The Auteurs

One:

Joe Baker and his arch-nemesis race across the virgin American wilderness and try to kill each other in a search for gold. One of about 61 films its director made that year (1912), 13 minutes long, silent, forgotten, and French, Jean Durand’s Le railway de la mort should be a great American classic. But maybe it could only be French: the two men, nearly indistinguishable from each other, occupy far backgrounds beyond swaying wheat stalks and shimmering swamps, as indifferent figures to the landscape as they are to Durand. The human tale is purely existential, in the pettiest ways—the men are nothing more than bodies trying to kill each other and get gold—as the nature ode is totally romantic in the sublimest.

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The True Story of Jesse James

Dir Nicholas Ray

1957 United States

Greed

Dir Erich von Stroheim

1924 United States

Whenever the modern film-maker feels that his movie has taken too conventional a direction and is neglecting “art,” he need only jerk the Gimp-string, and–behold!–curious and exotic but “psychic” images are flashed before the audience, pepping things up at the crucial moment, making you think such thoughts as “The Hero has a mother complex,” or “He slapped that girl out of ambivalent rage at his father image, which, he says, he carries around in his stomach,” or “He chomps angrily on unlit cigarettes to show he comes from a Puritan environment and has a will of iron."

–“The Gimp,” June 1952

One doesn't mind the crawling acceptance of cures, motives, troubles that have been rubber-stamped by endless usage in fiction and plays as much as the mechanical feints made at the idea of human complexity.

–“Hard-Sell Cinema,” November 1, 1957

As goes the cliché, given ample evidence throughout Farber on Film, Manny Farber is probably still one of the only American film critics to move through the “intentional fallacy” of formal analysis into territory both deeper and more superficial: not to evaluate art as dead illustration but living organism. For Farber, say the literate, film is not a language to communicate powdered, dolled-up ideas in straightjacket compositions (Truffaut, Antonioni); it's something to tear off the make-up, see how a face or space can be explored in wild permutations (Godard), to “open windows and let air into the industry,” as he writes of Park Row's failure with all its supposed bids for meaning and bravura. Documentaries and experimental films that stand at the sideline and simply observe spaces in place with people moving through them are extolled throughout for their particularity. Sententious, picturesque evocations of pastoral innocence (roaming hills, Satie), guilty pasts (furtive glances, instinctual reaches for gun), and swell, sexless homes (Biblical reliefs, knitting moms) are dismissed for their generalizing signifiers–though nobody's got a better grasp on how Griffith and Walsh reinvigorate well-worn tropes with small details than Farber. The now-calcified dialectic of “termite art” against “white elephant art,” as it tends to be recited, pits b-movie against epic, show against tell, reactions against speeches, research against thesis, the amateur against the professional, cheap against rich, the bum against the snob, compression against schmaltz, the personal against the trendy, the organic against the contrived, the inventive against the ossified, the felt against the imitated, the unpretentious against the self-important, the inquiry against the message, what's discovered against what's retold and designed; in short, life against death, or the film that has a life of its own against the film that exists only in audience cues and pretty shots of bodies flattened to plastic dolls. Farber's reputation will probably always rest squarely on his going to bat for the former against reductive art that would classify, explain, or immobilize life: people, places, treated as brand names. Read More

“We live in a fishbowl, and people love to talk.”
– Sisters of the Gion

Famously, Mizoguchi’s camera is a spy: peeking in behind bars and curtains and doorways (framing shots diagrammatically on left or right), watching unobserved, waiting, as characters eat and drink and shuffle in and out, for the action to happen. In this, it’s like so many Mizoguchi characters peering into private spaces.

Above: The Downfall of Osen (1935).

Above: Osaka Elegy (1936).

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Street of Shame

Dir Kenji Mizoguchi

1956 Japan

Osaka Elegy

Dir Kenji Mizoguchi

1936 Japan

Sisters of the Gion

Dir Kenji Mizoguchi

1936 Japan

Above: Le streqhe.

"Beauty in art reminds one what is worth while. I am not now speaking of shams. I mean beauty, not slither, not sentimentalizing about beauty, not telling people that beauty is the proper and respectable thing. I mean beauty. You don't argue about an April wind, you feel bucked up when you meet it. You feel bucked up when you come on a swift moving thought in Plato or on a fine line in a statue. Even this pother about the gods reminds one that something is worth while." -- Ezra Pound

There’s a useful habit of vainglorious artists and authors to deny their artistry and authorship, in the works and out. James Joyce declared he wasn’t a genius; didn’t even know Greek; and suggested that masturbation, while writing, was the way to unleash his inner poet. Ezra Pound claimed remembrance as a “minor satirist who contributed something to a refinement of language.” Orson Welles, whose films all tell of men who attempt authorship of the world around them, nearly ended his career with F For Fake, a film about authorship’s folly. F For Fake, in which Orson Welles plays Orson Welles as a magician who claims he’s invented the documentary the audience is watching, professes the artist as a tool for art, and the greatest art as a decent plagiary of the actual world. “For whatever is truly wonderous and fearful in man,” Welles’ original, Herman Melville, wrote, “never yet was put into words or books.” It’s hard enough to play God—harder, as Melville, Pound, Joyce, and Welles all do, to represent and echo divine power within the limits and terms of material reality, the practicalities of Ulysses raising his mast (Melville, Pound), small towns raising bell-towers (Welles), lonely men raising their cocks to salute lonely girls on the beach (Joyce), all to the heights of God. Pound’s

“I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.”

leads straight to Jean-Marie Straub’s “Nature has ten million times the imagination of the most imaginative artists.”

