Three Kurt Kren shorts, 1969-1982

[This is part of a sporadic series in which I explore the work of the Austrian DVD label Index DVD. This company has released a great deal of valuable European experimental cinema onto DVD, naturally focusing on the Austrian underground but occasionally branching out as well. Index's DVDs are distributed in the US by Erstwhile Records, so anyone intrigued by Index's catalog should take a look and support the fine work both these companies are doing for obscure and avant-garde cinema. The three films reviewed here appear on the Kurt Kren collection Which Way To CA?.]


Underground Explosion is Kurt Kren's approximation of the feeling of being frazzled and high at a rock concert. Kren was recording a performance by Krautrock band Amon Düül II at a 1969 underground music festival, but the recording is anything but a straightforward documentation. Instead, the frenzied, fragmentary nature of the film captures the drug-fueled, hazy nature of the music itself, communicating the confused, confusing sensation of this music and these kinds of experimental 60s festivals. The images are shaky and rapidly collaged together so that the action is often unclear: lights, mobs of people, a stage full of musicians, men slow-dancing with one another, performers stripping down at the microphone, a guitar, someone singing. Only sporadically does the frantic flow of images slow down, and then as often as not it's only to photograph some near-empty corner of the auditorium, the camera not settling down on anything in particular. The jagged pace of the editing is what really counts, the shapes and colors that go flying by, rather than the actual content.

Similarly, the soundtrack seldom provides much of a clue as to what the band actually sounds like, their spiky, dissonant rock jams only occasionally coming through clearly. Most of the time, the sound is as unpredictable as the images, giving the impression not of listening to a rock band but of listening to their bassy, distorted pulses through thick walls in a room next door to where they're actually playing. The soundtrack is muted, distorted, sometimes seemingly even reversed and manipulated, the sound occasionally fading out almost entirely to a dull headache-like throb at the edges of awareness.

Like Andy Warhol's famous deconstructive portrait of the Velvet Underground, this film is unsatisfying as a concrete document of a performance, but very satisfying indeed as a blurry, subjective suggestion of the feeling of being there.


Auf der Pfaueninsel is a devilishly simple conceptual joke told with Kurt Kren's characteristic deadpan wit. The film is a minute and 21 seconds long, which consists of a solid minute of methodically displayed credits followed by a few short snippets of "home movies" showing members of the Vienna Aktionists and family members at leisure. The joke is one of expectation, as Kren's opening credits lists the names of Günter Brus and the other Aktionists who will appear in the film. One expects something like Kren's other Aktionist films, a frantic collage of horrifying excerpts from the group's scatological, provocative performances.

Instead, Kren shows the provocateurs offstage, outside of the theater, as family and friends. They're taking a walk, visiting the zoo, goofing around a bit. Brus sees a van with some writing on the side and uses his hands to cover up some of the letters so that it spells "Brus," the kind of goofy, self-conscious joke that anyone would do in a home movie made while hanging around with friends. The other shots in this quick flash of footage are even more mundane, showing the members of the performance art troupe standing around looking at zoo enclosures or just walking along; most of the people named in the credits are never even seen clearly, just appearing from behind as they stroll with their family and friends. It's a very simple gag but a very clever one as well, a way of interrogating the public/private divide. Just because this is a film introduced with a cast list, does that make it every bit as much a performance or a piece of art as the Aktionists' usual displays? Or is it merely a "home movie" like any other?


Getting Warm was the third and best of the three self-described "bad home movies" that Kurt Kren made on a 1981-82 trip to the United States (the other two films in this trilogy of three-minute shorts were Which Way To CA? and Breakfast im Grauen). Shot in New England and Austin, Texas, this is the only one of the three films to be in color, and the change in film stock makes a big difference, giving the film a sensual, evocative quality very different from the dull, quotidian, washed-out grays of the other two films. Kren has said that these films are purposefully more amateurish than real amateur movies, the joke of the "bad home movie" description being that even amateur home documentarians usually edit their tapes a little, whereas Kren leaves in everything he shot. All the banal moments are left in, creating a home movie that simply captures a string of disconnected, soundless, usually quite unassuming moments. At one point, Kren even leaves in a shot in a room where it's too dark to see anything, and the frame goes entirely black for a few moments, the darkness too a document of something that happened, something seen and experienced and captured for posterity on film.

At another point, Kren cuts from night to day and back to night again, with three consecutive shots of a Safeway sign, glowing an eerie neon blue in the darkness, one of the only points of light, but rendered ordinary and unremarkable again in the light of day, in the daytime shot sandwiched in between those two quick slices of neon-lit night. Similarly, a television set flickers and glows, sometimes a square of light surrounded by black, sometimes just a focal point for the bored gaze of a reclining man on the nearby bed. Kren cuts in different views, different times of day and different lightings, to show how ordinary objects can shift and change depending on context, sometimes acquiring a weird prosaic kind of beauty for a few brief moments before a cut.

The Color of Pomegranates

Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates is an extraordinarily challenging film inspired by the 18th Century poet Sayat-Nova. The film is loosely based around the poet's life, but rather than relating a conventional biographical narrative, Parajanov's film is almost entirely visual and abstract, translating the subject's life and poetry into a purely visual language. Snippets of Sayat-Nova's words are read aloud or appear onscreen at various points throughout the film, but for the most part this is a strictly non-verbal movie, its images apparently drawn from the imagery of Sayat-Nova's poems so that the film becomes a cinematic poem rather than a mere biography of the poet.

The result is that Parajanov's work will inevitably be all but impenetrable and obtuse except to those already well-versed in the life and work of the film's subject. It's a very challenging and boldly avant-garde film that seeks to communicate feelings and sensations rather than concrete facts. The broad outlines of Sayat-Nova's life story are apparent here — starting with his boyhood memories and intimations of a young romance before he enters a monastery — but the emphasis is on the evocative visual poetry of Parajanov's aesthetic.


The film's look is influenced by the textual illuminations of religious texts, several of which appear within the film to confirm the visual reference point. Each shot is static and stagey, with Parajanov meticulously arranging theatrical tableaux in which symbolic figures enact strange rituals, often while staring, disconcertingly, into the camera. Blank white stucco walls are like the margins of the page in an ancient manuscript, while these figures in their elaborate, colorful costumes pose and contort themselves. Religious imagery proliferates throughout the film, as does Armenian folk art in the form of the old-fashioned garments and rugs that adorn the film's various tableaux. Parajanov is paying tribute to the culture and traditions of the region as much as to this particular poet, as evidenced by the emphasis on the scenes of animal sacrifices, dying of wool, and other rural pursuits.

A major theme running through the film is the opposition between sensuality and spirituality. As a boy, the poet (played as a child by Melkon Alekyan) witnesses scenes of tremendous sensuality, particularly in a voyeuristic sequence in which he peers into a bath house, where men are caked in mud and showered with water from urns, poured on them from overhead. The boy also gambols among the washerwomen, and Parajanov trains his camera on the women's bare feet, jogging along the wet ground as they scurry back and forth doing their work, their bare feet and ankles contained within the frame. Most potently, there's an image of a woman's naked torso, a seashell cupped over one of her breasts, a searing and strange image of sexual promise that seems to have great meaning for Parajanov, and for Sayat-Nova: the image is repeated several times, and the poet himself repeats the gesture at certain points by placing a seashell over his own chest, connecting him with the woman, whoever she was.


As a slightly older youth, Sayat-Nova falls in love, but he seems to reject sensuality and sexuality and enters a monastery instead, opting for a life of asceticism and restraint. (In fact, the poet was exiled from the court of the Georgian king Erekle II after falling in love with the king's sister.) Sensual temptations still plague him, though: a pair of nuns look at the handsome young monk and swoon with desire, alternating between hiding themselves behind thick rugs and lowering the rugs to peek out at him, succumbing to the same voyeuristic impulses that had caused the young Sayat-Nova to peep into the bath house. Later, a woman in a white nightdress and nun's habit leans over to kiss the monk/poet, but he holds up a rug between them, its thick fabric separating their bodies and their lips.

The film's romanticism and sensuality are further enhanced by the decision to have a single actress, Sofiko Chiaureli, play both the poet and his lover in their youths, androgynously embodying both genders as well as appearing in more symbolic guises later in the film. The Color of Pomegranates is a dense, baffling work, beautiful and strange, and utterly unlike anything else in the cinema. It's as intensely poetic as its subject, exploring the conflicting passions and religious feelings of the poet, as well as his deep connection with the traditional lifestyle he experienced as a child.

