Change Your Image
p_radulescu
Reviews
Nema-ye nazdik (1990)
Vanity Fair
A guy (just a guy, you know, nothing more) claims to be a well-known filmmaker (Mohsen Makhmalbaf) and the people seem willing to believe him very easily. Is he a scammer, or a man living his illusions to the extreme? (at the end, the real filmmaker appears, and the confusion seems to be total). A reporter notices the possibility of a journalistic hit and determines the police to arrest the guy: the newsman will practically direct the action, while recording everything. Another well-known filmmaker (Abbas Kiarostami this time) asks to film the trial, and his request is approved immediately. The trial fails to clarify anything (in fact, at the end the plaintiffs withdraw their complaint), but the ciné-vérité feeling is overwhelming. Vanity Fair. We are in the Tehran of the 1990's, and the people there seem obsessed with turning their lives into a movie show. After all, is the movie art struggling (and probably failing) to create the illusion of reality, or the other way around?
The Gardener (2012)
Living the Forbidden Dream
... a cinematic approach calling in mind Parajanov and his Sayat Nova ... Paula Asadi's apparition in the movie, a diaphanous dance, like she's coming from a god, impossible to define ... a prophetess telling an ethereal message ... and the birds drawing high in the sky paths seeming to go towards an unknown deity ... Baha'i originated in Iran, where it is now forbidden, it is hosted by Israel, a land forbidden for Iranians ... a forbidden faith, beautiful as a forbidden dream, in a forbidden land ... and the impression that the movie is made just in front of your eyes, through trial and error ... a cinematic journey, inviting us to meditate together with them, about faith and reality, about the link (illusory? Certain?) between the mundane and the beyond ... the father and the son are both agnostics, however their difference of age makes the difference ... for the father all he witnesses in the Baha'i Gardens puts into question his ways ... the son is a rebel, with clear-cut certitudes and definitive answers ... we all passed through his age ... we all were once rebels ... and the meditation is ultimately not only about a religion (or any religion), it is about the path between objective and illusion ... our objective universe and the universe of art, or of faith ... but this is common to all great Iranian filmmakers ...
Finding Vivian Maier (2013)
Expecting the Unexpected
We have here actually two movies. The movie about Vivian and the one about Maloof. Each of the two is highly unorthodox. The movie about Vivian exists only in disparate fragments that are discovered by the movie of Maloof. The movie of Maloof is created in front of our eyes: productionism as in the masterpieces of the twenties last century. Vivian exists only as and when Maloof unexpectedly discovers the unexpected: a new evidence about her, out of the blue. Sheets of paper, shoes, hats, invoices, stills, footage, a new witness who had known Vivian, realizing now that it was the elephant in the room. But also Maloof exists only as and when he finds out of the blue something new about Vivian, and decides how to continue. And for us it is the same: both the life of Vivian and the story of Maloof are the expecting the unexpected. She was a crazy genius. He is a hell of a story teller.
Tini zabutykh predkiv (1965)
World of Traditions, Gate to Our Inner
Parajanov was inspired by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's classic novella telling a Hutsul story placed (like all Hutsul stories) in a world apart, with certitudes slippering toward a universe of dreams and tales becoming now and then certitudes (to turn then back, as flash ghosts do). A strange world revealing at every turn long forgotten meanings, sometimes reassuring, some other times nightmarish.
There is an English translation (published for the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies by Ukrainian Academic Press), maybe there are also some others. As I have a particular interest for the Hutsul ways, I read several books with short stories written by a Romanian author, Casian Balabasciuc, and I warmly reccomend them: his stories paint a fantastic world, and they do it with deep knowldege.
Coming now back to the movie, the title describes very well, I think, Parajanov's credo: if we want to understand our true identity, we need to access the world of our ancestors; that world is hidden beneath the traditions, that act like shadows; thus we arrive at our inner truth only by crossing the layers of tales and legends, croyances and superstitions.
Is this world of ancestors the Paradise Lost? Not at all. Like in today's world, you find there the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. It doesn't matter: it's essentially your world, your reality, your true meaning of life.
And it's the same regardless of the region where you are from, for the Hutsuls of the Carpathians, as well as for the Georgians, Armenians or Azeris of the Caucasus.
Ashug-Karibi (1988)
Treat or Trick
Parajanov starts here from a short story by Lermontov to go further in his own way, sometimes very far from the original. It's true, both novel and movie end with the same promise for the two lovers (happy together for ever and ever), but along the film Parajanov follows his own instincts and abandons some very important points that are present in Lermontov's story.