As religious art's always (if not exclusively) been genuflection, Le streghe, les femmes entre elles, 21 minutes long, is about Straub’s ultimate genuflecting: to the mysterious powers of women over men, immortals over mortals, nature over people, all taken from a Cesare Pavese dialogue in which Circe confides to a friend what mortal, what a man Ulysses was. Gradually it becomes clear, if not to her, that she’s in love, like a Hawksian heroine whose never needed the feeling, definitely not for a weaker man than her, but likes the fun of it anyway. Immortality gets boring. Circe spends the time trying to figure out what makes mortals laugh and what makes immortals laugh, while her friend chides her for not turning Ulysses to swine. “Before fate, mortals laugh,” Circe posits. “And after. But not during.” Immortals, though, laugh during fate; it’s their blessing and curse that they’ve got nothing to fear, that everything gets forgiven, that loves never last. The tone is pure Renoir: Circe, like any Renoir character, laughing at her fate. The love will pass, as it has for Ulysses. Mortals can have a trajectory to their life. But it takes an immortal to show how time is fleeting. Read More

***

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s world looks painted—like a painting, it’s a selective recreation of reality, history designed to the frame, with light traced in neat, neoclassical lines through shadows. Magnificent Obsession’s world is just as painterly, directed by ex-painter Douglas Sirk, if more abstract: colors flare from black, faces are grainy, more light-effects, and Sirk patterns his characters against stripes, for texture, almost like Rauschenberg and Johns about the same time:

A melodrama set in front of a bunch of abstract expressionist installations—maybe—but Magnificent Obsession doesn’t look painted. It looks staged. Button is neatly composed of radios and top hats and nannies, its direction just a matter of storyboarding and fitting the scene to the frame. People are just objects to be placed in the pattern. But the compositions in Magnificent Obsession can change, dynamically, as the camera pans, doors open into background rooms, and the camera can come across a character on the side.

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Magnificent Obsession

Dir Douglas Sirk

1954 United States

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Dir David Fincher

2008 United States

What to do with an idiotic script? Douglas Sirk replied,

“I realized maybe Jane Wyman could be right, and this goddamn awful story could be a success. And it was. My immediate reaction to Magnificent Obsession was bewilderment and discouragement, but still I was attracted to something irrational in it, something mad in a way, well, obsessed, because this is a damn crazy story if ever there was one. The blindness of the woman, the irony of it all—not irony in the usual sense of the word, but a structural element, an element of antimony—it is a Euripidian irony. One person pacifying death by taking the place of another. It is a combination of kitsch, and craziness, and trashiness. But craziness if very important, and it saves trashy stuff likeMagnificent Obsession. This is the dialectic. There is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”

Trash is stupid for telling us what we know; art’s pretty for proving it: sex is tempting, love is powerful, time goes on, and one day, we will die. Eric Roth’s script for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is full of these idiotic homilies, all true: death makes us realize the value of life; you never know what’s gonna happen. This is advice good only to the blind, but then, walking into Magnificent Obsession or Benjamin Button is meant to feel, quite intentionally, like opening your eyes into a new, entirely self-contained world. Walking into a coma. The realities of Button and Obsession are entirely virtual, not just by virtue of their dumbass scripts, but deliberately. They’re the works of exacting artists who understood such scripts could only take place in worlds that look to have been created—all of it, from the lighting to the actors’ flesh itself—only as an extension of the characters’ unwieldy desires or memories. Sirk called himself an expressionist. And David Fincher, a video game wizard?

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Related Films

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Dir David Fincher

2008 United States

Magnificent Obsession

Dir Douglas Sirk

1954 United States

Zodiac

Dir David Fincher

2007 United States

Tsai Ming-liang’s movies, critics noted more and more in his last few films, are founded from parallel universes, banal reality and another universe that opens up inside it. The other universe can be one of movies, of musicals from movies, of water flooding bourgeois homes, of Europe in Taiwan, or of phantoms, in What Time is it There? and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, who come back to walk and eat among the living. Almost all of Tsai’s films feature these other worlds intersecting with a reality of lovers courtships, cookings and fuckings, as the whole courtship itself often seems to be nothing more than two bodies who intersect each other in the night, fuck and say they’re in love, and move on—“you look like you come from somewhere else” Jean-Pierre Léaud tells Fanny Ardant vaguely in Visage. As Tsai’s favorite, Boschian image is of contamination-as-bursting, always sexual—the bursting of a water pipe in the kitchen, the bursting of food out of its container, or a cock’s ejaculation—one world, in Tsai, tends to literally bursts into another, as if by spontaneous generation: the inexplicable floods that come from the insides of houses, the inexplicable neck pains that come from the inside of Lee Kang-sheng’s body in The River and the unseen disease that inexplicably infects the insides of a whole city in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, the ghosts that appear as living people, the sum of their bodily functions, throughout. “Each image throbs with a latent connection,” Adrian Martin writes, “that could at any moment be made manifest—and this feeling is what raises Tsai’s cinema above the more determinist prison-structures of a Michael Haneke or a Peter Greenaway, where the isolated vectors hold tight, and the fiction only confirms their crushing, indomitable weight.” About all of Tsai’s movies concern some metaphysical phenomenon—sickness, ghosts, movie characters, and love—that manifests itself out of nowhere and nothing as a body, usually in the kitchen, to use the toilet, fuck, and eat some food.

Visage requires something like a Tsai primer, or maybe is one: the film develops in Tsai shorthand, the symbols, motifs, and even scenes of his previous films given about a shot apiece. Martin calls Tsai’s closed, scrubbed spaces, where characters enact rituals over and over like hamsters on a wheel, “communicating vessels,” but for the first time in Tsai, the spaces don’t communicate; and Visage is nearly the sum of its symbols. Where previous Tsais are based on exploring buildings that operate like organisms—a flooded apartment complex, a movie house, and so many houses and rooms—each room and each shot in Visage is nearly self-contained from the rest, and each the real-time staging of a single idea as installation piece (with the key exception of a haunted house in an indeterminate location where sound carries from one shot to another and whose architecture is laid out in pieces throughout the whole film). The ideas vary from a woman blocking her window and her mirror with black tape (two shots, about five minutes each), to a woman climbing down an elevator, to Jeanne Moreau singing the song from Jules and Jim, to a woman packing meat in a fridge, to Jean-Pierre Léaud performing Tawainese rites for the dead, to a few musical sequences in the snow, to a man making a phone call, to a model putting on make-up, to Léaud crawling inside the Louvre. There is an elaborate story—a Taiwanese director whose mother dies and haunts his apartment and of his French producer (Fanny Ardant) who goes to bury her and of the film he envisions—told entirely as visual evidence: the only proof that Léaud, the star of the film, has even gone to Tawain is that he’s burying ashes in Taiwanese, just as the only indication that Lee’s mother has died is a shot of him crying, and the only sign that Léaud has been hurt is his producer complaining about the insurance company.

