Saturday, November 24, 2012

Valerie / The Eclipse


Valerie (Birgit Moller, 2006) - German cinematographer Moller found inspiration for her sole feature film to date from an American magazine article on "shadow women", a subculture of poverty stricken models who despite their homelessness are able to carry on - mainly through various means of deception, self and otherwise - some semblance of extravagant social lifestyle. Valerie chronicles a handful of late-December days and nights in the life of its titular character (played with tremendous pluck by the stunning Agata Buzek - think Sarah Polley after a month in a midievil stretch device), one such lost soul whose crumbling career has left her floating through the chilly Christmas streets of Berlin destitute and sleeping in a car, hiding the reality of her desperate situation from friends and scrambling to maintain an image of opulence by opportunistically seizing any shard of luxury and its accompanying sense of power that comes her way. The gritty, intimate, hand held visual approach immediately calls to mind the Dardennes (with splashes of dutch tilt thrown in for good measure), but Moller is more interested in the mysteries of complex human behavior and its response/relation to the inescapable passage of time than she is in acts of great moral weight, and the intensity with which the camera aligns itself to the character's experience, the degree to which it inhabits her sad, nervous energy, rendering any notion of potential judgement moot, puts the film closer to the realm of something like Barbara Loden's remarkable Wanda. Never straining for tidy psychology, and avoiding easy depictions of either abject misery or fortuitous, epiphanic Moments, Valerie unspools as a sustained note of deep, stifled melancholy. Highly recommended.

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The Eclipse (Conor McPherson, 2009) - A widower quietly tortured by memories of his dead wife, and yet he dreams about ghosts of the living. A failed writer of the supernatural who falls in love with a successful author on the same subject, while a macabre personal prophecy seems to inscribe itself into the very air of the chilly seaside that surrounds all. The genre blend foundation of this supremely odd Irish production - equal parts modern horror, classical romance and gothic poetic - works much better on the level of tone than plot; narratively it flirts dangerously close with a certain trendy kind of overdetermined strategy involving the piecemeal doling out of vague intrigues surrounding some kind of diffuse revelation that might as well be a black hole. It very often feels like a filmed first draft, and the constant gear switching offers little help in the way of clarity of vision, but at the same time it's in the rough-hewn elasticity of this conglomeration of emotional registers that the movie eventually attains its own audacious, peculiar integrity. For a parable in which the space between the living and the dead, the haunter and the haunted, the experienced and the imagined, and the fantastic and the staid is all but elusive, it certainly stands to reason that a harsh transition from pensive reverie to BOO! jump could hold more value and resonance than a solid chunk of straightforward exposition. At under 90 minutes there is still some fat to be found (mainly in the form of Aidan Quinn's arrogant, annoying twit, completely disconnected from everything relevant and yet somehow in command of his own subplot) and a few too many fancy-to-be-fancy camera moves (not something that typically irks me, but a little too flagrant and unnecessary here); what I will remember most are the handful of quiet, unassuming moments where one or two of the characters are rendered by the lighting as flat, whispering graphics against the hazy backdrop of the living world, moments where the movie briefly seems to stumble onto a distillation of everything that it's interested in and finds beautiful.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Strangers / K.K.


Even with an opening act that Rivette would remake many times over in spirit (the gamey hunt for an elusive figure whose actions have layed down trajectories for the others / but does he even exist?) and a middle sequence involving a dark hotel room and a note slid under a door that matches the quiet menace of anything Lewton or Lang would do in the decade, still the most striking thing about When Strangers Marry is it's insistence that the outlandish happenings of it's insular melodrama occur within a vital, bustling, breathing world. Tracking shots that fluidly incorporate peripheral working stiffs, and extended asides into lively public spaces that make no pretense of narrative import; again and again moments are sprinkled in that lie entirely outside of the story being told, at once lending a potent quotidian contrast to the central cloud of violence and uncertainty, while also providing a larger context into which the blood that's spilt must inevitably flow.

