Climates (2006)

It's winter in Turkey. A rather self-centered college professor has broken up with his girlfriend and leads a lonely existence in Istambul. Too lonely - he realizes it was a mistake to part with her. The girlfriend works in the television business and has gone to the eastern part of the country to produce a TV series. The college professor sets his mind on talking to her again.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan made the excellent Uzak and Climates is very similar, both in the subjects it explores and the style it is immersed in. Ceylan is interested in the distance between people, the friction, the silence. He uses wintry landscapes to augment the icy atmosphere of the story and even though that sort of embellishment is likely to have ended up in overwrought cheese somehow the film's sober tone saves it from sentimentality. I mean, Ceylan even gets away with showing people looking at ruins without this becoming too much a painfully obvious metaphor for the kind of emotions the film looks into. (The two main roles are played by the director and his wife - I didn't know that until afterwards) Ceylan looks at how specific situations evolve. How people struggle with words, how they talk past each other, how they are awkward or lonely in one another's company. Ceylan does not have to show us the history of this couple's resentment towards each other. All scenes hint at that, and we need no more to understand that there are problems of many different kinds between them that go way back. The camera focuses on faces that express too much all at once or face that are hard to read. Climates may be a pessimistic film, but it is far from world-weary. The second half of the film is strikingly beautiful, and sometimes painful to watch. Ceylan is a master of simplicity and I hope he will make many more films.

The Rules of the Game (1939)

If The Rules of the Game had been made in the US, it would have been a lighthearted screwball comedy, or a slightly melancholy and extremely talky film by Robert Altman. But this film is so typically French in its idiosyncratic shifts of gears, from amiable to ominous to comical (I think of a much later example of this cinematic style: The Barbarian Invasion) Jean Renoir's comedy seems to hint at social critique (the title gives that much away) but it is not clear to me what the nature of this critique is. The relations between people is seen as a monumental network of social roles that people are predisposed or take on themselves to inhabit (Renoir's use of deep focus brilliantly embellishes these networks that we sometimes only see somewhere in the background of the image; everything happens as it were at once, on an overwhelmingly vast social scene). One or two of the character seems to be placed outside this "game". There are a multitude of characters here and the romantic entanglements are endless. The major part of the film takes place in a manor in the countryside where ar party is celeberated: first as a hunting party and then as an evening bristling with tensions and scheming. Among the quests are an anti-heroic, brooding aviator, a family friend and a mistress (along with servants, game-keepers and a poacher). All of them jump from 'earnest' to 'artificial' in a split second, and it is hard to know what is what; everything seems to be moves within an endlessly volatile game that seems to make up a world in itself, indifferent to everything else that goes on around it. The hunting scene is intriguing to watch. Some of the participants are not interested in hunting; they loll about, talking about their messy relations. Other again are involved in shooting at everything that moves, without discrimination. The cruely and strangeness of this upper-class ritual is captured in a single frame of a dying rabbitt. This is one of the very few moments in which we see another approach to reality than that of "the game". The Rules of the Game is a hodgepodge (a thrilling one) of slapstick, endless and overlapping talk (often idling and empty phrases) and a few explosive moments which in the end are not explosive at all, because they are mere parts of the game, which seems to allow for these kinds of continuous eruptions. But what is the point of the film? What is Renoir's ideas about the social system captured in this film (a system in which both the upper-class and the servants seem to take part in the "game", whatever it is)? Something seems to be foreshadowed, but I can't really pinpoint what it is. I am not sure, but The Rules of the Game won me over with its strange mix of rawness and elegance.

The Moderns (1988)

The supposedly bohemian and "free" lifestyle of artists is an endlessly flowing well from movie-makers. All of these films are not bad, but many - are. I apply this hard verdict to The Moderns (dir. Alan Rudolph) about a circle of non-friend in Paris. The artists engage in love competition, professional competition and personal competition. The 20's, everyone's feeling that they live at an exciting moment of history. The artists are bitter and they are not even that interesting (some real people also appear, and not even Gertrude Stein can keep up my interest in this film). As a film, The Moderns isn't anything special to write home about. But the strange accent of that villain-millionaire is something I will remember from this film.

They Drive by Night (1940)

They Drive By Night (dir. Raoul Walsch) develops a rather American line of critique of capitalism: the economic system is bad in so far as it turns people into wage slaves or slaves of commercial relations: people are no longer their own masters. Utopia is becoming one's own boss. Even though They drive by night doesn't belong to the best film noir movies of the period, it has its good parts and strong sides - and it has Ida Lupino in a leading role. The story revolves around a pair of brothers who drive trucks and have a hard time making a living out of it. They strive to be independent but the loan sharks loom over their dreams. Another problem is the Wife: one of the brother's has a wife who is concerned about them being on the road. The two brothers' lives are drastically changed when one brother loses an arm in an accident. The other driver starts to work a white-collar job for one of his friends whose wife (Lupino) is after him ... big time. I'm not sure what led to this HUGE hang-up about "the ravenous woman"; this film is yet another example of a film about the Dangerous Woman who destroys the life of the decent and simple-minded man. The first part of the movie has some interesting (and beautifully filmed) scenes about the trucking business and the film's social commentary is apt (the very American slant on it notwithstanding). The second part - even though that's where Lupino enters the story - is almost a parody of film noir, even if no private eye is involved, the formula and the sentiment is there: there's murder, there's scheming, there's regret and there's dangerous love - and the way to destruction is paved with good intentions. To me, They Drive by Night is too similar to what other noir films do far better: The Postman always rings twice and Double indemnity are two movies that have a similar plot but are superior in my book.

