Of course I romanticize the careers of screenwriters such as Kuang Ni, Ennio De Concini, and Ben Hecht, prodigious as they were, and it's nice that they each wrote films now considered classics, it's nice that they were successful, but who cares, they wrote and wrote, dozens and dozens of films, and the facet I most romanticize is my perception of them as full-time, professional daydreamers. They lived a continuous fantasy, yes, but also fantasies of their own design. They had projectors for minds, and their eyes were tunnels that led to the treasures of their skull-sized kingdoms; this I admire most.
I read Ben Hecht's treatment for Underworld before I watched the movie, figuring it would hardly spoil anything as he was "legendarily unhappy with Josef von Sternberg's revamping." It was my first unfiltered Hecht experience and it was great. Dreamy, hard-boiled prose, meaningful and expressive, written and constructed with intelligence and aplomb. This treatment, I believe the first Underworld treatment he wrote, and I believe he wrote a second with Art Rosson, is divided into twenty-one sequences. There's a letter insert in the twentieth. The story is of a criminal named Bull Weed (they all have adorable nicknames: Paper Collar Sam, Piano Joe, Slippy Lewis, etc.) who escapes from prison just before his scheduled hanging. Hecht was a Chicago journalist who specialized in prohibition era gangsterism and his emphasis is a kind of poetic realism - the final sequences bank on a motif of fate - and perhaps in its time Underworld was penetratingly real. The dramatic structure (it bounces between parallel searches and reactions to Weed's escape) is transparent and compounded with Hecht's writerly voice nothing, including the behaviors and emotions of the characters, strikes me today as particularly authentic.
So why was he legendarily unhappy with von Sternberg for adding "sentimental touches that falsified his story" is beyond me. Maybe it was more of a general thing that Hollywood kept doing to all stories and Hecht wasn't able to separate this precise incident for an objective evaluation. Josef von Sternberg's story is better told. Feathers has a much stronger presence. In Hecht's story her charm is toxic, while in von Sternberg's it's multi-dimensional, and her magnetism to competing love interests is better motivated, better explored. As for the different endings, I prefer the concept of willed destiny to inescapable fate, dramatically speaking. The truth is both Hecht's initial treatment and von Sternberg's film depend on a last-minute instance of altruism (the gravest sentiment? the most Hollywood, yes) from a character to bring the story to a close. Hecht gives it to a supporting character, von Sternberg gives it to the main character.
Underworld the 1927 Josef von Sternberg film begins with the same clock imagery used in Hecht's story but then opens on Bull Weed robbing a bank, and from there introduces Rolls Royce (Weasel in the story) and then Feathers, blossoming their love triangle as the story and characters grow too. The images of the film are so strong, may I say the film is less black and white and more lightning bolts and thunder clouds? As a true filmmaker von Sternberg is conscious of the connectedness of the major aspects of film; he weds photography, editing, and (in this film) story, creating a film that eighty-three years later retains its white-knuckledness. Perhaps a really great white-knuckler is always such, as this quality is achieved by fluidity and grace of cinematic design, elements incorruptible by time, founded on inalienable concepts of film theory.
Though timeless as a piece of art, one of the joys of Underworld is how grounded in the 1920s it is. Eternal human traits are expressed through social characters now vanished. The above party scene, saturated in streamers and populated by men in suits and women in gowns, evokes all the bygone romance of its time. As the character of Feathers embodies both romance and destruction, so too this party sequence features champagne happiness and backroom despair. The "devil's carnival" montage of faces is the type of playfulness and technical splendor sorely lacking in many contemporary films. I can't explain what the recurring cats in the film mean dramatically, but their inclusion adds to the sense of reality. Von Sternberg's not a filmmaker to erase cats from history, no, he pushes against the walls of drama, expanding them with his cinematic mastery and perceptive eye. The way he choreographs scenes (the famous jewelry store robbery), composes his photography, dresses his sets, and his dramatic use of lights, all bulge and breathe, pulse and quiver, encapsulating the beast of cinema for all to cherish and behold (if you don't mind me saying).
