Jacques Rivette's "La Bande des quatre" (1988)

Not only a "double inconstance" ("double inconsistency") but infinite of them. "Il y a des choses derrière les choses" ("There are things behind things") in Jacques Rivette's La Bande des Quatre (English title: Gang of Four).

Consciously and wisely artificial, the line between acting and reality is never even drawn. There are no clear meanings, not a theme you can put your finger on, but a simple question such as "Coffee?" has such infinite weight that it can easily bring tears, tears coming from somewhere I didn't even know existed.

There is a sense of magic, of something supernatural, even though what we see is very realistic and rational... Is art, or existence itself, a sorcery?

Just as in theatre, in cinema, or in life, it's impossible to know where the truth, or the beauty, lies. But in La Bande des quatre the answer is given by Constance (first in original French, then my English translation):

"La démolition. C'est avec ça que vous avez à faire. Tout le temps. La démolition et le doute... C'est avec ça que vous devez construire, créer, inventer..."

"Demolition. That's what you have to do with. All the time. Demolition and doubt... It's with these that you have to build, create, invent..."

In Rivette's case, what results is a free cinema, liberating the mind, and the eyes, forcing the viewer (the participant) to understand a new way of composing the world, a whole new restructuring...

La Bande des quatre might easily be the most wonderfully acted film I've ever seen, each actress (or actor) constantly creating wonders, certainly helped by Rivette's free mind.

Sidney Peterson's "The Potted Psalm" (1947)

To interpret The Potted Psalm is beyond my capacity. I'll just try to react to it.

In Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney uses the title of this specific film as the title of a whole chapter. And there is a quote by Sidney Peterson over there:

"The connections may or may not be rational. In an intentionally realistic work the question of rationality is not a consideration. What is being stated has its roots in myth and strives through the chaos of the commonplace data toward the kind of inconstant allegory which is the only substitute for myth in a world too lacking in such symbolic formulations. And the statement itself is at least as important as what is being stated."

Vertical pans, rhythmic movements, fetishes, but more importantly, freedom, the liberty to see what happens... A film that grows organically, without any rational connections, always human... Using a phrase from Peterson's Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur: "Something that is perfectly natural, but beyond anatomy".

I don't have the book at hand but in Film at wit's end: eight avant-garde filmmakers, Stan Brakhage has detailed comments about the film, and Peterson's art in general.

As Fred Camper writes: "The truly silent cinema of avant-gardists requires no accompaniment—silence deepens the viewer's imaginative involvement."

And one of my favorite quotes on art, by Sidney Peterson:

"These images are meant to play not on our rational senses, but on the infinite universe of ambiguity within us."

In my opinion, the title itself describes Peterson's definition of film as art: Great films are sacred songs that have, unlike ancient songs, a definite form, but they are also like plants, capable of growing in time. According to Merriam-Webster: "Potted" also means "drunk" in slang. I don't if the word was used in this sense at the time, but if it was, then "Potted Psalm" might also mean a sacred but possibly irrational, debauched song. I think all of these interpretations, and others I can't think of, can be true at the same time.

Johnnie To's "Vengeance" (2009)

Vengeance was my first Johnnie To in 35mm.

If you take things for granted, it is a mechanical film that drives its plot to more and more action scenes. But if you look carefully, there's something about the obsessive way everybody in the film is obsessed. "What do your primary instincts mean when you've lost all your memory?" is a question To asks, but doesn't delve on much. Vengeance doesn't delve on anything much except the consistently imaginative frames, compositions and the puzzling lighting.

There are many hints of a great vision, but I have to say the film isn't consistent in this. Which is why it's not ranked so highly in my best of 2009 list.

Philippe Grandrieux's "Sombre" (1998)

Philippe Grandrieux is one of my favorite filmmakers alive. His films are a new voice, almost a shriek, that could have only been expressed through a rediscovery of the medium it's using. Every new vision, like Sombre, requires its own form of expression, and therefore redefines, and expands the cinematic language. It frees thinking, embellishes our experience of the world.

Here's what Adrian Martin says in his article about La Vie Nouvelle:

"The films of Philippe Grandrieux pulsate. They pulsate microcosmically: in the images, the camera trembles and flickers so violently that, even within a single, continuous shot, no photogram resembles another. And they pulsate macrocosmically: the soundtrack is constructed globally upon unidentifiable, layered, synthesised, ambient noises of breath or wind, sucked in and expelled, which underlie the entire film and constitute its disturbed heartbeat, returning to our ear when all other sounds have disappeared."

Sombre, as Grandrieux's first feature film, establishes some of the important characteristics of his art: An insistence on vision, with characters beyond psychologies, driven by biology or metaphysical forces.

Love (a mix of brotherly and sexual Love, a true awareness of the other, a communion) mostly overrules all, and its discovery by Jean creates waves that emanate in every shot, every cut and every sound in the rest of Sombre.




While the movement in Un Lac is from perfect love (a paradise communion) to the loss of innocence, here the movement is reversed, not in the sense that the film has a happy ending, there are no clear conclusions (nor clear beginnings) in Grandrieux... The discovery of the other (an other?) disturbs the existing rules of behaviour.

This is also true for Claire, who have a face to face conversation with a stranger, something completely unexpected in a film of such few words. A scene that would have been ordinary in another film (except the abusively frontal camera) acquires a huge force by its contrast to the rest of the work.




What is truly impossible to describe in words is the sense of rhythm, and Grandrieux's Brakhage-like belief in the transformative powers of vision and perception. It's a sombre film alright, content-wise, but Grandrieux also shoots in extremely low-light situations, abstracting bodies, faces, expressions. He teaches us to care less about what's happening, and this increases in every new film of his. Instead, we learn to care about the how, and the way, the feeling, the sense of the presence, not of the actual happenings, because the films are not realistic, but the presence of the director, filtering, flirting and dancing with the events that are taking place.

