Earth (1930)

Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth contains plenty of USSR propaganda: it even contains people dancing in anticipation of the first tractor in the village. Earth chronicles the violent tensions within the new society, USSR (and Ukraine), it explores new technology and collectivization of land. One does not need to guess where Dovzhenko stands: he cheers on the New and "kulaks" are depicted as old people who want to stick to the old ways. But what on Earth could imbue such views with cinematic quality? Well, Dovzhenko knows what to do with images (which makes a level of ambiguity slip into the movie). He is at his best when he leaves the Agenda and directs his gaze at nature, which he does - often. When I read about the film I realize that I've seen a restored version of the film that contains a few scenes that Dovzhenko was more or less forced to eliminate back in the days. In one of these scenes, we see the famous tractor appearing on the horizon (BIG, BIG sky and a small, small patch of land, on which we discern this glorious, tiny-great thing). It gets closer .... and closer ... and closer. But then it stops. The beastly machine won't work. One clever guy realizes that there's no water in the radiator and the gang on the tractor scratch their heads. Then one of them has a bright idea: they should urinate into the radiator. That kind of playfulness is not something I associate with Stalin-era movies and well, unsurprisingly this scene proved to be too much for the Soviet censors. Earth starts with a serene scene of an old man's death, continues with tumultuous debates between the young and the old about the merits of collectivization and towards the end, these societal tensions are unleashed as on guy, the young man who brought the tractor to the village, is killed. The young guy is buried and honored with new songs - no religious rituals. Even here, beyond the expected gestures, Dovzhenko makes the progress of the story engaging by using bold cinematic techniques - what feels quite fresh here is how he mixes romantic images of nature with Eisenstein-like montage images of crows and frenzied activity.

Interestingly, the reception of Earth was mixed. Some saw in it an example of perfect propaganda, while others denounced it as Spiritualism or some other stripe of anti-Soviet mentalist obscurity.

The Holy Mountain (1973)

The Holy Mountain may be a cult movie and that's why I watched it. That was a bad, immature decision. Sorry fans of Jodorowsky, but The Holy Mountain was a very, very, very bad film. It tried hard being far-out, trippy, hallucinatory, psychedelic - but it ended up as a rather repulsive hodge-podge of very predictable themes and images intended to shock or outrage us. I wasn't outraged, or thrilled, I was bored. It's hard give a summary of what the film is or where it is going - I guess it might not have been that clear to Jodorowsky. There's a Christ figure, a strange tower that takes him to a guru that have brought together a few candidates for Enlightenment (they're from different planets....) and together this gang sets out on a well you know journey of the soul, a journey that is to end in liberation from worldly temptations and the shackles of the I. ... Or that's what I think is going on. What I got from the film was that a) I am quite suspicious of the word 'spirituality' b) for a bunch of people the most exciting images on film, if you want to be weird & Different, is showing lots and lots of naked people and crawling insects c) surrealism can be outrageously predictable d) if 'spiritual symbols' are cluttered in a circular room stuffed with naked people, the result will not be interesting. - - - AVOID.

East of Eden (1955)

The good son and the bad son. The father who loves the good son. The other son who desires to be loved by daddy. Elia Kazan's East of Eden may be a cheesy, biblical family drama, but James Dean adds enough explosives for it to be interesting. The guy bounces, fidgets, jumps, gazes - you don't see that kind of anxiousness and restlessness in movies that often. I'm not saying this is great acting, but its pretty excessive, make what you want of it. Well, pretty much everything is predictable and over the top in this colorful tale about decency, family relations and love, and wouldn't it be for Dean's energy, Kazan's film wouldn't take off. There are not many layers to unwrap and the characters are what they are, paper-dolls with clumsy and overwrought lines. There's religious daddy, the conventional son, the rambunctious kid and the lost mother who has turned into a powerful businesswoman. The one and only thing that kept my interest was the early critique of the futures business. East of Eden is plenty of fun to watch, but it's an over-dramatic mess.