Some data and triviality, beneficial to both me and the potential reader as a way of organizing my entry points into this movie, a way of demarcating my cinematic tastes, and as a general prelude (skippable as preludes tend to be). A couple months back the Criterion release of Black Orpheus sparked debate in some circles about the merits of the film (helped along by the Criterion supplements themselves), and an interesting component of this conversation was the release year of the film, 1959, and its quality of storytelling and character design as compared to other New Wave films. For example I noticed some people are still enraged about Black Orpheus receiving the Palme d'Or over Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It's an interesting conversation for a number of cine-political reasons, but of course it's completely trivial, because the only person who should decide which film better is you, I mean it's a personal question with internal battlegrounds and exterior debates unconcerned with discussing the films themselves are just farts in the wind. I bring it up because I feel slightly the same way about last year, when The White Ribbon, Un Prophète, Thirst, and Fish Tank were the major winners at Cannes. These are all great films (as I think both The 400 Blows and Black Orpheus are great), but I felt they were safe films, more reflective of the past than progressive or demonstrative of new avenues for exploration. It reminded me, as the Black Orpheus/400 Blows conversation reminded me, that prestige, acclaim, and awards are superficial elements of film studies, illusory in their power and scope. The best films are the films I like the best, and the two films that most excited me that also played at Cannes 2009 are Police, Adjective (winner of Un Certain Regard), and Enter the Void (which just simply premiered to mixed reviews). I've had the opportunity to see Enter the Void three times now, as I write this, and hope to see it at least three more times before it leaves the theater (it must be seen in the theater!). I had planned this past week to write about Tim Burton's Ed Wood with companion discussion of Bela Lugosi in The Raven and The Invisible Ray, and I'd wanted to write about Dial 1119 as well, but once I saw Enter the Void it bulldozed all other thoughts and indeed for the first few days I couldn't even watch other movies (Kings of Pastry was the first movie I saw afterward, a documentary, and Thief of Bagdad was the first narrative, it was like going from the hot tub back into the pool - though I like them both too, I'm just saying that's what it was like). On The Omen blu-ray there's a video in which Richard Donner explains that to him The Omen features extraordinary coincidence and is about Peck's character being driven by these amazing coincidences to the point of insanity where he would harm a child. To me it's more baffling to consider The Omen as a literal story, and it's fascinating to me that Donner would believe in astronomically absurd levels of coincidence before he'd believe in anything even a little spiritual. What I mean is, he's right, The Omen is more interesting as a literal story.
Don't read if you haven't seen.
"'Making a film is difficult, but making a great film is an almost impossible task.'
This quote from Spielberg is perhaps not completely accurate, but that’s how I remember it. However, some examples of great films do exist, including the film which had such an influence on my existence: 2001, A Space Odyssey. Without professing to be able to create such a masterpiece, trying to make a film that is, at the same time, a large-scale entertainment, suitable for adults and complex in cinematic terms, is one of the most exciting undertakings one could wish to tackle. And if one does not set out with the aim of making a great film, one can be sure that it will not turn out to be one.
Few of the arts can satisfy man’s need to be uplifted as immediately as film. And none (except interactive video games) can yet reproduce the maelstrom of our states of perception and consciousness. In the past, certain films have tried to adopt the subjective point of view of the main character. enter the void will try to improve upon its predecessors and accompany the hero just as much in his normal state of awareness as in his altered states: the state of alertness, the stream of consciousness, memories, dreams...
The visions described in the script are inspired partly by the accounts of people who have had near-death experiences, who describe a tunnel of light, seeing their lives flashing past them and ‘astral’ visions, and partly by similar hallucinatory experiences obtained by consuming DMT, the molecule which the brain sometimes secretes at the moment of death and which, in small doses, enables us to dream at night. The film should sometimes scare the audience, make it cry and, as much as possible, hypnotise it.
In recent years, films with labyrinthine structures have proved the audience’s ability to follow storylines in the form of a puzzle, and its desire to move away from linear narration.
But a complex form where the content does not move the spectator in any way would only amount to mathematic virtuosity. Whereas this film is above all a melodrama: the universal melodrama of a young man who, after the brutal death of his parents, promises that he will protect his little sister no matter what and who, sensing that he himself is dying, fights desperately to keep his promise. A film where the life of one person is linked to the love he has for another human being.
The reason for choosing the most modern areas of Tokyo as a setting is to further emphasize the fragility of the brother and sister by propelling them like two small balls in a giant pinball machine made up of black, white and fluorescent colours.
My previous two films, which were far less ambitious, were once described by a critic as being like roller coasters playing with the most reptilian desires and fears of the spectator. enter the void, whose themes and artistic choices will be far more varied and colourful, should, if I succeed, be the Magic Mountain which I, as a spectator, dream of riding on." Gaspar Noé
Gaspar Noé is an intelligent filmmaker and in interviews avoids injecting the film with mystical or spiritual or other unwarranted meanings. Although I think there's tremendous sub-surface depth to the film, Noe's point must be to keep the focus on the film without exaggerating its already intrinsically melodramatic dimensions. Enter the Void is a simple story, and that's one of the criticisms that has been brought against the movie, although it's clear those were Noé's intentions.
