In the Fog

Sergei Loznitsa is one of contemporary cinema’s most underrated humanists. The Belorussian mathematician turned filmmaker cut his teeth on documentaries before making the switch a decade later to fiction with the ironically titled My Joy (10), one of the most recent entries in the longstanding Slavic tradition of grim and frostbitten (not to mention long and languorous) parables about endless cycles of violence and the general pointlessness of life. The film earned him just as many accolades (a Palme d'Or nomination at Cannes; director Andrei Zvyagintsev calling it the best Russian-language film of the decade) as condemnations (accusations of everything from self-hating Russophobia to good old-fashioned misanthropy), which proved, if nothing else, its success as a provocation. In the Fog is similar to its predecessor but less extreme, its heavy-handed fatalism tempered by an undeniable compassion for its characters.

It’s also one of the quietest war films ever made, a glimpse at Nazi-occupied Belarus (shot in Latvia) that turns into a slow-moving meditation on morality and mortality. During the 1942-44 occupation, the inhabitants of an unspecified region are locked in a cycle of conflict and cruelty, their loyalty to each other nonexistent thanks to the choosing of sides forced by the war. Rebel partisans attempt to undermine the operations of Nazi collaborators, and vice versa, while the Germans lean back, watch, and enjoy the proceedings, pleased with their ability to turn the peasants against one other. In the middle of it all is the hapless, Christ-like Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy), a gleaming beacon of decency in a wasteland of moral destitution. Imprisoned by the Nazis for an act of sabotage he didn’t commit, then released as bait for the partisans while his “accomplices” are hanged, this stone-eyed and stoic family man who is just trying to survive the war is eventually wanted dead by all sides—the reward he gets for his attempt to do the right thing.

Loznitsa uses a roving handheld camera in order to wring as much atmosphere and emotion from the film’s setting, primarily an Auden-esque forest that feels equally lush and Spartan. Every scene is composed of one or two shots, in the manner of Béla Tarr, and the soundtrack is devoid of music, comprised instead of wind in the trees, birds chirping, and the occasional gunshot. The symbolism of the film’s stark imagery walks a fine line between evocative and risible: the pile of bones outside the butcher’s shop on which the camera comes to rest during the off-screen hanging; the lone black horse in a field followed, soon after, by a lone black bird in a tree; the titular fog that eventually swallows the film whole. Yet these effects hang together in an expressive nonlinear framework that fleshes out the characters’ lives and the extent to which their world punishes those (especially Sushenya) who dare to be heroic.

There is certainly some humor lurking in Loznitsa’s slavish (and Slavic) devotion to depicting mankind’s collective heart of darkness, a tragicomic method to his madness. His is a world of heightened absurdity, an atrocity exhibition where noble intentions invariably meet horrific ends and no good deed goes unpunished. Loznitsa is still intent on portraying mankind as a writhing, impotent mass of dubious morality and wretched cruelty—life as one long cautionary tale of human folly with a series of inevitably tragic ends. But with In the Fog, he allows his characters good intentions. The film is the director’s big reveal, a glimpse past the steely façade (one might call it the iron curtain) of My Joy—an expression of his overarching cynicism as a thinly veiled hope for humanity, not a battle cry in favor of its extinction.

Le Sang / Early Works

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)

The Berlin File

The opening scene of Ryoo Seung-wan’s new spy-thriller The Berlin File is, for better and worse, an apt introduction to the film. A confusing arms deal involving North and South Korean, Russian, and Arab agents goes spectacularly awry, somehow entangling Israel and America in the process and sending North Korean super-spy Pyo Jong-Seung on the run, the victim of an elaborate plot that has framed him as a defector and left him wanted dead by all sides.  A mosaic of action- and espionage-film clichés, yet bearing its share of novel qualities, what follows is equally lithe and languorous, light-footed and heavy-handed, and entirely frustrating.

There’s a good film lurking somewhere inside The Berlin File. The actors do what they can with the script, turning in strong performances of which the film is almost undeserving. Ha Jung-woo (known to American audiences as the hapless cab driver-cum-hitman of 2010’s The Yellow Sea) injects his character with staggering pathos and emotional complexity, as the North Korean agent on the run after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ryoo Seung-bum (the director’s brother and longtime partner in crime) is gleefully deranged as a sadistic North Korean operative/psychopath with an agenda of his own, sent to Berlin to clean up the mess. Playing the characters’ South Korean nemesis, Han Suk-kyu is a walking contradiction, both amused and horrified by the absurdity of the bloodshed he stumbles into.

The Berlin setting, though ripped from The Bourne Supremacy, is rendered unfamiliar enough to imbue the film’s borderline-potboiler tale of international espionage with an air of exoticism, and parallels between the Cold War and the contemporary situation in Korea emerge. But the film’s ending—a moment of unveiling in which Seung-wan shows his hand—is as predictable as it is disappointing, suggesting The Berlin File wasn’t made to stand alone. Beginning as a surprisingly moving tale of an unlikely protagonist and his quest for agency in an emotionally and politically convoluted world, the film forfeits most of its emotional impact when its conclusion evokes nothing more than the first installment of a new franchise.

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(Originally published on Film Comment's blog HERE)

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III

Roman Coppola’s new film, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, finds Charlie Sheen in the role of the titular protagonist: an endlessly narcissistic and inexplicably famous graphic designer whose two main loves (aside from himself) are women and booze.  Though he is ostensibly acting, those traits, combined with the character’s name—almost identical to the actor’s own—make it impossible to watchSwan without feeling that Sheen is playing anyone other than himself, as made notorious by his most recent stint in the headlines. 

But how interesting is it to see Charlie Sheen play Charlie Sheen? Engaging in an admirable yet ultimately unsatisfying discourse with reality, the film boils down to little more than an extension of Sheen’s recent one-man show.  In this way, the film is inherently flawed and hopelessly misdirected, a snake swallowing its own tail. The actor and director's lifelong friendship is the entire reason for the film’s existence (Swan is even more disappointing once you consider the fact that the result of the two men’s fathers’ collaboration was Apocalypse Now), yet as presented in the film, Sheen is nowhere near compelling enough to justify the muse/star treatment.

Swan feels like an inside joke, meaningful only to the filmmakers, a Playboy-chic fantasy far more impressed by its own intimations of psychodrama than any viewer will be.  An attempt at a tale of profound existential woe, Sheen’s character is left by his girlfriend, sending him into a downward spiral of self-pity and hollow introspection, his dealings with his friends and family interspersed with numerous live-action enactments of his daydreams and fantasies. This promises insight into Charles Swan and, by extension, Charlie Sheen, but the façade wears thin, almost immediately devolving into glad-handed wankery that becomes downright exhausting.

There are no surprises, no revelations and almost no fun.  In their place is forced, painfully self-conscious quirkiness and a bounty of neuroses that ring false. Coppola—who co-wrote both Moonrise Kingdomand the Darjeeling Limited—comes off like a second-rate Wes Anderson. Jason Schwartzman (Coppola’s cousin), playing Charlie’s comedian/musician and best friend, is once again typecast as a vaguely eccentric mensch, while Bill Murray, his manager, successfully keeps a straight face (much to the actor’s credit).  Liam Hayes’ Seventies-inspired soundtrack comes off as variations on a theme: the same tepid, retro-worship indie schmaltz done over and over again.