The Headless Woman (2009)

The Headless Woman (dir. Lucretia Martel) may not be a traditional horror movie - there are very few horror movie tricks here - but this film scared the shit out of me. The normal horror movie might make you jump at a sudden gruesome face or startle you with some gory situation; The Headless Woman had another type of effect. It worms into my mind, and stays there, impinging its sense of dread on my consciousness for days on end. What is more, even though the movie conjures up a vivid feeling of horror, it is a horror that stems from guilt, conscience. I don't know if I have ever seen such a quietly scary portrait of guilt before: I mean guilt here in the sense of it changing one's entire world, the way one perceives, the way things announce themselves.

Some movies tries to take you "inside the head" of some of its characters. Few succeed. The Headless Woman does, and the result is quite stunning (in this film, it seems, a "subjective" approach is all-important; without it, not much of what makes it special would be left.) The story starts and ends with Veronica and what happens to her one day when she is driving home from a family re-union. She hits something with her car, we see her head hit the wheel and we see her gaze at something. Afterwards, the camera follows her almost sleep-walking through life, reacting, holding back her reactions, trying to act normal. This sounds like it could been a Hallmark production about a car accident. Martel structures the movie like an existential mystery, or a nightmare (where one thing suddenly turns into another) but she leaves it at the most ordinary level; and maybe that's the reason why the film crept under my skin.

The Headless Woman shows many sides of guilt and conscience. It shows it as haunting, as a person being placed besides herself, alienated from herself, split from herself, but it also shows the reaction of denial: the hope that somebody else will fix things, or that it will fix itself, that guilt can be dissolved by convincing oneself that "it was nothing". But this is far from a detached philosophical account of a perspective. Martel lets the images present us with a very tactile, embodied state; concussion, trauma, lack of response, numbness, disorientation. Very few bodies are as corporeal as this one, and corporeality here means everything from what it means to act in a body, to how one's perception and attention is guided by and interacts with a specific surrounding. Martel often works with skewed impressions, looking at something one does not quite see, or perceiving something as something. She works in a similar way with sound and voices - how a voice appear as if from nowhere, but still somehow close.

There is something else going all as well which I haven't mentioned. Veronica lives in a wealthy family. Early on, we get the feeling that appearances are to be kept up, no matter what. Everything that rings a bit odd, or appears a bit outside the "normal" is brushed off as tiredness, as something that will go away if one just rests a bit and takes it easy. The ghosts and myriads of secrets and strange relations evoked in the movie tells another story: and here Veronica's numb and disoriented state is situated in a much bigger pattern of family relations and the way one learns to keep quiet, to etch a polite smile on one's face and say the things one is expected to say. (If you start to think about Antonioni at this point, you're on the right track.)

BIG RECOMMENDATION FOR THIS MOVIE!!

Our Beloved Month of August (2008)

On paper, Our Beloved Month of August (dir. Miguel Gomes) sounds like a wonderful, wonderful film: improvisation, the Portugese countryside, drifting fictional tales. It might have been a bad day when I watched it, but I never felt myself moved by it; instead of enjoying the looseness and the relaxed mood of the film, I was - and this doesn't happen that often - bored. There were things I liked (some of the musical scenes, some of the quieter landscape explorations, some of the storytelling) and had the film focused less on the fictional story, I might have ended up with a more positive verdict. The inclusion of the film team in the story is all right; its quite fun watching anxious producers and the staff trying to explain what they are up to, reassuring everybody about the time table, creating diversions etc. And watching villagers tell coherent and not-so-coherent stories is entertaining as well, It's when the fictional elements take over the film that I'm starting to lose interest; the family drama that was unraveled seemed dull and forced.

Damnation (1988)

I consider Béla Tarr as one of the most important contemporary film-makers (I'm sad he has stopped making movies), but Damnation is not his best film. It's worth a look, though. It features Tarr's typical slow-panning long takes, deadpan lines (people speak rarely and when they do they mutter some apocalyptic aphorism) and elusive events. And yeah, the music would be a good competitor in Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World. Maddin's film was not sad, but Tarr's is, and the problem is perhaps that it eventually flounders on the border of miserabilism.

The characters and the way they speak and move are extremely stylized, wooden even - but in contrast with other movies by Tarr, this stylized acting doesn't take off, it doesn't take me anywhere: I am crammed within a crumbling, depressive world. Why is it so miserable? Why is even dancing a form of death-like, or somnambulistic ritual? When I have been watching other movies by Tarr - other glacial-paced, depressing movies, these questions haven't occurred to me; then, I have been in the grips of the movie, not questioning its universe.

