The Conversation (1974)

As for a plot synopsis, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation is about a conversation recorded by Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) and his surveillance crew.  The rest of the movie explores the consequences of the act before we find out what the surveillance is used for.  

Written and filmed during the Watergate scandal (and between the first and second Godfather films), it seems as if Coppola is making a commentary on the right to privacy.  Perhaps Watergate is where our current unrest at the very thought of being spied upon comes from, but only in a distant way does Watergate and by extension, The Conversation, affect us today.  

The right to privacy appears to be an important value, but why?  Many of us shop at places with cameras, pay by credit card, and use cell phones without a second thought.  The response is rhetorical in almost every case:  "Why worry?  I have nothing to hide."  It is precisely this dimension of the right to privacy that gets debated, but little moves past the rhetorical gesture.  Little can be said to suggest a convincing rationale for privacy except as a matter of information that is used for theft, as libel, or some other mischief.  No one seems to have a great argument for why we might wish to remain private about something good, or even a case where it isn't bad, but could be perceived as such until it becomes a crime of theft, libel, and the rest.

What makes for excellence in The Conversation is something more subtle than our current debates on privacy.  In the film, Harry Caul begins his work with far more concern over the technical merits of his surveillance work, and as Roger Ebert points out in his Great Movies reevaluation of the film, Caul is not as good at what he does as his reputation indicates.  Still, Caul is obviously disturbed by the end of the film, but why is he bothered and what effects the transformation if it is more subtle than a concern with privacy or that some element of his job is lost if someone else can do it?

The pivotal moment comes when Stanley (John Cazale) says, "Sometimes it's nice to know what they're talking about."  Caul replies, "I don't care what they're talking about.  All I want is a nice fat recording."  What Caul is concerned with is being able to hear the people, not to listen to what they say.  The anxiety Caul feels at a later point in the film only comes when he tries to listen.  The danger is not in hearing someone speak, but for Caul, it is with listening and being involved in what he hears:  humanity.

Though The Conversation could easily impress the viewer who wishes to make a conspiracy theory or apocalyptic warning of the film, the enduring quality of the work is better recognized as a fear of being involved in listening than the MacGuffin of privacy.  That is, Caul is afraid of being in conversation with humanity rather than passively observing others. 

IMDb rates this film 8 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 5 (distinguished red) stars out of 5

Roger Ebert includes it on his Great Movies list

Network (1976)

Sidney Lumet's Network is crude and exaggerated to the point of earning the monikers of satire and farce, but neither term is sufficient in itself.  Rarely does a movie seem so crazy and somehow believable.  Then again, it is not believable at every moment.  The film goes nowhere near as far as Robert Altman's Nashville in making the sideshow circus the main event, but it is enough to have to pause before the question of what the film is about.

The film is about two people in the news business.  Max Schumacher (William Holden) is a symbol of the old guard, replete with references to Murrow years of journalistic integrity.  Opposite of Max is Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) who subverts news into a quest for ratings.  In fact, her approach is prototypical of reality television:  she offers fifteen minutes of fame to whomever she thinks will get ratings.  Thus, Max and Diana end up in a relationship, mostly as a matter of contrast.

While Max and Diana are the main characters, Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is the caught in the crossfire as an old friend of Max and a ratings magnet for Diana.  Howard is exactly who the audience remembers, if only for the phrase, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"  Howard is also the most dynamic character, going from traditionalist news anchor to suicidal to "the mad prophet of the airwaves."

Alongside performances by Robert Duvall and Ned Beatty, the film is well acted with a director who works to get good performances from his actors.  Lumet also brings his penchant for finding a good script and his eye for the lighting that a situation would actually have.  What sells the movie beyond believable lighting, a great screenplay, and top notch acting, is its impeccable balance between the main characters and the sideshow.  Without Holden and Dunaway continually pulling the story back in to a struggle between integrity and results, the tragedy of Howard Beale at the hand of ratings would not likely be credible.

The Patsy (1964)

In an era where people treat the line, "based on a true story," as having some mystical quality, imbuing a film with profound wonderment, Jerry Lewis becomes an increasingly important reminder of something altogether different.  And how is it that some expect to the external truth of a mere film to be experienced as more than a story?  Obviously, realism is an aesthetic, a style of representation, not truth.  Perhaps this is the fundamental misunderstanding with the term "reality television."  Worse yet, it is a misunderstanding of how truth itself works.  (It used to work us.)

Lewis' reminder is present in many of the films he directed, including The Patsy.  The film begins with the death of a star comic and his comedy team being left with the question of what to do next.  They decide that they will make a new star out of someone they can teach all of their tricks to.  Enter Stanley Belt (Jerry Lewis). What ensues is a comedy of errors that culminates in Stanley's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

What sets the foundation of Lewis' style is a Chaplinesque bumbling about.  With the addition of sound, we do not get witty dialogue, but Lewis' use of sound to say nothing–nothing coherent through dialogue anyway.  But more than these peculiarities, we get the reminder that this is anything but a true story.  At the end, Stanley seems to have fallen off the hotel balcony.  Next he casually walks behind the wall and reveals that the audience knows he is not going to die. Carrying it further still, he points out that the entire set is fake. His love interest from the film, Ellen Betz (Ina Balin) gives up too, referring to Stanley as "Mr. Lewis."  By today's standard, such a scene could only make the outtakes. 

We are left with what can only be thought of as a let-down, the sort of let-down we did not want. This film is not only not based on a true story, we are made completely conscious of its sheer fabrication.  Now would be a good time to challenge our bread and water stoicism and ask a more epicurean question.  The question is not one of indulging in everything indiscriminately, but a question of learning to enjoy a greater array of delights than previously.  

IMDb rates this film 5.9 stars out of 10

Film 101 does not rate this film

Loves of a Blonde (1965)

"Here at the front end, the narrator.

At the front end, the meanwhile:  God's laughter."
--Jorie Graham

Before coming to Hollywood to make films about cultural misfits, Milos Forman was already a Czech New Wave exemplar of dark comedy.  He crafted these early films with bleak humor, but a humor  sugarcoated with pathos.  

Loves of a Blonde, in particular, is set in a small factory town disproportionately populated by women.  A couple of military officials decide the town would be a good place for soldiers to go.  Andula (Hana Brejchova) and her friends decide to attend the dance welcoming the soldiers and they end up spending most of the night with three soldiers, but all involved end up going their separate ways.  Andula herself ends up with a young piano player, Milda (Vladimir Pucholt) whom she later visits in Prague.  When she arrives, he is not there, but his parents take her in.  She stays the night, but returns to her factory job.  The film ends with Andula telling her friend that she plans to visit a lot more, oblivious to what Milda is really like.  

So goes the plot sans episode, yet it is precisely episodic sensibility that makes the film.  Loves establishes its unique sensibility by combining several key components.  Firstly, each episode is a comedy of errors.  Second, each episode is laced with ignorance on the part of the characters where the audience readily sees what the characters are missing.  Finally, each episode gives way to gradually worse situations for Andula.