Ride in the Whirlwind (1966)

Monte Hellman directed the quite fabulously low-key racing car-drama Two Lane Blacktop and I wasn't actually aware of the fact that he has also dabble in Westerns until I found a grainy VHS with Ride in the whirlwind. OK, I'm not generally a fan of westerns (there are exceptions) but the way Hellman defies genre rules is great to watch: the story is minimal and could be summed up in a sentence (vigilante posse tries to hunt down three men for having robbed a stagecoach - the men are falsely accused even though their path crosses that of the real killers) and the action is reduced to eerie quiet scenes and something I would say is an intentionally boring shoot-out. I wonder whether shooting at people has ever looked so boring on film, there's zero excitement or coolness here. Only sadness and a sense of endless injustice that I feel will continue and continue as the ending titles roll. Rather than being a film about the usual heroes of westerns, brave vigilantes who conquer the West, Hellman delivers a bleak image of people who do not seem to have a place in the world. Actors like Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton opt for stony faces and angst rather than bravado. No sense of American honor and frenzied activity, no nothing. As an Anti-Western, Ride in the Whirlwind is a good accomplishment.

The Act of Killing (2012)

After having seen a particular movie, fictional or documentary, I sometimes ask myself the question: should I really have watched this movie? This question is not alway a reaction to a film being sub-par in terms of quality. Here, I have in mind the question whether some images should be seen at all, as I am unclear what they do with me. The Act of Killing (dir. Joshua Oppenheimer et al) is hard to watch. It is strange and I am not sure whether the project in itself should be applauded. Another thing I was not sure about when I watched it was how it was directed, what the director(s) said to the people he encountered and what his idea of the film was. Generally, I might not have been worried by such questions, but the specific content of the film (where a skewed image makes a difference) seemed to elicit a puzzle like that.

The mass-killing of "communists" in the sixties in Indonesia (millions were slaughtered) are the dark core of the film, in which several of the murderer re-enact the killings. They take on the aura of movie stars, proudly calling themselves "gangsters" and rendering the murders with a cinematic quality: when they re-enact the events of the sixties, they do it like a thriller, or a musical. The film consists with these re-enactments along with discussions among the "gangsters". It is not obvious how one should think about this combination of horror and cinema: on the one hand, there seems to be a critique of cinema here somewhere, but at the same time, The Act of Killing itself moves head-on into the realm of images where it is not that clear how we should watch, and as I sad, what it means to watch these people re-enact what they did. Many times, I was not sure where the re-enactment began and where they ended - I am thinking especially of a TV show that included some of the weirdest responses I've seen in a while. The strangest thing in the documentary is watching the murderers' own accounts and testimonies: most of the time, they are not precisely sorry for what they did, they try to justify the mass-killings and represent themselves as cool heroes. At some points the facade drops, and we realize that of course the victims haunt their killers. But where they make these confessions, what does the presence of the camera mean? What does it mean if Oppenheimer staged some of the scenes? What are these re-enactments, really?

The image of Indonesia one gets from the film is not a rosy one. I get the impression - without have any knowledge of it really - that the murderers are still close to the political and commercial power in the country and that the para-military movement that took part in the killings is still going strong.

What troubles me about The Act of Killing is that I am confronted with a string of confessions and testimonies (and sometimes also a compulsion to make other watch, and that might include you and me in a very unsettling way), but the nature of these confessions are so muddled, so double-minded and so compulsive that one is tempted to direct one's attention to the psychological defenses of these killers rather than what they actually did. And that felt very strange. So the point is not that The Act of Killing is a bad movie; I am just thinking about what kind of movie it is.

Ugetsu (1953)

Ugetsu (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi) is a relentlessly pacifist movie. A village is about the be attacked by an army. The villagers know about this. But the film's two main characters are too self-involved to take this seriously. One of them is a craftsman who makes pottery. He is obsessed with selling as many pots as possible. The other one has made up his mind that he wants to enlist as a soldier, a samurai - he wants to be honored, no longer a nobody, no longer a village fool. There's nothing wrong with the film's message: ambition will make people walk over bodies to get what they want. The chronicle of the two characters (admittedly, these remain types) is ingenuously intertwined with the story about war. The village is attacked everybody flees. The craftsman is separated from his wife and ends up being lured into the arms of a wealthy aristocrat. The mysterious femme fatal is here taken to the next level, one might say. The wannabe-soldier joins the troop and pretends he has collected a war trophy. We learn that in this world, nothing really matters beyond keeping one's name clean; ambition and the ability to elbow oneself into the first ranks are the primary virtues here (no stately samurais with an admirable code of conduct can be found here: the samurais in this films are country people who want to create another life for themselves). Mizoguchi's perspective could be described as a form of humanism: he shows how his characters are doomed because of their view of life and the persons who have this view become virtually unstoppable because they are completely convicted that they are right. The potter's frenzy can be compared to the gold-craze in Greed. There are some remarkable artistic qualities of the film as well. Mizoguchi breathes life into the feudal world the film portrays: the film wanders from the village to marketplace as well as very minimally decorated interior sets. In the middle of the film, events take a surprising turn and I think it is the subdued style of Ugetsu that prevents this turn from becoming ridiculous. 