Important to note that he is the cameraman in all his films, he says there wouldn't be a point making films otherwise. Here's something from an interview with him in Balthazar (first in original French, then my English translation):

"Je ne pourrais pas imaginer, même avec le plus grand cadreur du monde avec qui je m’entendrais parfaitement bien… C’est le regard, c’est la vision… C’est le regard : comment moi je vous regarde là maintenant, je ne peux le dire à personne. C’est vraiment une question sur l’altérité, c’est la limite."

"I could not imagine, even with the greatest cameraman in the world with whom I get on very well... It's the look, it's the vision... It's the look: how I look at you here and now, I cannot describe anyone. It's really a question of otherness, it's the limit."

The art of cinema only speaks strongly when every cut matters. In Sombre, every cut is an event, a comment about the rest of the film. Every formal choice, or everything that happens storywise have meanings that constantly expand. Grandrieux never chews on the same idea, the same feeling, he constantly looks for new ways to perceive the rest. And he doesn't stop doing it even after everything is over.

It's unfortunate that I had to see it in a terrible .avi version, but I would call Sombre sublime simply because I felt missing so much by not experiencing it in its true medium. It's a film that asks us to be aware of the film grain. There lies the true expression in Un Lac. And seemingly in Sombre.

Roberto Rossellini's "Blaise Pascal" (1971)

"The vacuum, the void, is the face of the infinite. If I seek the void in nature, it's to discover its mirror in the heart of man" declares Rossellini's Blaise Pascal... He also talks about "la mesure infinie du vide", "the infinite measure of the void"...

This is possibly Rossellini's darkest film. Let's hear what Tag Gallagher says:

"Thus Blaise Pascal is a horror movie, like Dreyer's Dies irae (Day of Wrath) (1943). Everything is drenched in suffering, torture, fear, superstition, blood and penance, masses of black, white and scarlet; everyone is writhing in desperate faith, self-mortification and pain. "

The void Pascal Blaise is looking for in nature, is consistently with him, and with others. Everybody seems to have their souls vacuumed out. People talk about joy, but we never see any of it. I think this sense of the void is the key to the film. But there are also many other levels at work...

It's a film where everything is a ritual (even waking up, even death). The trial scenes summarizes all the injustices in the world (and how there are always people who rationalize other people's sufferings). The cause-consequence in the universe is one of the main subjects.

Using Tag Gallagher's words, Blaise Pascal is "a direct experience."


In his wonderful blog post, Dennis Grunes writes that Blaise Pascal "begins matter-of-factly, in the middle of a conversation in the street, and ends on the threshold of eternity." And he describes Pascal’s death scene as "a sober, stunning, luminous passage."


Tag on Rossellini's late period (which is, for me, the greatest period of the greatest filmmaker):

"To say, as many have, that these movies lack acting, psychoanalysis, Murnau-like expressionism, overwhelming emotions and the richest possible cinematic art is like closing one's eyes at high noon and claiming the sun no longer exists."

Howard Hawks' "I Was a Male War Bride" (1951)

Describing a Howard Hawks movie with stills is truly impossible. Every one of his films are odes to movement, whether it is the movements of humans, animals, or vehicles. And there is the always-attentive camera, slightly following each movement, emphasizing every happening within (and without) the frame.

All the great writers-on-film (I hate the word "critic"!) underline Hawks' dance with biology. Perhaps the main key to appreciating Hawks is watching, carefully, the very tiny, and partly improvised, camera moves... Almost invisible, sometimes to a little left, and a little to the right, etc. reacting to the movements of the characters. Some movements can't be noticed without paying attention to the borders of the frame. And great stuff always happen at the very corners...

It is true that all these moves always refer back to things that happen in the frame, so re-direct our attention to the movements of the main characters. But this does not mean that someone who wants to get the highest pleasures should stay unaware of what is happening. What Tag Gallagher wrote about the so-called "invisible cuts" is also true about "invisible movements":

"One is certainly not less involved with music by being conscious of the rhythm, the meter, the phrase structures, the harmonic motion, the contrapuntal lines, which instrument is playing, how the instrumentalist chooses to phrase and articulate. Quite the contrary, the more we are consciously aware of these elements, the more we shall become engulfed in the emotions, in the world, of the music.

So too with movies. Not being aware of cuts is just being oblivious, cutting oneself off from actual sensual contact with cinema. It's a denial of pleasure, of experience. It's stupid.

I don't think it's true that things affect us without our being aware of it. Experiencing art is not like being etherized for an operation. It's above all a physical and emotional awareness. If you're not intelligent, you're not aware."

If you really want to see Hawks, pay attention to the tiniest camera moves. I would say his camera moves are not so far below Stan Brakhage's methods in training our eyes to see more, and more.

Here is one great example, which, by definition, might look inconsequential until one knows everything that happens before (or after, for that matter) in the sublime film called I Was a Male War Bride.

Roberto Rossellini's "Viva L'Italia" (1961)

In 1964, Rossellini exclaimed: "Of all my films, I'm proudest of Viva L'Italia."

About one and a half hours into the film, a singer meets Garibaldi and expresses his joy as follows, describing perfectly Rossellini's own cinema (French translation of the Italian original):

"Devant toutes ces beautés rares, je suis venu ici, et ce soir je veux chanter quantité des chansons. Des chants sans apprêts, écrits comme ils venaient, sans style, ni prétention, qui font parler le coeur."

My English translation:

"Before all these rare beauties, I came here, and tonight I want to sing many songs. Songs without preparations, written as they came, without style, or pretension... Songs which make the heart speak."

In his book, Tag Gallagher writes the following about the war scenes in Viva L'Italia, where the camera constantly zooms in and out, pans around, telling the story of the battle with extraordinary precision, and beauty: "... a new era in cinema: never before has a camera done anything like this, never before have we seen anything so vast." And later in the book: "... Viva L'Italia erupts into a crescendo of liberation across an ever-expending space."

Zach Campbell also wrote beautifully about the war scenes in his own blog.