Actually the story is in the film only a pretext. Well, in all the great movies of Parajanov, starting with the Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, the story is more a pretext for the master to immerse in a traditions' universe and to enjoy there the view. But here in Ashik Kerib, even the traditions' universe becomes a pretext! The master simply plays with all kind of artistic genres from all kind of traditions' universes, to see how they fit. All kind of treats or tricks, that may leave you in total perplexity. At a certain moment it's like you attend a Kabuki theatre. Some other times you seem to visit an exhibition of Azeri or Persian art. It all seems gratuitous, only to see at the end that Ashik Kerib is dedicated to the beloved memory of Tarkovsky: a dedication like a joyous present.
The Neighbors' Window (2019)
Subtle Morality Tale
Two families can watch each one what's going on into the other's apartment, their windows faithfully capturing everything. And a lot happens in each apartment, a whole life of joys and sorrows, of enthusiasms and regrets. But every family sees only what they want to see, only what each one's heart dictates to be seen. The story is told straightforward, letting us draw the conclusions. And each of us will retain only what she or he wants to retain, according to each one's heart.
A 20 minutes movie with a gorgeous cinematography that gives a coregraphic rhythm to the whole, subtly transforming the story in some sort of a morality tale.
Lights (1966)
Epiphany
Menken finished the work at this 6 minute film in 1966, and terms like augmented, or virtual reality would come decades later; and just such terms of nowadays would come to mind when watching Lights; in other of her movies (like in her 1944 Visual Variations of Noguchi, for instance) she was exploring the objects trying to make them active parteners in the play; here in Lights it's different; Menken gives up any effort to show us the reality she films; here she goes beyond the world of the objects to find out something more fundamental; here the effort is to surpass even Plato's cave, so to speak; and the result is an epiphany.
Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)
Forcing Art Object to React to the Context
A handheld camera permeating a studio full of statues (kind of huge abstract constructions: Noguchi's studio); starting to explore them, one by one, each one in relation with itself and with its constitutive parts, as to discover some holistic verities; each one in relation with the others, as to discover some conversation around; a conversation as a voiceless movement along the surface of the statue; sometimes very slow movements, sometimes rapid, sometimes like chaotic; wich makes sense, as any conversation has moments of slowness and of speed, moments of fluidity and of chaos.
Marie Menken made this 4-minute film in 1945. It was the first movie directed by her (she had previously collaborated with her husband Maas for The Geography of the Body in 1943). It seems to me that Menken tried to find an answer to this: can a movie force an art object (whose nature is intinsically static, focused on itself) to react to the context?
Well, here's the thing: the main personage in the drama is actually the camera. We expect a story told by the statues, we get it told by the camera - and imagined by the camera. We are interested to see how the statues react to the context, it is actually the camera that reacts. Earlier, by the end of the twenties Vertov had illustrated this in Man with a Movie Camera: a movie is a story told by the camera. And later, by the sixties, Brakhage would try to ultimately eliminate the camera in making his films, in his desire to get the story unmediated. Which is possible only in very few cases.
Marie Menken continued to create movies after her first one, and it would be interesting to analyse them, to see the relation between camera and image, the way the camera forces the image to create its story, the way the story is changed by the camera.
Mechanics of Love (1955)
The Reality of the Image
She is waiting for him naked, he takes off his clothes to join her in bed. That's porn you'd say. Well, here's the thing: during five minutes (presumably the intercourse duration), what we see on the screen is a chaotic float of mundane household objects, and what we hear is a chaotic dialog (or rather two intertwined monologs, each one chaotic in its own right) about very mundane activities. Well, we can talk about the way in which the choice of the household objects could suggest a correspondence with different moments of the intercourse, but I'll leave that to connaisseurs. The male personage is perhaps right, "love in some ways is not always simple."
It was the third movie made by Willard Maas (this time co-director was Ben Moore, a constant collaborator of Maas). And putting Mechanics of Love in relation with the first film created by Maas (Geography of the Body - as the second seems difficult to find), both try to respond to a question tormenting many modern artists: what is the correpondence between image and the reality that it claims to represent.
Better said, what is the reality of the image? Magritte enonciated it in his famous Ceci n'est pas une pipe: the image of a pipe is just an image, you cannot smoke with it. Kiarostami and Panahi also are preoccupied in their movies with that question (to the point that Kiarostami's movies seem sometimes meta-movies).
Here, at Maas, it is about what image to be chosen by the artist to represent the intimacy of the body (Geography of the Body), or the intimacy of a couple (Mechanics of Love). The couple gets intimacy both in sex as in their day-to-day routines. We are very far from a porn movie, indeed.
