Peur(s) du noir

Peur(s) du noir is an anthology film which unites six very different comics artists and graphic designers to tell six stories of horror, fear, and darkness. The artists involved are Americans Charles Burns and Richard McGuire, the Italian charcoal artist Lorenzo Mattotti, and French artists Blutch, Marie Caillou, and Pierre di Sciullo, and each of them brings a unique perspective to the subject "fear of the dark." Unlike with a traditional anthology film, though, Peur(s) du noir does not maintain a rigid separation between the six segments, instead arranging them with fluid transitions from one story to the next, and with several of the segments divided up and themselves used as bridging material. Only the segments by Mattotti, McGuire, and Burns are presented as wholes, while Blutch and di Sciullo provide bridging material, with short chunks of their contributions doled out periodically throughout the film, and Caillou's segment is split in two with other cartoonists' material as an interlude. This presentation ensures that this film works much better as a unified whole than most anthology films of this type, which are typically disjointed affairs of uneven quality. It also helps that, with the exception of Caillou's trite manga-influenced ghost yarn, the quality of the individual pieces is almost uniformly high to begin with, making this a film very much worth exploring for fans of modern comics and animation alike.

The film opens with the first excerpt from the work of the French cartoonist Blutch, mostly known here in the States for the handful of short stories he's had published in various anthologies. His work, with its tendency towards thick blacks and figures defined by the interplay of light and dark areas, is a perfect fit for this project, and his pencil drawings are beautifully translated into movement. The opening few shots, of a quartet of vicious dogs pulling along their master by the leash, are a bit too static, and Blutch's dense pencil shading can sometimes make adjacent areas from different figures blend into each other, so that at several points in these early sequences, for example, the dogs appear to be partially translucent. However, he quickly overcomes this initial stiffness in the animation, and with each subsequent installment of this story throughout the film, his beautiful pencil drawings come more and more to life. The dogs' movements become more fluid and natural, and the use of shadows, creeping along walls in advance of the figures they're attached to, is at times breathtaking. The story itself is minimal, involving a sadistic military officer who roams the countryside like a harbinger of death, periodically releasing one of his dogs on an unsuspecting person he encounters. The dogs' attacks become increasingly graphic and disturbing as the film progresses: the first occurs off-screen, signified only by a scream, and the last is one of the film's most grisly moments, with the dog ripping off the head of its victim and tossing him around like a ragdoll. Used as punctuation, this grim and mysterious little tale works perfectly, setting a tone of macabre terror and inexplicable violence.

The other recurring segment that is stretched out throughout the film is a strange abstract animation by the designer and typographer Pierre di Sciullo, the only artist included in this project who has not previously worked in comics. His contribution consists entirely of abstract patches of black and white, constantly shifting and changing shape, forming patterns of lines or dots, or simply abstract fractal designs and shapeless masses of black. These abstracted patterns are accompanied by a voiceover from a woman who recounts her own "fears," taking a much more liberal approach to the project than the straightforward horror interpretations of the other five artists. Di Sciullo's broad interpretation of the simple concept "fear" includes the fear of political conservatism, racial hatred, and the fear that positive change is an impossibility. This explicitly political, social slant on fear weaves through the film, as di Sciullo's abstract patterns recur at intervals between the other segments, a perpetual reminder of types of fear that are much more grounded in prosaic reality than alien insects, murderous ghosts, or demon dogs.

Charles Burns is a name doubtless familiar to anyone who's followed alternative comics in the last couple of decades, with his teen horror opus Black Hole being his defining work thus far. His contribution shouldn't be any surprise to those who have seen his work before, especially since his is the artistic style that changes the least in the translation from static images to animation. His clean, crisp linework and stark contrast looks like it has leapt right out of the pages of one of his comics and onto the screen, moving fluidly but otherwise largely unchanged. His segment tells the story of an isolated, bookish young man who collects insects and studies them in his room, which he's converted into a makeshift science lab. But when he stumbles across a strange, almost humanoid creature with grasping arms and mandibles like a praying mantis, this weird little insectoid creature begins subtly taking over his life, and ultimately taking over his girlfriend as well. One of Burns' signature themes has always been sexual uneasiness and disgust, and this short film — structured much like a particularly clever Twilight Zone episode, complete with a skin-crawlingly creepy twist ending — is one of his best encapsulations of the strangeness underlying sexuality. In Burns' hands, sex becomes weird, frightening, even disturbing, and though this is ostensibly a kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers tale about insectoid aliens, the real terror here is a more generalized youthful uncertainty about sexuality and relationships. Even before the hapless protagonist's girlfriend becomes an alien, he's pretty much terrified by her and in awe of her, never sure what to say when he's around her (when they're introduced, he even pauses before giving his name). Nobody translates psychological turmoil into visceral body horror like Burns (well, except for David Cronenberg), and this short piece is truly worthy of Burns' comics oeuvre.

