Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Father

Architect Glen Small, feeling unappreciated, with no books or significant critical studies of his work in print, drafted his will and testament with a special request: He bequeathed to his middle daughter Lucia the task of writing his biography. His hope was that she would document his achievements and thus firmly establish his professional reputation once and for all. He wasn’t near death; he was just bitter, and wanted the story to be finally told.

The assignment was strange for other reasons as well. Glen Small was closer to his oldest daughter, and his youngest daughter was a writer. So why had he chosen Lucia?

Despite having no answer to the question, she took him up on the offer with the hope that the project might bring the two of them closer together. But she had two caveats: that she make a film rather than a book, and that it cover the man as well as the work. With some hesitation, her father agreed.

The result, My Father the Genius, is amateurish, but in the best sense of the word: It’s a very personal film, with the feel of a home movie. With the exception of a few animations, there is little flourish or flare. Instead it presents a simple, eye-level portrait of a man and how his obsession with his work has affected his personal relationships. 

Glen Small was, by most accounts, a visionary architect in his younger years. He was a founder and faculty member of the Southern California Institute of Architecture and one of the principal proponents of ecologically sound design. His fantastically futuristic Biometric Biosphere combined eco-architecture with science fiction to create an arresting vision of the city of the future, a structure that would touch the ground in only a few places but could house 100,000 people. 

His more modest designs—the ones that actually got built—include houses, museums and commercial buildings that usually feature dramatic sweeping lines. “Sensuality,” as Small puts it, is his intent. 

But despite his talents, Small was brash, arrogant, rude, and at times downright stupid. He alienated his colleagues, jeopardized his career, undermined his own financial stability, and all but abandoned his wife and daughters. And, as we see in the film, he has apparently learned little from his mistakes.

Small is presented as an aptly named man, one so self-centered and tunnel-visioned that he repeatedly fails as father, as friend, as husband and as lover. His world view allows for little that does not center on himself and confirm his self-image. Granted, when a camera is in your face you’re inclined to behave as though you’re the center of attention, but we get the feeling that Small believes there should always be a camera in his face, that he is just that interesting and important. And the irony is that this is precisely what makes him compelling, if not personable, as a subject.

It is surprising and a bit disappointing that Lucia Small was unable to get better access to some of the buildings her father designed, and that there is little discussion of the merits of each structure, other than from Glen Small’s own perspective, which we at times suspect is an inflated view. But if you go into this film with only architecture in mind, or with the hope of finding an in-depth portrait of an artist, you’re bound to be disappointed, for My Father the Genius is only superficially concerned with these matters. Ultimately the film is not about whether Small is great or what he is like as a man; it is really Lucia’s story, the story of a daughter given a strange assignment, her willingness to take on that assignment, and the effects that assignment has on her relationships with her sisters and with her father. 

My Father the Genius (2005). Written, directed and produced by Lucia Small. Featuring Glen Small. 84 minutes. $29.95. www.myfatherthegenius.com.

Finding Poetry Amid the Horrors of World War II: The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain

Kon Ichikawa directed nearly 30 films in his native Japan before anyone took much notice of him. He was a studio director, taking assignments and completing them dutifully if not artfully. It was only when he and his wife/co-scenarist Natto Wada began developing their own projects that Ichikawa received his due recognition.

Two of his most renowned works, The Burmese Harp (1956) and Fires on the Plain (1959), have recently been released on DVD by Criterion. 

The Burmese Harp is often hailed as one of the masterpieces of Japanese humanist cinema. Based on a novel by Michio Takeyama, it is a thoughtful and compassionate view of Japanese soldiers fighting in Burma during World War II. A regiment, led by a captain who was a musician before the war, surrenders to British forces after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The captain has trained his men to sing as a choir and one member of the company has learned to play the Burmese harp, accompanying his comrades in cathartic folk songs during their imprisonment at the hands of the British. (If the oft-repeated theme seems familiar, it’s for good reason; it’s a Japanese derivation of “Home Sweet Home.”)

These men are patriotic and rue the fall of the Imperial Army, yet they are only human and thus weary of battle, eager to return home not only to surviving friends and family, but to do to their part in reconstructing their decimated nation. When the captain, who eloquently gives voice to this sentiment, learns that another Japanese regiment is entrenched on a mountain, refusing to surrender even though the war is over, he dispatches one of his men, Mizushima, the harp player, to ascend the mountain and persuade the stubborn company to surrender. When the company’s captain refuses, Mizushima’s company believes that he has perished on the mountain in the ensuing round of bombing.