There is, however, an undeniable kinetic energy to the proceedings, a visual inventiveness to the flamboyant pop art mélange that defines the mise-en-scene.  Still, Coppola can’t art-direct his way out of a lousy script.

Swan is the latest development in Sheen’s very real attempts at public redemption and personal catharsis, turning the baring of his soul into commercial fodder.  The film’s attempts at ironic distance—elements of innocuous mockery such as the character being perpetually clad in a pair of purple-tinted sunglasses—indicate a newly acquired, if dubious, self-awareness on the part of the actor; a moral engagement that he believes will make him a more sympathetic character in the eyes of the public.  He may very well be on a quest for self-discovery, but the film definitely isn’t going to convince anyone of that.  Now that Sheen seems to care about the consequences of his actions, the question is, why should we?

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(Originally published on Film Comment's blog HERE)

Casablanca and the Cinema of Familiarity

 

            From the mid-‘20s until their collapse in the ‘60s, Hollywood’s seemingly omnipotent film studios reigned supreme over the American film industry, resulting in a period of film history now known as Classical Hollywood.  Characterized by a utilitarian, workmanlike, “invisible” style of filmmaking (which led Andre Bazin to compare such films to photographed plays), the point of which was to call as little attention to the camera or sound recording as possible, Classical Hollywood cinema favored linear storylines (the only exception being the use of flashback), an adherence to the three-act structure, clearly defined goals for the hero to work toward and distinct story resolution, usually exemplified by a happy ending.  The Classical Hollywood mode of production, known as the studio system, dictated that each studio had its own employees (writers, directors, stars, etc.) with which to make its films, resulting in a certain uniformity of style: films that often bore more of their studio’s stamp than their respective filmmakers’.  The Big Five studios that perpetuated Classical Hollywood cinema (MGM, Warner Bros., 20^th Century Fox, Paramount and RKO) churned out thousands of these films during their “Golden Age.”  They knew exactly what the audience wanted, and catered to them constantly, resulting in a slew of generically and thematically similar films often featuring similar (if not the same) stars, made in a similar fashion.  Warners’ most enduring (and, some would say, best) film — the one often considered to be both the epitome and pinnacle of Classical Hollywood cinema itself — is Michael Curtiz’s 1942 romantic melodrama Casablanca, itself a prime example of this cinema of familiarity.

            The most obvious way that Casablanca fits into the Classical Hollywood schema is its adherence to the collaborative nature of the studio system.  The film is as much a product of Hal Wallis, its producer, and Howard Koch, Julius and Philip Epstein and Casey Robinson, its writers (contributing romantic intrigue, “slick shit” and “a franc for your thoughts,” respectively), as it is of Michael Curtiz’s direction.  Adding further to the production’s collectivism was the input of Max Steiner, who composed the music, and Murray Burnett’s and Joan Alison’s unproduced 1938 stage play “Everybody Comes To Rick’s,” on which the film was based.  In his 1968 director-organized critical assessment of films of the sound era, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, Andrew Sarris calls Casablanca “the happiest of happy accidents,” and not without good reason.  Warner Bros. didn’t even expect the film to be their most critically acclaimed or financially lucrative of 1942, let alone all time.  For all intents and purposes, the production was half luck and half studio panache, a Hollywood hodgepodge that was in a constant state of flux, practically strung together on the lot, line by rewritten line, actor by contested actor, day by turbulent day — a cinematic palimpsest of mythic proportions; more than anything else, an improbably cohesive end product that lends credence to there being a method to movie madness after all.  It’s a testament to Classical Hollywood efficiency that the film most emblematic of the period’s erratic mosaic of a production style became its most beloved.

Another way Casablanca secures its place in the Classical Hollywood canon is through its manipulation of the audience’s collective unconscious.  Classical Hollywood cinema was contingent upon its star system, turning successful actors into marketable, identifiable brands fit for mass consumption.  Many of the actors in Casablanca, character actors and stars alike, are examples of this commodification; filling a specific niche role early in their career before being pigeonholed, cast similarly from then onward until they occupied that particular place in American popular culture and became synonymous with that particular persona in the audience’s collective unconscious.  The purpose was twofold: means to a financial end, cashing in on what the audience considered to be a given actor’s star appeal, and, in many cases, using an actor to the best of his or her abilities.  Three of the actors featured in Casablanca were essentially reprising the roles they had played in John Huston’s 1941 film noir, The Maltese Falcon, less than a year prior.  Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet are all examples of this most ubiquitous of Classical Hollywood characteristics: typecasting.  From a modern vantage point, the technique seems to call attention to the film’s artifice, giving the viewer a nudge and a wink as it expects him to watch Sam Spade, Joel Cairo and Kasper “the Fat Man” Gutman change their names and move to North Africa, trading their pursuit of literally jewel-encrusted birds for that of metaphorically jewel-encrusted exit visas.  These three are examples of what San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle calls “apotheosis” actors, acting in the manner with which they themselves are associated, muddying the border between actor and character, as opposed to “chameleon” actors, who make a point of disappearing into their roles in an attempt to present themselves as they’ve never been seen before.  Even the name of Ferrari’s (Greenstreet’s) café in Casablanca — The Blue Parrot — seems like subliminal messaging, a crafty attempt to play off the audience’s memory of and love for the actors’ previous roles.

It is important to note that, though most often defined as a mere romantic drama, Casablanca takes influence from a good number of popular American film genres, including film noir, melodrama, war films and the western.  The film’s uniqueness, when compared to the broader framework of Classical Hollywood cinema as a whole, lies in its assimilation of these disparate genres and how it toys with the very generic stereotypes it employs.  Rick’s constructed, post-Ilsa, personality is all noir fatalism, filled with enough bitter vitriol to qualify for what Paul Schraeder describes, in his seminal 1972 essay “Notes on Film Noir,” as one of the seven dominant noir stylistics: “an irretrievable past, a predetermined fate and an all-enveloping hopelessness.”  Similarly generically minded, Robert Ray spends much of his 1985 essay “A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980,” detailing Casablanca’s “reluctant hero story, clearly derived from the western.”  And the film wouldn’t be the same without its WWII backdrop, an urgent battle between good and evil that allows for all the requisite action, suspense and melodrama to unfold.  This diplomatic attitude toward genre creates Casablanca both in the image of, and in stark opposition to, its Classical Hollywood cinematic contemporaries.  It is similar to everything and nothing.

Perhaps most relevant to a current study of the film, Casablanca exemplifies the element of Classical Hollywood that has become apparent only in retrospect: the sheer degree to which the best films of the era have embedded themselves in the American psyche, their quotes, images, storylines and characters referenced and recycled seemingly ad nauseum in popular culture.  Humphrey Bogart’s tortured, self-pitying mug, drunk and staring off into space as Sam begins tinkling the first chords of “As Time Goes By” was recycled as early as 1945 in Edgar Ulmer’s Detour, when the main character, Al, hears “I Can’t Believe That You’re In Love With Me” at a roadside diner in Nevada, both films using their respective song to precipitate their main character’s flashback to happier days (Rick recalling Ilsa and Paris, Al remembering Sue and New York City).  Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam is named after the oft-misremembered Casablanca quote, and it would seem that Rick’s answer, “I’m a drunkard,” to the question, “What’s your nationality?” served as cinematic inspiration as early as 1946, in the western My Darling Clementine, when one character asks another, “Mac have you ever been in love,” only to receive the reply, “No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.”  Rick’s and Ilsa’s mantra of “No questions,” while enjoying their bout of Parisian passion, was memorably turned on its head by Bernardo Bertolucci in his 1972 film Last Tango In Paris, echoed by Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider while they perpetrate their perverse, loveless, similarly located fling.  The most enduring films of Classical Hollywood, of the cinema of familiarity, have now become the most familiar, essentially defining the distinction between Classical Hollywood as a whole and those examples that have actually withstood the test of time, which one might call “Classic” Hollywood (not to be confused with the extremely misleading Classical Hollywood synonym, “the Golden Age of Hollywood”).  Neither Classical nor Classic Hollywood is a title after which Casablanca sought, though it has assumed both over time.  This is Casablanca taken to its logical conclusion, emerging from universal themes and routine filmmaking style, only to eventually become universal itself.  Classical Hollywood arose from familiarity, and to familiarity it now returns.

