Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead is an intense film.  It starts out bleak, turns horrific when the zombies attack, and becomes hopeless when man turns against humanity.  The formula might now be unoriginal but the power this 50 year old film retains is stronger than any horror film made since.  The fact is Night of the Living Dead is the most important horror film ever made.

Zombies attack; that is the basic plot for most undead survival horror pictures, but George Romero’s original 1968 film uses zombies more like a Hitchcock MacGuffin.  Barbara and her brother Johnny travel hours outside of Pittsburg to leave flowers in a cemetery.  Johnny jokes about her being afraid.  A man attacks.  Johnny fights him and Barbara runs away.  The man pursues and chases Barbara to an abandoned house in an isolated rural area.  This is the set up.  Ben arrives and takes refuge in the house.  By now Barbara is hysterical and incoherent and paralyzed.  Ben boards up the house as zombies group outside.  Down in the basement another group of survivors led by Mr. Cooper.  They don’t come to until they are certain danger is absent.  Cooper and Ben disagree with their course of action.  Cooper wants to barricade in the cellar.  Ben feels they stand a fighting chance upstairs where there is food and radio, and where they can observe their surroundings and maybe get away if need be.  The tension develops between who is right.

The first glimpse I ever had of Night of the Living Dead was in a horror tribute special hosted by Vincent Price in the 1980s.  It was called “Creepy Classics”.  Price provided campy commentary in between movie clips, and the first sequence shown was the cemetery scene.  I was scared by the film and did not see it complete for another 10 or so years.  I always thought Barbara was the star of the piece.  The last image I had of the film was her running into the lonely house—a shelter from the undead—and never imagined that the film could shift focus from the zombies to the horror that the human characters create.

The film sets up immediately an uneasy relationship to death: the cemetery sign has bullet holes shot into it, a foreshadowing of just how easy and dismissive death will become in this tale.  We also are uncertain of who Barbara and her brother are leaving flowers for.  Is it their father or grandfather?  We know through their conversation that the deceased is close to their mother who is too old to make the trip, but Johnny claims he cannot remember the person.  He surely could remember his own father.  That both show, in their own ways, such a distance from the dead man led me to believe it was a grandfather buried in the cemetery, especially when Johnny reminds his sister that his grandfather said he would be damned to hell for scaring Barbara in the very same cemetery when they were kids.  The set up is misleading, and must have been in 1968 when such a film was new and unbearably terrorizing—there is no way to expect that in the very first scene, led into with an impersonation of horror icon Vincent Price (“They’re coming to get you, Barbara”) that a zombie will attack the defenseless people.

Night of the Living Dead began what was, up until 2005, a trilogy known as “Undead”.  George Romero wrote and directed a series of films about human behavior in the face of catastrophe.  Night seems less a satire than the following films.  It fact there are no laughs in the picture.  It’s pretty grim.  But one bit of commentary, which leads to a death we hate to witness, looks ahead to Dawn of the Dead.  As the human race outside the isolated house discovers how to kill the zombies, their behavior becomes very monotonous.  They roam the field killings zombies dead.  They become so robotic, hypnotized by their repetitive ritual that they never check if those they’re shooting are the undead or civilians.  I will say no more, but at the destitute mood at the end of the picture I thought to myself that with a little more care something more positive might have happened.

Back to my initial impressions as a kid—I was disappointed to see that Barbara is killed by the very man whose death made her catatonic.  The finale, which I will not spoil, now, after I don’t know how many viewings, is still chilling.  Forget any idea of the film being a metaphor for racism—it is chilling to think that if everybody in that house listened to Mr. Cooper and hid in the cellar, they would have gotten out alive...well, maybe.  That the most despicable and cowardly man in the cast turned out to be right all along, and to a lesser extent what happens to Duane, make us doubt everything we know about the world.

I will say after my latest viewing, I was still shrunken in my chair.  I don’t think I had moved for the final 15 minutes—I am still stunned by this picture; it was not safe to move.  I felt safer contorted in my seat.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Director: George A. Romero

Writers: John A. Russo & George A. Romero

Stars: Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, and Karl Hardman

USA

In English

Runtime: 96 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350/

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

As a contemporary viewer familiar with war-time films of the forties, Shadow of a Doubt is a disturbing and relentlessly modern look at the corruption of small town American life. In an era when the movies all but had to portray only positive images of this country, Alfred Hitchcock was testing the limits of decency and morality as defined by Hollywood’s Production Code. Hitchcock takes the all-American family and introduces malice so true it consumes.

The horror is, of course, Uncle Charlie. He visits his sister and her family in Santa Rosa, California, and develops a strange relationship with his niece, Charlotte, affectionately referred to as Charlie in honor of her uncle. She soon suspects her Uncle Charlie of being the Merry Widow murderer and is plunged into turmoil over her family obligations and the vulgarity of his acts.

The director’s previous American films had had a distinctly English feel: gothic, elegant, mild-mannered, even Saboteur, the American remake of The 39 Steps. Hitchcock was keen on capturing the America he’d been seeing, and Thornton Wilder was hired to script the original story that was, by Hitchcock’s own admission, his first American film.

Hitchcock would often advise his actors on a technique he called negative acting, where an actor would be smiling at the beginning of a scene and then lose the smile after a dramatic blow, capturing the extremes of human emotion. He was working in archetypes, presenting clearly made movies to mainstream audiences. The structure of Shadow of a Doubt unfolds similarly. When we’re first introduced to the Newton family, it’s a kind of clichéd look at bucolic family life. Everybody is nice and genteel and pleasant to an almost cartoonish degree, or at least to a laughable one. This might appear dated when we, less as Americans and more as human begins, know that this isn’t the reality of daily life. But the light atmosphere Hitchcock cultivates in the film’s early scenes heightens the dark aspects of the story to follow, dark like the column of smoke snaking behind Uncle Charlie’s train.

Perhaps the most glaring detail of the film is the Young Charlie’s relationship with her uncle. Throughout, Hitchcock connects the two Charlies with similar visuals, setting up the recurring Hitchcockian theme of doubles. Young Charlie is always saying how alike they are... like twins! There is even a disturbing scene where Uncle Charlie gives to his niece a ring from one of his victims. While the thought is innocent enough I guess, the Uncle slips the ring onto her finger not unlike in a marriage ceremony. In the end, Young Charlie is forced into becoming like her Uncle because of her Uncle. I was always struck by Young Charlie’s line, “Don’t touch me, Uncle Charlie,” after she confronts him with her beliefs. This is the moment when Charlie has lost her innocence. She later threatens to kill her uncle if he doesn’t leave the family.

Originally it seems their relationship was to take an even edgier turn. In Hitchcock’s own story outline, dated May 11, 1942, he writes, “...her (Young Charlie) being attracted to him (Uncle Charlie) is going to possibly upset the humorous state of affairs between the Uncle and the family.” Is Hitchcock detailing their relationship as it exists in the finished film, or is this a direction the director would have liked to travel with his unconventional family drama? It reads to me like the latter, and while it is clear that Young Charlie has very confused feeling towards her Uncle, the family never is bothered by their friendship. Of course the extreme relations would never have been allowed to continue into a second draft of the screenplay back in 1942, but this idea gives us excellent insight into Hitchcock’s lifelong obsession with unusual sexual behavior.

