Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg, 2026)

I'm an alien, I'm an illegal alien

Easy enough to call Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day his reworking retelling reboot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film so elegantly worked out on the big screen you can recall most shots as being not just effortlessly lyrical but inevitable, locking in place to present a vast sound and light show, a once in a lifetime rock concert burnt into your brain the way the shape of Devil's Tower is burnt into Roy Neary's.

Disclosure is a different creature flavorwise. Spielberg's visual grammar (using his present favorite cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) has grown more sophisticated, his color palette more complex and mutedly realistic, his editing chops (with the relatively unfamiliar Sarah Boshar) if anything more daringly intricate. But that wide-eyed spirit is still there, for better or worse, that willingness to lift one's head up and look around to check if there's someone really out there. 

Signs (M Night Shyamalan, 2002)

Little green men

M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense featured a nicely intense performance from a child actor, some creepy atmospherics, a neat twist that makes you want to sit up and applaud for O all of two seconds. Unbreakable I found more interesting because Shyamalan had shrugged off his mainstream appeal and started to show his true colors: a comic-book freak who takes his superheroes seriously, to the point of spending the budget of a major motion picture telling an origin story.

Shyamalan's latest-- where Mel Gibson and family find funny going-ons in the middle of their cornfield-- shows no sign whatsoever of him apologizing for his career to date. His first movie was a hit his second an interesting failure (though not to my eyes, not quite); he's on to something, he believes, and in Signs he wants to make believers of all of us.

Christ almighty

Questioning The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson and his publicists have repeatedly claimed that his The Passion of the Christ is the most historically accurate of all pictures made on Jesus.

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

Mean streets

Call The Last Temptation of Christ my favorite Martin Scorsese film-- not perhaps his best or most ambitious, just my favorite. Grew up Catholic, saw many of the classic Jesus movies, liked most of them with little contextual knowledge or sense of discernment. By '88 I'd seen and enjoyed Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, King of Comedy, After Hours; the idea of Scorsese tackling the life of Jesus-- knowing he wasn't shy about using Catholic imagery, or about putting personal beliefs and feelings about his faith on the big screen-- seemed like an especially interesting idea.

That was the theory; in practice I arrived at the movie theater with a picket line blocking the entranceway, folks waving signs like 'SCORSESE PRINCE OF LIES' and 'LEW WASSERMAN CAUSING JEW HATE' (Wasserman was chairman of MCA, Universal Studio's parent company). "Would you like to know the real story of Christ?" a cleancut young man in a necktie asked me, waving a bible. "I read it," I told him, stepping into the theater. 

Silence (Martin Scorsese, 2016)

And the rest is

(Warning: story and ending discussed in explicit detail)

The film begins with the sound of cicadas whirring rhythmically over a black background. The sound drops out, the film title (simple white letters) flashes onscreen. Cut to a vision of hell: a guard cloaked in steam stands beside a wood shelf topped with severed heads. We are at the volcanic springs of Unzen, near Nagasaki, where friars are strung up on crosses and longhandled ladles with holes sprinkle boiling water, delicately poaching their skin (Today of course the springs are a popular vacation resort). 

Welcome to Martin Scorsese's idea of heaven: his thirty-years-in-the-making version of Shusaku Endo's Silence, completed at last and screened to near-universal acclaim (and near-empty theaters) in 2016.

The Trial of Joan of Arc (Proces de Jeanne d'Arc, Robert Bresson)

Joan unornamented

(Robert Bresson's film is available for streaming on Filmstruck, which will shut down by November 29; is still available though less readily on Amazon; should ideally be on a streaming service accessible everywhere including the Philippines (Filmstruck is confined to the USA) but alas isn't.)

The first film to come to mind viewing this stony ground of a picture is Carl Th. Dreyer's silent film, a series of gigantic closeups shuffled through at speed, arguably the most revered and the best-known version of the story.

Robert Bresson's response? "Grotesque buffooneries."

First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

Last holdout

Paul Schrader's First Reformed--his twenty-third directing job--is a tiny feature shot around Brooklyn and Queens in only twenty days, on a budget of roughly three and a half million dollars. Arguably his best work to date--or if not his best then somewhere up there.

Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008)

Martyred

(Warning: plot and narrative twists discussed in explicit detail)

Pascal Laugier's 2008 horror film deserves respect for taking the challenge presented by American torture porn (The Devil's Rejects, Hostel 1 and Hostel 2, the remake of I Spit In Your Grave) and upping the ante considerably.

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)

Bronx Othello

Properly speaking Scorsese in what is arguably his masterpiece should have introduced the lean La Motta (Robert de Niro) to us first let us get used to him then revealed the overweight figure later on-- but no; Scorsese wasn’t interested in easy dramatic strategies. He immediately has us confront the later man in all his fleshy glory complete with piggy eyes and wheezing breath delivering his nightclub monologue, a mix of highbrow quote (“a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse!”) and lowbrow aside (“haven’t had a winner in six months”) in the same gag. We are bemused, if slightly repelled by the man; he looks like the kind of close relative you hide silverware from when visiting. He ends his spiel with arms flung wide declaring “That’s entertainment!” repeats the line thoughtfully looking at his cigar (his lost virility?). The film cuts back to a boxing ring in 1941

and the young La Motta leaping into the camera frame. Trim loose-limbed taut-muscled (you can’t help but gasp at the sheer physical difference) he shakes off Jimmy Reeves' blows like raindrops. He is told he’s behind on points and has to knock Reeves out; down in the ringside seats a woman screams as a fight breaks out in the audience.

Super (James Gunn, 2010)

Duper

James Gunn is better known for mixing quirky humor with standard-issue superhero shenanigans in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). The movie (which for the record I liked) was actually watered-down Gunn for the PG crowd, a fairly risky move (A gun-toting raccoon? A walking tree with only one line?) that paid off handsomely to the tune of $770 million worldwide.

Super made four years earlier hews closer to authentic adult-dosage Gunn. Frank Darbo (Rainn Wilson) is a short-order cook and longtime loser who has experienced only two perfect moments in his life so far: his marriage to former junkie Sarah (Liv Tyler) and his helping a police officer catch a purse thief--both moments immortalized in colored-pencil drawings that he tapes to a wall. Sarah soon leaves him for Jacques (Kevin Bacon), a local strip club owner and mid-level dealer who lures her away with offers to renew and maintain her habit.

Frank is knocked into a downward spiral, weeping over his fry grill and making pathetic attempts to win Sarah back (for which efforts he's thoroughly beaten). Gunn documents Frank's descent in unflinching detail, including the pained reactions of people forced to deal with him (they keep him at arm's length, as if failure was contagious); when Frank hits rock bottom his roof and walls split open, his bedsheets twist round his arms holding them down tight, his skull is sliced open by tentacles wielding boxcutter blades and the Finger of God comes down from on high...

It's John Ford's The Searchers by way of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver with a dash of Monty Python. What makes Gunn's version work is that Wilson is no John Wayne or Robert De Niro--he has neither Wayne's reassuring stoicism (Frank weeps, given sufficient provocation) nor De Niro's psychopath charm (women tend to look past him) but instead has a lumpenprole quality that makes one want to leap up in recognition: "One of us! One of us!" We imagine being in his shoes (they're practically our size) so when Frank is beaten or humiliated yet again--and Gunn doesn't stint on the beatings and humiliation--we identify with his pain in a way we don't with De Niro or Wayne.

Frank is compelled to pull on a cowl and swing a pipe wrench, though the forces driving him seem religious. That admittedly requires a leap of faith--can't think of two cultures (comicbook collecting and churchgoing) less likely to intermingle, though 1) there have been attempts to adapt The Bible into comics (Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis being one of the best) and 2) the loneliness of geeks does in some ways resemble the loneliness of religious extremists (was about to say there aren't any evangelical superhero TV shows till I remembered Preacher) and 3) Frank's visions seem less like spiritual revelations and more like desperate attempts to take images from TV (including the cheesy parody The Holy Avenger) and real life and stitch them together in a dream sequence that would make sense of his life.

