Shohei Imamura's Japan

Think of Japanese cinema and one of two things probably comes to mind: either the robust, action-filled, western-influenced samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa, or the more refined, restrained and elegant films of directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Mikio Naruse.

Shohei Imamura, one of the primary filmmakers of Japan’s New Wave, falls into neither category. His work focuses instead on the dregs of modern Japanese society. Pacific Film Archive is hosting a retrospective of the iconoclastic director’s work through June 30.

The New Wave refers to the generation of filmmakers that rose up through that country’s studio system in the years following World War II. Unlike the directors of the French New Wave—outsiders who began as critics and then set out to re-define their nation’s film culture—the directors of Japan’s New Wave were trained, cultivated and encouraged by the industry they would later challenge.

Imamura began his career as an assistant to Ozu and quickly came to the conclusion that, though Ozu was undoubtedly a great director, his restrained style was not for Imamura. When he finally got his hands on his own crew and camera, he veered in the opposite direction, renouncing the refinement and formal beauty of Ozu’s work and opting instead for a cinema of cruelty, perversion and dark humor.

Imamura thought of himself first as an anthropologist. His goal was to document the world as he saw it, not to shape, explain or judge it. And in fact, after making such classics as Pigs and Battleships (1961) and The Pornographers (1966), the director turned to documentary filmmaking in the 1970s.

As he explains in an interview included in the Criterion Collection’s new DVD edition of Vengeance is Mine, Imamura became somewhat disenchanted with actors while making The Profound Desire of the Gods in 1968 and afterwards sought other means of expression. For the next decade, he made nothing but documentaries, until returning to narrative, commercial filmmaking in 1979 with Vengeance is Mine, in which he fashioned a sort of reality-fiction hybrid.

The film, showing Tuesday, May 29, is based on the exploits of a real-life killer who roamed Japan for a few months in 1963. Ken Ogata plays the role of Iwao Enokizu with a steely impulsiveness, the very personification of id. He seeks only the immediate satisfaction of his desires, regardless of the human cost.

Imamura makes no effort to explain this man’s actions; he presents them as a simple fact of Japanese life in the post-war era. We learn much of Enokizu’s youth, his upbringing and his relationships, and though these details certainly help us get to know the character, there is still no clear motive given for his crimes. As critic Michael Atkinson puts it in the DVD’s liner notes, “Vengeance Is Mine … wastes no breath on compassion, no calories on decorousness, and no time on explanations.” Atkinson places Imamura among what he calls the “Sardonic Objectivists,” directors such as Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel and Douglas Sirk, who tried to shed light on humanity’s dark side. Imamura, Atkinson says, was “a Japanese Samuel Fuller, fascinated with working-class ruin and primal impulse.”

In the opening scenes of Vengeance is Mine, Imamura gives us the impression that the worst is over. The killer has been arrested and is being transported to prison. But soon we are subjected to flashbacks of Enokizu’s first two killings, graphic scenes which contain none of the usual screeching violins or tawdry effects of many a serial killer film, but are instead shot at arm’s length and with no adornment. Imamura sought no attention for his camerawork or framing; he wanted his technique to remain invisible. Thus, in simple documentary terms, we see murder not as a melodramatic plot point but as an almost mundane occurrence: grisly, clumsy and primitive.

There are no pure innocents in Imamura’s films. The killer's wife is somewhat deranged and manipulative herself. This is one of the themes that runs through much of Imamura’s work: women clawing their way through the morass of Japanese society, resorting to the baser instincts in the struggle to survive. These are not the long-suffering women of quiet dignity as found in classical Japanese cinema—“Those women don’t exist,” Imamura once said—they are bold, lusty, self-interested and at times desperate, using whatever means available to survive in a society that is structured to subdue and degrade them.

The result is a body of work unique in Japanese cinema, one that seeks not to organize and understand the world, but to simply document it without explanation or condemnation.

