Haunted by these images: The Film That Changed My Life

Something happens to us when we try to come to terms with formative experience. Some of us can articulate what constitutes the turning point in our lives. Some slip into reverie. Some are forced to acknowledge that there’s nothing more ineffable than the things that set fire to our imagination. Can something that blows your mind be analyzed? Does the fact that it blows your mind not preclude the inability to do just that? These questions haunt The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark (Chicago Review Press, $18.95). They give you some idea of what works and what doesn’t in this book of transcribed interviews conducted and edited by Robert K. Elder.

Alex Gibney

Some of the selections in The Film That Changed My Life are genuinely surprising, such as Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Pierce on The Godfather, or, most interestingly, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney on Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Gibney tells a nice story about his brief correspondence with Buñuel, and goes some distance toward explaining how he was influenced by Buñuel’s cryptic surrealist techniques while commenting on the intermediary walking scenes in Buñuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: “It’s like finding some random shot as a documentarian, and throwing it in there because it has some kind of power you can’t quite identify.” Elsewhere, The Last Seduction director John Dahl recalls seeing A Clockwork Orange at a drive-in in Billings, Montana. “It was the first time I paid attention to the sets,” he says, which probably tells us something about the cinema of Stanley Kubrick.

Danny Boyle

Many choices however, especially those from directors with a large and familiar body of work, are more predictable—and why wouldn’t they be? And who can blame Peter Bogdanovich if he doesn’t have anything especially fresh to say about Citizen Kane? 8 1/2 changed Henry Jaglom’s vocation from actor to director. Richard Kelly believes that “We get closer to Brazil with each passing week.” Danny Boyle declares Apocalypse Now “a celebration of the destruction as well as a condemnation of its subject matter.” Boyle laments the loss of the sort of quixotic ambitions that could drive a film during Francis Ford Coppola’s salad days. He also claims cinema is fundamentally a medium designed for young men, which I probably tells us something about the cinema of Danny Boyle.

I wondered soemtimes if The Film That Changed My Life mightn’t have been better as a series of magazine pieces. Some of Elder’s choices of interviewees might have seemed less puzzling in that context. (Bill Condon? Brian Hertzlinger?) It also might have forced him to be a more judicious editor. There are numerous repetitions that sound fine in conversation but in print read as mere redundancy. There’s also a lack of spontaneity in some pieces that I can only assume arises from Elder’s insistence on using same questions every time out, whether or not they go anywhere. The best interviews in here are the ones that seem to indulge tangents—that’s when Elder’s subjects, as well as Elder himself, really engage and come to life.

Guy Maddin

I’m happy to report that two of the very best interviews are with Canadians, and I take comfort in knowing that both directors in question discovered the movie that changed their life while channel-surfing late at night for glimpses of accidentally uncensored nudity (something I myself have experienced—is this a Canadian thing?). Had he never seen L’âge d’or, Guy Maddin, a man not adverse to hyperbole, claims that he would have never picked up a camera. “It’s just a love story,” Maddin says, “every bit as surreal as a love story deserves to be.” Atom Egoyan meanwhile is extremely sharp about Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, describing its sculptural qualities, how it emphasized the friction in language and the role of the listener. He also says one thing in particular that nearly sums up the entire book: “We are never more alive, I think, as when we are trying to ascertain our relationship to something which is completely mysterious to us.”

Artists incognito: books by Jean-Claude Carrière and Gabriel García Márquez

Jean-Claude Carrière

I knew Jean-Claude Carrière primarily as the scenarist for films such as The Tin Drum, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Birth, but most especially for his collaborations with Luis Buñuel throughout the final two decades of the great director’s career, during which time the pair co-authored the scripts for Belle de jour, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. The only literary work I’d ever attributed to Carrière was Buñuel’s memoir My Last Sigh—one of my all-time favourite books—which Carrière assembled from transcripts of interviews with Buñuel and no doubt had a large part in shaping. So I was surprised to discover only recently that Carrière, now in his late 70s, has written a novel, and it was no disappointment to realize in just the first few pages of Please, Mr Einstein (Vintage, $21.95), that this novel was very much informed by the dictates of cinema.

