10/24: I Am Curious — Yellow; Sweet Movie

[This is a Transgressive Sex Double Feature, my second contribution to the Double Bill-a-thon 2007 going on over at Broken Projector.]

Although it's somewhat hard to believe now, Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious — Yellow made quite a stir upon its initial 1967 release and subsequent importation into the US in 1969. The film was confiscated before even being shown, and subjected to an intense censorship debate while its release drew massive crowds curious about the scandal. Looking at it now, the film's nude scenes are scarce and relatively tame — though it does say a great deal about American puritanism that, 40 years later, the scene where actress Lena Nyman kisses her lover's penis would still cause an incredible furor if it appeared in a mainstream Hollywood film. Other than that, though, times have changed, and the question becomes: now that the outrage has died down, what else does the film have to offer? The answer, predictably, is not that much.

No doubt, Sjöman was remarkably ambitious, and his film (the first part of a diptych with sister film Blue) ranges far and wide in its combination of political and sexual exploration. The film attempts to blend the personal with the political, documentary with fiction, and locate all this within the metafictional framework of the film crew making the film. It's a true Godardian project, and no doubt if Godard was making it all these disparate elements would hang together a bit better, or at least hint at something deeper beyond the mess. As it is, the film strikes too uneven a division in its balance of politics and sexuality. The first half hour or so engages in some interesting political discourse, questioning both capitalism and hardline Communism. That is, literally questioning them, through a series of probing man-on-the-street interviews that attempt to get at the nature of class distinctions in 1960s Sweden. There are some very interesting parts here, especially the tongue-in-cheek "interview" with Martin Luther King, using stock footage of him intercut with Sjöman (playing the film director within the film) on-screen asking him questions. This leads into a scene of Lena going around asking people if they've heard of non-violence — hilariously, the first people she asks are a trio of cops, who oblige by saying no, never heard of it. She then asks a middle-age woman what she's heard about King, and the answer is "Oh, he won't fight for his beliefs, right?"

This is pretty much indicative of the film's political questioning, which is amusing and frequently at least thought-provoking, but perhaps not as deep or probing as Sjöman would like to think it is. Moreover, after the very beginning, this political material is increasingly backgrounded in favor of the fictional story that's being filmed by the crew within the film, about Lena and her philandering lover, Börje Ahlstedt. This is the part of the film that earned it its notorious reputation, and as an exploration of sexual liberation, feminism, and the "personal as political," it's not without interest. But mostly it's a drab, lifeless, indifferently acted series of scenes with little energy, little intellectual depth, and even little of the crackling wit that was present in so many of the earlier scenes.

The film's hardly a total loss though. Lena's sexual journey remains of interest as an examination of the consequences of total freedom and the individual's responsibility to make his or her own life and ideas. This is an interesting time capsule of an older era, flawed and badly dated, but somewhat redeemed by its sense of humor and seriousness of purpose.

---

Dušan Makavejev's Sweet Movie is another film whose primary renown these days is as a source of controversy and shock value. One crucial difference between this and I Am Curious, though, is that Makavejev's film still has the capacity to shock audiences, even jaded modern ones used to seeing just about anything in films. In fact, I only thought I was used to seeing just about anything, until Makavejev reminded just how much potential ground "anything" could cover. The film's steadily escalating assault on the senses starts relatively low-key, with the hilarious introduction set at a kind of gynecological beauty pageant, and culminates in a massive scatological orgy/food fight reminiscent of the Vienna Aktionists (and indeed, Aktionist icon Otto Muehl himself appears among the shitting, vomiting revelers). The last half-hour of the film contains some of the most perpetually shocking and visually extravagant images ever committed to celluloid, and their potential to stun and overwhelm remains undiminished by the 30+ years since their first appearance.

But if that's all Sweet Movie had to offer, it would be little more than a slightly fresher version of I Am Curious, which is certainly not the case. What's interesting is that Sweet Movie appears on its surface to be an infinitely more light-hearted, less serious effort than Sjöman's film, though at its heart it hides a much deeper political core. At times, the film's episodic structure and over-the-top energy make it feel like a particularly demented Monty Python episode or a parody of Aktionist excesses. The film's epic denouement had me alternately gasping in astonishment, laughing with sheer I-can't-believe-they-just-did-that delight, and wincing with disgust, sometimes within seconds of each other. It's such a visceral experience that it's quite easy to miss the film's subtler political subtext amidst all the chocolate sauce and mashed potatoes.

