Delta (2008)

Delta seems to be one of those films that is shown on a couple of film festivals and is subsequently sent off to mould in movie archives. Then again, Finnish TV showed it a few months ago. To my pleasure, because this is a quite good film.

The young director, Kornél Mundruczó, is mostly in charge of what s/he does here. It's an artistically successful movie: visually stunning, great scenery (the Danube delta), great work with colors, mostly unostentatious acting (but maybe not through-and-through convincing). Interestingly, Mundruczó is the person responsible for the horrendous Johanna, which I reviewed a while ago. Arguably, his work has an inclination towards the controversial. In Johanna, that proved to be a bad thing. With regards to Delta, I'm not sure what to say.

Mihail returns to the village where his mother, new boyfriend & half-sister lives. He has saved some money to build a house on the river delta on land owned by his late father. His sister goes to live with him and it turns out the bond between them is not limited to the Hegelian/Platonic purity of brother/sister relationship. There are some twists along the way and right from the start, I have a hunch something bad is bound to happen. There's a heavy feeling of tragic foreboding in these images, regardless of what they depict: beautiful landscapes, the peaceful ploddings of a turtle. 

There are weaknesses in how the story unfolds & in how it is developed. Some scenes are ingeniously shot with long, swirling takes, but not complex enough in terms of content. But that doesn't bother me too much. It was an interesting film that managed to stick to its aesthetic ideas - even though it is clearly inspired by the great Béla Tarr, it didn't end up being intrusively derivative. Mundruszó doesn't play in Tarr's league with this film but the visual poetry it creates is still quite marvellous.

Some things bother me, though, and, as in Johanna, it concerns Mundruczó's interest in female sexuality. To some extent, he shows awareness of patriarchal society & the kind of repression and violence it exerts. But maybe the problem is that the elements of violence runs the risk of becoming a mere visual shock disrupting the languid pace of the film - that Mundruczó is more interested in scenery and people end up being mere dramatic prop? But that is not entirely true.

The man from London (2007)

I regard Béla Tarr as one of the most interesting contemporary directors. The 7 ½-hour long Sátántangó is a mysterious exploration of greed and decay - and so is the marvellous Werckmeister harmóniák. These themes are not discarded. In The man from London, he re-builds the world of gloom and shadows for which he is known. Somehow, it makes perfect sense that the present film, shot in dazzling monochrome, is a take on 40's film noir. The cynism and alienation is there, for sure, along with disquieting moments of fear and paranoia.

The story is of a familiar kind: a railroad worker called Maloin (with a standard noir-ish haggard face) witnesses a possible murder in an anonymous dock area. A briefcase is dropped into the water. Maloin retrieves the briefcase, in which there is money. Some time into the film, we find out that Maloin gains knowledge of who murdered the man, and that a detective (whose talks more slowly than any actor heard on film - ever) is looking into the case... But this would not be a Béla Tarr film if the story was the primary source of interest.

Once again, Tarr challenges his audience with long takes and stunning camera work. The scenes from Maloin's watch tower are simply stunning. The movement of the camera, the play with light and shadow, evoke a truly eerie atmosphere. The sudden moments of humor (mainly represented by nods to the noir genre) work to great effect. And the last 25 minutes of the film, which contains a longish take of the murderer's wife that (as my sister said) is on a par with a Carl Dreyer moment, ties the film together in a beautiful way. But there are some problems. Tilda Swinton is a great actor, but her character in this film is bizarre in the wrong way and does not work in the context. The rest of the actors (especially Ági Szirtes as Brown's wife) are very good. Another problem concerns the role of the images. In Tarr's other work, I have never felt that there was a gap between the meticulous composition of the images and the few strands of "story". His images encourage me to contemplate over what I see, what is it I see? But in A man from London, there is not the same sense of mystery or wonder, even though that is what he seems to aim at. The question "what did I see?" is posed differently, in a more conventional way. On some moments, the images lapse into being just ... stunning - in the desolated and dreadful way that has come to be the Tarr trademark. It's just that most images lack the depth of his previous work. Disappointed? Yes, maybe a little.

