Apocalypse Now (1979) etc.

I'm not actually really going to write about this. I can't. Not now at least. Now at 2 am or so which hasn't been "too late" for me in a good long while. I have this nasty habit of getting into these periods where I watch a lot of war movies, read a lot of war books, poems, etc. I stick to 20th century, mostly. The rise of killing devices. It seems so much more tragic, so much more outrageous when 1,000 lives are taken with the push of a button, rather than with 4 days of grueling combat. Old War to me is too textbook, too wrapped up in the ideals and emotions we want to remember. There's heroes and pride, dignity and betrayal. All those Edmund Dante-style intangible words and archetypes..does that make sense?

20th century war is about descent, it seems to me most times. Dehumanization. Dirt.
I mean, that sentence can stand without the "20th century" of course, but not at this moment to me.

Cameo Appearance

by Charles Simic

I had a small, nonspeaking part

In a bloody epic. I was one of the

Bombed and fleeing humanity.

In the distance our great leader

Crowed like a rooster from a balcony,

Or was it a great actor

Impersonating our great leader?

That’s me there, I said to the kiddies.

I’m squeezed between the man

With two bandaged hands raised

And the old woman with her mouth open

As if she were showing us a tooth

That hurts badly. The hundred times

I rewound the tape, not once

Could they catch sight of me

In that huge gray crowd,

That was like any other gray crowd.

Trot off to bed, I said finally.

I know I was there. One take

Is all they had time for.

We ran, and the planes grazed our hair,

And then they were no more

As we stood dazed in the burning city,

But, of course, they didn’t film that.

"I am become death"
look it up

Not many people have really seen the Slaughterhouse-Five adaptation. I liked it. Might've been my default love for Billy Pilgrim (seemed well-cast to me). The Dresden parts are really...well good, but not good obviously. Though it's been a while since I've seen that one.


Stalingrad? There's another.

Though these past few days I've just been flipping through everything Tim O'Brien there is on my shelves and looking up scenes from Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now.

The latter we are studying in my lit/film class alongside Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

A bit from that:
“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not?”

In terms of the adaptation, Congo to Nam it is pretty cool to see. The general mood is what matters I think, in both. And that's most definitely what carries.

Really what initially made me want to put anything up here at all was the first bit of the movie. I swear its on repeat. My head is filled with The Doors.



Wasn't surprised in the slightest to see that details for Apocalypse were inspired by Aguirre, the Wrath of God. I did the Herzog/Kinski dive last summer, and this one was definitely my favorite. Here's the last scene because it's killer and you should watch it regardless if you're worried about a spoiled end or not. The theme of all this is definitely shitshow so inevitably:

Grass

by Carl Sandburg

PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,

Shovel them under and let me work--

I am the grass; I cover all.




And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?




I am the grass.

Let me work.

Shine On

Modern Times (1936)

Hey you! Get back to work!

Director: Charles Chaplin






The tramp fights the gears and switches, assembly lines and general mechanization of the modern world. Rich with the expected Chaplin humor, this powerful social and political commentary was one of the films that convinced HUAC of Chaplin's supposed "communist" involvement, leading Chaplin to move to Switzerland, vowing to never again return to America.

General Themes: Streamlining of society to the point where life is stripped of quality and value, the terrible rise of machinery over man, labor undercurrents in America, the mechanization of man, dehumanization in general

My favorite scene-- Chaplin has landed a job singing at a restaurant but oh: he has forgotten the words. This scene is actually the first ever in which the tramp speaks, and Chaplin wanted him to say something "universal" so the song he actually sings is a giberish mix-up of Italian and French, understandable only in the silly-slightest because of Chaplin's motions:

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

A PLEA FOR THE ART OF THE MOTION PICTURE / We do not fear censorship, for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue - the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word - the art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

Director: D.B. Griffith

A Face in the Crowd (1957)

"I'm not just an entertainer. I'm an influence, a wielder of opinion, a force... a force!"

Director: Elia Kazan

I can hardly call these reviews if we're going to consider by definition that to mean feedback with a healthy mix of praise and aversion. Everything I've watched thus far is gold.

