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.

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.

Que la bête meure

[This is a contribution to the Claude Chabrol Blog-a-Thon currently running at Flickhead from June 21 to June 30. For ten days, Flickhead will be dedicated to the works of the French New Wave master, and I'll be following along with many reviews of my own.]

In Que la bête meure, Claude Chabrol, interested as always in the mechanics of genre, engages with the form of the revenge thriller. Of course, Chabrol does not simply reiterate the staples of the genre, but digs into them, examines them, questions the basic assumptions underpinning these types of films. His plot is in many ways typical. A man loses a family member, who is killed by the carelessness of another. He is enraged, and when the police prove unable to do anything, unable even to find the smallest clue, he dedicates himself to discovering the man who did this to him. He vows to track down and kill this man even if it takes the rest of his life. It's a very stereotypical plot, the skeleton of countless revenge thrillers, a form that is perhaps even more circumscribed than other genres. But Chabrol's interest is in the details, in the moral ambiguities and problems stirred up by this clichéd story.

Charles Thenier (Michel Duchaussoy) has lost his son in an auto accident; the boy was mowed down crossing the street, and the driver simply kept going without pausing. No one steps forward to identify the car or its driver, no one knows of a car with its front bumper dented in. It is a mystery and the police are unable to get any further. So Charles, a children's book author, dedicates himself to tracking down the man who did this. Instead, by sheer chance he finds Hélène (Caroline Cellier), an actress who he believes was in the car that killed his son. Through her, finally, he discovers the identity of the man he has sought: the brutish, thoroughly horrible Paul Decourt (Jean Yanne), a garage owner and an utter monster of a man. As Charles describes him after their first encounter, Paul is "a caricature of the wholly bad man, such as one never imagines meeting in reality."

It's clear, then, that Chabrol is very aware of the manipulation of this genre, the way it stacks the deck, the way its details are carefully arranged to allow the audience to sympathize with murder. Charles is a basically decent man, unhinged by the death of a son he apparently loved greatly — in the opening scenes of the film, shortly after the accident, he tearfully watches home videos of the boy as he aged through the years. The man he is stalking, on the other hand, is a monstrosity, a man with no redeeming values, a man so despised by everyone he encounters that his own house grows hushed, dreadfully expecting his imminent arrival. Chabrol is quite aware of the artificiality of it all, the fact that this genre relies on the existence of a "wholly bad man," a man with no scruples, no morals, no trace of decency or likability or even humanity. He is hated by his son Phillippe (Marc di Napoli) and almost equally hated and feared by his cowed wife Jeanne (Anouk Ferjac). During a painful dinner scene at the Decourt family home, he embarrasses his wife by reading her poetry aloud in a mocking tone, much to the delight of his witchy, cackling mother (Raymone), the only human being who can stand her son's presence. When his son accidentally knocks over a wine glass, this oaf picks up food and throws it at the boy, ignoring his guests' horror. And he openly caresses his maid's legs and then castigates her for laziness, telling her, loudly enough for his wife and all their guests to hear, that just because he's sleeping with her doesn't mean she can loaf off.

He is every bit the "caricature" that Charles deems him, a man so thoroughly despicable that he could only exist in a movie, and even then most likely only as the villain of a story like this. It's all calculated so that Charles' inevitable murder of this man can be not only understand but cheered on, actively encouraged. Chabrol is too clever to simply buy into such conventions, though, and he's continually undermining the easy solution, adding complications that prevent the kind of clear-cut moral absolutism and justification for murder that such films typically offer up. Foremost among these complications is Hélène, who is overcome with guilt for her silence after Paul ran over Charles' son. She's basically a good woman, but self-conscious and delicate, easily thrown off balance, easily preyed upon. There's a certain tenderness between her and Charles, affection developing into quiet love.


Her presence distracts Charles from his goal and also awakens in him feelings more shaded and multi-layered than the all-encompassing hatred and desire for revenge that he feels for Paul. Charles begins the film as an emotional blank spot, desperately trying to suppress his emotions, to take control; in order to kill, he wants to be deadened, cool and calm. But his humanity reasserts itself in his relationship with Hélène. He allows himself to again feel something other than eviscerating rage and hatred; he cares for her. Soon enough, he comes to care as well for Paul's family, for the wounded son Phillippe, nursing his own bitter rage, and for the cringing wife Jeanne, who flits from one empty pursuit to the next in the hopes of finding some escape, no matter how shallow and momentary, from her domestic hell. His caring for these people does not dull his hatred for Paul — arguably, they only sharpen his resolve — but he does become a true man again rather than an empty shell, a hollowed-out action star whose only purpose is to enact brutality against an audience-sanctioned despicable target.

In pursuing this deconstruction of the thriller form, Chabrol's aesthetic is as precise and tightly controlled as ever. His camera traces careful arcs around the characters, turning neat 180-degree rotations that can bring characters together and sweep them apart just as easily. He favors both extreme closeups and distancing long shots, the latter generally used to accentuate the emotional chilliness of the bourgeois lifestyle he's chronicling. In one particularly devastating scene, Charles and Hélène arrive at a dinner party where no one can think of anything to say. Chabrol's camera frames them all in a long row, as formal as the Last Supper, while they chatter emptily, their talk littered with uncomfortable pauses; to find something, anything to say, they finally resort to enumerating the seasons and describing their beauty. But Chabrol's style can also be strangely intimate, as in a wonderful scene in which Charles and Hélène wake up in the middle of the night, their bodies tangled together in such a way that their faces, halved, seem to form a full face together, with one of his eyes and one of hers. It's a haunting image of two people coming imperfectly — but touchingly — together. Indeed, eyes are particularly important to Chabrol in this film. They are the focal point as well of the scene where Paul embarrasses Jeanne by reading her poetry. Chabrol pans around the table, capturing the distressed expressions on the faces of the guests, and finally finding the distraught Jeanne herself, her green eyes churning with anguish and hatred as her hands cover her mouth.