Its simplicity is pronouncedly vast, and Noé sometimes over-amplifies foundational dramatic moments. For example, the death of Oscar, and the subsequent voice message Linda receives. Oscar's death scene is actually a very long sequence (justifiable as the film hinges on this moment). It is also a moment revisited. The voice message scene is a long, long pull out from Linda and the camera first becomes unfocused and then begins to quiver. The scene's monomania and stylistic excesses make it feel like a music video within the movie, but also these two scenes are, in my opinion, excellent rebuttals to the criticism that the film is too simple. Simple in this instance refers to the narrative complexity of the two moments - moments which could be handled more swiftly and efficiently - but the criticism overlooks the emotional complexity of death.
Enter the Void challenges the concept of narrative complexity by challenging the conventional behavior of films and filmmaking, characters and story. This happens in both obvious and subtle ways within the film, and is a source of conflict between interpretations of the narrative after Oscar dies. I accept Noé's declaration that the film isn't about reincarnation, and when I accept this I begin to wonder about the relationship between the first section of the movie and the remainder. The questions that form can only be answered based on how I choose to interpret the characters, their scenes, and their lines. What does it mean that Oscar promises to kill the baby potentially conceived by Mario and Linda's relationship, and especially what does that mean in light of the abortion scene that actually occurs.
I'm not sure, but I experience it regardless, and Enter the Void is very much about the experience of the film (the digital work on the film flat-out amazes me). The experience seems independent of a structural or ideological analysis of the film, firstly, and secondly the efficacy of the narrative seems secondary to the ambition of the filmmaker and the force and range of his vision. This is the effect the movie has on me, and why it's so important to me, because more than in any other movie my feelings are subordinate to the currents and passions of the film, I am superseded by Oscar's experience, and of course it's my opinion that Noé succeeded in his intention to make the most obsessively subjective film yet. It's the strange behavior of the film. The dramatic tradition has always been a sort of bridge between the audience and story, a conversation between the two, a co-dependency, and film has mostly followed this tradition because film has sometimes assumed itself to be the inevitable offspring of plays and novels, but I've always felt this wrong, and Enter the Void is for me the loudest yet voice to declare the unique possibilities of film narratives (there have been other great ones recently, Police Adjective, The Headless Woman, Hunger, Silent Light, the films of Weerasethakul, try to adapt these movies into novels and you'll fail as adaptations of great novels onto the screen fail).
One of the things I always want to do when I rewatch Enter the Void is go out into the streets of Tokyo with my friend Alex (who needs to shower when he sees me, but the poor guy won't be able to shower for days, hiding in alleys and building small fires to stay warm), and one joke I always make with myself is that this time I (Oscar) will stop for a soda from one of Tokyo's beautiful vending machines. Imagine if that happened! The texture of Enter the Void is so rich, so lush, so detailed and specific, that all its major and minor details are important aspects of its experience, and everything that is meaningless or absent in most movies is in the foreground of this movie. This also includes the natural speech patterns of its characters, who say wonderful things but never utter 'lines,' and whom I quote, but my quotes are like "Thanks. (Beat). Thanks thanks." Smaller things too, like the club The Void inside the movie, and its dirty floors.
It's the texture of reality that's so often compromised by dramatic form in cinema. After Oscar's death the film's texture shifts from a direct experience into an indirect, intangible emotional experience. Again, not all answers are given, it's not entirely clear who Oscar and Linda are. In my mind this isn't underdevelopment, this is the actuality of knowing someone. So much life is missing from the screen, but they have missed each other through so much of their actual characters' lives. I wonder about Oscar and how he changes Linda, if he changes her. I picture her at the airport with her stuffed animal and wonder if Oscar corrupts her with drugs and nights at the club, but I don't really know, because I don't really know what she's been doing for so many years. I am able to wonder these things because Enter the Void first establishes the rhythms of reality, and then establishes the rhythms of emotion, and this enables and empowers me as the viewer to ask away, to crawl inside the characters - not their drama; their lives, their personalities.
Some drama, too, though, and I interpret the story as an exploration of the difficult realities of impossible love. I interpret it this way because of the answers I make for the characters, but I don't believe this is how everyone sees the film (I guess it's pretty close to what Noé says in the quote at the top). The abortion scene is a crucial moment in terms of how the audience member receives the film: how the viewer feels about Noé's decision to show it authentically, revisit it through the aborted blood, and also how that abortion meshes with the rest of the film. It's the most difficult scene in the movie and I think if you don't have trouble sorting through your emotional response to the scene you're probably broken inside. I think Noé gives us the highs and gives us the lows, and I admire his courage to show it all, but tell you the truth I take comfort breaks during the abortion scene when I see the movie now, and haven't fully sorted out my own response to the scene.