“Let’s follow that girl who’s walking down the street…” As he describes his heroine, an attractive, intelligent, and most of all curious young woman who shall remain nameless, Carrière reminds his readers that we will never learn anything about her that can’t be observed through action and dialogue. As in a film, television show or play, or whatever sort of time-based medium, we’re to be swept along, without internal voices to guide us, gathering clues only as they’re presented, ideally without inclination to ponder “subsidiary questions.” I read Please, Mr Einstein quite pleasurably over the course of a single day, so I guess Carrière’s gambit must have worked. I wasn’t very concerned about anything except what was happening in the scenes playing out on the page, which were sufficiently extraordinary to hold one’s attention. Our heroine after all pays a visit to none other than Albert Einstein, and the fact that he’s been dead for over 50 years doesn’t keep their exchange from being lively. The great German physicist always insisted that contradictory facts can be equally true, so why not be both dead and alive, still at work in an office in an unnamed Central European city, with Sir Isaac Newton in the waiting room? (Add an appearance from Liz Taylor or Dante to this anachronistic convergence and you’ve got yourself a new verse of ‘Desolation Row.’)

Mr. Einstein

The conversation between Einstein and his visitor is intellectually playful and only slightly flirtatious, sliding from Tyro Brahe’s attempts to prove the Earth immobile to the secret life of the moustache, from the basics of relativity to lessons gleaned from Shakespeare’s Prospero, from the enduring mysteries of light to the puzzle of dark matter, from the nature of celebrity to the elusive meaning of the word “everything.” Occasionally they exit Einstein’s office through one of a series of doors concealing spectacular surprises, like in an old game show. In the last third or so they discuss Einstein’s complicated culpability for the development of the atom bomb. All the while the allure of science remains infectious. “The universe is irresistible,” Einstein says as he and his visitor gaze upon a field of stars. “It’s seduction itself… The sight of it is a cruel, permanent reminder of how diminutive we are. It crushes us. At the same time, it amplifies us by making us welcome. It opens our eyes and, even more so, our minds.”

Miguel Littín

With Carrière, my familiarity with his films led me to his book, where as in the case of Miguel Littín, a book leads me to wonder why I’ve never even heard of the guy’s movies. Littín had already made a number of features before he fled his home country of Chile in 1973 following the coup that tore apart Salvador Allende’s still young, democratically elected socialist government. Littín returned to Chile in 1985 disguised as a Uruguayan businessman, meeting with an international film crew and covertly gathering material for a documentary about life under dictator Augusto Pinochet. What became of the resulting film I’ve no idea—in his helpful and erudite introduction, even Francisco Goldman claims he’s still never met anyone who’s seen it. No matter, since it could hardly be more fascinating than the book describing the process of making the film, Gabriel García Márquez’s Clandestine in Chile (New York Review Books, $17.95), newly back in print. Coming after a long period of silence for García Márquez, prompted by a somewhat misguided show of solidarity with Chileans living under Pinochet’s reign of terror, the book marks a return and a sort of farewell, since it could be argued that Clandestine in Chile is the last overtly political work in the author’s career, which would henceforth focus on themes of love and desire.

Gabriel García Márquez

However, García Márquez is not the author of this book in any conventional sense. As with his earlier Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Clandestine in Chile is a work of literary reportage, with all of the content ostensibly coming directly from conversations with Littín. Yet Littín’s adventures are such that those familiar with García Márquez could be persuaded that Littín was in fact the author’s invention. Whatever the case, this is the story of a director who perhaps imagined he might become not just an actor but the actual protagonist in his own thriller, only to find the masquerade almost unbearable. It’s a story of genuine guerilla filmmaking, of anguished nostalgia and suppressed identity, with Littín never feeling entirely comfortable with his transformed visage, particularly where grooming was concerned: “My uncles had worn beards and no doubt that increased the allure of beards for me. I had shaved mine off in Mexico a few years before but never managed to get my friends and family, much less myself, to accept my new face. All had the impression of being with an impostor…” Beardlessness renders Littín so distorted that, in what constitutes the book’s climax, his own mother doesn’t even recognize him. Whether this is the product of exaggeration on the part of Littín or García Márquez is impossible to say, but the effect holds: when your homeland has been stripped of its sense of self you really, truly can’t go home again. Or, as Littín himself puts it, “those who stayed behind are also exiles,” and not even the sudden reappearance of their loved ones can stir them from their forced internal hibernation.

After nature: Red Desert on DVD

Red Desert (1964) opens with images of industrial architecture, immense pipes and strange towers seen from some distance in rack focus, rendered as ghostly, uninhabitable monuments, as though our eyes need adjust to these unprecedented apparitions of a new kind of landscape. Our visual lives were already inundated with the products of such places, but Red Desert lingers at the source of these products. The film’s setting changes with each sequence, yet the striking palate modulates only slightly. Collaborating with cinematographer Carlo di Palma, director Michelangelo Antonioni introduced colour into his work with this film, and it’s as though he strove to introduce each one at a time. If Red Desert still arrests us through its use of colour and design alone, it may be because each and every shape and colour is photographed as though only just discovered. Our world has changed, this film tells us, and the change is total.