There's a woman who predict the apocalypse, there's a sordid proposal to take part in criminal activities and there's a doomed erotic affair between an alcoholic guy and a nightclub singer. Misery, alienation and betrayal. Everything spirals downward. Or no, it doesn't spiral anywhere, we're already there. If this film wasn't made by Tarr, it would have been quite unwatchable - I thought several times about which sides of Roy Andersson's films I don't like (a sort of pessimism that is revered as a prophetic view of life), and how these sides all seemed to be present in Damnation. But as this IS, thankfully, a Béla Tarr film there is plenty to enjoy, most of all, of course, the striking way Tarr lets the camera roam and our attention follows this hypnotic journey into a world that mostly contains very, very little: the texture of a wall, rain, a rattling and clanking mining conveyor belt, a night-club singer crooning a song that evokes the end of the world. Damnation isn't a boring film; but even though it is often stunning, the film goes off [creeps off] into a direction I am not at all sure about.

Fun fact: one of the bars to which the main character goes boozing is called Titanik. What a Kaurismäkian name, and the general feel of the bar is also totally within Kaurismäki's cinematic imagination.

Klute (1971)

Klute is one of those films where I want to shout: "they just don't make films like this anymore!" Even though this film is suspect and even repulsive at times, it has a singular style that creates some of the eeriest atmospheres I've seen in a movie for a while. The film is directed by Alan Pakula who masterfully uses surroundings and rooms to create a truly unnerving film experience - and what is so brilliant is that the means are so simple: shadows, a weirdly lit room, strange relations between people. But well, the trouble starts with the content and the story of the film. Jane Fonda plays a prostitute who seems to have ended up in the business because she is somehow addicted to it. She is entangled with a private detective (played by a haggard Donald Sutherland) who is trying to solve a case of a person who has gone missing. The story is propelled by so many male fantasies about prostitutes that I can't even bother to spell them out (but some are missing: the prostitute does not "save" the man; the story is about a cop with good intentions who doesn't have a clue). The best thing about Klute is that is so utterly muddled. It doesn't quite proceed in a way a thriller is expected to proceed, and the way the events unfold confound more than they clarify.

The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

Terence Davies directed one of the films that has influenced me most over the last few years, Distant Voices, Still Lives, a mournful, slow film about a working-class family. Many years have passed between that film and The Deep Blue Sea, but it is easy to recognize Davies' style and his sensitive and impressionistic approach to cinema. The initial scenes may strike one as pompous and over the top, but I hope you will not quit the film there. It's a very British affair; subdued, stylish, sonorous, a bit like a novel by Graham Greene (but it's based on a play by Terence Rattigan). And then there's Davies signature attention to music. He uses collective singing as no other director I know, the way the pub singing is integrated into his films is simply remarkable; somehow, this aspect of Davies' movies overpowers me in a way I have a hard time explaining (in one scene, a group of people sing Molly Malone in an underground station; the scene conveys beauty and sadness at the same time - but how the hell does it NOT become sentimental?).

The story, set in drab, post-war London in the 50's, explores the relations in a loveless marriage and an equally hopeless love affair. Davies take on these failed contacts could be depicted as meditative (the sparse use of talk enhances this impression); he shows the meaning of "life goes on", with broken hearts and regrets - but the film also contains a few lines that point out the danger of stoicism of the kind that warns against passion, and which instead recommends "guarded enthusiasm". The chronology is not linear and the transition from one scene to another has an emotional rather than a logical role - I like that very much. A weave of sad events is spun; Davies develops his scenes with a striking emphasis on composition that is neither formal nor "dashing" - quietly heart-wrenching, could be the right word. The wife, Hester, is shown with her older husband, the husband's mother. The tensions in this scene grow and grow, but are never overwrought. Davies renders desperation without trying to make it seem alluring or spectacular; this is the desperation of the everyday, of how life takes us in irreversible directions, how relations change people and how the distance between people may appear almost endless. The story may seem a bit old-fashioned to some, but speaking for myself I was eerily moved by this movie.

