Before the Rain (1994)

This beautiful tale in three parts has only one major weakness: the most beautifully shot and told part comes at the very beginning, and the viewer is left struggling to reexperience the classic tale of thwarted love in the remaining, as the story slowly evolves into a political statement, even if made so poetically, so indirectly.

Also known as Pred dozhdot (in Macedonian), the film's strength lies in its visuals and its rich, stunning music: so even if the film falters on scores of an irrelevant second part and a longer-than-needed third part, all is forgiven, since one is still mesmerised by what happened in the first part: magic between and by a Macedonian novice and an Albanian untamed girl, played memorably by the French actor Grégoire Colin and the Macedonian Labina Mitevska - any praise for the two would be less. The film reminded me of several classic Uzbek love stories, stuff on which I grew up and which probably influenced me into becoming greatly into what I am: however, director Manchevski's intentions are beyond a love that bloomed for a day. His intentions are that "the circle is not round": that instead of a man's past catching up with him, it catches up with others, and thus misery extends "like a virus". One man's misdeeds may lead to an unforeseen chain reaction: which is what the film's story is in a nutshell, though here the perpetrator is faceless, rather it is the stupid humanity which can poke out "twenty-eight thousand eyes", quite a spectacle, isn't it?

Manchevski employs certain tricks very close to Kieślowski: I don't think they necessarily work here. The structure of the film itself is not simply "non-linear": it is neither circular. It is rather, what I would say, jagged: and parts of it don't make any sense to me. How does Anne have the photos of Zamira's killing, unless that is the most latest chronological piece: and if it is, what purpose does it serve, even if I ignore that it is sandwiched in between older chronological segments in order to only confuse the viewer? Kieślowski used to employ jagged storylines often, but much more cleverly. There are also the recurring motifs like the cat and the same music on radio that Trajce and a stranger hear, and of course there is the strong emphasis on cinematography of Kieślowski. What Manchevski is not able to do with those motifs that he is unable to create intuitive links between their occurrences: for Kieślowski, there were unseen connections across time and space between events, between people and between periods, hence the recurrence, but here the same seems to be belaboured and simply a trick.

Regardless, it was the first-ever feature of Manchevski, and a very ambitious one at that, so it's understandable: the greater the experience, the greater the refinement will come. In the end, what he's done is that he's given us not just a sublime film but sublime poetry, illuminated at the very start by words of foreboding, of Meša Selimović.

À tout de suite (2004)

The much-underrated film À tout de suite (int’l title: Right Now) came as a major surprise to me: luminous and intense throughout, the film is a completely different take on the often-shot theme of bank robbery in French cinema. The film is rather all about the young girl who’s fallen hopelessly, and for ever, in life-changing love with a sensitive bank robber. It’s completely her story, that of her life, her emotions, her releases, her attempts to keep living: and the robbery and even her love are in the backdrop or serve only as props to that. Needless to say, the actor playing such a role needs to be superb and come across as vulnerable, exposable - beautiful Isild Le Besco as Lili gives one of the finest performances of French cinema.

I saw the original version in which Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” is used: I’ve heard that there is another version with some other music. “Shine on You” punctuates the film brilliantly (it’s another matter that the same music serving to bolster the story’s pathos kept me reminded throughout of Buongiorno, Notte). The decision to shoot the film in black & white serves also well the film: Le Besco seems more beautiful than she may have looked otherwise, the nude scenes seem artistic and voluptuous instead of crude as often the case is otherwise, and the film gets the grainy look of a life lived among raw emotions, not some color canvas expertly prepared for delicious consumption.

The best praise that I can think of the film is that it can give Carax’s Boy Meets Girl a stiff competition and worthy company.

Les arpenteurs

Les Arpenteurs is one of those rare tongue-in-cheek films that do more for cinema than all of Salvador Dali's so-called surrealist works: it's a dark comedy without being dark and a feminist lookout without being committal to feminism, but above all the film is a surreal study in art of conversations, relations and human desires. The thing worth noting here is that it is not the morsels of conversations that are surreal, nor does the film belong to a Dali-esque movement that is supposed to juxtapose together odds and ends in a self-mocking attempt to create, an eyeball of one creature with the ear of another: no, it is the study, of human society, that is surreal here, where topics of conversation or musings range from a hat's make to in which or in whose bed did you make love and where was it.

The film of course works much more if you know French, for no amount of subtitling can help absorb in their immediacy the fine nuances of double entendres and reinforcing by way of rhyming, for which French is a gifted language. The title "Les Arpenteurs" itself does not simply mean the surveyors, but also those who stride with long paces a space: here the space of a field to be surveyed as much as human hearts and homes, crushing what lies beneath their feet regardless of the texture of the trampled upon. Which is why it's a stupid folly to sell the film in English as The Surveyors - better not to translate the title in such a case. (Not to mention that the "The" is completely off here: only "Surveyors" is the sense!)

On the face of it, the film is strongly feminist, with two female protagonists, Alice and Ann, though the chief protagonist is a man, Léon (played expertly by Jean-Luc Bideau). The roles are projected to be stereotyped, but there is always a certain lingering self-derision at these stereotypical characters all through the film, as if the director Soutter is washing his hands off any kind of interpretation yet only amusing himself in your attempts to interpret and reinterpret. In a way, the film repeats the "liberty to women" kind of message, where liberty is held to mean that if men have been fucking around, why can't women do the same and break men's heartless hearts, men being nothing but driven by lust? Where women are "free" to express themselves through their bodies and not just submit to the old argument that man's bodies they must explore, but even each other's they "should/must?" (preach, preach, preach). Where mere wantonness is celebrated as "we are not afraid/shy/repressed" and where every argument turns around the phallus and thus the order needs to be subverted. The usual feminist trash. However, the message is so stalely given forth by Soutter, as if he's asking the validity, that well, is that really any kind of liberty? Or did we only try to emulate the man, and thus keep living in a world defined by men?

