2020 Tarkovsky Prize Runner Up: Tomi Osawa

Fair is Foul, and Foul is Fair: On Lady Macbeth Directed by William Oldroyd

by Tomi Osawa (Lowell High School)
 

The movie Lady Macbeth has little to do with Shakespeare. There are no puffed sleeves, swords, or words such as “art thou” and “wherefore.” Unlike Shakespeare's revered play, the movie is not set in Scotland but instead in 19th century rural England. There are no witches, kings, or civil wars. However, despite these differences, the film and play are similar in one critical sense: they are both, without a doubt, tragedies.

Lady Macbeth tells the story of a woman, Katherine Lester, trapped in a loveless marriage to a spiteful and perverse man twice her age. She is told she must stay in their country house, where she is starved of companionship, entertainment, and, ultimately, happiness. When her husband leaves on a trip, Katherine relishes her newfound freedom and is eager to explore. She begins a passionate affair with one of the estate’s workingmen, which is initially a fairytale but quickly takes a much darker turn. It’s a movie about loneliness and lust, a dangerous combination that causes Katherine to commit increasingly extreme and immoral acts as the film progresses. Lady Macbeth effectively immerses the viewers into the slow-burning story of Katherine Lester through cinematography, dramatic character development, and music editing.

Lady Macbeth’s set design and cinematography masterfully sets a melancholy and bleak mood for the film. Through the use of clever and deliberate camera work, the viewers are able to get a glimpse at how truly oppressive and unwelcoming life on the estate is. The film is shot in primarily cool tones, therefore it seems as though the world of Katherine Lester is engulfed in a perpetual overcast. The manor that Katherine is trapped in is austere and riddled with dark corners and grey-white walls. This sparse and frigid aesthetic gives the viewer an idea of both the depression and oppression Katherine experiences. Another effective visual technique prevalent in Lady Macbeth is the use of long and lingering shots of life on the manor, free of dialogue. There are scenes where the camera simply stares at Katherine’s blank face while lying in bed or struggling to stay awake doing simple daily tasks. These scenes, although seemingly simple, are able to expose so much about Katherine’s character and the depression she experiences living a monotonous and joyless life. Lady Macbeth is not just a visually stunning film: its design evokes emotion, demands empathy, and pushes the audience to get lost in Katherine’s dark world and mind.

One of the most interesting and thought-provoking aspects of Lady Macbeth is the ever-changing relationship the viewer has with Katherine as the film progresses. At the beginning of the film, it’s clear that Katherine is a character deserving of anyone’s sympathy. She was sold like a commodity into a marriage to a man that is distant, cruel, and sexually perverse. Her life seems to consist primarily of red wine, stiff dresses, and staring out windows. Therefore, it’s impossible not to root for her as she explores her newfound freedom and finally smiles in a seemingly unsmiling world. However, as the film progresses, Katherine steadily morphs from the victim to the villain, from prey to predator. It becomes clear to the audience that Katherine is selfish and, quite frankly, insane. The viewer is inevitably forced to reassess their allegiances and is faced with an interesting ethical dilemma: is it wrong to have sympathy for someone who is quite obviously a twisted individual? Katherine’s dramatic character arc is thought-provoking and has the audience not only examining her morality, but also their own. Therefore it allows for an overall more engaging film that leaves its audience thinking far beyond its hour and a half run time.

Lady Macbeth’s music, or lack thereof, makes for an unconventional and ultimately riveting viewing experience that draws the audience to the edge of their seats. With the exception of its two critical climaxes, the film is completely void of any soundtrack or musical score. This technique allows for the viewer to truly understand the power of silence. It strengthens the sense of loneliness one gets from a dinner scene, one where nothing is heard but the scraping of silverware on fine china. There’s nothing emptier than the sound of footsteps on hardwood floors, echoing through an empty mansion. Lady Macbeth makes it apparent that silence can be much more telling and powerful than dialogue. However, this silence is then beautifully marred by two surges of music at the most pivotal moments of the film. This contrast can’t help but give one goosebumps and raise one’s heart rate. This unique technique is simple but provocative, as it heightens the viewer’s emotional and physical response to the film.

Lady Macbeth is a slow-burning film that effectively seizes the attention of its viewers with brilliant aesthetics, complex characters, and deliberate sound editing. Although it’s definitely not Shakespeare, it does not disappoint when it comes to elements of calculated betrayal, dangerous lust, and poisonous power. It is a one-of-a-kind movie that leaves its viewers tampering with a common but significant question: what came first, the heartless person or the heartless world?

2020 Tarkovsky Prize Third Place: Shiuan Cheng

Portrayal of Humanity in Blade Runner

by Shiuan Cheng (Lowell High School)

In the film Blade Runner (1982), Ridley Scott explores the idea of humanity, portraying how an individual’s struggles and experiences are what make them human. Throughout the movie, the replicants are depicted to be inhuman, not because of their mechanical existence, but rather because of their perfect design. Yet, as they begin to realize the futility of their quest for survival, the replicants begin to seem more humane. To express this struggle that defines one’s humanity, and the hardships that accompany it, Scott uses the cinematic techniques of lighting, symbolism, and imagery.

In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, lighting is used to represent the imperfections that deem an individual, human. Over the course of the film, a variety of close-up shots are employed while the characters, human or not, exchange dialogue. However, a major difference which Scott applies to differentiate between replicants and humans is the lighting reflected in their faces. Shots of humans, especially Deckard, consist of imperfections in the brightness of their face, with usually one side being darker. In shots of the replicants, on the other hand, the lighting reflected in the entirety of their face is nearly always the same hue, with no irregularities. This element of lighting expresses the burden carried by human individuals, as they must live with the weight of their mistakes and weaknesses. The replicants do not share this burden, as they are designed to be flawless in every way, and so they are alienated from humanity. However, as they begin to face defeat in their quest to prolong their four-year life span, the replicants begin to shed their invincibility. As the androids begin to succumb to the efforts of Deckard to “retire” them, the imperfect lighting reserved for shots of human individuals is broadened to include shots of Roy Batty, the replicant leader. As he begins to accept the fate to which his allies have already fallen victim to, this defeat is represented by the lighting of Batty’s face, which now shows irregularity in tone and brightness, since the replicant has accepted his intended death. The futility of his quest, and the eventual failure that Batty and his replicant brethren meet, is what ultimately deems them humanlike, as they yield to the mortal threat of death, though their subsequent acquisition of humanity is reflected by the meticulous utilization of lighting by Scott.

In Blade Runner, Ridley Scott employs symbolism to reflect the flaws and experiences of defeat which make up the human soul. The Voight-Kampff tests, which are designed to determine whether a subject is human or a replicant, takes advantage of the fact that replicants are designed to be the “perfect” human: they are stronger both mentally and physically, and have the ability to perform tougher labor without the limitations imposed by human emotions and pain. The tests utilize a series of emotionally provocative questions to elicit and observe a subject’s psychological response, in the form of their heart rate, respiration, and eye movements, and it is the replicants’ exact inability to share human empathy and stress that leads to their detection. The Voight-Kampff tests express the symbolism of how although the removal of the ability to feel empathy was done to free the replicants of a seemingly human flaw, the absence of this “defect” is what is exploited by interrogation to reveal what the replicants lack: a human soul. Without the seeming “flaws” of human emotions and stress, the replicants are inhuman, and it is this idea that is examined by the Voight-Kampff tests.

Ultimately, as the androids’ mission draws to a close, chief replicant Roy Batty is left as the sole survivor. Though he is seemingly hunting Deckard to avenge his fallen allies, Batty ultimately reveals his harmless intentions after saving Deckard’s life, while also ensnaring a dove in his hands. Deckard, still fearful of the resilient automaton, grows calm as Batty expresses his thoughts. While he regrets the loss of his experiences “like tears in rain,” Batty reveals his acceptance of the fact that it is his “time to die.” Following his dramatic monologue, and peaceful death, the previously captured dove breaks free of the android’s grasp, and soars into the open sky, symbolic of Batty’s now released soul. By yielding to his ultimate enemy of death, the replicant leader is toppled from his faultless pedestal, but humanized by his failure. Though he was created as an automaton, the released dove symbolizes the obtainment of humanity by Batty in his final moments, with his acceptance of defeat, and it is through the use of symbolism that Scott is able to express the importance of flaws and failure in the definition of a human soul.

Ridley Scott utilizes imagery in Blade Runner to express how struggle characterizes humanity. Through the duration of the film, the cinematic technique of film noir is used in conjunction with practical effects, including the manipulation of smoke and blinding spotlights, to form a mechanical and industrial setting. The imagery of this environment: dark, lifeless, and robotic, reflects how the adoption of machinery by humans to remove their struggles and responsibilities results in the detachment of life from societies. Without the necessity for human labor and strife, humanity departs from their community, both physically and metaphorically, as machines have litterately taken over human jobs, leading to their physical departure from society. Yet, allegorically, the lack of struggle and purpose that was once created by the need to work has also led to the shriveling of humanity within certain individuals, such as J.F. Sebastian, who has grown distant from his community and surrounds himself with mechanical “friends,” which he designs.

Without the purpose once given to him by his job as a genetic designer for the Tyrell Corporation, Sebastian has lost a part of his humanity as he has grown more attached to his robotic companions, rather than his human community. This idea that humanity is defined by the purpose given to them through challenge and struggle is further exemplified by the difference in imagery of human and replicant eyes. Although the eyes of human characters always appear natural and lifelike, the eyes of replicants often appear glassy, and have an unnatural reflection of lights. Since the replicants have been designed to be flawless, their eyes, much more durable and effective than those of humans, lack the soul that comes with strife. While human eyesight is held back by physical limitations, the vision of replicants suffer no such hardship, which is reflected in their soulless eyes. Without suffering the same restraint faced by humans, the replicants lack the life which is characterized by hindrance, and as eyes are the “windows to the soul,” the lack of a soul is also reflected in the glassy and reflective eyes of the replicants. It is through the precise utilization of imagery, that Scott is able to convey the importance of strife in the definition of humanity.

With his meticulous use of lighting, symbolism, and imagery, Ridley Scott addresses the idea of humanity, in his film Blade Runner (1982). Scott argues that humanity is defined by an individual’s flaws and struggles, and this idea is depicted by the transformation of the replicants. Though initially alienated by their perfection, the replicants ultimately acquire humanity as they experience and accept defeat in their quest to prolong their life span. Although individuals often seek mastery of their lives, and the elements that surround them, one must realize that it is through defeat and struggle that growth is enabled, and it is growth rather than presumed success which defines a human.

2020 Tarkovsky Prize Second Place: Huckleberry Shelf

Post-War Paranoia and American Privilege in The Third Man

By Huckleberry Shelf (18, Ruth Asawa School of the Arts)

Carol Reed’s The Third Man weaves seamlessly together two very disparate stories. One is the obvious crime story revolving around black market racketeer Harry Lime and hack novelist Holly Martins. The other exists in the crevices and side streets of the first; it is a document of the pervasive intensity of fear and paranoia, both specifically in post-war Vienna and generally in life after the second world war. The second story constantly exists underlying the first one, showing the American privilege that is at the root of both Holly Martins’ heroism and Harry Lime’s evil.

Paranoia is everywhere in the way the film is shot. Dutch angles are used constantly, which makes everything feel skewed and wrong. This technique, combined with a subtly expressionist harshness of contrast in the black and white, allows cinematographer Robert Krasker to create a constant dark atmosphere. One shot that is particularly striking comes when the international police arrive to arrest Harry Lime’s old girlfriend Anna Schmidt. It’s a shot from above of the staircase. On the left, Schmidt’s landlady looks up towards Schmidt’s room, speaking German (presumably railing against the behavior of the police). On the right, the police ascend the stairs, but the lighting is such that they cast shadows over one another until the only thing you see is their shadows moving. The police, intended to be a protective force, become an object of fear, and their shadows advance on the viewer. Throughout the film, figures are skewed and cast in shadow, until the viewer isn’t sure if they can trust anyone.

The fear that runs through Vienna is also shown in how the general citizenry is portrayed. We are shown a city where those who aren’t criminals have been cowed into patterns of inaction. The porter at Lime’s building blows up when Martins asks him to go to the police, seemingly knowing that being involved with the law or with the lawless in any capacity will only end poorly for him. The camera cuts often to the faces of bystanders; always in shadow and always seemingly retreating from the camera. Fully understanding that fear requires looking at the context around it. This is a city that has just lost a war and is in complete turmoil. It has been split suddenly into four completely new governments. Those who live comfortably feel acutely the precariousness of that comfort, and know that in a city so volatile the best thing to do is nothing.

It’s hard to live in Reed’s Vienna and not have some connection with illegal activity. This is portrayed mostly in subtext, through small interactions. Resources are clearly scarce. When Martins gives Anna’s landlady a few cigarettes, she thanks him like they’re made of gold. Anna has a bottle of whisky an American theatregoer has given her, but rather than drink it, she is keeping it to sell. The general assumption made by the characters in this film is that they can’t take anything for granted, and the knowledge they have is that whenever they need money the black market is there waiting.

Holly Martins enters this city completely innocent of that assumption and knowledge, and so he floats around with impunity, barely paying any mind to the damage he causes. He comes into a precarious situation, and acts before he knows anything, trying to avenge his friend who he later learns is little better than a mass murderer. He barely seems to register the death of the porter. His brash heroics are something uniquely American, reflected in the pulpy Westerns he writes; he believes himself throughout the movie to be the center of something. He thinks that he has something that no one else does, either some knowledge or some drive. When it’s finally true, and he can be the hero and bring down Lime, it begins to feel wrong to him. Lime is his friend, and he can’t conceive his friend as the great evil of a western novel. This is reflected in the way the final chase scene through the sewers is shot. Rather than focusing on the heroic Martins, the camera fixates on Lime, and for the whole time Lime looks trapped and terrified. He appears not as a great criminal but as a cornered animal. He is pitiful, and the viewer is drawn to pity him, despite how many people he’s hurt and killed. Reed, in the way he designs this scene, is rejecting the American novel, where the bad guy is vanquished and everyone is happy. There is no question that Lime is evil but he’s also Holly’s best friend and Anna’s lover. Nothing is as simple as Martins has made a career of making it out to be.

What’s interesting is that, despite his many flaws, Lime rejects the privileged mindset that Martins has. In the famous scene where Holly confronts Lime in a ferris wheel, Lime reminds Holly that nobody is a hero, and that nobody deserves a spotlight. Furthermore, he understands the corruption in authority that Martins can’t seem to see. “No one thinks in terms of human beings anymore,” he says. “Governments don’t, so why should I?” By having Harry Lime make these criticisms that Reed has been leading the audience to for the whole film, but making them in service of justifying his murder of hundreds of innocent people, Reed forces you to confront the greyness of everyone’s morality.

At the end of the day, both Americans are two sides of the same coin; they are both using the people around them to get where they want to go. The only difference is Martins is using them through his privileged obliviousness and Lime is tactically exploiting them. Thanks to Reed’s ability to so strongly portray the mood and temperament of the citizenry of Vienna he can leave almost all of this under the surface of what would otherwise be a simple crime story. The ramifications of the story, however, are profoundly changed. Where otherwise, when the villain is defeated, one might be left with a feeling of relief, the ending of The Third Man feels empty. One is left with the sense that with or without Lime nothing will change in Vienna. It is a damaged city, and it will stay damaged in a way that shooting one man could never fix. That’s all that Lime is at the end of the day, just another man. Martins comes to this realization, just as the film ends. He stands at the side of the road, Anna walks past him, and he realizes that what he did amounted to next to nothing. No girl, no glory, just a dead friend.

2020 Tarkovsky Prize First Place: Sebastian Kaplan

Getting Sentimental Over You: Why ​City Lights​ Still Triumphs

by Sebastian Kaplan (17, Lowell High School)

“Thinking is the hard work,'' said Chaplin, “Just thinking.” How does a blind girl mistake a tramp for a millionaire? How do you make a critically & commercially successful silent film when talking films are all the rage? How do you balance comedy and tragedy throughout your film for a resonant, poignant ending? And how do you do it all without a completed script? Chaplin didn't have an answer, but he didn't give up, and in the end he had written, directed, edited, composed the music for & starred in ​City Lights, ​one of​ t​ he most esteemed, influential & indispensable films of the 20th century.

Before getting into ​City Lights​ and Chaplin there are a few things about early 20th century film worth noting. In the first few decades of the cinema, most of the interesting films were being made in Europe, and descended from a long history of art and culture. The European films of the time thought of themselves as emerging from poetry, literature, painting & theatre, in fact many of the first important artists of the early German film came from the theatre. Part of the glory of early European film was its recognition that it could be artistically powerful. The other side of the coin was that often the films were limited in their freedom to explore the unique properties of the medium. America meanwhile was freed from this inheritance, it’s films did not think of themselves as artworks. Early American films were often vulgar, trivial, silly, and had limited artistic ambitions, but they explored the capabilities of the medium in ways the Europeans did not because they were freed from the constraints of an artistic legacy.

An example of this is D. W. Griffith’s ​Birth of a Nation (​1915​), a​ film whose politics are indefensible but its status as the first epic of cinema is undeniable. ​Birth of a Nation​ was one of the first films to call attention to America as a producer of films, start riots, and to establish contemporary film language. Chaplin was a fan of Grifith all the way through, even if he found his films absurd, melodramatic and a tad outre, he considered Griffith a genius. Another important note about early American film was its self fashioning as an antagonist of high culture—no high socialite would be caught dead in an early film nickelodeon—accessible to anyone who could pay for the ticket and see. Chaplin’s artistry was both that he elevated his film to high art, as well as maintained his accessibility throughout (his fanbase was not high art intellectuals, but the common working people of the world), a coupling which reached its zenith in ​City Lights​.

In 1927, four years before the release of ​City Lights,​ the medium changed forever. Films up until then, when Warner Brothers released ​The Jazz Singer,​ had been silent; but this new Al Jolson musical introduced the audible screen. Talking films, Chaplin thought, would last three years at best, but with audiences now flocking to the cinema in numbers unparalleled since the creation of the form, it didn't look like they were going away any time soon. ​Films were now advertised with the magic words, “​A talking picture”​ . By the end of 1929 the majority of theaters were “wired for sound”; films now, whether filmed silent or talkie, were synchronized with sound effects . As one monograph from the 1950s put it, “The country was taking talkies''. Yet, just prior to this upheaval, Chaplin's latest release, ​The Circus​, had cemented the pantomime of the Tramp as an international language and Chaplin as an international figure—his name synonymous with comedy, artistry, and a medium that, to most aside from himself, was history.

