Ferrari (Michael Mann, 2023)

Fast car

(Warning: plot and story discussed in explicit detail)

Michael Mann's Ferrari continues his tradition of depicting work-obsessed introverted men but with a key difference: Enzo Ferrari was reportedly more gregarious till the death of his son Dino at the age of 24 from muscular dystrophy. Mann doesn't make the obvious connection, just shows the aftereffects: Enzo depressed and focused on his beloved racing cars with a singleminded ferocity. 

Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro, 2022)

Little wooden head

Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of the classic Carlo Collodi fantasy fits seamlessly into his gallery of monsters and freaks, but the changes he's wrought on this darker less sanitized work brings it closer to the Collodi original, places it in my book a notch above the 1940 Disney classic.

High claim, I know (and I like Disney's Pinocchio a lot). But hear me out--

Federico Fellini's '8 1/2' (1963), Mario O'Hara's 'Babae sa Bubungang Lata' (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998)

Through the looking glass

(Plotlines of both 8 1/2 and Woman on a Tin Roof discussed in detail)

Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) is one of the most gorgeous black-and-white films ever made not to mention one of the most influential: it has inspired at least one terribly expensive (and terrible, period) musical (Rob Marshall's Nine), one great dance musical (Bob Fosse's All That Jazz), a royal flush of filmmakers (Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, David Lynch among many many others). If I admire it I admire it for the way the camera--like its protagonist filmmaker Guido--dances nimbly past all the men and women in his (its) life attempting to lay claim to his (its) attention. It's a heady swirl of delicate Prosecco and robust Chianti--of the enigmatic and intimate, the personal and metaphysical.

Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone)

Anti-social distancing

(Warning: story and plot twists described in explicit detail)

Locked down and stewing in your home, it can be a relief to view the works of Sergio Leone, particularly the later titles. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; Once Upon a Time in the West; Duck, You Sucker; and Once Upon a Time in America all have the expansive feel of a tale told of long ago, set in a mythological West (or America) so vast it makes the real thing (glimpsed at in daguerreotypes) feel claustrophobic. A pipe dream, in effect, concocted by your favorite nutty uncle sitting at the fireside with other kids gathered round, listening raptly. 

America, about Jewish gangsters in Prohibition New York, may be Leone's most sprawling ambitious work and possibly his masterpiece but West is arguably perfection, impeccably cast and executed. Even the stunt of using Henry Fonda as villain pays off-- as the young boy looks slowly about him Leone inserts shots of his decimated family; enter the killers to the blare of an electric guitar, emerging from the surrounding brush like wraiths. The killers approach, and at one point the camera following behind swings around to peer at one of the faces and it's Mr. Lincoln-- sorry, Mr. Fonda, not so Young anymore, as hired gunslinger Frank. The lined face the pale blue eyes, so iconic in American films, are pitiless here, faintly contemptuous even.

I Live in Fear (Akira Kurosawa), Europa '51 (Roberto Rossellini)

The impossible dream

(Warning: narrative details and plot twists explicitly discussed) 

Fantasy double feature: Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear (1955) and Roberto Rossellini's Europa '51 (1952) both ask the question: how should we deal with the man who holds extreme views on life? Humor him or condemn him? Or--unsettling thought--listen to what he has to say?

Porco Rosso (Hayao Miyazaki, 1992)

Tocino

Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso started out as a manga for a modeling magazine turned into a short for Japan Airlines grew and grew and grew into his sixth animated feature--easily his oddest and most personal film.

Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)

Sunshine

And what of Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name, his adaptation of Andre Aciman's novel from a screenplay by James Ivory? I mean: two beautiful men, an Italian villa, a sundrenched summer in Lombardy, Italy--what's not to like?

Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)

Cinema is dead

(Warning: story and plot twists of Stromboli, Europa '51, Journey to Italy and The Flowers of St. Francis discussed in detail)

Simplest description of Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy (Viaggo in Italia, 1954): two Northern Europeans' odyssey through the mind and sensibility of a Southern European filmmaker. Second simplest description: the fracture and eventual disintegration of a middle-class marriage.

