Film

These essays are on films and the reviews of films (if more than one piece a critic is being treated for some critical disease). Rarely will these movies be given a value; I am interested in their ideas, not if they rate five stars or ten. Be warned: some of these pieces are very long!

Jacques-Henry Lartigue

The reviews are in chronological order; the names of directors to be found in the drop down menu next to the website's title. The following selection is what I regard as the key pieces helping us understand our present times.

Pierrot le Fou A World of Make Believe
The Third Generation Extraordinary Games  & Getting Down to Details
Frieda Civilised Bigotry
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser Befuddling the Bourgeoisie
Muriel Couldn't You Have Waited? & Critic as Clerk
Ran To the Knacker's Yard
Persona The Silent Sacrifice & Putting the Pieces Back Together Again
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant Soft Power
First Reformed Dynamite is Divine

Mud Slide (The Middleman)
We watch a civilisation perish; a beautiful city slip into the sea.

Cash and Carry Away.... (Branches of the Tree)
We cannot plan the future on the basis of the past. This the lesson the old Brahmins must learn; for British capitalism is based on different values to that of the old religions and the civilisation they spawned; a civilisation where morality and art, those fine-tuners of the soul, were its idols and gods.

Short Sight (The Lonely Wife)
The period setting suggests the dilemmas of contemporary India; the collapse of honest relations less about criminal behaviour than a change to the customs and morals of the country; as a culture built around a set of noble values dissolves under the pressure of new ideals and their disastrous temptations. 

Helpless Words (Goddess Devi)
In the 1950s it wasn't in Britain where modernity produced the greatest stress, the worst lunacy. No. It was in those countries whose intellectuals were taking the high-speed train to the West.

A Sad Case (Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment)
The morganatic marriage is over. The rich have had enough. Time for a divorce! Back to the well-tested relationships with those of their own class.

The Wrong Rogue (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)
It’s a truism that films rarely reproduce a novel’s rich texture. From that chest of buried treasure it grabs but a few gold coins. Worse: there are times the film changes, even falsifies, a novel’s theme. Maybe the director misses the obvious; or finds its truth too difficult to accept, too painful to portray. Thus Capitalism dominates this Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Karel Reisz is a politico. It’s why he gets Arthur Seaton wrong.

So Knowing (Exit Through the Gift Shop)
Like an ordinary working day, it opens with the cash register and closes with all that lovely money inside. It begins in a shop. For a time we leave it. Then the shop returns at the end. We’ve been watching a businessman who wants to do cool things; by freeloading off those who lead more interesting and meaningful lives. A member of the audience he dreams of being in the film. It is to mistake an advert for the product, hucksterism for the real thing.

A Moment of Paradise (Eden)
This film brilliantly creates the atmosphere of being young and hip. The excitement of finding new things - here, electronic dance music - and the making of them our own.
 
Prophylactics for the Hoi Polloi (Nymphomaniac)
They won’t take you seriously, Lars. Do you scare them that much? This is not it. They are not earnest enough to think you anything more than an entertainer. 

A Teddy Bear (Nymphomaniac)
Mr Bradshaw wants sentimentality. It is the Hollywood influence. Joe is an honest person - something of an artist - who knows that monomania has both its own rewards and its evil side-effects. Our friendly film critic wants this to be a nice movie. A good night’s entertainment, to be forgotten as soon as he files his copy. 

Horrible (The House that Jack Built)
Lars is a genius, I’ve said this before. He’s decided - the generosity is extraordinary - to let us wander around inside his head.

The Artist and the Scholar (Nymphomaniac)
Unhinge sex from the feelings. Untie the rope and let the yacht sail out to sea…. It is the perennial fantasy. The young sailor unaware of the estuary’s narrow channel, and those rocks, like sharks, waiting for their prey.

Clever Vandals (Solaris)
There is a strangely Freudian feel to a movie set in outer space that deals with the ethics of knowledge, its limits and human impact.

Peeking Behind Potemkin (Europa)
He is our Don Quixote. Although this hidalgo hasn’t read the medieval romances. Our knight having other dreams to feed on; different kinds of fairy tale in which to believe; there is the American Dream, as retailed by Hollywood.

An Act of Faith (Winstanley)
The blurb to the BFI’s reissue of Winstanley is leading us to where we want to go: a kindly commune facing the “crushing hostility” of a local population. Already we are thinking of nice people up against the wicked and narrow-minded (who, we are to discover, have been brainwashed by the neighbourhood’s bourgeoisie). An audience likes its innocents to be doomed and defeated. We swoon at the eponymous hero…

Stalker (Stalker)
Tarkovsky takes us to a toxic space. He assures us - against all common sense - that we will be saved. Do we believe him? Do we really want to…

Cult Crazy (The Master)
We hate cults, don’t we? They are nasty little things, brainwashing nice simple people. Danger! Danger! Don’t go there. That’s the idea, isn’t it? Have you ever been inside a cult, I ask… You look at me blankly. You have your doubts, I can see. They are confirmed when I mention Paul Thomas Anderson and his film The Master.