The last silent film released by a major studio had been MGM’s ​The Kiss​, and even if this Garbo romance featured the first on screen kiss (a real shock back in 1929), the public wanted talkies. Chaplin was torn as to what to do. He could eliminate the universality of the Tramp by having him speak English, but that would surely shrink his worldwide audience. Alternatively, he could run the risk of being deemed anachronistic by creating another silent film. ​However, the question of sound was far from the only problem ​facing Chaplin as he neared his 40th birthday. His latest film, ​The Circus h​ad been a commercial success, but by the end of production his life had become a cavalcade of scandal and trauma. His mother, whom he loved deeply and was his greatest inspiration, had died. He disliked his wife, opting to spend long unnecessary hours at his studio to avoid her. She then divorced him and accused him of “perverted sexual desires”. Alongside his marital issues there were​ economic ones. There were tax problems, then there was the beginning of the Great Depression, which rendered silent films a virtually pointless investment compared to the box office promise of Talkies.​ Chaplin suffered a nervous breakdown.

While reeling from personal trauma, Chaplin came up with the concept for a new film: a comedy that would have something to do with a blind flower vendor and the Tramp. After much deliberation Chaplin decided on a silent film, a romantic comedy in pantomime; but, if he was going to stay relevant, if he was going to be successful commercially & critically, if he was going to make a film in pure images at a time when the public opted for dialogue, the film would have to be perfect. As Chaplin put it in his autobiography, “I’d worked myself into a neurotic state of wanting perfection.” ​Perfection was no simple task, even for a master filmmaker like Chaplin. He was in for the most difficult, tiring, and testing production of his life. The shoot alone lasted 683 days (a typical shoot being 50), had 4,571 takes, amassing 58 hours of film for an 87 minute final product (​39 feet shot for each foot used​), all the while being the most expensive film shot that year. ​Nervous all through shooting because of the film's lack of sound, he experienced tortured creative blocks, labored over set pieces, and was constantly reworking old ideas in a search for inspiration. Like clockwork he rehearsed and rehearsed his scenes on set with the cast and crew, believing that only through complete understanding of the material could inspiration strike. His creative process was one of accumulation and elimination, thinking up as many ideas as he could, good or bad, until he considered one worth rehearsing, and, if it proved to be compelling enough, worth shooting. The results were perfectly crafted scenes that each tell a complete story while avoiding unnecessary camera tricks and tacky effects in favor of comically poignant pantomime and visual movement. ​In a late 1950's interview conducted by Jean Luc Godard, Jean Renoir observed​, “all Chaplin’s films were shot on this principle. They are divided into sequences, each one being a complete story [...] and the important, the essential thing is that the development of a scene must not be artificial.”​ The critic Alistair Cooke wrote, the film, despite all the struggles of its production, “flows as easily as water over pebbles.”

Note, early in the film, about five minutes in, his encounter with the female statue figure in the shop window. Here is the quintessential Chaplin woman, to be idealized, placed on a pedestal, worshipped. A sidewalk freight elevator is moving constantly up and down in the background as Chaplin eyes the statue; its arrival at pavement level is in perfect sync with the moment Chaplin steps backwards onto it. The scene plays adroitly and is one of the best visual gags in the film, all thanks to rigorous dedication to the choreography’s composition and execution. Another spectacular feat of choreography comes near the end, the tenth scene of the film: the boxing match. In the scene, Chaplin attempts to win money for his love, the Blind Girl, by competing in a winner take all boxing match. Originally agreeing to go 50-50 and remain unharmed with his sparring partner, a sudden change of plans lands him in the ring with a heavyweight who wants to play winner take all; a real David and Goliath situation. This scene is incredibly complex, almost a ballet, and again the product of meticulous rehearsal. Chaplin believed the more one rehearsed and knew the choreography, the greater the likelihood that inspiration would come. Eleven days were spent rehearsing, and 6 days spent shooting the fight which would only last about 4 minutes in the final film. The bell dings and the fight begins, the Tramp immediately maneuvers the referee in between himself and the fighter. The great visual joke of the scene being that the Tramp shadows the referee, avoiding direct contact with his opponent. Like expertly puppeteered marionettes, the three—the referee, the heavyweight, and the Tramp—move in precise synchrony. The music in the sequence is nominal and understated, to make room for the contagious laughter destined to infect any audience watching the scene. Chaplin told a reporter after the London premier, “the whole thing is like a symphony in which the audience is as important as the screen.”

The sequence of the film that gave Chaplin the most difficulty—the most trouble throughout his entire career in fact—is much earlier in the film; 7 minutes in. It is the now famous scene of the Tramp meeting the blind girl, played by Virginia Cherill, and her mistaking him for a millionaire. It was a difficult moment to capture and explain visually, but Chaplin was able to do it, revisiting the scene 6 seperate times during production and finally getting it right near the end. The choreography had to remain simple while solving the dilemma of how a blind girl could reasonably mistake the penniless little fellow for a rich socialite.​ ​The scene in the finished film plays effortlessly. ​Having made his way through a taxi and shut the door behind him, he notices the Woman holding out a flower for him. Accidentally knocking the flower out of her hand, The Tramp then picks it up, but as the Woman continues to search, he realizes: she is blind.​ He then makes a simple gesture, holding the flower in front of her eyes; ​“It is completely dancing,” said Chaplin. “It took a long time. We took this day after day. Week after Week.”​ As the Tramp moves away, a rich man gets into the taxi and drives off as the Blind Girl says “wait for your change sir.” Realizing the illusion she's under, and not wanting to ruin it, The Tramp departs, but not before being doused with a pale of water. The music swells and splices at the perfect moments as the camera stays unobtrusive and deceptively observant; allowing us to forget it’s there at all as we watch Chaplin elevate pantomime to the polished, ingenious form it takes here. The scene holds the Guiness Book of World Records title for most takes, requiring over 300, but it was not in vain. Chaplin historian Jeffrey Vance notes, “it's one stroke of genius to conjure up the idea, but Chaplin was doubly blessed with the ability to execute it to perfection.”

Chaplin’s process is fascinating, and his work is highly complex. Anyone can tell you about Chaplin’s idiosyncratic technique, but the film's real impact is rooted in the genius of Chaplin’s approach. Execution is one thing—but the “why” behind his maddening quest for perfection illuminates why this film has the effect it does on the audience. One method of deciphering Chaplin’s approach is through analysis of his visual style. His camera, acting, & choreography are all ostensibly in pursuit of realism. The films he makes are character oriented, preferring close ups, aiming to make the viewer oblivious to the camera and aware of the character’s psychology. There is complete devotion to mise-en-scene—everything being seen through the lens—from the lighting, the sets, the performances, and, most importantly for Chaplin, the choreography; even the most minute detail is essential. From this it can be inferred the realistic approach is how he achieved the film's power. Another clue that Chaplin approached film through realism can be gleaned by examining the direction his films had taken since the 30s, which made him prime for observation by realist critics. As film historian and professor Timothy J. Lyons notes in his “Introduction to the Literature on Chaplin”: “​City Lights (1931)​,​ Modern Times (1936),​ and finally​ The Great Dictator (1940),​ at the end of the decade, addressed themselves directly—if, at times, Romantically—to problems in the social environment.” This was true; The Depression, technicism, and the threat of war all played a role in this period of Chaplin’s work. ​These social questions manifest prominently in the Tramp, whose foibles at times assert and sympathize with the ideals of the era; borrowing screenwriter and film critic Cesare Zavattini's description of the Neo-Realist aim, the Tramp serves to, ​“tell the audience that they are the true protagonists of life.”

However realistically the film seems to be made, the reality Chaplin presents is not reality at all: it is a romantic, choreographed dream. Chaplin’s “reality” is as carefully constructed as a still life by Cezanne. Realism in fact was not the approach. Chaplin himself viewed realism as prosaic and dull, “It is not reality that matters in film”, said Chaplin, “but what the imagination can make of it.” While, on the surface Chaplin eliminates the camera and embraces unconditional mise en scene to make the film real;​ this, and his elaborate rehearsal and choreography are manifestations of his endless search for the sentimental.​ Chaplin, in ​City Lights,​ strived for a deeper unconscious truth, the spark that lights effervescence, the immaterial gunk that constitutes inspiration. He was searching for sincerity: “the deeper the truth in a creative work, the longer it will live.” His interest in the romantic notion of a profound genuineness​ seems to have stemmed from his interest and appreciation of essayist and critic of the 19th century, William Hazlitt, who believed ​that sentiment was more appealing than intellect and also the greater contribution to a work of art​. ​Chaplin took this to heart, and his films were often lyrically romantic because of it. Some of the most rich and dynamic sequences in the film—him meeting the Blind Girl, the dance party sequence with the millionaire, the boxing match, the escape from the millionaire’s mansion, and of course the ending—focus more on the spiritual than the intellectual. This also sheds light on Chaplin’s motivation to make another silent film. “Dialogue”, Chaplin said, “just gets in the way.” The “intellectual” was dialogue, realism. The “sentimental” was pantomime and the dreamy world of silent film. Luckily for us, he stuck to his beliefs.

By far the most sentimental moment in ​City Lights​, and in Chaplins whole repertoire, comes at the end of the film. The Tramp, rattier than ever after being wrongfully jailed for obtaining the money for the Blind Girl to receive her sight restoration procedure, is wandering the busy old streets of the nameless city, when, after some mockery from two newsboys, he finds himself in front of a flower shop and picks up a rose from the gutter, reminding him of the girl he loved and fought for. The music swells. There is something that reveals everything about Chaplin in this image of the rose in the gutter. In his autobiography Chaplin defines beauty as “an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and in all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels—an expression of it can be the dustbin with a shaft of sunlight across it, or it can be a rose in the gutter.” Here Chaplin reveals his conception of beauty, “the rose in the gutter”. The Blind Girl, the owner of the flower shop, watches the bum from her window with laughter and condescension, not knowing it is really he, not a rich man, who provided her with the money she needed to restore her sight. The Tramp brings the flower to his nose, turns, and sees her. The music stops. He stops. He stares at her, his face registering the complex emotions whirring inside. Here is the Tramp, his image seen for the first time by the woman he loves, but never thought he’d see again. The look says it all, lightly apologetic, embarrassed, but excited to see her again. She, not realizing who he is, makes a cruel comment, herself embarrassed by a vagrant taking an interest in her. She offers him some change and a flower, but he, coming back into reality, shuffles away, wanting to avoid pulling back the curtain and unworking the illusion he manufactured so meticulously. When she offers the flower again as he walks away, he cannot resist; his devotion to her is all-encompassing and blind. He is pulled back to her. She touches his hand, like she had so often done with him in the past, and through sensation, not sight, she realizes who he is. He holds the rose and shyly bites his forefinger. ​Her fingers run along his arm, his shoulder, his lapels, then she catches her breath: "You?" The Tramp nods with a doubtful look, asks, "You can see now?" The girl replies, "Yes, I can see now". The uncertainty on the Tramp's face turns to joy in what Chaplin referred to as “one of the purest close ups I've ever done”​. ​Critic, screenwriter, and friend of Chaplin, James Agee, wrote that the ending was, “Enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it's the greatest piece of acting, and the highest moment in movies.”​ The film fades to black, and ​City Lights​ ends. The last thirty seconds of the film produce​, through visual means, an atavistic, intangible, sentimental feeling, in a way no other art form could have. The ending is a poetic composition—coherent, organic, and governed by something deeply irresistible within us.

In January 1931, after four years of restructuring, reworking, and re-imagining, ​City Lights—​ born of immense personal and societal struggle, spared no expense in its execution, and repeated until the fullest potential of its vision had been realized—was released. Chaplin’s circumstances and modus operandi are the lifeblood of the film, and yet, neither mean anything without the soul of his approach; the sentimentality that is within all of us, tapped into by Chaplin’s genius.​ This approach was not lost on fellow filmmakers. Einstein, present at the film's premiere,​ exempt from the power of Chaplin’s film. During the final scene, Chaplin observed Einstein wiping his eyes, “further evidence,” wrote the filmmaker, “that scientists are incurable sentimentalists.”​ All the same, these facts come as no surprise, because in searching for a place within us all, Chaplin made a film that touches us all.​ ​In a film that couldn’t have been made by any means other than those it was—this time, this execution, this perfect vision—this film touches us in a way that only this film can. ​Avant Garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, building off the ideas of Soviet playwright and poet V. Mayakovsky, resolved that “there is an area in the human mind which can be reached only through the cinema.” We can only know certain places within us through film, and what we have known through ​City Lights ​is what it is to be beholden to oneself and another, recognizing each feeling is constructed, yet neither illegitimate.​ ​A testament to the universality of this understanding is that the never content perfectionist, Chaplin himself, told Peter Bogdanovich later in his life that ​The Gold Rush​ was the film he wanted to be remembered by, but ​City Lights​: “​City Lights​ is my favorite.”

Review of "I Am Not A Witch"

by Lucy Johns, mentor

“I am Not a Witch” is unspeakably sad and strange. Sad because the inevitability of abuse of the child increases with every scene. Strange because the film overlays the modern apparatus of tourism and government on a society that runs entirely on superstition, on blaming someone nearby for every failure, every disappointment, every loss. 

The film begins with an incredibly unsettling scene of tourists, both black and white, exiting a bus in the middle of nowhere to ogle two rows of women sitting immobile and silent on the ground, legs out, faces painted with white clay. The tourists chat, take pictures, ask questions of a guide as though looking at animals in a game reserve. A bank of white ribbons flutter behind the women. Their meaning will be revealed later. 

The film switches abruptly to a child observing a woman carrying a pot of water on her head. Seeing the child, the woman falters, the pot slips, the water spills. The woman shouts that the child is a witch. A courtroom scene ensues, presided over by a woman in uniform hearing testimony that the child is a witch. She is carefully neutral but it’s clear she’s concerned for the girl, who observes all but says nothing. When the child refuses to speak to deny that she’s a witch, the officer appears resigned. She confers with a higher official who takes the call in his bathtub where he’s being soaped and scrubbed by a well dressed woman. The girl’s fate is sealed, she is delivered to the witches’ compound. 

An extraordinary image of long poles topped by spools of white ribbon moving through a desolate landscape pulls back to reveal the witches riding on a flat-bed truck to a field where they will labor, obviously unpaid. They are each tethered at their back by a white ribbon that unspools as they move but that ultimately determines how far they can go. The child witch is also tethered in this manner. While she is removed from the field work to serve other purposes by the local leader who consigned her to her status, including being asked to pick the criminal from a line-up and serving as the source for white eggs promoted on TV, the ribbon is never removed. When he orders her to make rain come to the parched land, the logic of dependence on the supernatural for survival of an entire community works to its devastating end. 

“I Am Not a Witch,” written and directed by Rungano Nyoni, native of Zambia in southern Africa, reared in the UK, is a tale of scapegoating and helplessness before both earthly and natural powers. The locale is unfamiliar but the tendencies she deftly portrays are readily recognized, if often deeply sublimated, 

in modern societies. This may be part of the film’s widespread success, in addition to its excellent cinematography and unexpected music (18th century European). 

The emotional and visual impact of “I Am Not a Witch” lingers long after it ends. As its themes resonate, it becomes not so strange after all. Does anyone picking from a lineup in a police station know better than little Shula who the perpetrator really is? Does anyone dealing with petty officialdom not understand the need to placate with a little magic – or lies anyway - if disaster is to be averted? Does anyone who knows the risks of abuse suffered by foster children not see what must become of a child lacking any parental protection at all? Does anyone else who sees this film recall the master manipulator blaming all the evils of the world on a single woman about whom believers chanted “Lock her up, lock her up”?

© Lucy Johns (2020)

Review of "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"

Review of “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (American; 1971)

By Lucy Johns, mentor

Heroic acts amidst monumental scenery provide the conventional cinematic formula to visualize the conquest of the American west. Defying 50 years of film tradition, Robert Altman conjures the grueling grind and filthy conditions and random savagery of daily life in a forest mining village deep in pioneer Washington, where sheer survival was the only battle most people fought. "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" asserts this alternative memory of settlement to dramatize the brutality of early American capitalism and the powerlessness of its workers and the occasional rebellious visionary. Projects and plans and dreams. will be strangled by a force these people barely understand and cannot counter, the greed that imposed  capitalist order on untamed wilderness by force when guile failed.

The first hint of individual enterprise in the forbiddingly dark and wet terrain arrives with John McCabe, a small-time card shark who understands the power of personal style over people deadened by work and weather. Before entering a mining camp for the first time, Warren Beatty sheds his shapeless greatcoat, dons a fashionable bowler, and clamps a cigar between a full set of teeth set off by a silver cap. He conquers by force of image and the hint of a notorious past. Seeing no women about, he procures three "chippies" and sets them up in tents to be visited for a nickel. These unattractive women, whom the director individualizes despite their stereotypical task, are even more powerless than the townsmen who rejoice at their arrival. Their presence, however, inspires one man to send away for a young wife. She comes to town in the same wagon as the beautiful Mrs. Miller, who berates McCabe for his narrow vision and persuades him to invest in a bathhouse, a brothel, and some rules of cleanliness that become the talk of the region. Julie Christie creates a house of light and music and pleasure and a community of women who care for each other and provide respite - for a fee - from the grim reality outside. McCabe himself succumbs to the expensive - $5! - Mrs. Miller. Her aspirations exasperate him - she reads slowly as a finger traces the lines in books and has a head for figures - but her beauty and flashes of sweetness enchant him. She rouses "poetry" in his soul, a longing for a life he has never experienced but soon dreams of. If only, he mutters once as he prepares to visit her, she would allow him into her bed just once without paying first. 

The flow of funds stimulated by this most basic of businesses  (presented by director Altman as benign, even beneficial, to both the proprietors and the customers)  attracts the notice of the mining company. As any large capitalist enterprise will, it seeks to capture any expenditure made for any purpose. Two minions arrive in a phaeton drawn by a pair-in-hand, an elegant carriage available only to the powerful, to offer a buyout. McCabe treats the prospect as a poker game. He bluffs to force them to raise. Mrs. Miller's eager reaction to the news and her storm of protest at McCabe's feints brim with the powerlessness of women and portend the helplessness of anyone in the way of monopolist expansion. She knows what men are capable of when riches are there to be grabbed. McCabe, reaching the limits of his mental capacity with this particular deal, pays no attention. He naively seeks the help of a lawyer in the nearest city to protect him. In a moment of exaltation at the problem presented, William Devane lectures McCabe about the rule of law and the role of government. Both will shield the little man against rapacious monopoly force. The attorney's name, Clemens Samuel in gold letters on his store front, evokes a subtle reference to the greatest democratic artist of the era, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). The audience for the first time gets to place this drama in the late 19th-early 20th century, only 70 years - a single lifetime - before Altman recreates the lawless western territories. 