The Messiah (Roberto Rossellini, 1975)

(Plot discussed in detail--though it's hard to imagine anyone unfamiliar with this story. Film is not available on Netflix or Amazon in DVD form, but is available on youtube (though I don't feel I should include a link))

Promised man

"In the beginning was the Word," so began the Gospel of John, and so begins Rossellini's treatment on Christ, his last narrative feature--only I remember when I first saw the film it began so far back in biblical history I had to check the title again to make sure. 

Rossellini starts a thousand years before, with the Israelites' arrival in Canaan, all sunbleached vistas and dusty tents (the sand-and-rock palette providing a subdued background against which the occasional red cloak or robe pops out of the screen). A child digs a hole in the ground with a stick and pisses in it; a shadow looms over him and he turns; a Philistine soldier whirls his sling, cuts loose--the child cries "No!"--and Rossellini cuts to a shot of the child lying on the ground, the blood on his forehead as startling a scarlet as any we've seen in this desolate landscape. 

Rossellini cuts to a meeting of tribal elders, in front of their tents. He zooms out (to establish location), glides around (as if trying to find the best vantage point), zooms in (to focus on this or that speaker). 

The camera pulls back in a flat arc from an anguished elder declaring: "We want a king, Samuel, as all nations, a king to judge us and lead us!" Continuing its arc the camera catches an old man--Samuel--rising to his feet. "My brothers, there is no king for our people...no king for Israel, because the king of Israel is the Eternal, Who freed us from slavery."

The Israelites insist however, which is how the country got to anoint its first king: Saul, a bellowing tyrant hard on his countrymen and even harder on their cattle, at one point whacking a bull in the head with an oversized mallet (What did Joseph de Maistre once say? "Every nation gets the government it deserves"). Rossellini establishes the style and demeanor of Israeli kings to better contrast with the style and demeanor of the coming king, but establishes at the same time the historical and political context from which the line of rulers arose: the Israelites demanded a king, a military dictator, in effect, because they wanted the safety and relative stability of such a king--which wasn't quite what happened (Samuel: "You shall know what meaneth to be subject to a king's will!"). They may have also prayed centuries for a messiah, but wasn't prepared for when he finally came, or what he had to offer.

It's startling to realize just how much Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ borrowed from Rossellini--the baptism (with its shallow stream surrounded by rocky bluffs) could have been rear projected directly into Scorsese's picture (all that's needed is for Andre Gregory to do a walk-on cameo). A hut of straw and tree branches standing behind Christ (Pier Maria Rossi) as he tells the Parable of the Wheat and Weeds might have been dismantled right after shooting, then reassembled fourteen years later for Willem Dafoe's honeymoon with his not-so-blushing bride. The camera follows closely as a cup is passed from Rossi's Christ to disciple after disciple after disciple, and with a little judicious splicing might pass right back to Dafoe's Christ. 

Scorsese is an admitted admirer of Rossellini, but doesn't overtly adopt (despite all the borrowed images) much of the filmmaker's visual style. You often catch Scorsese indulging in visual flash--gold coins spinning in the sky; a recreation of Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross; a camera lashed to the top of the cross as it's lifted up into the air (a tribute if you like to a similar shot in Nicholas Ray's King of Kings). 

Rossellini's film might have influenced Scorsese and was probably influenced in turn (to cite yet another brother-in-Christ) by Pier Paolo Pasolini's earlier The Gospel According to Matthew--like Rossellini's film a low-budget feature and an angry rebuke towards Hollywood-style Christ extravaganzas. No name stars, no elaborate sets or costumes, no production values whatsoever--there isn't even any color. Pasolini took a page from neorealism (of which Rossellini was an establishing master), but did it his way: edgy editing, casual handheld shots that on occasion shoved the lens in the actor's face, a high-contrast black-and-white palette. His soundtrack is eclectic--Mozart; Bach; a traditional African-American spiritual. A leper's misshapen nose bulges into the big screen as he whispers "make me clean;" Christ (a no-nonsense Enrique Irazoqui) declares: "you are clean" and Gloria from the Missa Luba blares out from the soundtrack.  