Chabrol is methodically dissecting the conventions of the revenge thriller here, and even his ending is deconstructive, hinting that the hero is going to walk off into the sunset, unpunished and vindicated, before pulling away from this cliché. Instead, the ending is a complex acknowledgment of the moral toll of murder, even "justified" murder, and of the necessity for culpability whenever a human life is taken. The film begins and ends with the waves of the ocean, transformed by context: at the beginning, they are markers of innocent childhood play, while by the end they are cleansing waters, washing away the guilt and sin of a man driven by revenge.

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch is a brutish, nasty, ugly movie, a film that aims to strip the Western genre of its stereotypes and clichés and instead strips it of its humanity, of any trace of true honor or decency or goodness. The film certainly strips the varnish off of great Western archetypes like the honorable outlaw or the decent lawman on his trail, but it doesn't replace the absence with anything: it's just a big gaping hole that goes unfilled. As such, the film is an unremittingly unpleasant experience, watching rotten people do rotten things to one another, with one band of these rotten people placed in the central position usually reserved for the heroes in these kinds of movies. There's a lot of shrill laughter, but very little true humor: just these men making one another the butt of cruel jokes.

It's certainly hard to work up much sympathy for the gang of bank robbers and bandits led by aging tough guy Pike Bishop (William Holden). Joined by his friend Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), the rowdy, womanizing Gorch brothers (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson), the proud Mexican youth Angel (Jaime Sánchez) and the withered old coot Sykes (Edmond O'Brien), Pike and his gang have become the most wanted men in Texas. They're hunted by a band of bounty hunters led by Pike's former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who has no choice but to hunt down his old friend or else be sent back to prison. The bounty hunters are portrayed as a gaggle of cackling vultures, hooting and hollering whenever they come across a corpse, picking at the boots and weapons and gold left behind. These filthy, stupid, nasty men are so thoroughly amoral that Pike and Deke actually begin to seem almost honorable in comparison, almost like the good guys by default, just because there's no one else available who could possibly fill that vacuum.

In fact, though the outlaws claim to have a code of honor, to be bound together by their promises and commitments to one another, there's little honor to their actual behavior. They stop just short of killing one another, but that seems to be just about their only limit. They're hard men, doing anything for some gold, not above leaving one of their own to die and thinking very little of it. When one of the men learns that his grandson has been killed, he shrugs and just wants to know if the boy acquitted himself with honor — a laughable premise since the kid was a typically brutish thug who died while abusing and threatening a group of hostages. Pike and his gang are deluding themselves with their talk of honor and loyalty, of being bound together as a group, as though there's something noble in what they're doing. At one point, Pike talks about doing one last job and then pulling back, the oldest of clichés for Western outlaws getting old, but Dutch quickly puts things in perspective: "pull back to what?" These men have nothing beyond the hard, cold lives they've made for themselves, nothing to look forward to beyond the next gold score and the whores and booze it can buy for them.


Director Sam Peckinpah signals right from the very beginning what kind of a movie this is going to be. As Pike and his men ride into town, dressed as soldiers to rob a bank, they pass by a group of kids by the side of the road, playing with a pair of trapped scorpions being overrun by swarming red ants. The symbolism is obvious, and hints forward all the way to the film's conclusion: a few deadly, dangerous creatures being destroyed, eventually, by the less powerful but more numerous hordes surrounding them. Throughout the film, children frequently appear, as images of lost innocence for Pike, who is, with Deke, alone among these men in seeming to have some regret about what he's become. The laughing faces of children thus often appear as symbols of innocence, but just as often it's apparent that children can be taught to torture, to kill, to serve as soldiers: the innocence Pike seems to remember and cherish is very fragile indeed, easily overcome by a cruel world. On the way out of town, after the failed bank job, Pike and his men pass by the kids again, to see them growing bored of the contest between the scorpions and the ants; the kids cover the whole ground with straw and light it afire.

These opening scenes establish the elemental themes of the film to come, particularly in the disastrous bank heist, which backfires when Deke and his bounty hunters are waiting in ambush. In the resulting melee, the two groups of killers shoot up the town, and it's not clear who takes more innocent lives caught in the crossfire, the bandits or the men supposedly working on the side of the law. The streets are soon filled with blood, bright red and blatantly artificial blood, each bullet smearing a big red circle on anyone it hits. After this frenetic shootout, the pace of the film slows down, and the middle section is languid and episodic, following the disappointed bandits as they meander around, trying to plan their next heist while evading capture.

