11/15: Ikiru

[This is a contribution to the Akira Kurosawa Blog-a-Thon hosted by Film Squish.]

Kurosawa's Ikiru is concerned with a seemingly counterintuitive idea: the poetics of bureaucracy. Its hero is a bureaucrat, and its central premise boils down to this man learning that he is going to die, and in response dedicating his remaining months to becoming a better bureaucrat. Veteran actor Takashi Shimura plays Watanabe, a career bureaucrat in a city Public Affairs department, who abruptly learns that he has stomach cancer and has only a few more months to live. His initial reaction is to sink into depression. He stops attending his job without even calling in, and drinks himself into oblivion in neighborhood bars — he seems intent on either forgetting about his plight or speeding it up to ease the burden on his self-absorbed son. A chance encounter with a writer at one of these bars proves to be the first step towards coming to terms with his illness, and this man takes Watanabe out for a wild night on the town, dancing, singing, gambling, and meeting young girls. This experience awakens Watanabe from his self-pity, making him realize that he should do something with his final months to redeem the wasted, routine life he'd been living since his wife died. However, he rightly rejects the hedonism of that one night as a long-term solution, recognizing it for the momentary pleasure it is.

As he casts around for a direction in his new life, a chance encounter again sets him onto a path, as he runs into his former employee Toyo (Miki Odagiri). Her youth and vitality enlivens her, but their initially carefree friendship quickly sours when Watanabe becomes clingy and desperate. She does, however, indirectly point him back towards yet another path: escape into his work, which is the path he decides on. He recommits himself to his job with a resolution to go above and beyond his duties to truly help people. It's at this point that Kurosawa makes the interesting decision to skip ahead five months, to Watanabe's wake. The remainder of the film is told in flashbacks by Watanabe's fellow employees, underlings, and bosses, revealing the misinterpretations and credit-stealing that go on even the night after his death. The bisected structure of the film allows Kurosawa to essentially create two films, one hopeful and one pessimistic. In the first half, Watanabe's realization of his own mortality initiates his examination of his life and what he's done with it. Even if his ultimate decision to turn back to his career is perhaps questionable as a means of fulfillment, it's still the first time in 30 years that he's made a positive decision for himself rather than just allowing his life to pass by. The first half ends with him actively taking on a new project that everyone else had dismissed, the creation of a children's park in a poor and neglected area of the city where a sewage pond was causing a health hazard.

After the first half of the film, the quiet optimism of Watanabe's mission isn't quite dissipated, but it is seriously dulled by the realization of just how little change Watanabe managed to effect in his surroundings. The second half of the film takes place entirely at Watanabe's wake, with his co-workers not so much mourning him as trying to figure out exactly what made him tick and what prompted the tremendous change in his personality in those final months. The first half of the film is defined by its transcendent quality: the sense, largely communicated by Kurosawa's sumptuous visuals, that we are observing more than just the external realities of a life in flux, but the internal qualities of the man himself. Shimura's amazing, wide-eyed performance goes a long ways towards establishing this spiritual closeness between the audience and Watanabe. His large, watery eyes practically bug out of his head on cue, and Kurosawa frequently allows his facial expressions to say it all in extreme close-ups. He emanates a sublime mix of melancholy, hopefulness, and quiet desperation, and his hunched, shuffling gait and murmured, halting speech only heightens the empathy for him.

In the second half of the film, with Watanabe's disappearance from the narrative except in the form of a photograph hung in the center of the room, this transcendent quality also largely disappears. The employees' squabbles have the quality of the multiple perspectives that Kurosawa had used in Rashomon two years earlier, but in this case they disagree not on facts, but on matters of interpretation. The palpable absence of Watanabe is a black hole in the film, especially since the periodic flashbacks in which he appears briefly restore that feeling of transcendence and emotional connection. The arguing employees are no substitute for Shimura's powerhouse central performance, and it's as though Kurosawa ended a perfectly good narrative film early in order to stage a debate. The employees' arguments spell out all too clearly the ideas that Kurosawa wanted to communicate, a prime example of a great director not trusting his own visual storytelling. This is especially apparent since the second half also contains a handful of the film's best scenes.

