The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

Having seen only of Pasolini's ... works (which I regret having seen, it was awful) I did not quite know what to expect from The Gospel According to St. Matthew. That the film patiently, without eerie digressions, follows the events & words of the gospel itself makes reviewing no easier. The film's restraint surprised me. I expected Jesus to preach Das Capital, foam dripping out from his mouth, a few Roman sadists lurking around the corner. But it wasn't like that. Yes, the emphasis of Jesus preaching was on social justice, but whether that should be ascribed to the film or the gospel of Matthew I am too unenlightened heathen to say.

The scenes containing preaching were perhaps the least interesting ones, except for one quality. In most films about Jesus, the way the preaching scenes are filmed tend to be very predictable: Jesus in the centre, people standing around him in an orderly, quiet way. Pasolini makes all crowds bustle (true to the spirit of neo-reaolism, perhaps). He works with long shots that capture the movement and disorganization of the crowd. What is quite mesmerizing is that the crowd is never transformed into one entire wobbly, anonymous body. The crowd consists of people, the camera focusing on a group of people, a face, a piece of cloth. The crowd comes to life as something else than a dumb, beastly organism ruled by some demagogue (yes, Pasolini was a marxist, which might be of importance here). One can perceive this pattern throughout the film.

Another very successful element of The Gospel is the use of music. The soundtrack (sensitively mixed so that it is somehow on a par with sounds of people and nature) is a bold mix of African folk music, American blues/gospel, Bach and choir music. The sometimes dramatic pieces of music don't stifle the scenes, they bring out something new in what we see.

Actually, The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a good film. Undoubtedly, also a religious one. I.e.: his is NOT Mel Gibson.

PS: The history on philosophers on film is, I think, not a very extensive one. Here, we see Giorgio Agamben acting as one of the disciples!

Things to do in Denver when you're dead (1995)

Things to do in Denver when you're dead is the type of neo-noir that is somehow fun to watch but upon re-watching it you're quite not sure whether you've seen it before, because which neo-noir doesn't have:
a) sickly neon lights
b) a plot driven by men and women are reduced to lovers
c) people end up dead in every second scene
d) a poker-faced Andy Garcia
e) poetic imagery revolving around food
f) a drab place (like Denver)
g) a few lurid jokes
h) mafia talk
i) sleazy diners
j) silly names
k) Steve Buscemi in a minor role, Christopher Walken in another.
l) one ... more .... job (just one more)

The Snapper (1993)

The Snapper was released in 1993 and that's exactly what it looks like. It's a movie where everything looks kind of scruffy, kind of worn-down, kind of homey. That's what's so charming about it. A re-make in Hollywood would certainly be impossible: the reason why I love The Snapper is that you get to see Colim Meaney wearing ugly jumpers and that nobody looks as if they have had five nose jobs. Meaney is a good actor (I want to watch The Van again!) - sometimes. Here, he is heart-wrenching as a father who learns something about himself. If there were more films like The Snapper, the world would be a better place. Better beer, too. And philosophical wonder on a par with "how come a dog can have so much shit in it" you will surely fail to find anywhere else...

Playtime (1967)

In Playtime, Jacques Tati has constructed yet another world of never-ending mazes and technological monstrosities. This film inhabits a planet of its own. Welcome to Tativille (which cost a fortune to build). Well, if you've seen some of Tati's own productions, you'll know what you are in for. There is no "plot", no "characters" (only one or two have actual names) and no "dialogue" (mostly blurry English) - but it does have world. Most of the time, you'll find yourself busy: just to keep track of what goes on in these medium/long shots takes some effort. A lot goes on, all the time, everywhere (don't forget the blood pressure medication). Playtime is a giant torrent of people, vehicles and eerie noises. This torrent is systematic and perspicuous at first, but towards the end of the film, the order is abolished.

I'm surprised how contemporary Tati's futurist vision feels - Tati could have been the architect of my work place: gray/white/black, steel and glass; endless corridors; every place look like the place next to it, and so on, and so forth. A non-place, a passage, something to travel through, if you have some business there. The people populating Playtime do seem to have "business", at least for a while. But the world of business, errands and intentionality gradually fall apart, and we end up with a joyous and anarchic sense of disintegration. 

Mr Hulot - and his umbrella - is the anonymous "hero" of the film (you might recognize him from Mon Oncle). Mr Hulot wreaks havoc. Mr Hulot is hailed by people who seem to know him. Mr Hulot walks from place to place, without seemingly really going anywhere. Do we here him utter any words? Maybe a quiet "yes" or "hello". Mr Hulot is slapstick humor at its classiest.