Rossellini doesn't use much music; a kind of suspenseful shiver here, there (the child's murder, Herod's death), developing into a honest-to-goodness if modest melody in the film's final two minutes. His editing is anything but aggressive; instead he pieces together sinuous long takes that come close enough to the characters to register as medium shots (but otherwise keep a discreet distance). Unlike Pasolini he doesn't forsake color; he seems to acknowledge that color is a part of a man's normal view, that black-and-white is (especially nowadays) an extreme form of stylization. Where Pasolini is severe Rossellini is chaste; where the former denies himself the pleasures of period filmmaking the latter shows reluctance, a sense of restraint--the difference, I think, being mainly in attitude and tone.

I've tried describing Rossellini's style before, and was unhappy with the results; possibly it's easier to describe what he's not instead of what he is. He's not into displays of virtuosity like Scorsese, though there are shots that betray the pure craft of a master--a group of children chanting and clapping, for example, the camera climbing up to follow soldiers marching the ramparts of a high wall, then pulling back and arriving at Christ transfixed on his cross (the contrast between the children's singing and Mary Magdalene's soft sobbing being more emotionally devastating than anything in, say, Mel Gibson's laughably overheated Passion of the Christ). His film's austere, but not in the in-your-face manner of Pasolini; he doesn't use Pasolini's alienating manner of having Christ lecture to us, profile head-on and free of frills or music or movement or lighting effect of any kind (save the setting sun, and the occasional lightning flash)--daring us to stay focused on the words' inherent wisdom and the image's flinty beauty (not to mention Irazoqui's piercing eyes), despite our faltering, all-too-human interest. 

Rossellini for his part does something more audience-friendly, yet interesting on its own terms. His Christ is busy repairing one of the apostles' fishing boats--he's about to send them on their own teaching missions. A disciple asks "what should we bring with us?" the camera coming up close as if to better hear his reply (and along the way underline the importance of his reply). Christ answers: not much--just what you have. "Behold the birds of the air," he points out, noting that they do nothing to provide for themselves yet are somehow cared for; at which point the camera pulls out--as if it was us the audience taking this insight and carrying it in our hearts and looking at the world through a new attitude, through differing eyes--the camera frame restlessly framing and re-framing to juxtapose image to questions and questions to answers in a sustained visual conversation.  

And--for me the breathtaking part--Christ runs with the idea, or rather his people do. Rossellini cuts to one disciple, then another repeating Christ's parables (said parables--stories with a philosophical point--being easier to remember and understand for these mostly uneducated men and women). It's not all about him, Rossellini seems to be saying; Christ won't save the world all by himself--he's using them (and by extension us) to put words into others' ears, and into practice in everyday life (in a way Rossellini's suggesting a sequel to his mid-career masterpiece, The Flowers of St. Francis, where at film's end the master orders his disciples to spin around till they stumble, then go in the direction they've fallen to spread the word). He's using communal effort--a key concept of communism if you like (and remember that Rossellini's politics leaned decidedly to the left)--to scatter his ideas abroad. 

It's not as if the film were totally bereft of humor--there's funny here, if you look carefully. Or perhaps you didn't need care; a quick glance at the Pharisees and you see their ridiculous horns, the bizarre little cube of wood sprouting out of their foreheads. The Pharisees may represent established authority, or entrenched hypocrisy, or the interests of the powers that be (which may include Hollywood and its equivalent in Italian cinema); Rossellini has about as little respect for any of them as Christ does, mercilessly depicting them as helpless in the face of radicalism, till they concoct a cowardly plot to accuse Christ of political conspiracy against the Romans (a massive misunderstanding--he's subversive, but not in that sense). 

It's not as if Rossellini's film is determinedly secular--there are miracles but (unlike in say Pasolini's) they're even further de-emphasized, we don't actually see him performing them (though we do on occasion see the aftereffects, as in the miracle of the loaves of bread). The miracles aren't Christ's strongest selling point, Rossellini seems to suggest, or at least he seems to feel they're mostly gimmicks that distract from Christ's ideas, and can safely be relegated offscreen.