The most noteworthy example of Forman's penchant for episode happens at the welcoming dance for the soldiers.  Three soldiers are staring at Andula and her two friends.  As the girls notice, they think it yukky and encourage one another not to stare back, but they cannot help it.  The soldiers then send a bottle to the girls' table, but the waiter gives it to some other girls the next table over.  The girls who receive the bottle are flattered while the girls for whom the bottle is intended, are relieved.  The soldiers are upset and demand that the waiter bring the bottle to the correct table and he does.  Andula and her friends end up going along with the soldiers, though they are wholly unimpressed by them.  The episode incorporates a comedy of errors, ignorant characters, and leads to a worsened situation.

These elements, by themselves, show off Forman's sense of theater, but what provides his cinematic virtuosity is how he makes the episode happen in the "meanwhile."  What is meant here, is that Forman does not establish the scene with a bigger picture.  Every shot is taken going from one limited view to the next, leaving the audience to make the connections.  Still, Forman manages to successfully subject the scene to God's laughter.

In a final note, Forman shows off his cinematic vocabulary in what seems like two references to Lumiere films:  "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat," and "Employees Leaving the Lumiere Factory."  Whether the shots were intentional is another story, but given Forman's expertise in film economy, the intention is probable.

IMDb rates this film 7.6 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)

Other films by Forman include Firemen's Ball, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hair, Man on  the Moon, and The People vs. Larry Flynt.

The Cranes are Flying (1957)

Mihail Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying is a film about young love torn apart by World War II.  As a result, two themes work on the audience:  there is both the love of two young people and the love of one's country.  In terms of plot, there is not a lot to say.  Nothing all that clever presents itself.  Nonetheless, the film's strong sense of pathos, execution in acting, and off-the-charts direction and cinematography produce nothing less than sheer delight.

To be sure, the delight is derived less from plot twists and themes than style. In the case of plot, "tragedy" sums it up.  Furthermore, the viewer is always in a position to say what will happen next.  As for the themes, both are well worn and essentially mundane.  The romance is tolerable, but the patriotism is downright detracting to all but the choir.

And yet.  Despite the simplistic plot, one cannot fail to sympathetically latch onto young Veronica (Tatyana Samojlova), the naive, but goodhearted Boris (Aleksey Batalov), or Boris' father, Fyodor Ivanovich (Vasili Merkuryev), who is merely the voice of reason.  In terms of conflict, one cannot fail to despise Fyodor's nephew, Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin) from the moment he appears.  After all, Mark first appears in a scene tying to sway Veronica from Boris to himself, clearly as a matter of esteeming his own lust over the Veronica and Boris' giddy, mutual love.

Beyond the film's sentimental education, Samojlova and Merkuryev anchor the the story in the two respective themes.  Samojlova's part constantly finds the right expression or gesture in order to convey either  vivaciousness in Boris' presence, or emptiness in his absence.  The strength in either case amounts to the look of one who cannot keep their feelings from surfacing.  Merkuryev's part is also marvelously played out as the counterpoint to Samojlova.  He is austere and demands control of himself throughout.  He does not even bat an eyelash when his mother says, "You needn't pretend," as he sees Boris off to war.  

While the interplay between Veronica and Fyodor are well developed, Boris could have been written into the script with a fuller sense of substance rather than a casualty of two themes.  By portraying Boris as naive in lieu of a sense of struggle, or the mere struggle to struggle, material difference is lost to the interaction between Veronica and Fyodor.  (Note:  Kalatozov makes up for this in Soy Cuba, a joint effort between Mosfilm and the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry.)

The direction salvages an otherwise pitiful, though still possibly well-acted film, from the junk bin of films that never get reproduced in a new medium.  Examples of Kalatozov's artistry are readily seen in his use of silence.  First, when Veronica pushes her way through the crowd at the rallying center, and screams "Boris" at the top of her lungs, the crowd can still be heard (though it does not seem loud) and she is silent.  We simply read her lips.  A second instance is when Veronica learns her parents have died in an air raid.  Here, she sees a clock and hears it ticking.  It grows gradually louder as she stares at it, almost in order to silence it through mere will.  When she cannot, she covers her ears and the ticking stops.  The last example of Kalatozov's "silencing effect" happens as Veronica rushes away from the hospital.  Veronica's scream is swallowed up by a train that passes underneath the bridge she is standing on.  Without as capable directing, the film would have been disastrous.

Lastly, the film is somewhere between cutting edge and ahead of its time in terms of cinematography.  Sergei Urusevsky handles the camera with technical brilliance.  The tracking shots of Veronica through the crowds rate with Kubrick's tracking shots in Paths of Glory, which came out the same year.  The shots that run alongside Veronica when she runs from the hospital prefigure the race scene in Truffaut's Jules and Jim.  The shots of Boris running up the stairs after Veronica and later as he dies, where we see trees swirling above, are also unforgettable.  And though Urusevsky tops these shots with the opening scenes of Soy Cuba, this is an early version of a daring cinematographer.

IMDb rates this film 8.2 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 4.5 stars out of 5

La Jetee (1962)

Chris Marker is known primarily for his cinematic essays, though La Jetee, his best known work, is a science fiction short.  In all of but 28 minutes, and using almost exclusively still photos, Marker creates a masterpiece.

The story begins with a man (Davos Hanich) "marked by an image of his childhood."  The image the man remembers is the face of a woman (Helene Chatelain), but also a man being shot on the jetty at Orly Airport.  We also learn, "The face he had seen was the only peacetime image to survive the war,"

The rest of the film takes place in the aftermath of World War III, where, "The survivors settled underground."  Because of his obsession with a memory, the man is subjected to experiments by scientists who find the potential for time travel in the man's memory.  In his "travels," the man goes back to the past and falls in love with the woman who left such a strong impression on him, but the scientists need him to go into the future in order to get supplies necessary for human survival.  Finally, after he gets the supplies, the man learns he is no longer useful to the scientists, so they will kill him.  He is saved by the people he met in the future who offer him escape to their world, but he chooses to return to the past where he can be with the woman.

Throughout the film, Marker makes his impact by suggesting that the man's greatest obstacle is not the scientists, but time.  And the hints are deeply submerged in the film.  For example, the famous scene where the woman looks like she is in a photograph, but she blinks her eyes as if she may be looking back at us.  Beside being a haunting image, it foreshadows the oncoming reality of time itself.

Another statement Marker makes is through the parallel to Hitchcock's Vertigo.  In the scene where the woman and man are standing in front of a cutout from an old tree, the woman says something to the man, but he does not understand because it is a name in English.  Considering the overt visual reference of the tree cutout to a similar scene in Vertigo, and possibly even Hitchcock's name, the man is losing his stable connection with reality, much like Kim Novak's (and not James Stewart's) character in Vertigo.  Marker is more emphatic than Hitchcock in terms of pitting his character against time, but both films have a character looking at the rings of a tree (years) with disoriented eyes.

