Odds against Tomorrow (1959)

Odds against Tomorrow (dir. Robert Wise) was made in 1959 but it still in many ways bear witness of the classic film noir tradition. I mean, one of the big virtues of this tradition, as I see it, is that really oddball scenes always seem to pop up within these films: an eerie club scene perhaps, or a hauntingly quiet cityscape. The black&white cinematography is pitch-perfect, dreamy, yet perceptive: I was constantly surprised by the depth of the images and the strange mood they evoke. In that respect, Odds again Tomorrow is all you can wish for! And more. On the face of it, the whole thing boils down to the kind of heist-story you have probably been harassed with a thousand times too much. But here the heist is just an excuse, it seems, to explore the medium of film. New York has never looked better and it is as if the city is wrapped into a mystic haze. The soundtrack consisting of atmospheric vibraphone music is a perfect choice. To my mind, film noir has never looked better. (What I'm talking about is not some polished kind of beauty but I'm sure you reckon that.) The heist of which the story tells is just a desperate dream, a sort of fantasy that can only end badly. What I like in film noir is that nothing hangs on suspension. You pretty much know what will happen. The film is built around other types of tensions, and Odds against tomorrow is a fine example of that, the tensions here being, among other things, racism and troubled ideas about masculinity. The heist is masterminded (or ... ) by an ex-cop. He seeks out to people to help him. One of them is a veteran who cannot stand to be supported by a woman. The other is a jazz man with a taste for gambling. Well, as it turns out, these people is not the ideal working group and we see everyone fight their inner demons. The catastrophic social relations are sparked against a backdrop of urban life - the film uses locations so well that sometimes your attention is drawn more to the places than the people (a key scene takes place in central park which ends up having an ominous glow rather than being a cozy place for picnics as in most movies). Brilliant stuff - don't miss out.

Hannah Arendt (2012)

Margaretha von Trotta's Hannah Arendt is a very successful attempt at what would from a specific angle appear to be hopelessly quixotic: to make a film about thinking. How many films about thinking have you seen? Not that many, perhaps. von Trotta is true to her restrained style. No excesses, no flirtation with the sensational. On the downside, Hannah Arendt starts on a wobbly - and too familiar note that seems to have a very unclear bearing on the material: Arendt is shown in her middle-class circles, talking about men. And there the trouble continues, for some (sadly, due to the sexism that philosophy and everything else is still steeped in), Hannah Arendt is most known for her romantic relationship with a certain Heidegger. As soon as Heidegger, with his bumbling demeanor and pompous speech, appears on the screen, the film becomes a farce. But Hannah Arendt is not a farce, its a film about philosophy in a hard time, what it means not to let thinking be caught up in "controversies". And controversies are what Arendt faced when she reported from the Jerusalem trail against Eichman which resulted in her book The Banality of Evil. The trial and the reception of the book is the heart of the film and here von Trotta's treatment of Arendt as a character shines. Bravery is a word I usually find problematic, perhaps associating it with a language of warfare and machismo. But I would say that von Trotta's rendition of Arendt highlights what it can mean to be brave. Arendt knew her description and interpretation of the Eichman case wouldn't sit well. People were hurt and angry. Arendt is shown as a person who listens to others but without letting her thoughts be compromised by fear of controversies.

In her essays and books, Arendt writes about the silent dialogue that takes place in our conscience, and what happens when we are split into two in a problematic way, where a unity of conscience is lost. von Trotta transports this point into an image of Arendt. We see Arendt smoking, thinking, smoking. (Barbara Sukowa does a GREAT job!) Even though these scenes capture silent contemplation they are not at all decorum. Actually, I would go as far as saying that these scenes occupy an extremely central position in the film, where we get a glimpse of Arendt as a philosopher, as a human being. As Arendt would say: to be alone and think, to question oneself, is an equally important aspect of life as appearing in front of others and testing one's judgment in the midst of an endless multiplicity of voices. Rarely have I seen such a tangible depiction of being alone on film. Not only is Arendt alone in the sense that only she can deal with the situation at hand (the controversy) but being alone in the film is also a form of sacred space, a space for reflection, a place where one prepares oneself for returning to the world and to plurality.

