FILM CLIPS, 3

Bergman supra Bergman

While less often a viewer at the WHC screenings this semester, I availed myself more regularly of the DVD collection there. One reason might be the widescreen TV I acquired in the fall (just doing my part to help the ailing retailers of America), which made watching at home a more cinema-like experience. And the act of viewing at home has already acquired something of the status of reading -- which is to say that the ability to watch, re-watch, watch in discrete segments, etc., has much to recommend it when viewing movies one wants to study a bit more closely. Much as I like the big screen, viewing in the movie theater retains that outmoded sense of "theater" which has little to do with how we watch these days. I don't watch movies on laptops, much, and never on iPods and phones, but, y'know, things are changing.

Anyway, this semester I watched a string of Bergman movies from the '60s on disc: Virgin Spring (1960); Shame (1968); The Passion of Anna (1969). Bergman has long been one of the unavoidably major film directors of my lifetime, with most of his best work -- but for a few notable exceptions -- appearing before the '70s. That fact makes him "a classic" in the sense that his work from the '50s and '60s always seems to be situated in a world that's not quite the world we know. Even a late '60s Bergman film like Shame, with its setting of endemic warfare by unnamed combatants, and of refugee situations, seems less topical than such material would appear in other hands. And even when Bergman seems to accept something of Godard's aesthetic of film-making immediacy and levels of self-referential "frames," the end effect is not the same degree of timeliness, or datedness, that accompanies one's viewing of so many '60s concoctions. The reason may have a lot to do with the kinds of films Bergman made in the '50s, where the folkloric aspect of the themes and settings kept him from the kind of sentimentality and corniness of so many '50s productions. Bergman never seemed to feel any compunction to depict "the modern world" per se, with its plugged-in status and post-WWII boom in hi-tech commodities. One link in Shame and Passion ("of Anna" was added to the American title), besides the fact of Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann at their best, is the faulty phone service in Passion and the faulty radio service in Shame. The films Bergman made on Faro, his beloved island, boast a rigorous austerity that derives from the rustic settings, the stripped-down stories, the deep inwardness of Max and Liv, and a lack of specificity about temporal location.

Virgin Spring, coming at the end of that phase which included the famed medieval tale, The Seventh Seal (1957), benefits mightily from Sven Nykvist's black and white cinematography (his first involvement in a Bergman movie) and thus sets the standard for the visual impact of Bergman films. The sense of a Scandinavian folktale brought to the screen never flags -- evincing that grasp of a bygone world, or at least an artifice of it, that is so convincing in films like Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). Sydow is the rather taciturn and laconic focus of all three films, but when paired with Ullman, as in the color films from later in the decade, he becomes not simply a moral center but a figure for the personal intensities of the director. What Sydow wrestles with on screen has to do with what Bergman himself is at pains to grasp -- not simply how one lives with a woman, in a trivial domestic sense, but how one surrenders part of one's identity and takes on a new one, one that is never wholly or solely one's own. And that fact of emotional involvement shifts the focus to Ullmann, who in both films presents a tour de force of a style of acting almost wholly her own. Other great actors convince us of a character's reality; Ullmann convinces us that she and the character are the same person, that we are watching her reveal herself. In her comments about Shame, taped many years later, Ullmann speaks up for the film's significance in addressing world-scale tragedies like war, and indeed the power of the movie comes from the degree to which its situation is endemic to our times -- because of endless warfare -- but the film also, in the "trilogy" it makes with Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Passion, gives us yet another metaphoric situation for the isolation and lack of moral center in the Sydow character. So that, as moral center, Sydow is in each film a character at war with himself -- a struggle played against different backdrops: quasi-horror film in Wolf, war/occupation story in Shame, bourgeois marriage drama in Passion.