The Red and the White

Whoever says, with François Truffaut, that there's no such thing as a true anti-war film, has clearly never seen Miklós Jancsó's The Red and the White, a brilliant, harrowing war film that never even remotely falls into the familiar trap of glorifying war in the process of critiquing it. Set in 1919, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, the film depicts a series of skirmishes between Hungarian Communists, aiding the Bolsheviks, and the remnants of the Tsarist White Russian troops. These specific politics are hardly relevant to the film, however, because Jancsó seems far more interested in war as an abstract, in the absurdity and wastefulness of war. The film doesn't have a central presence, a protagonist or protagonists who the camera follows through their adventures; Jancsó doesn't even remain with one side or the other, instead fluidly shifting from one potential protagonist to the next, hardly even bothering to keep straight who's on which side as a series of bizarre, almost surreal vignettes create an atmosphere of confusion and pointlessness.

Jancsó's camera tracks smoothly across stark widescreen vistas, its movements suggesting the fluid way in which fortunes are reversed in the chaos of battle. The soldiers on both sides alternately charge and retreat, take prisoners and are taken prisoner, as the camera tracks this way and that. Prisoners are ordered to and fro, ordered to strip, to run, to line up, to line up again somewhere else. Some are killed, some are forced into games of sport, subject to the whims of sadistic commanders, others are stripped and told that they can leave; sometimes they're genuinely set free, and other times supposed freedom just leads into another game, another trap. There's no logic to all this, only the absurd rigor of military discipline, constantly arranging people into abstract groups, regimenting their lives and their deaths. People are picked at random to live or to die, most of them seemingly dying not in the heat of battle — which is rare and brief — but when they're toyed with, in post-battle boredom, by the victors.

Every victory is momentary, too, as Jancsó keeps underlining by constantly shifting from one side to the other. Sometimes the Reds seem to be winning, taking the White soldiers prisoner, but it's seldom long before more Whites will show up to turn the tide of battle yet again. To the people of the countryside, it hardly matters who's ascendant at any given moment, because no matter which side is dominant, the innocent civilians are subject to constant searches and harassment, the women always threatened with rape and assault, their only hope that there will be a stray honorable officer here and there among the troops.

Jancsó captures the fragmentation and absurdity of war in every moment of his film, alternating between long periods of stasis and confused bursts of violence in which it's seldom clear which side is which or who's winning. The countryside in which these battles are taking place seems largely empty, with big open fields dotted with farms and small wooden homes. The wide frame de-emphasizes any individuals: there are very few characters who survive more than a few minutes onscreen, and even when one of the soldiers momentarily steps into the foreground of the frame for an ad-hoc closeup, inevitably he's dead or melted back into the general clamor a few moments later. The closest the film comes to a conventional narrative is when Jancsó lingers for a somewhat longer stretch at a small hospital where a group of nurses shelter some fleeing Communists, refusing to divulge to the White soldiers who's who among the patients. One of the nurses (Tatyana Konyukhova) defiantly tells the commander, "there are no Reds or Whites here, only patients," a bold and rare expression of honor amidst all this vile pointlessness. Another nurse (Krystyna Mikolajewska) entertains a fling with one of the Reds — she doesn't need love, she says, seemingly just hungry for any human, sensual connection — but this brief hint of a conventional wartime romantic narrative is abruptly cut short by the arrival of the Whites, the abortive romance extinguished in the cruelest possible way, with Jancsó's camera remaining at an aloof distance from the violence, capturing the raw emotion of the moment from a slight remove. (Later, the Reds, oblivious to this cruelty, perpetrate a further injustice on the same woman.)


The war's absurdity is memorably captured in a surreal sequence where the Whites round up a group of nurses and bring them to a clearing in a nearby forest. The threat of violence hangs over the scene, but instead of shooting or raping the women, the soldiers bring out a band and order the women to dance together in the clearing, wearing fancy dresses provided by the soldiers, until finally sending them all home unharmed. There's no sense here, only inexplicable events and actions, outlandish expressions of war's total ridiculousness. Towards the end of the film, a group of Red soldiers strip off their uniforms and march, singing, towards a superior force of White soldiers, arrayed like human dominoes in neat rows on the field below. The men below remain static, allowing the charging enemy to pick off some of their number, the dead men falling and leaving gaps in the neat structure of the front line, before finally the surviving dominoes mow down all the approaching soldiers with a barrage of rifle fire. Jancsó observes this pointless exchange of deaths from above, peering down the hill from a distance so that the individual men are nothing but abstract shapes, identified only by the colors of their uniforms, part of a human formation, a human machine in which the individual parts are always expendable.

That shot, in which the opposing formations are clearly visible in relation to one another, is an exception here. Jancsó's framing often accentuates the confusion of war by shooting battle scenes so that the two sides are not in the same frame, and death enters unexpectedly from offscreen. The camera will often focus momentarily on a soldier only to have him suddenly die, with the opposing troops then entering from offscreen, the camera tracking over to accomodate the shift in perspective from one side to the other. There's no logic here, no strategy, and battles are often over as soon as they've begun, with one side being taken by surprise and slaughtered by the other, often while in the middle of the seemingly endless process of sorting out prisoners and enacting punishments and vengeance. The soldiers spend more time with that kind of administration than they do fighting. Both sides are constantly sorting out Hungarians from Russians, trying to identify who belongs to which nationality within the prisoners, but there's no consistency in how the two groups are treated, and the prisoners can't be sure if it's a death sentence to identify as Russian, as Hungarian, or, as often seems to be the case, if it doesn't really matter and they'll all be dying one way or another. In one early scene, the Whites sort out their prisoners in this way and then send the Hungarians home, which prompts one Hungarian who hadn't identified himself — presumably afraid of what it would mean to speak up — to belatedly come forward. By then, the Whites don't care, they tell him it's too late and herd him in with the Russian prisoners, who are then sent off to a cruel game that turns into a manhunt.

There's a clear sense here that these divisions — Red or White, Russian or Hungarian, citizen or soldier — are ultimately arbitrary and meaningless, as everyone is chewed up by the cruel anti-logic of the war. That's what makes The Red and the White such a bold war film, such a powerful statement. It's not tied to any ideology or any particular war, instead depicting the nonsensical wasteland into which war inevitably transforms any landscape, grinding up anyone in its path. The film follows the trail of death and destruction from one man to the next, allowing each man in turn to be the victor and the loser, the tormenter and the victim, the killer and the killed. Only rarely in all this is there any sense of right and wrong, of anyone able to maintain a strong moral center in the face of the absurdity and randomness that is war.

The Swimming Pool

The Swimming Pool is an almost stereotypically French, stereotypically 1960s kind of movie. Directed by Jacques Deray, this languid thriller is centered around the titular pool at a Riviera villa where the settled, seemingly happy couple of Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider) are spending a summer holiday. The film opens with an evocative, lazily sexy atmosphere of sun and water, the couple lounging their tanned bodies by the pool, wrestling poolside and passionately pawing and clawing one another. The film simmers and seethes with sex, Deray's camera sensuously drifting across the naked or near-naked bodies of the stars, capturing the clingy, sticky sensuality of these lazy summer days, their bodies warmed by the sun and sliding through the clear blue reflective water of the pool. The stars are beautiful, the scenery is beautiful, and the film has an almost savage, intense sexuality to it.

In the opening scenes, Marianne steps out of the water, sleek and dripping, and strolls around the pool to stand suggestively over Jean-Paul's reclining form, her legs slightly apart, her feet on either side of her head, so that he's staring up at her crotch. She then lays down with him and climbs on top of him, his hands scratching at her back, their bodies pressed tightly together. There's a desperate sexuality to their relationship, a raw physicality that's even more potently expressed in the somewhat later scene where Jean-Paul strips off Marianne's top and runs a tree branch across her bare skin, first gently and then whipping her with it like a lash, as though he's trying to both turn her on and to punish her, though for what it's not yet clear. When Marianne invites her former lover Harry (Maurice Ronet) and his daughter Penelope (Jane Birkin) to stay at the villa with them, the couple's seemingly happy, fulfilled relationship begins to strain, with Marianne's attraction to Harry rekindling while Jean-Paul finds his eye wandering to the coltish young body of Harry's daughter.

For a while, this simmering sexuality is enough, and the film gets by on the sexiness of its stars and the languidly beautiful imagery of their lazy summer idyll. Eventually, though, the film becomes slack, as lazy as its characters, content to set up this romantic and sexual tension without delving beyond the surface. Once Deray, working from a script co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière, sets up the basic premise of these criss-crossing desires and jealousies, the film stagnates, the tension simmering quietly but never really progressing beyond the charged exchange of glances and suggestive hints of infidelity. Even the violent climax is emotionally flat, and doesn't do nearly enough to shake up the characters.