In contrast, Marie Caillou's segment, about a young girl haunted by a violent past and tormented by bullies at school, is the one misstep of the bunch, a hackneyed ghost yarn with a cutesy manga-influenced visual style that's jarringly out of place amidst the other contributors' moody, atmospheric images. Caillou comes to this project mainly as a designer and advertising artist with little comics background, and she seems to be on board mainly because she already contributed to the last Prima Linea multi-cartoonist animated project, Loulou et autres loups, a children's film which also featured Richard McGuire. But whereas the always versatile McGuire (whose segment closes this film) is able to adapt his style to pretty much any situation, Caillou seems much better suited to children's fare, and her stylistic choices do little to enhance this generic tale. She does provide some memorably strange imagery in some of the short's extended dream sequences, in a surrealist outpouring of anthropomorphic lanterns, a six-eyed woman's head mounted on the body of a snake, and an umbrella with an eye on the outside and a full skeleton instead of a handle. But these admittedly great images (seemingly cribbed from a wide sampling of horror and fantasy manga) can't compensate for the shrill, aggravating tone of the segment as a whole. Sound is in general a minor problem for Peur(s) du noir, which is hampered at times by an overly bombastic score that tends to overpower the dazzling imagery that the other five artists bring to this project. But just as Caillou's segment is the visual weak link, it also seems to be the worst offender in terms of the sound, continually going off the register with obnoxious sound effects and dense waves of music. Its aural overload certainly works to unsettle and provoke the audience, but not necessarily in the way good horror should — I saw at least a few audience members clutching their ears at some of the more annoying moments of Caillou's segment.

Italian artist Lorenzo Mattotti is, like Blutch, a mostly obscure figure in the United States despite an impressive body of work in comics. His reputation in English-speaking regions, such as it is, rests mainly on his slim (and unfortunately long out of print) 1986 volume Fires and a handful of other translated books and stories in anthologies. More recently, the beautiful first issue of his new comic series Chimera, published as part of Fantagraphics Books' "Ignatz" line, pointed the way towards a more abstract, wordless, black and white aesthetic where a richly textured world is slowly developed from an initially sparse spattering of lines. To some extent, it is this latter approach which is carried over into his detailed, expressive charcoal work on this film; his is perhaps the most virtuoso, impressive visual style among these six artists. The scenario, written with Mattotti's frequent collaborator Jerry Kramsky, is a simple story about a mysterious monster terrorizing a rural village, told from the point of a view of a man visiting his hometown and recalling these strange events that occurred there when he was a boy. Mattotti's dense, beautiful renderings create a wholly convincing and living world, sometimes tending towards near-static compositions with very little movement, like a comics panel in isolation, but moving frantically or beautifully when the story calls for it. In one particularly stunning sequence, a family eats dinner in silence in the center of a darkened room, and their small square of light in the center slowly shrinks as the room around them seems to grow bigger and fill with sinister shadows. It evokes the fear of isolation perfectly, depicting a community paralyzed with terror by the unnamed thing stalking them.

The final segment of the film is also the one I was most looking forward to, as an admirer of the small body of work that Richard McGuire has amassed in comics, mainly his acknowledged masterpiece of formal experimentation, "Here" (see my last post on McGuire). McGuire is a remarkably varied artist. Pretty much the only common thread running through his career is his dedication to exploring the formal possibilities of the medium at hand, whether it should be comics, design, music, film, or children's literature. His contribution to this film lives up to this goal, and the result is one of the project's most satisfying offerings, not so much because it's a truly scary horror story (although there are a few creepy moments) but because it precisely deconstructs the way we see in the dark, taking a literal approach to the anthology's title. In McGuire's short, a man wanders through an empty old house he stumbled upon while escaping from a blizzard. It's a classic haunted house set-up, but McGuire is less interested in the ostensible story than he is in the opportunities it provides for playing with light and dark. McGuire bathes the screen in black for the bulk of the short, with the only patches of light being provided organically by whatever light sources the man is able to find: candles, matches, a fireplace. This ingenious conceit allows McGuire to illuminate just limited areas of the screen, creating a kind of dance between light and dark. There are too many brilliant sequences here to mention them all, but a few examples should suffice to give a sense of what McGuire brings to this project. In one scene, a wine bottle rolls off a table and across the floor; once it's outside the light area cast by the fireplace's flames, its rolling motion is signified only by the circular cycling of its white label in the middle of the black. In another sequence, the small circle of light cast by a flickering candle initially seems to illuminate a sinister-looking man's face, looming in the darkness, until the candle moves slightly closer and the change in illumination reveals the face as just a vase of flowers. I've never seen a better demonstration of that well-known perceptual trick where objects in the dark take on anthropomorphic aspects of monsters and lurking killers, until a shift in perspective makes the elements align differently and reveal their true nature. McGuire's commitment to this formal exploration of light and shadow is complete, so much so that when the protagonist is locked in a dark closet at one point, there is a minute or so spent in total darkness, with only the sounds of his struggles indicating the action, until the man pries away a board from the wall to let in a sliver of light from outside. This is a typically rigorous formal experiment from McGuire, but as with all his work, it's not just an empty exercise, but a deep interrogation of the way we see and the way the limits and peculiarities of our vision is linked to our fears.