Libby (Ellen Page) on the other hand is both a more convincing construct and obvious male fantasy--how many attractive female comic book geeks with overactive sex drives can there be out there anyway? Yet Libby talks acts thinks in a more familiar manner than Frank (despite being smoking hot): realizing who she's talking to she presents him with a proposition ("Batman had Robin; the original Human Torch had Toro") complete with name ("Boltie"), costume (yellow and green with cute short skirt), an awkwardly executed series of tumbles and rolls ("See what I'm getting at?" "No."). Going on her first adventure she's bored out of her mind ("You just sit here and wait for crime to happen?"); confronted with her first fight she goes berserk, smashing a car into the adversary's legs and jumping out half-naked (she was in the middle of changing) to spew obscene homophobic taunts.

The violence does more than release Libby's aggression; she offers sex to Frank, who promptly turns her down ("I'm married!"). Frank and Libby are a study in contrasts: where Frank is a romantic puritan who represses himself to the point that wearing a costume is the only way to vent his anger, Libby is an amoral free-floating hedonist seeking to direct her hostility--a direction only Frank has been able to provide. Libby plays Robin to Frank's Batman,* though Libby would've jumped Batman deep in their Batcave some time ago.

*(Not just any Robin and Batman but Frank Miller's Dynamic Duo ("Does this mean I'm not fired anymore?"), an indication of Miller's for better or worse lasting influence on the genre)

It's an interesting dynamic; Frank has been building up pressure all this time (like a swollen boil), some of that pressure relieved by becoming The Crimson Bolt (impressive name, till you realize a bolt is an inert hunk of metal used to hold objects together or keep people out--to maintain the status quo if you like). Frank's example unleashes the id in Libby who acts in turn as Frank's id--"What if we did this? What if we did that?" she keeps asking. To the problem of Frank's marriage she suggests wearing costumes during sex. "The Crimson Bolt's not married to Sarah--Frank is," she offers helpfully.

For the movie's look Gunn has hit on a non-style suggesting both cinema-verite and the kind of do-it-yourself videos amateurs post on YouTube all the time (if this were made some years later Gunn could've done exactly that). The look pays off with onscreen violence far more disturbing than anything found in Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass, released earlier the same year--where the violence in Vaughn's movie is extravagant even grotesque, the violence in Gunn's could be happening right now, down the street from where you're sitting, to people you might know. Gunn's has often been compared to Vaughn's which I don't buy for a minute: Vaughn doesn't touch costumed sex, doesn't cast unglamorous everyday faces (Wilson recalls a younger Garrison Keillor), doesn't skirt as daringly the borderline between comedy and horror.

Critics complain of the wildly varied tone; I'd say the film only really fails towards the end (skip the rest of the paragraph if you haven't seen the movie!) with the suggestion that some good came out of Frank's misadventures--the music is suddenly dreamier, the camerawork settles into a contemplative gaze, the film overall feels disappointingly gauzy, softheaded. Sarah's rescue demands the same sardonic treatment as the rest of the pic, only it turns out she's a true innocent, and the dullest character onscreen (Scorsese in Taxi Driver is at least able to suggest the last-minute rescue was an ironic coda). Instead of a much-needed slam against vigilantism (much needed today, particularly in our country) we have wishy-washy foot-shuffling, the "if you're willing to pay the price you can do whatever you want" kind of Faustian mantra Pixar and Disney like to push on defenseless children. Love the movie, but that ending is a disappointingly feeble squib.

First published in Businessworld 8.5.16

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek / Ordet

 
Two miracles

Warning: plot of both The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Ordet discussed in close detail)

Maybe the funniest joke in Preston Sturges' classic comedy--about Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton wearing one of the most salacious monikers in all of cinema) who after a night of drunken partying with a band of soldiers finds herself pregnant--was that it got made in the first place, in 1944, under the supposedly watchful eyes of the Hays Office (and in fact they were watching: when the picture was being developed the Office approved of only ten of the script's pages). 

Film critic James Agee managed to upstage (or top) the joke, though, with his appreciative quip: "the Hays Office has either been hypnotized into a liberality for which it should be thanked, or has been raped in its sleep." 