I came away from these viewings with a deeper regard for the ingenuity of good old "ball and chain Bergman" -- the man who made existential struggle the watchword of his films -- because it's clear that he can make almost anything happen on film, in the sense of a storyteller whose focus on what the story requires is his only driving force. Not 'entertainment,' not moralizing, not even 'being deep' or literary or symbolic. Occasionally, ideas don't quite get their full due or seem unnecessary intrusions (as in the "interviews" with the actors in Passion), but even when Bergman seems to be groping or over-reaching, there's a kind of personal presence to it all that reminds me somewhat of a storyteller making it up as he goes along. And that sense -- in the world of contrived and conventional dramas so often offered for our consideration -- is welcome
indeed.

FILM CLIPS, 2

Wham Bam

A 2008 release new to DVD that I've just seen: Wanted, directed by Timur Bekmambetov (no slouch of a name!) and starring the always capable James McAvoy as a working geek, somewhat in the manner of Ed Norton in The Fight Club (1999), until one day all hell breaks lose and, shazam!, turns out he's the scion of a super assassin, and gets to do the whole "train me till I break or make one of you" routine at the hands of a secret fraternity, complete with a sexy female, played by the ever-chiseled Angelina Jolie, named Fox (kinda ... says it all), and some other badass dudes, while Morgan Freeman stands around looking stoically sage, or sagely stoic. It all goes wrong in several right ways -- meaning that which side is bad and which good gets mixed up, but our hero manages to keep his head on straight. To its credit, the film just keeps moving with one of the more inventive car chase / shoot outs I can recall; it's also fun to catch glimpses of real Chicago in all the wildly improbable razza-ma-tazz. Basically it's a movie with characters who seem to occupy a video game, what with bending bullets and other kinds of Matrixy stunts. So, yeah, Fight Club meets Spider Man meets The Matrix in a video game. Just what the teen in us wanted.

WHC 'n' me

And for "Obscure Film I Never Heard Of That I'm Glad I Saw," the award goes to . . . Nothing But a Man (1964), directed by Michael Roemer, about Duff, an average black guy working for the railroad in Alabama who falls for a preacher's daughter slash school teacher, but runs afoul of the local Jim Crow status quo; he's also got a no-account drunken father whom he barely knows shambling around Birmingham. The cast is comprised mainly of non-professional actors (though a young Japhet Koto is one of the surly railroad workers), but that means that Abbey Lincoln (a singer who plays the preacher's daughter) and Julius Harris (a registered nurse who plays Duff's dad) get to shine with performances that manage to imbue somewhat hackneyed parts (even in 1964) with grace and power and believable depth. The "hackneyed" slur could easily doom this film, except that its unassuming naturalness -- everything in it seems manifestly real rather than a set -- keeps before us, without hammering it or going for the extended schmaltz with which Hollywood tends to play up its "social concerns," that these are simply black people trying to live normal lives. In the world of 1964 that was a radical idea: that black folk were "no different" and should be able to live like anyone else, on equal footing. And it's that point that the film's director nicely underscored in his comments after the screening: to even show on screen a black couple in intimate close-up together was crossing a taboo. In other words, the somewhat static camera and the overuse of close-up and tight compositions serves a purpose, so that we can't try to distance ourselves from the basic human frustration these characters face against the restrictions and impositions of a society that can't accept equality. The film is so gentle and restrained and yet, ultimately, so dignified about what it wants to say that it reminds one of good documentary-making where the point of it all is made by the clarity with which the scenes are put together. And at this remove in time, even the film's hokeyness, here and there, is kind of endearing.