Visage exists in the gaps between the scenes; what’s shown, almost exclusively, is people reacting to unseen developments and their own unseen fears and urges. The film works, or doesn’t, as symbolism and film theory executed as performance art—an idea rendered physically. The main idea, as it always is in Tsai, is of people trying to isolate themselves from parallel worlds and the parallel worlds breaking through: Rivette-ian (there are echoes of L’amour fou), and Tsai's as good as Rivette at showing people standing in rooms, doing nothing, and contemplating themselves in total terror. Mirrors are everywhere, little worlds, like films, of images which people try to block out or enter into. There is a musical both Léaud and Lee (as director) dream of. There is a real elk in a fake snow, like one of Courbet’s symbols of majestic innocence, that wanders around. There are a couple shots of reflections in the window, one as a woman naps while cars track the lines of highways intersecting below. Nathalie Baye appears out of nowhere—things always appearing out of nowhere in Tsai—from under a table to join a conversation with Jeanne Moreau and Fanny Ardant. Later the same shot is repeated, chairs empty, as Moreau sings off-screen like a ghost. An actual ghost reaches its hand into a frame to grab an apple; it puts on slippers at the smell of cooking food. Water gushes, tomato paste seeps out of a can, and the movie bursts into song, though characters contemplate singing before they do. People try to lock themselves up, go to sleep, go to Taiwan—try to escape themselves—or sing songs and look at images from Truffaut films, even at an image of Truffaut himself—as if trying, like ghosts, to recover their past lives. Visage is based entirely on these echoes, done in still life longeurs of bodies enacting rituals: incantations as they call each other, even the elk, to come back, sometimes, and sometimes just the minute process of a “body-machine” (Martin) at work covering black tape on a window or dancing a pre-choreographed dance.

Physical isolation is a given in Tsai, but unseen forces inevitably break through to connect people: the smell of food, a virus epidemic, the tacky song a girl lip sings when she dances, someone realizing they’re desperately in love. And so Visage, after two hours of near-static repetitions and parallel stories of actors trying to connect to the roles they played, a director trying to connect to his dead mother, and Jean-Pierre Léaud and Fanny Ardant trying to figure out what to do with the fact they love each other, gives way to bursts of movements, transgressions, and connections as spaces are crossed and people come together. Tsai’s minimalism is so totalizing that all it takes to suggest sex—really good sex—is a model entering the slit of a plastic drape and coming over to kiss the director, also covered in plastic, asleep, and the soundtrack of rustling plastic to suddenly come on. Léaud’s entrance below a De Vinci, through a hole in the Louvre wall, also plays as some spontaneous generation of an icon, as does the elk’s return. In Visage’s final sections, ghosts and fantasies become manifest for a moment as characters perceive each other. The actress of the Salome film everyone’s supposed to be shooting becomes Salome. Léaud becomes King Herod. And three relationships, the director’s with his mother and the model with her boyfriend and Léaud with Ardant, all intersect as people reaching for what they can’t even see and finally do. “I’d give anything to see her dance,” Léaud/Herod says of Salome; “just look at me and you’ll love me,” the model tells her boyfriend, or words to that effect, and she tapes their apartment shut from light so that with a lighter, he won’t be able to see anything else.

Whether they’re real or dreamer’s delusions hardly matters—Visage, filmed largely in the back hallways of the Louvre, takes place, like almost all of Tsai’s films, in a ghost world where people can become artworks and artworks can become real. Nothing so different from Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. The problem this time is just that the spaces and people can’t connect; the characters, Tsai’s strangers passing in the night, go back to being phantoms, unable to touch or fuck each other, but at least aware of each other there even while they drift into private fantasies realms of sleep, empty rooms, and the underworld, here shown as a sewer. There are at least moments of contact, always desperate. Formally, one shot will echo the last (a model being made-up as a painting matched with a dead elk hanging on a wall), fake snow falls on a burning pile of the dead mom’s possessions, and motifs—the water that makes one girl drift towards her lover and away, the birds in the first second and the last and a tribute to dead directors in between, the fake elk, and the food—that draw threads through the movie. More important are the moments of physical contact: the dead mother coming for food; Salome coming to kill the director in seduction; Fanny Ardant rocking Jean-Pierre Léaud back and forth and smiling as she tells him she’ll take care of him and they look into the mirror. Whether it’s real or delusion doesn’t matter when the characters don’t know themselves. In Visage, everyone, even Tsai, gets a face-off in the looking glass.

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Face

Dir Tsai Ming-liang

2009 Taiwan

All is Forgiven is the name of Mia Hansen-Løve’s first film, Doris Day’s "Que Sera Sera" ends her second as cars enter and exit Paris, and the presumption that affairs move on and whatever will be will be is a good deal of what makes the world of her films as recognizably ours (mine) as hers. In both Hansen-Løve’s films—The Father of My Children is the new one—the narrative of a relationship or a life ends, and the film goes on to see how supporting characters grow up to deal with the residue; in both, characters walk around between rooms and talk to people they meet while background conversations and games continue as one character moves onto the next and wait to be reentered into. Obviously, she’s not the first to care about life beyond the frame—of the narrative, of the image—but unlike, say, Griffith, Tati, or Renoir, whose characters are resolutely themselves despite the surrounding context, or Hou or Yang or Assayas (something of Hansen-Løve’s mentor), whose characters are struggling to be themselves against the surrounding context, Hansen-Løve’s characters can tailor themselves to a situation at hand and seize it. This is one reason why all the context at the edges counts. The panoply of particular details in The Father of My Children—characters surveying the fridge mid-conversation and turning off lights as they leave the room—isn’t just valuable evidence of real lives lived in 2009, and isn’t just larkish beauty of people amusing themselves by dancing and hooking up and swimming. For the most part, it’s also evidence of all the situations, from hunger pains to bankruptcy, that the characters have to deal with, and all the people that have to deal with them. The story is of a producer whose company is in debt, and the things he does during the day and night.

