C is for Cinema

I was unfamiliar with these films and with Franju until a friend mentioned them a few weeks ago. Intrigued, I ran out and rented the Criterion edition of Eyes Without a Face which features the short documentary Blood of the Beasts as a supplement and I was not disappointed.

Eyes Without a Face is a surreal, unsettling horror film more in the tradition of Jean Cocteau than anything from the more accepted horror genre. The plot follows a doctor who specializes in skin grafts and is obsessed with reconstructing the face of his daughter whose face was disfigured in a car accident. He and his daughter are so ashamed of the injury that the daughter was officially pronounced dead, but lives in hiding in the doctor's chateau, perpetually wearing an eerie, expressionless mask to hide her scars. The horror part comes in how the doctor goes about trying to reconstruct his daughter's face: by abducting young women of similar appearance to his daughter and attempting to transplant their face onto hers.

The strength of the film lies in its very creepy, other-worldly atmosphere. Franju did a magnificent job lending this piece a surrealist touch which imparts a sense of foreboding via discordant and abrasive music, an aggressive use of sound editing, a solid use of place and setting, and an unsettling, very sublime acting style showcased by the daughter and her creepy mask.

As much as I enjoyed Eyes Without a Face, I was really blown away by Blood of the Beasts. Before watching it, I read about it and knew that it was a documentary about slaughterhouses in Paris. I also knew that it was quite graphic, yet very poetic and beautiful. I hesitated for a few days before I finally watched it. Yes, it was very graphic and violent, but it only shows you exactly what you would think happens in slaughterhouses. I was actually surprised by how quick and efficient the killing of animals was in Parisian slauugherhouses in 1949.

The film shows the slaughter and butchering of horses, cows, calves, and sheep in four different slaughterhouses. However, the film is far from a straight-up depiction of the activities. It is very poetic in its treatment and offers some truly astounding aesthetics. The camera lingers on the blood pouring out of slaughtered animals and into gutters, and as Franju explained in an interview included on the DVD, he intentionally chose to make this film in black and white so that the images can be viewed from an aesthetic viewpoint. If it were in colour, he says, it would just be repulsive.

One shot in the film which was particularly horrifying and enrapturing at the same time was in the sheep slaughterhouse. Franju showed workers taking sheep one at a time and laying them on a rack to slaugther them via decapitation. He then cuts to show an entire row of decapitated sheep lying on their backs along this rack. However, their bodies are still in spasm and their legs are all violently kicking in the air. Franju set his camera at the very end of the rack so that we see the row of dead, writhing sheep as if they were a kicking chorus line in a Busby Berkely film. It's a deeply unsettling image that I couldn't turn my eyes from.

However, the film is not devoid of politics. While it is not necessarily an animal rights film, it does touch upon these issues and forces the viewer to confront the production that results in a steak or mutton. Interestingly, it also touches upon the dangers that the workers put themselves into in their line of work.

The ultimate aim of the film was to depict a truth, however unpleasant that truth might be. In this, it is very successfuly. However, it goes beyond that and lends this truth a sublime beauty and macabre, poetic element that is very, very enthralling. How many other documentaries about animal processing have ever quoted Baudelaire before?

Damn, I've once again been neglecting this blog. Here's my attempt to catch up on what I can remember watching since that last entry:

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (Michael Haneke, 1995): Great flick. I'm usually not a fan of these types of films wherein several seemingly separate storylines weave their way through the film and eventually link at the end, but the way Haneke uses this effect here is actually a comment on the flippant nature of modern life and mass media.

The Simpsons Movie: What can I say? As a die-hard Simpsons fan, I loved it. Best part: when Homer tries to jump in the sinkhole while flicking off all of Springfield, only to get stuck and have his scalp, the only part of his body exposed, brutally attacked by the townsfolk.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Meh. I love the Harry Potter books, but this film didn't really justify its creation. It was just the highlights of the book on film with way too much reliance on montage.

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007): I liked this more than I thought I would. As a friend of mine said, "it's just fun being able to watch a movie about a serial killer without having to feel bad about the victims." I thought that was pretty funny. But I liked how the film didn't try to come up with any motivations or explain the killer's acts, it just focused on the obsession of those trying to catch the killer. Neat twist.