As Mizushima’s company mourns the loss of their comrade, the captain is especially distraught, guilt-ridden for having sent the soldier needlessly to his death after the war’s conclusion. At one point his men ask him to let go of the notion that Mizushima may have survived, for although the company has come across a Buddhist monk who resembles him, they cannot confirm his identity. It would be easier, they say, to simply believe that the resemblance is coincidence. 

Meanwhile Ichikawa catches us up on Mizushima’s story. Wounded by the bombing, he is nursed back to health by a Buddhist monk. When he is able to walk again, Mizushima steals the monk’s robes to use as a disguise while trying to make his way back to his regiment. But he is waylaid by the grief and trauma he discovers along the way in the form of Japanese corpses, strewn across the landscape and abandoned to the elements. Mizushima is compelled to give proper burials to all he comes upon, and in the process he undergoes a transformation, the impostor monk becoming a true monk. And it is here that Ichikawa is at his best, seamlessly blending Mizushima’s physical and spiritual journeys with beautifully expressive technique. The director keeps the horizon always high in the frame, allowing his shots to be dominated by the rocky foreground, rough terrain that must be traversed en route to that horizon. Thus we see Mizushima struggling across the blood-stained landscape, his feet cut and bleeding, his soul tormented by the plight of his fallen countrymen.

Fires on the Plain, based on the 1952 novel by Shohei Ooka, is starker in its vision of warfare; it is a more harrowing version of a similar tale—more graphic, more comic, more disturbing.

Again, a Japanese soldier is left to fend for himself in a foreign land, this time the Philippines. Private Tamura makes his way across another rough landscape, encountering fellow soldiers along the way who, like him, have descended to varying degrees of depravity under horrific conditions. If The Burmese Harp focused on what was best in the soldiers of Japan’s Imperial Army, Fires on the Plain casts a merciless gaze on the worst. Soldiers are reduced to primitive survivalists, using, abusing and defrauding each other of the necessities of survival. It’s like an adult version of Lord of the Flies. 

But Ichikawa again manages to find the poetry in the turmoil, this time with a lovely metaphor of insects unable to see the greater world and context of their struggle, but concerned only with immediate obstacles. Our first glimpse of this device comes when Private Tamura takes a minute to marvel at an ant, placing it in his hand and watching it scramble madly across his palm. The metaphor comes more clearly into focus a bit later, when a group of Japanese soldiers attempts to cross a road and field under cover of darkness, right under the noses of Allied forces. One particularly artful shot shows the soldiers descending from the top of the frame, clinging to roots and vines as they scamper down an embankment, like so many insects filtering down the screen. They then writhe through tall grass toward the road, where they slowly crawl on all fours en masse like an infestation set on destroying the crops across the way.

Another memorable sequence presents a more light-hearted view of the conditions of survival. A pair of abandoned shoes lay on a path in the forest. The camera stays fixed on them as a soldier comes along, inspects them, and exchanges them for his own, followed by another soldier who does the same and so on down the line, until Tamura approaches and looks balefully through the soleless shoes before opting to go without shoes altogether. In the DVD’s liner notes critic Chuck Stephens points out the scene’s debt to Chaplin. While the scene obviously owes much to the famous boiled boot sequence from The Gold Rush (1925), it also calls to mind Chaplin’s short film Shoulder Arms (1918), which humorously and poignantly depicted the trials and tribulations of the little Tramp character while serving in the trenches of World War I.

More broadly though, Ichikawa has adopted the overall aesthetic of Chaplin, that genre-defying blend of pathos and humor that seeks to find truth and humanity amid deprivation and tragedy. With The Burmese Harp he finds dignity among the rank-and-file of the aggressive Imperial Army, and in Fires on the Plain he finds humanity and visual poetry amid the most gruesome of conditions.

The Burmese Harp (1956). 116 minutes. $29.95.

Fires on the Plain (1959). 104 minutes. $29.95.

Criterion Collection.  www.criterion.com.

Existential Despair in Antonioni's The Passenger

When I was 5 years old my kindergarten class, for whatever reason, took a field trip to the home of one of my classmates. Too young to have any notion of the local geography, I had no idea where the house was located. It was only when I stepped out the back door of the boy’s house into his backyard that I recognized the yellow playhouse and battered metal slide and realized that this was the house directly behind my own. I peeked through a hole in the fence and saw my own backyard: the lawn, the patio, the rusted swingset, the family dog sniffing about in the tall grass, the soccer ball under a tree where I had left it the day before.

It was a disconcerting experience to look back in on my life from another vantage point. For the first time I realized that to the boy who lived behind me, I was the boy who lived behind him. Thus I had to face the uncomfortable truth that I was not the center of the universe, but just one little boy from one family in one house in one neighborhood in a world of other little boys and families and houses and neighborhoods.

