Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

For the most part I no longer follow world cinema. I assume that it is a moribund art, both because of the rise of new technologies, and in consequence of the highly globalized system of financing, which ensures that any film that comes out of an under-heard-from part of the world will invariably have the imprimatur of the film boards of two or three developed nations, each of which have long since adopted the film stocks and the conventions of what we still call 'Hollywood'. If I have any gaps in my knowledge of world cinema, and any time at all to fill them in, I always prioritize films made prior to 1980, and whose canonical or at least novelty status is more or less solidified.

One of the few exceptions to this general rule is the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who made his first full-length film in 1995, and who conceives of his own film-making, against the spirit of the age, as an attempt to transmit a distinct aesthetic vision (another is the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose 2004 Tropical Malady I hope I'll have a chance to discuss here soon). I first saw Ceylan's Uzak [Distant] in Istanbul in 2003. It concerns an urban, educated man, divorced and lonely, whose peasant cousin comes to stay with him in the city in order to look for work. That is pretty much the entire story, though it says next to nothing about the film. Uzak, like its successor, the 2006 Iklimler [Climates], is primarily about the weather, or rather about the indifference of the cycles of nature to the futile efforts human beings make to claw their way out of misery and loneliness.

Art and religion figure in Ceylan's world, but only in the background. For me the most striking scene in any of his films occurs in Uzak, when the cousin of refined tastes forces his relative to sit with him in the living room and to watch Tarkovsky's Stalker. When the yokel finally gives up and goes off to bed, the aesthete immediately gets up and switches from cinéma d'auteur to porn. Occasionally people go to mosques and ruins, but only to take pictures, that is, to make art they no longer believe in, or simply to wait outside while someone else goes in to do his business.

Last night I finally saw Ceylan's Üç maymun [Three Monkeys] of 2008. I could not find any excerpts from the film itself online. The trailer does not really represent it all that faithfully, as it comes across looking rather more like one of those Japanese horror films I've never seen, and less like a faithful psychological portrait of desperate people (with only the slightest, and ever-so-interpetrable trace of supernatural intervention). The film is visually the most striking of the three I've seen, though perhaps occasionally Gökhan Tiryaki's cinematography crosses over into an unsatisfying hyperrealism in its compositions of landscape, the sky, and the Bosphorus.

 

Unlike the other films, Üç maymun seems preoccupied with the question of Turkishness, and the passions that are inflamed and that lead to domestic violence and to murder, one senses, could all have been easily avoided if the culture were just a little less possessive of its women. The husband has a moustache and a barrel-build that radiate patriarchal dominion, and the teenage son's feeble attempt, over the course of the film, to emulate his father's facial hair signals, to me anyway, the inescapable, eternal return of the patterns of traditional culture across generations.

One thing that is remarkable is how much the violent sex between upper-class lovers in Iklimler (I have in mind the scene with the chick pea) appears, now, as a sort of study for the violent non-sex between working-class husband and wife in Üç maymun. However context-specific Ceylan's focus is in the latest film, I mean, he seems to see the suffering in it mostly as one instance of a generally desperate human predicament. Chekhov comes to mind (I'm sure he does for Ceylan, too), but in Ceylan there does not seem to be much interest in tracing back the blame for human misery to various social and political injustices. Members of the upper class are empty shells of human beings, but nature wouldn't care if they weren't. Üç maymun ends with a thunderstorm, just like Uzak ended with waves hitting the coast: not as a mirror or an echo of human events, but as a reminder of their littleness. 

[Sunday Cinema, #14]

Busby Berkeley, “By a Waterfall” (1933)

In the past I’ve made light of Busby Berkeley’s films. Without ever having watched them, I knew they were filled with clichés about 'dames'; I knew Berkeley himself lived out his days in Palm Springs, which to me meant golf, which in turn, to me, was wholly incompatible with artistic genius; I knew, finally, that his choreography was parodied by Mel Brooks in the Spanish-Inquisition scene in History of the World, and being an object of Brooksian parody, I passively assumed, could only mean that there was nothing to earnestly admire in the source material. How wrong I was.