Guiliana (Monica Vitti) enters this landscape with her son Valerio (Valerio Bartoleschi) in fuzzy green and orange coats, colours so vivid they seem otherworldly here. Giuliana herself seems transported from another, very different place, still reeling from the taxing journey. Who is this woman? She seems well-to-do, vaguely resembles a young Barbara Streisand, yet she approaches a stranger lunching near the site of a strike and pleads with him to buy his already half-eaten sandwich. She then scurries off to consume the sandwich ravenously, and in private. As we get to know and try to make sense of such behaviour, we might surmise that her desire for the sandwich derives from some displaced urge for human contact, yet her need to eat it unseen reveals an inability to follow-through with this puzzling attempt at intimacy. It all seems very peculiar, but here’s the catch: neurotic as she appears, Giuliana is perhaps the most normal person in Red Desert.

Giuliana’s husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) works for the company who erected those spectral chemical plants. Compared to his wife Ugo seems perfectly amiable, socially adept. When he smiles he looks like Steve Buscemi. He expresses concern for Giuliana, who has recently survived an auto accident, yet he seems incapable of dealing with her hysteria. He clumsily attempts to seduce her to no effect. Along comes Corrado (Richard Harris), a fellow industrialist consulting Ugo in his search for workers to take to Patagonia. Corrado is undergoing his own existential crisis and seems drawn to Giuliana. He tells her he keeps moving around, that he feels out of place everywhere he goes. He’s embodied, rather fittingly, by an Irish actor, though he’s meant to be Italian. Does he really relate to her? Or does he simply find her vulnerability appealing, perhaps erotically inviting? He speaks as though trying to comfort her yet too often just sounds condescending and pompous. Among the most fascinating elements in Red Desert is Giuliana’s slow emergence as its most powerful character. She may be paranoid and neurotic, almost childlike in Vitti’s timid, occasionally playful performance, but where Corrado waxes philosophical and romanticizes his search for meaning, it’s Giuliana who genuinely searches, urgently scouring the desert-like world of Red Desert for some place where she won’t feel so hopelessly ungrounded, unmoored as the cargo ships that continually slide into frame, and haunted by the electronic drones that permeate the soundtrack.

Red Desert is a film in which landscape possesses an overwhelming influence on the human psyche (and vice versa). Its images of environmental devastation are not to be taken as lament—they’re far too aesthetically charged, drawing upon the work of contemporaneous painters such as Morandi, Pollock, and Rothko. This wintry post-natural world is in one sense observed objectively, without sentiment. How its landscape effects the characters, or rather, how it’s already effected the characters, most of whom, like Ugo or Valerio, are by now fully assimilated, is the essential subject. Red Desert capitalizes on the sense of modern alienation and bourgeois repression cultivated in Antonioni’s preceding trilogy of L’avventura (60), La notte (61) and L’eclisse (62). This lineage is most apparent in the famous sequence where Giuliana, Ugo, Corrado, and three others partake in a failed orgy in a seaside hut. One of the women tears apart the bright red walls of the hut for firewood—a gesture that might also be a small homage to Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (62), which also satirizes bourgeois manners. Yet this film takes a bold step forward, advancing on Antonioni’s established themes and style, not only in its distinctive audiovisual design, which looks forward to David Lynch’s Eraserhead (76) or the ecologically-themed photography of Edward Burtynsky, amongst many other important works of art, but also in its almost perverse pushing of the boundaries of drama—Red Desert is endlessly fascinating, richly detailed, mysterious, and hypnotic, but it would be misleading to call it in any sense entertaining.

Criterion’s new release of Red Desert on DVD and Blu-ray is itself a strange and beautiful object, designed to highlight the film’s most chilling and engaging images and garnished with supplements that offer plentiful insights into the making and reception of the film while, wisely, never going so far as to pretend there could be anything like a definitive interpretation of its bizarre and enigmatic story, one that still seems to speak to us from some under-explored place that both surrounds us and remains invisible.

Working Knowledge: Král catalogues the quotidian

Petr Král, with Jana Bokova

It was something I’d been meaning to pick up for months, yet Petr Král’s Working Knowledge (Pushkin Press, $16.95) ultimately found me precisely when I most needed it, which was about ten days ago, just as I was settling into this large, half-empty, half-lived-in house in rural Saskatchewan, the semi-abandoned home of a friend, where some arguably misguided notion had prompted me to pass some weeks in solitude. The book was the last thing I bought before leaving Saskatoon, my last chance to soak up city life, and heading farther east. It’s been among the wettest Junes in provincial history, the house cold and damp, the surrounding fields too marshy for strolling, so I’ve spent many of these hours seated at this big wooden table, trying not to let my brain go completely soggy. I needed to try and remain alert to the world, to not retreat completely and morbidly inward, and Král’s eloquent, charming little book, his “strange and beautiful existential encyclopedia of the everyday,” as Milan Kundera describes it in his brief introduction, served to help me keep my focus.

