The Wild Child

François Truffaut had, from his very first feature, his famous debut The 400 Blows, been very interested in childhood and the experiences of a child in a world governed by adult rules. The director's 1970 film The Wild Child returns to that theme and to the territory of childhood, albeit from a very different angle. Based on a true story, the film deals with a young feral boy (Jeanne-Pierre Cargol) who is discovered in the forest in 1798, running around naked, covered in dirt, fighting and biting and scratching like an animal when he's captured by some rural folk. The boy can't speak, has no understanding of language, and has apparently never experienced the socialization of being around other people. Totally isolated and wild, the boy, eventually dubbed Victor, is a case study for what humanity is like in a natural state, without the accoutrements of language and social behavior that society has created.

Dr. Jean Itard (Truffaut) hears of the boy and decides that he will take Victor into his own home, placing him in the care of his housekeeper Madame Guérin (Françoise Seigner) and trying to teach him language, trying to educate the boy and bring him into human society. It's another opportunity for Truffaut to study the rebellious spirit of a boy's resistance against societal rules: the film is dedicated to Truffaut's one-time child star Jean-Pierre Léaud, and one can easily see in Victor a trace of the same wild, anti-authoritarian qualities that Truffaut so admired in Léaud in The 400 Blows.

And yet The Wild Child possesses very little of those qualities. By this point, just over a decade after Truffaut's debut feature, the director who'd started out shooting rough and raw footage in the streets and decrying the "tradition of quality" cinema that had preceded the French New Wave, had himself been absorbed by that tradition, making films far more polished and conventional than one would have expected after his debut. In contrast to the unpredictable energy and enthusiasm of The 400 Blows, The Wild Child is somewhat dry and smooth, the sharp edges sanded away. Victor is a far wilder figure than Léaud's Antoine Doinel, but the film doesn't really do justice to his wildness, his unconventionality, his complete separation from human society. The result is a film of interesting ideas that's somewhat dull in its execution. Néstor Almendros' stark black-and-white cinematography is crisp and clear, but the film's more restrained tone clamps down on the poetic emotionalism of Truffaut's earlier portrait of uncouth childhood.


Most of the film is narrated by Truffaut's Dr. Itard, reading excerpts from his medical journals about the boy, which contributes to the clipped, clinical tone of this material. The film also moves at a very brisk pace, the long and arduous process of socializing this boy condensed to a highlight reel, complete with old-fashioned iris-in/iris-out effects to transition between scenes, a cutesy flourish that's completely at odds with the no-nonsense rapidity that otherwise characterizes the film. Truffaut makes the process of adapting this boy from a frenzied wild child into an at least superficially civilized kid seem like it happens quickly and incrementally, each new triumph of progress ticked off before moving on. Tellingly, he also cuts the story off before the sad conclusion of the real tale: in real life, Dr. Itard gave up on Victor soon after the events of this film are over, and Victor never progressed beyond the rudimentary fragments of language he's picked up by the end of the film. He spent the rest of his life in an institution, just as Itard's rival doctor had suggested at the beginning of this film. Truffaut elides any hint of this conclusion, choosing to end on a more ambiguous note, Victor having just returned from running away to resume his education with Itard. The ending hints that he could learn more, could actually become socialized and learn to speak, even if he still harbors a longing for the freedom he enjoyed in his former life.

That trace of melancholy about the loss of freedom is the film's strongest element, a cross-current to the unwarranted optimism implied by the ending. Cargol delivers a touching, raw performance, embodied entirely in his face, without recourse to any verbal expression other than a few grunts and a few hesitant words. He seems to long, viscerally and intensely, for the wilds of nature, and though he eventually accepts wearing clothes and eating with utensils and participating in Itard's language and alphabet games, he's still connected to nature. He'd rather stare out the window than watch his instructor. He'd rather run through the fields or stick his head out a carriage window like a dog in a car than play more of Itard's endless matching and memory games. One of the film's more provocative questions is the idea of whether the kid was actually better off not being discovered, if he was happier living wild and free without any attempt to fit in with a society that he'd never even known existed. It's at moments like this that Truffaut's poetic sensibility comes to the fore, in images of Victor running off through a large open field, escaping from the rules and restrictions of a world that he still doesn't fully understand, an image that strongly evokes the closing sequence of The 400 Blows, with Antoine Doinel escaping to the beach.

The Wild Child has periodic moments like this that reveal Truffaut's interest in this story and the ideas he wishes to explore through this wild boy's life. On the whole, however, it's a routine and undistinguished take on an inherently interesting subject, bolstered by its unique resonances with Truffaut's prior work. For a film that raises the question of whether its protagonist might have been better off living his life outside of society, it's a rather staid and conventional work that never truly does justice to the wildness at its core.

The Nude Vampire

One pretty much knows what one is in for with a film titled The Nude Vampire, and Jean Rollin's second feature (his first in color) certainly delivers on the promise of stiff acting, absurd plotting, and blatantly exploitative sequences that offer little besides titillation. What's notable about this film, though, is that it's also sensuous, moody, chilling, and strangely poetic, a trashy B-movie with copious nudity that intermittently becomes something much stranger and more mysterious. It's a very visual film, its dialogue sparse, and what little there is of it mostly silly and inconsequential. It's the images that matter, images of a surreal, unsettling strangeness — unsettling because Rollin's aesthetic is so matter-of-fact, making the supernatural and the bizarre seem utterly quotidian.

The film's visual emphasis is confirmed right from its extraordinary opening sequence, in which it takes nearly ten minutes for anyone to say a word. Instead, Rollin simply delivers one mysterious, outrageous set piece after another. Cult scientists in red hoods strip a girl wearing a similar hood and inject her with color-coded chemicals that drip into beakers around the lab. The bright chemicals look like dyes prepared for Easter eggs more than scientific solutions, but no matter. The pacing is slow, almost narcotized, and Rollin cuts between steady, silent closeups: the red-hooded men, their eyes peering out through thin, ragged slits in their cloth hoods, the beakers and scientific equipment around the room, the girl's eyes peering out from behind her own hood. In the next scene, a girl (Caroline Cartier) in a gauzy orange dress, naked beneath the thin, translucent material, runs through the darkness, pursued by men in animal masks. This sequence is evocative and beautiful and creepy, the girl and her pursuers casting elongated shadows on the blank walls of the buildings, Rollin making excellent use of wide expanses of negative space with the girl trapped between these monstrous shadow-creatures. The deliberate pacing only adds to the creepiness of it all, with Rollin frequently cutting in inscrutable closeups of the men in their gaudy, sinister masks.

The girl is soon cornered by these masked men and shot, and the scene is witnessed by Pierre (Rollin's half-brother Olivier), who escapes and follows the masked men back to a mansion, which he decides to investigate. His inquiry leads him — in a sequence that prefigures Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut — to a suicide cult that seems to be connected to his father Georges (Maurice Lemaître). The plot never even remotely makes any sense, but it doesn't really need to: Pierre just wanders around, stumbling into trouble, witnessing what seems to be a war between his father and some mysterious supernatural beings, who are struggling over control of the girl in orange, who's not dead, it turns out, because she's supposedly a vampire. There are countless absurdities along the way, like the fact that when Pierre calls his painter friend Robert (Pascal Fardoulis) for help, Robert first dresses up in a tuxedo before going to get his friend.


It's a nutty, outlandish movie, and a very trashy one. The action periodically comes to a halt for Rollin to deliver scenes of blatant titillation that are as woodenly staged as everything else in the film, which renders them almost as unsettling as the horror set pieces. At one point, there's an extended sequence in which a naked girl models for Robert, caressing her breasts with fingers capped with long golden nails, and it just goes on and on and on, punctuated with periodic cutaways to Robert's leering face in an uncomfortably tight closeup that accentuates his exaggeratedly pervy expression. Rollin has the instincts of a pornographer mixed with the sensibility of a visual poet — certainly not a verbal poet, though — and he often stages scenes from odd angles that seem intended primarily to provide a voyeuristic glance up a girl's dress.

But these obvious softcore flourishes are really the most boring aspect of the film, so obviously catering to simple titillation that the images fail to be even remotely exciting, in any sense. Rollin's eroticism is more memorably embodied in the pair of twins (Cathy and Marie-Pierre Castel) who serve as Georges' servants and seem to exist primarily to dress up in a succession of outrageous sci-fi fetishism costumes. In one scene, as Georges talks on the telephone, he idly plays with the girls' clunky, bizarre costumes, seemingly as a substitute for the bored doodling that most people do while on the phone. The twins are eerie and strange, like almost everything in this movie, and later they become perfectly synchronized, hand-holding avenging spirits, their faces smeared with blood as they relentlessly pursue their victim through a graveyard.