The film is, most obviously, a total celebration of freedom and no-holds-barred living. The loose story follows Miss World 1984 (Carole Laure), who's chosen as the most pure and desirable woman in the world, and given the dubious prize of marrying a Texan milk billionaire. After a disastrous wedding night — instead of making love, he rubs her down with alcohol and then displays his liquid-spurting, gold-plated penis for her — she's tossed aside and spends the rest of the film being limply passed from one ridiculous incident to the next. Carole is in the hands of the capitalist West, a typical feminine image of beauty used as an advertisement — most humorously in the film's infamous chocolate bath — and a status symbol, but never as a living, breathing person of her own. But the film's depiction of Communism is even nastier, with Anna Prucnal playing the symbolic captain of a symbolic ship with Karl Marx as its figurehead and a hold full of sweets and a huge sugar tank. Prucnal seduces a Russian sailor from the battleship Potemkin, copulating fiercely in a sugar bath, and in one memorable and shocking scene, she performs a creepily sexy striptease for a gathered group of seven year-olds. She's a symbol of Soviet Communism, seductive and alluring from the exterior, but with a deadly violent streak underneath, as revealed in the finale when the police unload her boat's cargo of corpses.

But the film's iconic image of Communism is some inserted documentary footage of the bodies found in the mass graves of Russia's Katyn Forest, where Stalin's army had killed and buried over four thousand people. Makavejev uses this footage in an interesting way, inserting it into the narrative twice, once towards the beginning where it is off-putting and seems out of context, and then again at the end, after the orgiastic communal scat party. In this second iteration, the footage's purpose becomes more clear, acting as a recontextualizing reference for the previous 30 minutes. Juxtaposed against the sheer human brutality of the Katyn Forest massacre, the film's over-the-top antics seem as light-hearted as they had previously seemed gratuitous. The film is sometimes hard to take, but despite this it is not the nihilist work that it is often decried as. Its concentration on human bodily processes is couched within a framework of celebration and riotous, hedonistic fun — the commune dwellers who are smearing each other with feces, inducing vomiting, and peeing into their food may be on the absolute fringes of acceptability, but they sure look like they're having a ball. And more importantly, in spite of the strong discomfort factor, it's mostly a ball to watch them.

10/23: Safe; Fear of Fear

[This Alienated Housewife Double Feature is a contribution to the Double Bill-a-thon 2007 going on over at Broken Projector.]

Todd Haynes' Safe is a strange, unsettling, difficult picture, a film that wholly commits itself to a reality that is slightly off, slightly surreal, and yet utterly realistic in every observable way. Julianne Moore plays Carol, a suburban housewife with a rich businessman husband, a stepson, and a tremendous house with a maid and a constantly changing decor. Her life seems normal, if dull, until she begins inexplicably developing symptoms with no readily discernible medical cause. She coughs, vomits, gets nosebleeds and headaches, suffers from insomnia, all seemingly in reaction to the innocuous environment around her.

Haynes isolates Carol in her upper-class suburban world, keeping the camera almost always at a distance from her, staying primarily in long shots that position her as a lonely-looking figure in a vast space. Haynes pays especially careful attention to the gorgeously lit interiors of Carol's palatial home. Each room is a beautifully constructed tableau of light and color, often appearing empty until Carol sneaks into a corner of the frame or walks across the empty space. In one scene, she and her husband quietly argue in the bedroom, which is chopped up into sections like a geometric figure. A segmented mirror is opposite the bed, reflecting the two as they talk, their backs to each other. The mirror's reflection, with vertical lines running down at the seams, seems to trap the uncommunicative couple together like bars on a cell. The room, with its feminine pinks and teals, is offset to the right by a doorway through which we see another room, all lit in a darker midnight hue. The colors are rich and vibrant, but somehow stale, too perfectly calibrated, too artificial, not at all like a home with real living people in it. Virtually every interior space is carefully constructed in this way, a subtle arrangement of light and color that reflects the carefully ordered but fragile nature of Carol's mental state.

The home is truly a reflection of Carol, who occupies her largely empty time by creating designs and redecorating; throughout the film's first half, the house seems to be in a constant state of flux, with couches being delivered, the garden tended and redone, and the kitchen cabinets replaced or fixed. Carol is pouring herself into her fastidiously maintained home. At one point, when asked to describe her occupation, she starts to call herself a housewife, then amends it to homemaker — perhaps because she identifies more comfortably with her home than her husband? Carol's alienation from her environment, as emphasized by the distanced camerawork, is near-complete, and it's obvious that her developing symptoms are merely the external signs of a profound inner isolation. She is rejecting her very life, in the way that a body might reject an unsuitable organ transplant. Carol is not depicted as being unique — in her drab, lifeless conversations with friends and neighbors, these deeply bored women don't seem any more comfortable in their skins or happy in their environment — except that she is more sensitive than most to the numbing condition of everyday reality.

The film's depiction of suburban alienation, thus far, is incredibly striking and handled with an unrushed deliberateness that enhances Carol's increasing terror and illness, until she is entirely cut off from everything around her. But this kind of suburban angst tale ultimately isn't that unusual, and it's in the film's unsettling second half that Haynes starts truly departing into uncharted territory. The disconnected Carol, strung out and desperate for a cure by this point, stumbles upon an ad for a secluded retreat, Wrenwood, where "environmentally ill" people go to escape the "load" that common contaminants place upon their weakened systems. She departs for this hideaway, leaving her family and friends behind, in hopes of being cured of her unusual condition. What she winds up finding, though she doesn't quite seem to realize it, is simply another form of alienation, another form of isolation.

