Written on the wind (1956)

Of course I've heard about Douglas Sirk. Most critics talk about his films as having not only kitsch value, but they are said to represent an unusual form of subversive critique of the American lifestyle. Watching Written on the wind, I can only agree and join the voices of praise. Sirk is funny. Sirk is witty. Sirk is cheeeesy. The film contains more than enough of veiled sexual imagery and exaggerated artifice. In one of the leading roles, we see an excellent Rock Hudson. He plays to poor kid who hangs out with the son of an oil millionaire. While his best friend is a carefree playboy, Hudson plays the man set on becoming the next big name in oil business. But of course this is not what the film is about. What we have here are several messy love triangles, the heads and tails of which we cannot always be certain. There are ... many undercurrents. These romantic ailments are set in a world of oil derricks, popular bars and huge mansions. I hope I will watch many more Sirk movies soon.

Silent running (1971)

Silent Running is a hippie version of 2001: A space odyssey, a prequel to Stars Wars and well, A VERY BAD MOVIE. If this were a parody of the hippie movement, I would have some mercy. But I suspect it isn't. But this film undoubtedly has some entertainment value because of the retrofuturistic technology and the embarrassing scenes of nursing an ailing robot. If there was an award for the most awkward use of music in any film of the history of sound film, the award would go to this film. Congratulations.

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Truffaut's classic sci-fi film Fahrenheit 451 is, as we all know, set in an eerie fascist country where books are prohibited and where firemen patrol people's houses in search for hidden books. The film's dingy futurist look is splendid. The images are humorous and chilling at the same time (I didn't expect the film to be funny but I suspect this is mostly due to reasons unintended by Truffaut). As an intellectual effort, I'm less convinced. It's a silly little film, but a nice-looking one.

The Temptation of St Tony (2009)

I'm not familiar with the character of St Anthony. This might or might not have limited my understanding of The Temptation of St Tony, a surreal journey into the heart of darkness directed by Estonian Öunpuu (who has featured in this blog before). Yes, this is the story about temptation, but in a very twisted way (is it the good that tempts the evil?). Öunpuu knows how to use the medium, that is for sure. Even though the first scenes left me with an impression of exaggered darkness, the last hour of the film, with its abundance of warped images, was more appealing to me. Tony is a middle manager. His boss tells him that he has to fire some people. He submits. His girlfriend cheats on him. He accepts this, too. The character of Tony is a walking void. He is not evil in the same sense as most of the other character. He simply doesn't seem to act in the situation he is in. When he acts, his entire being is awkward. It is as if he never knows what he is saying and how he should say things. This is the most concrete part of the film. Then I have said nothing about a quasi-fascist club, munching on a corpse and skating in what seems to be the world of the dead.

As a film about raw capitalism, this is a film that focuses on the life of the ambiguity of figures and corporeality. In one scene, we see a "sophisticated" dinner party. Suddenly, the chat stops. A haggard man stands outside the enormous window. It is as if the room stops breathing. The man doesn't move. Nobody reacts. Tony is the only one to do something. He seems to assume that the man is an alcoholic, so he offers his bottle of wine. The man takes it, pours out the content, and puts it in the plastic bag in which we see other empty bottles.

If you are interested in this movie, expect the style to be more interesting than the content. This is a film about the visual. Even though many scenes are beguiling, everything does not work on all levels. The reason why I was not fully convinced by the film's aesthetic language is that it overstates it's references; you see Andersson here (an almost tender scene about Tony's confrontation with fence-makers, "You say we are not real??"), Tarkovsky (Stalker's dog!) there, and wait, here we have an ode to Béla Tarr (the drab, yet evocative, surroundings). And without David Lynch, some scenes would not be what they are now (the scene at the club echoes Fire Walk With Me).

But yet, somehow, this is a mesmerizing film.

Basquiat (1996)

Films about artists tend to be pretentious and dull. Even though Basquiat doesn't belong to the worst category of the mentioned type of films, it's not a masterpiece either. What disappointed me about the film is it's recycling of almost every theme that we expect from a film about an artists. The artist has a troubled relationship with his girl. The artists turns out to be a genius, sometimes a misunderstood genius. The artist has a conflictual attitude towards the conventional world of artists and art dealers. However, there's a few unexpected elements here that made me sit through the entire film. Unlike most films about art, this film (for obvious reasons) discusses the widespread racism in art circles. What this shows us is that as soon as art starts to be about the artist or the role of an artist, we are already situated in yawn city. I'm not sure this point is something the director (Schnabel) would acknowledge, but the film is clear enough.