The film is rough and uneven and obviously has no budget — not even for effects; when one woman holds a pistol to her head and shoot herself, it's totally bloodless — but Rollin turns this necessary minimalism into an asset. It's a very stark film, set in dark, empty urban streets and rural estates that tower imposingly over the tiny figures of the characters in sweeping long shots where everything is covered in fog or darkness. The soundtrack is fairly minimal too, with long periods of near-silence occasionally interrupted by some stiff dialogue or a fragment of scraping strings from Yvon Serault's score.

Within this minimalist context, Rollin makes the supernatural seems utterly concrete and physical. When Pierre's father is attacked at the climax by a group of supernatural beings, they parade towards the camera looking like a band of hippies, led by a kid who's obviously (and comically) struggling to hold a black flag aloft. Similarly, when Pierre enters a chateau where he hopes to learn the secrets he's been chasing, he's confronted by a calm, utterly normal old couple who usher him towards his fate. After Pierre is gone, Rollin stays with the old couple, who seem lonely and slightly melancholy, always waiting in this empty house for visitors seeking answers, always left alone again when they depart. The camera tracks away from them, pulling back to emphasize their loneliness, a moment of surprising emotion, one sign of the strange sadness that lingers at the fringes of this film. Rollin has a feel for such quirky moments, like when two of Georges' assistants walk away through a field in a long shot, chatting, and refreshingly seeming as baffled about what's going on as the audience likely is.

Bed & Board

Bed & Board is the fourth installment in François Truffaut's series of films about the lovable rogue Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The previous film, 1968's Stolen Kisses, ended with Antoine settling down after some romantic adventures, finally realizing that his longtime on-again-off-again girlfriend Christine (Claude Jade) was the girl for him. This film opens with Antoine and Christine married, living in a small apartment above where Antoine works in a shop dying flowers. The film's opening scenes follow Christine on her errands, initially only tracking her shapely legs below the hem of her skirt, as she goes from shop to shop, correcting the shopowners on her title: she's a "madame," not a "mademoiselle," she says proudly, perhaps proud both that she's married and that she looks young enough to still be mistaken for a young unmarried girl. When Christine returns home soon after, she runs into an old man on the staircase, who lets her go ahead of him so he can ogle her legs, the same way Truffaut's camera had been admiring them just moments before. The point is obvious: Antoine has a young and very desirable wife, and in the subsequent scenes some comic interplay with a slightly older woman who flirts with Antoine establishes that he too is young and desirable. It's a portrait of a happy marriage but already the emphasis on youth and attractiveness sets the stage for some straying outside of this marital and domestic bliss.

The film picks up where the previous Doinel films left off, continuing to examine Antoine as he grows up but doesn't exactly mature. The series that started with Antoine as a young boy, rebelling against his parents and the oppressive confines of school, has now followed him through his teenage romantic troubles and into adulthood and marriage. The previous films are very much present here, in ways both obvious and subtle. During the early scenes, when Antoine is working at the flower shop, he gets a call and answers the phone with an enthusiastic greeting to someone he greets as a mother; for a moment, one wonders if Antoine has at last reconciled with his parents, who were last seen in the first film of the series, The 400 Blows, before he ran away from home. Instead, the woman on the phone turns out to be Christine's mother. As Antoine says, "I don't fall in love with a girl, I fall in love with her whole family." This was a running theme of the earlier films in the series as well. Antoine, who had such an unhappy childhood and such lousy parents, is constantly looking for an adoptive family to call his own. In Antoine and Colette, he'd been as attracted to Colette's loving, kind parents as to the girl herself, and in fact he'd probably spent more time with her parents than with her, as she was constantly dodging him and keeping him at a distance. In Stolen Kisses, he'd formed a similar dynamic with Christine and her parents, and his love for Christine seems to be bound up in his admiration for the happy home life and close relationship she has with her parents, a domestic contentment that had been denied to Antoine (and, by extension, Truffaut) as a boy.


Later, Christine refers to Antoine's ill-fated relationship with Colette, thinking that his admiration for Christine's new glasses is linked to the girl he once loved as a younger man. He corrects her, saying that Colette didn't wear glasses, but in fact his desire for Christine to keep the glasses on in bed hints at something else altogether: a slight restlessness, a desire for something a little different, for a change of pace. Antoine has met a girl, the Japanese girl Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer), and he seems to be heading towards an affair. That's the drama that eventually emerges from the film, but it does so only slowly, gradually bubbling up from beneath the light, charming surface of everyday life.

Day-to-day domesticity is the focus here, with lightly humorous scenarios like Antoine and Christine's elaborate and indirect way of getting a forgetful woman to remember to pay for the violin lessons that Christine gives to the woman's daughter. The courtyard of the building where Antoine and Christine live is populated with more eccentric characters, and just as the detective agency of Stolen Kisses provided a forum for little bits of antic comedy and one-liners, this cast of characters serves a similar function here, sprinkling little comedic routines along the fringes of the film. Most of it isn't particularly funny or original, amusing enough to elicit maybe a small smile or a chuckle rather than real laughter. As a comedian, Truffaut's material is rather tame and familiar, and the effect, as at times in Stolen Kisses, is of watching a comedy with very few real laughs. (One exception is Antoine's great response to Christine's musing that she wouldn't breast-feed a child, and another is the bit involving Antoine's insistence that he's reading a newspaper article about "lascivious broads.")

Léaud is such a charming presence that he's fun to watch no matter what the context, and the same goes for Jade. But the sad fact is that each subsequent Antoine Doinel film seems less weighty, less substantial than the last. By this point, the series has become a venue for Truffaut's lightly comic musings on marriage, which are strictly generic and derived from conventional romantic comedy — the best example is the recurring and very unfunny routine with an impatient opera singer and his perpetually late wife, who's always scurrying after him. When that gag is repeated by Antoine and Christine at the end of the film, it's meant to signify that they too have fallen into the routines of marriage, that this is true love. Instead, it's merely sad to see these charming and lively characters subsumed by such lame material. Truffaut's comedic impulses are at the level of a sitcom or a tired old-school comedy, with overly broad caricatured characters: dirty old men, horny housewives, and so on. In comparison to the loose, rich, offhanded humor of The 400 Blows and Antoine and Colette — humor that emerged organically from the characters and situations, blended into the varied emotional palette of those films — this staid and prosaic comedic sensibility is a jarring disappointment. Still, there are a few good recurring characters, especially a friend of Antoine's who's constantly asking to borrow money in incrementally greater amounts, always asking to borrow again whatever he already owes.


Truffaut also makes good use of a sinister mystery man (an echo of the mysterious stranger who followed Christine around in Stolen Kisses) who everyone in the neighborhood calls "the strangler." The man turns out to be an innocuous actor, and one night Antoine and Christine see him on TV, doing impersonations of Delphine Seyrig. He starts out performing a parody of Resnais' Last Night In Marienbad, then segues into dialogue from Stolen Kisses, dialogue that Seyrig's older seductress had spoken to Antoine before they went to bed together. As the lines are spoken, Truffaut focuses on a closeup of Christine, smiling and giggling, oblivious to the fact that the actor is reciting lines from one of her husband's previous sexual adventures. It's another of the film's premonitions of the marital discord and infidelity to come.

The thing is, once Antoine has achieved the bourgeois family life he always wanted — the loving parents, the sweet and smart wife, the beautiful baby boy they have halfway through the film — he doesn't really know what to do with it all. He's still a playful and aimless young man, drifting through life. He gets fired from his job as a flower-dyer after screwing up a bouquet with an experiment that fries the flowers, and he stumbles through a case of mistaken identity into a new and even more whimsical job where his sole responsibility seems to be piloting remote-controlled boats around a lake-sized scale model of a harbor. The purpose of this bizarre job is never explained; it's merely a sign of Antoine's continued existence within a quasi-adulthood in which he hasn't quite adopted to marriage, or parenthood, or the responsibilities of a real adult job. As little as Bed & Board resembles the earlier films in the series in terms of tone or style, Antoine himself is still very much recognizable, the impish adolescent of the earliest films in the series still embodied within an older body.