In one scene, perhaps the film's most potent, some women from the neighborhood that Watanabe helped show up at his funeral, interrupting at a crucial moment when the ambitious deputy mayor had been busily rationalizing his failure to give Watanabe proper credit. These women kneel in front of the altar and pour out their grief, weeping and crying over the kind, helpful, driven man who helped them so much. Kurosawa barely shows the women, though, instead keeping their cries on the soundtrack while he cuts around the room to close-ups of the politicians and public officials who have gathered for the service. Their uncomfortable expressions when faced with this wordless remorse say it all, and Kurosawa handles this moment with economical grace, indicting every man in the room without a word. The remaining hour of bluster and blather only confirms what's already implicit in this scene: these men don't understand Watanabe, and they don't get that his exceptional commitment to his job in his last months was his way of living his life to its fullest.

The other great scenes in the film's second half are both flashbacks, one in which Watanabe wistfully stares out at the work in progress on "his" park, and another from the night he died, as he sits on a swing in the snow-covered park, singing quietly into the night. These brief scenes — moments, really — are imbued with Watanabe's grace and poignancy, and they are gently affecting, getting at the man's core in ways that no amount of words ever could. Ikiru is the story of this bureaucrat's realization that life should never be accepted passively, but lived with vibrancy and energy. Its other characters never come to this same realization, making this film simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic. But if one broken and mummified man can learn to live his life actively, whatever that means for him, the same option must be open to everyone else too.

11/14: The Pornographers

Shohei Imamura's The Pornographers is a pitch-black absurdist comedy of outrageous sexuality and the role of sex in a modern world dominated by greed and manipulation. The titular pornographer is Subu Ogata (Shoichi Ozawa), who makes porn movies and sells a wide variety of sexual literature, photos, illicit audio recordings, and impotence medicines — all this while telling his widowed lover and landlady Haru (Sumiko Sakamoto) that he sells medical equipment. In a way, to Ogata, this seems to be a true statement. He increasingly views the world, and especially the men in it, as sick with sexuality, and views his "immoral" work as a kind of cure.

Ogata's profession starts out as just a way to make money, but as he encounters police raids, local mobsters, thieving partners, and his own complicated sexual impulses, he becomes more philosophical about his work. In any case, it seems like it's stopped making him money, and he begins pouring all his own money into buying equipment and supplies, while his personal life descends into a labyrinth of forbidden and twisted sexual desire. He wants Haru's 15-year-old daughter Keiko (Keiko Sagawa), and Haru, who is sick and on the verge of dying, encourages him to marry her, though the promiscuous Keiko herself has little interest. Meanwhile, Haru tries to remain pure due to a vow she made to her first husband, who she believes has been reincarnated as a carp and watches over her — when the carp jumps in his tank, that means that her dead husband disapproves of her actions. There's also a bizarre Oedipal subtext with Haru's son Koichi (Masaomi Kondo), who she spoils and takes care of, and who responds with a devotion bordering uncomfortably on the sexual.

With these warped and intricately intertwined sexual impulses wending through its narrative, The Pornographers is structured as though the id is periodically overwhelming the story. Imamura's narrative will often run in a more or less traditional manner for a while, only to be disrupted by the intrusion of an unsettlingly real dream sequence. These strange dreams pop up from time to time without warning, often emerging spontaneously from scenes that at first appeared to be entirely realistic. It's never even made clear quite whose dreams they are, although presumably they might be attributed to Ogata. Certainly the later ones, with their imagery of sexual impotence, are his, but several earlier ones seem to belong more plausibly to Haru or her daughter. In any case, these absurd interjections add to the film's stylized depiction of sexual desire. It all culminates when Ogata becomes impotent and is driven to entirely reject human sexuality in its ordinary forms, pursuing the construction of a perfect mechanical woman to satisfy his desires.