Geography of the Body (1943)
Image and Sound in Counterpoint
It was the first movie created by Willard Maas, in 1943; his next film (Image in the Snow) would come in 1952; bur let's go back to 1943, the year of the Geography of the Body; a 7 minutes black and white; Marie Menken did the cinematography, and George Barker authored the poem to be recited off-screen; two nude bodies (seemingly Maas and Menken themselves); the camera browsing them without any haste in extreme close-ups, from ear to nombril to eye to knee to mouth to tow, and so on, and so on; no genitalia showed (it was 1943, c'me on!); meanwhile George Barker (a poet considered a genius in his prime, largely forgotten nowadays) is heard reciting without any haste a strange litany, about ultimate experiences lived on ultimate settings; image and sound in counterpoint; a geography of the human body as a site of miriads of small exotic mysteries; a geography of the earth as a site of miriads of exotic spots of mysterious initiations.
Maybe it is interesting to stay a little more on the relation image-sound here in this movie. It seems to me that here the relation is paradoxical. R. Bruce Elder comes with a great interpretation (A Body of Vision: Representations of Body in Recent Filme and Poetry, Wilfried Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 1997, pages 36, 37): we would expect from the text to emphasize the meaning of the image, but here, the extravagance of the poem leaves the language in almost meaningless ruins, signaling the impulse to deal with energies that have a preverbal source; the image of a human body is an experience of a more primal sort than lenguages can accomodate.
And maybe we are not far from the universe of Rudolf Otto with his theories of Numinous.
The Last Supper (1995)
One can die only two ways
I've just watched it on TV, not knowing anything previously, just attracted by the generic showing Cameron Diaz and Jason Alexander in the cast. Obviously what followed was totally unexpected. A black comedy, maybe leaving the impression of being a bit too long, or a bit too repetitive, but above any imperfections, putting bluntly in front of us the tableau of who we really are. Traditionalists or progressives, pro-life or pro-choice, religious or atheists, whatever, we are the same, knowing only the extremes, getting nuts of any nuances, believing only in our own righteousness, free to do anything it takes in the name of our righteousness. And after all, a cultural war is a funny name masking the reality of the war: and in a war nobody's innocent. Any direction you take you'll find a bunch of lunatics. Anthony Loyd says that one can die only two ways, fighting the good cause for the wrong reason, or fighting the wrong cause for the good reason. Up2u.
La Once (2014)
Sometimes the Non-Euclidian Means Kindness and Empathy
Is the universe of Maite Alberdi also the one of ours, or a world of herself, with other geometry and other rules of logic? At the beginning it seems that's our known universe, however something is weird, and calls in mind the non-Euclidian. Says she, estoy obsesionada con lo insólito de la realidad (I am obsessed with the insolite of reality), which means it is our world, only she has the craft to discover the non-Euclidian here, in our day-to-day geometry.
Sometimes this non-Euclidian means just kindness and empathy, like in La Once (Tea Time): five ladies meet each month around the tea, in a ritual that's taking place for sixty years. Each time they repeat the same small stories, kind memories of a time bygone; they repeat the same small stories each time, in almost the same words, and the others listen without interrupting, because these small stories, like the cups of tea and the cakes, and like themselves, are part of the same ritual of a time bygone.
El Manzano Azul (2012)
A Simple and Beautiful Story
A boy of about ten or eleven must spend the summer at his grandfather (the boy barely knows his grandpa). The boy comes from a big city where the universe has smartphone, cable TV, and Internet as natural coordinates. The grandpa lives in a remote village in the mountains, where the universe is deprived even of electricity and bathroom. People in the village look like from another planet, and boys of his age are overtly hostile. Generally everything seems to be charged with an incomprehensible level of brutality. Add to this the traumas the boy carries with him from the city: the father has left the family to come back only in very short flashbacks in the boy's nightly dreams.
All this makes the little boy very reluctant towards his grandpa and towards everybody and everything there. Well, the grandpa is patient and tactful, and little by little he succeeds to communicate his own balance to the boy.
And so the boy starts progressively to open himself to the new universe and get more and more fascinated by the knowns and unknowns there. There is something beyond the incomprehensible brutality: a genuine collective solidarity against the potential evil coming from outside. Once you are accepted, you'll bee protected.
This grandpa seems to carry wonderful mysteries, the same as the blue apple tree near the house. It's for the boy the beginning of a lifelong fascination for the place, and he will come back in the years that follow, and will marry the girl he met here in the village during that summer of long time ago.
A simple and beautiful story that is recomposed through the memories of the adult who once was a boy of about ten or eleven, and who has inherited from his grandpa that wonderful balance in approaching the knowns and unknowns in life.
That is El Manzano Azul (The Blue Apple Tree), the 2012 movie of Venezuelan director Olegario Barrera. The grandpa is played by an unforgettable actor, Miguel Ángel Landa.