It's not as if Rossellini's film is bereft of lyricism either, or visual poetry: one of the loveliest passages in the film is of Rossellini's camera lingering over this man or that hard at work, then zooming in on Christ hammering on what looks like a partly assembled plow (unlike most other onscreen Christs, Rossellini's seems to be  busy plying his trade). He talks of who will or will not enter the Kingdom of God, asks what is the Kingdom of God--

--whereupon Mary takes over, explaining to a child that the Kingdom is where "milk and honey will flow," stressing that this Kingdom will come about when everyone works for its coming--

--and Rossellini's camera moves away from Mary to wander among people sweeping, cooking, milking, bricklaying, and so forth. Mary might talk of a heaven to come, but Rossellini seems to suggest that heaven might already be here in the form of a worker's paradise, if we so choose to recognize it. 

At one point Christ is asked a blunt question: how to gain eternal life? His reply is equally blunt: love God, and each other--the two sentences clarifying and simplifying and above all distilling thousands of years of Jewish theology (or at least that's how Catholics feel about it). In a way it's what Rossellini seems to be doing--to have done: clarify and simplify and above all distill the Christ of the Gospels (in particular Luke) in a single hundred and forty minute film, as cogent a case of form following content as is humanly possible, from a master of Italian--of human--cinema. 

Easter Sunday, 4.20.14

The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

Fool for love

(WARNING: story, plot twists, and ending of the film to be discussed in close detail)

Roberto Rossellini doing a film on Francis of Assisi is confronted with a formidable problem: how to adapt a book not just about a saint but one of the more extreme saints in the Catholic canon? How to present someone so obsessed with suffering, so selfless and sacrificing he seems not just improbable but out-and-out insane, not just demented but downright ridiculous in this skeptical, self-centered world?

Easy: you do it as a comedy. 

Bullet to the Head, Silver Linings Playbook, Secret Sunshine, Journey to Italy

Last Action Hero

Bullet to the Head is easily the best recent American action flick around, and Walter Hill can teach both Tarantino and Nolan a thing or two about action filmmaking.

You heard me. 

"But what about the script, a standard-issue buddy pic filled with standard-issue dialogue? What about Stallone, who hasn't given a good performance in years?" Actually the script is 1) a decent workhorse plot with a handful of fairly clever twists, the dialogue a touch more amusing than it has any right to be ("Bang. Down. Owned." "You had me at 'fuck you!'") because Stallone and co-star Sung Kang have good chemistry; and 2) if you want good dialogue and acting, go watch a stage play; the real reason to watch this is to welcome the return to the big screen of one Walter Hill, filmmaker--last reported retired, apparently not quite.

Hill speaks today's action filmmaking language--handheld footage, ADHD editing--with admirable fluency (he was after all doing hardcore action back when some of these directors were still in grade school). He knows how to shake 'em and cut 'em, only unlike some of the relatively younger turks (I'm looking at you, Nolan) he only flirts with incoherence, mixing up the footage with more stable shots that anchor the action to their confined urban spaces.

And it isn't as if he were repeating himself; the Hill that did The Long Riders or Southern Comfort or The Warriors used slow motion; Bullet does not, and you can almost hear Hill saying "That slow-mo stuff is for kids;  real men do it in real time." There's a showdown involving fireaxes that I thought was within shouting distance of Toshiro Mifune's spear duel in The Hidden Fortress--high praise, I know, but I think the choreography, camerawork and editing deserves it. A New Orleans critic called the confrontation "a choppy series of frustratingly quick cuts that end up turning the whole sequence into a generic blur of clanks and blood spatters." I say the man needs to see more Bob Fosse; Hill has the confidence to zoom in close, shake things up a bit, even accelerate the cutting rate to the point of confusion and at the right moment pull back and allow the whole thing to come together inside your head.