Dynamite is Divine (First Reformed)
This film is rammed to the rafters: religion, politics, business, terrorism, and then he adds sex, adds love... Can anything else be shoved in? We think of a hoarder’s house, rooms turned into caves, its rocks made of papers, books, boxes, videos, black plastic bags, DVDs, tapes, ornaments, clothes...a mountain range of secondhand treasure and newly minted junk; the carpet a street of cobbled shoes. The owner crawls out, a miner squeezing through a tumbledown tunnel. You want to look inside? Are you sure you want to go in?

Period Fashions (Silent Dust)
We are in the theatre, sitting behind an ex-serviceman, out, like us, for a night’s entertainment, when he discovers that the woman holding his hand was ecstatically happy and promiscuously free while he was…

He Can't See It (Silent Dust)
The ideas of the present are so ubiquitous that we are hardly recognise them as ideas; for us they are part of the landscape, as familiar as Tesco and Barclays Bank. The ideas of the past, in contrast, are not only dead to us, we hardily recognise them as products of human thought.

Freezing and Thawing (Manchester by the Sea)
These men are struggling to communicate. Their feelings are not commensurate with their ideas (of public service, of loss, of addiction, of religious enthusiasm). Officials trying to show solicitude to a dead man’s relatives invariably produce a mismatch of idea and feeling; the idea of compassion cannot meet the emotional expectations of the bereaved, whose anguish it does not share. 

Soft Power (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant)
Love is dangerous. It has its own crazy rules that only the lovers themselves can truly comprehend; rules which, by their very nature, breed instability and madness. Marlene is a classic case.
An artist should avoid the big themes. They are too vast for him. We imagine Atlas holding the earth on his shoulders when some jester suggests adding the moon. A few gods get together and…heave ho! up it goes. Our poor hero. He sighs. He creaks. Wobbling he slips…

Flying High (Die Große Ekstase Des Bildschnitzers Steiner)
And the raven? It is a traitor, and so must die, because it has given its magic away; it has given the gift of flight to a man who knows how to use it.

Osmotic Tendencies (Drunk on Women and Poetry)
Artists are passive beasts. Like lions amongst the savannah grass they wait for their prey to approach them.

Keep It Strange (Drunk on Women and Poetry)
Tourists in a foreign country - a Welshman in Korea - our critics want simple, universally recognisable signs to indicate the public facilities. 

Exquisite Loneliness (Drunk on Women and Poetry)
Would a bureaucrat give up his wealth, an attractive lover and a fine house to look for the maker of a beautiful object? To sacrifice himself for a vase? To stare into the kiln, and watch as the fire makes it…
Elizabeth speaks only once. Her silence a white canvas onto which Alma paints her own life. 
Help!  Expert wanted!  These characters are strange. Their behaviour is foreign. It is alien, both in space and in time; especially in time - this is a pre-modern society, where mores are determined by cultural codes whose meaning we find odd and incomprehensible. 

Difficult Lessons (Blue is the Warmest Colour)
All the brutality, the uncomfortableness, the pain, the inconveniences of the sexual acted are on display in these scenes. 

Pop Art (Privilege)
Steven Shorter is devoid of private life. He is surrounded, perhaps we should say imprisoned, by other people. Steven is not an artist. No. He is a pop star.
Film review as poem....

Vertigo (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders)
 The strain of carrying difficult truths is removed, and long buried secrets are reclaimed from long forgotten strong boxes. Suddenly nothing is what it appears.  All is transformed. A child, now seeing life through the eyes of a sex crazy teenager, discovers a new world from behind the shutters and locked doors of the old. 

Wake Me Up! (The Colour of Pomegranates)
This is a film that seeks to recreate the poetic mind on celluloid. Not as a real mind in a real person - Pomegranates is not Andrei Rublev  - but as a mind that lives only in poetry. Here is a world that is imagined rather than experienced. It is a fantasy, where reality has been left outside the gates of the imagination.
This title is a label.

Left Behind (Out of the Blue)
He became frenetic with insight and he cut with woeful extravagance; scene after scene falling to the floor, where they waited for the cleaner and her big black bag.
The film captures the inner world of a certain kind of young woman, who, if allowed her freedom, acts out her feelings and imagination with almost total abandonment.  