Antoine's continuing uncertainty about what exactly he wants leads to one of the film's best sequences, the penultimate scene at a restaurant where Antoine goes with Kyoko. During the dinner, in between courses, he keeps leaving the table to call Christine on the phone, telling her how unhappy he is and how tired he's grown of Kyoko already. The calls eventually lead to his reconciliation with Christine, a very touching moment in which Truffaut cuts back and forth between closeups of the earnest, upset Antoine and the sweetly smiling Christine, the editing bringing the couple back together even though they remain separated across the phone line. It's a very touching moment, and even if Bed & Board on the whole is too weak and inconsistent to be considered a truly worthy successor to the earlier films in the series, moments like this carry over a measure of the emotional complexity and warmth most closely associated with Antoine Doinel and his adventures.

The Spider's Stratagem

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, made in 1970, the same year as his masterpiece The Conformist, is another look at fascism, heroism, betrayal, and the lies and secrets of history. Like Bertolucci's more famous (and more fully realized) fascist parable, this film examines the deformation of character that occurs under fascist oppression, as well as the ways in which such regimes inevitably prey on the weaknesses and flaws of the people they subjugate. The film opens with a man (Giulio Brogi) arriving in the small country town of Tara. Everywhere he goes through the streets, he finds the name of Athos Magnani, a local hero commemorated with street signs and statues and buildings. This is the name of the man's father, and his own name as well, a name that's famous only in this local community, where Athos the father was an anti-fascist hero, a rebel who resisted the fascists and paid for it with his life, assassinated in a theater during an opera performance. Many years later, Athos the son has been invited to visit the town by his father's mistress Draifa (Alida Valli), because she believes that only the son can uncover the truth about the father's murder. Once he arrives, this son who looks so much like his father — Brogi plays both generations of Magnani men — wanders through this sleepy town where his father's life and death still seem so fresh after so long, where the old people (and the town is populated almost exclusively by old people, barring a few children) remember every detail of the now legendary story as though it had happened yesterday.

The film has a striking, beautiful look, a distinctive aesthetic, the beauty of which can't even be obscured by the slightly faded quality of the existing copies that can be seen. The imagery of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci's DP on The Conformist as well, is simply gorgeous, if in a very different way from the bold colors and broad palette of The Conformist. The town of Tara consists mostly of pale pink buildings with brown roofs, lending the film a sepia tone conducive to nostalgia: as soon as Athos steps into the town, it's as though he's stepping into the past. The fact that almost everyone he meets is old enough to have known his father firsthand — and to remark on the uncanny resemblance between father and son — further contributes to the impression that Athos is standing in for his own father here, returning to his father's town and his father's life, to a place that seems deeply rooted in the past. The fascist era is still fresh here. A local landowner who had been a highly placed fascist during Mussolini's reign is still a prominent figure here, with a sprawling estate guarded by thugs who rudely send Athos away when he tries to get an audience with this man. The memorials to Athos the father, seemingly on every corner, adorning every building, are more reminders of the past, more connections to a violent history. And the mystery of the anti-fascist Athos' death still hangs over everything, perpetually unsolved, lingering as an unspoken tension between the aging townspeople.

The film proceeds at a deliberate, plodding pace, as Athos visits with his father's three friends — Gaibazzi (Pippo Campanini), Rasori (Franco Giovanelli) and Costa (Tino Scotti) — and with Draifa, who seems determined to get the son to hang around as a replacement for the father. Bertolucci weaves flashbacks into the fabric of the story, skipping back and forth without warning from the present day to the past, to the time leading up to Athos' murder. These flashbacks are disorienting and odd, perhaps intentionally so, because Bertolucci makes no attempt to disguise the continuity between the aged characters of the present and their supposedly younger counterparts of nearly forty years ago. This doesn't make much difference with Brogi, playing father and son at roughly similar ages thirty-four years apart, but it's jarring when Draifa and the father's three friends appear to be just as old in the past as they are in the present. It lends a subtle surrealism to the film, and also a sense of casual disregard for the niceties of cinematic storytelling. There's a similarly jarring aesthetic at work in a scene where Athos the son meets with the formerly fascist landowner, sitting in separate boxes at the theater, initially separated by several tiers, but by the end of the scene they're suddenly sitting in adjacent boxes as they talk. It's puzzling, and utterly unexplained, just a weird disjunction to break up the film's smooth, languid meandering.


Another weird moment occurs when Athos the son goes out walking at night and is suddenly swarmed by the townspeople, pouring out of a bar as if spurred on by an unseen, unheard signal, encircling him and chasing him. It's as though the town itself is seeking to expel this interloper who's digging around in its past, trying to uncover the solutions to mysteries that many wish had been buried for good with the end of the fascist era. The film is about forgetting, about mythmaking, about the process by which the violence and tumult of history eventually settles into a digestible account for posterity. Athos stirs up the ugly history of the fascist era with his questions and his curiosity, and he finds that nobody, on either side of that struggle, wants the old wounds reopened. Only Draifa, still smarting from love and loss, wants to really think about the past; everyone else is content with the official version of events, with the myth of Athos the hero, mysteriously murdered by his fascist enemies.

In a scene late in the film — one of the best sequences in the film — Athos the father delivers a grand speech on the importance of heroes, on the importance of illusion and appearance over truth and reality. As he speaks, he walks around the perimeter of a tower overlooking the pink-and-brown conformity of Tara's tightly packed houses, his own form a brownish-black outline, a shadow overlaid on the town, predicting his future status as a local icon. It's as though, as he speaks, he's already becoming abstracted, already taking on his status as a historical figure with a set story, a grand tale of murder and intrigue that, as Athos the son instantly recognizes earlier in the film, is related to such famous legends as Shakespeare's MacBeth and Julius Caesar.

The film's ideas are fascinating, but the film itself isn't always as enthralling as the concepts it explores. The acting is almost uniformly flat and affectless, with few flashes of genuine feeling, and the elliptical storytelling only adds to the sense of aimlessness and distance. It often feels like a loose, half-formed story has been folded around an essay, and the result is that the film is constantly slipping back and forth from languid to simply boring. There are numerous beautiful, striking moments here — Athos the father dancing defiantly with a girl as the glaring fascists look on; Athos and his friends plotting to kill Mussolini, all of them ecstatically shouting, "boom! boom!" as they imagine blowing up the dictator; a dreamlike sequence with lion tamers trying to catch an escaped circus lion — but the disconnected moments never quite add up to a coherent, satisfying whole. The Spider's Stratagem is thematically rich but narratively slack, its characters archetypal and minimally defined, with little personality or specificity.

Pravda

Pravda was the second film that Jean-Luc Godard made with his collective cinema experiment the Dziga Vertov Group, after British Sounds. Like its predecessor — and like the later Struggles In Italy — it is a kind of critical report on a particular country and the status of the socialist revolution in that country. Filmed in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Soviet invasion of the country, with the assistance of DVG collaborator Jean-Henri Roger, Pravda is a savagely sarcastic indictment of the Soviets, the Czechs, and what Godard considered "psuedo-Communists" everywhere. The film's soundtrack is structured as another dialogue between Vladimir (as in Lenin) and Rosa (as in Luxemburg), the favored names that were repeated throughout Godard's revolutionary films. These two commentators, mimicking TV newcasters, dissect images of what Godard sees as the infiltration of Western imperialism and socialist "revisionism" into a Communist country: billboards advertising American companies; American-style rock n' roll music blaring on the soundtrack, cutting in and out unpredictably; the presence of Hertz and Avis renting Czech-made cars at the airports, thereby appropriating for profit the labor of the proletariat; the dominance of Hollywood-style exploitation pictures and spectacles at local movie theaters. Godard, at the height of his doctrinaire embrace of Maoism, finds evidence of socialist failure everywhere, and the resulting film is by turns savagely funny, utterly blinkered (the continued exultation of Maoist China as the ideal to aspire to is absurd and embarrassing), and intermittently boring.

In other words, it's a typical example of Godard in his "lost" years, after declaring the end of cinema in Week-End and proceeding to rebuild from scratch the artform he'd once loved and had come to distrust. At the root of his distrust was a suspicion of the too-easy consonances between sounds and images, and much of his work with the Dziga Vertov Group constituted a self-questioning attempt to create new relationships between sounds and images. He often didn't succeed, and he knew it: towards the end of this film, Vladimir lambastes Rosa because, he says, she hasn't created new conjunctions of sounds and images, she's merely resorted to the language of posters and slogans, and in the process has taken a step back instead of forward. These kinds of disclaimers are peppered throughout the DVG films, signaling Godard's awareness of the limitations of his current modes of expression. That's part of the point: when Godard declared the end of cinema, he meant the end of commercial cinema, and the films he made subsequently in the late 60s and early 70s were self-conscious "blackboard" films in which the director, while delivering dogmatic ideas well-suited to sloganeering and polemics, was simultaneously querying the very foundations of cinema, the union of sound and image, trying (and usually, and admittedly, failing) to advance beyond mere slogans into the truly revolutionary cinema he envisioned.