Berkeley's choreography is best known for its complex architecture, rather than for its 'moves'. He was more an architect than a choreographer, in fact, and what he achieves in the end cannot really be called 'dance' at all. The raw material he works with are women's bodies, and his oeuvre shows a singular obsession with turning these women into geometrical patterns. Once this aim of his work is grasped, it is hard to think of it as light entertainment. I don't know enough about him to say what was driving this obsession, but I can't help but be reminded of the well-known aim of 18th-century French gardening: contrôle totale du monde végétal. Replace the vegetal with the feminine and you have a fairly good summary of Busby Berkeley's art. 

Berkeley's architectural choreography is made possible through the intervention of a third art --cinema--, and the choreographed scenes, taken apart, suggest to me a possibility for the history of cinema that largely died out with Dziga Vertov and only lived on on the avant-garde margins in the work of such film-makers as Stan Brakhage: namely, cinema as principally a visual rather than a narrative art, whose objective is to capture transient patterns in the world. There is nothing more transient or unstable than a geometrical assemblage of women, but Berkeley understands how to use film in order to effect an incongruous, indeed impossible, transformation, and to make it, in a sense, permanent: he freezes these unstable moments in time during which organic bodies are reduced to simple and regular shapes.

If you are made uncomfortable by the misogynistic implications of Berkeley's project, it will be enough to describe it as issuing from a general biophobia, already well diagnosed in Kant's Critique of Judgment, and arguably, before him, in the aesthetics of Shaftesbury, which understands art as the managed and finite reaction to the revolting complexity of nature. Geometrizing the organic is obviously the most severe sort of imposition of order, yet again, it is film more than choreography that makes it possible: if performed on a stage or on a football field, a pyramid of girls' bodies will appear merely as impressive acrobatics. But on film the stunts become real sculptures.

The most stunning scene choreographed by Busby Berkeley is surely “By a Waterfall,” from Lloyd Bacon's Footlight Parade of 1933. It adds a further complexity to the choreographer's ordering impulse by moving back and forth between the geometrical and the biomorphic. We see fleeting likenesses of spermatozoa and digestive peristalsis, but in the end we are always returned back to perfect Berkeleyan order. (Note: the real show begins at around 5'17'' in this clip. The initial scene with the couple lounging by the waterfall, I take it, is just the pretextual schlock in which Berkeley had to trade in order to pursue his art; the real thing, as becomes evident at the end, is the man's dream.)

[Sunday Cinema, #13]

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Bruno S., 1932-2010

"Denn der Bruno geht in die Freiheit."

From Werner Herzog's Stroszek (1977)

Sunday Cinema, #11

Jean Rouch, Les maîtres fous (1955)

In this groundbreaking work of ethnographic documentary (also characterized as 'ethnofiction'), Rouch portrays an elaborate ritual staged by members of the Hauka religious movement in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). In the ritual, the participants become possessed by the spirits of a variety of personae from the British colonial administration of the Gold Coast (the 'governor general', the 'guard corporal', etc.), and act out a sort of distorted mirror-image version of colonial power, in which the administrators are no longer human functionaries, but crazed and otherworldly demons. The film was of course violently condemned by both the colonialists, who did not like to be mocked, and by the colonized, who did not like being exoticized. Even if much of the interpretation Rouch imposes on the ritual is also a distortion, I suspect in broad outline it is correct: the Hauka movement really did respond to colonial power by transforming its apparatus into otherworldly forces that could then be channeled and to some extent contained through ritual. I think this is a very creative response.