The film has a very strange construction, which helps in the lack of a definite interpretation for every viewer. While all throughout brilliant comedy, which is not through some Woody Allen kind of wit but by classic French props of comedy such as facial expressions, whimsical dialogues and slow pace (yes, a slow pace gives the same flavour - some claim only colour and nothing more, though - to a comedy as oak barrels from Limousin give to cognac), the film is almost throughout filled with the broad and huge frame of Léon, but in a sudden shift of balance of power, which could leave a viewer or two feeling betrayed, it's the two women, in turns Alice and Ann, who come to occupy the central place in the film, just as the looming shadow of an arpenteur's work also brings in a tint of impending tragedy but possible greater - or truer, depending on your choice of opinion - liberty in the women's life. However, the final image, that of Alice as a school teacher supervising children, leaves much to ponder and much unresolved: is it the future, once the houses have been demolished, or is it a wait? Is it the life Alice wanted or is it a compromise? A compromise for what?

The strangest thing is not however the construction but the images used throughout the film. One of the most striking is that of the cello case: while I usually am not fond of seeing things as symbols, to me at least the cello case of Eugène, the gentle, patient lover with whom Alice plays mercilessly, functions as the vagina: waiting to be penetrated. It's a strange image to use with a man, as if Alice, even if in the body of a woman, has donned the mind of a man, whereas Eugène has the mind of the woman. When Eugène invites Léon to bring the case till his car, his woman mind is inviting the man-mind man Léon over in a sexual manner, as if dejected of getting Alice, he will make do with the non-gay (mentally) gay (physically) option of sleeping with Léon. Of course, when I talk about the man mind and the woman mind here, I am talking of the classic hypothesized images of man and woman, on the exploitation of which all feminism, in all its forms howsoever diverse, thrives. After all, the vagina need not await penetration by some phallus, the modern feminists would claim: the earlier feminists said why couldn't the phallus wait, but now they say why couldn't a vagina be content with another vagina and artificial penetrations through sex toys? Or, rather, not be dependent on any of them, just keep "expressing" through your body: simply keep soaking physical pleasure as you will. Just as the men have been doing it. Full circle, anyone?

Így jöttem

Jancsó’s stories seem to emerge from the vast, deserted landscapes he films them on: just as much as the spaghetti Westerns. However, in the case of the Westerns, men seem to be driven by the nature to lust and violence; in the Hungarian or East European landscapes of Jancsó, though, men and women seem to be the rightful inheritors of mad rushes for power and for meaningless liberty.

Így jöttem (English title: My Way Home) is a film that however focuses less on the intoxication of power and the consequent madness, than it does on the fragility of human relationships. With beautiful cinematographic movements and adding detail little by little, we get to understand - very slowly - the character of Jóska, so lovably played by András Kozák. It is a testament to the massive acting ability of Kozák that he could play two so diametrically opposite roles in Silence and Cry and My Way Home, even when there is no melodrama involved to distinguish between the two shades of men he is representing. For Jóska is gentle, seeking, not angry, forgiving and seeking to understand; he is yet a child and still he has the understanding of a valuable friendship and not to turn away his back on it. He is at once the rebel in not seeking safety, and at once the submissive docile who maybe even would like something to occupy his thoughts in a labour camp rather than being set free. Not the István that is angry and for whom justice is more principle than love, more idea than natural.

The film in its second half does become more or less the story of a friendship that does not need words between two men, and it’s a beautifully portrayed relation, a friendship that can exist only between men and that is as much comradeship as friendship (akin to what is seen in the landmark Hindi film Sholay). It’s a difficult art to build a story that has no real plot except the ordinary details of life: My Way Home does it through some beautiful shots and sequences, for example, when the two friends are out hunting the nude-bathing girls and are finally themselves the hunted ones. It’s one of the most beautiful sequences I’ve seen in cinema till now, rivalling all the best cheetah-chasing-deer shots of the National Geographic.

Another compelling film from Miklós Jancsó, because of its more warm nature and overall lack of tensions between characters, even if the intricacies of Hungarian politics during the War are a bit difficult to understand at first unless you knew them beforehand, this is one of the more accessible films from the European cinema.

Oslo, 31. august

Rarely are films based on burning issues like drug addiction are so well made as Oslo, 31. august (international title: Oslo, August 31st): the film goes beyond addiction itself and rather explore what each man searches, the quest for some kind of meaning to one’s life, a quest that is present in the lives of each of us and which takes different forms of different addictions. Some are put into a corner or a cage by the society, and others aren’t.

The film is lit up by a stunningly brilliant performance by the lead actor, Anders Danielsen Lie as his namesake. Relying heavily on close-ups, the central question over today’s society, the Western society in particular, occurs somewhere in the middle, when Anders recalls the life he grew up to, a home wherein “liberty” becomes another religion, where the bywords are “free” and “artist,” and where the new rule is to not to have rules. Anders stands as an accusation to all the society: that where ethics and principles are often confounded with rules and attack on liberty. The only other solution that he finds is to become like them, which he would refuse to, finally gaining true freedom in his final act.

The film reveals beautifully how deceptions are unmasked and when they are unmasked, we realize how we would have liked to be remaining duped always. Everyone else has got something - that is what Anders thinks. But on encountering them, he will only realize that they are only bluffing at living life: what they are living is only lives. But they are as lonely and as angry as Anders is, and tired, for unlike Anders they have accepted contentment with being hollow.

In a world where ideas have taken the place of love, Anders and the puppets surrounding him are only inevitable.

Exit through the Gift Shop

It matters little whether Exit through the Gift Shop is about reality or is hoax: because the moral of the story remains as it is, since street art has become fashionable, just as most other things do nowadays very quickly, leading to the instant killing of art, unless practiced in solitude. Art on large scale, from literature to paintings, was often always “brainwash” and now is even more so: the more popular an artist, the more the reason to be wary of brainwashing. More importantly than the message, the film also traces how something is erected to the scale of brainwashing, and if the film is indeed by Banksy, then there is no lack of self-ridicule in the film.