"Shohei Imamura's Japan." Through June 30 at Pacific Film Archive. 2575 Bancroft Way. 642-1124. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Vengeance is Mine (1979). Starring Ken Ogata, Mayumi Ogawa, Mitsuko Baisho, Frankie Sakai, Kazuo Kitamura, Chocho Miyako, Nijiko Kiyokawa, Rentaro Mikuni. Directed by Shohei Imamura. 140 minutes. Playing at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Available on DVD from the Criterion Collection. $29.95. www.criterion.com.

Red Road: A Minimalist Journey Along the Road to Recovery

Red Road, a Scottish film directed by Andrea Arnold, draws the viewer in immediately with its quiet intensity. The film begins with Jackie (Kate Dickie) silently watching a bank of monitors at her job at a security company, each screen presenting a different view of urban Glasgow from cameras positioned around the city.

The glimpses into everyday working-class life in the city are fascinating and Jackie looks upon them with an endearing combination of benevolence, amusement and boredom. It’s her job and nothing more, but she nevertheless seems to go about it with a certain degree of interest if not pleasure.

Thus right away we see that Jackie is an observer of life, not a participant. She lives alone and is apparently alienated from her parents and sister. Her only human contact consists of soul-deadening sex with a co-worker in a parked car. Her comfort at the surveillance desk console and her shy, nervous demeanor when she steps beyond it suggest that she is more at ease in this darkened room full of high-tech spying equipment, watching strangers come and go, than she is out in the world.

She almost appears god-like for a moment as Dickie manages to convey Jackie’s compassion for the strangers who appear on her videoscreens. She smiles as a night-shift housekeeper dances to unheard music while going about her work; she furrows her brow with pity while watching a man walk his aging and sickly dog. And when she finally steps out of that room and into the streets, it is as if she is not one of them at all, but a privileged observer who occasionally slums by walking anonymously among those she oversees, taking a role as just another character in the drama she monitors daily.

Yet once Jackie crosses that line and takes part in that drama, her life becomes a drama all its own. A chance sighting of a familiar face on one of the security cameras sends Jackie on a strange journey. It is apparent that this man is a figure from her past, someone who has somehow hurt her, but Arnold withholds all explanations right up to the end. Instead we watch as Jackie monitors the man for weeks and gains entry to his life, stalking him through a degraded, neglected cityscape, one whose battered streets and grafitti-scarred buildings mirror the heroine’s mental state; years of painful remembrance have taken their toll on her psyche.

The film is part of a larger project called the Advance Party, in which three directors made three different films using the same characters. Arnold has fashioned a compelling tale out of that raw material, and her direction is strong and focused, yet the film is slightly undermined by its evenness of tone. Those early scenes of quiet watchfulness are engaging, but after 90 minutes the minimalist approach causes the pace to flag.

But the most troubling flaws in Red Road come when Arnold yields to the threadbare devices by which indie dramas so often seek to prove their indieness: actors willing to appear naked under less-than-flattering lighting conditions; gratuitously graphic sex scenes; and somehow, somewhere, sometime, someone must vomit. Thus maketh a film of great import and honesty.

But these are minor complaints. Kate Dickie’s portrayal of Jackie is subtle and powerful, and Tony Curran as Clyde inspires just the right blend of allure and recoil. And despite the contrivance that draws these disparate lives together, Arnold has managed to create a memorable and harrowing tale of a woman who must come face to face with her fears before she’s ready to start piecing her life back together.

Red Road (2007). Written and directed by Andrea Arnold. Starring Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston, Natalie Press. 113 minutes. Not rated. Contains graphic sex. 

Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep Finally Gets Its Due

In the prologue to his 1945 novel Cannery Row, John Steinbeck articulated the difficulties inherent in capturing a real time and place in a work of artistic fiction, likening the process to that of a marine biologist attempting to capture the most delicate of specimens. Ultimately, Steinbeck concluded, it is easier to simply open the jar and let the little creatures ooze in of their own accord, and this is the approach he took to his novel—“to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.”