To sum up: you might expect a film about a philosopher to be packed with arguments. After all, this is the stereotypical image of philosophy: a pile of arguments. And yes, the dialogue in Hannah Arendt reflects the intellectual surrounding Arendt lived in (and well sometimes the lines are a bit clumsily transported from book to movie). But the philosophical talk has a variety of roles in the film (from chit-chat to lethal confrontation) and as I said, the dialogue of the film is surrounded by expressive silent scenes in which an immensely important side of the philosophical activity is revealed. Arendt is sometimes accused of being an arrogant intellectualist. In an extremely elegant and nuanced way, von Trotta explicitly deals with this accusation (after the Eichman book Arendt was derided as a callous person who shows no respect for feelings) but at the same time she shows why this might be a severe misunderstanding of what Arendt was talking about when she talked about thinking.

A Serious Man (2009)

Maybe I can blame my long hiatus on this blog on Joel & Ethan Coen's elusive, yet somehow humorous, take on the Job story in A Serious Man. Let me put it like this: I don't know quite what to think. My relation with the Coen bros tend to be a shaky one. Some films I adore (The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Barton fink), some confound me (No Country for old men, ) and some bore the shit outta me (everything with George Clooney, well basically O Brother Where art thou?).

Mid life crisis is looming over A serious man. Well, there are lots of crises here, but that's one for sure. Marriage, and all that - middle class life and all it takes of chicanery and self-made delusions. This is the mid-west and the 60's. A professor, Larry, is processing the latest news: his wife is leaving him (she's fallen for their mutual pal who tries to 'understand'). Their kid is abused by other children and life's a mess in general, but Larry is still fond of the equations he scribbles on the blackboard. He has decided that the best thing to do is to seek out some religious counselling by the ancient Rabbi - the Rabbi who never speaks or sees anyone it seems. Larry is unhinged, or let's face it, on the verge of deranged but perhaps in the sort of way that will suddenly put him on the right path again. But not much is going for him. The neighbor is too sexy, the brother is not of much use and he's got a problematic situation at work. Plus he might or might not succeed on the tenure track: his colleague paws into his office giving him ambiguous hints. In the end, I guess I give up and like this film - in its elusive humorousness, it opens up a perspective on life: it HAS to get better, goddammit, whatever it takes, but this messages is not delivered by means of sunny DYI aphorisms about you-can-do-it but rather through kabbalistic half-nonsense and one catastrophe after the other. All the time, the film remains sad, goofy and supercilious. How can one not be seduced by the strangeness of A Serious Man? Impossible. But let's not get into how and if the film goes from a belief in equations to a belief in God - Larry is not really a character for such traditional transitions. Nor do I have a clear-cut answer to the Coen bros' rendering of Larry's hopeful outlook. Is he supposed to look like a fool, or a deeply religious man, or maybe both at the same time? As I'm writing this, I realize I have an urge to watch this film again!

Silent souls (2010)

Silent, agonized men have appeared on film before. Putting silent and agonized men (who are consoled by kind prostitutes from time to time) in ravishingly beautiful landscapes cannot save a film like Silent souls (dir. Aleksey Fedorchenko). OK, so Fedorchenko knows what he is doing. The film is visually pleasant and it is interesting to see a take on Meryan funeral rituals. But at the same time, I never started caring. I watched these sullen men in their car and I tried to tune in on their silence - without anything much opening up to me. The Meryan community has a connection with Finland but as the characters in the film said: the traditions are withering away. The film tries to zoom in on that loss but the result is, I felt, that the melancholy becomes so all-encompassing that the viewer is choked in it. The shell of the story is that a factory owner's wife dies and he asks a friend to go with him to perform a burial ritual. The film follows them on this sonorous journey with a dead body in the back-seat and two stoical men pondering life in the front seats.