Paul Verhoeven and the Cinema of Excess

 

           I experienced a rude awakening last semester when I decided to show Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 satirical superhero flick RoboCop as part of my New School Criterion Collection screening series.  It was the first screening of the semester, and my partners in crime and I wanted to start with something accessible, a fun piece of cinematic candy to entice the masses and draw attention to our screening series’ presence, regardless of the fact that we had no free pizza to offer (a feat that, given the prevalent attitude of New School apathy, is far easier said than done).  I was excited by RoboCop’s timeliness: the parallels that could be drawn between it’s staunchly anti-corporate message and the ongoing Occupy movement, and, half-jokingly, labeled the screening as “our ode to Occupy Wall St.”  When the night of the screening finally arrived, I was pleased to find that around 20 people had actually turned out (though half of them were friends of mine I had berated into going).  The other half — the students who were actually interested in the event that they had seen advertised around campus — was made up of members of the New School’s Occupy contingent whom, it would seem, had taken my words to heart in a way I had not expected.  The next hour and a half went without a hitch.  There were no technological difficulties, everyone actually seemed to enjoy themselves and I overcame my fear of public speaking long enough to say a few words about the film’s significance, but the night still left a bad taste in my mouth. 

            There is no way around the fact that RoboCop is a very funny film — it’s a scathing satire of Reaganomics and all the privatization, gentrification and corporations that go with the territory — but one thing it doesn’t send-up is the police force.  Regardless of the film’s message, the Occupy kids proceeded to laugh and scream with delight every time a cop was maimed or murdered.  When they left the theater and told me how much they had enjoyed themselves, I didn’t have the heart to tell them they had laughed at all the wrong parts.  I think it’s safe to say that I resent the cops as much as the next guy, but that still doesn’t mean I advocate any kind of violence against them.  I was disturbed by the audience’s response and couldn’t help but feel like I was to blame, guilty for providing the outlet for their misplaced aggression.  But that’s the risk you take when you show one of Verhoeven’s over-the-top, borderline exploitative, yet ultimately subversive epics.

            Verhoeven has made a living out of being misunderstood; time and time again crafting gleefully gratuitous, deceptively trashy works of art that critics malign and popular audiences flock to, though neither group truly grasps what they are being confronted with.  He’s a self-conscious sultan of sleaze, a purveyor of moral filth and degradation whose films both revel in and transcend their wanton depravity, often to disconcerting effect.  His most effective films, RoboCop and 1997’s Starship Troopers, are brilliant mixtures of high- and low-art — works of subtle social satire that titillate the viewer with excessive violence while imparting an entirely different, usually contradictory message that makes his exact point of view difficult to decode.  It’s a strange concoction and, if you aren’t willing to give Verhoeven the benefit of the doubt and accept him as the world-weary cynic that he is, it’s easy to join the ranks of the opposition, to miss the sly criticism he offers of the very values he appears to extol.

            Even Verhoeven’s other American films, though often falling short of the mark of excellence exemplified by RoboCop and Starship Troopers, are significant in their own right.  1990’s Philip K. Dick-inspired sci-fi action blockbuster Total Recall, then the most expensive film of all time, was also the last big-budget American film to be made entirely without CGI (save for one shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger going through a metal detector).  The 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct is a pitch-perfect exercise in Hitchcock hero-worship.  And 1995’s notoriously awful All About Eve rip-off, Showgirls, Verhoeven’s one box-office flop, deserves attention if only because it is an experiment in the impossible — attempting to exaggerate Las Vegas, a city already defined by its excesses.  Verhoeven has become a lowbrow auteur of sorts, a director who marries a distinctly decadent, commercial visual aesthetic to an overly enthusiastic emotional tone that gives the appearance of buying into the very corruption it is instead taking the opportunity to lambaste.  His is a cinema of excess, of gratuitous sex and violence presented in an indulgently glossy fashion, where everything is blown out of proportion to the point of satire.  The only thing more ironic than Verhoeven’s films is the fact that most of the world has decided to take them seriously.

            RoboCop is the first, and best, example of the kind of genre-cloaked Trojan horses Verhoeven loves to sneak into theaters.  On the surface it’s just another action film, albeit a far bloodier, more entertaining one than the norm, but at heart it’s a work of black comedy, a critique of the times that doubles as the moving tale of a tragic everyman’s dehumanization at the hands of corporate America.

            RoboCop is set in the not-so-distant “future” where society has derailed and the government has lost control of the populace, allowing corporate giant OCP (Omni Consumer Products — a hilariously vague and grandiose name that embodies all of bureaucracy’s inherent emptiness) to privatize the police force in an effort to gentrify (and pacify) “Old Detroit” and make way for the construction of the futuristic “Delta City.”  The glass-and-steel skyscrapers of OCP headquarters look down on the rusted, anarchic dystopia Detroit has become, a place where street gangs rule and every day brings the police closer to organized strike, walking off their jobs in protest of horrendous working conditions (an OCP higher-up’s televised reaction to hearing that a group of cops has just been murdered is, “Any cop will tell you: ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.’”).  Enter doomed hero Alex Murphy, a loving husband and father who also happens to be one of the city’s last honest cops.  Crime lord Clarence Boddicker guns him down on his first day at a new precinct but, in a Christ-like twist, he’s resurrected by OCP as part of an experimental new program that furthers their modus operandi of increasingly fascist methods of lowering the crime rate.  Transformed from a standard, if well-meaning, patrolman into a mechanized superhero of the technology age, he doesn’t arrest bad guys so much as incapacitate them by any means necessary.  Fight scenes and explosions abound as Murphy’s new cyborg identity eclipses his human past.

            It becomes apparent that the corporations create the crime that they then set out to police, in a perverse twist on the classic economic formula of supply and demand.  OCP second-in-command Dick Jones is secretly in charge of the street gang that runs rampant in Old Detroit and hooks the residents on cocaine, while his company owns the police, hospitals and army.  The corporate world’s lack of any kind of sympathy or care for its customers’ well-being echoes Orson Welles, as Harry Lime, in The Third Man, when he says, “Look down there.  Tell me.  Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving?”  The only difference is that the question is posed metaphorically, from the window of a skyscraper’s 100^th floor, as opposed to literally, from that of a Ferris wheel.