Lenin v 1918 godu (1939)
Romm's movies about Lenin
Along the years Mikhail Romm had to come back and rework his movies about Lenin several times, as the heroes exalted sometime by the Soviet propaganda were suddenly becoming the villains to be erased from history. In the 30's Romm had to exclude from the footage the figure of any of the bolsheviks condemned throughout the Stalinist purges - and especially to present Stalin as the closest companion of Lenin (regardless of how close or loose had actually been everything). Later, in the 60's, Romm had to revisit the footage and shrink the size of Stalin as much as he could. And Mikhail Romm did very carefully his job each time. They were propaganda movies, and that's expected from a propaganda movie, to keep in line.
Thus, if you want to understand what really happened in Russia in 1917-1918, forget about. Or maybe you will understand something else, the way the Soviet society of the thirties was getting the Stalinist version of the story. But, if you are interested in movie art, you will understand the fine quality of the filmmaker who was Mikhail Romm. His movies about Lenin have no connection with what really happened. Just propaganda. Still, they build a cinematographic universe, fake of course, while extremely humane and extremely convincing. Mikhail Romm had a superb grasp of the small details of life, those small details that fill our existence. It was his immense experience acquired during the Civil War years, as he traveled throughout Russia all azimuths, and knew a lot of people facing a lot of situations. And these two propaganda movies are full of these small details, thus no wonder that behind what's told on the screen you feel some untold stories about anonymous men and women who had happened to live in those years and for better or worse had happened to make things happen.
Tri pesni o Lenine (1934)
The last movie Vertov was allowed to make
Lenin has lived, is living, will live: a film poster summarizing it very well. The atheist society of Stalin needed its own mythology, just as throughout the whole history any other society had to build its own mythology (a fiction is always essential in the struggle for survival; if Darwin hadn't told it from the very beginning, it was said anyway by lots of Darwinians). Ultimately any mythology supposes the existence of an eternal god. Of course, in the Soviet mythology the eternal god was Lenin. As he had died in 1924, the problem of his immortality had to be solved.
In this movie the god Lenin lives forever in the Soviet society: in the whole society, and in any particle of it. Any Soviet citizen, and any Soviet accomplishment, carries the personality of Lenin. With this movie Vertov gives up his atheism, to become a pantheist: he deifies the Soviet society because it embodies the eternity of Lenin, and he deifies Lenin because his eternity is embodied in the Soviet society. Is it pantheism or rather panentheism? I'd leave for you to decide. Anyway it is the demonstration of a perfect totalitarian system: one cannot have free will as everyone embodies Lenin, thus carrying the will of Lenin.
Well, for the regime officials this movie had two impardonable flaws. Firstly it was an Avangardist movie, it means some kind of bourgeois leisure. In 1934 the Soviet norm was already the Socialist Realism. And more than that it was the second flaw. The Soviet mythology was actually built upon two gods: one dead (Lenin) and one alive and in full control of the power (Stalin). And the dead god should have had only one role: to justify the almighty alive god. This movie said too much about the dead god, and almost nothing about the alive god. No wonder that Vertov would not be let to make another movie any more. He would not understand why, as he was too honest, too sincere, to understand the ways of life.
Apart from that, this is a superb movie, just because it is so consistently Avangardist (I would even say so Productionist - the whole Soviet construction living through one hero, Lenin), and so sincere.
Tretya meshchanskaya (1927)
Ménage à trois à la russe
We'd expect a Soviet movie to be framed in some Soviet canons. Well, with many Soviet movies of the twenties, simply it's not the case. Look for instance at this Bed and Sofa, created by Abram Room in 1927. It's the story of a ménage à trois à la russe, started (and keeping on) due to the huge housing problems of those years, and evolving into something that could suggest kind of a same-sex resolution.
It's Moscow of the twenties, housing problems are huge, it's far from the period of continuous development of huge ugly projects with myriads of small anonymous apartments. Right now it's just that, an old city with an ever growing number of people coming in, and it's impossible to find a dwelling for everyone. It comes that anyone finds a solution on its on, sharing bed and sofa and even more.
Some say that this movie alludes to the tempestuous story between Majakovsky and Lilya Brik. I don't know whether it's the case. Simply the Soviet mentalities of the twenties were unexpectedly free when it was coming to the gender issues, putting men and women on an equal footing on anything related to family, attitude toward sex, conjugal fidelity and ejusdem farinae. All this would radically change a few years later, but by then it was just the decade of the twenties. Anyway a wonderful comedy, full of tempo, and full of warmth, of sympathy for each hero, the wife and the two men.
A bit about the actors. Let's mention firstly Lyudmila Semyonova, playing with wonderful subtlety in the role of the wife. I saw her also in a much later movie, from 1961, The Steamroller and the Violin, the first oeuvre of Tarkovsky. Nikolai Batalov was in the role of the husband. He was an interesting actor, unfortunately he died too young and played only in ten movies throughout his life. I already watched three of them. His namesake, Aleksey Batalov (no relation between the two) would make a much, much longer career. And Vladimir Fogel in the role of husband's friend and competitor, he was one of the leading actors of his generation (the best, as Pudovkin would state later). He died tragically in 1929, being only 27 years old. Despite his brief life he played in fourteen movies.