Beginning with a rewatching of a personal favorite of mine, Straight Time, I began an impulsive streak of American film watching that both fascinated and exhausted me. It's low point was Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, of which I could not have a conversation without becoming violently offensive. If I must say something positive about it, I'd invoke a sentiment first expressed to me in a Ralph Ellison book, something about the closeness of hate and love in reference to specificity. Is it made-to-work or made-to-suck? It's made-to-suck. Compare to Adam Green's films, Hatchet and Frozen I watched, which are made-to-work.
The best theatrical moment in the rush was The Social Network. Fincher and Sorkin's movie leaves Pilgrim in the slow lane, as I like to say. For clarity, emotional accuracy, and dramatic speed, Social Network was fascinating. Another positive was Andrew Garfield, who then appeared in Romanek's Never Let Me Go (+ earlier in Gilliam's Parnassus). And that movie crushed me, as they like to say, with its tonal precision, emotional nearness, and vibrant vision. It's a beautiful movie, with sharp, natural colors, and subdued, steady expression. The meeting toward the end was my favorite scene from any film this year.
More distinctly, I also began a succession of American 70s films, ones with smaller legacies and followings, maybe you'd say second-tier American 70s films. I watched Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow, with Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, shot by Vilmos Zsignmond, co-winner of the 1973 Cannes Grand Prize (second-tier?). I mostly think of Pacino as intense (rewatched Carlito's Way recently - love the movie, but the problem is Carlito [Pacino] is the only compelling character in it), but here he's happy and easygoing, playful and kind. The movie is solely about the relationship between Pacino and Hackman's characters, and that relationship is exposed mainly through their contact with each other, the way they treat other, the way they behave, the way they speak and what they do. A pure-blooded character movie. Would've loved to have seen this in the theater.
Aloha, Bobby and Rose, with Paul Le Mat from Demme's Melvin and Howard! I was excited about this one. It's a dirty, sad, blue-collar 70s LA point of view on life and love, executed with the typical delusion and self-contempt of the period. Some filmmakers of the time veiled their films with illusory impartiality when depicting low-lives and deadbeats: authentic looking actors, naturalistic dialogue, regional atmosphere; yet so many of the films uniformly depict their lives as pathetic, irredeemable, and lost. Real people without real pain or joy. As a movie it has a few memorable moments, including an okay car crash, and I think someone orders ice cream, which I love in movies. And I think Elton John's Tiny Dancer is playing in the background! Would've loved to have seen this movie projected onto a white sheet in a friend's backyard.
The Last American Hero, with Jeff Bridges!, is a truly idiosyncratic movie, a totally American one that captures well some of the South's less exportable expressions of their famous virtues. Bridges has less room for personal expression and spontaneity in his performance than the actors in the previous movies because the script itself is more vocal about certain convictions. For example: Bridges plays the son of a moonshiner and becomes a Nascar champion, and it's titled The Last American Hero. I love it because Bridges never quite expresses his emotions yet somehow always does, he's always proving something. There's also a tremendously touching scene involving an office lady at a certain race track, who takes a personal interest in the drivers and follows them, supporting them, encouraging them, and sometimes sleeping with them. Sort of an office groupie. She's so sweet in this one bed scene it kills me. She tells a story of a horrible experience at an Atlanta frat party that involves ridicule and shame, and it's the most you learn about the character, so you don't really know who she wants to be, but once her party story is over, you know who she doesn't want to be. She doesn't want to be this person she once was. She isn't going back. It really worked for me. The moonshine and racing aspect and Bridges character were pretty interesting and easy to follow, though also formulaic, for example the same basic story is told in Robert Mitchum's earlier Thunder Road. Would've loved to have watched this one on a shitty tv in some third-rate hellhole hotel in the south, with a hooker, and pizza.
The films which brought me to the point of satiation were last night's Lee's Do The Right Thing (watched She's Gotta Have It earlier, a charming, wonderful movie) and this other 70s American movie set in the south, Macon County Line. It's at mid-point between Aloha, Bobby and Rose and The Last American Hero. Two Chicago brothers spend a few weeks joy riding through the south before Army duty, but by circumstance are involved in a gun battle with a local police officer. It's a homicidal misunderstanding. The film feels like a trip from Los Angeles to the south, and never manages to feel truly Southern, and it's never convincing, straight down to the father (police officer) and son relationship (although crucial for a late-movie moment), but it's always nearing something. For example: the brothers are supposed to be switchblade, hellbent Beach Boys, and that's fine in my book, but that's the most I learn about them, and so they remain only that. The craftsmanship in the final showdown moment is laudable, as is the payoff. Would've loved to have seen in it at a drive-in.