As a whole, Peur(s) du noir is much more than just the sum of the disparate and individually fascinating shorts that comprise it. It's a sustained treatise on the many faces of terror, from the geopolitical anxiety of di Sciullo's abstract images, to the sexual insecurity of Burns' insect horror, to the exploitation of visual limitations in McGuire's work. These are some stunning works of animation, ranging through a gamut of different styles and different approaches to the title theme.

Don't Touch the Axe (The Duchess of Langeais)

Jacques Rivette's newest film, Don't Touch the Axe (I prefer the original French to the American retitling The Duchess of Langeais) is a sublime game by an old master at the top of his form. Games are the film's central conceit, in fact, whether they be word games, mind games, literary games, games played between appearance and feeling. The game being played at the narrative level takes place between a General (Guillaume Depardieu) and a Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) whose circumspect courtship, constricted by the rules of polite society and the oppressive etiquette that goes along with them, turns into an increasingly barbed battle of wits and stubbornness. This perennially unconsummated couple veers between flirtatiousness and withdrawal, culminating eventually in the Duchess' retreat into a convent and the General's vain attempts to rescue/kidnap her from its cloistered, heavily barred confines. In one of his earliest films, the short Le coup du berger, Rivette already viewed love as a game of chess, and this wry perspective on human relationships has apparently survived intact from then all the way into his latest feature.

But this is only one game that Rivette is toying with, and he plays an entirely different one with the audience, a game of subtle winks and sly nods that continually disrupts the placid surface of the narrative — which on its most apparent level resembles any number of more typical period pieces — with a clever humorous slant on the material, a sense that the director is looking slightly askance at these people and their bizarre rituals of love. This narrative disruption is mirrored in the way the General's story to the Duchess, about his time lost in the desert after escaping from the enemy's imprisonment, is continually interrupted, usually by the listener's short attention span and her tendency to divert the flow of the conversation just as the story is reaching a critical juncture. This results in the General's story being doled out across three successive evenings that they spend together early in their relationship. On the third night, as they settle in to continue the story, Rivette frames the Duchess in a tight closeup as she asks her would-be lover to finish the tale. At this moment, she turns a sly sidelong glance directly into the camera, maintaining eye contact with the audience, as though to include them in the game.

This game of narrative interruptus is also carried through in the way Rivette uses the text of the film's original source, a novella by Honoré de Balzac. This is a rigidly faithful adaptation, in a manner similar to Fassbinder's interpretation of Fontane's Effi Briest, with texts from the novel periodically included as intertitles to highlight certain moments or get at the characters' internal states. The titles are also used to convey the passage of time, which is parceled out in scrupulously precise measures: "one hour later," "twenty-two minutes passed," "she waited twenty-four hours." These titles often seem to abruptly cut off the action, sometimes flashing up on screen when, after a long scene of near-stasis, a character is right in the middle of completing the scene's first real movement or action (most often: leaving the room). The passage of time, like everything else in the film, is subject to Rivette's subtle humor. After the Duchess kicks her friend out of her house, a title informs us that one hour passes (a very common interlude), and surprisingly in the very next scene there's the General again, still standing in her parlor, walking around it aimlessly, looking like only five minutes has passed since she ordered him to leave. Rivette's use of these titles is obviously very sardonic and mannered, as when he uses a long series of images of the Duchess at a party as though it constituted a clause in between two dashes in a sentence: "the Duchess searched for him —" followed by the visuals and then, when the dangling phrase had almost been forgotten, "— in vain."

This idiosyncratic approach to literary adaptation dominates the film, as Rivette remains literally true to the source material while slowly worming his way underneath it in order to get at the basic absurdity of this situation. This is a period piece where all the characters look distinctly uncomfortable in their clothes, especially Balibar, who never looks glamorous in the succession of ludicrous dresses she squeezes into; she's a rather frumpy and unappealing duchess. This discomfort is part of Rivette's agenda of deconstruction, and he accentuates the ridiculousness of this all in a way that should make it impossible to look at any straight-faced period piece quite the same again. The sound design is also a crucial element. The film's characteristic onomatopoeia are the "thud" and the "clank," heavy, awkward sounds that correspond especially to the loping gait of the General, who walks with a stiff-legged limp. His heavy footsteps are only one noise in the film's orchestration of incidental sounds, in which footsteps play an especially important part — the General's thumping walk is contrasted, in one scene, against the quiet shuffling of the Duchess' maid, who walks around in socks. Rivette also calls attention to the popping of logs in a fireplace, the rapping of canes, and the creaking of wooden floors loaded with people. One scene, at a grand ball, becomes a comedy in sound as the elegant dancing and string music is accompanied by the constant squeaking of the floor whenever someone moves.