The world presented in the film is inundated with advertisements, which become the key to understanding RoboCop’s implicit satire.  Everything is a glitzy and garish product that comes equipped with an asinine catchphrase, from fake, robotic hearts (“And remember… we care.”) to the game show everyone in the city watches (“I’d buy that for a dollar!”) to Delta City (“The future has a silver lining”) to RoboCop himself (“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”).  When the recently replaced mayor holds his successor hostage at gunpoint, part of his list of demands is “a new car!  Something with reclining leather seats that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage!”  The car in question, the Porsche 6000 SUX comes with its own telling catchphrase: “An American tradition.” 

Fake TV snippets are interspersed throughout the film, replicating the ironies, and reflecting on the consumerism, of the ‘80s.  (The most obvious jab at Reagan is the Earth-orbiting “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Peace Platform which later misfires, destroying all of Santa Barbara in the process.)  The advertisements are Verhoeven’s “tell,” his way of revealing his hand and injecting some much needed levity to what would otherwise be a slightly too deadpan lampooning of the times.  Through the figurative nudge and wink the ads provide, we realize how to interpret the plethora of disturbingly ambiguous scenes scattered throughout the film.  It becomes ok to laugh at the nightmarish scene in which the prototype of the hulking, robotic monstrosity ED-209 (ED for “Enforcement Droid”) malfunctions, pumping an unfortunate OCP executive full of lead (in unflinchingly gory detail) for no reason at all, during an otherwise normal business meeting, and all the grandfatherly CEO can say is that he is “very disappointed,” but only because the glitch means the loss of 50 million dollars “in interest payments alone!”  (The ill-fated executive’s “friend” offers the fittingly perverse epitaph, “That’s life in the big city.”)  Conversely, the satire imbues the film’s ending with a tragic, pessimistic subtext that recalls the “unhappy happy endings” of 1950s American melodramas.  RoboCop may finally kill Dick Jones and regain some consciousness of his former self, but he is and always will be an OCP product.  His very heroism is undermined from the start by his inherent submission to the evil empire that exploits the citizens of Old Detroit.  He’s won the battle, but lost the war.

Verhoeven isn’t content with just satirizing consumer capitalism, exaggerating the generic tropes of action films to comic proportions as well.  When RoboCop saves a woman from being assaulted by two rapists, he uses his automated accuracy to shoot through the woman’s dress in order to pierce one of the attackers through his legs.  He symbolically “gets the girl” by tearing open her dress and literally, bloodily, castrates the other man.  Later, when Clarence Boddicker (played to coke-addled cartoon villain perfection by Kurtwood Smith, obviously relishing the chance to play against type) impales him on a massive metal shaft, RoboCop prevails by way of the computer interface ice pick implanted in his arm, which he uses to stab Clarence in the throat.  In this new age of techno-fetishism, digital aggression triumphs over that of the human or the industrial.  Even in the case of Murphy’s Macchiavellian RoboCop resurrection, technology doesn’t giveth (life, efficiency) nearly as much as it taketh away (free will).  In no other film is mankind’s tumultuous relationship with technology rendered (or exaggerated) so exquisitely.

            Exactly ten years after he made RoboCop, Verhoeven decided to revisit the same themes with Starship Troopers.  As if RoboCop weren’t filled with enough deadpan vitriol already, Starship Troopers finds Verhoeven taking the earlier work’s generic, aesthetic and tonal exaggeration to its logical extreme, amplified to a point of surreal absurdity.  The film is a veritable piece of concept art, an exercise in social criticism that genuinely seems to celebrate the fascism, globalization and the unbelievably horrible reality of war that it so deftly skewers.

Using as its source material Robert Heinlein’s controversial 1959 novel of the same name, Starship Troopers at first seems like an example of wish fulfillment, of a world close to Utopia.  It’s setting is Earth, 300 years in the future, at a point where race and gender are meaningless and humanity is united as one under a world government called The Federation.  Education is available to all, poverty is no longer an issue and the only social distinction is that of being a civilian or a citizen, citizenship being a privilege earned by enrolling in the Federal military service.  Governmental authority and media accuracy are unquestioned, as the Federation seems to work for the good of all mankind.  The film focuses on three Argentinean youngsters, Johnny Rico, Carmen Ibanez and Carl Jenkins, who, fresh out of school, decide to enlist just as humanity goes to interstellar war with a hostile arachnoid species known only as “the Bugs.”  The war escalates, and the three friends quickly rise through the military ranks, Johnny as a grunt in the Mobile Infantry, Carmen as a pilot and Carl as a psychic intelligence officer.

Once again, Verhoeven proves himself a master of sloganeering and propaganda.  Engaging in a self-conscious dialogue with the modern world, the director uses Starship Troopers as a way of furthering the implicit social critique embedded in RoboCop’s TV commercials, updating them to fit the Internet age.  Through the Federation’s friendly, accessible, interactive news broadcasts, we see a world where a man can be arrested, tried and convicted within six hours (then publicly executed in a televised broadcast later that evening); where you need a license in order to do anything as natural as have children; where humanity can decide to go to war within seconds of a disaster’s occurrence, regardless of its actual cause.  One commercial forcefully declares, “The only good Bug is a dead Bug!”  Another urges civilians to “Do your part,” illustrating the ideal by way of young children gleefully squashing bugs in a residential backyard while a mother whoops with joy and cheers them on.  Social Studies teachers speak of “the failure of democracy” and how “naked force has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor.”  The world leader, shot from below (in one of the many scenes that echoes Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will), gives a speech, the point of which is that “[we must] ensure that human civilization, not insect, dominates this galaxy now and always!”  It’s practically redundant to have Carl make his grand reappearance at the end of the film decked out in a black leather cap and trenchcoat, as if he were a member of the Nazi SS. 

This is a film that has been consistently misunderstood by critics, many of whom have decided to take the spectacle at face value.  Sure, the fascist cheerleading is obvious, but so is the inherent irony, especially when, as in RoboCop, you follow the clues provided by the obviously humorous commercials.  Combined with the fact that this a film made by a man who spent his childhood running from fascists, it becomes apparent that Starship Troopers isn’t a celebration of all that is evil in the world, but a pitch black comedy in disguise.

Because of its innate moral ambiguity, Starship Troopers gets under your skin in a way that few films can.  Verhoeven’s trademark excess is made somehow more excessive, as the film’s ludicrously gory ultra-violence pushes it to the very boundaries of its R-rating.  The violence is entertaining, but to the point of being disturbing.  Something about it just isn’t right.  The film is a little too gung-ho about its world of totalitarianism and senseless inter-species slaughter, precisely because these are the ideals it is mocking.  By not providing the blatantly condemnatory message we expect to accompany these values, by utilizing a casually skewed moral compass, the film finds a way to be even more deadpan than its predecessor, to the point of caching us off guard and tricking us into thinking, even for a second, that maybe it’s right.  It’s easy to root for humanity when the war against the Bugs seems justified, stemming from an “unprovoked” “attack” that demolishes Buenos Aires and leaves millions of humans dead, but that is only what the news tells us.  There is no proof that the Bugs are actually responsible and, even if they are, it is alluded to that their viciousness is a response to our attempting to invade and colonize their solar system.