I dearly love the film but do feel that both film and Agee's topper were topped in turn by the Office itself when it cautioned the filmmakers (sometime during script development) to depict the men as "normal, thoroughly fit American soldiers who have had an evening of clean fun."

Maligno (Malignant, Celso Ad. Castillo, 1977)

Supped full with horrors

Celso Ad. Castillo's Maligno (1977), his horror genre follow-up to the hugely popular Patayin sa Sindak si Barbara (Let's Frighten Barbara to Death, 1974) uses many of the previous films' cast (Susan Roces, Dante Rivero, Mary Walter) but ups the ante considerably by openly inviting comparison with Roman Polanski's masterful Rosemary's Baby (1968)-- Satanist cult targets attractive young couple (Roces as Angela Cortez; Rivero as her husband Paolo) and their unborn child-- with mixed results. On one hand the film's tone isn't as understated, the music decidedly unsubtle; on the other Ad. Castillo (unlike Polanski) does manage to grant the cults leader his moment onstage, front and center, instead of forcing him to lurk about in the shadows. In the guise of Eddie Garcia's Lucas Santander, he's a grand, eloquent figure, given to slouching insouciantly in the darkest corner of his prison cell and pronouncing judgement on society's religious hypocrisy; unlike Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer, Garcia caters to our more traditional notions about evil cultists, but I guess if you must play a cliche, you should at least play it bigl Garcia plays it so the very bars of his cell seem to tremble. 

Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947)

Belatedly for St. Patricks' and just in time for Good Friday!

(WARNING: story and plot twists of both The Third Man and Odd Man Out discussed in detail!)

Shuffling to Golgotha

Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (from the novel by F.L. Green) was released two years before his best-known work (The Third Man, 1949) and often suffers in viewers' minds when compared with the latter. Admittedly some elements in Third I find superior: Anton Karas' zither score, which sets a bouncy jaunty tone (sometimes unsettlingly so); Graham Greene's screenplay, which wields the Catholic elements with a lighter, more satiric edge; and the city of Vienna itself, its torn walls and rubbled streets prompting Reed's camera to view the world through a darker, more sharply skewed glass. 

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. 

Mystic Hitchcock

Posted as part of the For the Love of Film: Film Preservation Blogathon. 

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Mystic Hitchcock

(Warning: stories, twists, and surprises of various films to follow will be discussed in close detail)

Despite his Roman Catholic background, you find a dearth of mysticism in Hitchcock. He seems more concerned with the mystery residing in the human mind, than with any unknown supernatural power residing in the world at large.

That's fine, I suppose--the mind is as complex a puzzle as any, and a lifetime's study probably won't offer any immediate solution. Hitchcock, one might say, has confined himself to specific territory, though a territory particularly rich in drama and conflict.

Original Sin

Possibly the most consistent influence Catholicism had on Hitchcock was on the idea of "transference of guilt"--of an innocent man who comes to bear the burden and suffering of one who is guilty. That idea bears more than passing resemblance to the Catholic concept of Original Sin--where all of  humanity is guilty by reason of Man's fallen state, and the only hope of redemption is through an innocent Son of God.

Hence the common thread going through films like The Wrong Man, The 39 Steps, The Lodger, I Confess, and Strangers on a Train, where a man is accused of a crime he did not commit. A scapegoat if you like, in the Old Testament sense, a creature arbitrarily chosen to be blamed for others' sins.

Which isn't the same as saying the man is a total innocent--in The Lodger one reason why the man is so suspicious, why he's always at the right place and time, why he carries so much circumstantial evidence around with him is because he does have a relationship with the killer; in I Confess the priest is suspected because he stands to profit from the murder; in Strangers on a Train the thought of murder is so tempting the hero actually blurts the thought out loud--in effect, he is guilty in all except the actual deed.

That's as far as Hitchcock went, mostly: a kind of subtle filigree of fear and paranoia, overlaid on his otherwise secular filmography.

Life after death

And then there's the idea of life after death, which Hitchcock didn't deal with often, but when he did it was with unnerving intensity.