The utter futility of resistance to this force plays out in the village. A strapping, tender, harmless cowboy who delights the brothel prostitutes is gunned down for no reason by a hired killer with little Dutch boy haircut. His two accomplices, a bear of a man and a genuine Indian who embody the raw indifference of frontier freelancers to higher human aspirations, taunt McCabe and then start to track him. They will carry out a faraway decision to eliminate a barrier who didn't understand that the first offer was final. The tragedy of McCabe's fate is poignantly postponed for a brief scene. He sits on Mrs. Miller's bed, apologizing and crying over losing his best and her only chance to grab a better future. She takes him into her arms and onto her breast without payment. When she leaves the room in the dawn of silent, snow-bound streets, the viewer knows McCabe is doomed. She would not have yielded to feeling, would not betray her own relentless pursuit of self-protection, were there the least chance he could reappear to disappoint her again. 

McCabe is killed but not before he shoots all three of his assassins, two by hiding and one by playing his last poker hand, seeming to die in a snow drift but poised to deliver a final bullet to the forehead of the bear hunter. In a slightly incongruous parallel scene, the town turns out to save its unused church that catches fire during the hunt. This glimpse of community and redemption to come feels unpersuasive to an audience tense from all the killing and suddenly confronted with Mrs. Miller's morning destination, an opium den in the Chinese ghetto at the edge of the town. She is an addict seeking her only respite from an unkind and unjust fate. 

Altman's vision of how the west was actually won initiated his unique film chronicle of American life at its less glorious. Yet the artistry of this early film belies its sordid content. The soundtrack of "McCabe..." features nothing but songs of Leonard Cohen, howling winds, incessant downpours of rain and snow, the lonesome  whistle of a train, gunshots, the plink of a violin missing its bow. No background muzac lures the viewer into this dismal place. Cohen's lyrics are so beautiful and tunes so haunting they can distract from the unhappy story: 

"Like any dealer he was watching for the card
That is so high and wild he'll never need
To deal another
He was some Joseph looking for a manger...

And then leaning on your window sill
He'll say one day you caused his will
To weaken with your love and warmth and shelter..."

("The Stranger Song" ©1966)

"Oh the Sisters of Mercy they are not
Departed or gone,
They were waiting for me when I thought
That I just can't go on...

Yes, you who must leave everything
That you can not control; 
It begins with your family, 
But soon it comes round to your soul..."

("Sisters of Mercy" ©1967)

Unfortunately, the reconstruction of the film on video flattens the original storm blues, forest greens, and snowy, rainy grays that were the colors of life of this continent at the edge of civilization. 

It must be noted that the injustice that suffuses "McCabe..." misses a crucial element in the history of that time and place. Sex and drugs and death were not the only escapes. Thousands of mine and lumber workers in Washington were organizing as the Industrial Workers of the World, the legendary "Wobblies." They could be as violent as the capitalists but their vision was generous. McCabe's town would have swarmed with them. 

Does their absence signify Altman's preference for rebellion over revolution? Rebellion is individual, is endemic to adolescence, and often takes artistic forms. It is easily dissipated, co-opted, even commercially exploited. It does not challenge power directly, as revolution intends. Altman's affinity for rebels, starting with the iconic James Dean, is echoed in this and subsequent films. Dropping out, as Mrs. Miller and her customers do,  was not the only option available at the time. Viewers in mid-20th century America who were rebelling against the crushing conformism of the American Century would recognize the appeal of this course of action. Others would love Altman's challenge to the myth of the west and the uncompromising realism of his subject, dialogue, and production. But they might also miss a more accurate portrayal of the political passions evoked by untrammeled capitalism not so long ago.

©Lucy Johns December 13, 2003

Review of LADY MACBETH

by Lucy Johns, mentor

Before there was film noir, there was Lady Macbeth. The woman whose passion overwhelms and thereby corrupts men is a timeless force that undermines patriarchal order. Whether she grasps without reserve for sex, power, or knowledge (Eve!) she must, in the end, be punished.

The new film “Lady Macbeth” from the little known British director William Oldroyd adds a disturbing enhancement to this timeless parable. Not only is she not punished, the lady uses her power to reach into and destroy within a segment of society that truly has no recourse, the black underclass, even more helpless against patriarchy than a woman whose wiles may save her. A white woman is oppressed, no question. A black person, woman or man, is ever a handy surrogate to suffer the wrath of the oppressor. A white woman knows this, exploiting white supremacy to avoid or at least postpone her own reckoning.

The film opens on an image of a bridal veil on a head of dark hair. The veil has intricate detail: this is not a poor person. While the congregation sings a benediction, she turns her head slightly to the black-clad shoulder looming next to her. Florence Pugh’s eyes, the angle of the camera on her face, unmistakably convey that she doesn’t know this person. In fact she was sold, along with some land, for marriage to the son of a local Scottish tyrant. Her new husband treats her with icy contempt, her father-in-law, living in the same house, with implacable hostility. The black maid servant Anna, taking her cue from her masters, shows no sign of potential for female bonding. She wakes her new mistress every morning with a clatter of immense wooden shutters. She tightens the corset strings with expert strength. She does as she’s told but intuits that she can take her anger out against another woman helpless against the family males. Catherine is utterly alone, utterly powerless in this house of strangers.

When her husband leaves for an indeterminate time to take care of business, Catherine takes to the moors, which she has been forbidden to do. Exultant from fresh air and momentary freedom, she happens upon a gathering of farmhands tormenting Anna. Her manner betrays no diffidence as she orders them to stop. Something about the ring leader makes her hesitate. He rushes her. His temerity, followed by invasion of her bedroom, evokes passion rather than rage. They fall into tumultuous sexual bliss.

Of course this cannot end well. Murders, betrayals, extraordinary complications emanating from the dead, follow. Yet this lady Macbeth, asserting agency that violates the limits of her time, models what women have to do to gain any freedom of action whatsoever. That she ends as she began, utterly alone, is not the price normally exacted for such transgression.

Oldroyd’s filming shows great skill in shaping the medium and the messengers to the story. Catherine is posed, motionless, for longer periods than actors normally sit or lie still in a movie. There is little music to distract from the visual bleakness of life in that time and place. The house is almost as soundless as its denizens are constricted in movement and expression. Oppression conveyed through lengthy and repeated minutes of stillness ensures the eventual explosions are all the more emotionally powerful. The actors - Naomi Ackie as Anna the servant (slave? This is never clarified.), Christopher Fairbank as the presiding tyrant, Cosmo Jarvis as the irresistible force of illicit sex and especially Pugh as a maid mad to test her and others’ limits - are thrilling to watch. This is a Macbeth expertly fitted, 400 years later and filtered through Nicolai Leskov’s 19th century short story “Lady Macbeth of Mzensk,” to a modern sensibility alert to the misogyny and racism that pervade western societies to this day.

© Lucy Johns, 2017

Review of THE RETURN

By Lucy Johns, mentor

The Return is a film archetypically Russian in its enigmatic story and elemental imagery. It’s possible that ambiguity became so inbred in the Soviet arts during the 20th century that unadorned realism simply disappeared as an approach to film. It’s also possible that the theme of The Return is too painful to confront directly. Regardless, the film sustains interest and suspense with its masterful symbolism and continual small surprises.

Two young brothers living with their mother and grandmother arrive home one day to discover that their father, absent for 12 years – probably the entire life of the younger brother Ivan – has returned. He sleeps a bit (perhaps after having sex with his wife, perhaps not) and insists on giving wine to his sons, a gesture disapproved but not prevented by the women. He announces that he and the boys are going on a trip, ostensibly to fish. The boys are overjoyed.

They are also completely unprepared for the lack of care they receive and the lack of information about destination, location, or duration encompassed by the announcement of a “trip.” Andrei, more adventurous due to his age and elder status, takes pictures and goes with the flow of his father’s terse manner. Ivan, apprehensive with unspoken and if spoken, unanswered, questions, is defiant. They drive through desolate landscapes to desolate places. The father behaves mysteriously. The boys stumble along, arguing about compliance with this stranger’s orders and only occasionally agreeing about how to cope with their situation.

Finally they arrive by boat at an island, uninhabited and unmarked except for a tower. The father takes off on foot for undisclosed reasons and without a word as to how they will subsist in this place. He digs up a trunk, extracts a box, and secretes the box in the boat, all unobserved by his sons, who have moved out to find worms for their fishing rods. Eventually, a violent conflict erupts. Distraught, Ivan runs to the tower and threatens to jump. His father attempts a rescue but fails. Death alters the terms of the trip, which ends, as it began: destination unknown.

This minimal story derives its force from the challenges faced by the two boys, in particular continual abandonment. Abandonment of family defines the father. The elder brother abandons the younger constantly. The father abandons both periodically even as he has them in his charge. On one level, the film is presenting the primeval dares that presumably force boy children to become men by risking their own and threatening others’ lives. On a deeper level, the film grips with the terror of being left alone to fend for oneself without preparation, warning, or obvious means. The unremitting tension among the family males conveys the pitiless theme: no one can count on anyone for anything and growing up means confronting and surmounting this ineluctable fact. The pain of this reality is barely mitigated by the character of the mother, an undemonstrative but loving parent. She’s absent however, for most of the film, during which the males enact ancient rituals of dare, risk, order around, fight, figure it out, or die.

The film’s imagery and tone reinforce the foreboding and dread of the story. Water – placid, drenching, brooding, dangerous – dominates. The first scene occurs at a shoreline that invites death-defying dives into unknown depths. Failure to conquer the fright that wells up from this prospect is punished with abandonment in a torrential downpour, a vision of absolute misery that will recur. Water is the source of food, but only after major effort. Water is the moat between life at least somewhat familiar and complete break with civilization. This prevalence of water is not typical of Russian fables, pictured more commonly in dense forests or on endless steppes.

Although the film is in color, the chiaroscuro lighting creates an impression of blackness and a landscape of stark outlines that symbolize the bleakness and danger of the human activity in the foreground. This director has studied his Bergman and Russian predecessors. His artistic skill occasionally breaks through the surface of the film, with scenes whose elegant composition is stronger than the simple action taking place. The father’s darkly seductive, yet almost expressionless face, is an element the director places and watches with a painter’s care.

In fact, the film concentrates on faces with singular intensity. The human face can be a source of meaning and explanation and comfort. Not here. Only the children reveal their emotions in smiles, scowls, grimaces, tears. The adults move their eyes but transmit almost nothing a child could comprehend. They are a mystery when viewed through a child’s eyes, the vantage point of this film. It bodes well for the director that the sentimentality and self-pity that lurk in this perspective are completely absent in this work.

Has the father survived a gulag and returns to teach his sons to do the same? Or perhaps the military, once guarding a god-forsaken outpost where something life-preserving was buried and must now be retrieved and bequeathed? Did this director experience the treatment by parents so eloquently portrayed? Whatever its intellectual origin, this film exemplifies the paradox at the heart of successful art. It melds light and shape and color that grasp with irresistible emotion in order to create a vision of life whose only triumph is having survived to tell the tale.

© Lucy Johns 2004

Review of THE CONFORMIST

By Lucas Neumeyer (17) 
2016 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place

There are two movies fighting for attention in The Conformist. These two stories diverge and intersect throughout the narrative creating a feeling of unbalance and confusion. One is a cold drama documenting a man’s insecurity and failures. The other can be described as a convoluted and tragic love story focusing on how uncomfortable a lonely man is around extroverted people and how lost he is confronting his own bottled up passion. This conflict occurs in the head of a man who has ideas of self-fulfillment and happiness, but has trouble achieving them when his ambition battles with his conscience. It frames a story of inner exploration and outer isolation during a period of political turmoil and reform. It is a story that can reignite the emotional core of anyone who has felt confused for even a small portion of their lives.

It is not surprising that a story as binary as this one is set in two locations. On the one hand, we have Rome where the heart of fascism has the appearance of archaic buildings and stern stone columns. On the other hand, we have Paris: The intersection of art and culture. The Conformist is set during the build up and fallout of the second world war, both a time of civil unrest. It is of significance to note that the film was released in Italy in 1970, also a time of civil unrest. The Italian Socialist Party and the Christian Democrats were at odds with one another; strikes and acts of terrorism were rampant. Vulnerable people were scooped by these political agendas and student protests were at their height. Events such as those occurring in Italy at the time and May 1968 in France are to be kept in mind as Bertolucci tells the story of a meek man coerced into acts of violence on behalf of a central political party and his own personal conflict. The political ideas are really rather prescient: it ends with an assassination that serves to burn bridges and create ruin several years before Italian President Aldo Moro was murdered.

Looking beyond the politics and symbolism, The Conformist is simply a gorgeous film. It is remarkable how Bertolucci and his director of photography Vittorio Storaro rely on expressionistic, unrestrained, completely illogical imagery to express the emotions onscreen. The images range from a photo of Laurel and Hardy appearing when Marcello is embarrassed, to the background changing colors during a sex scene. This method of imagery highlights the theme of duality and brings it to the surface of the film. The film starts with Marcello lying in a hotel bed rubbing his brow with discontent. The neon sign outside supplies a malicious red across the room as the darkness ebbs and flows. This feeling of rocking back and forth is repeated a few times in the film. We see it when Marcello is pacing in front of a window in and out of darkness as radio entertainers behind slide in and out of frame, or during the fight in a restaurant kitchen where the overhead lamp swings, illuminating and darkening the room. This sense of pendulum is given significance when Bertolucci splits the frame apart. As Marcello leaves the hotel and waits for the car, the edge of the building takes up half of the screen, and when he is in the car the camera is placed in a manner that allows the windshield wiper to be laid right across his face. The imagery helps to emphasize Marcello is always confused and worried: he rocks back and forth between the opposing forces that struggle in his conscience.

Marcello’s struggle to either conform to a higher power or lead an unfulfilling life is reminiscent of the classic premise of existentialism. The appeal of fascism and a higher order is a promise of prosperity and normality, but also a path of lack of responsibility. Existentialism is all about the freedom of choice allotted to humans by life, and how those who deny this freedom are living in “Bad Faith”. Marcello doesn’t have any qualms about living in Bad Faith, he is simply searching for normality and relief. We can assume his quest for ordinariness derives from his extraordinary childhood. Having a near sexual encounter with a pedophile and shooting him are not what he considers ordinary. Neither is having a morphine-addicted mother or father committed to an insane asylum for political murders. Marcello clearly has a strong reaction to a traumatic childhood experience and suppressing his true feelings. He married Giulia because he assumed she was complacent and normal, “A mound of petty ideas. Full of petty ambitions.”.  He even gets visibly embarrassed when his mother calls him “an angel”. 

Marcello’s attempt to distance himself from this type of absurdity is reminiscent of Sartre’s ideas: God gave us morals and purpose, without them there is no way to gage what is right, wrong, normal, or absurd without a reference point. The film points out this absurdity when it cuts away to humorous details such as the maid stealing a piece of spaghetti from the bowl with her mouth, or a boy practicing somersaults with a harness, his mother in a bed of puppies, or Guilia overenthusiastically cranking a mimeograph machine. As a result, Marcello who can’t stand this confusing, free-for-all world hides in the comfort of normality that Fascism appears to offer. For him, fascism is like the church, where he could follow rules and not have to worry, right? Not exactly.

What little we see of God in this film, we perceive as not very influential. Marcello only attends his confession because it is mandatory for the wedding, and finds himself quickly blessed when he reveals the party he belongs to even though he’s just confessed to murder. Bad Faith is not only reflected in Marcello’s relationship with the church, but also in Marcello’s attempt to avoid any regrettable decision. He can’t handle the task to murder his college mentor Quadri in cold blood, or continue to live his confusing unhappy life. This is exacerbated by the fact that Marcello falls in love with his mentor’s wife Anna. He experiences this dilemma like another existentialist theme, “I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.” Marcello’s dilemma is like that of many people: always regretting what could’ve happened. He tries to achieve a middle path by indirectly setting up the ambush outside Quadri’s country house, but trying to prevent his wife from joining him. This inability to commit only leaves him with the consequences of both actions: an unhappy life with a guilty conscience.

Bertolucci provides a view into what happens when one’s life is devoid of agency: Isolation. A major theme in The Conformist is Marcello being singled out and isolated. It comes across in several details, such as his sitting in the back of the car as Manganiello drives, or sitting at the head of the dinner table while the two women in his life chat with each other. He can portray the feeling of loneliness that detaches him from other people, even while they’re in the room. One of the most memorable scenes is during a dancehall sequence when all the dancers form a gigantic circle around Marcello and smother him with their zealousness. This is also made clear in the images of Marcello behind glass; there is a tangible divide between him and the rest of the world.  He can see the other side of the glass in the recording station, and all the extravagant and happy singers, but he is isolated. This image of Marcello behind glass is repeated for the coldest scene in the film: When her husband is murdered, Anna is chased by men and begs Marcello frantically to let her in the car, but he just stares back behind cool glass as she pounds on the window and runs off. This distance has tragic repercussions, as the fascists prove to be the wrong horse to back in the mid 40s.

Marcello begins to isolate himself from everyone he knows: he has a distant and emotionless marriage with Giulia, accuses his blind friend Italo for his own crimes of fascism and murder. The final frame consists of a close up of him sitting at a bench from behind, with metallic bars between him and the camera. His actions have finally caught up with him, and all he can do is ponder. At least until he looks into the camera, at us, with sad eyes. It is here where the man he becomes is fully formed: a prisoner trapped by his guilt and our screen.

Review of LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS

by Lucy Johns, mentor

“Les Enfants du Paradis” is a sprawling 19th century novel of a film. it creates a familiar world in meticulous physical detail, develops a few paradigm characters an audience wants to know more about at every turn of their cosmopolitan lives, shimmers with cultural references for the educated commentator. It even lodges in the great European tradition of political subversion so veiled that censors beguiled by the story should not notice the challenge. It is, in short, an irresistible, unforgettable and timeless cinematic achievement.