In my lit/film class we were talking about how Jean Shepherd's short Red Ryder Nails the Hammond Kid” (what "A Christmas Story" was adapted from) presents an honest portrait of American times (in that case, of the later years of the Great Depression, told with quite the somber charm). So the same is the case for "A Face in the Crowd", done with the same dualistic quality of being both entertaining, lighthearted, and charming but also sad and disquieting in the overall tone it contains.

For starters, Lonesome Rhodes gets his start on the radio, participating as "a face in the crowd" which plays off finding interest in ordinary people. As a devoted follower of "This American Life" on NPR it was all I could do to keep from swapping Marcia's face for Ira Glass's and Lonesome's for some Tom Waits-infused David Sedaris or Sarah Vowell.



Marcia Jeffries: You put your whole self into that laugh, don't you?
Lonesome Rhodes: Marcia, I put my whole self into everything I do.


More Animal, More Hungry Ghost
(After Rashomon and A Face in the Crowd)

The Bandit Tajomaru and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes jump from the greatest Kyoto Hotel.

the airplanes go fast
faster than you would expect
the air tastes of dirt

"It looked like they were rising in reverse," one witness said.

he's lost all patience
for chord and sword sales
and where is Marcia

"Rising and rising."

she answered the door
the whole place was a shitshow
but she let me in

"Laughing the whole way."

tell me of her legs
you said the light made them snow
some elegant bull

The Bandit Tajomaru and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes take the elevator to the fortieth floor.

think the smell of pine
that is what I saw of them
just a lighted glimpse

The Bandit Tajomaru and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes have a drink, grappa and whiskey, respectively.

I can't remember
if she even noticed me
she was on a horse

They share the whiskey.

They share the women.

They chase both.


Marcia was gone then
and there I was with her name
back in Arkansas

"It was like making love to something borrowed, something with a wig," said an anonymous woman of Rhodes.

and what were you then
I could make do without her
so what about you

Little is known of the Bandit.

I'm not a crime man
couldn't take the big time game
monsoon mobster shit

The Bandit Tajomaru and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes work a two-man show about giving and receiving. Their hook is the atom bomb.

I should have lost thumbs
or given up this dry life
who knows what I did

The Bandit Tajomaru and Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes meet in the greatest Little Rock hotel. They have a drink and talk about the people they have been.

The Crowd (1928)

"The crowd laughs with you always... but it will cry with you for only a day."

Director: King Vidor


They certainly don't make movies like this anymore.

imdb fact: King Vidor shot nine different endings before settling on the one used in the finished film, because MGM did not like to release films without a positive ending.

pft.


For everyone's sake, the city introduction:

M (1931)

"Just you wait, it won't be long. The man in black will soon be here. With his cleaver's blade so true. He'll make mincemeat out of you! "

Director: Fritz Lang











Still Life in the Hall of the Mountain King

"The end is a dirty piece of bone, broken.
The entire world sobs like an old woman"
--Charles Bukowski

Mitterand meets his cancer over
breathless plates of ortolan
the bluebird's flight a stellar M
somehow in whistling his teeth a ticklish Mmmm

the world moans like an orphan mother
drunk malinger fingers
batting at the naranjilla
painting her Bellini glass

she saves them in a leather pouch
dries them, smells them Mmmm, Mmm
nods the waiter over softly
asks for John the Baptist's head

eats it like an open heart
thanks the plate and walls and pays--
the floor below a man shakes the hand
of the whore out the door

the M's of the check scrawl suggest
pedagogue, sex fiend, narcissist,
notes in a German opera
songs of plagues and cleaver killers

the world can't wait for her
and rests on shoulders, chalky hands
the world grins like a little girl
that white song hair a tasty game
Mmmm






"Who knows what it's like to be me?"

Rashômon (1950)

"It's human to lie. Most of the time we can't even be honest with ourselves."