It is remarkable that a film largely constructed on footages and interviews could be at once revelatory, hilarious and a story: there is a hidden powerlessness in the film about the society; faced with more and more technology, where once art was perfected for years, it is possible to become an overnight artist now, since too often adulation and fame will win over the artist from what he could have loved doing. Of course, Guetta is no artist: he has maybe an artist’s temperament and passion, but not the skills, not the mind. But the larger question is, whether it is Guetta’s fault, or rather those of people like Banksy who produce signatured pranks, who court controversy and attention, and who think meaninglessness is art. When counterculture starts itself becoming culture, do we need to go back to culture, either embracing it as what we ran away from or trying it as a new “counter-counterculture”? And in all this, we forget why is meaninglessness so important to an increasing number of people today? Is this fondness for meaninglessness a reaction, and if so, then to what? Are we too informed with meanings and symbols all round? Or is it in fact beyond semiotics, is semiotics itself a semiotic game? Rather, do we live in a more and more heraldic world, with concepts and ideas serving now as heralds, instead of herbs and fauna?

A brilliant film, Exit through the Gift Shop will keep asking questions from all shades of consumers: tourists to art collectors, from those who find meaning in Cézanne to those who strive to create. The most disturbing question shall be: can we create anymore? Or, can we only copy and trick à la Guetta (urf Mr. Brainwash)?

Si le vent te fait peur

A rare beauty that explores romantic and sexual tension between two beings without being sensual, a feat difficult to achieve (Rohmer has done that in an attempt to banalize desire; Emile Degelin does it here in a better way, by using an interpretation of love wider than mere desire), Si le vent te fait peur (English title: If the Wind Frightens You) is on apparent looking a story of incest, or rather one of incestuous thoughts. However, on getting lost in the story, you find you are confronted with Adam and Eve. Not the Adam and Eve. Because the beautiful Elisabeth Dulac and the modern, a bit intellectual Guy Lesire only represent Adam and Eve for being alone not in a world, but in a civilization: this is a land where they cannot desire each other, where every thought is marked by a fear of condemnation, and more importantly the fear of what will happen to their love in the fallout. It is that that they fear, more than the condemnation, they who know each other so well, whose love for each other is so pure, who are the first born, the first couple, since the other lovers will only later, suddenly emerge from the waves, nymph-like. But they have always known each other and loved each other’s company, and yet they are not to love each other.

Degelin has selected and used the Belgian coastal landscape wonderfully: it is as if the land has given birth to this story, these monstrous two human beings, monstrous in their capability of laughing, of cocking a snook at others, of daring to think of love each other, and it is as if in these shimmering sands, they are the only two living, the only two loving. The two who think what will the other’s lot be when they will be condemned, not that they will be condemned, the two together alone in this vast world of sun and youth. There are others who will make occasional appearances: the thief, the lover, the debonair, and the two sisters. But they all seem dead, they have forgotten what loving is, what desiring is: they are too ready with their tongues and yet laughter has forsaken them, and only little intrigues and desires to be quenched in a moment engulf them. It is apt that it is the debonair with his mock-play of love who rouses the slumbering passion in Dulac for her brother: confronted with the lover from outside who could have been equal to his brother, she prefers the known rather than the unknown who will vanish like the wind.

This is not a story that talks of the tortures of desire, like most literature or film does; rather, love here is companionship, mental and physical, love here is ease, and love here is fidelity that will be everlasting. Fidelity to self, for the other is the complementary self of myself here. It goes beyond what Melville's Les enfants terribles could. The cinematography is beautiful, and unlike a Polanski or most modern directors, instead of a continuous building up of tension, here we have a more natural flow with spurts and ebbs throughout, a film closer to life and the story it tells. Most importantly, both Dulac and Lesire, the former in particular, have been wonderfully captured, and the film is like an ode to their beauty, something which is fitting to the story the film tells. As if it is but natural that both should fall in love with one another, slowly but inexorably.

Csend és kiáltás

Miklós Jancsó’s Csend és kiáltás (int’l title: Silence and Cry) is a film that takes some time to warm to: even if you knew the Hungarian history. However, more than the Hungarian history, if you knew the Hungarian landscape, you will eventually not only appreciate the film but also love it: watching the film brought to me several memories of little scenes I had almost forgotten, even if my memories of Hungary are not too old by any means. Nature plays a large role in this film: the desolate-looking land also reflects the country’s hopeless political climate, and the sterile lives of all the protagonists of the film.
The Hungary of today is not so very different: even if there are not secret police everywhere, life is still marked by the same barrenness, and the same bleak landscape foretells everything.

There is hardly anything left for me to say after this fine entry here: http://filmjournal.net/kinoblog/2008/03/18/silence-and-cry/

However, I do wonder whether Jancsó has left lots of untied ends in his film as a deliberate measure, in a way of saying that tying or untying them does not matter, or is it a matter of loose direction; it’s difficult to say this for me, especially since I don’t have access to all Jancsó’s films preceding and succeeding this particular film. I did dislike the ending of the film, however: it was difficult to imagine for me that István did not know about the poisoning before. I would have also liked to see some kind of exchange between István and Károly, the former being the adored one of the two women and the latter the scorned one. Probably there is no exchange worth a name, since István is completely indifferent about Károly: but why should an idealist who prides himself over being one be so utterly heartless to all that Károly has to go through because of him? And if he’s not an idealist in the real sense, then why would he go and do the final act? Or is István merely a tool in the hands of the two women, who exploit his need to hide, while István in turn also sees them in the same light and hence feels a latent brotherhood with the farmer Károly, even if feeling him not enough a rebel? In that case, why does István not kill the women in the final act, which would also inevitably lead to his denunciation?

These are questions that are not really resolved satisfactorily in this ménage-à-quatre story (or should I say cinq, considering that Kémeri does get some sort of satisfaction by knowing he has the women - and István, since the possibility of Kémeri and István being former lovers cannot be ruled out - in his power), a story of power struggles all round; however, the cinematography and the overall fluidity of the story bound in a rigid plot make anyway for an enriching viewing.