In Vertigo Madeleine Elster dies halfway through the story--but death in one form or another was always implied in this picture. Through  color, through camera angles, through sound effects and above all Bernard Herrmann's haunting music we are made aware again and again that this is a film steeped in death and memories, that everyone is haunted by everyone else. Madeleine is haunted by Carlotta Valdez, the city is haunted by Madeleine's desolate figure, Scottie Ferguson is haunted by details and echoes of Madeleine scattered throughout the city long after she's gone. 

There's something otherworldly about Madeleine herself: Hitchcock often shoots her from a distance, in profile, constantly on the verge of turning round a street corner or stepping behind a redwood trunk or dropping off a stone pier into San Francisco Bay. Finally she evades him, slipping like a prestidigitator's assistant up the bell tower's trapdoor; Scotty catches a glimpse of her hurtling past a tower window. 

As for the body itself, crushed and broken on the Mission's rooftop, he could hardly be less interested: it's the woman's elusive ghost--her soul if you please--he's after, not its mere fleshy remains. He leaves that behind, slipping surreptitiously out a side entrance, for others to discover.

What makes the second half of Vertigo so unsettling, I submit, is Scottie's full-on attempt at resurrecting Madeleine through Judy Barton. We get a rough inventory of half the filmmaker's arsenal in realizing his ideal woman: clothes ("I want to look at an evening dress, a dinner dress, black, short, long sleeves...with a neck cut this..."), makeup and hair ("You're sure about the color of the hair?") even lighting (standing before the windows in such a way that when Judy steps out of her bathroom she's wrapped in the unnatural green glow of the hotel's street neon). "She's alive!" Scottie might have cried, the way Dr. Frankenstein did in James Whale's horror classic; she is for a while anyway before she steps off the bell tower ledge one last time, simultaneously stepping  into Scottie's despairing, devastated memories for all time. 

There is, sadly, a rational explanation behind the film's supernatural claptrap, Gavin Ellster's over-elaborate plan to kill his wife. But in mood and tone, in spirit and intent if not strictly in actual deed (and isn't that an accusation leveled at nearly all of Hitchcock's heroes?), Hitchcock manages to create one of the greatest ghost stories in all of cinema.

Then there's Psycho, where for the first thirty or so minutes Hitchcock seems to be setting up Norman Bates as one of his Wrongfully Accused. We know, of course, that his mother did it. 

Turns out we're right and wrong: Norman did it, but not as Norman. The whole case is written off as an example of split personality, presented in what has often been argued as Hitchcock's worst-directed scene--an endless expositional monologue by Dr. Fred Richman.

Simon Oakland's performance as Richman should have clued us in to what Hitchcock was really after. Oakland has the manner of a carnival barker, speaking hurriedly and energetically as if to keep his audience from leaving; a police officer enters, blanket draped over one arm: "He feels a little chill," the officer asks. "Can I bring him this blanket?" The camera follows the officer out the hallway towards a door, which he enters. The camera sits outside waiting; suddenly we hear a woman's soft husky voice call out: "Thank you!"

Cut to inside the room, the camera slowly approaching a seated Norman Bates as he wraps the blanket around him. We hear a woman--the same woman, we realize--talk: "It's sad when a mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son..." We recognize the gravelly voice of Mrs. Bates in voice-over.

Basically Hitchcock through Dr. Richman first gives us the official explanation, a tale full of cross-dressing and poison and enough guilt to kill an entire platoon of mama's boys. It's not a convincing performance; you wonder if Oakland was rushing through the text, if his heart was really into making the most of the short and specific period of time allotted to his character. It comes off like a makeshift reply, something cooked up last-minute to satisfy a deadline.

Then we have Mrs. Bates, taking slowly and deliberately while the camera brings us close and closer to Norman's glittering eyes, and we come to a realization: this is the film's true explanation, this is the film's (and Hitchcock's) true response--that Mrs. Bates is alive and well, living inside Norman's totally insane head. 

Fade to the film's final image, of a chain pulling a car out of the swamp. During the transition we catch a glimpse of an image superimposed over Bates' glittering eyes and wide grin: a human skull. We can't help but note that the shape and width of Bates' grin and eyes match those of the skull's almost perfectly. 

