The Color of Pomegranates

Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates is an extraordinarily challenging film inspired by the 18th Century poet Sayat-Nova. The film is loosely based around the poet's life, but rather than relating a conventional biographical narrative, Parajanov's film is almost entirely visual and abstract, translating the subject's life and poetry into a purely visual language. Snippets of Sayat-Nova's words are read aloud or appear onscreen at various points throughout the film, but for the most part this is a strictly non-verbal movie, its images apparently drawn from the imagery of Sayat-Nova's poems so that the film becomes a cinematic poem rather than a mere biography of the poet.

The result is that Parajanov's work will inevitably be all but impenetrable and obtuse except to those already well-versed in the life and work of the film's subject. It's a very challenging and boldly avant-garde film that seeks to communicate feelings and sensations rather than concrete facts. The broad outlines of Sayat-Nova's life story are apparent here — starting with his boyhood memories and intimations of a young romance before he enters a monastery — but the emphasis is on the evocative visual poetry of Parajanov's aesthetic.


The film's look is influenced by the textual illuminations of religious texts, several of which appear within the film to confirm the visual reference point. Each shot is static and stagey, with Parajanov meticulously arranging theatrical tableaux in which symbolic figures enact strange rituals, often while staring, disconcertingly, into the camera. Blank white stucco walls are like the margins of the page in an ancient manuscript, while these figures in their elaborate, colorful costumes pose and contort themselves. Religious imagery proliferates throughout the film, as does Armenian folk art in the form of the old-fashioned garments and rugs that adorn the film's various tableaux. Parajanov is paying tribute to the culture and traditions of the region as much as to this particular poet, as evidenced by the emphasis on the scenes of animal sacrifices, dying of wool, and other rural pursuits.

A major theme running through the film is the opposition between sensuality and spirituality. As a boy, the poet (played as a child by Melkon Alekyan) witnesses scenes of tremendous sensuality, particularly in a voyeuristic sequence in which he peers into a bath house, where men are caked in mud and showered with water from urns, poured on them from overhead. The boy also gambols among the washerwomen, and Parajanov trains his camera on the women's bare feet, jogging along the wet ground as they scurry back and forth doing their work, their bare feet and ankles contained within the frame. Most potently, there's an image of a woman's naked torso, a seashell cupped over one of her breasts, a searing and strange image of sexual promise that seems to have great meaning for Parajanov, and for Sayat-Nova: the image is repeated several times, and the poet himself repeats the gesture at certain points by placing a seashell over his own chest, connecting him with the woman, whoever she was.


As a slightly older youth, Sayat-Nova falls in love, but he seems to reject sensuality and sexuality and enters a monastery instead, opting for a life of asceticism and restraint. (In fact, the poet was exiled from the court of the Georgian king Erekle II after falling in love with the king's sister.) Sensual temptations still plague him, though: a pair of nuns look at the handsome young monk and swoon with desire, alternating between hiding themselves behind thick rugs and lowering the rugs to peek out at him, succumbing to the same voyeuristic impulses that had caused the young Sayat-Nova to peep into the bath house. Later, a woman in a white nightdress and nun's habit leans over to kiss the monk/poet, but he holds up a rug between them, its thick fabric separating their bodies and their lips.

The film's romanticism and sensuality are further enhanced by the decision to have a single actress, Sofiko Chiaureli, play both the poet and his lover in their youths, androgynously embodying both genders as well as appearing in more symbolic guises later in the film. The Color of Pomegranates is a dense, baffling work, beautiful and strange, and utterly unlike anything else in the cinema. It's as intensely poetic as its subject, exploring the conflicting passions and religious feelings of the poet, as well as his deep connection with the traditional lifestyle he experienced as a child.

The Rape of the Vampire

Jean Rollin's first feature, The Rape of the Vampire, establishes virtually all of the templates for this trash auteur's distinctive approach to no-budget sexploitation horror. Surreally dreamlike and strange, with a plot that never makes a shred of sense, Rollin's film wanders dreamily from one set piece to another, the connections between them as ephemeral as the neural pathways linking one moment to another in a dream. This debut was shot in black-and-white, and though a bright, garish color sensibility is integral to the director's later work, the color is hardly missed here, as he crafts an equally potent, moody aesthetic in stark sun and shadow.

The film is actually split into two unequal parts, and though the story, such as it is, continues more or less seamlessly from one part to another, they're definitively split apart and there's even a second credits sequence that runs before the second part begins. The bridge between the two parts of the film is like crossing from the real world, where a rational explanation, however unlikely, is still possible, to the truly unhinged world of the surreal, the nightmarish, the supernatural, where rationality is utterly banished and the semblance of a plot is all but entirely erased.

In the first third of the film, the psychoanalyst Thomas (Bernard Letrou) and his friends visit a remote village supposedly haunted by four vampire sisters. Thomas doesn't believe the sisters are actually vampires, he thinks they've just been manipulated into thinking they are, and he seeks to cure them of their delusion. He even seems to be right: the sisters worship before a pagan altar and are given orders by their god, who turns out to be an old man from the village, hiding behind the altar, delivering instructions to the women for his own mysterious purposes. This segment ends with virtually everyone dead, climaxing at the bleak-looking beach, with wooden posts like prison bars, that Rollin would return to again and again in his oeuvre. That beach is a conduit into the unknown, and as the film transitions into the second segment that constitutes its final two-thirds, the rational explanations and pseudo-scientific jargon of the first part are jettisoned in favor of an enthusiastic embrace of the supernatural.


This shift is announced especially by the arrival of the Queen of the Vampires (Jacqueline Sieger), a campy and outrageous figure who's constantly baring her fangs and laughing sinisterly, often without any context whatsoever: Rollin seems to love cutting to her in mid-cackle. The Queen's plans are typically hazy, but there's lots of grave-robbing, hypnotized girls hooked up to tanks of blood from which the vampires drink through long straws, sinister operations and rituals, a vampire priest holding an upside-down cross, and so on. The film's imagery is wild and weird, climaxing with a very chintzy vampire wedding that looks like the vampires are actually staging an amateur play: it's set on a stage with a huge and clumsily constructed bat in the background, its wings seemingly made from bedsheets.

There's a strong element of theatricality in Rollin, certainly, a sense that these vampires are performing for someone, maybe just for one another. The vampires even repeat the trick that the old man had pulled in the first part of the film, setting up an altar that seems to be speaking to some vampire supplicants, but actually houses a tape recorder playing back a loop of the Queen's voice. The supernatural is very ordinary in Rollin's world, the artifice paper-thin. There's little boundary between the real and the unreal, and the rough, clumsy low-budget aesthetic lays bare the artificiality of it all. There's a raw, one-take feel to much of the film: if a statue falls off a shelf and nearly hits the vampire queen in the head as she descends on a reclining victim, no matter, it's good enough, and Rollin leaves in this unscripted accident. The blood wedding, with its amateur drama club feel, is another good example; the vampires for some reason feel the need to stage their rituals with shoddy dramatics and awkwardly constructed props, performing for an audience of other vampires, who sit playing bongos in the theater seats and storm the stage for an impromptu celebration at the climax of this "play."

That's the essence of Rollin right there, the real and the unreal, the theatrical and the seemingly unstudied, the supernatural and the ordinary, colliding within his utterly idiosyncratic cinema. He presents a fractured and nonsensical dream world that leaps without warning from one thing to another at the speed of thought, giving the impression of a film edited according to the momentary whims of the dreamer. Action can jump suddenly from one location to another without warning or narrative justification, and the connections between scenes are often, let's say, mysterious. Even the seedy eroticism that always characterizes Rollin's work follows this (il)logic: women are rarely seen taking their clothes off in this film, instead leaping effortlessly from clothed to naked in between shots. All of this combines to make Rollin a true poet of trash, locating a strange kind of unsettling poetry and even beauty in his outrageous dream world.

Je t'aime, je t'aime

Alain Resnais has always been concerned with time and memory, and his best-known films revolve around these themes with almost obsessive dedication, as though locked into compulsive loops in which the same ideas recur with rhythmic regularity. The signature cinematic technique of his art is the edit, the cut, which is quite natural for a director so concerned with time. The art of montage is the art of arranging and controlling the flow of time; the editor shapes the raw material of a film, deviating from the linear progression of the shoot to arrange the scenes and shots in ways that express ideas, or tell stories, or create emotional juxtapositions between images. Editing reaches its apex as an expressive form in Resnais' art, and especially in Je t'aime, je t'aime, a film whose structure very cleverly mirrors the editing process, embodying the art of editing in the film itself. It's one of Resnais' very best films, a sci-fi time travel masterpiece in which the publishing executive Claude Ridder (Claude Rich), after recovering from a suicide attempt, is enlisted by a secretive research firm for a potentially dangerous experiment. The anonymous, unnamed scientists want to send Claude back in time as their first human research subject, reasoning that since he hadn't wanted to live, he didn't have much to lose if the experiment went wrong.