A last example comes from the experiments the man undergoes.  We learn from the narrator, "On the tenth day images begin to appear--like confessions."  What is interesting, subversive even, is that we cannot take for granted that the scientists are gloating over the images, or that their methods, likened to torture, are able to elicit the images.  As scientists, their agreed upon mission is to find a possible method of time travel and in fact, the quantifiable element is that it was the tenth day.  Time is not what we first think of, but it is probably what the scientists were measuring.

The ending, however, also reveals that the man is not subject to the scientists, but to time.  In order to explain without giving away the ending, the man goes back to the past and crosses paths with his childhood self, the woman, and the man he saw shot that day on the jetty.  But is the man choosing to go back to the past, or is he doomed to be there?  While there is no easy way to decide an ultimate arbiter in such a question, it is clear that whether the man chooses or is destined, whether he is subject to the present only or otherwise able to move across time, he is still unable to escape time itself.

IMDb rates this film 8.2 stars out of 10
Film 101 rates this film 4 stars out of 5

Dogville (2003)

Dogville presents a challenge to the sophisticated viewer. The challenge is how much of a given rhetorical situation can rest on concept alone and still be convincing.  Of course, there is no way of taking the director and audience out of the equation.  There is, however, a direct sense of purpose, though very little context enriching the purpose.  As a result, the film has a concept and purpose, but little context.  The character of the film's direction and the manner of its reception are thereby asked to suspend the quest for sophistication.

The film opens with narration and an overhead view of a sound stage where the "places" are represented only as chalk outlines.  Grace (Nicole Kidman) wanders into Dogville one evening, apparently on the run from gangsters.  The town is left to decide, several times in the film, whether she should be allowed to stay, and at what price.

The themes are ready-made.  Intolerance, suspicion, jealousy, ignorance, and a fear of the many run the gamut.  Director Lars von Trier makes little effort to hide how these themes constitute his idea of America and the American national identity.  In fact, as the credits roll at the end, we listen to Bowie's "Young Americans," and watch unflattering pictures of America (for example, one of Dorothea Lange's pictures of the migrant mother).

Additionally, in one of the town meetings, Liz Henson (Chloe Sevigny) asks Thomas Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany) "Are you for us or against us Tom?"  The question is simply whether Tom commits to identifying with Dogville and its people, and by extension, whether he identifies as American.

What is striking about these themes is how they present an idea of America, that is, an idea alone.  Von Trier has never been to America and so his conception must rely on ideas rather than experience, at the very least, for the sake of integrity.  It is as if von Trier's two films on America (Dogville and Manderlay) are conceptual remakes of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.  The overwhelming difference is simply that Griffith sustains an immanent critique, while von Trier remains an outsider.

The fundamental concern with viewing the film then becomes one of how to take a wholly external view of America under these projected themes.  And the question is valid even if one has never been to America or identified with it.  Hence, though Ebert did not like the film, he had the wherewithal to ask rhetorically if a David Spade movie was any closer to being an accurate look at America on account of Spade being American.

If the American viewer sympathizes with von Trier's take, there are at least several grounds for doing so.  From a conceptual standpoint, anyone might have to ask to what extent these themes are at play in forming a national identity--American or otherwise.  Another possibility is that the thematic content is already something Americans are self-conscious of as being part of their national identity, and so they are not a stretch to consider.  A final reason may be that Americans desire the bare bones approach to the uglier side of their history.  Perhaps they welcome the reminder of core issues precisely because their own view has become too sophisticated.

IMDb rates this film 7.9 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 4.5 stars out of 5

Other films in von Trier's oeuvre include Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Melancholia, and Europa.  

The Wild Bunch (1969)

Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch stands out, not only in the Western genre, but film history.  It stands out at least for its graphic violence, and hence it has been an aesthetic influence on De Palma, Scorsese, and Tarantino, to name a few.  For sure, it is a pretty normal Western minus the incredibly violent opening and closing scenes.

The opening scene shows Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his men roll into town.  At the freeze frame introducing Holden, he looks down at children huddled together.  They are smilingly watching ants swarm a couple of scorpions.  We then hear a minister speaking on behalf of the temperance union.  "Do not drink wine or strong drink," the minister admonishes, echoing the likes of a Billy Sunday.  An old lady drops a few parcels, and Pike helps her cross the street.  Pike's men enter a bank and Pike says, "If they move, kill 'em."  It is soon discovered that their bank robbery is a trap.  They are surrounded.  There is the sound of a heart pumping faster and faster as the temperance union marches directly in between Pike's men and the bounty hunters hired by the railroad.  What ensues is one of the bloodier scenes in film history.  There is a sheer cacophony of gunfire and neither side has any feeling about those in the middle.

The final scene tops it, however.  The death totals are slightly over five times as high.  According to IMDb, the death count in the opening scene is 22, while the final scene tallies a "whopping" 112.  Another trivia bit mentions that there were "supposedly" over 90,000 blanks fired in the making of the film (a number higher than the estimated number of live rounds shot in the entire Mexican Revolution of 1913).  

Reducing the film to carnage is a mistake though.  It is also shaped by anachronism, from which we can infer a certain degree of historical commentary.  There is one scene in which Pike's men see a car and are awestruck.  They realize times are changing too rapidly for them to keep up.  An airplane is mentioned and one of the men says that it could only be a hot air balloon.  Pike corrects him and says there are machines, fully equipped with motors, that can do over sixty miles an hour.  At another point, Pike explicitly remarks on the feeling of being outdated.  "We've got to start thinking beyond our guns.  Those days are closing fast."  Indeed, the cowboy story of riding horses and slinging guns looks suspiciously outmoded next to planes, cars, and the M1917 Browning machine gun from the end of the film.  

The machine gun, in particular, has great historical significance.  The Gatling gun goes back to the American Civil War.  Its inventor, Richard Gatling actually believed that his invention, which was capable of 200 rounds a minute, would end war altogether simply because no one would want to fight if killing was this easy.  With trepidation, one can see an analogy to the atomic bomb and the persistence of fighting even in the Cold War era.

Peckinpah, in fact, took the film to be an allegory to what was happening in Vietnam.  His hope in portraying graphic violence was to make people sick of it, and furthermore, to be done with it.  Peckinpah later regretted that the violence was merely enthralling to audiences, a regret we can only imagine he shared with Richard Gatling over humanity's tie to violence.

IMDb rates this film 8.1 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (red stars indicating the site's higher degree of appreciation)

Roger Ebert includes this film in his list of Great Movies

Other notable Peckinpah films include Straw Dogs, Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Berkeley in the Sixties (1990)

Mark Kitchell's Berkeley in the Sixties is a documentary which sustains exceptional balance throughout its two hour running time.  This balance does not come from any single interview, but over the course of multiple interviews.  Furthermore, while the events are taken up in first person narratives, each retelling reveals how years of reflection can yield different meanings, coupled with altogether new sympathies.