It was a revelation for which I was not quite ready. But, being 5, I soldiered on.

This notion of moving outward in order to look back in is the central theme of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, in both content and form, though the protagonist’s epiphanies are hardly as simple or as benign. The film screens at 8:50 p.m. Friday as part of Pacific Film Archive’s ongoing retrospective of the modernist director’s career.

The Passenger stars Jack Nicholson, in one of his finest performances, as David Locke, an American journalist abroad who seizes an unforeseen opportunity to shed his life and identity in exchange for the life of Robertson, an acquaintance who has just died. Locke leaves behind a wife, a reputation, a home, everything, to take on the life of a man he barely knows. Using the man’s datebook to meet his appointments, Locke gradually unravels clues as to the life and identity of the man he has become, finding himself in more than a bit of trouble along the way.

We get a hint as to the catalyst of this adventure in the form of documentary footage of the journalist at work. In the clip, Locke, during an interview, hands over his camera at the request of his subject, who then casts the camera’s gaze back at Locke and begins to question the questioner. The tables are turned, and Locke, squirming before the lens, has nothing to say. He has unexpectedly been given a glimpse of himself—his first, it seems, and just for a moment—and has no answer for what he sees. He grimaces in discomfort, looks about nervously, then reaches forward to take the camera back, suggesting that he is fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with the truth with which he has been presented.

How much more resilient the 5-year-old who faces such a revelation, for he is unencumbered by the lifetime of assumptions and psychic inertia built up by the 35-year-old—a series of elaborate constructions each of which must be re-examined. The child’s epiphany is at least rooted in a sense of place; he sees a yard and a house, a family within the house and the house within a neighborhood—while Locke looks inward and finds nothing at all, or at least nothing he recognizes.

Thus he takes the opportunity to adopt a new identity, to shed the dead skin of a life through which he has been sleepwalking and to usurp the life and identity of a dead man, to become a passenger on the road of another man’s narrative. The journey is both alluring and dangerous; Locke, as Roberston, picks up a young lover, negotiates with underworld thugs, and cruises scenic byways as he works his away across Europe.

The closing sequence is a tour de force, a demonstration of bravura filmmaking for which the groundwork has been carefully laid over the preceding two hours. In a single, unbroken shot, Antonioni again employs the out-and-in motif, with Locke lying down on a hotel bed and turning away as the camera begins an extremely slow tracking movement toward the window. The movement and ambient sounds of the street draw our attention outside: Locke’s lover walks away, then returns; a boy throws stones; a trumpet sounds; cars pass by, stop, and move on; the two thugs arrive, and one walks toward the girl. All the while the camera steadily pushes forward until, just before it passes through the window, it pans slightly to the right to catch the faint reflection of the second thug entering the room, drawing his gun and using the rumbling of a passing car to mask the shot that kills Locke.

The camera continues outward and into the street, following the arrival of the police and Locke’s estranged wife. And as she enters the hotel, the camera, still in one unbroken shot, turns back toward the building and pushes again toward the window, looking back in as she and the girl and the police enter the room. “I never knew him,” she says, when asked if she recognizes the man on the bed. “Yes,” says the girl, when the question is put to her. And Antonioni has left us with something of a metaphysical quandary.

Who is this man? Is it Locke? Is it Robertson? Is it either, or is it anyone at all? Antonioni has forced us to look back in on our assumptions and re-examine the man we have come to know over the course of the film. Yet by the time the camera has made its journey outward, wheeled around and turned back in on itself, reality has shifted; Locke has ceased to exist. For that very act of introspection and the self-consciousness it requires permanently alters the man, the child or the moviegoer who experiences it, and in that long, lingering single shot, the film itself takes on the slow-motion processing of that self-awareness, stretching to contain not just action, but the mental processing of that action—the self-conscious preview, experience, re-play and analysis of its every facet.

The Passenger is perhaps the Antonioni's most successful merging of his patient, contemplative style and his somewhat grim world view, coalescing in the most tantalizingly inconclusive of conclusions. It is the dark side of rationalism: It is not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I think too much, therefore I cease to exist.”

Black Book Beyond Repair

Dutch director Paul Verhoeven made his mark in 1977 with Soldier of Orange, a film about the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. Now, after a 20-year-stint in Hollywood making films such as RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Showgirls, Verhoeven has returned to Holland to make another World War II epic, Black Book. But unfortunately the director took home with him every unpalatable and hackneyed trick he’d picked up in his travels.