Wrenwood's method of treatment is oddly laidback and hands-off, and this section of the film functions as a deadpan parody that could refer to Christianity, New Age philosophy, triumphalist liberalism, or any combination of these. Its founder, Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman, subtly vacillating between earnest and creepy), offers a vacuous self-love philosophy that rests on a total blindness to the realities of the world and a repetitive insistence that everything is OK. The film itself offers plenty of hints that everything is not, in fact, OK with the world. The TV blasts news reports on assisted suicides, radio voices discuss religious fundamentalist politicians, there are constant references to factories dumping industrial waste in residential areas, and the specter of AIDS hangs heavy over the whole film even as a barely mentioned subtext. In this context, Peter's impassioned speech about all the good things he sees happening around him — the environmental movement, health food, self-help — seems limp, ineffectual, and naive. Moreover, he actively advocates disconnection from the world, and proudly admits that he no longer reads newspapers or receives news from the outside world. His proud disconnection fits in well with the group's ambiguous blend of real-world parallels. He could easily be a fundamentalist Christian rejecting all worldly things and waiting for Armageddon, or a New Age guru living in a private fantasy, or an ineffective Western liberal fighting small battles and leaving the largest problems un-addressed.

Haynes leaves pretty much all these options open, and the most unsettling thing about the film's second half is its almost total lack of authorial perspective. Whereas the first half very clearly mirrored Carol's increasing alienation in the stylized aesthetics of the house's interiors, Haynes steps back from such showy maneuvers after Carol's enrollment in Wrenwood. His style becomes objective in the extreme, largely eschewing both the alienating long shots and the occasional probing close-ups that characterized the first half's camerawork. The film confounds interpretation at every turn, constantly opening itself up into more and more potential meanings. What it comes down to is a broadly questioning critique of modern American society and the multitude of ways in which it pushes the individual into inaction, isolation, and confusion. This is a film where both the disease and its "cures" are revealed as facets of the same soul-crushing system.

---

Fassbinder's Fear of Fear is, like Safe, a dark rendering of a housewife's descent into madness as a result of the antiseptic isolation of her life. However, Fassbinder's film takes place on a much more personal level. Though Fassbinder frequently used Brechtian distancing techniques in his work, his depiction of the passionate but desperately lonely Margot (Margit Carstensen) veers in the opposite direction. Where Haynes fills his film with coldly calculated long-shots in which his heroine is a distant figure, Fassbinder zooms in for close-ups on Carstensen's expressive face — and not just close-ups, but tight, intimate, see-every-pore close-ups that chop off the top and bottom of her face to focus on her darting eyes and twisted mouth.

Margot is a tragic figure who seems to be simply too warm, too lively, for the smothering environment she's trapped in. She lives with her cold, passionless engineer husband (Ulrich Faulhaber), who seems to love her in his own quiet way but is utterly unaware of his wife's emotional nature. After they make love, she turns to him with a heartfelt look, seemingly about to express herself to him, but he obliviously begins blathering about a math professor he hates, staring at the ceiling while his wife disgustedly rolls away. Even worse are his mother and sister (Brigitte Mira and Irm Hermann, respectively), who live upstairs and despise Margot for representing a warmth and genuineness that they completely lack. In this repressive atmosphere, it's no wonder that Margot's increasing insanity — indicated, somewhat tritely, by eerie music and a wavery effect on the screen — is linked with a new sexual openness. She goes to the local pharmacist for both Valiums and affection, since he expresses his desire for her in a way her husband never does.

Another theme in the film is observation, and the gossipy spying of middle-class suburbia. There are frequent shots of Margot walking through the streets, going out for drugs or a tryst, from the perspective of an upper-story window where Hermann or Mira watches her. This is a tight-knit world, empty of any sort of relief for Margot, who like Carol in Safe can't seem to find anything worthwhile to do with herself. She bakes a never-ending series of cakes, and picks her daughter up from school, and otherwise her life offers her very little. Indeed, Fassbinder's film seems to be a prototype for the first half of Haynes' later work, encompassing many of the same scenes and images. There's the disinterested lovemaking, the visit to the doctor who says that everything is physically fine with her, and even the change of haircut in an attempt to use small measures to fix her mood. I would say, though, that Haynes' work takes the theme into incredibly interesting and complex territory, whereas this is a fairly minor and surprisingly conventional work from Fassbinder, though not without merit of its own. The scene where Margot, listening to music, glides back and forth across the frame in a very tight close-up, her distinctive face shifting from left to right, is a wonderful example of Fassbinder's skill with unusual and disarming framings. And Carstensen's performance as a whole is as stellar as ever, which is a very good thing since she spends so much time in extreme close-ups. For the most part, though, Fassbinder's distinctive style is subdued here, and his stylization of Margot's illness verges on cliche, so this is a distinctly minor entry in his large body of work.