And Hill unlike some filmmakers (I'm looking at you, Tarantino) knows how to evoke setting; knows how to evoke atmosphere;  knows that the throwaway shots that fill the dead space between action setpieces are what help distinguish a coked-up hack from a real filmmaker. New Orleans here may be an urban fantasy every bit as unreal as New York City in The Warriors, but it's a memorably stylized fantasy--Stallone drives past an abandoned factory and it sits in the bright Louisiana sunshine like a disintegrating Czarist palace; old industrial spaces gleam with rust and dripping water, as if dipped in oil; Bobo's shack squats over the gleaming bayou like an oversized poison toad. When a car explodes and flips (we're told that Stallone's character was trained in demolitions, helping explain--barely--all the gratuitous detonations) the flame and smoke rise pyramidlike from one corner of the screen, and your spine can't help but tingle at this bit of gorgeously served mis-en-scene.  

Are the boys back in town? Not really--the film has earned the smallest amount of boxoffice of any in Stallone's career, and barely registered in the local multiplexes before being pulled out, presumably due to poor ticket sales. But from the evidence onscreen Hill is back, and he's back with a vengeance.

Lovers on Lithium

David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook shows how a pair of lovers meet and struggle with each other, the catch being both suffer from a mental condition. It's a romantic comedy, of course.

That takes more and less courage than one might think. No, Russell doesn't depict the extremes of the condition: Bradley Cooper's Pat is bipolar but not cripplingly so, at least while he takes his meds; Jennifer Lawrence's Tiffany has something unspecified which probably involves depression (she mentions taking Effexor) and she does just fine, more or less; Pat Sr. has an obsessive-compulsive disorder that he manages to keep undiagnosed, though after five minutes of watching him (the relentless viewing of every Eagles game; the even more relentless observance of football superstitions) anyone would come to the same conclusion. 

They're not that bad off; if they were, this would probably be a different movie, and probably not a comedy. That said, it's amazing the things they do get right--I love the scene where Pat and Tiffany start talking about their meds, throwing names like Seroquel and Klonopin and Trazadone around like so many types of Hershey's Chocolates. It's a funny way to connect that feels perfectly true, with everyone around wondering at the foreign language they're suddenly spouting. I love how Pat seems to focus on a specific topic, then suddenly swerves ninety degrees in a different direction: "I don't have an iPod. I don't have a phone. They don't let me make calls. I'm going to call Nikki." Some of the dialogue sound as if recorded or scribbled down from inmates from real institutions, then handed over for the actors to use.

I love it that the finale--a dance contest where Pat and Tiffany don't mean to win, just earn enough points for a parleyed bet--doesn't show a pair of lovers giving a great dance number, just two reasonably limber actors pouring their hearts out clumsily and heedlessly on the dance floor, letting their chemistry instead of their meager dance skills speak for them. Russell's signature brand of nervy cutting and over-the-shoulder handheld footage makes for a good fit--the style suggests Pat's precariously high-tension worldview nicely. His camera rushes the lovers like a fan shrieking for an autograph, giving them the unadulterated star treatment (he's more respectful of the veteran dancers, keeping the camera relatively still to better capture their choreography). 

This is easily one of the best romantic comedies I've seen recently--is probably the only romantic comedy I've liked recently, which is a whole miracle right then and there.

Massive trauma

Lee Chang Dong's Secret Sunshine is easily the most harrowing film of recent years; with its deceptively bright and artless cinematography (by Cho Yong-kyou, who also did Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie and Barking Dogs Never Bite) it conceals the machinations of a vast uncaring world ready to pull the unsuspecting in, chew them up in horrific ways, spit 'em out like gristle. 

Like Ozu or Naruse it seems Lee is able to sketch with elegant strokes the complicated life of a young woman named Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon in a tremendous performance) who has already suffered a tragedy; with son in tow she wants to replant roots in her dead husband's hometown of Milyang, which in Chinese apparently translates to 'Secret Sunshine.' Lee is a modern master at the art of understatement, unreeling with relentless deliberation a story of suffering, anger and loss--leavened with not a bit of satire and observational, sometimes perverse, humor.