This experiment is supposed to send Claude exactly one year back in time, and he is supposed to remain in this time for exactly one minute before returning to the experimental chamber, a cushy, womb-like enclosure that from the outside, absurdly, looks like a misshapen brain or a vegetable or a hybrid pileup of curved human body parts. Instead, Claude becomes unmoored in time, blinking in and out of the present (another editing trick, that) and reliving a shuffled series of moments from throughout his life. Moments in time become unpredictably, randomly pulled out of context, so that Claude's life flashes before his eyes — and our eyes — out or order. Key moments are repeated, scenes are cut off abruptly and may or may not be continued or expanded later, surreal visions that might be dreams butt up against real memories, and several dramas and mysteries slowly emerge from this fragmented view of Claude's life.


The focus of his memories is his wife, Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot), whose death triggered Claude's own suicide attempt. The couple's troubled relationship dominates the memories that Claude relives, leaping non-chronologically from their first meeting to the later unhappy stages of their relationship to its possibly violent ending. They meet, they fall in love, they argue. Claude is unfaithful and Catrine is perpetually depressed, and it seems like far from an ideal relationship, although the fractured chronology makes it difficult to tell if the couple's relationship started in one state and progressed towards another, or if they were continually bouncing back and forth from better times to worse ones. The shuffling of narrative chronology eliminates the linearity from a person's life, so that each individual moment stands on its own, the moments of tenderness (the sweet love scenes in which the couple exchanges loving words) and the moments of cruelty and darkness (the scene where Claude casually confesses his infidelities while saying he still loves his wife).

Cause and effect are blurred, to a degree, so that it's no longer possible to think of one scene leading into the next, and the lack of clear indicators of time and place means that the order in which things occur is frequently unclear except when the dialogue drops enough contextual clues to figure it out. But if time travel makes Claude's life a puzzle, it's obvious that Resnais doesn't mean for the audience to reassemble the pieces: there are too many pieces missing, too many that don't fit, too many gaps. There is a genuine mystery here, some uncertainty revolving around how exactly Catrine died, but the mystery is not the point: the core of the film is the emotional intensity of re-examining one's life, rifling through the archives of memory and finding all these moments and images that evoke nostalgia, or regret, or happiness, or despair. The way things fit together in the end hardly matters; Claude already knows how things end, even if the audience doesn't quite yet, and his experience of his life as an out-of-order flow of scenes both banal and earth-shaking is what the film is all about.


The mystery is also largely rendered irrelevant by the sense that the film is really exploring the distorting effects of memory, the ways in which memory can lie and obscure rather than revealing the truth. Resnais is concerned with the selectivity of memory, and for much of the film several key scenes are occluded, perhaps because Claude is on some level subconsciously directing the images that flash before his eyes. At other times, it seems like his memory is rebelling against the staid confines of reality, creating surreal disjunctions and weird interludes that suggest that not only can memory lie, it can go mad.

In several scenes, dreams filter into reality, as when Claude remembers a sexually charged encounter with a beautiful woman, and the woman appears, stretching her shapely leg up into the air, in a bath tub that's ludicrously placed in the middle of Claude's office. That woman appears again later in a scene that's presumably the source of Claude's erotic dream/vision, but the "real" scene has a similar absurdist visual sensibility, since the woman appears twice, reflected in mirrors on either side of Claude as though he were being asked to choose between two identical women. Indeed, he occasionally does seem to confuse his many women, as in a scene where the woman he's in bed with shifts between cuts from Catrine to several other women before settling back into his wife again; the bed and the room change as well, as Claude's mind mashes together different scenes with women from throughout his life, his erotic adventures all blending together. Other scenes are utterly inexplicable, ripped out of context as surreal intrusions of the subconscious: a man drowning while speaking on the phone, a short figure in a suit and a green reptilian mask who walks alongside Claude without saying a word.

The film also shuffles the chronology of Claude's career at a publishing firm, where he progresses from working in the mail room to a mid-level office drone to an executive position. The scenes of work are almost always deadening and numbing, and though Claude's progress upward through the company is not presented in a linear fashion as he skips from memory to memory, it gradually becomes clear that the only time when he was actually happy or contented at work was in the stock room, mindlessly stacking magazines for shipping. The more responsibility he gets, the higher he rises, the more miserable he becomes. At one point, he sits at his desk with glazed eyes, musing about how slowly time passes, how it seems like it will remain the same time forever — a memory that acquires a very different resonance when shuffled into Claude's jaunt through the past. In another scene, Claude sits at a desk working while men in business suits are clustered around him, commenting disparagingly on his ability to finish the project he's working on. With the dark setting and the shadowy figures arranged around the desk, towering over Claude, it's staged like a nightmare, a paranoid fantasy of workplace pressure, another expression of Claude's subconscious rather than a literal memory of something that actually happened.


The film's more surreal diversions confirm that Resnais has a sense of humor about this sci-fi material, deliberately skewering the conventions of the genre in the deadpan scenes leading up to Claude's experiment. The scientists take him on a tour of their facility, showing him a mouse that they insist has successfully traveled in time, though they joke that they can't be sure since the mouse can't talk; how short-sighted, Claude says, they should have taught the mouse to talk first! The mouse, who accompanies Claude on his own time travel trip in a plastic bubble, shows up at random in Claude's memories, scurrying across the beach while Claude and Catrine lounge in the sand.

The mouse is a physical manifestation of the unreliability of memory, as it scurries into memories where it previously hadn't existed, its presence distracting Claude from the moment; is the mouse actually changing the past, or only changing Claude's memories of the past? Another animal, the cat that Catrine and Claude keep as a pet, appears, it seems, only when Claude remembers that it exists. Suddenly, once the cat is mentioned, they have a cat. The memory that they have a cat seems to shift the cat into existence, or back into existence. It raises the question: can something be said to exist, or to have happened, if we don't remember it? It's as though memory is populating and creating the world through its functioning. Claude's wartime memories, which similarly seem to be unreliable, are an interesting and unresolved undercurrent in the film. He refers several times to his experience in the army during World War II, which contradicts his frequent assertion that he dislikes guns and doesn't know how to use them — but then again, his chosen method of suicide also contradicts this statement. In a very puzzling scene that's unconnected to virtually everything else in the film, Claude runs across an old man who, he claims, gave Claude fake documents and a new identity during the war. The old man protests that he doesn't remember Claude, and says that it's impossible, that he too got a new identity during the war. It's a very mysterious scene, suggesting that there's a lingering mystery in Claude's past, even in his identity. Is memory really so fragile, so malleable?

That question is at the heart of Je t'aime, je t'aime. The film's minimal sci-fi story provides a framework and a clever conceptual container for Resnais' consideration of the nature of memory. As Claude hurtles through time, each memory he encounters might or might not provide additional context for the scenes that surround it, sometimes completely altering the understanding of another memory or casting other memories in a different light, at other times existing independently as self-contained stories or scenes. It's a film that acknowledges that a life can seldom be completely understood, and that the retrospective filter of memory can provide many different vantage points on that life. Its construction, a parallel for the process and artistry of filmmakers, suggests that we're all filmmakers and artists in our own minds, that the life stories we construct for ourselves are mental films, scenes projected in endless loops, moments edited together into semi-coherent assemblages that don't tell stories so much as replay emotional highlight reels.

Stolen Kisses

Stolen Kisses is the third installment in the series of Antoine Doinel tales that François Truffaut inaugurated with his debut feature The 400 Blows. The film opens several years after Truffaut's last visit with Antoine (played as always by Jean-Pierre Léaud), in the short film Antoine and Colette. As with the gap between The 400 Blows and that short, several years are left as an ellipsis between installments, with the effect that each new film in the series is like catching up with an old friend, learning what he's done and where he's been in the intervening years since his last appearance. Since Léaud grows up on screen with his cinematic counterpart, it's also a way of catching up with the actor, seeing how the fourteen year-old boy from The 400 Blows has matured into an independent young man with a vibrant, eclectic life both onscreen and off. When Stolen Kisses opens, Antoine has been in the army for three years, and at the very beginning of the film he's in a military prison, awaiting his release from the army after a troubled career as a private. During his exit interview with a superior officer, the man rattles off a list of Antoine's offenses, including all the bases where he'd gone AWOL, and Antoine smiles at each one, as though fondly recalling happy memories of what he'd done during each of these infractions; a whole history is suggested in those smiles.

