10/31: Inland Empire

The first time I saw David Lynch's much-discussed newest feature Inland Empire, a few months ago, I was convinced that the narrative threads of this complex, twisting film were all just outside my grasp. I felt sure that another viewing or two would clarify things, make the connections between the film's obvious multiple layers of reality and fantasy clearer, just as they had when I watched Mulholland Drive a few additional times. Revisiting it now, a few new things did indeed click, associations and connections that I'd missed the first time in the film's dense layering of stories and images and echoes upon echoes. On the whole, though, my experience of the film was remarkably similar to the first time I watched it — dark, strangely compelling, mesmerizing in the flow of its imagery and the sudden transitions between locales and realities. And I felt, once again, that the overall thread of its narrative was somewhere just beyond my grasp. In fact, I'm starting to think that it's something of a mistake to even approach the film in a narrative mindset. Lynch's films of late have often been thought of as "puzzle films," but really this only works even slightly for Mulholland Drive. The labyrinthine Lost Highway twists and turns away from the kind of narrative analysis that Salon performed on Mulholland in their now-famous feature, and even that interesting explanation leaves plenty of mysteries unresolved and loose threads untied when the film is over.

This is even more true of Inland Empire, which resists even the least attempt at plot summary. The film is a three-hour fever dream, a dense collage of alternate realities in which Laura Dern plays an actress, a Southern belle committing adultery, a Los Angeles prostitute, and an abused wife telling her story to a shadowy man who may be out to help her or hurt her. These stories weave into each other without warning or explanation, and some seemingly unconnected fragments may actually be part of the same story. And all this is connected, somehow, to a young girl sitting alone in a room watching TV. She's a Polish prostitute from an earlier era, who may have been killed by the mysterious carnival barker known only as the Phantom, who may in turn be connected to Dern's husband in all her various iterations, played by Peter Lucas. There are, of course, numerous explanations for all this, and some of them are fairly compelling, but none that I've seen or thought up seem to hold together quite as well as the through-line in Mulholland Drive. To some extent, the film is the story of the actress Nikki, who in playing the part of the adulteress Susan, begins to fall for her co-star (Justin Theroux) in real life as well. As she begins to conflate the film with reality, her mind becomes unhinged, and she's drawn into both the film and the much earlier, more violent Polish folk tale that inspired the film's supposedly cursed script. On the face of it, this is an interesting idea, but it hardly begins to explain more than a few of the film's many facets, and leaves plenty of loose ends dangling.

This second viewing has convinced me, for now, that this film may be better approached as a pure avant-garde work, without looking for or expecting any such narrative coherence. I've come to see that what holds my attention in the film is not the shards of narrative that swirl around Laura Dern's shifting identities, but the terrifying atmosphere created by Lynch's disorienting visuals. Much has been made of his decision to turn away from film for digital video, and not just DV but a particularly lo-fi, consumer-grade digital camera. In fact, this is a perfect fit for such hallucinatory material, and the dark, hazy visuals frequently call to mind Derek Jarman's super-8 work, which achieved a similarly smeared, ugly aesthetic by reducing the grade of film and then blowing it up to 35mm for projection. Here, Lynch also pushes his technology to its limits, and the result is a very distinctive look. Large segments of the film are almost entirely encased in blackness, with flashes of light and blurry, barely glimpsed faces floating in the dark. As with the last viewing, I took a while to get adjusted to the DV in the opening scenes, especially during Dern's freaky encounter with a prophesying Grace Zabriskie. But once I'd settled into the film, the darkness and distorted, artificial quality of the DV proved to lend themselves very well to Lynch's never-ending series of funhouse mirrors disguised as a narrative.