The documentary begins with the free speech movement, then moves to protesting the Vietnam War, the influx of hippies to the Bay area, the rise of the Black Panthers, and finally the feminist movement in Berkeley.  In addressing different movements, and looking at how different perspectives are forged over the span of an entire decade, there is no easy consensus on what happened.  It is, of course, a matter of perspective.

Nonetheless, perspective is a way of correcting conclusions all too easily taken for granted.  John Gage and John Searle, for example, find the free speech movement to be a model scenario of protest.  Indeed, it is the most clearly victorious battle for protest shown in the documentary.  But both come across as conservative in light of further examples.

The free speech movement, for example, becomes a protest of the Vietnam War in one of the more memorable moments.  As Mario Savio congratulates the students on their victory, the students begin walking away only to stop dead in their tracks when Savio says they are not done because there is a war going on.  

Other disparate perspectives include Allen Ginsberg answering questions with a chant, Bobby Seale debunking popular myths of why the Panthers sold Mao's red book, and Jackie Goldberg explaining how the Left was unable to take women seriously.  As the range of perspectives increases, solidarity fizzles proportionally.

On the whole, the film juggles a wide variety of perspectives, and sympathies do not go unchecked. Still, the documentary does appear to have more sympathy for radicals.  Whether the sympathy is a matter of who gets interviewed, or a catchy tune played during a protest, something more elegant highlights its radical flare.  The film allows participants in these movements to account for why they changed their minds at any given point.  To allow for someone to explain a change in their political methods and objectives is a far cry from today's penchant for immediately dismissing change, as if morality itself could only be a static category.  This allowance is balanced precisely because it also serves as a corrective to the conservative limitation of fairness to merely affirming the status quo.  

IMDb rates this film 7.4 stars out of 10

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

"This film is concerned with the inner realities of an individual and with the way in which the sub-conscious will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently casual occurrence into a critical emotional experience."  --Maya Deren from Essential Deren

Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon is a 14 minute long experimental film. Sticking to the Deren quote above, the "apparently casual occurrence," can be seen as the opening sequence of the film:  Deren picks up a flower of the way home and as she arrives at her doorstep, watches someone turn around a bend in the road.  She goes inside, surveys the house, and falls asleep.  The rest of the film involves the opening sequence being played out in a nightmare.  Nonetheless, the dream sequences are variations on the opening sequence.

The opening sequence provides only a modicum of experience.  The sheer fact that the dream sequences make up a majority of the film reveals how the components of ordinary waking experience take so much emotional content for granted.  The overall beauty and contribution of this film could be as simple as taking a mundane event and expanding its emotional content into a visual medium.  

Here's an example of what is taken for granted in ordinary experience:  in the opening sequence, as the Deren character arrives home, someone is walking away.  In a flash, one might imagine that the person is an intruder.  But the thought comes and goes without being processed.  Still, Deren checks out the apartment and the objects lying around take on new meaning.  Were they there before?  Is it a good idea to leave a knife on a table when one leaves? &c.  There are a series of red flags that get recognized, but they need to be sorted out.  And here, strictly speaking, they are sorted experimentally, through film.

Meshes feels less about a story than a moment, and the objects we see throughout the film are less symbols than emotional possibilities.  As a story, there is but the opening sequence.  The sequence is a moment.  As far as symbols go, the knife, the mirrors, the flower, and the telephone are dynamic.  There is no symbolic status, no appeal to fixed meanings; only one emotion triggering another.  In a lump sum, the film explores emotional contingencies as forms.  It is a movie for someone who enjoys watching objects change meaning when juxtaposed with something else and can be satisfied by a film without climaxes, resolutions, or a punchline.

IMDb rates this film 7.9 stars out of 10 

Film 101 rates this film 4 stars out of 5

Tape (2001)

Richard Linklater, like no other director these days, knows how to craft a film around the language being used.  He understands how language is used in a particular time and place, and whether that language is intelligent or ignorant, it seems authentic to the situation.  In Tape, the language is intelligent and its authenticity derives from the opportunities available in the context.  The context is first of all the film's setting; a hotel room.   The context is, furthermore, a game of sorts; and like all games, it can elicit the worst in its players.  Finally, the players are three people who are friends from high school, and possibly still are, though probably not.

One room movies are a tricky business.  In varying degrees, they suggest irrationality will come into play and escape will only come at a price.  Tape utilizes the anxiety implicit in one room settings to an unprecedented extent.  The entire film takes place in a hotel room without a single camera shot elsewhere.  We do not even see out the door of the room as characters come and go.  The curtains remain drawn throughout as well.  The setting is simply bleak.

As the film opens, Vince (Ethan Hawke) is in an obvious state of preparation and the rest of the film is a matter of carrying out his plan. Because Vince is seen preparing, we know the events of the film are a game of sorts.  The game is played as a matter of deciding whether Vince's friend Jon (Robert Sean Leonard) date raped Amy (Uma Thurman) during their senior year, just after Amy had broken up with Vince.  Much like the room they find themselves during the movie, high school was also a confining and maddening experience, so the question of how they leave the hotel room accrues the added meaning of whether the characters are any more adult now then in high school.

In terms of the film being played out as a game, we see what we would expect from a game; hostility and obscenity, which Freud took to be the primary aims of a joke.  The games we play seem to have the capacity for degrading into hostility and obscenity even when they begin in fun, and Tape is no exception to games so conceived.  Whatever it is about games that so often leave at least one person frustrated is hard to say, but Tape does an excellent job at exploring a range of answers.  Is it that Vince is competitive with Jon?  Thankfully, the film only mentions this overused explanation and considers deeper motives in explaining how games have the capacity to degenerate.

Of the characters, Vince clearly enjoys the privilege of being direct, or what Foucault labeled the "speaker's benefit."  His courage in speaking directly to the taboo generates a powerful performance, too.  And despite taking courage to a brazen excess, Vince is essential in drawing out truth.

Jon on the other hand explores the situation with a far higher degree of pathos.  It is as if his circumlocutions and euphemisms suggest that there is something to explore prior to naming something.  At one point, after making arrogant statement, Jon says, "If it sounds pompous, it's only because I haven't fully honed my skills yet."  His skill is precisely the ability to suspend  judgments made in naming things,  and to assess the world with a little sophistication (literally, with a move toward a more complex notion).  Jon is essentially capable of processing the truth.

If Vince draws out the truth, and Jon processes it, Amy is the one who puts it into perspective.  She is capable of saying things like, "People change.  They end up having nothing to say to each other even if they were best friends years before."  She seems to have enough wherewithal to play their games and then step back and ask "Is that what you wanted?"  She has a leg up on Vince and Jon since perspective includes both Vince's direct approach and Jon's sophistication.

Under Linklater's direction, and with his penchant for working from language, the film flourishes in the hands of actors who are perfectly capable of being their character.  In a way, the film sets the  bar high for what counts as a compelling film.