The funniest part of Starship Troopers might just be that, to all appearances, the actors don’t seem to be in on the joke.  Verhoeven uses young soap opera stars (Casper Van Dien, who plays Johnny, starred in One Life To Live and Beverly Hills 90210, and Denise Richards, who plays Carmen, appeared in Life Goes On and Melrose Place) to convey a world of shallow humanity and inherently fake emotion.  The acting is undeniably terrible, but in that cliché, cardboard-cutout manner that feels so at home in TV soap operas.  Verhoeven is obviously using this acting style to self-conscious, self-aware effect, presenting a future of ideal, depthless humans whose very bodies have practically become consumer products, but the irony is doubled by the self-assured quality of these authentically fake performances.  It is unclear whether the actors understand their exact purpose in this work of satire, or whether they’re merely going through the motions of the hollow kind of performing they know so well.

Just as RoboCop made its statement (about late-stage consumer capitalism) by way of satirical exaggeration, so does Starship Troopers.  This is a future society (equal parts Nazi Germany and modern-day America) ruled, and fueled, by the notion of globalization cranked to 11, where multi-nationalism has become planetary dominance of literally universal proportions.  The subtle tragedy of RoboCop’s ending is amplified exponentially in Starship Troopers.  Johnny, Carmen and Carl may walk off into the proverbial sunset, celebrating mankind’s ultimate victory, but it is an intrinsically corrupt version of mankind.  If RoboCop is the tragic tale of one doomed man, Starship Troopers is a cautionary tale of our whole doomed species.

This is Verhoeven’s true talent as a filmmaker: his ability to craft works of trashy entertainment that also serve a higher purpose.  RoboCop and Starship Troopers are works of genius because they have something for everyone.  They give the people what they want, supplying all the extravagant surface qualities (violence, excitement, etc.) that characterize a good action film.  They work as popular entertainment so well (often breaking box-office records) precisely because they are, above all else, a joy to watch.  And beyond that, Verhoeven goes deeper into the thematic potential of filmmaking by giving the films a political dimension, by imbuing them with relevant social commentary.  They’re works of subversive fiction, not necessarily implying anything “offensive” (there isn’t much controversy in asserting the horrors of Reagan or fascism), but still tricking the masses into getting far more than they bargained for.  The films fulfill the urges of those looking for “substance” in their viewing material, but also those who just wish to see stuff blow up.  The result is an abstract quality that I believe is a standard of worthwhile viewing in movies — a self-conscious form of entertainment that caters to the id while simultaneously subverting popular conventions in order to deliver a social message, to offer guidance without being preachy or self-righteous.  The films serve to titillate as well as educate, and, honestly, what more could you want?

Beating a Dead (Turin) Horse

          There was a moment during a recent screening of Bela Tarr’s new film The Turin Horse (A torinói ló in the original Hungarian), about two hours in, when a collective groan rose from the audience (a groan, the sentiments of which I shared).  The groan wasn’t a reflection of the film’s quality or artistic merit, so much as of the sheer heaviness of watching a film of The Turin Horse’s nature, of the cross you bear when you decide to sit down and tackle one of the somber and sedate epics that have become Tarr’s trademark. 

Tarr’s new film, his ninth in a 35-year career, has been billed as his final one and, though it’s not his longest (that would be the 7 1/2 hour Satantango) or his best (The Werckmeister Harmonies), it’s a worthy addition to his canon nonetheless; a culmination of the themes and style the Hungarian has worked with for decades.

            In life, one occasionally sees a good film (and sometimes a great one) that, though aesthetically pleasing or in undeniably high taste, is so relentlessly uncomfortable a viewing experience it can only be watched once.  The Turin Horse is the latest addition to my list of such films, joining the ranks of John Cassavetes’ 1974 A Woman Under the Influence and Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 magnum dope-us Requiem For a Dream.  The black-and-white film is so spare, repetitive and ultimately bleak that re-watching it — re-visiting the lives of these desperate, doomed characters — would be an act of masochism for all but the most callous and hardened of film snobs. 

The Turin Horse is good art insofar as it conveys exactly the unpleasant feelings that Tarr wants it to, but its success is at the expense of the audience’s pleasure. The story finds beauty in its simplicity: a father, his daughter and their horse try to survive in a windy, apocalyptic version of the Turin countryside, eating piping hot boiled potatoes and occasionally fetching water from the well, repeating their ritualistic existence day after day in an attempt to stay alive.  You feel as the characters feel (that is to say, increasingly hopeless), and you don’t enjoy the film so much as you experience it.

Like all of Tarr’s recent work, it’s a collaboration with the Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai, best-known for his sentences, which often run uninterrupted for pages.  This long-winded writing style is mirrored by Tarr’s Spartan long-takes.  Despite its 2 1/2 hour running time, The Turin Horse consists of only 30 separate shots and, at most, 25 lines of dialogue.  The score, composed by Mihály Víg, is comprised of one minimalist theme, reminiscent of Phillip Glass and repeated again and again on a mixture of violin, cello and synthesizer, the perfect soundtrack for an existential crisis, or close to three hours of apocalyptic Hungarian desperation.

The Turin Horse isn’t fun.  It isn’t romantic.  There is no uplift.  Your voyeurism, in being forced to watch and wallow in these characters’ hardships, is enough to make you cringe.  And that’s a testament to Bela Tarr’s power, to the uncompromising nature of his vision.  Without dialogue, without color, without any kind of fancy self-conscious editing, he can still cut you to the core.  There is no easy explanation offered for the horrible living conditions of this world, where things falter and then just refuse to work.  It’s an oblique, abstract and formless kind of dread, a nagging feeling that choosing to wake up in the morning is just an exercise in postponing the inevitable.

After a long career of difficult films that don’t give to their audience so much as they ask from them, Tarr’s swan song of existential peasant despair in the face of a windy, apocalyptic world is fitting: a further exploration of the themes he’s toyed with for decades, in what is possibly an even bleaker manner than any of his other films.  The Turin Horse chronicles just six days in these characters’ lives, but it could be any stretch of time.  The end of the fifth day is enough to pull a despairing groan out of anyone, even a whole theater of people.  No one can beat a dead horse quite like Bela Tarr can.

Fowl Intentions

           Back in middle school, I had a friend who claimed that his first memory was of being forced to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror film The Birds by his parents when he was four-years old.  His story went: he was frolicking in the sand during a rare outing to the beach when, out of the blue, an avian anarchist of a seagull swooped down and stole his hot dog, proceeding to devour it right before his eyes.  Later that night, in an act of desperation, and more than a little questionable parenting, his folks attempted to stop his incessant crying and caterwauling by showing him The Birds.  The movie scared the living shit out of him, but it also shut him up.  Though he could never sit through the film again, and it may or may not have been a deciding factor in his eventually seeing two therapists simultaneously, his parents’ point had been made: “Quit kvetching.  As far as attacks from above go, you got off lucky.”

            Odd as it now seems, I was kind of jealous.  We were 11, and my parents still wouldn’t even let me watch The Birds. He had seen something actually traumatic, and had the emotional scars to prove it.  As far as I was concerned, that was street cred.  Finally getting around to viewing The Birds now, I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t turn out even worse.  The Birds is both a relentlessly tense, borderline misanthropic parable of humanity’s precarious existence in a chaotic, uncertain world, that you don’t enjoy so much as you experience, and a horror film in the truest sense of the term.  In other words, it just might be the worst film you could ever show a four-year old.