Television audiences today respect the outlining tenets proposed by a show's pilot, I think, I think they accept the interior logic of a show if that logic is conveyed persuasively and followed loyally. A show like Max Headroom could be done really well today. As it is, this episodic show - in its first four episodes, the ones I viewed - consistently commits self-betrayal and violates narrative and real world logic for the sake of cheap entertainment.
It's unfortunate, because the underlying concepts of the show are impressive. "Twenty minutes into the future" major network television stations compete for massive audiences (200 million at a time - assumably the world's population has continued on a precipitous path) and dire financial stakes. The leading network, Channel 23 XXIII, has an ace reporter named Edison who frequently risks personal and professional injury in order to expose corruption, scandal, exploitation, and the like. His show is very popular. It must be a cornerstone of the network because in the very first episode his critical eye turns on his own network: the episode is about him uncovering the tragic, body-exploding consequences of Channel 23's revenue generating blipverts (adverts shown in rapid montage, too quickly for anyone to turn the channel!). People explode because their nervous systems are underused and the accumulating energy from this stagnation is ignited by the mentally intense blipverts.
Max Headroom does an okay job of explaining the bullshit it makes up. A friend of mine recommended this show told me. He described it as prophetic, the way it depicts the pervasiveness of technology in everyday lives, but its representation is far removed from our present reality, and my friend should have told me that the show was prophetic about the way writers would use absurd technological imaginings in order to explain away plotholes in adventurous storylines. Anyway I watched the show because he used the word cyberpunk in his introduction, and there certainly is plenty of cyberpunk weirdness. According to Max Headroom, in the future people will be confused by places called Body Banks - they'll be clueless as to what goes on inside of them. There will be a thriving black market of human organ selling, safely concealed behind the impenetrable veil of the name Body Bank - what goes on in a Body Bank, who knows, the name is so misleading, life is complicated, there are so many people and such violence, no one can stop to figure out these Body Banks. Also, even though Edison's show is massively popular, he has no imitators. Everyone else is complacent, so it really is up to him.
I'm writing myself out of the idea that this show has a strong foundation. There are lots of glaring annoyances like I'm describing. In Episode 2 the youth strap engines onto their skateboards in order to move at the same speed they already do; there is apparently no advantage because the skaters continue to perform inside half-pipes. The magic of the show is that it even attempts to invent these things. Engines on skateboards - that's interesting, isn't it? I've never seen it before, but here it is in Max Headroom.
That's what I mean though, in the television days of Max Headroom you didn't have to think about these things, there was an uncanny suspension of disbelief. Or maybe not - the show only went fourteen or so episodes. Why underestimate the people of the past, why assume they bought this hook, line, and sinker? I doubt anyone thought Get Smart was an intelligent and penetrating expose into the world of spies. Yes, I'm missing the point, and the point is entertainment.
The lack of fixed rules and a sense of reality inhibits my ability to enjoy the show. Television, like film, is fundamentally manipulative, and almost always a lie, but when you misshape your show's design for the sake of a single episode, you betray your own set of lies, and destroy some of the bridges you've formed with your audience. Sometimes rules are betrayed for subversive means, but in Max Headroom it's always for dramatic purposes, and that cheapens the entertainment because it's hard for me to value what they themselves don't. For example, this spontaneous rule making applies also to Channel 23. It's headache inducing to examine how this station is supposedly run - the autonomous Max Headroom, whom I haven't even yet explained, and won't, supposedly goes live on the air at any moment, interrupting whatever else was on. According to this show, in the future there won't be television programming or scheduling, just whims and chaos.
In each episode Edison is put in a perilous situation, but in each episode he escapes. There's not much weight to his danger, then, and there certainly isn't an escalating sense of danger over a course of several episodes. Each episode has its little threats and its unique reasons with little communication between the episodes. These qualities do help keep the show fun. The dialogue is sometimes very snappy, and the camera is extraordinarily mobile for a television show. The characters are sharply defined, and the social backdrop is vibrant and compelling. Some of its central questions are meaningful, and its objectives are worthwhile. If only the created world of Max Headroom had been cherished. A great movie, with a little love and attention, could be made from the first episode alone.
A top-shelf director works on the outskirts of Hollywood with a limited budget and a short production schedule. The cast is also high quality, as is the crew. It's a crime film about a killer, told in an expressionistic way, with flashbacks, and parallels of ancient themes. Co-written by the director (over a week's time in a secluded part of Austria), the film feels slightly mechanical (Herzog says precise), but with a director's strong imprint.