The Pornographers is a unique and incredibly odd examination of sexuality in a world of greed and repression, where the human, personal aspect of sex is increasingly being subsumed by economics, legalities, and mechanical desire. As such, this 1966 film is a stunningly prescient work, predicting among other things the numbing of sexuality in the age of Internet porn and the continuing interaction between ordered sexual repression on the one hand and unfettered id on the other. The wild imagery is offset by the surprisingly philosophical commentary of Ogata's conversations with his fellow pornographers, in which they discuss the ethics of incest, the potential for the fantasies of porn to replace real-life violent sexuality, and the loss of one-on-one romantic and sexual connections in a world where sexuality has become a commonplace public spectacle and a commodity on the marketplace. Imamura's sensibility is perfectly suited to such a complex film, which treats its subject matter with both irreverence and depth.

11/12: A Canterbury Tale; Beware of a Holy Whore; Act of Violence

In A Canterbury Tale, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger crafted a magical and haunting film from the simplest of premises, spinning out a rather uncomplicated yarn into a magical fable of the English countryside and its way of life. The set-up is simple: two soldiers on furlough, one American and one British, arrive in a small country town at the same time as a young woman who's seeking employment on a local farm. The setting is World War II era Britain, but the war seems very distant indeed from this idyllic country setting. The only, rather mild, indication of the war's effect is the periodic rumbling of military jeeps through the otherwise undisturbed and tranquil countryside. But this small town, situated along the same Pilgrim's Road that once led the travelers of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to their destination, has a darker undercurrent which these new travelers encounter almost at once. While the two soldiers lead the girl, Alison (Sheila Sim), into town, she is suddenly attacked by a mysterious figure who pours glue in her hair and then runs away. For anyone giggling at that already, yes, the seminal subtext is patently obvious, and yes, she does yell out, "Oh, there's sticky stuff in my hair!" One can easily picture an audience of Freudians going into raptures.

Needless to say, the trio become embroiled in an investigation to solve this mystery and capture the "Glue Man," who has struck 10 times before and whose activities seem to be of curiously little interest to most people in the village. But while this is the film's nominal plot, it's kept almost completely to the background, the better for Powell and Pressburger to focus their attention on the beauty of country life. By fifteen minutes after it's happened, the glue incident has already been nearly forgotten, as the characters begin to explore the town in earnest, and the audience begins to meet these sweet, innocent characters. The American GI is Bob Johnson (real-life Sergeant John Sweet), a fresh-faced Oregon boy who's wondering why his sweetheart back home has stopped writing. His earnest, wide-eyed manner and gentle good manners are instantly endearing, and Sweet is the perfect choice as a representation of good-old American values abroad. If this is what the British thought of us during WW2, then it only makes our current world image even sadder. Along with the similarly appealing Alison, Bob explores the village and the duo tries to figure out if the kind but strangely sinister local magistrate, Colpeper (Eric Portman), is the Glue Man or not. The third member of their trio, the British sergeant Peter (Dennis Price), is stationed at a nearby camp, and he joins in on the mystery when he's off from his duties.

What's most interesting about this scenario is that the filmmakers themselves seem to be most clearly aligned with Colpeper, who is an avid historian of the area around Canterbury and its rich history. Colpeper, even in his most sinister moments — and there are many, since the film begins dropping hints about him early on — is oddly appealing in his enthusiasm for local lore. He seems to be in a deep spiritual communion with the land around him, a connection to its religious past that he wishes to spread to others through his lectures and teaching. He seems, by today's standards, to be a figure of conservative morality, expressing a desire for the younger generations to get in touch with their more spiritual and innocent pasts. And certainly the Glue Man is an instrument of this backward-looking morality, since his sexualized crimes are intended to punish and discourage the local girls from going out with the soldiers stationed nearby. Despite all this, Colpeper is hardly an irredeemable villain, and the filmmakers clearly have great respect for his motivations and ideas, even if they stop slightly short of endorsing his actions.

