Indiana Jones Loses His Footing

If the Indiana Jones films were never exactly realistic, they were at least grounded; they were rooted in archaeology, in the earth—in the discovery of things ancient and mysterious, yes, but always terrestrial. Jones himself was grounded too, an unlikely hero by turns deft and incompetent, benefiting from equal doses of intelligence and dumb luck. And that made him all the more charming and his adventures all the more appealing. For the wide-eyed child in the audience, there was no need to conjure images of outer space, of aliens or monsters or supernatural powers; all you needed was a hat, a jacket and a rope. The fantasy was all the more effective for containing the illusion that it was within reach.

Throughout the first three films, producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg kept the series fairly close to that essential premise. As much as possible, they kept Indiana Jones’ feet on the ground, or at least somewhere beneath—in tunnels, in caverns, in crypts and caves. And that’s precisely where the latest installment loses its footing.

As entertainment, it’s good enough. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is pleasant viewing for two hours, with all the ingredients you expect from the series: ultra-villianous villians who, despite all their diabolical powers, simply can’t shoot straight; mysterious rites and riddles encoded on crumbling parchment; plenty of self-effacing humor, even if it isn’t always all that humorous; and that familiar, charming self-awareness, an attitude that shamelessly embraces the inherent absurdity of the whole enterprise.

The series began as a throwback to the old serials that accompanied the feature each week at movie theaters across America. It was both an homage and a modern update of those cliffhangers of yesteryear, a wild, silly ride through unlikely scenarios, with thrilling action and an utter lack of pretentiousness. It’s hard to expect a series to retain its allure through one sequel much less three, but with nearly 20 years passing since the last film, expectations run abnormally high. So while there’s really not all that much to complain about—it’s still better than much of what passes for action entertainment these days, and takes itself far less seriously—Crystal Skull still manages to lose sight of one of the franchise’s essential charms.

Almost from the start, there’s something not quite right. There are hints of the supernatural waiting at the heart of the mystery, and the plot always seems poised for a plunge into Erich Von Daniken territory. But there’s always the hope that the inherent pragmatism of the character and his creators will reign in the excesses and that the solution will ultimately prove to be terrestrial in origin.

And yet, after two hours of chases that are three minutes longer than you’d like and four minutes longer than necessary, fight scenes with so many punches thrown that it seems there’s a quota in place, and three—count ‘em, three—waterfalls through which John Hurt never loses his grip on the prize, we come to an absurdly un-Indy-like ending that almost renders the hero obsolete during a spectacularly unspectacular special effects sequence. As a swirling paranormal maelstrom of destruction swirls overhead, Jones stands small and silhouetted in the immediate foreground, a mere observer of digital effects that are meaningless, emotionless and, despite all their fury, dramaless. Cast in shadow and virtually inanimate, Indiana looks, for all intents and purposes, like one of us, like a member of the audience just a few rows ahead—and just as irrelevant to the action on screen.

Despite the whirlwind of gimmickry that has been added to the formula, it is the old standbys that still deliver—the snakes, scorpions, quicksand, and, in one of the film’s most effective sequences, a swarming colony of man-eating ants. Lucas and Spielberg could have saved themselves a great deal of trouble had they stuck with the creepy-crawlies and stayed clear of the close encounters.

Three Films Examine the German Conscience

First Run Features has released three provocative films on DVD that delve into the complex consciousness of the German people. From the atrocities of the Holocaust to the repressive post-war socialist government of East Germany, these films offer fascinating glimpses of artists and historians struggling to come to terms with their nation’s past while battling forces—in the form of both the government and the people—who would rather keep such horrors hidden. 

The Second Track 

Joachim Kunert’s The Second Track went unseen for decades, only recently resurfacing and taking its rightful place among Germany’s greatest films. This 1962 noirish thriller examined the burden of the Holocaust on the German conscience at a time when the country as a whole was eager to forget and move on. 

A freight yard inspector stumbles upon a robbery but does not inform the police that he has recognized one of the perpetrators, a man from his past whom he is eager to avoid. This sparks a chain of events in which the inspector’s daughter begins delving into her father’s past as well as her own, uncovering a debilitating cache of Nazi-era secrets. 

The movie is filled with spectacular black and white photography, juxtaposing emotional close-ups with stunning imagery of trains and railroad tracks, of steam drifting across black skies, of glistening cobblestone streets, and impressionistic shots of industrial architecture: freight yard bridges, passageways, stairwells, and gleaming tracks that merge and separate and crisscross the frame. 