That said, Deray provides some interest through the formal rigor with which he films this unfortunately static drama. This is a film in which nearly everything that happens can be boiled down to looks, glances, and Deray has a habit of honing in on the staring eyes of his protagonists, the camera slowly tracking in, the cuts drawing connections between one look and another. At one point, Penelope and Jean-Paul have been left alone at the villa while Marianne and Harry went out shopping together. Penelope finds Jean-Paul upstairs and stares nervously at his back, seemingly anticipating his seduction of her, and when he abruptly turns to face her, Deray captures him in closeup, his cool blue eyes taking her in, an unreadable expression on Delon's typically stoical face. At this point, Deray cuts away, not back to Penelope, but to Marianne, staring off into space, briefly distracted from her shopping by something, as though she could feel Jean-Paul's gaze, as though he were looking at her rather than the younger girl. The edit connects them even though they're apart, pairing off with others, starting to drift apart.

In another scene, later in the film, the camera tracks slowly across the couch where Jean-Paul and Penelope are sitting close together, watching a silent comedy on TV, and then begins crossing a gap that separates them from Marianne, sitting apart from them, the camera suddenly jumping and speeding up its movement as it approaches her to signify the disconnect between her and this newly forming couple. Deray also makes good use of window frames, which segment images of Penelope and Marianne in particular, the two women partioned behind glass, divided up by the games of jealousy and conquest that the men, former friends and rivals, seem to be playing here. The pool itself similarly distorts and reflects the action at the villa, creating wavery reflections in which everything is upside-down and elongated.

Deray's chilly, formally precise aesthetic makes for some striking, suggestive compositions, but one is still left with the impression that all this silent staring and affectless introspection doesn't add up to very much in the end. At its best, The Swimming Pool is sexy and sensuous, but its sexiness can only take it so far, and it's very difficult to locate the heart or the brain behind that sexy, fleshy surface.

Le Doulos

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos is a bleak, twisty crime film in which no one is what they seem to be, and loyalty and friendship can never be taken for granted. Moody and brilliantly shot, it's a powerful examination of betrayal and the twisted concept of honor among thieves. Style is everything for Melville: his crooks and criminals prowl around and scheme against one another in a perpetually foggy, dimly lit night that seldom gives way to day or sunlight. Men in trenchcoats and fedoras stalk through the shadows, visible only as silhouettes through windows, staring at their fragmented reflections in mirrors as cracked as their souls. Pistol shots sound as loud bangs in the night, and the bodies pile up as these criminals kill one another in the name of revenge, greed, friendship, and a warped concept of justice.

Maurice (Serge Reggiani) has just been released from prison, but he's already getting tangled up again with his old associates and his familiar criminal schemes. He's tying up loose ends, exacting revenge on a former friend in the opening scenes and then planning his next heist. When his plan goes wrong, he blames his friend Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who everyone has always said was a snitch and an informer, so it shouldn't have been any surprise to Maurice if his friend turned on him. It's expected, so much so that it almost seems as though Maurice wants the job to go badly, wants to get caught or killed by the cops: he's repeatedly told that he's going to be informed on, and he suspects that it's all "too easy" and could be a trap like the job that sent him to prison years ago, and yet he does the job anyway. There's a sense of fatalism in Maurice, a resignation to things going bad, and he's not the least bit surprised when he sees the cops closing in on him just minutes into this job.

Things aren't always what they seem to be, however, and after this point Melville centers the narrative on the supposed snitch Silien, who's involved in a complicated and twisty scheme, the final purpose of which is anything but clear. Melville methodically, rigorously lays out Silien's plans and actions, watching as he seems to be playing everyone against one another, juggling multiple plots and pointing various players from among both the police and the criminals at one another. Throughout it all, his motivations remain cloudy, which is what makes the film so compelling and ambiguous. Is he helping a friend? Is he maneuvering to make a big score for himself? Is he aiding the cops or simply manipulating them into position for whatever his larger plan is? Melville, through Silien, finally lays it all out in a series of explanatory flashbacks towards the end of the film, and the narrative puzzle falls into place with the satisfying click of a well-constructed mystery.


What's interesting is that the mystery here is not a whodunnit but a whydunnit: everything that happens is utterly clear, though a few missing scenes are slotted in by the flashbacks at the end. What's up for dispute, for the most part, is motivation, the unseen thought processes behind the mysterious actions of this ambiguous antihero. It's a mystery of the mind, focusing on the ephemeral nature of loyalty and friendship: there's no way of knowing what's going on in the minds of those who claim to be friends, no way of knowing who's plotting betrayal and who's genuine. This is especially true for these underworld figures, who can trust no one, and for whom lifelong friendships often end in bloody murder — as evidenced, of course, by the opening scenes, in which it seems as though Maurice is betraying his own friend. Of course, nothing is as it seems here, and even that seemingly straightforward action is complicated by certain revelations later in the film.

Melville's high-contrast noir-influenced style adds to this sense of instability and shadowy motivations. Killers are always lurking in the shadows, holding pistols, their faces obscured beneath the brims of their omnipresent fedoras. The streets seem to be empty of anyone other than cops and criminals, which may be why there are never any witnesses to the film's many crimes, only people who say they saw someone, a vague silhouette perhaps, their accounts never lining up to the reality. As a result, the cops have to count on informers, as one detective complains during the stunning sequence where he pumps Silien for information, a scene that Melville stages in a single nearly ten-minute take, the camera restlessly circling the room as cop and criminal try to outmaneuver one another.

This is a man's world that Melville is documenting here. The women, like Maurice's girl Thérèse (Monique Hennessy) and Silien's girl Fabienne (Fabienne Dali), are simply used and abused by the men, manipulated as pawns in these games of betrayal and scheming. Though Silien is planning to run off with Fabienne, to get out of this criminal life and live a quiet life with her, everything he does is centered around Maurice; it's for the sake of masculine friendship, not love, that he does everything he does. Le Doulos is a stylish, compelling noir in which those bonds of male friendship are repeatedly strained, tested, and interrogated.

Four Agnès Varda shorts, 1957-1968

In Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux, Agnès Varda sets out to document and discourse upon the architecture of various Renaissance-era castles, but her playful sensibility and constant digressions make this anything but a conventional documentary. This is apparent right from the opening credits, which whimsically sync up the movements of a trio of gardeners with the jazzy score by André Hodeir, pairing sweeping rakes with brushed cymbals. The voiceover mostly recounts facts about the reigns of various French kings and the castles they built, the renovations that were added to them over the generations by subsequent rulers. Often, though, this narration is interrupted by excerpts from poems, since the narrator is easily distracted from the succession of kings and castles by the stories of the poets who wrote within these walls or served these kings, and Varda's camera frequently wanders off the beaten track into the surrounding woods and gardens to admire the cool orange light of an autumnal glade or the geometric maze of an elaborately laid out garden, still immaculately maintained by the gardeners who seem to excite much of Varda's visual interest. It's as though the film keeps subverting its royalist history with anecdotes about artists and laborers, taking the focus off the upper-class, the big names of history, to focus on ordinary people and obscure poets.

The images are idyllic and pretty, capturing the charm of rural France surrounding all the photogenic ruins of the past. The film was commissioned by the French Tourist Bureau, and those origins are apparent in the scenic imagery of the countryside and the informative narration, but Varda can't play it straight. The narration relates the facts but has a flippant tone that suggests it's all read with a sly, skeptical smile, and the constant digressions suggest that Varda's wide-ranging interests can't be contained by her ostensible subject.

She finds an old man painting the castles and for a while focuses on his charming, rough canvases more than the actual scenes he's painting. At the site where Joan of Arc gave her famous prophecy to the Dauphin, Varda's camera dramatically pans upward at a key moment in the voiceover, a visual punctuation to the narrative. Gardeners occasionally stroll through the frame, making gnomic comments about trees or architecture. Fashion models in glamorous gowns, carrying shopping bags full of expensive clothes, wander through the ancient grounds, evoking the fashionable, idle women who once inhabited these lavish palaces. It's sensual and eclectic more than factual, anything but a dry tourist guide to the region.