Charles Burnett’s 1977 Killer of Sheep, opening this weekend at Shattuck Cinemas, has this quality. It is an episodic film that moves at a languorous, summertime-like pace as it charts the life of Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a slaughterhouse worker struggling with depression amid the ghettos of South Central Los Angeles. The film captures the dark reality of racism and poverty, of a bleak existence with little hope for the future, and yet it resorts neither to easy cynicism nor simplistic idealism. Images of despair and disillusionment are juxtaposed with the simple, almost transcendent joys of love and family and friendship: the embrace of a loved one; the gaze of a child; a quiet moment of togetherness in the fading light of evening. It is as though Burnett simply opened the lens and allowed the essence of 1970s Watts to flow into the frame, whole and untouched.

One of the film’s most remarkable achievements may be its authentic portrayal of children at play. With the directness of a documentary, Burnett’s unassuming camera records the exploits of kids left to their own devices, staving off boredom and adulthood with improvised games amid tenement complexes and dusty vacant lots. They haven’t much, but they make do with what they have, from dirt clods to battered dolls, from passing trains to accessible rooftops. And Burnett succeeds beautifully in depicting the seemingly innate inclination of boys everywhere to take any opportunity to throw a rock. Put an unfamiliar object in its path and a dog will sniff it; an infant will put it in his mouth; and an 8-year-old boy will invariably throw a rock at it.

The dangerous terrain between youth and old age is one of the film’s central themes. “You’re not a child anymore!” a father tells his son in the opening scene. “You soon will be a goddamned man! Start learning what life is about now, son.” The father’s scolding is punctuated by a mother’s slap across the face, a stark wake-up call delivered with a sad, maternal smile.

Later an iconic shot expands on the theme, showing kids jumping from one roof to another across a two-story drop, symbolizing the perilous gap between childhood and adulthood. The camera then tilts downward to follow Stan as he descends a stairwell into that very chasm, looking up at the children as they hurdle over his head.

Along the way, the adult world is burnished with echoes of a long-lost past in the form of old Southern words and phrases that suggest where these characters have come from and what they’ve left behind, evoking memories almost archetypal in their ability to comfort as well as afflict with nostalgia for days gone by.

Rediscovering classic films can be like a series of “a-ha moments,” with missing links in the progression of cinematic style, technique and vision revealing themselves like long-lost Rosetta Stones. Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, while clearly drawing on preceding films and genres, is a seminal film for many reasons, but primarily for its application of the Italian neo-realist techniques of the ’40s and ’50s to black urban life in America; its low-budget indie aesthetic; and its use of popular music in shaping and defining its imagery.

The film’s obscurity is in large part due to its soundtrack, a wonderful blend of classic jazz, blues, R&B and pop songs for which Burnett was unable to afford the legal rights. Thus Killer of Sheep never enjoyed commercial distribution and was bottled up under threat of litigation for three decades, until Dennis Doros of Milestone Films (with a bit of financial help from director Steven Soderbergh) undertook the daunting and expensive task of securing those rights and presenting a beautifully restored 35-millimeter print, courtesy of UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Since the advent of MTV, the use of popular music in films as the all-consuming soundtrack to a scene has proliferated, most often in youth-centered films. At its worst it is a lazy method of direction, using the song rather than the image to carry the essence of the scene. But at its best, as in Killer of Sheep, lyrics and music deepen and amplify the impact of the imagery. One especially effective scene features Stan and his wife (Kaycee Moore) in a heartbreaking slow dance to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” played out in silhouette against the harsh glow of sunlight through a tenement window. Another scene, of a weekend outing derailed by a flat tire, is granted both gravity and humor by the strains of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues.”

Only one song remained out of reach. Milestone was unable to secure the rights to Washington’s “Unforgettable,” which originally punctuated the final scene, so Burnett instead opted to repeat “This Bitter Earth,” which proves not just an adequate substitute but perhaps an improvement, providing a fitting reprise for the film’s central themes.

Killer of Sheep poses no easy questions, seeks nor finds no easy solutions; it merely presents the African-American experience in a particular time and place. And, through a relentless focus on character—on everyday people and their everyday lives—Burnett manages to find the universal in the specific, depicting the timeless struggle of men and women to—as Washington sings—ensure that the dust does not obscure the glow of the rose.