            At their core, horror films are only as effective as the primal fears they are able to manipulate in their audience.  Hitchcock knows this and, in The Birds, juxtaposes two of the oldest, and downright scariest, themes of the genre’s lineage: that of the things we trust turning against us, and the fear of the great unknown.  Not only are the merciless, murderous villains of the film those docile winged bipeds we’ve coexisted with for millions of years, they’re sparrows, seagulls and blackbirds (nothing even resembling a bird of prey), and there is absolutely no explanation offered for their sudden change in behavior.  The beginning is horror film motif incarnate (eau d’horror motif), as Melanie leaves the safe confines of the big city and migrates north to the rural, picturesque fantasy world of Bodega Bay, a parallel universe where the laws of nature soon head south.  Leaving to bring Mitch the lovebirds, in this case the ironic harbingers of doom, it’s something out of a monster film like The Blob, the little seed that spreads the cancer that will take over Anytown, USA.  However, unlike standard horror films, this is not a literal contamination but a symbolic one, which is somehow artier.

The birds eventually fall into an unexplainable pattern.  They attack, lose interest and disperse (wash, rinse, repeat), coming and going seemingly on a whim.  It’s Hitchcock’s abstract, absurdist take on the apocalypse — catastrophe without rhyme or reason (albeit with rhythm), without substantial build-up or satisfying denouement; just another unexplainable phenomenon in a world gone mad, a world we were mad to have ever believed sane in the first place.  If anything, the film is a condemnation of human self-importance; an assertion of our species’ inherent fallibility; a cautionary tale about the dangers of assuming we understand anything at all, especially nature and — of course — we ourselves are a part of nature.  The Birds is obsessed with this idea of nature as a vast, unknowable, hugely powerful force of which we are at the mercy.  Lars Von Trier may have dedicated his 2009 piece of eco-terrorist art-house torture porn Antichrist (aka “I Hung Out With Lars And All I Got Was This Stupid Clitoridectomy”) to Andrei Tarkovsky, but it could just as easily be paying tribute to Birds-era Hitchcock.  As that particular film’s self-munching CGI fox so succinctly puts it, “Chaos reigns.”

            There’s also something unsettling about the first two-thirds of The Birds, something that feels off, even though it doesn’t get truly unhinged until the final half-hour.  The San Francisco set-up, maddening in its brevity, features what might just be the most non sequitur “MacGuffin” of Hitchcock’s career. (We get it, Melanie has a propensity for pulling dumb pranks, but that still says nothing about why Mitch wants to sue her.)  The initial bird attacks are too ludicrous to be taken seriously (an issue that is only exacerbated by the now-50-year old special effects involved), and the characters, ranging from downright deplorable to marginally sympathetic, represent the worst traits of city-slickers and bumpkins alike.  Everyone is far too smug, deluded or just plain dumb to not be meant as comical.  Not even the “heroes” — the arrogant, coquettish Melanie, and the equally haughty lawyer, Mitch, who sets the story in motion when he ruffles her feathers — are spared the director’s deadpan vitriol.  This is a casually amoral, gleefully macabre piece of dark comedy disguised as a horror thriller, pitting bad against worse (who’s who, you decide) in an attempt to catch the audience rooting against mankind.

Coming at the tail end of Hitchcock’s long streak of near-flawless films, The Birds finds the director at his most self-assured, further honing his trademark filmmaking technique.  There’s the unsettling voyeurism and implication of the viewer he used so well in Psycho, the emphasis on suspense over surprise, the gallows humor, the lethal presence with which he imbues the mundane (staircases haven’t seemed so threatening since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari).  Confident in its hold on the viewer, the film takes the liberty of moving at a languorous pace that draws attention to its fluid, precise camera movement and meticulous sound design that eschews any real soundtrack in favor of a sparse, spare collection of claustrophobic sound effects.  Even before the birds actually arrive, they’re there, a constant chattering and flapping that is forced into the viewer’s head, building the nest in which the birds will live for the rest of the film.  Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann tweak almost every sound in the opening scenes until it resembles the birds somehow.  Driving to Bodega Bay, every twist and turn in the road brings a high-pitched screech from Melanie’s tires, an ominous prediction of the birds’ perverse banshee shriek.

But the most “Hitchcock” element of The Birds might just be how deftly it lures you in before unceremoniously pulling the rug out from under you.  The film is a slow burn.  What begins as a relatively straightforward psychological thriller turns weirder and weirder, as Hitchcock anticipates what the audience wants and constantly does the opposite.  By the time that awkward, self-conscious moment comes around, when it becomes apparent that any heroism you’re hoping for, and subconsciously expecting, isn’t going to happen, it’s too late to turn the film off.  Hitchcock’s vision reaches its absurdist heights after the birds attack the school, while Melanie is at the diner trying to convince the locals that something is indeed up with the town’s feathered population.  The only person who listens to her is the (drunk) bible-spouting Irishman at the bar.  Everyone else is either too stupid (the waiter) or arrogant (the elderly ornithologist), to pay any attention.  The tension builds, more contemptible eccentrics arriving every second, until the whole thing literally explodes.  It would appear that Hitchcock views humanity as little more than a long line of lemmings following each other off a cliff.

The fact that a film this pessimistic, gory and anarchic could be released in mainstream theaters in 1963 is a small miracle in and of itself.  Tippi Hedren’s real-life stage fright is palpable in every action sequence, lending a veritable snuff quality to the film, and The Birds takes its motif of role reversals to exploitative heights. Time and time again Melanie is forced into “cages” (cars and phone booths — her glass menageries) by the birds, or filmed as being behind metal grates or fences (as she is at the post office).  Mitch even says to her, in the very first scene, “Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels,” a snide jab at her wealth and, most likely, femininity.  Critics are so keen to apply interpretive models to The Birds in order to unearth some kind of deeper meaning.  The models are political (environmentalist, feminist, etc.) or psychoanalytic (everyone is so convinced those birds must represent some oppressive part of the human psyche), but I feel that one doesn’t need to read so deeply to render an effective critique of what is essentially a two-hour excursion into existential dread.  The Birds’ genius lies in its frustrating obliqueness.  There is no explanation offered for the attack, there is only the outcome: the surprisingly effete and despondently hopeless human response.

The most disturbing scene occurs in the final quarter of the film when, after the birds have finally revealed their hand, Melanie and Mitch join a small congregation of Bodega Bay survivors hiding in the town diner.  One particular woman, a once-concerned, but now-hysterical, mother of two, turns to Melanie and pitifully implores, “Why are they doing this?  They said when you got here the whole thing started…. Who are you?  What are you?  Where did you come from?  I think you’re the cause of all this… I think you’re evil.”  The genius of the moment is that this particular segment is shot from Melanie’s point-of-view, so the woman’s histrionics are directed right at the camera and, by extension, the audience.  This jarring destruction of the fourth wall deflowers you as a viewer, solidifying your role as not just innocent bystander, but very guilty partner-in-crime.  It’s a semi-sadistic cinematic trick, and I know a few people who would call Hitchcock a misanthrope (if not a far worse epithet) and storm out of the theater right then and there.  And they might even be right to do so if it weren’t for the scene that immediately follows, in which our heroes choose tending to their friend’s corpse over seeking blind vengeance against the birds who are the cause of all this carnage (some of whom are a literal stone’s throw away).  It’s an affirmation of natural human goodness and compassion, a much-needed morale booster, a suggestion that maybe humanity doesn’t deserve to die after all, in a horror film that otherwise makes a point of being disconcertingly ambivalent on the subject.