Castle's visual style here is never less than entirely arresting, yet the most effective shot in the entire movie may be one of the simplest: a malevolent, downward gaze directly into the camera from Mitchum. Not only because of what it conveys about the character with such chilling simplicity, but also because it feels like nothing short of the birth of Harry Powell right before your eyes.

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"Both formally and thematically, Kurosawa Kiyoshi's films are a series of fluctuations between rigid and chaotic elements, grids in which emphasis is placed variously on the lines and the spaces. The lines: the hard angles of his long-take shots, sectioning the screen in balanced but asymmetric compositions; the confines of genre; the habitual codes of consensual reality. The spaces: unexpected activations of seemingly static planes or elements within those strict compositions; pushing generic considerations to a larger, allegoric frame of reference, then beyond to ambiguous apocalypse in which an old order/means of perception is abolished in an act of either nihilism triumphant or possibility affirmed - or maybe both, an affirmative nihilism."

- B. Kite, "A Kurosawa Kiyoshi Kit"


"It is nonsense to argue over whether giant monsters or dead people are scarier. How good or bad a film is isn't dependent simply on how scary it is. I just want to give the generic name "horror films" to that family of films that take as their subject matter the fear that follows one throughout one's life.....Now that I think about it, since there are no works that have failed to change my life even a little bit, all films are horror films."

- Kiyoshi Kurosawa, "What is Horror Cinema?"

Friday, October 5, 2012

w/o


Men Without Women - survival tale or ghost story? At the very least a lot of both, but above all most certainly a Ford film: the first quarter of the 70+ minute running time is spent in a Shanghai bar that resembles some kind of Fordian afterlife, with deep space stretching back into eternity filled with sailors and officers in spanking uniforms guzzling booze and playing pranks and breaking out into song and referring to the bartender as 'undertaker' and to themselves as ghosts and running into old acquaintances and spotting others thought to be dead. Precisely nothing of consequence occurs in this opening sequence, yet everything pertinent is felt - this world of thick fog and alcohol and the sea and death is clearly a step towards what would be expressed so profoundly a decade later in The Long Voyage Home - and the desperate situation that fills out the remaining movie becomes infused with this eeriness and vague sense of hyperphysicality and is thus rendered with maybe something less than the appropriate intensity of desperation, even if it does at times quite nimbly reach the fevered pitches of claustrophobia and dread that Ford struggles towards in The Lost Patrol (on that note, was there any other major director experimenting with violent strobing in 1930?). "S.O.S...SAVE OUR SOULS!!!" one sailor gone mad screeches towards the end; it's probably the most sane line spoken in the entire thing.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Blue Tomorrows


Nearly a decade before INLAND EMPIRE, Satoshi Kon gives us in Perfect Blue images of a woman in trouble, a bloody screwdriver, personal surveillance, the complete collapse of reality and fiction, of performer and performance, and reunion and blinding light as a way out.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Freeform Phantom

The Phantom of Crestwood (J. Walter Ruben, 1932)

First, history: In 1932, NBC radio broadcast a six part murder mystery serial, entitled The Phantom of Crestwood, that deliberately elided its final chapter. Listeners were solicited to send in their own endings, with the winning selection receiving both a cash prize as well as on-screen realization in the form of an RKO motion picture.

It is interesting to note then, in a day and age where it's become, it seems, the rule rather than the exception for television series on all ends of the popularity scale to pin their hopes for one degree or another of resolution or perpetuation to resurrection via the big screen, that this idea of resolving the tensions of a narrative through intermedia mingling was not only occurring in 1932, but was in fact being openly embraced and factored into the total vision of productions. "The history of film is in some ways also a history of the repression of emotion" said critic Dave Kehr in his piece on Cassavetes' Love Streams; learning about the existence of projects like The Phantom of Crestwood, of figures like William Castle, tempts one with thoughts of the history of the American film industry also in some ways being the history of the repression of experimentation with interactivity. Far from being simply a "gimmick", the act of Crestwood is a boldly populist gesture, a version of the surrealists Exquisite Corpse game (I start it, you finish it...) played out between those behind the microphone and screen and those in the front and back rows.