Le mani sulla città

One of the best films I’ve ever seen, Le mani sulla città (the insipidly translated UK title being Hands Over the City) goes into the uncharted territory of a film not having any representative characters: instead of characters that one could love or hate, instead of the rise and fall of one man or family or group, this brilliant film explores the nexus between politicians, law-makers and builders on a broader scale but constructing its gripping story around one particular incident: the collapse of a residential building in a poor, crowded area, coveted by those for whom deaths and misery are calculated in terms of profits and losses. While watching the film, there were times when floated through my mind certain scenes, subplots or ways of filming particularly from Z, La battaglia di Algeri, and Dilip Kumar’s Mashaal, and yet it is a testimony to this extraordinarily tight (but not sparse) film, that it stands head and shoulders above the three cited ones, gems in their own right.

One of the surprising and best things that director Rosi does is not to let have Rod Steiger, in whom the corruption is seen to be invested ultimately, a lot of screen time; neither does Steiger have many dialogues or even much acting to do, except keeping moping his brow all the time and looking tense. In many ways, he reminds me of Richard Burton here, who used to have a very similar acting method. The film is rather kept on the edge by a bunch of non-professionals, with Carlo Fermariello playing the stellar role of De Vita - the leftist politician who rejects (or who doesn’t see any profit in supporting) Steiger till the end. Interestingly, it is not De Vita’s character but Balsamo’s, who also happens to be a doctor, that seems the only disinterested one amid a stinking bevy of dignitaries, who only serve to fatten themselves and their art collections at the expense of people.

The discordant music, recurring throughout the film whenever the city “buildscape” is presented to the viewer, reinforces the double image of a residential complex, crucial to the film’s understanding: profits for Steiger and his like apparently, but what we have to imagine is that there are people living and growing there. Even in the case of the building collapse, there is no focus on the human suffering or fear in the aftermath: Rosi leaves that for us to imagine, since similarly for all his political characters, except that of Balsamo, the living beings there are no more than votes - to be used at the time of elections, but otherwise to be disposed of as profitably as possible.

The film is also something very relatable for people from countries like Italy and India, with their high amount of civic corruption. Both countries also have a strong presence of mafia, an area which this film chooses not to explore (on the contrary, Mashaal does that but in doing so, forgets the politicans; Z has all the bases covered, but instead of mafia, it is just local hitmen who are used to “silence” a political opponent). Le mani sulla città is one of the rare flawless films, not least for its clear-headedness about what to include and what to exclude.

Slnko v sieti

When a film takes more than one dimension and gives forth several layers of coherent meaning, it is already a worthy one. Slnko v sieti (int’l title: The Sun in a Net) not only does that but also produces several visual and aural metaphors, serving also as reference marks for emotions and for the other undescribables throughout the film. The film is sort of a collection of several little stories interacting with each other: the story is more like the tributaries of a river when they have not yet joined in with the river. We only have a sense or an anticipation, which successfully works as suspense, that there will be a river, that these stories mesh with each other. To write such a screenplay and thereafter to translate it onto the screen are the toughest things I can imagine, and I can only marvel at the skill of Štefan Uher, the director, and Alfonz Bednár, the writer. Both would have been nothing had it not been for the wonderful black-and-white cinematography of Stanislav Szomolányi.

It is hard to define Slnko v sieti: the title says it all, and just as the sun in a net is not so tangible after all but only a fleeting joy, so does the film talks of all such fleeting impressions, which slowly build and create a man’s character, his or her persona. If the film were only about Fajolo, a bereft teen with an obsession of photographing hands, it could have been probably called as one of those “coming-of-age” movies. However, while Fajolo is always learning and discovering the world, so is his romantic interest, Bela, and so is Bela’s blind mother, and so is Bela’s little brother, amidst the lies that he excels in creating.

The central question of the movie is contained in one line uttered during a soliloquy: “Who hurts us?”
It is the black sun that is hoped to be more revelatory than the white sun they daily see and fail to catch in the nets, the black sun that comes only once in 120 years. The black sun is like the messiah for the modern world: where you say “tyranny,” but you don’t even know how is it the very word that tyrannizes us, that dominates us to the extent that we are nothing outside of it, that we are not able to do anything than mumble “tyranny, tyranny.” And in such a world there are also Peto and Jana, who have decided to live under the white sun, for whom waiting for the imagined does not exist; on the other hand, Bela’s mother has also never waited for the imagined, but because she has also lived in the imagined: in those yarns created by Bela and her brother and in her own fears and love. Between the tensions of these two worlds exist Fajolo and Bela: Fajolo is the poet with his camera, for whom imagination has taken the proportions of a despot and he disregards what is there (Bela) for what all he imagines, he is ready to wait another 120 years even if cursing himself for it; Bela is the poet with her love to give, who only waits to escape this battle between sun and darkness, who hates but does not know what or whom she hates. She doesn’t know who hurts us.

De Vlaschaard (1943)

Boleslaw Barlog’s little-known film De Vlaschaard (meaning “The Flax Field”; also known as Wenn die Sonne wieder scheint) is yet another masterpiece from the best of decades for cinema: the 1940s. Shot with a camera given to detail, the film narrates an ages-old story of father-son rivalry in a world where land means everything; inevitably, women have not much role to play in this capitalist world where only the stronger is richer, except being a silent motivation or conscience to their lovers and husbands. A brilliant performance is given by the two Pauls, Klinger (the son) and Wegener (the father): these two men, who dominate the film, who cannot understand each other, are tied by relations of familial pride in each other, and yet resent each other’s ideas and way of doing things.

In spite of flaws like a happy ending where it looks out of place and terrible miscasting of the son’s love interest Bruni Löbel, who doesn’t at all look like a poor farm girl even if I forget her lack of acting skills, the film doesn’t fail primarily due to its tight structure: even if the camera lingers, the story doesn’t, and in a matter of 80-odd minutes an effective, realistic and sad story of many fathers and sons across ages is told. There is also no attempt to brush-stroke characters sympathetically, but rather the world is shown as it is.