Through what must have been heroic maneuvers to secure financing and space for his vision, director Marcel Carné built an immense Boulevard to frame his story of a woman so beautiful that men’s entire lives warp around their desire for her. The Boulevard signifies the era when such public spaces were new in Paris, circa 1830, exploding with street life reminiscent of but much bigger than its medieval antecedents. Great crowds, a constant flow of coaches and horsemen, blocks of sideshows throng the scene. One of the attractions is a completely naked woman to be viewed for only a few centimes. That she is immersed in a barrel of water, showing only her face, neck and sculptural shoulders, is unknown until the gullible are inside the peep show. A handsome aspiring actor makes the rounds of little theaters, pushing for a place with operatic flair and unflagging ambition. A sinister gangster plies his trade in theft, fencing, perhaps a murder here and there. A mime, so disrespected he performs on stage outside, not meriting the price of admission, slumps in his shapeless white garments, observing the surges of people through heavily painted eyes. These are the characters we will follow for the rest of the film. The woman, now clothed in a fetching dress, attracts the actor, who woes her with poetry and unmistakable lust. She brushes him off with magnetic charm, then enters the gangster’s storefront, apparently familiar, where he bores her with philosophical tirades explaining his misanthropic life and proclaiming indifference to love. She leaves, he follows, they pause to listen to a barker promoting a play. A fat gentleman sidles up to her, the stereotype distraction, while the gangster picks his pocket. He bawls accusations at the woman, attracting a gendarme who shouts for a witness. The mime awakens. His pantomime of the woman, the victim, the pickpocket and the crime entrances the crowd and relieves the woman of suspicion. She tosses him a rose. His fate is sealed.

The mime Baptiste is Jean-Louis Barrault, one of the greatest of the 20th century and surely the best such performance ever in film. The beauty Garance is Arletty, whose affair with a German officer during the Nazi occupation of Paris must’ve been a factor in Carne’s ability to get this film made in the middle of World War II. (It also earned her a prison term for collaboration after the War.)

Garance’s lovers - respectively the menacing crook, the histrionic actor and later an insufferable Count of the realm - play their roles to perfection. None is able to capture her love although sex is readily available.

This predicament of unrequited love is a pervasive theme of French films, the female object of desire whose body is compliant but whose heart is closely guarded. “Les Enfants” has deeper reverberations, however. Baptiste, who tells Garance of constant beatings by his father during childhood, escapes incessant pain in dreams and then in the wordless anguish his art projects. Art saves lives seemingly doomed to helpless failure. Did this theme influence Ingmar Bergman, whose Alexander in “Fanny and Alexander” is also going to be saved by artistic pursuit? Garance, beautiful, free-spirited, radiating joie de vivre, seems to be France itself, acquiescent but not conquered by German rule. Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine in Francois Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” reprises this French archetype, acquiescent but not conquered by her German husband.

“Les Enfants du Paradis” is classical film-making, The camera is still nearly always, filming activity and conversation from a respectful distance. No hovering countable seconds over faces here, so annoyingly prevalent in contemporary movies. It also makes clever use of an ancient dramatic strategy, the play within the play, wherein to catch the conscience of the king. Many scenes occur on stages of theaters full of rapt patrons, an homage to theater as a social force. Garance’s aspiring actor rises to play Othello, where he can strangle the beloved he thinks he’s lost as a foil for the beloved he can’t lose because he never had her. Baptiste, too frightened to embrace Garance in real life when she waits patiently, rises to murder in a play to get some clothes that will let him follow his beloved into a ball. The crowds that began the film, so full of possibilities, end it by overwhelming any lovers who thought they might beat the odds.

Life, not love, is the paradise that “Les Enfants” must embrace. The film is not so much romantic as defiant for a time when no one could know the outcome of Nazi conquest of most of Europe. Such defiance keeps civilization going when power seems out of reach. This message resonates as deeply 70 years later, here in the United States, as it must have in France when “Les Enfants du Paradis” was made.

© Lucy Johns

The Dark Journey of FANNY AND ALEXANDER

by Owen Reese (16)
2017 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place Essay

The colorful, haunting 1983 Ingmar Bergman epic Fanny and Alexander dramatizes the battle between two ways of understanding the world: the way of magic, mystery and freedom, against rigid, rule-driven Christianity. The two children at the center of the film, Fanny and Alexander, live happily with a warm, spirited, extended family until a disaster turns their world upside down. They’re thrown from one world into another, each world being represented by the different houses they find themselves in over the course of the film. The story is their odyssey back to the peaceful, balanced world where started.

The film opens with Alexander alone, wandering around his family’s large, lavish home, a place that seems endless, without boundary, and full of mystery. Alexander is imaginative, perceptive and curious about his world. When he looks up at a statue of a nude woman, she begins to move. The moment is interrupted by his grandmother walking in, and asking him if he wants to play cards. He doesn’t respond, just looks startled and so she leaves him alone because although she didn’t see the statue, somehow she understands. (The grandmother is the film’s most dignified and thoughtful character, though she is always on the sidelines.) The moving statue is the first moment of magic we see. It’s an image of something natural, sensual, human. But it’s also unpredictable and startling. It could represent the spirit of magic, passion and freedom.

Alexander’s father and mother are introduced to us on Christmas Eve when the whole extended family comes together for a big, joyful party. The grandmother hosts, and we learn that she is a wise and caring woman who watches over her children. At the party, everybody – Alexander’s uncles, the kind maids, other family members – are singing and running through the house together, and the children experience this as an entirely sweet, innocent event of family life , Christianity in this house is a warm, celebratory faith about community, love, and safety. Unlike magic, it isn’t unpredictable or startling. It provides security in an otherwise chaotic world. Some unspecified amount of time after the festivities end, Alexander’s father is on stage rehearsing Hamlet, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Alexander is watching. Suddenly his father freezes, forgets where he is, and collapses on the floor. He dies – but comes back to as a ghost, exactly like Hamlet’s father. Both children see their father whenever their lives are about to change drastically (he also once appears to his mother, the children’s grandmother). They have a special connection to their father that isn’t strictly Christian.

The death of their father has serious consequences. After losing her husband, their beautiful, angelic mother marries an icy old bishop, a God-fearing man who wants control and order, nothing else. The mother and her children move into the old man’s plain, gray house, and bring none of their personal belongings with them. No piece of the humanism and spirituality from their previous life. The house is full of boundaries, rules, and barriers. The doors are locked, the windows are barred, and the children are not allowed to have toys. The grandmother’s house was full of soft furniture, warm colors, warm people. Everything here is hard and cold. There’s magic in the house, but it’s restricted by the tight walls of uncompromising Christianity, and God is used as a tool to scare the children into submission. When Alexander speaks of ghosts, he’s punished severely and told never to lie again. These are the horrors of an overly religious life. No freedom, no imagination, no color (quite literally). Everything is scraped back, tied up, clamped down, just like the hair of the women in the household.

The children are rescued. It’s hard to say how, but we know that a sorcerer, their great uncle Isak, a Jewish man (his religion is an intentional choice – it puts him outside the whole conventional Christian world) casts a spell and then takes them to safety. The children arrive at Isak’s house, and in it find marionettes lining the walls. They’re told never leave their room after dark for their own safety. Of course, Alexander wanders off that night in search of a toilet, and ends up exploring, just as he explored his family home at the beginning of the film. Unlike the Bishop’s barren house, this place is cluttered with magical relics and other strange items. And then the boy hears the voice of God. He cowers in fear. The booming voice comes from behind a door, slightly ajar. And just as God is stepping out to show Himself, He is revealed to be just the sorcerer’s nephew, holding a puppet of God. Just like God was previously used as a puppet by adults to scare children metaphorically, in this case, it was literal.

The nephew shows Alexander around the house, and introduces him to Ismael, a man (played by a woman, a large boundary that’s dissolved) who’s locked away for the safety of others, he’s told. Alexander spends some time with Ismael and begins to understand how dangerous and evil unbounded magic can be. Ismael asks him to write down his name. He writes ‘Alexander Ekdahl’ but upon second viewing, he sees he’s written ‘Ismael Retzinsky’ instead. Ismael says, “Perhaps we’re the same person, with no boundaries” It goes to show how uncontrollable this new environment is, and tells us that Ismael is simply the dark side of Alexander’s own mind, locked away for the safety of others.

The scene ends with Ismael teaching Alexander voodoo; he can tell Alexander wants to hurt the Bishop, but can’t admit it. “You won’t speak of that which is constantly in your thoughts” Ismael says. He describes the old man’s death and when Alexander says “Don’t talk like that” Ismael replies: “It is not I talking, it is yourself.” As he speaks, the Bishop’s bed bursts into flames and the Bishop burns to death.. Alexander’s mother is freed. The sorcerer’s house brought out Alexander’s power to make life-saving changes, but it also brought out the murderous hatred he held inside for one man, and caused that man’s death.

The film ends on a relatively happy note. It shows the extended family reconciled and back together for another party. It’s now springtime and the world inside the grandmother’s house is exceptionally bright. There’s an abundance of the color pink and everyone’s celebrating two new babies born into the family. The scene portrays a vision of rebirth. Life has found its order again both in the real and magical sides of the world. Now there’s balance.

The key to that balance is Fanny and Alexander’s grandmother. Throughout the film, she’s been strong and caring, a symbol of stability. She embraces the best parts of Christianity, the love, the ritual, the celebration, as we see in the beginning, but she’s also open to the world of magic and nature, and has a Jewish lover (Uncle Isak). The children aren’t the only ones who notice the ghost of their father, so does she. Her world is the one we see in the large, warm happy house. It isn’t dull and dead like the Bishop’s house, but it also isn’t a hellish, scary pit of mystical energy like the marionette home.

But to finish, we get one chilling reminder of recent events. Alexander walks down a hallway and behind him appears the Bishop’s ghost. He knocks Alexander to the floor and tells him he will never be free. It’s a reminder that he may feel safe in his cozy home, but there are things he’s learned that will haunt him forever. He can never regain the innocence he lost during his journey, and he will never forget how dangerous the world can be.

FILM: ONE TWO THREE

A Teenager’s Guide to Serious Film

by Ronald Chase, Founding Director of San Francisco Art & Film for Teenagers

Film has become such a universal part of people’s lives it hardly needs to be introduced to you. At the same time, most any child being raised today has also been strongly influenced in the way they think and see by its offspring: television, the internet and social media. 

The invention of television was hailed as monumental. Ideas, news of the world, art, entertainment would flow with never-ending variety into the homes of every citizen making all our lives richer and better. It was going to be the learning tool that changed our world. Sadly—and probably inevitably—it quickly became the marketing tool that ruled our lives. In doing so, TV producers and marketers develop clever tricks and techniques designed to influence their audience.  Unfortunately those techniques also encourage passive viewing and deter critical thinking. 

Even if you don’t watch it, TV has an influence on you because it shapes popular culture. Before you can start to develop ideas about film you need to unlearn the habits of seeing that you have picked up unconsciously and never thought about much.

BAD HABITS
So what are these so called bad habits and why should you care if you have them?

We live in a materialistic, consumer society which too often places money at the pinnacle of many people’s existence. No one likes to admit this, so there’s lots of ways that help them deny it. For example, most of the thrust of advertising is to make people think they want or need things which they seldom want or need. This way, they encourage them to buy, and that keeps the consumer society happy. This was pretty much developed to perfection during the early television years.

A “marketing” technique is just that. It’s a tool to make you want to buy things. The entire structure of the television empire is dedicated to this end, otherwise it would not exist.  You say you don’t pay attention to the commercials? Well, you did when you were little (without even realizing it) and the structure of TV—“and now a word from our sponsors…”—was etched in your mind.

It works like this: on television a drama, a comedy, a story develops in a certain way to grab your attention quickly and hold it so you won’t reach for the remote and change the channel. Episodes are constructed around commercial breaks: they bring you to an emotional or humorous high point, and then, bam! try to sell you something. 

This pattern has trained you to expect to be kept titillated and interested without having to do a thing except sit there, and you’re likely to become impatient if you’re not kept constantly stimulated. This means lots of information in small, highly amusing or absorbing, digestible short segments. Your ability to pay attention for long stretches of time, your capacity to concentrate, your patience—all of these virtues you’re going to need to get you through your life—have been strongly distorted and in many cases, practically wiped out.

Television, Facebook, YouTube, texting, tweeting, etc. has filled your sensibilities with endless hours of mindless trivia – sometimes exciting on the surface but nothing much to think about. It wants you to keep you busy, without thinking, and convince you you are watching material of substance. It reconfirms this illusion by selling the most popular, profitable ideas of what’s important and what’s not. Social media is a central force channeling the most destructive values of popular culture—conformity (so you can be more easily manipulated and buy more), materialism (you’re not valuable unless you’re buying things) and celebrity,

A few years of a steady diet of first-rate serious film can sober up the most avid television addict. Not that you’ve never tried anything more thoughtful and serious than TV, but you likely haven’t had any help making the transition between industry driven “products” and films whose purpose is to express a more honest interpretation of life.

FILM 1 2 3 is a primer to give you the tools for thinking about film seriously. 

Every person has a right to his or her opinion, but this doesn’t mean all opinions are equal. There are informed opinions, uninformed opinions, and ignorant opinions. Opinions are subject to change, usually through learning, arguing, reasoning, and experience. Our aim is to help you form your own educated opinions about film and, in the process develop a vocabulary of terms, concepts and ideas that help you think about yourself and how you relate to film. Out of this will grow your own taste as it relates to your personality, which will help you as you begin to discover the person you are and the person you want to become.

OUR GOALS:

1. Know what you like about a film and be able to explain why. You’ll be able to say, “I liked that film a lot, but I don’t think it was very well made” and explain why. Or say, “The film was really first rate, but I didn’t like it very much” and explain why. You’ll be able to mention the strong points about the film that you liked, and observe its weaknesses using references to its concept, style, editing, acting, lighting, use of camera and its imagery. You will have a subjective idea of your personal taste, and an objective idea of a film’s quality. To do all this will probably take you many more years, but at least we’ll give you a start.

2. Know enough about the techniques of film making, and what makes films first-rate, to be able to appreciate films on that level, regardless of whether the subject mater interests you or doesn’t. This requires having a technical vocabulary, and being able to relate this vocabulary to individual scenes in a film.

3. Know enough about the history of film to make connections, associations, spot influences and read the symbolism. You’ll have learned this through a lot of practice.

4. Be able to spot themes and subject matter and relate these elements to the individual scenes in the film, to help you form an educated opinion of the film’s meaning.

Ambitious? Yes. It’s tough, you need patience and determination to stick with it, but astute and brilliant observations from students over the years have convinced me this is a realistic goal.

Cine Club exposes you to new kinds of films all year long. Many of these will be classic films, foreign films, silent films, films studied in college classes, films shown at local art-house theaters. We will also see new films. These new films are chosen because (1) they have many first rate qualities, (2) the subject matter will expand your knowledge of the world or of film in general and (3) they are not films you would choose on your own.

We choose these films to stretch your mind, to make you take in ideas bigger than you have now. That stretch is the most important aspect of this program. If your head isn’t sore afterwards, you haven’t stretched far enough. You’re the judge. It’s your head.

THE TOUGHEST HURDLES FOR THE BEGINNER:

Making a transition to new types of film can sometimes be off-putting. If you’re prepared, it isn’t so strenuous. Here are the difficulties students complain about first:

1. Subtitles:

Having to read and follow the film at the same time can be frustrating. Your reading skills count. The way you read can matter, too. If you’re used to reading one word at a time you’re in trouble.  One trick is to keep your attention on the images and only consult the subtitles when you need to. In many films the dialogue and relationships can be understood without much help from subtitles. When we remember movies, we never remember the subtitles, we remember the images. 

Why subtitles? Why not watch films that have the dialogue dubbed into English? Hearing a film with its original actors speaking their own language makes the film feel more real to us. With dubbed films, the speech doesn’t match the lip movements, and the voice acting is less than authentic, creating an artificial quality that diminishes the power of the film. The one exception in this case is the Italian film: during its heyday (‘50s-‘60s) Italian film used actors of all nationalities speaking their own languages, and they were all dubbed into Italian.

2. Getting lost and/or being bored:

“I didn’t like it. It was boring.” That’s O.K. but why was it boring? At what moment did you get bored? Most of the time when students are questioned closely, the boredom is directly connected to losing track of what the film is about.

Boredom is important. Sometimes boredom will help you understand something about yourself; sometimes it will help you understand where you got lost in the film, and of course sometimes it’s completely justified. When you lose interest note when—and if you are completely confused, be patient and note when your interest is piqued again.

It’s only natural you might get puzzled and lost when:

a. Films contain new elements that might be unfamiliar to you.

b. It’s filled with symbolism that’s difficult for you to understand or interpret.

c. You get tired of reading the subtitles and get lost.

Believe me, this has happened to everyone at one time or another.

3. Talking about film: Our discussions are made livelier by your input. If things puzzled you, ask, and we’ll try to straighten them out. We want to hear what your favorite moments were, and when you were impressed, and vice-verso. What you hated. And you might not know why. We’ll try to figure it out together.

The words “film” and “movies” have subjective meanings. Many associate the word “film” with art film, in contrast to “movies” which they connect to “Hollywood” or commercial films. 

This battle of contexts began in the late 1950s with the invasion of art films from Europe, and the concept of “auteur,” a French term which sees the director as the total creator of his own work—with consistent style and vision. This idea is misleading because very few directors have ever had absolute control over their work. Most films, even “independent” films cost massive amounts of money that they need to make back, and as for “art films,” very fine films have been made in Hollywood as well as around the world.

It’s easier to understand the lack of first-rate films if we’re aware of recent production trends that force directors to alter their films to make them profitable. Reasons include poor test-audience response and “packaging” techniques of agents that bundle actors, writers, directors and musicians around story vehicles regardless of their appropriateness in order to raise profits. These films are products. Under these circumstances it is difficult to consider these films “seriously.”

Then there are “ordinary films”: films that are competently made but don’t have any distinctive qualities. These are the films most people feel comfortable with. They are pleasant and exciting to sit through but they leave no lasting effect. These films are the life blood of the film industry.

All films are subjected to a variety of outside pressures (including commerce) but some survive with their integrity intact.  For these films I use the word “serious.” By “serious films” I mean films of high quality that observe the world in a thoughtful or imaginative way, confronting truths about life, philosophy or art. You can discuss them in terms of the truths they reveal. These films stand in contrast to the “industry products” or “ordinary movies” I have described above. This does not mean a “commercial” film can’t be well made or entertaining—many are—only that the film’s aim is not a truthful and thoughtful view of life. You will learn the distinctions in film as you see more of them. So let us get to the plot.

Most of the films you see in movie theaters today are plot driven. “The test of a good movie is that it’s able to tell a good story,” says the Hollywood mogul. This standard has held in Hollywood (and much of the rest of the world) through the last century. In this type of film a “story” hangs on a plot. The plot describes the story line, and dramatic conflicts. But many fine films do not follow this formula and to describe a plot often doesn’t describe what even a story film is about. You can usually tell how naive a person is about film by their description of it— “Well, it’s about this guy, and he goes to —, and then he meets—, and then—” But what is the film about?

The subject matter and the themes of a film describes what it is about—the subject matter in relation to larger concepts.

For example, you could say MACBETH is about the abuse of power and its toll. Many of its major scenes relate clearly to this theme. A film could be about family dynamics, or about a young person’s loss of innocence. When searching for what a film is about, talk first about its subject matter and its themes rather than its plot. 