Killer of Sheep (1977). Directed by Charles Burnett. Starring Henry Gayle Sanders and Kaycee Moore. 80 minutes. Not rated. A Milestone release.

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.

Forbidden Hollywood: Pre-Code Classics

The Pre-Code era, running roughly between 1930 and 1934, saw American filmmaking venture into frank and sometimes scurrilous examinations of the shadier side of life. They pushed the envelope, a bit too far in fact, causing the Hays Office to finally begin enforcing the Code Hollywood had thus far managed to evade.

Turner Classic Movies sheds light on this fascinating era of film history with 'Forbidden Hollywood," a series of DVD sets collecting some of the best films of the period.

Forbidden Hollywood 1

Red-Headed Woman (1932) is a fairly wild tale, featuring Jean Harlow as a ruthless gold digger and home-wrecker who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. The film would likely go over well today in a theater with a live audience, but on video it seems to lack what many films of the early 1930s lack: a sophisticated use of sound. Without effective music and rhythmic editing, long silences between lines of dialogue appear awkward and strained.

Also included on the set is director James Whale’s version of Waterloo Bridge (1931), the story of a down-and-out showgirl in war-torn France who is forced to turn to prostitution to make ends meet. It’s a sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute, a plotline the Code would later render impossible on the screen, even if she does come to a tragic end.

The film features Mae Clark and Douglass Montgomery as star-crossed lovers who find each other amid the air raids and destruction of World War I. The performances are strong and the special effects, though rudimentary, manage to lend an element of stirring if surreal tragedy to the proceedings despite the transparency of the techniques.

But the real value of this set is the inclusion of not one but two versions of Baby Face (1933), probably the most notorious and best of the Pre-Code classics. The film was released just as the Code came into full effect, and thus it was heavily edited, and for 70 years the original, uncensored version was thought lost. However, a print was finally discovered a few years ago and toured the country in theatrical release (see review, Daily Planet, May 26, 2006).

The film is one of the most gleefully salacious of the era, following Barbara Stanwyck as Lilly Powers as she sleeps her way to the top, literally floor by floor up the ranks of a New York bank.

The Turner release allows viewers to see both versions side by side, revealing that the attempts to tone down the film were more varied, more numerous and more hilariously inept than previously thought. The print that circulated last year was accompanied by a few additional scenes after the closing credits to give a sense of some of the changes made to the film, but the DVD release reveals much more. There must be more than a dozen edits in the first 20 minutes alone: excised words and lines, trimmed shots that jump awkwardly from one to the next, clumsy inserts covering other deletions. It’s like trimming every other word from a Lenny Bruce monologue, or removing all the innuendo from a Groucho Marx routine—take out a few pieces and the whole structure falls apart.

The cover labels this as the just the first volume in a series of Pre-Code releases from Turner, though no word yet as to what lies in store. The project promises to shed much-needed light on one the most fascinating eras of American filmmaking, when an industry found that its morals and mores were greatly at odds with a puritan government.

Forbidden Hollywood 2

Volume 2 starts off with two Shearer vehicles. The first, The Divorceé (1930), tells the story of a woman who responds to her husband’s infidelity with a pledge to live as a man lives, and thus begins a string of extramarital dalliances that the enforcement of the Code would crack down on in just a few years. Not for decades would women on screen be able to live and love as freely. Also featured is Shearer’s follow-up, A Free Soul (1931).

Ruth Chatterton runs an automobile factory in Female (1933), taking and casting aside lovers from her stable of employees at will and transferring them to a Canadian subsidiary if they get too attached. Eventually she meets her match, and from there things go down hill a bit in the feminism department until finally crashlanding in the end with a severe cop-out in which she transfers control of the firm to her husband while setting out on her new goal of producing as many as nine children. 

Three on a Match (1933) shows Bette Davis, Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak as they grow from children to adults, Dvorak along the way slipping into a life of drug addiction. Humphrey Bogart plays a small role as a gangster thug. 