Du côté de la côte is a satirical, mocking documentary about tourist season on the French Riviera. Agnès Varda's examination of the coast, packed with tourists from all over, emphasizes the absurdity of it all, poking gentle fun at the trendiness and crowdedness of the region, the superficial qualities of tourism. A bright, colorful, lively short, it provides a vibrant overview of the charms of the Riviera, both its genuine beauty and its kitschy tourist trap nonsense, the real historical foundations sitting side by side with imported, readymade exoticism, buildings made up to look like Asian temples or Russian palaces, all coexisting along the same sun-swept coastline.

Varda finds plenty of delightful, silly, striking images in her tour along the coast. The narrator opens the film by saying that they're not going to focus on the natives — "we'll leave them to the ass and the ox," he says, as some old peasants stroll by with farm animals — but rather on the tourists, and the camera immediately begins panning across a line of sunbathers in tiny bathing suits, before pulling back to show a whole beach crowded full of reclining bodies, with hardly an inch left to move or walk around. Varda finds some photogenic sunburns, peeling skin, demarcation lines with lobster-red flesh above and pale white below. At one point, she holds a deadpan funny shot of a little boy staring intently at his middle-aged mother's butt crack as she lays on her stomach to sun-bathe.

Spliced-in images of Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot suggest that all these tourists are searching for glamour, trying to fulfill movie dreams of high-class luxury that are otherwise unattainable, acting like movie stars relaxing at the shore. Varda also subtly undercuts the touristic impulse and its superficial approach to the real, rich history of the region, which has hosted great names of art and culture throughout the centuries. Even museums are ripe for mockery: the narrator says that "Cro-Magnon man received homage," and Varda accompanies the words with an image of a dog rooting in a museum display of a skeleton, pushing the skull around with its nose. Ultimately, Varda finds the real essence of the Riviera in a deserted rocky island, an Eden, devoid of people except for a pair of naked sunbathers, quiet and truly blissful in comparison to the manufactured, commercialized bliss peddled all along the more populated areas of the tourist coast. The camera's sensuous gliding in this final section says it all, evoking the peace and tranquility of this natural beauty without all the people around to screw it up.


Elsa la rose is Agnès Varda's affectionate chronicle of the love between the writers Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. The couple had met in 1928 and married in 1939, and they were old and contented when Varda filmed them together in 1965 — five years, as it turned out, before Elsa's death. It's a very sweet film, a tribute to a love that had lasted a long time and been immortalized in many of Aragon's poems. In striking black-and-white cinematography, Varda captures the couple at their home, talking about their lives together and their shared memories. Varda weaves in Aragon's poetry as well, narrated by Michel Piccoli, to bring together these images of enduring love with the art that had so often arisen from that lifelong partnership.

Varda's loving portrait of these two aging writers includes an interesting examination of the relationship between life and art. Elsa discusses how she feels about being the subject of so many poems, what she thinks about so many people reading her husband's descriptions of her youth and beauty, so that in many readers' minds she is forever frozen at the age of 20, young and pretty. Varda keeps cutting back and forth from images of the writers the way they look now and images of them from old, faded photographs, their pasts and their youths jutting up against the present as they tell their stories.


In 1968, Agnès Varda traveled to California to make a documentary about the Black Panther Party, focusing especially on a rally to free Huey P. Newton, who'd been arrested for killing a policeman. In the resulting film, called simply Black Panthers, Varda and her crew interview the Panthers and their supporters at the rally and surrounding events, trying to present a portrait of the group's ideas and politics. Most eloquent and interesting is Eldridge Cleaver's wife, Kathleen, a high-ranking communications officer in the party, who speaks to Varda's crew about the importance of embracing black ideals of beauty rather than trying to straighten one's hair or lighten one's skin in deference to white ideals of beauty. Varda seems especially fascinated by the seeming gender equality within the party, the opportunity for women to take on important roles in this political struggle, though a jailhouse interview with Newton himself reveals some strange remnants of old attitudes, as he says that women have "duties" within the party and then hastens to add that he doesn't mean sexual duties.

Interestingly, though Varda is obviously sympathetic to the Black Panther cause and the radical politics of the movement in general, the film maintains some skepticism regarding the way in which the drive to free Newton seems to skirt around the issue of whether or not he actually did what he's accused of. The film crew asks many of the rally attendees some pointed questions about Newton's guilt or innocence, about what kind of defense is being mounted to prove his innocence, and the narration points out that no one seems to care, that whether or not he actually killed someone or not seems to be immaterial. His prosecution is considered solely in political terms, with no attention paid to the facts of the case, and it's to Varda's credit that she doesn't just accept this at face value but continually questions it within the film.

The film's coda recounts the verdict that Newton was found guilty of manslaughter, but given a lighter sentence than expected as a compromise between those who wanted him freed and those who wanted him to get the death penalty — a compromise that satisfies no one, the voiceover points out. Varda then describes how two angry policemen responded to the verdict by shooting out the windows of a Black Panther headquarters, shooting the photographs of the party's leaders in the windows of the office. This is an expression, the voiceover says, of "the magical act of killing the image, usually attributed to so-called primitive and non-white people," a strange irony in which these enraged white policemen enact a superstitious, almost voodoo-like ritual as a symbolic revenge, a symbol of their hate and anger. That's a fascinating analysis, one that, typically of Varda, gravitates towards the symbolic power of images and the importance of the image in defining politics. Thus her images of the shattered glass windows and the photos riddled with bullets are crucially important as reminders of the systemic violence and atmosphere of hate which surrounded the Panthers and created the necessity for their struggle in the first place.

Black Girl

As the first feature film ever made by a black director in sub-Saharan Africa, Ousmane Sembene's 1966 debut Black Girl was a historical landmark, marking the novelist and fledgling filmmaker as the father of African film. At only an hour long, the film is a brisk, punchy, documentary-like examination of economic relations between black Africans and white Europeans, and the crises of identity that are caused by this state of being.

The film focuses on a young Senegalese woman named Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), who's hired as a governess for a white family (Anne-Marie Jelinek and Robert Fontaine) who are living in Dakar. When the family returns to France for a vacation, they bring Diouana back with them to their apartment on the Riviera, but she finds that the trip is not at all what she expected. Outside of Africa, where the family had relied on Diouana only to take care of the children, they now treat her with more naked contempt, parading her before their friends for her exoticism, asking her to cook and clean for them like a maid rather than a governess. The trip to France, which Diouana had been excited about, actually lays bare the true nature of her relationship with this family, a relationship that's more like slavery than a boss/employee dynamic.

Sembene brilliantly conveys the disconnection that Diouana feels in relation to her employers. Diouana barely speaks to them, her words instead relegated to a running internal monologue in which she registers her complaints and her thoughts about her situation, never giving voice to these ideas aloud. The lack of communication is an important thread in the film, as Diouana has no outlet for the ideas running through her head. She questions her very sense of self, unsure of what her place is in this family or in this unfamiliar country, and yet she has no one she can speak with, no one with whom she can share her experiences. The communication here is strictly one-way, with the whites barking orders at her, telling her what she can and can't do and what they need her to do for them, but Diouana remains blankly silent despite her active inner life.


Language barriers and the lack of literacy prevent true communication. When she receives a letter from her mother, Diouana can't respond herself because she can't write, so her white employers write the letter for her, inventing generic responses for their servant, while Diouana feels alienated from the whole process — especially since she knows her mother can't write either, which means that someone else wrote the letter for her, as well. What should be a channel of communication between mother and daughter is instead mediated by others on both ends so that the letter becomes just another form of alienation.

Sembene films Diouana's disheartening, restricted existence in stark, plain black-and-white, crisp and straightforward, with not a trace of ornamentation. There are many closeups with the young woman staring into or just past the camera as her internal monologue narrates her thoughts. The style is rough and casually realistic, but it suits the material well. Sembene renders the apartment where Diouana spends all her time in France as a blank, boring place with mostly undecorated walls, except for the African mask that Diouana gave her employers and which serves as a symbol of their surface appreciation and appropriation of African culture, as well as a reminder of Diouana's distance from her home. The sense of claustrophobia is palpable.

This is a powerful debut, dark and uncompromising in its portrait of a young African woman's increasing hopelessness. Sembene unsurprisingly portrays the white French as clueless and nasty, but despite the caricatures, the source of Diouana's suffering is actually quite subtle and multi-faceted. It arises from a general sense that she's being used, slotted into a system that's an echo of slavery, subjected to the sexualized glances of white men and the petty demands of white women, called lazy and only praised for her "exotic" cooking, denied any time or place of her own. It's an intense and affecting film, abruptly veering into tragedy at the end, offering no escape. Interesting, Sembene doesn't end things there but lets the story continue with a fascinating, richly ambiguous coda in which the white employers are forced to confront the results of their behavior.