Close Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990): A very engaging drama/documentary about a man who innocently passes himself off as director Mohsen Makhmalbaf in order to make a film about a family that he has befriended. Really neat piece which explores the nature of documentary truth and the responsibilities of filmmakers in terms of their subjects. I'm not sure how much of this film is a straight-up documentary and how much was re-created, but it's all based on actual events.

There are probably some others that I'm forgetting, but there you go.

Peter Watkins essentially makes two kinds of films: historical films, and speculative fiction based on current events. With Culloden, Watkins' first film, he does a masterful job of blending the two.

A Watkins historical film is not a period piece or an epic. Rather, it's a chance for Watkins to delve into the deeper issues of the time, to give a complex portrait of that era, to try new tactics in historical representation, and to show how history is very much linked to the present, and vice-versa. All of which Watkins does to great effect in Culloden, a short film about the last battle fought on UK soil, a battle which saw the British forces matched against the ill-organized Highlanders of Scotland, leading to an utter slaughter and the destruction of Highland culture and society.

Watkins' approach is almost clinical. Through emotionally-detached narration, he introduces us to the commanders on either side, as well as some of the foot soliders. He also tells us about the weaponry used, but rather than glorifying the combat, he goes to great lengths to detail the gruesome effects that grapeshot and bayonets have on human beings (Narrator: "This is grapeshot." We see British soldiers loading bags full of metal scraps and small rounds into a cannon. "This is what is does." We see the grapeshot tear through the Highlanders).

Through this narration, not only is the conflict between the Crown and the rebel forces led by Bonnie Prince Charlie explained, but we are also informed of how the Highland forces are mustered to the field: not through loyalty to Charles or by patriotism, but instead through the classist clan system which forces sub-tenants into muster as rent payment on the behalf of tenants to landlords, themselves beholden to lords and clan leaders. Watkins' Culloden is not a patriotic battle of Scottish nationalism, it is a complete disaster in which clan feuds and class systems play more of a role than most history books attest to. The same treatment is given to the British soldiers, as we are introduced to various men who have been forced into service for a variety of reasons.

Throughout the film, Watkins subverts standard historical representation by breaking the illusion of reality. The actors stare directly into the camera, and in the midst of action will stop to speak directly to the camera to explain how they got here, what they are doing, or the exasperation that they are feeling. In this way, Watkins gives agency to the anonymous of history, those that make history through their daily lives but have no statues dedicated in their honour, as opposed to the princes and clan leaders.

Earlier, I mentioned that Watkins created a mix of his styles with this film, historical and speculative. This mostly becomes apparent when Watkins shows the after-math of the battle, when British forces went on a spree throughout the country-side, slaughtering survivors of the battle and pretty much anyone else that got in their way. The more long-term aftermath of British occupation of the Highlands through the creation of a series of fortresses and steady patrols through the hills in search of rebels is also shown. In this manner (remember, this is 1964), Watkins ever-so-subtly links the events of this era to the events happening at the same time in Vietnam, when the US was in the early stages of "pacification" of the Vietnamese countryside through steady patrols and the creation of pro-US hamlets. While Watkins makes no direct link between the history and the present, the elements are there for the viewer to make the connection, a sublte approach which demeans neither the past or present.

Anyway........long story short, a brilliant film. Check it out.

God, I love Peter Watkins! And his films are finally becoming available on DVD, enabling me to finally see them instead of just reading about them.

The War Game was deemed so disturbing and subversive by its producers, the BBC, that it was kept off the air for a full 20 years before it was finally shown on television. And why not? We certainly can't have a short film like this that forces people to question the sanity of nuclear conflict and those that build an entire foreign policy aroud it, can we?

Using evidence from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, plus fire-bombings of Japanese and German cities during WWII, Watkins creates a speculative film of what a nuclear attack on Britain would look like. He supplements this evidence with official gov't policy of what steps would be taken in the event of an attack, plus the speculation of leading scientists, policy creators, and religious leaders to give a chilling, documentary-like glimpse of post-nuclear Britain. Interspersed with the speculation are "man-on-thestreet"-style interviews with various citizens which showcase the ignorance of the general population when it comes to the effects of nuclear arms and the blind acceptance of nuclear war as a distinct possibility.