Sunday Cinema, #10

Henri-Georges Clouzot, L'enfer (1964, unfinished)

This looks more promising, as a start, than the version of L'enfer eventually completed in 1994 by Claude Chabrol. Not being European, I was graciously spared the Paris Match treatment of Romy Schneider's life and death, so I do not see her as the larger-than-life Princess Grace/Diana persona that the histories tell me she was, and I honestly do not have any strong response, positive or negative, to her physiognomy or her screen presence. But I like Clouzot's effects and his choice of music, and I find it amusing to think that by 1964 he had been thoroughly sidelined by the Nouvelle Vague. The look here is certainly not as jumpy as the opening credits of Le mépris from a year before, but a director does not have to be jumpy in order to properly exalt a woman's beauty, and it seems to me that Clouzot does a better job of exalting Schneider than Godard did with Brigitte Bardot: the New Waver filmed the starlet's ass, yes, la vraie chose, but you get the sense that he personally could not have cared less about it. All that pseudo-Maoism and deconstruction and cut-uppery, I mean to say, had to sideline eros for supposedly higher ends, and it's not our fault if some decades later the New Wave looks old, while the old lechers still seem to have been pursuing a timeless aesthetic goal.

For some earlier, over-the-top, love-and-death eroticism, supervening upon some fairly standard (and, in Clouzot's case, disingenuous) anti-Nazi mythmaking, here's the final scene of Clouzot's 1949 Manon:

Sunday Cinema, #9

Werner Herzog, Stroszek (1977)

In isolation, this scene, the very final one in a very long movie, works simply as a clever music video. But when seen at the end of Stroszek's desperate journey with his prostitute girlfriend and his elderly Mesmerist neighbor from Berlin to Wisconsin, and ultimately up a ski lift on an Indian reservation with a shotgun, the ending works as a sort of microcosmic summary of everything that has gone before. Stroszek isn't even a trained animal (as the rabbit and the duck are, minimally): like a dancing chicken, he is made to do his tricks by external force.

Bruno S., the actor who plays Stroszek, is a mentally impaired survivor of severe child abuse in Nazi mental institutions. Until as recently as 2008, he continued to play his accordion in Berlin restaurants at no charge, performing standards from the era of the Three-Penny Opera. I am no great fan of Herzog's manipulations, of his hardline Schopenhauerianism, his awkward machismo (see Little Dieter Needs to Fly), or his memorialization of idiots (see Timothy Treadwell), but watching Bruno S. one wonders why directors ever bother with professional actors. The world is full of people (just as it is full of donkeys), and yet to make movies one has to go to great lengths to simulate people. Why?

Sunday Cinema, #8

Robert Bresson, Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

Scenes from the Gospels, as enacted by a donkey, in this film from my favorite Christian atheist, Robert Bresson. Next to Pasolini's Il vangelo secondo Matteo, it is likely one of the greatest works of Christian atheist art from the 20th century. (When will this category finally be recognized?)

The opening sequence depicts Balthazar's adoption and incorporation into the family of Marie, played by Anne Wiazemsky, the trajectory of whose life Balthazar's own is supposed to mirror. However much I enjoy watching Anne Wiazemsky, she seems to me a supporting actress in this film: it is not that her life bears an interesting parallel to the life of a mere brute, but that reality just is the brute's life, and human life, with all of the supposedly uniquely human trials and growth it involves, is somehow only an epiphenomenon of that reality. I've left her out of my selection of clips altogether.

Here is the opening sequence. The music is Schubert's piano sonata D. 959.

What is so striking to me already with the young Balthazar, but even more so with the adult donkey that has been turned into a beast of burden, is how marvellously convincing the acting is. That donkey sure is good at playing a donkey, I feel like saying. But of course it's Bresson who ensures that the donkey plays more than a donkey. It plays for all humanity, which, it turns out, can include asinity, if one is perceptive enough, or cares to notice. What is so confounding and miraculous about the final scene of the film is just how easily Balthazar the donkey takes the place of Jesus Christ, sacrificed for human idiocy, attended to the very end by a (literal) flock of sheep exhibiting as much solicitude and reverence as the ovine race knows. The shift to a one-time-for-all human sacrifice was supposed to be an advance in the history of religion over the periodic animal sacrifices of the pagans, but Bresson somehow manages to pack as much theology into that dying donkey as any anthropocentric depiction of the cosmic order, and of the place of mortal beings in it, ever had.