Another film shown at WHC this semester along these lines -- of depicting average people in such a way as to illuminate their lives' quiet dignity -- was Yosujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953). This touching story of an elderly couple from a provincial town visiting their successful children in Tokyo, children who in the economic progress post-WWII have little real connection to their elders, works because of the understated bond of the older couple. One could search for a word to describe it: affection, commitment, love, tenacity -- but what those words don't get across, but the actors do, is how life with someone, for decades, becomes a taken-for-granted togetherness that works because it requires no proofs or demonstrations. When the wife/mother dies at the end, we get to see how self-absorbed her children are, but the film doesn't condemn them -- like their father, it accepts that that's how the young are. It's only the widow of the son who died in the war who truly empathizes with the old man, seeing the loss that the children would prefer not to notice. What makes the film so extraordinary is that it isn't sentimental or unsparing; it's as if it has no message at all. This is simply what some people lived through, it seems to say -- but in the context of the post-WWII world, and there are many shots of the urban world and many comments on how things are changing, what these people were living through is significant, and the film lets you grasp that without underscoring it unduly.

It seems that most of my viewing this semester at WHC fell into the "neo-realism" category. Another worthwhile screening was Fellini's seminal Nights of Cabiria (1957). For me, "Fellini" is always the Fellini of La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963), but this film is effective for, in neo-realist fashion, depicting the underclass with genuine interest and fascination, not simply looking at "sordid" lives for the thrill of the sordid. It manages to create a varied and fascinating backdrop to the episodic vignettes that comprise a period of time in the life of the prostitute Cabiria. Played by Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina, Cabiria is a tour de force of expressive faces and physical gestures and movement. She's been likened to a female Chaplin, and rightly so. Like Chaplin's Tramp she is always more sinned against than sinning and is naive and pathetic in a winsome way. But unlike Chaplin, she can also be vituperative, egotistical, and somewhat callous. But in Fellini's case, the judgments aren't aimed at Cabiria but at the world she inhabits, with its frenzied religious rituals; destitute people living in caves visited by a single good Samaritan; rich, bored movie star and angry, then repentant girlfriend; coarser whores than Cabiria, who maintains an almost bourgeois sense of dignity; and heartless predators who woo the unsuspecting Cabiria, who never seems to learn from her misadventures, and then rob her. The film is ultimately unsatisfying because its only response to Cabiria's final predicament is to show life and high spirits going on -- which does revive Cabiria herself, but that revival is purely cinematic. And it's that insight, I believe, that sets Fellini off into his greatest achievements in understanding what cinema, as artifice, is all about.

While I admire the neo-realist efforts here and the documentary aesthetic, it seems to me that cinema as artifice is something a true artist of the medium must confront -- if only because of that tendency, as in Wanted, to keep pushing the envelope of what appears "real" on screen. Now that nothing does (or anything does -- same thing), it's good to go back and see films like Roemer's, Ozu's, '60s Fellini to see that there was a time when film might be as "real" as a Chekhov story or a newsreel. Really.

FILM CLIPS

Soon it will be that time of year when critics and bloggers take stock of the best of the year -- in books, music, film, what have you. Since I don’t think I read any books published this year, and only saw maybe two or three movies released this year -- at a theater, maybe more if we count DVDs -- and bought maybe four CDs released this year, it would be pointless to try to do that kind of summation. Suffice to say: I’m way out of touch with the times. So it makes more sense to close out the year talking about some of the things I did watch and read and listen to, which will be a way of marking what went on in 2008, in my little corner of the world, sorta. But even so, with regard to films, I’ll just comment on the fall, and anything I saw, whether new release, WHC screening, or DVD, is fair game. Here goes....

