably the reason why Dean responds so vociferously when anyone calls him a chicken. If the point wasn't clear enough already, Backus shows up at a crucial point wearing a flowered apron as he cleans around the house, and when asked for advice by his son, all he can tell him is to write down a list of pros and cons before making a decision.

Naturally, Dean is infuriated by his father's inability to say anything of meaning, and he flees into a car race to prove his honor and bravery to the kids who taunted him at school. At this point, the car race forms a pivot point in the film, in which the audience hand-holding of the film's first half is largely discarded, and the film becomes much more interesting. If the first half of the film showed Dean and his female counterpart Natalie Wood as kids without a real family, the second half shows them forming their own family. Fucked-up, dysfunctional, ultimately doomed to be broken up, but still a much more smoothly functioning family than their real ones. The trio is completed by Sal Mineo, the younger kid who idolizes Dean from the start and seems to latch onto him as more of a father than a friend, a replacement for his own absent dad, who sends child support checks but nothing else. The trio — mother, father, son — runs away to an abandoned mansion, where they hole up hiding from the gangs of kids who want revenge on them. There's violence lingering in the air, especially in the form of the pistol that Mineo has stolen and stashed in his pocket, but it's on hold while the trio forms their own new family.

In an exceptional series of scenes that subtly develop the group's collective relationship, Ray shows the trio touring the huge house, lit by flickering candles, with Dean and Wood pretending to be newlyweds wanting to buy it. It's funny, light, and yet infused with undercurrents of real emotional depth. The characters are playacting, fulfilling fantasies, mocking the clichés of adult lives while simultaneously creating their own new idea of adulthood. The sequence culminates in a scene that arranges the "family" into a suggestive tableau of closeness, with Dean resting his head on Wood's lap and Mineo sitting at their feet, resting back against Dean's prone body. There is an undercurrent of homosexual desire here, running perpendicular to the dominant familial dynamic, an unexplored (and, in 1955, unexplorable) hint that Mineo is sexually attracted to this tough father figure. But this is clearly a sideline here, a repressed secret just as it would have been in the 50s nuclear family. So after Wood and Dean tuck Mineo in while he sleeps, they sneak off for a private moment.

Ray shows the couple in medium shot, with their faces seeming to blend together into one. Dean is seen from the side, with Wood's face half-obscured by the contours of his profile; surprisingly enough, it looks forward to such radical examples of facial blending as Persona, though the love scene context here is manifestly Hollywood material. It's through shots like this that Ray infuses even the film's obligatory material, like this love scene, with greater complexity and visual interest than is usually seen in a Hollywood melodrama. During an argument between Dean and his parents, the camera sways and tilts in response to the power shifts, as the characters jockey for position against each other on a cramped staircase. The scene comes to a head with Dean's mother poised on the stairs a few steps above him, with his father at the foot of the stairs, sitting crumbled and helpless to intervene. The camera, in response, is tilted to one side, exaggerating the hierarchy so that it becomes a drastically sloping downward line, like an arrow pointing at the ineffective father.

Ray's film isn't perfect as a whole. Its script is often heavy handed, and its themes would probably be better served by a much more subtle rendering at times. Its ending, too, though potent in many ways, wraps up some of the familial tensions at the story's core a bit too easily, and one senses that in some ways this is just bowing to the convention of the happy ending. But script flaws aside, Rebel Without a Cause is a powerful and probing examination of teenage loneliness and frustration with the inadequacy of the family structure. That a film made over 50 years ago, and in some ways dated in its specifics, can still have so much to say about growing up and family relationships, is testament enough to its quality.