Giant (1956)

Giant (dir. George Stevens - who made the fine A place in the sun) is an epic mess. It has its good parts but oh lord, is it overwrought! But I tend to enjoy these kinds of megalomanic attempts to make the Ultimate films, so I fared quite well through it all. I mean, who DOESN'T love over-the-top studio productions with acting that veers from papery to "intense". The James Dean - Rock Hudson chemistry hardly beats anything. With a sprawling script, tacky lines and a story that covers almost every phenomenon within the human condition, Giant must be taken for what it is: a film to enjoy for its sheer ... grandness. I'm not sure of every logical step, but forget about it. Enjoy the technicolor! One must say that the social agenda of the film is in the right place: Texas is indicted for its racism (the film's relation to machismo codes is much more complex). Hudson plays the wealthy landowner who finds a girl to marry. The girl helps people in the community - people that shouldn't be helped, according to the landowner, Bick. The girl Leslie has "adjustment problems" and her befriending a local worker called Jett Rink (!! yep) doesn't help. Basically, Bick, the racist swine, is the focal character of the film: he is the one who gradually faces himself, who changes. For this, it needs a couple of generations and the transformation of Jett Rink into a wealthy oil magnate. Giant is also refreshingly anti-capitalism. It captures the business of landowning-for-profit and the oil business in a very unflattering light. Land is exploited and in the end, people are exploited, empty and lonely. Interestingly, BOTH the rugged individualist AND the well-rounded socialites are presented negatively. That's a point I can sympathize with.

 - - I shouldn't be too harsh on the film. In some interesting scenes in the second part of the film, the clashes between children and parents are chronicles, clashes that are often sparked by the children's pursuing a different path of life than their parents. Sadly, this aspect of the film is under-developed. The drama is what is focused on.

Come and see (1985)

Come and See (dir. E. Klimov) is a movie about war; the afflictions war brings with it, the endless suffering and pain it produces in people. There is no glory here, no worthy purposes and no heroes. War is not in the least thrilling - it is the view that war is an adventure that is brutally crushed.

The film starts and ends with Flyora. Belarussia is occupied by Germany and destruction is total. Everyone is afraid - and I have rarely seen such feeling of fear in film, the physical feeling of shell-shock and the fear of being caught. Flyora, a role very well acted, is the young kid who thinks about joining the partisans. Like the other kids, he plays and looks for rifles. A bunch of them arrives at his house, for the purpose of recruitment. The kid, of course, doesn't know what joining would mean. Despite the worry of his mother, Flyora tags along with the band of soldiers, and is initially a part of their routines - they have gathered in the woods, and it is evident that it is all a bit ramshackle. Flyora is encouraged to leave behind when the rest of the group goes to fight, and the kid disappointedly (he wants to be the heroic partisan) goes away on his own adventure in the woods, where he meets Glasha. Here the problems with the film starts. The boy is depicted with - it seems to me - some sort of honesty and sensitivity to what it means to be a child in a state of war, and the sorts of naivety a child might have (to see war as adventure). Glasha is immediately sexualized and this approach to the character continues throughout the film. She is the Beautiful, Deranged Girl. And there is an obvious thread in the film that I think reveals a form of horrible sexism: war destroys the purity of Womenhood (madonna -> whore).

The film continues with the two kids' return to Flyora's village after they have suffered a heavy air raid attack. The boy is deaf and the village is desolated and it is clear that people have left it in panic. Flyora tries to find the rest of his family, stubbornly convicted they are still alive. The two kids wallow through a bog to an island on which other villagers have gathered. The laborious trudge through the bog is some of the most gut-wrenching stuff I have seen on film. Klimov makes the bog come alive to the viewer and the viewer experiences and looks at the bog from the perspective of wallowing through it. It is a landscape of horror, but the way it is evoked never gets heavy-handed.

Come and See doesn't stop there, but I think this is enough to get a hunch of what the film is like. It is a visually stunning (where stunning does not mean breath-taking in a way that encourages you to sit back and relax and enjoy the beauty of nature) and the horrors of war are transported into images in a unique way. No consolation is offered, no humor, no release, no breathing holes. This is total destruction, of the world and of the soul. Survival here means escaping death, as if that escape is itself defined or marked by death, the destroyed world. The film does not pretend to speak a supposed language of realism. It is immersed in nightmares, it conjures up the tactile and auditory elements of those harrowing nightmares. That the horror is rendered so harrowingly real is however not, as I saw it, an expression of the director's diabolic imagination. Somehow, it feels as though this film had to be made (even though some elements of propaganda can be detected towards the end - having to do with how 'nazis' are depicted - the film seems an honest attempt to say something about war).

