The war against forgetting: Salvador Allende

Patricio Guzmán has devoted much of his career to navigating the foggy history of his native Chile, particularly those few jubilant and turbulent years marked by the unprecedented non-violent ascension of its democratically elected socialist government and that long trail of dark years marked by terror, torture, order and oppression, by ostensible prosperity and cooperation with imperialist foreign powers, that followed. There’s this notion that Chile’s elder populace (those who didn’t, like Guzmán, go into exile), thinned out along its peculiar narrow stem of diverse topography, have constructed their national fog by way of a collective willful amnesia surrounding those aforementioned years. This amnesiac fog is invoked in the very title of Guzmán’s film Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997). I wonder if the process inherent in journeying through this fog, unable to apprehend a view of what’s ahead or behind, hasn’t contributed to that special wandering, uncharted feeling that accompanies some of Guzmán’s finest, most personal films.

This feeling is certainly among the most compelling elements of Guzmán’s Nostalgia For the Light (2010), a masterpiece essay film that traverses the Atacama Desert in search of distant stars and bones of the disappeared. Yet this feeling can even be found in the more conventional documentary Salvador Allende (2004), now available on DVD from Icarus. After repeatedly encircling the Allende enigma, most famously in the three-part, Chris Marker-produced The Battle of Chile (1975-79), Guzmán took this project as an opportunity to take direct aim at Chile’s controversial fallen president, about whom there remains a conspicuous paucity of commentary. Yet there’s nothing especially direct about Salvador Allende. It finds its path as it proceeds.

Guzmán narrates Salvador Allende, emphasizing the first-person approach, while his soft voice can also frequently be heard off-camera posing questions. Guzmán was in his early 30s when Allende came into power (and passed 15 doubtlessly despairing days of detainment in the National Stadium following the coup) and is able to cull a healthy portion of Salvador Allende from his own archive of footage, shot between Allende’s 1970 inauguration and 1973, the year of that other September 11, when US-backed military forces ousted Allende’s government (a day Guzmán hauntingly evokes with repeated images of flames consuming the Palacio de la Moneda following the aerial bombing). Early in the film, Guzmán explains that he wants to get to know the Allende beneath the icon. He travels to Allende’s native Valparaiso, where the city’s former mayor persuasively insists that Allende (who received support from Cuba, but not from the USSR) was neither Marxist nor Leninist but libertarian, having received his first political education from an anarchist Italian shoemaker. But as the film goes along this effort to focus on Allende the man quietly dissipates, replaced by a more straightforward chronicle of Allende’s pre-presidential political career, conveying his charisma and popularity, highlighted by memorable images such as the one of gleeful rural children chasing his departing campaign train.

Later in Salvador Allende Guzmán details Allende’s difficult presidency, his agrarian reforms and nationalization of the mining industry, the hostilities directed at his policies, and his outspoken contempt for US interference and multinational corporations. A notable, revealing interview with former US Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry confirms Nixon’s explicit commands to get rid of Allende by any means necessary. Yet, appropriately for a film about a politician devoted to workers and the poor, Guzmán finds many of his strongest sequences by giving the floor to ordinary Chileans. He documents a lively debate between several former UP militants about whether or not Allende should have defended the government and properly armed the militia. This debate also pries open the thorny question of Allende’s suicide, undertaken just as the army was about to take him prisoner, an event which only compounds the mystery of his life. One could argue that Salvador Allende falls short of its ostensible goal in that Allende is virtually as enigmatic a figure by the film’s end as he was at its start. But the fortitude of this enigma is also, it seems to me, the film’s point. Allende, though revered by Guzmán as he is by millions around the world, is a truly singular, enduringly contentious figure—so singular that very few have made significant attempts to tell his story. The value of Guzmán’s film is that even in its limitations it makes an enormous contribution to a conversation about Allende that needs to be maintained. In Guzmán’s films the personal inevitably merges with the political, and the articulated memories of the filmmaker and his subjects continue to wage a non-violent war against the perils of forgetting.

The long goodbye: pop culture collage + politics + genre deconstruction + divorce = Made in USA

When Paula Nelson wakes in her dormatorial hotel room in some place called Atlantic-Cité she finds at her door a dwarf with high blood pressure who knows her from some shady dealings in their past. Their arrivals here, it would seem, were prompted by the same thing, the suspicious death of one Richard Politzer. But before their relations become unduly friendly Paula beats the dwarf unconscious with a lovely shoe—a blue one, as requested by the dwarf—and the talismanic appearance of his blood becomes Paula’s entrance into an adventure where reality and fiction blur. She soon meets the dwarf’s nephew, a novelist named David Goodis, and his companion, who sings folk songs in the bathroom and whose last name in Mizoguchi. Soon she’ll meet a sinister young man named Donald Siegel and a police inspector named Aldrich. She’ll visit a bar where a very young Marianne Faithful sings ‘As Tears Go By’ a cappella, and a spa where Daisy Kenyon and Ruby Gentry are being paged. As she sinks deeper into mystery she’ll be directed to streets with names like Preminger and Ben Hecht.

