kagablog

Ion Martea
posted 27 June 2007

Mikio Naruse is not a household name for European audiences. Eureka’s recent release of a Naruse DVD box-set, in conjunction with a retrospective of his work at the BFI Southbank, which opens on Friday 29 June with the UK premiere of the long awaited When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) – all aim at changing that perception. For once, Japanese cinema achieves something that British audiences may perceive as universal, not through intellect (a trend developed by Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi), but primarily through feeling. Watching a Naruse film is unsettling, as he seems a rather unique blend of Douglas Sirk, Michelangelo Antonioni and Billy Wilder, yet his characters, his settings, even his technique are intrinsically ingrained in Japanese cinema.

There is a stunning shot near the beginning of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs in which we see the beautiful Keiko Yashiro – a widow in her early thirties, a bar hostess in the middle of Tokyo, the woman everyone calls endearingly Mama so as to amplify her status as a lady of dignity and as an object of unreachable desirability – walking to work, with a peaceful, undemanding look suggesting faith in the future. This shot, following the actress Hideko Takamine (a Naruse regular, appearing in seventeen of his films) reminds us of the hopeful walk of Maria Ceccarelli (Giulietta Masina) in Fellini’s tribute to his wife’s talent, Le Notti di Cabiria [Nights of Cabiria] (1957). In essence, Naruse’s Woman appears like a tribute to Fellini’s Cabiria, as both films look at a single woman who wants to be loved for the lady she truly is, while the men surrounding her rarely see anything more but a piece of meat they’d like to devour. Both women are loose women (prostitute for Europeans, bar hostess for Japanese) through their own choice, based on a wish to survive in a world which allows only men to prosper. Yet, while we sense a future of redemption for Cabiria, we realise that Mama Kieko has lost all chance of becoming the person she wants to be.

Naruse’s film is born of the changing relationships between men and women in Japanese society. The death of the Geisha left space for the bar hostess, caught between two worlds. On one level she seeks status by getting as much money as she can from her men; on another, she still hopes that it is her beauty, her manners, and above all, her spirit, that will ensure success in this business. It is thus not surprising to see Kieko’s losing customers in a modernised late 1950s Tokyo. We also doubt her chances of improving her business by going independent, and establishing a venue run according to her own ideals. She is trying, but investments with doubtful financial (or sexual) returns seem uncomfortably risky for all who respect her, for all who say they love her.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs could have been made as a dramatic story of survival, or a less successful romantic fairytale. Naruse’s decision to go for melodrama seems a risky venture, but it is accomplished with a unique touch of the un-dramatic. Hideko Takamine has no scenes in which she is obviously passing through a psychological breakdown, except a convincing drunkenness, and an inhibited cry at the disappointment that her rich fiancé (a long awaited relationship after the death of her husband) turns out to be just a poor married fellow who can’t help proposing to all the women he lusts after. Otherwise, we see Kieko just living: going to work, talking to her customers and talking them out of bedding her, and hoping that life will not be just a monotonous show of unfelt feelings fuelled by alcohol.

It is surprising that despite the density of the plot, cluttered with a plethora of fully-rounded characters, among whom Tatsuya Nakadai’s bodyguard/manager and Masayuki Mori’s banker/lover are particular achievements, the film centres so much around Takamine’s representation of womanhood, that one can fully understand the intricacies of the story only by submitting to Naruse’s vision. His whole body of work, like those of many of his 1960s European fellow directors, finds in the life of woman a undying source of inspiration. The love the director has for his heroine is heartbreaking in its purity of understanding her completely, of making her appear akin to a goddess demanding respect simply by being.

However, this is not feminist cinema. It is humanist cinema, which puts the principle character at the heart of the society, thus developing a discourse on the roles of individuals within a whole aiming for unity and coherence. Mama Kieko is the victim of society not through her own choice. However, her Darwinian need to progress in both the physical and the sentimental lead her to an existence that appears as the only available choice to her. The horror of the dénouement comes precisely through her rationalisation of her choice as inescapable. For Naruse, the bar hostess’ ascending of stairs towards the place she is deemed to deserve and must accept unconditionally, is nothing more than a demonstration that progress in society is just sheen on the dehumanisation of the individual. The theory may be faulty from the start, yet When a Woman Ascends the Stairs makes sure you leave the cinema believing that Naruse’s reasoning is impeccable.

this review first appeared on culturewars.org.uk

Hes, an uptight and disaffected social worker reaching retirement, discovers a young woman, Anna, in the closet of an acquaintance who has committed suicide. Realizing that she has been kept in the apartment all her life, he moves in and helps her comes to terms with the complexities of the real world. Although Anna suffers from serious mental disabilities, she and Hes form a tender bond as she takes her first, tentative steps towards normality. As he helps Anna on her journey, Hes finds new meaning to his empty life and an escape from his Kafkaesque job.

Based on the novel by Hungarian writer György Konrád, A Taste of Water is a sensitive and moving character study. Director Orlow Seunke won a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival for Best First Work.

Director Orlow Seunke
Screenplay Orlow Seunke
Dirk Ayelt Kooiman
Jan Utger Achterberg
Maarten Koopman
Producer Orlow Seunke
Jan Musch
Tijs Tinbergen
Editing Orlow Seunke
Tom Erisman
Original Novel György Konrad
Cinematographer Albert van der Wildt
Music Maarten Koopman
Art Direction Dorus van der Linden
Cast Gerard Thoolen
Dorijn Curvers
Joop Admiraal

Alphaville & Its Subtext In The Poetry of Paul Eluard

essay by michael benedikt

Many critics who’ve written about Alphaville over the years since its release in l965 have remarked on–among other things–its more up-front & in-your-face subtext levels. That is to say, they’ve duly noticed as is apt (1) the film’s many references to 1960’s Pop Art on the one hand, and (2) pulp fiction (sci-fi and detective fiction) on the other. Those references appear particularly at the start of the film in statements which hard-boiled-detective type, gun-toting central character Lemmy Caution makes which recall utterances of characters in pulp fiction or in comic-books. Whether exclaimed or spoken as flat statements, some of those utterances are accompanied by comic-strip-type like balloons such as can be found in the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein, a leading 1960’s US Pop Artist who’s now considered a leading US 20th century painter. The tie-ins of this l965 film with with both Pop Culture & Pop Art are indeed apparent–but there’s a whole lot of other sub-text going on beneath that Pop-inspired surface!

It’s often been said that Godard’s films–even when compared to the creations of French filmmakers as thoughtful as his ‘New Wave’ contemporaries–are uniquely concerned with ideas. With a thinker of Godard’s depth, that means of course concerned not only with ideas up front, but also with ideas in layers. Godard’s reputation as a thinker, coalesced by the time his playful, poignant, popular success Breathless was released in 1959, also suggests to me that–having looked at Pop-related levels (1) and (2)–one ought to look further and dig deeper. There’s gold down there, I think. Not only is additional subtext located on level (3), but I believe that the driving force behind Godard’s startlingly rich film called Alphaville, is located down there too. Alphaville’s subtext is in part literally text–text from the poetry of French Surrealist Paul Eluard, readings aloud from whose work occur at various points in the film and allusions to whose work abounds in it. Additionally, that relatively unexplored level (3) contains concepts which link Alphaville to Godard’s other early films–as well as to concepts which relate to his thinking and value-system in general, and ideas which are key to his work starting with his early work.

The third level I’m referring to relates to Godard’s feeling for Poetry. And specifically, in the instance of this French filmmaker, to a feeling for the trenchantly lyrical, visionary ideas of French Surrealism–the literary/art movement whose philosophy and iconoclastic literary productions brought new fire to both French poetry and world poetry starting in the mid 1920’s; & whose influence continued throughout the 20th century & into the 21st century as well. In addition to creating poems, paintings, and other works of art which have political implications in terms of their longing for accelerated patterns of change, Surrealists often sought literal political involvement. That kind of territory is also visible to anyone looking at Godard’s life and work, including Alphaville.

* * *

Who is the film’s hero Lemmy Caution and what does be represent? We learn early on in the film that he’s the fourth in a star-crossed line, secret-agent successor of Dick Tracy, Guy Leclair (Flash Gordon); and just after them, & just before Lemmy Caution, a fat little man named Henri Dickson. Caution’s been to sent from the “Outerlands”–lands so truly outlandish from the perspective of Alphaville, a place where freedom is unknown, that they might as well be located on another planet. Caution’s been sent to spy on Alpha 60, the giant computer complex which governs a monstrously unearthly, yet somehow also all too-earthly city created by Professor Von Braun and his fiendish science. (The reference to World War II German rocket scientist Werner Von Braun, who later worked on post-war projects for USA, is we believe deliberate. Lemmy Caution has a history, too. A hard-boiled character with same name, and also played by Eddie Constantine, appears in a series of earlier French films–detective films. But in the Alphaville context, the name Lemmy Caution takes on a deeper meaning, perhaps even giving this advice re coming to terms with either Alphaville or any place like it: “Let me wise you up & caution you against all this”).