The filmmaking spirit of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done feels close to the popular view of film noir; though the style is far removed. Maybe the hard-boiled style of Port of Call was closer, but further in spirit. And maybe they are both somehow closer to classic Hollywood filmmaking traditions than their contemporary grindhouse counterpoints, films typically made by young filmmakers reverent first to style and attitude. The only way to be faithful to a true original is to be a true original yourself.
In My Son, My Son, you feel the constrictions of a police procedural bend to the convictions of Werner Herzog. He wants to make the movie his own way: the fabric of the film pulses with his personality, and sometimes there appear gaping, naked moments, fragments and details like flamingos, oatmeal, and gospel music, and larger revelations about the weight of an instant, transformations of personality, and creativity/madness. Conceptually there's a lot to admire, and Herzog continues to be outside our time.
It challenges the priorities of other crime films. The act of murder is never shown, the interior of the house during the hostage negotiation is never shown (I think it should have been!), the peripheral charters' interior lives are mostly ignored, and sleeping pills aren't slipped under the cheese of a peppery pizza. Typical aspects of a crime film, like a goal-oriented narrative, and a killer derived cathartic release, are foregone. Many details of the real life case are omitted (Herzog continues to refer to fact based narratives as possessing 'an accountant's truth'). The center of the film is a murder, and the narrative is a swirling mass of personality, metaphysics, police procedure, and murder mystery. It seems unfocused.
The film's tone suggests neither a crime film nor reality; it's too distanced, too impersonal to be auteurism. Its chaotic masquerade is the biggest problem in terms of appealing to an audience, the same criticism commonly attributed to diffident, underimaginative filmmakers who lack the will and sense of vision needed to beguile an audience, filmmakers nothing like Herzog. But it seems difficult to praise the film beyond these connotations without the background knowledge of who Herzog is and the context of the production, there's too much order and not enough force of personality to give the film a clear shape, and it's easy to see the film as underdeveloped, poorly written, and poorly executed. For some, the idea might trump the execution. A more exciting and rewarding option is admiring it for what it is.
Herzog has begun to use Hollywood actors, but there remains a sense of a madman running the show. The appearances of Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny, Udo Kier, and Grace Zabriskie were inevitable and logical. He continues to best use Brad Dourif. He wants to take Michael Shannon to new places, though I struggle to see all of what Herzog sees in him. He lacks both madness and authenticity.
Speculation: it's a thrill to work with Herzog as an actor. His brand of artistry is boundless jubilation and curiosity, wonder and adventure, and he asks his actors do things other directors don't. According to Herzog, during a dinner scene in My Son, My Son, he decided he wanted a freeze frame, and instead of freezing the frame in post-production he simply directed his actors to freeze (not move) at the end of the scene. You can see, for a moment, the actor's respond to this request, and then they freeze, and Herzog holds.
At the drive-in of my heart, 3 Women and Cría Cuervos double-feature together, all the time. Their skeletal structures are similar, they have in common the 70s, auteurism, and female protagonists, and a dissection reveals the sharing of vital, essential characteristics. They the two movies are psychological dramas that obtain their narrative intensity through careful observation of minute, idiosyncratic behaviors of their central characters.
The lead in Cría Cuervos is Ana Torrent, the lead from Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive. In Spirit she was seven, here she is ten (in real life). The layers of the narrative are draped over her performance. I've always respected the precocity, energy, and commitment in Natalie Portman's Léon The Professional performance, but she's stagey, histrionic, and vociferous compared to Torrent. I'd call Ana Torrent the little girl James Dean, but she's better than James Dean. She possesses the magic light of a secret, like all truly great actors. The presence of so many of the complexities of childhood depend on the nuances of her performance, and the believability and verisimilitude of these films are partially a product of her strengths.
Physically, Torrent is virtually the same in both movies. She's a girl with tremendous eyes, pretty short. Her emotional range crosses frequently into adult territories (her favorite movie is Frankenstein, she's an attempted murderer), though doesn't stray far from archetypal childhood characteristics (her innocence and compassion, her playfulness - she literally plays).
Unlike other child actors who are written roles in which they 'perform' as children, Torrent is given the chance in Cría Cuervos to behave like a child. When the housekeeper tells the story of the local girl who claimed a virgin pregnancy, Torrent admits she doesn't understand anything being talked about. Only a child could somehow earnestly issue multiple death threats without moral consequence. The narrative works so well because it simply asks Torrent to absorb, to experience, and to encounter, like all children, with a child's limited knowledge of the details and intricacies of adult relationships. She isn't meant to grasp certain social or age related components of the story, and anyway her journey is a deeper one, into the nexus of the soul.
