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Perception_de_Ambiguity
http://www.imdb.com/list/ls056227522/
just another film blog
http://perception-de-ambiguity.tumblr.com
a small collection of reviews/comments/random thoughts about various films I've seen
http://letterboxd.com/systematicer/films/reviews/
you have seen The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and want to see more Spaghetti Westerns but have no idea what else is good apart from Sergio Leone? here are some films for your consideration
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Lists
Within "[ ]" I added "personalized genre descriptions".
Not listed on IMDb:
O is for Orgasm (part of "The ABCs of Death") Fame (Steven Klein) Couch Gag for The Sampsans Epasode "Clown in the Dumps" (Don Hertzfeldt, 2014) El Guincho - Bombay (Canada, 2010) Blade Runner [alternative final cut by Johanna Vaude] / Blade Runner Tribute / Blade Runner par Johanna Vaude - Blow up / Remember futur replications of human experiences (Johanna Vaude, 2013) Samouraï /Samurai (Johanna Vaude, 2002)
"Surreal" is another word that I tend to avoid in this context, I associate it too much with symbolism, a work that tries hard to make you derive some metaphorical meaning from it, which often takes away from creating a state of dreaming. Maybe in retrospect you can read a dream in terms of symbols, but I’m not interested in this here, I rather want the actual experience of dreaming replicated as vividly as possible.
Also worth mentioning are the (generally metaphysical) concepts that at least in my mind have some overlay with dreaming, so the films here that you may find have no apparent connection to dreams likely relate to one or some of the following things: Subconscious, collective unconscious, death (or rather the afterlife/netherworld), trance, stream of consciousness.
In approximate order of evocativeness.
Also on MUBI: https://mubi.com/lists/i-must-be-dreaming
Tier One: Nicole Rittenmeyer - Trey Parker Tier Two: Larisa Shepitko - Mervyn LeRoy Tier Three: Valie Export - The End
Nicole Rittenmeyer = Nicole Rittenmeyer & Seth Skundrick Hélène Cattet = Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani Ben Hecht* = Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur & Lee Garmes Mary Ellen Bute = Mary Ellen Bute & Ted Nemeth James Sibley Watson = James Sibley Watson & Melville Webber (in 2 out of 3 cases) Ruth Orkin = Ruth Orkin & Morris Engel Christoph Lauenstein = Christoph Lauenstein & Wolfgang Lauenstein Anthony Gross = Anthony Gross & Hector Hoppin Luis Cerveró = Luis Cerveró & Lope Serrano & Nicolás Méndez (a.k.a. CANADA)
*Note with Ben Hecht that 4 out of the 7 films were written and directed together with Charles MacArthur, and Lee Garmes allegedly co-directed all 7 films, but always uncredited. So since things aren't clear-cut in this case I decided to put all three on the list.
Nicolas Cage - Tommy Wiseau = Ranked Elina Löwensohn+ = Unranked But Not Forgotten
Tier One: #1-#19 Tier Two: #20-#44 Tier Three: #45-#91 Notable rest: >#92
The limit for feature length films is 1,300 votes, for documentary features it is 1,000 votes, and for short films it is 200 votes. 2015 and 2016 releases are also excluded.
Some anime are also included. Special things like making ofs, stand-up shows, music videos, episodes of a series, etc. have largely been omitted, with some notable exceptions.
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Celles qui s'en font (1928)
Poetic realist short about loneliness, and arguably the first-ever music video
Celles qui s'en font' comprises of two little scenarios, each about three minutes in length. The first shows an obviously poor, "triste" and probably already a little crazy, fairly young woman sitting outside of a pub/bar/whatever having a drink. With great sadness and some disdain she watches the cheerful people around her, then gets up and walks through the streets, sees herself in a mirror and tears start running down her face. The second scenario is in a similar vein, at least in terms of overall feel. A young, unhappy woman strolls through the streets and through flashbacks we see why she is so gloomy. Maybe the scenarios aren't connected but the two women were played by the same actress so I interpreted the second one as quasi being a flashback of the first one (she has a missing tooth in the first scenario so that one would definitely have to come later).
