Naked Island (1960)

It's always risky to re-watch a film that has made a great impression on you; will it hold up, will it let you down, will you be abhorred about your own bad, bad judgment? Watching Naked Island (Kaneto Shindo) again was not painful at all - the film is as marvelous as it was the first time: repetitive, strange, beautiful. Even though a description may make this film seem like a formalist experiment (a slow study of work and habits), there is nothing studiously experimental about Naked Island, nothing self-important, nothing contrived.

The basic set-up of the film is the daily toil of a family of four who inhabit a small island on which they have crops that need tending to and water needs to be fetched from another island. Without sentimentality or overblown emphasis on scarcity, the movie follows the family members' everyday life, the rowing, the fetching, the carrying of water, preparing food, etc. All this is chronicled in flowing images that place the human being in her environment. We start to look at the environment, the sea, the island, the city, from the perspective of the character's active gaze, from the perspective of their activities. But we also start to focus on the way these human beings lives are formed by and conditioned by the environment. Few films contain this meditative attention to methodical action - the only comparison I come to think of is Akerman's Jeanne Dielmann, but that film is done in a completely different spirit and the latter film gives us a very different image of the role of routines in human life. In Naked Island, routines never seem soul-crushing or monotonous. The camera follows the woman and the man carrying water in buckets. We learn to recognize the paths they laboriously have to climb, and we see them gently pouring the water on the crops (these images do not conjure up the illusion of real time, but they make us feel the duration of what is done). The same chores are repeated over and over again, but through a cinematic technique that all the time shifts angles and perspectives, we sense that their toil is a way in which their life continues, and life is never the same.

Its interesting how work and repetition is rendered so radically different on film, depending on what angle the director chooses and more importantly how work is conceived, or rather, in which connections work is placed.

Shindo pays close attention to survival, not as a primitive mode of merely "living" in a naked sense (the island may be naked, but life is not), but as a form of life, a form of life that is contrasted with the life of the city which is hinted at as the family members sell a fish, dine out on a restaurant, look at a dance performance on TV, and take a trip with a ropeway (the life on the island is hard to pin down in terms of historical periods, but the city life reveals specific models of cars, technology and fashion). Up till now I haven't mentioned one of the peculiar traits of Naked Island: it is a silent film. Not in the sense of music-and-intertitles but in the sense of there being no dialogue. I am surprised that this doesn't appear like an eccentric ploy a desperate director comes up with trying to think of something new to sell his latest flick. The silence is almost always an organic part of the film; instead we hear the rain, the thundering wind, steps, flowing water and so on - or the distant chatter of city-folks. And then there's non-diegetic music, a beautiful score that frames the on-screen drudgery magnificently. We learn to know these people, the family of four, on other terms, and I never experience the lack of speech as a lack, or as something that forces me to guess at what is going on. I don't think the point is to make the islanders' life look 'primitive' or 'changeless' - we see their lives changing, there are sudden breaks in the everyday rhythm of work (one scene in particular is a jolt) and we see subtle strains in their relations, and speech is not needed to convey that. 

Blackboard Jungle (1955)

So, I watched Detachment a week ago, a film about a not particularly healthy school system. Richard Brooks' Blackboard Jungle (dir. Evan Hunter) is a superior film (its not fantastic, but its not terrible - but its DATED) about a similar theme. The main character is a youngish teacher who lands a job at a school with a bad reputation and we all expect him to turn the rowdy kids into art-appreciating saints. These kids are their teachers' worst nightmare: they belong to gangs, they beat their teacher up, they break a teacher's jazz records (rarities!) and though the new-comer tries to make the best out of the situation, but most of the time he has a scared and desperate look on his face (when he goes to a bar with his colleague and the colleague wants them to have another drink, the newbie dryly asks whether many teachers end up as alcoholics). Sadly, the film seems to go nowhere. It self-importantly reports the crimes and misbehavior of the young hoodlums, trying to elicit reactions from the viewer: how horrible, horrible! An interesting aspect of the movie is its treatment of race. The students come from different backgrounds and the teacher explicitly states that he is no racist. Hunter's agenda seems to be to denounce certain racist ideas about social problems: the big problems seem to be --- oh well, it's not very clear. That the parents were not around when the kids were small, perhaps due to the war? Maybe. But Hunters focuses more on the problems than the solutions. The classroom is a place of assault, protest and violence. The film seems to long for discipline, tranquility and harmony, but it's not sure how that could be achieved. And maybe that's the merit of the film that it abstains from scratching out a blueprint for how social problems are to be dealt with. There are moments of respite, moments of connection between students and the new teacher, but this is only temporary. Most scenes opt for melodrama rather than social critique (even though I really felt for that teacher who got his records destroyed....) and perhaps there are too many copies of Marlon Brando tough guys in there. Blackboard Jungle is not overly "inspirational", it tries to be rough and edgy - but what does it want to say? .... And yeah, this is the film in which Bill Haley's "Rock around the clock" was used - I must say I am not really convinced that this song conveys the toughness it was perhaps meant to give you an immediate feeling for. Perhaps the contemporary audiences opined differently.

Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1871)

Paul Mazursky's Next stop, Greenwich Village is nothing to write home about - it's a film that seems to have one goal: to capture a certain time and a certain place, Greenwich village, New York, the mid 50's. But somehow, I couldn't stop watching the movie, perhaps because of its scruffy look, its haphazard plot and the characters (a gang of New York outsiders, most of them wanting to be artists). Mazursky wants to show a time where kids felt that they were very different from their parents, they wanted to be independent, drink beer, listen to jazz and have free(r) sex. The main character has just moved from his parents in Brooklyn to The Village. Not a long way, one might think but for this young man, having an apartment of his own implies freedom, independence and time and space to figure out what he wants to do with his life and his relation to his girlfriend. He pursues a career as an actor but ends up making juice in a sleazy café. (I might have had a bad day or something, but the scenes in which the mother barges into her son's flat unexpectedly were surprisingly funny - one couldn't help recognize some of the tensions in the parent-kid dynamic blown up into huge proportions.) Next Stop, Greenwich Village is a cozy, good-natured movie, a movie for nursing a hang-over or a boring Sunday.