I know too little about Tati to say anything about the politics about the film. What I know is this: Tati is a far more observant interpreter of the anonymity of modern space than a bunch of conservatives and marxists alike. Like some contemporary critics of modernity, Tati shows us a world in which an airport is hardly distinguishable from a cafe or an office building. Often, it takes some initial work to figure out where the characters are located. Hell - that is an apartment! Wow, it sure looks like .... everything else! Everything looks the same. The diference is that Tati is never whiny. His rendition of modern standardization and technical "progress" never fail to be surprising, moving and disturbing. In Tati's world, humans are never totally immersed in the steel&glass dystopia/utopia; he shows the enormous humorous potential of human reactions of confusion and reverie in the face of escalators, beeping buttons, skyscrapers - and the total indifferent shown by these glorious inventions. Walls are knocked down, doors are bumped into, invisible doors are closed, chairs are messed with, elevators are accidentally boarded, ceilings are ripped apart, floors are destroyed - etc, etc. The interesting thing is that what this surrounding IS will be shown over and over again in a multitude of ways in how people interact with it. Totally indifferent, and yet ---.

I guess Deleuze might have been a fan of this film. Like Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus, Tati places his hopes in disorder, but also in a change of perspective: humans are no longer humans, but a sort of weird appendage to machines. It's just that people are not the slaves of machines. They don't adapt. They don't fit. Nothing fits. The point is that new matches and mismatches emerge all the time, so that new situations appear, but not "situations" in the familiar sense of the word, where a situation has a clear direction. What makes me think of Deleuze (and maybe some marxist situationists, too) is the film's merry purposelessness. For Tati, like for Deleuze, the world is not "going" anywhere. Mr Hulot makes his way through the city - and the city makes its way through Mr Hulot. (If you want to watch a deeply anti-foucaldian film - watch this.) For the first 30 minutes, I thought that Playtime would be a grave attack on urban alienation. Instead, it turned out to be a film about our notorious ways to always inhabit the world, to always make the world our own, no matter how standardized and clinical it appears to be. 

Playtime is a mess. But a wonderful one at that. It's one of the most strangely optimistic films I've seen in a long time.

Days of Being Wild (1990)

In Days of Being Wild, the ever-recurring themes of a Wong Kar Wai movie are already present. It's a film about obsessive love, obsessions that spread like a disease, love that doesn't leave its prey in peace but feeds on the heart. Usually, Wong Kar Wai is quite successful in exporing this dark side of "love", but here, it seems to me that only a handful of scenes evoke the appropriate quiet & implicit maelstrom of emotion. Most of the scene baths in a mysterious darkness. Most scenes are composed so that an eerie light is situated somewhere on the edge of the frame. In one scene, we see a girl talking to a police officer doing the night shift. They wander through dark alleys and talk about what goes on in their lives. This is a very good scene. It work just the way it should. I wouldn't consider it an insult to say that Wong Kar Wai makes mood films. It's just that in this film, he doesn't really have the skill to strike the right note. Too many scenes appear unfocused and the conversations seem idle and unncessary. In the best Wong Kar Wai films, every word functions as a dagger. Here, those moments are few.

(One interesting aspect of the film is how it is one of the male characters that is eroticized to an extent that is very unusual in mainstream films, where it is usually female characters that are treated in this way.)

Fucking Åmål (1998)

The human faculty of judgement is fickle and unreliable. That was my point of departure as I, a while ago, sat down to re-watch Lucas Moodysson's Fucking Åmål, a film I first saw at the age of 18. 12 years later, I am still impressed by the smooth treatment of the story, the dedication to the characters and a good ear for how kids talk (plus: how hapless adults talk when they try to convince themselves that they mean what they say). The film has just the right kind of restless intensity. No LOL:s, no obvious jokes. Fucking Åmål still strikes me as a good attempt to depict the oppressive habitus of small-town life. Of course, Fucking Åmål has its "feel good"-moments, the application of the blueprint of what a movie about rebellious youth should look like. But Moodysson's film rarely feels like an adaptation of the rule book. It is a likeable film that never patronizes its young characters. Immaturity is never glossed over (this is actually a film in which kids don't talk like small business CEOs), nor is the characters' joy and hope portrayed as the cute yet capricious feelings of people too inexperienced to become jaded and world-weary.

