RECENT ADDITIONS TO OLDER TOP
TEN LISTS, and other films destined for such:
Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1922) -- My entry for the "Big Ones" series at Fandor.
To the Left of the Father (Luiz Fernando Carvalho, Brazil, 2001) -- My entry for the "Big Ones" series at Fandor.
Commingled Containers (Stan Brakhage, 1996) [s] -- It's bizarre that on first viewing this miraculous little film struck me as minor, because it's so, so not. One of Brakhage's most intensely photographic works made during a period of activity dominated by the hand-painted films, Containers is in essence a compressed study in the depiction of fluid, the many ways the frame can contain liquid imagery. This includes some abrupt hand-painted passages but mostly it's startling footage of light on water, from extreme closeups of beaded surfaces, drops forming concentric circles of squinty white on beige or amber backgrounds, or the exhilaration of blue-white water curving over a rock in a stream, an image so perfect it almost veers into beer-commercial kitsch (too beautiful for art?) but holds it back, keeping it on the right side of the law of aesthetics and dazzling, even paralyzing with its overpowering purity. Although the treatment of surface and especially of color are classic Brakhage, the use of alternating foci and non-connective editing junctures recalls aspects of Nathaniel Dorsky's work. Dorsky, of course, was deeply influenced by Brakhage but I wonder if Brakhage might have unconsciously been returning the compliment here.
Three Films by George Landow (Owen Land): "No Sir, Orison!" (1975) [s] / Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present (1973) [s] / A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley California (1974) [s] -- Three of the only remaining Land(ow) films I'd not yet seen, and they comprise a tight, evangelical little trilogy of sorts. Although none exhibits the breadth and mindblowing originality of Land's two flat-out masterpieces, Wide Angle Saxon and On the Marriage Broker Joke, taken as components of the overall late-Land project these short works are highly provocative and one ("No Sir, Orison!") is most likely one of his most important films. Thank You Jesus is a fascinating formalist experience, given that it bombards the viewer with scads of sonic and visual information, looped and collapsed into near-incomprehensibility. We see snippets of a woman in a Vegas-like showgirl outfit working what looks like a CBS Records convention booth. We also get a close-up of an African-American woman looking upwards in praise, while the audio offers a near-sexual litany of a woman's devotion to Jesus Christ. Added to the mix, a manipulated chant of "God, God, God." The point is clear enough -- religious epiphanic time, or the temporality of God, is an "eternal present," a dense, enfolded time not amenable to quotidian linear experience. Land does construct a film that conveys the struggle of existing in that temporal zone, but he does this even more successfully with A Film of Their Spring Tour. Segments of a seemingly straightforward document of an evangelical duo, holding what look to be spectacularly uninvolving "revivals" in college classrooms, A Film intercuts two different times and angles on the events at hand, resulting in a barely comprehensible staccato-ization of the aural information. The jagged soundtrack never lapses into total abstraction (a la Paul Sharits), so the experience of listening is one of frustration and palpable loss of meaning. We know that there is a discussion of God, but as with Thank You Jesus, we are unequipped to grasp the complete text of the preaching, putting the word of God out of reach. However, it's possible to "get" the point without hanging on every single word, so Land hints at religious conversion as a tense mental space hovering between intellection and intuition. A formal / structural effort in every respect, Land manages to put this technique to the purpose of praising his Lord, in a manner that in no way diminishes the power Land obviously finds in the Word. The final film, "No Sir, Orison!", marks a move between these formal endeavors and the somewhat more performative turn Land's later work would take. We see a man in a vaguely Mennonite-looking suit pushing a basket in the grocery store. He stops to sing to the camera, a hymn about how love performs certain kinds of miracles, "and so does the market." The singer then drops to his knees mid-aisle to silently pray. (Program notes indicate he is praying for forgiveness for those who produce unwholesome processed foods.) If The Clash could be lost in the supermarket, Land implies, why couldn't someone just as easily be found, or even saved there? And although I would like to proffer a left-leaning interpretation of Orison, that Land's incongruous connection between (holy) love and the market implies a challenge to the right-wing American conjunction between Christianity and capitalism, if such a critique exists it is more along the lines of Land castigating the market, like all human constructions, as being too impure, too rife with sin, to share any meaningful content with the teachings of Christ. Finally,
Under Satan's Sun (Maurice Pialat, France, 1987) -- I don't want to come off like a lily-livered auteurist, but I really feel like I need to see more Pialat films before I can fully evaluate the greatness of this one, even though, as the first of his films I've seen, its power is pretty undeniable. Pialat is in conversation not just with Bernanos here, but Bresson and Dreyer, a tradition of pessimistic religious inquiry and miraculous materialism. (Similarly, Brisseau seems to be Pialat's heir in this arena.) Depardieu's lunkheaded hulk of a priest is himself Pialat's presentation of the conundrum. Would a modern saint be loved, feared, ostracized, or even comprehensible? The problem is staged as a series of conversations, all brutal contests of will. When Father Donissan (Depardieu) encounters Satan Incarnate as a traveller on the road (Jean-Christophe Bouvet), Pialat shoots the night scene as a composition of black on black, the frame almost completely unreadable. Donnisan's paranoid protestations emerge from a void. Are they a part of our world? On the other hand, Donissan's confrontation with Mouchette (the amazing Sandrine Bonnaire) takes place in broad daylight, in what looks like a roadside field. The only unbridled, self-aware presence in the priest's whole sorry parish, she is condemned by Donisson as possessed. The intricacies of verbal parrying, the balance (it appears to me) between scripted guidelines and extemporaneous sparring and reaction, lends the entire film an awkward documentary quality, as though we are witnessing a record of a very particular set of actorly interactions. I can see where the "French Cassavetes" tag comes from, but the tenor, and the stakes, are completely different. Whereas Cassavetes interrogates human behavior as a form of acting -- cinema's Erving Goffmann, if you like -- here Pialat is using Bernanos' novel and its worldly implausibility in order to force his characters into improbable, uninhabitable human states. If Satan controls the game, action is impossible, and yet action must continue. In this framework, one is giving into evil simply by continuing to exist. That's the double-bind of classical Freudian paranoia, and Pialat, in theme and execution, has produced the perfect paranoiac film.