Ranging in length from a few pages to a single sentence, Working Knowledge catalogues dozens of meditations on things known and most commonly taken for granted. Though I can hardly verify this, the translation sometimes strikes me as poor. Thankfully, Král’s is the sort of poetic yet mostly spare writing that can weather an awkward rendering or two. The book opens with ‘Coffee,’ immediately awakening our senses with its “residue of night,” before slipping into ‘The Shirt,’ considering ‘Dawn,’ that “washed-out, ashen period in which all things are reborn into doubt,” assessing the distinct values inherent in two kinds of breakfast, exploring the miniature offerings of self-recognition that lay waiting in every act of shaving, and reminding us to cherish the glaze of sleepy morning stasis: “…we are never closer to a state of grace than on those mornings when we lie in bed, half-awake, allowing ribbons of thought and itinerant dreams to drift idly through our minds. We are as yet no more than pure potential… sending out feelers and drawing them back again, between the shadows and the flares of light which occasionally reach us from between the closed curtains…”

Not all of these writings are so serene. One piece considers the unease raised by retrieving your luggage from the airport’s conveyor belt and wondering where it’s been or who’s been inside of it. Another is a strident defense of the word “cunt.” There are a number of rousing declarations threading through Working Knowledge, which sometimes read as so out of left field as to constitute enigmatic one-liners. “Only visiting mothers truly makes it possible to get to know a foreign city,” he writes at the top of ‘Mothers and Daughters.’ Yet as the book continues Král engages with his topics less as platforms for such pronouncements than as opportunities to ask the reader questions, as in his pages on laughter, where he wonders when did we first truly laugh, or whether true laughter is instinctive or learned. The prose seems cleanest when considering concrete items with a minimal number of words, yet I think the most wonderful passages are the longer ones which, while en route to some other assertion, pause to offer some tantalizing fragment of some other, larger story. These micro-narratives include references to ex-cons from Guyana who build their houses facing the prison as a reminder not to go back, to a mountaineering conductor who takes a catastrophic fall, to Lenin asking Trotsky for a cigarette even though he didn’t smoke, or to Luis Buñuel, who was hard of hearing, spending his final days rising at dawn to listen to the wind in the trees off his Mexico City terrace.

Like Kundera, Král, a poet, essayist and one-time surrealist, is a Czech living in France since fleeing his homeland back in 1968. It’s tempting to attribute his sensitivity to small things to the exile’s condition and its implied nostalgia—after all, there is in Working Knowledge a tribute to Czech Christmas fish soup that’s as brimming with affection as anything else in this book—but I’m fairly confident that Král would have written about such things anywhere and under any circumstance. Though often writing as though of universally shared experience, his perspective is unapologetically specific—male, white, heterosexual, European, art loving, and at times a little old-fashioned in his adoration of women and notions of gender roles—yet it’s this specificity that elevates Working Knowledge to something inspired, bold and funny, and necessarily particular, rather than aphoristic. I’m certain that this book is best read slowly, or even randomly, at one’s whim, but my present conditions compelled me to gobble it up over only a couple of sittings. It’s the sort of thing I read first for pleasure, secondly for work, and, perhaps thirdly, out of a lingering suspicion—or desire—that to live with a little more alertness to quotidian experience might make us better human beings, or at the very least slightly more pierced by the rush of living as it passes us by.

2009: The year in DVD

There were countless great movies released on DVD in 2009, so what follows isn’t “the best” of them so much as the ones that seemed to cry out most urgently for a wider audience, some quite old, some unjustly forgotten, some previously ill-served on video, all of them very much worth your while.

The Whole Shootin’ Match
Gorgeously packaged and generously supplemented, Watchmaker’s release of Eagle Pennell’s lost 1978 debut reminds us how seldom we see resonant stories from the vast America existing between the costal metropolises. Alternately despicable and deeply endearing, old pals Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman—who was sadly murdered in his Austin home earlier this year—are forever stumbling between get-rich-quick schemes and humbling disasters, between bouts of drunken revelry and bursts of terrifying lucidity. Theirs is a rambling, fumbling, comically inspired waltz across Texas.