Downhill (1927)

I began watching Downhill (1927) after a night on the town. After a while, I concluded I had probably had a drink too many to appreciate the film. When I resumed watching the film, I instantaneously got the same woozy feeling. So sometimes beer is not to blame: Downhill, a silent film directed by Hitchcock, is a hallucinatory and sad tale about what happens when one takes blame for something one hasn't done. The downward spiral is endless and one cannot blame Hitch for beating around the bush about what kind of story it is. Intertitles are few and well sense-making is not on the top of the agenda. There are a few moments where I'm wondering what the hell is going on. Eerie camera panning and unnerving people (maybe the most sinister looks on film are delivered here) are what matter here. The story itself is rubbish and doesn't really make much sense but the way the film is done is GOLD, if one digs outlandish stuff and strange angles. Lost & delirious, Downhill excels in focusing on weird details and filming all locations as they were located on an alien planet. I'm thinking of one scene in particular that takes place in a nightclub where the curtains are suddenly drawn back so that the sun shines in, and well the effect is both cheesy and, again, eerie. Downhill is nightmare material from start to finish, and brilliant at that. As far as I know, Downhill has not received any particular acclaim. And looking at the story (and the far from flattering view of women), I can of course figure out why this is so. Clunky - yes (in one scene Roddy rides the escalators down to the underground, speaking of DOWNHILL, and an intertitle informs us: "This is the quickest way to everything", subtle stuff...), and maybe its the clunkiness I somehow embrace.

Sunrise (1927)

FW Murnau's Sunrise is a movie I like more than what is good for me. It is an unabashedly misogynistic film in which all bad sides of urbanization are epitomized by brash, prowling femininity (black dress, cigarettes & short hair) in the guise of a man-eater who does most anything to steal a man from his poor, innocent wife. So what's there to like? Well, the way the scenes are developing works magically - the camera work is dreamily fluid and very elegant (often, I do not like fluid camera-work: in its notorious attempt to create that special floating atmosphere, it often enough ends up in a kind of sterility - Matrix is of course one example). Murnau uses the cinematic medium at its fullest and the viewer can take delight in small details ranging from how one scene fades out into another and how Murnau superimposes one image on another, or uses juxtaposition and contrasts. And then there's the city. Evil and tempting - well, but also loony and perversely fun to watch: Murnau's approach sometimes paves the way for the screwball comedies of the thirties (many directors seemed to have been greatly impressed by the scene involving a bunch of people involved in the delicate pursuit of chasing a pig) - it even features one of the most important themes of those films: true love is found in the form of re-marriage, where the bond of love has been tested and then strengthened. Some of the city scenes go from loony to tender in a second, which is an interesting way to tell a story.

The cheesiness of the plot only adds to the charm of this movie - but as I said: it's also a disquieting kind of charm and in one scene towards the end, the romantic film turns into a sort of horror movie, a horror movie where the film's perspective is hard to make out. The basics: a guy falls in love with a girl from the city. But there's the wife problem. That sort of problem can be solved - by murder. Guilt-ridden and tormented, the guy sets out on the mission to kill his wife but well, the events take a sudden turn... As I said, Sunrise contains shady elements and it is V E R Y sentimental but the film itself is pretty impossible to resist.

Funeral Procession of Roses (1969)

On paper, Funeral Procession of Roses (dir. Toshio Matsumoto) sound like a film I simply have to love: this experimental film tracks the underground gay culture in Tokyo. Somehow, the film failed to impress me. Technically innovative, yes, but the use of interesting cinematic technique, pop-art sensibility and genre-hopping was not put to use in a way that made me see the world differently, it was just technically endearing (the links to Godard, not exactly my favorite director, abound). Instead of the rather detached use of tricks, I would have like to get a closer view of the people in the film, or the community, or Tokyo, or something. The minimal frame of the story is the relations between a club owner, a go-go dancer and an aging drag queen. There's a lot of partying, erotic adventures, stylized fighting, eerie conversations (about Jonas Mekas for example) and some unnerving memories/fantasies. Maybe somebody would claim that I just not get it: the film is supposed to look scrambled and impressionistic, more disparate tableaux than a story. And generally, I tend to like that kind of thing, and it's not as if the subject lacks interest. But if there's something I like about Funeral procession of roses it's its incessant play with gender and sexuality. This is undoubtedly a queer film that mocks standard gender interpretations and that contains many ironic performances of gender stereotypes. Maybe its the twists involving Oedipus and inner demons that for me makes the film flounder. Extravagant - yes. But this time around I was not thrilled by the extravaganza on display.