Created at the height of the Cold War but unlike other nuclear-related films of the era, The War Game doesn't drum up fear of the Soviet threat and the need to remain ever-vigilant in the face of communist aggression. Instead, Watkins forces the viewer to question the wisdom of nuclear weapons in any circumstance, to show the horror of what it would be like, and to point out the deadly arrogance and stupidity of governments that proliferate nuclear arms. Awesome.

And speaking of films that are both radical in subject and format.......Michael Haneke is a godsend to radical cinema. I've only become a Haneke admirer in the last 6 months or so, but I'm thrilled that I finally got around to discovering him. Now I'm playing catch-up.

Funny Games is a treatise on the uses off cinematic violence. There is no plot in the traditional sense, and the characters are more like archetypes than fleshed-out attempts at charaterization. The entire film is set up to force the audience to confront our own role and complicity in screen depictions of violence and how we as an audio-visual culture crave and demand acts of violence. Not an easy thing to realize, much less make a film about.

Considering that the theme of the film is cinematic violence, it is relatively free of violent acts. The nature of the film itself is violent and disturbing, but in an act of sheer genius, the only straight depiction of the kind of movie violence that we're so used to seeing is given to the audience as an example of how much we crave it and how easily we are manipulated into rooting for more violence.

Nevertheless, the whole time I watched the film, my entire body was gripped by tension. My muscles were tight and I was quite uncomfortable as both I and the characters in the film were subjected to "funny games," both by the on-screen tormentors and by Haneke himself as chief tormentor/manipulator.

Amazing film, check it out. Just don't pick it up when you're in the mood for some light viewing with a bowl of popcorn on a Friday night or what-have-you.

This documentary on the first wave of American hardcore punk made me realize something: as much as I love the music, if I were of the appropriate age when this music scene picked up, I probably wouldn't have been into it. Way too violent for my more bookish tastes. It's so much safer to listen to Black Flag, MDC, and the Circle Jerks in the comfort of my own home......

This film was a treasure trove of great footage from the era, however. Once again, pretty standard in its portrayal, but there was enough meat to it to keep me engaged. For someone who's not into hardcore, however, the subject matter alone wouldn't hold enough interest as the format just doesn't stand up on its own.

I liked how the filmmaker tried to delve a bit into the more problematic, troublesome aspects of the original hardcore movement, such as sexism, racism, and violence. However, the director only scratched the surface and not much more. What can you do?

As a bonus feature on the Sir! No SIr! DVD, these two short films were added. I was quite happy, as I have read a lot about the Newsreel Collective but had never has the chance to see any of their films.

The Newsreel Collective was a group of radical American filmmakers who created a distribution/creation network across the States in the late 60's/early 70's. Their goal was to document social struggles on film and to use said films as agitation and education across the country. The covered a host of topics, from the anti-war movement to the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and feminist movement. These two films focused on soldiers' resistance to the war, with Only the Beginning documenting Vietnam vets throwing their medals onto the Capitol's steps and Summer of '68 documenting the Oleo Strut, a soldier's coffee house outside of Fort Hood in Texas.

The key criticism that I have always read about the Newsreel Collective is that they failed to challenge traditional modes of filmmaking, even as they challenged the social status quo. These two films certainly attest to that: Only the Beginning is pretty much just a camera set up on a tripod, showing each soldier step up to a mic to make a brief statement before hurling the medals. Summer of '68 is your pretty standard doc, showcasing interviews with the workers and denizens at the Oleo Strut and not much more.

While the films themselves are great documents of the times, as radical filmmaking, they are certainly less than impressive. That always seems to be the case with American attempts at radical filmmaking, doesn't it? Too often, American filmmakers just don't seem to understand that radical filmmaking is radical in both form and subject, something that the European radical filmmaking tradition has been aware of for decades.

Man, I've fallen behind on the movies once again. I've lost track of the ones I've seen since my last post, so I'll just write about the ones that I enjoyed the most/remember. Starting with this one.