Here is the final scene:

Sunday Cinema, #7

Guy Maddin, The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

Siam faces Mexico in a competition, hosted in Depression-era Winnipeg by the beer-heiress Isabella Rossellini, to determine which nation has the saddest music in the world.

Guy Maddin is a national treasure.

Sunday Cinema, #6

Sergei Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible, Part 2 (completed in 1946, first screened in 1958; score by Sergei Prokofiev)

It's well-known that Eisenstein was a great admirer of Walt Disney. Here, though, one sees clear echoes of not just Fantasia, which had come out in 1940, but also Busby Berkeley's terpsichorean delirium in musicals such as the 1934 Dames; and, in the other direction, one sees anticipations of everything from Fellini's Satyricon and Sergei Paradjanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors to, e.g., Hedwig and the Angry Inch. (I also see a bit of the 'Spanish Inquisition' segment from Mel Brooks's History of the World, Part I, but that's probably just me.) If you think you couldn't possibly be watching a Stalinist propaganda film that features a supremely campy, unmistakably gay musical number, it is best to just trust your senses.

While Paradjanov would later spend several years in prison for 'immorality', Eisenstein's own, shall we say, non-partisan sexuality would only get him in trouble when trying to enter the US from Mexico, where he had just completed filming of Que viva México! in 1931, and where he had passed the time by filling several notebooks with erotic sketches. The Soviet authorities responsible for Eisenstein's late-life marginalization did not share the concerns of the morals police at Laredo, but were put off only by the decadent turn his artistic output took, a turn that he himself would have denounced in his early Proletkult days. Stalin had stood behind the production of the first part, which was released in 1943, and liked the obvious parallels between himself and the iron-willed Tsar. But Part 2 showed Ivan in a far too paranoid light: in this segment, he has got his would-be successor --the soft and oblivious Vladimir-- drunk, and tricked him into confessing an assassination plot. 

It is shot at the Mosfilm Studio, evacuated to Kazakhstan during the German siege, on Agfa color film that was, Jonathan Hoberman reports, captured from the Germans. It is stylized to the point of cartoonishness, and more Hollywood than Hollywood. At the heart of the Proletkult movement was the idea that the proletariat could will into being its own art, entirely unconnected to any bourgeois traditions. This idea was denounced by many, including Trotsky, as a deviation, and as no less plausible, or necessary, than the destruction of the railways built in pre-revolutionary times. Part 2 of Ivan the Terrible is the ultimate rejection of the idea. (Let me add that I would take it over Battleship Potemkin any day.)

Sunday Cinema, #5

Arnold Fanck, Der heilige Berg (1926)

One of the most important questions about film is, I think, the genetic one: what were people doing before film technology was available that made cinema develop the way it did once the technology was there? What, that is, are cinema's ancestor arts? Some of the usual candidates are photography, theater, painting, and literature. Which of these seems most in evidence depends a great deal, however, on what sort of early film is in question. In the UFA Studio's many Bergfilme, a more or less forgotten genre in which the protagonists predictably ascend an icy precipice and are thereby transformed in some way, the 19th-century precedent is plainly German Romantic Idealism, usually written in the form of philosophical prose essays, while also spilling out into painting and poetry. This scene from Fanck's Holy Mountain, with a young Leni Riefenstahl dancing like a nymph beside the ocean, is explicitly labelled through intertitles (missing here) as "a visual poem, with scenes from nature." Caspar David Friedrich and Friedrich Hölderlin loom large in the background; Madame Bovary's oft-cited "cinematic" realism avant la lettre certainly does not.