Inland Empire is, as befits its length, many things. It is, first and foremost, an exhaustive catalogue of David Lynch's ideas and obsessions, a kind of meta-text to his previous films. His favored themes show up yet again, especially his exploration of the Hollywood star machine, which is ridiculed and skewered here, along with Hollywood's recycling of other cultures' ideas, its treatment of women, and its reliance on cliché. These are of course familiar themes from Mulholland Drive, and the exploration of identity and playing roles dates back at least to Lost Highway. But Inland Empire is not so much a retread as a distillation, a development of his signature themes into their ultimate expression. Laura Dern, back in a Lynch film for the first time since Wild At Heart, gives a powerhouse performance, acting a lot of the time in unsparingly tight close-ups that require her to act intensively with her facial expressions, while also handling the shifts between an array of different characters all played by her. She's the centerpiece of a film that's brimming with ideas and images, enthralling from its first image to its last.

[Note: I have more comments about this film in my write-up of its mini-feature "sequel" made up of deleted scenes, More Things That Happened.]

10/30: La Truite; Holiday

Joseph Losey's La Truite is a strange and deeply unsettling film, not so much because of what happens on screen — not much happens at all, actually — but because of what it obliquely suggests. It's a work of odd stasis, with a curiously elliptical narrative that frustrates at every turn. Of course, Losey has always been a somewhat difficult figure to get a grasp on, and that is perhaps nowhere more true than in this nearly asexual meditation on sexuality. Isabelle Huppert turns in a stellar performance as the manipulative Frédérique, the daughter of the owners of a country trout farm, where she works, as the opening scene shows, squeezing out the bladders of fish as though she's milking them. This casually disturbing image sets the tone for the film, as Frédérique has made it her mission in life to milk men for all they're worth without ever offering them much in return. She marries the fey, perpetually ailing and conflicted homosexual Galuchat (Jacques Spiesser), to whom she seems genuinely devoted despite their sexless union, but this doesn't stop her from seducing, almost offhand, two businessmen who the couple meet at a bowling alley.

She runs off with one of these men, Saint-Genis (Daniel Olbrychski) on a business trip to Japan, and though she turns on the charm in some ways, she keeps him constantly at a distance and totally frustrated. Huppert's performance is remarkable because she manages to convey a subtle aura of seduction that emanates from her body at all times without her ever even doing anything. Frédérique is crass and hardly a match for the glamorous women who are set against her, played by an aging but still radiant Jeanne Moreau and the black model Lisette Malidor. Nevertheless, she exudes a subtle sexual pull that seems to draw every man in her vicinity to her, like a trout letting off pheromones.

Losey lets the implications of her manipulations and coldness play themselves out from such an objective distance that at times it feels like the narrative is in danger of slipping out of reach. Losey's objectivity verges on indifference at times, a coldness towards these characters that is very much like Frédérique's indifference towards the men around her. His presentation of the nouveau riche business class is a deadpan satire with few enough jokes but plenty of sharp critical observations, as in the dryly funny dinner scene where Losey skewers the banal chatter and pompous self-inflation of the bourgeoisie money-makers. The film is all about careful observation and accumulation of detail. Not for the sake of psychological insight, since the characters are ciphers with little enough explication of their actions, but for the examination of the ways in which sex, power, class, and money interact with each other.

This was Losey's penultimate film, made in France at the end of his lifelong post-McCarthy exile from Hollywood, and it finds the director's keen analytical mind and unique perspective still in full flower. The intentionally showy camerawork, marked by constant pans, unsteady tracking, and attention-getting zooms, keeps the viewer destabilized at every point, always too far away from Frédérique's story to really get into her head. The only exception is the haunting and powerful final shot, in which Losey finally allows a moment of psychological insight to penetrate his character. He sustains a long close-up on a cryptically smiling Huppert, framed against a window as her husband is visible outside, pacing back and forth. By the end of the film, she's manipulated herself into a position of relative power and prestige, a seeming happy ending, but when asked if she likes things better now, she can only say, "It's all the same." Losey holds the shot a moment longer, the static close-up offset by the background tension of the pacing Galuchat, an enduring image of disillusionment and Frédérique's belated realization of her life's essential emptiness.

