Megan Fox of “Transformers” fame only made second place on the drool-worthy list of Maxim’s Hot 100. Recently she is clicked in Red and White dress. She is looking hot as always in this photo shoot.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Brief Reviews
THE MIRACLE WOMAN (1931) ***½
This is a most impressive early sound picture, more compelling and well-crafted than most of the movies of its time I've seen. Barbara Stanwyck plays Florence Fallon, a young woman who with the help of a sleazy showman, Bob Hornsby (Sam Hardy), becomes a celebrity evangelist/miracle healer in the style of Aimee Semple McPherson. The daughter of a minister who dies after the congregation he had served for many years replaces him with a younger man, she is motivated by bitterness and revenge, and by disillusionment with what she sees as the hypocrisy of those who profess to be true believers. When Hornsby sees her deliver a fiery denunciation of her father's parishioners from the pulpit, he realizes what a potential goldmine she is with her histrionic evangelism and her ability to make religious platitudes seem sincere. "George M. Cohan said, 'Leave 'em laughing,'" he tells her. "I want [you] to leave 'em crying."
Her revival meetings are theatrical, stage-managed affairs—almost religious spectacles—complete with shills planted in the audience to fake miracle healings and help Florence fleece the gullible for contributions. Problems begin when Florence meets and falls in love with a blind war hero, John Carson (David Manners), whom she saves from suicide, and begins to question her ruthless exploitation of her followers' trust. The possessive Hornsby, a sort of malevolent Pygmalion, senses he is losing control of Florence and coerces her into continuing their scam by threatening to implicate her in crimes he himself has committed, including bribery, fraud, embezzlement, and even murder.
Stanwyck is sensational in the title role, relentlessly intense as she maneuvers through a whole gamut of emotions. She is by turns a hardened cynic out to manipulate the credulous with her showmanship and phony piety, a frustrated victim being controlled by the menacing Hornsby, and a disillusioned and vulnerable woman susceptible to redemption by the goodness of her blind lover. But whatever emotions she expresses, she always remains believable and basically sympathetic.
Capra's direction is assured, and he keeps things moving briskly. The emotional intensity of the plot surges and relaxes, but Capra's sure-handed staging never for a moment lets the movie's interest level flag. Highlights include the lavishly detailed, circus-like revival meeting scenes, including one in which Stanwyck delivers a rousing sermon on the strength of faith while inside a cage of lions; a tender and humorous birthday party scene with Florence and John; a dramatic night scene on the beach between Florence, John, and Hornsby in which she defiantly confesses her charlatanism to John; and a spectacular fire that destroys Florence's Temple of Happiness in the movie's climax.
Florence and John in the lions' cage
Capra's expert staging of these sequences is aided tremendously by the inventive photographic effects of cinematographer Joseph Walker, including impressively mobile tracking shots, startling whip-pans, and imaginative camera placement—for example, looking into John's room from inside its fireplace, with roaring flames in the foreground between the viewer and John and Florence. Many shots of the revival scenes are composed showing Stanwyck from the rear with upraised arms, the silhouette of her body visible through the backlit diaphanous white gown she wears. This is one of the most watchable movies of its era I've seen—one of Capra's best early directorial efforts and one of Stanwyck's best and most sizzling early performances.
THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER (1974) ****
Directed by Werner Herzog, this movie is a part-factual, part-speculative work based on a true story. In 1828 a young man is found early one morning standing in a deserted street in Nuremberg, Germany, holding in one hand a note saying his name is Kaspar Hauser and in the other hand a prayer book. Able to speak only one nonsensical sentence, he seems disoriented and confused. He appears to be neither violent nor mentally defective, only unacquainted with normal human life.
Kaspar appears on a street in Nuremberg
Exhibited as a freak in a circus, he is observed by a professor who adopts him and undertakes to teach him the ways of civilized humans and the German language. Kaspar quickly learns to communicate, and the story he tells is a bizarre one. He claims to have been kept chained in a dark cellar for nearly his entire life and never to have encountered another human being (food was left for him while he was sleeping) or to have seen anything outside the cellar where he was imprisoned. Under the professor's tutelage, Kaspar becomes something of a celebrity. There is much speculation—most of it absurdly fanciful, for example, that he is the castoff heir of the royal House of Baden—about his true origins before he is mysteriously murdered a few years later.
Filming largely in the Bavarian village of Dinkelsbühl, which looks essentially unchanged since the early 19th century, Herzog authentically recreates the life of the time. In the midst of this historical realism, he interpolates brief dreamlike scenes filmed in an anomalously distorted style. The overall effect of this historical authenticity punctuated with unexpected departures into surrealism is to suggest how utterly strange life in his new environment is for Kaspar. No matter how much he learns about the ways of human beings, his conception of life always keeps its edge of strangeness, threatening to slide at any moment into weirdness, if only briefly. Like a mystic, he is subject to occasional visions and imaginary events that seem to the viewer baffling and mysterious, but to Kaspar as genuine as his real experiences.
Kaspar is played by a 41-year old street singer named Bruno S., who didn't want his full name used in order to preserve his privacy. It's hard to imagine that anyone else, especially a professional actor, could have given such a naked, real performance, so spontaneous, instinctive, and entirely lacking in artifice does he seem. And it's hard to imagine that the movie would be half so effective with anyone else in the title role. One of the oddest supporting characters in the film is a scribe who is present almost from the beginning of the movie until its very end, obsessively documenting every experience Kaspar has, from his discovery in the town right up to the results of his autopsy. Yet these factual details provide no real insight into the man. The insight is provided by Herzog and Bruno S., whom it's clear played off each other and inspired each other like two complementary halves of a whole, Herzog providing the intellect and vision and Bruno the heart and emotions.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is unlike any other movie I've seen: It incorporates dreamlike elements that in a strictly logical and narrative sense don't seem to belong in an otherwise realistic movie, yet that on some extra-logical level do enhance the narrative without compromising its coherence, suggesting through the story of Kaspar Hauser that the nature and meaning of human existence can be explained only so far before hitting the impenetrable wall of the inexplicable.
DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) ****
Terrence Malick is one of the great contemporary American directors, a filmmaker with a style as distinctive as that of David Lynch, yet he has directed only four movies. When you see how meticulously conceived, written, photographed, and edited his movies are, this deliberately unhasty approach to filmmaking becomes entirely understandable. His first movie, Badlands (1973), seemed to follow a clear plan determined in advance, with little improvisation. But beginning with Malick's second movie, Days of Heaven, his work seems to be the result of a combination of advance planning and spontaneous inspiration taking place at the editing stage.
I have heard that Malick is an exceptionally well-read man, and in Days of Heaven I detect two clear literary influences. The plot of the movie resembles Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove. In the early 1900s two lovers, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams), pretend to be brother and sister. When Bill is fired from his job in a steel mill in Chicago after a dispute with the foreman, he and Abby, along with his young sister Linda (Linda Manz), travel south seeking work as itinerant farm workers. They end up in the Texas panhandle, where the wheat harvest is just beginning. The wealthy owner of the farm where they find work (Sam Shepard) quickly becomes obsessed with Abby, and when Bill overhears the farmer's doctor telling him he has only a few months to live, he persuades Abby to allow herself to be romanced by the farmer and to marry him, with the expectation that he will soon die and she will inherit the farm. Two forces thwart this scheme, though. The farm foreman (Robert Wilke) is immediately suspicious of Bill and Abby. And the farmer's love for Abby cures him of whatever disease the doctor thought he had.
The other literary influence I detect is apparent in the visual element of the movie and makes an even stronger impression than the narrative. This element resembles the vividly atmospheric rural locales of certain novels of Thomas Hardy and the themes in those novels of the conflict between man and nature as humans attempt to tame and dominate nature in an early Industrial Age agrarian setting. The people in the movie are dwarfed and made insignificant by the vast, flat landscapes of the plains and the golden fields of wheat, the imperatives of following the rhythms of the crops, and the challenges to human endeavor posed by the physical world. Some of the strongest images in the movie are of the wheat being grown, being harvested, being processed. Scenes of frenzied harvesting, a sudden invasion of locusts, and the nighttime burning of the fields are especially dramatic and hypnotic. Such images contrast strongly with those of artifacts of early 20th-century industrialism—steel mills, steam-driven trains, the first automobiles, primitive farm machinery, even the World War I-era airplanes of a flying circus.
The invasion of the locusts
Visual and thematic preoccupations present in all of Malick's movies appear here: scenes of the limitless sky overhead shot through overhanging trees, of ever-flowing rivers, of animal and insect life coexisting with human beings shown in almost documentary fashion, of people attempting to survive in immense landscapes that barely accommodate their presence. All this is imbued with a deterministic sense—not unlike that of Hardy—of the lack of control of individuals over their destinies, which seem governed instead by hostile human enemies, their own self-destructive impulses, and a benignly indifferent natural world.