It's perhaps useless to compare Lee to a seasoned sadist like Lars Von Trier; personally I find the contrast instructive. Lee's heroines are generally less passive, more likely to possess a sense of wit or imagination (I just have to think of Emily Watson's Bess or Bjork's Selma to shudder at the sheer sense of victimization involved). Von Trier has often said he suffered from depression; watching his films I often feel he wants to dump his depression on us, bringing along all the advantages of personal involvement (strong motivation, extensive experience) as well as disadvantages (a lack of perspective). Lee from the evidence of his films doesn't seem as emotionally entangled, bringing to the table his advantages: the patience to refrain from pushing till the victim (sorry--viewer) is numbed past the point of belief or suffering (at a certain point you stop weeping and start giggling); the judgment necessary to inflict only as much pain as necessary to prove the film's thesis, not as much pain as will satisfy the filmmaker's bloodlust.

Arguably the single most painful moment in the film (skip the rest of this paragraph if you plan to see the picture) is the conclusion: as Shin-ae grasps desperately at one thing or another (church, sex, suicide) to steady herself, she finally and unexpectedly finds peace...and hence the cruelty. Some kind of resolution, even one involving death, even one involving her death, could have provided closure; instead she's granted breathing space, a moment of grace that enables her to move on, accept whatever else life has in store for her. She's ready for more punishment in short, and you feel that Lee has a varied and limitless inventory set aside waiting for her. That's the frame of mind you're in, after watching this film.

Cinema is dead

Simplest description of Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy: two Northern Europeans' odyssey through the mind and sensibility of a Southern European filmmaker. Second simplest description: the fracture and eventual disintegration of a middle-class marriage.

For the rest of the post (it got too big!) please go here.

2.22.13 

Mario O'Hara tribute screening of Pangarap ng Puso (Demons) at the 2013 Udine Far East Film Festival

The 2013 Udine Far East Film Festival will feature a tiny tribute to Mario O'Hara, a rare screening (Monday, April 22, 2.15 pm) of his pito-pito film Pangarap ng Puso (Demons, 2000). 

O'Hara, who died June 26 last year, was actor, writer, director for Filipino radio, television, stage, screen. He was best known for writing and directing the wartime drama Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, 1976), for acting in and writing the screenplay of close friend Lino Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) and for co-directing the recent political miniseries Sa Ngalan ng Ina (In the Name of the Mother, 2011).

Pangarap ng Puso was made at an odd juncture in O'Hara's career. He had just enjoyed a small success with his previous pito-pito melodrama Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998), a multi-storied, multi-charactered behind-the-scenes look at Filipino filmmaking, described by one of its actors as "a eulogy for the Filipino film industry." Bubungang Lata functioned as both expose of abuses and exercise in nostalgia, freely mingling the grinding realism of the filmmakers' hardscrabble lives with the supernatural presence of their predecessors (younger incarnations of aged actresses, dead husbands come back to life). 

Pangarap was a different creature altogether--a brief, deftly sketched precis of Philippine history from just before the assassination of Ninoy Aquino Jr., through the toppling of dictator Ferdinand Marcos and rise of Aquino's widow to the office of President, and beyond. Along the way it depicts both military atrocities and the at times even more extreme violence inspired by those atrocities.

The film (set in Negros Oriental) touches on Negrense mythology, particularly the kapre: a huge, hairy manlike creature with sharp stink, who liked to play pranks on people.

It tells the shared story of Nena, daughter of a wealthy haciendero, and Jose, son of one of the haciendero's employees.

It's also a celebration of Filipino poetry.

If the film doesn't end up as an incoherent mess--and I'm not saying it doesn't, not entirely--that's because O'Hara manages to tie almost everything together into a bewildering, genre-defying Gordian knot, where Negrense mythology and Philippine political history are just differing aspects of the same sociopolitical-cultural landscape, and a young girl's love can assume the features of both angel and demon simultaneously. 

This was when O'Hara was introduced to digital nonlinear video editing, which seems to have liberated him--his editing here at times resembled the shuttering of a single-lens reflex camera, at times the streaming consciousness of a young girl's febrile mind, free-associating ideas and emotions into a single narrative. 