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Holiday is the kind of fun, witty, vibrant, and intelligent Hollywood comedy that, unfortunately, modern Hollywood no longer shows the least interest in making. This film is a sheer joy to watch, the kind of film where you can simply get lost in its characters and milieu while they're on screen, only to find that they're still lingering with you long after the film is over. Director George Cukor has a light touch for comedy, deftly balancing the witty banter and comedic scenes with a real sense of drama. This drama arises from the fact that one senses, from the very beginning of the film, that Cary Grant's Johnny is a much better match for the free-spirited Linda (Katharine Hepburn) than he is for her more straitlaced sister Julia (Doris Nolan). Part of this is sheer Hollywood gamesmanship — when Katherine Hepburn shows up in what seems at first to be a supporting role, it's instantly clear that she's going to have to take control of the film and end up with the leading man somehow. But Cukor is also wise to let the romance between Grant and Hepburn develop naturally, subtly, so that their growing love is clear to the audience well before it's clear to either of them.

When the film opens, Johnny and Julia have just gotten engaged after a whirlwind romance when they met on vacation. Johnny's a rough-and-ready fellow who's pulled himself up from very humble origins to become a moderately successful businessman, but he's stunned when he discovers that Julia is a fabulously wealthy heiress from the old-money Seton family. The fit proves to be poor, especially since Johnny has dreams of striking it rich in business early in life so he can then take a few years off to explore the world. He's therefore not too eager to settle down into the kind of staid life in finance that Julia's father envisions for him, and as the engagement announcement looms closer, it becomes increasingly clear that Julia is carved from the same mold as her father. In contrast, the iconoclastic Linda is a true breath of fresh air. Of the three Seton children, only Julia seems comfortable in their sheltered, money-über-alles existence. Linda retreats into childhood memories of their mother and the "play room" that she set up as an alternative to the marble pillar glamour of their mansion. Their brother Ned (Lew Ayres), meanwhile, retreats into alcoholism, and his bleary-eyed performance provides a kind of foreshadowing of what might become of Johnny if he follows through on marrying Julia — smashed dreams and chronic depression.

At the heart of this film is a magical New Year's Eve party that locates a small core of fun-loving vibrancy amidst a sea of pretension and empty riches. Linda is distraught that her father has not allowed her to throw the intimate party she envisioned for Julia's engagement, instead turning it into yet another dull society ball. Linda retreats once again into her play room, and over the course of the party her inner sanctum becomes a similar retreat for all the party's genuine souls. Johnny's whimsical friends (Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon, in great bit turns) are drawn there before long, as is Ned, and finally Johnny himself. The quintet find themselves throwing an impromptu party of their own, with a puppet show, Ned playing the piano, and Johnny and Linda attempting back flips and acrobatic feats. It's a magical interlude, a small holiday from the dullness of the society party happening a few floors below, and the intrusion of Julia and her father at the end is a rude awakening, the destruction of something beautiful and pristine that was developing among those free-wheeling spirits.

The film never actually gives poor Julia much of a chance. Jean Dixon isn't much of a challenge for the wise-cracking, earnest Hepburn, and the audience is rooting for the proper match between Grant and Hepburn from the very first moment they appear on screen together. What's special about the film is the urgency with which it imbues this budding romance, the sense that this is a crucial decision for Johnny. In the climactic scene where Julia's father begins laying out the road ahead for them if he marries Julia, the tension begins mounting to tremendous levels as it becomes clear just how bad a fit for Johnny this constricted life would be. The film certainly parodies the old money lifestyle; when Julia earnestly tells Johnny how much fun business can be, one can't help but laugh, especially in light of Grant's shell-shocked expression. But more importantly, the film stresses that different lifestyles suit different people, and that the choices we make in life define the paths that are open to us. Johnny and Linda, ultimately, realize this, and realize the importance of going off on their own holiday together, making choices for themselves.

10/29: Invocation of My Demon Brother; L'amour existe; The Wild Blue Yonder

Revisiting Fantoma's second collection of Kenneth Anger's films, next up was Invocation of My Demon Brother. This is another of Anger's expressions of his ritualistic magic, like the earlier Inaugaration of the Pleasure Dome, but I for one found this film to be much more effective, with a visceral assault of wild imagery. Anger densely layers superimposed images of his ritual performances, creating intense and often frightening collages. He superimposes multiple faces together, forming complex webs of eyes or laughing mouths packed into the frame, and speeds up rapidly edited ritual footage to enhance its immediacy.