But, as I said, the gender thing is hugely disturbing here, and it says something about very troubling ways of understanding affliction and war. But: Come and See is an important film about war. It focuses on war as a traumatizing time in a way that I didn't feel was exploitative (or nationalistic). Still, there are some scenes, especially towards the end, that should have been left out. Images of Flyora shooting at pictures of Hitler together with a montage of newsreel material about the third reich - I ask: from whose perspective is this montage seen? I find the idea of adding it ill-advised on many levels. What the film basically says is: look, this war destroyed the entire world for these people. The war becomes a form of apocalypse.

Uncle Bonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

I must confess I don't have much of a clue about what Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is about. Mortality, yes, but in what way? Apichatpong Weerasethakul's approach to storytelling is idiosyncratic to say the least. Linearity and the quotidian - or even the extra-ordinary! - is not his thing. He invites us into a story about ghosts and people and places. The ghosts never surprise anyone in the movie. They appear, and become a part of life. I've seen one other film by Weerasethakul, and I was thrilled - Uncle Boonmee made me even more convinced that this is a director with his very personal contribution to how to make a film. In fact, this film turned out to be a magnificently eerie and beautiful piece on how we live together. Depicting what is the center or the angle of the film immediately reveals how one understands it. Let's say we are introduced to Uncle Boonmee, a dying man. He lives in a rural area and members of the family along with a nurse take care of him. When these people gather for dinner, they are joined by other family members who appear from the shadows of the jungle. One of them is Boonmee's wife. Nothing of this is silly, or scary. (And don't expect it to be fluffy magical realism: here's a film that suddenly turns political, dealing with xenophobia and Thailand's bloody history.) The film shifts gears several times, and throw us into completely other forms of lives, but I sense Uncle Boonmee is always present in some form or other, as a catfish perhaps. The end of the film is a mix of Kim Ki-Duk and David Lynch - the thing is just that it keeps us close to what somehow still is everyday life. These are elusive scenes, and I am not able to talk about them here. The cinematography of Uncle Boonmee is breathtaking - if you are one of those who have problems with Terrence Malick, but think that there is some potentiality there, you should watch how Weerasethakul immerses the camera in the flows of nature. This director's film all reflect a mix of playfulness and tenderness I rarely see in other films.

Network (1976)

Sidney Lumet's Network is made like a dystopia about the world of TV but it does appear far from contemporary reality. The film explores how a TV network tries to fix their bad stats by letting a deranged TV anchor ramble in prime time. The audience love the guy's "honesty" and now everyone is watching.The point is obviously that the guy's rants (his first outburst came after he was told that he would be laid off in two weeks) are transformed into exploitation, he is a domesticated mascot who can say anything on TV as long as the ratings are good. Network is a parody about how mainstream media takes advantage of radical streams in society and thereby makes them less threatening (on the TV channel in the film, there is a docu-drama with a terrorist sect.) William Holden is impressive as the news division president - a jaded type who finally comes to realize that is precisely what he has become. OK, so Network may not be the most subtle work of art in the world, but as a reflection on the relation between business and what is seen as "acceptable" this is a quite good attempt to mock cynicism, populism and branding. But the film has many flaws as it also tries to delve into some of the characters' personal lives and as the story goes from interesting to far way over the top.

Bright Star (2009)