It's all pretty simple, much more poetic realist instead of superimpressionistic like a lot of Dulac's other works. Nevertheless the emotions as well as the localities are very palpable. I was very much reminded of especially the first section of Jean Epstein's 'Coeur fidèle' like when the characters in that film stand or sit ashore and absentmindedly gaze into the ocean. Instead of a longing for love the predominant feeling here is one of utter loneliness and hopelessness.
But probably the most noteworthy thing about this so-called "silent" film is that it is meant to be shown with two specific chansons for a soundtrack. I think it wouldn't be a stretch to make a case for the film to be the first music video ever made, at any rate it apparently was meant to serve as an illustration of two songs. 'Celles qui s'en font' is featured on disc 1 of the DVD box set "Retour de Flamme" (which is also available as individual DVDs) and it shows the film with its intended soundtrack. In the film it looks like the protagonists are mumbling to themselves, which would seem to fit their characters well enough, and this is maybe even what they are supposed to do in the story, but I'm convinced that more than that they are also mouthing the vocals of the songs. In the DVD restoration(?) however the mouth movement never really matches the vocals, so I think something isn't right. Maybe the footage is incomplete, maybe the frame-rate is off, or maybe the music is just not synchronized well. This is quite unfortunate, but at least one gets the general idea of what Germaine Dulac (probably) intended.
One IMDb reviewer wrote that the two chansons that the soundtrack consists of ("Toute seule" & "A la dérive", both performed by Fréhel) were recorded in 1930 and concluded that thus instead of 1928 the film more likely was also made in 1930 (or possibly shortly thereafter), which seems like a very reasonable conclusion to me.
Gekijô-ban: Zero (2014)
Japanese lesbian coming-of-age Gothic ghost mystery with a very Victorian flair
'Fatal Frame' is a Japanese lesbian coming-of-age Gothic ghost mystery with a very Victorian flair, all romanticism, no kink, all yearning, and no consummation. Innocent love? Yes. But anything but harmless.
To go into the film's plot without missing the point its mysteries (and even its main characters) are a bit too ever-changing and evolving, instead I'll say that the main motive of the film has to be John Everett Millais' 'Ophelia', and the film does justice to that evocative painting that is as beautiful as it is tragically sad and even unsettling. The supernatural element (ghosts) can easily be read as manifestations of extreme (often suppressed) emotions like unrequited (and forbidden) love while also being manifestations of a traumatic past. The mysteriousness and eeriness of the film doesn't just exist for its own sake but serves as an apt reflection of what its teenage characters are going through, with their feelings being new, mysterious or even scary to themselves.
If you want to know what you can expect from this film, 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' is probably a good reference point in terms of the Victorian girls' boarding school setting, the ethereal beauty, as well as the eeriness in broad daylight. The plot also involves girls suddenly disappearing, but the way in which this fits into the narrative and its function has much more in common with 'Ringu' and its dooming curse than it does with the inexplicable mysteriousness of nature in the Peter Weir classic. But in terms of the general look, feel and pacing it can be somewhat compared to 'A Tale of Two Sisters'. The way in which the mysteries pile up without ever losing the plot and having everything neatly come together is more in line with Vincenzo Natali's 'Haunter' or maybe a compressed version of a mystery anime series.
Even though its eeriness I thought was at its highest towards the beginning and in the last section the piling up of mysteries and their explanations exceed the film's climactic point, the atmosphere never lets up, nor does the subdued beauty of its visuals (I love the texture and color palette of its 16mm Kodak film stock) ever lose its classical magic. 'Fatal Frame' is conceived in the modern Japanese storytelling mode (teen-centric, lots of emotion-centric voice-overs that never leave you in doubt about character motivations, etc.), which isn't to everyone's liking, but if you are OK with this or maybe even have an affinity for that mode and if my other descriptions also sounded good to you then this one comes highly recommended.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)
The very essence of Gothic literature in cinematic form
I would describe 'I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House' as a Gothic short story (or maybe even a Gothic poem) brought to the screen. But forget about all the tropes and visuals that are associated with this genre, it is instead focused on what for me is the essential element of Gothic literature: The dead are alive. This doesn't seem like much to build a narrative on, and the driving force of "Pretty" indeed is not plot, nor characters, nor the solving of a mystery. And while all three things are embedded into its narrative it is first and foremost a tone poem. An important thing about the the-dead-are-alive notion, especially in this film, is that it goes both ways. The living can sense the presence of the dead (AKA ghosts), but the dead actually live on after their death, probably mostly concerned with reliving their past, but they might also be able to sense the living. So who is haunting who?