Under sandet (2015)
The elephant in the room
At the end of the WWII, the German soldiers deployed in Denmark as occupation troupes became war prisoners and were used to clear the enormous number of land mines from the Baltic littoral. Did it count that so many of them were just teenagers, anonymous pieces in the game of the others? If they had been old enough to go to war, they should be old enough to clean up, so was the common wisdom. Nobody was willing to go beyond and see the elephant in the room: these teenagers had been just victims, nothing more, and from the very beginning.
I came on this movie by pure chance, browsing the TV channels. It was already in the middle. I remained on it for five or ten minutes, then I passed on my laptop, and found the film on youTube. A powerful story, told in great simplicity.
Ha-Me'ahev (1985)
My story about this movie
I watched this movie on TV one evening, sometime in 2000 or 2001. I didn't know anything about the director or the cast. Actually I didn't pay attention to the title either. Very curious, because the movie impressed me, and it came back to my mind often during the years. A film I couldn't remember the title, any name from the cast, anything, while remembering perfectly almost every detail.
An Israeli family where for some time things were far from running well. The husband owning a body shop, the wife teaching Spanish, their girl at the difficult age of fifteen - sixteen. An unknown guy appearing out of the blue, pretending that he had come from Argentina to inherit a dying aunt here. Meanwhile being without money, dying of hunger. The husband offering him shelter, a torrid affair exploding between the wife and the stranger, the husband incapable of doing anything against.
It's 1967, the war erupts between Israel and his neighbors. The stranger leaves the house, presumably to join the military, and simply vanishes. The wife enters a deep depression, and the husband understands that in order to save her he has to find the guy. For a week or so he searches for the guy everywhere (here the story takes a picaresque turn, with unexpected turns and funny episodes, like many stories of this kind). The aunt is far from dying, a schoolmate of the girl wants to start her sexual life and pushes the husband to commit, the girl herself starts her sexual life with the husband's apprentice (a very young and very nice Palestinian, otherwise helping the husband in his search) - and meanwhile the wife going on with her depression. Eventually the stranger is found, the scoundrel had just entered an orthodox community to avoid drafting.
Why did this movie remain so deeply in my memory? I think because I found in it a deep understanding of what true love is: the husband's love for his wife. In order to cure her for the depression the only thing to do was to find the vanished stranger.
Thus, I knew anything about the movie's story, nothing at all about title, cast, production year. We are now approaching the end of 2018, and one evening I felt that I needed to find the movie, by any cost. I searched on the web for three or four hours, browsing various sites of any kind, trying various search tips, till I found it! The Lover, made in 1985.
Amur senza fin (2018)
The Limits of Traditional Menthality
I watched this movie on a flight over Atlantic. I had plenty of time, and an impressive choice of movies of all kind. I didn't know anything about this particular movie (as was the case with many others in the selection). I saw that the language was Romansh. This made me eager to see the movie immediately. My information about Romansh was scarce and a bit contradictory and I wanted to understand more the thing. In the movie the language appeared to me like a mix of Italian and German (or maybe some dialects / neighboring idioms), with a few words that were sounding strangely similar to their correspondents in Romanian. Well, I couldn't say that I increased my knowledge in this domain, but anyway it was my first contact with the idiom spoken in the Engadine region.
Now leaving aside my interest for Romansh and the whole group of Rhaetian languages, the movie was very interesting per se, very well made, with a good balance, having a point that was subtly followed.
A village someplace in the Engadine region, surrounded by woods and mountains, everybody knows anybody, a traditional universe of traditional families. The husbands are passionate by hunting and enjoy a beer or two in the evening, the wives keep the household, all of them attend the mass on Sunday morning. Traditional ways: very soon we can see that tradition has its limits, keeping unsolved some abnormal realities. It's a comedy, so it's not about gender identity or abusive behavior, that kind of things. Just the fact that the husbands, for one or another reason, don't fulfill properly their sexual responsibilities anymore. Various reasons: one of them has a secret affair, another one practices intercourse in the missionary position just once a week, after the Sunday mass. As I said, it's a comedy: the women start to take attitude, and the guy who coalesces the women will be no other than the new priest (who came from India, as the Catholic Church in Europe lacks sacerdotal vocations more and more). A priest from India, advising the women (and subsequently their men) to read Kama Sutra, in order to get the full picture. And little by little, the husbands (along with their wives) begin to realize what's expected from them in a normal (rather than traditional) universe.