If any of this means anything to you, you probably cherish classical Hollywood, the Japanese masters, detective fiction, or the rich cultural palate of the hip 1960s in general. (You’ll also note that the picture is affectionately dedicated to directors Nicolas Ray and Sam Fuller.) The ravenously referential postmodernism of Made in USA (1966) offers a superb example of what once tied Jean-Luc Godard to his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan especially. Though where Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ spun out for nearly 12 minutes on a effervescent wave of irresistible border town melodics and expressive guitar figures, Godard’s long-lost feature is a less inviting, more difficult mélange of imagery, homage and intertext. Made in USA came at the end of a frenetic creative period launched explosively with Breathless (60). Godard had already divorced Anna Karina, and Paula Nelson would be her final role for him. He was becoming increasingly politicized and this would be described as his final attempt at a genre picture. But Made in USA is only a thriller in the most notional sense. So unconcerned with thrills, its shot mainly in front of nondescript walls, and its violence is rendered quite literally as cartoons.

The script was based, though uncredited upon its original release, on Richard Stark’s terse crime novel The Jugger (65). But Godard, never very interested in conventional narrative models at the best of times, giddily changed the gender of its protagonist and took from his source material only the most skeletal framework—though when you think about it Made in USA is only a marginally more liberal adaptation of Stark than the haunted, dreamlike and lyrical Point Blank (67), vaguely based on The Hunter (62). Fact is that the Stark novels featured an antihero from another time, where these films are so very much products of the 1960s. Among the virtues of Godard’s film is its value as an artifact that speaks to the present. The dead Politzer, whose strident political provocations are heard via a cache of tape recordings, was a communist still intensely bitter about recent French colonial misadventures and newly enraged by Vietnam. Godard’s dream of cinema as a progressive art form is conveyed most openly by the unapologetic, sometimes absurd merging of politics and pop culture, revolutionary esprit in creative life being aligned with like struggle in the war of ideas and policy. So in this sense the title of the film is almost a joke, a punk rock robbery where the vestiges of Old Hollywood’s glory days and American iconography are lovingly sewn into a quilt, only to be battered and sullied beyond recognition. It makes for dense viewing at times, but the carefully staged chaos can also be exhilarating.

Watching Made in USA is clearly a different experience when the viewer shares a modicum of Godard’s cultural knowledge base. In Criterion’s terrific new DVD of the film they even provide a video essay that functions as a sort of Coles Notes explaining each of the film’s most important references, as well as another featurette rife with insightful comments and helpful history from Godard biographers Colin McCabe and Richard Brody. Yet, rather surprisingly, the context that McCabe and Brody provide us with deepens our ability to read the film’s emotional undercurrents just as much, if not more, than its intellectual ones. As I watched Made in USA I was struck by how strangely touching certain moments seemed. Strange because so much feels cryptic and cool as can be. Yet Karina’s performance, already very fun and seductive—and so well dressed—is imbued with an elegiac weight, which transmits in one melancholically adoring close-up after another. Politzer, after all, was once Paula’s fiancé, and when she first speaks in the film she’s sleepily recalling the time when she was once “the mirror of his desires,” the virtual embodiment of his dreams. Politzer’s voice, it begs mention, was provided by Godard himself. Paula’s interests in investigating his death are too layered to fully comprehend, but on one very direct level she’s come to say goodbye to him, to meditate on the cause they once shared, and this ostensibly cerebral collage piece leaves us with the impression of having watched something once so ambitious and impassioned slowly fade to black, like the horizon vanishing behind Paula as she’s driven away from that place called Atlantic-Cité.

War, torture, and the limits of control: Man Hunt, Time Limit on DVD

The story was already in circulation, how in 1934 Fritz Lang was summoned to a meeting with Joseph Goebbels where he was offered the position of Führer of the German film industry; how Lang, whose Jewish heritage Goebbels presumably wasn’t aware of, whose ex-wife, screenwriter and actress Thea von Harbou, had already joined the Nazi party, then fled Germany immediately with nothing but the clothes on his back. The story’s so perfectly in keeping with the pursuit narratives Lang favoured. Its likely at least partially apocryphal, but anyway makes a hell of a great set-up for Man Hunt (1941), the thriller Lang made for Fox, newly available on DVD, that opens with Walter Pidgeon lining Hitler up in his sights on the cusp of World War II. Like Powell-Pressburger’s 49th Parallel (41), Man Hunt was a rallying cry for Americans to enter the war, and it was that much more persuasive for being helmed by this visionary Viennese director who had abandoned a dazzling career in the very country he was urging his new homeland to attack.