Klinger’s character, while ambitious, unafraid to follow his own lead and even if his ideas do turn out to be right always, does turn out to be insensitive and selfish, unable to think outside of himself or his farm; the story is very well constructed, so that Klinger’s offer to go away from the farm if Löbel were to be turned out comes only at a certain critical juncture of the film, when he is full of frustration and rage at being unable to do things his own way. Klinger also comes across as a Rudin-like character, unable to fulfil his promises and yet giving them thoughtlessly.

On the other hand, while Wegener on the face of it resents Klinger’s advice, he does follow it furtively, and when he’s away, he does celebrate the intelligence of his son with his neighbours: for him, his son is just like his farm, and he hopes it is also a very good produce. The issue, however, is that human beings, especially the good produce, are not mute like flax would be: that humans are not owned like cattle. However, while both father and son are obstinate, Wegener is to the point of being obdurate, thoughtlessly so: and he does fulfil his promises, if just for the sake of recklessness.

Without pretentiousness and without claims to intellectual stuff, De Vlaschaard is a powerful film telling a real story and asking questions. The most poignant scene is to watch and imagine the corruption of Wegener’s heart in a world which lives by things like capital and thus-earned respect and morals: how the man has become blind to everything but these, how he estimates himself and his worth and his youth in only these. And maybe, Klinger with his fond love for his farm will follow in the same steps of decay.

The Third Man

A film from that golden era of English films, whether coming from Hollywood or Britain, the 1940s, when films dared to be grey, realistic and yet fogged in a halo of street lamps, Carol Reed's The Third Man boldly tries things which few films have done throughout the history of cinema, until today. A music that grows on your nerves rather than forming a complementary to the plot; a key man of the plot being introduced when you had almost forgotten of him (and what an introduction!); and some never-to-be forgotten dialogues that give the film a human relevance much beyond what its film noir look would have done so: these are things that are hardly done nowadays, when directors claim to be "experimental," let alone back then in that era when women often had nothing to do except being the love interest. Alida Valli also doesn't have to do more than that, but in walking off from the blundering positive protagonist, Joseph Cotten, she makes a statement to rival that made by Maj-Britt Nilsson in the Swedish film Sommarlek, interestingly from the same period: the statement that a nearly similar film, at least as far as the atmospherics are concerned, George Cukor's Gaslight, failed to make, in spite of a remarkable performance by the talent of Ingrid Bergman.

Apart from the music, the film's strengths lie in its unconventional cinematography but conventional editing, and actors very well suited to their parts except Welles to a large extent and Valli to a certain extent. However, since Welles' role is primarily that of bringing a shock value at points in the film, it does not matter that much; it is the ensemble of the self-pitying but still-searching Joseph Cotten and the very internationally diversified world around him in the post-War Vienna that form the crux of the cast and the strength of the film. Where crisp cinematography, Valli's eyes, and Cotten's performance are already ruling the roost, it's a feat to even be noticeable: Austrian actress Hedwig Bleibtreu rather manages to illuminate the whole film, in the matter of hardly minutes, with that minor role of the landlady of Valli she has. Not only that, but in the context of the post-Welles film, she - more than any gangrened patients in the hospital, who should've been shown by the camera (this is one major flaw of the film; I don't know if it was due to any production code issues or merely that fine detail of avoiding hurting people's sensibilities) - it is she who represents one of those obscure "dots," which hardly matter in the scheme of things. While Raskolnikov's old lady might have been portrayed as mean and not in a flattering way, here is another such obscure dot, waiting to be exterminated: but this time this dot is brimful with life. Life not in the sense of doing great things, rushing from one city to another, or unbounded laughter or sex; but life in that ultimate sense of living, that love for living which permeates so many of us, which only gives meaning to everything we do.

A lot has been said of that brave shot at the end of the film, and even after having watched hundreds and hundreds of films, I, too, find it a really brave shot: I hadn't expected it at all. Only Lean's entry for Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia rivals it, but I would say even that wasn't as brave a shot as this one is: to set such a shot at the climax of the film, with around 2 mins of screen time without wavering from that simple walk that rejects the pretender, could not just be termed brave, but could have been called visionary, had the later filmmakers learnt anything.

Talking of other things, Trevor Howard gives a fine performance, as does the Austrian actor Ernst Deutsch in a vampirish-looking role. The accent of Bernard Lee makes a delightful addition to the film. And the end of Welles is probably even more remarkable than the entry of Welles in the film: clutching and grasping. For? Money? Or this time, life? Salvation? Or trying to escape from being a once-upon dot?

Le roi et l'oiseau

A precursor for many films and inspiration for many filmmakers, Le Roi et l'Oiseau (int'l title: The King and the Mockingbird; more appropriate would have been the literal translation, The King and the Bird) is not merely a heritage object; it says things that many other films do not, it brings to life characters that appear stilted even in live-action movies, and it moves with a fluidity that is remarkable and typical of a good animated movie.

Fluidity does not only belong to the storyline and editing; it also belongs to the brilliant animation work done, especially considering that it's traditional 2D work and not 3D. In the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale extract, when the chimney sweep helps the shepherdess come down a ladder, the movement of the hips of the shepherdess is a sight to watch: and compared with the precedent climbing down movement of the sweep, a highly instructive lesson as to how carefully observed life has to be to create a good work of art. Sustained by the music and more of excellent animation work (the King has no rivals in all the animation work I've ever seen), the film also, atypically for an animation film, attains greater consistency by not introducing too many characters. Yes, the finale has a bevy of carnivores, but they are more a chorus rather than an assortment of tricks.