Torrent confronts the death of her mother, followed by her father. She naturally assumes her father died from a poison she herself had stirred into his milk. It was a vendetta for her mother. A question is: will she kill again? Would she just kill everyone whom she doesn't like? Though it isn't a movie about a killer, it's a movie about a little girl, and a single girl, not 'all little girls.' Her psychological make-up is specific to her and her experiences. Some of her actions reflect the behaviors of her parents, there's a clear outline of a person, and she has a multi-dimensional personality.
The film is remarkably well-written. It's told nonlinearly and with dreamlike emphasis; it's written from Torrent's emotional point of view. The exterior portions are vastly interesting themselves. Following her father's death, her aunt and grandmother, from her mother's side, take charge of the house and the upbringing of Torrent and her two sisters. The grandmother is wheel-chair bound and mute, so the aunt shoulders the burden of raising the children. I think the aunt would use the word 'burden,' and the film highlights well her strengths and weaknesses in a motherly role. Another significant character is the housekeeper, who remains employed and has old friendships with the three sisters. Torrent prefers to hang out with the housekeeper, sharing stories and making jokes, or else goofs off with her sisters (they're on vacation from school). There's a kind of warden-prisoner rivalry between the aunt and Torrent; or at least a bitter, difficult period of them getting to know each other.
Also, an adult version of Torrent's character sometimes narrates from a future time beyond the story. There are flashbacks of the parents, and sometimes a surreal blurring of temporal divisions. Like kids on vacation, the narrative isn't superb at keeping track of time. As an audience we record the development of characters, and an emotional progression, more than a sense of real time. We the audience are then as surprised and grounded by the revelation of a school day as the children are. The mention of school reminds us of clocks and schedules and routines.
There are political dimensions to the film as well, but I'm not familiar with all the elements, which might be pretty explicit because the film's Criterion synopsis is "Carlos Saura’s exquisite Cría cuervos . . . heralded a turning point in Spain: shot while General Franco was on his deathbed, the film melds the personal and the political in a portrait of the legacy of fascism and its effects on a middle-class family (the title derives from the Spanish proverb: 'Raise ravens and they’ll peck out your eyes'). Ana Torrent (the dark-eyed beauty from The Spirit of the Beehive) portrays the disturbed eight-year-old Ana, living in Madrid with her two sisters and mourning the death of her mother, whom she conjures as a ghost (an ethereal Geraldine Chaplin). Seamlessly shifting between fantasy and reality, the film subtly evokes both the complex feelings of childhood and the struggles of a nation emerging from the shadows."
It was the emotional specificity of the story that really attracted me. The film is light but deep, fun but serious, wise but innocent.
Screamers begins with scrolling text over black. A background story, to catch the viewer up on the happenings of Sirius 6B and conditions between the NEB and Alliance. This is extremely helpful for those of us not yet familiar with the ongoings of 2078, but it's not necessary. Most of the information emerges organically as the story develops; though the text is helpful in an orientating sort of way. It's nice. Why it's mostly sci-fi and fantasy films that begin this way I'm not sure, I think it'd work to the same extent in a romcom or action movie. One possible reason is that scrolling text requires reading and a modicum of patience, factors that obstruct enjoyment for some movie goers, yet are acceptable for some sci-fi geeks and the like. Though a lot of times when a film cuts to text I can feel some of the audience turn against the idea. The text, of course, is anyway read to us by a narrator, and maybe it's simply more sophisticated, artistically, to have a visual counterpoint to the narration. Many movies of all types begin with a voice over narration, but only in sci-fi and fantasy films does the text function on an ornamental level.
Scrolling text is a slow opening, and Screamers does little to ignite its jet thrusters in the moments following. The first scene is atmospheric. It establishes the forlornness of the protagonists, the malevolence of the landscape, and introduces the screamers. Screamers are an advanced version of the worms in Tremors. They stalk you subterraneously. They're murderous. They're mechanical. They're self-sufficient. They improve themselves, in order to better kill. They're Phillip K. Dick inventions, and the movie is based on his "Second Variety," adapted by the also-great Dan O' Bannon, co-written by Miguel Tejada-Flores. O'Bannon writer of Alien, stalwart genre writer and sometimes actor and/or director, whose breakthrough was with John Carpenter and Dark Star.
O'Bannon tends to build his scripts upward, and this is the experience of Screamers. He gives you as a gift the death of the message boy by screamers in the beginning, and then backs off and develops his characters, the severity of their plight, and the stakes. Few writers, compared to the whole, give their characters this much consideration. I consider O'Bannon a-grade, though Screamers is a b-grade genre film in terms of budget and acting, with the exception of the also a-grade Peter Weller as the main character. Weller isn't a-grade simply because he's RoboCop. His performance in Screamers is textured: you sense his loss, his struggle, his growing disillusionment, vestiges of discipline, a protracted sense of responsibility, fragments of sympathy and goodwill. You sense both the ice in his veins and the restorative warm blood in his heart.