Based on Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male (39), the film concerns big game hunter Alan Thorndike (Pidgeon), captured by SS guards after being found perched on a cliff near Hitler’s Obersalzberg home with rifle in hand. When Thorndike eventually escapes, Hitler’s Security Commander (George Sanders) relentlessly pursues him as he returns clandestinely to England, determined to get Thorndike’s signature on a statement claiming the British government ordered the assassination. Yet not only was Thorndike not given any such instructions, he wasn’t actually trying to kill Hitler at all. The rifle wasn’t even loaded. A proud sportsman, Thorndike just wanted to know if he could do it. So Man Hunt becomes the story of how one man comes to understand the Nazi threat, takes responsibility, and returns to the hunt with guns now loaded.

There are some distractions, especially with accents. Pidgeon, the Brit who sounds suspiciously Canadian, and Sanders, the German who sounds suspiciously English, actually fair better than Joan Bennett’s thinly veiled London prostitute. She’s the only one to bother attempting an accent appropriate to her character, though her broad Cockney grates like a rusty lawnmower. Fortunately she’s still lovely, sensual and sassy in spite of her character’s poutiness, and has some touching scenes with Pidgeon, who treats her more like a niece that the lover she wants to become. But Lang’s exemplary staging and camerawork is finally the reason to see Man Hunt: his beautifully rendered inserts; his exquisite use of silence and shadow; his subtle motifs, such as Pidgeon’s forest footprints echoed later by marks left on a floor by his feet when dragged out of a Nazi torture chamber; his haunting compositions, such as those involving water and night especially, or the tree-enveloped deep-focus scene that plays out in a single shot with Pidgeon stumbling away from the Nazis who hunt him through the dense Obersalzberg wilderness.

Moving ahead in time to reflect on America’s involvement in Korea and, indirectly, Hollywood’s ensnarement in the red scare, Time Limit (57) is another allegory involving responsibility, torture and the limits of patriotism. It concerns a former POW accused of collaboration with the communists whose refusal to defend himself prompts a conscientious military investigator to look deeper into his case. The title refers both to the pressure placed on the investigator to speed the ostensibly open and shut case along, and to the psychological limits upon which even the most formidable soldier breaks down and becomes malleable to the enemies’ dictates. The film came out during a time when brainwashing was an increasing concern, one that fed directly into the ideological paranoia of the Cold War.

Time Limit was the only film ever directed by character actor Karl Malden, who took on the project at the suggestion of the film’s star and producer Richard Widmark. Malden had by then firmly established himself as one of Hollywood’s most dependable talents, and his reputation is reflected in the pedigree of his collaborators. Besides the inimitable Widmark, who plays the investigator, the film also features excellent turns from Dolores Michaels as a stenographer who manages to be both sexy and smarter than most of her superiors, a very young Rip Torn in his first credited film role, a very vulnerable Richard Basehart as the guilt-ridden POW, and Martin Balsam, who as a desk Sergeant bullying Widmark to court-martial Basehart and get it over with, embodies the virtual flipside of the character he played that same year in 12 Angry Men. Cinematographer Sam Leavitt, who often worked for Otto Preminger, was behind the camera, which shifts seamlessly between the actors, who are the utter focus of Malden’s clean, crisp approach.

MGM’s DVD’s not great. The aspect ratio’s been reformatted and there isn’t even a menu. But the transfer looks sharp enough and the film itself is sleek and engrossing. It also speaks very much to this mentality that’s loomed over us these last several years, one that says treason is so heinous a crime that mere accusations equal culpability, while ignoring the fact that love of God and country is not itself enough to withstand the frailties of our minds when driven to their outermost limits.

Red harvest: Metro Cinema collectivizes the films of Miklós Janscó

With their flamboyant adoption and advancements on some of the most modernist formal tropes of the era, the 60s films of Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Janscó have often come up against accusations of being more concerned with geometries than geopolitics, of being triumphs of design over directive. You could argue that their ostensibly socialist ideology—Janscó joined the Communist party in 1945 and would eventually work under the auspices of the Soviet film industry—was compromised by techniques and aesthetics inspired by the decadent West as celebrated in the Italian, French and American cinemas. For those inclined to read every artistic choice as a political statement—a habit once quite fashionable, lest we forget—Janscó’s work exhibited a troubling schism of form and content.

