Torn Curtain

Torn Curtain is a late thriller from Alfred Hitchcock, and it represents an unfortunate step back from the increasingly complex, psychologically dense films he'd been making in the late 50s and early 60s. Rather than capturing the apocalyptic atmosphere of The Birds or the penetrative character studies of Marnie and Vertigo, Torn Curtain is more of a throwback to the kind of relentlessly plot-based potboilers Hitch was always capable of churning out. Even in that respect, though, the film falls short of the standard set by the director's best thrillers. Excepting a handful of typically Hithcockian moments, mostly in the film's first half, this is a singularly dull, joyless movie from a man whose previous films were anything but.

This story hinges on a somewhat flimsier premise than is usual for Hitchcock. Michael (Paul Newman) is an American scientist trying to develop a device to counteract nuclear warheads, but he has reached a snag in the project and it is put on hold by the American government. As a result, he publicly defects to Communist East Germany, where he promises to help the Germans develop this defensive weapon instead, while his innocent fiancée Sarah (Julie Andrews) is mortified, reluctantly following him only in order to find out what's going on. Of course, the problem with this scenario should be clear from the beginning, mainly because it's instantly obvious what's really going on here. Paul Newman playing a genuine defector to the Soviets? In a 1966 Hollywood film? At the height of the Cold War? Yeah, sure. Thankfully, Hitch seems to realize that his premise won't be fooling anyone, and though he wastes a good half-hour at the beginning of the film planting the false leads to make the audience think the impossible, he soon enough comes clean. Michael, as it turns out, is not a no-good Commie, but a patriot who simply wants to get close enough to the German scientist Lindt (Ludwig Donath) to discover the last crucial formula he needs to complete his weapon — for the United States, of course.

What's interesting here is that Hitchcock's infamous "MacGuffin" is, in this film, simply an abstract idea. There is no physical prize that Michael is racing for, no secret documents he seeks to ferret out of the country. The object he's seeking can only be described as a thought, a thought that quite possibly only exists within the unique brain of Professor Lindt, the ingenious nuclear scientist who has, Michael believes, solved the problem that he himself cannot manage to solve. Considering the limitations of actually showing this struggle in a visual medium, Hitchcock comes up with a brilliant solution, consisting of a surprisingly taut sequence in which the characters simply write mathematical formulas on blackboards, with Michael slowly pushing the professor into revealing the secret. As MacGuffins go, it's all faintly ridiculous, a far cry from the famous wine cellar of Notorious or the cigarette lighter from Strangers on a Train. Just two men, scribbling on a blackboard; that Hitchcock manages to extract such drama from it at all is remarkable, even if the whole thing falls apart on close scrutiny.

It's equally interesting that Michael is depicted as needing Lindt at all, considering the film's over-the-top Cold War politics. After all, is the American scientist really admitting that he is simply incapable of figuring out what the Soviets have perfected with seemingly little effort? Lindt treats Michael as if he's a child who understands nothing, which raises the whole question of how Michael ever got so far in his research project to begin with. These plot holes and deficiencies mar the film, but not as much as the more serious structural problems with the film as a whole. This is a curiously limp affair from the normally rigid Hitchcock, stretching out to two long, plodding hours that drag in a way his films seldom do. This is especially true after the blackboard sequence. Once Michael gets the formula from Lindt, he makes his getaway along with Sarah, but what should've been a taut, suspenseful series of tight escapes, racing against time and the East German police, is instead numbing and dull. For a seemingly endless amount of time, Hitchcock traps his two protagonists in a fake bus operated by an underground German organization, slowly making its rounds towards Berlin against a patently fake rear projection background. This is not even the interesting artificiality of Marnie, which utilized rear projection and painted backgrounds in fascinating ways, but the sheer uncinematic laziness of a director who's run out of visual ideas: a startling idea to apply to Hitchcock. The obstacles placed in the couple's path — a roadblock, a robbery by army deserters, a shrill woman on the bus who doesn't want to help the Americans — seem contrived and half-hearted, as do the escapes that Hitchcock manufactures for them. It's a Hitchcock chase sequence with all the energy drained from it.

Things get even worse when the couple arrives in Berlin and falls in with the Polish Countess Kuchinska (Lila Kedrova), who provides the film's worst extended sequence by far, as well as some of the worst melodramatic, stereotypical acting I've ever seen. Her tearjerking portrayal of a desperate emigrant seeking entry into the United States seems bluntly intended as a bit of pro-capitalist propaganda and nothing more. This is made even more clear by the way she insults virtually every aspect of Communist society she can think to mention: the people are "ignorant," the coffee is awful, the cigarettes are only half-filled with tobacco. Hitchcock takes a strange stance in relation to this ridiculous character, half seeming to mock her — superficially, for her heavy accent and overstated makeup — even as he accentuates the heartbreak she feels because she can't get to America. The Americans, of course, pity her, agreeing to help. The fact that this pointless and offensive scene comes as a long interruption of the film's escape sequence only makes it more unbearable, as even the negligible tension of the bus ride was preferable to this static nonsense.