They spend some time in Angel's poor Mexican village, where he is outraged to find that in his absence, Mexican federal troops have stormed the village, killing his father and stealing his lover away as the woman of the general Mapache (Emilio Fernández). Angel is the only character in the film who has some sense of nobility, who wants something beyond himself: freedom from tyranny for his people. The film's middle section drags, though, mainly because Peckinpah seems very interested in capturing the milieu of his characters, but not in delving any deeper into them as characters. Pike gets a few very brief flashbacks, fading in and out over closeups of his face, but neither him nor any of the other characters could really be said to have much complexity or nuance. The closest the film comes to deeper characterization is the blank stares of Pike whenever he's in an ugly situation, like the excruciatingly long sequence toward the end where Pike sits uncomfortably staring at the prostitute he'd just spent the night with, as her baby cries in the background. In overthrowing old archetypes, Peckinpah only replaced them with new ones, crude and ugly archetypes biding time until they next bathe in blood. The film picks up again when the group decides to rob a munitions train and escapes with both Deke's hunters and the US Army on their trail. But no matter how viscerally exciting the film's action set pieces often are, it's hard to escape the overwhelming impression of this film as wallowing, without relief, in dirt and blood and ugly emotions.

Topaz

Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz finds the master of suspense technically at the peak of his game, especially in comparison to its often-awkward, indifferently shot predecessor Torn Curtain, in which Hitchcock had seemed only intermittently engaged. Though this was reportedly a very troubled project for the director as well as a huge commercial disaster, this Cold War espionage tale is filled with inventively staged sequences; the signature Hitchcock touch is everywhere. Indeed, in many ways this is Hitch at his technical best, and some of the film's suspense sequences are not only tours de force of invention and montage, but are experimental even for Hitch, who to some extent is trying to conceive of new ways of handling his typical subjects. Many of the film's best scenes are nearly wordless, achieving a tense atmosphere solely through tightly paced editing and controlled compositions.

Fittingly for a film about international spy rings, whispers and private conversations play a crucial part in the action, but Hitchcock often lets these moments pass by without the audience hearing what's said. In many scenes, the camera is placed at a distance or in some way prevented from picking up the sound of a conversation, so that words pass between conspirators and spies without the audience getting a hint of what's being said. Without his musical collaborator Bernard Hermann, Hitchcock seems increasingly indifferent to music, which is used at random and without much feeling. The upshot of this is that many scenes actually take place in a suffocating silence, or accompanied only by the dull clatter of street noises and background din. Hitch had not lost his interest in the formal properties of sound, and the sparse, minimalist nature of this film's soundtrack gives it an eerie, airless quality, a close companion to the ostentatious artificiality that, in other films, Hitchcock often achieved through matte-painted backdrops (a device he ceases using with this film). The sound is ostensibly realistic, a diegetic backdrop rather than an overbearing orchestral score, and yet Hitchcock is continually calling attention to the smothered, dulled quality of his sounds, shooting scenes where people talk to each other at length without any sound being picked up on the soundtrack.

It's an unsettling feeling, lending an oddly mechanical air to the film. There's an emphasis on actions and objects rather than words and characters, and the scenes of espionage frequently emphasize the process rather than the people involved. The opening sequence, in which a Russian defector (Per-Axel Arosenius) and his family attempt to escape to the Americans while on vacation in Copenhagen, is handled almost entirely without dialogue. Instead, Hitch cuts back and forth between three groups of people as they walk around the city, trying to evade one another: the defector, his wife and daughter; three Russian agents who are stalking them; and a group of Americans led by agent Mike Nordstrom (John Forsythe). The editing is crisp and simple, often ratcheting up tension simply by cutting from the defector's family to the Russian pursuers and then back again. Everyone is whispering with each other, but the audience hears nothing; when the daughter stops to speak with a museum worker, presumably as part of some plan, the camera takes on the perspective of a nearby Russian agent who cannot tell what's going on. Later, a Cuban spy ring provides an opportunity for Hitchcock to trace the process by which a piece of film is passed from its original photographers to a drop-off point within a hollow roadside railing, after which it is sent to a secret film lab, smuggled stuffed inside of a chicken.

The roll of film (of a Russian missile base in Cuba) is one of several MacGuffins in Topaz, but more than in any other Hitchcock movie the MacGuffins here seem much more important than any of the people. This is a curiously dispassionate film, and despite the frequently interesting mise en scène, it is often a frustrating one, with a turgid plot that's not nearly as convoluted as Hitchcock seems to think it is. Though he arrives late on the scene, French agent Andre Devereaux (Frederick Stafford) is the film's central figure, a Washington, D.C. diplomatic figure who has become a close ally of the Americans during his stay in the country. He is recruited by his friend Nordstrom to execute a number of missions relating to the escalating Cuban missile crisis: to determine what the Russians are doing in Cuba, and then eventually to uncover and disband a ring of French spies operating under the codename of Topaz, who threaten to expose America's plans to the Russians. Stafford, as much as Forsythe, is a blank slate, a complete black hole of charisma where the film's star should be. Other Hollywood directors might get away with a lack of a creditable star, but Hitchcock's films often suffer without a strong presence at their center, whether it's Cary Grant, James Stewart, or Tippi Hedren.