Sorok pervyy (1927)
Three artists telling the same story, contemplating it differently
It's during the Russian Civil War; she is a sniper in the Red Army; he is an officer at the Whites and her prisoner; she must shoot him is he to escape; these are the orders; suddenly a storm leaves them alone on a deserted island; the two fall in love (you'd say it's kind of Stockholm syndrome avant la lettre, somehow turned upside-down, whatever); the occasion for him to escape arrives, will she follow her orders or rather her heart? add to this his uncanny gift of retelling the story of Robinson; add to this the strange magic of the Karakum desert - blue sky infinite over yellow sand infinite - and of the Aral sea - yellow sun infinite over blue sea infinite; all this magic can make you falling madly in love, or simply falling mad.
Boris Lavrenev wrote this story in 1924; it was published in Zvezda (a literary magazine led by that time by Ivan Maisky, who would later become one of the most outstanding Soviet diplomats of the epoch); in 1927 Yakov Protazanov adapted the story to film; Grigori Chukhrai made a remake in 1956.
I took contact with the three oeuvres in reverse order. Firstly I saw the movie of Chukhrai, sometime by the 1960's. I had already watched his Ballad of a Soldier and Clear Skies and I was very impressed by his his way of telling the stories, distancing from the official artistic dogmas, being simply natural. Obviously I was interested to see also The Forty-First, made earlier than the other two. I wanted to make a comparison, to see if his attitude towards life had been free at the same degree. As for the movie of Protazanov, it was impossible to find it.
The memory of Chukhrai's movie came to my mind recently, and I watched it again, on youTube. A great director, a great cinematographer (Sergey Urusevskyi) producing hallucinatory imagery. And Oleg Strizhenov was unforgettably telling the story of Robinson, setting with it the frame for the magic.
This time I watched immediately also the movie of Protazanov on youTube. Another great director, another great cinematographer (Pyotr Yermolov, I did not know much about him). Ivan Koval-Samborsky was in the role of the White officer, an actor with a dramatic biography.
Surely I wanted to go further, to the original story. I found a very well written summary on the web, then I ordered an English translation of the book on Amazon. I read it in one day. Though I knew now the plot very well, the book could not be left up to the last page.
Lavrenev, Protazanov and Chukhrai, three artists telling the same story, while contemplating it differently.
Let's begin with the movie created by Chukhrai. It was his first movie, made in 1956. The Soviet society was beginning a painful process of freeing itself from the Stalinist referential, of opening the windows toward fresh air. Though this process was tightly controlled and had very strict limits, for many people living in those years the effort was genuine. And the movie of Chukhrai was trying just that: to find out what was beyond the political datum. The director set the story under a deep humanist credo: Soviet musts could not be absolute - beyond them life was claiming its rights to exist. The story of love, yes, that was absolute, and it was tragic, because the political chains could not be broken. The tone of the story seemed very personal: the effort of the love story to liberate itself from the political realities was the same with the effort of Chukhrai to go beyond the dogmas of the regime.
Lavrenev's story (and Protazanov's film) had a different tonality: a fact of life observed from afar and told with a good dose of detachment. This time the political realities constituted the absolute, with their two totally separated universes, the Reds and the Whites. Anything that appeared beyond, like the story of love, was just absurd. But this meant that life in general was absurd, which ultimately implied even the political reality. The two universes were not only hostile, each one was perceiving the other without any correspondence in the reality. It was not clear at all (to use Anthony Loyd's way of telling things) whether they were fighting the good cause for the wrong reason or the wrong cause for the good reason. His Holiness the Paradox seemed to be in control of the whole circus. There is in Lavrenev's story (well reproduced by Protazanov's movie) a subtle sense of Swiftian irony.
But all this irony is greatly balanced by a feeling of empathy for each personage and each fact. From the story author, as well as from the movie director. As absurd as they could be these facts and these people, everything is observed with a great science of the human - human naivete, weaknesses, illusions, absurdity - the whole is wrapped by something like a charm.
And actually this charm links all three artists, Lavrenev, Protazanov and Chukhrai, beyond their different tonalities in telling the story. The magic of the infinite dialog of the sun with the sky, the desert, the sea. Paradox at Lavrenev/Protazanov, tragedy at Chukhrai, it is beyond the same magic, following its unknown laws, maybe unaware of our struggles, however sending us, through these artists and their books and movies, discrete signals of sympathy.
Casa Ricordi (1954)
Traveling on a Time Machine
I saw this movie in my teen years and I enjoyed it enormously. I was an enthusiast of Italian opera, and here was an unbelievable pageantry with all the great names of the nineteenth century belcanto from Rossini to Puccini passing through Verdi, impersonated by actors like Marcello Mastroianni and Micheline Presle, Paolo Stoppa and Danièle Delorme, Roland Alexandre and Märta Torén, Maurice Ronet and Myriam Bru, Andrea Checchi (to name just a very few from a huge cast), supported by such golden voices as Mario Del Monaco or Renata Tebaldi. It was a blockbuster, and I was young and this was what I loved, such a great spectacle with great historical names, great cast, great colors and great music. A bit of humor now and then, a bit of melodrama here and there, love permeating everything .... and glorious belcanto. And Carmine Galone, the director, knew how to make a blockbuster.