The movie is filled with arrestingly beautiful images, and a great deal of credit for this must go to Nestor Almendros, the Spanish-born cinematographer best known for his work with François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, who won an Oscar for his work here. (Additional photography was done by another Oscar winner, Haskell Wexler, who has said he tried to duplicate the work of Almendros rather than impose his own style on the parts he shot.) Almendros largely eschewed artificial lighting, particularly in the many outdoor scenes, in favor of natural sources of light. Those outdoor scenes were shot mostly late in the long summer days on location in Saskatchewan, and the result is nothing short of stunning, with one riveting image following another. The voice-over narration typical of Malick, the performances, and the plot are lean, while the visual element is of a contrasting richness seldom found on the screen. Days of Heaven is in all ways the expression of a fully developed and uniquely personal cinematic style associated only with the greatest film directors.
This is a most impressive early sound picture, more compelling and well-crafted than most of the movies of its time I've seen. Barbara Stanwyck plays Florence Fallon, a young woman who with the help of a sleazy showman, Bob Hornsby (Sam Hardy), becomes a celebrity evangelist/miracle healer in the style of Aimee Semple McPherson. The daughter of a minister who dies after the congregation he had served for many years replaces him with a younger man, she is motivated by bitterness and revenge, and by disillusionment with what she sees as the hypocrisy of those who profess to be true believers. When Hornsby sees her deliver a fiery denunciation of her father's parishioners from the pulpit, he realizes what a potential goldmine she is with her histrionic evangelism and her ability to make religious platitudes seem sincere. "George M. Cohan said, 'Leave 'em laughing,'" he tells her. "I want [you] to leave 'em crying."
Her revival meetings are theatrical, stage-managed affairs—almost religious spectacles—complete with shills planted in the audience to fake miracle healings and help Florence fleece the gullible for contributions. Problems begin when Florence meets and falls in love with a blind war hero, John Carson (David Manners), whom she saves from suicide, and begins to question her ruthless exploitation of her followers' trust. The possessive Hornsby, a sort of malevolent Pygmalion, senses he is losing control of Florence and coerces her into continuing their scam by threatening to implicate her in crimes he himself has committed, including bribery, fraud, embezzlement, and even murder.
Stanwyck is sensational in the title role, relentlessly intense as she maneuvers through a whole gamut of emotions. She is by turns a hardened cynic out to manipulate the credulous with her showmanship and phony piety, a frustrated victim being controlled by the menacing Hornsby, and a disillusioned and vulnerable woman susceptible to redemption by the goodness of her blind lover. But whatever emotions she expresses, she always remains believable and basically sympathetic.
Capra's direction is assured, and he keeps things moving briskly. The emotional intensity of the plot surges and relaxes, but Capra's sure-handed staging never for a moment lets the movie's interest level flag. Highlights include the lavishly detailed, circus-like revival meeting scenes, including one in which Stanwyck delivers a rousing sermon on the strength of faith while inside a cage of lions; a tender and humorous birthday party scene with Florence and John; a dramatic night scene on the beach between Florence, John, and Hornsby in which she defiantly confesses her charlatanism to John; and a spectacular fire that destroys Florence's Temple of Happiness in the movie's climax.
Florence and John in the lions' cageCapra's expert staging of these sequences is aided tremendously by the inventive photographic effects of cinematographer Joseph Walker, including impressively mobile tracking shots, startling whip-pans, and imaginative camera placement—for example, looking into John's room from inside its fireplace, with roaring flames in the foreground between the viewer and John and Florence. Many shots of the revival scenes are composed showing Stanwyck from the rear with upraised arms, the silhouette of her body visible through the backlit diaphanous white gown she wears. This is one of the most watchable movies of its era I've seen—one of Capra's best early directorial efforts and one of Stanwyck's best and most sizzling early performances.
THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER (1974) ****
Directed by Werner Herzog, this movie is a part-factual, part-speculative work based on a true story. In 1828 a young man is found early one morning standing in a deserted street in Nuremberg, Germany, holding in one hand a note saying his name is Kaspar Hauser and in the other hand a prayer book. Able to speak only one nonsensical sentence, he seems disoriented and confused. He appears to be neither violent nor mentally defective, only unacquainted with normal human life.
Kaspar appears on a street in NurembergExhibited as a freak in a circus, he is observed by a professor who adopts him and undertakes to teach him the ways of civilized humans and the German language. Kaspar quickly learns to communicate, and the story he tells is a bizarre one. He claims to have been kept chained in a dark cellar for nearly his entire life and never to have encountered another human being (food was left for him while he was sleeping) or to have seen anything outside the cellar where he was imprisoned. Under the professor's tutelage, Kaspar becomes something of a celebrity. There is much speculation—most of it absurdly fanciful, for example, that he is the castoff heir of the royal House of Baden—about his true origins before he is mysteriously murdered a few years later.
Filming largely in the Bavarian village of Dinkelsbühl, which looks essentially unchanged since the early 19th century, Herzog authentically recreates the life of the time. In the midst of this historical realism, he interpolates brief dreamlike scenes filmed in an anomalously distorted style. The overall effect of this historical authenticity punctuated with unexpected departures into surrealism is to suggest how utterly strange life in his new environment is for Kaspar. No matter how much he learns about the ways of human beings, his conception of life always keeps its edge of strangeness, threatening to slide at any moment into weirdness, if only briefly. Like a mystic, he is subject to occasional visions and imaginary events that seem to the viewer baffling and mysterious, but to Kaspar as genuine as his real experiences.
Kaspar is played by a 41-year old street singer named Bruno S., who didn't want his full name used in order to preserve his privacy. It's hard to imagine that anyone else, especially a professional actor, could have given such a naked, real performance, so spontaneous, instinctive, and entirely lacking in artifice does he seem. And it's hard to imagine that the movie would be half so effective with anyone else in the title role. One of the oddest supporting characters in the film is a scribe who is present almost from the beginning of the movie until its very end, obsessively documenting every experience Kaspar has, from his discovery in the town right up to the results of his autopsy. Yet these factual details provide no real insight into the man. The insight is provided by Herzog and Bruno S., whom it's clear played off each other and inspired each other like two complementary halves of a whole, Herzog providing the intellect and vision and Bruno the heart and emotions.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is unlike any other movie I've seen: It incorporates dreamlike elements that in a strictly logical and narrative sense don't seem to belong in an otherwise realistic movie, yet that on some extra-logical level do enhance the narrative without compromising its coherence, suggesting through the story of Kaspar Hauser that the nature and meaning of human existence can be explained only so far before hitting the impenetrable wall of the inexplicable.
DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) ****
Terrence Malick is one of the great contemporary American directors, a filmmaker with a style as distinctive as that of David Lynch, yet he has directed only four movies. When you see how meticulously conceived, written, photographed, and edited his movies are, this deliberately unhasty approach to filmmaking becomes entirely understandable. His first movie, Badlands (1973), seemed to follow a clear plan determined in advance, with little improvisation. But beginning with Malick's second movie, Days of Heaven, his work seems to be the result of a combination of advance planning and spontaneous inspiration taking place at the editing stage.
I have heard that Malick is an exceptionally well-read man, and in Days of Heaven I detect two clear literary influences. The plot of the movie resembles Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove. In the early 1900s two lovers, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams), pretend to be brother and sister. When Bill is fired from his job in a steel mill in Chicago after a dispute with the foreman, he and Abby, along with his young sister Linda (Linda Manz), travel south seeking work as itinerant farm workers. They end up in the Texas panhandle, where the wheat harvest is just beginning. The wealthy owner of the farm where they find work (Sam Shepard) quickly becomes obsessed with Abby, and when Bill overhears the farmer's doctor telling him he has only a few months to live, he persuades Abby to allow herself to be romanced by the farmer and to marry him, with the expectation that he will soon die and she will inherit the farm. Two forces thwart this scheme, though. The farm foreman (Robert Wilke) is immediately suspicious of Bill and Abby. And the farmer's love for Abby cures him of whatever disease the doctor thought he had.
The other literary influence I detect is apparent in the visual element of the movie and makes an even stronger impression than the narrative. This element resembles the vividly atmospheric rural locales of certain novels of Thomas Hardy and the themes in those novels of the conflict between man and nature as humans attempt to tame and dominate nature in an early Industrial Age agrarian setting. The people in the movie are dwarfed and made insignificant by the vast, flat landscapes of the plains and the golden fields of wheat, the imperatives of following the rhythms of the crops, and the challenges to human endeavor posed by the physical world. Some of the strongest images in the movie are of the wheat being grown, being harvested, being processed. Scenes of frenzied harvesting, a sudden invasion of locusts, and the nighttime burning of the fields are especially dramatic and hypnotic. Such images contrast strongly with those of artifacts of early 20th-century industrialism—steel mills, steam-driven trains, the first automobiles, primitive farm machinery, even the World War I-era airplanes of a flying circus.
The invasion of the locustsVisual and thematic preoccupations present in all of Malick's movies appear here: scenes of the limitless sky overhead shot through overhanging trees, of ever-flowing rivers, of animal and insect life coexisting with human beings shown in almost documentary fashion, of people attempting to survive in immense landscapes that barely accommodate their presence. All this is imbued with a deterministic sense—not unlike that of Hardy—of the lack of control of individuals over their destinies, which seem governed instead by hostile human enemies, their own self-destructive impulses, and a benignly indifferent natural world.