When Caution’s quest finally leads him to his last living predecessor, Dickson is spending the night with, & as it turns out also his last on, one of the robot-prostitutes (aka “Seductresses”) of the vast, liberty-extinguishing city. Dickson gasps out his last breaths and somewhat mysterious words: “Lemmy… conscience… conscience… destroy… make Alpha… 60… destroy itself… tenderness . . — save those who weep.” A certain familiarity with the leading tenets of Surrealism–as well as a certain capacity to play connect-the-dots–can do much to explain those and other of the more enigmatic utterances in the film.

From beneath Dickson’s pillow, Caution extracts the dead man’s pillow-book–a battered volume of French poetry called Capitale de La Douleur. What is Natasha Von Braun–the fiendish Professor Von Braun’s very own daughter, who Caution manages to enlist as his guide to the city of Alphaville–doing afterwards at various intervals in the film, reciting selected passages from that book ? Why as if in exchange for her own invaluable guidance, has Caution introduced Natasha to that particular book? What was Dickson doing reading that sort of thing in the first place? What does all this mean?

Capitale de La Douleur (The Capital Of Sorrow, 1926) is perhaps the best-known book of poetry by Paul Eluard, who is one of the founders of the French Surrealist movement launched in the 1920’s. Eluard is, with Robert Desnos one of Surrealism’s leading lyric poets and also one of the most engaging 20th century French love poets. Love, & the transforming power of Love–particularly erotic love but not limited to erotic love–is at the core of & some might say at the heart of, Surrealist doctrine. (Andre Breton, poet and leading theoretician of French Surrealism, proposed that centrality in his First Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 & then in later writings such as–to name only one example of many–his 1928 novel Nadja. As we learn early on in the film, the central problem in AIphaville is that nobody except a few misfit & seemingly impractical poetical types (who like Henri Dickson live in “condemned sectors”) is doing any living in, much less dying of, love. “What is the privilege of the dead?” giant computer Alpha 60 asks Caution in its hoarse, electronic voice during one of several interrogations. “Not to die any longer,” replies Caution. Meaning, according to Surrealist doctrine–which in effect cites dying of love as a prequisite for living–not to live any longer, either.

The city of Alphaville is a nightmarish place for many reasons–perhaps the chief of which is because it’s a city (a City-State, as ancient Greeks termed it? an entire Nation? a world?), where the privilege of the dead has been usurped. Hardly anybody is doing much dying there, for which one prepares by–in the first place–living. The title of the book Eluard published just before Capitale–which title appears onscreen in small font on the back of the edition of Capitale de La Douleur which Natasha holds up while reading from it–succinctly expresses that belief. Eluard’s pre-Capitale book is entitled Mourir de ne pas Mourir (Dying Of Not Dying, 1924). What could be more apt than that Henri Dickson, dedicated reader of Eluard, should both literally & figuratively, die both for & from, Love? What could be more appropriate than the relentlessly pedagogical Lemmy Caution–by introducing Natasha Von Braun to Capitale de La Douleur & by encouraging her to read it–also begin to teach Natasha (who in addition to being a very attractive young woman with unforgettable eyes also happens to be none other than the daughter of Alphaville’s founding father), the meaning of the word Love. For how else after all, is she going to learn about it?

* * *

The city’s spine-and-spirit-chilling slogan–initially seen by Caution when he drives into the city limits from The Outerlands–is “Alphaville: Silence - Logic -Safety - Prudence.” Those purely rational, calculating, left-side-of-brain values could not be more precisely the opposite of values which one of Surrealism’s major patron saints–the later nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud–recommended when as a corrective to the limitations of logic, he called for “A systematic derangement of all the senses…”–an idea refined in Breton’s rather exquisitely-written yet nonethleless more or less systematically mind-boggling 1924 First Manifesto of Surrealism. (The leading figures of Surrealism, far from being merely misfit or impractical poetical types, were rather good at integrating both left sides & right sides of brain. Which is, we’ve had many occasions to observe in passing, a trait seldom to be found in so-called “tough-minded” left-side-of brain types–or in the humanoid computer who rules the city of Alphaville).

If Caution is, as I think he is, the perfect Surrealist person (that he isn’t an literary intellectual but a hard-boiled, super-practical gun-toting Private Eye type, is precisely the raison d’etre of Caution’s personality–we should remember that the Surrealists always spoke about Surrealism expressing itself in “actions” as well as in art-works such as poems), then Alphaville is the perfect anti-Surrealist city. Surrealists–Eluard in particular–often speak of going forward to the light (enlightenment). Alphaville is a black-&-white film. Godard maximizes the so-called ‘limitations’ of black & white film-stock to bestow upon the city a relentlessly stygian, hellishly dark look relieved only by reflections from substances such as formica, plexiglass, aluminum and chrome; or by clinically white rooms filled with florescent glare. The citizens of Alphaville–as in any Dictatorship including those Democracies which obfuscate by doublespeak, & in which there are vast gaps between theory and practise & between lofty Constitutional Charters & the relentlessly grinding actualities of everyday life as decreed by local & other authorities–are literally “kept in the dark.” Concepts such as freedom or happiness have not only been discarded, but have become invisible. (Enough has been made of Godard’s re-invocations of the shadow-strewn, dimly woozy world of Hollywood detective film & “Film Noir” we trust, for us not to have to additionally emphasize those stylistic roots in this context). The city of Alphaville is above all else dark because as Godard evokes it in the film, it’s a place built out of the stuff of anti-belief. It’s a place where Nobody Has A Clue–except perhaps, for denizens lacking imagination who only have a single clue: how to assure, in a highly monitored world, bottom-line physical survival via an absolutely unprotesting and even unthinking, silent conformity.

* * *

An aside (we’re attempting to avoid footnotes here): In our computer-era times especially and given the benefit of decades of hindsight, Godard’s been criticized for taking a tack that’s seemingly sentimental re technology in this 1965 film about a futuristic world dominated by computers. Those powerful gadgets which–as long as we control “PC’s” which indeed remain “personal”–mean for so many of us access to information we might not otherwise easily get, or even acquire at all; and opportunities to redistribute that same or other information, and freedom from a whole range of restrictions of that kind. And yet ordinary caution suggests I think, that we consider the fact that all the returns are by no means in, re that subject yet. As we know, legislation is regularly proposed worldwide which would permit greater State control of things which many people consider “personal”–computers & Internet being particular targets. So that, long-term, Godard’s sentiments may yet prove to have been both instinctively and intellectually correct. The mainframe computer which rules Alphaville is dangerous not because it’s a computer and because computers are inherently nasty, but because it’s either a computer In The Wrong Hands or a computerized databasing device which Frankenstein-like, has taken on a life of its own–and caution suggests at least to me, that inevitably the 21st century is going to see more of that..

* * *

In Alphaville, Godard makes enough direct, even blatant references to Surrealism to encourage us to think that he’s proposing Surrealist perspectives specifically, as curative to the kind of Consciousness Without Conscience represented by places like shadowy, obfuscating, enlightenment-blocking Alphaville. For in addition to being what one might call because of its seamlessly dictatorial, spying regime “a sick place,” Alphaville is also a rather sickening place. In the gloom-shrouded, claustrophobic city of Alphaville all those who’ve remained alert to either the more tender values which have traditionally sustained humankind, or alert to the value of human ingenuity in seeking some means of escape, are in one way or another murdered. (A particularly memorable example of which is the execution, in a swimming pool, & performed by acqua-suited Seductresses–actually mermaid-types straight from a Hollywood water ballet reminiscent of those of Esther Williams in the 1950’s–of non-conformists who’ve somehow survived a shooting by a firing squad at the tiled edge of the pool. Indifferently, if somewhat decoratively, the upstarts are finished off anyway by a bevy of water-nymphs with knives, performing with serene efficiency as if in a water-ballet).

After Caution attends a relatively slow extinction–that of Dickson, who chooses to kill himself over at least some version of love, rather than trying to live totally without it–he attends more rapid executions. During one of them, we hear quotations from Eluard as we witness the execution–i.e. murder–of two men. After being lined up prior to being shot, the condemned fling out their last words. The second is most emphatic. He shouts out a paraphrase of the Dickson-Eluard philosophy: “Listen to me, you normals! We see the truth that you no longer see. This truth is, that there is nothing true in man except love and faith, courage and tenderness.” The first proposes a somewhat more cryptic formula: “In order to create life, it is necessary simply to advance in a straight line towards all that we love.” That line is later reiterated during a reading aloud of Eluard into which the ever-pedagogical Lemmy seduces Natasha:

And because I love you everything moves–
One need only advance to live, to go
Straight forward towards all that you love
I was going towards you
I was moving perpetually into the light

Natasha Von Braun’s education in the nature & meanings of love will center upon the word spoken twice by Dickson in his death-bed speech: “conscience.” That key word also turns up during the Natasha’s recitations, when she reads aloud from Eluard’s Capitale:

We live in the limbo of our metamorphoses
But that echo which runs through all the day…
That echo beyond time, desire and caresses keeps asking…
Are we close to, or far away from our conscience…..