The Young Girls of Rochefort

Jacques Demy followed up his musical masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with a second Catherine Deneuve musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort, a delightful companion piece that continues the throughline of Demy's sustained examination of love, longing, and separation, a thematic current that extends back not only to Umbrellas but to Demy's debut feature Lola. This is a more conventional musical than Umbrellas; not all of the dialogue is sung, and the song-and-dance numbers here are overt breaks in the diegesis as they are in most musicals, and as they weren't in Umbrellas, where the music was smoothly incorporated into the quotidian so that everything was transmuted into song. Despite the differences, Demy, again working with composer Michel Legrand, has concocted another marvelous tribute to the Hollywood musical form, with bright, popping colors, energetic choreography, and musical numbers that burst out of ordinary reality with all the force and beauty of a dream, elegant movements that become dances, open expressions of emotion poured out through song. It's dazzling, colorful, and romantic, and though it's not quite as bittersweet or near-tragic as Umbrellas, that undercurrent of melancholy still drifts just below the surface vibrancy.

This is an exuberant fantasy of love and separation, a film in which nearly everyone has an ideal love, someone they may not even have met, or who they only glimpsed briefly, but who is clearly meant for them, destined to be the great love of their lives. The plot is thus a tightly constructed framework of missed connections and improbable coincidences, constant chance meetings and chance misses in which these would-be lovers careen around Rochefort, searching for love and sometimes colliding with it, or nearly colliding with it and passing by none the wiser. There's very nearly no plot beyond this maze of love and desire, the connections between the characters defined by who loves or lusts for whom, who's destined for whom. At the center of the maze are the twin sisters Delphine (Deneuve) and Solange (Françoise Dorléac) and their mother Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux, the only performer in the film whose voice isn't dubbed for songs). The sisters each have an ideal man who they're searching for without having met him; love for them, as for most of these characters, is an idea before it's a reality, a very romantic Hollywood musical concept. They know exactly what the man they love will be like, and they're simply waiting for their dreams to take shape in reality.

For Delphine, her ideal man will be a sensitive, poetic artist and intellectual, which perfectly describes the sailor/painter Maxence (Jacques Perrin), who just so happens to have painted a portrait of his own ideal woman who looks exactly like Delphine. Throughout the film, these two never meet, though Demy has great fun arranging near-collisions and coincidences that place them just seconds apart, their meeting always imminent — a word that Maxence turns into a pun that he delights in trying out on everyone he meets — without ever actually taking place. That's one source of the film's melancholy, this sense that there's a great love out there for everyone, a soul mate, but that their meeting might not be fated, that in fact fate and chance might conspire to keep them apart rather than bring them together, the precise opposite of the meet-cute conventions of the movie romance.


There's a remarkable shot that prefigures the melancholy of Delphine's story, suggesting that her tale will be streaked with sadness even before she's properly introduced. At the beginning of the film, a carnival is setting up in the main square, the carnies dancing through their preparations, turning their work into choreography. As this number comes to an end, a plaintive, minor-key piano motif slowly replaces the more upbeat tune that had accompanied the choreographed carnies. As the piano melody takes over, the camera begins swooningly drifting upwards, following a few of the carnies as they walk away from the fair ground, and the camera tracks away from them and up towards a window where little girls can be seen practicing ballet. The camera floats through the window and into the studio, where Solange plays the piano while Delphine gracefully strolls between the dancers, instructing them. The combination of the melancholy piano music with that evocatively graceful shot immediately communicates a sense of deep emotions being stirred up, and even though the sisters soon launch into their charmingly upbeat signature tune, that plaintive tune still lingers over them.

That's not the only darkness drifting through the film. As in many of Demy's other films, sailors and soldiers are important figures because war is constantly lurking in the background; as Yvonne says while reading the newspaper, "trouble is everywhere," suggesting the outbreak of war and violence, likely in Algeria, which had so poignantly haunted Umbrellas as well. A café patron says that the soldiers who march in rigorous formation through the streets would "shoot us like rabbits," a rather morbid thought that's contradicted by the presence of the sensitive sailor Maxence, who's consumed by his poetry and his paintings and indifferent to the military maneuvers, simply counting the days until he can return to civilian life. He clearly doesn't belong in the Navy, and one fears for him, fears that he won't be able to escape unscathed.


The many stories of lost loves, missed connections and aborted affairs here are darkly mirrored in the story of an ax murderer who killed a woman he'd loved and longed for many years, suggesting one much more grisly possible outcome for these tragicomic love stories. There's also more than a hint of violence in Delphine's affair with the gallery owner Guillaume (Jacques Riberolles), who tries to force her to marry him even though she says she doesn't love him. Guillaume sinisterly makes his abstract, Pollock-like paintings by shooting at bags of paint dangling over a canvas — when Delphine breaks up with him, he suggestively fires at the black bag — and at one point he turns his pistol on Maxence's Delphine-like portrait of the "feminine ideal." It's easy to imagine Guillaume one day moving beyond such symbolic violence and enacting another variation on the ax murderer's revenge for his jilted love.

Despite this undercurrent of violence and ugliness, the film remains relentlessly bright and sunny, its colors unreally bright and clean, this town a place where even an ordinary stroll down the street becomes a lighter-than-air dance for these hazy-eyed romantics. Solange's destined true love is the composer Andy (Gene Kelly), who she meets on the street by chance, holding a loving glance for a few moments before they separate. Kelly's presence here is the surest sign of Demy's love and respect for the Hollywood musical, and he gives the American actor and dancer two of the film's most dazzling dance numbers, which together encompass the full circle of the film's rapturous approach to love. In the first, after meeting Solange for the first time, Andy is so excited that he spontaneously erupts into an exuberant song-and-dance number, skipping through the streets, engaging in impromptu choreography with passersby, and leaping up onto his car — a white convertible like the one in Lola, since Andy is this film's version of a beloved Demy trope, the masculine presence who's intrinsically linked to his car. It's an exhilarating performance, pure emotion translated into motion and music, the essence of the movie musical. At the conclusion of the film, when he's finally reunited with Solange, their love again takes the form of a dance, a graceful and fluid interplay of separation and togetherness that teases the embrace, the kiss, that finally marks the conclusion of this courting dance, before the couple walks away wrapped in each other's arms.

Fittingly for such a romantic, emotional film, it closes with a happy ending several times over, even if it never quite delivers on the inevitable union of one of its potential couples, just dangling the possibility, tantalizing with it, hinting at it several times before coming just close enough to the actuality of it that the mere continued possibility is exciting in itself. It's a wonderful film, bursting with life and joy, tempering the bittersweet emotions of Demy's previous Umbrellas of Cherbourg with the pleasures of love in its anticipation and its fulfillment.

Maurice Pialat's Turkish Chronicles

Though Maurice Pialat began making short films and documentaries in 1951, at the age of 26, it wasn't until 1968 that he completed his first feature, L'enfance nue. The years before this were a long period of experimentation, using whatever materials he could get with limited means to create a series of rough amateur works that both presaged and overlapped with the nascent French New Wave. This period was capped off by the director's 1964 trip to Turkey, where, using spare reels of film stock taken from Alain Robbe-Grillet, he made a series of six fascinating, poetic documentaries about the country. These Turkish films, each of them around 10-15 minutes long, represent the finest accomplishment of Pialat's early work, with the director turning his keen cinematic eye and feel for observation on this foreign land, its culture, its architecture and its history.

All of Pialat's Turkish films are uniquely interested in the country — especially Istanbul — as it was, not just as it is at the precise moment that Pialat is filming it. History informs these films in a big way, with the voiceover narration (which incorporates excerpts from various authors) introducing tension between the images of the modern-day city and the descriptions of incidents from its long and rich history.

The first film in the series, Bosphore, is also the only one that was shot in color, presumably because most of the stock that Pialat could scrounge up was black and white. Pialat makes good use of the color here; this is a strikingly beautiful film where each composition is richly layered and perfectly balanced. In the Istanbul harbor, boats drift by while a bright green flag flutters in the breeze in the foreground. Rippling light patterns are reflected off the water onto the red-brown wood of a ship's hull. Pialat foregrounds distinctively misshapen trees with the city stretching out beneath these bursts of green, a tightly coiled maze.