If Pravda, like the other DVG films, falls well short of that goal, it's still a fascinating failure. The voiceover ironically calls attention, again and again, to the disjunctions between words and images — in other words, between theory and reality. This is a central theoretical construct, the idea that the image is reality, the documentation of something actually happening, while the sound is something else: on the one hand, the revisionist cover-up that uses words to disguise the reality, and on the other hand the ideal, the theory that has not yet been put into practice. Thus, the disjunction between sounds and images, between words and the reality they ostensibly describe. This is the reverse of the dynamic at work in British Sounds, in which images were presumed to lie while words and sounds provided the revolutionary truth. Godard hasn't exactly regained his faith in images, but Pravda already displays a more complex and dialectical understanding of the relationships of sounds and images to the truth. Thus, the voiceover says, "that's a picture of a girl in a bikini," but the image is missing, replaced by a black screen: the image had been sold, the narration corrects itself, to the Columbia Broadcasting Corporation, and thus could not be shown. The voiceover says, "those are wire fences that the government puts around everything which is the private property of the people." The image shows a playground, fenced in, looking grim and forbidding, and the irony in the description — intimidating fences to demarcate land that supposedly belongs to everyone — emphasizes the discontinuity between words (the people are supposed to be "free") and images (the government continues to control and channel the people's activities from above).


This concept introduces one of the film's most effective sections, as the voiceover, posing as objective reportage, is actually engaging with the subject of ownership, the issue at the root of the debate between capitalism and socialism. Godard shows an image of a wheat field, while Vladimir says, "that doesn't belong to anyone, it's collectivized wheat." In another image, the film makes a distinction between a fruit tree that's genuinely placed by the side of the road and one that's separated from the road by a fence. The image of the tree, sitting just outside the fence's barrier, right by the side of the road and thus accessible and free to anyone, makes the point that the space between freedom and constriction is incredibly small. Through these clever juxtapositions of images and words, Godard is probing the thorny question of who owns what in capitalist versus socialist societies. The deadpan quasi-journalistic presentation adds a note of irony to these sequences: this is a tree, this is wheat, this is a "nationalized food store," and yet all of these things are more complicated in their status than they appear.

That's the essence of Godard's approach to the Dziga Vertov Group films. Pravda frequently gets bogged down in its polemics and contradictions, but one of those contradictions is that even when Godard is being didactic and extremely politicized, he's also grappling with his own assumptions and with the methods of representation he's chosen. That's what makes these films so interesting, despite the theoretical knots that Godard ties himself into over the course of each one. For all the seemingly humorless didacticism of Godard the polemicist, there's still a strain of bitter, ironic humor in this film's wordy narration, and also a lingering appreciation for beauty, as in the image of a solitary bright red flower, alternately blooming brilliantly or trampled in a mud puddle, a classically beautiful symbol for socialism's bold promises and its often disappointing betrayals. Godard is lamenting the need for tanks to "watch over" the peasants, and mocking the kind of men, brainwashed by Western advertising, who "would rather wash their cars than fuck their wives" on the weekends. This film, from Godard's transitional "blackboard" period, is hampered by all the flaws that are common to his DVG works — the ideological blinders, the inexplicable affection for Mao — but it's still a fascinating film that even pushes beyond its polemics in some unexpected ways.

Wind From the East

Wind From the East is a product of Jean-Luc Godard's involvement, during the late 60s and early 70s, with a collective filmmaking experiment known as the Dziga Vertov Group. The film is, typically of the films he made during this period, about ideas and simultaneously about how best to express those ideas through the medium of film. The film deals with the situation of a strike and, during its first half, methodically analyzes the different components of the strike: the workers, the radical students who encourage the strike while not quite being able to communicate in the same terms as the workers, the union delegates and other middlemen who preach moderation and compromise, the employers who demand the immediate resumption of work, the police state that suppresses the strike on behalf of capitalism.

All of these forces are allowed a voice on the film's dense, verbose soundtrack: a collage of voices constantly talking, expressing different points of view on the strike and on anti-capitalism in general. Some voices, in sympathy with socialist ideas, advocate for small measures, for small steps and incremental advances, while other voices, representing the bourgeois and the capitalist classes, say that things are already good enough, or getting better, that the strike is accomplishing nothing, that it should end already. Both of these views are contrasted against the voice of the agitator, the radical, the militant, who denounces both those who say that the work is already done and those who say that the work should proceed more slowly. Godard doesn't speak himself, but it is obvious that this last voice is representative of his own.

The film's soundtrack essentially tells its story, subverting the conventional narrative expectations of the cinema. Its images, related only tangentially to this tale of strike and conflict, instead depict a pastoral rural setting through which various characters wander, dressed up to symbolically embody the various voices of the soundtrack. There is a bourgeois woman in a frilly dress, carrying an umbrella to shield herself from the bright sun. There is a union representative, a compromiser, dressed in a bold suit that makes him look like a reject from the Sgt. Pepper's photo shoot. There is a policeman or army officer, dressed like an American cavalryman in a John Ford Western, with his musket and his saber and his horse, a real Hollywood icon of law and order. And there are the young radicals, the students and workers in their shabby clothes and long hair, opposing these forces of suppression and status quo. The whole thing has an aura of playfulness that belies the dead-serious ideas being expressed in the film. When the militants fight with the cavalryman, it's staged as a play cowboys-and-Indians battle, like kids waging pretend war, the bullets never hitting anyone, the sword never slicing anyone up. When someone does bleed, it's the bright red paint that Godard favored — along with an equally bold blue — in title cards and mise en scène alike in many of his films from the second half of the 60s on.


Godard's playful references to the Western are made most explicit during a segment in which he declaims and analyzes the filmmaking theory behind his radical films of the late 60s and early 70s, opposing this filmmaking practice to Hollywood's "realism." In contrast to radical filmmaking, the voiceover declares, Hollywood works on the assumption that an image of a horse is not only the same thing as the horse, but is in fact better. Godard, drawing on Magritte's infamous painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe, says the opposite: this is not a horse, this is not reality, this is not a real Union soldier, this is not an Indian. His joking deconstructions of Hollywood plots and characters in earlier films had already hinted at this point, and here, by toying with genre and narrative in only the roughest and most casual of ways, he is definitively rejecting the idea that what we see on a cinema screen should be taken at face value.

In another scene, Godard parodies the conventional understanding of cinema as a source of spectacle and entertainment. A man breaks the fourth wall by speaking directly to the camera in Italian, his words translated into French by the female narrator, describing the dark space of the theater and the people in it. The man ends his monologue by coming on to a pretty girl in the back of the theater, asking her to join him in his splendid rural surroundings. This is, as Godard sees it, the essential nature of the cinema, an act of seduction, asking audiences to believe in the space of the screen so completely that they wish to enter it.


Godard is suspicious of this cinema of seduction, but in some ways he can't help recreate it as well. His images are at times calculated to produce boredom, to focus attention on the words pouring by on the soundtrack: static images of youths lying in the grass, their faces obscured by protruding shubbery, or endless takes of people trudging slowly through open fields. Godard is critiquing the pictorial sensibility, the presentation of images as beautiful, but his own images are often beautiful as well — one suspects that Godard's aesthetic sensibilities frequently sabotage his theoretical embrace of ugly or functional images. At times he deviates from his subjects to film the leaves on trees nearby, a move dating back to 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, in which he wondered aloud why it was necessary to photograph a woman if the tree swaying in the breeze behind her was equally interesting.

Later, he stages a scene in a field of pink flowers that might have come from a Monet painting: a bourgeois woman sitting with umbrella over her head, chatting amiably with a man standing nearby. The two figures, particularly the woman, are obscured by long green stalks topped with pale pink buds, the kind of pointillist field of flowers beloved by Monet. On the soundtrack, the female narrator applies various historical and fictionalized names to the two figures, positioning them as representatives of bourgeois oppression: a white woman who falsely accuses a black man of rape and gets him lynched; a scientist who develops napalm to destroy Third World lands and people; a German Communist who urges moderation in responding to the encroaching Nazi threat before the Second World War. One of the names given to the woman in the image is the wife of Monet (although with the wrong name), along with a (presumably fabricated) description of her opposition to worker activism. Coupled with the pastoral beauty of this very Monet-like image, the message is obvious: beauty is to be distrusted, and the bourgeois people framed within such lovely images are often actors in racist violence, in fascism, in the suppression of the working class.