IMDb rates this film 7.2 stars out of 10
Film 101 rates this film 2.5 stars out of 5 

Shame (1968)

Years after Ingmar Bergman made Shame, he expressed dissatisfaction with the film.  He thought that it could be divided into a first part on war, and a second part on the aftermath.  Of the two parts, Bergman said, "In a nightmare, I felt at home.  In the reality of war, I was lost."  Bergman could not justify the war scenes, but could stand by his work on the scenes that looked at the survivors of war.

Bergman is one of the great directors in terms of conveying a character's psychology, especially through the use of his signature close-ups.  In the first part of Shame, we see him abandon his expertise to show how the external realities of war intrude on these psychological spaces and overcome them.  Yet in order to be precise, Bergman does not succeed in capturing the external reality of war, but how Jan (Max Von Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullman) are unable to make sense of it; that is, unable to organize the sensory details of war.  

The film begins in sound (just as it ends in quiet).  As the credits roll, there are radio reports and more importantly, radio sounds.  An alarm clock breaks in, and the next attention grabbing sound is Eva pulling up the shades that cover the windows as if the show is starting and the stage is outside.  Moments later, Jan hears church bells ringing and he asks Eva if there is an occasion.  There is no occasion and so the bells have no significance Jan can determine.  A phone rings and Eva answers, but no one is on the other line.  The church bells continue only to be drowned out by a military convoy.  We are not exactly in the external world, but a world filtered through sound, and it is utterly appropriate considering the main characters are members of a disbanded orchestra.

A while later, Jan and Eva are in an antique store to buy a bottle of wine.  The owner of the store goes to get the bottle of wine, but leaves an eighteenth century music box playing in the meantime.  The camera surveys the items in the antique shop as the music plays.  Again, sound is the filter.

The ultimate intrusion of sound comes at the end of the first half of the film (though there is no precise marker between the halves).  As bombs go off in Jan and Eva's yard, Jan remarks that he cannot decipher which direction the cacophony is coming from.  More remarkably, Eva says something to Jan that is completely drowned out by the bombing.  There are not even subtitles here.  The sound has has finally achieved its intrusion.  After the bombing, Jan and Eva are standing in front of us with alternating camera shots on one or the other to the sound of water dripping.  Jan is clutching his violin.

The departure from the deeper psychological elements of existence made Bergman uneasy.  In the scene where Eva buys fish, Jan tells her he feels like he has fallen in love with her all over again and that she looks beautiful.  Her response is, "When I'm far away, right?"  Bergman seems to be mocking his own tendency to explain things from a close-up.  Bergman may be right in suspecting that his strength is not in capturing the external reality of war, but he proves masterful in understanding the auditory impression it leaves us with.  

IMDb rates this film 8.0 out of 10 stars

Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)

Masculin Feminin (1966)

"The signals are jukebox songs, forms of dress, and, above all, what they do with their hair.  Americanization makes them an international society..."  --Pauline Kael on Masculin Feminin in "The New Republic."

Certainly the plot of Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Feminin is complicated in terms of the order it is told in, but easy in terms of what actually happens.  What actually happens is Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud) runs into Madeline (Chantal Goya) at a cafe where he both hits on her and asks her to help him get a magazine job. Paul gets the job first, then Madeline.  Paul moves in with Madeline and her two roommates.  He takes a different job opinion polling while Madeline goes into making hit records.  Madeline gets pregnant and Paul dies falling out of an apartment window.

Satyajit Ray once claimed, "Godard is the first director in the history of cinema to have totally dispensed with what is known as plot line." Indeed, plot is not how Godard wishes to craft a film. Godard is looking for truth in film, not story.  And the truth is demonstrated in other techniques than plot.  Godard himself said in an interview, "For me, cinema is at the same time life.  It is something that photographs life. Resumes of life, once they have been put together are what we call a film."  For Godard, the truth is photographed, not photo-shopped, so to speak.

In terms of what Godard wishes to photograph, Kael is right in suggesting that signals are at the heart of the film.  One has to wonder what Madeline has in mind when she plays a tune from a jukebox, as if to ask, "Who is she trying to impress?"  The forms of dress demarcate not only gender, but how one conceives their gender. Madeline is always looking fashionably mod and Paul has the look of a Jean-Paul Sartre wannabe.  As for hair, Madeline primps as if it were not only a hobby, but a defense mechanism like Paul with his cigarettes.  

The recognition of signals are caught in Kael, but represent only one dimension. Two additional activities seen throughout the film go beyond the play of signals, however; at least inasmuch as they become context, or literally, what weaves together.  These are the act of reading and the act of interviewing.  

Interviewing, which becomes Paul's job, gives the film a documentary feel at points.  Paul is almost conducting sociological research, though he is not quite scientific about it.  He asks questions that expose his interviewee's attitudes toward life.  It is his randomly styled questions that expose not only the interviewee's attitude, but his own momentary interests.

Reading is perhaps the most emphatic act throughout the film.  With an almost Wittgensteinian eye, Godard captures people in the act of reading; most notably in the opening scene when Paul is reading in the cafe.  Paul is reading at an awkward pace and pronouncing words with his own emphasis.  It tells about who he is and almost nothing about what he is reading.  Here, Godard moves away from silent era film where audiences often read letters left on a desk, for example. Godard instead lets us see how an audience (Paul) reads a text, not just how they act afterwards.  As a result, the film is not only viewed as signals, which were already well entrenched in movie history, but also viewed with an eye on contexts which normally escape the frame.  

IMDb rates this film 7.6 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 4.5 stars out of 5

Petulia (1968)

"Lists are what they tell you to begin with if you want to be on top of things."

"Lists are what you write when you are going shopping for things you don't need as much to remember regardless."

--Monica de la Torre from Public Domain

Lists might conceivably replace the essay one day. Perhaps there is a grad student in sociology somewhere working out the empirical details of whether people turn to lists more than essays nowadays, but the research could only add a statistic to what is already apparent; that people prefer examples to reasons and a discovery to a defense.

Only a few months ago, one such list caught my attention.  It was the Harvard suggested list of films for undergraduates to see, and I have returned to the list at least a dozen times.  The Harvard list is not a canon of the greatest films of all-time, but rather, guides the undergraduate towards films that will supplement their predictable viewing selections.  On this supplementary list is Petulia.

Richard Lester's Petulia is laced in all sorts of pop iconography. We see Big Brother and Holding Company and the Grateful Dead in snippets, Petulia's (Julie Christie's) amazing late-60s wardrobe, fairly cool cars, and all of this set in San Francisco.  The film is also chock-full of flashbacks and what are probably anachronisms, adding to the overall pop facade.

Underneath the stylized story-telling, the plot is plain and simple.  Petulia propositions Archie (George C. Scott), they have a romance that never quite works out, and they go their separate ways.  If there is a motive behind it all, it is that Petulia is trapped in bad circumstances and looking for a way out, but not at the expense of faking love.  She wants something real, and so does Archie, though he does not know it is Petulia until it is too late.  As director Richard Lester said, "It's a very real film about two people trying to get through to each other."  The operative word here is "trying."

