Broken Lullaby (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

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Last night’s viewing was the new Indicator release of Lubitsch’s BROKEN LULLABY, which I found intensely moving.

The opening sequence is extraordinary: a victory parade in Paris on the first anniversary of the Armistice, swords glistening in a row in Church, shiny boots marching, the Parade again, now seen between the legs of an amputee, a detour through a hospital to show veterans howling in pain, the church services finishes and as all the forces officials leave, there’s a young man remaining, Paul Renard (Phillips Holmes) praying in anguish, the camera dollies to a figure of Christ, more of the young boy suffering, then the priest comes out of the confessional, the camera quickly dollies to the priest, and the young man runs to him to confess he’s killed a man. This all culminates in a close-up of the French veteran dissolving into the face of the man he killed, a boy just like him.

Totally melodramatic and totally thrilling mise-en-scène (see above). After this the young man sets off to a small village in Germany to apologise to the other boy’s family, the Holderlins, expiate his guilt and find a reason for living, which he does in the most difficult way possible: by falling in love with Elsa (Nancy Carroll) the fiancée of the man he’s killed.  The film deals with prejudice, guilt, remorse, the way small communities support but also discipline and punish, the futility of war. The vehicle is melodrama and Lubitsch wrings every ounce of feeling from the mode without sacrificing complexity, whilst also getting a few laughs along the way.

The only creaks are the dated style of performing: Phillips Holmes looks beautiful and intense but overdoes the gestures; Nancy Carroll who can be so lively and magnetic is here overly subdued whilst also over-gilding the lily in her big moments; as to Lionel Barrymore as the father, I’m fascinated by him; he’s so imitable, I dislike all his loveable curmudgeon schtick, and yet here he is playing all his old tricks and being extremely effective with them. The great Zasu Pitt brings spark as the Honderlin maid, and the famous Lubitsch touch is still in evidence (see below).

François Ozon remade this as FRANZ and changed the ‘who knows what when’ form to put more emphasis on the fiancée in the second half of the film. I remember liking it then but now can’t remember much else. The script is by the great Samson Raphaelson and is  based on Marcel Ronstadt’s novella and subsequent play, THE MAN I KILLED, part of a cycle of international interwar anti-war works that include JOURNEY’S END and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.

Josè Arroyo

The American Soldier (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1970)

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THE AMERICAN SOLDIER is not so much a pastiche of noir as a noirish dream incurred by watching American gangster films of the fifties and sixties.

The plot is basic: Ricky (Karl Scheydt), a German-American Vietnam Vet returns to Munich and is hired as a contract killer by three policemen. The whodunnit element is negligible. There is no suspense.

Graphic but inchoate

The psycho-sexual elements are heightened. It’s all songs and smoke, fedoras and phone booths, a romance of futility, of dark forbidden desires, laced with whiskey and ennui, that lead to death.

Your future’s all used up.

There are innumerable references to crime films, of which my favourite is the Dietrich ‘your future’s all used up’ scene from TOUCH OF EVIL (Orson Welles, 1958). It’s full of personal references, not, I suspect, meant for a general audience: the prostitute who falls for Ricky played by Elga Sorbas is called Rosa von Praunheim, after the director who would soon release IT IS NOT THE HOMOSEXUAL WHO IS PERVERSE, BUT THE SOCIETY IN WHICH HE LIVES (1971). The film is self -referential. The nightclub the characters go to is the ‘Lola Montes’, just as in GODS OF THE PLAGUE(1970); Ricky goes to visit his old home, in front of which are railings exactly like the ones the characters of KATZLEMACHER sit on throughout much of that film.

Revisiting Katzelmacher

Like in Almodóvar’s work, where a scene in one film is developed into the main plot of a later one, here we get a chambermaid (played by Margarethe von Trotta, the celebrated director) who comes into Ricky’s hotel room as he’s making love to Rosa, sits by the bed, and tells us the story of what will become ALI, FEAR EATS THE SOUL (1974) .

There’s luminous black and white cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann that adds to the incantatory quality in the film, and seen to advantage in this very beautiful restoration. The acting seems posey and theatrical, though that too adds a symbolic dream-like dimension to the drama. There are moments that seem awkward and amateurish. Some of the compositions seem well thought-through, others merely grabbed, but this too adds to the film’s dream logic. It’s less a pastiche than a dramatic rendering of personal fantasies and desires that are rendered vividly, sometimes even graphically,  but remain inchoate. Murnau, Clark Gable and Batman are referenced. I loved it, though I don’t know if I would have had I not already been immersed in Fassbinder’s world.