As with many documentaries, I found the subject matter of this one to be absolutely fascinating and the format to be rather hum-drum/tedious. Sir! No Sir! documents the little-known G.I. resistance movement during the Vietnam War. It covers a lot of ground, from counter-cultural soldiers' coffee houses that sprung up around army bases, to military prison riots, to underground newspapers distributed amongst soliders, to desertions, mutinies, and fraggings. Most interestingly, it delves into (too briefly, however) the idea that soldiers returning from the war were hated and spat upon by the civilian anti-war movement. The film went a long way toward dispelling this idea by showing that the most effective aspect of the anti-war movement were the soliders themselves, and how the contemporary press focused entirely on acts of solider resistance with never a mention of anti-solider backlash, which you would think they'd jump all over to dis-credit the anti-war movement.

Anyway, as for the format of the film, a lot of the old standards: talking heads, mis-used/amplified archival footage, and cheesy music created for the film meant to sound like contemporary music that the soldiers themselves would've listened to. I guess they did that because they couldn't afford the rights to the actual muusic, but I found it distracting and unnecessary. Another distracting element that popped up a bit too much was shaky camera-work during static interviews. Use a tripod, morons! There's just no reason to go hand-held while you're shooting some guy sitting in his living room talking. Oh, and there was a bit too much of the old extreme close-ups when the interview subject's eyes started to tear up. Quite manipulative.

The manipulation was a shame because the subject matter and original archival footage really speak for themselves and didn't need the exploitation forced upon the audience. The film is an important work in that it makes head-way in re-gaining history that has been lost and intentionally buried/re-written by the powers that be, powers that have a lot to lose by admitting that yes, the US military is susceptible to wide-spread and highly effective subversion and insurrection.

If you've ever wondered if the US military will ever resort to a draft again, check this film out. You'll soon realize that a draft is the last thing Bush and his gang want.

And so my obsession with Albert Brooks continues........

The thing that I like so much about him, the thing that makes Albert Brooks so brilliant is that he can make these really intelligent, biting, intuitive films and disguise them as innocuous comedies.

In Lost in America, Brooks plays a yuppie advertising executive, David, who's expecting a big promotion. He and his wife, Linda, have even up-graded their house, expecting all of their dreams to come true with this one promotion. Privately, Linda feels that her entire life is in a rut and that David's promotion won't change anything, even though David adamently feels that it's the key to the kingdom.

When David is passed over for the promotion, he loses it and tells off the boss, proclaiming that he used to laugh at his friends in college who went out to "find themselves" while he stuck it out in business school. So now he has the perfect opportunity to "drop out of society," sell everything, buy an RV with Linda, and find themselves. This decision leads to one of the funniest lines I've heard in awhile:

"This is like what we talked about when we were 19! We wanted to find ourselves, but we didn't have a dollar so we just watched TV."

And herein we see the biting, satiric humour of Brooks. The yuppies that he depicts always equate money with happiness, no matter the situation. In this case, finding themselves means having a comfortable nest egg to live off of. David needs money to find himself, a comfortable set-up in a fully-loaded RV. Nothing less will do.

When David and Linda experience real, actual poverty, they are less than pleased and will do anything to get out of it, back to the artificial, totally un-satisfying life that they knew. I found it quite telling that the film focused on Los Angeles and New York and passed by most of the interior of the States. That brilliant little move said a lot about the characters that Brooks presented: they're out of touch with reality and the struggles that normal people have to go through in places like Kansas, Wisconsin, and Alabama. For them, America is LA and NY and their attempt to dig deeper becomes merely a side-track on their pre-ordained journey to "find themselves."

Wowie zowie! Such an amazing film, my favourite of Wajda's war trilogy. A really complex portrait of one day, May 8, 1945. The Allied countries are celebrating their victory over Nazi Germany, but not in Poland. There, it's a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" and the Home Army (the largest resistance movement in Poland during the war) is training their sights on the in-coming Soviet occupiers.