The film's bracing visual impact is matched by the brutal score from Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger; if it wasn't for his name in the credits, I would've guessed this was a modern noise composition. The soundtrack is a rough, noisy feedback improvisation in the spirit of Lou Reed's infamous Metal Machine Music, a mechanically rhythmic exploration of harsh electronic tones bleating and squealing behind the images. The periodic bursts of less disciplined textured noise become a component in the overriding rhythm as well as the piece goes along, and the film's editing rhythms often play off of the music. This is one of Anger's most potent outbursts of visual excess.

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I was somewhat surprised to discover that Maurice Pialat's 1960 short film debut, L'amour existe, was not the minimal dialogue-based drama I would've expected as a starting point for his career. Indeed, for his first film, Pialat forgoes narrative altogether, crafting a free-associative essay film that has much more in common with the first efforts of Alain Resnais than I ever would've guessed based on their respective later work. The film begins with an elegiac childhood remembrance. A romanticized voiceover narrates a series of key childhood moments — afternoons in the cinema, a map that aroused fantasies of far-off places — while Pialat's camera tracks across the suburbs of Paris. The film is an endless series of such stately tracking shots, the grand romance of the camera's gestures serving as a counterpoint to the general squalor that Pialat is depicting.

His film is essentially a recounting of the full life cycle of a lower-class suburban laborer, commuting into the city and back for hours every day, working hard for little pay, given exceedingly little free time and nothing of substance to fill it with. The film's introduction, in boyhood, is relatively brief, and then, the voiceover says, "the suburbs grow up" and the time of carefree adolescence comes to an end. From there, his camera roams freely across the streets of Paris and its surrounding environs, while the narration presents a poignant depiction of post-war Paris and the plight of its workers. The bulk of the film is taken up by this discussion of the working life, exploring the disconnection of workers from culture and art, the long hours, the decrepit neighborhoods outside Paris, the cramped public transportation. After all this, Pialat suggests, the workers are released into the relative peace of old age, which he depicts as a pale shadow of childhood's carefree spirit.

This is a lovely, understated cinematic poem that combines an evocative tone with a probing social conscience. Its an interesting start for Pialat, but on reflection not quite as odd as I initially though. All of his films display a sharply honed moral sense and an interest in the seeming banalities of existence, even if later on he would turn to narrative features rather than documentary essays.

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Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder is a unique, compelling, but ultimately uneven effort from this master director of the uncharted and unusual. Herzog's work has always ventured in search of the unexplored territories, and his greatest sympathy has always been with those characters — real or imagined — who set off to do the impossible or the foolhardy. Some of his greatest work, especially in the latter part of his career, has been concerned with finding these adventurers in real life and crafting visionary documentaries around their surreal journeys. In a few of these, like Fata Morgana and Lessons of Darkness, documentary and fiction blend almost seamlessly, with Herzog narrating journeys into the unreal using footage wholly taken from the real. These science fiction documentaries, of which Wild Blue Yonder is the latest example, have often ranked among Herzog's most fascinating films, but this one doesn't quite reach the same ecstatic heights.

In the film, an alien (Brad Dourif) lands on Earth as part of an exhibition fleeing his now-inhospitable home in the faraway Andromeda galaxy. He's stunned to find, though, that the people of Earth are in the process of sending out their own astronauts in search of a better place to live, and he can only watch in awe and sadness as those astronauts land on and explore his former home, an icy planet in Andromeda. Herzog depicts this journey using documentary footage shot on a real space shuttle exhibition and on a diving exhibition below the ice floes in Antarctica, as well as periodic archival footage from NASA and the history of aviation. There are also a handful of fictional vignettes with Dourif, as the alien visitor, ranting and spouting his philosophy. Dourif is the film's first big problem. His oddball persona and earnest lunacy is more than a little off-putting, and he often seems like he doesn't know whether to play the alien as threatening, poignant, or silly. The result is mostly just awkward. Fortunately, he's a little better when he's relegated to voiceover, and he especially tones down his melodramatic intonation when he begins to narrate the Earthling astronauts' mission, adopting a more hushed and whispery tone that's better suited to the film's overall mood of melancholy contemplation.