Incestuous brotherly love and Clark Gable

 

José Arroyo

 

Rio das Mortes (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1971)

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RIO DAS MORTES is my least favourite Fassbinder film so far, though still with lots to enjoy. Based on an idea from Volker Schlöndorff, it’s a rambly film about an apprentice tile-layer Michael (Michael König),  with a beautiful girlfriend Hannah(Hannah Schygulla),  who dreams of going to Rio das Mortes, which they think is in Peru, leave the grind of life in Munich behind and maybe set-up a farm or find some lost treasure….whatever. Hannah hopes to be married to Michael, he resents her seeming to shut down all his dreams with practicalities. When Michael’s childhood friend Günther (Günther Kaufmann) returns from his military service, they decide to pursue that dream together. Their bonding increases in spite of their many failures and Hannah is left behind. The film would make an interesting case study on the relationship between  homosociality and repressed homosexuality. Michael and Günther both sleep with Hannah but are clearly each other’s primary object of affection. The film is interspersed with feminist agitprop, lectures on underdevelopment, extremely long-take tracking shots of dialogue, and a memorable dance numbers between Schygulla and Fassbinder. There’s pop music of the period (I recognise Elvis and Leonard Cohen), filmic references (Buster Keaton to Lana Turner) and a very beautiful and sensual Hannah Schygulla, wearing a fox stole, with a Dietrich veil, first full of love and lastly contemplating murder. What is it with Lana Turner and gay culture in this moment? The film includes references to the Frank O’Hara poem first, and then as its picked up by Alan Ginsburg; all of that as read by Schygulla and pictured by Fassbinder, a whole prismatic and layered set of queer references. RIO DAS MORTES was made for TV, filmed in 16mm and blown up to 35mm.

Gods of the Plague/ Götter der Pest (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1970)

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A mood piece disguised as a crime film, about futility and anomie set in a marginal underworld of pornography, crime, prostitution, seedy nightclubs, and lowdown cafes and restaurants.

Franz Walsch (Harry Baer) is released from prison but is slowly drawn back to a life of crime. He’s loved by two women (Hanna Schygulla and Margarethe von Trotta). The first is obsessed with and will betray him, the latter he shares with Günther (Günther Kaufman), a criminal colleague, with whom he seems to share an affection that does not seem purely platonic.

This one of a series of nine films Fassbinder would direct between Nov. 69 and Nov. 70: prodigious. And one sees and equally prodigious advancement in Fassbinder’s audio-visual skills; the camera is more mobile; the shots more interestingly framed and composed; there are zooms; action now takes place on different planes.

The queerness is still ever-present (a barman tells a gay couple, ‘you still fooling around with that nonsense?’: they seem the only happy people in the film). The presence of Günther adds a racial dimension to the film’s depiction of class and criminality. I was struck once again by the supermarkets, bursts of light in this otherwise dark film, and particularly notable in the scene where the wounded Günther trawls the dark streets where the shops seem to glow with light and goods, but the doors are closed to people like him. The only way in for people like them is to rob, which is of course also their way out. Those who loved Franz will weep at his funeral, even as that love hurried him on to his death. I liked it very much.

PS: Camp is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Fassbinder, but the two musical numbers here (Schygulla doing Dietrich’s Mein Blonde Babe; and Carla Egerer singing the theme tune from HUSH, HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE just before she’s killed) suggest a re-think might be necessary. It’s camp that doesn’t feel campy, and used more as used as dour acceptance of inevitable nothingness rather than as joyful queer survival

As surprising as the queerness is the male full frontal nudity  in mainstream feature cinema so early on:

Fassbinder’s Cinema continues to be loaded with film references. This one below was one of the most striking:

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: De Cierta Manera/ One Way or Another (Sara Gomez, Cuba, 1974)

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Thinking Aloud About Film talks Sara Gomez’ debut feature, DE CIERTA MANERA/ ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, a model of Marxist dialectical filmmaking, mixing fiction and documentary; a dramatic auto-critique of class and race that puts gender at the centre: an extraordinary film, currently on MUBI.

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

If you want to see the excerpt from Agnès Varda referenced in the film, it may be seen here:

https://notesonfilm1.com/2019/05/10/benny-more-in-agnes-vardas-salut-les-cubains/

José Arroyo

Katzelmacher (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1969)

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It’s hard to imagine that Fassbinder was only 23 when KATZELMACHER was released in 1969; That it was his second feature; and that he’d made it in spite of his first – LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH – being greeted with opprobrium and shouts of ‘Narcissist’ at the Berlin Film Festival. By then, Fassbinder had also written, acted, and produced many plays, including KATZELMACHER, staged at Munich to accompany Jean-Marie Straub’s condensation of Ferdinand Bruckner’s three-act SICKNESS OF YOUTH.