The film has been compared to the dark tales of suspense crafted by Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, but its most apparent influence is Carol Reed’s English masterpiece, The Third Man (1949). Traces of that film can be seen in the angled shots, atmospheric nighttime photography and zither score, and most decidedly in the closing shots, which seem to deliberately draw a parallel with the earlier film. But whereas Reed’s film ends with a single long take of the heroine walking toward and past the hero in what amounts to a romantic rejection, The Second Track closes with a much more troubling and ambiguous rejection, as a woman walks along railroad tracks, toward and past a man who turns to follow her until they approach a gate. The gate may represent passage to another plain, but does it lead to a purgatory in which the German people acknowledge and do penitence for the past, or does it mark entry into a hell of recrimination and reproach? And will the these two figures pass through the gate at all? The image fades to black before we find out. 

Extra features include a short film about Second Track’s cinematographer, Rolf Sohre, and an essay and newsreels about the film. 

The Rabbit Is Me 

A few years later, Kurt Maetzig’s The Rabbit Is Me (1965) shined a light on the opportunism, careerism and political calculation that undermined the professed principals of the repressive East German socialist government. 

A young woman’s brother is imprisoned for subversion, though his crime is never revealed to the public or to his family. The sister embarks on an affair with the judge who sentenced her brother, and eventually the truth behind the sentencing is exposed. Though the film was made with solid studio backing, the final product proved too hot to touch, the film’s politics, sexuality and frank moral discussion deemed too dark and skeptical by government censors. 

It was not the only film to draw the government’s ire that year. Many more were likewise banned in the wake of Rabbit Is Me, the whole lot of them thereafter referred to as “the Rabbit films.” The Rabbit Is Me was not screened for the public until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

Rabbit calls to mind the films of the French New Wave, and anticipates the edgy youth-centered films of America in the 1950s. The movie not only challenges the validity of government institutions but sets up a generational conflict between the young heroine and her much older lover, between the energy and idealism of youth and the stodgy, self-interested avarice of the establishment. Maetzig delights in some of the new tools available to filmmakers, most notably the zoom lens, which would become a common fixture in American films of the 1960s and ’70s, allowing the director to create both establishing shots and close-ups without a cut. 

The disc includes a 1999 interview with director Kurt Maetzig and an essay and brief documentary about the banning of the Rabbit films. 

The Unknown Soldier 

First Run has also just released an intriguing documentary, The Unknown Soldier (2006), that tracks the volatile controversy surrounding a museum exhibit that first opened in Germany in 1996. The Wehrmacht Exhibition documented the complicity of the German Army in the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Waffen SS and the Gestapo. For decades, the accepted portrait of the German soldier was that of an innocent pawn, who knew nothing of the crimes being carried out by the Third Reich. While many were oblivious to the horrors of the Holocaust, many were fully aware, and the exhibit featured evidence, in the form of personal letters, photographs and film footage, of knowing collaboration between the army’s common foot soldiers and Hitler’s Nazi forces. The exhibition sparked riotous protests from an outraged populace and revealing a split in the German psyche as the nation struggled to pay tribute to its veterans while confronting once again the horror of its past. 

It wasn’t only the neo-Nazi skinheads who were angry; World War II were incensed, as were the children and grandchildren of deceased soldiers who felt the memories of their loved ones were being tarnished. A second exhibit a few years later, which sought to correct a few troubling issues with the first, elicited a similar response. Michael Verhoeven’s film captures the pain and conflict of a nation caught in the midst of an identity crisis. 

First Run Features. www.firstrunfeatures.com.

The Artistic Restraint of Yasujiro Ozu

Almost from the beginning of the medium, filmmakers sought to exploit cinema’s unique properties. From the moment they could, directors were eager to transcend the limits of traditional theater by putting the camera in motion, by sending it racing, swooping and soaring; by using a variety of lenses to shape the image, to magnify, distort and exaggerate; and by using the editing process to suggest, startle and surprise. 

And while some of the most exciting filmmakers over the past century have been those who found ways to employ these devices with flash and panache, one of the greatest directors the medium has ever produced was one who limited himself to the simplest and most austere techniques. 

Yasujiro Ozu, rather than employing his camera in bravura displays of pyrotechnic virtuosity, used it to simply observe his characters, to linger on their faces, on their homes, on their possessions—to look into the souls of everyday people under everyday circumstances. Not for Ozu the moody shadows and vertiginous angles of the expressionists, or the heightened reality and stylized melodrama of Hollywood fare. Ozu was both a naturalist and a rigorous formalist, a director who sought to capture life as it is lived, but within a framework of rigidly defined restrictions. He limited the camera’s range of motion and the angles from which it could gaze; he limited his editing to simple, direct cuts—no dissolves or fades; and dialogue was conveyed in simple master shots followed by alternating close-ups. This artistic code focused greater attention on content over form, allowing character to reveal itself, allowing dialogue to breathe, and allowing revelatory spaces to open up between words and gestures and characters. Thus relationships and motivations and plot points would gradually take shape before the viewer’s eyes. 