Sunday Cinema, #4

Denys Arcand, Le déclin de l'empire américain (1986)

Simply revolting. I remember watching this, the Québécois director's best-known film, shortly before moving to Montreal in the summer of 2003. I was aghast, and nearly backed out of the deal, so put off was I by these sixties-generation academic boobs who, having themselves failed to amount to anything much by the eighties, determined that supposed commitments of any sort, to Maoism or to love, could only ever be pretexts for the pursuit of individual pleasure; and by the wizened bourgeoises, working on their fitness in full Jane Fonda attire while trading 18th-century stereotypes about the sexuality of various species of foreign men. These are some naughty grown-ups alright, but not at all in that compelling Philip Rothian way that cuts to the core of the deep trauma that is the condition of possibility of a human life and that drives a person to insane extremes in the vain hope of curing it. These adults are just frivolous, and any theme that would have the potential for depth in another auteur's hands shifts at once to their level. I conclude only hesitantly and unbelievingly that Arcand sought to present their story not in order to lampoon them, but rather to hold them up as exemplars of some sort of authenticity in a world that has lost all sense. To my great relief, they are of a type I have yet to encounter in reality, in Québec or elsewhere.

Sunday Cinema, #3

Mikhail Kalatazov, Soy Cuba (Я Куба) (1964) This film is certainly the only example I can come up with of a hybrid between tropical exoticism and Soviet agitprop. Apparently the Soviet censors judged that Kalatazov had depicted the Batista-era decadence of Havana with a bit too much sweet nostalgia, and so the film languished in obscurity until it was resurrected in the mid-1990s thanks to the apolitical cinephilia of some prominent American directors. What I like most is the blend of classical propaganda elements with appreciation for all those things, such as nightclubs, that do not fit easily into any political message or other. I am assuming, but do not know for sure, that the evil American businsessmen ogling the girls in the club are played by the children of mixed American and Cuban parentage, who found themselves useful to the burgeoning Castro-era film industry as stock American villains. Their acting is so heavy-handed as to briefly occlude any non-propagandistic virtues of the film, but even this contrasts in an interesting way with the class and polish of the musical number.

Sunday Cinema, #2

Andrei Tarkovskii, Andrei Rublev (1969)

How did such a profoundly Christian film --so much more Christian, for that matter, than the smug instructions being handed down simultaneously on US television screens by Billy Graham and other enemies of Soviet godlessness-- get green-lighted by Mosfilm in Khrushchev's USSR?  Watch Andrei Rublev and you'll sense what an irrelevant blip in Russian history godlessness in fact was.



Deeper than this, though, it is not only a Christian film, but an Indo-European film and a pagan film as well: not pagan in any sense that Billy Graham could have understood well enough to oppose, but in a sense that only continues to have any meaning where Christianity remains, as practitioners of Orthodoxy like to describe it, primitive. You will never see animal abuse in a Hollywood production that comes close to what Tarkovskii put the horse through in the scene depicting the Tatar raid of Vladimir (segment #11 on YouTube). You will also never see such an appreciation of the beauty of horses, those Eurasian creatures, as Tarkovskii shows.

Jonathan Hoberman seems to detect the animistic spirit of the film when he cites the horse falling down the stairs as an instance of Tarkovskii's desire to capture the 'undirectable', which I take to be nature itself. Hoberman calls the film a "pre-Soviet theater of cruelty charged with resurgent Slavic mysticism," and stresses the us-them dichotomizing so familiar in the Russian popular imagination. For him the film is "founded on the conflict between austere Christianity and sensual paganism-- whether Slavic or Tatar."  But even Stalin approved the familiar proverb about scratching a Russian and finding a Tatar underneath, and in the scene with the idiot girl running off with her Tatar occupiers Tarkovskii offers a sort of myth of origins for this layered identity.  As for Rublev's encounter with indigenous Slavic pagans in the middle of one of their ritual orgies, he too appears to give in and join them, spending the night with the young witch Marfa.

The final scene (the only one in color) shows, I think, at least two of the layers of spirituality that animate this film (though you must watch it until the end to see this).

Sunday Cinema, #1

From Georges Méliès, L'Éclipse du soleil en pleine lune (1907)

The sequence that begins about three minutes in is unbelievable. Of course, the eclipse as a sexual coupling of the sun and the moon is an ancient trope, but these two seem somehow out of synch. (A friend to whom I showed this clip described the moon as 'a sarcastic catamite'.)  Anyhow Méliès is simply a genius; without him cinema could easily have remained at the stunted level of development of, say, L'arroseur arrosé.