After Nastasha’s entranced recitations are done, how far we’ve come from the references to Pop iconography and pulp fiction which some have taken to be at the heart of this film! Godard’s Pop-culture referential pranks following the opening of Alphaville, which partake of the high-spirited playfulness to be found in much of his early work, contrast with the subsequent seriousness of the proceedings–so that when the underlying seriousness of Godard’s purpose begins to emerge, it may almost shocks us. We’re apt to listen almost in disbelief to the evocation of the Humanistic values which increasingly dominate the film as it unfolds–prepared for by what turns out to be a key event in the film: the moment when Caution obtains from beneath the pillow of the deceased Dickson, the Eluard edition.

Brief paraphase of “Author” theory of filmmaking, to which Godard has contributed much & to which he subscribes: The Director controls the whole show. As the film proceeds it’s as if Godard himself–having created Alphaville, the forbidding City of anti-belief via scenes of horrific darkness disorientingly highlighted by florescent urban glare–then set about raising the consciousness or “conscience” behind the sheer visual force of the opening of the film, ascending to visions which contradict the benightedness of Alphaville or of any place like it. In many ways, Alphaville still tells a contemporary “Cautionary” tale.

this essay first published here

by tim robey

In the early Seventies, Stanley Kubrick was enjoying one of the most extraordinary positions the film industry has ever given a director/producer. His last three films – Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) had been, in their different ways, global sensations, all three earning him Best Director nominations at the Oscars, and securing his reputation as a perfectionist auteur who loomed larger over his movies than any concept or star. “Kubrick” was by now an imprimatur of a certain style, and one that his current studio, Warner Bros, was eager to bankroll wherever it might lead them.

Production on his next project was shrouded in the utmost secrecy. The controversy provoked by A Clockwork Orange, especially in the UK, had heightened Kubrick’s long-standing paranoia about the tabloid press, who were apt to characterise him in turn as a chilly, reclusive, borderline-psychopathic control freak. All they were allowed to know was that his new film would star Ryan O’Neal – a seemingly un-Kubricky choice of leading man – and the former Vogue and Time magazine cover model Marisa Berenson. It was to be shot largely in Ireland. Even Berenson, when Kubrick first approached her, was told only that it was to be an 18th-century costume piece – she was instructed to keep out of the sun in the months before production, to achieve the period-specific pallor he required.

Never an originator of his own screenplays, Kubrick had in mind to adapt Thackeray’s 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a satirical picaresque about the fortune-hunting of an Irish rogue and the position he secures for himself in the English aristocracy. For some years Kubrick had been wrestling with a project in the adjacent period, his long-gestating but abandoned film about Napoleon Bonaparte, and the switch to Lyndon gave him the chance to put some of that research to good use. In particular, he relished the technical challenges of shooting “in period”, and was determined not to reproduce the set-bound, artificially lit look of other costume dramas from that time.

Almost every Kubrick film is a showcase for some major innovation in technique – in 2001 it was the revolutionary visual effects; in The Shining, his mastery of the Steadicam. On Barry Lyndon, Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott set themselves the task of shooting as many sequences as possible without recourse to electrical light. For the many densely furnished interior scenes, this meant shooting by candlelight, a feat difficult enough in still photography, let alone with moving images to capture. For months they tinkered with different combinations of lenses and film stock to make this possible, before getting hold of a number of super-fast 50mm lenses developed by Zeiss for use by Nasa in the Apollo moon landings. With their huge aperture and fixed focal length, mounting these was a nightmare, but they managed it, and so Kubrick’s vision of recreating the huddle and glow of a pre-electrical age was miraculously put on screen.

The stately, painterly, often determinedly static quality of Barry Lyndon was at least in part dictated by this stylistic choice – lit only by candles, the actors in the many sequences of dining and gambling were under instruction to move as slowly as possible, to avoid underexposure. But it fits perfectly with Kubrick’s gilded-cage aesthetic – the film is consciously a museum piece, its characters pinned to the frame like butterflies. For the stunningly beautiful exteriors, in which Ireland plays itself, England, and Prussia during the Seven Years’ War, Kubrick and Alcott looked to the landscapes of Watteau and Gainsborough; the day-lit interiors owe a lot to Hogarth, with whom Thackeray had always been fascinated.

Alcott would win an Oscar for his amazing work, as would Ken Adam and Roy Walker for their scrupulously researched art direction, the often outlandish but totally convincing costumes of Milena Canonero, and Leonard Rosenman for his arrangements of Schubert and Handel, whose addictively funereal Sarabande in D Minor stomps ominously in the background of the various duels, like a march to the gallows. The film was greeted, on its release, with dutiful admiration – but not love. Critics were itching to rail against the perceived coldness of Kubrick’s style, the film’s self-conscious artistry and slow pace. Audiences, on the whole, rather agreed – it was not the commercial success Warner Bros had been hoping for.

An air of disappointment seemed to cloud the film’s reputation for many years. It has sat dormant, gorgeous but remote, waiting patiently for re-evaluation. Watching it now is a spellbinding experience on many levels, but it makes you realise that the most undervalued aspect of Kubrick’s genius could well be his way with actors. The supporting cast is a glittering procession of cameos, not from star names but from vital character players. Leonard Rossiter makes the first unforgettable impression as Captain Quin, the pompous and prickly suitor
of Barry’s cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton) – he raises snobbish indignation to an art form. The Irish stage actor Arthur O’Sullivan has just two scenes as the notorious highwayman Captain Feeney, but manages to be both disarmingly polite and terrifying.

Patrick Magee, who played the crippled writer in A Clockwork Orange, has a lovely, quizzical turn as the avuncular Chevalier du Balibari, an inveterate cheat at cards who takes Barry under his wing. And the list goes on, taking in the extraordinary Murray Melvin as a pursed-lipped reverend, Marie Kean as Barry’s mother, Frank Middlemass as the splenetic Sir Charles Lyndon, Hardy Krüger as a Prussian captain, Stephen Berkoff as a priapic gambler, Leon Vitali as Barry’s resentful stepson Lord Bullingdon, and Kubrick regular Philip Stone – he was Alex’s father in A Clockwork Orange, and the dead caretaker Grady in The Shining – as the Lyndon family lawyer.

Subjected to the director’s infamous regime of many, many arduous takes, their faces light up the film and the era, like a series of fine, carefully hung, oil portraits. Kubrick’s cast may have been required to sit for these for days and weeks on end, but no one could say the results weren’t worth it.

this review first published in the telegraph.co.uk

Q. What sort of intensity exists when you’re making a film like this? How much intensity is it necessary to have?
A. I have to say, it was a very fun shoot. I feel very glad to have worked with these people - Sarah, Mark, Scott, Amanda, Deborah - and I think we were on the same path, on the same wave, but it was a fun shoot. We were having fun… all these actors really loved their characters, and they really loved the story, but there were some kind of sad moments, when Sarah was in the car, alone, recording the tapes for her daughters. I remember watching her, when she had the picture of the babies, her two daughters, and I remember thinking you were going to be more lonely than this woman there. But, as for intensity, I don’t know.

Q. What then was the inspiration for the story, and the film?
A. The film is based on a short story called Pretending The Bed Is a Raft, by an American writer, and I read the story five years ago and really like it. I thought there was something there that was always calling me. At the same time, the film is really different from the story, because in the film, she’s not telling anyone she is going to die, whereas in the short story, she is telling everybody.
I thought with a classical story, like the story of My Life Without Me, it’s a new kind of view; it is really a different type of story if she keeps the secret.

Q. And crucial to cast the right actress in the lead?
A. I work with two casting directors, who were very good friends of mind, and this was the second time I had worked with them - we did another film together, called Things I Never Told You, with Lili Taylor, and I remember we watched every single actress, from 18 to 28. I watched very good people, very good actresses, who were very well known, and some who were completely unknown, and there was something lacking, something crucial, something was not there. And Heidi, who was from Toronto, and she told me, ‘what about Sarah Polley’? And I remembered her from, of course, The Sweet Hereafter, which is a magnificent movie and she found an amazing way to play that character, but she was 15 then. So I thought, ok, how old is she now?
And we sent her the script, and spoke on the phone, and then we met in New York, in the lobby of a hotel, and there she was, I don’t know, it was like having her in front of me, something told me she was the right one, she was perfect, and I was right. I don’t believe in God, but I think she was a gift from something, or someone.