Most memorable of all are the hazy, foggy images of the Istanbul harbor, with black silhouettes of ships drifting through the thick air, shadowy figures working on the shore, while the voiceover speaks of "ghost ships" gliding through the fog. This port connects Turkey with the rest of Europe via ferries that continually make the trip back and forth. Turkey is in a unique geographical position, straddling Europe and Asia, bordering both southern Europe and the Middle East, and Pialat offers up hazy, almost mystical images of the port that provides these connections. The history of Europe's interactions with Turkey are a major subject of these films, drawing a contrast between Turkey's current place in the world and its ancient status as the center of the Ottoman Empire, which at one point represented a threat to Europe and a major flashpoint in the ongoing conflict between the forces of Islam and those of Christianity.

These themes are introduced in outline here; whereas the other Turkish films tend to be tightly focused on a single event or theme, Bosphore serves as an overall introduction to the series, a portrait of the city as a whole. At one point, Pialat draws a visual and verbal comparison between the minarets of Islam and the towers erected by the oil industry, suggesting an implicit connection between the two aspects of the Middle East most often emphasized by foreigners to the region. More than that, though, he's bridging the gap between past and present, between the old world of the Ottoman Empire and the new, modern world of industry, international trade and communion with Europe. Towards the end of the film, Pialat holds a long, arcing tracking shot from a boat as it glides past an ancient, crumbling cathedral surrounded with wooden scaffolds, a city's heritage under construction, the beauty of the old world peeking out from beneath the façade of modernity, the old and decaying being restored to some semblance of its former glory. It's an elegant encapsulation of the film's themes: the old restored, through modern means, to resemble a modern conception of what it might have looked like when it was new.


Byzance is a bleak, melancholy film about the history of religious conflict and conquest that characterized the relationship between the Middle East and Europe for so long. It is specifically about the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II and his defeat of the Byzantine Empire at Constantinople in 1453, pushing the Roman Empire's reach back from the borders of the Middle East. The sounds of cannon fire, military drumming, and battle cries accompany the images of modern-day Istanbul, as the voiceover (assembled from texts by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig) describes the battles and military maneuvers that led up to this decisive moment.

This film is about the ways in which history can be seen as a series of erasures, one event building on top of the others in never-ending layers to create the present. Pialat shows an Islamic mosque that, the voiceover says, was once a Christian cathedral, until the city was conquered, the church's Christian mosaics whitewashed from its pillars, the cross taken down from atop the dome, repurposed by the conquerors for their own religion. The victors get to define what lasts and what doesn't, what gets passed down to future generations and what gets wiped away, never to be seen again.

Istanbul is of course a perfect site for this kind of inquiry, since it has had such a long history of change and reversals, conquest and repurposing. Even the city's name is fluid, and Pialat shifts constantly (not just here, but throughout the Turkish series) between calling it Istanbul, Constantinople, and Byzantium, the name of the city before Mehmed II sacked it and absorbed it into his own empire. Pialat is acknowledging that his images represent only the top layer of history, the accumulated sediment of many centuries that has built to this precise historical moment, to this particular image. The film's final image is an especially poignant examination of the ways in which time shapes and reshapes a place's character, through processes both natural and human. Right at the end of the film, Pialat tracks along a wall of stone faces, starting with some that have been relatively well-preserved and gradually panning until the wall is increasingly smooth, the details of the faces eroded and erased, their features blank, lost to history.


La Corne d'or is mostly concerned with religious ritual, examining the mosque (and former cathedral) discussed in Byzance. As a contrast against Istanbul's status as a center of historical religious conflict, Pialat — drawing here on texts by the French poet Gérard de Nerval — also describes the city as a place of strange ethnic and religious harmony, with representatives of various cultures and religions living in close contact. He emphasizes the city's hybrid culture, its blend of Southern European and Arab influences, reflected in both its people and its very construction.

Pialat seems fascinated by the architecture of Istanbul, and in this short especially he's expressing his love for the look of the city, its sprawling density and complexity. He composes several crisply edited montages that examine the city's architecture from multiple angles and perspectives, observing closeup details and cutting from there to the macro structures that form larger geometric patterns stretching out across the city. Pialat's images emphasize the design tension in Ottoman architecture between hard geometric lines and rounded domes, simultaneously suggesting rigidity and fluidity, contributing to the city's fractal-like networks of tightly packed buildings.

Of course, this density is also a reflection of the poverty that afflicts many of the city's people. At one point, the voiceover compares Istanbul to a stage set best admired from afar, without peeking backstage, because its rigorous beauty and historical richness obscures the poverty that is rampant in many of its neighborhoods. This passage has the feel of a self-correction, with Pialat acknowledging that his romantic, poetic images of the city's beauty risk obscuring some of the human dimensions of the people who live there.


Istanbul is probably the most conventional documentary of Pialat's Turkish series, providing a general profile of the titular city, its different neighborhoods, and the different cultures and ways of living that coexist within its sprawling borders. As the other films in the series also suggest, Pialat sees Turkey, and Istanbul in particular, as a junction point between Europe and the East, between the old and the new, between history and modernity. That's the subject of this film as well, capturing the way that modern Istanbul is split between sections where it looks just as it did in Ottoman times, sections that are more European in character, modernized industrial districts, markets that have one foot in the old world and one in the new. In one early shot, Pialat captures the city at night, bathed in neon, crowded with cars that speed recklessly through streets not meant for such traffic, its modernity coexisting somewhat uncomfortably with all the ancient architecture and other reminders of its historical roots.

At one point, Pialat explores a market that was once the greatest in the world until an earthquake devastated it. This somewhat melancholy segment describes how the market was rebuilt in 1889, and now looks like a typical mall, full of cheap junk for tourists to buy. The voiceover says that, to really know what this grand market was once like, one can only rely on the romantic accounts of ancient travelers who witnessed it firsthand. The narration then falls silent as Pialat's camera observes the somewhat chintzy reality of the modern market, so different from its former glorious reputation. It's a subtly sad and ironic commentary on the limitations of the modern world: the supposed advances of progress don't always lead to something better, and the cost of Istanbul's place in the modern world is the loss of some of the things that once contributed to the city's distinctive character.

Pialat also comments upon the intrusion of a Western conception of sex: nudie magazines with naked women smiling from the newstands, large billboard advertisements with women in their underwear, selling sex to men, and burlesque shows with dancers in skimpy outfits, belly-dancing to Arab music, somewhere between a traditional performance and a strip show. This is probably the most explicit sign of the changes wrought in this culture by contact with the West: in a culture where women are only just starting to earn some independence, and many still wear veils and traditional garb, this highly sexualized, lurid imagery is nevertheless already starting to appear everywhere.


Maître Galip is the most poetic and powerful of Pialat's Turkish Chronicles, using the poems of Nazim Hikmet to accompany a series of evocative images of ordinary working class people in Istanbul. This was the film that Pialat himself claimed was the most complete realization of what he was aiming for with his Turkish documentaries. It's not difficult to see why this was his favorite: here he abandons the historical commentary and documentary observation of the other shorts in favor of an emotional emphasis on the lives of the poor and the unemployed.

The film's final section is accompanied by a poem in which the title character, Mr. Galip, wonders, at various points in his life, why he can't go to school, why his family's so poor, why he must work so hard in his father's shop, why his father has to close his shop when bigger factories are opened up in the town, and why he's perpetually out of work. It's a moving account of the struggles of the lower class that's as universal as it is specific to Istanbul or Turkey. At the beginning of the film, the narration starts with the local, observing how many factories are in Istanbul and yet how many people are out of work, then wonders how many factories are in the world, and how many men have no jobs everywhere.

In the final part of the film, as the narration walks through the stages of Galip's life, Pialat accompanies the lines with images of children, then teens and young men, and finally older men for the part of the poem when Galip realizes that he is 52 years old, two years older than his father was when he died, and yet no better off than previous generations, who also struggled in poverty. Pialat uses a lot of closeups throughout this film, strikingly composed images that focus on the faces of random people encountered in the streets.

As with the segment on the commercialized market in Istanbul, this film is dealing with the sadder fallout of modernization, as old family businesses shut down, replaced by factories where jobs are unstable and men are continually being laid off, their functions no longer necessary. The film is so striking because of the juxtaposition of Hikmet's poetic ruminations on unemployment and poverty with Pialat's crisp images of rundown neighborhoods and men stooped with hard labor. Pialat's pride in this film is well-justified: it is undoubtedly the best of his Turkish documentaries, dealing concisely and movingly with the human toll of the meeting between Europe and the East that Pialat sees in Turkey.