Burned After Viewing

I did make it to a theater to see Burn After Reading, The Coen Brothers first release since they're Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men (2007). Early on, the film struck me as very entertaining, in their typically acid way, but then it came apart in a way also very typical of them. Which is to say: their movies often give me the feeling that they just lost interest, like their own movies don't even deserve their full attention. And I can't say I blame them. It was over quickly after getting ridiculously nasty -- and not in the sustained, unraveling way that their Fargo (1996) did. Fargo is the high water mark for this sort of thing, and is one reason I went into this one with more expectations than they bothered to meet this time. Great cast, yeah. Skewers DC playas in a way that, I guess, got in under the wire before "The Change" hit town. And that might be part of the problem. By the time this thing made it to theaters, "The Change" had already done much to change the context (we had to believe, at least, that Americans have a learning curve). Maybe if there were at least one "likeable" character we could get behind it -- like Frances McDormand in Fargo, where even the hit men were kinda likeable (Steve Buscemi, how bad could it be?) and the idiot who set the whole avalanche in motion, as incarnated by William H. Macy, as comical a nebbish as ever graced film. But then such grace notes require a minimal regard for one's "fellow citizens," which I confess might become increasingly hard for lots of us as our country continues to tank. Anyway, the film is a nice dig in the ribs, but isn't really jocular and doesn't quite get the jugular either. Har har, we got you into the theater, I seemed to hear the jaded Bros shrug as I hit the street.

Au - strail- ya, Au -strail - ya, Au - strail - ya, we love ya, amen.

Another director who got me into the theater this year was Baz Luhrman. I still think Moulin Rouge! (2001) is a work of genius -- an editing tour de force, a consistently inventive and frenetic musical send-up that is also a sincerely felt musical, a pastiche of fast and furious cultural referents, graced with a loony cast -- led by Jim Broadbent -- with Nicole Kidman at her sexiest AND most fun, Ewan McGregor at his most sincere, awww, AND a show-stopping rendition of "Roxanne" that implies that there might've been more to Sting than we ever wanted to believe. Oh, yeah. But that's not the movie I'm supposed to be writing about. Australia's got Nicole again, and her gap-ridden faking of the lyrics of "Over the Rainbow" is the best comic moment in this lengthy, breathy, absurd, and romantic (because absurd) epic. Everyone reviewing the film references Gone With the Wind (1939) and The African Queen (1951), but it also has a scene straight out of Out of Africa (1985). And it's all deliberate as making fin de siècle decadence out of '70s-'90s pop rock culture, but not half as fun. I was hoping for something campier, looser, more theatrical. Instead it's a film that glories in the ridiculous coincidental and providential schtick that is cinematic storytelling. Which means that even while we don't believe a minute of it, we believe in make-believe, and that's what this is, with a vengeance. The vengeance comes in the form of evil deadbeat white dad getting his at the hands of granddad the aborigine shaman. And if that doesn't set things right, how about gorgeous couple Nicole and the ever-crusty and buff Roveh (Hugh Jackman) setting themselves up as doting parental figures for the half caste kid Nullah (Brandon Walters) who, never know, just might go on to be a world leader some day...

Which I guess is a way of saying that one film I saw this fall was a parable of W.'s Washington -- dumb and dumber in the corridors of power -- and the other is a parable of The Change's effect on the interracial social playing fields of our cliché-ridden society. And who says Hollywood isn't relevant?

(to be continued)

OF ULRICH AND AGATHE

At long last, I've made it through the 1,130 pages of The Man Without Qualities that Musil published in his lifetime. In the Third Part, Into the Millennium (The Criminals) we get to know Agathe, the sister of Ulrich, the main protagonist. Indeed, Agathe becomes an unexpected focus for the entire section, not only taking our attention away from Ulrich's earlier concerns -- the planning of the great Jubilee event in honor of the Austrian Emperor; his interest in his cousin Diotima and her fascination with Arnheim, the Prussian businessman-of-the-world who gets caught up in the Austrian plans; his intrigues with Count Leinsdorf who looks to Ulrich as a man of unique sensibility who should be able to have a beneficial influence on the proceedings; his affair with Bonadea, a rather nymphomanic woman who wants to understand him better; his attraction for Clarisse, the highstrung and Nietzschean wife of Ulrich's best friend Walter, a would-be Wagnerian composer; his involvement with the Fischel family, particularly their somewhat neurasthenic daughter Gerda who, despite feeling Ulrich's morbid attraction, seems set upon uniting her future with the nascent fascist Hans Sepp -- but also eventually taking our attention away from Ulrich's own peculiar perspective on things.