In this case, the film is saddled with long, unbearably dull stretches sentimentalizing Devereaux's relationship with his wife (the equally boring Dany Robin) or his Cuban lover and underground contact Juanita (Karin Dor, who does her best with an underwritten role). It's hard to care about any of this when Devereaux himself seems to have no believable reaction to anything, not when his wife leaves him or when his lover is murdered. Stafford is expressionless, even more bland than Paul Newman was in Torn Curtain, and one wonders if Hitch was simply unlucky in his choice of actors, or if he was losing his ability to get good performances. Certainly, he seems to show a lot more interest for the film's visual components than in anything relating to its rather prosaic plot. Juanita's death, despite its complete lack of effect on Devereaux, is affecting anyway because of Hitchcock's brilliant staging. The sequence is shot from above, with Juanita in the arms of her other lover, the cold-eyed Cuban military leader Rico Parra (John Vernon), who has just found out about her espionage for the French and Americans. His shooting of her is implicitly framed as an act of mercy — or as close to one as he can get — in order to save her from brutal and prolonged torture. Hitchcock shoots Juanita's slow, graceful descent to the ground from above, the camera admiring the billowing spread of her purple gown on the floor around her, pooling at her feet as though it was the blood leaving her body. Only after she's fallen does the camera capture a streak of bright red on Parra's hand where he had touched her side, the only trace of actual blood in the scene.

Scenes like this recur frequently throughout the film, and in fact there are few moments when Hitchcock is anything less than technically proficient. If Torn Curtain had only momentary flashes of visual showmanship in a film that could otherwise have been made by virtually any hack director, Topaz is obviously a Hitchcock film from start to finish, even when its plot and non-entity leads threaten to derail it. The film especially begins to pick up a bit in its final hour, when the injection of some fine French talent into the cast belatedly provides some of the charisma and fun so sorely missing from the main actors. Philippe Noiret is excellent as a French spy, outwardly cool but inwardly growing jumpy; he's introduced at a luncheon where he pours himself into the food like a gourmand, seemingly ignoring the conversation until a sudden revelation startles him out of this act. Also admirable are Michel Piccoli as one of Devereaux's old French Resistance buddies, and the young Michel Subor as a cocky, charming reporter who aids in the investigation. That all of these characters — who only become important when the film's action shifts to Paris after long sequences in New York and Cuba — are more memorable and intriguing than any of the leads is indicative of the film's essential miscalculation.

To some extent, it's possible to think of Hitchcock's dispassionate stance here as a half-hearted commentary on the nature of his story. There was a similar — and similarly under-developed — thread running through Torn Curtain, a sense that all this bloodshed and intrigue is somehow out of proportion to its usefulness. The film is openly propagandistic on its surface, a piece of Cold War agitprop that even takes some jabs at French "neutrality," and yet there's an undercurrent of ambivalence about the necessity of this espionage and deceit. After Devereaux risks his life and his career for the Americans by going to Cuba, resulting in his wife leaving him and his lover dying along with two other agents, the blank-faced Nordstrom congratulations him for the good work, saying that he's "confirmed" what they'd found out from "other sources." The moment passes by without missing a beat, but it's really a jaw-dropping line, tossed off with such casual indifference. That's it? He just confirmed something they already knew? For that, three people died and his life is in ruins? It recalls the moment when the Russian defector, after his tight escape into the arms of the Americans, calls their efforts to rescue him "clumsy," and indeed it's undeniable that their plan for bringing him in seems totally undeveloped. Perhaps there's a reason that all these agents are such emotionless blanks, such impenetrable ciphers.

Even so, whatever slim justifications can be mounted for Hitchcock's use of these flat-lining actors, the film as a whole is a shapeless, uneven affair, one that doesn't seem to conclude as simply end. It's not surprising that no less than three endings were shot, and if the one that's used is certainly the least silly, it's no more satisfying than the others. The film was Hitchcock's biggest commercial flop, and in many ways it deserves its dismal reputation as a strangely unengaging spy thriller. But if Topaz is a failure, it is never less than a thoroughly Hitchcockian failure, one marked with the director's distinctive touch in virtually every image.

British Sounds

"Sometimes the class struggle is also the struggle of one image against another image, of one sound against another sound. In a film, this struggle is between images and sounds." This voiceover, delivered about twenty minutes into British Sounds, might describe both the dialectical nature of the film itself, and the general aesthetic thesis of director Jean-Luc Godard during his politically radicalized tenure with the filmmaking collective Dziga Vertov Group. This aesthetic is summarized even more succinctly by the film's title card, on which, between the words "British" and "Sounds," the word "Images" is crossed out with an "X" through it. Commissioned for British TV but never broadcast, this was the first film made under the aegis of the Dziga Vertov Group, Godard's brief utopian experiment in revolutionary filmmaking. British Sounds is a fascinating time capsule and indispensable viewing for those interested in Godard's evolving aesthetics. The only thing it's not is a compelling film in its own right.

Of course, it's only fair to note that Godard and his collaborators never intended to make a compelling film. As the above rhetoric about images and sounds implies, at this point Godard saw the two elements of film style as working, not in concert, but at cross-purposes. He had always played with the relationship between sound and image in ways far removed from mainstream norms, subverting their conventional linkages and calling attention, through the disjunction, to the ways in which they might be considered separately. But by the time he made this film, Godard had come to distrust the image altogether, and the result is a strange documentary which documents nothing other than the filmmakers' polemical purpose. The form of British Sounds is relatively simple. It consists primarily of six segments, which are linked only by the structures of the film itself, and which are loosely "documentary" in content if not in form. The main blocks are: a long tracking shot along an auto assembly line; a nude woman walking through a house, stepping in and out of frame in front of a static camera; a right-wing news anchor delivering a hateful speech; a group of workers discussing working conditions and the possibility of socialism; some Maoist students trying to rewrite Beatles songs with more revolutionary lyrics; a bloody hand in the snow reaching for a red flag.