It's a loving and playful re-introduction to this familiar character, an assurance that though Antoine has grown older he's still a charming misbehavior, a defiant young man with little tolerance for authority. Even more telling, perhaps, is what precedes this scene, an opening image which on the surface has no real connection to the rest of the film. During the credit sequence, Truffaut films the building that housed the then-closed Cinémathèque Franèais, which at the time of the making of this film was embroiled in the Langlois affair, when the firing of Henri Langlois, the Cinémathèque's longtime director (and mentor to the Cahiers du cinema group of filmmakers and critics), triggered student protests and riots demanding his reinstatement. Truffaut and Léaud were both on the frontlines of these protests, with the latter making fiery speeches on Langlois' behalf in front of that very building. Some text during the titles of Stolen Kisses dedicates the film to Langlois, but the film itself has only the most tenuous of connections to Langlois or to the protests and politics bubbling up around him at the time. The protests over Langlois' departure from the Cinémathèque would eventually seem like a precursor to the broader student riots of May 1968, but these political questions linger only at the edges of the film.

The Langlois affair is mentioned explicitly, once, by the parents of Antoine's sometime-girlfriend Christine (Claude Jade), who describe it in vague and slightly bemused terms, reflecting the generation gap between the older generation and those who, like Truffaut and Léaud and their associates, grew up with the Cinémathèque and with Langlois' tutelage. But Antoine and Christine are equally abstracted from the events; Christine gets off from school when boycotts break out at her university, and she uses it as an unexpected vacation, going skiing with her friends. Antoine, for his part, is totally unaware of any of it. Later, Christine mentions to him that some of her friends are involved in protests, but Antoine, absorbed in his job, barely listens, and that's the extent of the film's engagement with the political upheavals sweeping France at the time. It's a curious decision, this abstraction from the politics of the time, especially since both the director and the star were so heavily involved in the events in their personal lives. It's as though Truffaut is asserting, with his casual integration of the politics at the fringes of a politically content-free film, that he intends to keep his cinema somewhat separate from the upheavals of the time — a pointed rejection of the very different path taken by Jean-Luc Godard, and the increasing split between the two filmmakers and former friends. Truffaut's film makes a token nod to the politics, to the concerns that so occupied both Truffaut and Léaud off the set. Godard could not make such a separation between his politics, his life and the films he made, but Truffaut, it seems, could.


Instead, Stolen Kisses is largely concerned, like Antoine and Colette, with Antoine's romantic adventures, in this case especially his on/off relationship with Christine, with whom he has a relationship that mirrors his friendship/affair with Colette, even including his closeness with the girl's mother and stepfather, who are like surrogate parents for the adrift young man. In addition to the relationship with Christine, the film also traces Antoine's visits to prostitutes (including his very funny encounter with a pair of them early on) and his fascination with Fabienne (Delphine Seyrig), a beautiful older woman who's the wife of the shoe store owner Tabard (Michael Lonsdale). He meets this latter couple while working as a detective for a private investigation firm, one of several jobs he takes during the course of the film. Antoine is an inept detective, perhaps because his example is the movies: in one of the film's funniest scenes, Antoine, excited over his new job, follows a random woman on the street and acts so suspicious that she detects him almost instantly. His exaggerated cinema detective routine — hiding his face behind a newspaper, ducking behind trees, weaving back and forth behind his chosen target — is derived entirely from the language of detective films, with a heavy parodic spirit in the way he executes these maneuvers.

Indeed, Stolen Kisses is a comedy in a way that, for all the humorous moments in both The 400 Blows and Antoine and Colette, neither of the first two Antoine Doinel films were. This film often seems to be built around sketches, bits of comedic business like Antoine's introduction to the detective Henri (Harry-Max), in which the detective cons Antoine (in an short-lived job as a hotel desk clerk) into helping him get proof for an adultery case. The scene is pure antic slapstick, albeit somewhat clumsily staged, with jarring cuts and a kind of forced cheerfulness as the woman in the case sits in bed topless and the men yell at each other. Truffaut's comedy often seems forced and off-key like this, particularly in the scenes involving one of the detective agency's other clients, an obviously gay man who enlists the agency to track down his former boyfriend, a magician. Truffaut makes the gay man an object of mockery, emphasizing the way the agency's owner sees right through the man's explanation that he wants them to find his "friend." Later, when the detectives tell the man that his "friend" is now married with a pregnant wife, he loses it, assaulting the detectives and eventually getting carted away. (The best part of that scene, though, is Léaud's possibly unscripted sudden fall off camera, tripping over an unseen obstacle in the midst of the chaotic scene.) The gay man provides comedic relief, his heartache over his breakup an object of derision and implicit mockery — a stark contrast to the treatment of Antoine's naïve romanticism and obsession with his amour du jour in this series.

The film is more compelling in its comedy when it comes to Tabard, the shoe store owner who hires the agency, he says, because even though he's a very successful businessman and, he thinks, a decent guy, he believes that everyone in his life, from his employees to his wife, actually hates him. Even in his first interview, he gives a first hint as to his true character, casually letting slip his racist sentiments even while insisting that he doesn't discriminate against anyone in his store — even Arabs and Chinamen, he says, not realizing that he's revealing more clues than he thinks. It gets better. Antoine gets a job in Tabard's store to observe the store owner's (nasty) interactions with his employees, and becomes obsessed with Tabard's wife Fabienne. Tabard is a jerk with his wife, too, and it's obvious that she looks at him with barely veiled contempt and annoyance. When Tabard says that he once painted houses, his wife, with a girlish smile, jokes, "like Hitler." Tabard slams down his fork, obviously angry, but the way he phrases his response, it almost sounds like he thinks she insulted, not him, but Hitler, by calling the dictator "a housepainter." "Hitler painted landscapes," he says indignantly, with the air of a man tired of hearing his hero slandered. The portrayal of Tabard as a silly fascist who wonders why nobody likes him is the film's richest vein of comedy.


In a way, the structuring of Stolen Kisses as a comedy robs the film of the depths conveyed by the earlier Antoine Doinel stories. In this film, Antoine is almost a bystander in his own story, observing the action and the weird characters around him but staying curiously uninvolved — which also works as a metaphor for the film's lack of political involvement. Antoine is almost a placeholder in this film, the strong emotions he displayed in the earlier films somewhat dimmed, held at a distance. The film is about Antoine's slow realization that he has to finally grow up, and in the final scene — having reconciled with Christine and proposed to her after a fling with Fabienne — he comes face to face with a romantic, passionate young man who wildly declares his love to Christine, who calls him "crazy." Antoine, one senses, would recognize himself in this fiercely romantic and impetuous man, and as Antoine walks away with Christine at the end of the film, disappearing down a tree-lined boulevard, he's leaving behind that iteration of himself. It's a powerful conclusion, but not one that's organically developed in the rest of the film, as Antoine simply shuffles from one job to another with little indication of what he's feeling on a deeper level, beyond his desire for one woman or another.

Even so, the film is at times charming, and the eccentric characters who populate the detective agency provide a real source of entertaining diversions. The heart of the film, though, is Christine, and Claude Jade's sprightly performance, radiating girl-next-door charm and poise, makes her a compelling character. When she decides she wants Antoine back, and devises a simple ruse to bring him back to her, the mischievous smile on her face communicates everything one needs to know about her. Truffaut also stages a lovely scene in which the reunited lovers communicate entirely in short notes to one another, culminating with Antoine proposing to her and declaring his love, all accomplished silently, just watching the faces of the actors as they play this little game of non-verbal love. Delphine Seyrig's performance as Fabienne — which climaxes with an absolutely wonderful and meandering speech she gives to a silent, slightly frightened Antoine as she seduces him — is also great, and in many ways the two women overshadow Antoine, and Léaud, in his own movie.

It's sometimes a problem that Antoine seems peripheral to his own story, but the emphasis on the two women he loves restores some of the energy and richness that's otherwise lost here. The film is sometimes funny (Antoine trying out for a job as a stock boy, ineptly wrapping a package and getting the job because the owner wants a detective in house) and has clever flights of fancy like the sequence where a letter is tracked from the post office through the underground pneumatic tubes of Paris to its eventual destination, but on the whole it's an uneven third visit with Antoine Doinel, not nearly as satisfying or consistent, or as deep, as the first two entries in the series.