I kept the memory of this movie through the years, and I wanted to watch it again. I had this possibility today. Traveling on a time machine to see how it was everything on your past, your universe of those times, and your own selfie. To see it with your eyes from now. Of course it shows its age this Casa Ricordi from 1954, and I am showing my age, too. But I watched it with joy, a very old friend from sixty years ago.
Entuziazm (Simfoniya Donbassa) (1930)
Sic transit gloria mundi
Some see Vertov's Enthusiasm as a masterpiece. Many others consider it a failure. I think that even as a failure Enthusiasm is a great experiment, one of the greatest in cinema history. It was Vertov's first sound film. And he tried with the soundtrack to do the impossible. In Человек с Киноаппаратом, the camera had been the main actor (maybe the only actor), constructing the film in front of the spectators' eyes. Here in Энтузиазм, the sound was the only actor, controlling an insane counterpoint of ballets on industrial themes, radio and railroad infrastructure, political meetings, huge demonstrations, coal exploitation, steelmaking, kolkhoz with tractors and stuff; all these seamlessly metamorphosing one into another, becoming the avatars of a unique reality. And as a symbol of sound supremacy, the power of the radio.
This movie is a perfect demonstration of конструктивизм: the old culture (religion and alcohol - here Vertov was the most orthodox avant-gardist) replaced by a new culture, where the art (of course, Constructivist) is generating the whole new society: policies, infrastructure, industry, agriculture, and above all, Stalinist enthusiasm. A huge difference from the actual reality, which also meant forced labor, Голодомо́р, repressions (even one of the political leaders of the epoch, showed in the movie at a demonstration, Stanislav Kosian, the infamous organizer of the Ukrainian famine in the thirties, would become himself a victim of the Stalinist purges, in 1939). Carloss James Chamberlin is right: Vertov believed in his own reality, based on his filmic montage, always looking through his camera and at his strips of film. But that's the way the history goes, with the Avant-garde of the cinema: all of them, Eisenstein and Vertov among others (and also Riefenstahl by the way, on the other side) were politically very committed, for better or worse.
And as an irony of history this ultra-Communist film was not agreed by the Soviet officials either: the epoch of Socialist Realism was beginning, and Constructivist art had become to be viewed as a bit too formal, a bit too decadent, definitely too unhealthy, in one word too bourgeois. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Salesman (1969)
A Quiet Desperation At a Subliminal Level
An almost hallucinatory piece of cinéma vérité that needs a second watch to get its message and everything. And that is because Salesman is subtly but unbearably depressing. A quiet desperation is pervasive throughout the movie, almost at a subliminal level. A group of four door to door salesmen is followed in their daily business. A business implying a network of bosses, salesmen, prospects. A network where nobody's innocent: the prospects struggle to find reasons to reject the offer, the salesmen push relentlessly to perfect the sales, the bosses press the salesmen to get results. And all this takes place in the Catholic universe: they try to sell expensive Catholic editions of the Bible to lower income families of Catholic parishioners. Spirituality and business interlaced, or rather business pushing aside spirituality. Under the spiritual skin a Darwinian struggle, where the weak ones are eliminated: aging parishioners cannot find any more the energy to reject the offers, aging salesmen cannot find the energy to place their Bibles any more. One of the salesmen, the eldest of them, is on the brink of loosing the battle: for those who fail the American Dream shows its nightmarish truth.
Paradoxically this depressing movie carries also something like a charm: a time capsule bringing the today's viewer back to a bygone era, the wonderful 1960's, when we were so young, ladies were wearing their curlers with genuineness and gentlemen were playing cards with open pleasure, sales were made door to door, the Internet wasn't yet born, you talked with your sweetie via a phone operator, people were not afraid to invite strangers inside the house, faith was still a thing people cared about, the convertibles were so big and Gosh, so vintage! And everybody smoked, everybody, all the time! You can guess I watched it twice.