(The outline for Shadow of a Doubt is published in Dan Auiler’s invaluable book, Hitchcock’s Notebooks, which gives a full understanding of Hitchcock’s working methods from conception to release. The book is a patchwork made up of materials covering Hitchcock’s entire career.)

The performances in the film are among the best in all of Hitchcock’s work. In a marked detour from his usual mother figures, Emma Newton (Young Charlie’s mother) is not just the sweet and doting martyr expected of the era. One gets the feeling she’s on the verge of a breakdown, and Patricia Collinge gives a complex and heartbreaking performance that perhaps went beyond the call of the script. Teresa Wright is perfect as Charlie. She expels the structure of the story exactly; acting naive by way of Shirley Temple in the beginning, then tortured and conflicted at the end. Though it is the showiest part, it should not be overlooked: Joseph Cotton as Uncle Charlie, for a 1940s movie killer, is unique. When I first saw the film and even now, I was surprised by how much Anthony Hopkins’ performance of Hannibal Lector mirrored Uncle Charlie, especially when Cotton gives the speech at the dinner table about “those silly wives.” His voice is emotionless and monotone, as if he’s slipping into his compulsion. It’s a remarkable portrayal not only for its time but now. It elicits a response from today’s audiences that maybe they were not expecting from such an old film.

An unsuccessful element of the picture is the recurring image of the dancers’ waltz. It is shown after moments of great tension, almost the euphoric release of a satiated killer. The image can be seen as Hitchcock’s visual attempt at Uncle Charlie’s unstable mind, but I’m afraid the technique is just bewildering. It is not a dated element of the film; I can’t see it working in the 1940s either, but we’ve seen the director use this technique in his silent days. It feels like the weak cousin of the famous shot in The Lodger of the fade-away glass ceiling. Since Hitchcock could not dramatize the footsteps from the floor above in sound, he simply showed us the suspected villain walking over the heads of the innocent family below. The similar theme in Shadow of a Doubt never works as the director intended, and in fact feels like a copout. Instead of showing us the emotional resolution to very intense scenes (the finale on the train, for example) this shot quickly fades up, accompanied by the tune of the Merry Widow’s Waltz.

The Waltz was infused into the dramatic score by frequent Hitchcock composer Dimitri Tiomkin. The score itself is melodramatic and evasive, and indeed Hitchcock’s scores were the typical European sound the Golden Age is remembered for. It is an unsettling sound for this picture, one that distracts too much from the action onscreen without support. It wasn’t until the director teamed with Bernard Herrmann in the mid-fifties that the Hitchcock film found its music. Herrmann’s music would take on narrative dimensions that would have served well a film like Shadow of a Doubt, but taken on its own Tiomkin’s score is very good. He himself is an underappreciated composer from the era, and his score for Hitchcock’s I Confess is actually very good.

Ultimately, Shadow of a Doubt remains one of Hitchcock’s best movies because it is a clear example of the director’s sense of the world. From out of the censored studio era, it’s refreshing that an artist could commit to celluloid a personal, cynical voice. Nothing, it seems, is as it should be in a Hitchcock film, and I’m not talking about genre. While his films are certainly nail biters, I believe the reason Hitchcock was so great was because he understood the human condition and its flaws. Psycho is not a horror film. It’s a complex study of trapped souls. Nor is Shadow of a Doubt simply a suspense film. It’s a story of morality and of people trapped within themselves, almost certainly a parallel of the repressed social conditions. To call Alfred Hitchcock’s films shallow is to ignore the complexity that is bubbling beneath the surface of his facades.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Thornton Wilder
Stars: Joseph Cotton, Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge

USA

In English

Runtime: 108 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036342/

Great Dictator, The (1940)

The Great Dictator begins with a note telling us that any resemblance between Hynkel the Dictator and the Jewish Barber is purely coincidental. Is this supposed to be a joke, or is it Charlie Chaplin’s way of separating his comic persona from Adolf Hitler? Chaplin, a world recognized celebrity since the nineteen-teens, was arguably the most popular man in the world when Hitler took power in Germany in 1933. It is said the dictator crafted his mustache after Chapin’s Little Tramp to feed off of the comedian’s popularity. Was it also a coincidence that Chaplin retired his Tramp persona in 1936’s Modern Times?

Charlie Chaplin’s most daring film takes place in a fictionalized version of Germany called Tomainia. In a prologue set in 1918, years before Adenoid Hynkel takes power, a bewildered Jewish Barber is thrown into WWI and suffers a severe injury that keeps him in hospital until WWII. Chaplin plays the Barber and, of course, the dictator, giving credence to the fact that the opening note may be a lighthearted wink to the audience who, in 1940, would recognize Chaplin anywhere. But The Great Dictator is an unusual comedy, something more sinister for it satirizes one of the darkest memories of world history. The Barber escapes, eager to return to his beloved shop just as the Tomainian storm troopers begin severe persecution of the ghettos. The Barber meets Hannah, a Jewish girl, who assists in fending off the storm troopers. This is one of the many scenes that are laugh out funny but exist with an undercurrent of dread, panic, and sickness because the true events, 70 years later, fueled further by modern examples of bigotry, are no less painful. Perhaps because WWII exists so vividly in motion images the horrors will never fade.

The Great Dictator contrasts the experiences of Hynkel and the Barber during changing times; for the dictator, changes towards perfection; for the Barber, a disintegration of everything he understands.

The film’s most famous scenes give us a stark contrast to both of Chaplin’s characters, and stand as perhaps the greatest examples of Chaplin’s dedication to rehearsal and perfectionism—in short, to his craft. The first is the chilling, beautiful and bizarre dance Hynkel performs with a feather-light globe of the world. His Ministry of the Interior, Garbitsch, informs him that with their new plans Hynkel will become Emperor of the World, a thought that sends the ruthless dictator up the wall, literally. He dances to the music of Wagner, incidentally Hitler’s favorite composer. It is the opening to his Lohengrin, a light, airy but pretentious piece of music. Chaplin’s moves are narcissistic and bold, graceful but futile. In trying to juggle the world, cradle it, domineer it, Hynkel pops his globe and is left with a deflated, impotent piece of rubber. The Jewish Barber then shaves a man to Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5. Here Chaplin’s Barber is a cousin to his famous Tramp. The Barber lathers the man’s face, takes his blade, sharpens it, and with perfectly precise motions hits every note of Brahms’ innocent, frenetic music.

It is interesting that with all of Hynkel’s ambition, his contribution to the world ends with a deflated balloon—a waste for someone who, like Hitler, had the brilliance to muster the masses for a common goal. The simple Barber, with the mere shaving of a man, enriches the world with his craft. The choice of music, too, shows Chaplin as a Renaissance Man and as someone who, despite preferring silent films, was keen on using every element of sound to make his point: Hynkel is marked with heavy, pretentious music, the Barber with humane culture.

