Citizen Kane (1941)

I re-watched Citizen Kane. This time, I didn't sleep through half the film. Actually, this Orson Welles classic almost lives up to its reputation. A more observant viewer would perhaps be able to see more depth in it than I managed to do. My expectations of the film were not let down, except for one aspect: I didn't know it was so melancholy film. Cynical - yes. But not melancholy. Maybe that is the flip-side of cynicism, teary images of a castle filled with expensive garbage.

Seconds (1966)

More Rock Hudson on the blog! It is a good thing that I knew nothing of the film beforehand. Anyway, Seconds is a nasty little sci-fi/horror movie that mocks a certain idea of "freedom" along with the dream of "starting all over" (for a certain amounts of dollars). An elderly man lives a humdrum life with his wife. He is contacted by a friend who .... couldn't possibly be alive. The man is lured to go to a shady agency. The agency, who looks like something from Kafka's brewery, promises "a new start" - and a fake death. After some intricate bodily transformation in the form of plasic surgery, Tony the artist is born. He is already established in business (somehow), he's got an apartment, a valet, and soon also a girlfriend. Is he happy? No. Can he begin again, a new start would probably help?

I would not be surprised if Seconds taught David Lynch a trick or two. Some moments of it could have been snatched from Eraserhead. Of course, many European film-makers were doing similar things as Frankenheimer, who uses twisted angles, eerie settings and extreme close-up to create an atmosphere of dread and disorientation.

I must confess I liked Seconds quite a bit, even though the backbone of the plot has been recycled many, many times on the big screen. As a critique of consumerism, the film is both funny and frightening (but don't expect it to be "deep"). And, as I said, the treatment of "freedom" is equally disturbing and amusing. The main character is free from all external burdens, yet he is not happy, or the things the agency presents as external burdens may not be that at all. But most of all, this is a film about the face: look at the elderly man's haggard face in the first very scenes, and then look at Rock Hudson's hollow eyes in the latter part of the movie. Those faces unsettled me, for sure.

Lone Star (1996)

Far more than a crime story, Lone Star is a mood. Lone Star evokes the secrets of a society of racism and chauvinism; it conjures up unwanted ghosts, histories that are known to all but intentionally forgotten or ignored. The past haunts the present, but the present is also connected with the possibility of a future.

Even though some sentimental moments could have been removed from the film (hey, John Sayles wrote the script for Dolph Lundgren's masterpiece Men of War), this is mostly a good film, perhaps because of the way it deals with historical continuity. The story unfolds in fluid camera movements, which augments the sense of continuity in a very nice way. Flashbacks have a tendency to present things every intelligent viewer could work out in her own mind, but here, there are moments where flashbacks are used without a feeling of redundance. This has everything to do with how the film treats its subject: racism.  The past is a part of the lives of the people in the film, the difficulties they have, a community of segregation and transgressions. The film is set in small town in the south, by the Mexican border. A human skull is found. But unlike the progression of most conventional movies, this initial scene does not function as an instigation of a mystery. Rather than offering us a puzzle, Sayles is interested in the psychosocial dynamics of the town and its residents. What I appreciate about Lone Star is its refusal of overstatements. Although Sayles investigates difficult social issues, he sets out to map them, rather than mine the landscape for emotional thrills. In the hands of a less talented director, the script for this film could have been a piece of sensationalist trash.

Written on the wind (1956)

Of course I've heard about Douglas Sirk. Most critics talk about his films as having not only kitsch value, but they are said to represent an unusual form of subversive critique of the American lifestyle. Watching Written on the wind, I can only agree and join the voices of praise. Sirk is funny. Sirk is witty. Sirk is cheeeesy. The film contains more than enough of veiled sexual imagery and exaggerated artifice. In one of the leading roles, we see an excellent Rock Hudson. He plays to poor kid who hangs out with the son of an oil millionaire. While his best friend is a carefree playboy, Hudson plays the man set on becoming the next big name in oil business. But of course this is not what the film is about. What we have here are several messy love triangles, the heads and tails of which we cannot always be certain. There are ... many undercurrents. These romantic ailments are set in a world of oil derricks, popular bars and huge mansions. I hope I will watch many more Sirk movies soon.

Silent running (1971)

Silent Running is a hippie version of 2001: A space odyssey, a prequel to Stars Wars and well, A VERY BAD MOVIE. If this were a parody of the hippie movement, I would have some mercy. But I suspect it isn't. But this film undoubtedly has some entertainment value because of the retrofuturistic technology and the embarrassing scenes of nursing an ailing robot. If there was an award for the most awkward use of music in any film of the history of sound film, the award would go to this film. Congratulations.

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Truffaut's classic sci-fi film Fahrenheit 451 is, as we all know, set in an eerie fascist country where books are prohibited and where firemen patrol people's houses in search for hidden books. The film's dingy futurist look is splendid. The images are humorous and chilling at the same time (I didn't expect the film to be funny but I suspect this is mostly due to reasons unintended by Truffaut). As an intellectual effort, I'm less convinced. It's a silly little film, but a nice-looking one.