Is there not enough drama, enough tragedy, enough evil and nobility and pain and sorrow in the story of the Holocaust? Apparently not, as Verhoeven and fellow screenwriter Gerard Soeteman have fashioned the raw material of history into a trite melodrama, attempting to merge the all-too-real horrors of the Nazi march across Europe and persecution of the Jews with the twists and turns of a swashbuckling thriller.

Every overwrought and cliched B-movie device is in use. It’s a veritable glossary of cheap and simplistic filmmaking: The suffering but enduring heroine, who has seen so much, suffered so much, that she cannot even cry...until she can; the milquetoast resistance-fighter sideman for whom the firing of a gun into a dirty Nazi Jew-killer would mean going against every Christian moral fiber in his body...unless that Nazi Jew-killer should heap insult upon crime against humanity by taking the Lord’s name in vain. Every symbol is underlined and in bold, used, overused and repeated in close-up: Witness the prized locket containing portraits of martyred Jewish parents, employed once as a key to gain admittance to the office of a sympathetic gentile, and later used, in dramatic close-up, as a tool to quite literally seal the fate of a traitor and—once again all-too-literally—for the beset-upon heroine to find closure...by locking the traitor in a coffin where he will suffocate along with the jewels and cash he looted from his victims.

The score too adds to the mess, descending more often than not into camp Hollywood edge-of-your-seat spectacle. Villainous acts are underscored with ominous, Darth Vader-esque chords; suspense is heightened with blasts of the horn section and the staccato thrusts of plaintive violins. Every five minutes you get the feeling Indiana Jones himself is about to burst into the room, and what a welcome relief if he did.

The villains of Black Book would be worthy of him. They dish out a wealth of sexualized cruelty in graphic scenes that have become a Verhoeven trademark. The head of the Dutch Gestapo doesn’t merely hold our heroine at gunpoint, but waits until she’s topless and points the gun at her exposed breast. And when an unruly mob assails her in a prison camp, they again make sure she’s half-naked before dumping a steaming cauldron of excrement over her head.

There may be talent and skill at work in Black Book, but unfortunately it has been applied toward unworthy material. For no amount of directorial talent or photographic competence can make this film work; no cast of polished, handsome actors—no matter how lovely their period costumes—can rescue the turgid dialogue. Nothing can save Black Book from itself. Not even Indiana Jones.

Black Book (2007). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written by Verhoeven and Gerard Soeteman. Starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Kock, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijn. 145 minutes. In Dutch, German and Hebrew with English subtitles. Rated R for strong violence, graphic nudity, sexuality and language.

Brother vs. Brother in The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley is the story of the nascent Irish Republican Army and its struggle against British occupation in the early 1920s.

“If they bring their savagery over here, we will meet it with savagery of our own!” the group’s leader calls to his guerilla troops after a successful ambush of British forces on a remote country lane. He angrily declares that their actions will send a message “that will echo and reverberate throughout the world.”

Thus develops a seemingly endless cycle of escalating violence that does in fact reverberate throughout Ireland, Britain and eventually the world, and indeed finds echoes of late in America’s exploits in the Middle East. Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty do an excellent job of capturing the essence of the conflict from multiple vantage points: from that of the die-hards, who believe in the nobility of the cause; from the contingent of pragmatists that eventually accepts a compromise with the British; and from the long view, in which the eye-for-an-eye violence and retribution becomes a weary demonstration of futility and human frailty. In this film nothing is black or white or good or evil; politics and motivations are all as gray as the fog-shrouded landscape.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, as well as a number of other European awards, and it is not difficult to understand why. Almost everything about the film is well done; it is beautifully photographed, features strong performances by compelling actors, and it is directed and edited with competence and grace. Quiet scenes are handled with restraint, while the more dramatic and violent episodes are forceful without ever being excessively graphic or gratuitous.

However, the film has one significant flaw which threatens to undermine its artistry and impact. Loach and Laverty have unfortunately fallen prey to one of the more tedious and ham-fisted of devices: In order to amplify the already clear theme of brother pitted against brother, they have found it necessary to dramatize the conflict all too literally, with two familial brothers finding themselves divided over the issue of the compromise treaty.

It’s a bit insulting. Do we need the story reduced to melodrama in order to comprehend the enormity of it all? Did the filmmakers not trust the audience to grasp the tragedy of the conflict? Or was it merely a clumsy attempt to elevate the tale to Biblical proportions, with Cain rising up to slay Abel in service to the twin causes of acquiescence and moderation?

It’s a structural flaw, and thus it infects the entire production. But if you can get past that and accept the contrivance, Loach and Laverty and a talented cast manage to bring the story to life in spite of it.