Once this diversion is over, things pick up again, but the remainder of the film still holds little of interest. There's a workmanlike suspense scene in a theater that recalls numerous similar scenes, in theaters and crowded rooms, in previous Hitchcock films from Saboteur to The Man Who Knew Too Much. Derivative as it is, this sequence is nevertheless handled beautifully, with Hitchcock systematically switching camera angles around Michael and Sarah, who are sitting in the middle of a row in the theater, unaware that around them German soldiers are filing into the theater to apprehend them. Hitch cuts between several different angles on the couple, showing the various entryways around the theater each filling with soldiers in turn, occasionally panning away from the couple to reveal more soldiers entering behind them. This is a typical Hitchcock suspense scene, and even as a retread of previous highlights, it's a welcome relief from the otherwise uninterrupted tedium around it.

Fortunately, the film is not a total loss, even if its second act is largely a bore. There are many characteristically Hitchcockian sequences in the film's first half, into which it seems the great director poured most of his enthusiasm for this particular project. Best of all, and perhaps the sequence that stands out in memory the most, is an all-too-brief sequence at a museum where Michael attempts to shake the East German agent Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling) who has been tailing him. Shot within the rigidly geometric confines of a cavernous building, created almost entirely with matte paintings, this is a highly idiosyncratic chase sequence in which the two men are never in the same shot together. Each of them seems entirely alone walking among the massive pillars of this multi-leveled maze, and after a while Gromek is not even seen at all; Michael only hears his footsteps reverberating in the empty chambers. Hitchcock keeps his camera at skewed but static angles that accentuate the deep space around Michael. One memorable shot simultaneously peers down a staircase and into the long space of the room above these descending stairs; a single image seems to encompass multiple spaces. In fact, there are several shots here in which the frame encompasses multiple levels of the museum at once, in impressive geometric compositions that often seem to rival M.C. Escher with their warped sense of perspective. Coupled with a sound design that emphasizes each of Gromek's heavy, echoing footfalls, these distinctive visuals make this an unforgettable scene of suspense.

Almost as unforgettable is the agonizing, shockingly brutal sequence in which Michael, together with a woman (Carolyn Conwell) from the democratic underground, attempts to kill Gromek once the agent discovers Michael's status as a double agent. This is a remarkably violent and realistic scene for the normally reserved Hitchcock, as well as an incredibly physical one. This murder is not an easy affair, not a simple matter of a gunshot and a spurt of blood. Rather, Gromek is violently stabbed, strangled, battered with a shovel and a metal pan, and finally shoved into an oven headfirst with the gas on, and held there until he dies. Hitchcock presents this entire sequence in a frantic montage, cutting from a haunting closeup of Conwell's face, a knife held in front of her, to closeups on Gromek's shoulder with the knife blade sticking out of it, or to the agent's fingers tightening their grip around Michael's neck. The final part of the scene, as Michael and the woman hold Gromek's head in the oven, is filmed from above, a long sustained shot of the two struggling people, with only Gromek's hands visible, flailing in the air at first and finally coming to a rest. This is a scene that makes one sit up and take notice, the kind of moment that signals a film where mortality will not be taken lightly, where each life snuffed out comes with a cost and where the brutality of murder, even necessary murder in the service of a "good" cause, is considered worthy of contemplation. Unfortunately, the film never follows up on this scene, which as a result is curiously divorced from the rest of the film. Gromek's murder has narrative consequences, triggering the flight from the authorities in the second half, but there are no moral consequences, and there is no deeper consideration of the issues inevitably raised by this scene's fearless inquiry into the truth of violence.

This failure to follow up on the implications of this scene is mirrored in the failure to follow through on the distinctive Hitchcockian visual style of the film's first half. There are many striking and attention-getting shots here, not only during the museum chase and Gromek's murder, but for instance in a scene where the German scientists interrogate Michael and Sarah to learn what they know about their country's nuclear secrets. Hitch films this by alternating between closeups of the two Americans and an alarming deep-focus shot of their interrogators which reveals five grim panelists sitting at the bottom of a tiered room, at the top of which sits a single bearded figure: Professor Lindt, it turns out. This shot has the kind of wry, subtle humor that Hitch was justly famous for, and it's particularly funny since the scene is edited as though it's an intimate conversation between two parties, with 180-degree cuts from closeups of Sarah's earnest face, with this impassive panel as the reverse shot. The second half of the film largely abandons this kind of visual subtlety, opting instead for the cheesy rear projection of the overlong bus sequence, or the claustrophobic talking heads montage in the couple's conversation with the annoyingly eccentric Countess. Torn Curtain winds up being half a Hitchcock thriller, the other half having been allowed to simply flutter away into nothingness, all its interesting threads and ideas dropped, its mechanical plot grinding to a halt as though something were stuck in the gears.