In fact, the film is so much in sympathy with Colpeper that in many ways it seems to be his vision of the countryside that we're seeing on screen throughout the film. It's a strange and mystical place, where the past is sometimes so close that Alison, standing on a windy hilltop in an eerie stillness, can hear the music of the old Canterbury pilgrims from 600 years earlier. This connection to the past is established in the film's unforgettable first sequence, which begins in the time of Chaucer's tales. The pilgrims make their way along the road, and one of them, astride a horse, releases a falcon, which goes soaring off into the sky. In a stunning edit, the filmmakers then cut to an image of a modern fighter plane, similarly diving and swooping through the sky; the pilgrim has been replaced, down on the ground, by a wistfully smiling soldier. The whole film is subtly influenced by the texture of this non-diegetic introduction, which links all the film's modern events to the long-ago pilgrims who once passed through this region. These images have such a haunting and quietly beautiful quality that one can't help but believe Colpeper when he waxes ecstatic about the region's qualities. His words are bolstered by the weight of Powell and Pressburger's imagery, an odd situation in which the filmmakers seem to be conspiring with their villain.

All of this comes to a head in the film's ambiguous, elegiac denouement, in which the characters fulfill their connection to the past by themselves becoming pilgrims to Canterbury. All go for their own mundane reasons, but they all find something much different and greater than they expected — something mystical, spiritual, even miraculous flows through this final part of the film. By now, the mystery plot has drifted away and nearly been forgotten, nominally solved but not really resolved, its threads left hanging and ambiguous at the ending. It's a wonderful, entrancing end to a film that truly defies description, the kind of film whose charm and beauty are nearly impossible to resist.

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore is, essentially, one big in-joke, a feature-length parody of his own filmmaking process, in which he casts almost his entire stock company. It's a very nasty, acerbically funny film, with Fassbinder fearlessly turning his sharp tongue on his own image and the sexual complications that constantly surrounded him. Fassbinder steps back from himself in one respect, giving the part of the dictatorial director Jeff to Lou Castel, while he plays Jeff's assistant Sascha. Jeff is an angry, diva-ish tyrant, and a sexual manipulator who seems to constantly crave some attention of any kind. He's most infatuated by the boyish Ricky (Marquad Bohm), but he willfully sleeps his way through most of the cast and crew, male and female, and is frustrated when he fails to consummate things with the actress Hanna (Hanna Schygulla, vamping in an indescribably sexy channeling of Marilyn Monroe). She's more interested in the film's star, the craggy-faced Eddie Constantine, who's there because Jeff is making a new Lemmy Caution picture. Meanwhile, Ricky competes with assistant director David (Hannes Fuchs) for Jeff's attentions, while simultaneously seducing some of the women on the set. And the chronically depressive set designer, Fred (a typically histrionic Kurt Raab), breaks down and cries over seemingly anything.

This exaggerated cast of characters fight, sleep around, exchange partners, scream and yell, and consume massive quantities of alcohol — and all this before having completed even a single frame of film. Fassbinder's satire of his own emotionally draining filming process, made right after Whity and directly inspired by its torturous shoot, pulls no punches, either for himself or anyone else. These are a bunch of neurotic, hopeless, desperate people, and none of them more so than the Fassbinder stand-in Jeff, who even wears Fassbinder's trademark black leather jacket just in case there's any confusion about the connection. And yet the film is subtly hilarious, in its own bitchy way, for those who are open to its black charms. The histrionics and rage are played totally straight, even deadpan, but at the same time it's all so ridiculous that the film's straight face becomes difficult to uphold.