The movie is filled with arrestingly beautiful images, and a great deal of credit for this must go to Nestor Almendros, the Spanish-born cinematographer best known for his work with François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, who won an Oscar for his work here. (Additional photography was done by another Oscar winner, Haskell Wexler, who has said he tried to duplicate the work of Almendros rather than impose his own style on the parts he shot.) Almendros largely eschewed artificial lighting, particularly in the many outdoor scenes, in favor of natural sources of light. Those outdoor scenes were shot mostly late in the long summer days on location in Saskatchewan, and the result is nothing short of stunning, with one riveting image following another. The voice-over narration typical of Malick, the performances, and the plot are lean, while the visual element is of a contrasting richness seldom found on the screen. Days of Heaven is in all ways the expression of a fully developed and uniquely personal cinematic style associated only with the greatest film directors.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
A Study in Scarlet: Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers
"Bergman insists on the truths of how people feel toward others they need to love."
From Wild Strawberries (1957) to his final feature film, Fanny and Alexander (1982), the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman returned again and again to stories about the family, about the ways that members of a family relate to one another, the ways they grant and withhold intimacy, the ways they conceal or reveal their true feelings for one another. Along with Through a Glass Darkly (1961), his 1972 film Cries and Whispers is probably his most concentrated and focused examination of family dynamics.
At an upper middle-class country estate around 1900, two sisters, Karina (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), have come to be present as their eldest sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), dies after a long illness, probably cancer. Agnes is cared for by her long-time servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). These are the main characters in the movie, although other characters—Agnes's doctor (Erland Josephson), the sisters' mother (also played by Liv Ullmann), Maria's daughter (played by Linn Ullmann, the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman), Karina's and Maria's husbands, and a handful of others—appear briefly.
Bergman was a master at creating highly individualized and complex female characters, a rarity in male directors and one of the most remarkable things about him as a screenwriter and film director. In Cries and Whispers he has done this four times over. Agnes, the eldest sister, is a loving and warm woman. (The name Agnes is derived from the Latin for "lamb.") She is unmarried, and her relationship with the servant Anna suggests she might be a lesbian. Karina, the middle sister, is a cold, withdrawn, self-centered woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a domineering and equally cold older man. Maria, the youngest sister, is flirtatious, promiscuous (in the past she had an affair with Agnes's doctor, which caused her husband to attempt suicide when he discovered it), and also self-centered, but warmer and more sensual than Karina. The servant Anna, who is about the same age as the sisters, is a simple, selfless woman devoted to her mistress and of the four women in the household the only one who is openly religious. No mention is made of a husband, but she did once have a daughter, now dead.
We learn these things about the women not only from the way they treat each other, but from details about their pasts that are subtly interpolated into the plot as very short flashbacks. Childhood memories of a brief glance at a doll's house and of a Twelfth Night celebration with a magic lantern limn a contented childhood for Agnes and Maria. Karin's most vivid childhood memory, in contrast, is of her cold jealousy for the affection given by their mother to Maria. The childhood dynamics of these three sisters are stunningly observed: the confidence and maturity of the eldest sister, the feeling of being excluded and starved of attention of the middle sister, and the pampered special position of the youngest and prettiest sister. It is easy to see how these experiences as children prefigure the personalities and behavior of the three sisters as adults, especially in the pressured environment of the present situation.
The reactions of Karin and Maria to the coming death of their eldest sister clearly indicate how unnerved and frightened they are by the idea of death and the inevitability of their own deaths. After Agnes dies (about halfway through the movie), there is a stunning dream sequence that vividly shows this fear. It is not clear whose dream it is (at one point the dead Agnes says it is her dream); it is likely that the sequence is a cinematic conceit intended by Bergman to represent a collective dream. In the dream the dead Agnes, laid out on her bed in her funeral attire (which eerily resembles that of a baby), calls Anna to her in the night and asks her to bring each of her sisters to her. First Karin then Maria gingerly enters the room, is overcome with fright, and immediately turns and leaves. Only the religious Anna, who seems to accept death as a natural occurrence, consents to stay with her mistress and is seen in a final shot cradling Agnes, curled in the fetal position, in her arms, almost like a Pietà. Most of this sequence is shot in tight close-up and with few edits, making the expressions on the faces plain to read.
Anna cradles the dead Agnes in her arms
The second half of the movie deals with events that happen after the death of Agnes. Karin, Maria, and their husbands are quite businesslike and unsentimental about wrapping up the estate and dismissing the faithful Anna. Far from being a transformative event, the death of their eldest sister has only hardened the personalities of Karin and Maria. The one possibility for change occurs when the shaken Maria confronts Karin and pleads with her to accept her affection. Resisting Maria's overtures, Karin loses control of her tightly reined-in emotions and tells her younger sister how much she hates her. But Maria persists, and finally Karin (who can't bear to be touched) responds, the two embrace, and a new intimacy seems to have been created. Near the end of the movie, though, just before they part, the mercurial Maria disavows this new relationship as just a passing whim and leaves Karin alone and isolated once again. It is the final and most potent example in the movie of what David Thomson calls Bergman's "convictions of the harrowing separateness of people, the intractable privacy of men and women."
In a recent post on Bergman's Shame, I wrote of the precise balance in his best films between the thematic and the narrative, between ideas and people interacting in emotionally charged situations, and attributed this to his background in theater. (Bergman was involved in theater from his days as a student at Stockholm University, later managing several theater companies. For several years in the 1960s he was director of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm.) This theater-influenced approach to film, which is more apparent in his movies of the 1960s and 1970s than in his earlier work, is on full display in Cries and Whispers, with its plot reminiscent of the family dramas of Ibsen and Chekhov.
Added to this balancing of ideas and characters is the theatrical staging of the action and the overall look of the movie, with its strong emphasis on composition, on the placement of objects and people within the frame and their limited movement within a confined space. Cries and Whispers is in the literal sense of the term a chamber piece. Nearly all of the action takes place in Agnes's country house—in the sitting rooms, in the dining room, in Anna's room, and most vividly in Agnes's bedroom, which is, of course, also her sickroom and the scene of her death and laying out. I can't think of another film by Bergman with such a strong sense of being influenced by stage sets.
Perhaps the most obvious indication of this is the use of an identifiable color scheme in the movie, only Bergman's second film shot in color. The predominant color in this scheme is red, with white, black, and the occasional gray the other colors in the scheme. Every room in the house is painted an intense red color, like those red rooms in paintings by Matisse. The dresses the sisters wear are often red or rust colored. The nightclothes, the bed linens, the linen in the dining room, and the clothing Agnes is laid out in are pristine white. The furniture is of dark mahogany or black lacquer and, of course, the clothing worn after the death of Agnes is mourning black. There is no blue or yellow in the movie, and even the outdoor foliage is drained of color because the movie takes place in the fall. And whereas movies conventionally fade to black or occasionally white, the fade-outs in Cries and Whispers are always to red. This saturation of the images in the color red may perhaps be intended to remind the viewer of blood. After all, there are a lot of open emotional wounds on display in the movie. But blood is also essential to life. When something is referred to as bloodless, it is lacking in vitality, and the result of anemia is a dearth of the nutrients necessary for life.
Maria, Karin, and Anna in the red sitting room
Each of the three actresses who play the sisters had a long association with Bergman, and each had memorable roles in several of his films. All give beautifully accomplished performances. Thulin has perhaps the most difficult role as the unlikable, neurotic Karin, whose childhood alienation still governs her life and her reactions to her sisters. Ullmann must suppress her natural intelligence and sensitivity to play the frivolous and inconstant Maria, and she does this convincingly, with her red-gold hair and simpering mannerisms. But it is Harriet Andersson who dominates the movie, even though she dies halfway through, as the eldest sister who manages to retain her nobility and selflessness even as she ventures more than once to the brink of death, gasping in agony, only to be pulled back to life again by the devoted Anna, before finally dying suddenly and quietly. These near-death scenes are truly disturbing and the most demanding of any performer in the movie. This marvelous ensemble is completed by the plain, Rubenesque Sylwan—who appeared in only seven movies between 1956 and 1982 but easily holds her own with the veteran Bergman actresses—as the earthy, maternal Anna, the life force of the movie and the person who holds the household together.
The movie opens and closes with two brilliant sequences. It begins with a brief montage of morning scenes in the garden outside the house before moving indoors as clocks in the various rooms strike. We then see a close-up of Agnes's face as she wakes. For a few seconds, her face registers disorientation, then—and Andersson conveys this with absolute clarity—we see the dawning realization of where she is and the sudden memory that she is dying. It is a heart-rending moment. As Agnes is gripped by a spasm of pain, one small tear forms in each eye. She gets out of bed and walks to the window, where she gazes at an allée of leafless trees in late autumn. (In that opening montage, the garden appeared to be in summer. Was that Agnes's dream?) After winding the clock on the mantel, she goes to her writing desk, opens her journal, and writes a short entry: "It is morning, and I am in pain."
The movie ends in another brilliant sequence that tempers all the pain, unsettling memories, and uncertainty that have occurred in the hour and a half since that opening sequence. After the sisters and their husbands have left, Anna stays behind to clear the house. She has been offered a memento of Agnes and has declined the offer. ("She's playing her role well," comments Karin's lawyer husband condescendingly.) But she has kept one thing of Agnes's of which the sisters are unaware: her journal. The movie opened with Agnes getting out of bed and writing a brief entry in that journal. Now Anna picks up the journal and begins to read in voice-over as we are shown what she is describing.