Sometimes elements of the plot need to be mentioned to help explain how it explores its themes. Serious films have a clear grasp of themes and those themes relate to the experiences, aspirations, disappointments people experience in real life. Subject matter is different than plot. The very best plots clearly explore the subject matter and themes of a film. Some films can easily be described in terms of plot—“a chase movie,” for example, explains the subject matter (Do they get caught?) and suggests a plot-driven film. Many narrative films lose grasp of their themes and become vague or generalized.

In many of our discussions after the film, students are asked what the film was about. This often takes many stabs and can be open to a variety of interpretations. Sometimes the subject matter of the film can be hidden under layers of symbolism, or sometime will be very clear in the way the film turns out.

Films take their plots from all sources—history, news reports, novels and theater as well as original stories invented by the screenwriter. 

The plot of a film can usually be synthesized into a single sentence. Here are some examples from film and literature:


A CHRISTMAS CAROL (w. Charles Dickens)

A miserly old man is reformed through a series of visitations on Christmas Eve. Its major theme is redemption, its subject is the transformation of character.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (w. Jane Austen)

A young couple destined to be married must first overcome the barriers of pride and prejudice. It’s major theme is the developing of self-awareness, its subject matter is the observation of society.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (w. Dostoyevsky)

A young man commits a crime and is slowly pursued to his inevitable punishment. Its major themes relate to the complex interrelation of the conscience, emotions and intellect to an individual’s actions, its subject matter is the defiance of moral laws and their effect on the individual.

THE SEVEN SAMURAI (d. Akira Kurosawa)

A besieged village hires a band of warriors to defend it from bandits. Its subject matter is the complexity of motives and relationships within a community and one of its themes the complex ironies of heroism.

My comments illustrate that a description of the plot alone may not give a clear idea about a film. Less complicated films are often only about their plots. Great films require you to ask, not only “what’s going to happen next?” but also “what is this about?” 



Overly manipulated plots can make them become unbelievable. When that happens it becomes impossible to consider the film as a serious view of life. What British novelist Anthony Burgess (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE) says about novels holds true for films:

“In the lowest level of writing a plot need be no more than a string of stock devices for arousing stock responses of concern and excitement in the viewer. The promise of conflict, mysteries or frustrations that will be resolved. We usually want to be entertained so badly, we’ll suspend criticism of even the most trite modes of resolution.

“In the least sophisticated films the knots to be untied (plot setups) are usually stringently physical, and the denouement often comes as a sort of triumphant violence. More sophisticated films prefer plots based on psychological situations—and the climax comes through new states of awareness for the characters and the viewers (often understanding or awareness on the part of the viewer.)”

The plot may have a minor part in a film, or no part at all. Rather than the driving force moving the film forward, the plot may be nothing more than a clothes line on which to hang a series of events or “set pieces” that expand the film’s themes.  For example:

LA DOLCE VITA (d. Federico Fellini)

Set in Rome in the 1950s, it follows a newspaper reporter through one big “set piece" after another: the arrival of a film actress and her entourage; a visit to the house of two children who claim to see the Virgin Mary; an evening party with a band of decadent aristocrats in a deserted mansion, and so on. Again and again, the hero—his story with his girlfriend, friends and self doubts—gets lost in the crowd. 

Students who viewed this film were mystified and angry—their focus was on the reporter and they expected the story to hinge around him. What was going to happen to him? They missed the way the scenes reflected and developed the themes of the movie. The subject matter of the film is the loss of faith, both on a personal level and throughout all levels of society. Each section of the film is constructed to reflect this theme. In the end, the reporter has lost his faith in life, but what gives the film its greatness and power, is that in following him, the viewer is introduced to a complex social world in which scene after scene reflects the hero’s own dilemma. The effect is of a panorama of society mirroring the film’s theme.

Your reaction to films that frustrate you often takes time to settle in. Students were irritated by LA DOLCE VITA, but months later we saw a simple, straightforward narrative film of Fellini’s, LA STRADA. These same students claimed they liked LA DOLCE VITA so much better! They had found it richer, more mysterious, and they remembered its scenes vividly.


Sometimes the plot is cloaked with images and layers of meaning that are symbolic—what looks simple must be constantly interpreted before the meaning and themes becomes clear.

ANDREI RUBLEV (d. Andrei Tarkovsky)

Tarkovsky’s epic film about a 13th-century icon painter moves its hero through nine episodes in an artist’s life. Here again, the hero often vanishes, and students were left with scenes they could barely identify as having anything to do with art. Vivid imagery carries the themes along as Rublev abandons his faith in himself, gives up art and wanders for years as a self-imposed mute. 

Students missed the meaning of many vivid scenes: of artisans being blinded in the snow, of pagan celebrants of Midsummer’s night being hunted down by daylight and murdered by Christians; the systematic slaughter of a village by the Tartars, and the uplifting ending, when a young boy’s faith in himself brings Rublev to his senses. Students expected a clear plot and were thrown by constant layers of symbolic scenes.

It was only after our discussion that some of its meaning began to become clear to students. Symbolic films need your free association with images before clues to their meaning can be found. You often need help in reading their meanings. Sometimes the plot is only an outline for style and imagery which express the themes. These films, like music, need to be absorbed rather than figured out step-by-step.

THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES, ALICE, INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA

These are three films that create their own universe.

THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (d. Sergei Parajanov) is based on a poet’s life. The subject matter—the power of the imagination and its mime, pageantry and symbolism —threw our students off entirely because there was not any recognizable plot line.

ALICE (d. Jan Svenkmajer) was easier because the Wonderland story is familiar to most, and the film uses magnificent stop-motion animation, but students were mostly oblivious to its heavy Freudian symbolism and sexual overtones.

They fared better with INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA (d. The Quay Brothers) because they had been prepared for its unique mixture of heavy symbolism, strange atmosphere and visual poetry. The students who relaxed and let the film patiently take its own course came away with a rich and haunting experience they discussed enthusiastically.

Resistance to a new challenge in viewing can keep the viewer from understanding the value of a film or its revelations. This takes practice and time. Often it takes returning to a difficult film again.

1. AS AN EXPRESSION OF AN INTERPRETATION OF LIFE

The bulk of Anglo-American films from their beginnings to WWII show a world that is reasonable and just—wrong is punished, good rewarded, as is noted by one of the characters in Oscar Wilde—in novels the good characters end up happily, the bad characters unhappily “that is why it is called fiction.” 

On the continent (France) where realism took hold, films reflect a life where there is no justice and the evil and stupid prevail. (Equally extreme.) 

Since the war, serious films and literature reflect man as imperfect and life possibly absurd. It is interesting to reflect on these trends when you watch contemporary films, as these three points of view inform all films today.

2. AS ENTERTAINMENT OR ESCAPE

This is the most common use of film, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with dreams and laughter. Problems arise when these films give a false view of life through oversimplification and tend to corrupt viewers into thinking reality is the way the film portrays it. Such films can be tremendously harmful when they are used as role models in the real world. These films usually avoid real human issues—as the old saying goes,” Who wants to see a movie about real life? That’s boring and depressing. It’s bad enough as it is!”

3. AS PROPAGANDA

To make the viewer initiate certain acts, or support certain points of view is another potent use of film. These films generally lose value when the wrongs they expose are eliminated. The contrary is also true. THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, for example validated the policies of the Nazis, and later destroyed the career of its director, precisely because it was so effective.

4. AS REPORT OR DOCUMENTARY

Here, also, film has triumphed. From the early documentaries (Flaherty’s NANOOK OF THE NORTH) it has left a record of the age. Fiction films which documented Europe at the end of the war (PAISAN and OPEN CITY) still retain the power of being there. Today documentary films have come into their own, exploring new aspects of modern life in absorbing ways.

5. AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE ZEITGEIST

Film shares with novels in helping us understand periods in the past. Masterworks like MOLIERE, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC and BARRY LYNDON present the past with a vividness and breadth that is hard to match. Contemporary films like LA DOLCE VITA and APOCALYPSE NOW capture important aspects of their eras and become symbolic of them.

6. AS A CREATOR OF LIFE STYLES AND ARBITER OF TASTE

Another great influence films have on the world is because of the huge audience it reaches. Television also has a huge impact on influencing the life styles and taste of viewers—an impact less than ideal. But blockbusters like HARRY POTTER, LORD OF THE RINGS, TITANIC, STAR WARS also have an enormous influence on their audiences.

From the early days of film it became evident that films which reflected popular ideas about life and reaffirmed the false values many people never question were going to be more popular and well liked than difficult films which reflected a more realistic view of the human condition. The entertainment value of films has never been questioned, but as films tried to conquer the “market”and compete financially with others many film makers were forced to tilt their thinking and ideas into a more acceptable, popular direction. 

Many of these types of films reinforce popular myths—that people fall in love at first sight and live happily ever after, for example, or that immorality will lead a sinner to ruin, crime doesn’t pay, etc. (the most destructive being killing someone doesn’t have any consequences)—and in many cases are central to the film’s meaning—films show characters in jobs they would never be able to hold in real life, for example, or living in houses they could never afford, in situations that could simply not happen because of the circumstances of the character and place. 

We refer to these manipulations as the “magic” of film—that ability to help the viewer put his reason on hold, in the name of “seeing is believing.”  An inexperienced viewer needs to be constantly on alert, questioning and challenging the distorted content of films that reinforce lies.

Films are stories, but they are also about ideas. Like fiction, these ideas concern character, plot, theme and subject matter, but also important is how these ideas are being expressed. This “how” has also to do with ideas in film. 

When you talk about film, certain phrases, references and terms will always pop up. They concern the essentials of what is being told, and how the story is being created. Here are the building blocks on which film is built.

We’ve already covered the separation of plot, theme and subject matter, but we also need to consider how the story is being told. For this we need two new terms, LINEAR and NONLINEAR.

LINEAR: The most common way a plot is told is from beginning to end (linear narrative). The story starts at the beginning and goes through to the end without interruptions. Because this method is so common, it is sometimes referred to as traditional or “conservative” which doesn’t mean the film maker is not interested in trying anything different or new. It indicates only that the director wants to tell a good story, and sets about it with the most traditional tools.

NON-LINEAR: Another way of telling a story is to jump around between present, past, and future (nonlinear narrative). Film is unique because it uses pictures rather than words to tell its stories. Many researchers tell us that what we see delivers a more lasting impression than what we hear or read.  “It’s true, I saw it with my own eyes” is a very ancient expression.  

One of film’s great strengths is the ability to move the same way memory does. When we remember something in the past, we often remember an image—just a flash, that can trigger thoughts of our experiences. (Sound, smell and taste also act as vivid triggers to memory.) 

The most common way a linear film narrative is interrupted is when a character stops and remembers. At this moment, the film cuts away from the present, and gives us a scene from the past. This technique is called “flashback” and is a popular and frequent example of a “nonlinear” technique. In films that go to the trouble of “setting up a flashback” (preparing us and leading us through this “cut away”) these scenes give the viewer little trouble. In “forties” films, the scene usually dissolves slowly, accompanied often by music or a voice over, and the “memory” scene replaces the contemporary one. (Also the use of titles—One Year Later, 10 Years Before and so on—easily help the viewer.) 

EXAMPLES: REBECCA (d. Hitchcock) & SUNSET BOULEVARD (d. Wilder)

Hitchcock’s REBECCA is a memory film that begins with a slow move through a forest road toward the ruins of a manor house in the distance. A woman’s voice is heard over the picture, explaining her need to return to the past. The scene then fades to the past. This is a classic memory technique. A film of this sort usually returns to the present to end the story.

Several twists gave this formula a new flavor—Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BOULEVARD opens with a dead narrator—a body floats in a swimming pool. The voice over is that of a dead man who becomes the narrator of the memory. This classic beginning and end to a film ( with a narrator) was the most common use of the “memory” film until the sixties, when this technique became more complex.

Difficulty for the viewer comes as films strive for more sophistication in the way the story is told. Here a viewer who does not become attentive and active ( asking questions: where are we now? where have we jumped to?) can get lost.

EXAMPLE: CITIZEN KANE (d. ORSON WELLES)

Orson Welles’ CITIZEN KANE (1941) is a classic example of the nonlinear film. The way the film jumps forward and backward is skillful, and there are plenty of devices to help the viewer along. Its bold touches with this technique give the film much of its unique quality. The film begins in a castle, with a deathbed scene (Kane’s). The next scene jumps to a newsreel which outlines the plot of the film we are about to see, and ends in a screening room, where reporters are sent to solve the “mystery” of Kane’s life by interviewing his close circle of friends. This way it uses several voice overs (one for each friend). Each person’s narrative moves chronologically through the story, ending before another narrative begins, or overlapping with other narratives. Thus the film is constructed like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which, when put together, give an overall picture of the story.

CITIZEN KANE is a film of exceptional originality and left a huge impact on generations of film makers who wished to continue these “nonlinear” ideas about film.

EXAMPLE: RASHOMON (d. Akira Kurosawa)

Kurosawa’s RASHOMON, through its construction, is also easy for the viewer to follow. Here four narrators tell their versions of the same story—a rape and murder in the forest—and each episode is filmed from a different point of view and perspective. As the story is reenacted, it shifts according to the perspective of the narrator—the form of the film relates to the film’s ideas about perceived reality and truth. The ending is unresolved, and left open ended.

As films became more complex, many directors abandoned trying to make nonlinear stories easily accessible.

EXAMPLE: LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (d.  Alain Renais)

Alain Renais’ LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD begins with long moving shots through the gilt and mirrors of a Bavarian castle. The voice-over resembles a cant—it doesn’t narrate, or explain, but hypnotizes.  The early scenes in the film are constructed primarily to invoke a mood. The “story” is constructed in fragments, pasted together like collage—scenes of isolation and longing in what could or could not be taken as a love affair. The “plot” is one that uses repetition of scenes to evoke memory. Nothing “happens” in the movie, but the intricate overlay of images and event leave the story open to the viewer’s imagination. The viewer must decide what has happened and what the scenes mean.

EXAMPLE: THE CONFORMIST (d. Bernardo Bertolucci)

Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST tells a rather straightforward “memory” story—it opens in the present (or at least, the end of WWII), then goes back in time. But the viewer doesn’t get any help and, especially difficult, is that the past becomes a “memory” story—a car ride in the rain lets the hero muse on the “recent” past (in the past). This technique becomes even more complex when the man’s memory involves a scene in which his memory inserts a character from his present—that is, a woman he will fall in love with, but hasn’t met yet in the story. She is seen in a memory, completely out of context, and almost out of character, as a vamp wrapped across a Fascist official’s office desk as if she is a wish-fulfillment on the part of the hero. ( Almost all our students were thrown by these scenes.)

Non-linear films can also move between different stages of the present, memory and fantasy.

EXAMPLE: 8 ½ (d. Federico Fellini)

Fellini’s 8 ½, an extremely popular but complex nonlinear film takes place in the head of its major character, a film director who panics when he experiences a creative block in his work. The film opens in a dream, moves into the present, then into several dazzling scenes at a spa, filmed as if they were scenes in a film the director is imagining. Constantly the film moves back and forth between the past, the present, and fantasy, from the imagination’s (a film maker making a film) point of view. But the viewer gets little help. Often the memory scenes are filmed like fantasies, the scenes in the present like “films.” The insecurities, anxieties and longings of the director build into a climax that lead to his suicide. The suicide, however, in this context, has to be seen as symbolic. The scene is what he “feels” like doing. The director is quite alive in the very next scene, where all the film’s themes meld into a grand finale—the director films a final dance, with all the characters from his life, his memory, his present and his fantasy moving together into a unified whole—the film he had wanted to create all along.

A film as complex as 8 ½ needs an attentive viewer, one who is quick to connect the implications and quickly shift from present to past, dream to fantasy. This takes practice, and explains why films of complex natures can be returned to again and again and still seem fresh and original.

EXAMPLE: THE MIRROR (d. Andrei Tarkovskt)

Another famous example of a nonlinear film is one that abandons help for the viewer entirely—Andrei Tarkovsky’s THE MIRROR. On the surface, this story of family life (a wife, husband and children) seems realistic and believable. But the way the scenes follow each other make no real sense. The viewer must piece together the elements. The film is composed of fragments of memory in no chronological order. Scenes return again and again, like themes in music, and certain grim scenes (the mother visits a village crone for what could or could not be an abortion; the fierce domestic arguments) are returned to from mirrored perspectives that give the structure of the film the same disjointed character of dreams. (I know film goers who have seen THE MIRROR more than 10 times—they claim they have never see the same film twice!)

Sometimes films are constructed in a linear way that moves between dreams and reality. These films often explore philosophical themes that are highly challenging to the viewer.

Example: PERSONA (d. Ingmar Bergman)

Bergman’s PERSONA, for example, seems fairly simple on the surface.  It moves through a linear narrative with ease–two women spend time together on an island––one, an actress who refuses to speak and two, her nurse who never shuts up.  What becomes so intriguing is to ponder what so many of the strange scenes mean. The film begins with a series of totally abstract, disturbing images. Often scenes are filmed like dreams, and slowly the two personalities of the women merge. Or do they?

The implications of the plot lead the viewer to contemplate the complexities of character:

Less sophisticated films tend to be preoccupied with plot, and the characters in them conform to certain stereotypes —”types of people”—easily recognized. In many current action films it is objects themselves, as well as “kinetic” (anything moving, exploding, threatening or scaring you) incidents that are far more important than the characters in the film. These films are comfortable with easily recognizable “types” in “good” or “bad” moral categories—the “good” cop vs. the “bad criminals,” the “good” hero vs. the “bad” extras—which allow the plots to move in predictable and comforting ways to conform.

EXAMPLE:  JAMES BOND series

The notorious James Bond movies exploit objects as the main characters in a movie: the car, the gun, the attitude and the way a martini is mixed. The popularity of this approach has influenced four decades of action film making. The Bond influences extend to any film which etches its characters in blatant black and white (good and evil) coupled with pyrotechnics and material opulence.

In more complex and more sophisticated films, the human personality and the way it reacts to the stress of artfully selected experience tends to be the chief focus. Character can be based on animals (BABE, the Walt Disney classics, and Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST are good examples; and of course, there’s LASSIE), on caricatures (in literature think Dickens and in film think TRAINSPOTTING, or the majority of comedies or dramas) or on complex, unpredictable and often unexplainable personality (in literature you have Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Balzac, Henry James and Dostoevsky—in film, not much comparable.) A character in film generally tends to be simple (though the actor’s shadings make it more complex and “true to life”). It is this human element in relationship to character, life, relationships, our own experiences that gives films their importance in our lives.