In one scene, staged at an almost excruciating length, most of the cast is gathered in the central room at the villa they're shooting in. Some are drinking at the bar, while others are paired off making out or dancing, and over the course of the scene these pairs constantly shift and rotate as the characters all play off each other's feelings, manipulating and jilting each other with only casual interest in what's going on. While all this is happening, those at the bar sink deeper and deeper into drink and begin heaving their glasses behind them over their shoulders, or throwing them at the far wall, prompting the dutiful bartender to appear with his broom and dustpan. Meanwhile, Jeff's fiancée Irm (Magdalena Montezuma) throws a fit at his disinterest and is promptly ejected from the set, following a harrowing speech which Fassbinder allows her to deliver in close-up. The scene as a whole is sustained for incredibly long, with most of it held at arm's length in long shots except for periodic close-ups like this one, which draw us closer to particular moments of emotional collapse. The distance which Fassbinder mostly keeps from the action allows him to ratchet up the tension without ever losing its comic edge. He wants us to feel the emotional anguish of these characters while simultaneously recognizing the ludicrous nature of the situation. The scene is both intense drama and absurd slapstick, with one feeding off the other and leading into the other. The screaming, the breaking glass, the Leonard Cohen music with couples slow-dancing and fornicating in the background, it all accumulates into a fever pitch of ridiculous tension.

Fassbinder presents many scenes in this way towards the beginning of the film, keeping the characters locked into a single space together and letting the sparks fly as their complex relationships and ever-shifting objects of "love" collide. The individual scenes feel disconnected from each other, having little to do with each other besides the same basic cast of characters and the same theme of searching for love and affection. Each scene is a new take on the film's central theme, a new set piece in which Fassbinder sets his characters free to hurt and play off one another. This feeling becomes even more pronounced as the film goes along, and towards the end, Fassbinder drastically shortens the scene length, increasing the tempo of his editing so that many different scenes breeze by. Whether the scenes are held at great length or last barely a minute, the idea is the same: they are "takes," different perspectives on the same set of emotional dilemmas. Fassbinder's coldly critical and blackly humorous look at his own filmmaking persona stands as yet another dark-hued masterpiece in his fertile career.

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In Act of Violence, Robert Ryan does an excellent job playing the initially threatening crippled GI Joe Parkson, who is an unrelenting mission to murder his former commanding officer, Frank Enley (Van Heflin). But of course all is not as it seems in this masterfully crafted film noir from director Fred Zinnemann. For the first half of the film, Parkson is a terror stalking Enley's pleasant, succesful suburban life. Enley is married, to the innocent and cheery Edith (Janet Leigh), and a well-respected local businessman, but the sudden appearance of Parkson clearly terrifies him, and Zinnemann keeps the audience squarely on Enley's side. The gun-toting Parkson is initially kept at a distance, a single-minded killer who can hardly wait to kill his prey; he stalks him mercilessly and with great haste, as though he's eager to kill him as soon as possible. Even Parkson's limp is turned into an instrument of fear. In one memorable scene, Frank and Edith are locked up in their house, hiding from Parkson, as the killer stalks around outside, trying all the doors. The scared couple can track his progress by following the dragging shuffle of his limping gait, the only sound in the otherwise eerily quiet scene.

That the film is then able to transform this jaded killer into a much more complex and morally ambiguous character is one of the film's central conceits. The second half of the film, when Parkson's motivations become known, reveals the complicated morality at the heart of the film, which encompasses war crimes and the question of whether some deeds are so heinous they just can't be forgotten. While Enley flees from Parkson and stumbles around for a way out, the film humanizes both men, making it clear that the violent link between them is only being continued in the current events. In the finale, both men have a chance to redeem themselves, with a resolution that of course allows Parkson to retain his humanity (Robert Ryan could never really play a cold-blooded killer), and for Enley to atone for his own violent past.

Act of Violence is a solid, well-made noir with a complex moral core to back up its gorgeous high contrast blacks and whites. As with many of the best noirs, the imagery may trade in one or the other, but the script recognizes that morality more often exists in shades of gray.