10/22: Le chant du styrene; One, Two, Three

Alain Resnais' Le chant du styrene is in form a simple industrial documentary, commissioned no doubt as a straightforward piece intended to explain the process of manufacturing plastic. Resnais, though, was clearly not content to produce the kind of author-less hack work that such a bills-paying project would normally call for. He dedicates the same artistry, intelligence, and depth to this as he had to his Holocaust documentary Night and Fog two years earlier. The film's close-up examination of the industrial processes behind plastics manufacturing is as abstract in its way as the best of avant-garde film. The opening sequence in particular, with its playful tableaux of brightly colored plastic objects on a black background, inevitably calls to mind the work of experimental animator Oscar Fischinger, whose visual symphonies of geometric figures and colored areas are a primary touchstone here. Resnais lends the same eye for composition and color to the many extreme close-ups that show the plastic factory's machines at work, making this a masterpiece of visual design first and foremost. Resnais is playing with light and color and movement, putting cameras right into the machines and observing gears turning at the most intimate levels. His camera's eye is as probing and intrusive here as it could be when confronted by the horrors of the Holocaust or Hiroshima. One suspects, seeing this, that the reason Resnais was able to face such catastrophes so calmly and with such intellectual rigor was the discipline that allowed him to approach each project with the same high level of commitment and thought. In this case, the film is primarily an abstract visual exercise, but it also takes a turn, in the final minutes, towards philosophical inquiry into the repercussions of industrial society. The narration suggests that the process of making plastic from the byproducts of coal and petroleum is akin to creating solid objects out of smoke — a reversal, perhaps, of the socialist slogan "all that is solid melts into air." The final shot of murky water is accompanied by the suggestion, in voiceover, that everything in the natural world could potentially be transformed into something else in the hands (and machines) of man.

---

It's a marvelous thing when a film can completely change your sense of time, and Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three has made me feel like moving at double speed all night. Watching it is an exhilarating experience, probably because you don't so much just watch as get carried along by it, swept up in its non-stop wave of energy and enthusiasm. I'm not even sure it's actually a movie; it feels more like a particularly eager troupe of circus performers stormed into my living room for two hours, made a mess and a whole lot of noise, and stormed out again. It's a wild three-ring extravaganza, all centered around James Cagney as Coca Cola executive C.R. MacNamara, stationed in West Berlin and jockeying for control of Coke's whole European operation. His plans for promotion run into a snag, however, when he's asked to watch over the boss' ditsy, slutty 17 year-old daughter Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin) on her European vacation. Unsurprisingly, she almost immediately gets into trouble of the worst kind — at least for a Cold War-era Southern belle — falling in love with and marrying the hardcore East German Communist Otto (Horst Buchholz). As she says herself, with a heavy twang, "This boy, he was in the parade, he said to the police man I shouldn't be arrested, I should be pitied, because I was a typical bourgeois parasite and the rotten fruit of a corrupt civilization. So naturally, I fell in love with him."

The film is packed with one-liners like this, practically bursting at the seams with them, and after a relatively calm opening half-hour that establishes the characters and situations, the pace hardly slackens one iota. Instead, Wilder keeps ratcheting up the tempo, driving his characters into increasingly frantic set pieces as MacNamara fights to salvage a terrible situation. First, he contrives to get Otto arrested, but this backfires when he realizes that the girl is pregnant and he'll need to keep the communist around. Then, with his boss set to arrive in Berlin the next day, MacNamara has to race around, getting Otto out of prison with the help of a hilarious trio of Russian commissars who want to sleep with MacNamara's sexy secretary Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver). The hapless Otto is sprung, but not before he's tortured and forced to confess as an American spy — by making him listen to "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" over and over, so I can't say I blame him for giving in. It then falls on MacNamara to convert the militant Otto into a distinguished gentleman, even borrowing him a title from a down-on-his-luck Count, and the film ratchets up into an even higher gear than I could've even thought possible.