Talking about Viva L'Italia, Andrew Sarris mentions Rossellini's camera that "keeps its cosmic distance." And later in the same paragraph, he states: "Where Buñuel's ideas sometimes transcend his images, and where Chaplin's images sometimes transcend his ideas, there is in Rossellini little or no separation between style and substance. If there be such a thing as a cinematographic language, and I firmly believe there is, Rossellini requires the least translation..."



One of the things I like the most about the film is its courage to emphatize with history, and its characters (notwithstanding the "cosmic distance" that Sarris talks about). The chants and hymns on the soundtrack or the ideological exclamations might feel naive to many but Rossellini only makes movies about the things he feels, and by feeling Garibaldi's followers, he makes us understand a very important point in recent history: the formation of nation-states. As Tag Gallagher says, what interests Rossellini "is always the moment when one cycle of history is dying, another is born." At the very beginning of Viva L'Italia there's an important emphasis on telegrams, and later, on mass printing of newspapers. Without the changes in mass communication, history would have happened very differently. Rossellini allows determinism, understands the forces that drive history, but also embraces the human beings who drove it, Rosa being a great and heroic example.

Michael Mann's "Public Enemies" (2009)

"There must be mutation, swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without denouement or close. There must be the rapid momentaneous association of things which meet and pass on the forever incalculable journey of creation: everything left in its own rapid, fluid relationship with the rest of things.

This is the unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present, poetry whose very permanency lies in its wind-like transit."
- D.H. Lawrence talking about Walt Whitman in his intro to the New Poems, 1918

Michael Mann's Public Enemies is liquid, ephemeral and present. Every moment happens "all of a sudden". It's not the past or the future but the perpetual now we care about, ever-changing, dynamic, and through the eyes of Michael Mann, the greatest living Hollywood filmmaker, gorgeous, intricate, LOVEly. You care, honestly care, about his images, it's a love-affair in a way, physical and tactile. Nevertheless, the images, and the vision behind each image, changes so quickly, you can't hold on to it. The unstoppable forward motion, like in life, leaves you unaware of the moment, because it's replaced by something else as soon as possible.



The movie ends with a shot of a door closing, inconclusive. None of the bank robberies or the prison escapes are as operatic as in some other works by Michael Mann. The finale leaves us with no meanings, nothing to hold on to, no grand narratives to explain it all. Compared to Miami Vice, Public Enemies feels unworked, incomplete. This, I think, is a great direction for Michael Mann, fitting perfectly with his style. Life offers, or promises, no human conclusions, but only a perpetual moment. It's a "curve, which flows on, pointless" as D. H. Lawrence once wrote.



Have I been describing the life of John Dillinger, or the movie called Public Enemies, I do not know... There are all these concepts floating around in my mind, all these things I'd like to write about, but after seeing the movie twice, it's hard for me to try to make any "unifying" comments. The movie is too vast, and too alive for me. So I'd like to share some things other people wrote:


"It's the way these events occurred in this unique life that was so short but so dynamic, and so intense, dedicated just to living right now for the moment is really what kind of fascinated me in doing it." says Michael Mann in a video interview on Screen Rush. There's another interview with him you can see at ITN and one at the Guardian site (where he says he doesn't "look backwards very much").



Talking about the shooting of Public Enemies, at The Auteurs, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky quotes D.W. Griffith: "What's missing from movies nowadays is the beauty of the moving wind in the trees." And he argues that Mann recently "left behind grammar for expression." I agree, and this is why I think the last three films, Collateral, Miami Vice, and Public Enemies are his greatest, a whole new direction...


Here is how Manohla Dargis begins her review in New York Times:

"Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp."

And Keith Uclich of Time Out New York commits the perfect commentary:

"It might sound damning to say that the film resembles a bullet-riddled carcass just barely clinging to life, but it’s exactly this ephemeral sensation, which Mann sustains for the entire two hours plus, that distinguishes Public Enemies."

Roger Ebert talks about "compulsions" (a beautiful word to pick, to talk about a Michael Mann movie) but then explains "why it is not quite a great film" by adding: "I think it may be because it deprives me of some stubborn need for closure." At least he's honest! Art has moved away from that need for closure years or centuries ago...



Scott Foundas, in the best review I read about Public Enemies, writes:

"Visually, Public Enemies seems like the summation of something Mann has been steadily building toward ever since he first incorporated video-shot footage into the dynamic opening training montage of Ali in 2001. Where digital methods have gradually become the industry standard by simulating the dense, luxuriant textures of film, Mann embraces video precisely for the ways in which it is unlike film: for the hyper-real clarity of its images, for the way the lightweight cameras move through space, and for its ability to see sharper and more deeply into his beloved night. At every turn, Mann rejects classical notions of cinematic "beauty" and formulates new ones. The sounds and images rush at you, headlong, and before you can fully get a handle on them, something else takes their place. (...) those robberies are brisk, expedient affairs rarely lasting more than two minutes each. Where Mann staged the heist sequences at the center of Thief and Heat as a kind of grand opera, Dillinger's are closer to proletariat street theater."

Zach Campbell also sees what is happening, and desribes it with extraordinary ability:

'...people as apparitions moving around, or as nodes in, a network "in the air." The figural dimensions of human beings in Mann are phantasmatic, mysterious, he doesn't much strike me as a corporeal (or perhaps more precisely: a kinesthetic) filmmaker. These are not characters who have psychologies, they are psychologies. They are not bodies, they have bodies. Maybe.'

And again D.H. Lawrence: "The quick of the universe is the pulsating, carnal self, mysterious and palpable. So it is always."

Roberto Rossellini's "India: Matri Bhumi" (1959)

A rhythmic voyage of our psyche like no other...

A film about the individual, the civilisation, and the "communal multitude" with the animals, the plants, and cosmos, "the big mother".



It's a mirror of our primitive nature, our internal, biologic fears, and the rituals imposed on us by the society.



An ode to work, to symbiosis... The film viewer has never been so close to death, to the horrors of life...