And it is hard NOT to like any performance by Dennis Hopper.

Bad day at black rock (1955)

I'm not sure HOW Bad day at black rock slipped through the fingers of the censors, but apparently, it did. Or maybe I am just over-interpreting it, but the story seems to be quite politically controversial from the point of view of post-WW2 50's in the US. I know the film is about a thousand other things, but one dimension here seems to be the hatered agains Japanese people during and after the war, even those Japanese people living in the US (as you remember, internment camps were erected). But what do I know: perhaps this was discussed during the fifties? Some have read the film as an allegory for contemporary Hollywood blacklistings (not far-fetched).

The story in the film: a man arrives by train in a shabby-looking town in the middle of the desert. Right from the start, he is treated with hostility by the locals, ranch-owners, thugs, hotel-owners - all with a very masculine demeanour. They suspect he is in the business of poking his nose into local affairs. It turns out that the man wants to contact a certain Japanese farmer. And here the trouble begins.

The story of the film is told with due economy. Some scenes get a bit heavy on words in the sense that the film becomes too stagey. But most of the time, the actors manage to create just the right atmosphere of antagonism and a secret that is not to be revealed. The downside of the film is that it is badly structured, so that some things are obvious at the wrong time, and that, for this reason, a necessary level of suspense fails to develop.

The Match Factory Girl (1990)

Aki Kaurismäki's films consist mostly of silences (he has also made a silent film). For the first 20 minutes of The Match Factory Girl, we hear no spoken words, but other sounds unravel the life-world of Iiris, a young girl who lives with her parents. We hear the rumbling sounds in the factory she works in. Snippets of news are presented (it's 1989 and the world is in turmoil). The first word we hear by a character, in this case Iiris, is, if I remember correctly, "a beer". These drawn-out silences are heavy with sadness, but Kaurismäki is also evoking proletarian gloom from a humorous point of view.

OK, so the story here is flooding with dead-pan humour and tongue-in-cheek miserabilism. Iiris has a lousy job. Iiris' parents are oppressive. When Iiris meets a man, he tells her, after one night together, that he has no intentions whatsoever of initiating a relationship. But Iiris is pregnant. He is not interested in having a child. An appointment at the doctor's. Iiris rests in a hospital bed. Her dad enters the room, utters a sentence of dour and insulting words, and equally dismissively, places an apple on the table next to her bed.

It's easy to describe the film: it's a blunt, dark, humorous fairytale. All scenes are extremely austere, in terms of dialogue, camera angle, composition - even set design.  One person at an internet discussion board called this film "a Finnish Jeanne Dielman". To me, that is a very apt, yet quite surprising comparison. Akerman's and Kaurismäki's vision of urban drabness have many similarities, and their sense for meticiously composing every frame can be seen as related as well. Or maybe because these two belong among my favorite movies. Unlike Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, diegetic music plays a big role in Kaurismäki's work. There is tango, rock n roll schmaltz. The scene in which Iiris, whose parents threw her out, sits in her brother's bachelor's pad, gazing at a pool table and listening to the jukebox (!) is simply heartbreaking. And FYI: The world can't have enough of Olavi Virta.

Un dimanche à la campagne (1984)

A lazy day in the country side. An artist expects his son's family to come and visit him and his housekeeper. They do come. The sons' kids run around. The parents dutifully scold them for misbehaving. The artist languidly chats with his son and his son's wife about ordinary things. While most of the grown-ups are asleep, the artist's daugther arrive in a fancy automobile (this is the 1910s). Her arrival puts a sudden end to the tranquility we've seen so far. The daughter is admired by everybody. Will she stay for dinner?

This sounds like a meagre plot. It's not. Or: the plot is not so important. Nothing out of the ordinary happens in the movie, the story of which spans a few short hours. A family is spending leisurly time together. Most things have an air of rituals that have existed a long time, comments that are uttered against a background we are not completely aware of. On some level, they seem to be a happy family (even though this is put in a somewhat new light as the daughter arrives from Paris, a favorite child of the father). This is not the type of movie that hints at dark secrets or never-ending neurotic preoccupations. Yes, there is friction, but it is not the kind of friction that threatens the possibility of communication. What Bernard Tavernier tells us about is rather an unspoken sense of disappointment or an equally unspoken feeling of having disappointed somebody else.