Lives are relative in these movies, as in life: situations change according to the character involved, and characters change according to the situation. Only children, in The Father of My Children, are insistently themselves, and they’re always acting: Manelle Driss, as Billie Canvel, a 6-year old, tucks her mouth and blurts her eyes as she waits to deliver lines in a play, as if suffocating them to the moment, walks funny long strides with her family by a river, and winces widely when her mom expects her to tactfully say she’d like to move. All of these gestures are as hammy as they are revealing, and as revealing as they are real—Hansen-Løve’s technique was to get the kids playing, hide behind the furniture so they wouldn’t think about her, wait a few minutes, start rolling, and to call the main actors in for the scene. The result’s probably about the best film about children and childhood there could be.

Because even though The Father of My Children isn’t about children or childhood, it is: children’s comedy inside a bubble, adults tragedy outside, even though Hansen-Løve’s children are adults, able to cope with drama and move on, while her adults are children, innocents unable to deal with the practicalities of real life, and so childish not to think of the effects they have on anyone else (she’s said she deliberately picks actors with childish features, round faces). The childishness is also their charm: "yes, yes, I killed a man," says the producer, Gregoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), as playful as his kids, when the cops take him in for speeding and he calls home to explain where he is to his family. The major question of The Father of My Children is who these people are when they aren’t playing at life, and what they feel in a world where people express their love for one other by making each other coffee. The pivotal moment of Father answers the question even as it suspends it indefinitely. Where All Is Forgiven had soul-baring arguments, Father builds off the best moment of that film, where two characters who don’t know each other take a leisurely walk, look at each other occasionally, say nothing, and it’s clear their newfound love for each other is just an ability to get along well with one another.

Father only has these moments of hidden reserve, the children aside (and counterpointed). The film flies with these little grace notes of interactions, then slows down for its best moments, Impressionistic shows of leisure, almost from Renoir or Manet, as characters at key moments relax in isolation: a young girl with her face just emerging from milky white water (an image inspired by Nostalghia), her older sister as she sits by the window and light seems to soak into her, the older sister again after a night with a boy as she orders a cappuccino at a bar, puts her head on her hand, and listens to Lee Hazelwood. In a film that watches time pass and relationships change in the most minute exchanges, these are the hinges, Hansen-Løve explains, the moments of transition that she started the film with along with the real-life story. Somehow, it’s these shots of characters doing nothing but gazing off that are the most revealing, in a film where despair lingers inside and outside but is only once seen on-screen, the single moments characters have to themselves from time and the world.

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The Father of My Children

Dir Mia Hansen-Løve

2009 Germany

Above: Mia Hansen-Løve, director of The Father of My Children.  Photo by Fabrizio Maltese/EF Press/fabriziomaltese.com.

24 hours after A Brighter Summer Day (wishful titling for a film in which light lags far in the background) and still in Taiwan with Uncle Fat and Sly and all the dumb teen hoods trying to hurry adulthood, Danny Kasman and I go for the free espresso, as much for the caffeine as the espresso girls. “Wouldn’t get this in the states,” says Danny; “not in the culture.” “The class,” I say, “they’ve got in France.” “The sexism,” says Danny. “Oh yeah, it’s great.” “Yeah.” The girl smiles. As real as the cotton pastries up the block, or anything we’re watching. Cannes’ a highway exit that looks like Florida; I step from one virtual reality to another.

Time here is measured by movies; each is a way to get to the next. I meet director Mia Hansen-Løve, 28, very wan, pretty, and exhausted; what I’ll remember are her stray blue eyes and a way of saying “goodbye” that sounds relieved to be 40 minutes closer to bed. She’s got about my favorite movie in Cannes, maybe because it’s a movie where people know how to tell jokes and the kids remind me of ones I was playing with a couple months ago who wanted to feed me to alligators and would point to farmers and yell “that guy looks like the guy we were drawing moustaches on in the newspaper!”

Kids are artists: wood floors are oceans of lava where the adults go; swivel chairs are mountains; walking is still a pantomime. Hansen-Løve gets it: The Father of My Child is about artists and kids forced to see things as they are, but it’s also a film, like Cassavetes’ or Rozier’s or Mekas’, assembled from a thousand favorite gestures from her life and her actors’. They’re moments not just expressive of how people live their lives—of course people go to the fridge when they’re hungry—but of how they live their lives in relation to each other—a producer’s distracted comfort with his wife that he opens the fridge while he’s talking to her, a testament to the way this family operates and lives and communicates, in one particular instance on one particular night, well beyond the range of Politist, Adjectiv and Huacho, with their long takes of people alone eating soup meant to symbolize every night and everybody. Those characters are tools to their own lifestyle, where if Hansen-Løve shows small moments of characters doing what they feel like, it’s because these are the only moments when they can. More on the film, differently, soon.

***

For the most part, the directors here aren’t artists (by-the-definition): they don’t transform life, they pigeonhole it. Movies like Politist and Huacho treat the viewer as a tourist here for a summary of different lifestyles. Practicalities and particularities are the subject of Politist, as in Porumboiu’s first film, 12:08 to Bucharest, as in the other major films recently out of Romania, as the simplest, loftiest goals get entangled in minute procedure and wasted prep time. But these particularities are all formalized. There’s a strong sense of real life in Politist, and every moment of it funny for its pointlessness; nobody can communicate with anyone else except procedurally, which is why the couple key scenes obsess over language—nobody can express themselves in any other way, in gestures or in glances or in acts. Whether Politist mocks life reduced to rules and dead time or reduces it to rules and dead time itself is probably enough of a question to make the film a must-see: it can’t do one without the other.