Anna and the three sisters stroll in the autumnal garden
It is a day in early September, and Agnes's sisters have arrived for their visit. For the first time in the movie since the opening montage, the action takes place outdoors. Dressed completely in white summer outfits and carrying white parasols, the three sisters, accompanied by Anna, dressed in pale gray, are strolling through the autumnal grounds, the trees and earth covered with brown leaves. They come to their childhood swing and sit down, Karin and Maria facing away from the camera and Agnes opposite them facing the camera. Agnes no longer has the haggard look of a dying woman wracked with pain. She now resembles the healthy and beautiful Harriet Andersson of earlier Bergman films. And she looks peaceful and contented. As Anna pushes the swing, the camera moves in to a close-up of Agnes, who thinks to herself: "Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes I can experience perfection. [She closes her eyes.] And I feel profoundly grateful to my life which gives me so much."
Perhaps for Bergman this is what the art of cinema is all about: capturing in the midst of pain, the unstoppable passage of time, death, and the certainty that each of us is ultimately alone (the cries?) those fleeting, still moments of perfection (the whispers?) that briefly bring us peace and contentment.
—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
From Wild Strawberries (1957) to his final feature film, Fanny and Alexander (1982), the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman returned again and again to stories about the family, about the ways that members of a family relate to one another, the ways they grant and withhold intimacy, the ways they conceal or reveal their true feelings for one another. Along with Through a Glass Darkly (1961), his 1972 film Cries and Whispers is probably his most concentrated and focused examination of family dynamics.
At an upper middle-class country estate around 1900, two sisters, Karina (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), have come to be present as their eldest sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), dies after a long illness, probably cancer. Agnes is cared for by her long-time servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). These are the main characters in the movie, although other characters—Agnes's doctor (Erland Josephson), the sisters' mother (also played by Liv Ullmann), Maria's daughter (played by Linn Ullmann, the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman), Karina's and Maria's husbands, and a handful of others—appear briefly.
Bergman was a master at creating highly individualized and complex female characters, a rarity in male directors and one of the most remarkable things about him as a screenwriter and film director. In Cries and Whispers he has done this four times over. Agnes, the eldest sister, is a loving and warm woman. (The name Agnes is derived from the Latin for "lamb.") She is unmarried, and her relationship with the servant Anna suggests she might be a lesbian. Karina, the middle sister, is a cold, withdrawn, self-centered woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a domineering and equally cold older man. Maria, the youngest sister, is flirtatious, promiscuous (in the past she had an affair with Agnes's doctor, which caused her husband to attempt suicide when he discovered it), and also self-centered, but warmer and more sensual than Karina. The servant Anna, who is about the same age as the sisters, is a simple, selfless woman devoted to her mistress and of the four women in the household the only one who is openly religious. No mention is made of a husband, but she did once have a daughter, now dead.
We learn these things about the women not only from the way they treat each other, but from details about their pasts that are subtly interpolated into the plot as very short flashbacks. Childhood memories of a brief glance at a doll's house and of a Twelfth Night celebration with a magic lantern limn a contented childhood for Agnes and Maria. Karin's most vivid childhood memory, in contrast, is of her cold jealousy for the affection given by their mother to Maria. The childhood dynamics of these three sisters are stunningly observed: the confidence and maturity of the eldest sister, the feeling of being excluded and starved of attention of the middle sister, and the pampered special position of the youngest and prettiest sister. It is easy to see how these experiences as children prefigure the personalities and behavior of the three sisters as adults, especially in the pressured environment of the present situation.
The reactions of Karin and Maria to the coming death of their eldest sister clearly indicate how unnerved and frightened they are by the idea of death and the inevitability of their own deaths. After Agnes dies (about halfway through the movie), there is a stunning dream sequence that vividly shows this fear. It is not clear whose dream it is (at one point the dead Agnes says it is her dream); it is likely that the sequence is a cinematic conceit intended by Bergman to represent a collective dream. In the dream the dead Agnes, laid out on her bed in her funeral attire (which eerily resembles that of a baby), calls Anna to her in the night and asks her to bring each of her sisters to her. First Karin then Maria gingerly enters the room, is overcome with fright, and immediately turns and leaves. Only the religious Anna, who seems to accept death as a natural occurrence, consents to stay with her mistress and is seen in a final shot cradling Agnes, curled in the fetal position, in her arms, almost like a Pietà. Most of this sequence is shot in tight close-up and with few edits, making the expressions on the faces plain to read.
Anna cradles the dead Agnes in her armsThe second half of the movie deals with events that happen after the death of Agnes. Karin, Maria, and their husbands are quite businesslike and unsentimental about wrapping up the estate and dismissing the faithful Anna. Far from being a transformative event, the death of their eldest sister has only hardened the personalities of Karin and Maria. The one possibility for change occurs when the shaken Maria confronts Karin and pleads with her to accept her affection. Resisting Maria's overtures, Karin loses control of her tightly reined-in emotions and tells her younger sister how much she hates her. But Maria persists, and finally Karin (who can't bear to be touched) responds, the two embrace, and a new intimacy seems to have been created. Near the end of the movie, though, just before they part, the mercurial Maria disavows this new relationship as just a passing whim and leaves Karin alone and isolated once again. It is the final and most potent example in the movie of what David Thomson calls Bergman's "convictions of the harrowing separateness of people, the intractable privacy of men and women."
In a recent post on Bergman's Shame, I wrote of the precise balance in his best films between the thematic and the narrative, between ideas and people interacting in emotionally charged situations, and attributed this to his background in theater. (Bergman was involved in theater from his days as a student at Stockholm University, later managing several theater companies. For several years in the 1960s he was director of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm.) This theater-influenced approach to film, which is more apparent in his movies of the 1960s and 1970s than in his earlier work, is on full display in Cries and Whispers, with its plot reminiscent of the family dramas of Ibsen and Chekhov.
Added to this balancing of ideas and characters is the theatrical staging of the action and the overall look of the movie, with its strong emphasis on composition, on the placement of objects and people within the frame and their limited movement within a confined space. Cries and Whispers is in the literal sense of the term a chamber piece. Nearly all of the action takes place in Agnes's country house—in the sitting rooms, in the dining room, in Anna's room, and most vividly in Agnes's bedroom, which is, of course, also her sickroom and the scene of her death and laying out. I can't think of another film by Bergman with such a strong sense of being influenced by stage sets.
Perhaps the most obvious indication of this is the use of an identifiable color scheme in the movie, only Bergman's second film shot in color. The predominant color in this scheme is red, with white, black, and the occasional gray the other colors in the scheme. Every room in the house is painted an intense red color, like those red rooms in paintings by Matisse. The dresses the sisters wear are often red or rust colored. The nightclothes, the bed linens, the linen in the dining room, and the clothing Agnes is laid out in are pristine white. The furniture is of dark mahogany or black lacquer and, of course, the clothing worn after the death of Agnes is mourning black. There is no blue or yellow in the movie, and even the outdoor foliage is drained of color because the movie takes place in the fall. And whereas movies conventionally fade to black or occasionally white, the fade-outs in Cries and Whispers are always to red. This saturation of the images in the color red may perhaps be intended to remind the viewer of blood. After all, there are a lot of open emotional wounds on display in the movie. But blood is also essential to life. When something is referred to as bloodless, it is lacking in vitality, and the result of anemia is a dearth of the nutrients necessary for life.
Maria, Karin, and Anna in the red sitting roomEach of the three actresses who play the sisters had a long association with Bergman, and each had memorable roles in several of his films. All give beautifully accomplished performances. Thulin has perhaps the most difficult role as the unlikable, neurotic Karin, whose childhood alienation still governs her life and her reactions to her sisters. Ullmann must suppress her natural intelligence and sensitivity to play the frivolous and inconstant Maria, and she does this convincingly, with her red-gold hair and simpering mannerisms. But it is Harriet Andersson who dominates the movie, even though she dies halfway through, as the eldest sister who manages to retain her nobility and selflessness even as she ventures more than once to the brink of death, gasping in agony, only to be pulled back to life again by the devoted Anna, before finally dying suddenly and quietly. These near-death scenes are truly disturbing and the most demanding of any performer in the movie. This marvelous ensemble is completed by the plain, Rubenesque Sylwan—who appeared in only seven movies between 1956 and 1982 but easily holds her own with the veteran Bergman actresses—as the earthy, maternal Anna, the life force of the movie and the person who holds the household together.
The movie opens and closes with two brilliant sequences. It begins with a brief montage of morning scenes in the garden outside the house before moving indoors as clocks in the various rooms strike. We then see a close-up of Agnes's face as she wakes. For a few seconds, her face registers disorientation, then—and Andersson conveys this with absolute clarity—we see the dawning realization of where she is and the sudden memory that she is dying. It is a heart-rending moment. As Agnes is gripped by a spasm of pain, one small tear forms in each eye. She gets out of bed and walks to the window, where she gazes at an allée of leafless trees in late autumn. (In that opening montage, the garden appeared to be in summer. Was that Agnes's dream?) After winding the clock on the mantel, she goes to her writing desk, opens her journal, and writes a short entry: "It is morning, and I am in pain."