It's odd, but Don't Touch the Axe definitely functions as a comedy, despite the often melodramatic thrust of its narrative. Rivette's whimsical touch is evident everywhere, perhaps most memorably in the scene where two of the General's friends engage in some drunken and utterly inscrutable language games as the Duchess waits impatiently for him outside. These two seem to be making jokes on their own personal level, cracking each other up over variations on the usage of words like "drama" and "stunning." The repetition of these jokes, and the tension built up by Rivette's cross-cutting from this scene to the Duchess waiting outside, culminates until the duo starts to actually seem funny to the audience, rather than just themselves. This same duo provides another of the film's funniest scenes, this time a purely pantomimed one with no dialogue, in which they draw straws to figure out which of the General's friends will have to be disguised as a nun for the convent raid at the end of the film. This is not to say that Rivette disregards the seriousness of his story, and there are moments of surprising pathos, well-played by the two leads, who throughout the second half of the film practically seethe with barely suppressed emotions. Rivette understands the sturm und drang inherent in this story, but this doesn't prevent him from also seeing the humor. In a way, this humor arises because Rivette, unlike other directors of period romances, looks at the conventions and surfaces of this type of film from a distinctly modern perspective, rather than simply accepting the social mores of the time in which the story is set.

Don't Touch the Axe is a delight in every way, a film that functions on its surface level as a straightforward melodramatic romance, even as Rivette plays gleefully with the form of his storytelling in order to infuse the film with his love of gamesmanship and multi-layered constructions. He employs his actors as pieces in this game, and Balibar and Depardieu do an excellent job of delineating the rigid boundaries of their characters, both of whom oscillate between stubborn refusal and open yearning. Balibar especially gives an interesting performance, breathless and flighty, her flute-like voice bringing an otherworldly vibe to her unattainable Duchess. Depardieu is more stoic as the unflappable General, who possesses shadowy connections and nearly unlimited resources but is no less flummoxed by love. Ultimately, though, both characters are simply pawns on Rivette's meticulously arranged chessboard, playing games that have little to do with the story they're ostensibly involved in, and everything to do with the pleasures of narrative deconstruction and the director's sly sense of humor.

Husbands and Wives/Le Corbeau

Husbands and Wives is a perfect combination of the new and the old in Woody Allen's filmmaking, a film that treads very familiar thematic ground even as its style breaks with his past and opens up entirely new possibilities for his art. For Allen, it's a clear case of an old story being told in a new way, and the difference is palpable in every frame of the film. It's one of his loosest, most self-assured works, a compendium of Woody Allen plot points and character traits cast in a new light, as though looked at from an older vantage point as the fond memories of youth. This metatextual element, unusual in Allen's mostly self-contained films, is tipped off right from the very first shot, in which Woody's character, Gabe, watches a TV show about the philosopher who appeared in Crimes and Misdemeanors — in fact, he is watching what was, in the earlier film, a documentary created by the failed filmmaker Cliff Stern, also played by Woody. This moment is thus notable, besides its metafictional appeal, for its subtle note of optimism, suggesting that Cliff had actually managed to get his documentary on TV, so that he was successful after all, at least in the universe represented by this different film. It's a neat gesture, a kind of token extended to one of Woody's more miserable past incarnations, as though to imply that his signature negative outlook had mellowed out a bit and he now allowed for at least the possibility of success and happiness.

To be sure, though, this mellower Woody is otherwise not especially apparent in the film's stormy opener, in which Gabe and his wife Judy (Mia Farrow) are stunned by the announcement that their friends Jack and Sally (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis) are breaking up their long-standing marriage. The couple announces this split almost casually, smiling as they do so and expecting that their friends will simply take it in stride and they'll all go out to dinner afterwards. But Gabe and Judy are not so serene, and Judy especially seems shaken by their friends' break-up — the obvious subtext is that she's disturbed by the realization that long and seemingly stable marriages can shatter so easily and so calmly. The camerawork in these opening scenes mirrors the tension and emotional excess of this encounter, with the camera swaying frantically back and forth from one character to another, achieving the effect of the 180-degree reaction-shot cut without actually cutting. This is Woody's first film with a handheld camera, and the jittery, edgy cinematography by his longtime collaborator Carlo di Palma is perfectly suited to the film's themes of instability and change. It's a very rough film, jagged and raw both in its emotions and its style of presenting them. I commented, after seeing Jean-Luc Godard's contentious interview with Allen in Meetin' WA, that the two filmmakers have very little common ground and very different ways of thinking about movies, and yet Husbands and Wives is the first Allen film where Godard's influence can be felt, at least on a superficial level. The editing is as rough and elliptical as Breathless, with jump cuts in the middle of many scenes and a camera that hardly ever sits still. The technique is particularly used with images of Mia Farrow, whose most emotional scenes are frequently broken up by cuts and ellipses, in much the same manner as Charlotte Rampling's breakdowns were fragmented in Woody's earlier Stardust Memories.