El infierno (2010)
Calls in mind the movies of Berlanga
WARNING: I HAVE MANY SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW:
Benny Garcia had left Mexico as a young fellow to find his fortune in US. What happened with Benny during his stay in US nobody told us, maybe it was good, maybe it was not so good, suffice it to say that after twenty years they deported the guy back to Mexico. To be again home after so many years had its charm, there were the guitars and sombreros, and all the good stuff, plus Benny had the gringo experience, which meant he was able to ride on both worlds. Not exactly, as the gringo experience proved kind of confusing in what he found home. His younger brother had been killed and he had to find the authors and take revenge, actually killings looked very common, the brother's girlfriend, Guadelupe by name, was making ends meet as a prostitute at Café México, her son was rising up as a loose cannon, plus Benny was irresistibly attracted by Guadelupe (who was terribly hot, no question about). Was that the hell or what? A childhood friend helped him adjust. The hell was rather a paradise, provided you were in the gang of Don Reyes. El Infierno was El Paradiso, more exactly El Narco (that was the definition of paradise: being in the narcotic business). All you had to do was to execute the orders of Don Reyes (including to kill now and then), and you had plenty of money, plenty of drinks, a big car, any women you wanted, the order you had them was your choice. Wasn't that splendid? Everybody, the mayor, the police, the priest, all the others, were under the authority of Don Reyes. Well, it was also the rival gang, of Don Pancho, the two bosses were actually brothers, and the war between them had ups and downs, sometimes it was hot, with mutual killings and disfigurement of victims, some other times the war was put on hold. All this was keeping the men in that village very busy. The kids dreamed to enter one of the two gangs, as for the women and old men, it was another story, they weren't living in the paradise, rather in limbo, and sometimes they were unexpectedly shot for unknown reasons, because also the limbo had its rules.
And pretty soon Benny found out that the paradise was just a stage to hell, nobody could remain in the cards for too long, for each one the bell was ringing and the turn was coming to be tortured, disfigured, then killed. Hell and paradise mocking each other, playing a common black farce, for what was life other than a black farce? The movie stirred extremely controversial reactions in Mexico, for obvious reasons. As the whole movie had not been enough, by the end Benny was shown coming to the Mexican Bicentennial celebration and killing everybody from the official tribune (Don Reyes surrounded by all authorities of the village). Thus many protested against El Infierno saying it was profoundly unjust and unfair to depict their country as a grotesque caricature. Luis Estrada (director, writer and producer) defended his movie, saying that, firstly, a caricature was just a caricature, secondly, a caricature was a very legitimate artistic approach, like all other legitimate artistic approaches, thirdly, he agreed that obviously not all Mexican society was made of drug dealers and corrupt politicians, while this Mexican society had to be aware about the serious problem of having so much criminality and corruption in their country, all these leading to the conclusion that a grotesque caricature was sometimes necessary for its cathartic effect.
I'm just wondering how would I react against a movie depicting in this way my own country. Honestly I wouldn't take it easy at all, but my reaction against it would prove the power of the message. An artist has the duty to say the truth he believes in, with all risks, even with the risk of stirring ardent passions against him. Luis Estrada is politically intense and his movies cannot be but politically intense. His extreme sarcasm calls in mind the movies of Berlanga, and generally the Spanish and Hispanic-American movies are often very tough.
I would add to all this that the value of a movie cannot stand only in what it speaks to its country; it should go beyond and transmit something universal. I think this is the case with El Infierno. It's the drama of returning to your home after many years and realizing that for everybody there you look like an ostrich joke, because that's what you are. It's the tragedy of having illusions till you realize that your life is just a black farce. It's a parable saying that our whole world became a hell in all respects.
A Natural Born Gambler (1916)
The Special Charm of the Vintage
Bert Williams is director, writer and star. The cinematographer is Billy Bitzer. Both of them are known today mostly by guys passionate for vintage movies and vintage records: they were great names in their times.
A group of black gentlemen, organized in some sort of fraternity or lodge whatever, meets regularly in the back room of a bar to discuss matters of interest, their reunions ending in drinking or gambling or both. However gambling seems to be forbidden those days, so the guys have to be careful not to be discovered by the police. Among them the Honorable Bert Williams, kind of a walking delegate, which means big mouth and vague duties, always in debt and in need of money, always trying to cheat for the pleasure of game, always loosing. On the wall a torn-out image of President Lincoln, like a Deus Otiosus no longer interested in the daily operation of this rapidly decaying world, while seemingly taking pleasure in watching this very movie (he from the wall where's hanging, we from this other side of the screen). Watching this movie is like visiting a nostalgia shop: each scene looks like an incredible memorabilia.
Of course the police discovers the gamblers and brings them in front of the judge. The only one put in jail is (you gotcha) no other than our main hero (only for ten days, it's a comedy, not a drama). While in prison, he plays imaginary poker games, where he keeps on loosing: his pantomime is genial.
The movie comes with all racial stereotypes of the epoch: the rule by then was that the interpret of a black personage had to do minstreling, which meant to shoe-black his face and whiten his lips for the contrast; the inter titles followed another rule, to spell the fractured English supposed to be the blacks' parlance; and many other things like that. No wonder, the movie was made in 1916. It looks now completely anti-PC, but in those days the political correctness was just the opposite.