 

In KATZELMACHER, a gang of young people sit on a railing outside an apartment and shoot the shit; they talk about sex and money, not always truthfully. Sometimes they continue the chat in a park bench, or they move to a tavern. These mainly static scenes are punctuated by mobile shots of two people, usually women, taking short walks towards the camera as the camera pulls back, and talking about their lives as Schubert’s German Dance, Op. 33. No. 7 plays over the soundtrack.

The youth are disaffected, trying to find love, sometimes selling themselves for money, including the men, but mainly judging each other. Halfway through the film, their bored sullenness is pierced to action when a Greek immigrant enters the scene. Soon they begin to whisper that he’s filthy, sex-crazed, one of the women claims to have been molested by him, moreover he’s a communist. All the group’s not-so-latent fascist tendencies are brought to the fore and it all erupts in violence.

KATZELMACHER was filmed in only nine days and remains potent. I was struck by the kiss between men and wondered what seeing that might have meant in 1969. I was also struck by the gendered structures of feeling expressed in the film. Women are constantly slapped around, causally, as if the men had a right to; and the women also take it nonchalantly, as if the men did indeed have a right to exert that violence on them. The Greek guest worker, played by Fassbinder, though indeed a victim, is, as a man, no better than the German ones, starting an affair whilst denying he has a family and children back home. Part of Fassbinder’s success is that the characters work as both social types and as flesh and blood people.

 

It’s going to be interesting watching these films in order.

 

For a more extended discussion of the film you may want to look at Jonathan Rosenbaum’s excellent piece: https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2022/10/the-example-of-katzelmacher/

José Arroyo

Love Is Colder Than Death/ Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1969)

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LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH is Fassbinder’s first feature and in it are present elements that would reappear later on and help constitute what we’ve come to recognise as his style. The film begins with an image of him, shoft left of center, with the rest of the frame empty, smoking, reading the newspaper, legs crossed, overweight, menacing and sensual.

Soon we’ll see a shirtless black man, an object of desire, and when we see the head of a syndicate place his hand on his knee, the queerness will come to the fore.

There will be a Turk on the loose who must be got rid of. Hannah Schygulla is the love interest/whore, one of the great presences in film history, here so young, sensual, with a face that seems to communicate everything and yet remains inscrutable.

Fassbinder is not afraid to hold a close-up so that the eye can wonder all over Ulli Lommell’s handsome face,

Lommell clearly dressed to evoke Delon in LE SAMOURAI.

And Fassbinder knows how to compose a shot dramatically so whilst the film is clearly based on a play (and with bare sets, minimal furniture etc), it never feels stagebound, and indeed the setting is opened up (tellingly, to freeways and supermarkets).

It’s a cinephile’s film, dedicated to Chabrol, Rohmer, Jean-Marie Straub and Linio and Cuncho, the characters from Damiano Damiani’s A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL. I love the moment where they go steal sunglasses in a department store and he tells the saleswoman he wants glasses like Janet Leigh wore in PSYCHO. The film seems all tone – alienated, distanced, sensual — and attitude. Personal bonds are valued but deceive, the world is merely out to get you so maintain what you can of your freedom at all cost. All this in a world that’s exploitative and murderous but where numerous people are killed without once drawing blood. A distinctive first feature which I enjoyed very much. The frame grabs are from the Arrow release.

 

Film is currently playing on MUBI

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Hippodrome Silent Film Festival 2023 Bo’Ness

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Intrepid investigative journalist Richard Layne returns to the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival to report on the films and the glamour of Silent Cinema in Bo’Ness, a model of what place and event can do together: a site of scholarship, restoration, fandom and even the commission of aspects of production, bringing together a cultural intersection of the local and the international. An unmissable event that I unfortunately had to miss but,  luckily for us, Richard was there and leaves no stone unturned.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The Hippfest programme notes giving background on the films from this and previous years may be accessed here:

https://www.hippodromecinema.co.uk/silent-film-festival/programme-notes/

The performance of the “In Spring” score may be seen here:

 

Our own previous podcast on the festival may be accessed here:

 

Thinking Aloud About Film with Pamela Hutchinson on Hippfest

 

 

José Arroyo

The New Life, Tom Crewe (London: Penguin Random House, 2023)