Der Stand der Dinge (1982)

What's the matter with me? I'm watching a Wim Wenders movie - again! The story told about this movie is that Wenders did a film in Hollywood. Lots of things went wrong. The process was interrupted and Wenders went to Portugal, where he found a film crew that had run out of money. Then he made a film, The State of Things, in which Hollywood is bashed. In the beginning of the film, we see a film team in action. They make a B-movie. It turns out there is no more film and no more money either. The crew, stranded in Lisbon, try to occupy themselves. The director goes to L.A. to hunt down the producer, with fatal consequences.
Wenders attempts to show how real life have no stories but how we try to think that we need "stories". Alas - as soon as the film crew is deserted by their producers, the film falls apart, the story starts to wander. The anti-story theme is also explicity elaborated in the dialogue of the film - sometimes not too subtly.  “Stories only exist in stories, whereas life goes by in the course of time without the need to turn out stories”. Errr.
The cinematography, dusty black-and-white, works perfectly to capture the trudging rhytm of the film. But many scenes were far too pretentious (the problem I have with some of Jarmusch's work). However, I must admit that the last 15 minutes, chronicling the re-union of director & producer, were awesome. Here, he builds up some tension and there is also a hint of comedy.
This is not the worst film about movie-making. Wenders might be self-obsessed, but Godard and Fellini are still in a league of their own.

Blonde Venus (1932)

Half through Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus, I had high hopes that it would be a film antagonistic to family values. No it wasn't. The ending scenes displayed shiny happy family triangulation. A chemist marries a German cabaret artist (Marlene Dietrich). He gets sick and needs money for medical treatment. His wife performs one more time (a racist number) and ends up selling herself to a rich man. Some of the scenes in the film worked very well: it was nice to watch how Dietrich becomes an outsider to a patriarchal society. But, as I said, in the end, she pays her homage to that same society and everything is well.
This might be a bad movie, but it was messy in a rather entertaining way, and it was interesting to note that almost all characters were unsympathetic.

Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000)

Les glaneurs et la glaneuse was certainly a very different film from Cleo from 5 to 9, Agnès Varda's most famous film. I didn't know what to expect. For some reason, I didn't think I were to see a very political, yet simple, documentary about poverty and waste. The film is shot with a digital camera. The visual style of the film is thus very simple. That is no shortcoming. Varda's film could almost be called an essay-documentary, in how it explores its theme by means of association and reliance upon the viewer's own ability of reflection. Varda explores "gleaning"; a variation of activities revolving around picking up stuff discarded by others, be it fruit, vegetables, broken TV:s or food in garbage bins. Varda talks to gleaners and supervisors, shop owners and activists. Varda's voice-over provides the film with structure, at times reflective and interesting, but during some moments too obtrusive, and too self-occupied (a very French motif: towards-death and quasi-phenomenology: "My project is to film with one hand my other hand). The strenght of the film is how soberly it deals with materiality. Varda does not look down on the gleaners, nor does she make any grand claims about "survival" nor "consumerism". She quietly observes day-to-day variations of eating, living and consuming, along with the joys and miseries of rummaging and scavenging.

Herzog x 2: Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (1970) & Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974)

Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen was, in my opinion, a disappointing movie, even a bad and cynical one. Maybe some consider it subversive. I don't. This was such a crude way to hammer home a point about, I suppose, "stripping down civilization" and "nature's revenge is cruel, cruel, cruel". Early on, we see a chicken feeding on another chicken. Get it? If you want to watch a movie about the indifference of nature - watch Grizzly man instead.
Auch Zwerge... - dwarfs and all - was cluttered with metaphors and allegorical hints. And, so I don't forget to mention it: pointless scenes. The story starts with a prison-like institution in the middle of rebellion. The innates rebel against control, their oppressors and society. The rebellion quickly slides into destruction and brutality.
Actually, I doubt that Herzog himself knew what he was up to when directing this one.  Even the music (something "African") seemed to suggest quite repulsive ideas in combination with the images of "savage people" and "the brutality of nature".

Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle is also about civilization, but this time we are watching the trite construction of "civilized men". A young man, Kaspar Hauser, turns up at a village square. He cannot speak and he can barely walk. It is evident that he has grown up with very little contact with other human beings. "Civilization", in this film, means everything from cruel freak shows to a professor in logic who uses Hauser as a test to whether logic is something you can grasp without an education (and what logic!). In all these contexts, Hauser remains an outsider, "an artistic mind" that is necessarily out of touch with the expectations and norms of society.  
In some ways, this film is just as speculative as Auch Zwerge.., but it is far more focused, and even those parts that veer towards the ridiculous or the overstated contain enough ambiguity and humor to be interesting - the brainy ending is a case in point. It's a better film. The points made in this film about social morality and weird ideas about what it means to "grow" or to be "natural" (theology and all) are far better developed than the caricatures we are exposed to in Auch Zwerge...

Mädchen in Uniform (1931)

I had a strong feeling that Goebbels was no fan of Mädchen in Uniform, directed by Leontine Sagan & Carl Froelich. But then it turns out that Goebbels is rumoured to have liked the film "as film". Taking account of what kind of movie we are talking about here, this is very, very strange.
The film, the story of which takes place in a boarding school for girls, oozes social revolution. Manuela has just been sent to the school. Her mother is dead and her father is some kind of military officer. Manuela and the other girls have difficulties in conforming with the expected level of Prussian morality. One reason is the gorgeous von Bernburg, whom all the girls adore. One night, there is a festivity. A group of girls perform a play by Schiller. Afterwards, there is punsch. Manuela shocks the teachers (and thrills the students) with a drunken speech in which she openly professes her love for Bernburg. A series of tragic events irrevocably follow... This is a very good film. Not only is it inventive in how it uses camera movement (which was a fairly new invention) and close-ups, it has also a strong message. Mädchen in Uniorm doesn't hide its agenda: to criticize repressive norms and militaristic ideals. What is even more mind-boggling: this film in no way treats desire among women as wrong or perverse. The point seems rather to be to show what kind of society is created when desire is squashed. The lesbian plot that was very prominent in the stage play version is said to have been toned down a bit in the film. But regardless of this fact, we are not talking about homoerotic subtext here at all. It's all over these images.
As a story about repressive morality & coming-of-age, this is a wonderful film, even a feminist one. The role assigned to the girls by the majority of teachers in the school is very clear: "Soldatentöchter, und wenn Gott will, wieder Soldatenmütter." - This line is uttrered by the school's headmistress, who embodies a repressive system. It's also one of those anti-authoritarian films that have aged well, perhaps because there are many scenes that are very complex in dealing with what it means to act for and against an authoritarian system (in what ways does the Bernburg character change throughout the film?).
The acting - by an all-female cast - is very nice and energetic - and the film has almost no sentimental additions such as sugary music. It's a very simple, matter-of-fact film. 
I suppose this kind of movie was impossible in Germany two years later. Reading about the film, I am surprised to learn that it was commercially successful and that it was distributed in several countries.

Johanna

A pornographic opera about a drug addict-turned-saint? Is there such a film? Yes there is. Kornél Mundruczó made Johanna in 2005. It's one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen. One might assume that this is a positive judgement, but it isn't. I simply couldn't stand to watch one more minute of a film about a young woman at a hospital ward who is considered a saint because she "cures" men by having sex with them. Was there a twist? I don't know, and I don't care. The film started off as an attempt to turn The Kingdom into an opera, but gradually, we ended up in the twisted world of Breaking the waves, without the slightest context. I liked the silvery cinematography, but no, but yes, this was quite unbearable. This is supposed to be an up-dated version of the story about Joan of Arc. Well, if it is, I prefer Bresson or Dreyer or even Luc Besson. Listen to this summary:  "A modern operatic version of the Joan of Arc story, where a young drug addict wakes from a coma with the power to heal the sick by having sex with them." I mean - gosh!