A much more interesting feeling that one gets is that the film is not only an attack on unenlightened monarchy, but an attack on any kind of totalitarian institution. The film attacks, much more snidely than Yann Jouette's brilliant Berni's Doll, which seems to have taken the baton and carried it forward, all sorts of assembly-line work: it is worth noting that not only there are a thousand statues of the King being assembled, but every member of the King's police force looks alike and behaves in the same stupid and dead manner. It is only the lower city that has escaped the dummification, and yet they are also dummies in another way: waiting for the Bird to come as their messiah. However, they are still not dummies in every way: they still do believe that the Sun exists, they still listen to music and can dream that more beauty is there even if they can't really say what it is like, and hence they can still be someone. It is interesting that most of those who are under the Sun and the Stars have nothing to believe in and know everything, most of those are dead; and that from those for whom the Sun is a myth and to say that the Earth is round a prayer, who can only and do believe, most are still alive, even if stripped of the confidence in themselves. But it is the swaggering Bird who believes and yet knows a lot, who makes - one knows not - stories or truths of all the world she has seen but also has the anger to finish the last cage in the world of Kings, which exemplifies the virtue of being sagacious and yet a romantic, especially in a world being increasingly populated by dummies.

El espíritu de la colmena

At times, silence speaks much more than voices, forebodings are truer than what happened, and a deserted plain has more secrets than a forest of chestnuts. I will call Victor Erice, the director, the timekeeper: a man who must have had the ability to feel the untold burden and the untold wealth of love, fear and anger to be able to make El espíritu de la colmena (int'l title: The Spirit of the Beehive).

The film has no need of oblique references to Franco and the Spain of yesteryears; within itself, the story of a child haunted and imprisoned, a life-changing sentence that at once is transcendental between life and death, between the meaningless order of bees and the disorder of humans consequent to striving for meaning, the story not only moves you sweepingly in her world, but also thrills you and grips you. Even without the horror, there is horror; the film is shot carefully, with colors chosenly blended: a heavy melancholia pervades at all times the house of two lively girls in the silent Castillian village. While Isabel slowly develops sadistic streaks as her form of rebellion against the silence, Ana chooses silence to cut silence: finding labyrinths through the silence, she must encounter the spirit, and determine if the spirit is even evil or not. Why to accuse the spirit beforehand? She is ready for change, for a new oncoming; may not a spirit bring more sense to the world of bees, building cells and collecting honey as if they were run mechanically?

Every shot is a beauty to watch, and it is rare that a film succeeds when every shot is some thing: here it does, because every shot has a purpose, a meaning. The art direction is very relevant, only enhanced by the extraordinary cinematography. At once, through rich poetics, Erice addresses growing up, rebellion, the gatherer's life we choose to live, and the meaning of poetry itself in life. A film hard to forget, The Spirit of the Beehive raises the rarely asked question: who is said to exist?

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes

Klaus Kinski had to play only himself; but it is the way that Herzog restrains himself in his critique of the West’s lust for power and riches, not going overboard and yet being to the point, that defines the astonishing film Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (int’l title: Aguirre, the Wrath of God). And it is the music of the film that gives that elemental touch to the film, when man is at war with nature: nature not only of the Amazon but also nature within, where man makes a slave of himself in pursuit of mastery over everything and everyone. Power brings with it the subjugation to the oppressed: something unfinishedly said in Orwell’s “Shooting an elephant” and more refinedly in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. For when you establish a power over someone’s body and wealth, his will and land, you tie yourself up within the realm that that power gives you; the more vast the reach, probably the wider is the radius of your tether, and yet tied you remain. And sometimes like a hurt animal ready to bite, as Aguirre (Kinski), mad but ready to pierce every envelope, and madder for he has the intelligence to feel that this was not a prison worthy to broken, a fort worthy to be taken; gold means nothing, for fame and power are absolute to him; and yet, if he had attained that fame and power, would he have finally felt satisfied? Or, like Ashoka, been driven on to that eternal lust of repentance and God?

Werner Herzog would have been the right man to make a film on Ashoka, for here he leaves the business unfinished; the final realization, that the powerful is the most powerless, is here only as the apparent truth, but what about the implied truth, when even the senses say otherwise? But given the limited scope of the film, he does marvellously: the way he only touches upon the aspect of incest since the start of the film; the manner in which he handles the pristine beauty of the landscape without letting it be the central element of the film; and how he handles, sparingly, Kinski himself. Rather than any antics or rhetoric, it is Kinski’s burning, blue eyes that bespeak the maniac in him, the man who is not the average but who has risen to only so far as to despise the others, not more above. A bully besotted with himself.

L'avventura

When you do not believe in anything, how empty is your life? A story stunningly portraying the decay of Western civilization, L'avventura (literally The Adventure) goes where films as a rule don't go: a sincere attempt to comprehend reality. The film stops where Sandro stops: wanting sympathy, in despair, and himself not knowing where is the response. And, outside the pales of forgiving or forgetting, having crossed the sense of culpability in loving a forbidden, does Claudia know anymore?

Like leaves without wills blown at wind's whim, men and women flow about: what they leave behind is facades, ruins and church bells. What they desired is an answer to who they are: but they forgot to seek it in the other; they forgot to ask who the other is. Obsessed with the quest for themselves, every human comes crafted for them: Anna and Sandro have merely utilised each other in this lonely and selfish quest, and none has ever really thought about the other. None has known how horizons can be expanded; tragically, Anna's mysterious vanishing will only bring to the fore the inability to cope with themselves as they are. Sandro does find himself, would know what he is: a man unable to love. He will not need to look in Claudia's eyes for that judgment; he will need to look at the sky, or he will need to look at the buildings he never built. He is but the man who watches, envies, takes malicious pleasure in destroying the beauty he seeks, and tries to leave furtively; he is but the pitiable human who are born for greatness but are lost for ever in trying to deconstruct beauty. And the woman, Claudia?

Among the few women's films, l'Avventura is one. Monica Vitti (playing Claudia) neither is pretty nor knows very well to act, but the way Antonioni has used her is remarkable: she is not exactly wooden either, and her beauty is the kind that you will believe in one day and not the next day. Which is why, the constant focus on her face gives the film a double edge: a sympathy that she is ruining her life by falling into that love, but that she could not do anything otherwise. She is the one who still believes, who has that courage; and she has the horrible destiny of being undeceived: of how the others don't, and of how they can merely fit you in the scheme of things. Her belief, whether in Anna's being alive or whether in love and happiness, is never very well founded, yet never seems crazy, and seems a better thing to have than coldness which would be called realist by some.