This isn't the only way in which the film refers back to past Allen films. The central issues, of course, have been thoroughly explored in Allen's oeuvre, especially his dramas: love and fidelity, the changing nature of love over the years, the tension between the intellect and the emotions, sexual frigidity and impotence, the ways in which emotional truths can be buried for years before sudden realizations trigger their unearthing. There's also an element of past Allen films in the character of Rain (Juliette Lewis), one of Gabe's students in a creative writing class, who he thinks is a promising student and is obviously attracted to as well. Her character bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Woody's much younger girlfriend in Manhattan, played by Mariel Hemingway. Woody has always been interested in the idea of the romantic relationship as a professor/student bond, and many of his films have positioned him as the wise figure dispensing advice and philosophy to a younger or simply less experienced woman — though usually losing that woman in the end, presumably once the pupil has exceeded her master. Rain fills that role here, but the crucial difference is that Gabe seems to realize the folly of this pattern, and rather than sleepwalk through the usual routine, at the last moment he steps back and wisely says that he sees where this is going, and he'd rather save them both the heartache. It's a surprisingly mature gesture from Allen, a stark contrast to the miserable and pathetic scene he makes at the end of Manhattan when he loses Hemingway's character for good — it's as though he's recognized his own failings, as a filmmaker and a character, and has acknowledged them here. He even has Rain herself criticize his treatment of women in a novel he was writing, in a very cogent and well-stated critique that might just as easily have come from feminist writings about Woody's films and public life.

It's obvious that Woody has grown accustomed to the sense of loss and loneliness that accompanies the departure of love; with age and maturity, he's come to look at it as simply a part of life, and this film faces both love and loss with an equanimity never before present in his work. Nevertheless, he can't resist including just one sweepingly romantic moment in the film anyway, a loving depiction of the single passionate kiss between Gabe and Rain, set in a rainstorm, during a blackout at her 21st birthday party. Woody has always been fond of rain — probably why he named a character after it — and the scene where a man and a woman are caught in a storm together and bond because of it recurs throughout his filmography (there's one in this film too, when Judy and her new love interest Michael (Liam Neeson) run laughing inside from the rain). Blackouts also hold a special place for Allen, and the one in September is one of the most magical sequences he's crafted, a sepia-tinged moment of candor and warmth set in the flicker of candlelight, with Sam Waterston and Diane Wiest letting out their suppressed love for one another. The similar scene between Allen and Lewis in Husbands and Wives clearly evokes the earlier movie, a blackout in which the moody lighting and romance of the atmosphere charges the air and brings out suppressed truths, resulting in the electric moment of that one kiss, with lightning flashing in the window behind the couple. The crucial difference, of course, is that at the end of this scene the lights come on, and once out of the darkness of the moment, Woody simply steps away.

This is a complex and multi-layered character study, one in which all the characters are given a chance to develop and come to their own conclusions about love, marriage, and sexuality. The film adopts a somewhat "objective" stance towards these separate conclusions, positioning the film as a kind of psychological study, with an offscreen interviewer directly addressing the characters in private sessions, and often providing dispassionate narration for many of the film's events. The narrator even tracks down past lovers, interviewing them to provide information not otherwise known to many of the main characters. This objective distance leaves the film's denouement largely up in the air, as each of the characters strikes his or her own balance on the subjects of love, sex, and romance, finally tamping down many of the more extreme sentiments and emotions briefly allowed free rein during the course of the film and settling on more comfortable domestic arrangements. This is a witty, mordantly funny film, one that finds humor in even the darkest of romantic situations, and one that promises at least a hint of stability and comfort amidst the insanities and incompatibilities of relationships.

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Le Corbeau is a fierce, dark, stridently misanthropic film — that is to say, a film entirely characteristic of its director, the notoriously bleak Henri-Georges Clouzot. Made in 1943 at the height of the German occupation of France, and thus the subject of much controversy for its director after the war, Le Corbeau certainly doesn't paint the French bourgeois in a pretty light. In fact, a light is the film's central metaphor, a swinging light bulb that represents the shifting moral boundary lines between good and evil, symbolizing both the internal conflicts within all people and the larger external battles on a societal level. This relativist morality is the festering core of a film built on ugliness, lies, and rampant corruption, as a small provincial town is torn apart by a mysterious letter-writer called the Raven, who's methodically exposing all of the townspeople's darkest secrets to one another.

The focus of much of this antipathy is local doctor Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay), who attains a reputation as an abortionist, a womanizer, and possibly a crook through these letters, accusations at least partially bolstered by his obvious disdain for children and his often abrupt manner. As the center of the film, he becomes its de facto hero, but a very unlikeable hero he is, and one not entirely above suspicion either — it's not at all clear just how much of a relationship he has with the wife (Micheline Francey) of the hospital supervisor Vorzet (Pierre Larquay). The film spends much of its running time systematically raising suspicions about virtually everyone in its large cast of characters. At times, it seems like it's going to turn out that everyone in the village is sending these nasty letters to each other. The attention briefly focuses on a puritanical nun (Héléna Manson), but when she too is exonerated by the appearance of a new letter from the Raven, the town is nearly torn apart by the mutual suspicions, anger, and barely suppressed emotions.