The Good Bourgeois (The Cremator)
The sudden shifts of attention, the transformation of one image into another, and the merging of a metaphor into its literal interpretation all reflect the plasticity of the human mind; and reminds us that British empiricism, which for centuries has been thought as a philosophy of freedom, actually assumes our mental servitude.

Critic as Clerk (Muriel)
We are bored with Proust.  No!  Let us be more precise.  We are bored with the critics who quote Proust so selectively.  Thousands and thousands of pages across multiple volumes and all we ever hear about is a single cake and a pot of tea. 

Only One Lepidopterist Here (Mahanagar: The Big City)
Too many critics are enthralled by Ray’s “universality”; a tepid term that hides the highly specific problems that his films address.  Thus it is no surprise that Tom Milne compares Mahanagar to Chekhov, and describes it is “an enchanting film”.  He thereby overlooks the seriousness of Ray, while downplaying that sense of desperation which pervades the stories of the Russian master; whose major work shows characters adrift in environments that overwhelm their inadequate natures. 

Uncomfortable Company (A Woman's Uphill Slope)
Too often I criticise the critics.  A couple of punches, a head butt; one carefully placed kick to the goolies, as they approach the postbox to mail their manuscript, usually has the effect I desire. 

Success Story (A Woman's Uphill Slope)
The colours - mostly light greens, blues and khaki - are restrained and harmonious, and are suggestive of a civilisation where civility and modesty are as natural as breathing; and where beauty isn't so much advertised as inadvertently revealed...

A Class Act (Mahanagar: The Big City)
A person changes.  The effects are at first so subtle nobody notices them, although very quickly a threshold is crossed and we discover that a new kind of person has emerged out of the chrysalis of the old. 
Fassbinder has compressed two scenes into one.  In doing so he has altered the meaning of the novel to accord with this own ideas about it, expressed in the motto he appends to the beginning of the film - whoever does not resist society’s conventions perpetuates them.

After the Fantasy, the Facts... (Echoes of a Sombre Empire)
My speculative fancy had got the better of me.

Weird Evil (Echoes of a Sombre Empire)
Many are the times when we think Herzog has found his image, only to see him discard it as inadequate; because it is not strange enough to capture both the craziness and the brutality of Bokassa’s regime.

The Religion of Revolution (The Niklashausen Journey)
He is the ideologue.  He is also the revolutionary impresario who directs events from behind the scenes, using theatrical display and the talents of the charismatic Böhm to galvanise the masses into action.  

New Gods Now (The Seventh Seal)
Only art is saved.  This could be the literal truth.  The objects of art and craft the only things to survive the Middle Ages; the Universal Church long gone, its remnants transubstantiated in Lutheran ritual.  

Goodbye Fate! (Katalin Varga)
This is a very British film, even though it is set in Romania and there is no English dialogue. It is British because of its irony and the emotional control that allows the irony so much prominence. 

Pagan People (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)
It is a silent film, where the dialogue is part of the score, which is extraordinary: folk music played on traditional instruments producing avant-garde effects.  The movie is even split up into chapters, with titles informing us of what is to happen next.

All Gone Now (Ran)
The glories of both Japanese industry and Japanese cinema were founded on the country’s war economy, which extended from the early 1930s up till at least the 1970s, when the government relaxed it.

Case by Case (Ran)
Michael Wilmington is right.  But…we feel short-changed.  It’s like…he’s gone to Brighton, and writes to tell us it has a beach and a pier.  
This film is a buried treasure of metaphor. 
This film is not really about the DDR.  It is about the real lives of a provincial town; a place where people are highly suspicious and mentally narrow; the gimcrack nature of this spy state, with its reactionary moral views, a perfect fit for such an unsophisticated society, where the majority are natural snoopers... 

Befuddling the Bourgeoisie (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser)
Kaspar wants to tell a story.  But his innate gentleness and his rigorous education have given him too strong a respect for the opinions of his dull acquaintances.  He thus submits to their views; afraid of breaking their rules, which he believes must be correct and true. 
Come on.  Come on!  Come here with me.  I have kept a seat for you.  Yes, yes, make yourself comfortable.  Good!  Put your drink away, and switch that phone off, the film is about to start.  Now look straight ahead...

Bad Ideas (Frieda)
Professor Barr interprets the film within a Freudian framework, which although highly illuminating – the explanation, by appearing to be insightful and profound, shows us the power of dogma - is wrong in this specific case. 