India: Matri Bhumi is a celebration of human consciousness, of nature, the unpredictable, the unwritten future, the perpetual now, the moment...



We need artists such as Rossellini to remind us that creation is still in process...





Fred Camper cites India: Matri Bhumi among his three favorite films of all time, calling it "mystical" and "expansive".

I find his description of the earlier prints of the film very valuable since, unfortunately, all the existing prints have deteriorated (slightly or immensely, depending on where you draw your lines):

'About "India" prints: was the one that those who saw it found "serviceable" harsh and high contrast, sort of like Kodachrome printed onto Kodachrome? Because the film in 1970 had very gentle, very sensuous, very supple colors, which seemed crucial to its nature as a kind of inventory of the sensual pleasures of what virtual all tourists call an extremely colorful country. The prints I saw might seem OK to someone who hadn't seen the earlier print, in that the color at least wasn't tinted one way or the other. But the colors and surfaces lacked detail and texture.'

Howard Hawks' "Monkey Business" (1952)

In a post to a_film_by on August 2003, Tag Gallagher, talking about Howard Hawks, asked: "Is sanity truly a goal or even a desideratum in Bringing Up Baby, The Big Sky, Red River... ?"



And in another post, the same day:

"I'm not sure that people are trying to cling to sanity, but I suspect that sanity is an illusion in Hawks, and that biology rules all, and from a male point of view (Hawks's) that's the power of women. Sanity may be a possibility, but it's irrelevant ultimately."

I think these statements go to the very heart of Monkey Business, which I saw countless times by now.

Here is a dialogue from the film:

Barnaby: Hello, Griffith Park Zoo, Snake Department. Sssshhh!
Oliver Oxley: Hello? Hello? What is this?
Barnaby: What do you want?
Oliver Oxley: This is Mr Oxley.
Barnaby: I'll see if he's here.
Oliver Oxley: No, I said *this* is Oxley!
Barnaby: Who is?
Oliver Oxley: I am, speaking!
Barnaby: Oh, you're Mr. Speaking...
Oliver Oxley: This is Mr. Oxley speaking!
Barnaby: Oxley Speaking? Any relation to Oxley?
Oliver Oxley: Barnaby Fulton is that you?
Barnaby: Who's calling?
Oliver Oxley: I am, Barnaby!
Barnaby: Oh, no, you're not Barnaby. I am Barnaby! I ought to know who I am.
Oliver Oxley: This is Oxley speaking, Barnaby!
Barnaby: No, that's ridiculous! You can't be all three. Figure out which one you are and call me back!

Not only it is one of the funniest films ever made, it also has THE most romantic kiss scene ever (the first one, when they're staying home from the Everett Winston party).

Vincente Minnelli's "Lust for Life" (1956)

What drives things? An inner truth finds some reflection in Minnelli's harmonious compositions, and his rhythms.



In September 18, 1956, after the premiere of Lust for Life, Bosley Crowther wrote beautifully in New York Times, despite greatly sinning by not crediting Vincente Minnelli, THE ARTIST himself:

"... it is gratifying to see that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in the persons of producer John Houseman and a crew of superb technicians, has consciously made the flow of color and the interplay of compositions and hues the most forceful devices for conveying a motion picture comprehension of van Gogh.

In "Lust for Life," (...) color dominates the dramatization—the color of indoor sets and outdoor scenes, the color of beautifully reproduced van Gogh paintings, even the colors of a man's tempestuous moods. These pictorial color continuities, planned like a musical score, have more effect upon the senses than the playing of Kirk Douglas in the leading role."

First time I saw Lust for Life, I said to a friend of mine: "It's the portrait of an artist, by an even better one." I still don't disagree with this.



Just like Van Gogh, Minnelli is an expressionist... All artists are.



There is such grace, and powerful drama. It's the story of a man who can't be happy (or sane) because of some inner conflict he (or we) can't put into words. He can only put them in paintings, and I'm pretty sure Minnelli, in his own way, feels the same. Notice how dark Lust for Life is, especially at points there is no good reason in the plot to be dramatic, but the inner workings of the human psyche work beyond psychology, and beyond explanation.



Vincent says: "Sometimes I work on into the night, hardly conscious of myself anymore, and the pictures come to me as in a dream with a terrible lucidity." and somewhere else: "I work as a miner who knows he's facing disaster."

Is this Minnelli talking to us somehow?



The story of someone who committed suicide, who suffered all his life, and the title is: Lust for Life. I find this a simple proof of how Minnelli's vision goes beyond the common ways of seeing things. As stated twice in the film, death "happens in a bright daylight, the sun flooding everything and in a light of pure gold."



The best moment of Lust for Life, and perhaps one of the highest points in all Hollywood, comes at a very unexpected, seemingly unimportant moment. It's just a pan following Theo's wife, from the window to the door where she'll be greeting Vincent. The decor, the costumes, everything is the exact opposite of what's going on in Vincent's life. It's the antithesis of the whole movie, in some way, included in the movie. She looks at herself in the mirror for a second, to make sure she's perfectly beautiful. Yes she has happiness, but is it real?

Then the camera pans back, the characters move around, etc. It's a choreography of bodies and camera moves impossible to explain in words... The whole shot lasts 2 minutes 56 seconds.



Just like Tag Gallagher says, Lust of Life is a "super masterpiece".


You can read ALL OF Vincent Van Gogh's letters here.

John Maybury's "The Edge of Love" (2008)

The Edge of Love, what a beautiful title! It's not only love as a concept that binds couples, but all kinds of Love and Bonds that are formed between people. Every relationship is intense, and many admit to an unstoppable force, not necessarily sexual, connecting people...

Characters in this movie are driven by some superhuman force, their actions never explained by psychology, which makes the drama even more universal, more life-full, and more tragic. One can also claim that the movie always has a mind that evades drama.