Consequently "Pretty" presents a ghost story within a ghost story, to put it in simplified terms. In more concrete terms the plot concerns Lily, a nurse who stays in the house of elderly horror fiction writer Iris Blum, to take care of her until her death, which shouldn't be too far into the future now. But it also wouldn't be too wrong to say that the main character is the house that had a few occupants over the course of its lifetime. I don't mean this in the tired old this-and-that-place-is-like-another-character-in-the-film way, the personality of the house certainly is made up of all the people who lived in it. But writer-director Oz Perkins takes the expression "If these walls could talk" and makes it a reality. It is about the people who lived in the house (or more correctly the people who died in it), but for all intents and purposes the main character is the house itself.
"Pretty" starts with nurse Lily's first day at the house and her opening narration tells us that she just turned 28 years old, but that she will never be 29. She talks about death, memory and says "From where I am now, I can be sure of only a very few things." One of those things is her name. So right from the beginning we know that Lily (at least Lily as a narrator) is already dead. Logic dictates that what we see on screen are her hazy memories of her short time in the house. Can we trust her words and can we trust what we see?
In any case, old Iris Blum doesn't talk much. But she keeps calling Lily by the name of Polly. And Lily seems to sense some ghostly presence in the house. Polly, as we soon learn, is the main character of Blum's most famous novel "The Lady in the Walls", a novel of which Blum said it lacks an ending because of "an obligation to be true to the subject" for Polly didn't tell Blum about her ending, but Blum tells us that she is convinced that "as endings go, Polly's was not an especially pretty one." Incidentally there also slowly emerges an ugly, moldy stain on one of the walls in the house that Lily grows concerned about. Is there some connection?
Perkins leaves the viewer in the dark for most of the film's running time about the concrete connections between all the characters, as slow and eventless as the whole thing is it is difficult to keep track of all the points of view. For example Lily isn't the only one whose voice-over we hear, we also hear and see young Blum as she writes the novel, and we hear and see Polly. Those voices also aren't particularly easy to distinguish, and it gets even more complicated when scaredy cat Lily finally dares to pick up "The Lady in the Walls" to read at least parts of it, the content of which is told from both Blum's and Polly's point of view. Through the viewer's natural desire to know the answers the film evokes ideas on the way as we contemplate all the possible answers. Did Polly really exist? Is she buried behind the wall? Are Lily and Polly somehow the same person? Is Lily a fictional character altogether? Or is Lily only imagining things?
Like a poem or a song it evokes first and foremost a tone, a mood, and sparks ideas of what it might be about. It takes further readings/listens to find that in between all the lines it actually tells a story, a simple story perhaps, but nevertheless a story. And this is actually how 'I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House' worked for me. The tone and the ideas immediately took hold of me, but it took me two viewings to really make sense of the narrative. This isn't without its drawbacks, because frankly it isn't so much difficult to follow because it floods you with information that you need to sort out, on the contrary, it basically is so eventless that it poses a challenge to stay attentive for the whole time. This was, however, clearly a conscious choice by Perkins, and his approach is nothing if not consequential. But it makes criticisms of the film being "boring" particularly understandable in this case, "Pretty" indeed is very one-note, and unless it is a note you relish or that you learn to relish, it won't be enough for you to satisfyingly get you through a whole feature film.
As it turned out after two viewings, the solution to the mystery is quite concrete and surprisingly not at all convoluted. Nevertheless the ending for me is as chilling as it is simple, and it beautifully circles back onto itself, like a chorus that keeps coming back, just what you would expect a story told by a ghost to be.