A Film Like Any Other

In the aftermath of the student demonstrations and worker strikes that swept across France in May 1968 and after, Jean-Luc Godard — who had already declared the end of cinema, at least for him, in Week-end — fully embraced the student radicalism and the peculiar French Maoism of the time. He was setting off on a journey away from the cinema, but continued making films (and eventually videos) nonetheless. For the last couple of years of the 60s and throughout the 70s, Godard all but abandoned the commercial cinema for various political and aesthetic experiments in which he would drastically reconfigure his approach to the cinema. A Film Like Any Other was one of the first statements of this new, experimental era in Godard's career, the beginning of his long exodus from the cinema, the first of what would be many attempts to work out, in film form, the political and cinematic questions that concerned him. In that respect, this film is a precursor to the films that Godard would make collaboratively with his Dziga Vertov Group experiments, as well as the later (and ultimately much more advanced) videos he'd create with Anne-Marie Miéville.

A Film Like Any Other establishes many of the concerns that would motivate the later films: the possibility of real change, the problems of how to better organize revolutionary actions, and implicitly the central idea that would drive the Dziga Vertov Group's work: Godard's attempts to reconstruct a cinematic form appropriate to ideological films. Whether intentionally or not, A Film Like Any Other also winds up demonstrating, better than any of the other films Godard made during his revolutionary period, just why the student idealism and radicalism of this period ultimately amounted to so little. The film is a direct response to (and document of) the events of May 1968. It is constructed primarily around footage of a group of workers and students having a discussion in a field with tall grass and flowers, interspersed with black-and-white documentary images shot during the May protests. The color footage of the discussion is shot from a low angle, with the speakers mostly either turned away from the camera or with their heads chopped off by the top of the frame, so that they remain anonymous representatives of student or proletariat interests rather than individuals.

On the soundtrack, Godard frequently layers the audio of this discussion with other voices, a man and a woman who are not part of the group and who sometimes talk over the discussion. Their interjections are excerpted from various texts or describe events happening in other countries, largely consisting of accounts of fascist repression or the co-option of socialist regimes by dictatorial impulses, as with Stalin. The soundtrack is often a riot of voices in which some are drowned out and others rise periodically above the chaos, but more than anything the film captures the spirit of the "revolution" as endless talk, endless debate about intricacies of policy and rhetoric, endless cycling through possibilities and if-then scenarios. Whether Godard means to or not, there's a pointed irony in his editing when he cuts from the frenzied action of the May riots to the students sitting in that pictorially beautiful field, calmly discussing revolution and resistance and never quite doing anything about it.

And yet all this discussion doesn't even imply the openness of a free exchange of ideas. One of the most telling moments (unintentionally funny, too) comes when the group is discussing the possibility of disrupting the "bourgeois knowledge" of the university, and one of the group's members asks if they mean discussing things with the professor, debating the professor's ideas. The rest of the group reacts with horror, shouting "no!" in unison, as though the idea was absurd. (The one who suggested the idea lamely protests, "it was just a question.") No, what they mean is impeding things through protests, riots, disruptions and provocations, like the one suggested earlier on the soundtrack of standing up in class and, more or less, calling the teacher an asshole and storming out. The very idea of dialogue with the bourgeois, with the oppressors, is anathema to them, not even worthy of consideration. For all their endless talk, their perpetual debate and discussion, they're only willing to give voice to certain ideas, to discuss things with those who already agree. It's a closed circle, a feedback loop in which they repeat slogans and bits of rhetoric, circling around and around the same ideas and the same concepts. They all agree so completely it's hard to see the point of talking so much other than as a form of reinforcement and encouragement.


For all that talk, one of the most powerful sequences here is a brief montage in the latter half of the film in which the voices on the soundtrack finally fall silent, as though in hushed respect for the images of the fiery, smoke-filled streets of Paris, where students and police are massed against each other across barricades, in streets filled with tear gas fumes and cars on fire. These images of the May riots, shot in the streets at the height of the chaos, are the film's most enduring legacy, and Godard assembles a wealth of footage that captures the violent, unpredictable mood of the protests, showing the competing signs for various socialist and students' groups as well as those held aloft by counter-protesters in favor of De Gaulle. The images from the protests are undoubtedly powerful, capturing all the activity in the streets, the sense of upheaval and instability, the sense that anything could happen. Simplistic slogans are angrily scrawled on the walls, there are huge assemblies where speakers give impassioned speeches (unheard on the soundtrack, doubtless because whatever video equipment recorded the May events by and large wasn't equipped for sound), cops beat the protesters and the students throw stones or light cars on fire. It's an atmosphere of chaos and violence, and it's these images that provide context to the theoretical discussions of the rest of the film. May 1968 suggested that change was in the air; A Film Like Any Other suggested the determination of these radicals and intellectuals to talk about that change, to wonder what they could do next, to nitpick one another's points while basically agreeing.

Some of Godard's later works in this vein would pose similar questions in formal and aesthetic terms, but in A Film Like Any Other he hadn't yet really begun the process of rebuilding atop the razed foundation of the cinema left over from Week-end. The other post-Week-end film he made around the same time, the much more successful and inventive Le gai savoir, was similarly built around ideological dialogue and dialectics, but despite its simplicity formal questions were very much at the heart of that film in a way they aren't here. Rather, A Film Like Any Other represents Godard's cinema truly stripped down to its barest essence. The result isn't really satisfying, as politics or as cinema, despite some interesting moments and memorable documentary images from May 1968.

Partner

Throughout the 1960s, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci was searching for his own cinematic voice, experimenting in film and theater, working through his influences as he tried to find his own unique approach to his chosen medium. His debut film, La commare secca, was a neorealist noir with a script by his mentor Pier Paolo Pasolini, a work with only touches of the young director's nascent style. His next film, Before the Revolution, was far more personal, as he worked from the example of Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave to make a film in which politics and sexuality and psychology were intricately interwoven. His third film, Partner, was even more indebted to Godard, though in the years since Before the Revolution and the early 60s French films it had been inspired by, Godard had moved on, and Bertolucci tried to move on along with his idol. Partner is obviously derived from the example of Godard's late 60s political films, especially La Chinoise and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, both of which loom large over Bertolucci's Godardian pastiche. Ostensibly based on the Dostoevsky story "The Double," Partner is actually an attempt to ape Godard's radical essay-film style.

It is, for the most part, an unsuccessful attempt. The film's obvious debt to Godard is distracting, as it's disconcerting to see a style as personal and idiosyncratic as Godard's adopted so shamelessly. Moreover, the film's appropriation seems shallow, limited to the superficial aspects of its source: what's missing is the complexity and density of Godard's thinking, and the corresponding lightness and dexterity he brings to even his most didactic and experimental films. Bertolucci's style is much heavier by nature, much more oppressive, and as a result Partner's theater of the absurd shenanigans come off as shrill and grating rather than whimsical. The film follows the theater professor Giacobbe (Pierre Clémenti) as his personality splits in two and he's haunted by a double who shares his name and appearance but who eggs him on to acts of provocation and violence.


And that's about it for the film's story, which is utterly peripheral here, as Bertolucci simply stages one ludicrous set piece after another, a few of them entertaining or interesting but most of them rambling, intermittent exercises in what one character self-consciously deems "ham acting." The film's best sequences have a loopy charm that reveals Bertolucci's clever sense of humor and his subversion of expectations. In one scene, when Giacobbe is first starting to go crazy, he wanders through the streets at night, casting large shadows on the walls of the buildings lining the streets. At one point, he plays with a massive shadow projection of himself, performing mock salutes and military marches and watching as his shadow mimics him, cast up on the wall like a cinema projection. But then the shadow stops following Giacobbe's lead and begins marching on its own, and when Giaccobe hesitantly approaches the giant, it stomps on him and kicks him. It's a hilarious and visually provocative image of Giaccobe beginning to split in two, and also a metaphor for the loss of control over a creative work, which begins to function independently of its creator once it enters the world. If the film is about anything, it's about trying to find a creative voice, trying to find a way to express one's feelings about an absurd and violent world, and that image is one of the film's best and deepest.