The dialogues are some of most clever I heard in years, somehow resembling those of Howard Hawks, Joseph Mankiewicz, and their likes. What is clearly different is Maybury's own, personal sense of composition, aware camera movements, and his intense editing, leading to an emotion of tragedy as the rhythm progresses.

I remember really liking Love Is the Devil (another film about a "possessed" artist) when I saw it years ago, and parts of The Jacket I saw on television a few years back. Maybury needs to be taken very seriously.

Kenji Mizoguchi's "Gion bayashi" (1953)

English titles: A Geisha, Gion Festival Music


Tag Gallagher on Kenji Mizoguchi's use of space:

"Virtually every relationship in Mizoguchi is humiliating, hierarchal, enslaving, with space expressing the power of one person, the nullity of another: endless bowing and kowtowing and scraping across floors in self-abasement. And despite all these shots of people walking in rooms and passageways, we get no sense from Mizoguchi of what it is like to be in these houses, because these are sets, designs, formed of rectangles, cubes, lines and blocks, and their space is fictive, part of the nightmare of power. The grace of the architecture, the clear lines of buildings, the comforting sensation of a storybook Zen order radiated by structures, all are geometric forces of imprisonment and oppression, (...)"

You can read the full article, called Mizoguchi and freedom, here.

Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu Monogatari" (1953)

English titles: Tales of Ugetsu, Tales of a Pale and Mysterious Moon After the Rain, Tales of Moonlight and Rain




An ode to everything about Nature and Light. Here's a song from Ugetsu:

This world is a temporary abode,
Where we weep until the dawn comes,
Pitched by the waves...

Incredible pain described, shown. At the very limits. But also incredibly dark humour: A husband, trying to be a samurai, forgets to protect his wife who gets raped.

Ugetsu is romantic to the core and attached to the emotions felt, but also distant and wise.




Another song from Ugetsu:

The finest silk,
Of choicest hue,
May change and fade away,
As would my life,
Beloved one...

"Such is the way of the world", someone says. How is it exactly? is the question Mizoguchi's films are asking. But "the fog is thick", you have to "be careful", because the unknown surrounds you.




Near the very end: "Fruit of experience is beauty, but only a master craftsman can create such beauty." Art is a dance to call the immaterial spirits...

Kenji Mizoguchi's "Oyu-sama" (1951)

English titles: Lady Oyu, Miss Oyu




Three-dimensional spaces confine people, define people. Architectures we live in change the way we see things, concepts, relationships. The perception of space is one with the perception of the world. Abstract form can touch all human emotions, thoughts...

Mizoguchi is a master of form and light. As in the case of Miss Oyu, his lighting can be very precise, with high contrast. This is one of my very favorite Mizoguchi films.

Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sansho dayu" (1954)

English titles: Legend of Bailiff Sansho, Sansho the Bailiff, The Bailiff





Nature, diagonals, water... Everything is expressive. One of the most beautiful dialogues in all cinema:

– It's my mother's voice.
– No, it's the sound of the waves.

Symmetries constantly broken, there is almost always an angle to the shots, it's very rarely head-on. There's perspective. There's distance. "It's a cold world indeed" says someone in Sancho Dayu, "Isn't life torture?" sings another, "A man is not a human being without mercy. Even if you're hard on yourself, be merciful to others." teaches someone.

Through Mizoguchi, we learn to seek something extraordinary...

Kenji Mizoguchi's "Gubijinso" (1935)

English titles: Poppies, Poppy, The Field Poppy




It's senseless. "I should have changed. But it's not my fault" says one of the characters. In the great tradition of storytelling, Mizoguchi creates remarkable characters, gets involved in their drama, but also keeps distance. He skips between concepts, ideas, emotions poetically. In his films, people laugh and people cry...

Kenji Mizoguchi's "Shin heike monogatari" (1955)

English titles: Legend of the Taira Clan, New Tales of the Taira Clan, Taira Clan Saga, Tales of the Taira Clan, The Sacrilegious Hero, The Taira Clan

Life is a dew
Fragile and quickly scattered...

Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" (1959)

In North by Northwest, both space and identities are deconstructed, broken down to pieces, and then rearranged.




In Hitchcock's films, fantasies and nightmares are all intertwined. And characters very often talk about this very openly. Here are some dialogues from North by Northwest, interveawing sex and death:


Roger O. Thornhill: Tell me... How does a girl like you get to be a girl like you?
Eve Kendall: Lucky, I guess?
Roger O. Thornhill: Oh, not lucky. Naughty. Wicked, up to no good. Ever kill anyone? Because I bet you could tease a man to death without half trying. So stop trying, ha?


Roger O. Thornhill: I wonder what subtle form of manslaughter is next on the program. Am I to be dropped into a vat of molten steel and become part of a new skyscraper? Or are you going to ask this female to kiss me again and poison me to death?


The Professor: If I thought there was any chance of changing your mind, I'd talk about Miss Kendall, of whom you so obviously disapprove.
Roger O. Thornhill: Yes, for using sex like some people use a flyswatter.


By the way, she does kill him in the film, but it is an illusion.

Orson Welles' "F for Fake" (1974)

In a post to a_film_by about F for Fake (one of the best films I have ever seen), I wrote:

The film has an unbelievably breathless rhythm, one that constantly forces us to feel on our toes, as if the whole film can change at any moment, as if it can veer off to a completely new direction in terms of colors, or pace, at any point, it is so unpredictable that one has to give himself/herself to the moment as if life depended on it since the next one can be only one of the infinite possibilities available.

...what is real about F for Fake is its intensity, its multiple perspectives shifting like life does constantly, and its sense of harmony that forces the human being to get closer to its full potential, whatever that means.

In the film, Orson Welles quotes (a few times), The Conundrum of the Workshops, a poem by Rudyard Kipling. You can also read it, without interruption, here.


The Conundrum of the Workshops

When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"



Wherefore he called to his wife and fled to fashion his work anew—
The first of his race who cared a fig for the first, most dread review;
And he left his lore to the use of his sons—and that was a glorious gain
When the Devil chuckled: "Is it Art?" in the ear of the branded Cain.