By the way, films where teenagers play the main roles often tend to be written off as less insightful than films about older characters. This is a misconception. I'm not saying this is Shakespeare, it isn't. But it is too easy to fixate a pre-conceived idea on a film like this one. Another misconeption is that adult film-makers cannot make movies about teenagers without becoming creepy voyeurs capitalizing on the innocent lives and lusts of the young ones. Moodysson is no voyeur.

Wittgenstein (1992)

 Few films about philosophers or philosophy have ever been made. OK, made philosophers are not blockbuster material. Iris hardly counts. Wittgenstein does. Derek Jarman was a director that sometimes made films that were interesting rather than good, but somehow, I have always liked his work. If you know the slightest bit of fact about Jarman's filmography, you will know that Wittgenstein cannot be an example of conventional docu-drama. It's not. Instead, Ludwig W is thrown into a bustling, yet stripped-down, milieu of aristocrat young men, Austrian family members and --- an Über Gewissheit-framed creature from Mars. The film builds on Wittgenstein's life, and if you've read his books, or read some biography about him, you will recognize most of what is said here. Yet, if there are many familiar things that the philosopher can rest her head on while watching Wittgenstein, the style proves all the more striking. This could have been a theatre play. The background is black. The set design is made up of colorful, striking objects. So is the clothing; remarkably lavish and colorful, extravagantly over the top, no single piece of garment displayed in the present film fails to make an impression on the viewer's eye. Except, of course, Wittgenstein's unchanging drab outfit (but no tie!), that mirrors his overall psychological tendencies towards the ascetic.

Wittgenstein employs an eerie sense of humor that is hard to explain. The philosopher whose philosophy was transported from the strict arena of logic to the rough ground of everyday life, is characterized as a person with very mixed attitudes towards "the everyday" in his own life; tired of his aristocratic surroundings, he dreamt of "a simpler life" of work and honesty (not only for himself, but also for his lover). This striving is depicted with a warm, gentle form of humor. Wittgenstein is less a film about this particular philosopher's thoughts than it is a humorous account of an ever-problematic relation between the thinking life, a life of work and a life of leisure and play. In one of the funniest scenes, Wittgenstein is interviewed by a Soviet bureaucrat. Wittgenstein has set his mind on going to the USSR to be - a manual worker. Of course, that doesn't happen. A recurring theme in the film is the idealized image of work within the mind of an aristocrat (even the über-aristocrat Russell seems to take a more sober attitude).

Like Wittgenstein's philosophy (and love of musicals and detective stories) Jarman does not eshew what to most people appears silly. But that particular silliness augments one important quality of the film: its tenderness.

Actually, I found the film to be a rather moving portrait of Wittgenstein. Moving, because it doesn't deal in "genius cult" but rather strips Wittgenstein down to very humane forms of fear, doubt and loneliness.

No matter how much Bertrand Russell's work bore me in real life - I absolutely adore Bertie the character in this film. Plus: Tilda Swinton is (unsurprisingly) making magic with her sheer presence. Ergo: YOU should watch it.

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

A man drives a big car through a herd of sheep. The man is hollering, "hello, hello" into his ancient mobile phone. The car trudges up a hill. The man steps out of the car and starts talking in the phone with his employer. Everything is wrong. His project is stuck. Gently, he kicks a turtle that happens to walk by. The camera focuses on the turtle. The car drives away. The camera zooms in the turtle again. The turtle starts to abscond from the camera.

This is one of the brilliant scenes from Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, a slightly absurd study of frustration and human encounters. A group of men, we are not sure of their profession, arrive in a village. Something is to be done. The only man we see in-camera, a slightly dour middleaged man, mostly trods along aimlessly in the village, talking to people, asking for milk, asking about the old lady who is rumoured to be dying. Why is he inquiring about the lady all the time? Eventually, it is clear that they are to document a mourning ceremony, if only the woman were to die...

Nothing much happens in the film. We see almost the same scene repeating over and over again, ritualistically. The man drives up the hill, and down the hill again. Make no mistake: Kiarostami does not bore us. His film, one might call it a comedy, is full of life. Of course, I am not a speak of the languages spoken of the film, so should not really say this, but from the contexts, it seems as if language is used very fluidly here, not as a conveyor of information, but as a part of the life people are living, the way the understand one another, or don't.

Winter Light (1963)

So you like Bergman? You like to watch sonorous people sit in a dimly-lit room, talking about the silence of God? OK, I admit: Winter Light is one of my favorite movies. I've watched it as many as ten times. But still, everytime I re-watch it, I think about new things, as new details become the focus of my attention.