By this time, the relatively even-keel beginning has long been forgotten, and Cagney is snapping his fingers, barking orders punctuated by "Next!," his ex-SS assistant is storming in and out of the room, clicking his heels, the coo-coo clock on the wall is constantly going off with Uncle Sam marching out of its window and waving a flag, Otto is having a fit at being transformed into a capitalist, and one of the Russian commissars reappears as a defector, planning to make a fortune selling silver-plated sauerkraut as a Christmas decoration. It's a ludicrous, riotous, non-stop barrage of dialogue and whirling bodies, and Cagney's performance is exhausting to watch. For pretty much the entire second half of the film he's in non-stop motion, his voice roaring and barely even pausing for a breath. The whole thing in underpinned by the famous "Sabre Dance" movement that's been used and overused in so much comedy throughout the years but has never, ever, been used quite as effectively as this, perhaps because in Cagney the music has finally found its match in whirling dervish intensity and sheer speed. This is one of the most fun tour-de-force performances in all of cinema, a careening steamroller of a performance that rolls over anything and everything in its way, and Wilder simply keeps amping up the pace, increasing the tension, juggling more and more balls in a seeming contest to see how much detail he can cram into a scene. It doesn't so much climax as just come to a sudden halt, but before it does, MacNamara's office is a revolving door staging area for the whole tremendous cast to come charging through — lawyers with papers to sign, a host of clothing salesmen and haberdashers, sign painters, the Count who's also the men's room attendant at a local hotel, a reporter in search of a story who happens to have been a former SS commandant, a trio of MPs looking for the woman who'd been walking around Berlin with "Yankee Go Home" tattooed on her breasts (don't ask), Ingeborg in a trenchcoat and slip, hiding her "goose pimples," and even MacNamara's wife who's fleeing this chaos to return home to Atlanta. The scene just gets progressively more and more cluttered, with more going on in every inch of the frame as Cagney dashes here and there and keeps barking the whole time.

The whole thing is such a wild frenetic mess that it's almost a shame when it all finally comes to a rest. But even after the brief and slowed-down coda, the last memory of the film is definitely its steadily quickening pace and the driving pulse of the "Sabre Dance" underneath it all.

10/21: Charlotte et son Jules; Another Woman; New York Stories; Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?; Only Angels Have Wings

Charlotte et son Jules was the last short film that Godard made before his feature film debut with Breathless. As with all the early shorts, this one points the way towards the bold stylistic innovations and unfettered attitude of his first features, without actually being anything too stunning on its own. In this case, it's a brief and lighthearted character study with a great punchline, anchored by a rambling monologue from Jean-Paul Belmondo. When Belmondo's old girlfriend Charlotte (Anne Collette) returns to his flat, looking adorable and saying little, he almost immediately launches into an epic and fast-paced speech and doesn't run out of steam for nearly 13 minutes. By turns, he berates her for leaving, insults her, intimates that he might take her back, then says he won't, and eventually, grudgingly arrives at assuming that she's coming back to him. It's a prodigious outpouring of words, and all the while Collette silently looks on, making faces at him, mouthing exaggerated surprise at a few of the more insulting lines, and generally having fun with her almost entirely non-verbal performance. Collette is unsurprisingly the best thing about the film, and her mimed performance is worthy of the best silent comedy. Godard dedicates the short to Jean Cocteau, who was definitely a major influence on the young Godard but is pretty hard to glimpse in this scenario; Collette's hilarious mugging puts the film more firmly in Charlie Chaplin territory. The other point of interest here is the early appearance of Godard's characteristic soundtrack manipulation, which is the one aspect of his aesthetic that seemed to be nascent in the pre-Breathless shorts. The music skips and jumps and fades out suddenly, as it would throughout Godard's career; this is the only clear indication of the truly original talent who would blossom just a couple of years later. Even so, there are at least hints of later Godard works even here. The cutesy scenario combined with the musical playfulness point the way forward to A Woman is a Woman especially, while Belmondo's cigar-chomping, wordy tough guy act would carry over right into his role in Breathless. This short is an interesting for its perspective on some of Godard's earliest work, and it's also quite a lot of fun on its own merits.

---

By the late 80s, Woody Allen had reached a seeming pinnacle to his work, deftly combining comedy and drama for some of his smartest, wittiest, most bittersweet masterpieces. And then towards the end of the decade he turned back to straight drama for the first time since 1978's Interiors, with the claustrophobic chamber piece September and the powerful psychological character study Another Woman. September was already a tremendous step forward for Allen's approach to drama, and Another Woman is even stronger. Gena Rowlands turns in a powerhouse central performance as Marion, a successful philosophy professor about to start work on a new book. She takes an apartment to work in, only to discover that the vents allow her to hear the conversations of patients at the psychologist's office next door. She becomes particularly interested in one woman (Mia Farrow) who's dissatisfied with her life, and whose words trigger similar feelings in Marion. She begins a thorough self-examination which leads her to question her relationships with her husband, brother, friends, older lovers, and herself.