Interestingly, though the film is all about getting beyond the abstract and the theoretical into practical action, Godard really only runs into trouble when he tries to advocate for specific action, which for him at this point means revolutionary violence. Gone are the back-and-forth debates over violence that marked his La Chinoise, from a few years earlier. The advocacy of violence here is direct and troubling, complete with practical advice for militants — avoid leaving fingerprints — and images of homemade explosive devices constructed from various consumer goods. Godard does nod to Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers — which earlier in the film he'd criticized as an unforgivably Western take on Third World struggle — in his direct images of bourgeois businesspeople and children shopping or traveling, but the disconcerting advocacy of random violence is never resolved by counterarguments as it often was in Godard's other films. Allowed to stand alone as it here, it's the clearest example of Godard's theoretical ideas existing in a vacuum where priorities and relativities are obviously skewed.

Elsewhere, though, the film is simply fascinating and complex, deeply engaged in dealing with the question of how to represent class struggle, how to deal with questions that aren't fully resolved even for the people taking part in the struggle themselves. As with most of the Dziga Vertov Group films, Wind From the East is in part about its own process of production. At one point, in a convoluted meta maneuver that's hilarious in its boldness, the narrator talks about how the next scene is a document of a conference that was called for the purposes of deciding how to film the next scene, with the subject being how to film an assembly of socialists and the ideas they present. Then the scene plays out exactly as described, with overlapping voices only occasionally resolving into an identifiable phrase, in French or Italian, while the camera spins around, revealing the sound crew, filming the trees, showing images of Stalin and Mao, panning among the students sprawled out in the grass at the gathering. The scene consists of filming the discussion that is intended to decide how to film the scene, a kind of filmmaking paradox that Godard obviously finds delightful, and invites us to find delightful as well. As the narrator says, the voices are confused and the ideas are not necessarily fully developed, but they're trying to move forward, trying to express complicated ideas and incite change.


That describes the films of the Dziga Vertov Group in general. Although in practice the "group" generally consisted of Godard and his collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin, the theory of the DVG was intended to create a whole new practice and ideology of making films. Wind From the East is thus constantly calling into question the methods of Godard and Gorin as well as the methods of Hollywood cinema. The narrator often speaks in the second person, as though talking about the filmmakers: always "you," encompassing everyone in the failures and limitations of the film. When the narrator describes images of apartment blocks and suffering working class people as enforcing the bourgeois order, she might be describing 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, with all its similar images of towering urban buildings representing the alienation of its characters. Godard, who broke from his own past and his own oeuvre after 1968, is consistently looking forward in films like this, trying to start over from scratch. If he doesn't always succeed, as the film itself frequently and explicitly acknowledges, the results are rarely less than fascinating anyway. Wind From the East is a rich, complex work, a work of bold ideas and slapdash, often goofy aesthetics, approaching the cinema not with a reverent aesthetic sensibility, but with an anything-goes mentality that promotes experimentation and risk-taking on every level.

Rio Lobo

This is a contribution to the Late Films Blogathon being hosted by David Cairns at Shadowplay.

Howard Hawks' final film, Rio Lobo, is an awkward, limping, but still often poignant and entertaining goodbye from the great director. It is the concluding chapter of his loose, self-plagiarizing trilogy of John Wayne Westerns, another film cast from the mold that produced the classics Rio Bravo and El Dorado. Like its predecessors, Rio Lobo centers on Wayne as a tough but good-natured man of principle, in this case the Union officer Cord McNally. McNally is looking for justice following an incident at the end of the Civil War when a Union traitor allowed a gold convoy to be hijacked by Confederate troops, with one of McNally's best friends dying in the attack. With the war over, McNally enters into an unlikely alliance with two former Confederates, the Mexican-French Cordona (Jorge Rivero, an exceptionally unlikely Confederate officer) and Tuscarora (Robert Mitchum's son Christopher, singularly lacking in his father's screen presence). This trio, eventually joined by the lovely drifter Shasta (Jennifer O'Neill) and Tuscarora's crotchety, cross-eyed old father Phillips (Jack Elam), set out to find McNally's justice while also resolving a battle over land rights in the town of Rio Lobo.

The film has all the ingredients of a classic Hawks adventure, taking a disarmingly offhand approach as the heroes rush headlong into danger. The script has the signature laidback feel of late Hawks, spiced with some mild banter and goofy humor, but something feels off about it all. A big problem is the casting, which is almost top-to-bottom awful. Hawks' other two late Wayne Westerns had been packed with supporting turns from Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Arthur Hunnicutt, Walter Brennan and Angie Dickinson, and their ease and charm with the quick-witted scripts were crucial to the films. For Rio Lobo, Hawks pulled together a cast nearly as inexperienced and undistinguished as the young troupe he'd gathered for his equally clumsy racing picture Red Line 7000. Only experienced character actor Jack Elam is really fun to watch, in a campy, over-the-top role; the rest of the cast is simply lackluster. The usual Hawks charm occasionally shows through anyway, which is to say that one gets what he's going for, even if the actors can rarely pull it off. O'Neill has a certain appealingly matter-of-fact attitude that makes her laughing banter go down easy, but she has no depth, no feeling, and Hawks did her no favors by casting her in basically the same role, of the proud woman with a checkered past, that had previously been played with far more wit and pathos by Angie Dickinson.

But O'Neill at least makes an impression. Most of the rest of the cast is utterly unappealing. Hawks' great hangout Westerns had relied on a minimum of gunplay and a maximum of relaxed wordplay, and for that he'd needed actors who could be comfortable in their skins, and with one another, who could be captivating while simply lounging back in a chair and verbally sparring. He comes up empty here, and seems to know it. Even Wayne, who was near the end of his own career and ailing, seems ill-at-ease, and in any event his laconic manner can't compensate for the non-entities he's surrounded with. The actors can't shoulder all the blame, though, because the script is nearly as haphazard as the performances. There are some fun lines — asked why Cordona had taken Shasta's clothes off after she'd fainted, he replies that he and McNally flipped for it, and he won — but otherwise there's a whole lot of clunky exposition and banal dialogue. There's too much purely functional chatter, the kind of placeholder fluff that one suspects the Hawks of a few years earlier would've improvised or rewritten on the spot, but perhaps he didn't have the energy anymore.


In that respect the film is kind of sad, as though it bears the marks of Hawks' age, his inability to marshal all his tremendous talents the way he once had with such verve and wit. He'd live another seven years, but he wouldn't make another film. In many ways, the film is about saying goodbye, is about what it's like to be the man of action growing old. If one reads between the lines, Rio Lobo begins to seem like Wayne and Hawks, two old men at the ends of their careers, wondering what old age could possibly mean for men like them, men who had in many ways defined themselves by youth and virility and vigor. To see Wayne, old and sickly and bulkier than ever, struggling to mount a horse, is to know that Rio Lobo is a kind of farewell to the cowboy who'd grown old onscreen — it's a long way back from here to the young, surprisingly skinny gunslinger defining his iconic image in John Ford's 1939 Stagecoach.

One sees the difference in Wayne's relationship to the women, too. Wayne had never been the most comfortable actor in romantic situations, and Hawks had always gleefully taken advantage of that discomfort, making it the chink in the tough guy's armor, pushing him into situations where beautiful younger women could upstage him with their frankness and their beauty. In Rio Lobo, though, the duo finally acknowledge Wayne's unlikelihood as a romantic hero; he's now the aging father, uninterested in women and uninteresting to them. When Shasta throws in with McNally's group, Cordona immediately latches onto her, aggressively pursuing her, but she spends the night cuddled up next to McNally — not because she wants him, but because he's "comfortable," because he's not a sexual threat the way the fiery, passionate Cordona is. McNally laughs it off but the way he keeps bringing it up subtly underscores how much it stung, how much he took it as an insult. The tough guy, the gunslinger, the cowboy, has become sexually irrelevant, to the extent that this beautiful young woman doesn't even consider him in terms of sexuality. She thinks nothing of spending the night curled up next to him under a blanket because she obviously considers him sexless, safe, and one feels how much that must hurt McNally — and by extension, Wayne and especially Hawks, who always prized his ability to win the attention of far younger women.