Der Nachtmahr (2015)
Donnie Darko meets Enter the Void meets E.T.
17-year-old Tina keeps hearing and seeing a noisy food-craving creature at night that is sitting in the kitchen in front of the open fridge. Are they dreams, hallucinations, is the creature real or is Tina maybe already dead (she has a potentially fatal accident very early in the film)? She starts off being terrified by the creature but as she finds herself unable to have it leave her alone she gradually gets acquainted with it and basically learns to live with it. Does this mean that she is getting better or worse? Is she learning to conquer her fears or is she only falling deeper into the rabbit hole?
This setup is far from unique, but the film feels incredibly fresh, bringing an authenticity to the proceedings that would be notable even for a straight drama, not just in the way the characters interact witch each other in the individual scenes but also in how the "plot" unfolds overall. It is also shot without the use of any artificial light, all hand-held (certainly not "shaky-cam", though) and doesn't seem to use any overdubbing for the dialogues either. What's particularly remarkable is that at the same time the film also is quite a visceral experience, thanks of course especially to the party scenes (which aren't that numerous) that are full of strobe lights and loud techno, but even beyond those scenes this "techno party feeling" that can in turns mean ecstasy or dizziness, bleeds to some extent through the whole film, creating an atmosphere somewhere in between 'Enter the Void' and 'Spring Breakers'. And even when things become quieter the film is paced in such a way that it always maintains a certain level of intensity.
The creature itself (an extremely convincing sfx) is terrifyingly ugly yet once you actually start to look at it and get closer to it it is weirdly cute in its small size, pathetic looks, and its nonthreatening slowness. This creature design alone already makes Tina's very gradual embrace of this thing understandable.
Occurrences involving the creature are presented as completely real, even though nobody else (primarily this concerns Tina's parents) get to see or hear it, and when they do seem to be able to see the creature or the results of its doings there always is some possibility that it might be the girl's own actions that they are reacting to. All this doesn't sound too original, but what helps the effectiveness of this, and what helps to keep the viewer doubting what's real and what isn't, is the fact that while it is clear that the film is told from a very subjective point of view, the way it is photographed give the images a certain sense of objectivity, the camera isn't particularly focused on its protagonist and the film is completely shot with wide lenses. This approach manages to lend a lot of credibility to the existence of the creature.
I think a stylistic choice that perhaps best exemplifies this combination of subjective point of view and the sense of objective camera is when during a few of the party scenes the viewer can't actually make out the spoken dialogue, and instead they are shown through subtitles (yes, pretty much like the nightclub sequence in "Fire Walk With Me"). The impression this leaves is that the camera (or rather the sound equipment) isn't able to pick up the dialogue over the loud music, but at the same time we know that Tina can hear the dialogue. I'd also argue that subconsciously this suggests to a viewer that even though in this case the film fills us in on what we are missing, the images and sounds may sometimes be inadequate to capture Tina's experience. So as much as the camera tries to document everything, the film itself is limited in how much it can get to the core of its protagonist (each person is a mystery, after all). Likely you will end up with a puzzle with missing pieces and it's on you to make sense of that mystery.
The following paragraph is more spoiler-y!!! Things are wisely left ambiguous even as the closing credits roll, even the extent of Tina's drug use is ambiguous, in retrospect I can't even remember seeing her have as much as a drink (well, a beer, maybe). Nevertheless it should be clear that she is a party girl who makes a lot of use of illegal substances which remain unnamed. 'Der Nachtmahr' does a good job of implying things rather than showing them without ever feeling vague. It would be too easy (and probably too reductive) to just write Tina off as a junkie who has lost her grip on reality. There are other aspects to her life that may have a lot of bearing on what Tina is going through. Perhaps most importantly there is a guy in her circle of friends that she is infatuated with, but even though he seems to quite like her too they don't quite get together and instead another girl keeps latching on to him. Naturally Tina hates her guts. From all the partying she probably also simply doesn't get as much sleep as she should and her relationship to her parents may also weight on her.