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‘We must live in the future we hope to make’ says one of the characters in Tom Crewe’s THE GOOD LIFE. What the novel then explores is the extent to which that’s possible and for whom that’s; how the institution of marriage may enable choices even as it might also obliterate individuals; how class and money figure into it, making some risks worth taking for one and not for others; how sexuality lends a different skin to the game, some wanting to be invisible due to personal shyness others simply terrified of being discovered; and how patriarchal power figures within a 19th century marriage, even when the male is an ‘invert.’ It’s a wonderful novel that well dramatizes the pull of sex – sex is central to this telling in a way it rarely is outside of porn – whilst surgically unveiling a spectrum of moral complexities tied to particular actions. It’s loosely based on John Addington Symons and Havelock Ellis’ writing of SEXUAL INVERSION, here the publication takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trial, and the novel vividly evokes that world of 19th century reformists (child labour, women’s rights, free speech, sexual research etc). Edward Carpenter appears as a character. The last line in the Afterword is ‘Truths needn’t always rely on facts for its expression’; and I would go further — the novel so successfully evokes the sexual dimension of all these struggles, the personal desires, the lure and restrictions of sex, the danger and frustrations —  that it gets at truths facts alone can’t even begin to express. A novel to savour.

 

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 392 – Rye Lane

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Rye Lane follows two new friends, both reeling from breakups, as they spend a day together walking the streets of London and getting into scrapes. It’s a well-intentioned romcom with some things to like, but it suffers from the implausible writing and poor performance of the male half of its romantic pairing, and a lack of cinematic nous.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Thinking Aloud About Film: El imperio de la fortuna/ The Realm of Fortune (Arturo Ripstein, Mexico, 1986)

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Dionisio (Ernesto Gómez Cruz) lives with his mother in a one-room hut, scraping a living as a town-cryer. He’s at cock-fight in a village fair and is given a bloodied rooster as a tip. Dionisio heals him and begins a career. The innocent naïve peasant is transformed into a leading gambler, marries a beautiful singer (Blanca Guerra), who brings him even more luck. But in his single-minded pursuit of money, he loses sight of everything else and ensures his own downfall. A synthesis of many elements we’ve seen in previous Ripstein films, a film which shows the influence of Italian neo-realism but also leaps into a more magical kind of story-telling. Dark and funny, with a great evocation of the sensual and criminal dimension of rural fairs. We discuss this and more in the podcast below:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Cadena perpetua/ Life Sentence (Arturo Ripstein, Mexico, 1979)

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A great noir, currently on MUBI, that brings to mind Crime & Punishment, Jean Valjean, Bresson’s Pickpocket and I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, among others. A petty thief and former pimp, now a banker, s forced back into a life of crime by the very police who are meant to uphold the law. The story is told in flashback, through voice-over; the setting is contemporary; the indictment of the culture in the final shot, brutal. Whilst a society of spectacle is obsessed with a football match our hero’s odds against tomorrow are nil. There’s no exit, he’s got no way out. He’s no good, but the structures of the culture are even worse. A great film.

The podcast may be listened to below;

 

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

The Podcast references:

A Place Without Limits

Las Islas Marias

Pedro Armendariz Sr, here in another great noir: La noche avanza.

Dolores Del Rio, in one of the great films of Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age, here also with Pedro Armendariz

Emilio Fernandez (here a marvellous scene from Victimas del pecado/ Victims of Sin

Tom Shepherd on ‘Noir in Brick’, a video essay

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Creator’s Statement:

 

The process of the video essay began with the film review for Rian Johnson’s film noir, Brick and was then furthered in the consecutive essay. The review attempted to convey the tones and narrative of the feature while bringing attention to various filmic elements such as cinematography and mise-en-scène. The essay builds upon this foundational text and conclusions on the main points of subjectivity and guilt take root. Despite, being devoid of literary sources, a fact rectified in the video essays development, the essay’s focus on the film allowed crucial understanding of Brick’s tactics and meanings. Moreover, the inclusion of close analysis marked the beginning of the structure to be seen within the final video essay itself as well as the identification of key elements such as music which go onto frame later arguments.

 

The video essay, as a combination of these past two texts with theory and close analysis to the film, attempts to convey the ways in which Johnson uses the genre of noir with the high school setting. Key to this is the way in which he utilises the idea of two worlds; the first being the surface banality of the ‘ordinary’ high school, and the second, highly stylised world of the noir. Assigned to these respective worlds are Brendan’s relationship with Emily, which uses the authentic tone of reality to garner empathy from the viewer, and ideas of immorality and crime. The video essay shows how Johnson uses conventions of the genre and camerawork to express Brendan’s feelings of guilt which allows the viewer to track the submeaning of his quest to “find the one who put her on the spot”, which, in this reading of the film, is Brendan himself.