Hawks' insecurity with this theme leads him, perhaps, to counterbalance it with a scene where Cordona, fleeing from the bad guys, stumbles into a young woman's house, where the topless Amelita (Sherry Lansing) waits, barely covering herself with her hands. The scene reads as racy and flirtatious — and it might've come across as funnier if the actors weren't so bland — but it's an obviously gratuitous display of T&A, a particularly blatant bit of pointless, seedy pandering. The moment is redeemed only slightly by the film's climax, in which Amelita, thirsty for revenge, proves her mettle as a tough Hawksian woman.

Still, this is a Hawks film, and if the casting and scripting aren't up to his normal standards, there are still pleasures to be had here. Perhaps to make up for the lack of compensating joys in the characterization, the film is much heavier on action than either Rio Bravo or El Dorado, and the action is well-staged and viscerally exciting. During the lengthy opening sequence, Confederate bandits rob a Union train using a string of contrivances — a nest of hornets, torches, grease, ropes strung across the tracks — that are ludicrously convoluted but play out great on screen. The robbery leads directly into a cleverly staged pursuit from the Union troops, with the troops splitting up at each fork, so that eventually McNally is riding through the center of a shallow stream all by himself, seeking out his prey. Later, the trio of McNally, Cordona and Phillips lead an assault on the ranch of their enemy Ketchum (Victor French), and Hawks' tense staging of their stealth dispatching of the ranch's bodyguards is impeccable.

But he has the most fun with the grand finale, after the ranch shootout. At one point, when McNally calls a huddle and tells his allies that they're going to hole up in a jail, it's a kind of metafictional wink: he might as well have turned to his friends and said, "hey, did you ever see Rio Bravo or El Dorado?" The actual jail hangout sequence is pretty short, but Hawks quickly follows it up with a re-enactment of the prisoner exchange and shootout with which he ended Rio Bravo. This time, though, it's the bad guys who think to throw dynamite into McNally's position, along with other subtle variations that show Hawks having fun recycling old plots and old situations. The film is frequently clunky and awkward, but it's also often charming, exciting and, in its examination of the aging Western archetype — and the aging filmmaker behind the camera — surprisingly poignant.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a poignant, surreal Freudian fantasy in which a young girl's transformation from child to adult through the onset of puberty is expressed as a nightmarish fantasia, a dreamlike fairy tale populated with vampires, uncertain parentage, transformations from one state to another, grisly violence and lurid sexuality. Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) lives with her forbidding grandmother (Helena Anýzová), retaining her child's sense of curiosity and good humor despite the austere circumstances of her upbringing and the religious seriousness of her pale, corpse-like grandmother. Director Jaromil Jireš depicts Valerie's grandmother in thick, pasty makeup that gives her a wan appearance, as though she was already a ghost with no corporeal presence. There is an opposition here between those who embrace the sensuality of the world, like the curious, open-minded Valerie, and those who deny it and castigate themselves for supposed sins of the flesh.

Valerie is very much out of place within this atmosphere of Christian guilt. She spies on young women bathing in a lake, watching as the women's white clothes are soaked through, and they kiss and play strange sexual games; one woman puts a slithering, writhing fish down her shirt, letting it slide around between her breasts. As Valerie walks home after seeing this outrageous erotic fantasy, a few drops of blood fall on a white flower, signaling the girl's first period and thus her transition from girl to woman, setting her off on a journey she only half understands. Her grandmother takes the news disapprovingly, but is even more dismayed when Valerie points out a sinister stranger who her grandmother seems to know: a man (Jirí Prýmek) dressed in a black cloak with a pale white face and horrible crooked, pointed teeth. He hides behind a weasel mask and keeps with him a servant named Eagle (Petr Kopriva), who generally obeys his orders but revolts when it comes to Valerie, with whom he forms a nearly instant camaraderie. This sinister man is a monster, sometimes called Weasel, or Richard, or the constable, or the bishop; he is apparently many different men, possibly Valerie's father, a former lover to Valerie's grandmother and/or her absent mother. He is the devil, or a demon, or the vampire of Murnau's Nosferatu (with whom he shares an especially close resemblance with his bald white dome and pointed ears), or a metaphysical incarnation of the missing man who begat Valerie and then vanished from her life. Whoever he is, his attempts to gain control over innocent young Valerie, who possibly holds the key to his eternal life, send the young girl on a strange adventure through multiple planes of reality.


Jireš depicts Valerie's adventures with a casual surrealism that is constantly disrupting the flow of reality. Characters die and are reincarnated without explanation, while others transmute into multiple forms and multiple personalities, seemingly warped by the strange power of Weasel or Valerie's imagination. As Valerie hovers on the cusp of womanhood, she is beset with multiple possibilities, multiple incarnations of her oncoming sexual awakening. As befits this unstable, uncertain transitional phase, her exposure to sexuality is sometimes fascinating, sometimes horrifying, sometimes merely puzzling. She is pursued by the priest Gracián (Jan Klusák), another religious hypocrite who promises her he'll tell her all about her father and mother but instead merely tries to seduce her, dancing towards her baring his grotesque teeth and pulling his robe down from around his neck to reveal the necklace of bones at his throat.

The veneer of normality is very thin here, and the priest might become an animalistic rapist at a moment's notice, just as the "missionary" in the pulpit, lecturing about the sanctity of virginity and the way innocence is spoiled by sex, might be Weasel barely in disguise, his white face painted dark blue beneath his robes. There is something disconcerting, though, about the way Jireš' camera sometimes seems to be ogling Valerie and the real teen actress who plays her, who spends much of the film in various states of undress or carefully arranged disarray. There are times when Jireš seems unwittingly complicit in the sexually voracious leers of those who pursue Valerie.

Despite this unsettling feeling, the film is a sensual phantasmagoria, exploring the strange netherworld opened up at the junction point between childhood and adulthood. Jireš marries his dazzling imagery to a continually shifting score (written by Lubos Fiser and Jan Klusák) that encompasses tinkling music box circularity, jaunty folk melodies, and haunting religious choral hymns. This mix of disparate musical moods and sources mirrors the film's uneasy blend of fantasy with a child's eye view on reality. The film's unsettling surrealism is perhaps a perfect visual expression of a preteen's insecurity and uncertainty: she is beginning to understand certain things, to be disabused of her innocence, but she her perspective is still slightly askew, without an adult's certainty about how the world works and what her experiences might mean. Valerie is starting to be exposed to the adult world, and what she sees looks grotesque and perhaps even evil: thus one interpretation of the film is as a wholly subjective perspective on Valerie's dawning realizations about her family's complicated sexual history and the hypocrisy and distasteful behavior underlying the seemingly respectable Christian folk around her.


Valerie, however, is ultimately triumphant because she manages to maintain her honor and her innocence even as she transitions towards adulthood. She is not corrupted by the adult things she is learning about, but instead confronts them directly. She resists the priest's advances and struggles to understand the nature of her developing relationship with Eagle: are they brother and sister or prospective lovers? This relationship especially could indicate a new perspective forming, a transitional state between the innocence of childhood, when everyone, boy or girl, is merely a friend, a platonic sibling, and the new sexual awareness of maturity, when relationships between boys and girls are fraught with sexual tensions and the possibilities of less platonic affections. Valerie is still polysexual, unattached to any particular conception of herself or her sexuality. At one point, she goes to bed with the young bride Hedvika (Alena Stojáková), and Valerie's innocent affection ("I've never had a girlfriend before," she exclaims excitedly), her kisses and embraces, cure the other woman of the vampiric affliction she'd been suffering, which had been slowly draining the life from her. Valerie, in her innocence, is a powerful figure; hers is a spiritual innocence, like that of Joan of Arc, to whom she's implicitly compared in the scene when Gracián, in a fervor of religious hypocrisy, sentences her to be burned at the stake for supposedly trying to seduce him.

With its striking surrealist imagery, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a haunting, magical film, a film alive with a sense of forbidden sexuality and transformation. It's a deeply strange film, constantly subverting narrative clarity and demanding that its images be taken as metaphors rather than at face value. Valerie's grandmother makes a deal with the Weasel for eternal youth, and returns as a sexy vampire who sucks the life out of the men she beds, but by the film's end she's been restored to her former dour, pale-faced self; perhaps her vampiric incarnation was only an expression of her domineering influence on Valerie's life. The ending is similarly ambiguous, as Valerie wanders with a mischievous smile through a riverside bacchanalia, summoned with a wave of the hand from various revelers to join in their orgiastic sexuality, but she simply strolls through their midst, no longer threatened by the man in the black robes, or her grandmother, or even by the frightening and longed-for specter of her missing mother. Instead, she simply finds her way to a white, frilly bed in the center of a clearing and goes to sleep, initially surrounded on all sides by a circle of partiers but then framed in isolation within the spacious clearing for the film's final image. This image suggests that Valerie has maintained her innocence and purity of spirit against the temptations and horrors of the world, and gone back to sleep with the ease of a child in her cradle.