Director: Akira Kurosawa


Based on Akutagawa's short story "In a Grove"
http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/ryunosukegrove.html
though the title and setting were taken from another Akutagawa short

(n.b. most late-night awkward film analysis)

"We all want to forget something, so we tell stories. It's easier that way." Thus a single line of dialogue encompasses the mighty column that supports In a Grove by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film adaptation, Rashômon. Clearly related although altered slightly to suit the varying mediums, the story and film each present an intricate whodunit scenario far before its time, crafted with meticulous elegance and understated mystery. I was initially drawn to In a Grove because of its structure. It is a story built from seven different perspectives on the same twisted event, and that appealed to me, drawing my thoughts back to discussions of cubism before reading Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Add that to a guilty love for crime drama and the thrill of jury-style debate and there was no question to what I would choose from the anthology.
Treating In a Grove like a typical story makes analysis rather peculiar. Each testimony recalls an incident, brief and personal, that exists for each witness standing alone in his or her memory. That incident is of a mysterious crime that occurred unplanned in a secluded grove of bamboo and cedars. The greater story, the one that the reader contemplates as the book is closed, is the collective testimonies and the underlying essential questions of truth and the shady condition of human nature. In a Grove presents for questioning the significance of honor and reputation, pitting words against words for the objective and unsuspecting reader to consider. The revelation of what really happened would be earth-shattering, confirming terrible qualities in one or more of the characters involved, so at least some of the witnesses choose to tell and live the lie -- for honor, for reputation, to protect themselves, or perhaps to protect others.
The seven testimonies in the story of a woodcutter, a priest, a policeman, an old woman, a bandit, a wife, and a spirit are on a rape and murder involving the just mentioned bandit, woman, and spirit of the murdered man. The bandit, Tajomaru's, testimony seems most powerful to me, especially because it is one of the four carried on to the film. He certainly faces the most pressure from the court. From the text (and in the film from his words and disheveled appearance) it is suggested that he was tortured or at least threatened with torture. This undoubtedly is what pushes him to tell a "good story". “No torture can make me confess what I don't know," he says. "Now things have come to such a head, I won't keep anything from you." Perhaps the violence worked too well, and the words Tajomaru feeds the court have been stretched beyond the truth. The story that follows lives up to his apparent notoriety as a bandit. Another motivation to bear false witness would be to uphold his infamy, to go down in history if he were to be found guilty and executed. This provides justification for the information he chooses to reveal, possibly explaining the vagaries in his story. How could he have tied up a sword-bearing samurai? How did he so easily become equal to the samurai in the eyes of the woman?
The warrior's story is similarly strange. First of all, how far can we trust the medium? Forced to assume her connection is real and her words are those of the slain warrior, what of them? They contradict like all the others. Perhaps the warrior lied in the embarrassment of so easily being lured and slain by Tajomaru and of breaking the Bushido code. Why does he ultimately praise the bandit and degrade his wife? And where does the wife's testimony come from? Exploring her words, explanations for dishonesty range from shame and dishonor, blocking of the memory, and further covering of an unhappy marriage and an attempted suicide. Beyond these three core characters, the other testimonies are equally believable and yet contradictory, but were cut from the film (although some of the characters were not).
In the story, the inflections and tone of voice in the delivery are impossible to detect beyond the pace and diction of the writing. These are details that usually make testimonies and inquisitions much more effective in determining guilty and innocent. In order to maintain the same sort of ambiguity, Kurosawa needed to be very particular in manipulating the words for his adaptation. Set as flashbacks in an exchange between a commoner, the priest, and the woodcutter, the testimonies in court are from Tajomaru, the wife, and the warrior's spirit and they are perfect. Symmetrical in frame, each person sits before the voiceless court, speaking and responding to the unseen group while the focus is kept solely on them. Tajomaru does have a guard bound to his side though and shots of both wife and medium have a figure sitting in the far right background, as if to distract the eye only slightly, interfering with or weakening the strength of the focus they are receiving. Outside of the court, all the exchanges at the gate are heard with the distracting ambient sound of pouring rain.
My favorite part of Rashômon and what really is most notable in terms of cinematography is the lighting. Kurosawa's use of natural light, enhanced by mirrors and the trees themselves in the forest scenes, establishes each shot under the rawest circumstances, reflecting how human nature is both open and light-hearted, but also spotted with heavy tones of obscurity and evil. Natural light exposes but also readily hides. Because of this, all the cut-away scenes portraying each testimony are definitely most memorable. Intricate and creepy, the shifting, inconsistent light is ominous and makes the viewer rather uncomfortable. In these scenes, the camera manages to capture bandit, warrior, and wife all as most powerful and most vulnerable. Some shots are close-up detail shots of their emotion-filled faces caught in conflict while others pull back so that the light riddles their frames with layers upon layers of distraction. In terms of editing, the clean and patient cuts from still and dramatic court to figures talking with a heavy rain backdrop go quite smoothly. The contrast of just that is striking.
A technical and creative success, Rashômon successfully captures the motives of crime and the qualities of man that encourage lies and deceit. There are the pressures of honor and reputation--the obedient wife, the fearless warrior, the cunning and infamous bandit. Akirugawa ends his story completely hanging, with no real conclusions or directions in terms of resolving the crime. While Kurosawa keeps this open ending, he adds a glimmer of hope in the condition of man when the Commoner, however half-heartedly, takes in an abandoned child as one of his own. Having read the story first I found this addition to the plot in the film's final minutes slightly distracting. It just seemed out of place. I think this is just because of how familiar I was with the text at that point though. I can understand it as a choice in direction. That little moment of compassion leaves a hope for mankind, appealing to audiences by showing a fine quality of man muddled in with all the lesser qualities presented beforehand. Rashômon is an excellent adaptation of an excellent, albeit troubling short story and left behind the quiet air of sad satisfaction that comes when presented with life’s unanswerable questions.