What sets the film apart is its sense of dealing with life as it comes, and precisely that alone.  The film seems to bump its head against these limits as if real life deserves a place on celluloid even if other movies take another route.  It is not a great story, just a believable one, and for this reason, it maintains a place on Harvard's list of supplementary films (the only list I have seen it included on).  Furthermore, as a supplement, it is a film that informs our core sense of what a film can be by not being the average 60s viewing experience, but distinctly itself; something of a one hit wonder.

IMDb rates this film 6.9 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 4 stars out of 5

F for Fake (1973)

Orson Welles' F for Fake is not postmodern.  He is certainly one of those artists who find favor with the next generation, but he is still a modernist, and like any self-respecting modernist, he challenges assumed conventions.  But in terms of cinema, Welles is not a child of Marx and Coca-Cola.  He is a brooding father.

F for Fake is, as IMDb so tersely describes it, "a documentary about fraud and fakery," but it is also more. It is a personal film.  It is a filmic essay.  It is a more than mockumentary since it could equally pass as an ontological statement. 

More importantly, it is a documentary on fakes of all sorts. There is no single use for the term "fake," but rather a series of nuanced uses of the term.  Gilles Deleuze put it this way:  "...it is so difficult to define 'the' forger, because we do not take into account his multiplicity, his ubiquity, and because we are content to refer to a historical and ultimately chronological time." Hence, Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving are fakes.  Paintings are fakes.  Art experts are fakes.  War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane are fakes.  Welles himself is a fake.  Magic tricks are fake. Oja Kodar is a fake. Picasso is a fake.  This documentary itself is a fake, but it adds at least one new dimension to being a fake.  It is about "fake" itself in myriad forms.

The beginning of the film starts with magic tricks, quite literally, but the greatest feats are Welles' camerawork and editing.  The reasons to notice the camerawork is Oja Kodar, who is filmed from the waist down, walking past men and never failing to gather a wanton look. Only after a while do we see Kodar's face.  It is a powerful stretch of film, not only as a feminist commentary, but because it reveals a major theme of the film:  that we often do not question an illusion because we want it to be true.  To be sure, Kodar is beautiful.  The beauty is no illusion, but she is definitely acting out a role.

With the editing, try finding a spot in the first fifteen minutes of the film where it seems like a good place to pause.  There is not a place that seems to be right for the job, no place that the camera itself pauses as if to say "take a moment before the next scene."  Even the freeze frames are misleading because as the frame stops, a voice is still finishing a sentence.  The overlaps in these first fifteen minutes demand attention and hold our attention as a matter of craft.  

The full effect of the film is realized fairly early on as we learn the stories of Clifford Irving and Elmyr de Hory.  Irving is already famous for his fraudulent biography of Howard Hughes.  At the time of the film, he is working on a biography of Elmyr de Hory who is possibly the world's most infamous art forger.  What the scenes have to offer beyond fascinating anecdotes is simple, however.  Irving and Elmyr have exposed museums and art dealers to be less than expert, and furthermore, in the world of painting, Elmyr may be the real expert since he can differentiate between one of his "fakes" and a "real" Manet, Matisse, or Picasso.  Why is Elmyr not in jail, then? The art world may not want to know the truth as with Kodar earlier in the film.  Also because if any art dealer or museum exposes Elmyr, their credibility would also be lost.

Lastly, Welles tells us a story about Kodar and Picasso.  Describing the story would be a bit of a spoiler, but if one can imagine The Usual Suspects as having a memorable twist, imagine at least three sharper twists in a story.  Imagine a brooding father, capable of War of the Worlds, telling it to you as a bedtime story.

IMDb rates this film 7.8 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film (an appalling) 3.5 stars out of 5

Other films in the Welles (directorial) oeuvre:  Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, The Trial, Othello, Mr. Arkadin, and A Touch of Evil.

With a critical eye towards the Criterion Collection, I applaud their two-disc version of this film.  The supplementary material they provide with their edition of this film is exceptional.  

Stroszek (1977)

If Werner Herzog's Stroszek is a ballad, it digs deep into the etymology of the word, a word that indicates a lyric we dance to.  Not only do the characters dance to the ballad at one point, but infamously, so does a chicken.  Stroszek is also a ballad in the sense of a being a lyric of the people, at the very least since many of the characters in the film are not professional actors.  

What makes this film a compelling ballad is twofold.  First, there is a distancing effect, which puts the ordinary in unfamiliar circumstances in order to gain perspective as Brecht would have it.  Secondly, there is the rich identification between the director and his audience, where "identification" indicates the combined effects of ethos and pathos as Burke would have it.  

The distancing effect is easy to decipher.  Bruno (Bruno S.), Eva (Eva Mattes), and Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) start out in Berlin.  Bruno has just been released from a mental institution, Eva has just decided to leave her pimps, and Scheitz is an eccentric old man with an offer to move to Wisconsin.  The three take the offer to move and are defamiliarized in the new setting.  They have gone from an awkward bunch to a really awkward bunch via circumstance.

Bruno is the one who explains it though, as if the audience has not already noticed.  He self-consciously describes the difference between a not so distant Germany with a present America.  Eva says, "No one kicks you here Bruno," to which Bruno replies, "Not physically, here they do it spiritually."  In another scene, the difference is yet more pronounced.  Working in the auto shop, Bruno's boss is describing sexual acts while Bruno is contemplating his own misery.  As they talk past each other as if the other could understand them, Bruno is clearly in a place that his utterances are not even capable of being overheard.

Herzog does not pursue the distancing effect without a great deal of pathos, however.  Sure, Bruno is unfairly treated when the German pimps have him kneel on his own piano.  One cannot help but feel bad for Eva even when she is running away from Wisconsin with two truckers headed to Vancouver.  Scheitz is eccentric, but also a helpless old man.

Ethos is more difficult to examine, but hardly.  Bruno is described as an "innocent," in many reviews; a mark of pathos.  But when he is wrong, we cannot blame someone so full of goodwill, which is a mark of his ethos.  Eva leaves Bruno alone, but she never means harm, and Scheitz holds up a barber with Bruno, but is a compassionate being on the whole.  Both are also marks of ethos.

Herzog's use of ethos and pathos goes the extra mile, though.  When the audience sees Bruno being taken advantage of, but still able to speak with conviction on the differences between Germany and Wisconsin, they see someone who may be speaking for them.  Bruno is speaking for those who strangely enough, feel most alone surrounded at a party.  And while a critic may not identify with Bruno, Herzog is seeking such an audience through Bruno.  He is seeking an identification with the lonely rather than the critic who still may be wondering whether defamiliarization contradicts identification, unable to dance to a ballad.