These images are simple in every sense. Each image communicates a single idea or documents a single situation, and the aesthetics with which the film presents each image are minimalist in the extreme. For the assembly line, the camera pans along the line in an agonizingly slow, hesitant left-to-right pan that might be Godard's idea of a deadpan joke on the similarly endless tracking shot from Weekend — if you thought watching a traffic jam for ten minutes was dull, check this out; these cars aren't even finished yet, so there's no chance of them moving anywhere. The other shots are equally minimal (though they are not, as is often said, continuous shots: there are many interjections of titles and other materials). The sequence with the nude woman is composed of three shots: a static angle up a stairs, with the woman off-screen more than she's on; a shoulder-level close-up while she's talking on the phone; a static close-up on her hips and pubic hair. The news anchor is of course shot in the conventional talking head pose, while the two group discussions are captured with a shaky hand-held style, the camera swinging around in a way that would normally denote an attempt to focus on each speaker in turn, except that in this case the speakers are most often kept off-screen. The final sequence holds a close-up on a hand for a long time as it clenches into a fist in the snow, then snakes slowly along in search of a flagpole to grasp, at which point the camera zooms out to encompass a broader view of arm and flag together. Each of these shots is purposefully limited in its style and execution to the absolute minimum of what's needed, and the dull quality of the visuals pushes the emphasis onto the soundtrack, which is of course exactly what Godard wanted.

At every point in British Sounds, the prosaic quality of these images is at odds with the fervent, polemical nature of the soundtrack, which is a near-constant exhortation to Marxist revolution. The film's purpose is most obviously demonstrated in the frequent voiceover interludes in which the male and female narrators teach slogans and bits of revolutionary history to a young child, who dutifully repeats whatever they tell him by rote. This suggests, to say the least, a somewhat uncharitable characterization of the target audience for this kind of film — if these segments are to be taken at face value, Godard and his collaborators saw the Dziga Vertov Group as a revolutionary schoolhouse, imparting knowledge to common people as though they're children in need of an education. At one point, the voiceover contrasts bourgeoisie films (Hollywood, of course, with Gone With the Wind cited by name) and revisionist films (read as "Soviet" in this context) against the truly revolutionary films that they wish to make. The revolutionary film, the voiceover declares, is like a blackboard on which political ideas can be discussed and debated. This ideal of open debate is contradicted by the condescending and narrowly didactic tone with which this material is delivered; it's hard to imagine anything so strident and polemical fostering real discussion.


Even so, the film remains interesting for the ways in which it illustrates Godard's ideas about sound/image dichotomies in their most extreme forms. In the opening sequence, as the camera pans along the auto assembly line, there are two competing soundtracks: the cacophonous noise of the factory itself, and a narration track that delivers a Marxist analysis of factory working conditions and the idea of "wage slavery." While the former might seem to contradict Godard's separation of sound and image, the sounds of the factory do not serve the traditional purposes of diegetic sound in the cinema. The sounds, in the strictest sense, do seem to be originating with the images on screen, which gives them a documentary function within the scene. And yet, paradoxically, the shrill, grating quality of the sound, its constant barrage on the senses, is distancing and even aggravating. The sound is continually pushing against the image with sheer volume, keeping the audience on edge, simultaneously annoyed by the sounds and bored by the repetitiveness of the visuals. The sound and image match up in the traditional way, and yet they are still working at cross-purposes, giving the eyes nothing to see and the ears too much to hear. This dichotomy is heightened by the addition of the secondary, polemical track, consisting mainly of quotes from Marx, which one often has to strain to hear over the roaring factory noise. The diabolical genius of Godard's technique becomes apparent when one realizes that, when driven to near-madness by the combined aesthetic effect of this sequence, the polemical speech is like a buoy of relative coherence amidst the enervating din.

The tension between sound and image is, if anything, even more pronounced in the film's second segment. As a nude woman walks silently past the camera, in and out of the frame, a female voiceover expounds on sexual liberation, women's rights, and the necessity of women making demands for better treatment. The images provide long expanses of nothing to look at — just blank white walls and a staircase — and momentary flashes where the naked girl walks by on her way up or down the stairs. The sequence takes an image of a sexual nature and all but defuses it of its arousing potential, placing it between long stretches of complete stasis and accompanying the whole scene with a feminist voiceover. The effect of this juxtaposition remains ambiguous — how do you show an exploitative image without being exploitative? — but the intent is clear: to create a dialectic between the sexualized depiction of women through the filter of the male gaze, and the voice of a woman speaking out for her rights. A more subtle dialectic is at work in the racist news segment, as Godard cuts from the anchor's angry rant to completely unrelated pastoral images, with no soundtrack at all accompanying these prosaic scenes. The effect, oddly enough, is to radically undermine the speaker, mainly because the form of the documentary has conditioned audiences for what to expect with these kinds of cutaway shots: they should be illustrating what the speaker is saying. Since the images do nothing of the kind, and are in fact so generic that they could hardly "illustrate" any polemical point, the speaker's words, lacking in visual support, are invalidated by the form of the film itself, revealed as hollow. This is, perhaps, one of the most effective and nuanced of Godard's experiments with sound/image disjunction here.