The movie ends in another brilliant sequence that tempers all the pain, unsettling memories, and uncertainty that have occurred in the hour and a half since that opening sequence. After the sisters and their husbands have left, Anna stays behind to clear the house. She has been offered a memento of Agnes and has declined the offer. ("She's playing her role well," comments Karin's lawyer husband condescendingly.) But she has kept one thing of Agnes's of which the sisters are unaware: her journal. The movie opened with Agnes getting out of bed and writing a brief entry in that journal. Now Anna picks up the journal and begins to read in voice-over as we are shown what she is describing.
Anna and the three sisters stroll in the autumnal gardenIt is a day in early September, and Agnes's sisters have arrived for their visit. For the first time in the movie since the opening montage, the action takes place outdoors. Dressed completely in white summer outfits and carrying white parasols, the three sisters, accompanied by Anna, dressed in pale gray, are strolling through the autumnal grounds, the trees and earth covered with brown leaves. They come to their childhood swing and sit down, Karin and Maria facing away from the camera and Agnes opposite them facing the camera. Agnes no longer has the haggard look of a dying woman wracked with pain. She now resembles the healthy and beautiful Harriet Andersson of earlier Bergman films. And she looks peaceful and contented. As Anna pushes the swing, the camera moves in to a close-up of Agnes, who thinks to herself: "Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes I can experience perfection. [She closes her eyes.] And I feel profoundly grateful to my life which gives me so much."
Perhaps for Bergman this is what the art of cinema is all about: capturing in the midst of pain, the unstoppable passage of time, death, and the certainty that each of us is ultimately alone (the cries?) those fleeting, still moments of perfection (the whispers?) that briefly bring us peace and contentment.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Two by Michael Powell
"There is not a British director with as many worthwhile films to his credit as Michael Powell."
THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951) ****
Generally speaking, I'm not a great fan of opera. Because of the inherently realistic nature of movies, with the camera's ability to bring the viewer close to the action, the very things that make me wary of opera—its slow pacing, rather static dramatics, and high level of artifice—would seem to make it a difficult art form to turn into a real motion picture rather than just a recording of a stage performance. Yet I have seen two filmed operas that succeeded brilliantly as real movies. Franco Zeffirelli took a completely realistic approach with Verdi's La Traviata (1983), filming it like a real drama taking place in real locations. Ingmar Bergman filmed The Magic Flute (1975) as a performance of Mozart's opera that includes both backstage and audience scenes. Both approaches worked beautifully.
The great Michael Powell, one of the most visually creative of all film directors, chose to film Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann with little attempt at realism. What he did instead was to use the full range of cinematic effects—and his mastery of those effects was astounding—to turn the opera into a highly stylized example of pure cinema. One reason the movie succeeds so well is that the opera itself is ideally suited to such an approach. For one thing, it is divided into three discrete episodes, which immediately solves the problem of lagging pace. The movie is nearly 2 hours 20 minutes long yet certainly doesn't feel like it. And the three episodes, each based on a bizarre tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann of a supernatural encounter with an otherwordly woman by the poet himself, seem to call for a non-realistic approach to emphasize their eerie nature.
In the three tales, Hoffmann first falls in love with a life-sized mechanical doll named Olympia (brilliantly danced and played by Moira Shearer of The Red Shoes) in Paris. Next he travels to Venice, where he is bewitched by Giulietta, minion of the demonic Dapertutto and collector of souls for him. Finally he sails to an isolated Greek island where Antonia, a gifted singer who loves him, lives under a deadly curse that she is hypnotized into fulfilling by the sinister Dr. Miracle. Appearing to great effect as the villain in all three episodes is Robert Helpmann, who makes a strong impression in all four of his guises. (He also appears as Hoffmann's nemesis Lindorf in the framing episodes at the beginning and end of the film.)
The movie combines ballet and singing; there is no spoken dialogue, and the libretto is in English. The physical action within the frame may at times be stately, but Powell has a firm grasp of the purposeful use of stillness as a counterpoint to motion. On the visual level he never allows the film to stop moving, continuously engaging the viewer's eye with his hypnotic and constantly shifting images, created through the inventive use of his entire cinematic bag of tricks—set decoration, costumes, makeup, camera placement and movement, editing, color, and special effects. At the same time, he uses these elements to emphasize and enhance the dream-like quality of the tales. The result is an eye-popping, almost hallucinatory phantasmagoria that makes Fellini's most extravagant exercises, like those in Juliet of the Spirits, seem restrained.
The only real complaint I have is that the third tale is dramatically and cinematically a bit less compelling than the first two, although it does make up for this by leading into a dazzling finale. In the Powell-Pressburger canon, The Tales of Hoffmann is not as well known as their masterpieces of the 1940s. This is unfair. It is one of their strongest, most daring, and most memorable movies and a must not only for fans of the great Powell-Pressburger team, but also for anyone interested in ballet, opera, or cinema as an art form.
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946) ****
As I write this I've just finished watching A Matter of Life and Death (original US title: Stairway to Heaven), and I just can't praise this movie enough. Powell's greatest movies, of which this is one, show his astonishing skill and creativity in presenting the story in the most strikingly visual terms possible. His command of the language of film easily equals, and possibly even exceeds, Alfred Hitchcock's. Like Hitchcock, he was fascinated by the technical challenges of expressing moments of heightened sensation through filmic means and habitually punctuated his movies with mind-bogglingly original and glorious set pieces that linger with the viewer as eidetic memories long after the movie has ended.
Powell's amazing visual creativity is on full display in his movies with the most unconventional subjects—movies like The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann, Peeping Tom, and this one, the first to showcase the real extent of his cinematic imagination. A Matter of Life and Death, released in late 1946, the year after the end of World War II, is saturated with a sense of the collective and personal loss caused by that war. The movie's response to that melancholy is an almost desperately mystical optimism that with the aid of the transcendent power of the cinema, Britain can somehow exorcise the grief of the war and heal its wounded national psyche.
This hope is expressed through the story of Peter Carter (David Niven, who has never been better), an airman who miraculously survives a suicidal jump into the sea without a parachute from a flaming Lancaster bomber off the coast of England on May 2, 1945, just days before the war in Europe ended. Before he bails out, Carter has a brief conversation on his radio with a stranger, a young American woman named June (Kim Hunter) working as a radio operator at an air base in England. After washing up on shore and finding he is alive, he wanders toward the base and immediately meets June riding home on her bicycle that morning after her shift has ended. The two instantly fall in love. The only problem is that his survival is the result of a heavenly error, and an emissary is sent to retrieve him. But Peter refuses to go, insisting on an appeal in a heavenly court of justice, where he will argue that because his love for June has negated the heavenly edict that he must die, he must be returned to life.
The plot is constructed in a fascinatingly ambiguous way: Are all these supernatural events really happening, or are they actually elaborate visual and auditory hallucinations caused by a head injury Peter received two years earlier? Is the climactic sequence of the movie really a trial in heaven to determine if Peter will live or die, or is this a hallucination occurring under anaesthesia while Peter is undergoing neurosurgery that will determine if he lives or dies? As in the best fantasy movies predicated on ambiguity, and specifically on the ambiguity between the subjective and the objective interpretation of events, the plot functions simultaneously on both levels without any apparent contradiction. Near the end of the movie, when the neurosurgeon removes his surgical mask and his true identity is revealed, it is a stunning revelation that underscores vividly this fundamental ambiguity between the real and the imaginary and the film's seamless blending of the two.
The exceedingly clever plot (I have only hinted at its many twists and turns) is only part of the movie's fascination, though. What really makes the film so memorable is the inspired visual ideas Powell devises to show us these events. From the moment the film opens, with a view of the cosmos ("This is the universe," the narrator says as the film begins. "Big, isn't it?") that gradually reduces itself to Niven in the cockpit of that flaming bomber, we know we are in for a unique experience. And when Peter comes to on the beach and encounters a naked young goatherd playing a flute, we know this is a movie where something unexpectedly weird and mythic might happen at any moment. The film is crammed with similarly imaginative sequences based on the creative use of sets (that stairway to heaven is unforgettable, as indeed are all the sets for the afterlife), lighting, photography, and editing. The sequence in the camera obscura of the village doctor, played by Powell stalwart Roger Livesy (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I'm Going), is especially noteworthy. Powell and cinematographer Jack Cardiff's use of tricks like stop-motion, slow motion, double exposure, reverse motion, back projection, matted images, and alternation between black-and-white and Technicolor constitutes a virtual catalogue of pre-CGI special effects.
Powell and his collaborator Emeric Pressburger wrote the original screenplay, which seems influenced by three notable fantasy movies of the early 1940s. It resembles Here Comes Mr. Jordan in its use of a heavenly error to drive the fantasy elements of the plot. But here the situation is reversed and instead of being taken before his time like Robert Montgomery in that movie, Peter is inadvertently left behind. Powell's film is also reminiscent of both The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), which I wrote about recently, and Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1943) in its idea of the protagonist pleading his case in a supernatural hearing that will determine his fate. The details of the fantastic plot of A Matter of Life and Death and their visualization on the screen are so conceptually intertwined that to watch the movie is to journey into the mind and imagination of one of the greatest geniuses of cinema.