Katzelmacher (Rainer Werner
Fassbinder, West Germany, 1969)
-- Okay, this is a cheat, since I have not yet made a list for 1969, but I
wanted to jot a few thoughts down before I forgot them. Contrary to its
middling reputation, Katzelmacher
is a pivotal work in RFW's oeuvre. It's pretty much the exact moment when
his major influences come together. There is a stark visual and temporal
economy that harks back to his tutelage with Straub and Huillet. There
are the crisp black-and-white images, frontal blocking, and slimy, slutty
underworld ambiance of Andy Warhol. But now, thrown into the mix for what
I think is the very first time is Fassbinder's Sirk jones. In Katzelmacher, we see a host of pathetic back-biting
bums and sluts (or both), essentially the sort of folks who we used to call
"white trash" back home in Texas, before that became a classist
epithet. They turn tricks, nurse pipe-dreams about movie stardom, talk
shit about each other behind their backs, but mostly sit on the wall until they
get thirsty and go to the pub. The only thing that can bring (most of)
them together is an outsider, in this case Fassbinder himself playing a Greek Gastarbeiter with a shaky command of German. It's
here that Fassbinder the writer-director first lays down his major moves,
pushing social commentary right to the brink of believability. The
"villains" speak in slogans and received ideas, all the better to get
the point across. But unlike some desiccated leftist exercise, Katzelmacher lends a sad pathos to the hatred, as if
(as in actual works by Brecht and Sirk) the racists are saying and doing what
they have to do,
paying lip- and fist-service to ideologies they themselves can't even fully
commit to. After being a bit frustrated with some of the early films (Love
is Colder Than Death, Gods
of the Plague), Katzelmacher
was an astonishing kick
in the teeth. Fassbinder the Master Filmmaker starts here.
Dawn of an Evil Millennium
(Damon Packard, 1988) [s] --
Holy shit. This guy is onto something. I have not seen his recent,
celebrity-roadtested opus maximus
Reflections of Evil
yet, but this little taste of Packard's sensibility (courtesy the Other Cinema Experiment
in Terror DVD) has whet
my appetite. Packard is combining low-budget splatter-exploitation
aesthetics (preposterous amounts of gore, dime-store Dracula fangs,
70s-pompadour haircuts) with the textures of classic grindhouse avant-garde
(especially Kenneth Anger in Satanic-mode), all wrapped up in frenetic Benny
Hill slapstick, frequently achieved just by undercranking the Super-8.
Everything has a sumptuous, grainy look and the over-pronounced light qualities
of low-gauge film. And it's all in the service of a slimy mustachioed cop
fighting a veiny Halloween demon on the streets of L.A. Cool.
L'Oeuvre au noir (André
Delvaux, Belgium, 1988) --
A bit of classicism never hurt anyone, and while this film may adhere a bit too
faithfully to the "great man" historical bio-pic, it's nonetheless incredibly
engrossing. Gian Maria Volonte radiates pure charisma as Zeno, a 14th
century physician and scholar struggling to just do his work without being
burned alive as a heretic. I'm not above admitting that the subject
matter -- a modern intellectual bristling in impotent horror at the
superstition and stupidity around him -- resonated a little bit with my own
feelings about our times. Unapologetically stodgy, but this is why it
works so well. Added treat: Anna Karina as a lusty, brain-addled servant
girl.
Notes After Long Silence
(Saul Levine, 1989) [s] -- It's
a staccato-edited Super-8 film comprised of noisy footage of a construction
crew repairing what looks like an overpass, interpolating it with some domestic
scenes and a fine mid-period performance by B.B. King off the TV. Levine knows
how to get the blaring, almost neon intensities of light that only Super-8 can
provide. The visible splices and off-and-on din make the film a bit like a musique
concrete composition, a
tape piece that just happens to have the perfect visual accompaniment.