Other sequences are simply a lot of fun, like a scene where Giaccobe and his servant/landlord Petrushka (Sergio Tofano, delivering a fun, clownish performance) steal a car but can't actually drive it, so they make sure to steal it at the top of a hill so they can simply roll it down. Later, when Giaccobe gets into the back of the car with his paramour Clara (Stefania Sandrelli), Petrushka "drives" by making humming motor noises with his mouth and pretending to steer. The film's best moments have that kind of sketch comedy verve to them, the willingness to be silly and goofy, to act like a clown. There's also the startling image of Tina Aumont as a detergent saleswoman with pale blue eyes painted onto her eyelids so that when her eyes are closed, she appears to be staring straight ahead, her gaze unblinking and eerie. The scene, with its giant detergent boxes and bold, colorful brand logos, is obviously derived from the very similar scenes in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, just as Giaccobe's fortress-like piles of books in his apartment come from La Chinoise. Even the camerawork, with its graceful tracking shots and now-you-see-it-now-you-don't back and forth pans, is copied from Godard.


But Giaccobe's unhinged absurdities and non-sequiturs are a long way from Godard, and even at its best the film is slight and silly. One sequence parodies TV commercials with a jaunty ditty about cleanliness looping repeatedly as Giaccobe and the salesgirl frolic in the sudsy discharge of a washing machine, bathing in the suds, stripping and playing, alternately sexual and childlike, and ultimately deadly, all while that cheerful jingle plays over and over again in the background. In other scenes, Bertolucci subverts his own aesthetic by playfully messing around with the hidden split screen gimmicks that allow two iterations of Clémenti to coexist on the screen at the same time. The device is usually cleverly hidden, with the split obscured by dark areas or obstacles that disguise the split, but Bertolucci makes sure to reveal the trick, like a magician who can't help but excitedly exclaim how he did it even before the show is over. In one scene, the two Giaccobes have a conversation while one gets dressed and the other putters around nearby; they seem to be standing right next to one another, in the same space. But at a certain point one Giaccobe tells the other to hide, and the double on the right side of the frame begins walking left until, suddenly, he disappears into the hidden cut at the center of the screen, vanishing into thin air. Then, just to underline the point, the right side of the screen flashes with a light source that doesn't affect the lighting on the left side of the frame at all. It's Bertolucci's way of acknowledging the filmmaker's own complicity in this game of doubles and insanity.

The film's metafictional component becomes even more apparent in the finale, when one of the Giaccobes, ostensibly talking to his double, actually faces the audience and addresses them directly, calling on the viewers to get in touch with their own inner doubles, to be roused to action. It would be a stirring speech if the film as a whole had been more of a coherent call to action, rather than a confused blend of pseudo-philosophy and sloppy theatrical improvisations. Bertolucci's commitment to slathering the screen with messy, absurdist diversions sometimes yields interesting results, but more often the film fails to really delve deeply into the ideas it raises.

TOERIFC: If....

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's selection is courtesy of Pat Piper from Lazy Eye Theatre. Visit his site to see his thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

Lindsay Anderson's If.... is a harsh, uncompromising nightmare vision of British society as a culture unhealthily obsessed with tradition, locked into brutal, nearly fascist rituals and a blind, cowering respect for authority. Set in a British boys' college where the discipline is draconian and completely without rationale, the film examines the peculiar pressures placed on young men in a society where militaristic virtues such as loyalty, obedience, servitude and conformity are held up as the example. This school establishes a rigorous chain of command, selecting the most obedient of the older boys as "whips," who then become disciplinarians, keeping the younger boys under control. The result is that the school seems structured not so much for real education as for indoctrination and control — the only thing these boys are learning is that, in order to get by, they must learn the rules by rote, parrot back what they're told, never question orders, never think for themselves. Anderson juggles multiple storylines throughout the first half of the film, showing the way the school is run from multiple perspectives.

Jute (Sean Bury) is a new boy in the school, and he provides the newcomer's perspective in the early scenes, looking at the chaos around him with wide, terrified eyes. He is quickly taken under the wing of another boy, who impresses upon him the importance of obedience, of learning the rules quickly and being able to pass the complicated tests that will be imposed upon him. Jute is the film's icon of innocence, a usually silent and cherubic witness to the horrors around him, confused and disheartened by what he sees, unwilling to be shaped into the cold, brutal thing that this place seems design to churn out. There are other boys drifting around the film's edges, too, mostly stock types like a scrawny loser who's constantly being beaten up, a fat kid, and a quiet intellectual who generally buries himself in his telescope or his studies. But the film quickly centers itself around the school's trio of rebellious outcasts, the three friends who refuse to conform, who refuse to bow politely before the pointless discipline and cruelty of this place. Mick (Malcolm McDowell) is the de facto leader of the trio, with Johnny (David Wood) as his best friend and co-conspirator, and Wallace (Richard Warwick) as their somewhat slow-witted, dopey buddy. These three boys have the only reasonable reaction to the absurd regulations of power-hungry whips like Rowntree (Robert Swann) and Denson (Hugh Thomas).

Anderson presents this college as a nasty, suffocating place, piling on one infuriating incident after another until it seems obvious that something has to break, that no one could sustain this much tension and pressure. There is more than a hint of the absurd here, too. The whips are fey and masochistic, fingering their canes as though they'd really love to use them at any moment. They shout at the students to stop talking even before anyone has talked, as though always anticipating some minor infraction over which they can exercise their power. They survey their fellow students in the lower levels like military drill inspectors, advising them to cut their hair, making sure they're docile and ready for bed at the proper time, and capriciously confiscating any trivial item they deem unnecessary. The teachers are no better. The headmaster (Peter Jeffrey) is a pompous elitist who seems to fancy himself an education reformer, adapting to new times, when in fact his school is run like a barbaric Middle Ages prison. He leads the whips around the grounds at one point, boldly orating about the necessity to encourage creativity in young minds, to enlighten the next generation, to prepare them for life. His words are hypocritical, of course, considering his audience — the brutish thugs whose job it is to beat and suppress the younger students — and his spiel about education is especially empty when contrasted against the scenes in actual classrooms.

The teachers, for the most part, barely engage with their students. A professor of mathematics marches around the room intoning abstract phrases about geometry, lessons that can have no real meaning without demonstrations and diagrams, and yet he randomly stops every so often to ask a student if he understands. Then, even if the poor boy says yes, he slaps him in the head, or molests him in some way, at one point worming his hand inside a boy's shirt to caress his chest. Anderson's style is exaggerated and absurd, presenting these shocking, over-the-top images side by side with more naturalistic and conventional presentations of college life, the brutality and oppression of students guided by pointless rules. The result is metaphorical more than realistic: Anderson views education as a process of molesting and deadening the minds of the young, so he presents the education system in his film as literally abusing and violating the children it's supposed to be teaching. Only one teacher here even tries to engage his students, talking about the power of fascism and asking the students if they believe that fascism arises because of one powerful, evil leader, or because of a whole society of docile, casually evil people. As if to prove his point, the students simply stare back at him, uncomprehending.


This question is a central theme of the film, particularly in its final acts. The film slowly slips more and more into an absurd, surrealistic dreamworld in its second half, particularly after Mick and Johnny go out on a trip to town. The two boys steal a motorcycle, riding through the lush, open green fields of the countryside, laughing as the speed blurs their faces; it's a potent image of freedom in a film where these boys are hemmed in on all sides by oppression and a denial of free will. At an empty offroad café, the two boys meet a young girl (Christine Noonan), a waitress who will turn out to be a pivotal and mysterious presence, gently nudging the film into the spiraling surrealism of its denouement. At first, her confrontation with Mick and Johnny is utterly prosaic and nearly silent, as the boys snarlingly order coffee and Mick tries to grab her for a kiss, getting violently slapped for his efforts. But then the tenor of the scene abruptly changes, as the girl begins seducing Mick; they act like tigers, snarling and clawing at one another, rolling around on the floor tearing at their clothes, until suddenly their clothes disappear altogether and the girl is biting Mick's arm. The whole interlude is over as suddenly and inexplicably as it began: a lurid and transitory dream vision of animalistic sexual release. It's a true down-the-rabbit-hole moment, signaling the film's increasing departure from reality into a netherworld of dreams and nightmares.