In the end, all I can really say about this movie is watch it and marvel at the way it suggests simultaneously the ineffable, vast, and timeless mysteries of existence and a specific story about a small group of people experiencing very human emotions in a situation clearly delimited in time and space. A Matter of Life and Death is more than merely worthwhile: It is an essential masterpiece that will kindle the ardor of anyone who loves movies.
—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951) ****
Generally speaking, I'm not a great fan of opera. Because of the inherently realistic nature of movies, with the camera's ability to bring the viewer close to the action, the very things that make me wary of opera—its slow pacing, rather static dramatics, and high level of artifice—would seem to make it a difficult art form to turn into a real motion picture rather than just a recording of a stage performance. Yet I have seen two filmed operas that succeeded brilliantly as real movies. Franco Zeffirelli took a completely realistic approach with Verdi's La Traviata (1983), filming it like a real drama taking place in real locations. Ingmar Bergman filmed The Magic Flute (1975) as a performance of Mozart's opera that includes both backstage and audience scenes. Both approaches worked beautifully.
The great Michael Powell, one of the most visually creative of all film directors, chose to film Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann with little attempt at realism. What he did instead was to use the full range of cinematic effects—and his mastery of those effects was astounding—to turn the opera into a highly stylized example of pure cinema. One reason the movie succeeds so well is that the opera itself is ideally suited to such an approach. For one thing, it is divided into three discrete episodes, which immediately solves the problem of lagging pace. The movie is nearly 2 hours 20 minutes long yet certainly doesn't feel like it. And the three episodes, each based on a bizarre tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann of a supernatural encounter with an otherwordly woman by the poet himself, seem to call for a non-realistic approach to emphasize their eerie nature.
Moira Shearer as the automaton Olympia
In the three tales, Hoffmann first falls in love with a life-sized mechanical doll named Olympia (brilliantly danced and played by Moira Shearer of The Red Shoes) in Paris. Next he travels to Venice, where he is bewitched by Giulietta, minion of the demonic Dapertutto and collector of souls for him. Finally he sails to an isolated Greek island where Antonia, a gifted singer who loves him, lives under a deadly curse that she is hypnotized into fulfilling by the sinister Dr. Miracle. Appearing to great effect as the villain in all three episodes is Robert Helpmann, who makes a strong impression in all four of his guises. (He also appears as Hoffmann's nemesis Lindorf in the framing episodes at the beginning and end of the film.)
The movie combines ballet and singing; there is no spoken dialogue, and the libretto is in English. The physical action within the frame may at times be stately, but Powell has a firm grasp of the purposeful use of stillness as a counterpoint to motion. On the visual level he never allows the film to stop moving, continuously engaging the viewer's eye with his hypnotic and constantly shifting images, created through the inventive use of his entire cinematic bag of tricks—set decoration, costumes, makeup, camera placement and movement, editing, color, and special effects. At the same time, he uses these elements to emphasize and enhance the dream-like quality of the tales. The result is an eye-popping, almost hallucinatory phantasmagoria that makes Fellini's most extravagant exercises, like those in Juliet of the Spirits, seem restrained.
The only real complaint I have is that the third tale is dramatically and cinematically a bit less compelling than the first two, although it does make up for this by leading into a dazzling finale. In the Powell-Pressburger canon, The Tales of Hoffmann is not as well known as their masterpieces of the 1940s. This is unfair. It is one of their strongest, most daring, and most memorable movies and a must not only for fans of the great Powell-Pressburger team, but also for anyone interested in ballet, opera, or cinema as an art form.
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946) ****
As I write this I've just finished watching A Matter of Life and Death (original US title: Stairway to Heaven), and I just can't praise this movie enough. Powell's greatest movies, of which this is one, show his astonishing skill and creativity in presenting the story in the most strikingly visual terms possible. His command of the language of film easily equals, and possibly even exceeds, Alfred Hitchcock's. Like Hitchcock, he was fascinated by the technical challenges of expressing moments of heightened sensation through filmic means and habitually punctuated his movies with mind-bogglingly original and glorious set pieces that linger with the viewer as eidetic memories long after the movie has ended.
Powell's amazing visual creativity is on full display in his movies with the most unconventional subjects—movies like The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann, Peeping Tom, and this one, the first to showcase the real extent of his cinematic imagination. A Matter of Life and Death, released in late 1946, the year after the end of World War II, is saturated with a sense of the collective and personal loss caused by that war. The movie's response to that melancholy is an almost desperately mystical optimism that with the aid of the transcendent power of the cinema, Britain can somehow exorcise the grief of the war and heal its wounded national psyche.
This hope is expressed through the story of Peter Carter (David Niven, who has never been better), an airman who miraculously survives a suicidal jump into the sea without a parachute from a flaming Lancaster bomber off the coast of England on May 2, 1945, just days before the war in Europe ended. Before he bails out, Carter has a brief conversation on his radio with a stranger, a young American woman named June (Kim Hunter) working as a radio operator at an air base in England. After washing up on shore and finding he is alive, he wanders toward the base and immediately meets June riding home on her bicycle that morning after her shift has ended. The two instantly fall in love. The only problem is that his survival is the result of a heavenly error, and an emissary is sent to retrieve him. But Peter refuses to go, insisting on an appeal in a heavenly court of justice, where he will argue that because his love for June has negated the heavenly edict that he must die, he must be returned to life.
The plot is constructed in a fascinatingly ambiguous way: Are all these supernatural events really happening, or are they actually elaborate visual and auditory hallucinations caused by a head injury Peter received two years earlier? Is the climactic sequence of the movie really a trial in heaven to determine if Peter will live or die, or is this a hallucination occurring under anaesthesia while Peter is undergoing neurosurgery that will determine if he lives or dies? As in the best fantasy movies predicated on ambiguity, and specifically on the ambiguity between the subjective and the objective interpretation of events, the plot functions simultaneously on both levels without any apparent contradiction. Near the end of the movie, when the neurosurgeon removes his surgical mask and his true identity is revealed, it is a stunning revelation that underscores vividly this fundamental ambiguity between the real and the imaginary and the film's seamless blending of the two.
Is it all just a dream? The heavenly court observes the operation
The exceedingly clever plot (I have only hinted at its many twists and turns) is only part of the movie's fascination, though. What really makes the film so memorable is the inspired visual ideas Powell devises to show us these events. From the moment the film opens, with a view of the cosmos ("This is the universe," the narrator says as the film begins. "Big, isn't it?") that gradually reduces itself to Niven in the cockpit of that flaming bomber, we know we are in for a unique experience. And when Peter comes to on the beach and encounters a naked young goatherd playing a flute, we know this is a movie where something unexpectedly weird and mythic might happen at any moment. The film is crammed with similarly imaginative sequences based on the creative use of sets (that stairway to heaven is unforgettable, as indeed are all the sets for the afterlife), lighting, photography, and editing. The sequence in the camera obscura of the village doctor, played by Powell stalwart Roger Livesy (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I'm Going), is especially noteworthy. Powell and cinematographer Jack Cardiff's use of tricks like stop-motion, slow motion, double exposure, reverse motion, back projection, matted images, and alternation between black-and-white and Technicolor constitutes a virtual catalogue of pre-CGI special effects.
Peter encounters the goatherd on the beach
Powell and his collaborator Emeric Pressburger wrote the original screenplay, which seems influenced by three notable fantasy movies of the early 1940s. It resembles Here Comes Mr. Jordan in its use of a heavenly error to drive the fantasy elements of the plot. But here the situation is reversed and instead of being taken before his time like Robert Montgomery in that movie, Peter is inadvertently left behind. Powell's film is also reminiscent of both The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), which I wrote about recently, and Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1943) in its idea of the protagonist pleading his case in a supernatural hearing that will determine his fate. The details of the fantastic plot of A Matter of Life and Death and their visualization on the screen are so conceptually intertwined that to watch the movie is to journey into the mind and imagination of one of the greatest geniuses of cinema.
In the end, all I can really say about this movie is watch it and marvel at the way it suggests simultaneously the ineffable, vast, and timeless mysteries of existence and a specific story about a small group of people experiencing very human emotions in a situation clearly delimited in time and space. A Matter of Life and Death is more than merely worthwhile: It is an essential masterpiece that will kindle the ardor of anyone who loves movies.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
Salma Hayek in Pictures of Famous Actors and Actresses
Salma Hayek
Salma Hayek
Top Pictures Salma Hayek
Monday, June 1, 2009
The Shame of War
The recent Memorial Day weekend inspired a surfeit of war-themed movies on television. Turner Classic Movies, AMC, and other channels seemed to be showing one war movie after another all week long. The subject was covered as well by movie bloggers. Richard Hourula at Riku Writes, who writes frequently about war movies, posted a list of a dozen war movies as a follow-up to a previous post just a few months ago on 25 memorable war movies. He once accounted for his fascination with war movies by remarking that the pressures of wartime seem to test individuals, to place them in situations that bring out their essential human qualities. It's a perceptive observation that explains why war has inspired so many movies. Most of the great directors, both American and foreign, have made films about warfare, and often these have been among their very best works.