La rupture

The title of Claude Chabrol's La rupture is a wonderfully slippery phrase for a wonderfully slippery movie. It refers, or seems to refer, to an incident that occurs, with shocking, sudden violence, within the first minute of the film. The struggling writer Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot), son of a rich bourgeoisie family, wakes up one morning, walks into the kitchen, and without saying a single word, brutally assaults his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) and their son, until Hélène finally manages to subdue him with a frying pan. As is typical of Chabrol, this scene sets the tone of the film right from the start. The first few moments of the film are quiet and peaceful, with Hélène cheerfully preparing for her day and feeding her son. The attack itself, coming so suddenly with virtually no set-up, is thus doubly startling and disorienting, creating a stark rupture in the fabric of the placid domesticity that existed before Charles — shirtless, hulking, wild-eyed — emerged from his room. This incident of violence, so frightening and abrupt, is the film's first sign of fault lines.

This attack does indeed hang over the rest of the film, and yet it is not the only rupture that occurs in the course of the film. The title could just as easily refer to Chabrol's aesthetic approach to this narrative of domestic fracturing, which might be described as a system of tiny ruptures in the narrative continuity and the cinematic conventions. Chabrol's characteristic editing can only be described as abrupt, jarring, even disorienting at times. His choices in editing and camera movement never fail to call attention to themselves, but they do so in ways that also subvert the usual psychoanalytical readings of camera movement and film techniques. His choices in constructing his film rarely reveal the emotional tenor of the scene, nor are they meant to suggest anything about the interior states of his characters, which are usually only as apparent as the characters themselves wish to make them. Rather, his editing in particular often seems to be governed by a utilitarian philosophy that has little patience for the niceties of continuity and spatial laws. Chabrol cuts directly from an interior shot in which Hélène says, "We'll take the tram," to a point-of-view shot out the front window of said tram, directed downwards at the rails speeding by below. Likewise, no sooner does Hélène say she is going to see her injured son than, in the very next shot, she is standing beside his bed, already in mid-motion as she leans down towards him. Such direct, sudden cuts frequently move Chabrol's characters from place to place, so much so that on the very rare occasion when he uses a dissolve to indicate a passage of time or place, it seems inappropriate, a lapse into a much more conventional cinematic vocabulary.

The film's other crucial "rupture" is in terms of point of view, which remains puzzlingly ambiguous throughout the film. Hélène is undoubtedly the story's protagonist at the outset, reacting to this brutal assault and to the remarkably hostile reaction that she receives from those around her, who seem to blame her for the events and for hurting her husband, rather than the other way around. But at some point, Chabrol subtly, sneakily diverts the audience's attention from this besieged woman, shifting the film's point of view onto Paul (Jean-Pierre Cassel), the shady character who's hired by Charles' rich father Régnier (Michel Bouquet) to discredit Hélène. At this point, the film becomes something of a low-key thriller, as Paul attempts to gather evidence to paint the saintly Hélène as a whore, a drunk, a drug addict, a child molester: anything in order to make her appear unfit to take care of her son. Chabrol completes this shift in perspective so smoothly, so quietly, that one barely even realizes at first that Hélène has been shuffled into the background, while Paul has taken over the place of the protagonist.

The audience is thus placed in a strange relationship with respect to Paul. He's a detestable character in so many ways, and furthermore attempting to smear and ruin a thoroughly good and sympathetic woman. And yet Chabrol realizes the sway that a strong central protagonist can have over audiences, with a potential to redeem or at least complicate the reception of even the sleaziest anti-hero. He allows Paul's charming and warm outward manner to seduce the audience even as it earns him the trust of Hélène herself. Nor is Paul entirely unsympathetic. In fact, he is a dark mirror of Hélène in terms of the film's emphasis on economics and class divisions. He is, like her, struggling on the edges of poverty, doing whatever it takes to make ends meet. Just as she once worked, briefly, as a stripper and now serves as a barmaid — both careers that automatically lowered her in the eyes of Charles' class-conscious parents — Paul is irrevocably lower class. Furthermore, there's a strong suggestion that Paul was himself a victim of the ruthless business practices of Régnier; his promised reward for his dirty work will be a well-paid managerial job, a chance to return to the rich man's business empire. Paul is placed in the kind of position that would normally be reserved for the hero of a spy thriller. The focus is on him, not Hélène, as he attempts to weave the traps and complicated plans that will undo her. It seems inevitable that he will succeed, that his schemes will go off without a hitch, just as they always do for the master spy trying to outwit his nemesis.