Q. It’s an odd mix of emotions at the end of the film, isn’t it, for the viewer, because you’re not expecting to feel quite so upbeat?
A. I’m actually obsessed about death, but in a very uplifting way. I don’t have any kind of morbid obsession, but I just want to be in my death bed thinking I tried to be alive. And I’m really obsessed about what is being alive.
I look at certain things, such as the rain, which is a flood, and we hate it, because it’s cold after the rain, and try to see them another way, because there is always a different way to look at things. Rain could be something magic, even if that sounds kind of corny.

Q. Did you perhaps draw up a list of things to achieve before you die, onset, to sort of get into the character?
A. Maybe very simple things, like going to my daughter to Hawaii, because she is obsessed about it, and little things like that, I guess. But I don’t really know. Never, anything about false nails, or my hair, because there is nothing you can do!

Q. Is there something in this subject matter that appeals especially to the Canadian sensibility?
A. Well, I’m from Barcelona, so I don’t know what I can tell you…

Q. But why choose that as a setting?
A. Every time I say it, it sounds fabricated, but the thing is, I was doing a commercial in Vancouver, for a Japanese company, with Kate Beckinsale, and I spent one month there, and some guy from the production company, while we were talking about the story of My Life Without Me and its requirements of people living in trailers, etc, he said, ‘oh, well, I know what you need!’. And he took me to Barnaby, which is a neighbourhood 25 miles from Vancouver, and within one square mile we had everything. So I took dozens of pictures and when I got back to Spain, I showed Pedro Almodovar the pictures and the script and he said, ‘yeah, that was the perfect place to make the film’.

Q. Had the film been of a certain budget being made within the Canadian industry, is it fair to assume that there would have been pressures placed upon you to have those sort of cliched elements?
A. Well, I have to say, the film was produced by Pedro’s company, and I never had any kind of pressure, nothing. It was like an easy road, and Pedro was always very respectful - he always said, you know, this is your film, and maybe I wouldn’t make exactly these choices, but this is your film. And I have to say, once he watched the film finished, he was the first person to say, ‘you were right, this is a wonderful film and I’m grateful you did it’. And I’m very grateful to him, because there are very few producers who are not agreeing with their directors, who would say this is your film.

Q. I imagine when you were making this, he hadn’t yet won the Oscar, but that can’t hurt now - having an Oscar-winning producer getting behind you?
A. This Oscar thing, you know, for me, I was 15, and I had a picture of Pedro in my room. I’ve been a big fan of his films from the beginning, even his short films, so, for me, he’s a genius and no matter what those Academy members said…
The thing is, when someone like him is telling you things, you’re not saying to yourself, ‘what does he know?’ This man knows what he is saying, so it can be hard and it can be tough, but it’s good, too. It’s much better having him, than having one of those studio guys.

Q. How did you come to cast Deborah Harry?
A. I have to say that when Heidi and Monica, the casting directors, told me that Deborah Harry is calling because she really liked the script and she wants to read for you, I was very, like, I don’t know, sceptical, because I had watched her films before. I thought she was good, but for this role, I was like, ok, we can sing together, but, you know…
And then she came, with no make-up, secondhand clothes, and her hair a mess, and she did an amazing reading. I’ve seen a lot of actors before, for the same role, but the way she was expressing herself was basically what was in my mind, so she got the role.
I was very sceptical, but she was just great. She’s a very innocent person, genuinely.

Q. It did seem like you had to act around them, because they were being kids, and yet they were still in character? Was that a difficult balance, ensuring, as well, that they didn’t become too precocious?
A. The small one, she never quite realised we were doing a movie. I think she thought we were a sort of new day-care type of school, or something. They were really happy to be onset. They were enjoying themselves. I’m not a very maternal person, but I think Sarah has a sort of motherly thing going on with everybody, so that helps.

Q. How many kids did you audition for the roles? Obviously you had to find two who could play sisters?
A. We auditioned a lot. But, at the same time, I wanted normal kids - not overly professional. And I have to say, the younger one has made some commercials, but they were very good together, from the beginning, and Jessica was always protecting Kenya Jo… And they were so sad, the last day of filming.

Q. We’ve known your work from The Sweet Hereafter and other stuff, but Mark Ruffalo and Scott Speedman we’ve only really discovered much more recently. What was it about their work that made you cast them here?
A. I never watched Felicity, which was the only thing Scott had done before, so for me, he was just a guy who came to the audition. He was just the perfect guy to make his role.
And Mark, I thought he was perfect too. I met Mark a while back, he was in audition for the other film I did, Things I Never Told You, but I didn’t cast him, because he was too young for the part. But I really like him. He was someone who was in my mind, and I think he is an amazing actor. I think he has only eight or nine scenes in this movie, but he is there, and we needed someone who you really can’t forget.

Q. Was it always obvious which roles these men should play?
A. No.

this interview first published on indielondon.co.uk

You may not recognise his face, but you’d certainly recognise John Lasseter’s work: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Cars, Ratatouille and Wall-E, to name just some of his writing, directing and producing output.

Lasseter was a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, and a pioneer of computer animation. In fact, Pixar pretty much invented computer-animated movies - developing from scratch the process that almost every Hollywood studio now uses. It refined its craft with a series of award-winning short films throughout the 80s, and broke into features with Toy Story in 1995 - the first full-length computer-animated movie.

“It began way back when I first started, in 1983, working with the Lucasfilm computer division, which became Pixar,” Lasseter says. “There inevitably comes a time when they say: ‘Hey, we have this new computer and it’s 10 times faster than the ones you’re using.’ So everybody logically thinks: ‘OK, that means you can do what you’re doing, only 10 times faster.’

“[But actually] what happens is that it takes the same amount of time, but it becomes 10 times more complex. We have more computer power than you can imagine now, and still our movies take the same amount of time to create.”

Stars and Cars

Each feature is a four-year process, and the animators have to lock down the technology about two years before completion. “That’s when you have to say: ‘We don’t know how to do this, or the movie really requires us to do this’,” he says. “In Cars, it was the reflections on the cars and windows; in Monsters Inc, it was the fur; and there’s the underwater stuff in [Finding] Nemo. There was a tremendous amount of complexity in Wall-E.

Yet this complexity is not the result of clever technology, rather, it was achieved by imitating the way a film camera captures what it sees.

“That was Andrew Stanton, the director, working with Roger Deakins, the great cinematographer,” he says. “[The team] actually had lessons – learning technically what happens with the set of lenses that a cinematographer has to use on a classic Panavision 35mm camera. They studied the way this master cinematographer shoots things. That’s why [Wall-E] looks as if it was shot.

“But that’s classic Pixar. What we’ve always done, since the very beginning, is we have studied what is that unique limitation of the way things look, and we’ve modelled that into the computer.

“That’s why Pixar films have always had this movie feeling about them. For instance, we invented motion blur for computer animation. The way that a 35mm camera works is that it has a disc that spins – its 180-degree shutter. Half of that disc is clear, and half is solid. As it spins, half of the time it’s exposing the frame, and the frame is still. And when the disc is blank is when the frame advances, and it holds there and is exposed. So there is a look that 35mm has in the way that it blurs, because of this framing. So we studied that and we modelled that into our system when we created motion blur, to get that same look. This was on the first short I created in 1984, The Adventures of André and Wally B. It looked so real, even to myself. But it’s not real because our eyes don’t see motion blur. It’s a limitation of the [film camera’s] lens.

“This understanding of the limitations of how films are actually made, and then modelling that within the computer, is classic Pixar. In live action, you get that for free, but we had to create it.”

Pixar’s visual creativity has developed over the years, from the simple geometric shapes used in early shorts such as Luxo Jr (the lamp that became Pixar’s mascot) and the Oscar-winning Tin Toy, to the more advanced character renderings in Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Ratatouille.

“One of the key things is the speed of the computer being used in an interactive way – by the animators, or the lighters, or the art department,” continues Lasseter. “Because the more complex that a model or something that you’re doing is, the less it can be interactive, because it’s so computationally expensive to do that. Pixar is the only studo that really has a major investment in research, where we’re creating our own modelling and animation system, and we have a new system coming online now. It’s been years in development, and one of the big issues was this interaction.”

Yet, as computers become more powerful, and Hollywood relies more on CGI special effects, does the technology ever get in the way of telling the story? Lasseter thinks that sometimes, it does - but for others, not for Pixar.

“One of the things from the beginning that we recognised is that these are just tools,” he says. “That the technology never entertains an audience by itself. And for us, since we invented much of computer animation, we have a pretty good sense of what our tools can do.

“Like Toy Story - we couldn’t do humans very well, so we kept them in the background, you just see feet and hands and stuff like that. But we could do plastic well, so making a film where the main characters were made of plastic was perfect.”

The next film technology with which Pixar is leading the way is 3D, which has seen a huge resurgence in the past 18 months. Pixar’s next release, Up, out in the UK in October, has been made in 3D - as will all its features from now on - and there will be 3D versions of the first two Toy Story films in advance of next year’s sequel.