Over the course of the loose trilogy, we see a really interesting portrait of the Home Army, all the more so considering that these films were made in a time when the Soviet-allied communist regime in Poland had criminalized Home Army veterans, killing, imprisoning, or deporting thousands of them. In A Generation, the Home Army nationalists are seen as the boss class, elitists who stockpile weapons and never do anything with them. In Kanal, the Home Army is the sole focus of the film, depicting the common fighters in active and terrible resistance to the Nazis. Finally, Ashes and Diamonds gives us the most multi-faceted depiction of Home Army veterans at a crucial point in Polish history: they took up arms against the Nazis in the name of Polish freedom, and now they find themselves in a difficult situation wherein they must continue the struggle for the same cause, only this time their foes are the new Polish communist elite who would continue a foreign occupation of Poland.

That being said, this is also a formally astonishing film. I was particularly interested in the unnatural use of sound in this film and the two previous in the trilogy. Often, sounds such as gun fire or the closing of doors will drop out of the soundtrack, almost as if they were superfluous. And in essence, they are. We see a door closing or a gun shooting, we understand. But this dropping of sound also connects the audience with the film on a more theoretical level. For those brief moments, we are taken out of the fiction and are reminded of the realities of the present (when the film was made, that is). In this way, we are subtly shown how the events on the screen still resonated with Poles in the late 50's and throughout the Warsaw Pact era.

Visually, Ashes and Diamonds is stunning, especially on the Criterion edition. Wajda packed so much meaning into every frame, telling us so much about the conflicts, personal and political, of the characters by how he frames his actors in a bombed-out church, in a dirty bathroom, in an empty bar outside of a banquet for the local elite, or in a ballroom as weary party-goers dance in the first dawn of "peace" in Poland.

And how 'bout that Zbigniew Cybulski? He's like a Polish Belmondo!

I just loved his characterization of Maciek, a characterization that Wajda allowed him practically free reign with. And we're all better off for it!

For Your Consideration (Christopher Guest, 2006): I liked this one more than a lot of recent Guest films. This one had a much better sense of comic timing. A few of the more recent Guest films (such as Best in SHhw and A Mighty Wind) let some of the scenes drag on a bit too much, which I guess can be problematic when you're dealing with an ensemble cast and a lot of improvisation. But For Your Consideration seemed to be perfectly timed. Nothing dragged on too long, and scenes often ended just as they were getting funnier, leaving us with a George Costanza-esque sense of exiting on top.

Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman, 2005): Ok, I suppose. Although one of my pet peeves is when movies use a lot of visual gimmicks and quirky little tidits, and then drop them like a bad habit once the plot really picks up, which this film definitely does. It's like the director does just enough to make the film slightly more original than others, then decides it's too much work to keep it up.

I also think the film sent a lot of mixed signals, like how the audience is aligned so that we relish the comeuppance that the Katie Holmes character receives for doing essentially what the male protagonist does so well. Maybe that's the point, but the form of it matched so many other comeuppance moments in other films, so I felt it was a little murky in this film. Whatever.

I've been slacking on this. So, in the interests of efficiency, here are the films that I've seen (or at least remember seeing) since the last time I updated:

The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006): A strong genre film, Scorsese's B movie. Nice character work, and when you realize that it's a crime genre film, it's easy to excuse the weaknesses in the plot.

Battle Ground: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge (Stephen Marshall, 2004): Iraq doc. Began by criticizing the standard, superficial media treatment of the situation, only to use a montage-heavy, hipster-esque, superficial treatment when showing the US forces in Iraq. But the scenes focusing on Iraqis were pretty strong, especially when time was given to the former resistance fighter who fled to America at the end of the Gulf War and was now returning for the first time since.

Marie Antoinette (Sophia Coppolla, 2006): Take the French queen out of her historical context and what do you get? A teen romance? Nope. Historical apologism. I wanted to see her head get chopped off, I didn't care about whatever personal upheaval she went through as the pampered queen. Besides, take away the modern lingo and the 80's soundtrack and this was a pretty standard biopic.