At this point, with Paul seemingly in complete control and ready to spring his devious trap, the film switches, in its final act, back to a point of view more closely aligned with Hélène, the original and true protagonist. Chabrol's feat here is to construct a series of illusions that are designed to fall apart completely once the point of view returns to Hélène. There's one last wonderful sequence, after Hélène coolly rejects Paul's dim-witted attempts to rope her into his convoluted scheme, when the crestfallen henchman scurries around, desperately trying to straighten up after the mess he's made, literally cramming the evidence of his endeavors into his closet. It's a complete deconstruction of the film's secondary protagonist, this slimy man who briefly seemed to be deviously clever but is revealed as insufficient to the task in the face of Hélène's calm, reserved goodness. It's also a gleeful subversion of the conventional thriller plotline, in which the hero or heroine is inevitably forced to do absolutely illogical things in order to comply with the dictates of the screenwriter. This film's heroine, refreshingly, reacts with intelligence and rightful suspicion, thereby completely disintegrating Paul's laughably absurd plot, which might itself have been scripted by a Hollywood genre scribe.

Paul's plot fails, then, because he is relying on a Hollywood-stupid adversary, but also because his deceitful evil can ultimately not measure up to the good in the world, and in Hélène. This goodness radiates from her throughout the film, as Audran delivers a stunning, restrained performance. This woman represents one half of the film's dissection of that essential myth of femininity, the Madonna/whore complex. She is a saintly creature, unshaken by tragedy, always ready to face each challenge with her seemingly unlimited reserves of strength. As she says towards the end of the film, spitting it like a curse at the increasingly unraveling Paul, "I am tired, but I still have my strength." It's a fitting line for a woman who is the embodiment of perseverance and constancy, an eternal mother figure willing to do anything to protect her child. If Hélène is the film's Madonna, its whore is undoubtedly Paul's girlfriend Emilie (Marguerite Cassan), a creature of such pure, unfiltered sexuality that she is naked or nearly naked in virtually every scene in which she appears. She is continually throwing herself at the disinterested Paul, who more and more seems simply bored with her unfettered sensuality, and perversely attracted to the untainted Hélène. Emilie is woman stripped, quite literally, of everything but a raw sexual drive. At one point, when Paul asks her what she's thinking, she simply smiles lasciviously, prompting his reply: "That's all you ever think about."

These are, of course, the two poles of conventional media representation for women, and Chabrol navigates the film's proto-feminist sentiments in typically interesting ways, drawing out the complexity and strength of Hélène's vision of womanhood. In fact, far from being the simplified "Madonna" figure, she is a fully fleshed-out woman, capable of great strength, great independence, mothering instincts, and even remarkable passion, as we finally see towards the film's end as the depth of her feelings for Charles are revealed in a scene of pure melodrama. Society is all too willing to slap a much simpler label on Hélène, tagging her as a whore for her past as a stripper or for her pending divorce. Society would much rather she was as easy to identify and classify as Emilie, who in fact is a pure cartoon, a hollowed-out male fantasy projection. The film's opposition of these two "types" is thus, not only a Madonna/whore dichotomy, but a contrast between a "real" woman, with all her attendant complexity, and a purely fictional construction intended to elicit sexual urges and nothing more. It's no coincidence that Paul's apartment, in addition to housing the perpetually naked Emilie, is papered with photos clipped from porno magazines; Emilie originates from the same source.

If the film mostly focuses on these central conflicts, particularly the tense and antagonistic relationship between Paul and Hélène, there is also a lot going on in the margins as well. Chabrol has crammed the film with a weird, quirky supporting cast, ranging from a morally censorious landlady (Annie Cordy) to a hammy actor with a much more expansive, humanistic view of morality (Mario David) to the trio of gossipy old women who, like a Greek chorus, comment on the action and come to life as avenging harpies or guardian angels in the film's hallucinogenic final section. La rupture is an unsettling masterpiece for Chabrol, a film that's at times shocking, at times darkly funny — especially during a ludicrous but satisfying denouement that needs to be seen to be believed — and always piercing in its satirical insights about class, gender, economics, and relationships.