Films I Love #47: The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

The Conformist is Bernardo Bertolucci's melancholy, lovingly crafted portrait of Italy's fascist era, and the pressures forcing individuals to accede to oppressive political regimes. Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a weak man whose only desire is to fit in, to be accepted; he is the conformist of the title. In Mussolini's Italy, he conforms by serving the state, agreeing to turn his honeymoon with the lovely but empty-headed Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) into a cover for an assassination assignment. His mission is to go to Paris and track down his former professor, Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), who had fled from the Italian fascists. Instead, the continually dithering and uncertain Marcello gets tangled up in an affair with Quadri's wife Anna (Dominique Sanda) and finds his conformist resolve shaken by Quadri and Anna's idealism.

This is a visually stunning film, with each scene a study in color and light. Bertolucci's images have a certain pristine formalism that both abstracts the narrative and dramatizes its morality: characters shift between darkness and light, and slatted shadows fall across the characters as though they were being imprisoned by their choices. In one of the most striking scenes, Giulia's black and white striped dress visually rhymes with the light filtering in through the windows of her house as she dances around the room. The images, and the moral imperatives, are derived from the grammar of the film noir, and Marcello in his fedora hat and long coat is a misplaced noir antihero wandering through a vibrant color world. Like a noir hero, his weaknesses — sexual confusion, malleability, willingness to compromise — doom him from the start. The film is a clear-eyed examination of his failure, as well as the failures of all those like him whose collaboration allows fascism and brutality to flourish.

The Indomitable Leni Peickert

The Indomitable Leni Peickert is a loose, half-hour sequel to Alexander Kluge's second feature film, Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed. This shorter work, seemingly assembled from leftover footage from the longer film, continues the story of the circus owner Leni Peickert (Hannelore Hoger) after she first abandoned her idea of a radical circus in favor of a job in television. It opens where the previous film left off, at a TV station where Leni and her friends have gathered as employees, attempting to infiltrate the corporate establishment with their own revolutionary ideas. This radicalism is somewhat undercut by the way that Kluge deliberately shoots down the low-cut blouse of one of these young revolutionaries, the camera eyeing her cleavage and then panning down, to the text she's reading, and then back up again, finding her sexuality ultimately much more interesting than her radicalism. This lascivious camera movement is then mirrored in the young radicals' plans to create "sex education" movies that somehow change the world by categorizing and numbering the sexual positions — after all, the Hindus have 365 positions already, one vapid would-be filmmaker says, and wouldn't it be better to have even more?

Even more than its predecessor, The Indomitable Leni Peickert is an inquiry into what all this chatter and ideology actually means; Kluge seems to be wondering, how much actual substance is there in all these half-baked 60s ideas about sex, free expression, equality, peace, love and all that good stuff? Is the sex film made by Leni and her friends a real expression of sexual liberation, or is it just as exploitative and perverted as Kluge's own ostentatiously ogling camera move? In any event, despite its title, The Indomitable Leni Peickert finds the titular heroine even more besieged and overwhelmed than in her first appearance, less able than ever to fulfill her ambitions and really create a lasting and important statement. She's always putting things off, dithering and delaying, telling herself that she's building foundations, that she shouldn't rush. Her plan for TV is a very long-term one, to eventually become the head of a station; in the meantime, she's just been promoted to manage the building's heating system. Later, she's fired from the station and returns to the circus, but only for commerce this time, abandoning her ambition to make a challenging new kind of circus: now she only wants to make money at it. Soon enough, she grows disillusioned with that as well and quits, or at least says she quits: in a typical example of Kluge's clever use of voiceover, the omniscient narrator announces that Leni has quit the circus and then, without acknowledging the contradiction, continues to talk about her working for the circus.

This disconnect between talk and action is at the heart of these two films, which is probably why Kluge, following earlier French avant-gardists like Godard and Debord, has so radically separated sound and image here. He allows the two halves of the cinema to exist independently, sometimes commenting upon one another, sometimes syncing up, almost as if by accident, but more often going their own separate ways.


Although in many ways The Indomitable Leni Peickert seems like simply an extension of Artists in the Big Top, utilizing the same style and exploring similar themes, it does differ in that it's more of a straightforward narrative film than its predecessor. Despite its disjunctive audio and its habit of narrating events from a distance, the film tells its story succinctly and with relative directness. The one notable exception is the denouement, which montages together classical drawings and paintings, taking Leni's struggles to a symbolic plane: through a progression of still images, these paintings tell a story of oppression and struggle between authoritarian forces and the rebellion of the masses. It's a clever way of universalizing the film's story. It transforms Leni's personal struggles — with artistic expression and with maintaining her individuality against smothering capitalistic constraints — into the larger story of the common people throughout history. It also unites Leni — and by extension, Kluge — with the artistic lineage of the West, with the artists who documented various populist uprisings of the past. This sequence suggests the interplay between art and reality, with the former both documenting the latter and echoing down through history to eventually have an influence on reality as well.

The Indomitable Leni Peickert is thus much more than a simple coda to Artists in the Big Top. It extends the longer film's themes into a broader social and political context, making explicit a few of the connections and ideas that were merely implied in the earlier work.

Le Boucher

[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.]

Claude Chabrol spends nearly two-thirds of Le Boucher establishing an idyllic country setting, a small rural town, peaceful and quiet, where the lonely, middle-aged schoolteacher Hélène (Stéphane Audran) develops a friendship with the butcher Popaul (Jean Yanne), a veteran haunted by the things he saw in the army. The sun shines brightly, the people are cheerful and friendly, and all seems good in this tranquil little town. The film opens with a wedding, where Hélène and Popaul first meet, sat together by chance and enjoying each other's company amidst the fun, vibrant atmosphere of the wedding. Chabrol maintains his characteristic distance here, observing from a vantage point above the assembled throng of revelers as they drink and dance and laugh and give speeches or sing songs. His camera seems to hover in the rafters of the hall, watching like an ambivalent god as his creations scurry about below; despite the festivities, one always senses Chabrol's removed perspective, and hesitates to take the cheerful surfaces presented here at face value. Indeed, before the film's hour mark, one of these revelers will be dead, and Chabrol will film the funeral from the same distanced vantage point, as many of the same people appear in different circumstances — it's just another ceremony, just another ritual, very much like a wedding.

This darkness is always lurking beneath the surface of Chabrol's work, a subterranean hint of evil and violence buried underneath a thin veneer of civility and social niceties. The relationship between Hélène and Popaul develops hesitantly, with the butcher slowly overcoming the standoffish reserve of the schoolteacher, who was hurt by a passionate love affair many years before, and had been reluctant to love again ever since. Her rapport with Popaul is instant, however, despite his roughness and the occasional hints of darkness that shade his normally cheerful personality whenever his thoughts turn to his wartime experiences. But even as this romance develops in the foreground, innocently and patiently, in the background blood is flowing through this small town. A body is found in the woods, a young girl murdered, sliced up with a knife and dumped among the trees. The police come to investigate, their little black vans racing up and down the village's quaint cobbled streets, their mere presence a reminder of the ugliness that lingers at the fringes of this paradise.

This violent intrusion does not disturb the village's life very much immediately. The police first appear in the background only, walking through the rear of a shot as Hélène's pupils play and laugh in the foreground; no one is aware of the police's presence, and no one knows why they've come. Only the audience sees them and understands that something sinister is brewing, an impression underscored by the dissonant music of Pierre Jansen, who crafts an unsettling score of isolated piano tones and string plucks. This violence exists, initially, offscreen, in the background, and is thus easily ignored by the townspeople, who gossip idly about the murder and speculate about the police investigation. They are offended, but only in the abstract; Chabrol takes the opportunity to expose the hypocrisy of bourgeois morals. Popaul is unfazed by the idea of a single murder like this. He compares it to his experiences in war and describes in grisly detail the scenes of corpses strewn everywhere, devoured by maggots, bodies torn apart by bullets and bombs. "We counted corpses by the truckload," he says, but for one of his customers, such horror in war is expected, while the idea of violence infiltrating a little suburb like theirs is unacceptable. "Yes, war is horrible, that's a fact," this man says, prissy and shocked, "but a murder like this, it's barbaric!"