Whereas Huacho, another ethnographic scrapbook of peasants cooking and napping and noting they’re getting older, affirms a tourist’s stereotypes. Where’s the old peasant I farmed next door-to a couple months ago, who forged his own sheep bells to be in tune with each other and trained his sheep to follow him, so that we’d hear him coming for coffee with a hundred chimes? Making his lead characters idiot mute aborigines, Warwick Thornton, in Samson and Delilah, offers empty capsules for audiences to insert themselves into. It’s the Malick-meets-neorealism shtick of David Gordon Green: innocent people trying to love each other and being brutalized by terrible, arbitrary things (the main girl gets kidnapped, raped, and run over by a car) amidst “ambient” shots of running water and sun flare to show the natural beauty in an overdeveloped Eden. Sound’s manipulated strangely—two characters listen to different music, but the soundtrack fades to one song—and manipulatively. Audiences loved it. And as usual, a film didn’t open up a world, old fat ladies beating the young girl when her grandma dies aside, but closed it down. The main message of Cannes, so far, is not to become a Romanian narcs officer, or a Chilean peasant, or a beatnik aborigine, especially when you can watch the movie. Stay at home, in a movie theater. In Dogtooth, a family grows up without ever leaving their house; they dream of their mother falling in the pool. And so my dreams here have been imagining Antichrist as a neorealist chase movie, and that there’d be a full Moullet retro on the Croisette.

Dogtooth is on the other side, the static movies that make bedrooms look like studios, behavior look trained, and treat characters as graphic designs (The Time that Remains a conscious Tati homage but Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void so much closer to Tati’s ant farms). For the hell of it, Danny and I split movies into two groups: crickets and sadism. Crickets, inevitably with bugs on the soundtrack on opening and closing credits and all throughout, are the ambient, realist routines about nobodies living daily life in the middle of nowhere. Bad handheld is usually a staple: where cricket-masters like Stan Brakhage (silent) and Jacques Rozier composed an image and let it shake to let the wind in, never to let the shot be self-contained, a new generation uses it to avoid composition altogether. Eastern Plays has a camera jerking to figure out how the scene should be shot; Huacho and Min Ye (by Souleymane Cissé, whose Yeelen is the opposite film) hold their cameras to upper bodies, with no sense of where people are in scenes; Samson and Delilah centers the character and wastes space at the edge of the frame. Sadism, which usually centers on a couple trying to humiliate each other through mutual temptations, or a closed family or community stuck in a house or village as demons are released, inevitably proposes that staid society was created to repress destructive, sexual urges: the old theme from Hobbes or Voltaire, Renoir or Kubrick or Buñuel. This year, it includes at least Dogtooth, Argento’s Giallo, Air Doll, Eccentricities of a Blonde, and Vincere, another rabid call for freedom from Marco Bellochio, as usual (for him) setting up forms to burst them apart in futurist and documentary interludes, and sudden spurts of red.

***

The two most interesting genre films and best comedies—Lars von Trier’s Antichrist and Luc Moullet’s Land of Madness—are works of crickets and sadism both and neither, both of them positing homicidal madness as the only means of grappling with the void, not to be confused with Enter the Void’s void, a catalogue of circular objects borrowed from Kubrick to represent birth and death and rebirth as the camera, which represents the disembodied soul of a dead drug dealer in Tokyo, dives through one and out another: manholes, ashtrays, vaginas, nipples, ova, fire pits, windows, and the heads of Japanese scum fucking his sister. Enter the Void’s one-way symbols, techno-beat movements, stunt editing (a roller coaster recalls a truck accident, though why the inside shot of a fucking dick isn’t cut with both these is a question) and retreads of 2001, Jordan Belson, and Grand Theft Auto in riffing as tackily as possible off of Scarface is too clever to count as insanity; Antichrist and Land of Madness are, occasionally, insane. Both are built from clichés: Antichrist’s over-intellectualizing husband and sex-charged wife (a mind/body split that’s the most obvious appropriation from Tarkovsky), fairytale woodlands, and word-by-word illustrations of dreams and fantasies taken to mutinous parody; Land of Madness’s endless talking heads in their kitchens telling stories of murder.

What’s easily missed is structure. Where every other film in Cannes imposes a style onto the movie that’s endured a couple of hours, Antichrist reinvents itself every few minutes, but also takes a germ of an old idea—a couple that needs each other to express their desperation—and lets it ripen to its furthest of far-flung conclusions: castration, impalement, and an irritated Willem Dafoe stuck in a hole in the ground between a bird about to eat his eyes out on one side, and his wife about to stab him in the back on the other. There’s a Night of the Hunter Loony Toons horror of narrative, form, and two lovers in constant free-fall; von Trier, spontaneous but never arbitrary, has made a movie about two people trying to make sense of their fears and hates through diagrams of “fear pyramids” and mythic constellations, that’s every bit as preposterous in its irrationality as its characters attempts to rationalize. The same goes for Land of Madness: as characters calmly discuss historical killings on one side of the screen with cloud-covered mountains behind them on the other, as Moullet shows the audience his film collection (“come with me… to my attic”) and restages a suicide attempt by sitting on the edge of a bridge, then redoes the ending of his Anatomy of a Relationship with a zoom-out to the landscape, Moullet shows himself again one of the great working Romantics (but as usual, not all of the film is like this). As in Antichrist, nature is sublime, inspires madness, and madness, then, is the only reason to live. And die. Like most of Moullet’s films, Land of Madness is an attempt to make the epic banal and the banal epic, and bring them both back again.