One could say that this film is just as idle as its lazy surroundings. Proust could have written the script. In one eerie scene, we see the family having dinner. Need I say that nothing spectacular happens (they praise the food, one kid brags about having experienced the state of drunkenness) The strange thing is that the picture fades out to a black screen quite a few times so that we expect a new scene to begin. It doesn't. The dinner scene goes on and on, and just as in some moments in Proust's book, we gain a sense of time having freezed. This is the eternity that everyday life sometimes can lull us into (which need not be a sign of false consciousness).

The film's aesthetic builds around a hazy yellowish green that permeats almost every scene (in an exquisite way, I might never have seen such greens!), and produces a dream-like quality. Of course, the dialogue reveals some personal things about the characters (how the son has a complicated relation to giving up art or how the father quietly scornes the son's having changed his name), but mostly, we hear small talk, irritating repetitions, idle chatter. Actually, except for the artist's glamorous daughter, Irene, and her father, who has sunken into a nostalgic form of sadness, most of the characters are dull, respectable, in line with what is expected of them. In the hands of a less imaginative director, this would make for a boring film as well, but instead, we have a film that without a trace of bitterness or glacial irony attempts to give a fair picture of the dull life of the rich.

All this works very well, save for the, in my view, unnecessary ending scene. A Sunday In the Country will perhaps not change your life, but it is a charming little film nonetheless - or one might even say that it is a beautiful film about the magic patterns of everyday life. Some have compared Tavarnier's film to Yoshiro Ozu. To me, that makes sense: both have eyes and ears for life beyond the dramatic or the poignant.

Grand Canyon (1991)

Excavating my library of VHS:s, I find many movies that I've seen a long time ago that I remember having liked, but the only thing I can actually recall is some sort of atmosphere. What I remember about Grand Canyon is its slow pace and depiction of the urban jungle where almost any situation can take a dangerous turn. Re-watching it, this proved to be a quite apt description. What I didn't remember is the many clichés, the horrible music and a "social" agenda that is so rediculously over-stated that this film is, at times, rather embarrassing to watch. There are, however, some nice scenes, too. In one of them, we see a father teaching his son to drive a car. The boy is not really focusing on the driving. He talks to his father about family problems. The father is nervous. They end up in a messy traffic hub. The boy is supposed to make a left turn. Red light. We see the boy's impatience and the anxious expression on his father's face. It's time to press the speed pedal. But another car swooshes by and the boy reacts too slowly. A severe car accident is avoided in the last second. In this scene, the director, Lawrence Kasdan, makes the best of the actors and the surrounding. The scene is simple, but it works. It is not too talky, there's music (I think), but it's discreet. Here, Kasdan has discovered the exact pitch for conveying a sense of, first, foreboding and, later, a real and very concrete sense of fear.

But Mr. Kasdan; if I were you, I would have sued Paul Haggis' (director of Crash) ass. As a matter of fact, Grand Canyon is a thousand times better than Crash. At its best, it really has something to say about urban fear. Which Crash doesn't.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

Having seen only of Pasolini's ... works (which I regret having seen, it was awful) I did not quite know what to expect from The Gospel According to St. Matthew. That the film patiently, without eerie digressions, follows the events & words of the gospel itself makes reviewing no easier. The film's restraint surprised me. I expected Jesus to preach Das Capital, foam dripping out from his mouth, a few Roman sadists lurking around the corner. But it wasn't like that. Yes, the emphasis of Jesus preaching was on social justice, but whether that should be ascribed to the film or the gospel of Matthew I am too unenlightened heathen to say.

The scenes containing preaching were perhaps the least interesting ones, except for one quality. In most films about Jesus, the way the preaching scenes are filmed tend to be very predictable: Jesus in the centre, people standing around him in an orderly, quiet way. Pasolini makes all crowds bustle (true to the spirit of neo-reaolism, perhaps). He works with long shots that capture the movement and disorganization of the crowd. What is quite mesmerizing is that the crowd is never transformed into one entire wobbly, anonymous body. The crowd consists of people, the camera focusing on a group of people, a face, a piece of cloth. The crowd comes to life as something else than a dumb, beastly organism ruled by some demagogue (yes, Pasolini was a marxist, which might be of importance here). One can perceive this pattern throughout the film.

Another very successful element of The Gospel is the use of music. The soundtrack (sensitively mixed so that it is somehow on a par with sounds of people and nature) is a bold mix of African folk music, American blues/gospel, Bach and choir music. The sometimes dramatic pieces of music don't stifle the scenes, they bring out something new in what we see.

Actually, The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a good film. Undoubtedly, also a religious one. I.e.: his is NOT Mel Gibson.

PS: The history on philosophers on film is, I think, not a very extensive one. Here, we see Giorgio Agamben acting as one of the disciples!