This is the story of a cold, cerebral woman who is gradually coming to realize just how disconnected she is from those around her. Her brother is distant towards her, her old best friend actively despises her, her husband is passionless and cheating, and she deeply regrets an old choice to turn away the passionate, loving Larry (Gene Hackman) and marry her current husband instead. It's to Allen's credit that he takes what sounds, on paper, like a somewhat drab and cold scenario, and infuses it with life and warmth by really pushing into the mental world of his protagonist. Marion's dreams, memories, and fantasies leap onto the screen with the same force of reality as her everyday life. This technique is especially effective because of the understated beauty of cinematographer Sven Nykvist's imagery, which brings a tactile life to Marion's dreams and memories, making their origins in her mind clear without resorting to the usual language of movie dream sequences. This gives the memories a strong presence in the narrative's present, emphasizing the continuing relevance of the past to this frozen, unchanging character. Even more important to the narrative is the way in which Allen uses visual representations of dreams to externalize Marion's self-examination. In one memorable sequence, Marion dreams of a play that dramatizes moments from her life, mostly ones we've already seen earlier in the film. In every case, the actors in the dream play take the dialogue beyond the rather flat, emotionless territory of Marion's everyday life, bringing out the hidden subtexts of dissatisfaction, melancholy, and regret lurking beneath the surface.

Another Woman succeeds because it fully submerges us in the mind of its main character, accomplishing the difficult task of bringing a somewhat distant and unlikable character to full-blooded life. Even the camera gets in on this task, in subtle ways. In one scene, Marion sits reading from a book of poetry and remembering the past. The camera initially keeps its distance, maintaining Marion in a long shot in her room as her voiceover reads the poetry and talks about her memories. Then, just at the end of the shot, before cutting to a closer view of Marion's face, the camera jiggles and shakes slightly, as though revealing just the barest trace of the turmoil beneath this woman's calm narration. It's a wonderful moment, disrupting the stolid fluidity of Nykvist's usual camerawork, and its parallels to Marion's mental state add a rich subtext to the scene. Another Woman finds Allen finally finding his own true voice in drama, largely abandoning the overt homages to heroes like Bergman or Chekhov (though both still provide a clear line of influence) and displaying his confidence in his own material and his own instincts for visual storytelling.

---

New York Stories is a contribution to the increasingly rare genre of the omnibus, multi-director film, which was briefly popular in communally inclined 60s Europe, but fell into disuse soon after. This 1989 entry unites Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola, with each one providing a short film. Scorsese is up first, and he offers the best of the three. In fact, his Life Lessons is a mini masterpiece in under 50 minutes, ranking up there with the very best of his work. It is perhaps Scorsese's most stylistically ambitious work, and the one where the extent of his debt to the experimental films of Kenneth Anger is made most clear. The film's opening sets the mood early on, presenting a fragmented and elliptical portrait of a painter's studio. Scorsese focuses on details — paint smears, brushes, palettes — and isolates them with an iris-out effect, zooming out to show the whole scene and then cutting to the next isolated detail. He overlays this with Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale," and in many respects this combination of near-abstract montage with classic pop, a hallmark of Anger's filmmaking, is the linchpin of the film. The studio belongs to the famous painter Lionel Dobie (Nick Nolte, giving his all), who works in a similar fashion, crafting deeply expressive and violently conceived paintings that he creates mostly in fits of pique, smearing paint wildly while listening to tapes of classic rock. Scorsese lovingly films these fits of creativity, and one suspects that there's a real affinity there between the fictional painter and the real filmmaker.

But the heart of the story is Dobie's assistant, Paulette (Rosanna Arquette), who he's been sleeping with for some time but who now seems to be sick of his controlling, manipulative personality. Her character is portrayed consistently from Dobie's point of view, and as such she remains alluring and seductive, but always opaque in her emotions and ideas. She is a true cipher, not because she's one-dimensional, but because Dobie lacks the insight or the sensitivity to ever really understand a woman, even one who's lived under his roof for a long time. Arquette gives a great performance, irresistibly sexy and sizzling with hidden depths so that the audience senses her frustration and emotional confusion without fully understanding her anymore than Dobie does. The film is a character study of Dobie, who seems to be using the tension and anguish of his fraught relationship with Paulette as a catalyst for his art. After every argument with her, he submerges himself in his work, blasting Dylan tapes and hacking away at his massive canvases with great globs of paint. This is a presentation of the artist as parasite, feeding off of the emotional energy of those around, never giving much of himself except in the form of his artwork. Nolte's fierce, magnetic performance makes it clear that this is what he's doing, even if his anguish is genuine and he doesn't himself realize the extent to which he's manipulating those around him.

The less said about Coppola's horrendous Life Without Zoe, the better. It's a ridiculous fantasy about an upper class girl living in a New York hotel while her parents jet-set around the world. And if there's anything more annoying than the film's overly precocious and badly acted youngsters, it's the way in which Coppola uncritically accepts the self-mythologizing style of the upper classes. At the climactic costume ball, set at the palatial home of a young sheik, the world of rich New York parties is giddily elevated to the level of a fantastical Hollywood vision of the decadent Orient, complete with acrobatic entertainers and some creepy pre-pubescent belly dancers. This is a horrible and offensive little film, not worth any further comment.