Husbands
Another chronicle of male friendship by turns appalling and touching, this 1970 feature is among the best of John Cassavetes, the father of modern American independent film. Following the death of their fourth musketeer, Peter Falk, Cassavetes and Ben Gazarra undertake one long, lost, wasted weekend, getting as far as England before they even realize what the hell happened.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Criterion’s typically deluxe release of Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 ultra-slow-building, devastating debut about three days in the life of a single mother and prostitute is impeccably preserved and encourages hypnotic revisits. Its observance of everyday banalities is so exacting and immersive as to make high drama of the smallest event, and to invite compassion and repulsion in equal measure. It also makes you wonder if Delphine Seyrig isn’t one of the great unheralded actresses of cinema history.

The Exterminating Angel, Simon of the Desert

Two crowning achievements from Luis Buñuel's prolific and under-appreciated Mexican period, the former (1962) finds Mexico City's snotty elite huddling together inexplicably in a house that they just can't seem to leave, while the latter (65) is an outrageously bizarre biopic about a saint who has to contend with Silvia Pinal's Satanic minx tempting him from his pedestal in the desert. It ends with them trapped in a cabaret where young folks gyrate to a dance called 'Radioactive Flesh.' I'm definitely performing a reenactment this New Year's Eve.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle
When you spend as much time as I do compulsively gazing at the young, handsome, sleepy-eyed face of Robert Mitchum in his many films of the 1940s and 50s, it comes as something of a shock to see him as the palpably world-weary protagonist in Peter Yates’ wonderfully detailed, downbeat, Boston-based crime drama, originally released in 1973 and newly resurrected from oblivion by our dear friends at Criterion. Mitchum’s so damned good here as the titular gunrunner trying to retire, one more shifting point in the film’s wintry geometry of crime and punishment.


The Walking Dead
The diamond hiding in Warner’s otherwise pretty negligible Karloff and Lugosi Horror Classics box, this melancholy tale, released in 1936, of a lonely man framed and sent to chair, only to be resurrected and thus able to exact his revenge, is endowed with far more poetry than its generic premise would have you believe, thanks in part to director Michael Curtiz and in part to Boris Karloff, one the true greats, who makes us believe in a sadness that follows us beyond the grave.


A Matter of Life and Death
The astonishingly beautiful use of Technicolor in Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 masterpiece is only one reason to own this sublime Sony reissue. A fantastical romance perched on the edge of mortality—one sufficiently attuned to the strange workings of the mind as to garner accolades from Oliver Sacks—it finds a British WWII pilot tumbling to earth and miraculously surviving, only to be shot heavenward by his love for an American radio operator. Will the celestial tribunal allow this trans-Atlantic couple to stay together?

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1
The Sniper (1952), The Lineup (58), Murder By Contract (58): none had been on DVD before, and every one of them is a gem, encapsulating much of what was thrilling, fascinating, daring, and deliciously nasty about the final years of the classic noir cycle. Add Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (53) into the mix and you’ve got yourself one of the best noir collections ever released. Your image of genteel 1950s America will never be the same.


Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura
Among the most woefully under-represented of Japanese directors in the West, Shohei Imamura was lovingly devoted to the seedy, the undigested, the vulgar, and the desperate masses living at the bottom of the social totem pole, a rather outrageous way to shape one's career in postwar Japan. This trio from Criterion are perhaps not my absolute favourites, but they're nonetheless crazily entertaining, terrifically perverse, often strangely beautiful tales of sex, murder, crime and obsession.

TIFF '09: "To exist clearly, and to do so without thinking about it..." Two films about beautiful and mysterious women

Okay, beautiful, mysterious, and wearing great shoes!

When Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle Toujours began making the rounds a few years ago it was met with a resurgence of interest in the world’s oldest filmmaker. The homage, or rather sequel, to Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour, in which Michel Piccoli revisits his role as Henri Husson, worked as an introduction to Oliveira’s work for an uninitiated generation of filmgoers. But its investment in its source material was at times as slight, or even superficial, as it was basically lovely. The appearance of his latest film, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, as well as the Cinematheque Ontario’s upcoming Oliveira program is an encouraging sign that Belle Toujours wasn’t a mere one-off in terms of the 100-year-old auteur’s circulation. This new work, while featuring numerous similarities to Belle—including a framing device that might even be a very subtle homage to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire—is arguably more indicative of the particularity and breadth of Oliveira’s aesthetic and thematic concerns. It’s also an absolute delight.