As a portrait of the ugliness beneath the bourgeois facade, this film is nearly unmatched. Clouzot maintains the suspense and festering antagonism so well that the ultimate resolution can only come as a disappointment, and the final act sort of defuses much of the moral ambiguity and dark emotions of the rest of the film. In the famous scene of the swaying light bulb, light and dark are represented as not only coexisting, but intimately related, with good shaping evil and vice versa, just as the light areas define the shadows and the darkness delineates the bright spots left untouched. This interplay of good and evil, so potent and pungent throughout the film, is largely thrown out the window for the unconvincing denouement. In fact, Clouzot's films seemed to be plagued by these types of inappropriate endings, like the feel-good resolution of Quai des orfèvres or the ironic O. Henry-esque twist at the end of Wages of Fear. It's as though the dark ideas and human ugliness raised by Clouzot's films can't find an appropriate expression in the final moments, and so he either retreats into a Hollywood-style tying-up of loose ends, or else opts for a non-sequitur with little relation to the rest of the film.

Even with this ending hampering its impact, Le Corbeau is a dark and gritty exposé of bourgeois pettiness, as well as, at the height of the German occupation and despite the outcry against Clouzot's supposed "collaboration," very likely a coded denunciation of the divisive effect of informants. It's a taut suspense film, an engaging mystery in which all the characters are guilty, even the ones who are ultimately cleared of the crime. The stain of guilt never truly leaves any of these characters behind. They are all complicit in the Raven's crimes, because they are all complicit in the network of betrayals, blackmails, blacklisting, and petty gossip that spreads in the wake of these letters. Guilt and innocence, like light/dark and good/evil, thus constitute another of the film's central dichotomies, although in this case Clouzot resolves the dialectic with much greater finality. Good and evil, light and dark, may be ambiguous quantities, subject to change and present in people to greater or lesser degrees. But, Clouzot clarifies, all these people are simply, finally guilty.

RoboCop/Carmen Jones/Lessons Of Darkness

I haven't seen RoboCop since I was a kid, and then only on crappy dubbed and scrubbed TV broadcasts, so it was practically like I hadn't seen the film at all. Since my recent experience with the sublime Black Book tipped me off that there's more to Paul Verhoeven than I expected, I figured it was about time to revisit this old classic. And I'm very glad I did. There's a lot going on in this film beyond its surface-level ultra-violent action, although of course the action is great and there's plenty of it. Verhoeven's wry, satirical perspective elevates what might have been a typical 80s schlock-fest into an enduring classic, a portrait of creeping totalitarianism at work. The titular RoboCop is actually Murphy (Peter Weller), a cop who has a fatal run-in with a group of notorious cop-killing drug-dealers. His body is then used as fodder by the corporation OCP, a Halliburton-like independent contractor that's taken over management of the Detroit police force in addition to their usual line of supplying military weaponry. OCP transforms Murphy into RoboCop, a wholly prosthetic cyborg with only trace memories of his old life, suppressed by the rigorous programming by which the corporation's scientists attempted to transform him into the "perfect" cop: dedicated to the letter of the law but without any emotions to interfere with its application. This is a frightening proposition, the idea that the perfect cop should be almost inhuman, but what's even scarier is that RoboCop is himself an improvement on the company's other idea of the perfect cop, a robot with absolutely no human elements who winds up accidentally killing a senior manager due to a glitch. The film posits a conflict between the inhuman and the marginally more human, and forces the audience to root for the rigid RoboCop simply because he at least shows traces of his former humanity.

Within this story, Verhoeven works mostly with the small touches, especially the not-so-subtle media commentary contained in the frequent glimpses of television news and unfunny comedy shows. The recurring shots of a bizarre sitcom where the pervy main character has the catch phrase "I'll buy that for a dollar" are a riot, skewering the inanity of pop culture with total believability. Does anyone think that couldn't be a real TV show? Even more pointed are the TV news clips, in which constantly smiling drones recite both tragic and ridiculous news with equal dismissiveness and flippancy. More subtly, these news blurbs provide hints of the darker subtexts at work in the culture, particularly the insinuation that the nation's current president is using an orbiting missile defense satellite as a base to kill his political enemies with controlled laser blasts, positioned in the media as "accidents." It's both hilarious and terrifying to see the grinning news anchors describe the laser-triggered explosions as accidental, while the graphic in the corner of the screen seems to indicate perfectly targeted shots at diverse locations. This kind of detail, almost subliminal at times, is packed into the margins of the film, suggesting the very scary and dystopian world that could both create RoboCop and decide that he's a desirable solution to its problems.

What's equally striking about RoboCop is the extent to which it's actually a dark comedy rather than a straightforward action flick. Many of the scenes that should play out as action showcases wind up being really funny, especially the scene where RoboCop first battles it out with the ED-209 military droid that preceded him. This robotic battle machine is equipped with an animalistic growl, presumably to intimidate criminals, but it is apparently not programmed to be able to climb stairs, and RoboCop manages to elude it by simply running down a staircase. The robot then tentatively tries to follow — and the scene where it tests out the stairs with its ill-eqiuipped feet surprisingly anthropomorphizes it — but winds up on its back, squealing and crying like a baby and banging its legs on the floor in a robotic tantrum. The film also boasts a scenery-chewing parade of stock villains, including Kurtwood Smith as their sociopathic leader and pre-Twin Peaks turns from both Miguel Ferrer (sleazy and leering as ever) and a gleefully creepy Ray Wise.