The final two "documentary" segments of the film offer an interesting case study in the different forms of revolutionary thinking, and it's especially difficult to figure out just what the film's point of view in these scenes might be. In the first, a group of assembly line workers discuss Marxist theory and the numbing working conditions of the factory, while Godard's handheld camera ensures that whoever's speaking is usually off-screen. The result is compelling, and makes a nice change from the dry, polemical tone of most of the film's voiceovers. These workers don't want an academic discourse on Marx and capital, but a discussion that circles around the concrete conditions of their lives and approaches socialist ideology in terms of practical changes and improvements that can be made. From a strictly formal viewpoint, the scene provides the obvious starting point for a similar discussion in Godard's 1982 film Passion, in which Isabelle Huppert and a group of factory workers discuss strikes and unions as the sound and image continually fall in and out of sync. The next scene here features a group of students rewriting Beatles songs to include revolutionary slogans: "You say U.S./ I say Mao." Godard doesn't seem to be making fun of these earnest young radicals, but juxtaposed against the stoic practicality of the assembly line workers, it's almost impossible not to view the students as silly and insipid in comparison. Nevertheless, in this sequence the sound and image are closer to being in sync than they had been throughout the rest of the film, raising the troubling possibility that Godard viewed these ridiculous dilettantes as a truer expression of revolutionary power.

In any event, the sound and image are finally united in the last sequence of the film, which abandons documentary pretense for a more abstracted, symbolic image of a bloodied hand struggling through the snow in order to reach and lift a red flag. This is the first time in the film that Godard consciously presents a compelling image — and a recognizably Godardian one, with the incredibly bright reds of the blood and the flag enforcing one another and recalling the brilliant color schemes of earlier films like La Chinoise. It's also the first time in the film that sound and image make sense together. The polemical speeches, joined now by stirring revolutionary songs, are a fitting accompaniment to this symbolic image of the workers' struggle toward Communism. The film ends with a series of shots of a fist punching through the British Union Jack, as on the soundtrack the male and female narrators speak in unison of their solidarity with various British radical groups and newspapers. It's the first time that two voices are speaking together, towards the same goal. In the earlier scene with the nude woman, when she's speaking on the phone she repeats several phrases from the feminist narrator, but out of sync with the voiceover itself, in a way that simply confuses and creates layered noise rather than clarity. Only when joined in revolutionary exhortation does the film allow two voices to speak as one, suggesting that the only route to unity is through true Communist revolution.

Seen today, British Sounds works primarily as a document of Godard's developing formal and ideological interests. In his films with the Dziga Vertov Group, he was working out a rigorous aesthetics of boredom and dialectical tension that would carry over into much of his later work as well, and find perhaps its fullest expression in Numéro Deux. This film, like many of Godard's more polemical works, denies nearly any possibility of cinematic pleasure, except for the final moments celebrating the worker's struggle. There's also very little sign of Godard's characteristic humor, though his playfulness does shine through in the use of hand-lettered title cards that flash on screen periodically (my favorite was the transformation of "Ford USA" into "For Us" by crossing out the last letter of each word). Still, it's hard to fault the film too much for failings that were, after all, fully integrated into the very conditions of its making. In making a dull, didactic, challenging, aggravating film, Godard completely fulfilled his revolutionary purpose at the time.

Le gai savoir

Le gai savoir falls at an absolutely critical position in the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard, as the final film he made before embarking on his radical experiment in communal, revolutionary filmmaking with the Dziga Vertov Group. The film is Godard's attempt to "return to zero" at the end of the 60s, an attempt to both erase and rethink the 17 features he'd made during the previous decade. Godard said at several points in his career that he felt like he was making his "first film" over again, and it's clear that after the radical deconstruction of cinema down to its constituent elements in Le gai savoir, whatever he made after this would have to be a "first," starting from scratch after this minimalist manifesto clears the ground. The film consists entirely of a series of dialogues and conversations between Emile (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Patricia (Juliet Berto), two young revolutionaries who meet on an empty soundstage every night in order to discuss the nature of sound, images, words, and the multiple relationships possible between them.

Godard's basic tactic in approaching these broad, weighty, and yet entirely basic questions is to experiment as freely as possible with as many different techniques and ideas as he can splatter across the screen. This is his messiest and most confounding pre-70s feature, deliberately grating and challenging in its overlapping sounds, with narrative and character stripped completely away in favor of a freewheeling investigation of the component parts of cinematic representation. Godard had, of course, been working steadily towards this investigation of sound/image relationships throughout the 60s, and not one of his films, even from his very first, had failed to undermine in one way or another the supposed "fundamentals" of cinematic language. But nowhere prior to this had the director so rigorously and intently broken down film, or approached it from so many angles. In one scene, the images cut rapidly between opposing closeup profiles of Emile and Patricia, suggesting the editing rhythms of a dialogue, two people facing each other and speaking to one another. Indeed, the soundtrack also contains a dialogue between the pair, but the images of the actors onscreen are not actually speaking or even moving, and moreover the images don't correspond at all to who's speaking at any particular moment. In subtle ways like this, Godard suggests the ways in which, even when image and sound appear to be working in concert towards representing the same thing, they may in fact be detached or distanced from one another.