The final segment of the film is Woody Allen's hilarious Oedipus Wrecks, a return to straight comedy for him after making two serious dramas in a row. Woody plays Sheldon Mills, whose mother (Mae Questel) dominates his life to such an extent that he lives in constant fear and anxiety because of her very continuing presence in the world. So when she disappears during a magic act, it initially seems like the best thing that could possibly happen to him, except that she then reappears as a massive head floating in the sky over New York. In this film, the mother figure literally looms large, telling embarrassing stories about Sheldon not just to girlfriends and acquaintances, but to the whole city. Woody milks this absurd situation for all it's worth, and it is one of his funniest films, even as it deals in the kind of psychoanalytical subtexts that inform all of his work. He has always been interested in the influence of parents on the child's life, and his dramas like September and Interiors have especially dwelt on the damage that parents can do to their children. This theme is taken to its extreme here, literally visualizing the massive importance of the mother by projecting her giant features into the sky and making her tremendous voice boom out over an entire city.

Mae Questel gets the film's juiciest part, and she completely inhabits the role of the overbearing Jewish mother, providing a running commentary on her son's faults and foibles to anyone who will listen. When she shows up at Sheldon's workplace, dragging along his deaf aunt (Jesse Keosian, Woody's elementary school math teacher!), she manages to completely embarrass him by yelling the most inappropriate things imaginable as asides to the aunt. "That's Bates," she says when Woody's boss steps out to see him, "He's the one with the mistress." Julie Kavner also gets a good role, as the voodoo shamaness who Woody goes to visit in a desperate bid to get his mother out of the Manhattan sky. She's a perfect and hilarious foil to Woody's neurotic nervousness, dressing up in ornate headdresses and shamanistic gear, chanting and dancing and spreading herbs around. When she takes a break to order a pizza, in full voodoo priestess regalia, it's one of the film's best moments. This is a light and funny diversion for Allen, arguably his first straight comedic work in quite a while.

---

The title of Fassbinder's fifth feature (co-directed with Michael Fengler), Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, asks a question, and were this a conventional film, the question would doubtless be answered by film's end. But Fassbinder has never dealt in easy answers or conventional aesthetics, and his film in fact takes quite a different path. Instead of asking and then answering a question, Fassbinder is pointing out the kind of questions that audiences should be asking themselves when the film is over. Of course, the title also reveals basically what will happen at the film's climax, which comes abruptly and without fanfare after over 80 minutes of utter ordinariness. Herr R. is played by Kurt Raab, who also gives his name to the character to increase the film's sense of documentary reality. Raab is a blank everyman, a commercial draftsman at a small engineering firm, with a lovely but somewhat distant and petty wife, overbearing but genuinely loving parents, a withdrawn young son, and an assortment of friendly acquaintances.

He leads an utterly normal and uneventful life, and for 80 minutes Fassbinder meticulously documents it, in interminable scenes of great length and crushingly prosaic content. Raab chats idly with co-workers, listening to them tell jokes (he seems to have none of his own). Raab talks over technical matters with his boss. Raab reminisces with an old school friend while his wife looks on contemptuously. Raab tries to order a record he can't remember the name of, much to the amusement of two teenage record store clerks. This is a life of complete triviality and normality, consumed by everyday affairs. Nobody ever seems to have much to say to each other, and the entirety of the dialogue is comprised of small talk and idle chatter. It's a trying, wearing film, totally engulfing the audience in the experience of Raab's life as he lives it. Raab himself is often positioned off to the side, motionless, looking lumpy and sullen while others talk animatedly amongst themselves. At other points, he is placed conspicuously off-camera, especially when he is speaking or is the subject of others' conversations. This puts the audience even more thoroughly into Raab's life, allowing them to imagine his reactions at key points. When his wife and mother begin discussing his career prospects and his lack of a drivers' license, subtly insulting him, the camera is focused squarely on the two women. Just as they are acting like the butt of their jokes isn't even in the same room with them, the camera ignores Raab, but his humiliation and emasculation is palpable. In the later scene when Raab is giving a drunken and halting speech to his co-workers, trying unsuccessfully to get his boss to toast with him, the camera mostly takes on Raab's perspective again, panning around the faces of those watching him, taking in their various expressions of humor, embarrassment, and confusion.

This film is a measured experiment in audience identification. If its violent climax isn't too surprising — Herr R. does indeed run amok — it does demand questions and answers that Fassbinder isn't willing to provide. Why does Herr R. run amok? The vacuousness and emptiness of his life might be the most tempting answer, but that would simply trigger the more pointed question: why doesn't everyone else run amok? I'd link Fassbinder's film with a later work from Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which is also a study in everyday tedium leading to a shocking outburst of violence. Akerman's film, though, has a distinctly feminist outlook, and the film seems to be structured so that the source of Jeanne's violence is clear: the fragmentation caused by her dual societal roles of the woman as domestic servant and the woman as sexual servant. Fassbinder presents no such overarching societal critique, instead pointing out a multitude of details and moments, giving none of them any undue stress to make them stand out from a thousand others. As with all his films, this is a work about the lack of connection between people, the profound distance between one mind and another. Herr R. — an abstracted name that is present in the title but not in the film itself — remains as much of a mystery at the end of the film as at the beginning, and all we can do, Fassbinder seems to be saying, is keep asking hard questions.