Movies can express radically different attitudes toward war. They can be as partisan as the hundreds of patriotic films turned out by American and British studios during World War II, as anti-war as powerful films like All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory, or in rare instances as detached as Jean Renoir's great movie La Grande Illusion. So rich is the genre that it has many identifiable sub-genres—from combat movies to prisoner-of-war movies to movies about holding down the home front to movies showing the aftermath of warfare as populations transition back to peace—a clear indication of the fertility of the genre. What nearly all war movies have in common though is that they are set within the context of a specific war. We know who the two sides are and at least roughly why they are fighting. And almost always we know on which side of the conflict the screenwriter and director stand.
This was not the approach taken by the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman when he decided to tackle the subject. Previous films by Bergman had dealt peripherally with war. In The Seventh Seal (1957), the medieval knight played by Max von Sydow is returning home from one of the crusades when he has his famous encounter with Death. In Persona (1966), the actress played by Liv Ullmann, who has had a nervous breakdown and stopped speaking, is haunted by images of Buddhist monks in Vietnam immolating themselves to protest the war then happening in their country. The movie Bergman made next, Shame (1968), was his first to deal exclusively with war.
But unlike other filmmakers, Bergman made a point of making the war depicted in Shame as non-specific as possible. About all we're really sure of is that there is a war raging in the unnamed country where the movie is set. We don't know why the war started or what the issues are. We're not even sure who the two sides are or what political philosophies they represent. One side calls the other invaders; that side calls themselves liberators. There are indications that this might actually be a civil war of some kind and that this labeling of the other side as invaders or oppressors is simply an example of wartime propaganda.
Shame opens in a darkened bedroom with two people sleeping in separate beds. An alarm clock rings, and one of the two figures stirs but does not rise. The other figure, a woman, snaps awake, sleepily gets out of bed, flings open the curtains, flooding the room with light, and walks to a jug and basin and begins washing. The first figure, a man, lingers in bed a few moments then slowly sits up, puts on his eyeglasses, takes a pill of some kind, and sits there with a stony and dispirited expression on his face. The two people are Eva Rosenberg (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Jan (Max von Sydow), former violinists in a symphony orchestra that has disbanded because of the war and who now live as refugees in a primitive farmhouse on a remote island, where they grow lingonberries. Their existence here is not so much one of bleakness as of life reduced to its essentials. Their house is lit with oil lamps but they have a battered old station wagon, and a telephone and radio that sometimes work.
Later they sit at the table eating breakfast. She is dressed and ready to begin their day, which will consist of taking the ferry to another island to deliver two boxes of lingonberries. He sits in his pajamas, unshaven, and tells her of the dream he had—that they were once again playing in the orchestra and that the life they live now was behind them, like a nightmare. "I woke up crying," he says to her. This first sequence tells us a great deal about these two people by showing us the way war has affected them and influenced the dynamics of their relationship.
Eva is resilient. Self-controlled without quite being cold, she organizes and regulates their life together. She has not lost her capacity for pleasure even in the face of the straitened conditions and political uncertainty in which they live. When they sell their berries for more than they anticipated, she suggests buying a bottle of wine to celebrate. Nor has she altogether abandoned hope for the future. As they drink the wine together outside under a tree, she talks animatedly to Jan of her love for him and her desire for children.
Jan, on the other hand, is close to being a broken man. Like most depressed people, he has turned inward, dwelling on his misery, and with the exception of Eva seems scarcely able to connect to those around him. Moody and withdrawn, he is emotionally dependent on Eva's nurturing strength and barely able to keep going from day to day. He can no longer even play his instrument. He may even be impotent. Not only do they sleep in separate beds, but Eva's talk of children, of their emotional commitment to each other, and of their future clearly makes him uncomfortable. He accuses her of being angry all the time; she accuses him of being weak. "Pull yourself together," she tells him at one point, impatient with his self-pity. "I do."
So far Jan and Eva seem to have adjusted to their life in exile, and if they must endure a certain amount of physical deprivation, at least they appear to have escaped the conflict raging on the mainland and to live in relative safety. Their comparatively peaceful life soon collapses though. As they sit under the trees sipping their wine and chatting, the rural silence is suddenly shattered by the scream of low-flying jet fighters racing across the sky. One of the planes explodes, and running toward the wreckage, Jan finds its pilot hanging from a tree. From this point on, Jan and Eva experience the full gamut of the horrors of war.
Their farm is invaded first by enemy troops, then by local troops. Arrested and accused of collaboration with the enemy, Jan is interrogated and beaten while Eva listens from the next room. They are subjected to stage-managed psychological intimidation then arbitrarily told by Mayor Jacobi (Gunnar Björnstrand), supposedly a friend of the couple, to return home. He tells Jan that the authorities knew he wasn't a traitor, "but we had to make an example of you." Making their way home, Jan and Eva wander through a stark, bombed-out, burned-out landscape of devastation.
After returning home, they are visited by the mayor, who makes an overt sexual pass at Eva while Jan looks on. Later Jan sees them together in the greenhouse, where they appear to be having sex. At this point guerrilla fighters, who have been hiding in the woods, show up looking for the mayor and in a powerfully dynamic sequence completely wreck the house, smashing everything in it, and finally blowing it up. During this long sequence the only sounds are those of the house being destroyed. Afterward, Jan finds his antique violin lying outside in the dust, smashed to pieces, and this, along with the discovery of what he believes to be Eva's betrayal, is the final blow to his humanity. The loss of the last meaningful connection to his former life and of Eva's fidelity causes him to lose his moral bearings completely: when the guerrillas put a pistol in Jan's hand and demand that he execute the mayor, at first he drops the pistol in revulsion, then hesitantly picks it up and shoots the mayor several times.
This is the first but not the last time in the movie that Jan kills. After the guerrillas leave and Jan and Eva are living in their greenhouse, an exhausted young soldier turns up, and Jan seizes his rifle and leads him down the road. Jan returns alone, carrying the young soldier's shoes, and tells Eva that a boat will be leaving for the mainland soon. Shocked at what Jan has apparently done—"You killed him for his shoes?" she asks, incredulous—and at what he has become, she at first refuses then agrees to go with him. The last scenes in the movie show the couple clinging to each other as they drift, along with a handful of other refugees, in a small open boat on a vast sea that fills the frame.
By stripping all specific context from the war happening around Eva and Jan, Bergman focuses on the human effects of war on those unwillingly caught up in it, making Shame one of the most moving of all anti-war films. Jan and Eva are completely apolitical. They don't understand what this war is about, and they support neither side. The thrust of the film is entirely on the effects war has on these two people, who are trapped in an unreal situation and want only to avoid its harsh consequences.
Yet the war's toll on them is great. It destroys Jan, causing him to lose not only his dignity, but also his humanity. Bergman may allow the camera to linger almost obsessively on Liv Ullmann's expressive face, radiant in its unadorned, earthy beauty. But it is really von Sydow, his face growing progressively more haggard and his expression more tormented as he slowly unravels under the soul-destroying experience of life during wartime, who is the center of the movie. The war also destroys Jan and Eva's marriage by turning their relationship from one based on love and shared values to one based on necessity and desperation. A relationship based on the desire to share a common future devolves into one based on dependence on each other for physical and psychological survival, and characterized not by mutual respect but by mistrust and suspicion.
Shame, like Bergman's best films, strikes a precisely calibrated balance between the thematic and the narrative. I have always thought of Bergman as the most literary of the great film directors. By this I mean that his movies function simultaneously on both the intellectual and the human levels. His movies deal with ideas, but they also deal with complex and clearly defined individuals interacting in compelling situations. Perhaps it is Bergman's background in theater that accounts for this ability to explore weighty, abstract subjects through emotionally engaging stories that are both personal and specific.
Shame is an incredibly dense movie. At just 103 minutes, fairly short by current standards, it is far richer in narrative incident than my cursory description of the plot indicates. Bergman weaves into the film's plot incidents that touch on a remarkable number of the ramifications of war—among them the control of entire populations through mass psychological manipulation, the use of film as a propaganda tool, the devaluing of beauty and art, and the sanctioning of inhumane impulses that would never be tolerated in peacetime. Its quiet early section—with its depiction of a static, almost ascetic life—draws the viewer in before suddenly giving way to a vision of constantly accelerating instability and the inexorable disintegration of the tentative security that Jan and Eva have found in their island refuge. Its visualizations of the violence and destruction that occur as a result are memorably vivid and truly harrowing.
Bergman's perennial subject is personal suffering. In Shame the source of this suffering is not internal and spiritual as in so many of his films, but external and specific. Shame deals not with existential pain, but with man-made pain. In this sense, it is a movie for those wary of Bergman. There are no dreams or hallucinations, no religious allegory, no obscure symbolism, no abstruse reality-and-illusion puzzles. Its plot is calculated to drive home in a realistic way the simple message that war is humankind's most cruel and dehumanizing creation. By limiting the scale of the military conflict in the movie and concentrating on its toll on ordinary non-participants, Bergman created a timeless anti-war film that still has great relevance more than forty years later. If you have any doubt about that statement, just watch a news program or read a newspaper with good international coverage, and note how many stories deal with small-scale regional conflicts like the one depicted in Shame and their effects—the fear, pain, confusion, and humiliation—on local populations and on individuals like Jan and Eva Rosenberg.