The Temptation of St Tony (2009)

I'm not familiar with the character of St Anthony. This might or might not have limited my understanding of The Temptation of St Tony, a surreal journey into the heart of darkness directed by Estonian Öunpuu (who has featured in this blog before). Yes, this is the story about temptation, but in a very twisted way (is it the good that tempts the evil?). Öunpuu knows how to use the medium, that is for sure. Even though the first scenes left me with an impression of exaggered darkness, the last hour of the film, with its abundance of warped images, was more appealing to me. Tony is a middle manager. His boss tells him that he has to fire some people. He submits. His girlfriend cheats on him. He accepts this, too. The character of Tony is a walking void. He is not evil in the same sense as most of the other character. He simply doesn't seem to act in the situation he is in. When he acts, his entire being is awkward. It is as if he never knows what he is saying and how he should say things. This is the most concrete part of the film. Then I have said nothing about a quasi-fascist club, munching on a corpse and skating in what seems to be the world of the dead.

As a film about raw capitalism, this is a film that focuses on the life of the ambiguity of figures and corporeality. In one scene, we see a "sophisticated" dinner party. Suddenly, the chat stops. A haggard man stands outside the enormous window. It is as if the room stops breathing. The man doesn't move. Nobody reacts. Tony is the only one to do something. He seems to assume that the man is an alcoholic, so he offers his bottle of wine. The man takes it, pours out the content, and puts it in the plastic bag in which we see other empty bottles.

If you are interested in this movie, expect the style to be more interesting than the content. This is a film about the visual. Even though many scenes are beguiling, everything does not work on all levels. The reason why I was not fully convinced by the film's aesthetic language is that it overstates it's references; you see Andersson here (an almost tender scene about Tony's confrontation with fence-makers, "You say we are not real??"), Tarkovsky (Stalker's dog!) there, and wait, here we have an ode to Béla Tarr (the drab, yet evocative, surroundings). And without David Lynch, some scenes would not be what they are now (the scene at the club echoes Fire Walk With Me).

But yet, somehow, this is a mesmerizing film.

Basquiat (1996)

Films about artists tend to be pretentious and dull. Even though Basquiat doesn't belong to the worst category of the mentioned type of films, it's not a masterpiece either. What disappointed me about the film is it's recycling of almost every theme that we expect from a film about an artists. The artist has a troubled relationship with his girl. The artists turns out to be a genius, sometimes a misunderstood genius. The artist has a conflictual attitude towards the conventional world of artists and art dealers. However, there's a few unexpected elements here that made me sit through the entire film. Unlike most films about art, this film (for obvious reasons) discusses the widespread racism in art circles. What this shows us is that as soon as art starts to be about the artist or the role of an artist, we are already situated in yawn city. I'm not sure this point is something the director (Schnabel) would acknowledge, but the film is clear enough.

And it is hard NOT to like any performance by Dennis Hopper.

Bad day at black rock (1955)

I'm not sure HOW Bad day at black rock slipped through the fingers of the censors, but apparently, it did. Or maybe I am just over-interpreting it, but the story seems to be quite politically controversial from the point of view of post-WW2 50's in the US. I know the film is about a thousand other things, but one dimension here seems to be the hatered agains Japanese people during and after the war, even those Japanese people living in the US (as you remember, internment camps were erected). But what do I know: perhaps this was discussed during the fifties? Some have read the film as an allegory for contemporary Hollywood blacklistings (not far-fetched).

The story in the film: a man arrives by train in a shabby-looking town in the middle of the desert. Right from the start, he is treated with hostility by the locals, ranch-owners, thugs, hotel-owners - all with a very masculine demeanour. They suspect he is in the business of poking his nose into local affairs. It turns out that the man wants to contact a certain Japanese farmer. And here the trouble begins.

The story of the film is told with due economy. Some scenes get a bit heavy on words in the sense that the film becomes too stagey. But most of the time, the actors manage to create just the right atmosphere of antagonism and a secret that is not to be revealed. The downside of the film is that it is badly structured, so that some things are obvious at the wrong time, and that, for this reason, a necessary level of suspense fails to develop.

The Match Factory Girl (1990)

Aki Kaurismäki's films consist mostly of silences (he has also made a silent film). For the first 20 minutes of The Match Factory Girl, we hear no spoken words, but other sounds unravel the life-world of Iiris, a young girl who lives with her parents. We hear the rumbling sounds in the factory she works in. Snippets of news are presented (it's 1989 and the world is in turmoil). The first word we hear by a character, in this case Iiris, is, if I remember correctly, "a beer". These drawn-out silences are heavy with sadness, but Kaurismäki is also evoking proletarian gloom from a humorous point of view.

OK, so the story here is flooding with dead-pan humour and tongue-in-cheek miserabilism. Iiris has a lousy job. Iiris' parents are oppressive. When Iiris meets a man, he tells her, after one night together, that he has no intentions whatsoever of initiating a relationship. But Iiris is pregnant. He is not interested in having a child. An appointment at the doctor's. Iiris rests in a hospital bed. Her dad enters the room, utters a sentence of dour and insulting words, and equally dismissively, places an apple on the table next to her bed.

It's easy to describe the film: it's a blunt, dark, humorous fairytale. All scenes are extremely austere, in terms of dialogue, camera angle, composition - even set design.  One person at an internet discussion board called this film "a Finnish Jeanne Dielman". To me, that is a very apt, yet quite surprising comparison. Akerman's and Kaurismäki's vision of urban drabness have many similarities, and their sense for meticiously composing every frame can be seen as related as well. Or maybe because these two belong among my favorite movies. Unlike Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, diegetic music plays a big role in Kaurismäki's work. There is tango, rock n roll schmaltz. The scene in which Iiris, whose parents threw her out, sits in her brother's bachelor's pad, gazing at a pool table and listening to the jukebox (!) is simply heartbreaking. And FYI: The world can't have enough of Olavi Virta.