Although much of the film is as over-the-top as one would expect, there are moments of quiet empathy in which RoboCop's slow process of discovering his past is documented with real warmth and pathos. This is, amidst all the bluster and explosions, a very sad character, a man who died and left behind his beloved wife and child, but whose consciousness nonetheless continues to exist in some perfunctory form, trapped in the guts of a robotic shell. The scene where he explores his abandoned former house, now up for sale by an annoying real estate agent who appears only on TV monitors, is beautifully handled, as RoboCop's tour of the house triggers poignant memories from his past. Verhoeven manages to dig deep into a story that in other hands would require only numerous clichés and lots of blood splatter. The result is a film that isn't stingy with the expected blood — in fact, it's sometimes shockingly gory — but which also searches for multiple layers of meaning within RoboCop's story: not only political and social commentary, but addressing the question of what it is to be human and what separates a feeling human consciousness from a machine.

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Georges Bizet's classic opera Carmen is a primal tale, a story that's been told and retold, its elements rearranged and cast into different contexts, time and time again in various media and forms. This version, Carmen Jones, is a distinctly American slant on the tale, directed by Otto Preminger based on the successful Broadway play, and populated by an all-black cast. It's a hugely promising premise, especially with Dorothy Dandridge as Carmen as Harry Belafonte as her luckless beau Joe. The leads have just the right chemistry and smoldering sexuality to infuse this Carmen adaptation with raw energy and sensual sizzle whenever they're on screen. This version relocates the story to a Southern military base, where Joe is a soldier about to leave for flying school, and planning to marry his longtime sweetheart Cindy Lou (Olga James) before he leaves. But he's sidetracked by an assignment to bring the tempestuous Carmen, who has set her sights on him, to the local jail after she gets into a vicious fight with another woman. This detour quickly ends with Joe and Carmen in bed together, triggering the beginning of a stormy romance that leads the pair to Chicago, on the run with Joe AWOL from the military after fighting with an officer, where Carmen promptly deserts him for a prizefighter (Joe Adams) who likes to throw his money around freely.

It's a familiar story, and its archetypal quality is exactly its appeal. It casts the virgin against the whore, the small-town girl against the worldly wild woman, and nothing sums it up better than the saccharine song Joe sings to Cindy Lou shortly before he leaves her, praising her because she's just like his mom (hello, Oedipus!). Much has been made of the change of context from Spain to black America, but in point of fact it doesn't make much of a difference to the story, which plays out the same way no matter where it's set (as Godard proved, perhaps definitively, with his abstracted version of the story in Prénom: Carmen). There's not much specifically black or specifically American about this story or its treatment here, other than the window dressing of the scenery and the characters' surroundings and occupations. And the music, taken directly from the Broadway play with Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics, is often awkwardly shoehorned into these surroundings, usually falling flat and fizzling even as the characters themselves are sizzling.

The main problem is that the music simply lacks the sexual charge contained in the performances by Dandridge and Belafonte, which drastically hampers the film whenever the characters start bursting into song. In the scene set at Pastor's Cafe, where one of Carmen's friends (Pearl Bailey) sings "Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum," everything about the song's lyrics and the jitterbugging dancers in the background suggests a wild party, but the music is curiously tepid once it dispenses with an opening drum solo. And although the drummer is present in the background throughout the scene, and though the song explicitly calls for wild, rhythmic party music, the orchestrations are as flat and sickly as can be, a wan string section with no trace of the frantic drum beat that the drummer can be seen beating out on his kit. This curious lack of synchronization in the music carries through to the whole film, and even Belafonte and Dandridge get their voices dubbed by trained opera singers for the songs. The result is a near total disconnection between the music and the drama of the story, so that the music seems to be happening on a whole other plane, often sounding like it's being beamed in with no relation to the characters supposedly singing it. There's no trace of the sexual urgency that the leads bring to the film, no trace of the raw emotionality and desperation in every second of their performances — Carmen's fierce independence and fickle love, Joe's increasingly angry lust, even Cindy Lou's pathetic yearning for the man who pushed her aside. The weak and disconnected performances of the songs drain all this emotional fervor from the soundtrack, leaving it to the spoken portions of the film to get across the urgency of the narrative.

Of course, whenever the music stops, there are plenty of effective moments, especially in the film's second half. Dandridge is responsible for much of what's best in this film, and her loose, sexy performance can only be gawked at. When she stretches out her long bare legs towards Joe, huskily telling him to "blow on 'em" to dry her toenail polish, it's an impossibly suggestive moment, one of the cinema's best love scenes. Her performance is filled out by many such details and moments, from the sneering way she holds her lips to the hip-swaying swagger of her walk to the distinctive drawl of her voice. She even manages to get across the film's best song, Carmen's anthem "Dat's Love," by the sheer energy of her grinning performance, as she lip-syncs the telling lyrics: "You go for me and I'm taboo/ But if you're hard to get I go for you/ And if I do, den you are through, boy/ My baby, dat's de end of you." This song, with its contagious melody, is perhaps the one exception to the unbearable flatness of much of the music, and Preminger is wise to keep returning to it throughout the film, its presence a constant reminder of Carmen's predatory outlook on love and desire. It returns as snatches of string melody, bits of sung lyrics, and most memorably, with Carmen whistling it throughout a scene with Joe as she preps to go out and visit the boxer who she's already decided to go for.