Getting Down to Details (The Third Generation)
At a certain level of generality all abstractions are true.  It is why they excite us. 
She is too normal for the inhabitants of Denfield, who therefore treat her as she if were exceptional: for them Frieda represents a nation, and includes within her own being all the bureaucrats, soldiers and psychopaths in that large and multi-various land. 

Like all great artists his ambition extends way beyond his reach; his own perspective, limited but exquisite, is not enough for his ambition, which is outrageous.  He wants to go beyond the horizon of his own talent!

Extraordinary Games (The Third Generation)
Everyone was protesting, and they were protesting against everything!  It is precisely this atmosphere that this film captures; The Third Generation set in a world of tiny sects where protest exists merely for itself.  

VIPs (Xala)
We want so much more from our critics.

Small Town Minds  (Les Noces Rouges)
Enamoured with our own thoughts we lose track of the film, engrossed in a question we struggle to answer: why did Hélène shop her mother to the police?
What happens when you disagree with a great critic?  To them: nothing much.  If they notice you at all, you’re a slight irritation, a chihuahua yapping in the distance.  

This is Love (Le Boucher)
It is the mind that gives a human life its structure, and which determines the meaning of what it encounters; so that even the most notorious events will fail to register with a person who doesn’t think about them.  

He's a Fake! (My Back Pages)
It is a film about how reality is shaped, sometimes even created, to accommodate modern myth and contemporary legend.  But the director does not employ the usual lenses; of nefarious newspapers with their ideological and cynical manipulations of the public realm to sell products and policies.  This is work subtler, and more interesting.

Perfect Day (Picnic at Hanging Rock)
The culture of Victorian Britain didn’t collapse on the death of its queen.  Although under strain before she died, its spirit creaking under the accumulated weight of its years, most of its mores and social structures continued long after the funeral; like the Matriarch herself they lived well into their dotage.

Which Way To Go... (Martha Marcy May Marlene)
My friend had his doubts, his seat could hardly hold him, so desperate was he to leave at times, uncomfortable with a film he no longer wanted to see, reluctant to even watch; the force of his dislike infecting the neighbouring seats...
Academics.  They miss so much.  And forget the rest of us.  Infatuated with other people’s theories, they lose themselves inside vast abstractions; the only things they seem keen to write about.  Big kids with ice cream. 

Limited Insight (Céline and Julie Go Boating)
It is very easy to produce generalisations.  Often it is the best way to stop understanding; abstractions like custom barriers preventing the free trade in impressions and facts…

Stumbling Into It (Céline and Julie Go Boating)
Watching this film, and remembering that old sceptic turned convert, I wondered if I should write about it.  Would some academic, obese with the books he has eaten, scoff at my ignorance?  

A World of Make Believe (Pierrot le Fou)
Why can’t life be like in books?  Gorgeous women, dead bodies, boats, fast cars singers film stars crooks.  Why can’t it be intellectually exciting, and have the unity of a work of art; with its beauty and its meaning, and with its perfect form? 
Walking down the street Hélène turns, almost pirouettes: so light, so free, she should have wings – for she is a bird that is ready to fly…  Yet there is also some reserve.  She has a shyness, a degree of self-consciousness, that ties her to the ground; and we see that her happiness teeters on the brink, her laughter ready to fall into nervous giggling.

They'll Be Gone Soon (The Ipcress File)
It has few pretensions.  The film is a spy thriller dressed up in Sixties cool; the camera part of the smart clothes it wears.  

Nice Guy... (Hannah and Her Sisters)
There are so many stories, and the film becomes a small city, a miniature Manhattan, and a very cultured one, at that.  Art, opera, books and plays are the living reality of these characters’ lives, and which, characteristically, Elliot uses instrumentally...
Pauline Kael wasn’t keen.
It is an extraordinary film.  Even more so when you consider the time it was made, in the very late Sixties, at the beginning of the feminist movement; when women were aggressively questioning the old stereotypes, and asserting their independent political will.  

An Accidental Life (Days of Heaven)
He didn’t mean it.  He couldn’t help it.  He didn’t want to be poor; it was his fate: born to be a no-hoper, a drifter, an impoverished workingman, a fool with a few ideas; all of them bad.  

Everywhere Freud (Cria Cuervos)
After the early confusion, and our complete disorientation, we begin to distinguish between the mundane world of the senses and the imaginary fantasies that are invading it. 

We Passed It (Long Ago) (That Day, at the Beach)
No film is easy when it looks to find the simple truths.

No Man's Land (A Brighter Summer Day)
Once upon a time you were told you were outstanding, and everyone predicted you would rule the world; or at least appear on our television screens.  But now you are just another anonymous clerk; and the country and your own generation has defeated you. 