***

Finally, Alain Resnais’ Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass, but Folles also means mad) changed everything; it’s the one film whomever I talk to agrees is a masterpiece and the only one. At a small press conference with 12 journalists leaning in around a table, and a spry, boomerang-bent Resnais leaning back, Resnais told us that the film was inspired by Eisenstein (for the colors) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (for the comedy); that he knew he was on the right track when he saw Larry David was in Woody Allen’s new movie; that the logic of the film, as in Lewis Carroll, is largely based on puns (even English ones—the problems of a pant’s fly as a man flies a plane); that his camera imitates a plane; that he’s never seen The Bridges at Toko-Ri, which at the center of the film has almost the same ending as Resnais’ film; that Leo McCarey understood details better than anyone; that he and Andre Bazin were good friends, though at first he didn’t have much respect for Bazin, who never watched any movies; that at 18 in Provence, he argued with his friends whether cinema was an art form, since it can only show reality instead of interpreting it (as, contra Bazin, his friends insisted art must), and that he defended himself with the Kuleshov effect and invocations of the editing of Pudovkin and Lubitsch;  that Abel Gance or von Stroheim would probably be thrilled by the possibilities of TV series like The Sopranos; that he’s read his films are about memory, but that’s not true; that they’re really about imagination (“but that includes a bit of memory, too”); that he doesn’t distinguish between a real apple and an apple painted by Cezanne (all his movies in a line?), but that he might prefer to eat the real apple, and might prefer to keep Cezanne’s.

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The Father of My Children

Dir Mia Hansen-Løve

2009 Germany

As in most gangster movies, character interest and plot interest are the same in A Prophet: a man’s identity is the moves he makes. Which is why the movie holds on as an investigation into who the main character, Arab prisoner Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), is—every move he makes is ordered by a prison mobster, while his one or two stabs at autonomy and power are intended only to free him from slavery, and only tangle him deeper in the system. There are all sorts of frameworks here, a patricidal Greek tragedy, a microcosm of the Arabs’ rise to power in France, a Burt Lancaster melodrama of a old man deluding himself of his power, a Rousseau-ian political allegory of men in chains from nature, and a Nietzschian religious allegory about pretending man-made structures are the dictates of god—and about the prophets who deliver the dictates. They’re all just scaffolding for what really counts, in a world where relationships are only economic, as if every man were a nation-state: the rules and procedures and schemes of people staying alive in prisons and mobs in France, 2009, the precautions they take with cell phones, or the best way to slice a guy’s throat. A Prophet doesn’t need a film critic, but a critic who’s been to jail and the mob and back, to say how good it is. At the least, it’s a handbook to the way a world could operate and people talk and take stock of their opportunities, as much a termite piece as The Wire.

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A Prophet

Dir Jacques Audiard

2009 France

Like Bresson, Melville, or Boetticher, Johnnie To makes movies about men surveying their possibilities to do a job, then doing it as neatly as possible—To’s method too, diagramming characters in a space, one at a time, then letting them fly at each other. But a To character could never make a To movie: where To’s heroes subjugate all thought to action, and abandon all emotion to the plots they plan (very Boetticher), To’s as shameless a toughie as Sam Fuller, who’d also write in kids to tell everyone what the hard-liner heroes should be feeling, and turn characters into each other’s martyrs just to show what good friends they were. Every gesture in a To is a monument to man’s endless duty to his job and family against mob bosses and wind machines—even the borrowings are totally transparent. As François Costello in Vengeance, Johnny Hallyday shares Le Samourai’s Jeff Costello’s last name, fedora, and lifestyle as nothing more than a hitman’s daily tasks. Not just a man without a past, he’s a man who lost his past, an amnesiac out to revenge his family’s murder. The identity doesn’t matter (he’s Johnny Hallyday). To, as usual, takes it for granted that the Langian eye for an eye till everyone’s blind bit makes enemies almost identical vehicles for the exact same drives. What matters—Hallyday, lost his family, lost his past, a Frenchman speaking English in Macao (language a standard divide in To)—is the ways strangers, estranged from the world around them, from themselves, come together, usually at night, as kindred spirits. Sometimes as friends, more often to blow each other’s brains out.

Where Jean-Pierre Melville’s world is a marble checkerboard of chess pieces making their move, To’s mechanisms of fate work in ballet: the slo-mo that makes even walking look like predetermined choreography, the barely (but perpetually) spinning camera that never sees them as fixed figures against the landscape, and most of all, To’s Tati-like shifts in perspective that displace protagonists to the background and bring background characters to the front. No character occupies a space in To, as they do in the shoot-offs of Ford, Mann, etc.—To cares about their trajectory through it, the foreplay, as in ballet, to the moment of contact as the spaces practically seem to swirl around them. Both Vengeance’s setpieces show space in total flux: one, in some desert just outside of Macao where the trash blows like a million tumbleweeds and gangster’s try to crouch behind it; the other, a campground showdown as the moonlight fades in and out while the gangsters wait for light to shoot a bit of tinpan poetry worthy of Michael Powell. Everyone is relative to one another, but in both, the men’s movement, whatever it is, seems as straight and determined—or predetermined—as they are. It’s all dance.

And because Vengeance thinks its total corniness is profound, it probably is. For To, fate’s not just the machine that makes men cogs in a cycle of vengeance. It’s also the force that makes three mobster stooges (To’s sense of duty: one of them plucking a bullet from his fat friend’s ass) turn against their boss, even though he owns the city, to help a Frenchman who never says anything to them and is slowly forgetting their names and carrying around Polaroids to identify the men he’s trying to kill. To’s force is in his improbabilities—men’s self-set fates carried to their full, preposterous conclusions. They kill each other because they have to, and like each other just because they do, like Hawks characters taking on the system as a good excuse to hang out with each other. If not one of To’s worst films, Vengeance is one of his best.