Noroît (une vengeance)

The films of Jacques Rivette have always placed plot in a somewhat secondary relationship to the other elements of the cinema, but never has this been more true or more obvious than in the hallucinatory, baffling Noroît (une vengeance). The film seems to exist almost entirely in terms of individual scenes, which stand apart from each other with a willful refusal to cohere into any overarching plot. Nevertheless, there is a narrative, of sorts, that carries through the film — Geraldine Chaplin as the avenging Morag, enacting her bloody revenge on the pirate gang who murdered her brother (or lover maybe) — but it's far less important than the way individual scenes play out within this broad context. And things play out, inevitably, in as strange and unsettling a manner as possible. Rivette sets up shop early on in a castle fortress, populated by his massive cast of mostly female pirates, with only a few token men on the fringes. It's a story of intrigue in which the players' motivations aren't necessarily clear. Everybody in the castle seems to have a story, and a scheme, but Rivette seldom focuses on the root causes of these double-crosses, games of treachery, and violent uprisings. It's enough, for him, that they happen, that they drive these characters into confrontations and altercations that give his weaving camera a chance to document the tensions and interplay between his actors.

With Duelle, Noroît was meant to form part of a four-film series, though the project collapsed before the other two films could materialize. And like Duelle, this film is built around these systems of interaction, expanding the previous film's rigorous rotation of duets into larger groupings. The relationships formed and dissolved here are also infinitely more mysterious, as Morag infiltrates the base of the pirate queen Giula (Bernadette Lafont), aided by the duplicitous Erika (Kika Markham). The castle is teeming with women, a huge and unwieldy cast with enigmatic purposes and affiliations, multiple murder plots and quests for treasure overlapping and intersecting one another at all times. Rivette gets almost uniformly excellent performances from these actresses, many of whom frequently seem to be improvising, vacillating between playfulness and dead-serious (if obscure) drama. Rivette's camera is constantly moving through this web of deceit and cross-purposes, but even he can't catch everything, and at times he seems to deliberately keep things obtuse or unexplained. What does Morag whisper to Elisabeth Lafont (Bernadette's daughter, here playing her niece and heiress) while running her hands through her hair? What's with the scene where Morag's supposedly dead brother returns to her and passionately kisses her? Why are there two Giulas in the film's final scenes? What is the meaning of the mysterious red stone with its tremendous magical power? There are few answers. This last element, at least, is seemingly carried over from the moon goddess plot of Duelle, but here with even less explanation of the story's mystical elements.

And while we're asking questions, what's with the improv trio hanging out in the corner of so many scenes and improvising the film's soundtrack? Who are these ragged 70s musicians acting as though they really belonged there on the outskirts of a swashbuckling adventure story? Indeed, with this project Rivette carried over the improvisatory spirit of his preferred acting methods into the soundtrack, bringing in the composer and multi-instrumentalist Jean Cohen-Solal along with his brother Robert and Daniel Ponsard. It was a tactic he also used in a more limited way for Duelle, with the sporadic appearances by pianist and composer Jean Wiener, but here the musicians are both more fully integrated into the film's visual strategies, and far more incongruous in their surroundings. Whereas Wiener fit relatively comfortably on a nightclub stage or tinkling away in the background of a room, these musicians are much more obviously out of place in an ancient castle, lounging against the stone walls or haphazardly hidden behind bales of straw. Moreover, Rivette goes to great pains not only to point out their presence, but to underline its absurdity. He frequently allows them to begin playing while offscreen, so that their music functions in a more familiar way as the film's soundtrack, while his roving camera, following the action of the actors in the scene as they walk around a room, eventually reveals the musicians tucked away in a corner, heads bent over their instruments, a gleeful anachronism in a film whose whole structure, basically, is an anachronism. It's a period film set in no particular period, with the actors dressed in a ragged pastiche of styles ranging from plausible-looking historical pirate garb to Lafont's audacious, forming-fitting pink leather pants.

To this end, the music of Cohen-Solal and his cohorts is perfectly suited to the film's modernist approach to period material. The group plays gritty, scrabbly free improv of the kind popular throughout European post-jazz circles in the 70s, all scrapes and rattles and occasional mournful tones from Jean's flute, his signature instrument but one he mostly leaves aside here in favor of various bowed instruments. The trio's music is mostly tense, edgy, even unpleasant, but they're also capable of hauntingly emotional melodies and, in one memorable scene, a bizarre but very danceable form of rhythmic pseudo-jazz, the uptempo beat assembled from a loose accumulation of clicking percussion. This provides the accompaniment to an astonishing scene in which Giula and her bodyguard Ludovico (Larrio Ekson) perform an energetic tango together, the latter sporadically breaking free of the dance in order to search the room for some trace of his mistress' treasure. It's a perfect example of the film's digressionary method, a scene with virtually no narrative purpose, but a ludicrously fun diversion all the same.