A Window in Iran (A Separation)
This is not art we are watching but life; it all its contingent messiness.  And so it reads like fictionalised biography, with its attendant problems of formlessness and lack of insight; pages overwhelmed by detail and superfluous facts. 

Too Nice to Leave (Last Year at Marienbad)
Our past should be like an historic monument we visit now and then, with its impressive rooms and expensive paintings, its silver cutlery and the Dresden dinner service locked safely away.   

An Odd Place (Je t'aime, je t'aime)
The past is dangerous.  Although for scientists with their simple certainties such an obvious truth is easily overlooked. 

Japanese Poetry (This Transient Life)
Art film.  It can suffer the same problems as lyric poetry.  Marvellous in short moments of crystallised atmosphere; but sinking into insipidity when extended into longer forms.  The intensity of a few stanzas stretched into monotony when strung out across hundreds of pages...

Let Me Join You (Lost Lovers)
He is shouting at the audience.  But they are only listening to the drums and guitars.  He shouts about the violence, he quotes poets and writers, but the crowd is only interested in the music; and his weird antics. 
The old world is shattered.  It will be a long time before it is put together again.

Blow Them Up! (Ecstasy of Angels)
Disciples need leaders to interpret these mysteries; those rocks of certainty and insight amongst the chaotic ignorance, that enormous sea of misunderstanding, that surrounds and sometimes engulfs them. 

Strange Comforts (All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace)
Few people, and Bill and George, as described by Curtis, are very good examples, can live long with doubt.  Not many people are truly agnostic.  This is especially so with intellectuals, particularly artists and certain kinds of scientists; neighbours and close relatives, although they usually won’t admit it.  Unable to live with doubt they replace truth with certainty.

Too Human... (America Radical)
Then I come along.  I don’t follow all the rules; in particular I don’t pay lip service to the conventional pieties, or fake obsequience to the boss – I tell him straight what I think, if I happen to disagree.

Lost in Chauvet (Cave of Forgotten Dreams)
Do we know anything about this time; or is it an odd vision, a new world, a free creation, out of the fragments of a lost one? 
So, to continue the discussion of the last post, who is the more intelligent? Our clever salesman or the engineer he manipulates. The man who can work out complicated formulas or the man who works out him…

Look Here! (Black Swan)
How much do we need to be told?  Hollywood is never quite sure.  A screenwriter writes with the subtlety of Elizabeth Bowen; but this upsets the producer, who imagines tomorrow’s reviews in the Washington Post.

Dark Dangerous Bird (Black Swan)
Nothing has changed in forty years.  Manhattan, you’re still the same.  The grainy camera shots, and the subway carriages – the adolescents’ MOMA -; those old apartments, that could be Parisian, though somehow are not; even the tattered vinyl stacked on the shelf, all is familiar...

To Die For (To Die For)
Immovable and impenetrable she cannot see other people; or understand their deepest needs. For don’t we all want to be conned just a little bit? To be liked for ourselves alone; not for our status, or our money; or for some fantastic future we are meant to represent.

Wishful Thinking (Mulholland Drive)
To understand a film we should have a sense of its totality; details can help of course; but to view it as some cipher to decode, or a crossword puzzle with arcane clues, is surely to see it wrong; and will lead us astray. 

Metropolis (Metropolis)
What would humans be like without language? All that thought, but no ability to express it, except in grunts and wild gestures. All those complex ideas, the nuance of feeling; but you have nothing but ugly facial grimaces...
All art and popular entertainment can be reduced to concepts.  And the more crudely popular the more likely their content will be just formulas; simple ideas that are endlessly repeated within set patterns.  In this respect popular art forms are easy for intellectuals to write about... 

Peeping Tom (Peeping Tom)
Mark appears human, but like most artists, he is somewhat detached, estranged, obsessed by images and ideas, that sets him apart, and makes him both attractive, Julia is curious to understand and cure him, but also uncanny.

Stone Them (Agora)
This is the Clash of Civilisations played out as cartoon. Of Religion against the Enlightenment. It represents the western liberal position, as it now stands in much of respectable circles – that religion is the source of evil and irrationality. 
Goodbye Dennis Hopper.

Come on In (Bad Lieutenant)
There is something repellent about people high on drugs – a certain sensitiveness, of feeling for the outside world, disappears. In its place a brick wall of overweening ego, and secret meanings, a poet high in a hall of mirrors...

Le Bonheur (Le Bonheur)
How selfish is happiness! 

Film! Film! (Cleo from 5 to 7)
My education started when most people’s end. It began in my early twenties with the BBC, and its seasons of classic films; a museum of film art, from that great period - the 1950’s through to the mid 70’s.