10/11: Late Spring

Yasujiro Ozu is a director whose appeal is utterly inexplicable, and yet almost impossible to resist. Whenever I watch one of his quiet, deceptively simple films, I am inevitably mesmerized by the peerless rhythm of his images, the graceful composition of his low-angle, usually static shots, the subtle characterizations and rich emotional subtexts he draws from his talented casts. Late Spring is one of his loveliest, calmest, and most gently affecting works, a meditative examination of familial love and the societal pressures that can damage it. The film's plot is minimal in the extreme, allowing Ozu greater freedom to explore his characters' well-hidden emotions and milieu. The aging widower Somiya (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu) somewhat reluctantly begins planning to marry off his only daughter, Noriko (the dazzling Setsuko Hara, also a regular actor for Ozu), who has taken care of him since his wife died and with whom he has a deep bond. Somiya clearly does not want to part with his daughter, and Noriko is openly antagonistic to the prospect of marriage. Both father and daughter seem content with their lives, largely solitary except for each other and a few friends, and neither really wants the change that Noriko's marriage would bring to their lives and relationship.

Nevertheless, the societal mandate for marriage is strong, and Somiya finally gives in to the pressuring of his sister to find Noriko a potential husband, though Noriko herself resists for much longer. Despite the melodramatic potential of this situation, Ozu keeps the tensions subdued, expressed only in the form of strained glances, forced smiles, and awkward, faltering conversations. All of this is filmed from Ozu's usual low camera position, an intimate set-up which gives him a unique perspective on his characters and their lives. This choice of camera position is often linked to the tatami mats which traditionally served as seats in Japanese homes, and that's probably at least part of its meaning. At the most superficial level, the low camera position does seem exceptionally well-suited to filming seated figures. But there's certainly more to it than that. This camera set-up has the unique quality of being simultaneously intimate, in that it is close to the characters and embedded in their surroundings, and distancing, in that the characters, seen from slightly below rather than head-on, are kept somewhat at arm's length. This is in keeping with Ozu's dispassionate storytelling, which draws us close to his characters but doesn't ever reveal quite what they are thinking or feeling.

We see quite a bit of Noriko throughout this film, in intimate conversations, but her motivations and thoughts remain largely a mystery. We're unsure, for instance, of her true feelings regarding her father's aide, Hattori. Does she love him and regret that he's taken? Does she want only friendship? Is she indifferent? In many respects, with her gentle smile and charming manner, Noriko remains opaque. Her feelings on love and sexuality, though presumably crucial to any discussion of marriage, are never articulated or even addressed. Her relationship with her father is more clear-cut, and bound up with genuine love, devotion, and seemingly a happiness in knowing that she is needed. This is a powerful bond, and whenever father and daughter are on screen together, the pair radiates contentment and familial love.

It's hard to find an Ozu film that is anything short of great, but Late Spring is especially stunning in its effect, certainly among my top few Ozu favorites, and also one of his finest technical achievements, at least before his conversion to color added a whole new set of paints to his palette. The stately, measured pace of the editing is always the most salient stylistic feature for me in Ozu's work, and that seems especially the case here. In the opening few minutes, Ozu cuts between long shots down a hallway, showing women gathering for a supper together, and disconnected shots of exteriors — a pagoda-like building, a grass-covered hill. His editing establishes both a sense of place, and a subtle mood of undefined longing and sadness. The mood in these near-silent opening scenes is enhanced by the quiet murmur of the soundtrack, which mingles Hollywood-style themes with the barest hints of Japanese melodies. This music, almost unbearably sad and affecting, is the film's only melodramatic touch, and its emotional nakedness plays nicely against the comparative restraint of the characters. Ozu's careful editing also comes into play during many of the face-to-face conversations, in which he often employs a rapid series of 180-degree cuts, showing whoever is speaking in turn. This technique is one of the few times in Ozu's work (at least the later films; I haven't seen any silents) when he uses something like a subjective camera, since the effect puts the audience in the place of the listener in the conversation. When contrasted against the generally disengaged camera placement in other scenes, this close-up montage can have a particularly dramatic effect, as it does in the scene when Noriko reminisces about the past with an old classmate.

One of Ozu's finest works, Late Spring is a masterpiece of complex emotions hidden just below the surface. Its power lies in its ultimate ambiguity, the mingling of loss, despair, and hopefulness that wafts through the film and finally comes to a head in its final few scenes. No other director could extract so much depth from such quiet, minimal, uneventful material. Ozu was a true master of his craft, and every film I watch by him fills me with sheer joy.