Criterion has just released a three-disc set of Ozu’s early, silent films, called "Silent Ozu." The set is the most recent in the company’s line of Eclipse boxed sets, highlighting lesser-known works, and follows the recent release of "Late Ozu," a five-disc set of films from the last few years of the director’s career. Together the two sets form the bookends of one of cinema’s monumental oeuvres. 

It is a body of work consisting of more than 50 films, nearly all of them created in the same mold, with Ozu’s patient camera calmly observing his characters. He was not interested in dense plots or edge-of-your-seat melodrama; his work was almost literary, owing more to the novel than to film. “Rather than tell a superficial story,” Ozu said, “I wanted to go deeper, to show ... the ever-changing uncertainties of life. So instead of constantly pushing dramatic action to the fore, I left empty spaces, so viewers could have a pleasant aftertaste to savor.” 

Though he is often regarded as the most Japanese of Japanese directors, whose cinema captured unique and very specific aspects of that nation’s life and culture, Ozu’s work easily transcends international boundaries, delving into character, relationships and commonplace issues to find the universal. His favored subjects included families and the relationships between generations; the aging process; city life versus rural life; and all the values that complement and conflict with one another in the ensuing drama: pragmatism and idealism, love and kindness, justice and forgiveness. “Intellectually we may be different,” said film scholar Donald Ritchie in reference to Ozu’s work, “but emotionally we’re very much the same.”

The three films on this set display Ozu’s remarkable ability to blend comedy with poignant drama.Tokyo Chorus starts with a long comedic sequence that soon seems like a wild digression as young men engage in a series of pranks and gaffes under the stern gaze of a schoolmaster. But once the sequence is over and the Chaplinesque hijinks have concluded, the film takes on a more somber tone, following the hardships of one of the young men as he grows up, struggles to support a family, and in the process learns humility, compromise and the value of friendship. But eventually, Ozu brings the film full circle, and the connections with the earlier scenes are made not only clear but dramatically satisfying. 

These early films also give us a glimpse of a side of Ozu not visible in his later, more well-known work. A clever use of the moving camera draws parallels between the toil of children at school and the toil of clerks at the office. And a sustained bit of Lubitsch-style humor plays up the methods by which the workers attempt to glean the details of each others’ end-of-year bonuses. 

I Was Born, But... examines the difficulties both of children growing up and of their parents in handling them. A man’s young sons brawl with the local kids in their new neighborhood to assert their dominance, and once they do they exercise their power without restraint. Later their father falls from his figurative pedestal as they witness him kowtowing to his boss, the father of one their schoolyard underlings. What follows is both a loss of innocence and a tough lesson in parenting, as the father tries to express the realities of adulthood and the boys learn that there are other ways to get along than by thundering in the brush and pounding one’s chest like a baboon. 

On display in these early films are some of the techniques that Ozu would employ throughout his career: the floor-height vantage points that place his camera at eye level as his characters sit on the traditional tatami; and the alternating dialogue shots in which each character looks directly at the camera, placing the viewer right in the middle of the exchange, allowing greater identification with each character, with each argument and with each perspective. 

The End of Summer, from the "Late Ozu" collection, demonstrates the tenacity with which Ozu stuck to his principles of filmmaking throughout his career. In this, his penultimate film, we see Ozu and his actors spin the same complex web of dreams and desires, motives and secrets. The family patriarch, a widower, seeks the company of his long-estranged mistress in his twilight years, much to the chagrin of his children. Meanwhile the next generation is struggling to maintain the family business he has left in their care. The film examines the issues faced by three generations of the family as they clash, argue and try to understand one another. There is no ill will involved, just the understated spectacle of people at different stages of life, trying to get on. Along the way, we see them share, deceive, sacrifice and scheme, but they are always human, always sympathetic and always compelling. 

And herein lies much of the appeal of Ozu’s films: His calm, gently unfolding dramas give us time to not only get to know his characters, but also deeply care about them—to enjoy their humor, to admire their strength and to forgive their transgressions—so that, when a film ends, there is often a feeling of regret that these characters are gone from our lives. “Every time I watch an Ozu film,” says actor Eijiro Tong, “I start to feel very sentimental as the end of the film nears. As I think back over the story, it’s like a flood of old memories washing over me, one after another.” 

This is the essential sadness and loneliness that resides at the core of Ozu’s work—the awareness of the inevitability of change and that beginnings are followed all too soon by endings. 

"Silent Ozu." 3-disc set. $44.95. 

"Late Ozu." 5-disc set. $69.95. 

www.criterion.com.