These diversions form the core of the film's method. It's a film in which, if you removed the diversions and offshoots, you'd be left with very little indeed. There are so many wonderful scenes, many of them with a relationship to the main plot that is puzzling and ambiguous at best. Similarly, Rivette punctuates the film with shots of the landscape around the castle, meditative glimpses of crashing waves and placid vistas populated only by a distant figure on horseback (who is that, anyway?). These inserts are occasionally jarring, too, as when he inserts a shot of the ocean as a reaction shot when Erika looks around a corner within the castle — what's the meaning of this sudden, unmotivated cut from interior to exterior? Rivette further adds to the confusion by wryly suggesting, in the way he structures the film, that there actually is a coherent narrative here somewhere, if only we could understand it. He periodically flashes up titles on screen that count off the acts and scenes within them. According to these titles, Noroît has a traditional five-act structure, though one would be hard-pressed to say so if Rivette hadn't provided such helpful chapter breaks. Even then, he does further muddy up the waters by adding multiple scenes to a single heading, so that one title might introduce the next section as Act II, scenes 1-3.

In a movie as willfully slippery as Noroît, such tactics can only be a typically playful Rivettian joke, suggesting coherence in a film whose form is akin to a string of non-sequiturs. These titles may also be a reference back to the film's purported source, the Jacobean revenge play The Revenger's Tragedy, once attributed to Cyril Tourneur but now thought to have been written by Thomas Middleton. This play, with its tale of a man seeking revenge for his lover's death, provides the basic impetus for the film's story, but more importantly Rivette uses dialogue quoted verbatim from the play, in the original English rather than the French otherwise used throughout the film. This dialogue, recited by Geraldine Chaplin and Kika Markham as the two avenging schemers of the film, takes the form of an incantation, repeated with ceremonial precision as a code for their ritual of revenge. In one remarkable scene, the two women pace in opposite directions around a circular room, reciting the same lines of dialogue from the play, overlapping one another as if in a round; Rivette further complicates the soundtrack with Cohen-Solal's flute, for once playing while the musician isn't actually in the room. The line they're reciting, which they eventually converge on in the center of the room, thus making it fully coherent for the first time, is: "I have not fashion'd this only for show and useless property; no, it shall bear a part, e'en in it own revenge."

This line, repeated at several key points in the film, seems to hold multiple resonances for Rivette, both on the level of the narrative and in meta terms, in the implications it has for Rivette's own film. Especially in the scene where Markham dramatically shouts the line to Chaplin, it begins to seem as though Rivette is himself addressing his audience, prompting them to look beyond the surfaces and think about what else is there. It's an invitation behind the curtain, a suggestion that there is more here than meets the eye, even if it's not as yet readily apparent. And it's also, as with so many things in Rivette's films, an elaborate joke of sorts. Because in addition to being a metaphor for Morag's vengeful quest, The Revenger's Tragedy also holds a more literal place within the world of Noroît. In continually reciting these English lines, the two women are not just expressing their plans for revenge, they're actually rehearsing for a play.

Indeed, one of the film's many marvelous scenes is the sequence where the two plotters stage the climax of The Revenger's Tragedy for the assembled audience of Giula and her pirates. As the two women perform, building towards a hilariously extended death scene for Geraldine Chaplin, playing the object of revenge in this staging, the line between theater and reality begins to blur and vanish. First, Chaplin veers into the audience to enact her death scene, stumbling and running between the assembled spectators, reeling wildly and overacting with melodramatic flair, launching into one of those endless "I'm dying but I still have time for a soliloquy" finales where even multiple poisonings, stabbings, and beatings can't quite do her in for good. But even as the play nears its close, the audience begins stirring and possibly breaking out into a for-real revolt against Giula. It's unclear exactly what happens next, though the seemingly earnest rebellion soon degenerates into some more play-acting, including more stabbings with a retractable knife; Rivette's soundtrack even emphasizes the distinctive click of the knife's blade receding into the handle when someone is "stabbed." Only when Giula finally, and bloodily, slits the throat of one seemingly innocent bystander, is the line between theater and reality definitively restored to clarity.