11/11: Crimes and Misdemeanors; Pittsburgh Trilogy; The Text of Light

With Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen finally made the serious, sustained look at death and morality that he had clearly had in him for quite some time. This is Woody's most refined presentation of his darkest, most cynical and pessimistic views on the nature of the universe and humanity's place in it. It's a film in which murder goes unpunished, a deeply religious rabbi goes blind, a seemingly wise and upbeat philosopher kills himself for inexplicable reasons, and an intelligent and artistic documentary filmmaker has his career and life ruined while his shallow, phony brother-in-law prospers as a TV comedy producer. In short, this is Woody's exposé on the unfairness of life, a questioning of the place of morality and spirituality in a world seemingly so lacking in fairness, order, or justice.

In some ways, this film also revisits some of the ground explored in The Purple Rose of Cairo, specifically the contrast between the tidy, ordered fantasies of Hollywood movies and the harsher realities of the real world. Woody's character, the struggling filmmaker Cliff, is a compulsive moviegoer, both with his adored young niece and with the new object of his affection, the TV producer Halley (Mia Farrow). Cliff goes to the movies — mostly Hollywood classics like Singin' in the Rain or Hitchcock's lightly comic Mr. and Mrs. Smith — as an escape, a pick-me-up, a relief from the outside world. This escapist facet of films is something Crimes and Misdemeanors steadfastly refuses to provide, although Woody's love for the films quoted here appears to be genuine.

But the film's moral inquiry is carried out most thoroughly through the character of Judah (Martin Landau), a highly successful opthamologist whose comfortable life is in danger of falling apart when his former mistress Dolores (Anjelica Huston) threatens to tell his wife about their affair. His internal struggle to figure out what to do in order to maintain the status quo of his happy, successful life eventually leads him down the path of murder, and he hires his mob-connected brother to do the job for him. Judah is initially conflicted, and the murder awakens memory of his deeply religious childhood and his father's admonitions that God is always watching, but ultimately Judah gets away with his crime, and he settles back into his life with very little compunctions about the terrible act he's committed. At the very end of the film, when his story finally intersects, very briefly, with Cliff's, and the two of them sit down for a chat, he tells Cliff the story as though it's a movie plot. Cliff responds, essentially, by saying that it doesn't work as drama because he doesn't believe any man would be able to live with that act as easily as Judah describes it. Cliff still lives in the world of movies, and Judah knows the truth — that in fact we tend to rationalize and excuse our own decisions, and that if we don't punish ourselves for own crimes, often no one else will. This is reality, and it is the film's philosophical point to present this reality and then ask what the consequences are for our concepts of morality, love, God, and justice.

Nowhere else in his oeuvre has Woody so thoroughly examined the nature of these broad existential themes with such sharp insight and depth, and with such an open-ended perspective as well. The film raises a great number of questions about morality and spirituality, but provides few answers. The film is concerned with the way things are rather than the way they should be, and as such its stark presentation of the reality of human morality cannot end in any conclusive lessons. Even the film's most powerful philosophical voice, the professor (Martin Bergmann) who is a subject for one of Cliff's documentaries, contradicts his own lifelong message of love and human morality by suddenly and without explanation committing suicide. As a distraught and uncomprehending Cliff says when he hears of it, this was a man who saw the worst of life and still said "yes" at every point, and then suddenly he just said "no" to life.

This is the film's central paradox, and its central question: in the absence of God as a defining force in our lives, what do we have to take his place? Of all the film's characters, only the rabbi Ben (Sam Waterston) is truly content in his life, even if he is losing his sight. He has his family, his belief in God, and his belief in the basic goodness of humankind to bring him through life. Even if these beliefs are false — as Woody certainly believes them to be — Ben is much happier for holding them, even if by doing so he misses out on the real truths about life and the world. Ben is a quiet and powerful presence in the film, a beacon of spiritual contentment in a vast sea of malcontents and morally confused people. It's because of this that Woody ends the film on a shot of Ben, dancing, happily blind, with his daughter at her wedding.