In today's television landscape, with "spoilers" at their height of commodification and invitations for interaction not extending much beyond voting for your favorite talent act, it seems something close to unthinkable that a piece of fiction might be devised for the purposes of handing it over to and creating a dialogue with the viewers. Lost, just to name one recent show that constructed an intricate, detail-oriented mythology that viewers eventually seemed to bear just as much if not moreso a grip on than its creators, seemed a natural example that could have greatly benefited from this method of idea-exchanging with the viewership and cross-media exhibition. While I don't read fanfiction, I find it tough to fathom that there weren't a deluge of fan-penned resolutions to the series that were more intelligently crafted and emotionally coherent - particularly with regard to the thousand plot strands left blowing in the wind - than the grand wipe-away of a finale that the show eventually delivered. And seeing as how Lost was one of the more sheerly cinematic of recent American television concoctions, it would have made plenty of sense for its final episodes to have been made available for experience in theaters - as much for the fans' accompanying sense of emotional culmination as for the size of its visual spectacles.


So, The Phantom of Crestwood as translated to and concluded on screen (plot: Jenny Wren (Karen Morley), a high society vamp, arranges a secluded dinner party where she plans to blackmail current and former lovers in order to accumulate a quick fortune and flee to Europe. She's murdered in the middle of the night, and with nearly everyone having a motive, it's up to Ricardo Cortez to crack the case) is a brutal and elegant precoder poised between two traditions: that of the Feuilladian serial depictions of clandestine criminality with its secret passageways and disguises, and that of the gothic "dark house" horror-thriller and its hermetic delineations of shadowy mystery and atmosphere (for which James Whale's The Old Dark House from the same year continues to be maybe the most obvious cornerstone.) It's entirely appropriate then that the movie, itself on a constant teeter between two modes, deploys its central murder as the nexus point of a series of bridged dichotomies: from the sexual (the Jenny Wren character - a typically flamboyant embodiment of precode femininity - and her murderer, another female who early on proclaims "My grandfather said I should have been a man, and raised me as one") to the professional (the Cortez character, a criminal who, solely for the sake of saving his own hide, tasks himself with investigative duties and effectively becomes a law enforcement figure) as well as the textures of tone and atmosphere.

In the latter regard, the dinner party sequence stands as probably the most impressive piece of filmmaking in Crestwood, a deft blend of fond reminiscing and self-mutilation; of joyful faces framed amidst candelabra, and vacant gazes at enemy offscreen space; of lush romantic music harmonizing with thunder and lightning. A notion of the sensual existing alongside the horrific insists itself repeatedly throughout, and is probably most starkly represented in the two key scenes for the Jenny Wren character: the first, where she stands framed in a doorway with the wind whipping her into a kind of intoxicated state of anguish before glimpsing what she believes to be the ghost of a dead loved one; the second beginning as a slow track through the latenight darkness of the house, at first appearing to be a study in candle flickers, fireplace flames and flashlight beams before arriving at a bloodcurdling scream and the image of Jenny stumbling down a flight of stairs with an oversized dart buried into her skull.


Technique reaching across the decades and brushing fingersCrestwood utilizes a repeating flashback pattern in its middle stretches as a way of both fleshing out the gaps in and linking the characters' individual experiences that evening, as well as charting the intricate physical spaces of the house. These flashback moments are achieved technically by a zoom into the relevant characters mid-dialogue, before a zoom out and quick 360-degree whip around with the camera designed to transport us into the realm of memory. Occasionally here the pre-flashback zoom is performed prematurely, with the closeness held for an inordinate duration, lending the sense of a guiding hand and a heightened air to these brief moments that continued to recall for me the trademark zooms found in the work of Hong Sang-soo:



Then there is this...


...and also, as with so many other movies, the ghost of Vertigo, in the form of a suicidal plunge to death right around the midway point, and its almost preordained reprisal in the final moments of the film:



 (The Phantom of Crestwood was released on DVD for the first time earlier this year by Warner Bros. as part of their Archive Collection)