The girl, who periodically reappears without explanation as an icon of freedom and sensuality for the three rebel boys, leads them into the final act of the film, in which the school is taken over by militaristic fervor. Generals and bishops visit, along with distinguished men and women dressed up for some pomp and circumstance, while the students, now dressed as soldiers, march around in formation, chanting and playing tightly controlled war games with paintball guns and firecrackers. This, Anderson suggests, is what this kind of oppressive conformity is grooming people for: to be soldier-automatons, ready to die for God and country, always willing to obey, never questioning orders. Only Mick, Johnny and Wallace really stand out, refusing to go along with this absurdity: while they lounge around in exhaustion, bored with this ritualistic violence, other students teach each other the "scream of hatred" that's yelled out when charging one's enemies. Then, just as these war games are starting to die down, the three boys begin shooting real bullets at the administrators and teachers, finally shooting and then bayoneting a priest in a general's garb. Absurdly, the boys are given a slap on the wrist for this offense, and asked to apologize to the dead man's corpse, which is kept in a wooden drawer in the headmaster's office and sits up to shake their hands before lying back down, playing dead. Obviously, the film has departed from reality by this point, increasingly existing in a fragmented fantasy in which these boys are finally able to strike back at their oppressors, using the headmaster's much-vaunted creativity and imagination to fashion an alternative world, one in which they're actually free.

The paradox, of course, is that having been themselves created by an atmosphere of cruelty and violence, the only freedom they can imagine is the freedom to wage war. The film's final scenes are a horrific vision of anarchy and destruction in which the rebels and the authorities (the latter represented, cartoonishly, by stereotyped authority figures like generals and bishops, as well as a knight in armor) go to war, everyone handling submachine guns as though they were born to. This anarchic finale suggests burning everything down to start anew, but Anderson's vision is more nuanced than Mick's punk rage. There's a moment earlier in the film that suggests a more utopian possibility for change, when Wallace's graceful exercises on a high bar halt a gym class, as the younger students, including the gay Phillips (Rupert Webster), stare at him in awe and admiration. The scene is staged in languid slow motion, as the younger students watch the fluid movements of the older boy as he spins around the bar, his body curling up and unfurling like a jackknife. There's a sense of wonder in this scene, a sense of real connection, that presents an alternative to the violence, hatred and disconnection that's everywhere else in this film.

This scene, like many others dotted throughout the film, including the café scene, is shot in black and white, which Anderson randomly intersperses with the color footage, creating disjunctions that call attention to the film's essential unreality. This approach separates Anderson's If.... from its obvious black and white influences, Zero For Conduct and The 400 Blows, the seminal French films of youthful rebellion and authoritarian oppression. Anderson nods to those films, but tweaks their verité aesthetics by often setting his most disjunctive and surrealist scenes in black and white, reversing the usual conventions about black and white stock versus color. Elsewhere, during a church service that's shot in black and white, Mick looks up briefly and sees a stained glass window in dazzling, brilliant color, a sudden vision of spirituality and clarity to offset the numbing banality of this college. This is a startling, utterly original film, a potent and unrestrained critique of a society seemingly teetering on the brink of fascism. Anderson is spitting in the face of the establishment, crafting a film as rebellious and revolutionary as his proto-punk protagonists.

Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed

Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed was Alexander Kluge's second feature, an unusual collage film that deals with the frontiers of human possibility, with the problems of creating art that truly pushes boundaries and broaches uncomfortable subjects to an audience largely unwilling to hear about anything unusual. Naturally, the film is in part about Kluge's own dilemma. Taking the circus as an unlikely metaphor for all artistic pursuits, Kluge is wrestling here with central issues: how to create art when audiences want merely to be entertained, how to balance art and commerce, how to find the proper medium in which to express one's ideas. On a narrative level, the film is about Leni Peickert (Hannelore Hoger), the daughter of a trapeze artist, who desires to create her own circus, a circus that would reinvent the form and express new, revolutionary ideas through performances with animals, acrobats and clowns. But describing the narrative does little to describe the actual texture of Kluge's film, which is comprised of a collage of improvisatory fragments and brief scenes, while on the soundtrack various competing narrators tell stories, recite philosophical ideas, laugh and read dialogues as if from plays, with identifications for the speakers. The audio frequently cuts off in midstream, and it is only sporadically synced to the actual onscreen images, instead flowing languidly in and out of sync. Sometimes a scene will start with two characters speaking to one another, but as they continue speaking, Kluge cuts away to something unrelated, or else cuts in footage where the characters simply stare blankly into the camera, while on the soundtrack their voice continues on. At other times, Kluge's jump cuts wreak havoc with the flow of time and reality, as when the glasses on the face of a journalist appear and disappear between sentences.

These multiple voices create a democracy within the film, in which no single narrative voice is dominant, and the audience's own experience of the film is privileged. The evidence of the film's construction is frequently evident, in scenes that cut off abruptly, the actors breaking into laughter or stammering incoherently as they lose track of their lines and respond simultaneously to the conditions of production. Kluge leaves these moments in. At one point, Leni's business partner Von Lupetow (Bernd Höltz, also the sound man) is eating a sandwich, stuffing it rapidly into his mouth. He laughs, spitting the food, and the scene cuts off, only to return to a straight-faced continuation, as though nothing had happened. The damage is done, though, and the rest of the scene can only be taken with a self-conscious smirk, aware of the shattering of the artifice. Elsewhere, when a female voice questions a story about a sex-starved astronaut filling up a vase with semen upon his return from space, a male narrator admits, "the story is exaggerated to emphasize the point."

These disjunctive techniques are appropriate for a film that's all about the issue of audience participation and audience connection — Kluge wants to foreground the effect of artistic techniques on those who experience an artwork. There's an undeniable playfulness to the way Kluge toys with artifice, presenting a loose patchwork that is all-encompassing enough to include both the opening's color, faux-documentary footage of Leni's father Manfred (Sigi Graue), the grainy newsreel inserts that appear throughout the film, and the crisp black and white of Leni's own story. There's play, too, in his chosen metaphor, in the idea of using the circus as a vehicle for expressing grand ideas. Leni's circus, like her father's proposed radical circus, would include animals suspended from the roof of the tent, barrier-breaking acts in which wild elephants seem to charge at the audience, and an absurd, theatrical staging of the assassination of an emperor, with all the participants wearing animal masks. It's all about confrontation, about presenting challenges to passive spectatorship. Just as Kluge's non-diegetic sound and jittery editing rhythms challenge conventional responses to a narrative film, Leni's revolutionary circus would challenge audiences to find new ways of thinking about this kind of entertainment.


Of course, implicit in this exploration is the possibility that challenges like this can push an audience too far. One of Kluge's interests here is the tension between giving an audience what they want and remaining true to one's own ideals. Ultimately, Leni's circus falls apart as she realizes that her ideas are impractical, that they can't be communicated in any real way to an audience, and that her vision is being diluted with the ideas of others, her collaborators on the project. It's a film about artistic disillusionment, then, about failure, and Kluge is open to that possibility as well. His own work is open-ended, not so much a finished project as a compendium of raw material, assembled by patchwork procedures that could result in a theoretically endless number of possible films. (The evidence of this is apparent in the short sequel, The Indomitable Leni Peickert, which seems to have been assembled in an analogous fashion from leftover footage.) Kluge knows that the upshot of artistic experimentation is the risk of losing the audience, and his resulting film is sometimes entertaining, sometimes boring or baffling, at other times enlightening and insightful, but always above all a challenge, a starting point, a call for serious thought about artistic expression.

His own starting point is announced at the very beginning, with a montage of newsreel footage from a 1939 Nazi rally, which included parades and elaborate pageantry. In light of the remainder of the film, it's obvious that Kluge is calling attention to the tremendous power of spectacle as a vehicle for expressing ideas (or ideology) in a populist form. He's implicitly suggesting: if the Nazis used performance and entertainment so effectively, could the same means be put to use in order to express anti-fascist ideas, anti-totalitarian ideas? Leni fails in her quest, but the film's answer is not so much a definitive no, so much as a "why not try?" It's the effort that counts here, the effort of grappling with the obstacles to art.

Initially, it seems like it's only money that's holding Leni back, that if she only had the resources she could express herself freely. So she experiments with various compromises and negotiations with capitalism, trying to gather the necessary funds while maintaining her independence, eventually concluding that it's impossible. Then, when a sudden inheritance — a deus ex machina inserted by Kluge as a way of working through his schematic diagram of the artistic process — allows Leni to pursue her dream unhindered by monetary woes, she discovers a whole new set of barriers: the disconnect between theory and practice, the difficulties of collaborating, the challenge of communicating with an audience. It's a rebuke to the tired old excuse that one could really make a statement if only one had the money (or if only anything, really). Kluge is advocating action, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and the scenes of Leni's radical pals endlessly debating and tossing around ideas might be seen as an implicit critique of all the empty talk floating around among leftists in 1968, none of it adding up to much at all.