They builded a tower to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart,
Till the Devil grunted behind the bricks: "It's striking, but is it Art?"
The stone was dropped by the quarry-side, and the idle derrick swung,
While each man talked of the aims of art, and each in an alien tongue.



They fought and they talked in the north and the south, they talked and they fought in the west,
Till the waters rose on the jabbering land, and the poor Red Clay had rest—
Had rest till the dank blank-canvas dawn when the dove was preened to start,
And the Devil bubbled below the keel: "It's human, but is it Art?"



The tale is old as the Eden Tree—as new as the new-cut tooth—
For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth;
And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart,
The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was it Art?"



We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice-peg,
We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yolk of an addled egg,
We know that the tail must wag the dog, as the horse is drawn by the cart;
But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: "It's clever, but is it Art?"



When the flicker of London's sun falls faint on the club-room's green and gold,
The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mold—
They scratch with their pens in the mold of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start
When the Devil mutters behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it art?"

Now, if we could win to the Eden Tree where the four great rivers flow,
And the wreath of Eve is red on the turf as she left it long ago,
And if we could come when the sentry slept, and softly scurry through,
By the favor of God we might know as much—as our father Adam knew.




Near the end of F for Fake, Orson Welles says:

“Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.”

Johnnie To's "Breaking News" (2004)

Breaking News is the first Johnnie To film I saw. It's got wonderful rhythm and a very fluid camera. The film somehow grows, in style and meaning, as it progresses.

I think the big mistake people make about Breaking News is that they try to find the content in the whole issue with the media, etc. (and I agree, he doesn't have anything very original to say there) while the true story lies in the characters, their relations, and the very architecture-aware cutting...




In an interview on Breaking News, Johnnie To says:

Hong Kong, with its particularities, is different than all the countries of Southeast Asia. The dissimilarity with Europe is even more striking. You find very interesting aspects to discover in Hong Kong. It's a rich place in terms of paradoxes. Ultra-modern buildings contrast with the very old houses... the too clean, even sterilized, neighborhoods with very dirty corners. Hong Kong is a city of two extremes, interesting to film, like New York. In Hong Kong you find buildings with such narrow corridors that you can't carry furniture. There is nothing like this in France or Europe.

My filmography abounds in action films. My films are about the relations between men, through the conflict between cops and criminals, questions of Life and Death, loyalty, and masculine heroism. I adore that universe.

If you haven't been introduced to Johnnie To before, you can begin by reading this. I hope to see more by him and I'd really appreciate if anybody has any suggestions.

Michael Mann's "Miami Vice" (2006)

There is the monologue below off-screen while the volume of the music is turned down, and the two shots above (seemingly irrelated to the action) follow each other:

"It's just there's variables, you know? Randomness, see? That's why."

Read Edo Choi's inspiring post on Miami Vice here.

Özgür Özcan's "Bengi Dönüş" (2008)

I like Özgür Özcan's 3 minute 40 seconds work Bengi Dönüş (or Eternal Return, in English) that I saw today in the shorts section of !f Film Festival.

I don't know if it's a correct thing to do to post it but you can see a short part of it here.

I like his play between the material and the immaterial and his sense of rhythm. I don't really know how good Bengi Dönüş is... I would like to see more of Özgür's videos.

Michael Mann's "Heat" (1995)

Michael Mann's movies are about the dichotomy lovelife / evildeath. His characters are torn apart between these two extremes. In Heat, every significant character involved in the story (all of them are male) have a relationship that ties them to life. Vincent's wife says: "You don't live with me, you live among the remains of dead people." Nevertheless, Vincent's response to this, later in the film: "All I have... is what I'm going after."



It isn't very surprising that our introduction to Vincent is a sex-scene with his wife. The most evil guy in Heat, Waingro, will have sex with a prostitute... whom he will later kill. The moment Vincent sees the body of the prostitute, almost half-way into the movie, is his most intimate encounter with Evil, poetically... His wife's words, when he's about to leave: "This better be earth-shattering."



Neil does the same monologue twice. Notice the word "heat":

Neil: Do you remember what Jimmy used to say? "You wanna be making moves on the street? Have no attachments. Allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner." Remember that?
Chris: For me the sun rises and sets with her, man.

Vincent: My life's a disaster zone. I got a stepdaughter so fucked up because her real father is this large-type asshole. I got a wife. We're passing each other on the down slope of a marriage, my third. Because I spend all my time chasing guys like you around the block. That's my life.
Neal: A guy told me one time: Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. If you're on me and you gotta move when I move... How do you expect to keep a marriage?
Vincent: That's an interesting point. What are you? A monk?
Neal: I have a woman.
Vincent: What do you tell her?
Neal: I tell her I'm a salesman.
Vincent: So then if you spot me coming around that corner... You're just gonna walk out on this woman? Not say goodbye?
Neal: That's the discipline.
Vincent: That's pretty vacant, you know?
Neal: It is what it is. It's that, or we both better go do something else pal.
Vincent: I don't know how to do anything else.
Neal: Neither do I.
Vincent: I don't much want to either.
Neal: Neither do I.

"L'Amour par terre" (1984) de Jacques Rivette

An artwork is broken so that a new one can be born...

An actress turns to the director and says: "I don't understand a bit of what's happening!" (Who does?)

Rivette opens the doors to a metaphysical and poetic universe somehow paralleling our own...

John Ford's "Fort Apache" (1948)

'Two of the most beautiful things in the world," Ford was fond of reminding his scenarists, "are a horse running and a couple waltzing." (...) "With Ford," said Flora Robson, one of the 7 Women, "the actor is continually conscious of the fact that he is making a motion picture and that it must move, move, move. His scenes are never static or dominated by the dialogue." "When movies are best," said Ford, "the action's long and the talk's short. When a film tells its story and reveals its characters to us in a suite of simple, beautiful and animated shots, that's a movie.'

from Tag Gallagher's book on Ford.

