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  At another point, Pike explicitly remarks on the feeling of being outdated.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