Indeed, once the film gets past a bumpy start that's heavy on Dourif and lots of CIA conspiracy theory nonsense, things become much more promising. Some of the space shuttle footage is still a bit dry, and Herzog mostly lets it stand on its own, possibly banking on a certain awe factor associated with the weightless movement of the astronauts. I can't speak for everyone, but a lifetime of being exposed to this kind of footage has possibly diminished its inherent impressiveness too much. This is not true, however, of the footage from Antarctica, taken by improvisational guitarist and deep sea diver Henry Kaiser. As the astronauts disembark from their shuttle, they descend into a gorgeous underwater netherworld, teeming with strange life and flooded with a gorgeous blue light. Herzog has always been fascinated by the foreignness of our own planet, and both Fata Morgana and Lessons of Darkness were structured as the experience of Earth through the eyes of alien visitors. Here, the concept is taken a step further, as images from Earth stand in for another planet. The Earth is made strange to its own inhabitants, who poke around and explore its recesses as though they were on a true alien world. It's some truly awe-inspiring photography, and here Herzog is probably wise to let it stand mostly on its own. Its eerie beauty speaks for itself.

Also contributing to the film's strange appeal is the haunting, utterly original score, performed by cellist Ernst Reijseger with Senegalese vocalist Mola Sylla and a choir of Sardinian singers. The music is stunning, achieving a strange blend somewhere between African vocal music, European religious music, and modern avant-garde composition. It's a perfect complement to Herzog's gorgeous imagery, evoking an otherworldly aura that helps to disassociate the images from their earthbound origins, aiding the transition to an imaginary icy world in the Andromeda galaxy. The music was so beautiful, so unique, that I had to immediately order the soundtrack CD as soon as the film was over. Reijseger's compositions elevate the film to a whole other level.

Wild Blue Yonder winds up being an interesting but only partially successful venture into Herzog's trademark territory of "ecstatic truth." The film examines man's isolation from his environment, possibly the universal condition if even aliens feel the same disconnection. Beings from one planet flee to another, only to find that the denizens of that planet are also heading off for uncharted waters. In examining this poetic situation, Herzog pulls in NASA science, string theory and astrophysics, and some of the most beautifully shot underwater footage I've ever seen. With such an odd mix of ideas and images blended together, not to mention the collision of Dourif's fictional framing story with documentary realities, it's perhaps not surprising that this film hangs together a bit awkwardly. Still, there's plenty of great material here to make this well worth seeing — as pretty much all of Herzog's films are.

10/28: Arabic Series #11-19; The Ox-Bow Incident

Stan Brakhage's Arabic Series is a suite of 20 short 16mm films, ranging from 5 minutes to half an hour in length, that rank among the director's most abstract and challenging works. I missed out on #s 0-10 yesterday at the Anthology Film Archives, but I was here for today's screening of #s 11-19 in the series (though #12 seemed to be absent). These films confound even the limited potential for figurative or thematic interpretation that I discussed in my last Brakhage post, existing entirely in a framework of visceral sensory experience that represents Brakhage at his most primal and elemental. The films all deal with light and color in their most basic forms, crystalline shards of prismatic light dancing across a grainy black surface.

Over the course of the eight films in the series I saw, Brakhage explores a variety of forms of light, everything from star-like pinpricks, to diamond-shaped bursts, to diffuse shifting glows that spread across the frame or collide with other areas of color. There are frequently points when the frame goes entirely black, a dense grainy black that seems to hint at the return of the light at any moment. At times, it seems like Brakhage or someone else is standing between the camera and the light source, or placing some object between them, so that the light peeks around the edges of the obstruction like a sunrise coming over a hill. At other times, superimposed (probably optically printed?) bits of light play off each other, scattered across the black of the frame. The individual films have their own identities, too: #13 features mostly diffuse color fields while #14 is a bit spikier and pointillist, and the final three films are especially colorful and lively, with bursts of bright blue and red, super-saturated golden yellows, and pale purple washes. But on the whole the films work best as a cluster, because the careful, meditative quality of the works — a stark contrast to, for example, the frantic pacing of Brakhage's hand-painted work — lends itself to extended contemplation.

