Portrait of Jennie (1948)

The essence of art, love, loss and change - the themes dealt with in William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie are HUGE. The frame is a kind of 'ghost story' but a very allegoric one. The main character, Eben, is a poor and struggling artist. On a misty evening in Central park he meets a little girl. A ghost, it turns out. We gradually learn the story of the girl. Every now and then, the artist encounters the girl and every time, she has grown much older. The two fall in love and the artist sets out the draw her portrait. So what is this girl, Jennie? She's rendered as the fantasy of a very lonely man. The clichés about the poor but noble artist are there, but there is also something else, something a bit more unsettling. The film is immersed in Eben's private dreams, and these dreams are presented vividly. Instead of psychologizing too much, Dieterle enters the story through Eben's self-understanding. His creative power are entirely dependent on the presence of this Jennie. This of course begs the question: what does the director try to say about artistic inspiration, what kind of elusive muse is Jennie? Eben is obsessive, he clings to the possibility of a new encounter and he goes deeper and deeper into this 'love affair'. On some level, he knows Jennie does not exist but this has no force for him, it is of no avail to what is important for him. One could say that the film explores a total collapsing of the separation between art and life. Inspiration is inspiration - the nature of this source is not interesting, only its power is. Even though I was not hugely impressed with this movie, it goes rather far in its portrayal of a certain idea about the relation between art and reality, namely the idea that art creates its own realm, its own space. Someone pointed out the kinship between Portrait of Jennie and Ferrara's gruesome Driller killer. The tone of these two movies are very different but the way reality is suspended is quite similar. What for me made the film tedious to watch was its bombastic use of music and its equally bombastic storytelling. The morbid look on Eben's face, however, is something I will remember this film for.

United 93 (2006)

I had a hard time relating to Paul Greengrass's United 93. It's a very tragic story based on real events. My overall impression is that the film doesn't quite know what to do with itself. Is it to be a project of re-enactment (some of the people in the film play themselves)? Is it to reveal some specific angle of the events of 9/11? Is it an attempt to honor the victims? The film is built around the idea of real time. This creates a sense of intensity, anxious anticipation and fear and dread from the beginning onwards. We see tired passengers boarding the plane in the spirit of routine, and we see people respond with chock at the news of the WTC plane crash. We all know what will happen. Helpless, we watch the plane being hijacked. Because of the strict set-up of the film, it is a strange complaint I make when I say that I am unsure where the film is going. Perhaps a better way to state my hesitation is that I don't know how to watch it. Greengrass abstains from promulgating a heroic account of some specific people while demonizing others. It's not that kind of film. We know extremely little about the character and I agree that this is how it must be in this case. Apart from following the passengers and the hijackers, Greengrass takes us to the National Air Traffic Cotnrol center, along with the military and airports. The staff at all these places has been rendered helpless. They become aware of the planes crashing into the WTC towars and they are tracking some suspicious activity in the air. Some planes have departed from their routes but are soon nowhere to be found.

My hesitation stems from how all of these events are framed. The film starts with the soon-to-be-hijackers deeply focused on prayer. Later on in the film, we see many scenes accounting for the resistance of the Americans on board the plane. I cannot help repressing the feeling that Greengrass wants to deliver a comment on terrorists vs. Americans, the religious Muslims versus the brave Americans on the plane. At the same time, this critique seems unfair, given the simplicity and lack of overt political speech-making and conclusions. A very important aspect of United 93 is the panic and the confusion it investigates. People in the military and the administration are reduced into onlookers. There is something about the shift of focus from the plane to the control rooms and offices that doesn't quite work. More and more questions abound, tensions is built up, but artistically, this film loses the grip.

As heartbreaking as this film is, I am still haunted by the question: what was the purpose with the film? What does it mean to make a movie in the spirit of reverence, what kind of requirements does that perspective face up to? What does the film show? What does it mean to keep viewers encapsulated within the horrible moment, and where the point is to experience the 'real time' of those moments? This is not articulated critique, more open, philosophical questions about film as an act of remembrance and experience. There is no such thing as memorial itself, no pure 'never forget'. Somehow, I never get my head around what sense of memory, or re-enactment, United 93 gets at. At some moments, I am even afraid that the film takes us on the kind of journey that in the midst of frenzy and the sense of inevitability risks losing the acuteness of precisely that question.