 

Bergfilme and Blitzkrieg: The Two Sides of Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl is often considered the most controversial filmmaker of all time.  Equally famous for the explosive content and masterful craftsmanship of her Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia, she embodies the age-old question of whether or not it is possible to separate an artist’s virtuosity from the content of her message.  These films are infamous; everyone knows them, or at least knows of them.  They instantly catapulted Riefenstahl to stardom and solidified her place in film history, while simultaneously leading to her exile from the world of filmmaking and persecution in the world at large.  Hearing what most have to say about Riefenstahl, one could be forgiven for thinking she magically emerged from the ether in 1934 just in time to film the Nazi Party Conference in Nuremburg to make Triumph of the Will and become "the quintessential articulator of the Nazi film aesthetic" (Schulte-Sasse, 124).  Riefenstahl’s propaganda films have become synonymous with her persona, eclipsing everything she did prior.  What’s forgotten is her work in Weimar cinema, first as actor in many prominent mountain films (a genre called bergfilm) of the era, and then as director of her very own mountain film, 1932’s The Blue Light, that made her a minor star before she became the Nazis’ secret cinematic weapon.  By working within the framework of Weimar cinema, then ushering in the advent of the Nazi cinema that would take its place, Leni Riefenstahl exists at the intersection of Old World and New World cinematic values and signals the transition in Germany from one to the other.

            The bergfilm was a specifically German genre that celebrated the romanticism of the Alps and the heroism of mountain life and mountain climbing.  It was simultaneously a part of, and apart from, Weimar cinema, gaining popularity in the Weimar Republic while generally not conforming to the dark, uneasy atmosphere of most films of the era.  It was a lighter alternative to the heady, heavy fare that was making the rounds typified by proto-horror (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, etc.) and proto-noir (Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, M).  The genre’s ethos was practically the polar opposite of Weimar city films, like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City.  Where the city film was practically an exercise in techno-fetishism, fixating on the innovations and customs of modern (rather, modernist) life, the bergfilm often “featured a primal and very male struggle between man and nature… far from the purportedly softening, feminizing influences of modern urban society” (Brockmann, 152).  Bergfilme were shot on location in the Alps, and were often lacking in plot or character development, instead relying on the spectacle of their settings to entertain. 

Riefenstahl’s life changed forever when she saw Arnold Fanck’s 1924 bergfilm, Mountain of Destiny.  She had been a relatively successful dancer, taking classes at the Grimm-Reiter Dance School in Berlin since she was 16, but a knee injury had forced her to stop working.  She saw an advertisement for Mountain of Destiny while waiting for the train one day, went to see the film on a whim and was entranced.  As a dancer, she was especially captivated by the way the film captured the movement of the natural world.  In Ray Müller’s 1993 documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, she recalls, “[It was] the first mountaineering film.  The first with sequences so filled with movement.  The clouds were alive with movement.  I’d never seen that before. I didn’t know much about film, but I realized I was looking at a very special art form on the screen for the first time” (Müller).  She tracked down and charmed Fanck, who was so smitten he wrote his next film, 1926’s The Holy Mountain, specifically for her.

            Fanck demanded a lot of his actors, and working for him was rigorous, but Riefenstahl rose to the challenge.  She learned to ski and rockclimb, quickly becoming a skilled mountaineer and even climbing with bare feet and no ropes.  She didn’t care that mountain climbing was an activity practiced exclusively by men, showing an assertiveness that would come out again when she took part in the almost exclusively male National Socialist movement eight years later.  She then convinced Fanck to let G.W. Pabst co-direct his 1929 silent bergfilm, The White Hell of Pitz Palu.  Riefenstahl starred in it, and it was a huge success, becoming the second highest grossing film of the year at the German box office.  In her words, “Fanck was a wonderful outdoor director, for filming nature.  Pabst was a fabulous feature film director.  I brought the two together and it worked wonderfully.  That’s the reason Pitz Palu was such a success worldwide” (Müller).  It was on the set of that movie that Riefenstahl first started giving thought to the idea of becoming a director.

            In 1932, Riefenstahl traveled to the Brenta Dolomite mountains in Ticino, Switzerland, to produce, direct and star in The Blue Light, a romantic fairytale of a bergfilm.  Though it was only her first film, she was already a perfectionist.  She ordered a special lens from Hollywood, and asked the Agfa Film Corporation to invent a new kind of film-stock, called R-Stock, for her to use to shoot the night scenes.  When filmed through a red filter, R-Stock made blue look practically pitch black.

            The Blue Light is the tale of Junta, a “wild” woman who lives in union with nature and Monte Christallo, the local mountain, but at odds with the villagers who live at the mountain’s base.  Only Junta knows the source of the titular blue light that shines from the top of the mountain every full moon, and the villagers think her a witch.  It doesn’t help matters that every full moon, a different man from the village attempts to scale the mountain to reach the light and ends up falling to his death.  A new man, Vigo, comes to town and falls in love with Junta.  She shows him the blue crystals that are the source of the light and he betrays her secret to the villagers.

            In keeping with bergfilm tradition, the picture is pervaded by a naturalistic quality in the visual aesthetic.  When the audience is first introduced to Junta, she seems like a forest nymph of sorts.  She is juxtaposed with cascading waterfalls and an otherworldly mist, serenely holding her mystical blue crystals, bathed in an ethereal glow that outlines her body and makes her hair shimmer.  Her habitat is something out of a dream: fantastical and surreal.  Her disconnect with the outside world is illustrated by shots from her point of view from atop the mountain.  Shunned or attacked whenever she visits the village, Junta is only safe on or around the mountain’s “natural” setting.  Later, when Vigo leaves the village in search of her, he finds her by way of “natural” clues — a dropped apple she was eating, a branch that falls from the bush she is hiding behind, her reflection in a puddle of water.  Junta is literally embedded in the landscape.  Adolf Hitler proclaimed the film one of his favorites of 1932, and it’s easy to see why.  The film is filled with the kind of idyllic, people-less landscapes of which Hitler was such a vocal fan, and painter before he was rejected from art school and turned to a career in politics.

            There is also a surprising amount of dark, distorted imagery; unexpected affinities with the rest of Weimar cinema and its obsession with the macabre.  Riefenstahl has a great eye for faces — all the people of the village are grotesque in their own way.  They all have a faraway look in their eyes, like they’re not entirely there.  The village is an ugly, unfortunate place, while Junta and her world are beautiful.  Once the full moon comes out, the Expressionist imagery becomes far more pronounced.  Tall, black buildings loom large.  The already disturbed (and disturbing) villagers turn downright creepy as they lock their doors and shutter their windows.  Overcome with a sick desperation, they steel themselves from their fears of the unknown.  It’s literal lunacy, and more than a little reminiscent of a werewolf film.  When one of the men inevitably begins his ill-fated climb to the blue light on the mountain, he is presented as being hypnotized, drawn to the light like a moth to a flame.  The theme of hypnosis, in and of itself, is a motif of Weimar cinema — a manifestation of an obsession with the dark side of the mystical, here exemplified by the villagers’ vilification of Junta.  The village’s cobblestone corridors are narrow and twisting, labyrinthine and claustrophobic, calling to mind the mangled cityscapes of films like Caligari.