A final image meant to send the audience out of the theaters on an appropriately macabre note? A way of suggesting what's really going on inside Norman's head--basically cunning and implacable Death, grinning at our ludicrous need for a crumb of comfort, a word of reassurance? Or did Hitchcock in a moment of weakness betray his true attitude towards death--that certainly there's the possibility of an afterlife, but we're entirely too optimistic in thinking this a good thing?

A greater power

The Birds stands alone among all of Hitchcock's films, I think, in leaving us with no explanation, however demented, for the violence. Bruno wanted his father dead because he couldn't stand the man; Gavin Ellster wants his wife dead presumably because he wanted control of her money; Mrs. Bates wants any girl interested in her son dead because she's jealous of him (or rather, as Dr. Richman puts it, he's so intensely jealous of her he assumes she's the same way about him). The birds never tell us why they want everyone dead, they just keep at it--presumably will keep doing so until the desired end is achieved. 

There's a funny scene in a diner where different people gather together and offer explanations: changing weather, occult malevolence, biblical vengeance, none of which ultimately stick. With the film's final image--of the little sports car about to lose itself in a vast herd of fowl, inching towards a baleful sky--there's an ambivalent rise of volume and intensity in the birds' constant murmur: are they about to attack again? We can't know beyond the end credits; we can only speculate.

But the supreme moment for me isn't the film's appropriately bleak final image (not as bleak perhaps as in Daphne du Maurier's original short story, but in its way more cruel--as hope, represented by the few sun rays that manage to penetrate the gray cloud cover, is always more cruel than absolute despair); rather, it's the pause right after the gas station explosion--the breathless moment before the birds launch into their most massive attack yet.

To review: gulls attack a gas station attendant, knocking him down. Gas flows downhill, towards a parked car; the driver has stepped out to light a cigarette. The gasoline ignites, the car explodes; the flames follow the stream up the road to the station, which explodes.

Suddenly Hitchcock cuts to a high overhead shot, looking down on the town of Bodega Bay. Far below we see the flames from the burning car and gas station.

A startlingly peaceful moment, this. The panic and mayhem are all far below, out of earshot; the town itself looks like a toy diorama, where some willful boy has poured whiskey over one corner and set it alight.

Then you hear it: the sound of breathing. Barely registering on the ear but labored, as if someone were sucking air from a scuba tank. Then you see a pair of wings--here, there, gathering in increasing numbers. The birds are like skiers on a summit, looking down on the slope they plan to plunder; or like fighter planes perched above clouds waiting for the signal to attack--and suddenly you realize the burning station looks like a signal, like something they've been waiting for all this time.

Hitchcock is almost always about the point-of-view, about gliding, eye-level shots that increase our identification with the protagonist's helplessness and fear. Once in a blue moon (I'm thinking of the opening shot to the cropduster sequence in North by Northwest, or the camera swooping upwards to look down on Norman carrying his mother to the fruit cellar in Psycho) he resorts to a high overhead angle--less a point-of-view shot than a pitiless gaze assessing man's all-too-apparent vulnerability.

This was, well, different. This felt like both point-of-view and pitiless, sentient yet not quite human. The breathing (or rather the faintest suggestion of breathing) makes the moment all the more unnerving--who is this? Why is he doing all this? What does he intend to do next?

It's the closest, I submit, that Hitchcock ever comes to entertaining the possible existence of God, albeit here--and more clearly in du Maurier's story--a God in the guise of implacable nature. You do form specific impressions from this all-too-brief assumption of his  point of view, this fleeting glimpse of the world through his eyes: he seems less like the loving God of the New Testament, more like the vengeful God of old; and he seems to look down on the town and its inhabitants like so many ants--like a pestilence that must be dealt with, if a house is to be considered clean and fit to live in by more respectable inhabitants.

It's about as mysterious and terrifying an image as anything Hitchcock has ever produced--and as such, arguably one of the most mysterious, indescribably terrifying images ever created in the history of cinema. 

6.15.12

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.