Brakhage himself compares these films to music, specifically modern composition, and the comparison makes a certain amount of sense. These are carefully calibrated explorations of rhythm, and the relationships that Brakhage develops between different areas of color and light might easily be thought of as akin to the relationship between sounds in music. With their measured rhythmic pacing and self-contained, entirely non-figurative imagery, these films seem to invite a wholly different experience of viewing. This is, of course, true of all Brakhage's films to some extent or another, but most of his other films at least provide a handhold for those inclined to look for one. The hand-painted films at least offer the possibility of figurative identification amidst the constantly shifting forms, and the photographic montage films like Cat's Cradle or A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea, no matter how rapidly edited, usually provide at least a hint of figures and mini-narratives and events. There is nothing of this kind to hold onto in these films. This is pure light, and not even light that can be traced back to a source, since Brakhage has entirely divorced these images from even a trace of concrete reality. This makes these films perhaps the purest expression of Brakhage's art that I've yet come across. If cinema is an artform of light, the Arabic Series is cinema in its most primal and instinctive form, splashing light across the screen in mesmerizing patterns and leaving the spectator overwhelmed when it's all over.

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William Wellman made his name with The Ox-Bow Incident, a potent use of the Western genre to tell an allegorical story of miscarried justice and mob rule. Two drifters (Henry Fonda and Henry Morgan) wander into a small town just as a local rancher is murdered by cattle rustlers, and they find themselves swept up with an angry lynch mob to go track down the perpetrators. The mob quickly stumbles across three men camped out in the mountains, driving cattle assumed to have been stolen from the rancher, and they set out to give the men a hasty show trial and then lynch them. There is a battle of wills between the forces of justice and those of mob revenge, as it becomes increasingly clear that the men are probably innocent. The obvious point, the value of true justice as opposed to revenge and punishment, is delivered with a slightly heavy hand, though the blow is softened somewhat by the skill of the powerhouse cast.

Although this situation provides plenty of suspense and drama, the film doesn't have much to recommend it cinematically. Wellman could be a very theatrical director, and at times he seems too comfortable simply getting across his story and message as a filmed play. The whole film is lighted beautifully, though, and the nighttime scenes around the campfire, before the three captured men are set to be hanged, are haunting and gorgeous. Wellman also provides at least one striking scene here, at the beginning of this campfire segment. He opens the scene tightly focused on the men clustered directly around the fire, laughing, eating and drinking, enacting the roles of a riotous but fun-loving lynch mob. The camera pulls back slowly, filling the frame with more and more men, and then at the top of the frame the three dangling nooses come into view, hanging over the whole scene. The camera keeps pulling back until it's revealed the whole tree and the dark sky behind it, but those nooses remain the center of attention, a powerful but peripheral presence in the far background. It's a wonderfully executed scene, and one wishes only that Wellman had trusted his camerawork and mise-en-scène to present these kinds of things more often.

Nevertheless, the film remains a taut, economical drama, with the tension steadily escalating as the moment of truth comes closer, then deflates into the melancholy coda. Wellman seems to have only a passing interest in fulfilling genre requirements in this film. All the basic trappings of the Western are here, but the film feels more like a morality play dressed up in Western garb. In point of fact, its events could happen anywhere, they are not unique to the American frontier, which is of course Wellman's point. The film's power rests primarily on its script, which is mostly strong and only falters when it adds a few moments — they're hardly substantial enough to even be called a subplot — with Fonda's old girlfriend (Mary Beth Hughes), which seem intended solely to get a female lead into a plot where there's not much space for it. A few script-related missteps like that aside, Wellman's landmark film surprisingly retains much of its impact today, perhaps because the spectacle of ordinary people turned bloodthirsty and vengeful is frighteningly plausible in any era.