“We’ve been interested in 3D for a very long time,” Lasseter says. “In 1989, Pixar made a short film called Knick Knack in 3D. I realised very early on that what you’re creating inside the computer is a three-dimensional environment. And I’ve always felt sad that you could only see a two-dimensional window into that three-dimensional space.

“We did quite a bit of research in holography, in lenticular imagery, to try to get a true three-dimensional view of the world and objects we were creating. I was doing a lot of amateur 3D photography - in 1988, when I got married to my wife Nancy, we took 3D wedding pictures. But there were no theatres you could see 3D in - you have to do a special setup with a silver screen and polarised projectors and all that stuff - and it was a pain that no one got to see [Knick Knack] in 3D.”

Extra dimension

“Theatres started recognising that with digital they could do 3D far more easily than with film. And what’s exciting about that right now is that you can’t get it at home. That’s why theatre owners have been investing heavily in it.”

And Lasseter believes 3D could help cinemas beat the economic crisis.

“They make a little premium on the 3D ticket, so it is beneficial for them to do it. You know, going to the movies has always been recession-proof. It’s fairly cheap entertainment, it’s classic escapism. So in all the recessions and depressions in the last 100 years, movies have done quite well.”

Bolt, which opened in the UK last Friday, was made from the beginning as a 3D film. It’s also the first computer-animated film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, of which Lasseter was appointed chief creative officer in 2006, when Disney bought Pixar.

“There’s one technological advance in Bolt that Pixar’s never done before: there is a softness and an interesting quality to the backgrounds,” he says. “The artists at Disney said: ‘Is there a way in computer animation that we can make the backgrounds look more like they’ve been painted?’

“I got to know some of the classic Disney matte painters such as Harrison Ellenshaw and his father Peter – and when you look at some of Peter Ellenshaw’s matte painting from Mary Poppins, which are some of the best ever made, you’re shocked at how rough they are, how impressionistic. But with film it just clicks in there. When you see a matte painting where everything is too perfectly rendered, it doesn’t look real for some reason.

“This new technology in Bolt makes the world believable - not really real, but believable. When you stop a frame and study the backgrounds, you realise wow, that’s pretty painterly - and you have never seen that before in computer animation. There is a beautiful, rich quality to Bolt that no one’s seen before in computer animation.”

With technology still advancing, what does Lasseter think Pixar will be able to do five or 10 years from now?

“It’s hard to say,” he says. “It’s getting to the point where the limitation is in the imagination of the filmmaker: if he can imagine it, chances are that he can make it. Which early on in computer animation was not the case.

“Clearly, the most difficult thing to create is a human being. That’s why, when we’ve created human characters such as those in The Incredibles, we’ve kept them fairly stylised. To create a character that’s totally believable and realistic is always going to be the challenge. But it depends on the story you’re trying to tell.”

this interview first appeared on guardian.co.uk

Mamma Roma is an unforgettable experience.

Filmed in the Italian Neorealist tradition, yet with a wit and visionary power all its own, Mamma Roma offers a sharp look at a poor, single mother and her son trying to live in postwar Italy. It also shows Pasolini’s early mastery of film, as he extends his unflinching portrayal of the destitute of modern Rome from literature, in the now-classic novels The Ragazzi (1955) and A Violent Life (1959), to his new medium. The film also features his major themes – focused on the struggle of the marginalized for survival, and love – and stylistic techniques. Raw yet beautiful, this gripping work has lost none of its power in the more than forty years since its release. For people who have not yet seen the film, please note that after the summary in the next paragraph (which does not divulge the ending), this review will discuss several major plot developments, including the final scenes.

ImageMamma Roma (Anna Magnani, Rome: Open City, The Rose Tattoo) is a middle-aged prostitute doing everything she can to put her sullied past behind her and make a good life for her mixed-up teenage son, Ettore Garofolo (Pasolini uses this non-actor’s real name for the character). Mamma Roma is not above setting up an elaborate con to help her boy land a job at a fancy restaurant after he drops out of school (again). She even gets her street walker friend Biancofiore (Luisa Loiano) to entice Ettore away from the twentysomething Bruna (Silvana Corsini) who’s ensnared him, after reputedly dating all the other men in Rome. Mamma Roma wants much more than that for her only child – even more than he wants for himself. Just when her new life as a produce vendor, with a tiny new apartment in a huge housing project, is going well, back comes her ex-lover and pimp Carmine (Franco Citti, Accattone, Oedipus Rex). Swearing that he was “innocent” before she corrupted him years earlier, Carmine now threatens to tell the boy that his mother was a hooker. In a catch-22, in order to pay the blackmail money, she has to go back to work on the streets at night, after running her stand all day. Mamma Roma has to be sure that Ettore never finds out what she’s doing (again). But can she?

ImagePasolini’s technical, and hence aesthetic, advances in the year since he made 1961’s Accattone (itself one of the greatest debut features I’ve seen) are astonishing. Mamma Roma shows the poet/novelist/philosopher as a filmmaker in total creative control of his new medium. Director of photography Tonino Delli Colli (who shot almost all of Pasolini’s films), in an interview included in this DVD set, marvels at how in just two weeks Pasolini taught himself the full expressive range of cinematography. Pasolini came to know exactly which lens he wanted for an intended effect (such as the relative sharpness of focus between foreground and background), and precisely the compositions and editorial rhythms he needed. Pasolini’s films are as rich visually as they are thematically and, of course, emotionally. Considered one of Italy’s greatest modern poets and novelists, Pasolini also had one of the most striking visual imaginations in cinema.

What strikes me most about this film is its great emotional immediacy. Magnani gives a powerhouse performance, yet so does Pasolini on every level of his filmmaking, from the writing to the visuals and use of sound to his raucous sense of humor. He consistently, ingeniously, balances the real with the stylized. I believe it’s one of Pasolini’s greatest works because he also brilliantly integrates so many of his themes and techniques, both earlier (from his writings) and later (from his films), while connecting with us on a deeply human level.

ImageAnna Magnani (1908–1973) here gives one of her finest performances, in a career which encompasses Rossellini’s Rome: Open City (1945), Visconti’s Bellissima (1951), Renoir’s The Golden Coach (1952), and even a Best Actress Academy Award for her first Hollywood movie, The Rose Tattoo (1955), from the play by her friend Tennessee Williams. After being thunderstruck by Accattone, Magnani had to make a picture with Pasolini. And he certainly wanted to work with one of Italy’s best-known, and best, stars. Pasolini had the perfect project for them, although he had actually been inspired to write it by Ettore Garofolo, whom he met through the boy’s brother. Magnani was immediately taken with the script – and she certainly knew something about Mamma Roma’s world. The illegitimate daughter of an Egyptian father and Italian mother, both of whom deserted her as a young child, she was raised in a Roman slum district by her grandmother. She worked her way through Rome’s Academy of Dramatic Art by singing bawdy songs in seedy nightclubs, which in turn led her to find work in theatre and later in movies. She also felt especially close to this film (even though she was horrified by the “enormous bags under my eyes!” – which we can see only make her character that much more real) because of experiences with her own son. Magnani gives a shattering performance which, like the film itself, is simultaneously hilarious and tragic, realistic and stylized. Strangely, she is more over the top than, say, Maria Callas as Pasolini’s (non-singing) Medea, and that’s a role where you’d expect big-time histrionics, especially from an opera diva. If you want to compare Mamma Roma to another character, you need look no further than the lusty, irrepressible Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which of course Pasolini would film nine years later.

Let me add that I disagree with Pasolini who, in hindsight, felt he had miscast the title role, despite his admiration for Magnani. Her earthy, passionate performance works brilliantly in many ways, holding the entire film together. On one level, her character can be extremely funny. And in a film with as much political and aesthetic seriousness of purpose as this one, those laughs are a definite asset. Accattone works very effectively without much humor, but by adding that additional texture here, the film is all the more powerful.

ImagePasolini immediately establishes that he’s not just making some social realist tragedy by opening with an ebullient Mamma Roma leading three fat pigs, dressed like proper citizens, into the wedding banquet of her ex-lover, and ex-pimp, Carmine. (Franco Citti, who plays Carmine, starred or appeared in many Pasolini films – including the title roles in Accattone and Oedipus Rex; his brother Sergio Citti collaborated with Pasolini on the dialogue for this and other pictures.) Mamma Roma’s choice of livestock is right on target. Carmine is a metaphorical swine, but he’s also, with his boyish features and ingratiating smile, cute – like the pigs. (And talk about Pasolini foreshadowing his apocalyptic satire Porcile, literally “pigsty”!) Mamma Roma laughingly calls them “our brothers” (including herself – she knows that she’s part of this world too); Carmine plays along, tagging them as “sons of Italy.”