Pehlivan focuses on a three-day wrestling competition, an ancient tradition that dates back over a thousand years to the time of the Ottoman Empire, originating in the games the soldiers would play to entertain themselves in between battles. Maybe that's why there's more than a hint of homoeroticism in the way the wrestlers oil themselves up with grease, making sure to cover every inch of their bodies so that their opponents will be unable to get a grip. Pialat's closeups emphasize the men's muscular bodies jammed together and sliding off one another, posed in intimate, twisted arrangements, struggling desperately for a grip on each other's bodies. Arms are jammed down pants, one of the only places there's some potential for a handhold, and the whole thing is very suggestive and sensual, a form of intimate male contact that's sanctioned as a show of strength and masculinity.

These are the pehlivans, which the narration says means "wrestler, paladin, knight," all three meanings implied by the same word, connecting this sport showcase to the very real battles and conquests described in the earlier shorts in the series. Pialat contrasts all this "male exhibitionism" against the accompanying strip shows where curvy gypsy girls shake and dance in barely there bikinis, allowing their clothes to shake off their bodies, flashing the audience, smiling the whole time, while the men hoot and whistle. It's a pretty provocative parallel that Pialat is drawing here, suggesting that male sexuality and female sexuality have found very different culturally mandated outlets that nevertheless are somewhat similar in providing opportunities for the admiration of the human form. Just as the men display their muscular physiques when they wrestle, dressed only in their identical black, oiled-up pants, their bodies glistening as they roll around in the grass before a large and appreciative audience, the women display their bodies in a show that's framed quite differently but amounts to the same thing. As in many cultures, the male displays require some macho justification, while the women's shows are transparently sexual in nature, but the suggestion is that sport of this kind is just sex in disguise.

La femme infidèle

It is already apparent from the first few moments of Claude Chabrol's La femme infidèle that this film will be concerned with domesticity and the illusion of the happy home. The film opens at the lavish country estate of the Desvallées family, Charles (Michel Bouquet), his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran), and their son Michel (Stéphane di Napoli). They're enjoying an idyllic, relaxing day at home, sitting on the sunny lawn, enjoying one another's company. They come together around a table in an almost parodic, self-conscious tableau of domestic tranquility and shared love, and then Chabrol blurs the image, erasing this happy family into an indistinct smear as the credits roll and the suggestive title appears, announcing right up front that this seeming peace and perfection is all a lie.

Chabrol is, in his usual stoical, subtle way, examining the fault lines and secrets of this ideal family. Even if the title didn't telegraph much of the film's plot up front, it would be obvious early on that something is amiss here: the family seems somehow too happy, everything too smooth and frictionless, their smiles too sweet and their chatter too banal. A bedroom scene reveals the sexless detachment between the couple, a disjunction between the smoldering sensuality of Hélène and the staid, lazy comfort of Charles, who seems to be taking his wife for granted, slipping easily into middle-aged boredom. As he himself admits, he's set in his ways, unwilling to change, not interested in exercising to get rid of his middle-aged paunch, a sign of his complacency. Chabrol pans from Charles lying in bed in pajamas, the covers pulled up over him, across the room to Hélène, framed by a doorway, doing her nails in a very short nightie, her long legs curled up and extended sensually, a very provocative and sexy image. Back across the room, Charles gets out of bed and turns on a record of pleasant classical music, then gets back under the covers. When Hélène joins him, she doesn't get under the sheets but stretches her body out on the bed, in a pose that all too obviously offers sex, though Charles, tightly repressed beneath the covers, barely seems interested. In this rigorously composed sequence, Chabrol has laid out, through body language and his clinically precise camera movements, the essential dysfunction of this marriage, which is superficially happy, all smiles and sunny days, but totally devoid of passion.

It's no surprise, then, that Hélène is spending many of her days in Paris with a lover, Victor (Maurice Ronet). While it's always sunny and edenic at her home with Charles, she goes to see her lover in the rainy city, walking through a downpour, then reclining in a postcoital bed with an unreadable expression on her face. The film's title would suggest that this is going to be a study of an adulterous woman, but Chabrol doesn't explore Hélène's reasons for her affair, doesn't delve into what she feels for this man she visits during the week. There's obviously passion between them, in a way that there just isn't with Charles, and that's it. More than her adultery and her psychology, the film is about the nature of marriage and the nuclear family, the nature of happiness, even. Because a pivotal event over halfway through the film disrupts the family's happiness and reveals just how illusory their contentment and stability are; on the surface, nothing happens, but the familial interplay has been unbalanced, its illusion of perfection fading away into affectless going-through-the-motions and awkwardness.


Chabrol makes this discomfort felt especially in a strange evening where tensions arise over Michel's jigsaw puzzle, which is missing a piece. The boy's constant complaining about the puzzle irritates his parents, and they all begin sniping at each other, letting all their long-suppressed feelings come to the surface. In one telling moment, the boy accuses his father of hiding the puzzle piece, which is a nonsensical accusation that points to something else entirely: Charles has not hidden the puzzle piece, but he has hidden something else, a body, and in doing so he's also undone the secret foundation that this happy home had been built upon. The missing puzzle piece is both a corpse and the family's very happiness.

Interestingly, the way the family falls apart like this after Hélène's affair ends suggests that what was holding this family together all along was the wife and mother's ability to find pleasure outside the home; without Victor, she just lounges around the house, her face blank, not even bothering to get dressed. Everyone else has a reason to go out — Michel to school and Charles to work — but she had only her affair, because otherwise she's just a housewife in a sumptuous bourgeois house where all the work is done by maids and servants, her very comfort and her security leading to her boredom and disaffection.

The film's ending is perhaps its most interesting part, so rich in subtext that it elevates the film to a whole other level. Hélène finally discovers a shocking truth about her husband, but rather than confront him or get angry with him, she burns the evidence of what he did, and then walks towards him in a remarkable shot, Chabrol's camera tracking with her, observing the strange, secret smile that keeps threatening to flicker across her lips, her love for her husband reignited in the most surprising way. The film's final shot is even better, and even more mysterious: what might be a point-of-view shot from Charles' perspective of his wife and son, until the camera begins gliding and tracking to the side, nudging in closer towards the mother and son standing together in their garden, the camera gradually passing behind some bushes so that the family is obscured by the branches, glimpsed through the latticework of foliage. The shot's meaning is ambiguous and complex, loaded with emotional intensity and narrative suggestion, making it a perfect ending to a very thought-provoking film.

The Rape of the Vampire

Jean Rollin's first feature, The Rape of the Vampire, establishes virtually all of the templates for this trash auteur's distinctive approach to no-budget sexploitation horror. Surreally dreamlike and strange, with a plot that never makes a shred of sense, Rollin's film wanders dreamily from one set piece to another, the connections between them as ephemeral as the neural pathways linking one moment to another in a dream. This debut was shot in black-and-white, and though a bright, garish color sensibility is integral to the director's later work, the color is hardly missed here, as he crafts an equally potent, moody aesthetic in stark sun and shadow.

The film is actually split into two unequal parts, and though the story, such as it is, continues more or less seamlessly from one part to another, they're definitively split apart and there's even a second credits sequence that runs before the second part begins. The bridge between the two parts of the film is like crossing from the real world, where a rational explanation, however unlikely, is still possible, to the truly unhinged world of the surreal, the nightmarish, the supernatural, where rationality is utterly banished and the semblance of a plot is all but entirely erased.

In the first third of the film, the psychoanalyst Thomas (Bernard Letrou) and his friends visit a remote village supposedly haunted by four vampire sisters. Thomas doesn't believe the sisters are actually vampires, he thinks they've just been manipulated into thinking they are, and he seeks to cure them of their delusion. He even seems to be right: the sisters worship before a pagan altar and are given orders by their god, who turns out to be an old man from the village, hiding behind the altar, delivering instructions to the women for his own mysterious purposes. This segment ends with virtually everyone dead, climaxing at the bleak-looking beach, with wooden posts like prison bars, that Rollin would return to again and again in his oeuvre. That beach is a conduit into the unknown, and as the film transitions into the second segment that constitutes its final two-thirds, the rational explanations and pseudo-scientific jargon of the first part are jettisoned in favor of an enthusiastic embrace of the supernatural.


This shift is announced especially by the arrival of the Queen of the Vampires (Jacqueline Sieger), a campy and outrageous figure who's constantly baring her fangs and laughing sinisterly, often without any context whatsoever: Rollin seems to love cutting to her in mid-cackle. The Queen's plans are typically hazy, but there's lots of grave-robbing, hypnotized girls hooked up to tanks of blood from which the vampires drink through long straws, sinister operations and rituals, a vampire priest holding an upside-down cross, and so on. The film's imagery is wild and weird, climaxing with a very chintzy vampire wedding that looks like the vampires are actually staging an amateur play: it's set on a stage with a huge and clumsily constructed bat in the background, its wings seemingly made from bedsheets.

