Whirlpool

The opening credits of Otto Preminger's Whirlpool: printed on fancy paper, wound through the screen by some sort of scrolling mechanism. The camera then pulls back into the filmic world, where the credits paper is revealed as a sheet of gift wrap in the hands of an upscale department store clerk who begins spreading it out for use, after which it will presumably become a piece of trash. In this same store, Gene Tierney's not-so-happy homemaker and covert kleptomaniac is caught boosting a pricey piece of jewelry, and, soon after, pens a hasty confession note meant for her husband, but thinks the better of it and tears it up. And just a little later she writes a check for a sinister man to keep quiet about her theft; it too becomes ripped into pieces. It's a film that in so many ways eventually takes as its very core the maintenance of appearances, and yet Preminger in these early moments has already sown the seeds of tension through this subtle nudging towards a sense of self-negation.

Forever perched high on the pedestal of "ambiguity" by auteurists, Preminger is probably an underrated director of sheer terror - there are so many moments of it in his work. It's something his style is perfectly suited for, as the horrors are allowed the space and distance to mingle with the mundane, to infect, subvert and swallow it in fell swoops. The crucial sequence in Whirlpool is a remarkable series of fluid long takes depicting the midnight-hour possession via delayed hypnosis of Tierney (rupturing another expressive use of paper, this time an abandoned love letter), charting an entranced trek across town to take her place as patsy at a murder scene. As a formalist coup it's part and parcel with the most striking of Preminger's cinema, and as a depiction of one of the scariest of all propositions - the loss of self-agency - within an unbroken visual and narrative context, it's fairly unparalleled within my viewing experiences.

Whirlpool seems settled nicely in the Preminger critical narrative as neither his best day nor his worst. I wouldn't argue - the second half which is almost all Richard Conte and little Tierney flattens out pretty quickly - but I'll give the last word to Jacques Rivette, one of Whirlpool's staunchest defenders:

"I believe more and more that the role of the cinema is to destroy myths, to demobilize, to be pessimistic. Its role is to take people out of their cocoons and plunge them into horror...More and more, I tend to divide films into two sorts: those that are comfortable and those that aren't. The former are all vile and the others positive to a greater or lesser degree."

The Last Hurrah

If death is always felt most strongly in Ford around the edges, then The Last Hurrah earns its reputation as something fundamentally and uncharacteristically disengaged in the late deathbed sequence where the director finds himself confronting mortality in the most overtly conventional of dramatic terms. So many of Ford's endings are one or another kind of final goodbye, endings that bloom with melancholic force because of everything that's left unsaid and the way that this shapes the emotional timbres of the moment(s), so the necessity here to have it all verbally expressed in pat phrasing (Tracy to his doc: "Let's stop kiddin', we both know the score") instills a certain parched effect upon the event, and the stuffy, studio-imposed editing of the unusually ascetic b&w compositions tips everything over into a somewhat stilted variant on the type of frigid rigor one tends to associate with a Dreyer (and is there any argument that this isn't the most Dreyer-esque of Ford?)

But the grace notes survive - watch how Tracy holds on just a fraction of a second too long to Edward Brophy's finger as Brophy is leaving his side for the final time - and the last shot is just one of the most beautiful things ever filmed, a mournful ascent of shadows suggesting that all of these dear, authentic men in Frank Skeffington's life/death themselves already have one foot out the door. If it's not quite as devastating as the final moments of The Sun Shines Bright (and really, what is?), it at least affirms the world of The Last Hurrah as the twilight zone of the former film dragged onerously into the present, with more dust and less to hold onto.

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.

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?"

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.