A young man begins to recount a tale of personal tumult to a woman on a train, who incidentally may be blind, given that she always seems to be staring blankly off to the side of the young man’s face. He speaks of a beautiful young woman whose figure he first found fondling a flamboyant oriental fan in the upstairs window across the street from his office. There is a seduction, buoyed by a harpist and the recitation of a poem by Pessoa. Somehow the girl responds and encourages him while remaining always distant and mysterious. The young man falls in love, but his uncle and employer won’t give their marriage this blessing, and the young man is without savings of his own. As the story unfolds with Oliveira’s characteristic economy, a great deal of pleasure is to be taken in the simple act of looking, through windows and doorways, through mirrors, at grand vistas of the city under sunlight and shadow. But Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl distrusts appearances just as it celebrates the undeniable pleasure appearances give. The eccentricities turn out to be perilous. And perhaps the woman on the train makes an ideal audience for the young man’s tale, since, if she is blind, she’s less likely to be seduced by the visible.


Equally mysterious to those around her, virtually all of whom adore her, is the titular character of Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, though the film makes her somewhat less so for those of us privy to Pippa’s inner world. Swaying between the present and the past, Miller, adapting her own novel, displays her almost singular gift for crafting portraits of women with secrets, with a quiet yet tremendous capacity for change and adventure, and who can act impulsively, even audaciously or cruelly, without apologies.


The present-tense Pippa is brilliantly portrayed by Robin Wright Penn, who does a remarkable job of containing herself around others while also exposing fragments of her true self for the camera alone. The way director and star collaborate here is a wonder in itself, as is the performance Miller gets out of the top-of-his-game Alan Arkin, here playing Pippa’s much older husband. But the film still suffers somewhat from the neglect of supporting characters—Winona Ryder’s part is a comic shambles, Maria Bello’s is gravely overwrought—and a glib finale that promises freedom without complication. It reaffirms that I’ll happily watch anything Miller does, but I’m still holding out for something from her that takes this refreshing approach to character and pushes it to its fullest extent. Watch for an odd little cameo from Princeton philosopher Cornell West.

Three fiery, famous lives, under-examined, overcooked, burnt to a crisp: Little Ashes

In 1933, while visiting Buenos Aires, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca gave a lecture on the aesthetic properties of duende, a force that can be located in certain works of art or folkloric traditions, such as flamenco, yet resists clean, orderly explanation. It has something to do with the abyss, with a deeper sadness that speaks from experience, with a strangeness that shakes loose unexamined fragments from the firmament of the unconscious, with an inescapable connection to one’s roots, with a sensuality never entirely distanced from the diabolical, with earthiness and desire and death. (Trying to define duende can be a bit like trying to define film noir; sometimes it’s simply whatever makes something otherwise routine, such as a crime drama, or a poem mediating on loss, into something rich, chilling, and mysterious in ways that extend far beyond the solving of a mystery.) Little Ashes is a movie about García Lorca as his formative youthful encounters with filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dalí, and, let me tell you, does it ever not have even a drop of duende.

Though made, perhaps, with commendable intentions, Little Ashes, written by Philippa Goslett and directed by Paul Morrison (Solomon and Gaenor), effectively takes three of the 20th century’s more incendiary artists and tames their shared youthful reveries into something grotesquely bland and safe, an assembly of biographical conjecture in which the term “outrageous” is most firmly kept within quotation marks, and annoying affection, rather than artistic revelation, is celebrated. It’s like the worst thing Christopher Hampton never wrote. More earnest and awkwardly acted even than the Hampton-scripted Arthur Rimbaud-Paul Verlaine movie Total Eclipse. It goes to show that there’s nothing, not surrealism nor sadism, not dada nor death metal, that cannot be appropriated and converted into stuffy museum pieces, sordid soap opera, or soul-deadening muzak. My recoil exacerbated by the fact that at least one of the three figures in Little Ashes is among the artists whose work I treasure more than any other, I’m fighting the temptation to call the movie an abomination, because that word just sounds a little too exciting to be applied to what’s found here.

It starts in 1922, when the soon-to-be dark luminaries García Lorca (Javier Beltrán), Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) and Dalí (Robert Pattinson) converge at university in Madrid. Much ostensibly iconoclastic wankerspeak about revising the values of art is tossed about in mealy-mouthed Castellano accents, since, unfortunately, the proceedings are largely to be spoken in English by one Spaniard and two Brits. Dalí upsets the status quo with his foppish ruffled shirts, giddy non sequiturs (“I would love an enema!”), and advanced talents, arousing the admiration of Buñuel and the erotic desire of García Lorca, whose quiet homosexual longings find an eager receptacle in Dalí’s sexual ambivalence and overriding urge to be adored.