Chaplin’s craft belongs to an era of silent film comedy. In both sequences, silent except for the music, we can witness the skill and precision of Chaplin’s art. He was not improvisational as many might hope; someone who could simply step in front of a camera and command it. He rehearsed. The choreography, the timing to the music, is such that we know that music was prerecorded, and that Chaplin would go from beginning to end mastering every gesture, would perfect difficult tasks like spinning a ball on his fingertip, scaling a tabletop with grace, and memorizing not only the music, but the particular performance of the music so that his impact is striking. This is not something that can be achieved in post production. Like Fred Astaire, Chaplin is seen often in medium or long shot, and the camera simply stays on him and we see his performance with minimal cuts, and in the case of the shaving sequence, arguably more awe-inspiring, one continuous shot. Among other things it allows us to lament the loss of great talent when we view our contemporary movie comedians. Chaplin understood that moviemaking was not spontaneous but the result of dedication, obsession, and doing and doing again.

It is difficult to look at the realities of the Nazi’s activities, but Hitler himself, someone who was so serious and seemed to lack humility, is prone to satire. It is one of the purposes of art to critique the world, and the powerful who control it, and to create for the public a better world. Chaplin does all this, and that he managed to create his epic in 1940, in Hollywood, after a war and great depression, with political tensions high and politicians eager to prosecute anyone who would contradict their ideology, is a testament to his popularity and socio-political awareness. He often resembles Hitler perfectly, no more so than when wearing the double-cross trench coat, and his inflections and diction when speaking his Tomainian gibberish remind me of Hitler’s great speeches in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. That Chaplin is a great comedian only helps him further, but the scenes with the Jewish Barber in the Ghettos were not so funny. Yes they were, but I felt sick watching them. We know what went on there, what would happen if the Nazis arrested anyone for any reason, where they’d end up. I don’t think it was inappropriate for Chaplin to make this film. The subject should not be off limits. My great admiration from the director stems from the fact that his films are often sad. They’re filled with pathos and meaning and have relevance to our society. In The Great Dictator, there are numerous scenes of the people hiding in the Ghettos, afraid and angry. I could imagine the real life scenarios like this, and unlike in Chaplin’s film things would not turn out so well.

Much has been made of the film’s controversial ending. It was Chaplin’s Jewish Barber’s speech to the soldiers of Tomainia that got him a file at the FBI; the Barber, mistaken for Hinkel, is to make a speech about the recent invasion of Osterlich. While facing the podium, unlike Hinkel whose words were so brutish that they’d bend the microphones, the Barber pleads for peace, preaches against greed and intolerance, and offers all those listening an opportunity for change. This speech, some 6 minutes long, is a stark difference to the rest of the picture. I think it’s a great ending, something that caps Chaplin’s political satire and offers hope where in real life at that time there seemed very little.

I will say no more to add to these discussions. I’d rather examine the film’s beginning. I don’t think it works. It’s not funny and feels like a separate piece to the rest of the film. We see the Barber fighting in WWI, how he becomes injured. In fact this prologue serves the narrative later as here he befriends a soldier who will become prominent in Hinkel’s Tomainia, but the sequence feels more like a one-reeler Chaplin might have made early in his career. And indeed did make in the 1920s. The comedy is broad and general, the effects small and unprofessional, and it throws off the structure of the film. It also seems remarkably unprofessional, as if it was an afterthought thrown in after the rest of the picture was cut together. We don’t see Hinkel’s rise to power, and seeing the Barber’s, I feel, gets the film off to a slow start.

There is a reason Chaplin is considered the greatest screen comedian of the 20^th Century. His films stood for something more than broad physical comedy. They have touching stories, and his images often contained gaiety and gravitas. With The Great Dictator, a boldly political work, he risked offending the dictators of the world when instead he could have made a film about Napoleon. At the time, many of Hitler’s “great” military accomplishments were still ahead of him, and the US had not officially entered the war, and Chaplin, sensing as much of the world probably did, what was about to happen, decided to do something about it.

Great Dictator, The (1940)

Director: Charlie Chaplin

Writer: Charlie Chaplin

Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, and Jack Oakie

USA

In English

Runtime: 124 minutes

IMDB link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032553/

Kissing on the Mouth (2005)

Kissing on the Mouth is a most appropriate title for a movie in which all four—four—of its characters are whiny children playacting as adults. The most profound words out of their mouths are, “Just, like...,” “Seriously!” and the popular, “What?” They have no insights into themselves, don’t understand what it’s like to be an adult let alone alive in 2003 (the movie’s release year), and they look around like zombies at each other, smirking because they don’t understand what their friends are saying and they are uncomfortable. I hate to say this because it is not a worthless picture, but it was a depressing experience to sit through this movie.

Ellen is recently out of college, still dependent on her parents for a job on the weekends, and spends her free time having sex with her ex-boyfriend, Chris. Ellen’s roommate, Patrick, is working on an audio project, recording interviews with people as they tell of their breakup stories, their dreams from when they were young, their parents, and every other illusion that is shattered once you become an adult. Patrick and Ellen do not have a sexual relationship, but I think Patrick has a crush on her. In one scene I think he imagines making out with her in the shower. I say I think because I wasn’t sure if the woman was Ellen or her best friend, Laura. Looking on IMDb, the actress playing Laura seems to be related to writer / director / actor (producer / editor/ photographer, etc) Joe Swanberg, who plays Patrick, so they’re probably brother and sister so he wasn’t making out with her. It’s sad when a movie is sloppy you can’t tell the characters apart. When Patrick learns that his roommate is still seeing her ex, he gets passive-aggressive.

The movie is filled with improvised dialogue and conversations; the characters stutter, spout out one word phrases and stop to think, hum and ho while trying to think of what’s next. Swanberg is one of the more prolific Mumblecore directors and this is a trademark of the movement, but a talent like Aaron Katz knows the right tempo for his characters’ mumblings, and knows enough to create powerful visuals without, for example, showing an untold number of close-ups of hands or bare feet. At first, the shots of the characters’ feet go along with the title and the images it congers, ideas of childhood wonder and naiveté, but after the tenth such image I began to realize that if Swanberg couldn’t rely on these images he just might have to find the truth and honesty in his scenarios. Such as it is, he dodges every honest moment for convention, with dialogue that is not funny, profound, or insightful. The best piece of dialogue made me laugh out loud, though: Ellen and Chris have just had sex, he wants to talk. He thinks he’s going nowhere. Ellen says, “No one is. Have you heard Patrick’s project?” It’s a funny line, one that was probably written down in some sort of script. The underlying story, a woman in need of sex with a familiar partner though unwilling to emotionally commit, is interesting, but inexperienced filmmakers need to know that looking at a character’s face, or hands or feet, or random out of focus shots, does not a profundity make.

In general the film looks amateurish. We can’t really fault the filmmakers, though. Mumblecore is an underground movement, one that offers true originality among an increasingly homogenized American independent market, but this is poorly lit digital filmmaking, the sort made with an untrained eye. Swanberg does not know how to mount the camera to a tripod. This is probably intentional, but a shaky camera is a superficial way to add drama or tension in a scene. That should have occurred in the writing stage.