            The Blue Light is about the clash between old and new world values, of the rapid changes of modern times.  Junta represents a simpler, more naturalistic way of life — sleeping on a bed of straw in a Spartan cabin away from the burdens of society.  Vigo is the embodiment of that modern society, infiltrating her secret realm and ultimately betraying her trust (regardless of his arrogant belief that it is in her best interest).  Vigo can’t see past the crystals’ superficial beauty.  “It’s a real treasure,” he says to Junta.  “It must be found and brought to the village.  You’ll never have to run around in these rag clothes anymore.”  He’s no different than anyone else in the village, after all: the crystals only thrill him insofar as they have the possibility to be worth money.  Junta asks him to stay and not tell anyone of the sight he’s been privy to, but he arrogantly brushes her off, thinking he knows best.  Vigo sees only opportunity — a discovery to be mined, appraised and drained — while Junta appreciates the crystals for her own personal reasons.  Neither of them truly knows what the crystals mean.  Vigo’s reaction is to try to control what he doesn’t understand, while Junta appreciates the beauty — that of the natural world — for its own sake.

My conjecture is that Hitler’s love of the movie stemmed from his own misgivings about modern times.  WWI was the first modern war and it completely ravaged Germany, leaving it in a state of social, political and economic turmoil.  Hitler may have appreciated the film’s message promoting a return to simpler, less complicated times, just as he wished to “purify” Germany, washing it clean of outside influence, reinforcing a back-to-basics nationalistic attitude.  It’s easy to see Hitler identifying with Junta — a misunderstood misfit, cast out and at odds with the world, struggling to preserve and protect the beauty of the things she holds so dear.  Whether those things are nationalist ideals or mysterious blue crystals, the concept remains unchanged.

In an emotionally wrenching final scene, Junta takes one last cathartic climb before finding her secret grotto ransacked.  Sold out, her holy mountain desecrated and her trust in Vigo the outsider violated, she plunges to her death.

            In the same year that she made The Blue Light, Riefenstahl heard then-presidential candidate Adolf Hitler speak at a rally and was mesmerized by his talent as an orator.  Describing the experience in her memoir, she wrote: “I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth” (Riefenstahl, 101).  She wrote to him, requesting a meeting.  Already impressed with her work, Hitler accepted and invited her to film the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremburg.  The result was 1935’s Triumph of the Will, the documentary/propaganda that brought Riefenstahl international fame, while signaling the end of Weimar cinema and the beginning of “the Ministry of Illusion,” so called by Rentschler because “[the Nazis] were keenly aware of film’s ability to mobilize emotions and immobilize minds, to create overpowering illusions and captive audiences” (Rentschler, 1).

            In the film’s prologue, Riefenstahl contextualizes the rally with a mixture of German history and loaded religious imagery.  By saying the rally occurs “16 years after Germany’s crucifixion,” Hitler is implied to be Germany’s resurrection — a Christ-like second coming after the humiliation suffered during WWI.  The narrative intertitles then tell us that “Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremburg to review the columns of the faithful followers.”  This is followed by shots from within his airplane, flying right above the clouds before dipping down over the assembling masses, its shadow a crucifix on the ground.  Hitler literally descends from the heavens, touching down in the Nuremberg airport to be greeted by hundreds of thousands of cheering, adoring fans, as if he were some holy rockstar.  Hitler is driven through the streets to the tune of a booming, triumphant soundtrack — the camera so close that we can’t see his car — appearing to be floating past the crowd; a divine hero of the people, something more than human.  "Systematically using editing techniques and structures such as the shot/reverse shot rarely found in previous documentaries, [Riefenstahl] constructs a cult of personality around Hitler. The editing patterns turn the Fuhrer into an object of desire, one who is looked at adoringly by the crowds that surround him" (Musser, 326).

            In this film, more than in any Weimar cinema, the camera is alive; animated to a self-conscious degree.  Moving up and down, left and right, the camera flits from audience member to audience member to Hitler, the MC of the party.  The camera sees all.  Riefenstahl makes effective use of different kinds of angles, shocking in their effects.  Characters (Hitler in particular) are often shot from below, seeming larger than life.  Soldiers often march right at the camera, enveloping the screen and, ultimately, us.  Used most of all is the extreme close-up.  The human form, especially the face, is idealized, made to look more like a statue than flesh and blood.  It really says something, that almost any shot in the film could be isolated and turned into its own Nazi propaganda poster.  This is Riefenstahl truly harnessing the power of the medium.  She shoots common people — anonymous faces — but turns those people into characters, and those characters into stars.  Even when she shoots sweeping panoramas of massive crowds of fervent followers, the lens aggrandizes the subject.  There are countless shots of what appears to be an infinite number of Nazis marching into the distance, as far as the eye can see, taking on the grand stature of a Cecil B. DeMille silent film spectacular.

            There is a deliberate focus on Nazi youth culture; the children and teenagers in the crowd.  Innocent, wholesome scenes of jocular tomfoolery (including wrestling and grooming) serve to break up the pedantic, formal tone of the film.  Moreover, they resonate as instances of everyday German culture, whether it’s real or idealized.  As high-ranking Nazi Alfred Rosenberg says in his address, “This is our unshakeable belief in ourselves… This is our hope in the youth of today… They are destined to continue the work started.”  Everything is invested in the youth, to be flag-bearers, to pick up the party mission and carry it forward. 

Riefenstahl always maintained that she never meant to make a Nazi propaganda film — just an objective documentary — but that becomes almost impossible to believe when lines like, “A nation that doesn’t maintain its racial purity will perish” are banded around.  Later, Goebbels praises “the creative art of modern political propaganda,” a sentiment that takes on a self-reflexive quality under the circumstances.

Triumph of the Will signaled the end of an era.  More than 700,000 Nazis were in attendance at the 1934 Nuremburg Rally, and Hitler took over Germany in August of the same year.  The Third Reich replaced the Weimar Republic.  Weimar cinema, in its shadowy angst and cynical glory, was forced out of the picture by Hitler and Goebbels’ Nazi cinema, which ended up being a bizarre mix of frothy entertainment and blatant propaganda.  Leni Riefenstahl wasn’t a catalyst for the change, but she did have an undeniable role in it.  From her Weimar bergfilme to her Nazi propaganda documentaries, she was a sign of the times; a consistent indicator of the zeitgeist.  Made on the cusp of this change in cinematic values, Triumph of the Will still allows for some Expressionist flourishes.  The scene of the second night, for example, is rife with smoke and shadows.  Though the scene is supposed to be jovial, a modern historical vantage point combined with the ambiguous imagery lends it a completely different tone.  It now seems ominous and menacing: a thinly veiled threat.  It’s a veritable army of shadows, Nazis saluting in silhouette all over the place.  The scene ends with shots of the soldiers, backlit by what are supposed to be celebratory bonfires but now seem like the very flames of Hell.

Bibliography/References

The Blue Light.  Dir. Leni Riefenstahl.  1932.

Brockmann, Stephen.  A Critical History of German Film.  Rochester, NY: Camden

House, 2010.

Musser, Charles.  "Documentary."  The Oxford History of World Cinema.  Oxford UP,

1997.

Rentschler, Eric.  The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife.  Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Riefenstahl, Leni.  Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Schulte-Sasse, Linda.  "Leni Riefenstahl's Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist

Aesthetic."  Cultural Critique 18 (1991): 123-48.  JSTOR.  Web.

Triumph of the Will.  Dir. Leni Riefenstahl.  1935.

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.  Dir. Ray Müller.  1993.