Meet John Doe (1941)

I always start out watching Frank Capra films with a sense of 'yeah, this could be good', only to end up with a feeling of disappointment, a feeling of having been tricked into something. Capra is unabashedly populist and Meet John Doe is certainly no exception. It all starts out with an angry column about 'John Doe', a guy who says he will commit suicide because of the corruption of society. The author of the column, Ann (great Barbara Stanwyck), has been laid of from the newspaper and 'John Doe' is her attempt to keep her job by creating some sensation. Sensation she gets. The newspaper is accused of fraud and now they need to hire a guy to stand in for 'John Doe'. A former baseball player named John gets the job. He's short on money and willing to go through with the thing. Doe becomes a celebrity, a representative of society's ills. John goes from being a tramp to being the guy eveybody try to manipulate. He is paid to deliver an emotional radio speech but after pulling it off he runs away with his pal, regretful of the big fraud he's complicit in. Meanwhile, 'John Doe' becomes a national hero. Capra's favorite character is the innocent guy who ends up in a series of events that change him drastically and that makes him lose his innocence while he is also learning something about himself. The film succeeds in criticizing a dangerous desire for national heroes. But in some weird way, that same desire is also confirmed - in the end, we are lead to think that we all need our John Does to comfort us, and somebody's got to step up and take that position. Capra unmasks the scheming that goes on behind such national heroes, but the hope of some kind of collective narrative is preserved. Capra wants to say something about leaders and the risks that strong leaders bring with them in a democratic society. He thereby also shows the sinister sides of collectivity. However, my complaint is that Capra never goes far enough. His critique of cynism never goes to the heart of things, it remains at the level of 'a few bad guys'. The biggest flaw of his film is that the perspective is never changed: the little people on the one side and the corrupted elite on the other hand. My idea would be that there is something deeply troubling about this kind of dichotomy and that Meet John Doe doesn't unearth that kind of dynamic. In the end, the film reintroduces a sort of contempt that it seemingly also assesses: the little people need their reassurance and faith. 'Let's not take that away from them,' Capra seems to say.

The Kids Are All Right (2010)

Annette Benning and Julianne Moore are great as two mothers struggling to maintain a good family life and to keep up the spirit of their relationship. They have two kids and the family seems to live a happy upper-middle-class kind of life. Their kids have decided to track down their sperm donor family. The father is a sympathetic bohemian guy who owns a restaurant and grows veggies in his backyard garden and who also seems a bit immature, the kind of guy who wants to live 'the good life'. The kids grow to like him - and so does one of the moms. This, of course, is a precarious situation that disrupts the former calm. The Kids are all right (dir. Cholodenko) investigates the alienation between children and parents without this becoming a film about super-dramatic conflicts. It focuses on the strains of ordinary life and how partners have started to take each other for granted. What we see is two person who are removed from a state of forgetfulness, a state of cozy everydayness that can be dangerous. The way this is transported into a film is generally successful. The actors are, as I said, doing very well and the choice to ground the film in ordinary life is exemplary. My only complaint is that the film sometimes feels a bit unfocused so that both the parental problems, the love issues and the kids' quandaries are not fully explored.

Two Cents Worth of Hope (1952)

Two kids fall in love but their relationship is an on-off affair. It's the fifties and they live outside a big city. The guy wants to leave for the city, to work. The girl is what you call a 'personality'. There is so much in Castellani's film Two Cents Worth of Hope that bears the promise of a beautiful film. There's plenty of life, the camera moves around and takes a look at the still agrarian village. Still, I had trouble engaging. The problem is spelled b-a-d c-o-m-e-d-y. The film tries all it can to create a jolly, cheerful mood. The humor never strikes hard and the more social observations (a band of guys are trying to start up a truck company, the social roles associated with marriage - just to mention to examples) are left at sketches. The best thing in the film is the main character, a strange girl called Maria. She's an outsider and she does whatever she wants: she's above the system of marriage deals and village gossip.

Pitfall (1948)

An anti-hero of a noir film simply MUST be employed by an insurance company. This is true for the sad-sack protagonist of Pitfall, a gem of the genre directed by a guy called de Toth. John is stuck in the suburban life. Wife and kids, dinner after work. An organized little life. We, of course, realize that this seemingly settled rhythm will not last much longer. And it doesn't. There's the brazen Mack at the office who's attracted to a dame suspected of possessing some stolen goods. According to the rules of the genre John will fall in love with this dame himself - an afternoon of boats and cocktails pretty much settles the deal. The problem begin when it turns out that a colleague of his has already set his eyes on the girl - he does everything to hurt his competitor. Mona's jailbird boyfriend is also soon to be an ally of the colleague's. Interestingly, I don't really get the sense that Pitfall is a moral tale that teaches the viewer the value of not giving in to impulses that will shatter what makes up the real happiness of life. As have been said by others, this film departs from the tradition of depicting scheming femme fatales who seduces poor men and leads them towards a doomed path. In Pitfall, it is the protagonist that is spared, and the girl that falls in love with him meets a much more troubling fate.

