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.