Messengers 2: Scarecrow (Martin Bernawitz, 2009)

If it only had a brain

Martin Barnewitz's Messengers 2: Scarecrow (2009), prequel to the Pang Brothers' Messengers (2007) gets the full theatrical release treatment in Manila--why, one can only guess. After gathering dust in the shelves of barely busy Blockbuster stores (the once mighty chain has cut operating hours, and is giving discounts and free rentals away as if the world might end way before 2012), I suppose the distributors expect supposedly less educated Asians to bite what supposedly savvier American audiences turn down.

Hope not. We have our happy quirks (where else but in the Philippines would a gay-themed melodrama like Olive Lamasan's In My Life be such a hit?), but if the '2' appended to the title isn't ample warning, the fact that this went straight to video in the United States should give local moviegoers pause. Just think, people: if garbage as bad as Planet 51 hung around American multiplexes for weeks before expiring, what are movies that shun big-screen exposure like?

In this case, you've been warned: Messengers 2 plays like a parody of Pumpkinhead, Children of the Corn and The Shining, only not as funny--the dialogue sounds stilted if not downright unnatural, the acting is wooden, to put it kindly, and the scares are strictly of the pop-up variety (to be fair they're sufficiently loud to help wake me whenever I nod off). Barnewitz uses enough handheld camera footage to be counted among the new generation of horror filmmakers, and I hate the new generation--not a coherent sequence among them.

Still, that's not what really reeks about this picture; it's how the movie seems to be subtly selling itself to conservative Christians while indulging the 'R'-rated fantasies of the pimply horror-geek crowd. Note such details as John Rollins (Norman Reedus) having trouble with his corn about the time when he's stopped going to church; note his good wife Mary (Heather Stephens)--mother of God, get it? Get it?--is a sensible, old-fashioned housewife who frowns at beer-drinking, cursing, and taking the Lord's name in vain. By way of contrast, when the bad guys come they bear six-packs, mutter insidious ideas (“reap what you sow, John”), and offer tempting visions of sweaty women dousing their naked breasts with bottled water.

I know, I know, I'm probably being paranoid--can't see some Christian conservative film production outfit putting out a subliminal “Jesus Saves!” promotion campaign in the guise of a mildly gory, mildly erotic horror flick, and for all we know the scriptwriter (Todd Farmer, who recycled his largely discarded script from the original “Messengers” for this picture) only meant to exploit Bible-belt agricultural workers, not glamorize them. That said, you can't help but wonder why the scarecrow is hung up in cruciform position, and why John later finds himself in a similar fix. Then there's the moment when a sardonic neighbor looks on John and says “I see who wear the pants in this family;” John in another scene repeats the line, and adds “isn't the man supposed to be the strong one?” Granted this is a drama about a man's corruption, and those lines are meant to be taken as sexist markers on John's progress towards, one can't help but feel we're supposed to nod in tacit agreement, not recoil in disapproving horror. Later, there's a lovemaking scene between John and Mary that comes uncomfortably close to rape; nothing is made out of it afterward, and Mary doesn't even mention the incident to her ex-beau Tommy (Atanas Srebrev)--it's as if no one knows what to make of the assault. Anyway it's between husband and wife, so that's okay. Right?

Then there are Jude and Miranda Weatherby (Richard Riehle and Darcy Fowers, respectively), who put on the most painfully obvious Mephistopheles act this side of a Sunday school kindergarten drama. Fowers has the pneumatic breasts and skanky look of a Fox Network newscaster; Riehle at least makes some attempt at subtlety--he heaves up the six-pack as an offering and can't seem to imagine why a body might refuse.

I'd mentioned Stanley Kubrick's The Shining--that film chronicled a father's breakdown and a family's disintegration. I kept thinking back to that film when John is confronted with a police officer's dead body and desperately tries to explain to his wife “it's the scarecrow! It's the scarecrow!” Sounds pretty much like blame-shifting, and maybe it's just me but the fact that a scarecrow does pop up to terrorize Mary, validating everything John has said, sounds like unbelievably good luck. Towards the end of Kubrick's film the monster comes out in the open as well, only he doesn't wear cheap makeup effects; he's simply himself, father and husband and head of the family, his inner demons revealed at last. Now that's horror.