Indeed, the film ends with Leni, disillusioned with the circus, taking a job in television instead, essentially capitulating to the corporations, although she tells herself she's doing it in order to one day control the TV station for her own ends. The film ends on this skeptical, critical note, but Kluge retains his optimism about the potential power of art, best expressed in the repeated declaration that work without an ultimate goal or meaning is worthless. Extrapolated to art, Kluge seems to be saying that art made merely as spectacle or entertainment is empty, and that the best art has something to say, even if it perhaps says it incompletely or clumsily: the goal is what counts. This doesn't suggest an anything goes egalitarianism, however, so much as an encouragement that everyone should try, should do their best, should like Leni attempt to make something big and dangerous and original, even if everything falls apart in the process.

L'enfance nue

Maurice Pialat's debut feature was L'enfance nue, a quiet, unassuming film about childhood confusion and isolation, following the lead of his predecessors in the French film tradition, Zero For Conduct and The 400 Blows. Like those Jean Vigo and François Truffaut films, Pialat's first film concerns itself with a troubled youth, a delinquent drifting aimlessly through an unstable childhood where everything seems transitory and he has nothing to hold onto. François (Michel Terrazon) has been abandoned by his birth parents, who have thrust him into the foster care system without fully relinquishing their parental rights. The result is that everything is always "temporary" for François, he can never settle down into a permanent home with a permanent family or living situation. He's perpetually wary, always aware that things could change at any moment, that he could easily be shuffled around to another home, another family, or else to an institution of some kind. In the film's first half hour, he's living with a family who are taking care of him, but who are reaching the end of their patience with his bad behavior. They profess to love him and treat him as well as their adopted daughter Josette (Pierette Deplangue), but this is a hollow assurance coming soon after the revelation of the disparities in the two children's bedrooms. Josette has a lovely, beautifully decorated room of her own — "everything she dreams, she can see when she's awake," her mother poetically coos — while François' bed is shoved awkwardly into a corner of a landing in the hallway, the only spare space for him in the cramped little home.

It's obvious that François feels destabilized by his situation, by the impermanence of his life, by how apparent it is that no one intends to keep him forever. Indeed, once this family grows tired of dealing with his rambunctious behavior, his tendency to steal and be difficult, they simply decide to send him away. This is a child's nightmare, the fear of being discarded like this, but for François it is a prosaic reality, a fact of his transitory, migratory existence. He has a surprisingly tender goodbye with this temporary family — kissing his sort-of sister on the cheek, giving his sort-of mother a present — and then he seems to forget about them entirely when he's sent to live with another family. This elderly couple (Marie-Louise Thierry and René Thierry) treats the boy with more kindness and patience than he is used to, and he seems to feel real affection for them, and for the old woman's even older mother (Marie Marc), who François calls Granny. This family still can't stabilize François, not really, and he continues his troubled ways, hanging out with rough kids who smoke, steal, fight, and in one scene, watch in awe as an older boy carves his initials into his own arm. But François is moved at least a little by their care: in a pivotal scene, he pulls out Granny's wallet while the old woman is sleeping, leafing through the life savings contained within, but surprisingly does not steal the money, instead simply placing it back. It's perhaps the most genuine act of goodness that François can do.

Pialat's rough, observational style treats François' life with near-documentary directness, a verité intimacy with the rhythms of daily life. The camera drifts along with François, following his aimless wandering and his acts of vandalism or pointless cruelty. Though the camera frequently pushes right up against the young boy, intruding into his already cramped space, Pialat maintains an emotional distance from his central character, never attempting to explain him. François likely couldn't explain anything about himself; he doesn't even seem to know why he does anything. At one point, after picking up a repaired shoe, he's kicking it through the streets and abruptly kicks it down a sewer grating. He seems to instantly regret it, staring blankly at the spot where the shoe disappeared, as though wondering what he'd accomplished. Pialat has a real feel for the aimlessness of this boy's life, the pointlessness of what he does and how he spends his time, the long periods of boredom and frustration.


But the film is not without its joys as well, minor as they might be. Pialat's depiction of childhood — even a childhood as rough as this one — is equally sensitive to the frustrations and the pleasures of being a young boy. François' rootlessness is the source of his sadness and disconnectedness, but in other ways he is remarkably free, able to do almost anything he wants. Pialat captures moments of joy and pleasure amidst the boy's lonely life, some of them spent with friends, like the scene where he and a couple of other would-be toughs stand around smoking, and François goofily puts the cigarette the wrong way into his mouth, laughing and looking at the camera afterward. Many of the film's other moments of pleasure, though, come from tentative, unexpected connections with his foster family. This family cares for him in a way that François is not used to, and a scene where the old man shows the boy photos of people he knew in the French Resistance is touching and sweet, especially when François kisses the old man on the cheek. He also seems to feel a real affection for Granny, with whom he shares the newspaper comic section, exchanging jokes and stories.

Even with his new older brother Raoul (Henri Puff), François has moments of brotherly camaraderie, as when they playfully wrestle together one night. But such moments are fleeting and often tinged with danger; later that night, François, again in a spirit of play, throws a knife at Raoul, so that it embeds itself in the wall right beside his head. François is ill-equipped to handle normal family life for any sustained amount of time. Without becoming a pat psychological study or sociological treatise, L'enfance nue deals seriously and subtly with the problems caused by a lack of strong familial attachments and stability. Pialat's debut is a gentle, ambling little movie, with a real eye for detail and the way actions inform character. The sensibility developed here, loose and improvisational and realistic, would be further refined in Pialat's subsequent work, but already L'enfance nue reveals a filmmaker of prodigious talent making his entrance.

Les Biches

[This is a contribution to the Claude Chabrol Blog-a-Thon currently running at Flickhead from June 21 to June 30. For ten days, Flickhead will be dedicated to the works of the French New Wave master, and I'll be following along with many reviews of my own.]

Few directors have as acute an eye as Claude Chabrol for patiently observing and tracing the petty cruelties and shifts of power that run through intimate relationships. His best films seethe with the undercurrents of frustration, jealousy, revenge and betrayal that flow between those who know each other best. In Les biches, he methodically examines the complicated situation that develops when the rich, icy, controlling lesbian Frédérique (Stéphane Audran) takes in a younger protégé, the struggling young street artist whose only name is the enigmatic moniker Why (Jacqueline Sassard). Frédérique takes the younger woman to live at her palatial home on the water in St. Tropez, where she entertains the girl with lavish parties and engages her in a strange, ambiguous relationship: sometimes they're lovers, even husband and wife, while at other times a chilly master/servant dynamic develops between them. Frédérique takes the masculine role, unquestionably, dominating her young lover. At parties, she shows her off like a trophy, draping an arm around her and condescendingly patting her head. In bed, Frédérique dons glasses and reads the paper while Why sits off to the side, folded up into herself, docile and waiting.

Chabrol calls attention to the power dynamics inherent in relationships by eliminating gender from the equation, if only temporarily. This situation puts the emphasis on the markers of power within relationships: money, intellectual dominance, social status, experience. Frédérique initiates her inexperienced young lover into a new world and takes nearly complete control of her as a result. The situation changes with the introduction of the arrogant architect Paul (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who initially takes to Why and seduces her away from her master for an evening. Frédérique is both jealous and amused. Determined to toy with this new development for her own amusement, she instead finds herself falling in love with Paul, and as a result fluidly, almost naturally, entering the submissive role. It's a fascinating study in the shifting balance of power, as Paul worms his way into this home, disrupting its stasis, exerting some control for a change: he has Frédérique read books on architecture, his chosen field, making her the pupil and him the teacher, a 180-degree flip from her relationship with the malleable Why.

Chabrol's examination of this increasingly complex triangle is precise and analytical, as each point of the triangle pushes and pulls, trying to retain some control, some dominance. Such triangles are perhaps the perfect subject for Chabrol, whose filmmaking is nearly mathematical in its precision. His camera is constantly moving, but seldom with the languid grace of other filmmakers' tracking shots. His editing is abrupt and oblique, while his camerawork is angular rather than fluid, composed of many slow zooms into or out of a scene, slowly burrowing into a claustrophobic closeup or pulling back to an antiseptic distance, a vantage point from which to observe his characters writhe like specimens on a slide. This juxtaposition of discomforting intimacy with clinical objectivity is consistent with the mingling of hot and cold in the film's emotional palette. Chabrol accentuates the blank, non-committal faces of his two actresses especially, allowing them to betray few emotions behind their pretty, vacant expressions, their doll-like makeup and refusal to say what they really mean. Speech and feeling are totally disconnected here, as the two women profess to happiness and contentment while suffering from the very opposite. When Frédérique tells Why about her love for Paul, and the younger girl unfeelingly expresses her happiness for her friend, Frédérique says that she is relieved: "I was afraid you'd feel resentment." Of course, despite Why's words her tone is cold, deadly, dripping with resentment.