Le passé (2013)

Asghar Farhadi made the brilliant A Separation a few years ago and now he returns with Le passé which even though it has much in common with the breakthrough film, is inferior to it because of what I consider to be an over-dramatized story. Farhadi is a capable director and there are a couple of stunning compositions where Farhadi strays from his usual social realism and hints at something more poetic. Farhadi is interested in human psychology and relational twists but in this movie this interest turns into soap opera, unnecessary plot embellishments and well, in general, too much stuff. A man goes to see his ex-wife in France. She lives with three tense kids and a new boyfriend. From the get-go, there are numerous tensions and we instantaneously realize that theirs must have been a bumpy relationship. The beginning of film is rather captivating because one knows so little and Farhadi skillfully makes us guess, wonder and re-think: what's going on with these people? Why are they so angry? What has happened to them? Here, the small details of people who don't get along are focused on, and many times it works. The second part of the movie is a mess of new threads, Big Feelings, Big Secrets & Revelations (Farhadi shows how social technology can be easily integrated into melodramas), and none of this feels very real. My attention went all over the place and maybe my erratic psychological set-up is not to blame exclusively.

Detachment (2011)

An interesting and challenging theme doesn't necessarily result in a good movie. Detachment (dir. Tony Kaye) tries to address an important topic - how do we respond to a person who obviously needs help? - but it does so in a way that I thought was both clumsy and a bit insensitive to what it appeared to be saying. Detachment revolves around the messy but strangely sterile (yes, it's a paradox) life of a substitute teacher. The school he works in is a mess: we get the sense that the public school is going down the drain, the teachers being a tormented bunch and the students enduring the school-day in a state varying from rowdy protests to glass-eyed disengagement. The substitute teacher is used to work in a place for a short term only. A merit of the film is that it abstain from portraying the teacher as some sort of social hero that saves the fate of the young generation by sermoning a few lines of classical poetry. What makes Detachment a not-catastrophic film (admittedly, it's a border-case) is that the teacher remains a sort of mystery. Most of the time, he is sympathetic, trying to help, trying to do his best. But all the time there is something aloof about him, his engagement always somehow held in check. Maybe the film is a portrayal of what depression may be like. On the downside, the approach to the material is at times incredibly heavy-handed and some scenes are so eager to deliver Message that it is almost painful to keep watching. Most characters remain paper dolls (extremely dramatized and obnoxious paper dolls, it doesn't help). There are so many things that go wrong in this movie - the attempts at artistic imagery are pretty embarrassing and the moments of "social realism" don't feel exactly authentic. Detachment tries so hard to wring out Emotions that it ends up making this viewer quite resistant to feeling anything; instead of images that somehow overwhelm in bringing about an emotional turmoil, Detachment seems to have calculated its ratio of pessimism and optimism very pedantically. Try to conjure up an extremely stereotypical image of Miserabilist "Exististentialism" in your head. Ultimately, We...  Are... All... Alone.... Falling..... Detachment resembles that mental image to quite a great extent.

McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971)

A few weeks ago I reviewed Monte Hellman's existentialist anti-western Riding through the whirlwind.  I have watched another film in this slight and odd sub-genre: Robert Altman took a shot at making a western without most of the recognizable western themes with McCabe and Mrs Miller (even though one significant western theme is tackled: change). Not a bad movie (I keep thinking about the Coen bros grim and sometimes a bit elusive approach to movies) despite the rather obnoxious soundtrack by Leonard Cohen (Cohen croons a sad, sad song that adds yet another layer of sadness to the movie which is not exactly a sunbeam).

The film tells a story about small town in which McCabe, a rugged entrepreneur and gambler with some sort of bad-boy reputation, starts a business, a saloon and a brothel. The location speaks to me: its rawness, the drastic changes - and the weather always seems inhospitable (wait for the ending scenes and that landscape will get to you). The role the locations play here is not as a mere backdrop. Altman's approach to light enhances this sense of place. The camera drifts over cloud-heavy days and very dimly lit interiors. People's faces are barely seen, much of the action takes place among the shadows - and Altman's attention is sprawling in all kinds of directions, this is not the kind of movie that lets you into the main characters' heads. Strange jokes are told, sneers are made, people dance to a music box tune, somebody throws down a cat from a table. McCabe & Mrs Miller has Altman's personal style, the film is somehow drifting in some direction or other, not aimlessly, but not with a linear story either. We have to figure out what is going on and what we perceive to be central. Altman broods over business and entrepreneurship in a way that takes us a long way from the American dream. The growth and development of the town is not seen through the lens of hard work and heroic accomplishment - Altman adopts a mournful, slightly ominous tone. The film's plot is placed in the relation between McCabe and his partner Mrs Miller and the hookers they get to work in the brothel. These are broken, eerie human beings who don't seem to have much going for them. Altman takes his time to show us who these people are, and how they relate to one another. And many things remain obscure. There are business propositions and there are plenty of tragedies: in the end, everything seems to be about money. McCabe & Mrs Miller is about small fish trying to make a living, a bit of money perhaps and then the big fish with the power to destroy everything. Here's the mining company which can do what it wants to get the piece of land it has set its eyes on. But maybe this is not the worst enemy McCabe and Mrs Miller have: there's naivety, paranoia, dizziness, and strange, unexplained human need to appear in a certain way to others.

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!!