First published in Businessworld, 1.21.10

Au hasard, Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

(Some old articles I never got around to publishing; a couple of more Bressons in the following weeks)

Gift of a Magi

What's so remarkable about Au hasard, Balthazar is that Bresson uses the simplest things--a donkey; a girl; a camera that tends to look at things askance; some piano music--and with them creates (as Godard puts it) the whole world, or about as beautiful and complex an evocation of that world as anything I've ever seen.

Bresson eschews most special effects, most camera moves, uses only one lens for the entire film (50 mm), doesn't resort to surrealism or trick cutting or even makeup, yet what he creates is as immediate as anything by de Sica or Rosellini, and as strange as anything by Bunuel or Godard. His lead actress hardly twitches a muscle throughout the film, yet you feel you know her inside out; his lead actor--a donkey--has at most a pair of darkly liquid eyes and a head of unkempt fur yet you're moved by his predicament, and ultimate fate.

Bresson throws in the story of a man accused of murder who comes to believe he is guilty (even if he isn't), and it's of a piece, as integrated into the film as if the film had wrapped roots around the man's story and just kept on growing into maturity. From an encounter between an old miller and the film's heroine (insomuch as the film actually has a heroine) Bresson manages to sketch an outline of the girl's father without the man being present, just the miller contrasting the father's philosophy against his own (honor vs. material wealth; pride vs. avarice); with every word he speaks the miller condemns her father's philosophy, then, for good measure, his own. In the end the girl succumbs to the miller, corrupt and decrepit as he is, partly because she must (he's taking her in for the night), partly because it appeals to her sense of perversity, her need for degradation. All this psychologically plausible, the simplest realism, yet somehow poetic, stylized, cinematic.

Bresson believes he's trying for a film where everything "is in its place," and cites the story of Bach reacting to a student admirer, saying what he does is not all that special: he just hits a note at the right time, and the organ does the rest. Bresson claims to be doing the same infuriatingly simple, mysterious act: he points the camera, then glues the resulting footage together. The projector, or so he would like you to think, does the rest.

The classic reading of the film is that the donkey stands for Christ, and all who abuse it are the sinners of the world. Recent critics think otherwise: the village folks' cruelty and vice, the village priest's ineffectuality contradict a strictly Christian interpretation and suggest, among other things, that the donkey is more the victim of an unfeeling materialist world. Bresson immerses us in the textures and sounds--the materials, in effect--of that world, presenting to us through Ghislain Clouquet's crystalline photography the rough weave of the characters' clothes, the crudely hewn rocks that make up their houses; his soundtrack emphasizes specific sounds--clacking cart wheels, clanking chains, Balthazar's defiant, pathetic bray.

If I may throw in my own two centavos (into a pot probably brimming over with currency): Balthazar's behavior in the film is like a base line for all living creatures; the animal acts the way man would act, bereft of human intelligence and given only a basic level of consciousness--move when able, resist when tired, ignore pain when struck, flee when the pain is unbearable. Simple yet, I would say, sane.

The donkey reacts as any animal would react; everyone else reacts differently, self-destructively you might say, because they're cursed with self-conscious intelligence and are capable of doing things against their immediate interest. They are for much of their lives insane, and the film continually compares the donkey's behavior with theirs to sometimes comical, sometimes tragic, effect. The girl sleeps around, her father refuses to compromise, the boy who loves her allows himself to be humiliated, the boy she loves is allowed to humiliate her, the accused man drinks heavily, the miller counts his virtues as covetously as he does his money; through it all Balthazar ambles along, a braying, four-legged condemnation of humanity's perverse craziness. If the donkey dies, that's because the world itself, or the part of it infested by human civilization, has gone mad, and no sane, sensible creature can long survive in it.

August 26, 2007

Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008)

How'd it suck badly? Let me count the ways:

1) It runs for a hundred and twenty minutes, about a hundred and nineteen too long.

2) It's a vampire movie without fangs, crucifixes, stakes, beds recycled from used coffins, and spontaneous daylight combustion--in short, all the paraphernalia that marks a classic vampire movie. Watching it is like watching a Western without horses, or a comedy without a sense of humor.