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Although the first film in Stan Brakhage's Pittsburgh Trilogy, created while on ride-alongs with the Pittsburgh police, is called Eyes, Brakhage focuses much more on hands, keeping the eyes perversely hidden. This is a film of actions — hands on steering wheels, hands poised on the butt of a gun, hands lighting a cigarette, hands writing. In following around several police officers on their daily rounds, Brakhage mostly avoids showing (or never encountered) the kinds of intense showdowns and action that usually characterize police films. Brakhage instead atomizes the police officer's day into fragmentary small actions, repeated routines, and momentary bursts of activity. The film rhythmically returns to the same kinds of images over and over again: officers' belts, cigarettes being lit, driving, the officers' backs during seemingly routine conversations with civilians.

The cops are often filmed from behind, in fact, hiding their eyes and even their faces for the most part, except for brief intervals. The film's seeming reluctance to focus on faces and eyes puts a premium on the few striking moments when Brakhage does choose a tight close-up on a cop's eyes, or when he reveals one of them looking back through the car's rearview mirror. These insertions are like brief moments of human connection in a film otherwise dedicated to process, procedure, and routine actions. Brakhage's fragmentary editing and purposeful avoidance of drama result in a surprisingly objective, even neutral, image of the police. Anyone expecting Brakhage's stab at social commentary will doubtless be disappointed. The film's slant, as with all three entries in the Pittsburgh Trilogy, is more philosophical and metaphysical. There are shots in the film that could doubtless be used in a radical anti-police tirade, and likewise other shots that might be used in an uncritical tribute. But Brakhage's film is neither, and he uses this material with a blind eye to socio-political considerations, instead generalizing these images and incidents to a generic police force. These three films are all concerned to some extent with mortality, and especially the ways in which our society attempts to deal with and confront mortality, violence, and suffering. In this case, the theme is largely implied, since the film is a semi-abstract but carefully modulated look at possibly the most prominent societal device for maintaining order and security against the chaos of nature.

Deus Ex makes the theme of mortality and societal order in the Pittsburgh Trilogy even more obvious. Filmed in a hospital while Brakhage was staying there as a patient, this film naturally deals much more directly with human mortality and the ways in which our society tries to prevent, delay, and alter it. This film is largely even more abstract than its predecessor, though, largely eliminating the human element and reducing, more than ever, the people that Brakhage encounters to hands, feet, and torsos. Only rarely does he show a face, most notably the tortured expression on a patient who's squirming in agony on a gurney. But for large portions of the film Brakhage is filming curtains around beds, doors and their hinges, the patterns on the hospital floor. The film's title derives from the Latin "deus ex machina," meaning "god from the machine," and the subtext here is the way in which human technology intersects with the work of god and nature.

Once again, the film deals with humans imposing order on the chaos of existence. The hospital, as filmed by Brakhage, is a place of coldness and constricted geometric lines, bathed in clinical greens and yellows. This is a building designed to trap sickness and death, as though in a box, square it off in a small area and not allow it to escape. But this human-imposed order is belied in the film's final segment, which finally allows both the beauty and the horror of nature to intrude upon the hospital's neatness and antiseptic clean. Beauty enters in the form of the budding flowers glimpsed outside the window of Brakhage's room, a single bright red bud pressed up against the glass pane. Brakhage intercuts this image with a particularly graphic and gory surgery scene — one inevitably wonders if the great avant-garde filmmaker had seen Altman's M*A*S*H the year before. Both the flower and the blood of surgery represent the victory of nature over all man's attempts to conquer it. The link is solidified in a stunning shot in which Brakhage uses a focus pull to make it appear as though the red of the flower is bleeding across the screen, spreading in a dark red blot like spilled blood.

If Deus Ex takes a few steps towards a more direct encounter with human mortality, The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes goes all the way with that idea, and then some. As the title implies, whereas the other two films in this trilogy deal with mortality through the filter of society's ways of dealing with it, this film removes the filters and looks at death head-on. Comprised entirely of autopsy footage and filmed with the same relentless attention to details that characterized the other two films, this is most definitely not easy viewing. Today was the second time I've seen it, since this is the only installment of the trilogy that was already available on DVD from Criterion, and it wasn't any easier seeing it a second time.