ImagePasolini then launches into a brilliantly entertaining way of getting through the necessary exposition. Mamma Roma, then Carmine, and finally even his hapless bride Clementina, sing about their past relationships. This isn’t an MGM-style musical number. Rather, it’s something which you could almost – just – imagine actually happening. The three come up with new lyrics to what sounds like a folk melody, as they tell their stories. Rarely has so much tension been both glossed over and heightened by song. (Pasolini came up with several other wildly innovative openings, including the fun opening credits to The Hawks and the Sparrows, which are sung in the glittering style of a comic opera aria.)

Of course, all is not tunes and boisterous laughter. For one thing, we notice that Pasolini has borrowed, satirically, his set design – including the arch motif – from Leonardo da Vinci’s 1498 fresco, “The Last Supper.” (With such irreverence, it’s no wonder that this film again brought Pasolini into conflict with the authorities, who still had Fascist-era laws on the books criminalizing “blasphemy” to use against him.) Below, I will look in more detail about other ways Pasolini used art history to give added resonance to this film.

ImagePasolini shrewdly balances Mamma Roma’s larger-than-life persona with some intriguing technical/aesthetic devices, including his repetition of the same haunting Vivaldi concerto – with its clear harmonic structure and graceful melod – under the most melodramatic scenes, as in the late scene when Mamma Roma attacks Carmine, who has invaded her home. The people who were outraged by Accattone’s use of Bach as the underscore to savage violence were far more accepting of the choice here. As Pasolini put it, here the “combination… was less shocking – ordinary people who are trying to be petit bourgeois with the music of Vivaldi, which is much more Italian and is based on popular music, so the contamination [juxtaposition] is much less violent and shocking.”

Pasolini also employs a visual way of literally slowing down, giving us some distance from Mamma Roma’s presence. During a handful of subtle buy key emotional transitions, he employs very brief slow-motion shots. We see this in the transition from the opening wedding banquet to the merry go round with Ettore, at the midpoint during the sequence of Mama Roma and Ettore riding on the new motorbike she’s bought him, and a couple of other times. But the most overt way in which Pasolini balances Mamma Roma’s energy is, paradoxically, by contrasting her with her own son.

ImageEttore Garofolo, reflexively playing a character named Ettore Garofolo, helps balance the entire film. To contemporary viewers, Garofolo might bring to mind a young Leonardo DiCaprio, circa Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). (Garofolo has made only a half-dozen films in the forty years since his debut here.) The young man also allows Pasolini to tie this film into a tradition much older than Neorealist cinema, namely, Italian art of the Renaissance and Baroque. As Pasolini, with his prodigious knowledge of painting (and all of the other arts), would have noticed immediately, Garofolo has the cagey but sweet qualities of a latter-day Caravaggio model. Compare the actor with, say, Caravaggio’s well-known painting, “Boy Bitten by a Lizard,” from about 1593. The resemblance is uncanny.

Yet just as Magnani brings her character to life, so does Garofolo under Pasolini’s careful direction. He doesn’t want a Caravaggio-like ‘living tableau’ (a technique which he parodied in his next film, the hilarious short “La Ricotta” – reviewed below). Pasolini wants a living, flesh and blood character, with all of the contradictions that that implies. And Garofolo delivers.

In his memorable introduction, we first see Ettore riding on a desultory merry go round – although he’s both too old and too big for it. Once, twice, then it comes around again and, presto, he’s gone (which, of course, foreshadows both his nature and his ultimate fate). Notice in this scene that we never see him and his mother in the same frame. This is a subtle but resonant technique which Pasolini uses throughout the film to clarify the relationships between characters. Notice in the many scenes between two characters when Pasolini chooses to keep them in separate shots (such as Mamma Roma and Carmine, Carmine and Ettore, half of the time with Mamma Roma and Ettore), and when he brings them together in the frame (as with Mamma Roma and and her friend Biancofiore, and half of the time with Mamma Roma and Ettore). In that merry go round scene, even if we do not consciously notice the framing, subliminally we feel the tension between the separated Mamma Roma and Ettore, whom she is at last able to bring to live with her for the first time since his birth sixteen years earlier. In their “respectable” new home, Mamma Roma gets her son to wear a suit. But tellingly, it’s a little shabby and too big. Like the merry go round, and like the way Ettore feels, it just doesn’t fit.

ImageEttore, and the other young slackers he hangs out with, is associated with the ruins which lie just outside of Mamma Roma’s tiny new apartment in Rome. The bare fields and crumbling ruins are melancholy, yet Pasolini depicts them with a certain stark beauty (in Porcile, Pasolini was even able to find the primal appeal in a surreal Wasteland populated with cannibals). The decay of the old order, Rome in its heyday centuries past, is apparent in the ruins which mar the landscape. Their ruin also may hint at Ettore’s own fate. But there is also a kind of freedom reflected both in the wide open spaces with the billowing grass, and in the tentative sexual freedom of the young men and women who have their rendezvous there. That freedom may be largely illusory, but it’s still welcome in contrast to the endless stacks of sterile – and prison-like – apartment buildings (which one knows will not last anywhere near as many centuries as the shards of ancient Rome).

ImageEvocative as are such symbolic, yet pressingly real, landscapes, Pasolini cares most about his characters – and the real-world people, so often outcasts, whom they represent. Pasolini lived in two completely separate worlds; he spent as much time with the destitute people we meet here as with the intellectual and artistic elite of his day. Yet besides the psychological depth with which he imbues Mamma Roma and Ettore, he also uses them to express larger social, philosophical, and aesthetic ideas.

For me, one of the most compelling aspects of Pasolini, whether as author or filmmaker, comes from how he used his many inner conflicts to create some astonishing works of art, including this film. His vision is always greater than any ideology, although Pasolini in interviews talks mostly about the politics of his work (as you can see in the rare interviews, from editor Oswald Stack’s indispensable but sadly out-of-print 1969 book Pasolini on Pasolini included in the booklet with this DVD set). The strangeness, beauty and power of his art comes partly from the antithetical perspectives – mystical Catholicism and hard-edged Marxism – which were constantly at war within him. The hostility of both those ideologies towards Pasolini’s sexual nature as a gay man, together with his critical readings in Freud and other depth psychologists, provides his work with yet more thematic and emotional richness. And as we’ll see a bit later, he connects all of those perspectives with Western – and in his later works non-Western – arts: painting, architecture, myth, drama, literature, cinema, and astonishingly eclectic music (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew’s soundtrack ranges rom African music and African-American spirituals to Johann Sebastian Bach to avant-garde composer Anton Webern).

Pasolini’s art can never be broken down into mere systems of belief, reduced to some pictorialization of ideas. His work pulses with life, as embodied – in the fullest sense of the word – in Anna Magnani’s performance here. Still, Mamma Roma does reflect Christian motifs: the fallen woman who has been redeemed. But here, despite her regular attendance at mass (which, besides reaffirming her faith, allows her to scope out potential rich wives for her son) and respect for the local priest, she is her own redeemer. And that connects her more with communism than Catholicism. She also allows for biting Marxist – and typically Pasolinian – satire on both conformist (”piggish”) middle class values and the unjust social order which doesn’t allow her to make enough money at an honest trade, and so forces her back onto the streets as a prostitute. And let’s not forget Freud.

ImageMamma Roma’s relationship with Ettore is textbook Oedipus complex, as we see clearly in that incredible Oedipal tango (which also looks ahead to the disturbing yet tender dance in Salò between the two – barbaric – young male guards). Still another part of the Oedipal chord here is the striking resemblance of Bruna to Mamma Roma: Ettore wants to bed a Mamma look-alike. The most disturbing part of the chord is, of course, Mamma Roma’s inchoate desire for her son. Notice how she prods Biancofiore, whom she persuaded to have sex with Ettore to draw him away from Bruna, for details about what it was like to have had sex with her son. But that is all part of this complex character. And Anna Magnani’s – and Pasolini’s – Mamma Roma is a total living presence, far greater than the sum of her ideological parts.

Although Pasolini uses a straightforward linear structure for the three dozen scenes of the film (he took a similar approach in Accattone, but a wildly different one in the somewhat experimental comedy “La Ricotta”), he knows how to use mysteries of character. Paradoxically, that strategy makes the film both more emotionally involving and thematically complex. Put another way, can we trust what Mamma Roma tells us? And if so, how much – and what?

Mamma Roma’s life story is split up into several – often contradictory – bits and pieces, which she recounts to various characters throughout the picture. For instance, she tells an anonymous stranger (and potential john) on one of her nocturnal promenades that, when she was just a young girl, the first husband she had was 65. But at another point she tells someone else he was 70. And he may, or may not, have “dressed like Robespierre” and built latrine-like housing units for Mussolini (talk about symbolic architecture).

ImageFor most viewers, the most tantalizing question, which I don’t believe the film ever answers definitively, is: who is Ettore’s father? Some people claim it’s Carmine, and he almost implies as much. Yet the chronology is wrong, and Carmine is (probably – but not definitely) too young.