Last is Night Nurse (1931), a strange story in which Barbara Stanwyck and Blondell do battle with an evil chauffeur (Clark Gable) in an effort to prevent a case of child abuse. The film is a mix of brash comedy, torrid melodrama and frolicking cheesecake as numerous pretenses are found for Stanwyck and Blondell to repeatedly strip off their clothing. 

Also included is a documentary, Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood, that puts these films in historical context, sketching out the scandals that led to Hollywood’s first tepid and later strident efforts at self-censorship. 

Forbidden Hollywood 1

Red-Headed Woman (1932).

Waterloo Bridge (1931).

Baby Face (1933).

Forbidden Hollywood 2

The Divorceé (1930).

A Free Soul (1931).

Female (1933).

Three on a Match (1933).

Night Nurse (1931)

Truth and Past Collide in Grbavica: Land of My Dreams

With Grbavica: Land of My Dreams, director Jasmila Zbanic has fashioned a thoughtful and moving film about characters defined by the past while yearning to break free from it.

Esma, a single mother, works two jobs while struggling to raise her 13-year-old daughter Sara amid the ruins and wreckage of Sarajevo’s Grbavica neighborhood, an area that functioned as a death camp during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The understated photography and camerawork emphasize the battered and worn buildings and streets. Like the people who inhabit it, Grbavica is a work in progress, a neighborhood in ruins awaiting reconstruction.

Mass graves are unearthed on a seemingly regular basis, and Esma is among the survivors who venture each week to the coroner’s office in an effort to identify the remains of lost loved ones in hopes of finding closure. This is a community of survivors still stunned by the enormity of the tragedy they have suffered; they cling to the past yet are eager to move on, to make sense of what remains.

Actress Mirjana Karanovic, as Esma, has the ability to convey a wealth of emotions with just a glance. Her face is haunted and weary, struggling in vain to mask the pain and anxiety that shape her daily life. She’s not sure she can trust people, and she has even less faith in her own ability to judge them. In every interaction Esma seems to be running through myriad interpretations of every word and gesture; she is not able to simply have a conversation, but instead weighs and measures the significance of every nuance before embarking on a reaction, a reaction which isn’t natural or instinctive but rather an only partially convincing re-creation of a natural reaction.

Esma is defined by her experiences during the war, yet she keeps her painful memories bottled up, as though with the hope that by denying them she may one day come to believe they never happened. She is not in therapy; she’s not ready for that yet. She only turns up for support group meetings once a month, when government checks are doled out.

Her daughter Sara, meanwhile, has problems of her own. Luna Mijovic portrays the budding teenager as a tomboy, aggressive, moody and mean. The absence of a father and the increasing strain on her mother and thus their home life only compound her troubles. She too looks to the past to shape her identity, taking great pride in her status as the daughter of a shaheed, a war martyr, using this knowledge as both a badge of honor as well as a convenient excuse for bad behavior when she finds herself facing discipline at school. Sara’s identity depends on a past that precedes her birth, and when, eventually, doubt is cast on that narrative, she reacts swiftly and angrily.

But this very revelation, the exposure of lies devised as protection for both daughter and mother, brings with it a new and perhaps more powerful narrative of the past, one that grants the mother the overdue credit of a survivor—credit she has long denied herself—and that grants the daughter perhaps, in a curious way, an even more exalted status. For she can now take pride not in the vague tales of a long-lost heroic father, but in the everyday reality of being the strong, blossoming, fierce daughter of a living, breathing—and ultimately heroic—mother, a survivor of war and its depravities, a woman whose strength is all the more admirable and dignified for the fact that it endures.

Both women have seen their lives turned inside out not so much by tragedy as by the deceptions used to conceal that tragedy. And when a bit of truth manages to break through those barriers, they find themselves at long last on the road to recovery.

Grbavica: Land of My Dreams (2005). Written and directed by Jasmila Zbanic. Starring Mirjana Karanovic and Luna Mijovic. 90 minutes. Not Rated.