Mysteriously, perhaps unnecessarily, a plane crashes outside the Sirius 6B Alliance base. The only survivor, unfortunately, is Andrew Lauer. Lauer gives the kind of performance that projects insecurity and astonishing insincerity. I can easily see Lauer on the Late Night couch, right ankle propped on left knee, telling David his experience in the weird sci-fi film. Lauer deserved the sitcom sidekick hell to which he was later banished. There's not a moment of believability in his entire performance. He's the worst part of the film; I'd believe in space colonies before I'd believe a moment of his acting in Screamers. There's too his role as the ace new-graduate of military school who's dying to get out and shoot some guns and prove himself, a pretty annoying and single dimensional character in the first place.
So there's that. Weller chooses to bring Lauer along with him. They set out in response to the message of peace delivered by the boy in the first scene. Their journey from the Alliance base to the NEB base is another moment of mood setting and orientation. This is when we the audience see the devastation nuclear war has borne upon Sirius 6B. It's also when we the audience are allowed to explore the environment and see the extent of the filmmaker's imaginings of this fictitious planet; it's a real powerful genre moment, I mean it, and perhaps partly the depth of this experience relies on a certain development of appreciation*, a building of understanding about the avenues of innuendo and allusion genre filmmakers explore while creating films of fantasy, because if you're tuned in on their wavelength, if you're experiencing the inner genre of the film, you're seeing shadows of real pain, you're seeing the skeleton of a belief system, suggestions of fear, paranoia, insecurity, anxiety, longing, patches of dread, bursts of horror, and genuine human feeling and thought. A good genre film gives up something personal, and if it does that, and you can read it, a connection as powerful as what happens in dramas or romances, whatever, occurs, a sharing of world views between the filmmakers and the audience.
D.H. Lawrence, for example, uses landscapes composed of emotion to enhance the depth of his characters in Sons and Lovers. Some of his text could fit into a Philip K. Dick story, and illustrates the dramatic range of landscape metaphor and allegory.
"Their two hands lay on the rough stone parapet of the Castle wall … He was brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seem to have melted away, there remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere - dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit." (Clara chapter)
At any rate, part of the delight of a sci-fi film is often the exhibition of the unfamiliar elements. The presence of Lauer interferes with the effectiveness of this long scene, in which Weller and Lauer encounter a young boy, named David, in the ruins of a major city on Sirius 6B, and bring him along with them to the NEB base. David is small and dirty and clutches a stuffed bear. He says very little, mostly "Can I come with you," and is only slightly more tolerable than Lauer. The presence of them together is insufferable. In these moments Weller is outnumbered, and the film is statistically at its lowest point.
Dramatic justice services the young David a rifle-shot through the chest, delivered by the bunkered Roy Dupuis (badass with tear drop tattoos) and Charles Powell (geeky and skittish with glasses), two off course NEB soldiers being sheltered by the strong-willed Jennifer Rubin. David is a Level 3 screamer, a weapon disguised as a boy, and Dupuis and Powell know this from previous experience. Rubin, Dupuis, Powell, Weller, and Lauer compose the largest and longest staying group of characters in the film, and together they set out into the perilous deserts of Sirius 6B, determined to reach the NEB base.
Things get worse. The NEB base is devastated, no one remains. Weller can't contact his Alliance base due to radioactivity interference. Powell and Dupuis can't get along: the overbearing Dupuis easily frustrates and enrages the fragile and nervous Powell. Their feud is a high-point in the movie. Progressed in increments, their mutual antipathy culminates in the killing of Powell by Dupuis, who claims to suspect the former of being a screamer. What and who are the screamers evolving into is an important question for the rest of the film.
* I mean development of appreciation in both a positive and negative sense. I understand that certain sci-fi films and novels require a heavy level of commitment from the audience, and I understand why for some people that would inhibit the performance of the work as dramatic material. Completely understand. James Cameron recently referred to contemporary sci-fi as fractal, and said that he doesn't read it anymore because of the high entry level. The king of filmic sci-fi doesn't even have the time or intensity of dedication required to consistently/excessively engage with the material.
Screamers is an old-favorite of mine, a film I was exposed to at an early stage and so I cherish with a fondness peculiar to emblems of nostalgia. Last night I attempted to watch it with fresh, impartial eyes. I was mostly successful, I think, because I could see the film's problems: its over-active camera work, its concessions to action film tropes, its sometimes lousy acting, and its overambitious scope in relation to its budget and potentialities. It comes on pretty strong. I also think there's a lot to admire about the film, perfectly expressed by the film's trailer.