Chabrol's wry humor skewers this perspective, which places no intrinsic value on human life but is merely offended by the loss of the illusion of society and civilization in this one little town. Thousands of faceless corpses in some far-off country are acceptable, as long as no blood flows through the gutters of one's own hometown. Chabrol will not allow these illusions to go unchallenged; he will not allow his characters or his audience to forget the blood that flows everywhere, everyday, in order to maintain the foundations of society. Even the food we eat is born of violence, and Popaul's profession is continually tying together the horrors of violence with the methodical motions of butchery. As Popaul speaks of the slaughtered bodies he saw in the army, he carefully slices up a hunk of raw meat. He speaks of animals often, and when he looks at a live lamb he's already envisioning it chopped up as meat. So when he jokingly calls an old teacher a "cow," it takes on a sinister undercurrent of meaning — does this man think of all live flesh as just a step or two removed from cold dead meat?

Of course, what this is all leading towards is the destabilizing tension of the film's final half-hour, in which Hélène begins to suspect, after a second woman turns up murdered, that Popaul is in fact the killer. This culminates in a harrowing, Hitchcockian suspense sequence where Hélène locks herself in her apartment above the schoolhouse at night, fearing Popaul's return. This masterfully executed sequence has Hélène — and the audience — jumping at shadows, unnerved by such innocent sounds as the creaking of the building and the high-pitched meow of a kitten somewhere in the darkness outside. Popaul's calls, unanswered, are repetitive and frightening, but even worse is the eerie silence that falls when he stops calling and disappears from his place in the courtyard outside. Chabrol proves himself disarmingly efficient at ratcheting up the tension, moving his camera in ways that call attention to the vast amount of space that cannot be seen at any given moment. What's offscreen becomes a black wasteland in which a murderer could be lurking, shrouded in shadows, just outside the enclosure of the frame. Thus every camera move suggests something about to happen: the killer, we suspect, is right where we cannot see him, right in the spot that Chabrol is conspicuously preventing us from seeing.

After all this tension, drawn out until it's nearly unbearable, the actual confrontation between Hélène and Popaul is a deliberate anticlimax, both a fulfillment of audience expectations and a clever subversion of them. This resolution does not answer any questions; indeed, it only opens up deeper, more troubling ones. What is the nature of evil? Is it the man who feels compelled to kill? Or is it the societal structures that created this man, that deadened his moral impulses, that stifled and suppressed the horrified, faint reaction he had as a child when he first saw blood? By toughening him up, making him accept death, did war and a brutal father create a killer drained of morality? If we cease to be horrified by violence, if we cease to be moved morally by the loss of life, can we even feel anything anymore? What does it mean to love in this context? How can we feel any connection to other human beings when life means so little? There are no answers in Chabrol's unsettling finale, only the dead, narcoleptic stare of Hélène, her anesthetized response to the complete destruction of her illusions and dreams.

Struggles In Italy

During his early 70s flirtation with collective filmmaking, Jean-Luc Godard came to think of cinema as a "blackboard," a conduit for revolutionary political ideas, a blank slate on which ideas could be debated and developed. As a result, most of the films from this period, made under the aegis of the Dziga Vertov Group (consisting, in practice, mostly of Godard and his collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin), are unfinished by design, as much about the (thought) process as the final result. This is especially true of Struggles In Italy, the film the group made about the situation of the class struggle in early 70s Italy. This is a road trip movie for the group, who shot much of the footage in Italy, but one would be hard-pressed to tell that from the film itself. Other than the presence of Italian along with French on the voiceover track — sometimes overlapping, sometimes translating for one another — the film betrays few traces of a specifically Italian outlook on the issues that typically wove through the Dziga Vertov Group films: class, gender, sexuality, work, the difference between "theory" and "practice." Indeed, some of the film was shot back in Paris, at the apartment Godard shared with Anne Wiazemsky (who appears briefly as a store clerk), and the film is so reliant on interiors and abstracted, minimalist locations that it'd be difficult to parse out just how much of this is actually even set in Italy.

The result is a modest, minor work from the DVG, an hour-long examination of the difficulties of the class struggle. Even more so than most of these films, Struggles In Italy deals explicitly with the process by which would-be radicals can develop and change from a cursory understanding of radical politics to a deeper engagement with their ideas. The film itself directly reflects this process. Its first half is confused and fragmentary, mired in dense mazes of words from which few concrete ideas are able to escape. The voiceover keeps making distinctions between "theory" and "practice," but it's difficult to see much of either in the rambling, discursive style of the film, which at first almost entirely avoids tangible reality in favor of textbook-style pronouncements and theoretical dialectics. One is tempted to dismiss the film altogether as a particularly frazzled product of Godard and Gorin's revolutionary period. Godard in the late 60s and 70s was often teetering on the edge of this kind of self-referential nonsense, always in danger of tying himself into such ideological knots that the film might implode, but seldom actually achieving the level of incoherence on display here.

Godard being Godard, of course, it turns out that there's more going on here than there appears to be at first. Something interesting happens about halfway through: namely, it becomes clear that the film's first half is intentionally obtuse and confused, and that Godard is very interested in discussing, in some detail, just why his film was in such apparent danger of disappearing up its own ass. The film's second half proceeds to critique, dissect and analyze everything that happened in the first half, with a self-critical perspective that is disarmingly candid. Loosely speaking, the film is the story of an Italian girl named Paola (Cristiana Tulio-Altan) who is involved in revolutionary Marxist politics within her country. She disseminates radical newspapers and makes posters decorated with slogans, but she struggles to get at a deeper understanding of how to live a truly "radical" life: in her relationships with her parents, her university professors, her lover, and the worker who she tutors.

In the first half of the film, she acquiesces to bourgeois conventions even while preaching a radical philosophy. She obeys the dictates of her professor, who teaches from a position of authority and passes on bourgeois learning. She doesn't talk openly with her lover, dodging political and sexual subjects, and when the worker she tutors asks her questions, she evades them as well rather than trying to engage him in a dialogue. Even an attempt to become part of the working class by taking a job in a factory doesn't achieve her goal: she finds herself more alienated than ever from the proletariat, handing out fliers that are quickly glanced at and then tossed aside. She has "theory," but she has not managed to apply her ideas in practice.


The aesthetics in the film's first half reflect the heroine's fractured state. The images are frequently interspersed with lengths of black leader, empty spaces that Godard would later fill in with concrete representations of factory workers, links in the chain of production. The voiceover rambles aimlessly, often disconnected from the images, unable to string together a coherent argument. The film is about a process of discovery, about the search for answers that accompanies growing up. Godard of course positions this discovery within a Marxist context, but this could just as easily be a film about growing up in general: learning to refine and develop one's ideas, to put them into practice, to gain new knowledge and experience. The film is about the transition from naïve youth to mature adulthood.

As Paola gains confidence — opening a political conversation with her lover, struggling to answer the worker's questions, rethinking her previous unthinking acquiescence to authority from parents and teachers — the film itself begins to find its bearings along with her. Scenes from earlier parts are revisited with new images and contextual material to clarify the ideas being explored. A lengthy sequence of Paola trying on clothes is fleshed out with images of factory workers and machines in order to draw the connections from the means of production to the final consumer, and also to accentuate the money gained in between these two stages: from the working class with their low wages to the very expensive final product, making money for someone but certainly not for the original worker. Even the voiceover subtly shifts in its pronouns, from a disinterested third person to a second person "you," drawing the audience into the film, and finally to the first person, with Paola taking responsibility for her own critique. From a disjointed and unsatisfying melange of regurgitated "radical" ideas, the film subtly morphs into a critique of those ideas and a genuine attempt to get beyond polemics and empty radical posturing.

Not that the film always succeeds: even after achieving this newfound clarity, Paola's rhetoric to the worker she tutors verges on incoherent chatter, a barrage of abstractions thoroughly divorced from prosaic reality. It's not at all clear if Godard realizes this or if he thinks she's saying something profound. But in any event, this film is clearly a starting point rather than a destination. It's about the thought process, about the ways in which ideas can change and mature over time, about self-discovery and the questioning of one's own ideals and behaviors. If the film is often trite, confusing and contradictory, looping back on itself and running in circles, well, that's often the way one's thoughts seem when one is trying to grapple with big ideas and complex issues. As with all of the DVG's work, Struggles In Italy encourages this kind of self-conscious thinking, this process of rejuvenation and reconsideration. The filmmakers, like their heroine, refuse to become stale or static, preferring to continue asking questions and digging deeper, even if it means reevaluating their own aims and ideas. There is in these films a refreshing openness to intellectual inquiry and debate, a curiosity and restlessness that belies the sometimes polemical thrust of the films' ideologies.