The development of artistic vision in Little Ashes is largely reduced to shallow manifesto spouting. To be fair, the story’s emphasis is meant to be on the peculiar and fragile dynamic of the relationships, yet here too, despite a valiant and genuinely sexy supporting turn from Marina Gatell as the sole woman to intrude on this very male milieu, we’re asked to be satisfied with boilerplate conflicts that depend on our acceptance that Lorca was a sensitive saint cursed by an oppressive culture, Buñuel a belligerent homophobic thug with, most astonishingly, no sense of humour, and Dalí a poncy, profoundly pretentious idiot. Now, I’m not trying to suggest that Dalí wasn’t, too a depressingly large extent, a poncy, profoundly pretentious idiot, since there’s an awful lot of evidence to support this characterization. But it is the most essential business of biopics to transcend the superficial depiction of their subjects, because otherwise what’s the point? I doubt that Little Ashes would have ever got any sort of theatrical release at all were it not for Twilight star Pattinson’s sudden stardom, but it surely won’t do his career any favours to be found hamming it up wincingly, playing a public figure all too large for life to begin with. Of the central trio only Beltrán can muster up any emotional integrity from the material, so Lorca, at least, might not be rolling in his grave.

Dalí, José Moreno Villa, Buñuel, García Lorca, José Rubio Sacristán

Death of a Cyclist: screening the delicate balance between pure polemic and pure pleasure

It opens on a stretch of country road so gray, stark and forsaken as to feel pulled from a dream—even the two or three trees look cold and lonely. The image of this landscape stays fixed as the cyclist passes us by, exiting the frame not long before the car enters it, the collision between the two happening off-screen in the eerie, phantasmagoric interim. The car stops and the couple within exits to survey the damage. The man, Juan (Alberto Closas), surmises that he cyclist is dying—all we can see in the framing is the still-spinning wheel. The woman, Maria (Lucia Bosé), urges the man to leave. They drive away, abandoning the cyclist, and the titular event of Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (1955), newly released by the Criterion Collection, has transpired with bracing efficiency.

Accompanied by a score of Herrmannesque portent, a tone of an unmistakably noir melodrama has been set. Yet right there within this brooding atmosphere lies the first of numerous overt, pointed allusions to a troubling class disparity: a humble-looking man on a bike is knocked down by a well-dressed couple in a sleek automobile; the couple, we learn immediately after, are having an affair, and are more concerned with maintaining their secrecy—and with it their comfortable bourgeois existence—than with the welfare of the victim of their negligence.

With each subsequent scene come further layers of social critique: the insularity and nepotism that allows Juan to hold an enviable position at a university; the appearance of a nefarious art critic, a self-described “good for nothing” who lurks in elevated social circles sniffing out opportunities for blackmail with an ingratiating smile (there is the sense that the art critic’s vocation is itself deemed a product of bourgeois decadence); the fact that Juan looks conspicuously similar to Miguel, Maria’s wealthy husband, implying that her extramarital activities are so automated that she doesn’t even require a lover that embodies a genuine variation of her husband. The accumulative effect, made complete by the sudden development of Juan’s class-consciousness, spurred by guilt over the accident, is a depiction of a Spain well-settled into Franco’s triumph, sinking into its own turgid morass of Fascist reactionism.

If Death of Cyclist reads as schematic, that’s because it is, and the supplementary texts in Criterion’s package, including one from Bardem himself, emphasize the director’s schema all the more. Bardem had publicly declared the Spanish cinema as “politically ineffective, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically nonexistent, industrially crippled,” and Marsha Kinder’s essay ‘Creating a Modern Spanish Cinema’ shows in great detail how Death of a Cyclist was designed as the antidote, a work that would subversively exploit the trappings of Hollywood thrillers as a way to synthesize and heighten Bardem’s polemical call to arms, its true stylistic genre being that of neorealism.

The problem with this sort of reading is that is renders the movie as an airless manifesto in which the artist only reluctantly lowers himself to entertaining us. It also does a great discredit to Hollywood—American film noir, for all its compromises, was already a great source of social criticism, frequently pulling back the curtain of American prosperity to reveal the corruption at the heart of the capitalist impulse, and the typical noir already possessed many of the same innovations as neorealism, such as its use of location shooting. Death of a Cyclist arrived right at the climax of the original noir cycle, the same year of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Maria, its femme fatale, even attempts to secure her social standing using the same shocking method as Margo in the superb poverty row noir Decoy (46).

Regardless of Bardem’s personal aspirations, focusing all one’s attention on its political promptings can make Death of a Cyclist feel somewhat academic, while the best compliment one can give it is to in fact call it a very elegant, highly effective, often fascinating noir. The film moves superbly, the brisk pacing enhanced by the consistent use of shock cuts, those transitions where one image weirdly matches another in an entirely different scene, as though the storytelling itself infuses disparate events with some creepy synchronicity; exposition is handled with tremendous economy; and there’s a bizarre, fascinating morbidity to the way the accident influences the love affair, which reaches its natural erotic climax in a spray of blood and mechanical impact, acting as a subtle precursor to the bizarre equations of David Cronenberg’s Crash (96).