But from the perspective of one not even born when Janscó’s most renown films came out, only vaguely familiar with the history they invoke, and open to whatever sort of reading, Janscó’s mise en scène—the audaciously long takes and fluid camerawork; the casts of characters whose allegiances are so often impossible to determine, something the regular shedding of clothing only enhances; the willfully cryptic narratives in which opposing forces become indistinguishable across a vast, featureless landscape—constitutes a powerful political gesture in itself. Violence self-perpetuates. The surrender and assumption of power are exchanged until power itself becomes meaningless. Ideology is reduced to pageantry. (Did I mention Janscó was once a law student?) I can’t think of a body of films with a bolder statement on the futility of war and malleability of national or political identities.

It functions all the better for its dearth of exposition or psychology, for our inability to identify with and comprehend characters, something that only grows as you work through these films where the same actors keep reappearing in different roles. There’s a compelling theatricality to these films, not only in their use of a stock company but, in Red Psalm (1971) especially, the sense that everything is staged as a sort of atheist Passion play. Unless you really know your Hungarian history—and, one suspects, even then—to enter into Janscó’s world is to feel like you should really be understanding everything while understanding almost nothing. Janscó drops us into the midst of a struggle without orienting us. What’s on display is “pure” war, or rather the peripheralities of war, the negotiations and executions. All of which is something most of us could stand to consider more carefully as our world slips ever deeper into a global chasm of conflicts whose meanings are never uncontestable.

The best way to get a sense of how all this works is to see these films in a condensed period, something our friends at Metro Cinema are granting Edmonton filmlovers next week with The Films of Miklós Janscó. The selected quartet begins with Janscó’s breakthrough The Round Up (66), which unfolds in a prison camp following the collapse of Lajos Kossuth’s 1848 revolt against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A man is accused of murder and the military use him to finger other insurgents they wish to condemn. What follows is a sequence of betrayals and a dismantling of alliances while the circumstances of the supposed murders become increasingly inconsequential. Brutality becomes an end in itself.

The Round Up introduced some of Janscó’s key themes, but the formal distinctions I’ve been describing don’t come into full fruition until The Red and the White (67), shot in the USSR and intended to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. But the story takes place two years later, with the Communists fighting the White Guard for a hilly plain along the Volga. Territorial lines shift, but any greater purpose for the struggle remains obscure, as does anything resembling heroics. It is the antithesis of a propaganda film. The Soviets were not pleased, while the film was celebrated in the US. Silence and Cry (68), probably the rarest film in this series, revisits the same historical moment, but on a comparatively intimate scale, with a former Red soldier taking refuge on a Hungarian farm regarded as suspect by local authorities. There are moments of what appear to be tenderness and communion, the performances engrossing and nuanced, but everything finally capitulates to the dictates of individual survival. The result is chillingly poetic.

Having seen it just recently, the Palme d’Or-winning Red Psalm—shot in gorgeously saturated colour and, rather surprisingly, with a 1:37 aspect ratio—has become a new personal favourite of mine, though admittedly, hypnotic, erotic, dream-like and seemingly endless—but in a good way!—it may the even more confusing than any of its predecessors. Folkloric and more than a little enraptured with the hippie culture of the time, it centers on a turn-of-the-century uprising of landless agricultural workers, who sing, play music, dance and act out rituals of triumph and slaughter. The camera weaves across faces or hangs back to watch soldiers encircle and open fire upon a ring of peasants. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it, though, as with the preceding three films, it makes clear that without Janscó the work of Theo Angelopoulos and Béla Tarr would be inconceivable.

Clandestine in Bolivia: Che Part Two

To enter Bolivia clandestinely, Ernesto “Che” Guevara disguises himself. Bald up top, with graying sides, dark-rimmed glasses and buckteeth. Castro tells him he looks like his father. The way this transformation plays in Che Part Two, which leaps across the eight years between Part One’s victory in Havana and the campaign that would end Guevara’s life, emphasizes how notoriety can thwart the real work of a revolutionary. (This doubtlessly resonates with actors like Benicio Del Toro, who endeavour to shape-shift so as to better embody that elusive autonomous character, or directors like Steven Soderbergh, who endeavour to make films so wildly diverse so as to sidestep expectation.) It also underlines the gulf between the careers of Guevara and Castro, still alive today, a robust anachronism in modern politics. In any case, long before the proliferation of T-shirts and mindless idolatry, Guevara was already in some sense attempting to foil fame as a means of following his vocation.

After the divergent results of the two campaigns they dramatize, the most striking difference between Che Part One and Two is their level of immersion into the business of developing an armed uprising. Part Two gets us into Bolivia relatively quickly and from there seldom maneuvers away from Guevara’s arduous trajectory, to which the camera doggedly sticks. There are far too many idiosyncratic flourishes and too much historical selection to call Soderbergh’s approach faux documentary, but there is the sense of the documentarian’s commitment to watching a process unfold. It can be grueling to watch, and sometimes confusing. Like The Thin Red Line, the films of Hungarian director Miklós Janscó, and perhaps Apocalypse Now, it joins the tiny league of war movies you could call hypnotic. And this tells you the strange—and I think utterly fascinating—place where Che lives. It feeds you waves of historical data, builds incredible tension, and puts you in a trance all at once.