IMDb rates this film 8 stars out of 10
Film 101 rates this film 4 stars out of 5
Roger Ebert includes this film on his list of Great Movies

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers was shot in 1965, released in '66 and released in the United States in '67.  The film is considered one of the finest post colonialist films ever made and arguably as great for its unflinching realism.  In fact, it was used by different groups, such as the Black Panthers, as a manual for guerrilla warfare.  Of course, it was also studied at the Pentagon.  Just to be sure.

The film offers convincing insight into how the majority of wars have been fought since World War II.  There is an attack from the underprivileged side who then retreat and hide among the rest of the population afterwards.  Portraying hit and run is not new to movies, though, and it certainly does not set The Battle of Algiers in a class any different than even Disney's Johnny Tremain.  What does set this film apart is, again, its realism, and  its almost DIY underpinnings.  

The film begins with a note to the viewer that it is not a documentary. Still, there are moments one could easily forget that it is not a documentary.  The press interview with Col. Matheiu, for example, seems real not only because of the documentary filming style, but the historically situated references.  After a recent article is mentioned (an article written by Jean-Paul Sartre condemning the French occupation of Algeria) a journalist asks Matheiu, "You like Sartre."  Matheiu responds, "No, but I like him even less as an enemy." 

If there is a moment where the film goes beyond realism into ideology, it comes after the head figures of the Algerian resistance, the FLN, have been killed.  According to Matheiu's analogy to a tapeworm, it is only when the head is destroyed that the tapeworm cannot proliferate.  And yet, a few years after the heads of the FLN were killed, we see people who remember what the struggle is about.  They fight and win despite the absence of a defined leader.  It reminds us of Lenin's comment to Trotsky just before the Russian Revolution:  "What if we lose?"  to which Trotsky replied, "And what if we win?"

IMDb rates this film 8.2 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)

Roger Ebert includes this film in his list of Great Movies

Johnny Guitar (1954)

Johnny Guitar is a Western directed by Nicholas Ray.  It is a subversive Western.  It is a gender-bending and anti-McCarthyist Western.  It is a picture that proliferates opinion.  Roger Ebert puts it in his list of Great Movies and calls it a "melodrama."  Scorsese liked the expressionistic colors.  Directors of the French New Wave, like Godard,  argued Ray was an auteur above many others.  Truffaut called the film a remake of Beauty and the Beast with Joan Crawford as the beast.  Bogdanovich is said to have lectured only referring to the film via jokes. The actors in the film wished to forget it and the criticism at the time was largely disparaging.  And today, the enduring quality of the film is now secured by the Library of Congress who has added it to its list of films for preservation.

The quality of the film seems impossible to reduce to an aspect and its place as an all-time great seems debatable for any particular reason.  The reason it is a great film generally, is that it continues to elicit strong and varied reactions to it.

With the quantity of differences in mind, Johnny Guitar may be a film best gauged by its ability to elicit new responses; that is, it may be a film in which analysis must shift toward synthesis in order to be appreciated.  Analyzing a single facet will not serve as well as adding new reasons to the list of prior reasons, and deciding the outcome as the sum of all perspectives.  The shift toward quantity seems fitting too, considering director Nicholas Ray branded film an "eclectic" art.

So what about the film?  A first viewing deserves privilege over a second viewing.  For example, one has to ask why Vienna (Joan Crawford) waits for a mob to arrive at her bar while wearing a white dress and sitting at a piano.  It may be part of her confidence as a woman or her ability to turn the tide with a phrase.  Perhaps both.  At any rate, it is a gamble on her part and a second viewing placates the intensity of feeling with an understanding that comes from hindsight.

Another famous scene is the conversation Vienna and Johnny (Sterling Hayden) have after their tiff.  The entire conversation has only the semblance of making up.  It begins with Johnny asking, "How many men have you forgotten?"  Vienna coolly replies, 'As many women as you've remembered."  At another point, Johnny asks Vienna to lie to him and she does, emphatically lying to him.  Agreements never come easily in the film.  Instead, the individual differences amplify the intensity of the film.

Johnny Guitar is a great film, but precisely because of how many responses are at stake in viewing.  The difference in kinds of greatness is this: there are great films that lend themselves to answers (like "rosebud" in Citizen Kane) and great films that allow differences to maintain their integrity over and above the demands of plot structure.  Johnny Guitar reaches for the latter.

IMDb rates this film 7.7 stars out of 10
Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)

Other films by Nicholas Ray include In a Lonely Place, They Live by Night, and Rebel without a Cause.

Sugar Cane Alley (1983)

Euzhan Palcy's Sugar Cane Alley takes place in Martinique.  The main character, Jose (Garry Cadenat) lives with his grandmother (Darling Legitimus) who insists that Jose never works in the sugar cane fields.  The film follows them as they move from the sugar cane village to the city where he attends an elite school.  Along the way, he absorbs a rich understanding of race in Martinique.

Roger Ebert mentioned in his review of the film that it feels like it is based on the director's own life and that "it's a surprise to discover that the director based it on a novel."  The film certainly feels autobiographical, and reveals details from an intimate vantage point.

In an interview about the film, Palcy states her aim with the movie precisely: "I wanted to make a film that could touch people, awaken their consciences to a sense of change--a revolt in a positive sense--and move them to struggle peacefully for a better life, to come to see themselves as people with dignity."  There is an insistence on dignity throughout the film, but the way it is absorbed by Jose keeps it from being preachy.


The film is doesn't merely go from one lesson on race to the next and it never seems to be merely about a message.  I suggest that it is because Palcy lets each lesson become a part of Jose.  Each lesson Jose learns tends to show up later in the film as if he carried the lesson with him.    

In Jose's time with Medouze (Douta Seck--a West African actor), for example,  he learns about a slave revolt where the only change was that the "master" became "boss."  What Jose learns from Medouze is carried to another important scene where Jose writes an essay about Medouze and is accused of cheating by his teacher at the elite school.  Of course, Jose does not cheat or even fabricate about Medouze.

In another school scene, Jose explains the difference between "singing" and "cackling."  The language Jose uses borders on poetry and this capacity for making words dance is carried to another scene when a woman behind a ticket counter yells at a thief (who runs off).  She says that she hates blacks (though she herself is black).  She adds, "Except for my color, I am not black.  My character is white."  Jose responds, "I'm sure no white ever yelled 'I hate my race' when another white stole, or even murdered.  Then why, for a trifle, are you willing to condemn all blacks?"  Jose carries his learning with him.

The film's purpose is "revolt in a positive sense," and the revolt is brought to us with the closeness of a memoir.  In the balance, there are lessons on race to be carried. When they later get used, the lessons are transformed into dignity.

IMDb rates this film 7.3 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 3 stars out of 5

Euzhan Palcy quoted from Patricia Aufderheide at http://www.library.american.edu/subject/media/aufderheide/sugar.html

Roger Ebert quoted from his online review.

The Wrong Man (1956)

The Wrong Man is an unusual film in the Hitchcock oeuvre.  For one thing, the film begins with Hitchcock telling us that it is a true story. Like Hitchcock's television show, the introduction provides a pleasant, almost theatrical dimension.  The ending of the film, on the other hand, feels helplessly disturbing.