There's a strong element of theatricality in Rollin, certainly, a sense that these vampires are performing for someone, maybe just for one another. The vampires even repeat the trick that the old man had pulled in the first part of the film, setting up an altar that seems to be speaking to some vampire supplicants, but actually houses a tape recorder playing back a loop of the Queen's voice. The supernatural is very ordinary in Rollin's world, the artifice paper-thin. There's little boundary between the real and the unreal, and the rough, clumsy low-budget aesthetic lays bare the artificiality of it all. There's a raw, one-take feel to much of the film: if a statue falls off a shelf and nearly hits the vampire queen in the head as she descends on a reclining victim, no matter, it's good enough, and Rollin leaves in this unscripted accident. The blood wedding, with its amateur drama club feel, is another good example; the vampires for some reason feel the need to stage their rituals with shoddy dramatics and awkwardly constructed props, performing for an audience of other vampires, who sit playing bongos in the theater seats and storm the stage for an impromptu celebration at the climax of this "play."

That's the essence of Rollin right there, the real and the unreal, the theatrical and the seemingly unstudied, the supernatural and the ordinary, colliding within his utterly idiosyncratic cinema. He presents a fractured and nonsensical dream world that leaps without warning from one thing to another at the speed of thought, giving the impression of a film edited according to the momentary whims of the dreamer. Action can jump suddenly from one location to another without warning or narrative justification, and the connections between scenes are often, let's say, mysterious. Even the seedy eroticism that always characterizes Rollin's work follows this (il)logic: women are rarely seen taking their clothes off in this film, instead leaping effortlessly from clothed to naked in between shots. All of this combines to make Rollin a true poet of trash, locating a strange kind of unsettling poetry and even beauty in his outrageous dream world.

Les bonnes femmes

Les Bonnes Femmes was Claude Chabrol's fourth feature, but in many ways it feels like his true debut, the first of his films in which his style is fully developed. Here, Chabrol largely forgoes the melodramatic and narrative elements of his first two films, as well as the brief detour into lurid Hitchcockian bombast that was À double tour. After that bigger-budget production, he returned to the street-level realism of his first two features, adopting an even rougher and looser style than even those films, while also sharpening his razor-sharp, unpredictable wit. The film follows a group of four young women who all work as salesgirls in an appliance store that never seems to get any customers. They stand around all day, bored and chatting, fending off the lecherous advances of their elderly boss, gossiping and talking about love. The four women are very different. Jane (Bernadette Lafont) is a wild party girl who loves to drink and laugh; she's dating a soldier but won't pass up dalliances with other men whenever he's not around. Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) is happily engaged, though her fiancé Henri (Sacha Briquet) is something of a snob who obviously thinks she's uneducated and is afraid of what his cultured parents will think of her. Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano) is the romantic of the group, a serious young woman who is breathlessly waiting for a true love to come along and sweep her off her feet. Ginette (Stéphane Audran) is more mysterious and independent; she's the only one of the group who doesn't define herself in terms of men, instead sneaking off every night to sing in a variety show, simply because she loves to perform. Out of all the women, she's the only one who's doing something for herself, not seeming to think about men or romance, only doing what she wants to do because she enjoys it — even though she's also strangely embarrassed of her late-night theatrics.

Through his observation of the other three women, Chabrol is exploring the nature of relationships between men and women, and the portrait he paints is not a pretty one. The film is often pitched as a comedy, sometimes even a broadly hilarious one, but percolating underneath its surface humor are some very bitter, cynical conclusions about the nature of romantic love. There are three different templates for love on display here. The most traditional is the relationship between Rita and Henri. They love each other, and she seems happy — she sighs just thinking that he loves her — but the scene where he takes her to meet his parents over lunch reveals the cracks in their seemingly perfect romance. Before his parents show up, he barrages Rita with a series of admonitions and warnings, telling her what she should and shouldn't say, what she should order, and trying to hurriedly catch her up on some details about Michelangelo so she'll appear to know something about art. He's condescending towards her, and in the process reveals some of the uglier undercurrents of this relationship.


A different template for male behavior is provided by the duo of boisterous ladies' man Marcel (Jean-Louis Maury) and his older, out-of-shape friend Albert (Albert Dinan). These two pick up Jane and Jacqueline at the beginning of the film, loudly and laughingly hitting on the girls until finally the more flirtatious Jane gives in and agrees to go out with them that night. They take the girls out for dinner and to a strip club, then, after Jacqueline breaks away from them, they both bring Jane back to Albert's apartment. They're boorish and loutish, putting their hands all over her, clumsily trying to get her to agree to a ménage à trois before she finally just goes off with Marcel alone. Later, the girls run into Marcel and Albert again, at a swimming pool, but this time, they've already gotten what they want from these particular girls, so they just act like even more overt assholes, dunking the girls underwater and chasing them around the pool. Chabrol is obviously dealing with male archetypes here, and while Henri represents the spoiled mama's boy who seems nice enough except for his condescension and pretensions, Marcel and Albert are the perpetually single jerks who are only interested in women for sex, for a night of fun and no more.

Jacqueline stays away from men like this, even politely rejecting the advances of the boyish young guy who sweetly asks her out at her job. She's possessed by the romantic notion of true love, and she thinks she's found it in the form of a mysterious man with a motorcycle, André (Mario David), who's been following her around constantly, stalking her while she's out with friends or at work, but never approaching her directly. She builds up this mystery man into her ideal, and believes that she's in love with him even though she's never met him. When she finally does meet him and begins dating him at the end of the film, Chabrol presents their relationship as exactly the kind of idyllic love that she had imagined it to be, briefly allowing the film to get swept up in Jacqueline's romantic reveries. And then, chillingly, a love scene in a deserted forest area seamlessly transitions into a murder, as André strangles his new lover to death and leaves her limp body in the dirt. Chabrol shoots the scene in such a way that it's ambiguous where lovemaking ends and murder begins: a wide shot shows the two lovers lowering themselves to the ground, André climbing on top of Jacqueline, and then Chabrol cuts to a closer perspective that partially obscures the view of what's going on, as André begins strangling her. One doesn't even notice the moment at which her moans of passion become anguished bird calls of terror and pain.


This turn of events is foreshadowed by the scene where a middle-aged co-worker shows Jacqueline a grisly souvenir, a handkerchief soaked in the blood of a man who'd been publicly executed for killing women. She'd romanticized this man, this killer, referring to him as "so pale and handsome" that all the girls who saw his death were swooning and overwhelmed. Jacqueline looks at the handkerchief with wide eyes and quietly listens to this story, and it's hard to know what she's thinking. This woman may be older than the young women in the film, but it seems that she has not learned any lessons by growing older, she has not rid herself of the naïve romanticism that leads these women to allow themselves to be won over, repeatedly, by cruel, brutish men who don't respect them.

The twist, in the film's final minutes, may seem abrupt, but it's all part of Chabrol's deliberate rejection and subversion of the conventions of romanticism, particularly the kind of goopy Hollywood romanticism offered up by the movies. Chabrol opts instead for gritty, near-documentary realism in many scenes, and the sudden intrusion of narrative at the end of the film only serves to shatter these women's remaining illusions about love and men. Chabrol is rejecting the narrative of romantic love in the most jarring way possible, briefly hinting that everything's going to work out wonderfully for this couple, before abrasively tearing apart the Hollywood happy ending. The formation of the couple, the goal and raison d'etre of so much romantic cinema, is here tragic and deadly rather than cheery. This should have been the obvious destination, though: not only does Chabrol offer several visual clues in which André looks sinister and unsettling even before his true nature is revealed, but the film is scored to a driving thriller soundtrack that seems incongruously creepy and foreboding for much of the movie, until the ending makes sense of it.

Chabrol then drives the point home with a brilliant coda in which a new, anonymous young woman, shy and reserved like Jacqueline was, sits at a table in a club until a man (whose face is never shown) comes up to her and asks her to dance. As they dance, the woman staring pointedly into the camera, while romantic music plays and a disco ball glistens overhead, but the previous scene with André and Jacqueline makes the scene foreboding and sinister. What kind of man is this? What fate awaits this trusting young woman who just wants to find love? Will she be killed — or will she just get her heart broken?