It is a wonder to me how could a film be made so well demonstrating the decay at the heart of the West, and yet not take a preachy or a flippant tone. In a way, Fellini does the same thing with 81/2 but he adds in a lot more absurdity, which makes the effort that much less touching. Rohmer does the same thing in all his films, but Rohmer is more like Zola: he is empty of ideas. He only points the microscope at the bacteria, but has no ideas about the bacteria's place in universe. In addition, using stilted dialogues and contrived situations, Rohmer can often be preachy and indulging in vanity. But, here, we have a storyteller who knows the phenomenon and knows the evolution, who knows the germ and who knows the fruit: and one who is in love with stories and humanity, and thus with himself.

L'uomo che verrà

It is as simple as a Daudet tale and it is as touching as the silent moonlight is: with a surprising sincerity even when the subject is Nazi devastation, avoiding rhetoric and background music scores that seek to put a story in relief, and treating children more like adults, L'uomo che verrà (int'l title: The Man Who Will Come) is first and foremost a story that desires respect for being story, for being truth: references can be dispensed with, even the actual Marzabotto massacre on which the film is based. If you've liked Hollywood and Polanski, you will not like this film: insincerity, pomp and loud activism find not a single echo here. If you love Tarkosvkiy and have asked yourself the question what can make a man so cruel, you will want to watch this film.

Education? That is the central question of the film: can it immunize a man to everything, and all the morals and all the conscience are only an education, a conditioning we have been born bathed in? Goring a human flesh and using a woman as your lover as good as it lasts: is there something wrong in it? Is it only yet another argument to justify cruelty, or is there no cruelty but in the head, in the imagination, in the fulfilment of the Other's desire through you? People want to be humane, as they are expected to behave so; they can easily want to be efficient killers, if they are started being expected to behave so? Where does desire get born? In yourself or in the Other? And yet, sometimes a shooting squad member will falter, a boy's blue uncomprehending eyes will ask him strange questions: is it simply that he was too grounded in his earlier education of morals and stuff? Those blue eyes, they don't trouble the other serial killer, after all. Shouldn't the blue eyes trouble every potential killer so as to prove an absolute?

In a very different way, the film raises almost the same questions as Tarkovskiy's beautiful Andrei Rublev raises, most notably during the Tatar raid in Rublev: an almost Salvador Dali-esque sequence, but instead of laughing in its face more intent on asking and asking. Beautifully shot, parts of the film will remind you of that yet another great movie, L'albero degli zoccoli; the grinding poverty of an Italian village and the dominant Catholic influence (absent in present-day Italy) do not serve to pigeonhole the film in an epoch, but only mark the universality of man's material concerns: food for himself and for his horse, clothes and marriage. A son, a daughter. Like many other Italian films, the film does not employ actors quite known, except Maya Sensa, who slips into her quiet role very efficiently; editing is not fancy but simple, and the film slowly lurches from grim monotony to shocking barbarity: just like it would have been for the inhabitants of Marzabotto. Disbelief. No, this can't be possible. Surely, not the church? Surely, not the women and children? Surely, not the priest?

La Collectionneuse

Words, works of art - and silences - are but the razor blades to keep an annular space of void, a zone of no-entry, between the world that constantly endeavours to attack us and the self. That is what Daniel articulates but that is also what every Rohmer character does in La Collectionneuse. The film is nothing but a deep, patient study of the decay of society: Adrien's vain solitude and Haydée's pointless flirtations and love-making are sadly not even due to an inordinate appetite, but those are the razor blades that each one has selected to keep everyone else at bay. At once narcissistic and unable to love, the choice before them is to manifest in deeds and words - or silences - their identity and their existence.

The private space of any human being is sacrosanct, but that private space is also peopled, and not sterile: peopled however by one's own emotions, beliefs and love for others, because alone in myself I cannot know myself. It is in the other's eye that I have a role, it is in the other's laugh: mechanical sex only makes me identify myself as a pump though I may believe that I have given the world a pump and retained myself intact. Which and what myself? Love is in the loving.

Haydée Politoff as Haydée is perfect; it is surprising that how did she never become a famous actress, considering that she is not only beautiful and can look dumb, but also that she is someone who would slip into most parts very well: she is not gorgeous and yet charming, and the air of mystery that can be construed both as real mystery and as dumbness multiplies the number of possibilities of roles for her. Camera work in the film plays a key role; it's a leisurely observation of chameleons basking in the sun, and all one should keep in mind is to let the viewer feel everything: every movement and every smile, the nap in the sun and the swim in the sea. Expressions on the faces of both the lead characters are focussed upon for great lengths of times, and the rest of the characters have been given a bit of a short shrift.

It's always puzzling to me why Rohmer used to make such films? If you remove the prologue, most viewers would be at a loss to understand the film: most of them anyway I guess watch it to gawk on Haydée Politoff. The film is like a camera observing how flies die: however, Rohmer instead of showing human existence as purposeless shows how the riches and the beauties are there and yet it is we who make of ourselves the flies. Words are for reaching out, and there already exists a void between the expression and the enunciation, so there is never the danger of the sacred space getting violated: yet, when we begin to understand ourselves from our own words, when we begin to take the proof as the all there is to it, when we lose track of discrepancy between the parole and the parler, it is then we erect razors, and we see words as razors: it is then that we start searching for our identity in every night's pleasure and in every witty statement.

A beautiful film by Eric Rohmer, with the typical French pace of cinéma, there is hardly a moment where the viewer is not engaged.