In other places, image and sound are truly independent. There are images, the two radicals explain, for which no sound exists, and sounds for which there are no images. In both cases, government censorship and repression are usually responsible for the missing pieces, and the film represents these examples of incomplete reality by presenting silent still photos or black screens accompanied by tape recordings of protest rallies. In another memorable sequence, Godard turns the idea of the onscreen interview on its head with a set of bizarre games. In the first, Emile and Patricia provide words for a child to free associate off of, though it's by no means clear from the presentation whether the child is actually hearing them speak, being prompted by someone else, or simply speaking randomly. There's a profound disconnect in the cinematic spaces inhabited by the two sets of people, who are supposedly conversing with each other. The child sits in a brightly lit room against a colorful background, while the two interviewers are in the shadowy blackness of the empty studio, which provides an entirely featureless backdrop for most of the film. This disconnection in images calls into question the soundtrack, creating a scene that can be read multiple ways depending on how the individual viewer decides to interpret the communication or lack of communication flowing between these two entirely separate cinematic spaces. This effect becomes even more pronounced in a sequence where the duo interviews a grizzled old man. This time, not only do Emile and Patricia ask him questions and give him words to free associate on, but Godard himself joins in on the act, speaking in his whispery growl from a tape recorder which also plays a distracting soundtrack of synthesizer beeps and mechanical grinding. Godard's voice, never associated with any onscreen presence in the film (except, very briefly, in a still photo of the director), is even more distanced from the usual relationship of interviewer to interviewee. This distance grows even greater when, at one point, the tape is wound back, so that the old man hears both Godard's question repeated, and his own answer as well — he seems not to recognize his own voice, suggesting the inevitable disconnection from reality that occurs in the mechanical processes of capturing sound and images.

The difficulty of capturing the quality of a sound is emphasized in a scene where Emile and Patricia discuss an incident that happened among their friends, when one made a half-joking comment and the other responded with an enthusiastic, "Oh, yes!" They try, in vain, to recapture the specific quality of this exclamation, which obviously conveyed something to them in the moment that cannot be either explained or reproduced (least of all by mechanical means like a tape recorder, had they had one handy when it was first said). This gets at the way that the mere meaning of words, even mundane syllables, do not contain the full possibilities of communication. The nuances of expression, context, phrasing, the voice of the speaker, and a thousand other variables coincide to produce the unique qualities of every utterance. It is this multiplicity of language and communication that Godard is getting at in the very form of his film, which veers through every possible permutation of cinematic expression without ever settling into one for very long. There is realist cinema, in which the sound and image coincide in ways roughly corresponding to reality, at least to the extent that when someone is moving their mouth onscreen, words are coming out on the soundtrack. But several times even this seeming realism is undermined, as in the scene where Patricia mouths the words onscreen while Emile speaks them on the soundtrack. Is this realist?


More typically Godardian is the use of collage, both aural and visual. The soundtrack is a confusion of noise, music, and speech, piling up fragments of protest speeches, the voiceovers of Godard, Berto, and Léaud, and snippets of television broadcasts. Similarly, the visuals switch between the darkened minimalist studio set and a polyphony of still photos, candid street scenes, and collaged magazine images and cartoons, often with Godard's slogans and enigmatic fragments of phrases scrawled over the image in pen. In one of the film's funnier images, a magazine photo of a naked model is accompanied by two labels: "Freud" with an arrow pointing to her head, and "Marx" with an arrow pointing between her legs. While the former is concerned with understanding the mind, the latter is busy worrying about the body; the labels invert the popular understanding of Freudianism but make intuitive humorous sense anyway. The same can be said for the scene where Patricia, dressed in a ludicrous purple dress that looks like it came straight from a period film set, reads mangled nonsense language from a book of poetry against a white backdrop painted with images of comic book characters, while Emile reads over her with a more coherent text. This scene is collage in motion, in sound, and even in ideas, creating juxtapositions between time periods (historical versus modern), between forms of art (pop versus classical), and in language (meaning versus incoherence).

These kinds of dialectics are, as anyone familiar with Godard's work knows, his essential tactic of discussion. He loves to encompass both sides of a contradiction within the same framework. In this way, the image of the magazine nude, torn between mind and body, is indicative of a larger structural theme within Le gai savoir: the split between theory (represented by Berto) and action (Léaud). Early on, the duo agrees to divide their study of image/sound relationships into three phases, each lasting a year, and though the film is not quite as rigorous as you'd expect in following through on this separation, it does provide a framework for discussion throughout. The first phase is one of complete uncritical study, in which they will simply watch and listen, collecting sounds and images and examining them, both in isolation and in concert. Only in the second phase can they begin to critique their collected sounds and images, as well as conducting an auto-critique of their own ideas and responses to these stimuli. And the third phase, naturally enough, begins the action stage, in which they will, having been informed by theory, put their ideas into practice and produce their own images and sounds.