To believe a character, most people only need a body, a firm position in time and space, and the most superficial parcel of behavioral attributes. All of us get hints that we might be complex and inconsistent, but we often want to imagine other people as being simple and easier to understand. 

Often audiences get exasperated with characters who for one reason or another do not conform to their easy explanations or approval of the character’s actions. In films, characters are often judged by their “worst” behavior, where in real life we often ignore bad behavior in people we know, because we have an overall picture of them that puts their difficult behavior in a context which helps us understand it. If the character in a film has attributes of people we’ve met or know, we generally believe them regardless of how cliché or unrealistically they might act. We give them the benefit of the doubt. 

To create people “bigger than life” has been the goal of film making since it began, even if creating these people means adding unbelievable action, and asking preposterous things of them. Disturbing, unpredictable and well rounded characters are rare in movies where the lines are drawn in good or bad. But some popular films have been successful in creating complex characters.

EXAMPLE: GONE WITH THE WIND (d. Victor Fleming and others)

One of the most popular films, GONE WITH THE WIND has a complex and disturbing character at its center. Scarlet O’Hara is at once beautiful, charming, head-strong and emotional. She is also self-centered, greedy, relentlessly ruthless and selfish. The view the audience gets of her is quite selective—her energy, determination and single mindedness is seen as strength of character, and the negative consequences of her ruthlessness are shown only in passing (very briefly).

EXAMPLE: ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (d. Luchino Visconti)

In Visconti’s ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS complex characters make the scenes in the film seem hard to believe if viewed from an orthodox sense of what people are like. Complexity here leads to problems in audience recognition. (“Who would act like that? That’s crazy!”) The hero forgives his malicious brother again and again for a series of terrible betrayals and his perverse sense of goodness moves the plot towards its climax of violence and tragedy. In relation to the tremendous wrongs done to the hero, his passivity and compassion for the wrong seem to many in the audience as unbelievable—it propels the tragedy forward, and in the end the film’s exceptional qualities relate directly to its mysterious, troubling and uncompromising view of character.

EXAMPLE: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (d. David Lean)

Lean’s LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is a good example. Until the middle of the film the perversity of the hero’s character is only hinted at—he is seen as brave, generous, vain, thoughtful, and non-conformist. The last half of the movie finds him vengeful, crafty, filled with anger, blood lust, with self destructive inclinations and blatant dishonesty. The selective mixing of these negative and positive elements in character give it its complexity, and “many sided” qualities.

Early films were created on film lots, in natural light, on constructed sets that filled the need for a revolving series of comedies and melodramas. For years, the authentic quality of these constructed sets varied. 

Many early directors like Chaplin and Von Stroheim were comfortable shooting “on location” in the actual settings like those in which the story takes place. Naive audiences didn’t pick many bones about things looking “real” as long as they had some identifiable details.

As films became more complicated, more attention was paid to detail. The new styles in decor from Germany—expressionism, with its brooding lighting effects and heavy architecture—allowed sets to become more stylized and left a large influence on the look of films.

The coming of sound in the late ‘20s brought radical change. Now outside sound was a problem, and scenes shifted from outdoor locations, to studio “outdoors” so the sound could be contained and balanced. This led to a period of artificiality which developed into a “studio style” of heavy back-lighting, highlights on actors faces, and elaborately built sets. “On location” was reserved for scenes that did not require sound. All films took on the “studio” look, with few exceptions. Films filmed “on location” still retained the stilted look of the “studio.”

At the end of WW II the Italian films of the neo-realist school began to be seen by American film makers. The films coming out of Italy were all shot on location, with real people mixed with actors, in natural light. They were considered authentic and startling. There influence was strong, and today the location of films varies—some are in studios, some on location or both.  Many directors prefer to shoot in studios because of the control they have of lighting , sound and equipment.

The settings of films do not have to be drawn from real life models. Films may be set inside the mind, in the body, the future, in space, but they need to have a consistency of style to convince you of their realness. Far too many films use setting as simple decor, not understanding that where a story takes place can be important to the values and ideals of the characters, and effect the believable way the plot moves forward.

When we discuss “style” in films, we refer to several different elements. For example, certain types of films—“expressionist,” “film noir,” “the Hollywood film”—are characterized by visual and subject matter that so clearly define them, their identity forms a style of film making. We also may discuss a certain director’s style, provided he has developed far enough with ideas about his techniques and themes that would make them identifiable. 

There are a certain number of important directors of classic films whose style is instantly recognizable. The look of work done by the Italians now referred to as “neo-realism” has an instantly recognizable style—outdoor realistic locations, a grainy black and white film stock, a type of verisimilitude that is unmistakable.   Certain film makers tend toward fluid, complex camera movements, where others prefer a fixed, static camera. We sometimes refer to “subjective” and “objective” styles of film making. In the “subjective” style, the camera movements, editing, compositions are active forces in the film, guiding the viewer and selecting what he should see. In “objective” film making, the camera and the film techniques remain as invisible as possible, allowing the viewer to make his or her own judgement on what should be seen.

Style refers to the overall characteristics of a film’s techniques, look, subjective or objective views of its director, and implies that the director has had an important say in the way the film has been created. Films of certain periods (the Hollywood films of the early sound period, for example) in history have their own styles as well. For example, a film with obviously built sets, excessive artificial light, unrealistic crowd scenes, make-up that seems perfect for even the most slovenly characters might suggest a “product” film from Hollywood during the 30’s and 40’s.

Tone refers to an individual element within the whole and is a more sophisticated term when discussing the relative success or failure of ambitious films. The curious thing about tone is that it is an unimportant aspect of mediocre and less ambitious films. Tone affects the integrity of the overall final production and has to do with the separate ingredients of film making—acting, direction, script, lighting, art direction, make-up, sound, etc. 

As a film becomes more ambitious (strives toward a higher goal of quality and integrity) tone becomes extremely important, and faulty decisions in this area can cancel the overall integrity of a film. Many fine films fall short of the perfection to which they aim because of lapses in tone. A single element being off in an individual scene does not mean the integrity of a film collapses, but this lapse of judgement is often fatal to a film that would be otherwise a more perfect work of art.

In acting, tone might be described as underplayed in one instance, overplayed in another, or adhering to intense mugging or pantomime. In an ensemble work, where all the actors are underplaying (muting) their roles, an actor who mugs his role would be “off in tone.” In the highly exaggerated acting style of films by Ken Russell, the period comedies of the Coen Brothers, or Baz Lurhman, for instance, an underplayed actor (acting in a highly subtle, realistic style) would be “off in tone.” The more stylized the look and feel of a film is, or the more original its unorthodox style is, the more difficult it is to keep the tone consistent.

In a highly stylized film (lets say one using garish light in bright colors for effect throughout) a subtly lit, realistic scene would seem “off in tone.” Tone which veers wildly in a film, usually means a director is aiming for short term payoffs and is not considering the overall consistency of the film.

Tone also refers to an overall feeling. For example, if the subject matter of a film called for an energetic, bubbly style that would match its upbeat script, a ponderous, plodding style of film making would be definitely “off in tone.” If the film reflects realism and grit, idealized scenes with moral lectures would seem “off in tone.” These incidents might diminish the integrity of a film as a work of art, but do not damage in the least its popular appeal.

THE EPIC:

From the beginning, ambitious film directors have been interested in depicting historical sweep and social complexity. Films of this category form the high peaks of achievement in the history of film. A unifying vision of the director is needed before a film with dozens of characters, a cast of hundreds—even thousands, and a strong theme that will support the movement of these masses through some important event in history.

Historic Epics:

D. W. Griffith created the prototypical historical epic with BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) which takes place during the American Civil War. He followed this with INTOLERANCE (1916) which wove several historic periods together, from biblical tales through the war between the Hugenots and Catholics in France, culminating in modern tales of injustice in America. Other great examples of epic films centered around major historic events include Abel Gance’s NAPOLEON, Fleming’s GONE WITH THE WIND (the American Civil War), Lean’s LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (WWI) and Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (Vietnam War).

Social Epics: 
The term “epic” implies scope—breath and width—something that important historical events produce. However, “epic” also can be applied to the social fabric of life. To qualify as a “social epic” a film must include characters from many ranks of society, and give voice to a wide array of values and points of view. The models for this type of film come from 19th century novels including the works of Charles Dickens, Tolstoy’s ANNA KARENINA, Balzac’s PERE GORIOT, Stendhal’s THE RED AND THE BLACK, and Dostoyevski’s THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.

“Epic” also implies length, so it’s no accident that these films are among the longest in film history. The original version of Von Stroheim’s GREED was over 20 hours. The producers thought he was mad, but Stroheim was intended to let the material define its own length. If he had been able to break his film into one-hour sequences and show them on television as a mini-series, the tragic fate of his film could have been avoided. The length of popular films had been capped arbitrarily at 90 minutes, mainly for commercial reasons (allowing two or three showings an evening, thus a larger box office). GREED was chopped mercilessly to 3 hours and even then its grim realism was barely tolerated by the public. The legend created by those who saw the original full-length reels has given GREED a mythological place in film history.

Abel Gance’s NAPOLEON originally clocked in at over 6 hours. GONE WITH THE WIND was released at a 4 hours, unprecedented for such a popular film; the public was often treated to sandwiches during its intermissions. Other examples are Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (3.5 hours), Bondarchuk’s WAR & PEACE (6 hours); Fassbinder’s BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (18 hours) and a series of films about life in a German village: HEIMAT (19 hours), HEIMAT II (26 hours) and HEIMAT III (11 hours). These extra long films challenge conventional ideas about film by proving that audiences will stand (or rather sit) for longer than 90 minutes if the material is rich and engaging enough.

GENRE FILMS:

Film Noir: A product of the pulp detective novels of the 1930’s. Dark brooding atmospheres highten stories fraught with lowlife criminals and desperate seductive women. Full of murder, revenge and double crossing, heavy on irony. “Neo-noir” films either quote these elements adapting them to contemporary settings. Examples: THE MALTESE FALCON, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, TOUCH OF EVIL. Neo-noir: CHINATOWN, LA CONFIDENTIAL, BRICK

Costume Drama: Also called “period dramas,” these films emphasize costumes, sets and props in order to capture the ambiance of a particular past era. Often very well acted and taken from literary classics. Examples: HOWARD’S END, PERSUASION, CYRANO DE BERGERAC

Horror: Horror films have been popular from the beginning—frightening audiences began with a locomotive moving toward an audience, causing them to scream and dodge. Vampires, werewolves, zombies and monsters (human and subhuman) have now their separate “sub-genres”. Grotesque or haunted subjects, steady suspense, often surprises to startle and large.

Many of the best horror films depend on suggestion to stimulate viewers imagination – from the silent Nosferatu, to recent ones like The Witch. Traditional horror films follow the pattern of the Grand Guignol role model, lots of beheadings, buckets of blood, bulging eyeballs, endless screams of terror. The very popular Game of Thrones, which mixes many of horror films patterns with its mythological tales is a good example. Operatic bloodbath finales are fixtures.

Western: This films hit their high point in the 1940’s and 50’s. They did much to create a mythical idea of the west, with very simple moral lines (good vs. bad) and archetypes drawn from fantasy. More recent post-western films are called “revisionist” and include gore, cruelty and little redemption. Examples: SHANE, HIGH NOON, THE SEARCHERS  Revisionist Westerns: THE UNFORGIVEN, McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

Thrillers: A car chase, a conspiracy, a man on the run, a woman in peril, a prowling maniac, a close escape and a last-minute rescue. These films function by keeping you on the edge of your seat so that you never have time to question how absurdly improbable all of it is. Examples: GASLIGHT, PSYCHO, INCEPTION

Musicals: A favorite born out of the depression: comic set pieces joined by extravagant musical numbers. Later musicals include the British PENNIES FROM HEAVEN, which accent the bleak, and MOULIN ROUGE which focused on extravagant style. Examples: BABES ON BROADWAY, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, CHICAGO

Gangster Films: first became popular in the thirties during the depression (they empowered the helpless); then they mixed with “film noir” in the forties; and later were revived with the GODFATHER films, and have experienced a population explosion on television. Prohibition era moonshine has been replaced by drugs but the attitude is the same. Examples: WHITE HEAT, BONNIE & CLYDE, SCARFACE

War Films: In times of war these tend to exude heroism and bravery, the nobility of self-sacrifice of soldiers. When the war is over, these become “anti-war” films and focus more on the horror, brutality, cruelty, ruin and reflect a collective madness. Examples: PATHS OF GLORY, PATTON, APOCALYPSE NOW

“Buddy” Films: Whether in pairs (BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID) or in gangs (DINER, AMERICAN GRAFFITI) the accent here is generally on friendship, male bonding, and “manly” virtues like violence and boorish behavior. Examples: THE STING, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, TRAINSPOTTING

Disaster Films: The flaming skyscraper of TOWERING INFERNO (1974) has morphed into earthquakes, tornadoes, asteroids, volcanoes and alien invasions, but the basic plot is the same. These films allow audiences to feign terror and laugh afterwards. Examples: EARTHQUAKE, ARMAGEDDON, 2012

Animal Comedy: Used to be the domain of cartoons but now include talking dogs, cavorting pigs and philosophical babies. very closely related is the DUMB HERO comedy where barfing, farting, and general lewd behavior is mandatory for the lead. Examples: OLD YELLER, DR. DOOLITTLE, BABE

Screwball Comedies: Invented in the 1930s as an escape from the dreariness of the depression. Characterized by “happy-go-lucky” atmospheres, colorful characters, rapid-fire dialogue and ingenious plot lines. Examples: HIS GIRL FRIDAY, YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU, MY MAN GODFREY

Bible Epics: Popular in the 1920s-50s. A strange hybrid of historical drama, lofty, Judeo-Christian moral pronouncements, and miracles. This type of film bit the dust when similar, but not exactly biblical CLEOPATRA proved to be a financial disaster. Has made a slight comeback with Mel Gibson's  gruesome and bloody THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. Examples: THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, MOSES, BEN HUR

Review of "Jules et Jim" (1962) by Lucy Johns

Review of "Jules et Jim" (1962)
A film review inspired by "Film: A Guide for Teens" by Ronald Chase

©Lucy Johns November 7, 2003
 

     The vicissitudes of life and love swirl and roil and confound in "Jules et Jim," a paean to a rather French view of the human condition personified in the artistic intelligentsia of early 20th century Paris. The film is reminiscent of "La Bohème," with an enchanting musical motif but a complete reversal of the classical story of who suffers for love.

     Jim, a French writer, and Jules, a German (Austrian?) poet and free spirit, become soulmates whose friendship is the only certainty in this tale of two men and the woman whose beauty and mystery become the center of their lives. Jeanne Moreau, in the role that defined her career, is magnetic and maddening as the unpredictable Catherine. She resembles a prehistoric sculpture "on an Adriatic isle" that Jules and Jim fly to visit after seeing a photograph in a friend's atelier. Supported in this "folie" by invisible financial resources, they wear the same clothes and vow that if a woman with the features of the stone head is ever met, they will follow her forever. Soon after, Moreau appears. Jules claims her instantly. He makes no protest when she asks to include Jim in a cross-dressing lark through working class Paris. All he asks of his friend is a quick "Not this one, Jim." Even after saving Catherine's life when her dress catches fire from burning a batch of "lies" on the floor of her studio, Jim is fascinated but respectful. The bouncing, hand-held camera captures the elfin mischief of Catherine's transgressions of clothes and behavior: she wears pants, smokes, races, and beats her copains because she sprints early off the starting line. That her whims can veer suddenly to the dangerous is apparent in a remarkable scene along the Seine one night after theater. The threesome has been to see an unnamed new Swedish play that each interprets differently. (Surely Ibsen's "The Dollhouse.") The men disparage the heroin for different reasons; Catherine "gets" the play's theme, which her friend and lover completely miss. When they ignore her analysis and fall into their comfortable disputations, she recaptures their attention by jumping into the river in her tight long dress and hat. No harm done but the point is made: she is an uncontrollable force. The three of them then whirl through an idyllic holiday in the south - again the means are invisible but adequate for the pretty villa and days frolicking on meadows and beach. Finally, Catherine consents to marry Jules, shortly after which they are all separated by W.W.I. Jules and Jim don opposing uniforms. Both write their beloveds - Jim has his archtypically devoted Gilberte – and their fear of hurting the other in the chaos.

     Here "Jules et Jim" dips below the surface tumult of bohemian affairs and creativity for a long sequence of original footage of real tumult, that hideous, incomprehensible war. Truffaut spends more time in this era than the viewer might expect, since a mere visual hint would evoke in the audience of his own time memories of W.W.II and its horrors. Scene after scene of violence and noise unfold, with the occasional glimpse of Jules or Jim in their wartime roles. In a way unrealized until the end of the film, Truffaut is preparing for the sadness and violence that will visit the trio when they reunite after the war.

     Reunite they do, now in Jule's villa on the Rhine where the couple and their daughter lead superficially tranquil but emotionally raw lives. Jim comes to visit. He intuits and is then told by both Jules and Catherine of their estrangement and of Catherine's periodic disappearances for respite from wife and motherhood. These conversations almost shock with their intimacy and honesty, surely unprecedented in film. Inevitably, Catherine determines to seduce Jim at last. With Jules' full acquiescence, she installs Jim in their house. Jules' motives are conveyed with a delicacy and understanding also surely unprecedented in a film script: at least he knows where she is, even though his lifelong chum is now in his beloved's bed. Her mere presence, he tells Jim with a candor rare for men but, the audience now knows, not for this pair, is both sufficient for him and essential for life. Oscar Werner masterfully conveys Jules' pain and devotion. His unconditional acceptance of his wife's increasingly profound transgressions signals a patient integrity associated more with the Mimi's of the world than with men of means and experience. Catherine knows this. She relies on Jules' fidelity as the anchor in the storms she creates to sustain her own vision of life. A scene where the camera never leaves their tearful faces as they voice the terms of their indissoluble union is both merciless and incomparably tender. She will always leave him but she will always come back because he will never leave her. 

     The highlight of this new permutation in these three lives is Catherine's performance of a song written for her by yet another lover. Its poignant theme of perpetual rondelet and its indelible tune, as familiar as "Frere Jacques" to those who first heard it in their own Bohemian youth, encapsulates this masterpiece and, perhaps, Truffaut's own philosophy of life.