Jane Campion has made a bunch of interesting movies. One of them, An Angel at my Table, about the author Janet Frame, is one of the best biographical films I have seen. On the paper, Bright Star sounds quite awful: the story revolves around John Keats, a poor and rather self-involved poet living for his art and a young girl, an independent-spirited dress-maker, who is his neighbor. They have mixed feelings for each other but gradually fall in love (despite Keat's jealous buddy who wants the poet all for himself), but it is not possible for them to marry. The poet, turns out, is ill. The film hints at a familiar figure of thinking: romantic love as most noble when it is - as the expression goes - never consummated (I recently read a philosopher who held this idea to be an important theme in 18th novels). If you expect all Campion's films to be about sex - this one is an exception. But the awfulness I expected never quite materialized. Campion is a far too curious director. What is perhaps most successful is how art occupies many roles. It's an enchantment, an obsession, it has its great risks, a sort of self-indulgence, where life itself becomes art. But in the end, Campion ends up confirming the image of ennobling romance, where romance transcends mere human desire by ending up in martyrdom. Well - it's interesting how Campion takes on the task of exploring this not very contemporary ideal, but I have no idea what the film wants us to think. It's never quite clear to me what destroys these people's love: an external obstacle or ideals and fears? Or is this more a film about transience and mortality? Is it a film about self-deception or a film about doomed love and what does "doomed love" even mean?The style of the film gives little cues. Campion embellishes the material with a calm, (mostly) restrained yet expressive cinematography (in slow, wistful takes, the colors and scenes of country and semi-urban life are evoked - and no obtrusive music is used to make us feel anything very particular) and she never looks for the sort of explosive scenes that are so common in movies about love. What saves the film is Campion's debunking of the myth of the Artist whose creativity and singular vision makes human relations secondary or even impossible. Campion takes a deep look into this image, disentangling it into several different human forms of temptations and yearnings. Campion seems to take more than a cursory interest in what kinds of conventional ideals about love the two main protagonists give expression to. The characters are often melodramatic but the film places itself at a distance, quizzically gazing at this form of life in which romantic poetry of the early 19th century was immersed.

Pather panchali (1955) & Aparajito (1956)

My knowledge about and experience about Indian cinema is embarrassingly small. Satyajit Ray's Apu-trilogi are films I have wanted to see and after having seen the first two, I can only conclude that their place in film history are justified. The two first films can be situated in the tradition of neorealism but they also feel strangely modern - I sometimes think about directors and films made in the sixties.

Pather panchali is set in Bengal in the twenties. It follows the ordeals of a poor family. The father is a brahmin, a sort of a happy-go-lucky type, whose income is on the meager side. Circumstances makes him go to the city and look for a job. The mother runs the household while taking a hostile attitude towards an elderly lady (it's unclear whether they are related) who is supported by them. This old lady is a magnificent actor and just watching her is one of the reasons to watch the film. The two kids lead the life of childhood: they play, steal fruit and eagerly follow the doings of the candy man. One day, they walk to the faraway place when they can spot a train on the other side of a gigantic field (this scene, as many others, is exquisitely shot!). The film takes a darker turn as it depicts the family's poverty and the death of the daughter. Aparajito chronicles what happens in the following years. The family has moved to the city. After a spell of illness, the father dies. A relative offers a place for the rest of the family in a village. Apu turns out to be a scholarly boy, and he goes to Calcutta to study.

The main thread of Aparajito is the choices Apu has to make: is he to stay with his lonely mother or should he pursue his studies? This leads the film to explore modern life and the conflicts born out of a new historical situation. Ray refrains from moralizing. He presents the struggles in an open way - open doesn't mean neutral, because these films are engaging and impassioned, but Ray never presents either modernity or the traditional life in terms of negative and positive. And: he doesn't conjure up anything as "emblematic" for modern life. He just shows situations of ordinary life and the choices people make. One of the major themes in the first two movies, poverty, is dealt with with a sort of matter-of-fact approach - this, however, not at all implying that feelings are absent. Especially in the first film, two different attitudes are contrasted: the mother is practical, economical - and she turns bitter. The father worries less. He is idealistic, even though he also acknowledges economic necessities.

The first films explore human relations very insightfully. This especially concerns the relation between the mother and the aunt - a relation characterized by dependence and ressentiment. We see the mother's anger, and the old woman's amazement. Another theme brought up in both films to great effect is loneliness. The film presents no solution and no gratifying reassertions, but presents a situation in a clear-sighted way: a boy who does not know how he is to react to his mother feeling lonely (the film shows the oscillation between well-meaning intentions and youthful lack of sensitivity) and a mother who is at pains to handle the fact that the boy is growing up and living in a distant place and living a life she knows very little about.

One aspect of the films I also liked was the music. Ray cleverly uses both non-diegetic music and sounds in the environment. None feels calculated.