This is a brutal, uncompromising document, with Brakhage insisting that the viewer should confront the realities of death with eyes wide open — although at this screening, quite a few people walked out during this film, and I can't say I blame them. The autopsies Brakhage observed are shown in their every detail, and like the routines of the police and the hospital, are atomized down to their constituent parts, with the focus on small aspects of the whole at various moments. The technique is largely the same, but the material here is gruesome and hard to take for even the strongest stomach. At the same time, it's absolutely necessary. Brakhage is committed to opening up new ways of seeing, and in this trilogy especially he's interested in presenting new visions of some foundational institutions and ideas, specifically the idea of death. And there has never been a vision of death so pure, so uncompromised by human feeling, so utterly cold and objective and scientific. This point is underscored by the film's ending, in which Brakhage gives the last image to one of the doctors, who when the autopsy is over, recounts the outcome of the procedure into a blood-smeared tape recorder. In the end, a human life has been literally hollowed out — all the organs removed and placed in a plastic bag, the blood drained, the brain removed and weighed — and its essence reduced to a recitation of cold facts and figures into a microphone.

There is a kind of harsh beauty here, which Brakhage finds and explores in the reflection of light off the peeled-back flesh and pools of blood, but this is mostly a look at the ugliness of nature and mortality. The human body, stripped of its life and vitality, is pulled apart and catalogued, as much by Brakhage's camera as by the doctors doing the autopsies. This is Brakhage's way of both confronting his own mortality, and forcing his viewers to do the same for themselves. It is impossible, in the face of this monstrous and terrifying work, not to think about one's own ultimate demise and the fate that biology has in store for us all. The other two films in this series are comparatively comforting, dealing as they do with the procedures and institutions that society has put in place to confront these things for us so we don't have to on a daily basis. But Brakhage has recognized this avoidance and created a film that purposefully short-circuits any possibility of avoiding the reality of death.

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Brakhage's The Text of Light is one of his most radical and fully realized attempts at creating a new way of seeing. The film is made almost entirely with the refracted light from a glass ashtray, although the source of these gorgeous, puzzling images is almost never made apparent for those who don't know ahead of time. In a few shots, it's obvious that some kind of glass object is involved somehow, but more often the film is completely abstracted from any physical realities altogether, totally divorced from the physical world except in the form of light. Brakhage creates an entire new universe of light, which is of course highly appropriate since actually everything we see in the real physical universe as we know it is derived from light anyway. We would know of nothing if not for light, which allows us to see and to see in colors. Brakhage has taken this axiom of vision to its logical conclusion by constructing his images entirely out of light and the prismatic colors that result from its refraction in warped glass.

Many of the images here resemble tiny solar systems and galaxies, or particularly vibrant sunsets, or horizons of land and sea and sky in stratified layers. It is a new universe of light, a radical re-imagining of a world in which light not only allows us to see, but is the physical essence of things as well. The light in this film has a real physical presence, bending and changing with the fluctuations of camera movement or shifts in the unseen room outside the ashtray. These are some of the most stunning, visceral, and beautiful images in Brakhage's large oeuvre. The film is absolutely mesmerizing in the graceful rhythms of its editing and seismic shifts in areas of light and color that flow smoothly across the frame.

It's also a film of contemplation, as evidenced by the somewhat calmer tempo of the editing as compared to some of Brakhage's other abstract works. There are occasional bursts of the kind of rapid-fire montage that characterizes most of Brakhage's painted works, or even many of his photographic works like Cat's Cradle. But for the most part the film has a much more even, tranquil pace, with Brakhage allowing time for each image to develop and linger in the viewer's consciousness. In this sense, the shifting patterns of tendril-like light are most reminiscent, not of any outer world, but of an inner one. The speed of light becomes the speed of thought, the electrical connections of neurons and the flow of information. From the observation of light stripped down to its elemental form, Brakhage's film moves ever inward, in search of some primal form of light that might be pure thought.