Kanal (Andrej Wajda, 1957): Amazing. The scenes in the Warsaw sewer as the resistance fighters attempt to flee the enclosing Nazi forces were some of the most haunting, harrowing, claustrophobic, desperate scenes ever put to celluloid. Can't wait to see the third film in Wajda's war trilogy, Ashes and Diamonds (the first being A Generation, which I watched not too long ago).

Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001): Started off pretty good. Ominous atmosphere, creepiness galore, and lots of Japanese nostalgia for me. But then it started to suck. Like when the focus of the film shifted from a tight-knit group of friends experiencing a series of traumatic episodes and trying to make sense of them (a limited focus which gave the film its ominous feel and emphasized the key motif of isolation, as if there was no one to help them) to encompass the entire world. Basically, I started watching a creepy little horror film with lots of haunting imagery and ended up watching a post-apocalyptic film? How did that happen?

The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005): Once again, started off good. Nice long build-up which increases the tension and lots of cringe-worthy moments in the cave even before the monsters show up (claustrophobia, anyone?), but once the monsters did show up I felt it was a case of too much, too soon. I think it would've been better to with-hold the monsters a bit more, but instead the film morphed into a common gore outing. And I really didn't care about the little dramas between the women. Get right rid of that shite.

Dog Star Man (1962-64) and other short films by Stan Brakhage: Look, I have a ton of respect for Brakhage. But he just doesn't do it for me. I love his abstract films, but I can take or leave his more symbolic efforts. I just don't like symbolism. I don't know if it's just me, but I feel that experimental film should be liberated from such out-dated, simplistic devices as symbolism. That being said, Brakhage is a giant in experimental film, as he deserves to be. I just wish the Criterion DVD collection of Brakhage films had more of his abstract work and less of his symbolic work.

Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997): This one was one of those films I go into not knowing what to expect because it's been so critically acclaimed. More often than not, those situations disappoint me. Taste of Cherry did not. It deserves all of the acclaim it's received, and then some. I loved that post-modern, extra-diegetic ending!

Ok, I think that's it.

Just when I start to think the world is a rotten place and there's no hope for anyone or anything, I discover that in 1986, JLG sat down and made a short film about Woody Allen! There is hope for us after all! And I was just wondering not too long ago if these two guys had ever met, and if they had, what did they talk about? Now I know.

Meeting WA, in three parts (for a total of about 24 minutes):







I love the bit in the 3rd part where JLG asks WA about how television may or may not have influenced his shooting style. WA just looks confused.

I knew I was watching an absolutely brilliant, amazing film about 15 minutes into it. The protagonist, Damien, a doctor on his way to London for a new job, witnesses two atrocities committed by British soldiers. The second atrocity happens on the train platform as he waits to catch his train. He hesitates, watching the soldiers from afar as they beat the train conductor for refusing to allow British soldiers on his train, as per the train union's mandate. This hesitation is purely external; we see the signs of stress on his face and in his halting gestures. As the soldiers depart, dejected, Damien approaches the fallen conductor to see if he's all right.

Abrupt cut. Close up on Damien's face as he swears an oath of loyalty to the Republican gov't and officially joins the Irish Republican Army, forsaking his new career as a doctor. With this magnificent, strong edit, Ken Loach frames the debate of the film. More importantly, he imparts what the film is not about: there is no internal debate about the morality of resistance. There is no hesitation to take the next step. The characters in the film and Ken Loach waste no time with that issue. It's a complete non-issue, and Loach doesn't even allow the audience to ponder it. A lesser, non-politicized director would've used the first act of the film to mull over whether or not fighting is the best thing. We would've seen the protagonist thinking it over, talking about it with his friends/romantic interest. Not Loach. Not in the best film of his career. Although I am an admirer of Loach, he has his weak-points such as a bit too much emphasis on melo-drama. But The Wind That Shakes the Barley has no such weakness.

The whole film is external. Loach doesn't use the trappings of classical narrative, with its emphasis on the individual, emotional feelings conveyed through sappy music, and self-obsession. Everything is externalized. The characters make their decisions through active debate. They take up arms through being victimized by the British. What they fight for is not an abstract cause, but the very culture that is externalized in everything they do. We never hear the characters yammering on about the glory of the Irish flag or politicians; to Loach, that would be too abstract. Instead, we hear them speaking Gaelic, playing hurling, singing traditional songs, living the way they have for centuries. That's what they're fighting for, and it is all shown externally. In fact, this is all done so subtly that we're not even aware of it at first.