Pasolini, already feeling in command of his new medium, also increases Mamma Roma’s aura through purely cinematic means. He often shoots her looking directly into the camera, although that is a taboo which few filmmakers have the courage to break. The almost unbreakable tradition is always to have the character look just a little off to the side of the camera. But not our rule-breaking Pasolini. So Mamma Roma, with her passionate and beautifully expressive face (Magnani need never have worried that the big bags under her eyes would in any way detract from her performance – they make Mamma Roma even more real), looks right at us, stares us down. Not in a threatening way (after all, we’re not stand-ins for Carmine, are we?). But as one human being to another. Directly, immediately.

ImagePasolini extends this technique in one of his film’s most visually innovative – and emotionally involving – devices. In two nighttime sequences which help structure the overall narrative – one about a quarter of the length into the film, the other a quarter from the end – Mamma Roma saunters down a long, nearly deserted stretch of road. She’s back to her old tricks, literally. As she speaks, in what sounds like jazzy free verse, about destiny and love and her own incredible life, she meets an ever-changing series of fellow streetwalkers, johns, and assorted denizens of the night, who drift into the frame, go with her for a bit (it’s hard to keep up with that energy), then drift off, only to be replaced by others. On one level, the interplay of Mamma Roma’s high-stepping promenade with the camera’s graceful, unstoppable movement feel like a musical number. In the opening we saw Pasolini magically turn character exposition into a singing duel, but here he uses the camera as if it were a dancer. Everything feels carefully choreographed yet also natural, even fun. It also brings to mind the earlier funny but tense Oedipal tango scene with her son. As in the tango, the camera keeps a fixed distance from its ‘partner.’ But there’s yet another, and darker, level to this scene. As Mamma Roma constantly, inexorably, moves towards the camera it’s almost as if she’s trying to make an escape. But she can’t. The camera is always there, capturing her ebullience but also hedging her in. She keep coming and coming, but it steadily remains just out of rich – like the mythic Tantalus reaching for the fruit which always, always remains just out of reach. That Pasolini can make a sequence both neorealist and surreal, musical comedy-like yet existential – and do it in purely cinematic terms – is a credit to his genius.

These two parallel scenes also remind us of Pasolini’s considerable influence on other filmmakers. One of the greatest filmmakers who admired, and emulated, the earlier, more Neorealist, Pasolini was Rainer Werner Fassbinder. To take just a few examples, Mamma Roma’s unique tracking shots – with the head-on camera constantly moving just ahead of her – can be seen in pivotal moments in Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969) and Martha (1973). The early stairwell scene here, with the boys mocking Carmine as he tries to shake down Mamma Roma, is followed closely in several comparable scenes in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974). And it’s perhaps no coincidence that in The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), his film most reminiscent of early Pasolini, Fassbinder made the title character, like Mamma Roma, a fruit peddler groping for a better life. Of course, Pasolini’s mythic films – like Oedipus Rex, Medea, and Arabian Nights – are those most often emulated, extending from such notable contemporary works as Fellini Satyricon (1969 – Fellini had hired Pasolini for Nights of Cabiria to write the many scenes with the prostitutes), to the extraordinary British filmmaker Derek Jarman in Sebastiane (1976), to films today which try, often in vain, to recreate the ancient world with the force of the past master.

But back to Mamma Roma herself. All of the contradictory clues about her history, that she constantly rewrites – along with the sometimes astonishing visual and dramatic devices which Pasolini brings to her – help to make Mamma Roma both very human and larger than life. This woman who has no name – she is only ever “Mamma Roma” – can be seen, on her most overtly metaphorical level, as Pasolini’s symbol of Rome itself, with all of its complexities and follies: religious, socioeconomic, even psychological. That level also brings her closer to Pasolini’s later mythic figures, like Oedipus Rex and Medea, than to her predecessor, the more straightforwardly Neorealist pimp Accattone.

ImagePasolini condenses those visual and thematic strategies in the climactic – and genuinely heartwrenching – death of Ettore. After being caught trying to steal a cheap alarm clock from a sick man in a hospital – talk about desperation – he acts up, and is thrown into a bare prison cell (architecturally, this could be read as an extreme extension of Mamma Roma’s sterile new apartment). Dying of fever, Ettore is strapped to what looks like a medieval torture device (although it was authentic, then still in use in Italian prisons).

ImageSome people wince at the obvious Christlike pose, although Ettore’s “crucifixion” is decidedly horizontal. But in addition to the Christian thematics the moment also represents Pasolini’s criticism of both the oppressive society and of human weakness. Ettore is a product of a spirit-crushing environment, but he’s also a lazy and aimless kid. On yet another level, we see the obvious, and intentional, connection between this moment and Pasolini’s passion for the sublime power of Renaissance art – in particular, Andrea Mantegna’s starkly ethereal painting, done about 1500, entitled “Dead Christ.” The poses are identical.

This tragic end to a young man we’ve come to care about (perhaps in spite of ourselves) also makes us question whether Ettore’s fate is due to his intrinsic nature or to his environment – both of which stem from his mother – or perhaps some combination of those factors.

ImageThere is also the suggestion not only of Ettore as a Christlike martyr but of his mother as a Madonna-like figure. There is clearly a religious quality not only to his suffering but to hers. But Pasolini ends by conflating Mamma Roma as much with the Classical tradition – like the climax of an ancient tragedy – as with the Christian. The devastated Mamma Roma runs down the street, pursued by the many people (shades of a Greek chorus) who want to help her. Those final shots of her at the window, staring out at the sterile ‘clean’ Roman world she longed to move into – her face contorted in unbearable pain at the loss of her son, whom she loved more than life – is in utter contrast to the boisterously laughing woman of the first scene.

Pasolini connects Mamma Roma as much with her earlier self as with mythic, literary, Christian, Marxist, Freudian and – most immediately, most powerfully – basic human experience. All footnotes aside, her emotions are something which all of us can understand, even if mercifully we have not known such pain.

Pasolini is not only a great thinker and an even greater artist, but fully – at times overwhelmingly – a deeply-caring member of the human race.

this review first appeared on jclarkmedia.com

The General (1927) is an imaginative masterpiece of dead-pan “Stone-Face” Buster Keaton comedy, generally regarded as one of the greatest of all silent comedies (and Keaton’s own favorite) - and undoubtedly the best train film ever made. The Civil War adventure-epic classic was made toward the end of the silent era. Posters describing the slapstick film heralded: “Love, Locomotives and Laughs.” However, Keaton’s greatest picture (arguably) received both poor reviews by critics (it was considered tedious and disappointing) and weak box-office results (about a half million dollars) when initially released in the late 20s, and it led to Keaton’s loss of independence as a film-maker and a restrictive deal with MGM. It would take many decades for the film to be hailed as one of the best ever made.

Filled with hilarious sight gags and perfectly timed stunt work, the chase comedy was written and directed by Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, and filmed with a huge budget for its time ($750,000 supplied by Metro chief Joseph Schenck). It is memorable for its strong story-line of a single, brave, but foolish Southern Confederate train engineer doggedly in pursuit of his passionately-loved locomotive (”The General”) AND the woman he loves. His stoic, unflappable reactions to fateful calamities, his ingenious and resourceful uses of machines and various objects (water tanks, a large piece of timber, a cowcatcher, a rolling artillery cannon on wheels, and unattached railroad cars), and the unpredictable forces of Nature, provide much of the plot.

The film’s fictionalized plot was based on Lieut. William Pittenger’s Daring and Suffering: A History of the Great Railway Adventure (aka The Great Locomotive Chase), a true Civil War story of the daring raid/seizure by a group of about two-dozen Union spies (led by civilian spy James J. Andrews) of a Confederate train near Atlanta (at Marietta, Georgia) in April of 1862. They attempted to ride “The General” back into the Union, meanwhile wrecking communications, tracks, and bridges along the return way to Union-occupied Chattanooga (about 140 miles away). Within just 10 miles of safety at the border, the Union group was captured and Andrews and seven of his Raiders were later hanged as spies in Atlanta in June, 1862. Congress created the Medal of Honor in 1861-62 and posthumously awarded it to some of the Raiders (James Andrews, leader of the raiders, was not in the military and therefore not eligible).

The original tale (told from a Northern perspective) was reworked for the film - the tale was told from the point of view of the South and a Southern engineer, a second return train-chase was added, and a heroine named after Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabelle Lee was also introduced. A second film was also made to depict the raid - Walt Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), with Fess Parker as mastermind Union spy James J. Andrews.

The General displays marvelous technical and structural perfection, playful comic inventiveness and realistic romance, and non-chalant graceful, fluid athleticism on the part of Keaton - the Great Stone Face. Realistic stunts (without stuntmen to double for Keaton), uncontrived, free-flowing set-pieces, non-stop motion, and a preoccupation with authenticity make parts of the film a visual history of the American Civil War, with each shot looking like a Matthew Brady photograph. Part of the film was shot near Cowan, Tennessee, between Nashville and Chattanooga. Another locale for the film was around Cottage Grove, Oregon alongside Oregon’s Row River, where a half-mile stretch of narrow-gauge track was found for the two ancient, wood-burning, steam locomotives that figured prominently in the film (the General and the Texas). [The original antique locomotive, the General, on display in Chattanooga at Union Station since 1911, was not used in the film. The Texas was the locomotive that used for the river-gorge crash sequence.]