At first, Agathe seems to arrive in the novel as yet another of Ulrich's women, meant to be more of a double or, as they term themselves, "Siamese twin." Interesting notion, but Agathe is not "a woman without qualities." She begins as a foil for Ulrich, and her desire to be rid of her dull and unimaginative husband Hagauer stirs Ulrich's penchant for moralizing, so that instead of defining his hero against the would-be cultural movers and shakers of a society not easily moved or shaken, Musil begins to define him beside a woman who, due to their easy complicity, comes to seem a destiny. In other words, we seem to have the makings of a grand folie à deux, its inspiring qualities (for a man who has eschewed qualities) leading Ulrich to define what he means by "the Millennium": not love that, like a stream, flows toward a goal, but "a state of being like the ocean."

"...you must now imagine this ocean as a state of motionlessness and detachment, filled with everlasting, crystal-clear events. In ages past, people tried to imagine such a life on earth. That is the Millennium, formed in our own image and yet like no world we know. That's how we'll live now! We shall cast off all self-seeking, we shall collect neither goods, nor knowledge, nor lovers, nor friends, nor principles, nor even ourselves! Our spirit will open up, dissolving boundaries toward man and beast, spreading open in such a way that we can no longer remain 'us' but will maintain our identities only by merging with all the world!" (871)

One could say that this Millennium is a way of denying "qualities" and connections, but as an act of transcendence -- which is surprising enough for Ulrich, but what is even more unexpected is the "we" and "our" in this statement. Ulrich has found a partner, he seems to believe, in his willful eradication of the claims of the world. And indeed the "twins" conspire to live together in a manner that recalls more than anything a poet shut-up with his muse.

But what kind of muse or double is Agathe? The interesting thing about Part Three of MWQ and, I suspect, the factor that caused Musil to have trouble maintaining the thread that would lead him to its conclusion, is that Agathe starts to take over the narrative. The investigation of her interior state comes to seem much more pressing as territory to delineate than any changes wrought in Ulrich, so much so that his efforts to continue as her guide or mentor begin to fall flat and miss their mark. This is deliberate on Musil's part, but what seems more problematic is what should replace the previous vigor in Ulrich's perspective. Millennium attained, the novel could end, happily ever after. Since it can't reach that stasis, the disruption must come from some quarter. Late in the novel Agathe, who was contemplating killing herself rather than live the diminished version of her life that seemed to face her when Ulrich, in a spate of perverse male solidarity, begins to lecture her about her ties to her husband, meets a man called Lindner who seems to give her some hope for herself -- if only she can overcome the morbid fixation upon herself and think of others.

We don't really get the sequel to this meeting. Instead the narrative takes us back to the endless discussions about the coming Great Event, but with perhaps a sense that something is about to change due to a new rival to Diotima's centrality in the planning.

For me, Agathe's possibilities create the interest of Part Three, even if it is unresolved. In imagining "criminality and purity" in Ulrich's sister, Musil creates more than a foil or double for his hero; he may have introduced, 730 pages into his novel, its heroine.

"It seemed to her that right and wrong no longer constituted a general notion, a compromise devised to serve millions of people, but were a magical encounter between Me and You, the madness of original creation before there was anything to compare it to or anything to measure it by." (867)

Agathe could be someone worth Ulrich's time, and vice versa, but as brother and sister they are doomed to either a hermetic reserve with one another or else must find "the madness of original creation." Clearly, that tension could play itself out, in Musil's capable hands, for another thousand pages or so, easily. As it is, nothing has resolved itself on the last page of this volume. Musil gives us a party that, like the one Proust's narrator attends at the close of the Recherche, brings back onto the stage figures we've done without for a couple hundred pages or more, in some cases, but, unlike the Recherche, this does not occur to give us summations or a measure of the temporal distance we've traveled before bringing things to a close. We "end" here in medias res, without "anything to compare it to or anything to measure it by."