     An entire essay could be written about the character of Catherine. She appears as a woman liberated from the stifling female roles of her era. Was she abused once and takes her revenge by being both irresistible and uncatchable? She has strong feelings on the subject of male perfidy: she burns letters of "lies" and empties a bottle of lye that she keeps handy for "lying eyes." Yet her willfulness and independence reek of childish impetuosity, as though the freedom she claims is authentic as an expression of human need but is also reckless. Unlike the two men, whose unconventional lives seem to grow through love, work, making war, and getting older, Catherine lacks the maturity throughout the movie - and perhaps the intelligence, Jules hints once - to use freedom wisely. She also trails a longing for motherhood that seems a little desperate on the part of the male filmmakers: yes she is ungovernable but she craves the irreducible essence of womanhood. Her disregard of conventional "morality" and escape from its punishments are not as unsettling as her arrested trajectory from seducer to recognizably modern autonomy. The director and his script writer would surely have read Simon de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex," published in 1949 and probably debated for years before that. But they do not present the woman that de Beauvoir envisioned. Were they ready for her?

     That is why this movie seems so "rather French." The character of Catherine - perceived by her creators and companions as quixotic, intriguing, mystifying - does not go so far that French men could be frightened or angered by her. Her embrace of freedom occurs only within a realm they well understand: the arena of "free love" they have taken for granted for themselves for centuries. Until the end of the film, when her life choices destroy as unpredictably as any war. Maybe liberated women are, ultimately, not a good thing – for men.

Review of “Days of Heaven” (1978) and “The New World” (2005) by Lucy Johns

Review of “Days of Heaven” (1978) and “The New World” (2005)
A film review inspired by Ronald Chase, "Film: A Guide for Teens"
©Lucy Johns April 22, 2006

Director and screen writer Terrance Malick is American cinema’s poet of love and land. The joy of the one and the beauty of the other make the heart ache, especially since both are doomed. This profound romanticism is sharpened by a keen understanding of the work required to tame wilderness. The combination of emotional longing, evocative landscape and exacting realism creates an elegiac mood rare in films. Malick’s historical settings provide fine cover for a sensibility probably not happy in the modern world.

“Days of Heaven” is a peon to the marvels and menace of the American west. It opens with scenes of urban, industrial squalor worthy of Blake’s “satanic mills.” A worker has problems taking orders. If Richard Gere were more than a pretty face, this confrontation with authority might have revealed a character unworthy of exploitation. Since his acting ability is minimal, the firing that results is merely a plot device. He collects his woman and her younger sister to head out west. In the first of many extraordinary images in this film, they travel on the rooftop of a train covered with unpaying passengers who brave weather and danger in search of a better life. A huge wheat farm in Texas is the destination. Brooding purple mountains in the distance, a gloomy gothic great house straight out of Winslow Homer or Edward Hopper, a raucous crew of immigrant and native workers toiling from dawn to dusk, cavalcades of clattering machinery, a plague of insects, uncontrollable fire – these elements suffuse the ensuing love story with a grandeur and pathos the three stock characters could easily lack. Sam Shepard is type-cast as the laconic Westerner presiding over a vast enterprise, lonely as a king and soon the victim of a plot by the working couple. The romantic triangle – beautiful woman, handsome but feckless lover, a husband whose social standing brings unimaginable opportunities that compensate, ultimately, for lost passion – may be a Malick theme, since it recurs in his latest work, “The New World.”

Now we are three hundred years earlier, in the magnificent wilderness of aboriginal Virginia. A band of Englishmen lands to found Jamestown. Colin Farrell, a prisoner on the ship for insubordination, effortlessly conveys what Gere couldn’t, that he is too valuable to let go. Reprieved, his Captain John Smith sets out to scout the land and the natives, wary but hovering like “curious deer.” He is ridiculous in his medieval armor slogging through mangrove swamps but he is clever and handsome enough to inspire the timeless fable of the princess who spares the warrior from the wrath of her father and tribe. Malick is better served by his actors here. In addition to Farrell and several reliable (although not always understandable) British supporting players, he found Q’Orianka Kilcher, only 14 when she won the role for her radiantly expressive face and body. The princess’s name, Pocahontas, is never spoken, as though her true self can hardly be captured by only her birth name. Eventually she will become Rebecca, wife of a nobleman and guest of King James of England. Her introduction to these new people symbolizes Malick’s poignant vision of the momentous encounter between the old and new worlds. He imagines invaders and invaded treating each other as new wonders to be explored. This is Malick at his romantic best. Of course it wasn’t that way and in the film can’t last.

Malick’s skill as a story-teller finds singular expression in “Days of Heaven” in the person of a young narrator. This devise of voice-over commentary or explication can be cloying. Perhaps because the girl, Linda Manz, is not pretty, has a Brooklyn accent automatically associated with sarcasm, and actually has interesting things to say, this commentator is reminiscent of a Greek chorus, wiser than the protagonists but not immune to their trials. She adds details that aren’t necessary to move the action but enlarge on its significance, reporting, for example, that a deranged preacher on the train prophesies disasters that soon come to pass.

The two films transcend their predictable stories thanks to Malick’s absorption with the earthly surroundings. His settings work almost magically to deepen the experiences of his characters. Texas wheat fields radiate heat and insects and prickly dust that blanket all human activity within them. A riverine wilderness looks as untamable as the homeless fugitives camped in it. The scrawny wooden buildings in snow-bound Jamestown are as ragged as its starving inhabitants. The rigid gridlines of an English country park reflect the evolved sensibility – elegant and perfectly controlled – of the new lady of the manor. Malick loves the outdoors in all its wonder, even the locusts chewing on grain in footage from some naturalist’s collection that must post-date the action in his film by half a century. His cinematography is calculated as carefully as his story and sometimes even detracts. Sadness and loss may overwhelm his characters while the viewer revels in the beauty of the scene.

This tension is one signifier of memorable art. The medium and the message are not the same. Malick is an artist in the grand tradition that insists on the permanence of beauty despite the prevalence of human failings. These two films show him at his most committed.

2019 Tarkovsky Prize Honorable Mention: Una Lomax-Emrick

Una Lomax-Emrick (18, Urban School)
The Racket of Consciousness: Three Colors: Red

            I recently listened to psychologist Kaern Kreyling describe the ways in which our minds are obsessed with maintaining constant inner dialogues in spite of the fact that silence dominates many layers of our subconscious. The brain and consciousness are vastly silent, she said, but we are often hypnotized by the small flood of doubts, mundane insecurities, philosophical musings, and “Did I remember to turn the stove off?” that crowd the top layer of our thoughts. Amidst our constant media inundations through the devices in our hands, we tend to forget the silence but are still desperately seeking it. We buy into the mythology of a spin class somehow destined to cure anxiety, laud prohibitively expensive “mindfulness retreats” when we could just as well follow a map to a stranger’s home or celebrate an oncoming storm. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red presents a stunning portrait of the power of silent human connection in spite of a superficial draw to noise. As Janet Maslin states in her 1994 New York Times review of the film, “Stories develop like photographs in a darkroom. They are sharply defined only in retrospect, when the process is complete.” Kieślowski examines love and coincidence with astounding poise, rendering the observer delightfully complicit in forming the relationships that arise and the hopes that spring in the face of a missed call, a wounded dog, and lost romantic connections. His characters are constantly seeking peace but are unable, until the film’s end, to find the silence that can truly bring them to rest and back to one another. His film is a tremendous testament to the power of connection and the ability of some beautiful, internal grace to guide people to the silence, if they will only pay attention.

            The telephone, a central focus of countless scenes in Red is the only real antagonist in the film. It acts as a block between people, a shade attempting to disrupt truth love, and much beauty throughout. Voices become weapons. Valentine’s (Irène Jacob) boyfriend summons her to the perilous waters of the English Channel, and Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit) makes plans and loses the woman he loves through the off-white chord of his landline. Their relationships are superficial; Kieślowski implies again and again that in order to love and to understand, one must be physically with someone and, of course, one must be silent. The Judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) lives a solitary life in a tumble-down house; he is obsessed with the noise of others. Sitting alone in the dark, we watch his mind play out in the rising and falling of voices on his stereo screen. This man is deeply unhappy, not content with the musings of his own desperate mind, he must prey on the voices and feelings others to be satiated, and Valentine is similarly disgusted and enamored of his noise. The night outside is dark and silent. Rita, the sweet dog, is not moaning anymore, she is with the people who care for her and there is safety to be had in the assurance that they will love her. Yet, The Judge and Valentine are isolated. Their friendship springs from this night and the subsequent thawing of their initial icy self-righteousness. Much later on, when they share a drink in the stormy hall of Valentine’s show, there is psychological silence. A beautiful howling of the wind is the only sound amidst their hushed declarations of truth. Their friendship has allowed Kern to find solace in his own mind. He writes letters to his neighbors just as Auguste books passage on the ship to England; they are present, direct, and soulful. This is how the two men finally begin to emerge from the tumultuous cacophony of their heartbreak and into a silent comfort.

Valentine, in many ways, embodies the kind of delicate self-possession that helps lead everyone back to silence, yet at the beginning of the film, we find her running her to the telephone, to a lover obsessed with the sound of her voice. She is trapped in the scene so brilliantly depicted in the opening credits, in telephones wires echoing across seas, in between walls, and underground. The telephone-world is a dismal place; we know that Valentine’s lover is all wrong, overbearing, jealous, but she sees him and her relationship with the distortion only her black telephone, perched perilously atop red table, can provide. Yet, though she is deceived by loud declarations of “care,” she is ultimately saved by her ability to sit comfortably with her own mind, and indeed, to quiet it down. In a truly spectacular scene, we see her entering the home of a man the Judge has been spying on with the intent to tell him that the Judge knows of his affair. Upon stepping beyond the threshold, she is met by his family and the loudness in her mind pauses, she reevaluates and leaves, understanding and finding peace with the simultaneous serenity and dangers of secrets. Valentine’s beauty doesn’t come from loud poetic declarations; instead, it appears in her ability to effortlessly blow a bubble without question and without laughter. She is not childish or pretentious, merely a woman who knows herself dancing and sweating in a crowded studio, or quietly consulting with a veterinarian in a dimly lit after hours clinic. She epitomizes growth in her melancholy; she ventures out onto the sea and finds quiet in the arms of another. She is human and deeply connected to her home: the little flat across the street from the place she buys a paper and the drive she learns to take in silence.

Silence is Kieślowski’s surprising and absolutely necessary choice for a film entitled Red. There is no screaming in this film. The Judge is no crazed professor, merely a lonely man with a void in his heart and the voice of others dominating his mind. Auguste is loud only in action; boldness and racket only echoing in his agile clambering up a balcony and subsequent confrontation. The telephone does not ring like in some 1950s nightmare film, sounds buzz and tinkle, but never yell. Red is every part of this film, and Kieślowski’s brilliance is in allying such a crimson with a kind of gentleness hardly captured on screen. He explores the lower part of the mind, the kind hypnotized by simple beauty instead of by fear. Soft words exchanged in lamplight and the curve of a narrow drive are the backbone of his picture. Three Colors: Red is a testament to relationships, to subtlety, and to silence.

2019 Tarkovsky Prize Honorable Mention: Nicholas Buckwalter

Nicholas Buckwalter (17, Berkeley High School)

The Subjectivity of the Human Experience in Schnabel’s THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

Beyond simply offering entertainment, film can open the mind to new ways of thinking and illuminate the subjectivity of humanity in a way unique to the medium. ​The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ​by Julian Schnabel uses the immersive nature of cinema to communicate the interior world of someone who has lost almost all exterior communication. The film centers around Jean-Dominique Bauby, an editor of a French fashion magazine, who suffers a stroke which leaves him paralyzed from head to toe, leaving him stripped of everything but his senses and the ability to move his eyes. Over the course of the film, Jean slowly writes a novel through blinking as someone reads aloud the alphabet.

The film touches on themes like family, love, and loyalty, but primarily deals with the subjectivity of the human experience.​ ​Large parts of the film are seen from the subjective point of view of Jean. This not only allows the viewer to better understand the protagonist's position, but also to reflect on the individual nature of their own experience. While as humans we have a basic understanding of each other, we can never escape the subjectivity of our mind and our own personal experience. Similarly, Jean is unable to escape his condition. The extensive continued POV shots reflect what life is: one long experience continually filtered through our own point of view.

The characters Jean interacts with further illustrate how our perspective colors our existence. While at the hospital, Jean is visited by his old friend, Roussin. Years earlier, Jean gave up his seat on a plane for Roussin. The plane was hijacked, resulting in Roussin becoming a hostage for four years. While at first it may seem like Jean was lucky for avoiding the plane, his condition of being “locked-in” (essentially, held hostage in his own body) in the end seems far more unlucky. The friends’ relationship indicates the futility of comparing human existence, as in the end we are all “locked-in” to our own perspectives. Regardless of what we choose, we may get on a plane that is hijacked or suffer a paralyzing stroke. Roussin gives Jean the advice to “hold onto the human inside of you.” Jean achieves this through memory which frees him from the prison of his physical limitations.

Memory is possibly the most subjective experience a human has. Different people can remember the same experience differently. Jean idealizes the past and frequently flashes back to happy memories of relationships from before he was disabled. He also holds onto his humanity through dream or fantasy. Through flashback, Jean sees himself shaving his father, a memory of a time where he had more control of his life and was in a position of being a caretaker. However, Jean also often sees himself in his wheelchair on an isolated plank on the beach. Even though he often tries to use memory to escape his experience, even his own mind draws him back to the limitations of his condition.

The story of ​The Diving Bell and the Butterfly​ is personally intriguing to me. When I was four years old I had a seizure on my Mom’s birthday. At first the doctors thought I had hydrocephalus. This meant I would have frequent seizures and fluid would slowly build up in my brain until I lost all muscle control and eventually all brain function. I would have also lost all memory, essentially losing all aspects of humanity. The doctors were wrong and I simply had a febrile seizure. However, I often think about the experience and realize how little control we have over our lives. No one can control even their own body or health. Just as Jean was locked-in his body, we are all “locked-in” in to our destinies. But at the same time, Jean’s story also illustrates how much control we do have. Although he was stripped of almost all bodily function, through the simple act of blinking Jean is able to take control of the humanity he does have.

2019 Tarkovsky Prize Honorable Mention: Jessica Schott-Rosenfield

Jessica Schott-Rosenfield
(14, Ruth Asawa School of the Arts)
Wong Kar-wai’s ​Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels​ is a 1995 drama film set in Hong Kong, written and directed by ​Wong Kar-wai. The film follows two separate stories, which overlap only by chance, and very rarely. The viewer is first introduced to a hit man by the name of Wong Chi-Ming, and a woman who acts as his partner, cleaning his apartment, and faxing him blueprints on the areas he is meant to hit. They have almost never met throughout their three years of working together. Throughout the course of the movie, Chi-Ming finds that the killing business has lost its allure, and eventually decides to quit. He does not know that his partner is in love with him, and when he separates himself from their connection, she puts out a hit on him, taking revenge on the realization that her dream of love is impossible. In another part of the city lives Ho Chi Mo, a young mute man still living with his father, and earning little money with his hobby of sneaking into businesses at night and running them. Often in his midnight revels, he runs into Charlie, a woman recovering from a breakup, who cries on his shoulder and takes him along in a search for her ex-lover’s fiance, Blondie. Kar-Wai uses symbolism, a musical tone, and limited dialogue to create a pair of love stories which are both visually stimulating and thought provoking. ​Fallen Angels​ a uniquely beautiful and unusual representation of love.

The plot lines’ tones differ greatly from each other, an aspect which might be expected to have the result of chaos in transitions between them. However, the use of sound separates each character and tone from one another, pacing the film. Wong’s story is far more crime-centered and dark than that of Ho’s, and so he is given dark and ominous theme music. This puts the watcher back into Wong’s story, after seeing Ho’s more comedic and romantic scenes. In addition to the music, the fact that the cinematography is so flashy, using bright color as a constant medium, it can be difficult to distinguish set design or physical context, and so the soundtrack assists the watcher by creating a stability to the ever-changing camera angles. Since music plays such a large role in the establishment of the mood, the effects of silence or dialogue are heightened, abruptly causing the watcher to start to pay closer attention. It is an effective technique in hooking the watcher, and clarifying a change in the storyline.

The symbolism in ​Fallen Angels​ arises mainly in one character called Blondie, who represents the enemy of every woman who has gotten her heart broken. Blondie appears first as a woman who meets Wong at a fast food restaurant, and encourages him to return to her home with her. Here, she is an onscreen presence, a real character. She next appears as the unseen fiance of Charlie’s ex-boyfriend, and the object of her hate. Charlie and Ho embark on a hunt for Blondie, never finding her. The theory that Blondie is a symbol for the adversary of every heartbroken woman is confirmed by a scene in which Charlie and Ho sit in a restaurant, and suddenly hear someone referred to as “Blondie.” Charlie whirls around, along with every other woman in the restaurant, and all begin to attack this person as one, despite the fact that he is, in fact, a man who could not possibly be the “other woman” they are looking for. These actions display the frenzied and invalid vengeance of Charlie, as well as every woman who has lost their love to her.

Much of the movie is comprised of silent imagery, with a distinct lack of dialogue, which requires the complete focus of every person experiencing the plotline, at the risk of missing an important subtlety. In the first few scenes, there is little backstory in words, but much of it is shown through images. The watcher first sees Wong’s partner climb the steps of a bus station, and enter a dingy apartment, which she cleans thoroughly in a club dress and then leaves. The watcher then sees Wong climb the same steps and enter the same apartment, but do nothing except go to sleep. These movements show in detail the working dynamic of two characters, without explanation through dialogue. This aspect of the plot is important to a watcher’s understanding of the film, and so demands a stark concentration.

Wong Kar-Wai’s ​Fallen Angels​ is unusual in its portrayal of love, in that it maintains a theme of heartbreak and negativity. No character’s dream of love is ever fulfilled, but throughout the film, each one learns something about themselves, or another person, in getting past their brushes with unrealistic infatuation. With technical skill and unique storytelling, Wong Kar-Wai creates an experience which is not easily forgettable.

2019 Tarkovsky Prize Third Place: Sofi Orkin

Sofi Orkin (14, Ruth Asawa School of the Arts)
Three Colors: Red

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red has a simple plot but is filled with intricacies that, while complicated, are never confusing. Valentine, a young woman living in France, runs over a dog, and when she goes to return it she meets Joseph, an old judge who she discovers is eavesdropping on his neighbors. Joseph, moved by Valentine’s insistence that he is doing something wrong, turns himself in, and this sets off a chain of events that leads to Valentine and her neighbor, Auguste, who she has never met but who the reader sees is perfect for her. Through the use of a motif of broken glass, a story about a book, and the color red, Kieślowski connects these three characters so deeply that, although none of them have known each other for long, or even face-to-face, there is a clear path that they are all taking towards one another.