Achim Bornhak is a dedicated artist who works in several fields and with 'Der Nachtmahr' he realized a passion project that was 13 years in the making. It started out as just a work on a sculpture (the creature), which lead to associations and a narrative, resulting eventually in this art-house genre film.
Happy End (1967)
Comedy a of Philosophy Depressing Underlying The :End Happy
If you have seen the film you will have understood what you just read...
OK, I won't make this post in reverse order even though that was the initial plan. Since in the film it is only justified because it works in both directions and I won't put the effort into my write-up for it to work both ways, it would be little more than annoying to make my comment mirror the film like this.
'Happy End' is a challenge to constantly read in both directions simultaneously, which should make rewatches worthwhile. Luckily the "actual narrative" (which is what I will call what we know the story of this man's real life is, as opposed to how the film presents it, which I will call the "fictional narrative"), is simple enough and at all times clear so that it isn't a necessity to try to follow the dialogues and the plot in reverse order, but it is certainly tempting to do so, and I think one sometimes wants to see the film in correct chronological order, because even though that would make it a lesser film, it would make one further appreciate all the planning that must have went into making it the way it is, for the result looks so effortless. This can be seen with the example of "Memento" of which a chronologically ordered version exists.
OK, so what we have here is certainly a great premise. And cinematically it was cleverly solved with the filmmakers doing a very fine job, it would be difficult to argue otherwise. But is it more than just clever? Well, it's amusing. So, yes, it is. Why is it amusing? Because the dialogues, which in normal order drive the plot along but are rather banal, now presented in reverse order, are written in such a way - line after line - to create amusing conversations. Yes, that's one reason. And yes, even gestures often take on an amusingly fitting alternate meaning by reversing cause and effect. But why else does it cause amusement? It's because negative things become positive. Things getting worse become things getting better. And while the middle section of the film is a back and forth between things going well for our protagonist, and things going bad for him, the beginning and the end both are things getting gradually better for our protagonist in the fictional narrative.
A cow gets slaughtered and skinned, and a woman gets hacked to pieces on screen, and we all laugh, because we see both creatures come to life before us, violence is turned into creation. This is what we witness, but at the same time we are also aware of the actual causality. The reality that is implied in "Happy End" where things keep getting better and better is that nothing ever gets better. From the moment we are born until we die everything only gets worse. Everything is falling apart. To live means to die. Slowly. (If you want to read more on this please see my comment on 'Irréversible': http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290673/reviews-668 .)
So the philosophy underlying all the fun shenanigans is a very bleak one indeed. Speaking of which, it is easy to also bring Nietzsche's concept of the eternal recurrence into this. The man is forced to relive his life exactly the same way he lived it, even if from a bit of a different "angle" this time. He builds his own narrative out of the life he already lived, and building a narrative is exactly what he is doing, because there would be countless narratives to build out of his reversed life, his fictional narrative is merely the interpretation he chooses. But does he really choose it or is he instead driven to build this one?
Because if looked at closer his fictional narrative parallels his actual one, creating a sort of circular movement. The actual narrative, we can gather, is that the man is trapped in an unloving relationship until he falls in love with another woman and they get married. Soon he becomes a cuckold husband who kills his wife and her lover, goes to jail for it and gets executed. Now, in the fictional narrative he gains his freedom, gets to have a wife who is less interested in him than she is in another man, so he wants to kill him and then kill her, or at least return to her to her parents, to be with the woman he really loves.
What I find telling in the fictional narrative is that he almost immediately wants to get rid of his wife, as if what she did to him in the actual narrative still is somewhere in his memory and he subconsciously hates her for it. Likewise, with his (actual) first wife(?) he has the urge to immediately skip to the paradise that is childhood. To live a life without worries, and still with all the hope of a bright future ahead of him. There can only be happiness where there is hope, or you can be happy by at least being oblivious to the fact that there is no hope. The reason why happiness can exist for our protagonist at the end of his fictional narrative is because unlike the certain death that awaits each and every one of us, his fictional narrative doesn't stop at the real end, he just has no memory of what lies beyond it, no memory of his birth and of his first few years being alive. In the direction of his fictional narrative there is no death, only oblivion.