For instance, the film opens with a group of young men playing hurling. A fine way to start the film, all fun and games. But the very next scene, we are given another view of that game when British soldiers arrive as some of the players arrive home. We then learn that that innocent game, a part of Irish culture, is considered a public meeting and as such, has been banned. Loach doesn't need to hide behind abstract ideas of patriotism and nationalism. Those are mere illusions compared to the physical, external match of hurling that we just saw and now know to be just one aspect of the culture that is facing extermination.

Loach also refuses to fall prey to the trap that has sucked so many other, lesser filmmakers in. When watching an historical period piece, especially one shot in such a picture-esque country as Ireland, we have grown accustomed to seeing endless, perfectly-composed shots of lush scenery as the director equates pretty pictures with good filmmaking. As much beautiful countryside there is in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Loach never once lingers on it. Instead, we see the countryside as the IRA fighters do: as good terrain to train in, to hide in, and to set up ambushes in. The fighters even become part of the terrain, emerging from the fog, crawling through the tall grass, sleeping in the forest. In contrast, the British soliders seem at odds with the very land they have come to occupy. When patrolling through the woods in search of IRA columns, they look out of place and clunky with their heavy packs while the fighters look perfectly natural with their trench coats and scully caps.

However, Loach has also given a complex portrait of the IRA resistance, not simply a romantic ode to the fighters. Through Loachian devices such as extended discussions and debates, a la Land and Freedom, we see the divisions within IRA ranks, namely between those like Teddy, Damien's older brother who has a purely nationalist point of view and kisses up to rich businessmen to have their support (and money) for the fight, and those like Damien himself and Dan, who was a member of the Irish Citizen Army, participated in the Dublin Lockout where he heard James Connolly speak, and who takes a class conscious view of the struggle. He is not only opposed to British over-lords, but also to Irish ones.

Through these discussions, Loach actively draws the audience into the debate. While listening to the characters speak, we mull over what they have to say and listen to the counter-points. We are participating in the meeting. At one such discussion, the fighters debate the merits of the truce that had recently been signed. Teddy and his lot support the truce because it creates an Irish Free State. Dan and his lost oppose it because the Irish Free State remains in the British Empire, Irish still must swear loyalty to the crown, and British elites have merely been replaced by Irish ones. To this, Dan states that if the treaty is ratified, the only thing that will change is the accents of the bosses and the colour of the flag. When I heard that, I was so enraptured by the scene that I swear I almost started clapping along with the characters who supported that stance. My arms actually began to move before I remembered that I was sitting in a theatre, not in the meeting room.

One last thing I want to comment on, and that is the local focus of the film. Not only does Loach use non-actors who are local to County Cork to create his naturalist style, but the focus of the film is also entirely local. We know that the fighters are one part of a larger movement, but we also see everything from their point of view. There are no cutaways to London so we can see the politicians debating, there are no sub-plots which try too hard to portray every aspect of the conflict. It is only one small part of a larger struggle that we are privy to, and in this we are exactly like the characters. We find out about the terms of the new truce the same way the fighters do, literally: by seeing it in a cinema. The fighters learn that they are to still remain loyal to the crown because they are told that in a newsreel at the movie theatre in a brilliant bit of audience identification concocted by Loach.

I could continue, as I've been thinking about this film pretty constantly since I saw it last night, but I guess I'll leave it at that. Go see it as soon as you get a chance to. If tickets weren't so expensive these days, I'd go see it again.

Brilliant film. It follows a young Polish hoodlum, Stach, as he progresses from an apolitical, delinquent existance to becoming a hardened leader in the communist Polish resistance against the Nazis during WWII. However, it's not as simple as that. Going into the film, I was expecting the usual rigamaroll, i.e., the resistance was perfect in every way, yeah us! But this film was far from that.