The tenant (1976)

I remember what it was like to watch Roman Polanski's The Tenant at the age of 14. I found the movie scary. What I recall most vividly from that viewing experience is the ominous atmosphere of the whole thing. The only images that remained with me were those in which a guy paces around a dark apartment and even that's scary as hell.
A youngish man, Trelkovsky, moves into an apartment whose previous tenant was a girl who committed suicide by hurling herself out from a window. Gradually, Trelkovsky finds his life transforming into hers. He senses that all neighbors are playing some malevolent schemes on him, that the house itself inhabits evil forces. And he gets himself a wig.
The second time around, it's still the atmosphere and style that makes the film; sinister dutch angles of stairs, moody dark colors, Sven Nykvist's cinematography - and lots of weird acting (Polanski himself acts in the leading role). Plenty of scenes that are strange and funny at the same time. In one scene, we see Trelkovsky wandering around in a park. A kid is crying because he has lost his toy boat. What does Trelkovsky do? He slaps the kid. The kid cries some more. 
It's hard to say that The Tenant is "about" anything. If the film has a topic, it is paranoia and some sort of dissolved identity.
I must confess I like this film because Polanski knows how to use simple techniques to evoke Trelkovsky's paranoid world. In plenty of scenes, the viewers sees what Trelkovsky sees. He stands at his window. It's dark outside. We see the toilet across the yard. A man is standing there, motionless. It's scenes like that which give rise to an eerie sense of dizziness, of the world falling apart. Mostly, Polanski is quite successful in doing this. Regrettably, some moments towards the end of the film don't quite match up to the rest - the illusion starts to wear out and the film is transformed into a case-study of psychology instead (plus some of the stuff is too far-out, demons and shit).  
In the end, Polanski makes us uncertain about the identity of lots of the characters. Especially the main ones. There are tons of theories about that, but I am not too sure that makes the film any more interesting ("deep") for me. After all, this film is too trashy to be taken seriously in that way. I don't think there's a set of symbols or hidden meanings here at all. A tooth in the wall is a tooth in a wall, simple as that.
The Tenant is entertaining and wonderfully excessive.

Der Golem (1920)

Der Golem is an engrossing movie primarily because of how it looks: Paul Wegener's film represents color tinted, eerie German expressionism with weird interiors and just as strikingly wonderful outdoor sets. The story builds upon the Jewish legend about the Golem, a clay figure brought to life by means of sorcery and invocation of the secret name. In the film, the Golem is brought to life in order to save Jews from some danger that a rabbi foretells in the constallation of the stars. It turns out that the emperor has decided that the Jews are to leave the ghetto of Prague. But the Golem is not a dependable protector and worker - especially when used for the wrong purpose. What follows is a Frankenstein story about transgressive and dangerous forms of power and creation intermingled with a love story. As I knew very little about the film, it was not clear to me whether the story would have antisemitic traits. I don't think it had many, at least not very clear ones. The expulsion from the ghetto is clearly shown to be unjust. As far as I could tell, the film did not appear to propound any statement about "Jewish character". But on the other hand, what was the meaning of the end of the film, the fade-out image of the David star? And obviously the film did trade on the image of Jews as a group mainly consisting of bearded old men.
As I said, it is the visual style of the film that impressed me the most. The colors contributed to the overall weirdness of the film. The dream-like quality of light in the images was a perfect way to carve out an uncanny living space for the clumsy Golem figure. Plus there were some scenes towards the end that had a strangely comic aspect: a little girl overpowering the Golem by tossing out the amulet that guarantees its life.