This review is best read in reverse order. Warning! Psych!
Vredens dag (1943)
Being a Witch: The Horrors of Pleasure
'Vredens Dag' or 'Day of Wrath' has a mysterious, unsettling atmosphere quite like Dreyer's previous film 'Vampyr', but it's very understated here. Unlike the Verfremdungseffekt in the previous effort the horror feel in this film is achieved through its setting (an extremely oppressive world) and by the way the plot is told, which is largely by means of suppressing the drama inherent in the situations. By not providing much release for the audience the film emphasizes that the real drama bubbles under the surface, namely it is within the characters, and the drama is a psychological one.
That aforementioned extreme oppressiveness of the environment within the film is one of Christian dogma, it becomes oppressive because all the characters believe in it to a more or less great extent and as a consequence no desire will go unpunished and fear dominates everyone's lives. The guilty conscience that arises from thinking that one broke a Christian law is actually the least of it, with its witch burning premise the film provides a more specific threat. One gets the impression that a woman can be made to burn at the stake by being denounced as a witch by seemingly anyone who feels like it. Further, women can be made to believe themselves that they are witches, which is an even greater exertion of power as it keeps the sincere belief in the existence of witchcraft and the occult alive in people's minds.
Dreyer cleverly maximizes the film's sense of an oppressive environment by presenting the Christian Weltanschauung of that time as unchallenged in people's minds and as essentially in direct control of the law when in reality surely not everyone held the same convictions in matters of faith in Denmark at the time, at the very least there were different branches of Christianity that disagreed with each other on even many of the fundamentals (an example of this can be seen in Dreyer's own 'Ordet'), and witch trials weren't at all conducted by clergymen alone, even THEIR power had limits.
It took a third viewing for me just to realize that among other things 'Day of Wrath' also is a roundabout coming-of-age film, a film about sexual awakening, Anne never experienced sexual desire until she laid eyes on her stepson. In addition to the all-encompassing religious indoctrination of that time this explains her naivety about coming to believe that she has supernatural powers over men, when apparently, without even quite realizing it, she bats her eyelashes, swings her tush, etc. and THOSE obviously are the things that do the trick, it's not her wishing that her stepson falls in love with her that causes this wish to miraculously come true for her through witchcraft.
'Vredens Dag' refuses to take sides, this results in an ambiguity about where the filmmaker stands on the issues at hand, which can easily be frustrating on a first viewing, but makes it all the more intriguing on further viewings and prevents it from becoming uninteresting for there will always remain a degree of mystery. The big ambiguity in this film is that although the Christian doctrine could hardly be shown less favorably Rev. Absalon is basically a kind-hearted and well-intentioned man and husband to Anne, but more significantly Anne's liberation from her life of oppression makes her happy, a happiness and joyfulness that not only has the side effect of turning her selfish (as she has no consideration anymore for anyone else's feelings and needs), but through Dreyer's compositions and lighting and by how the actress plays her, she comes off as evil, she is subtly made to look like the witch that she is believed to be by others, and whom even herself comes to believe to be.
As we all know, women are quite a mystery to men, and in this story woman's sexuality poses the biggest mystery of all, implying that men can't bare such an enormous lack of control, therefore the woman's behavior and her power over people and over men especially can only be explained with witchcraft. By making Anne at times look evil and like she revels in her power over other people the viewer will find it easy to relate to that time and its people, understanding how the belief in the occult could have been so prevalent. Prevalent not only among men who could make sense of woman's inexplicable behavior only through the concept of witchcraft, but also among women who sometimes couldn't explain their own powers and who were so often told that this or that makes them witches that they started believing it themselves. Significantly it is Rev. Absalon's mother who finally denounces her a witch and it is Anne's own remorse that urges her to agree with the accusations against her.