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Vengeance

Dir Johnnie To

2009 Hong Kong

The weird thing about Bong Joon-ho’s Mother is that Bong keeps the thing back from burlesque exactly by going too far: a mother-loving idiot touching his mom’s breast as they curl up together at night, or her bloody attack on a man who insults her son carrying caricatures realistically to their logical conclusions. Danny Kasman has described Bong as “a glossier Imamura,” and that seems right: only scamps, scalliwags, and ragamuffins populate their movies, as idiots hungry for food, sex, and blood, like medieval allegories of appetites, or Fellini’s hicks let loose in the city with none of Fellini’s affection on them. The Host turns sentimental, but even there the transition only works because of the underlying hint that these people struggle to maintain their family for the sole purpose of staying alive; Mother, meanwhile, abandons comedy and an entire plot about 20 minutes in to follow the incestuous mom ready to kill to prove her son’s not a killer (but, she tells him, “you and I are the same”—though he’s the only character dumb enough not to know what a dumbass he is).

A series of many more pointless digressions, pointless insert shots, and misleading developments follow as the mom plays detective to solve a murder to no avail. If Bong’s too commercial for any of Imamura’s coups of sound or light or cutting—Bong identifies memories and fantasies as fantasies where Imamura just cuts them in as part of the plot—the movie’s totally mad anyway: as in Kafka, the main character sees everyone in the world as a lunatic, and is both right and a lunatic herself. There’s no steady center; Mother’s as every bit destabilized as its title character. The last, flickering shot, as a murderer joins a party bus, simply shows an imbecile reconciled to a carnival of imbeciles, another Bong ship of fools.

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Mother

Dir Bong Joon-ho

2009 South Korea

There’s one great image in Abrazos Rotos, and it’s straight from Godard’s Prenom Carmen: a hand, in silhouette, hovers over a blue, static TV screen. It’s not a great image because it’s pretty. Almodóvar, like a pulp illustrator turned filmmaker, has plenty of pretty images, which he fashions by-the-dots melodramas around to get to: Penelope Cruz primping as a queen for herself in a mirror; Penelope Cruz in red, carried into the night by the man who just shoved her down a staircase; Penelope Cruz, post-coital, coming back to the bedroom to find her old lover looking dead. Of course, any image with Penelope Cruz is going to be pretty, and prettier in Almodóvar, who devotedly adds color and removes clothes—it's thanks to him that Penelope Cruz’s tits are an axiom of the cinema, his great symbols and sources, inexplicably, of man’s fortitude and woman’s devotion that mark the women of his films. What isn’t revealed in the face is revealed in the chest. One look and you know—always the woman’s problem for Almodóvar—that she’ll carry on. And how. Pendebat in aere tellus ponderibus librata suis. To understand desire is not to understand men, as they always are in Almodóvar, as martyrs to women’s love. It’s to see Cruz nude. In Almodóvar, the plot is inevitably pornography, justified only by the tits. But prettiness, in Almodóvar, is as easy as his characters.

Really easy: the pretty segments inserted into the narrative segments in Abrazos Rotos would be just as good in color pencil storyboards, and have nothing to do with the texture or movement, unique to movies, that Almodóvar likes to talk about in interviews. The colors, smooth and shiny, look more like markers than film. Almodóvar keeps his actors composed and poised in shot for a few moments as they make small talk, usually sitting as though in thrones, then lets them continue the story. They’re all manufactured as if Almodóvar held up his paper sketches to the monitor while he shot to make sure his actors were in the same place as when he drew them.

Abrazos Rotos plays as a string of hypothetical stories and images for an actual movie; it is easier to see the idea behind the image, in Almodóvar, than the image itself. While Buñuel resituates The Last Supper in Viridiana, or Bresson resituates the ending of City Lights in the ending of Pickpocket, Almodóvar, like indie bands with psych-rock, reheats his favorite themes, but removes any psychotic element that might end up disturbing audiences (who comes to Bad Education for the rape, and stay for the love). There are at least three main inspirations for Abrazos Rotos. A young, nerd filmmaker seeking to expose his stepmother is a werewolf caricature of Carl Boehm’s Peeping Tom, but notes himself he’s just a stalker, has no desire to murder (and so Almodóvar strips Michael Powell’s film of its main metaphor and meaning to preserve the image). John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven is the inspiration for the staircase fall, but where the shove in Stahl’s film is a deliberately calculated attempt to reclaim a lover, in Almodóvar it’s just a sudden shove of jealous rage as a husband tries to kill his wife (again, no sympathy for the bloodthirsty). Voyage to Italy, now a perennial date flick, is awesomely reappropriated in a montage with a camera swirling nowhere in particular, and Cat Power singing, and lovers snuggling on the couch watching TV, where Ingrid Bergman stares in a volcano. And a film that can only see life through other films takes up neorealism as its ancestor.

But Almodóvar’s too tasteful for Rossellini’s realism and he’s too tasteful for Sirk’s melodrama—both hurt, follow people who keep themselves from loving. Abrazos Rotos simply uses old screenwriter’s devices to keep lovers from one another. There is no soaring Sirk music as characters dance murderously with nobody to talk to, no eerie Stahl calm as characters think murderously with nobody to talk to, no dead Rossellini calm as characters think suicidally with each other to talk to, and nothing to say. They talk to each other. There’s no blood.

What makes the shot of a hand over a TV screen great, then, is not just that it’s got texture, but that it’s the only moment that justifies and offers some undercurrent to the film’s endless digressions that stack up as storylines and characters: a director, blind and amnesiac after an accident that killed his mistress; the mistress, 15 years ago, looking to be a star; her husband, finding she’s cheated on him, and trying to win her back; the film the director was making with her and never finished. In a single moment, Almodóvar’s rehashed plots—he’s a pulp curator turned filmmaker—converge, as the same story of men trying to reclench dreams that last a second, that they saw, like a movie, and dissolved. For Almodóvar, to lose your sight is to lose your visions. Or at least your grasp on them. Abrazos Rotos, roughly, translates as “Broken Embraces.” But a hand hovering endlessly over TV static is all it takes to really show it.