"Le fond de l'air est rouge" (1977) de Chris Marker

Jerry Lewis' "The Patsy" (1964)

John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956)

"Le fond de l'air est rouge" (1977) de Chris Marker

Jim Hoberman writes: "Marker begins by evoking Battleship Potemkin, and although hardly agitprop, A Grin Without a Cat is in that tradition—a montage film with a mass hero. Unlike Eisenstein, however, Marker isn't out to invent historical truth so much as to look for it."

Starting a movie with images and reminiscences from another one... Potemkin was about a failed uprising, a lost battle in a larger struggle. It was a call to action. The purpose of Le fond de l'air is the same, and Marker is very quick to draw the parallel between the Russian soldiers marching and the cops with gas-masks in the late 60s. And similar to Eisenstein, the montage creates a purely intuitive politics of revolt beyond ideologies...



The cumulative effect of seeing millions of people (the "mass hero", as Hoberman calls it) from all over the world, caught in the violent moment or expressing thoughts... And Chris Marker, embracing his subjectivity, is one of them... Makes one more and more conscious of one's own moment.

What Le fond de l'air leaves me with is a sense of a timeless history, a world without arbitrary boundaries, and a sense of a non-decipherable cosmos.





Here is a short piece from Chris Marker's 3-hour masterpiece (It is one of the rare sublime uses of Bach's music in Cinema):






Click here to read something I wrote on Le fond de l'air est rouge in 2002. (It might contain a few factual mistakes.)

"Le Fils" (2002) de Jean-Pierre et Luc Dardenne

Semih Kaplanoğlu's "Süt" (2008)

You can read Eytan Ipeker's comments here.

Hou Hsiao Hsien's "Millenium Mambo" (2001)

The following images are only from the first 25 minutes of Millenium Mambo. I'll try to write more on the film, but for now I would just like to say that there is nothing much greater than this in the history of art...

Chris Marker's "2084" (1984)

Chris Marker on memory and filmmaking

First in French, then in English translation... taken from chrismarker.org. The still is from Le fond de l'air est rouge.

"Dans nos moments de rêverie mégalomaniaque, nous avons tendance à voir notre mémoire comme une espèce de livre d’Histoire: nous avons gagné et perdu des batailles, trouvé et perdu des empires. A tout le moins nous sommes les personnages d’un roman classique (’Quel roman que ma vie!”). Une approche plus modeste et peut-être plus fructueuse serati de considérer les fragments d’une mémoire en terms de géographie. Dans toute vie nous trouverions des continents, des îles, des déserts, des marais, des territoires surpeuplés et des terrae incognitae. De cette mémoire nous pourrions dessiner la carte, extraire des images avec plus de facilité (et de vérité) que des contes et légendes. Que le sujet de cette mémoire se trouve être un photographe et un cinéaste ne veut pas dire que sa mémoire est en soi plus intéressante que celle du monsieur qui passe (et encore moins de la dame), mais simplement qu’il a laissé, lui, des traces sur lesquelles on peut travailler, et des contours pour dresser ses cartes."

"In our moments of megalomaniacal daydreaming, we tend to view our memory as a kind of History Book: we have won and lost battles, found and lost whole empires. At the very least we are characters from a classic novel (’My life is such a novel!’). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach would be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life, we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. From this memory we can draw the map, extract images with more ease (and truth) than do stories and legends. That the subject of this memory is found to be a photographer or a filmmaker does not imply that his memory is more interesting than that of any passing gentleman (or moreover, than that of the lady), but simply that he has left traces with which one can work, and contours to help draw up the map."

James Gray's "Two Lovers" (2008)

It's a very great movie! Such a pleasure to confront a relatively new director with such original sense of humour and a profound sense of light. There were moments my eyes could not follow the story cause the three-dimensional rhythms were too interesting...

Many thanks goes to Zach Campbell, who wrote in 2007: "I think James Gray may count as my favorite American filmmaker working in Hollywood right now". I like Michael Mann more, but James Gray isn't far below. You can read his post here, it's full of wonderful commentary on We Own the Night, which I haven't seen. Most of what Zach says is also true for Two Lovers.

Erden Kıral's "Bereketli Topraklar Üzerinde" (1979)

In my opinion, Erden Kıral is the greatest Turkish filmmaker. And unfortunately I don't know anyone who agrees with me on this. His films are very Rossellinian in the sense that the images acquire their true beauty by the place they have in the rhythm. His editing is always breathtaking...

"Fantômas" (1913) de Louis Feuillade

Louis Feuillade easily belongs to the pantheon. "He foresaw that people who went into the dark to participate in stories, no matter how sophisticated their world, were still primitive creatures." says David Thomson in A Biographical Dictionary of Film (quoted here).

Manoel de Oliveira's "Um Filme Falado" (2003)

A belated HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY to Manoel de Oliveira who was born December 11th, 1908.

According to IMDB, his new film is "in production". It is called Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loira.

King Vidor's "Solomon and Sheba" (1959)

I like Solomon and Sheba more than anybody else I know, including Vidor himself. For more, see below...




On his website, Tag Gallagher has a bio-critical filmography of King Vidor. Should be a huge pleasure to read for any Vidor fan. I stole the following from there. It is Vidor talking about the making of Solomon and Sheba:

"I did half of it—two months—with Tyrone Power. More than once he told me: ‘This is the best part I’ve ever had, the best picture I’ve ever been in,’ and when we ran the rushes we had to agree: he was able to convey the character’s vacillation between sex and religion, sex and state obligation, so well that we thought we were going to have a simply marvellous movie. Then Power died and was replaced by Yul Brynner, who was so cautious and inhibited at stepping into the part in those circumstances that Solomon and Sheba somehow turned into an unimportant, indifferent sort of picture.…We also had weather prob­lems. I’d started shooting in September, but it was December by the time we came to re-shoot it and we could no longer go to the places I’d originally used, so we constantly had to cheat in matters of climate and landscape. Yul Brynner wanted to skip over the interesting com­plexity, he didn’t want to hear about it. It was impossible to talk with him. Numerous scenes like the love scene in the wheeping willows thus became quickly ridiculous.…

“Despite everything, the film was finished in less than a month, as Yul Brynner’s contract demanded, and I could let go of my emotions. I had kept what had happened to me emotionally hidden until then and then suddenly, walking to my office, the floodgates broke. I went back home and closed the door. I sat down and began to cry.”