One plus for the film is its explicitness, and beyond that the bodies the movie uncovers. Swanberg, actress Kate Winterich (Ellen) and actor Kevin Pittman are all naked in Kissing on the Mouth. None of them are conventional beauties, though Winterich has moments of elegance. There’s an awkwardly framed shot on Pittman putting on a condom, and Chris and Ellen’s lovemaking scenes are as honest a sexual coupling I’ve ever seen on the screen: folds in their skin, blemishes, realistic sexual positions, the quite. It made me recall the sounds of lovemaking as I’ve experienced them, and it’s always soft breathing and something like pressure or tension filling the background. Patrick masturbates in the shower, and Swanberg, in what must be a ballsy move for a director, actually shows himself ejaculating. He shows off his round, pale belly, and this explicitness was exciting and refreshing.

But this is not a very good movie. At only 78 minutes it was an endurance test. Nothing much happened, and I generally love when movies don’t tell a story. At least we’re compensated with atmosphere and character. Kissing on the Mouth is the work of a young filmmaker who may or may not have something interesting to say. Joe Swanberg should try to think about what it’s like living as a 20-something, trying to make it for yourself, and hoping to enjoy as much of it as you can. He probably has great insights just as a human being, but he can’t render them onscreen quite yet. Years have passed since this one, so maybe he has.

Kissing on the Mouth (2005)

Director: Joe Swanberg

Writers: Joe Swanberg and cast

Stars: Kate Winterich, Joe Swanberg, and Kevin Pittman

USA

In English

Runtime: 78 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446725/

Times of Harvey Milk, The (1984)

I had never heard of Harvey Milk before seeing the documentary made by Robert Epstein. Milk took up a cause similar to other socio-political leaders who dared to challenge so-called moral convention by introducing to a wide audience a different way of life. People like Martin Luther King. Both Milk and King have had effects on the course of American history and indeed have inspired millions of people around the world. Why then did I not hear of the name Harvey Milk until I was 22?

Milk was America’s first openly gay elected official. San Francisco mayor George Moscone had divided up the city into districts allowing for neighbors at large to vote for more personal representatives, people the people could feel would do more for them. Milk was elected as City Councilman for District 5, the Castro area where an ever growing gay population was finally winning recognition and civil rights. But with the election of a gay man to public office taking the issue of homosexuality out of hushed whispers and screaming it loud inside newspapers, conservatives began proposing legislation to deny and in some cases strip Americans of their rights. While there was reason to celebrate Milk’s victory and the victory of gay people across the nation, communities in America were passing laws against gay people. The Briggs Initiative was proposed as Prop 6, a law that would fire all gay teachers from public schools in California. The reasoning behind this was that gays who want to live openly could more easily prey upon children.

The Times of Harvey Milk, created out of masterfully used archival footage and straight-forward, honest talking heads, shows a segment of a debate between Milk and Senator Briggs, cultivator of the initiative. Milk correctly points out that most pedophiles are straight males, and Briggs, apparently unfamiliar with this info gathered by several sources including the FBI, offers his reasoning for removing gays, in his estimation 5% of the population: if gay teachers were fired, than there is a 5% less chance that children would be sexually assaulted. This reasoning gets a laugh out of Harvey. Why not go ahead and remove the 95% of heterosexual teachers to totally protect the children? The thinking is ludicrous, and Prop 6 lost by a wide margin.

I think the documentary genre is suffering now more than ever. Most would disagree, and statistics would show me up: documentaries show in major art-house theaters, and in rare but evident cases they play in multiplexes across the nation. They make money, and the genre is quite popular with young film buffs... to an extent. I think it’s still a specialized genre or form of filmmaking, but when I say that documentaries are suffering I’m talking about the art of the medium. This is why The Times of Harvey Milk works so well. Most modern documentaries feel, look and sound like reality shows. They have a central character, often the filmmaker, taking up a task and accomplishing it with a camera in tow. They usually provide narration explaining what’s happening on screen. Often the interview segments are cut together so that the subjects form complete but superficial thoughts through the splicing together of many sound bites, and wall-to-wall music is laid in to I guess keep the audience awake, and this music is poorly chosen and repetitive.

The Times of Harvey Milk is relatively quiet, eloquently photographed, and it features subjects with insights and personalities, and the filmmaker brings them out fully formed characters. And director / editor Epstein lets these people speak. Some of them break down when talking of Harvey’s death and San Francisco’s reaction. Epstein isn’t a cheat; he doesn’t go for extreme close-ups of their eyes or their hands fiddling with a handkerchief, or even worse out of focus shots of completely uninvolving objects around the room. He lets us watch their faces, see the rage and pain of Harvey’s death, the joys that accompanied his many accomplishments, and their fondness for the man. And again they all speak so brilliantly. A labor union leader who admits to before having known Harvey having somewhat anti-gay tendencies goes through a complete story arc. He reveals that because of his association with Harvey through their like-minded political views he is in favor of gay rights.

I hate to be personal beyond my opinion, but with documentaries like The Times of Harvey Milk it seems impossible to disassociate myself from the story I have seen. I came out around the time I first saw the documentary in a college class... maybe a year earlier. It’s been so long I can’t remember now. When I was watching the film I couldn’t believe that this man, Harvey Milk, who accomplished a lot in a short career, has, since his death, been ignored by the mainstream media. He is certainly not forgotten; not in San Francisco where he was assassinated by a colleague: a statue has been erected of him. And indeed Milk’s name is not buried under the rubble of history. The problem is people have to search for him, unlike other leaders or influential persons who’ve charged their constituencies and extended themselves beyond them—history and the American population have exalted these men as exemplary, have named days after them, and their life’s work is taught in history books. But not Harvey Milk’s. Why?

The documentary is asking this question but in a larger context: if Milk were straight, would his murderer have served only 5 ½ years in prison? Would or should he have not instead been serving life?

Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were killed by Dan White, elected to office at the same time as Milk, and he is made the antagonist of the film. White is an interesting character: an idealist whose spirit is crushed by an ever-changing and degrading society, at least this was the defense’s position. White sunk into the City Hall with a loaded gun and extra bullets after resigning his position and then later wanting to recant his resignation. It is against the law for White to regain his job, and when Moscone supposedly told White he would not be reinstated White shot him, and then shot him again. He did the same to Harvey Milk: shot him to the ground, shot him three more times in the head, and then delivering one final execution shot at point blank range. It is clear who the murderer was, but the jury, supposedly a jury of straight white conservatives, a true group of Dan White’s peers, found him guilty of manslaughter, a crime that sentenced him to 8 years in prison. He was paroled after 5 ½.