There’s a fireside discussion where Mario Monje, leader of Bolivia’s Communist Party, suggests that Guevara will fail because Bolivians don’t want a foreigner for a savior. Someone counters with the fact that Bolivia isn’t even named after a Bolivian—Simón Bolívar was Venezuelan. But the disconnect between such sly arguments and the reality of popular sentiment looms large over Guevara’s Bolivian campaign. It’s simplistic, but maybe there’s something to the notion that Cuba was simply desperate enough, and the Bolivians not quite, or if so, perhaps their hunger was of a more particular nature. While carefully placing such discussions at the forefront, neither Soderbergh’s direction nor Del Toro’s largely stoic performance overtly support any one reading, but their evocation of the star-crossed atmosphere and litany of struggles surrounding the fiasco is haunting.

It’s been 50 years since the Cuban Revolution, yet its legacy, like that of its protagonists, remains no less fraught, no easier to assess. The final images of Che Part Two return us to where Part One began, with Guevara, clean-shaven, with triumph still far ahead, leaning on the rail of that leaky little boat with its 82 men. Guevara says nothing in this sequence, but glances over toward Castro, who stands confidently near the bow. There is a quality about Guevara’s stare that’s hard to guess at, a flicker of something. It could be suspicion.

Sólo con tu Guevara: Che Part One

In November 1956 he left Mexico for Cuba in a leaky boat with 82 men, only 12 of whom would live to see victory. The sequence depicting this traversal toward the island and struggle that would define Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s destiny is stark, quiet, fleeting, yet, tellingly, it offers one of the film’s rare close-ups of its protagonist. It lingers in your mind long after you’ve watched Che in its entirety, not simply because this moment is returned to so eloquently in its coda, but because by the time you’ve made it through all this you can’t help but look back on it as one of those truly indelible turning points, punctured with immediacy, anticipation, history, ambiguity. It’s the threshold upon which one of the 20th century’s most controversial and ideologically complex lives begins to truly bloom.

I saw Che first over two nights during the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, and a second time several months later over the course of one sitting with a lunch break between the two parts. These two parts were originally entitled The Argentine and Guerilla but have since been marketed by the rather less inspired Part One and Part Two. Part One will open in Edmonton first as a single feature, and there are perfectly good reasons for Edmontonians, or anyone for that matter, to see it separately with plenty of digestion time before the more daunting Part Two arrives in the coming weeks, even if the films possess a certain extra potency when viewing them in succession as a diptych, as two chronicles of armed uprisings, one successful and legendary, the other disastrous and sad. No matter how they’re packaged, I urge you to see them both in the theatre, without interruptions, to submit to this audacious beast of an epic. This decade-in-development labour of love from producer Laura Bickford, actor Benicio del Toro and director Steven Soderbergh is a most particular kind of masterwork, demanding special attention and, I believe, rewarding it in kind.

Part One is, by contrast at least, the more conventional biopic of the two, shifting mainly between two trajectories. One follows Guevara’s pivotal role in the Cuban Revolution from 1956-59, which closes on a perfect note—he’s just about to roll into Havana and heady glory but stops on the way to chew out some colleagues for appropriating a gorgeous convertible—that stops just shy of what a flabbier movie would consider the proper climax. The other is his visit to New York and the United Nations in 1964, when he was at his height of international celebrity and is interviewed by journalist Lisa Howard (Julia Ormond) for ABC. “Maybe a little powder,” Guevara (Del Toro, so good with stillness that he can absorb a multitude of possible intentions at once) quietly suggests after initially declining any make-up for the cameras. It’s one of a number of moments of levity and conveys something of Guevara’s learned sense of showmanship, a striking counterpoint to the preceding years of spartan jungle existence, the strategizing, the combat, the asthma attacks, and the submission to the vision of Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir), already rehearsing his beard-stroking and cigar waving.

This is in part a movie about merely extraordinary men becoming global icons, told through the accumulation and refinement of facial hair and the symbolic value of battle fatigues. It isn’t, I think, a polemical movie in any clear-cut sense. Despite the propagandistic poster art, Soderbergh hasn’t calibrated Che to render Guevara a more humanized hero or, as is often the case with biopics, clumsily reduce his persona or accomplishments. Yet one of Che’s most distinguishing characteristics is surely the ways in which its mise en scène corroborates with Guevara’s ethos. For a film ostensibly about one man, the integrity of the collective is repeatedly emphasized, not only in the scenes of Guevara’s training, camaraderie, lecturing or disciplining of his comrades-in-arms—among whom Santiago Cabrera’s Camilo Cienfuegos really deserves to be singled out for his charismatic presence—but in Soderbergh’s camerawork, guerilla-like production model and the process-oriented narrative itself, which updates and renovates the dormant aesthetic of the docudrama. You could even say that Che is in a sense a dramatized instruction manual, perhaps the only war movie from which a layman can actually grasp a coherent sense of how an uprising is staged.