Movies can express radically different attitudes toward war. They can be as partisan as the hundreds of patriotic films turned out by American and British studios during World War II, as anti-war as powerful films like All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory, or in rare instances as detached as Jean Renoir's great movie La Grande Illusion. So rich is the genre that it has many identifiable sub-genres—from combat movies to prisoner-of-war movies to movies about holding down the home front to movies showing the aftermath of warfare as populations transition back to peace—a clear indication of the fertility of the genre. What nearly all war movies have in common though is that they are set within the context of a specific war. We know who the two sides are and at least roughly why they are fighting. And almost always we know on which side of the conflict the screenwriter and director stand.
This was not the approach taken by the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman when he decided to tackle the subject. Previous films by Bergman had dealt peripherally with war. In The Seventh Seal (1957), the medieval knight played by Max von Sydow is returning home from one of the crusades when he has his famous encounter with Death. In Persona (1966), the actress played by Liv Ullmann, who has had a nervous breakdown and stopped speaking, is haunted by images of Buddhist monks in Vietnam immolating themselves to protest the war then happening in their country. The movie Bergman made next, Shame (1968), was his first to deal exclusively with war.
But unlike other filmmakers, Bergman made a point of making the war depicted in Shame as non-specific as possible. About all we're really sure of is that there is a war raging in the unnamed country where the movie is set. We don't know why the war started or what the issues are. We're not even sure who the two sides are or what political philosophies they represent. One side calls the other invaders; that side calls themselves liberators. There are indications that this might actually be a civil war of some kind and that this labeling of the other side as invaders or oppressors is simply an example of wartime propaganda.
Shame opens in a darkened bedroom with two people sleeping in separate beds. An alarm clock rings, and one of the two figures stirs but does not rise. The other figure, a woman, snaps awake, sleepily gets out of bed, flings open the curtains, flooding the room with light, and walks to a jug and basin and begins washing. The first figure, a man, lingers in bed a few moments then slowly sits up, puts on his eyeglasses, takes a pill of some kind, and sits there with a stony and dispirited expression on his face. The two people are Eva Rosenberg (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Jan (Max von Sydow), former violinists in a symphony orchestra that has disbanded because of the war and who now live as refugees in a primitive farmhouse on a remote island, where they grow lingonberries. Their existence here is not so much one of bleakness as of life reduced to its essentials. Their house is lit with oil lamps but they have a battered old station wagon, and a telephone and radio that sometimes work.Later they sit at the table eating breakfast. She is dressed and ready to begin their day, which will consist of taking the ferry to another island to deliver two boxes of lingonberries. He sits in his pajamas, unshaven, and tells her of the dream he had—that they were once again playing in the orchestra and that the life they live now was behind them, like a nightmare. "I woke up crying," he says to her. This first sequence tells us a great deal about these two people by showing us the way war has affected them and influenced the dynamics of their relationship.
Eva is resilient. Self-controlled without quite being cold, she organizes and regulates their life together. She has not lost her capacity for pleasure even in the face of the straitened conditions and political uncertainty in which they live. When they sell their berries for more than they anticipated, she suggests buying a bottle of wine to celebrate. Nor has she altogether abandoned hope for the future. As they drink the wine together outside under a tree, she talks animatedly to Jan of her love for him and her desire for children.
Jan, on the other hand, is close to being a broken man. Like most depressed people, he has turned inward, dwelling on his misery, and with the exception of Eva seems scarcely able to connect to those around him. Moody and withdrawn, he is emotionally dependent on Eva's nurturing strength and barely able to keep going from day to day. He can no longer even play his instrument. He may even be impotent. Not only do they sleep in separate beds, but Eva's talk of children, of their emotional commitment to each other, and of their future clearly makes him uncomfortable. He accuses her of being angry all the time; she accuses him of being weak. "Pull yourself together," she tells him at one point, impatient with his self-pity. "I do."
So far Jan and Eva seem to have adjusted to their life in exile, and if they must endure a certain amount of physical deprivation, at least they appear to have escaped the conflict raging on the mainland and to live in relative safety. Their comparatively peaceful life soon collapses though. As they sit under the trees sipping their wine and chatting, the rural silence is suddenly shattered by the scream of low-flying jet fighters racing across the sky. One of the planes explodes, and running toward the wreckage, Jan finds its pilot hanging from a tree. From this point on, Jan and Eva experience the full gamut of the horrors of war.
Their farm is invaded first by enemy troops, then by local troops. Arrested and accused of collaboration with the enemy, Jan is interrogated and beaten while Eva listens from the next room. They are subjected to stage-managed psychological intimidation then arbitrarily told by Mayor Jacobi (Gunnar Björnstrand), supposedly a friend of the couple, to return home. He tells Jan that the authorities knew he wasn't a traitor, "but we had to make an example of you." Making their way home, Jan and Eva wander through a stark, bombed-out, burned-out landscape of devastation.
After returning home, they are visited by the mayor, who makes an overt sexual pass at Eva while Jan looks on. Later Jan sees them together in the greenhouse, where they appear to be having sex. At this point guerrilla fighters, who have been hiding in the woods, show up looking for the mayor and in a powerfully dynamic sequence completely wreck the house, smashing everything in it, and finally blowing it up. During this long sequence the only sounds are those of the house being destroyed. Afterward, Jan finds his antique violin lying outside in the dust, smashed to pieces, and this, along with the discovery of what he believes to be Eva's betrayal, is the final blow to his humanity. The loss of the last meaningful connection to his former life and of Eva's fidelity causes him to lose his moral bearings completely: when the guerrillas put a pistol in Jan's hand and demand that he execute the mayor, at first he drops the pistol in revulsion, then hesitantly picks it up and shoots the mayor several times.
This is the first but not the last time in the movie that Jan kills. After the guerrillas leave and Jan and Eva are living in their greenhouse, an exhausted young soldier turns up, and Jan seizes his rifle and leads him down the road. Jan returns alone, carrying the young soldier's shoes, and tells Eva that a boat will be leaving for the mainland soon. Shocked at what Jan has apparently done—"You killed him for his shoes?" she asks, incredulous—and at what he has become, she at first refuses then agrees to go with him. The last scenes in the movie show the couple clinging to each other as they drift, along with a handful of other refugees, in a small open boat on a vast sea that fills the frame.
By stripping all specific context from the war happening around Eva and Jan, Bergman focuses on the human effects of war on those unwillingly caught up in it, making Shame one of the most moving of all anti-war films. Jan and Eva are completely apolitical. They don't understand what this war is about, and they support neither side. The thrust of the film is entirely on the effects war has on these two people, who are trapped in an unreal situation and want only to avoid its harsh consequences.Yet the war's toll on them is great. It destroys Jan, causing him to lose not only his dignity, but also his humanity. Bergman may allow the camera to linger almost obsessively on Liv Ullmann's expressive face, radiant in its unadorned, earthy beauty. But it is really von Sydow, his face growing progressively more haggard and his expression more tormented as he slowly unravels under the soul-destroying experience of life during wartime, who is the center of the movie. The war also destroys Jan and Eva's marriage by turning their relationship from one based on love and shared values to one based on necessity and desperation. A relationship based on the desire to share a common future devolves into one based on dependence on each other for physical and psychological survival, and characterized not by mutual respect but by mistrust and suspicion.
Shame, like Bergman's best films, strikes a precisely calibrated balance between the thematic and the narrative. I have always thought of Bergman as the most literary of the great film directors. By this I mean that his movies function simultaneously on both the intellectual and the human levels. His movies deal with ideas, but they also deal with complex and clearly defined individuals interacting in compelling situations. Perhaps it is Bergman's background in theater that accounts for this ability to explore weighty, abstract subjects through emotionally engaging stories that are both personal and specific.
Shame is an incredibly dense movie. At just 103 minutes, fairly short by current standards, it is far richer in narrative incident than my cursory description of the plot indicates. Bergman weaves into the film's plot incidents that touch on a remarkable number of the ramifications of war—among them the control of entire populations through mass psychological manipulation, the use of film as a propaganda tool, the devaluing of beauty and art, and the sanctioning of inhumane impulses that would never be tolerated in peacetime. Its quiet early section—with its depiction of a static, almost ascetic life—draws the viewer in before suddenly giving way to a vision of constantly accelerating instability and the inexorable disintegration of the tentative security that Jan and Eva have found in their island refuge. Its visualizations of the violence and destruction that occur as a result are memorably vivid and truly harrowing.
Bergman's perennial subject is personal suffering. In Shame the source of this suffering is not internal and spiritual as in so many of his films, but external and specific. Shame deals not with existential pain, but with man-made pain. In this sense, it is a movie for those wary of Bergman. There are no dreams or hallucinations, no religious allegory, no obscure symbolism, no abstruse reality-and-illusion puzzles. Its plot is calculated to drive home in a realistic way the simple message that war is humankind's most cruel and dehumanizing creation. By limiting the scale of the military conflict in the movie and concentrating on its toll on ordinary non-participants, Bergman created a timeless anti-war film that still has great relevance more than forty years later. If you have any doubt about that statement, just watch a news program or read a newspaper with good international coverage, and note how many stories deal with small-scale regional conflicts like the one depicted in Shame and their effects—the fear, pain, confusion, and humiliation—on local populations and on individuals like Jan and Eva Rosenberg.
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