The structure of the essay frames the points most important to the argument while allowing flow through film. Unlike words which have no corresponding signifiers, the video essay required words to be constructed around the visuals of the film. The introduction simply eases the viewer into the film, clarifying the features main ideas, styles and goals of the director. James Naremore’s summary of the iconography and devices of noir furthers the viewers knowledge as the essay mirrors examples on screen. A quote from ‘A Companion to Film Noir’ presents another side of the discourse on what noir is by noting the entity’s abstract nature that exists more in the discussion that in physical properties. The sequential opening analysis introduces the primary idea of the camera’s alignment to Brendan’s subjectivity while framing the secondary ‘noir world’ as the evil that killed Emily. The essay moves on to the idea of complementary worlds, something that was included to further Naremore’s examples, address reviews and to bring the argument neatly onto the topic of the Pin. Furthermore, an insert of a quote by Raymond Chandler, whose books massively influenced the noir genre, works nicely with Roger Ebert’s review of Brick as it displays how the tone has shifted from the urban city of the 40s, to a high school. The importance of addressing these reviews stems from the essay’s argument that Johnson is attempting to use the noir genre to his own ends, whereas the reviews allude to the notion that it is for that sake of gimmick and parody. The pin’s character, while not entirely to blame for Emily’s murder, comes to symbolise the noir world that certainly did play a part in said crime. As the part of the narrative concerned with the Pin climaxes, the noir style similarly increases, with a focus on the lighting in, and around the pin’s house. The essay uses this part in its narrative to again reinforce the ideas and effects of alignment within the film as well as Johnson’s use of it. Moreover, the character of the Pin takes the viewer to an example of Johnson’s portrayal of the idea that there are two worlds within Brick by showing the camera’s cut from the dark and stylised lighting of the basement to the light, playful setting of the kitchen with its entailing banality. Finishing the segment with a point on its world-oriented dialogue style, the essay begins upon the topic of lines and edges as an expansion on the idea of two worlds. The text, detailing the music used within the current point, is manipulated on the screen to exemplify the lines of which the narrator discusses. Shifting the essay’s focus from Brendan to Emily, the question of where does Emily belong in this system of worlds is brought to the foreground by the narrator. In this portion of the essay, the essay brings a focus to the main reason as to why a noir was set in a high school which was to utilise the familiar setting’s reserve of easily accessible empathy. While referencing, Chinatown and The Maltese Falcon, the principle is displayed through the comparison in plots; rather than a political scheme or a jewelled bird, Brick’s focus is on the relationship between two schoolmates, something most people can relate to, and empathise with. The pronouncement of this empathy is then developed in the essay with the idea of guilt which is brought to the forefront through the analysis of Dode’s murder and the flashback. The quote by Paul Schrader is inserted here to strengthen the concept of Johnson’s manipulation of genre convention to the effect of generating emotion on and off the screen. The perspective of guilt is guided by the essay to its end with a summary of the place of the football pitch as a site that tracks Brendan’s story. The match shots that came before refresh the audience of his feelings of guilt. The final turn from Brendan conveys his acknowledgment of his complicity in Emily’s tragedy.

 Filmography:

Rian Johnson, Brick, Bergman Lustig Productions, 2005.

Roman Polanski, Chinatown, Paramount Pictures, 1974.

John Huston, The Maltese Falcon, Warner Brothers Pictures (1941)

Bibliography:

Schrader, Paul. Notes on Film Noir. Film Comment, vol. 8, no. 1, 1972.

Spicer, Andre, and Helen Hanson. A Companion to Film Noir, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013.

Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2nd edn, 2008.

 

Sam Hamilton, ‘The Obsessive Perspective’

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Video Essay

 

Creator’s Statement: 

 

This work has three principle aims; to delineate a term in the canon of stereoscopic (3D) film studies which Spöhrer points out1 is a fledgling field and warrants investigation, secondly to link this term to the longstanding cinematic device of one point perspective, and finally to create an impression of how the director of Long Day’s Journey Into Night reveals an obsessive protagonist and how this ultimately links to the use of 3D.

 

The term is the Obsessive Perspective, which can be understood as Mulvey’s notion of the ‘gaze’2 and its potency when combined with an obsessed protagonist and one point perspective. Although this is not an essay on the male gaze, the notion of the male gaze is a fascinating pretext for this video essay which associates the way (often male) directors deploy one point perspective to channel an (often male) character’s psychological fixation on a singular goal into the audience’s viewpoint. I link this to the use of 3D in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

 

In Long Day’s Journey Into Night the philosophy of the sun, Buddhism, meshes with the genre of the night, film noir. It is intensely stylish and a beautiful modern restaging of the classical Hollywood noir, full of all the anxiety, eroticism, existential terror and rain-soaked nocturnal imagery that identifies the genre, applied to a new country, a new language and a new culture. But what makes Long Day exceptional is two things. A poetic wisdom to the way these elements combine to affect the audience. And a 59-minute shot stereo converted in post production to alluring 3D.

 

3D, which also creates artificial depth in a 2D medium as does perspective, creates the feeling of almost being able to touch the object in the frame3. I introduce this train of thought in the essay by invoking Jeong’s claim that 3D long takes are ‘not just a complete representation of reality, but a complete presentation of our being embedded in a represented reality’4. This chimes with the director’s intentions for Long Day’s Journey Into Night, being ‘the conjuration of fake three dimensional memories’5. The film clearly illustrates a psychological journey, full of intentional lapses in unities of space and time, that prevent any assumption we are watching a physical reality. For in this filmmaking intention, there is grounds to suggest that 3D in Long Day’s Journey Into Night activates a closer sense of viewing the perceived reality we live in than a by-standing Bazinian camera. A represented reality, as opposed to mere reality, is a subjective one, one which must by nature have a perspective, which in this case relates everything in the frame back to Wan Qiwen. Hence every texture and element of mise-en-scene which is heightened by 3D, an effect which mesmerised a mass audience in Avatar, is channelled back to that focal point of Wan Qiwen, at the centre of a psychological one point perspective even when the frame is not set up as a one point perspective with her in it.

 

Kogonada made clear the prevalence of one point perspective in the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, by cutting together over a hundred frames from his filmography6. But there is more than a filmmaking style to the way one point perspective has been used throughout cinematic history. This video essay draws upon the proclivity to use one point perspective in those moments where characters or their mental states are represented in a vortex. Spinning spirals, illusions and stereoscopic effects using vortexes that incur stereolepsis – seeing in 3D –  were eventually omitted from the final cut of the video essay on the one hand because it drew time away from the important explanation of Luo’s psychological state but also because such effects are known to trigger seizures in some viewers. They are useful tools, however, to distort vision and make the same clip appear different afterwards, demonstrating the important point behind 3D’s significance in Long Day’s Journey Into Night that should you change the way you look at a thing, what you look at changes too.

 

This video essay ultimately left me with more questions as to the specific nature of watching a film in 3D. Since autostereograms and optical illusions possess such a capability to reshape the frame as your eyes perceive it7, those curious about 3D should look into its own inherent effects on the film experience. One of the more curious discoveries I made while researching for this video essay, for example, one of the central pieces of information that I find warrants an intrinsic investigation of 3D as a technology, was a neurological discovery made by Liuye Yao, not long after the release of the film, that indicates extended viewing of 3D movies triggers theta wave activity, which only ever appears elsewhere during REM sleep. The suggestion that 3D has a hypnotic nature here gains some credence. It shows there is some psychological utility to the technology beyond merely exciting our senses. And it reinforces this video essay’s presupposition that 3D was the right choice for invoking an obsessive man’s wandering odyssey into a dreamworld.

Sam Hamilton

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harry Watts – ‘The Devolution of the Gangster’

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Video Essay:

 

Creator’s  Statement:

Investigating the Gangster film is crucial to understanding cinema past the silent era. From the 1930s “the western had been replaced by the Mob story as the central epic of America”[1]. During the decade the Mob movie had risen to unprecedented popularity due to its distinct working class mode of address. The Gangster film appealed to lower class audiences who had just witnessed and were deeply entrenched in the initial consequences of the biggest financial crash in history. Life in 1931 for blue collar workers and their families was very hard indeed, so the release of Little Caesar and The Public Enemy (as well as subsequent titles) provided necessary escapism. Moreover, films made in this period began and evolved to further provide specific experiences tailored for depression audiences, as to provide them with the most effective release from their real social contexts. Key to achieving this end was the Gangster archetype, who was very intentionally formulated over the period by filmmakers to serve as a spokesperson and icon of strength and solidarity for the lower classes.

In achieving this end, the Gangster genre adopted a very distinct set of connotations and a mode of address which allowed for the presentation of spectacle to be directed in a fashion that allowed audiences to voice their lamentations with their real existence while simultaneously indulging in their destructive fantasies through the Gangster archetype as a surrogate. The Gangster existed as a vessel for audiences; any lower class individual could implant themselves in the position of Tom Powers or Rico Bandello and live a rise from poverty. The character allowed for the average citizen “to become a maverick”[2] and involve themselves in the excitement of the criminal lifestyle, while relinquishing all the danger upon the fictional character. Robert Warshow highlights that the Gangster, in suiting this aim, was made to be intentionally spectacular. He brings our attention to the intentional fictionalisation of the Gangster and his world. The Gangster “inhabits and personifies not the real city, but the sad city of the imagination”[3]. Through this process, the Gangster genre over the decade manifested a fictional reality that mediated and reflected the genuine fears of the audience amongst increasing social unrest and organised crime, yet conveyed them with a certain glamorisation that undercut said fears and allowed audiences to embrace them and temporarily escape their social anxieties by confronting them within a power fantasy, piggybacking off the Gangster archetype. The glamorisation of aspects which in the real world were points of fear and concern characterised the classical Gangster aesthetic. The Gangster film as a result refined strict patterns of presentation and spectacle that consolidated the aesthetic and form of the genre. The first section of my video essay aims to identify the conventions that became embedded within the genre after it was established with this agenda.

These conventions actually proved to be a financial and repressive tool to constrict and control lower class audiences. Firstly, the Gangster film was an effective and proven paradigm for repeat custom and profit. Once the Mob film was established to appease and voice lower class views and concerns, audiences consistently flocked to theatres, eventually relying on cinema to continue coping with the dire circumstances of their existence. Under the surface, however, is a much more malicious possibility. The Gangster film was refined as a tool for the oppression of lower classes because it passifies them through allowing fantasies of resistance. If the Gangster film provides relief, then tension cannot be built up and potentially explode out into real protest and potentially revolution. The Gangster film, although contested by Will Hays, was explicit in its disregard for law and order and thus allowing the population to demonstrate their authoritarian attitudes, but in a manner of which they could be controlled by the very institutions the films appears to resist. This content is crucial to informing the form of the 30s Gangster film. These motivations provide insight into how the genre should be judged, by its ability to provide relief to audiences as this is what the genre was intended to do. Crucially, the depression was over by the end of the decade and the Gangster archetype was made redundant. If he existed to reflect, provide escapism and potentially control audiences during the depression, and the form of his depiction was suited for this purpose, then what was the meaning of the gangster past the 1930s? My Video essay will identify the changes in the gangster figure between 1940 and 1990. I will pay particular attention towards how attitudes change regarding the figure and identify how the form of the gangster film changes as a result of growing critiques. I will focus on particular milestone films that highlight a greater psychoanalytic critique of the Gangster, showcasing changes in societal or technological contexts, and demonstrating changes in the original form of the Gangster film. These milestone films will include: Angels with Dirty Faces, White Heat, The Godfather, Scarface, and Once Upon A Time in America. Through working systematically through these films I will demonstrate how since the end of the 1930s there has been a consistent growing psychoanalytic critique of the Gangster since he has served his purpose for depression audiences. Moreover, I will note how the form of the original Gangster film is commented on and adapted as the deployment of the Gangster changes. Overall I will demonstrate that as the decades progressed, critique grew and the Gangster devolved further from his original purpose. By the 1970s the Gangster represented a broken, flawed and regret-ridden man, and by the 1980s with the release of Once Upon a Time in America, the Gangster consolidated in the 1930s was finally completely eviscerated both as an idea and a set of aesthetic attitudes. Leone, more than any other director, takes the basic principles of the 1930s Gangster and deconstructs and undermines them, with a particular focus on exposing the hidden inherent violence that underpinned the genre all along. Not only this but he comments on what the post depression Gangster is, which is ultimately a violent and vindictive, yet lonely and empty pathetic excuse for a human being, demonstrating a clear devolution from the glory days of the 30s.

 

 

 

Bibliography:

Thompson, R,J. The Godfather (Berkeley: Reissue Edition, 2002)

American Film Institute. AFI 10 On 10 (New York: CBS, Air Date: 29 May 2008)

Warshow, R. “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”, Notions of Genre (Texas, University Press, 2016)

Footnotes:

[1] Thompson, R,J. The Godfather (Berkeley: Reissue Edition, 2002)

[2] American Film Institute. AFI 10 On 10 (New York: CBS, air date: 29 May 2008)

[3] Warshow, R. “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”, Notions of Genre (Texas, University Press, 2016)

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 391 – Creed III

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Listen to our podcasts on the original Rocky and the Rocky series by clicking these links.

Michael B. Jordan makes his first feature as director in his third Creed film as star. Creed III sees a retired Adonis Creed living comfortably with his wife and daughter, the walls of their mansion coated with trophies achieved during successful careers… until a figure from Adonis’ past comes back to haunt him.

If that language sounds clichéd, then good, because the film is nothing but. 2015’s Creed was a powerful reinvigoration of the Rocky series, so perhaps it’s fitting that this third instalment is reminiscent of those Roman numeralled sequels, all soap opera and surface. What could have been rich and dramatic is instead thin and uninterested in complexity. But the fights are nice and punchy and Jonathan Majors’ Damian is a bright spark, so there’s that.

Creed III isn’t a dreadful film, but it falls terribly short of its obvious potential and of the standard set by its predecessor.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Love in ‘Decision to Leave’, A Video Essay by Yewon Lee

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Love in Decision to Leave:

Video Essay: 

 

Creator’s Statement:

The idea of the film building a dictionary between the audience and communicating through the common language to share each other’s understanding really struck me. As even from my first watch I found a strong connection to the film and was wondering why the film did so, I realised that Decision to Leave and Park Chan-wook was successful in communicating through the dictionary of the film built by connecting with the audience.

 

I was motivated to explore further on how the language was built throughout the film. As the theme of love and the melodrama is one of the key aspects of the film, I was intrigued to know how the film communicated the sense of love without the word ‘love’. Jeong Seo-gyeong, the co-writer of the film stated that ‘I wanted to write a melodrama without the word ‘love’. How would I say that I love someone without actually saying ‘I love you’? How could I make the audience hear the phrase ‘I love you’ with just actions and gestures?… So, Decision to Leave was an extended description of love, without the actual word ‘love’’. This almost felt like a challenge to find the moments of actions and gestures which the two protagonists of the film, Seorae (Tang Wei) and Haejun (Park Hae-il), had used to not only communicate between themselves but with the audience. The way Park Chan-wook created an erotic atmosphere to the film despite the lack of nudity or scenes of sexual acts between Seorae and Haejun emphasises how the common language built between the audience and the film was effective.

 

Park Chan-wook himself mentioned that he intended the film to be as romantic as mysterious it gets, which the intensity of the melodrama increases as the suspense intensifies. The ending of the film can be seen as the peak of its love language, with Seorae’s failure to leave Haejun and becoming the femme fatale of herself, and Haejun realising what Seorae meant by his confession. The film puts great attention to the idea of language and how we communicate with one another. Since language can be in various different forms, not only spoken but in body language and actions, Decision to Leave tackles this idea to communicate with the audience. The film is unlike the films which Park Chan-wook had been making. When his previous films communicated visually, expressing his stylistics of violence, sex and horror in an explicit way, Decision to Leave shows how the same themes can be communicated implicitly, without the visual spectacle.

 

My video essay focuses on the theme of love and how the language of love is created between Seorae and Haejun. It is split into two chapters, the love language of Haejun and Seorae, exploring the image systems and the motifs in the film where we can find how love is communicated without using the word ‘love’. Although I only introduced three themes for each character, there are more ways in which Park Chan-wook uses in order to implicitly show love and create melodrama. However, I focused on the idea of language as it is one of the most crucial themes in the film.

Yewon Lee

EL SANTO OFICIO/ THE HOLY OFFICE / THE HOLY INQUISITION(Arturo Ripstein, Mexico, 1974)

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EL SANTO OFICIO/ THE HOLY OFFICE / THE HOLY INQUISITION (Arturo Ripstein, Mexico, 1974) is a more serious and austere film than we’re used to seeing from Arturo Ripstein, but at least as great as anything we’ve seen by him so far. A Jewish family fleeing persecution in Spain make a life in Mexico and prosper. That is, until the father dies. The family had sacrificed one of their male children to the Church as a cover-up for their own religious practices. Now a grown monk, that son returns to his father’s burial only to detect that they’re observing Hebraic practices. He denounces his own family to the Church, and the persecution begins. A great film about religious intolerance, patriarchal control, and colonial enslavement through the brutal enforcement of a particular ideology. Based on actual court transcripts, an austerely spectacular period film, with much greater production values than we’re used to seeing from Ripstein. We discuss all of this and more in the podcast below.

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 390 – Knock at the Cabin

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Like his previous film, Old, M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin is an intriguing, self-contained, efficient thriller – although not nearly as satisfying as it could be. The setup: A family staying at that classic American horror location, the cabin in the woods, is taken hostage by four invaders who’ve had visions of the apocalypse.

To say more would rob the film of some of its surprise, and its ability to keep you questioning what will happen is one of its pleasures – so think twice about listening to the podcast before you see it, because we spoil everything! There’s a lot to like, including its portrayal of a same-sex couple so unremarkable that the characters’ sexuality barely needs addressing (although more affection shown between them would have been welcome) and Dave Bautista’s calm but imposing presence as the leader of the intruders. But it’s so keen to have its sceptical protagonists arguing with what their opponents tell them that it doesn’t explore the dramatic and moral questions it has the opportunity to, and it’s too eager to be tasteful. When even José’s asking for gruesomeness you know you’ve shown too much restraint.

Knock at the Cabin is an interesting and engaging film but rather thin and could do with showing more bravery and style. Worth a look, though.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.