Occasionally O'Hara throws an image of the text being read onscreen, and one is reminded of Robert Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest), where we hear the priest mouthing the words, we see the words being written in his diary. The idea seems to be less about reinforcing some point or concept through synesthetic means, more about reveling in the physicality of poetry--the scratchy texture of wood-pulp paper, the visual pop! of seeing ink applied to paper, the feel of words read from the paper rolling off one's tongue. Then the shock of realizing that the words one is enjoying holds significance for the drama onscreen, their meanings detonating in your head like timed explosive devices--

At roughly one hundred minutes' running time and made for three million pesos (roughly US$75,000), the film seems outsized in its ambition, startling in its imagination. Despite barely having the money to evoke a hacienda lifestyle, much less produce the effects needed for a war or horror movie, the film encapsulates the pain and passion and perversity of one small corner of the Philippines, towards the end of the previous millennium. 

Coming this April 20th: a weeklong retrospective (here's a trailer/preview) of O'Hara's work as an actor, screenwriter, and director, with thanks to Jojo de Vera of the Sari-Saring Sineng Pinoy Blog. Will post links to the films soon (possibly no English subtitles except when noted; some of the films digitally enhanced and cleaned for improved visual clarity (again, when noted)); links to article whenever applicable.

Tentative titles to be shown:

As actor: Tubog sa Ginto

As writer: Rubia Servios and Kasal? 

As director: Bulaklak sa City Jail, Uhaw Sa Pag-Ibig, Prinsesang Gusgusin, Bed Sins.  

4.18.13

Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

The flick that fathered a hundred sequels

Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966) might be called the bastard son of a bastard remake of a bastard parody. 

Arguably it was Sergio Leone's fault. He did not strictly speaking make the first Spaghetti Western (or as Italians call them western all'italiana)--Raoul Walsh did The Sheriff of the Fractured Jaw in 1958; Mario Amendola did Terrore dell'Oklahoma (The Terror of Oklahoma) in 1959; and you might say Puccini's 1910 opera La Fanciulla del West (Girl of the West) was an Italian production set in the California Gold Rush...

But--trying to stay on-topic here--Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) took Akira Kurosawa's jidai-geki samurai comedy Yojimbo (The Bodyguard, 1961), transposed it to the American West, and produced a hugely influential hit that turned genre conventions upside-down, morphed the noble white-hatted protagonist into a dark, cigarillo-chewing anti-hero, basically created a whole new mythology for a bastard new genre.

Which is doubly ironic--Yojimbo itself was a parody, Kurosawa's subversion of the chambara (or swordfighting, a subset of the jidai-geki) genre, his way of sending up ossified conventions that he himself helped establish (Of course Yojimbo would became a hit and revitalize the genre, spawning its own sub-genre with countless imitators). Adding just one more twist is the fact that Kurosawa himself was heavily influenced by classic western filmmakers--John Ford, Howard Hawks--and all we need to complete the circle is a Japanese ripoff of A Fistful of Dollars or Django (arguably Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) is just such a picture)...

Coming back to Django (and trying, again, to stay on-topic), Corbucci's film doesn't even try very hard to disguise its influences--as with Yojimbo and Fistful we have the lone hero; as with the previous pictures the hero comes between two warring factions (the Mexican bandits and a troop of renegade Confederates (needless to say, they're racists)). Corbucci does away with the cyclical nature of violence, the vision of man outdoing fellow man in greed and depravity--he probably felt the two previous pictures wasted a lot of running time and effort keeping the complicated plotline coherent, and damned if he wasn't right: Django lives or dies on its extravagant setpieces of sadism and suffering and little else (there's a subtext involving racism, a topic Corbucci would develop further in other films, particularly Navajo Joe (1966), but it's more subtext here--an additional sharpness to the stink in the air, almost--than anything bold, or especially memorable).

Corbucci's visual style unlike Leone's doesn't try capture the action through sweeping tracking shots, nor does he try create a sense of outsized scale (the vast barrooms, endless cemeteries, gigantic closeups of Leone's films). Corbucci's action is mostly fast and functional, stitched together with quick (but coherent) cutting; when Django faces off with a bandit Corbucci intercuts handheld, high-angled footage of the two struggling with even shakier footage of the breathless onlookers, giving the viewer a strong sense of you-are-there immediacy. 