In this house where no one really means what they say, words mean little; it's looks and unspoken emotions that tell the real story. This idea is embodied most fully in Frédérique's two goofy henchmen/servants/hangers-on, Robèque (Henri Attal) and Riais (Dominique Zardi). These two clownish fools live in Frédérique's house, adding to the unstable atmosphere with their pranks and games and non-sequiturs. Alternately sinister and laughable, these two create a weird surrealist frisson around the fringes of the narrative, allowing Chabrol the leeway to smuggle in elements of slapstick farce, avant-garde performance art and referential word games into his sexual psychodrama. When Frédérique and Why first arrive at the villa, these two goofballs are reading revolutionary slogans from a Marxist book, gradually increasing the fervor of their proclamations, then throwing the book casually aside and running like eager schoolboys to meet their wealthy benefactress Frédérique, apparently without grasping the contradiction. Later, their dissonant music, played on a bizarre assemblage of drums, bells, whistles and glasses, fills the house with an absurd racket — "no wrong notes," one solemnly warns the other, before they resume pounding away with their defiantly un-rhythmic clamor. Spying on Why one night, Robèque and Riais become Clousseau-like buffoons, ostentatiously tip-toeing around through the darkness, ducking down behind bushes, and running around their car to switch seats when one of them proves utterly incapable of driving.

This nonsense enlivens and enriches the film, injecting a spirit of playful uncertainty into the proceedings. The central narrative is predictable in its progression, especially for those familiar with Chabrol and his idol Hitchcock — with the improbable introduction of a poisoned dagger early on in the film, it's obvious that it's going to wind up in someone's back sooner or later. With the narrative arc more or less constrained by the genre conceits, Chabrol bends and twists the film around this hard center, adding baroque touches and diversions around the central narrative.

He also delves deep into the subtleties of gesture that define the film's relationships, like the way Frédérique feigns drunkenness to nudge Paul into taking advantage of her, or the way Frédérique and Why, so similar they could practically be the same woman, semi-consciously fall into the same rhythms as they walk, their legs pistoning in tandem and their exhausted yawns escaping in sequence. Chabrol is a supple visual storyteller with a keen sense of symbolism, always skirting the obvious to suggest his story's darker undercurrents through elegant visual metaphors. The first kiss between Paul and Why is a prime example: she's on the right, he's on the left, both of them in profile, her face limned by light and his shaded in darkness. When he moves in, ever so slightly, to kiss her, her lips seem to be swallowed up by the darkness of his face, as though she were being devoured by a shadow.

Les biches is a taut, unforgettable psychodrama from one of the masters of the form. Its mysterious surfaces defy facile interpretation, offering up only glittering enigmas, like the shine of the button on Why's jeans as Frédérique undoes her pants for the first time, later mirrored in the glistening of the tears on the younger girl's face following her mentor's betrayal. Chabrol's art is chilly and abstract, designed to keep both viewer and characters at arm's length, and yet there are always dangerous emotions bubbling away beneath the surface, ready to boil over at any moment. This delicate balance of comfort and destruction within bourgeois life — and the ease with which it can be disrupted — is the essential subject of Chabrol's work.

I Am Curious — Blue

I Am Curious — Blue is the second of Vilgot Sjöman's two Curious films, and like its companion piece (the Yellow version), it's an uneasy mix of sociopolitical documentary, sexual drama, and a metafictional treatment of the filmmaking process itself. In both films, Sjöman throws a lot of different material together in the hopes that some of it will work, and in both films some of it does. On the whole, though, Blue is just as dated and meandering as Yellow, a tired mish-mash of radical politics and sexual titillation that seldom ventures beneath the surface of the ideas it raises. In both films, all the actors play themselves, or at least characters who share the actors' real names. Sjöman himself is among the cast, as well as his somewhat reluctant lover and star Lena Nyman, who shuffles indecisively between Sjöman, Börje Ahlstedt (who's married and has a kid), and Hans Hellberg (who is also in another serious relationship, with Bim Warne). There's a certain droll humor to the way the film incorporates its metafictional elements, which inevitably appear abruptly at the corners of scenes: the camera will pan left across a dramatic scene and then suddenly reveal all the equipment and loafing crew members sitting off to the side watching the acting. In one of the better moment, Lena speeds by in a car along the highway, but the camera stops following her when it stumbles across Sjöman and the rest of the crew posed along the highway, singing and intently meeting the camera's stare.

There's less to like about the film's actual drama, which is rather rote and lifeless. Torn between at least two lovers, and also feeling somewhat committed to her director, the actress Lena decides to blow them all off, instead wandering off to the countryside, where she interviews various people she meets, scrawls revolutionary slogans on placards outside prisons, and meets a tough, pretty bar singer (Sonja Lindgren). The film never commits to any one mode, which would be fine if its individual components were interesting in themselves, which they're too often not. The interlude with Lindgren is a notable exception, a haunting and erotically charged sequence that culminates when a fascinated Lena witnesses a lesbian couple making love at a nearby house. The scenes of Lena and Sonja cavorting at a lake, and Sonja later intoning a poignant ballad while accompanying herself on guitar, have a sensual beauty and purity that the rest of the film struggles to match. Sonja herself is fascinating, her hard face and distant stare silently testifying of her eventful life; she's one of the only characters in the film who seems to have a real back story, a real life beyond the boundaries of the film frame, a soulful depth beneath the surface. Sjöman, more interested in political truisms and sexual melodrama, doesn't delve into or linger on these hidden depths, but to his credit, his camera does capture them faithfully.

In fact, Sonja embodies the film's themes better than any of the more pointed moments of political commentary. She's a single mother, raising a child in spite of the disapproval of others — a disapproval that, according to Lena's interviews, doesn't even exist, since no one is judgmental in the abstract, or else everyone knows the right answer and no one wants to admit that they still harbor sexist and unenlightened feelings. The interlude with Sonja suggests the kind of film Sjöman could have made, if he was interested: a warm and very human drama in which prosaic realities are used to illustrate and evoke more abstract political concerns. Instead, too often he approaches things from the other direction, with broad sloganeering and trite storytelling.


More interesting, in a kind of anthropological way, are the film's documentary elements, in the form of Lena's probing questions about the changing attitudes towards sex, religion, gender, class equality and income gaps, prison reform, overpopulation and birth control. It's a kind of time capsule of late 60s political and social thinking, tracing both the extraordinary shifts towards more permissive ideas and the continuing retrenchment of conservatism in other areas, such as the widespread impression that no further social change is needed to achieve equality. Lena simply walks up to people — at dances, on the street, at political rallies, at church — and asks them very pointed, politically charged questions that are clearly driving at foregone conclusions even before her hapless subject answers. Her interview with a young religious man is especially so blunt that one wonders if it's staged; she's shooting fish in a barrel, asking him about sex before marriage, contraceptives and world overpopulation until the guy, in way over his head, simply stammers to a halt and admits he's stymied. Even those viewers most unsympathetic to religion — and I'd consider myself an atheist — would have to start feeling pretty bad for the guy, who's badgered with the most inane of theological paradoxes and battered into submission by Lena's smug, superior attitude. We get it, Lena, you care about world hunger and you have sex before marriage. Aren't you special?

At her best, Lena's interviews are more probing and go after less obvious targets in much more clever ways. One of the better sequences is one in which a series of people are asked about their occupations and incomes, and the cumulative results are used to reveal income disparities between different jobs and different genders — most strikingly, a male schoolteacher admits to making double the salary of a female schoolteacher. These are not earth-shattering revelations — and surely they weren't in 1968, either, at least not to the film's presumptive, largely left-wing audience — but at its best I Am Curious presents these ideas with enough style and panache to keep things interesting. At its worst, the film degenerates into empty posturing and 60s radical chic, like a parody of what most people think of when they think of Maoist-era Godard. One gets the sense that Sjöman aspires to Godard, but he lacks his idol's ineffable wit; his "radical" poses are too often either aggravating or, even worse, simply boring.