Gas, Food, Lodging (1992)

I have seen Gas, Food, Lodging (Allison Anders) mentioned somewhere and I wanted to see it. Even though the locations of the film (Laramie, a small, dusty town in New Mexico) were extremely sympathetic, little else in the movie impressed me. The beginning was a bit promising: this could almost be a Hal Hartley movie, I thought to myself while I watched the strange landscapes, the trucker café and two sisters quarreling, the lines and pace kept at an enjoyable level of laconic deadpan. Hartley delivered good kind of cheese, but in my book, Gas, Food, Lodging is the bad kind of cheese. A daughter wants to get her mother a date (her sense of romance is inspired by campy Mexican movies she enjoys in the local cinema). They live in a trailer park and the older sister is kind of wild. The story never took off for me and most of the turns felt positively badly directed and scripted. During some moments, I had an unnerving sense of having seen the scenes somewhere else, in another movie, but with an identical structure. One enjoyable thing here is to see Hank from Twin Peaks playing the don juan. Ugh, scary.

Repulsion (1965)

I have a hard time making up my mind about Polanski's Repulsion, which I re-watched during the Christmas holidays (as an alternative Christmas movie...). On the one hand, there's the psycho-sexual currents, the woman who is seemingly "afraid of men", and men's sexuality and who's fantasy is haunted by rapists. On the other hand, as a psychological horror movie, Repulsion stands its ground as Polanski develops the story and the perspective with a restraint I cannot but admire. Some of the stuff here are actually scary, precisely because Polanski doesn't take the scenes over the top, but lets the camera hover over a sudden image, sometimes accompanied by total silence, and sometimes by frenzy music.

The main character is Carol, played by Catherine Deneuve, who works in a manicure salon in smooth, swinging London. She lives with her sister, who goes on holiday with her boyfriend. Carol dodges her boyfriend, rebuffing his advances and withdraws to the apartment. From the get-go, Carol appears distant, sleep-walking and gradually, reality starts to fall apart. Cracks tear up the wall, the wall turns to porridge, and there are strange visitors there. The apartment becomes a sinister and claustrophobic place, with ticking clocks and rotting food. And then, at some point, the visitors are real and what ensues is gruesome and sad. Repulsion is at its best when it tries to show the world from Carol's perspective, when we are inside her hallucinations, her fear, her disgust, her numbness. The film loses its spell when things get too real - I continuously tried to convince myself that the things I saw where not "really" taking place, but that's not what the film wants. But all in all, this is an absorbing film that uses its limited locations brilliantly and the use of stark color contrast in the black and white cinematography is also efficient (even though one could also argue that many elements seem gratuitous: the skinned rabbit left to rot could be an example, the way the camera focuses on that rabbit and loads it with all kinds of symbolism).

But, what should we think about Polanski's obsession with Carol's sexual fears? Isn't the director here trading on an extremely stereotypical image of women, and instead of really confronting that image of the woman who is afraid of men as sexual beings, the film mystifies it (and eroticizes it, as the camera follows Carol walking around the apartment dressed in a thin night-gown), and shrouds it in gore and creepiness. (I had similar problems with Bunuel's Belle de Jour, which also mystified and sexualized "women's deepest fantasies" in a very problematic way.) On the other hand, this is not the kind of film where the camera gives us full access to the "poor, mad woman" - the camera tantalizes, shows only hints of what's going on, and some things remain in the shadows. And let's not forget that the main character is not only the possessed, the fragile and the one who tries to cleanse herself of male contact: she cuts, she kills. But the film perhaps remains at the level of insinuation, playful hints about fear, sexuality, femininity and domesticity. There's a kind of ambiguity in Repulsion I would account for as cinematic openness (in the good sense) but rather as something that comes terribly close to - titillation (this especially characterizes the rape scenes: they are portrayed as fantasies that express trauma or fear, but also desire in some strange way).

However, Polanski seems to hint at the point that Carol's repulsion for men is embedded in a world of sexism: leering men, men who coo and cajole, men who feel free to take up space and make propositions whenever they want - Polanski does focus on that, too. The men shown in this film are positively creepy types and we see how these men inhabit, invade and rule over urban and domestic space.