When called for, however, Corbucci can serve up cinema as grand and operatic as anything from Leone. He introduces one confrontation with the sparely beautiful image of standing fences and a spindly water tower, a lonely flute playing in the background; renegade Confederates strut into view and Luis Enriquez Bacalav's baleful trumpets take over, a snare drum giving crisp accompaniment. 

Corbucci (unlike, say Leone) doesn't have his camera track backwards, following the soldiers; instead he shows us Django's patient point of view, angular rail fences pointing as if in alarm at the approaching soldiers, the reverse shots showing Django's doomed position, perched atop his coffin behind a gigantic felled tree trunk (remarkable the contrast in imagery--the soldiers' unstoppable approach, the tree trunk's implacable solidity). More soldiers appear, wearing Klansmen-type hoods, only (a baroque touch) dyed a bright blood-red. Django continues to sit on his coffin behind the tree trunk; the music, the editing, the emotions escalate to the point where the very frame vibrates with tension--you know the climax when it comes will be something...

It comes, and it is something; it's also the punchline to a long and elaborate joke, one that began preparations from the moment we set eyes on our hero. Here's another difference between Leone and Corbucci: Leone's Man Without a Name (played with lanky minimalism by Clint Eastwood) shows a trace of faint amusement at Leone's complex shenanigans; said Man embodies Leone's point of view, an Olympian sense of distance flavored with irony. Corbucci's Django (played with soulful earnestness by Franco Nero) isn't nearly as interesting a character--he's totally immersed in his situation, no distance or irony to his posture, a classic western all'italiana hero. If there is any humor in the film--and there is, considerably--it comes from Corbucci himself, who gleefully sets up intricate visual and narrative pranks which detonate, then with ceaseless enthusiasm begins preparations for the next gag. 

I'd earlier said there's little more to Corbucci here than sadism; I'm not a little wrong. Hands are a significant motif, from a bandit spitting into his hands preparatory to whipping a helpless prostitute, to a Confederate major pulling a blood-red scarf from his pocket to wrap round the neck, to Django tenderly slipping a woman's camisole off her shoulder...later clutching desperately at his coffin, and being as desperately clutched in return. Hands, Corbucci seems to say, are arbiters of one's fate and expressive of one's inner state; to damage them is a grave sin, to have them damaged a great suffering.

So, Corbucci or Leone--who is better? Leone is an epic lyricist, Corbucci a baroque sadist; Leone likes to build complex narratives that resolve themselves smoothly, in ingenious fashion; Corbucci can barely be bothered with narrative bumps (he can't even be bothered to hide the fact that his narrative was lifted from somewhere else). Leone is a poet, Corbucci a near-madman; the world is a richer place for having both artists, and I for one refuse to pick between them. 

5.5.12

L'Inferno and Nosferatu

A still from L'Inferno

The horror, the horror

Thanks to the generosity of the Goethe Institut, the Japan Foundation, The Instituto Cervantes, the Embassies of Italy and Greece, The 5^th International Silent Film Festival will unfold from August 26 to 28 at the Shang Cineplex 2, in Shangri-La Plaza Mandaluyong, and oh, wonders of wonders--at least two of them are horror films (well, one indisputably is; so is the other if you stretch definitions a little).

The rarer creature (and borderline horror) is Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro's L'Inferno (1911). This largely forgotten silent was a huge hit at the time of its release, with plenty of applause during and after its premiere screening in Naples (the film went on to gross over two million dollars in the United States). Today it stands as a curiosity, at sixty-eight minutes the first Italian feature ever made.

Mind you, we're not talking D.W. Griffith here; the intertitles do most of the narrative heavy-lifting, giving us a clunky ten minutes of exposition explaining what's going on in Dante's life, who Beatrice is, why he's wandering a desolate wood, threatened by various largely symbolic predators. When Virgil finally takes him under wing (at the behest of his beloved Beatrice, who descends upon the great classical poet like the Good Witch of the North) he is informed that the path to salvation leads first through the depths of hell--you have to know the worst in human nature, Virgil seems to say, before you start trying for the best. It's not going to be an easy path; “abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Dante is warned before entering. The line still retains a chill, even in this film, even now.