Of course to really see the extent to which Che commits to evoking the most grueling aspects of jungle warfare one needs to wait for Part Two, where Soderbergh’s commitment to this fusion of form and content becomes more singly focused and severe. But we’ll come back to that when Part Two receives its Edmonton release, which is hopefully very soon.

The Birth of the Cold

Peering out from below a broad, heavy brow, he has the pale face of a man thoroughly eaten up inside. The London he moves in looks damp, grey and bone-chilling. He wears his trench coat tucked up around him like a blanket, and puts away half a bottle of whiskey a day. He has no friends and speaks as little as he can get away with. He takes a menial clerical job at the library for the Candahar Institute for Psychical Research, where he works alongside a pretty, confident young woman. She explains to him what lycanthropy means in a weirdly sexy way that suggests he might just be some sort of werewolf, and she likes the idea. What matters, perhaps, is that he is so clearly someone other than he claims to be. It may just be the starkest romance in movies, and it really works.

But I’m jumping ahead. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) actually begins with Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) stalking Checkpoint Charlie, waiting for a man to cross over on a bicycle. A tense piano, Satie-esque, plays over the barbed wire, flood lights and brick. Things won’t go well. The photography is black and white, and this Berlin seems to have forgotten about things like trees—this is one Cold War movie that looks irredeemably cold. Leamas will soon be back in London, where he visits Control (Cyril Cusack) and takes a new assignment that will keep him “out in the cold,” pretending to defect in a ploy to turn one German intelligence agent against another. The brief period of work at the library was only meant as a fleeting ruse, but Leamas’ unexpected connection with Nan (Claire Bloom), who, in a tidy bit of dramatic irony, is a card-carrying communist, will complicate that. We know how these things go. It’s a spy movie, and thus perpetually mired in the forbidding causality that comes with the milieu: everything complicates everything. Everyone is a pawn of some sort.

John le Carré’s third novel, released two years previously, was a sensation, de-glamorizing the world of intelligence just as Bond was cashing in at the box office, yet so brimming with intrigue, brutality and human frailty, courting our appetite for dirty little secrets, that no one bothered to notice how wildly bleak it was. At least until they saw Martin Ritt’s movie of it, which failed to startle in the same way, though it earned Oscar nods. But The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is now available in a deluxe two-disc edition from Criterion. I just saw it for the first time, and what can I say? I’m startled. Ritt, who also made Hud (63), Hombre (67) and Norma Rae (79), may not have a reputation as a master stylist, or even a master of anything in particular, but here, in collaboration with cinematographer Oswald Morris, production designer Tambi Larsen and editor Anthony Harvey in particular, he produced something of marvelous texture and specificity. It’s transfixing.

Burton, whose Leamas now reads as part of the formula that gave birth to Daniel Craig’s Bond, may brood to excess for some—including, reportedly, Ritt—yet the character’s near-suicidal desperation, his immersion in his soul-crushing vocation, lies at the very heart of the story. And morose as Burton is, the overall gloom is greatly tempered by Bloom, so charming and smart, whose every nuance is so exactingly turned. She’s the sole woman in the movie, as well as the sole outsider to Leamas’ world, and she’s nearly its only source of warmth. Yet Oskar Werner, just a few years after Jules and Jim (62), plays Fiedler, a Jew in German intelligence with a massive grudge, and also possesses a certain air of inner life and excitement. And he also connects in his way with Leamas. Cusack, too, is wonderful, vampiric in his stillness, and so very English. So the cast inhabits rather than simply populates this world.

Ritt’s method of taking it all in includes a great deal of god’s eye views to heighten the alienation, balanced by two-shots that constantly emphasize the coded negotiations taking place in smallish rooms. The camera prowls, always. Lamps hang from chains in one location, from thorny antler-like mounts in another, all dangling with portent. There are beautifully timed fades to black, like the one near the start where Leamas sits with un-sipped tea in hand in Control’s office. Near the end there is a superb, ambiguously menacing exchange of gazes between Leamas and the ex-Nazi Mundt, and its after this exchange that we begin to understand how the whole narrative builds to a point of proving Nan’s ideological distinctions meaningless just as it completes Leamas’ moral perdition.