Red: the color of love, but also of pain. The color of passion, but also of fear. It is the color that is starred in the movie, and Valentine and Auguste are both literally and figuratively connected by red. In a figurative sense, they are surrounded by it, suggesting that they themselves are very similar. There is red in their houses, on their clothes, Auguste has a red car, and they both have red names. They are connected in their love for the world, especially Valentine’s caring nature, but also in the pain and fear they have. They fear their partners do not love them, and they hurt because of it. Red also has a more literal importance to the story. It represents Rita’s blood after Valentine hits her, and how Rita’s injuries eventually connect Valentine and Auguste. Upon returning Rita, Valentine discovers Joseph’s habit of eavesdropping on neighbor’s conversations. They develop a friendship and Joseph eventually turns himself in. In court, where his whole neighborhood has gathered, Karin, Auguste’s girlfriend, meets a man who she ends up choosing over Auguste. Hurt and angry, Auguste decides to travel for some time, boarding the same ferry as Valentine.

Glass, and specifically broken glass, is a motif that ties Auguste and Joseph together in a sideways fashion, making it seem as though Auguste is like a second Joseph, living Joseph’s life over again but this time correctly. The primary example of this takes place first in a bowling alley, where Auguste’s glass is shown broken at the top but still full of beer and upright. A while later, a scene in Joseph’s house shows a glass full of beer that is blown over by the wind. Its contents pour out of it but the glass remains unbroken, the exact opposite of Auguste’s glass. These similar but different endings to a tipped glass mirror the similar but different paths that their lives are taking, even before either of them is shown to be very similar.

To strengthen the connection, Kieślowski shows Valentine cleaning up broken glass from the judge’s floor, which has a double meaning. She is simultaneously cleaning up his house and caring for him, but it is also referencing Auguste’s own broken glass, suggesting that Valentine, with her caring nature, will help both him and herself be fixed after the ferry sinking.

The idea of the similar but different paths of Joseph and Auguste’s life is shown once again by a book. Towards the beginning of the movie, Auguste is crossing a street when he drops one of his schoolbooks on the ground. It falls open to a page on which a question that could potentially be on his exam has been underlined, and he is later shown studying that question. After his exam, Auguste’s then-girlfriend Karin asks him if they asked the question and he says no. Later in the movie, this experience is echoed when Joseph is telling Valentine about his past. He describes how he had dropped his book and it had fallen open to a question that he had not yet studied. But when Valentine asks if he was assigned that question, the judge says yes, showing the difference once again in he and Auguste’s experiences. A similar journey, but a different ending.

Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red is a beautiful almost-love story full of coincidences that are just barely within the limits of possibility. Be it books, glass, or the color red, Kieślowski gives the viewer an experience that is both nuanced and moving throughout, despite the many motifs. There is not a single moment where a line of dialogue or facial expression appears unnatural or contrived, and because of that I, at least, felt as though I was watching real life, and was therefore fully invested in the story all the way to the end, leaning forward in my seat until it was proven to the viewer that Valentine and Auguste were safe.

2019 Tarkovsky Prize Second Place: Scully Randlett

Scully Randlett (18, Lowell High School)
The Noise of Le Samouraï

Jean-Pierre Melville’s​ Le Samouraï​ is a complete movie. What is meant by this is Melville not only successfully executes in every aspect of film (composition, theme, character development, etc...), but also manages not to rely on any single element in the creation of this work of art. For each of these elements there is an essay to be written, but there is one through which this film marks itself as truly special. The use of ​noise​ is this defining factor. For my purposes, noise is, in a film sense, the sounds in a movie that are neither a part of the soundtrack nor dialogue. Traditionally, film has been considered, above all, a visual art. Tarkovsky himself regarded reliance on sound, especially music, to be detrimental to the narrative created by what is on the screen. Yet he also acknowledged the power of noise to create an atmosphere complementary to the optical aspects of the film. ​Le Samouraï​ goes far beyond this in its use of noise however, masterfully curating a listening experience able to dictate the tone of a scene, create sound signatures for different settings, and turn specific sounds into symbols.

Merely on the strength of the acting of Alain Delon and others, the film manages to fulfill much of its storytelling duties visually. This dynamic both frees the sound channels from dialogue and necessitates the tone of the film be infused by other means. One need not look any further than the opening of the film for evidence of this. It takes nine minutes and forty five seconds before a single word is uttered, and this is not in the absence of plot movement either. To establish a distant, secluded context to its classic noir protagonist, the opening scene make exceptional use of noise, blending light rain, passing cars, and the ever-important chirping of a bird. The theme of the film, composed by François de Roubaix, then surges as the viewer is introduced to Costello as a criminal. Before Nathalie Delon breaks the “silence”, another well-crafted scene unfolds. After he pulls his stolen car into an unmarked garage, an entire series of interactions between Costello and an unnamed man take place, while the viewer is kept on edge with the sounds of the turning of a screwdriver, the clanking of plates, light switches, and their shifty movements highlighting the tentious nature of the encounter.

The most omnipresent sound throughout the film is the sound of walking, and despite its sheer volume, its importance lies in its ability to remain subtle. There are a plethora of excellent examples of this, the best executed of them being Jef’s journey from the police station to the train station where he is shot. On his way to collect his reward, lengthy sequences dominated by Delon’s measured stride contrast heavily with the scenes of action surrounding him, further cementing him as the eye of a hurricane that has just begun to form. The seminal scene of the movie comes as two policemen break into Costello’s apartment and plant a bug. The scene is told through the interactions of three sounds: the pacing and shuffling of the first detective, the jangling of keys and wiretap by the second detective, and the nervous fluttering and chirping of the bird. On a backdrop of very intentional silence, these three sounds create a choking fear which leaves the viewer incapable of anything but experiencing, paralyzed, the terror of the bird.

The noise throughout ​Le Samouraï​ is set on creating an intense, cold environment, and by all means is successful. On a more minute level, noise also manages to create distinct cues that are specific to an environment. Most notably, Costello’s apartment is immediately recognizable; which is as much a product of the bird’s chirping, the noise of rickety drawers, and the infrequent rumbling of a passing automobile as it is of the shots of the shabby chic decor, foggy windows, and dark atmosphere. Serving as a sort of escape from the city, the garage provides a unique atmosphere of relative peace, while maintaining the sense of foreboding central to the picture. This unique atmosphere is produced by a specific palette of sounds, such as the turn of a screwdriver, the barking of a dog, the rattle of license plate, the buzz of a solitary light bulb, and the rumbling of a train passing overhead. An equally well constructed soundscape is the one that engulfs the jazz club, Marty’s. Marty’s audacious jazz numbers and loud crowd chatter deeply contrast the rest of the film’s relatively barren soundscape. Not only does this distinguish the club from anywhere else, but also gives it its own life as the heart from which the film’s conflict flows. It is also important to clarify that, because much of what makes this setting’s atmosphere stand out is the jazz played by the pianist (Caty Rosier) and her band, the music played does technically qualify as an element of the soundtrack; however, it being performed on screen allows it to function as noise as well. Another enigmatic sound signature is that of the police headquarters. The police headquarters in actuality includes several distinct locations, such as the interrogation rooms, the lineup room, and the commissioner’s office, each with their own sound signatures. However, an overarching aural concept is presented throughout: an overwhelming lack of noise. While there is distant chatter and the sometimes-audible hammering of typewriters in the background, these scenes serve as a foil to the more common strategies of the rest of the film. While the majority of the film creates a veneer of silence by highlighting noise, the actual absence of noise in the headquarters is filled with dialogue, switching the narrative duties over to sound and conceding tone creation to vision.

In its depth of tone and setting, ​Le Samouraï clearly demonstrates a seldom-paralleled mastery of expression. What truly elevates this film to its deserved status of genius is the inventiveness of the concepts expressed within this mastery. This genius is Melville’s creativity to recondition noises, one of the most neglected component of filmmaking, into symbols, some of the most impactful of filmmaking’s components. ​​The first symbol would be the sounds of vehicles, so ever-present throughout the plot. Whenever it be automobiles, trams, or trains, there seems to be no reprise from the noise of mass transit, and this is quite intentional, as these vehicles are symbolic of the outside forces which tear at Delon’s character. As the opening quote from the Bushido states, “There is no greater solitude than that of the Samurai...” and this rings especially true for Costello. In this lies the central conflict of the film, the struggle between Costello’s structured coolness and the outside world’s demanding chaos. This symbolism manifests itself nicely, with the loudest transit coming when Jef seems most embroiled by external affairs (being followed on the tram, hastily crossing a busy street, etc...) and being heard far less while he is being reclusive (his apartment, the garage, etc...).

The other aspect of this contrast would then be the symbol for Jef Costello himself, and, incredulously enough, that symbol is: the bird. More specifically, the noises the bird makes are reflections of Costello’s thoughts and emotions. This relationship can first be noted when Costello, after being shot, returns to his apartment to much less chirping that in the opening scene. This represents Costello’s emotional depletion after the whirlwind of events the previous day. Even more symbolic is how, after bandaging himself, he goes over to the bird and feeds it, symbolizing the nourishment he needs, which, unsurprisingly, is followed by the bird resuming its normal frequency of chirping. However, this is a far cry from the intricacy of the metaphor which occurs once Jef returns from his interaction with the pianist. On entering the apartment, both the viewer and he can immediately hear the frantic calls of the bird, and upon realizing the bird has been losing its feathers, Jef begins to search for the listening device, during which the bird never ceases in its frantic cries. The depiction of the bird’s state perfectly captures the internal decay within Costello, as the world seemingly folds around him. Beyond that, the bird’s frantic chirping and fluttering also serves to represent the anxious dialogue Costello is having with himself as he stays on constant alert against his surroundings; and as is seen the next time he is in his apartment, this is for a good reason.

It is on these three strengths: the ability to create a vast tonal atmosphere, to provide iconic soundscapes for particular places, and to harness the broader themes of the film into rivaling sounds, that ​Le Samouraï​ harnesses noise to realize its full artistic potential. It is truly impressive how Melville has both something original to express, and the ingenuity to express it clearly. However, it is Melville’s skill in expressing himself using both the commonplace techniques of film and his novel use of the proverbial road not taken that catapults this film into something beyond merely impressive. In a medium as expansive as film, there is so much room for innovation, and for as excellent as the traditional elements of this, and any other, film might be, experimenting with techniques old and new is what keeps film as an art form as wonderful as it is.

2019 Tarkovsky Prize First Place: Sebastian Kaplan

Sebastian Kaplan (16, Lowell High School)
Hiding Behind Sunglasses in Fellini’s 8 ½

 8 ½, directed by Federico Fellini is a landmark film, it is a circus, it is theater, it is a dream, and it is all very, very liberating. The idea that the imagination liberates us from the entrapment of life’s absurdities is expressed throughout in dazzling ways.

It begins with a dream of liberation, and quickly breaks the rules of neorealism that Fellini once ascribed to , separating himself from his earlier work- ala The White Sheik (1952) La Strada (1954), and in turn opening himself up to criticism from such men as Guido Aristarco, prolific dean of Marxist film criticism and founder of  Cinema Nuovo (who resembles well the film critic from early in the film). The Camera immediately makes itself known, panning through a traffic jam. Our hero, Guido, played by Marcello Mastroianni is introduced from the back, through the rear view window of his car, in fact we will not see his face at all until the films next sequence  So far few clues are presented to suggest we are in a dream. From the beginning the sound is odd, as if off, lacking car horns or noise except for faint drum, suggestive of a heartbeat. Next  fog spews from the dashboard of the car and an off-putting shot of a busload of people with their arms out, heads covered, might tip some over the edge and into the understanding this is a dream.  After seeing Carla, his ‘fat assed, small headed- placid’ (as described by Fellini himself ) mistress being pleasured by an unknown older man - Guido, promptly looks to those around him in other cars for help as he cannot seem to escape his car,  Guido manages to liberate himself from his vices and tensions, and more importantly the car by climbing out of the roof. Arms outstretched, Guido glides over the cars and Fellini presents us with a very dynamic  image. Guido, freed from the traffic is now free to fly, advancing toward rapidly moving clouds. (Fully in the air I can’t help but think of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will, the gorgeous shots of the sky, and plane that holds Adolf Hitler.) Guido, flying high, looks to escape the world below, discovered by Claudia's press agent, who promptly yanks him down- sending Guido from his unconscious mind back into the possibly more confusing reality of his life.

Although it is dangerous to equate the film completely to Fellini’s  life- it’s hard not to at points. Obviously he didn’t pull the idea of a director who has trouble with his latest film out of thin air, he went through it!  Fellini, began his career as an assistant and writer to Neo Realist director Roberto Rossellini and after making the mad sprawling high life dramedy La Dolce Vita,  expected to be on his feet for his next work. Instead Fellini felt the horror of an inspirational void. Fellini had been fixated for a while now on the idea that a director only lasts ten years before he begins to repeat himself, pointing towards what he deemed exhibits A, Rene Clair, B, G.W Pabst, and C, Jean Renoir for reference. Fellini was panicking when he should have been celebrating and it created an obsession that he decided to make the subject of his new movie. Although the original intent was to have Guido the lead, be a writer struggling to write, Fellini could not decide how to clearly depict this  and so found the idea reborn with the struggle of the director.

After his Neorealist period Fellini found in his hands Carl G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) by the fault of Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Ernst Bernhard. There is no doubt that Carl Jung’s work has found itself into 8 ½ and many of his later films to come, especially the daring Fellini/Satyricon. The most prominent aspect of Jung I found to surface in 8 ½ were Jung's theories on dreams, the Anima and the Animus.

The Anima is most clearest perhaps in what is my favorite segment in the film. About 35 minutes into the film, as pressure mounts on Guido to begin filming, as he won’t even tell actors their roles, he retreats into the comfort of Childhood Memories. We are escorted to a whimsical land of children and mothers in a scene at Guidos Grandmothers, off screen, a woman is humming the “Ricordo d'infanzia” theme. This voice and this music persist through much of the sequence, along with a pattern of notes soothingly played on a guitar. All the women here are bizarre, yet loveable creatures held in great esteem by Guido. As the many children are tucked into bed by seuxalized Nannys  we can look to a quote by Jung selected by Albert Benderosn in his book Critical Approaches To Federico Fellini's 8 ½ ,“His aeros is passive like a child’s. The son hopes to be caught by the mother, sucked in, enveloped and devoured”. Specifically a young Guido is tucked in and embraced with a long kiss by a Nanny in White as the Camera tracks closer, letting us in on the slightly perverse, if not relatable moment.

The women here are very innocent seeming and kindhearted, and don’t give off the impression of wanting to bud anything sexually in the children. Saraghina, is the sort of archetype of woman on the fringe of society, witch, the anima projection responsible for the emergence of Guidos sexual deviance portrayed later on, who nests in a small hut on the beach. Jung in Man and His Symbols  describes a Siberian tale which illustrates the dangerous aspect of the Anima. One day a lonely hunter sees a beautiful woman emerging from the deep forest on the other side of the river. She waves and beckons him to her, singing of embracing him, that her nest is near. He swims to her only for her to transform into an owl and the hunter drowns in the water. The Anima here symbolizes an unreal dream of love, happiness and maternal warmth. When Guido is young he and his schoolmates visit Saraghina, she dances, beckoning him over, they dance only to be caught by Priests, dragged away, similarly to when he is dragged to the press conference towards the end of the film. Interestingly the priests Guido is then brought before are played by women with odd complexes (The only reason, Fellini claims, was that they looked the part). Later Gudio visits his Saraghina, and the scene is accompanied by a final zoom on Saraghina, an odd sort of objectification of her.

 Later in the film, as the line between his life, his film and his fantasies have become so blurred, we wonder if Guido has any life at all outside of his own film. As Carla sings and dances with his wife Guido is serendipitously transported back to La Fattoria Della Donna from earlier in the film, “Here he comes” says his wife as she takes a boiling cauldron of steamy water off the fire. Guido enters bearing gifts to many wonderfully shaped women, the ones who bathed him as a child plus a whole array of wife type archetypes and participants in his sex life. Carla comes from downstairs, a very dangerous place because that is where you’re put after you turn 30 (how wonderful!?). The Cinematography here by Gianni Di Venanzo has incredible depth and eccentricity, as something is always fluttering past the lense of his camera, always moving, like a young man's eyes trying not to be caught staring as beautiful women surround him. The Ramba plays as a Hawaiian girl dances for Guido as he begins to prepare for his maternal bath. It’s a wonderful comic scene, I’d never seen anything like this before-- such a capturing of a rampant teenage, and apparently middle aged mind pulsing with sexual thoughts. Ana Nisi Masa. Memory and fantasy merge as the Nanny in White appears for a brief moment and then he is wrapped in a sheet, perfect male fantasy of regression. Saraghina appearance in the scene reinforces this as she says upon seeing Guido again, “Such nice, thin legs.” and another woman adds on “Straight like when he was a boy”. It’s hilarious and very disturbing but I found myself not being able to say I wished I was where he was, (or did I?).

A showgirl bargains not to be sent upstairs and flaunts herself proving she indeed has a “tight little ass”, later “Look at my chest!”. But Guido, in the fashion of the decadent Roman Emperor (Caligula? Nero seems the better comparison reflecting on Fellini/Satyricon) sentences her upstairs. Saraghina interjects with an infantile high pitched moan and begins to ignite a rebellion against their patriarch, soon the Hawaiian girl shouts “Down with the tyrant! Down with Bluebeard!” as Wagner's Valkyrie creeps in. the women rebel against the god. The lighting here intensifies through use of a technique of pulling on lanterns and swinging them around, the camera work is equally eye catching. As Guido draws a whip the scene goes into full swing- a woman when whipped lets out an “oooh Delicious”, perverse enough? Yeesh.  

This scene for myself, and many others was so wild and inventive, i’d never seen anything like this. This surreal sequence continues and the showgirl is allowed one last song. It’s rather, degrading, embarrassing and depressing in comparison to the fun at the crack of Guidos whip.

 Reflecting the last scene, we fade to a scene of Guido watching Screen tests. Much mirroring here as we see how similar some of the footage is to his life. The film ends soon after.

 All in all this oneiric film guides us to view it in the perspective of dreams. Many films do this; Scorsese’s After Hours . Kubrick’s The Shining and most everything by David Lynch… Though Fellini ensures that the lines between dream, reality, fantasy and memory remain blurred, the audience is forced into a deeper level of involvement. Honestly, I still don’t understand the film. It’s still as much a mystery to me as when I first saw it. I’m serious--  this film is very shaking, it grabs you and slaps your silly face. If you’re afraid of the world around you, afraid of women, afraid of vulnerability, afraid of being disappointed, and afraid of being a disappointment slip on your sunglasses.

Folks, this film is bananas. Everyone should go see it!