The film opens with a church service. This segment is long, but rich in detail. Here, all characters in the story are presented. The pastor, Tomas (excellent, excellent Gunnar Björnstrand), preaches as if he had said all these words too many times before. It is clear that they mean next to nothing to him. The organist coughs and attempts to muster up the energy to finish his business. Most of the church-goers seem bored, or distracted. After the service, Tomas talk to his colleagues. He has to go through with yet another service in the evening, because the other pastor is busy driving his new car. Tomas has caught a cold. He is grumpy but a string of people has unfinished business with him. A fisherman's wife talks about her troubled husband. Tomas' on/off girlfriend Märta, who is a schoolteacher, gets on his nerves with her well-meaning attempts to nurse and take care of him.

This is what happens in the first 30 minutes of the film. The main themes, dis/belief and human frailty, have already been introduced. Winter Light treats its subject matter with care and depth (not without an ounce of irony, of course, this is Bergman). We see the kind of twists and turns in a relationship that we can get a glimpse of talking to somebody for several hours. Therefore, it is not surprising that the story takes place during less than one day. In scene after scene, characters go through minor tribulations, but there are also outbursts of emotion and pangs of honesty. None of this feels contrived. One could perhaps criticize Bergman for writing theatrical lines, but the content of the film still rings true. Bergman hits a spot. Masterfully, the film portrays moments of extreme intimacy and the harsh words uttered in a situation the end of which is impossible to guess. All of these scenes are somehow open-ended, in the sense that they point at a life that the characters will lead afterwards (the film itself ends very abruptly, in a scene full of contradiction and mixed emotion). This open-endedness has, however, nothing to do with vagueness. The reason why Winter Light is so good is that it wrestles with a cluster of questions in a way that strikes me as absolutely serious (yet, not losing a strike of dark comedy out of sight). This is not to say that the film is theoretical or abstract. The opposite is rather the case.

As a film about belief, this is a well-made, non-dogmatic affair. Bergman does not, I think, argue for or against anything. Belief (or the lack of it) is far from an abstractt theory about how the world is. Bergman connects questions about religion and questions about human relations. As Tomas says several times: God is quiet, but his own world is contaminated with human blabber and mundane trifles. Gradually, we see that Tomas' obsession with God's silence is an expression for his lack of commitment to human relations. People bore him. People disgust him. Their physicality repels him. Tomas, like every other (or almost every) character of the film is extremely complicated, and this is what drives the film onwards: the inner conflicts within and between people. Bergman makes nothing to lull us into a conviction that these conflicts can be resolved in a specific way. He wants simply to explore what these conflicts are about.

Aesthetically, the film is a peculiar affair. Sven Nykvist makes the film bath in harsh, merciless daylight. There are almost no shadows. This makes the faces so often placed in the foreground, appear all the more naked. There are no traces of mystery, or forced beauty. Non-diegetic music is thankfully non-existent. The sounds of the film are used very efficiently. In one particularly dramatic (not melodramatic) scene, the only sound we hear is the white noise from streaming water.

Of course, I could go on and on writing about this film. What I want to say last is that Ingrid Thulin makes a harrowing performance as a masochistic/unsure/self-loathing/dependent/strong schoolteacher. Every single second with Thulin in the movie contains so much expression that it is almost hard to watch. The strenght of Thulin's face matches Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc.

Some call this film a symbolic treatment of theological dogmas - other calls it a buster keaton movie made by Bresson. This is a proof of how many dimensions Winter Light has. Yes, it is dark comedy. Yes, it is a film about religion, one of the best, even. And still: it is also one of the boldest portraits of what it means to be unable to love.

Palindromes (2004)

Todd Solondz' Happiness might not have been the #1 masterpiece of cinema of the last century, but it contained a bunch of really funny, unnerving scenes. The same is true for Palindromes, which I watched in the middle of the night a while ago. My bleary eyes appreciated the pastel-eerie aesthetic of the film. A much weirder film than Happiness, Palindromes takes an offbeat trip in the ever changing bodily shape of "Aviva" (who is played by eight different actors). Aviva, whomever s/he is, lives in a world of strangeness and abuse, flag-waving religious people, sex-crazed men and odd sects. Aviva travels the landscape of childhood / adolescence. Despite occasional acquaintances, Aviva is alone in the world. We recognize Aviva no matter what shape s/he takes. What struck a note with me here was the tone of the film. We see lots of gruesome things happen, but all of it is unraveled in a quiet and melancholy way. Were it not for this way of handling its topic, Palindromes would probably have been an almost unwatchable film. In this way, Palindromes becomes less a provocation, than a sad meditation on insecurity and life as a teen.