A highlight among Criterion’s supplements is a new interview with le Carré. He speaks very engagingly and has an endearingly refined way with gossip, stories about screenwriter Paul Dehn, who, matching le Carré’s own background as a British agent, was once a professional assassin; about various affairs between the collaborators and Liz Taylor's lurking in the background; about Ritt’s difficulties with Burton and how their antagonism might have been unconsciously nurtured by both of them so as to turn up the tension in the film. Le Carré also critiques the film quite soberly, and interestingly, believes that if anything it was too faithful to the source material. For myself, I couldn't help but wonder what it would have been like had the film started with Leamas taking his job at the library so that we initially knew nothing more about him than Nan does, and made our discoveries roughly in step with hers.

"It is not possible to talk about history without real human beings": A conversation with Jiri Menzel

Hunger for monetary gain is a mainstay in movies, yet there are scenarios in which mere greed falls short of supplying the motive. Jan Díte, a diminutive, good-natured Czech of plebian background, decides he’d like to be a millionaire. He regards it as a vocation, something to work toward, like learning how to build a log cabin or becoming a better tennis player. He studies the science of it. Jan also wants to make love to beautiful women, and this too he pursues with a sort of honest diligence. He goes into the hotel business. He bears witness to tremendous spectacles of decadence while quietly showering ladies with gentlemanly adoration, seducing them with modesty and sincerity and paying homage to their beauty by decorating their naked bodies with fruit. His actions read as essentially harmless, if indifferent to the world around him. That is, they would read as harmless, were Jan’s career not contemporaneous with the rise of the Third Reich.

Based on the novel by Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England is a very dark comedy rendered with a very light touch. Tracing Jan’s unintentional development as a Nazi collaborator—he falls in love with a German who can only screw with a picture of Hitler beaconing down at her—the film warns against the perils of political apathy, yet Jan remains essentially serene in his attitude, even oblivious. Rather than feel the burden of having been a collaborator, as he looks back on his life, he seems largely burdened by nostalgia. Told mostly in flashbacks rife with wordless comic sequences that are equal parts Buster Keaton and Busby Berkeley, Jan is played as a young man by the nimble Ivan Barnev, while the older, penniless Jan is played by Oldrich Kaiser. The actors do not look especially alike, but the dual casting is inspired. The balance of similarities and differences provide the film with a rich sense of time and fate’s weathering of the body and spirit.

Jiri Menzel is probably best known for Closely Watched Trains, which won the 1968 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. It was Menzel’s debut, and the first of several adaptations of Hrabal. He was only 28. I Served the King echoes Closely Watched Trains not only in theme and tone—the conflict between one’s seeking of love and sexual fulfillment and one’s duty to one’s job or one’s country—but also in poetic gesture. Re-watching Closely Watched Trains, I had to smile as the young hero foolishly ran after a departing train he has no chance of catching up to—something we see happen twice in I Served the King, the second instance being especially grave in its implications. Hrabal and Menzel worked closely on all of Menzel’s adaptations until Hrabal’s death in 1997, the younger filmmaker always regarding the elder author and his ideas with reverence. Menzel, now 70, is in fact an exceedingly humble guy, looking back on his extraordinary, prolific career as a director, writer and actor as one long stroke of good luck. Yet, despite his rusty English, he speaks eloquently about what defines his approach. “It is not possible to talk about history without real human beings,” he explains. We spoke over the phone, he in Prague, me in Toronto. His bone-dry humour cracked me up repeatedly. We had a good time. I’ve tried to tidy up his responses enough to read fluidly while still giving a sense of his particular cadence.

JB: What drew you to this material? Why now?

Jiri Menzel: I have been very interested in Czech history, in the nature of the Czech character. And I found that we Czechs we are very flexible. We adapted to the Austrian Empire, to the German occupation, to the Russians. We seem able to collaborate with anyone. It’s a bad thing. We need to reflect on our history, on who we are. Mr. Hrabal’s work is an education in this. For many centuries now, we Czechs are heretics. We believe in nothing. We are skeptics. Our goal is only to survive. This is not good.

JB: There is here, as elsewhere in your body of work, a striking juxtaposition between the sweeping events of history and those of an ordinary individual’s daily life.

JM: If I could understand everything you say, I would agree.

Both laugh.

JB: Okay, let's try this one. Would you describe yourself as politically active?

JM: No, I’m not political at all. To be that way you need to be very concentrated, very strong. I’m not so strong. No.

JB: But your films have prompted strong responses from those who hold political power—and from those seeking political commentary.

JM: Yes, but I would like the viewers of my films to leave the cinema without feeling that their minds have had political statements imposed on them. Probably later, the viewer can locate some political connections in his mind, but I don’t like to approach these things directly. I just want to wake up the questions, of morality, of relationships with others, of responsibility. I want only to wake up the questions, not give lessons.