The aftermath of Harvey’s death is quite spectacular: thousands took to the streets for a candlelight vigil beginning on Castro Street, where Harvey Milk lived, and it spread several blocks to City Hall. The aftermath of the jury verdict was quite different. A mob stormed City Hall, fought with police and set cars. One image I found striking was a protestor holding a sign, “Avenge Harvey Milk”. I was angry that Milk’s death meant nothing to those jurors and the millions they represent then and now in the United States, but despite it all I was depressed that this was the reaction. This violence was not what Harvey Milk campaigned for. A close friend of his says this in the documentary. And it depressed me because ultimately, at least in the short term, Harvey Milk had lost. His death inspired violence, and I was further discouraged to learn that Dan White committed suicide in 1985, a year after the documentary was released. When I first saw this film in class, many of the students felt that justice was finally served. Not I; the final chapter in this story was simply another death. What a waste.

I began this essay by referring to Harvey Milk in a more formal way by calling him “Milk”. When revising it, I noticed that half-way through I began calling him Harvey. I promise that this was unintentional. The film, I think, breaks down barriers between you or me and its subject. We get to know who Harvey Milk was, his kindnesses and tenacity, both terrific qualities in friends and public officials. We grow to love this guy through archival footage, and more importantly by how he had shaped the lives of everyone the filmmakers chose to speak with.

Why then is Harvey Milk still a relatively unknown figure? Why don’t we have a national Harvey Milk Day? Are there no politicians, gay or straight, with the balls to support such an honor? Would committing political suicide not be worth honoring the life of one man who died for making the world better for others?

Times of Harvey Milk, The (1984)

Director: Rob Epstein

Writers: Judith Coburn, Rob Epstein & Carter Wilson

Stars: Harvey Fierstein (Narrator)

USA

In English

Runtime: 90 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088275/

23rd Psalm Branch: Parts I & II (1967 & 1978)

Experimental cinema is a niche not many of us venture into. Some more or less narrative films have been experimental in their handling of story sequence or the audacity of their imagery. We have numerous examples of this type of experimental film, but the genre as it has been parodied by and large finds its roots in filmmakers like Maya Deren and of course Stan Brakhage. His 23^rd Psalm Branch is, as cinema, anti-cinematic, and as experimental work, a perfect example. Perhaps my difficulty in trying to understand 23^rd Psalm Branch comes from my tradition with narrative films. I was looking for a story, and in fact was trying to create one in the images I saw, but this film works against convention, and this is refreshing and paradoxically makes the film difficult.

The film is in two parts, made at different times (1967 and 1978), and is completely silent. The director’s approach to his craft, wildly original and chemically and physically complicated, was partly created by distorting the actual film stock he used, in this case 8mm, by scratching, burning, or painting on it, creating visuals without photographic light. This is a style that, for many, will have its limits, and indeed I find it to be self-indulgent and defiantly confusing, but in the case of 23^rd Psalm Branch, Brakhage takes old war footage and fuses it with his technique. The first part is an artistic rendering of WWII, and psychological terrain that leads to the horrors of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. In some cases it seemed I was looking in on the membrane of society; some shots look like microscopic footage of blood flowing through veins, some looked like the surface of the brain, and the ever flickering, ever changing kaleidoscopic vision was a perfect manifestation of a world using destruction to solve its problems. The second part tires in Brakhage’s mind to recreate Vienna, Austria, the birth country of Adolf Hitler, but I found this shorted part of the film more erratic and less representative of any motivation. It seemed to me, in both parts, Brakhage might have been comparing the horror and violence of war outside the United States to the relative tranquility that, up until September 2001, defined American civilian living. Both parts have moments of peace, of quiet, and seem to represent the American dream, but we are given allusions to the Nazis, their great architecture, the philosopher Nietzsche, who Hitler admired. The films, apparently part of a 31 piece project spanning several years, were made during and after the Vietnam War, and I think Brakhage is arguing for humility and common sense over the nature of war, and warning his audience, those who are manipulated and indifferent to it, that we support war by being silent.

The film’s title is taken from Psalm 23 of the King James Bible, and is quoted here:

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou prepares a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”

In this passage, quoted exactly but not in the poem-structure it is generally seen in, God is said to be our shepherd, leading us down a path of goodness and mercy where we will dwell in heaven along with our enemies, who will be seated beside us. Is the film a search by its director to find God or at least meaning in war? Or is it a warning against using religion as an excuse to execute war?

It is obvious Brakhage borrows the title from the Bible, but the film’s full title, 23^rd Psalm Branch, recalls in equal measure a typical war movie from Hollywood’s silver age. 23^rd Psalm Branch could have been a B-grade Ronald Regan picture or a Sam Fuller effort, and indeed the film shows us images of war; some startling, some familiar, including the familiar and often revisited visage of Adolf Hitler. But Brakhage crafts less a history of WWII but lays down visually the mentality of war on human beings. In quoting this Bible passage, is Brakhage forgiving his enemies, putting his faith in God that the life we lead is merely His will, or is he being less direct with his spiritual curiosity and asking why in war we go so far? Or is he saying nothing, offering us a jolt to our senses in an effort to get us asking these questions ourselves? I’m not familiar with Brakhage having only seen a handful of his work, but if I would to danger a guess, I’d say the latter. Truth be told, I found very little meaning in the film. It worked as an experiment but it did not engage me. But I think I am being too traditional and cannot fault the film for what it is.

In my self-conscious attempt to view the movie, one that went off relatively well (I was wide awake for the whole picture despite silent one hour running time), I was trying hard to link images together with ideas, trying always to stay ahead of the picture. I stayed with it, and often was impressed by the beauty of Brakhage’s colors and rhythms, but I am a very literal person. I find my patience for extremely non-narrative films to be low, but again this is my fault and not the film’s. I need to better acquaint myself with the director’s work, and thanks to Criterion’s 56-film primer, I can get but a taste of the director’s vast 350 picture career. I will say I am eager to see more, and have, but a vast project like 23^rd Psalm Branch is a more difficult challenge than a 2 minute piece on Chinese characters, the director’s last work, made in 2003. I guess in a way my problem with these kinds of films is that they require less effort from the viewer; we only need to sit back and look, let the images pass over our retinas, and then afterwards, when the lights come up, should we think about what we’ve seen. This is why I think the film is anti-cinematic. The images come so fast and contorted that they’re more like sensations, and their impressions, if felt at all, are realized when every single image has been received. But maybe in saying anti-cinematic I really mean defiantly non-linear, devoid of plot or character, basically going against everything I’ve ever thought a film could be.

In a sense Brakhage continually tried to redefine what cinema is. His enthusiasm is overwhelming but I can’t say he succeeded in making excellent movies. He made experiments, fascinating, original experiments, but average viewers will not care. I consider myself well cultured in film but I cannot rank any of Brakhage’s work among the great works of documentary and fiction film. That is not to say he wasn’t a great artist, or that my opinion will not change over time, but to be completely honest a great deal of his work feels like an endurance test. To pass the test doesn’t make you a greater cineophile, but someone who enjoys experimental films.

Two recommendations about Brakhage’s movies: most are silent, and I know most people when watching silent movies often add their own soundtracks via iPods or MP3s. I am begging people to view his work without any sounds. All I had playing was the hum of my Blu-ray player and that was enough. Music tends to dictate the pace of the images, and while I can’t promise myself this, I hope to view every silent movie from now on without a score, unless the score was devised or approved by the director. My second, and maybe more important recommendation, is to view his films on the biggest screen you can find. IMAX might be perfect. Because they are so visual and impressionable nothing else should invade our eyes, including the vast black of the dark theater, or the black bars on widescreen televisions.