If he knew what I felt watching it...

John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962)

Fred Camper cites it frequently among the great masterpieces of Hollywood. Tag Gallagher says it is "John Ford at its apex" and cites it among the important works in Ford's "Transcendence" period. I can't imagine a better publicity for a movie.

Many things have been said about it so I'll just note a few things I found interesting.


1. Dutton Peabody reciting Henry V

When he notices he hasn't any alcohol left, Dutton Peabody looks at his empty bottle and says "No courage left?". Then he adds, "Have we credit? That is the question, have we credit?" obviously referring to Hamlet. A few moments later, he recites, incorrectly, the last four lines of the following from Shakespeare's Henry V (Act 4, Scene 3).

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

In his book, Tag Gallagher writes that if Rossellini made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance he would have titled it America Year Zero. There is truly the feeling of momenteous historical change happening right in front of our eyes.


2. Two non-invisible cuts

Nothing seems invisible at Ford anymore but there are two cuts that stand out because they clearly break the known rules of Hollywood editing. And it is interesting that these happen in very similar circumstances in the film and within a few minutes of each other.

In both cases, Ranse leaves Hallie and Link alone. Just at the moment Ranse is leaving the frame, Ford cuts to a shot just a little closer. It expresses a strong connection between Link and Hallie (and Pompey, in the second one), a silent communication which doesn't happen when Ranse is around. We have not seen Tom Doniphon yet but all the arrows already point to him, and to his tragic life.






3. About lighting

An example of non-realistic, expressive lighting. When Hallie looks back in anger, her face is lit in darker tones. Tom tells her "you look mighty pretty when she you get mad", we cut back to Hallie again, her face brighter.



4. Words

In his book, Tag Gallagher expresses really well the dichotomy between word & liberty in the film.

The following is an important point because here Ton Doniphon makes his most pompous statement in the film where his shattered ego will become the main drama. Which is partly why Ford needs to reframe the action: Notice the silence that comes after such a statement, it's as if a God has spoken and there is nothing to add to it. I love the little "silent-film" that follows, a great play on depth-of-field.



5. A sense of intuition

Ranse wakes up ans says, "I've got something to do!", before he knows what it is...



6. Fire-light

“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” has beautiful lighting, especially in the alternately mournful, ceremonial, and nightmarish night-time sequences. On the other hand, the lighting during the day is fairly even, but there are many moments when this isn’t so: the passage of the train over a hill with long, monolithic shadows cast across its slope; Hally sadly walking around Stoddard’s empty classroom as particles of light sift in from the windows off-screen right; Doniphon setting afire his cabin in a horrifically immediate sequence where Ford’s camera dissolves the proscenium he’s set up throughout the rest of the film by bringing us into this enclosed, three-dimensional space, a perspectival transition accentuated by Doniphon almost assailing the camera, if I remember correctly.
- Edo Choi on Dave Kehr's blog. (Click here for the specific comment.)

5. The last shot


The last shot: the black "THE END" appears, over the image, slowly. The camera is shaking while the train is moving right and left. This shaky camera goes against the whole style of the film, which is why it works, the feeling it leaves is one of a fragile universe... Very similar to what Ford achieved throughout the whole film by his editing.

King Vidor's "Metaphor" (1980)

Everybody seems to be more interested in "Truth and Illusion" but I like this one more. Although it seems to be in a much lesser subject, its rhythms and its tone goes deeper. Vidor re-editing a film of his in another film of his... It's something to see, really...

King Vidor's "Truth and Illusion: An Introduction to Metaphysics" (1964)

"The nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaningless."
- Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (quoted in the film)

"Did matter precede thought?", Vidor asks...

Vidor titled his autobiography: "A Tree is a Tree"

Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Gertrude" (1964)

As in all the other films I mentioned in this blog, the stills will do no justice to what one feels when the light actually pulsates. Dreyer's Gertrude is a light-dance.

Howard Hawks' "El Dorado" (1966)

Howard Hawks' "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953)

Howard Hawks' "The Thing from Another World" (1951)

Howard Hawks' "Air Force" (1943)

Douglas Sirk's "Imitation of Life" (1959)

My essay on Imitation of Life can be read here, on Radikal's web site. It's in Turkish.

Stan Brakhage's "The Dante Quartet" (1987)

The Dante Quartet (1987), painted over photographed imagery, is one of Brakhage's lushest works: in the "Purgation" segment, colors and images collide with and grind against each other, and in "Existence Is Song," contrasting colors, moonscapes, and volcanoes burst forth like an acre of flowers blooming.

- Fred Camper (in a capsule review he calls Stan Brakhage "a master of subjective vision.")

John Ford's "Grapes of Wrath" (1940)

John Ford's "Donovan's Reef" (1963)

John Ford's "The Horse Soldiers" (1959)

John Ford's "Mogambo" (1953)

Otto Preminger's "Advise & Consent" (1962)

"Céline et Julie vont en bateau" (1974) de Jacques Rivette

Michael Mann's "Thief" (1981)

Hou Hsiao Hsien's "Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge" (2007)

Orson Welles' "The Stranger" (1946)

Jerry Lewis' "The Family Jewels" (1965)

Jerry Lewis' "The Patsy" (1964)

Jerry Lewis' "The Nutty Professor" (1963)

Jerry Lewis' "The Errand Boy" (1961)

Jerry Lewis' "The Ladies Man" (1961)

Jerry Lewis' "The Bellboy" (1960)