Menzel and Hrabal

JB: This is your sixth adaptation of a literary work by Bohumil Hrabal. Is there something special you can trace in these books that speaks to your sensibility as a filmmaker?

JM: I like his work, as you know, but this film happened simply because the studio owned the rights and offered me the job. I was happy to have the chance, but it was not my initiative. Hrabal for me is very close because of his humour, and he is for me one writer who can describe man with all his weakness and better qualities and can do so without anger. Even the worst qualities in man he can describe with such elegance. Hrabal is not angry like much modern literature, which tends to be very pessimistic. Mr. Hrabal is full of humour and love.

JB: There is in your films an emphasis on work and, in several cases, how to avoid it—did you ever have ambitions to do something other than work in film and theatre?

JM: You are suggesting I have to look for another appointment?

JB: [Laughing] No. Honest. No, I was just wondering if you ever had other ambitions for your career than those you pursued. If you ever wanted a different job.

JM: I wanted to be a journalist because my father was a journalist. But when I was 15 I started to read the newspaper regularly and found the job was not for me because the newspaper was full of lies. This was the communist paper. So I escaped this fate and flew off to the theatre. From 15 to 20, I wanted to work in theatre as a director but I wasn’t accepted in theatre school for a lack of talent. I tried to work in television, which I thought might need new workers that didn’t have so much talent. I applied to the school for film and television and was given a chance there.

JB: Are there particular films that made an impression on you when you were young?

JM: In my high school, I had a chance to regularly attend screenings of many classic movies. In one week I could see all of Chaplin’s movies, in another, all of Renoir’s. I was able to see many great movies made during the silent era, movies from France, Germany and the United States, and they became part of my aesthetic. I was lucky to have that time because in film school I was not able to see many movies from the West.

JB: Have you felt like you’ve been able to make the sorts of films you wanted to make?

JM: I took it as my profession. I have never had the feeling to be an artist. I have respect for the man who takes his work as his profession. I don’t like art. Many artists are very far from ordinary people. My duty from the start, my decision, was to do everything for my neighbours. My father, you see, was a very educated man. An intellectual, very wise. My mother was a tailor. She was an ordinary woman. So I decided to do films for people like my mother, but at the same time, they needed to be films that I would not be ashamed to show my father. It’s not so easy.  

JB: Have you found filmmaking to be a radically different experience during the communist and post-communist periods?

JM: For me, nothing’s changed with regards to what I choose to do. I don’t see a big difference between the films I made in my youth and those I make now. Politics have had no influence on the content. The only difference now is that financially it’s not as easy as before. Now there is no ideological censorship, but it’s harder.

JB: I guess now you have economic censorship.

JM: Exactly.

JB: The performance style of I Served the King seems indebted to silent comedy and physical theatre. I think Barnev gives a truly amazing performance, but is it difficult to find film actors who can embody this style?

JM: No. I probably have a good feeling about personalities. I prefer that films convey information without words. It may be because in my youth I saw many foreign movies without subtitles. I tried to understand just from the eyes and movements of the actors as a way of reading what’s inside. To this day, I don’t like too much talking in film.

JB: I Served the King is often characterized as bittersweet. I read a quote from you somewhere recently I really liked: “It is bitter because it is Czech.” I wonder if you could elaborate on that.

JM: [Laughs] Well, thanks to this film, I know our character better. It is not very sweet. I mean, I am happy to be Czech. I have to be proud to have this nationality. But I think any man has to look at himself with different eyes. And it’s the same for our country. It’s good to read books about what the Germans think of Czechoslovakia, or the French or the English. It’s important to not be blind to our history, and I tried to get a little bit of it in this film.

JB: Of all the great Czech novelists of the last 50 years or so, Milan Kundera, whose novels are nothing if not at once bitter and comic, seems to be the most enduring as an international figure. Have you ever considered adapting his work?

JM: [Laughs] I asked him many years ago. One of my colleagues wished to make a film from one of his books, and, because Kundera was my teacher, I was in contact with him. But after The Unbearable Lightness of Being he decided that no more films would be made form his work. I asked him nice, but he was very determined. “Even you cannot do anything from my work,” he said. So I said to him, “I will wait for the moment when you need money.” He said, “So long as I’m alive, I won’t need that much money.” He is funny, but I like him. He’s a very nice man. He taught us comparative literature. He was very clever. He taught us what is the difference between Czech literature and that of other countries.

JB: You never considered being a novelist?

JM: Nah. I’m lazy for it.

JB: [Laughs] But making a movie is really hard work, no?

JM: Well, yes, but you are surrounded by people who work with you, who help you. Like a team. You just tell them what to do and they do it. You know, it’s kind of nice, actually.