Brakhage does not need to be recommended or warned against. Chances are if you’ve heard the name, buried somewhere under film history, you know what you’re looking for.

23rd Psalm Branch: Parts I & II (1967 & 1978)

Director: Stan Brakhage

USA

Silent

Part I runtime: 48 minutes (18 fps)

Part II runtime: 30 minutes (18 fps)

The total running time for both parts, on Criterion's Blu-ray and DVD, is 63 minutes.

IMDB links:

Part I:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0278885/

Part II:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0278886/

Tree of Life, The (2011)

I looked and saw the creation of the universe and of the planet Earth. I looked and saw an American family. The entirety of it was life itself as it has evolved through millions of years of impressions and booms. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is about these equally enormous forces. It is as ambitious a film as I have ever seen, certainly one of the most visionary works of cinema in recent decades.

It is difficult to narrow in on what the film is about. It is not a traditional narrative. In fact the film in form and style is entirely experimental, and the scope of the story is vast. We begin with light, the basic building block of the universe, and we see a woman, Mrs. O’Brien, receiving a letter. She obviously belongs to the 1950s. It is a death notice; her son has died at war. We follow her eldest child, Jack, as an adult in present day New York. He is trying, as his mother did, to make sense of his brother’s death, and in these early scenes time does not exist. Terrence Malick cuts back and forth, to the mother as a child, Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien, Jack’s parents, as newlyweds and after their son’s funeral, where Mrs. O’Brien asks God what has led to her son being killed. Malick then shows the most startling and insane sequence: the creation of life. Light, explosions, lava, earth, water, the elements; single-celled organisms and then land creatures, dinosaurs, and always, always, trees. Though the film opens with a quote from The Book of Job, Malick does not show us the bible’s creation of man. There is no Adam and Eve, only the building blocks that were laid to waste for our arrival. Among other things the film is about spirituality, about metaphysics, more than religion.

But can anyone answer truthfully why God would take this woman’s son? Mrs. O’Brien offers to her children two ways through life: the way of Nature and the way of Grace. Are these opposing forces? Do they represent the different philosophies of mother and father, their own ways of raising their children? Mr. O’Brien believes in toughening them up, preparing them for a viscous, dog-eat-dog adulthood, whereas Mrs. O’Brien wants them to love every flower, every leaf, uniquely. Whether Nature and Grace stand for the feuding parents is really irrelevant when considering if Nature and Grace can co-exist. This is one of the many questions Malick seems to be asking. Are we our own creation, led to this point by a history of its own making, or has God shaped us to be like Him? But then wouldn’t God, Nature, and Grace be the same entity? Is the film arguing that religion is a convention of morality, that a “civilized” society cannot function without an institution to hold its shame in place, and that what some call God does not exist? I’m sure many would disagree but in this film, like in any great work of art, we are not given answers. Any interpretation is valid.

The special effects work as they seldom do in modern movies: they are a part of a philosophical search for meaning. By juxtaposing an American family with the creation of the universe, Malick is suggesting some big questions. The reel-long sequence is stunning, and Malick pulls it off. The first time I saw the picture, not expecting anything like what I was about to see, I was stunned. My jaw dropped and it felt as if I did not breathe for the entire sequence. When I saw the film again I surprisingly was not as awed. The visual effects are still great, beyond brilliant, utterly convincing (except for the dinosaurs—they lack realistic texture). I hate to admit it but the sequence comes off more as pretentious and lacking in the same drama that will follow. The sequence is still powerful but the existence of a family, the true meat of the film, is far more fascinating.

Terrence Malick has created an impression of family life like I’ve experienced only once in my life: while living my youth. I am only 25 years old. I did not grow up in the 1950s but my father did. And he raised me in a similar fashion as Mr. O’Brien did his kids. And my mom was always more lenient and affectionate and playful. As I looked at the screen I felt I was watching fractions of my own childhood. There’s a sequence mid-way through the film where Mr. O’Brien goes away on a business trip, and Jack and his brothers are excited and playful. This was my mood when my dad was at work or away for long periods of time. There was a weight lifted off of the house, but looking back now I realize that a great deal of the hostility was imagined, and that my insecurities around my father manifested themselves as anger and repression.  But I was stunned to see this in a movie. To hear Jack whisper the things he’d like to say to his father while he is being disciplined is something I can easily relate to. At one moment he asks God to kill his father, and sadly this too is something I can relate to. There are also depicted in the film moments of beauty, such as the scene when Jack kisses his younger brother’s arm twice. It brought tears to my eyes because I could remember similar moments of peace with my own brother. Maybe my experiences do not parallel the film so much as Malick has touched upon what it is like to be in a family, the joys and pains and every emotion in between, but however artfully I can describe Malick’s work, the simple fact is that it touched me deeply.

Jack seems to be having a crisis of faith. He notices in his young age a lack of action on God’s part, and this silence is so frightening to him that he acts out. He says to himself and to God after witnessing a kid his age drown in a pool, ‘There’s no reason to be good. You just do what you want to.’ I don’t know the denomination of the O’Brien’s church but I was raised Catholic, and many of the same practices and hostilities existed in my church and in my younger relationship to God. I have since lost any notion of divinity, but that’s not important. To Jack, God seems linked to his father. They have the same will, the same authority. Both seem to preach, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ This causes Jack more pain, and at one point he thinks something about his father that I truly fell: “You wrestle inside me.” This is an issue that a repressed, 1950s Christian society probably felt a lot, and through the simple action of shushing, like when Jack’s mom stops him from asking embarrassing questions in public, people were raised to keep these thoughts or emotions inside. That’s what men do, civilized people. And it is maddening.

The way Malick directs the moments in this family’s life is astounding. The camera never once functions as we think it should. It moves like an eye: free-wielding, focusing on something and then quickly turning to something else, always curious about what’s next. The film is more a memory. Malick creates impressions of what it’s like to be a kid at any age, but he does a particularly great job in recreating a realistic 1940s / 50s. Jessica Chastain’s hair is never perfectly quaffed like in traditional period pieces, the lawns are not even, green fields of grass; they have weeds and dead spots. The streets are laid with browning petals and potholes, and the clothes are of their time, not a recreation. Malick’s camera moves through the space of the 1950s in a most anachronistic fashion. In my mind at least, when films are set in 1950s America their cameras usually recreate the cinematic style of the era: careful, expressionally-lit compositions mounted on tripods. Camera angles lining up to the characters’ points of view, absolutely no hand-held work. The Tree of Life uses rather liberally the Steadicam, and the effect is dreamlike and haunting, and it recreates the mood of life back then, at least as I’ve imagined it.