Höstsonaten

I haven't ever read interviews of Ingmar Bergman, or rather anything about him - the way I know him is his work, his films. He is, to me, one of that rare breed who are not afraid to doubt - who stand within the pales of religion and yet take a promenade in there. He is a "doubter" - not just in the sense accepted, that of doubting religion and God, but also doubting the arguments contrary to it. Bergman's overarching pain, which he imposes on others through his films, has been striving to understand the perfection of a world which has so much ugliness as well; if man is God's work, why the ugly institutions he created to venerate the same God? Why, Man whom Eva alludes to in the film as having the highest and the lowest in him at the same time, why that man who bears the image of God in himself does need the external symbols and securities? Eva loves: this is the expression of Man, and we give it names. She loves; and thwarted in a world long decayed, she tries to learn to live, wherein every day is a practice.

A beautiful film, which on the face of it is about a failed relationship between two humans, a mother and a daughter, Höstsonaten (int'l title: Autumn Sonata) delves much deeper and brings into play all the themes Bergman struggled with, all the things he tried to understand. One of the features of most Bergman works, one which is not met often in literature or films otherwise, is that it is the women who are successful (and also often prey to that success, just as men are in others' works): forgetting the successful pianist Charlotte, even the tormented and unloved daughter Eva comes across in a way successful compared to her silently suffering husband, Viktor. That is the way Bergman plots the film: although, of course, a silence does not mean that a person does not suffer, yet Viktor is, for Bergman's film, dispensable; he is merely a "detached" narrator, a man playing a side role in the prominent story of a daughter who wants to be loved as she is, without questions and without judgments, without expectations and without bouts of enthusiasm and worry about her. She wants to live but be loved, but not be weighed down by love. Or the affected love - as that of her mother.

Autumn Sonata brings in one more very strange constant of Bergman's work: an old, cynical, intelligent man, a man who understands the world very well but is always a bit bored and wants to keep himself amused by a novelty (Stavrogin if you have read Dostoyevsky, Uncle Erland if you have seen that marvellous Bergman film Summer Interlude), who finds a new prey in a young girl, ready to believe and love, ready to adore and pray, a girl whose spirit is strong but who is what the world will call as naive (it is interesting that in a politically correct world, all the actual cruel words do keep on existing). I consider the Leonard-Helena happening as a complete byplot in the film: probably, in structural terms, it is even a defect; it distracts from the main body and that for a long time in a mere one-and-half-hour film. Yet, who will mind? To glimpse what goes in Bergman's mind, and what dark shadows lurk there, is more fascinating itself.

The question that Bergman never really asked openly - maybe he never got further to the pith, or somehow he just didn't want to - is not a mere rhetorical one, that why this? It is, rather, why the boredness? At the same stroke, Bergman, almost, attacks the religious institutions and glorifies God: in a world of thousand things and patterns to learn, or as Eva says in a world of many alternate realities than we can sense or know ever - God - there is the pew-sitting, there is the sacrament, and there is the choir - religion - someone instilling and instilling always inside us, as if we were mere cardboards, as if our desires and hopes were unclean, as if they were not enough to make us learn ourselves. Instead of trying to know the other realities, we don't even know ourselves - but run after a shining wax model erected by someone and told as desirable, all to protect us from our insecurities, a deus ex machina for the times that we are in doubt of us.

For, yes, we are doubters: and it is good that we are doubters. The inherent opposition between the concept of God and the idea of religion has probably never been so brilliantly put, excepting Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Brilliant acting performances, especially by Liv Ullmann, and a simple film with no editing tricks elevate Ingmar Bergman to a master story-teller: the one who touches hearts, who can feel oneself.

Ivanovo detstvo

Tarkovskiy's first feature, Ivanovo detstvo (int'l title: Ivan's Childhood), lacerates the viewer with pain, questions, and a moody silence: Kolya Burlyaev as the 12-year-old Ivan shows a maturity of acting skills unsurpassed and is the pulse of this wonderful film, another example of what a fine black-and-white film can achieve and how strange it is that poetry is felt when one watches beautiful cinematography in black and white.

As a film, a young director's flaws do come out and at times there is more intellect than heart, more the intention of sending out a message than an attempt to understand and explore the message oneself using the medium of a film this time: some of the dream sequences like the apples one and the final fantasy of all gathered in a paradise? seem imposed on the film, seem like tacked onto it. However, even the flaws of a genius are beautiful to watch or experience, and such foibles do not in any way take away from the rare thing that Ivan's Childhood is: a humane attempt to make sense of an insensible world, a struggle to not reject, to not give way to the easy method of denial of everything. This is where the stunning performance of Kolya as Ivan comes to the fore: his burning hatred not just provides him with the fodder to live on, and the will power for action, but it also would have led him to a more enlightened self, through which he knows himself, that what he is, who he is, and probably that there are differences between the what and the who.

The subplot of Masha seems like a complete early Ingmar Bergman film: however, it does seem unneeded to me in this film. There is little time already in a one-and-half-hour film to devote to Ivan; outside of his dreams and his hate-filled eyes, there is little to choose from, and had it not been the expressions on Kolya's face which are themselves a million stories, the viewer would have been stifled. Tarkovskiy gives glimpses of that rare ability that Resnais had, to play with time, but compared to the latter, he still is green. I did not like the voiceover at the end when Ivan's fate was revealed to the viewer: the voiceover is a simple trick but ungainly because in real life there are no voiceovers (sometimes, it is effective, but those are different sets of circumstances). It very much reminded me of an opening scene of the Hindi classic Saahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, where the discovery of some broken bangles by a civil engineer leads to the unravelling of a past, forgotten story (here, the discovery comes only at the end, but again the end of the protagonist can only be guessed at by the person who discovers the remains of a life lived passionately). Time, even though we see it as so separate, is so kneaded: why to use voiceovers and flashbacks to reinforce the notion that time is separate, divided into discrete periods? Considering the intention Tarkovskiy set out with, I felt the story betrayed, the boy betrayed. He looked for synthesis everywhere: his quest for justice and vengeance was nothing but a search for resolution. A resolution above all in time: the old man who has lost his wife, he himself who has lost his family, Russia whose future is uncertain and present black, and Siberia where time and space both seem to stand still, for even 200 or 2000 kilometres in Siberia is not far.