'Vredens Dag' is amazingly deliberately paced for 1943. Around 1960 such pacing in films like 'L'avventura', 'Marienbad' and 'The Naked Island' felt positively revolutionary. With Dreyer having already been an established silent movie director one is tempted to say that his sound pictures simply hark back to the silent era when especially up to the early-/mid-20's films just naturally were very slow-paced. Dreyer's silent movie roots maybe were what enabled his style on some level, but to equate those two vastly different types of slow pacing would certainly be a folly, not least because of how expertly Dreyer uses off-screen sound as a storytelling device, which is what often makes it possible for him to have so many continuous takes run for several minutes in the first place. It can hardly be a coincidence that Dreyer's 'Vampyr' (1932) already practiced something that I think otherwise hasn't really been seen in film until around 1960 in films like 'Vivre sa vie' and again 'L'avventura' and 'Marienbad', namely the back and forth shifting between subjective and objective mode, making it seem like the camera has its own will separate from the characters and the plot.
Thèmes et variations (1928)
The Grace of the Machine
Closeups of working machines are intercut with a ballet dancer's movements, each of which corresponds to the movement of the machines. Before long it seems like the machines are dancing while the ballet dancer's movements seem more mechanical. But then the dancer's footage is intercut with corresponding shots in nature and her movements suddenly seem more graceful until in the end all three elements come together and the machines seem like blossoming flowers.
Personally I'd recommend watching 'Thèmes et variations' without musical accompaniment, without any soundtrack the rhythm of the cuts really does seem to create its own music of visuals, which from what I've read was one of Germaine Dulac's main cinematic ambitions.
20,000 Days on Earth (2014)
Feels thorough, self-contained and complete.
"Who knows their own story? Certainly, it makes no sense when we live in the midst of it. It's all just clamour and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it and retell it. Our small precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves or to others. First creating the narrative of our lives and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness."
Occupying a gray zone between documentary and autobiographical fiction film '20,000 Days on Earth' opens with a counter that, you guessed it, starts at zero and rapidly counts up to 20,000 in a mere 1 1/2 minutes all the while on a couple of screens we see Nick Cave in various stages of his life as well as TV footage that corresponds with the number of days (e.g. a boy smoking pot around day 5,000) or people that apparently were of significance to him around that particular time (so in the early days we for example see Johnny Cash, Elvis and of course Barbara Eden). It's a loud and chaotic montage that simultaneously serves as the opening credits. The first scene stands in stark contrast to it, through the storm of the past we have arrived in the present day. We see an alarm clock without a seconds hand giving the impression of time virtually standing still. Nick Cave lies in bed staring at his clock before it starts to ring to officially herald the start of day 20,000.
The film that follows feels thorough, self-contained and complete.
Thorough because it keeps returning to the same memories. First Nick Cave has a session with his psychoanalyst which feels as much like an interview with a journalist as it does like a couch session, for there is no couch but the "interviewer" asks more psychoanalyst type of questions that very often go back to Cave's childhood days. Questions like: "What's your earliest memory of a female body?" or "What's your earliest memory of your father?", each question being answered with a story. Later Cave exchanges memories about the Nina Simone concert that he earlier talked about to his psychiatrist with a colleague who was at the concert as well which of course transforms the same story, it becomes fuller, the atmosphere surrounding it changes, etc. Or at another point Nick Cave goes to the Nick Cave archive because of course when you are somebody like Nick Cave you don't keep your old junk in boxes, you get other people to do that for you...anyway. Objects from the stories he told his psycho-guy pop up again or rather he asks for them, like the copy of "Lo-li-ta" from which his father read to him one day and that made little Nick see a side of his father that he hadn't known before. Or a picture of Susie, who became his wife, which leads into a dazzling multimedia collage of sight, sound and spoken word about Nick Cave's erotic fantasies that climaxes where all good erotic fantasies climax, with Jackie Kennedy at JFK's funeral. Songs come back also, he writes a song, practices a song, records a song, records a background track with a children's choir, and finally performs it in the Sydney Opera House in front of a big audience.
Self-contained it feels because there is a clear core theme which always is a challenge in an (auto)biographical film, because how can a human life be summed up to one idea? Here that idea is that Nick Cave basically lives as a vessel for his memories, to acquire them, to put them into a narrative in order not to forget them, and to use them to create songs. His greatest fear, he says, is losing his memory. "...in some way that's really what the process of songwriting is for me. It's the retelling of these stories and the mythologizing of these stories." The people in those stories become mere figures, figures that he, as he puts it, cannibalizes for his creations.