I hope come Oscar time the Academy remembers this film. I know—who cares about the Oscars? But it looks like the best picture of the year is an American effort, and if the Academy Awards truly reward the best in American cinema then The Tree of Life should be nominated in several categories. Best picture, director, screenplay, editing, special effects, costumes, make-up, and acting. The acting category is going to be tricky. This is Terrence Malick’s film. His performers merely dramatize his vision, but there are several stand-out performances in a film filled with perfection: Brad Pitt and Hunter McCracken. Pitt plays Mr. O’Brien, and he deserves to be rewarded for this performance. He is not a cruel man; he is someone of his time, raising his children as he was probably raised himself. Pitt gives off every facet of this character and a best supporting actor nomination should come his way. McCracken plays the young Jack, and this character is the true lead of the film, though the film is intentionally plot-less. I did not like Jack. His father’s bullying is already manifesting itself in his violent thoughts, his repression, his lashing out at his brother in one scene and at the environment in many others. He defies his loving, lenient mother in a heartbreaking display of rebellion, but that McCracken is so hypnotic that he can carry an unlikeable, subdued role is impressive. In all likelihood the Motion Picture Academy will not nominate him at all and give Brad Pitt the nomination for lead actor. Such is the history of the Oscars.

Jessica Chastain needs to be mentioned as well. Her performance is magical—I am again surprised that a film dominated by its director can contain within some of the great performances of the 21^st Century. Some critics have said her character of the mother exists outside of the bitterness and stern qualities of the world and of her husband, but Mrs. O’Brien is another archetype of old-fashioned American parenting. We see she does not like her husband’s approach, and as it would in real life (and undoubtedly has nationwide at every point in time) this sours their marriage. But either through love, commitment or society they do not divorce. Malick’s handling of the marriage and Pitt’s and Chastain’s is so powerful, and Chastain is beautiful and mesmerizing and I wanted to signal her out as well.

The final scene, which I will not detail, is, I think, about forgiveness, about reconciling everything and everyone you’ve ever known to the fact that something has happened; that a brother has died; that parents are not perfect, age, and will always be a moving force in one’s life. But what is to be forgiven: Nature or Grace? What was it that took away this child; that began an exploration through the creation of the universe? Was it the will of God or the chance of fate? Did the way the planets formed influence the decision? Had a petal fallen too fast or withered on the plant for too long? Or had God decided it was time to take back what is his? Malick does not provide answers.  He creates a scenario that is open, and the scene on the beach with strangers and characters we’ve gotten to know on this odyssey is a metaphysical experience rendered on film, one of the most moving and inexplicable experiences I have ever seen. I am not embarrassed to admit that the film brought tears to my eyes. In quick moments I had experienced what in actual time has taken a short lifetime.

With all this I haven’t scratched the surface of this movie. It is an event, something like we haven’t seen in the art world for some time. It might be premature, but The Tree of Life will stand against the works of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky as one of the most thoughtful and ambitious projects ever filmed. I had my doubts when I read others saying this, but I’ve seen it twice, with about a month’s break in between, and I was moved to tears more the second time. Go see this picture; if you see nothing else in a theater this year you will likely have seen as great a movie as can be made.

Tree of Life, The (2011)
Director: Terrence Malick
Writer: Terrence Malick
Stars: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken and Sean Penn
USA
In English
Runtime: 139 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478304/

Paranoid Park (2007)

Stream of consciousness filmmaking is closely linked to the written counterpart, but because words are intellectual this form of writing is literate, whereas in cinema it feels more like memory. Moving images have an instant validity, and when a story is not linear, when it depends on the mind of a teenage kid with a lot of time on his hands, the work is experimental and involves us despite the disjointed, often fractured and confusing storytelling. Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park is a great and rare example.

Other examples in contemporary American cinema are some of Van Sant’s other recent works. He is proving himself a remarkable talent, one that even his early successes could not have hinted at. Paranoid Park is about an incident and characters that live it, but there is no storyline. Alex is a skateboarding kid. He hangs around with his best friend Jared who convinces him to go to a place that Alex admits he is not ready for: Paranoid Park, a grungy skate park in Portland. One night when Jared goes away, Alex goes to the park, meets some older guys, runs away with one of them via spontaneous freight train, and an incident occurs. This is linear progression, but Paranoid Park exists in Alex’s writing. He’s constantly writing in what I at first thought was an extended journal. Only at the end of the film did I understand that Alex is writing over the course of one night, and the majority of the film’s final scenes actually take place—chronologically—somewhere in the middle of the film’s short 84 minute running time.

We often see the same scenes repeated. The shots of Alex in either his uncle or his mother’s house show him entering his bedroom from a room where we had seen him previously write. I believe every time we see this same setup we are seeing the exact same moment in this character’s life. Why would Van Sant construct his film like this? He does a similar thing in Elephant, but there because of the structure of the film we were seeing several different stories taking place congruently. Here we have one perspective, Alex’s, and the conceit doesn’t seem like it could fit but it works remarkably well.

Well, why does it, and why do we see these repetitive moments? This is not a question to be asked but merely a fact we must accept. I personally found the challenge of deciphering this movie a welcomed change of pace from most films that predictably proceed in a linear fashion. I often wonder why films need to tell a story. It takes a skilled hand to render 90 minutes or so of screen time without a clearly defined story, characters and conflict, but often times the results of these experiments is quite fascinating. They are not slice of life films, a term I despise because of the connotations the phrase conjures. Rather they are experiences, impressions of life, and Van Sant’s treatment here creates an impression of a character. I often say that this is the ultimate reach of the cinema, to create impressions. A movie is a work of art, not life, and often times, films of this kind contain a hyper-reality that gives us, the audience sitting in our seats looking at a 2-dimensional flat screen, a sense of how the director uses reality to create his vision.

The film, however, though essentially about a death, is not a mystery nor is it suspenseful. Van Sant doesn’t show us the character most duplicitous in the crime or event as receiving punishment. He suggests it is coming and indeed creates a great deal of fear and paranoia and the utter indifference one so young, of a sort or type typical in youth culture for the past decades, but the film is never “about” the crime. It is about a kid dealing with the fact that he, directly or indirectly, is responsible and now has to deal with it. The film, however, is more definitive than I am suggesting, but because the narrative material is comparatively slight I will remain vague so as to not spoil for you the mood and anticipation I certainly got watching it.

One thing I greatly appreciated was Van Sant’s use of aspect ratio. Most films are in a wide-screen format, some 1.85:1 or even worse they’re in scope, something narrower like 2.35:1. This basically means the screen is rectangular. I don’t like looking at movies this way. In a sense the aspect ratio renders everything as a landscape, at least in terms of framing a painting; there’s either portrait or landscape. The landscape composition is meant to show beauty, and in cinema I find a square ratio, 1.37:1, is more fitting in capturing reality. It cuts off our peripheral vision and focuses in on what the director wants.

I love Gus Van Sant’s modern, experimental work. I love that it’s done by an American filmmaker. It shows us that American cinema isn’t dead yet. Paranoid Park is intelligent, thought-provoking movie making, about characters of a certain age, and still refreshingly original.