Of course, this is just the duo's theory, and it's one of Godard's most subtle jokes that he quickly reveals all this talk of separating theory and action as, itself, still just theoretical. Godard's own view of the relationship between the two is infinitely more complex, and this film represents both the elucidation of his theories and the proof of his action. For Godard, as he says in voiceover, correcting his actors' misconceptions, form and content, like theory and action, are not stages in a process but parts of a circle, continually informing and devouring one another in an eternal process. There is no film that demonstrates this better than Le gai savoir, in which the form and the content are nearly identical. After all, what would the film's discussions of image/sound relationships and the language of bourgeoisie versus radical cinema be without Godard's restless visual and aural imagination to illustrate them? In this way, the film's clarion call of "returning to zero" is misleading, despite the blank black backgrounds and minimalist characters that populate this void. Godard's idea of a "return to zero" is in actuality not empty, but densely populated, full of possibilities; full of all possibilities, in fact. In creating a new idea of cinema from scratch here, Godard is not so much erasing the cinema of the past as erasing the limitations of that cinema, restoring the openness of thought and imagination that can see a cinema without arbitrary boundaries on "acceptable" images and "acceptable" ways of using sound — or "acceptable" ways of combining them.

10/18: Blind Beast

Yasuzo Masumura's Blind Beast is a staggering example of Japanese pinku eiga cinema, a "pink film," part of the wave of sexploitation movies that swept over Japanese theaters in the late 60s. Of course, Masumura's take on this genre, which was often nothing more than soft porn, is as highly idiosyncratic and stylishly executed as anything in his filmography. The blind sculptor Michio (Eiji Funakoshi) kidnaps the beautiful model Aki (Mako Midori), in order to use her as the subject in his project to create a new art of touching. She resists in any way she can think of, finally using psychological manipulation to turn him against his clinging, overbearing mother (Noriko Sengoku), but she eventually warms to him, and the duo engage in an escalating orgy of sensation, in constant search for greater and greater pleasure and pain.

Masumura uses the simple, exploitation context of the story in order to layer on multiple meanings and ideas which are explored throughout the film. Most obvious of these, and least interesting, is the thick Freudian subtext. Michio is a virginal momma's boy who, before Aki's arrival, is content to explore sensation by becoming a masseur and creating sculptures of women's body parts. His warehouse studio is a phenomenally designed aggregation of these sculptures, the walls lined with disembodied body parts, organized by type — one wall is all lips, another all breasts. And in the center of the room are two tremendous nude bodies, which Aki helpfully points out indicate Michio's mother complex, a desire to be small in a woman's arms. Regardless of the Freudian implications, though, the set provides a stunning visual backdrop to the film. When Aki first wakes up after being kidnapped, she's bathed in total darkness and can't see her surroundings. Michio arrives with a flashlight and leads her — and the audience — on a terrifying tour of his studio's interior. As Aki flees from wall to wall, the blind sculptor advances, the beam of his light illuminating each wall in turn. We see a wall of huge ears, a wall with legs extended sinuously, a wall of arms writhing with their fingers contorted into strange poses.

Masumura and his art director Shigeo Mano had these sculptures made by a big team of art students, taking up most of their budget, but the effort clearly paid off. This is one of the most striking sets I've ever seen, and it is especially effective because of the way it externalizes the film's psychological conflicts. Michio is content in this bizarre room because it reduces the complexity of woman to dismembered parts, which he can caress in isolation, without dealing with the woman as a whole. Even his organization speaks to his inability to cope with actual humans; all the legs together, rather than all the parts of a single woman. The constant presence of these sculptures in the background means that the film is playing out in a giant reconstruction of Michio's mental landscape, writ large in the setting of the film.

The film also examines the nature of art itself, and it's surely tempting to see in Michio's manic quest for a new art, a parallel to Masumura's own career. For a director constantly obsessed with pushing boundaries and cramming his cinematic works with the most stunning imagery imaginable, there's a real link with Michio's desire to find new outlets for artistic expression, and new ways of expressing himself. The scenes where he's sculpting Aki's body, caressing her legs in order to learn their shape, establish the link between the physical act of sculpting, of creating, and the caresses of a lover. These deeply erotic scenes might be thought of as Masumura's own commentary on the sensory potential of art, and the artist's capacity to translate what he senses into new forms of expression.

Throughout the film, Masumura himself pushes the boundaries of expression, just as Michio does, in order to capture the complexities of the relationship between artist and subject. In the final twenty minutes, their relationship finally morphs as Aki softens her feelings towards her captors and they begin to develop a mutually parasitic relationship of violent sensual pleasure. I was initially wary of this change, abrupt and unexplained as it is, fearing that Masumura was merely indulging in a despicable male fantasy of rape engendering love. But it almost immediately becomes clear that this new turn of events is the logical development of the film's themes. Abandoning artwork, Michio and Aki engage in a total art of tactile sensation, their medium each other's bodies and their tools their own hands at first, and eventually whips, chains, and knives. Encased in total darkness (Aki is going blind too, in a somewhat heavy-handed metaphorical gesture), the duo caress and claw at each other, vampirically drinking each other's blood, in pursuit of the ultimate sensory pleasure. Masumura responds to this material by translating the couple's tactile excesses into an orgy of audiovisual sensations. Naked bodies blend into each other, set off from the darkness, blood flows freely and redly, and cries of mingled pain and pleasure ring out of the eerie quiet in the warehouse.

Blind Beast is a wild, powerful examination of eroticism, artistic expression, and the dangers associated with art at its extreme borders. As a channeling of pinku eiga material, it frequently verges into the lurid or the outright ridiculous — another risk of art at the edge — but its vivid imagery is constantly enthralling. Masumura takes his art right to the edge along with his characters, fearlessly following them into the abyss of sensual excess.