Upon my initial viewing, the disturbing part came at the end of the film when Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda), whose life is essentially ruined by an unfair investigation, blames the man who actually commits the crime, and not the police who proceed as if he is guilty until proven innocent.  

The issue is deeper, though.  As Renata Salecl states in her essay, "The Right Man and the Wrong Woman," Manny is psychotically indifferent.  "The truth behind the perfect image is not a simple weakness, but psychotic indifference manifested in the total absence of guilt..."  Salecl sees Manny's apparent perfections and complete assurance that things will work out, due to his innocence, as the source of every other part of his life falling apart.  Guilt is deflected off of him in every instance and carried by others, most emphatically, his wife (Vera Miles).

But does psychotic indifference alone explain Manny's belief in the system?  After all, where is the transference of guilt to the police officers when they learn that Manny is innocent?  If we adhere to Salecl's interpretation, there would then be psychotic indifference from the police as well.  The added feature of Manny's not being the only one who operates with psycotic indifference amplifies the issue greatly.  Manny has sided (if not conspired) with the justice system against his wife.  A "we" or an "us" for Manny is an entire conspiracy of "normal people."  The fraternal aspects almost work like an initiation ritual, complete with hazing.

The question in viewing the film becomes less an issue of his indifference, but one of simply agreeing with the term "normal," even at the expense of his wife's sanity.  The feeling of insanity is precisely this inability to identify with "normal," and if this amplification of Salecl's interpretation is right, the disturbing aspect of the film is not Manny alone, but that Manny is socially possible.  The title of her essay would have to be re-titled:  perhaps it would become "Normal Men and the Wrong Woman."

IMDb rates this film 7.5 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 4.5 stars out of 5

Salecl's essay is available in a collection entitled Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), edited by Slavoj Zizek.  I used the second edition, dated 2010.

Ordet (1955)

Ordet (The Word) is a film.  It is also more than a film. And whatever it means to say "more than a film," it is again more.  

There is a slowness that director Carl Dreyer brings to the film. The style of the film has been called "realized mysticism," which sounds perfectly awful. What this term consists of, however,  is camera shots that are both slow and discerning.  The camera work brings a meditative feel. The language of several characters is also slow, and almost leads to sheer boredom. But as Roger Ebert rightly points out, "...once you're inside, it's impossible to escape."

What seems inescapable in the film is an eternal truth.  But if the film is archetypal, it only skirts the question of historical differences.  What makes the film relevant today is not its affirmation of religious faith, but materialist limitations with regards to ideology.  How does ideology cut through materialist certitude?  The film forces the same question Gramsci had for Marxists who could not imagine a rival to economic class in figuring the results of history. Simply asked, what does a movie mean today if it denies all analogy to materialist importance?  The film is anything but fantasy.

Since engaging a detailed criticism of the film seems wrong, at least beyond preliminary questions, I will abstain.  It is a film that only asks to be experienced, even after it has been situated in the question of materialism and/or ideology.  So rather than commentary, I end with a monologue from the Johannes character.  Indeed, it is the point I knew I was "inside."  It is also the moment I recognized the shift from a language of material conditions to figurative language pointing beyond itself. The change happens as the minister enters the room to introduce himself. The minister asks Johannes if he is one of the sons there at the farm.  Johannes evasively remarks that he is a bricklayer and continues with what feels like a poem directed straight at the minister:

"I build houses,

but nobody will live in them.

They like to build themselves.

They build themselves,

even though they do not know how.

Therefore, some of them inhabit half-finished huts,

others live in ruins,

most of them wander about homeless.

Are you one of those

in need of a house?"

Perhaps this exercise is like giving someone a point on a map with no explanation, but all that is left is to recognize where one is and deciding whether the space is not to great for travel.

IMDb rates this film 8.1 out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 5 out of 5 stars (not red stars)

Roger Ebert includes this film in his Great Movies section.

Other feature length films by Dreyer include The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, and, Gertrud.

A Face in the Crowd (1957)

If any two years can be spoken of as the best in movie history, 1957 and 1972 are the ones.  Sure, one can speak of eras, movements, genres, directors, actors, &c...  But as for years, these are the two.  

Amid the swirl of great films in 1957 (for a list, look up "years" on the film 101 website) is Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, and Walter Matthau.  To be sure, it is a face in the crowd among the 1957 list of greats, but that it goes unnoticed by many makes it all the more rewarding if for no other reason than the feeling of stumbling onto something a bit more rare (snob appeal).  Part of why it is rare may be due to people thinking of it as an Andy Griffith movie, expecting Griffith's television persona.  The assumption of Griffith's easy going Mayberry would be wrong, though.  Here, Griffith is emphatically the character of Lonesome Rhodes.

Lonesome dominates the film right from the start.  At first, he is quite likable, but several hints are given that it will not last.  By the end, Lonesome's laugh goes from fun (while mischievous) to an uncomfortable mania (though it is the same exact laugh).  The reason for the change is simple:  the corrupting influence of power.

Critics of the film, at the time of its release, rightly noted that Lonesome overshadows the rest of the cast.  Where they go wrong is deciding that it is boring in parts because Lonesome is without a rival.  Perhaps there is a lack of tension in the middle for this reason, but it can also be seen as subtle direction.  Kazan may have been drawing attention to the way that television personas do overpower others (albeit telling the story through a film).  But what seems more interesting about the charge of boredom is viewers tend to want somebody to do the opposing for them on the screen.  They do not wish to make opposition themselves nor do they relish the subtleties of overextended power, such as recognizing the man who stands on his toes, does not stand firm.  Unopposed force is not infuriating here, but boring to these critics.

Mel Miller (Walter Matthau) and Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) are equally valuable supporting actors in the film.  Marcia Jeffries is essential to the birth of the Lonesome Rhodes character, while Mel Miller is the paternalistic figure who puts the nail in his coffin.  With a standout monologue, Miller says, "Suppose I tell you exactly what is going to happen to you. You're gonna be back in television.  Only it won't be quite the same as it was before."  Like many monologues, it earns its right to be preachy after a character like Lonesome has violated everyone.

As much as Miller's lines make for closure, Marcia Jeffries embodies sheer optimism at the beginning when she records her "A Face in the Crowd," radio program in the city jail.  She furthermore gives "Lonesome" his name, and by extension, gives birth to his persona.  Essentially, Jeffries and Miller are archetypal parents of an unruly adolescent son.

The film has a relevance today that can be seen in other movies such as Network and Broadcast News, but it also stands apart.  A Face in the Crowd, unlike the other two, reveals the false confidence that plagues television.  Because Network and Broadcast News admit the world of television is complex, they miss out on how someone like Rush Limbaugh can survive in this day and age.  Kazan does not miss the obvious sham.

IMDb rates this film 8.1 stars out of 10

Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)

Other Elia Kazan masterpieces include A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden.