A recent series at Anthology Film Archives paid tribute to critic, film
programmer, festival juror, professor, and cinéaste extraordinaire Amos
Vogel, who passed away last April at 91. Founder of Cinema 16,
co-founder of the New York Film Festival, and longtime contributor to Film Comment, Vogel is still best known for his hugely influential, woefully out-of-print 1974 book Film As a Subversive Art,
which provided the rubric for Anthology’s programs. In keeping with
the book’s preoccupation with radicalism in all its cinematic forms, the
two films shown on March 13 constituted an accidental coupling
connected by counterculture: Jean-Daniel Pollet’s exceedingly rare 1970
vision of agitprop apocalypse, Le Sang, and Zelimir Zilnik’s pitch-black Communist comedy Early Works, from 1969.
The 35mm print of Le Sang that was exhibited is the only one
in existence, and the screening marked only the second time the film has
ever been shown in North America (and perhaps the last). The tale of a
band of quasi-hippie nomads and their odyssey through a post-something
wasteland in search of the sea, Le Sang is Pollet’s perverse
take on the road movie, and an example of his tendency to make poetic
films that prize visual impact over all else. Vogel in Film As a Subversive Act classifies
the film under “Trance and Witchcraft,” calling it “an almost
completely successful example of visual cinema at its finest.” Set in a
barren landscape of sand, stone, and the occasional open field, that
suggests Philippe Garrel’s Inner Scar as much as it does a bad peyote trip, it’s like a more laconic El Topo, with numerous scenes of veritable animal slaughter that make the notorious bull beheading of Apocalypse Now look like Bambi.
But despite the film’s hallucinatory visual imagination, its
frustratingly abstract vision of a dehumanized future remains
emotionally hollow.
Pollet and company obviously fancy themselves revolutionaries, though
their precise target is unclear. Dialogue among the motley characters
is comprised of screams, grunts, and warbles, occasionally punctuated by
calls to arms and provocative sloganeering that often break the fourth
wall to berate the viewer. (One particularly graphic animal
throat-slitting is accompanied by the statement, “All the boars drugged
and killed for the image, by the image, will start a rebellion,” which
is soon followed by “Why always corpses on screen and never in the
theater?”) The film keeps up appearances of raging against everything,
taking visual potshots at religion and embracing primitivism in defiance
of modernity, while grabbing every opportunity to offend its audience’s
sensibilities by way of grisly animal sacrifice. All of which doesn’t
cover up the fact that it is an exercise in artifice—phony subversion in
the service of nothing.
Early Works, which won the Golden Bear at the 19th Berlin
International Film Festival in 1969 before fading into obscurity,
presents its themes of revolution and dehumanization far more literally
and effectively than its French counterpart. The film, Zilnik’s first
feature, exemplified the main tendencies of the Yugoslav Black Wave—the
political film movement then at its artistic and commercial peak and
initially established by such filmmakers as Dusan Makavejev
(writer-director of W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, a still
from which graces the cover of Film as a Subversive Art), Zika Pavlovic,
Sasa Petrovic, and Mica Popovic—and prompted Vladimir Jovicic to write
“The Black Wave in Our Cinema,” the 1969 article that marked the
beginning of the country’s official counterattack. A deft satire of the
1968 Soviet invasion of Czeckoslovakia, Early Works uses its
loose plot to allegorize Communism’s dark side, here presented as the
tragic outcome that inevitably arises when the idealism of high-minded
ideology is betrayed by the reality of fallible human nature.
A road movie of a different sort, Early Works chronicles the
maladroit misadventures of four young revolutionaries, three boys and a
girl named Jugoslava, who leave home to become political missionaries.
They wander across the countryside, pick cabbage, shoot guns
(inaccurately), make Molotov cocktails (poorly), and spread the
revolutionary gospel (only to be met with a lack of resources and
dispiritingly poor morale), all in a failed attempt to awaken the
conscience within the working class and peasants.
A sharp tonal shift follows, however, as sexual politics come to the
forefront and the proceedings turn from humorous to disturbing. The
boys fall in love with Jugoslava, who rebuffs each of them in turn (as
she is still entirely consumed by the political fervor that initially
set their journey in motion), resulting in an increasingly tense love
quadrangle. In the startling climax, the boys’ emotions triumph over
their political ideals, and they punish Jugoslava for not “sharing the
wealth.” They attempt to rape her, she resists, they shoot her, and, in
a grand ironic expression, throw a Communist flag over their handiwork
before blowing it up with their first successful Molotov cocktails of
the film—dignifying their base, human aggression by dressing it up as a
revolutionary act.
Artifacts of a time and place long gone—a Europe variously excited and
repulsed by revolutionary possibility—the two films are emblematic of
the zeitgeist from which they were born. Yet, in their zeal, these
revolutionaries also sow the very seeds of their movement’s decay and
demise. In Le Sang the radicals’ nihilism drives the spirit of revolution into its grave; Early Works
uses the literal rape and murder of Jugoslava as a thinly veiled
metaphor whereby revolutionary love of one’s country serves not to
awaken the nation to a higher political calling but actively destroy it.
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(Originally published on Film Comment's blog HERE)
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