Each half of the film is predominantly composed of two train chases over the same territory. Each scene in the chase of the first half has a counterpart in the film’s second half. In the first chase, loyal Southern engineer Johnnie pursues the blue-coated spies who have stolen The General and escaped to the North. In the second half, the Union spies chase Johnnie in his re-possessed General back to the South. The film concludes with a climactic battle at a river gorge, with the dramatic crash of the pursuit train into the Rock River in the film’s most spectacular scene - and the most expensive shot of the entire silent era.

At a “half-open” detention facility and work camp on the island of Imrali, a group of hopeful, but resigned men ritualistically converge on the entrance of the main penitentiary ward: first, for the disbursement of weekly mail and subsequently, for the eagerly anticipated posting of the list of prisoners authorized for a one-week furlough. A soft-spoken, unassuming man named Yusuf (Tuncay Akça), dispirited by the scarcity of letters from home, seemingly finds his fortune changed when he finds his name among the privileged list of furloughed prisoners. Mehmet (Halil Ergün), a pensive and conflicted man faces his trip to Diyarbakir with great trepidation and anxiety, having found his marriage increasingly strained when his wife begins to question his role in her brother’s death during a bungled robbery. A vibrant and self-assured young man, Mevlat (Hikmet Çelik), finds his romantic notions to reunite with his fiancée Meral (Sevda Aktolga) thwarted when her family dispatches chaperones in order to prevent the couple from being alone. An idealistic and apolitical man named Omer (Necmettin Çobanoglu) who daydreams of his idyllic life amid the lush, grazing open fields of his beloved village in Kurdistan returns home to the chaotic sight of his town under siege by the military as they attempt to root out suspected insurgents in the closely knit community. A rugged, unemotional prisoner named Seyit (Tarik Akan) receives a letter from his family explaining that his wife Ziné (Serif Sezer) had dishonored their clan by resorting to prostitution, and was sent with their son to her parents’ home at a mountain village in the frozen hinterlands. Now issued a temporary permit to return home, he vows to redress the shame of his wife’s infidelity and restore honor to both families.

Realized on film by Yilmaz Güney’s assistant director Serif Gören based on the screenplay by - and technical direction of - imprisoned political prisoner, author, actor, and filmmaker Güney, Yol is an elegantly spare, haunting, and socially relevant portrait of repression, tyranny, isolation, and inhumanity. By juxtaposing images of transnational public transportation (in particular, trains and rural buses) and varied landscape that characterize the disparate paths of the furloughed prisoners, Güney illustrates, not only the country’s innate cultural and ethnographic diversity, but more importantly, the universality of oppression and the erosive, incalculable toll of Turkey’s continuing political and socio-economic instability following the military coup of 1960 and subsequent military interventions of 1971 and 1980. Moreover, through repeated episodes of martial law curfews, random check points and inspections, and civilian searches, Güney draws an implicit parallel in the paradoxical status of the conditionally liberated prisoners with the broader depiction of curtailed personal freedom among the general population under the nation’s military rule. Inevitably, the sad, often tragic plight of the prisoners’ elusive search for a sense of normalcy serves, not only as a microcosmic representation of life under political instability and a repressive regime, but also as a distilled and elementally human contemporary document of desolation, struggle, compassion, and perseverance.

review by helgé janssen

This film is based on the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy. The opening scenes of a vast and expansive American landscape silhouetted against dawn become a metaphor for the film: a gothic exploration of fascism, while throwing light on the desperate need for man to collectively wake-up. All the while, narration by the local sheriff, bemoans the fact that crime is becoming more and more violent….that crime is no longer what it used to be.

Central to the story is Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hired assassin who ruthlessly pursues his prey with singular determination. This pursuit is tinged with fatalism rather than fanaticism. He is so much imbued with his raison d’être that he becomes the archetype of Evil. In the course of his detours in pursuit of his aim, he takes out whoever crosses his path….or not….relying on the toss of a coin (Fate) to excuse his distasteful link to compassion.

For him NOT TO KILL is nothing short of a denial of who he IS.

…This clear cut understanding of who he is, enables him to carry out his executions with a mixture of irked impatience and trigger happy fatality. So his victims plea of “you dont have to do this” becomes utterly meaningless to him. In this sense he sees himself as little more than the Grim Reaper who exhibits an unexpected morality: if YOU cross his path it could only be because YOU, like HIM, are TAINTED if not directly, then by association. He is simply the magnet.

This point is deftly proven in the scintillating scene between him and a remote candy store owner whom he discovers (through pointed cross-questioning) has married money - concluding that his marriage was motivated by greed.

…All the old men he encounters (hence the title?) are blatantly ‘asleep’ which he equates as being amoral: they are standing so close to evil, yet are completely oblivious to it, to HIM, and therefore disposable. It is in these scenes that the Coen brothers juxtapose and illuminate inner and outer realities so brilliantly and echo those fascinating scenes (though for obviously different reasons and within a totally despicable context) captured in Herzogs Nosferatu with the unforgettable Klaus Kinski. (The previous Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror with Max Schreck was equally as charismatic.) Bardem is a worthy winner of best supporting actor and it is no mean feat to have crossed this divide from ancient to modern gothic so effectively yet stripped of all romanticism.

…Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is the welder and hunter who, in following up on a wounded prey while hunting, stumbles upon a drug deal that had gone horribly wrong. Dead bodies rotting unceremoniously. He realises there must be money somewhere, and with astonishing alacrity, locates it. It is of interest to mention Moss opening scene where he is taking aim at his prey, for this surely is yet another metaphor within the film that transcends similar scenes from other films: Moss lacks a true killers instinct for he wavers slightly and thus wounds the animal. It is this lack of a killers instinct …which inadvertently steers him towards the shootout and makes him no match for Chigurh. However, he has a certain amount of street savvy, and very soon discovers the radar sensor that enables Chigurh to track him so effortlessly, stacked inside the satchel of money.

But of course it is Chigurh himself who is the radar meter whose antennae are not going to be in the least bit phased by this hiccup in consciousness.

… Bell, a Texas sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) is duty bound to pursue justice and does so without the slightest zeal. When we encounter him through his opening narrative, he quite clearly feels overwhelmed by the persistent and ever changing face of evil. He is an honourable man but not extraordinary, and has pursued justice without personal motive - he is not driven by vendetta, by righteous vengeance or any of the characteristics that seem to have become the hallmark of so many characters in cop movies.

In the context of this film he is untainted and it is therefore telling that he and Chigurh never meet. However, this latest episode proves the last straw and he resigns. In the closing narrative he relates two disturbing dreams he had to his wife ending with “and then I woke up”. There is an immediate blackout and the film ends.

To me, the ordinariness of this closing statement, probably used by every person who has ever related a dream, throws the entire audience on the spot in a brilliant coup de grâce of film making.

And, according to the Coens, if I am not mistaken, it is within the beguiling veneer of ordinariness that many people disclaim any responsibility for their part in the woes of the world.

this review first published on helgé’s great website

Kim Ki-young’s Hanyo, or The Housemaid, is one of the true classics of South Korean cinema, and when I finally had the opportunity to see the picture, I was startled. That this intensely, even passionately claustrophobic film is known only to the most devoted film lovers in the west is one of the great accidents of film history. I’m proud that the World Cinema Foundation is participating in the restoration and preservation of this remarkable picture. I am eager for more people to get to know and love The Housemaid. —Martin Scorsese, February 2008

In the film, the composer sleeps with his housemaid while his wife is gone to her parents’ house; he loses everything to the housemaid with personality disorders. Viewers of the film said that the story could sufficiently occur in reality; at that time, many such incidents occurred. Many households could afford to hire housemaids for low costs; but housewives were worried about such situations at the back of their minds. I made a set for the two-story house, which I thought to be a miniature of the world. I made all accessories and furniture for the film on my own, and especially I worked hard on lighting. Viewers of the film praised the beautiful scenes, and asked me what was the secret; however, I did not readily give the answer. —Kim Ki-Young

NOTES ON THE RESTORATION
Hanyo (The Housemaid) has been restored digitally by the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) with the support of the World Cinema Foundation. The original negative of the film was found in 1982 with two missing reels, 5 and 8. In 1990 an original release print with hand-written English subtitles was found and used to complete the copy. This surviving print was highly damaged, and the English subtitles occupied almost half of the frame area. The long and complex restoration process has involved the use of a special subtitle-removal software and included flicker and grain reduction, scratch and dust removal, color grading.