Death of a Cyclist in the end did not signal much of a revolution in Spanish cinema—not even Luis Buñuel’s return to Spain to make the deliriously perverse Viridiana (60) could manage that. Sweeping changes wouldn’t arrive until the 70s while Franco was either in decline, dying or dead. But Bardem’s film can be admired greatly for the way it gives us a portrait of his country in a period of deep repression and stagnancy, and delivering this portrait in the shape of a thriller sculpted from desire, coincidence, small dreams and the never quite squashed undercurrent of social unrest.

Some thoughts on Jimmy Stewart, perverts, the mysteries of arm acting, and what, should it need repeating, is still one of the all time greats

The name of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel upon which Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was based is D’entre les morts. As splendid as Hitchcock’s title was, an accurate description of the condition which afflicts both the film’s protagonist and its unsuspecting audience, Boileau and Narcejac’s evoking of the charnel house with the best-whispered words From Among the Dead so exquisitely capture the tone of what must be one of the most genuinely morbid movies ever to come out of Hollywood.

Curiously, Vertigo is also arguably among the best movies ever made, period, its goulishness absolutely matched by a sublime level of craftsmanship on display. From Saul Bass’ incisive opening credit sequence, text slashing across a looming eye like some sly wink to Buñuel's surgery in Un chien andalou (29), through the desperate, white knuckled roof-jumping prelude, through the unfolding of the haunted attraction of acrophobic detective ‘Scottie’ Ferguson (James Stewart) to doomed beauty Madeline Elster (Kim Novak) and the helpless, headlong tumble into psychological and moral collapse that follows, Hitchcock and company place us under a long, fevered trance, incited by Robert Burks’ pulsating Technicolor photography and guided by Bernard Hermann’s score, a thrilling, complex work of art in its own right, punctuated by those tremendous foghorn blasts from the netherworld.

This Sunday, the kind folks at Edmonton's Metro Cinema will screen Vertigo along with Hitchcock’s other most revered collaboration with Stewart, Rear Window (54), a movie that when placed in virtually any other double feature would be considered the residing masterpiece. A murder mystery involving a wheelchair-bound photographer spying on his neighbours, it is in fact more fun than Vertigo while still playfully incorporating similarly obscure impulses into its narrative, this time casting Stewart as a voyeur rather than a necrophile.

For all the praise rightfully heaped on both of these films, it’s often been suggested that Stewart was a poor choice for such shadowy, morose material. This proposal has been articulated most recently by Devin McKinney in the current issue of The Believer, where he argues that Henry Fonda should have played Scottie, for a variety of reasons both attributed to his talents and his tragic personal life. Yet watching his performances you get the sense that Hitchcock found something irresistibly delicious in subverting Stewart’s iconic wholesomeness and peculiarly American optimism into a weary façade disguising a catalogue of repressed perversions. Indeed, there are moments in Vertigo where Stewart's relative blankness of expression appears to me not as an actor's resignation to material beyond his abilities, but as a sort of mask, a defense against a mounting inner horror. Whether or not this was Stewart's intention finally matters little -the effect is striking, even with repeated viewing.

(Admittedly, while his face gives me no problems, I have always wondered about the weird way Stewart's arms always seem to be dangling limply in Vertigo, always functioning primarily from the elbow down. There should be a special study done on the arm acting of American movie stars, and it should begin by analyzing the bizarre poses Bogart holds every time he gets up in The Petrified Forest (33). He holds his arms stiffly, elbows-out, like he's in traction or something. Don't get me wrong, I adore Bogey in the film, but really, what the hell is with that?)

Likewise, Novak is admittedly not of the same elevated stature of many of Hitchcock’s stars. Yet (and I say this with, you know, respect) the whiff of trashiness that lingers around her persona, especially -and purposefully- apparent in Vertigo’s second half, is so utterly perfect for conveying the banal horror inherent in the story, the pathos of Scottie's need to project his fantasy upon her, that I can’t imagine anyone else in the role, especially the lovely and elegant Grace Kelly, Stewart’s love interest in Rear Window.

When regarding films as rich and obsessed over as these, film-lovers can of course debate the balance of merits, deficiencies and accidents endlessly. What’s absolutely essential is that you see these films, especially on the big screen, where the spell they cast takes full effect. Don’t miss your chance.