Preminger's Carmen Jones is ultimately a bit of a disappointment, though the sheer chemistry and raw power of the leads is nearly enough to revive it when its lackluster incorporation of the music threatens to drag it down. It's an interesting film primarily for the performances of Dandridge and Belafonte, who electrify the screen so completely that it's easy to forget about anything else when they're on screen.

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Lessons Of Darkness is one of my favorite Werner Herzog films, and probably the best example of his distinctive approach to the thin line between documentary and fiction. Nowhere in his filmography has his blurring of this line been more complete than in this terse, mysterious, and evocative film, made in Kuwait and Iraq shortly after the first Gulf War, in the immediate wake of the Iraqi army's destructive retreat from occupied Kuwait. But despite this setting, the film is almost stridently apolitical — aside from a pair of scenes in which Arab women describe the tortures of Saddam Hussein's regime — and ahistorical in its treatment of the war, the region it occurred in, and the world situation and events that caused it. None of this is within the purview of Herzog's art; he has never been a polemical filmmaker, or even a particularly political one, preferring to examine particular people and places and events in terms of their relationship to grand archetypes and ideas. He is a director of the grandiose and the large-scale, even if he most often finds these elements in the specific megalomanias of individual people.

In this case, though, man is almost entirely absent from the film, and certainly individual man. The film's only speaking characters, besides Herzog's stoic and, as the film progresses, increasingly sparse, narration, are the two Arab women already mentioned, and they are not even translated, as Herzog simply describes their stories in his own words. The film's other people are silent, mostly men working on extinguishing the oil fires that Iraqi soldiers lit in the aftermath of the war, and they are glimpsed usually from a distance, covered in thick layers of protective clothing and framed in silhouette against the towering blazes. This abstraction from the human elements of the story allows Herzog to transform this documentary into a kind of science-fiction narrative about an alien world, and right from the start his narration enforces this idea. Herzog's films have often stressed the absurdity and hostility of nature, and the ultimate extreme for him — one he has explored in several other films as well, most notably Fata Morgana, this film's direct antecedent — is the idea that our planet is alien to its own inhabitants. To this end, he has captured some of the most stunning and strangely beautiful images imaginable: lakes of oil, towering blazes that fill the sky with black smoke, a desert strewn with bones and mysterious metal wreckage, strange machines completing inscrutable tasks in the midst of this hellish landscape. It's no accident that the film is divided into chapters with titles like "Satan's National Park," or that Herzog's voiceover quotes liberally from the Book of Revelations; this is an apocalyptic vision.

The emphasis, of course, is on vision, since once the introductory few chapters are over, Herzog's voiceover recedes more and more into silence, and the film is propelled simply by the overpowering strength of its visuals and the sweeping, operatic music that accompanies them. Herzog spends much of the film up in a helicopter, dodging in between plumes of smoke and swooping across reflective lakes of oil. These images are equal parts horrifying and awe-inspiring, and Herzog presents them with a straightforward sensibility that lingers on each image, the camera slowly panning around these fiery infernos and giving the film a leisurely, contemplative pace. On the ground level, Herzog spends one entire chapter (the film's shortest but perhaps best) down at eye level with a large pool of oil that is bubbling in the heat. The dancing, bouncing droplets of oil, percolating with rhythmic pops, are like visual music, and the only sounds are the pops and burbling provided by the heated oil as it froths and spits up protuberances from the ground. Elsewhere, the film spends time with the men who are trying to extinguish the blazes, and Herzog treats these men as alien creatures, swaddled in thick protective suits and acting in mysterious and inexplicable ways, as when they re-ignite several oil plumes that had been put out.

It's perhaps impossible to overstate the unsettling beauty that Herzog has achieved here. In many ways, it's a very pure beauty, with every trace of political context effectively drained from the situations being depicted. Herzog has, of course, been criticized for this, but specific political engagement is not his style, and in any case there is something much deeper at work in this film, beyond the specific political events it is depicting. Lessons Of Darkness is, rather than a commentary on the first Gulf War, an impassioned meditation on the fallout of any war, a chronicle of the ways in which man's extreme violence has made nature itself alien to us. On the alien planet encountered in this film, a horrific war has set the ground against the planet's inhabitants, has ravaged the surface so thoroughly that it is engulfed in flames. Herzog finds an awesome beauty in these images, but also a profound sadness, a sense that we can never experience the world as our natural habitat, that it will always be strange and hostile to us because of the ways in which we uneasily coexist with it. Nature, for Herzog, is both beautiful and scary, and the same holds true for the works of man.