Unsurprisingly, Cave in the film comes across as self-absorbed and to call the product navel-gazing I think would be a pretty fair assessment. For the sake of context it bears reminding that this film doesn't show much of Nick Cave the private person and instead is much more about Nick Cave the musician and the public person. No doubt his profession is what enables and I think at least to an extent also excuses his constant self-examination, after all he made a successful career out of it.
And finally, complete it feels because the ending, a live-performance of a song we have seen and heard played several times throughout, is aided by footage of old live performances from the band history that often show him making the same movements on stage, reminding not only of the start of the film, but also that this performance that currently is the unfathomable now, will soon become a part of this man's memory turned life narrative. Put on film it shows one version of the event as it happened, something that will help Nick Cave keep the story from dissolving into darkness. But it also doesn't need a Nick Cave anymore to write a song about it, as a film it already is a mythologized narrative and it exists independent of any self-absorbed musicians that may happen to be the subject of '20,000 Days on Earth'.
L'invitation au voyage (1927)
Dreaming of Escape
In an introduction Germaine Dulac informs the viewer that this is her attempt to do a film without intertitles in the hope that the viewer will be able to follow it (such modesty), and lays out the scenario which is that of a woman who feels neglected by her husband, so one evening she goes to a bar where she is approached by a sailor whose interest in her suddenly seems to dwindle when he realizes that she is married.
What the 40-minute long 'Invitation to a Journey' offers indeed is more of a scenario than a story. More or less all the running time is spent in the bar (named L'invitation au voyage) that has some "cruise ship on the ocean" theme going on. We watch a band playing on stage, people dancing and drinking and men coming on to women. And in there we also have the protagonist (La Femme) who sits by herself at a table sipping a drink and of course it doesn't take long before the first suitor makes a pass on her.
Like Dulac's 'The Smiling Madame Beudet' it is a tiny "story" told impressionistically. And 'Invitation to a Journey' is nothing if not impressionistic. The film is so full of dissolves, superimpositions and split-screens that you almost have to look out to find any straight cuts. The function of this formal playfulness is, among other things, to show that while the characters are in the bar their minds are often somewhere else. Especially La Femme keeps fantasizing about being far away on a real ship, and seeing her little tête-à-tête with the sailor more romantically than it actually is. And the sailor too, who is less romantically inclined, can practically already see how his future-conquest offers herself and her naked chest to him in a cabin. La Femme also occasionally thinks back to situations at home and so we learn a bit about what the relationship between her and her husband is like.
An interesting thing to note is that the film plays a bit with gender roles, if not in the characters' actions than in their appearance. La Femme is a tall and quite masculine-looking woman while the men are all rather feminine in their appearance and mannerisms.
Lodz Ghetto (1988)
What was it like to live in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe?
A documentary about life in the Polish Jewish ghetto Łódź (aka Litzmannstadt Ghetto) from 1939 to 1945. It uses the same basic approach as the films by brilliant documentarians Nicole Rittenmeyer and Seth Skundrick, completely chronological, no third person narrator (but diary entries that were written at the time, serving as narration), and archive footage, not to say found footage. It doesn't follow this approach as rigorously as the documentaries by the aforementioned team (there's some contemporary footage of the streets and buildings in there and apparently also some diary entries that can't be accounted for), but that all those written accounts and this footage from inside the ghetto exists is amazing and especially the photographs (taken by ghetto resident Henryk Ross) have a real artistry to them. With its atmosphere of funereal quiet it's a compelling watch not only as a historical document but also as a mood piece. If you want to know what it was like to live in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe this is the real deal.
Alan Adelson's short postscript 'Sequel to Lódz Ghetto' (1992), which usually comes as an extra with home video releases, is both a making of and an extension of this documentary that unlike the feature film uses interviews with survivors. Serving as a companion piece to 'Lodz Ghetto' it does a lot in its brief 14 minutes and also is very much worth seeing.