Vive l'amour (1994)

Ming-liang Tsai is a very interesting director: his slow-building movies look at urban life from an angle that lets you see human fragility from a sort of cinematic distance. Vive l'amour is no exception in this respect. The ending scene of this film paradoxically exudes exactly this distance/bristling emotions. It's a strange thing to watch, indeed. There's a lot of other strange occurrences in this film. Let's start with the fact that the story revolves around an apartment which is shared by three people - and what is so eerie is that at first none of the people are aware of each other. There's the unhappy businessman who sneaks into the empty-seeming apartment. Then there's woman who takes a random guy, a guy who sells clothes on the street for a living, to the apartment for a rendezvous. She's some kind of broker and she is trying to sell this place. The guy she sleeps with steals her key and starts to move into one of the bedrooms... The loneliness of these people is painful to watch. The moments of intimacy are fleeting and often they only make the loneliness appear in even starker contrasts. Very few words are exchanged. It's the vacant-seeming apartment and its secretive inhabitants. The city is depicted as a place for an anonymous, unhappy life. A heartbreaking and very, very quiet movie.

A Brighter Summer Day (1991)

Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day is an extremely ambitious (237 minutes!) and well-directed movie about a transitional time in Taiwanese history. I can imagine this is one of the films that must have inspired Wong Kar Wai: it blends the wistful with the subdued. What characterizes this film is also the distance that is kept up at all time: this distance can be seen in the cinematography, in  the lighting and also in the way we are slowly, slowly introduced to characters.

The story takes place in the beginning of the sixties. The tense relation between gangs of teenagers - some of which are from mainland families - take a violent turn and one of the final eruptions of violence takes place in a seedy snooker bar. A wave of migrants came to Taiwan after the war that led up to the communist takeover. This film depicts a time of insecurity and state repression. The teenagers are heavily influenced by American pop culture and the music of the era plays a big - and moving! - role in A brighter summer day (the title comes from a snippet from a tune by Elvis). A tape recorder figures repeatedly as a treasured object, a center of gravity. Because of the bad copy I watched, there were some things I missed. Many scenes take place in scantily lit locations and there are a lot of long shots. This is also a context with which I am not that familiar. This is nonetheless a film I will bear with me.

The central event is the murder of a teenager. These bears witness of deep wounds within the community. Xiao Si'r is one of the main characters. His father is a civil servant, and he is also harassed by the secret police. Xiao Si'r and his brother steals their mothers watch and this comes to have fatal consequences. At night he attends school (!) where he meets Ming, a former girlfriend of one gangleader. Si'r is a steady part of one of the gangs. Yang weaves together accounts of family life and the life on the street. The film succeeds in showing how closed of these spheres of life seem to be from each other for these teenagers. The life of the family, the home, is one thing, the gang another. Rifts between generations are manifested in a way I found both subtle and illuminating. This is for sure a film that merits a second viewing. 

The Kid (1921)

I have seen embarrassingly few Charlie Chaplin movies in my life. The Kid is a good start - it is a brilliantly funny and moving film about a man - Chaplin's famous Tramp - who ends up a father. The man has found an abandoned child and despite his attempts to find the mother, there's nothing to do but to face responsibility. As the film moves on, the kid and the man are "business partners". The kid smashes a window and the father sells a new one to the unfortunate victim of this prank. What I couldn't stop thinking about during this film is how unusual its portrayal of masculinity is: the film shows a tender father's love for a child. Beyond this the film revels in street-smartness and acrobatic - and great locations!

El sur (1983)

Victor Erice's El sur is a masterpiece of colors and composition: it is simply a marvellous-looking and melancholy little film. Even though some plot-devices are badly chosen (maybe thsi is due to the fact that Erice was not able to finish the film the way he had planned), this is a film one will remember. It's one of those films that builds its own tight world. Most films, flat as they are, do not at all suceed in this world-making - and I suppose most don't even try. The story revolves around the relation between a dugther and her secretive father. The father comes from the south, and the girl dreams of this mysteroius place. The father is a man of many secrets, and the daughter tries to reveal what these secrets are. They live in a house far from the city. Sometimes, the father disappear without explanation. The daughter follows her father into town and she tries to make sense of what he does. El sur is a dreamy film that settles you into a landscape and a mood of longing. The emotions are more hinted at than rubbed into your face. The daugther gradually learns of her father's unhappiness.

Even though the mystery of El sur is not in itself extraordinary, the way it is evoked clearly is. In one memorable scene, we see Estrella dancing with her father at an empty restaurant. They are close, yet distant to each other. There is a sadness and wistfulness of this film that is both vivid and distand, as a dream that is about to dissipate. Someone has written that this movie is told in the tone of whispering, and that captures the essence of how I experienced the pace. There are countless scenes of stark beauty. Often these scenes are minimalistic in kind. In one, we see a dark-lit path surrounded by trees. Estrella is riding a bike and the gloomy light surrounds her. This scene is repeated in the film and creates a sort of pattern.