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.