If this scene restores life and acting to their proper places, the film's finale decisively erases the lines separating performance, reality and fantasy, frustrating anyone who might've been hoping for the ramshackle narrative to somehow get tied together in the end. Instead, Rivette stages a macabre and sinister ballet, a set of black widow dances in which one partner ends by killing the other, slow motion murders that shift between graceful beauty and murderous anguish. Rivette purposefully fragments these scenes, shifting from ordinary photographic reality to yellow- or blue-filtered alternate universes, or high-contrast, grainy black and white footage with the sound abruptly cut off as though the action was taking place in a vacuum. Similar techniques were also used in the more overtly magical Duelle, to signify magical battles taking place on a higher plane, but its sudden intrusion here, without explanation or context, is far more destabilizing and disorienting. These final scenes have an unsettling beauty in spite of their violence, as each dance plays out as an improvised murder game between the two participants. It's a stunning, fittingly ambiguous ending to a film predicated on such ambiguity and submerged narratives.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

It's difficult to think of what can possibly be said now about F.W. Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Based on one of the most famous horror novels in the world, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Murnau's film was the first adaptation of the vampire legend to the cinema, and a model and inspiration not only for every vampire tale to follow it, but for much of the horror genre in film. Considering its age and the extent to which its images and ideas have penetrated the popular culture discourse, the film has held up remarkably well. Pop culture tends to devour art, and any image or icon that passes into the popular vernacular tends to lose its aura of mystery and uniqueness, especially after enough time has passed for the various reiterations of this image to attain some prominence themselves. This deterioration still has yet to take place for Murnau's blood-sucking Count Orlok, played with a ghastly stiffness and creepiness by Max Schreck. Schreck's mimed performance, so famously horrifying, owes as much to his unnaturally tall, bony form and gaunt face as it does to his plodding movements and wide-eyed stare. It's a very physical performance, with Orlok embodied in every inch of the actor's body and movements. He's a horrifying figure, wispy and almost even fey but with a sinister allure anyway.

Clearly, Orlok is a powerful cinematic icon, one who has continued to exercise a dramatic pull on the genre of the horror film, so it's a shame that Murnau keeps him off-screen for so long. The story of Dracula may be familiar now, but this first adaptation treats the tale's developmental early stages at great length, unfortunately including a great deal of exposition that in a modern context seems largely unnecessary. It takes half an hour for Orlok to appear at all, before which the story focuses on the young real estate agent Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) and his wife Ellen (Greta Schröder). In E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire, a parodic dark comedy based on the making of Nosferatu, von Wangenheim is mercilessly mocked for his melodramatic acting, and the representation of his acting style in that film isn't even exaggerated too much, if at all. He's the ultimate silent movie ham, reacting to good news like a schoolboy skipping off to school, and to bad with moping gestures and eye-rolling, playing to the back row at every moment. He's the kind of actor who, when he sees a table full of food, widens his eyes, licks his lips, and runs gleefully to dig in. As a result, the scenes between Hutter and his wife, before Hutter goes off to Transylvania to conduct a transaction with the mysterious Count Orlok, are almost unwatchably saccharine, even though Schröder is far better in her role. Her Ellen looks vampiric from the very beginning of the film, with the same gaunt face, black-rimmed eyes, and wild stare as Orlok. She thus signals her inevitable doom right from her very first appearance, solely with the intensity of her emotional reactions and her sensitivity. She mourns for the "death" of flowers that her husband picked for her, and later she seems to sense Orlok's presence in ways that nobody else does besides his crazed servant Knock (Alexander Granach).

In fact, Ellen is a key figure in the film's first truly striking scene (which unfortunately comes about 40 minutes in, a not insignificant amount of time to wait for something interesting), in which Orlok assaults Hutter at the former's castle lair. Murnau cuts back and forth between this attack (mostly suggested through the projection of Orlok's sinister shadow on the wall) and scenes of Ellen back home, seized by nightmares and an inexplicable terror. The parallel editing between these two discrete events, taking place quite some distance apart, is especially powerful for the way it links Ellen and Orlok, making inevitable their eventual meeting in the film's final scene. At the end of the scene, Orlok looks back over his shoulder, casting his eyes towards the right side of the screen, and Murnau cuts away to a shot of Ellen, reaching her arms out towards the left edge of the screen, as though gesturing towards the vampire. The juxtaposition of these two shots give the distinct impression that Orlok is actually looking at Ellen, staring at her across vast gulfs of space with an unimaginable bloodlust. It's one of the film's most mysterious and haunting moments.

Of course, Orlok's desire for Ellen was already established before this, in the scene where the vampire catches a glimpse of a photo of her that Hutter carries. Orlok grasps the amulet containing this picture, bringing it up close to his face with his clawed fingers, and admiringly looks back at Hutter, telling him what a pretty neck his wife has. This line, with its obvious sexual undercurrents, is indicative of the way that Murnau plays up the sexuality of the vampire myth. This version of the Dracula story is unique, especially, for the way in which it makes the hero's transaction with the vampire seem like he's selling out his own wife for the monster's use. Immediately after the scene where the vampire praises Ellen's photo, he reiterates the terms of their bargain: he will be buying the abandoned house immediately across the street from Hutter's own home. Hutter has already left his uneasy wife alone to worry while he traveled a great distance, motivated only by greed. But in this scene it is apparent that what's at stake is not just a house back in Hutter's hometown, but the neck — and blood — of Ellen herself.


The crisp parallel editing of the Orlok/Ellen scene, which culminates in that meaningful cross-continental gaze between vampire and victim, is soon carried over into the second half of the film as Orlok races to realize his rendezvous with Hutter's wife. The entire second half of the film is thus structured on parallel editing of this kind, cutting between Orlok's journey by ship, Ellen waiting wistfully at home for Hutter's return, Knock's anxious time in jail awaiting his master, and the weakened Hutter's mad race to get to Ellen before Orlok does. Murnau's sense of pacing and dramatic tension occasionally slackens in these scenes, and the material with Knock seems entirely extraneous, especially since his character of the bug-eating servant isn't nearly as interesting or fleshed-out as it is in other variations on this tale. But even when the narrative temporarily goes slack, Murnau's brisk crosscutting between the different simultaneous events always promises a continuation of the action and a slow build-up of tension that finally explodes in the long sequence on board Orlok's ship.

This segment contains one of the film's most justifiably famous shots, with the camera positioned in a cargo hold and angled upwards at the vampire as he stalks by, walking with a strange sideways motion like a crab, his claws extended and his eyes glinting. But as creepy as Schreck is here, a handful of isolated shots of the ship itself are equally eerie. Murnau shoots the sailing vessel floating aimlessly, looking completely abandoned even before it really is depopulated by Orlok's efforts. In several shots, Murnau simply allows the boat to drift through the frame, a black silhouette seen from a distance with no activity on its decks, like a ghost ship gliding through the water. Another shot angles the camera up from the deck to catch the sunlight filtering through the sails above, a quietly beautiful shot that serves to further emphasize the ship's lifelessness; it's a shock (not to mention an anticlimax) when Murnau finally gives in and shows a few scenes of activity with the boat's crew. The scenes of Orlok's arrival in Hutter's town are similarly anticlimactic. There's something almost comical about the way he slinks into town, skulking through the main square while lugging a giant coffin under his arm, looking ridiculously undignified. This is doubtless the streak of silliness in Murnau's vampire that Merhige picked up on for Shadow of the Vampire. There's a real and very weird sense of the quotidian about Orlok, as in the early scene where he greets Hutter personally and explains the lack of servants by the late hour, as though he needs to justify why such a great personage should be doing his own chores. This winds up being even more unsettling, giving Orlok a warped human quality to play off against his more otherworldly aspects. A similar vibe runs through the scenes of his arrival, and he only manages to maintain some lordly dignity in the haunting shot where he arrives at his new home standing on a raft, the coffin still under his arm. Murnau shoots this arrival from a distance, capturing the dilapidated grandeur of this collapsing manse with Orlok's spindly form gliding towards it.

As a whole, Murnau's Nosferatu is a somewhat uneven masterpiece, if that term makes any sense. It's largely held together by the strength of a handful of iconic shots and images, often with long dull or purposeless stretches in between. The treatment of text is especially problematic, although not necessarily atypical for the silent era. The dialogue intertitles are relatively sparse and sparingly used, but Murnau makes extensive use of a variety of textual materials, including letters, books on the supernatural, ship's logs, and various other documents. This is doubtless inspired by the nature of Stoker's original epistolary novel, formed entirely from back and forth correspondence. But it's distracting when the film so often diverts from its wonderful images into lengthy text passages explaining various pieces of vampire lore or other expository details. When Murnau fills up the screen with such pseudo-scientific explanations of vampires, it's at least understandable in the context of the genre, but when he takes the opportunity to display Hutter's innocuous letter to his wife, in full, not just once but twice, one begins to suspect that he's either just filling up time or doesn't realize how these interruptions kill the narrative's momentum. Despite these imperfections, Nosferatu remains a horror classic for very good reason. There has never been a more memorable screen vampire than Max Schreck's Count Orlok, and in comparison to his raw, sensual performance even Bela's Lugosi's smooth, urbane version of the monster can't compare. Orlok is the iconic film vampire, a pure force of evil and unfettered desire, growing so rapturous (and ravenous) at the mere sight of blood that he can't resist breaking with decorum and sucking the blood from his houseguest's injured thumb. If Lugosi's later Dracula is a vampire of the heart or the head, Schreck's Orlok is purely a vampire of the stomach.