---

Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings uses the surface aesthetic of the aviation picture, with its tough flyers making deadly runs in all kinds of weather. But Hawks turns the genre in on itself, crafting a powerful and utterly unique character study of men on the edge, taking risks and living hard, under the constant specter of death. This is, as is often said of Hawks, a distinctly masculine world, where women are incidental at best and distracting at worst. Any feminist analysis of the film would have to point out the way in which the women are only portrayed positively once they accept the masculine way of doing things. In order to be happy and stay with their men, they must reject their feminine weaknesses and adopt the male strength. This dynamic is most obvious in the character of Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), who in order to truly love the head flyer Geoff (Cary Grant), must learn to love him in the same way as his male friend Kid (Thomas Mitchell), rather than in her unacceptable female way.

Ultimately though, this feminist perspective on the film, though interesting and in some ways today impossible to miss, is pretty much beside the point. Hawks has created an insular, self-contained world here, and within the logic of this world he explores his characters and their milieu. Geoff and Kid are ace pilots for a private airline stationed in a tiny South American town, bringing out mail shipments and other local cargo. These men fly in any weather, in outdated and fragile twin prop planes, dealing with thick fog, blinding rain, and towering mountains with narrow and treacherous passes. They do so not so much for the money, which one senses is modest and not particularly regular thanks to the economic woes of airline owner Dutchy (Sig Ruman), but for the sheer thrill and excitement of it all.

Hawks is perhaps unmatched at portraying the complicated emotions and relationships of men under stress in a totally male world, and in this film he is most concerned with men's reactions to death. Death hangs over the entirety of the film, a constant threat for every one of these pilots, taking up their claptrap planes in the worst of weather and hoping for the best. This is true even from the first sequence. We enter the film, not through Grant's character, but through two other pilots, Les (Allyn Joslyn) and Joe (Noah Beery Jr.). They are going to the harbor to pick up the latest mail delivery, where they find Bonnie Lee coming off a ship for a stopover and invite her back with them for a drink and dinner. The two men are jockeying for position with her, and gamble with each other for who will have to fly that night and who will stay with the girl. The men are betting over who will get the girl, but unspoken between them, and probably also to themselves, is the knowledge that they're really betting over who will have to go up in the horrible foggy storm and risk death that night. Joe wins, but at this point Grant shows up, stepping in to divert both men so that he can get the girl instead. Joe winds up flying, and in his haste to get back to the ground and have another shot at Bonnie, crashes to a fiery death.

The film's masculine approach to death is then encapsulated in a wonderfully handled scene where the men strive, with slight strain, to maintain a cheerful air as though nothing had happened. Bonnie doesn't understand, and she's visibly shaken and understandably weepy, but Grant sets her straight by making it clear that grinning in the face of death is pretty much the only option for these men. In an atmosphere where death can happen at any moment, treating it as anything special would be disastrous for the men; they can only ask "Joe who?" and go on with life. This culminates in a spontaneous party clustered around the piano, with Bonnie jamming as the men sing and holler. It's a kind of drunken Irish wake for Joe, his spirit existing unheralded at the party's core, sending him off with joy and an effort to forget as quickly as possible. Hawks presents this scene with a jam-packed mise-en-scène, cramming the screen with as many people as he possibly can, all singing and swaying and making noise. There's hardly an empty space here, no room in the composition for death to push its ugly way in.

Nevertheless, though, death very much remains in the picture, and the planes themselves become its most tangible representation. Hawks brilliantly uses the soundtrack to increase the tension, very early on associating the distinctive humming whine of the plane engines with death and danger. In the scene before Joe's crash, the men on the ground stand in the dense fog, listening to his plane in order to try and guide him in for a safe landing. They signal for the piano music in the background to be cut off and everyone to be quiet, and the scene takes on a deathly stillness, a calm and silence broken only by the droning hum of the plane far above. In the constant hovering bad weather around this area, the planes are often heard but not seen, and that motor hum is a signal of impending doom. Whenever that sound enters the film, everyone stands still a moment and listens, and the otherwise constant motion and witty repartee and barroom music comes to a halt. In this film, the sound design itself becomes the instrument of death, and this contributes to the profound uneasiness and tension that hangs over even the film's lightest moments, like Bonnie Lee's constant comic relief. This is a powerful and totally unique film, one of the true classics of the Hollywood era, taking a genre and delving beyond its stereotypical surface into the depths of its characters and their primal emotions.