Above: the hand from Godard's Prénom Carmen (1983).

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Broken Embraces

Dir Pedro Almodóvar

2009 Spain

First, Ne change rien turns up the idea that most of Pedro Costa’s recent films are dress rehearsals. Where his major mentors, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, also film bodies possessed, there delivering fluent incantations of old times lost through stone-still poses, Costa’s characters, like Jacques Rivette’s, always seem to be looking for the incantation—the spell—the fix—to summon any sense of feeling, or inspiration in a deadened world (inspire, originally, meant to breathe). The difference between Costa and Rivette, then, would be that Rivette’s characters find it—a magic talisman usually, maybe a romance, a moment of creation or destruction—while Costa’s exiles fumble around with syringes, get up, and fall asleep (Ventura recollects and recites his past, but seems unable to even be moved by it himself). Even Costa’s documentary on Straub plays as dress rehearsal for moments of great artistic genius that only come through a lot of huffing, pacing, and muttered swearing, all on the part of Straub as the anti-Straubian hero. Straub-Huillet’s musical, Cronik Der Anna Magdalena Bach, shows Bach’s polished performances. Costa’s, Ne change rien, shows Jeanne Balibar trying bars and melodies and entire songs over and over, repeating phrases, getting cut-off by an off-screen instructor, trying to build energy and rhythm with the background music into one, united song. The whole thing’s a jam session.

It also turns out Costa’s been making something like concert films for years—Costa, similar to Straub, displacing the emotions of his statue-characters to the soundtrack, usually diffused bird songs and children’s yelps. Balibar’s ongoing concert’s not any different: a woman in a closed room, standing at a mike, looking as straight and still as Costa’s camera (as usual, left in place for minutes), while her voice and the music, piped in and out around her, do the emoting for her while she’s just hanging out and trying to find the beat. Still lives with music, almost.

But what’s different in Ne change rien, probably because it’s a documentary (though about as much a doc as Costa’s other recent films, which also show everyday life as staged by the people who live it), is the expressiveness of the actors, grinning when they find the mainline, hands flicking up and down on their knees. Costa lights bodies like solar flare lines and faces like half-moons, slight whites against pitch black backgrounds, so that a slight turn of the neck can reconfigure a face’s composition, bring new parts out from shadow; the look is almost charcoal. The result’s that players are only seen minimally—in silhouette with a hand waving back and forth, or just an eye and right curl of the mouth—so that the smallest gestures express maximally. The opening shot, the simplest shot from a stage right wing as the musicians come out and start, makes stage lights look like stars, the act a constellation. The movie’s just people jamming, superficially his Poor Little Rich Girl, but Costa, as usual, gives the most banal acts metaphysical weight: as in a dream—my dreams, anyway, half-awake—starting with a half-formed image and a montage of sounds and voices, building, that gradually find their bodies (and what's maybe most dream-like is the tangential realism: an off-screen voice correcting Balibar's "v"s and saying "I like consonants too").

Costa, of course, would say otherwise, that his job is just to be in service of his performers and let them express themselves totally. And Balibar, with her low, breathy wail she fades in and out like an organ, and lifts girlishly till it sounds like it’ll break—not a great singing voice, but a great voice—is the central mystery. Costa just accentuates it, through the light, through the editing, which seems arbitrary at first, but turns out to be cycling through the same scenes in new takes or further developments; as in his last few films, each scene is a permutation off the other, as Costa tapes Balibar singing all types of songs, to see how her voice shapes them all the same (as Hollywood directors used to dress Jennifer Jones up in all classes of dresses to try to find the same, central personality all of them fit equally well). Like almost all of Costa’s films, Ne change rien is about an exile’s search for self-expression.

All this posed hypothetically, as usual, a couple hours later.

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Ne change rien

Dir Pedro Costa

2009 Portugal

Pinocchio: a sex doll comes to life, discovers she’s got a "heart." Amelie: But life, a heart, means a set tic, or routine (one character’s bulimic, another eats eggs every morning), ersatz characterization. Lolita: the thesis excuses lazy screenwriting—everyone’s hollow; such is the modern world. Garden State: Anyway, love’s better than personality. Still Walking: full-bodied and empty-headed, poses the preciousness to be tapped. There, a mother chased around a butterfly in the night believing it’s her dead son. Here, a guy’s ex-girlfriend is reincarnated instead as an erotic air toy. Life is Beautiful: life is beautiful.

It’s as though Kore-Eda set out to remake Amelie, world as dollhouse, bowl-haired girl piped into depressives’ lives to cheer them up, but was too depressed himself to commit to it. Kore-Eda’s air doll is the same plastic, pipsqueak ingénue, the child who sees the “beauty” in the world that adults (Kore-Eda included) are too accustomed to to see. Water’s beautiful, she says. The stars are beautiful, someone says. The cynical assumption is that the audience doesn’t know this. The more cynical assumption is that they do, and they just need to be reminded (never shown). But it takes Kubrick—who constructed deeper political allegories out of mannequins in single scenes of Killer’s Kiss and Eyes Wide Shut—to demonstrate, Tim Curry to recognize the mad potential; Kore-Eda ends up letting his mannequin kill her lover (like children don’t know about death) and get fucked by her master every night in exchange for board. Cute or capitalism? It’s the equivalent of a poem—“People are pretty/ the world is pretty/ I ache in a body I don’t have”—entitled “Life’s sad.” Any 15 year old kid could write it, though no 5 year could, but never mind that real children think about sex and murder constantly. Air Doll tells us life’s mysterious, and in doing so, figures it all out; life can be beautiful and sad at the same time, Kore-Eda decides, as best allegorized by a bloodied, bodybagged corpse on the street everyone finds precious. The camera, meanwhile, wanders around scenes as if looking for a better movie. Next time, let’s talk about government, horticulture, or horse races.

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Air Doll

Dir Hirokazu Kore-Eda

2009 Japan