Wajda took great care in showing many different facets of the Polish resistance. For instance, the resistance movement was not shown as some monolithic, all-encompassing entity. Rather, he shows a movement that has its own internal divisions; namely, the division between the bourgeouis, nationalist resistance and the revolutionary, communist resistance. The nationalist resistance is represented by the owners and managers of the factory that Stach works at, and at first we align our sympathies with them because we know from early on that they are stockpiling arms to fight the Nazis. As the film progresses, however, we see that the workers have organized a class-conscious resistance that opposes both the Nazis and the bosses. Beyond that, we see that the communist underground is quite active while the nationalist resistance spends most of its time talking and stock-piling weapons, but never using them. It is quite clear which side Wajda is taking in this film.

However, and this is the part that is most interesting, Wajda doesn't glorify the communist resistance, either. For instance, Stach joins the resistance not because of fierce anti-facist beliefs or class-consciousness, but because he saw a particularly attractive young woman (Dorota) giving a speech, imploring students to join the resistance. He is more smitten with the woman than he is by the cause. He goes on to enlist his friends (including a young Roman Polanski), but the friends are more in it for the thrill than for the ideology. What we see of the Stach's circle of freedom fighters is more inspired by teenage hormones than by any kind of reasoning. This is the strength of the film, that it is so sensitive to the seriousness and complexity of the situation that it documents.

Eventually, Stach realizes the gravity of his situation when he loses what drew him in in the first place: Dorota. And Dorota herself fell into trouble through her seemingly insignificant mis-step: she grew too attached to her apartment and didn't want to leave the one small comfort she had in her life. In this, Wajda conveys the merciless reality of militant resistance. It's not a game, it's not romantic, but somehow we still see it that way.

One last thing: the cinematography was brilliant. That is all.

While watching this film, there is one all-pervading thought that cannot be escaped: Steve Martin wrote the novella that this film was based on, then he wrote the script, then he acted in the role of the older man that seduces a young retail clerk. Cue the gratuitous love scenes and you've got a case of the willies.

I prefer to think of funny Steve Martin:

Dreyer's Vampyr is one of my favourite films, so I thought it was about time to delve into his other ones. And why not start with this one?

I thought that the film created a relly ominous atmosphere and that the composition was impeccable. However, the editing really stuck out for me. And not in a cool, Brechtian sort of way, more like a "this is the first film that the editor has ever edited" sort of way. I found it to be quite clunky and distracting.

Beyond that, this was quite an austere film that deserves its reputation. Oh, but the ending was a cop-out.

I should probably mention that I'm about 6 films behind on my blog, and that I'm drunk. Any spelling/logical mistakes can be attributed to one of those.

I liked this one. I have this thing where if I happen to catch part of a film on TV, I have an over-whelming urge to watch the rest of it at a later date. This film is one of those. I caught a couple of scenes of Little Shop of Horrors on TV in Japan, but didn't have the time to watch it all. So I stored it in the back of my mind to get back to, and I did.

I love Steve Martin and Bill Murray in this flick. They pretty much made the film for me. Without them, I don't know how I would feel about this. I wish Steve Martin was as funny now as he was in the 70's and early 80's, and I thank god that Bill Murray still is.

I think this was the very first Woody Allen film I ever saw. If not this, then it was Bananas, two films which are definitely not the typical Woody Allen film. I must've been about 11 years old or so, maybe younger. I think it had a lot to do with the development of my love for film.

Anyway, this was only the second time I've seen this film, and I remembered quite a bit of it. Just goes to show how much of an effect it had on me. One thing I didn't know about when I first saw it were all of the references that Allen made to early Soviet cinema. In the battle scenes (it's so weird to talk about battle scenes in a Woody Allen film!), he used conceptual montage that was obviously an homage to Eisenstein and the other greats. For instance, he would show a group of soldiers manouveuring on a field, then cut to a group of sheep running across the same field. The best bit was his homage to Eisenstein's October, specifically the famous lion montage. In Allen's verision, the series of lion statues culminates in a sleeping lion.

I'm glad I watched this again.

Meh. It was ok, I suppose. I saw the "twist" ending coming from about 53 miles away. The plot didn't do it for me, but I liked the whole atmosphere of the film. What else can I say?