Paranoid Park (2007)
Director: Gus Van Sant

Writer: Gus Van Sant

Stars: Gabe Nevins, Daniel Liu and Taylor Momsen

USA / France

In English

Runtime: 84 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0842929/

L.A. Zombie: Hardcore (2010)

Can porn be art? Is porn ever entertaining? And for that matter, what qualifies edited pieces of film as pornography? What is pornography in general? Historically, I mean—how did we create this word and how do we define it in a contemporary world? It comes from the Greek porno, meaning harlot, and graphein, to write; a literal translation being the writings of prostitutes, a solicitation for sexual acts. A dictionary definition in America might be something like, ‘materials (film, video, photos) designed to stimulate sexual excitement.’ Maybe the definition of Justice Potter Stewart may be the most eloquent when deciding what it or isn’t porn: “I know it when I see it.”

I will define pornography for myself: sex scenes which cut to close-up shots of penetration, usually beneath and between the dominating sexual partner’s legs or just above his belly, looking down on the passive sexual partner’s lower back, or most boringly from a simple close-up profile shot of the two actors. It’s these close-ups that make sex scenes pornographic. Actual penetration might be erotic to see, but from a wide shot, showing both actors’ bodies and in particular letting us see their faces, actual sex in movies can be quite moving. Look at Catherine Breillat’s Brief Crossing or Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. Neither film is erotic, but one cannot deny the power that those images have in the context of their stories.

I think I’ve just thought more deeply about the subject than Bruce La Bruce, writer and director of L.A. Zombie. I don’t understand the purpose of the film, the reason for it being made, but the story revolves around a zombie, henceforth known as The Zombie, played by François Sagat, who emerges from the sea and has sex with the dead and brings them back to life. Sounds interesting, some of us more perverted might be thinking, but the execution and staging of L.A. Zombie is exactly like pornography. There might be parallels La Bruce is making with a certain kind of life style in excessive America, but the movie is quite frankly too depressing an exercise for me to care about. It is not well made—in fact in one shot a cameraman who’s going in for a close-up shot of sexual penetration actually pops into the master shot of The Zombie plowing a dead homeless man from behind—and it is not acted at all, except for the stereotypical loud moans and grunts of pornographic films.

It began well enough with some beautiful photography of the sea, a landscape similar to the beaches of Ingmar Bergman’s films, and a haunting all strings piece of music. The Zombie emerges from the water, much like the fragile characters of Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, a film about a young woman with mental illness. This connection may be important to understanding the true nature of The Zombie. He is shown in three forms throughout the picture: a gray, post-George Romero zombie, a more hideously deformed zombie with large canines protruding from his gums, and a human form, Sagat in living flesh as a homeless man wandering the streets of L.A. Is The Zombie a homeless man by way of mental illness? Are all of his experiences largely imagined, schizophrenic episodes that speak philosophically to a perversity in gay culture in America? I’ve read comments on the internet like this, but I think that’s only a way for people to praise a film that has hardcore sex scenes without them seeming to the public to be perverted.

I think the director might have been trying to express a viewpoint, but what he didn’t understand, something anyone could have seen in the very first sex scene, is that pornography is not very interesting.

Male orgasm is achieved through a repetitious motion; watching an erect penis penetrating any orifice gets old very quickly. It’s pretty much the same no matter how you do it, and L.A. Zombie lingers on the penetration in the same ways as pornography. Bruce La Bruce should have known that showing porno scenes in-full would distract the viewer. I’ll admit I found the bodies on display to be attractive, though the scenarios were kind of disgusting and over-the-top, but after the first few minutes I got sick of seeing the sex. It was like watching open heart surgery: technical and gross. My mind started to wander; I started to think of why I was watching this movie. This is where the film became depressing—it was boring and wasting 2 hours of my life. How could La Bruce credit himself as writer? There’s no characters here, no dialogue except for the occasional trifles before the characters are killed (immature arguing between violent criminals, for example), and the structure of the film is stolen from pornography—the Zombie wanders the streets of L.A. and episodically has sex with the men he meets. What La Bruce basically had was a concept, an experiment which may sound interesting—a series of hardcore scenes—but as cinema it is lifeless. Boring, and that is the biggest mistake any filmmaker, narrative, documentary or experimental, can make.

Some might question if instead La Bruce has made an anti-pornographic film. And I would say that is an interesting argument. The form and function of pornography with blood; penetrating fresh wounds rather than natural orifices; and a penis for The Zombie that looks like a goblin’s tool—long, unnaturally colored with a curved tipped head—spouting blood instead of semen. It is impossible to find this material erotic, and I found it to be disgusting but so what? Any hack can revolt an audience. The image I found most deplorable is Sagat’s Zombie’s penis. Its unnatural curvature and the blood in place of semen might have been too much to take if the material weren’t so overblown, but I found absolutely no point to any of this. And, if this was part of La Bruce’s experiment, then he failed because most of the scenes involve natural-looking penises that have normal orgasms, the men for the most part are handsome, and the sex scenes linger so that I at least started to view them abstractly. Instead of the whole film I saw Sagat sucking on a penis. These are two diametrically opposite images and that they exist in my perception in this case is not a plus for the film. I got tired of what I was seeing and was looking for something else.

But to give another point to this idea of anti-pornography let’s look at François Sagat. I find him very attractive: a great body, handsome face and a great scalp tattoo. In L.A. Zombie he always looks ugly. Obviously as a zombie, but even in his homeless human form I felt more... pity, I guess, though I didn’t care about the character. I cared about François Sagat the actor doing some outlandish and embarrassing things onscreen. There is one scene where The Zombie tries to drink a cup of coffee but he spits up, and Sagat is made to rub the spilled coffee on his chest in an erotic way. Why is this man, who seems to be an intelligent guy in real life and who is a good actor (if his performance in Man at Bath is any indication of his range) degrading himself in such a meaningless piece of garbage like L.A. Zombie?

Maybe on some level the film does work. Maybe it is only meant as a provocation. Is society so numbed that we need these kinds of films? Yes and no. We have numbed ourselves in various ways as a culture (a 24 hour media?) but 99% of us if not more will never see this movie. They’ll never hear of it. I certainly didn’t like it but I’m trying to engage it on some intellectual level but it might be futile.

The version I saw was called L.A. Zombie: Hardcore. It ran for 105 minutes. Strand Releasing is putting the film out in theaters in the US, presumable in an edited form. It will run 63 minutes. There must be alternate footage shot because 63 minutes is still too long for the hardcore version minus the hardcore. I’m actually interested in seeing the edited version. Could it be a successful exercise without the penetration shots and the shorter running time?

L.A. Zombie (2010)

(a.k.a. L.A. Zombie: Hardcore)

Director: Bruce La Bruce

Writer: Bruce La Bruce

Stars: Francois Sagat, Rocco Giovanni and Wolf Hudson

USA

In English

Runtime: 105 minutes

To purchase the hardcore version of L.A. Zombie, visit the film's official website:

http://lazombie.com/

Visit Strand Releasing's official page of the film to lean more about the US release:

http://strandreleasing.com/films/film_details.asp?BusinessUnitID={BFD06A96-7612-4F21-AEC0-3452C34902C4}&ProjectID={BC9E0DA3-37A3-4983-AA48-9EE900A0B189}

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1594921/