Because the short story is written from an objective perspective in the form of various testimonies, I was curious how the transition to film might be done. Below is the opening scene, establishing well how Kurosawa made a time, place, and story out of the conflict and dialogue presented in Akutagawa's words.

Le Bonheur (1965)

“Happiness works by addition.”

Director: Agnès Varda

I'll get to some spoilers eventually, my friend.

Mozart, sunflowers, a matching quartet of mother, father, daughter and son. The vibrant colors of costume and setting in a synthesis almost too dulcet to the eye. Possessing the sort of clean, blithe attitude you'd find on expensive stationary or Toile fabric, the film opens in scenes of pastoral picnics and quiet small-city days, following the family life of a young carpenter named François. With honest labor and an overall honest life (watch out, François), he is blessed with a simple, continuous happiness, marked by close family, adorable and obedient children, and all the domestic pleasures a man could be given from his very beautiful wife.


With luck expanding exponentially, François soon meets another woman of equal beauty and begins an affair with her with a boyish exuberance that finds love, joy, and perfect satisfaction in the relationship almost immediately. What's more, this woman, Émilie, is alright with his wife and children and his relationship with his wife only gets better. Here's where the spoonful of sugar gets hard to swallow though. Honest and drunk with happiness, François reveals the affair to his wife, using a silly metaphor about adding another blossoming apple tree to the orchard in order to explain his thought that “Happiness works by addition.” She seems to accept her husband's infidelity calmly and with an open-mind, until a scene later when the floral print of her sun dress is soaked and mingling with the grass where her drowned body was pulled from the nearby lake. Autumn approaches and François grieves, but soon returns to Émilie who is quickly accepted as wife and mother in matching sweaters, carrying flowers and walking in the afternoon sun with her family.

The film is all-around beautiful and sweet to the eyes from the opening shot of approaching family to the mirrored end as they depart. With organized shots and color fades, its not only nice to watch but easy to watch. I know it's a bit obvious, but I kept thinking Wes Anderson in all the strange quick establishing shots, bright colors, and symmetry that Varda chose to use.

Le Bonheur is a tryst into the meaning of happiness, honesty, family, and love. It focuses on the fragility of happiness, how it might be as fleeting as the summer months--rich and slow when they are there, but sour and cold in their departure. François and his wife live happy, nice lives but everything seems very routine and dry, almost too lovely to stand. Summer needs to end. Even still though, the autumn is still beautiful, just in a different way, and summer is faithful in its return.

grin and bear it, welcome to happiness:


It was great, but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. Perhaps I consider myself a little too cynical to be head-over-heels charmed by the color and beauty and love-making of French stunners in the 1960s. Psh. No. It was great, it was beautiful

(In anticipation of) Watchmen (2009)

The General (1927)

"If you lose this war don't blame me."

Directors: Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman


1861. The Civil War rises up with the attack on Fort Sumter. The best and brightest of the Confederacy line up to enlist, with the young and eager Johnnie Gray right at the front. He is rejected without explanation, and must return to his girl, Annabelle Lee, who out-right snubs him and promises to do so until he becomes a soldier. So he is rejected by his true love because he is not in uniform, but he is denied a uniform (and here is the explanation the audience is let in on) because of his other true love, The General--the engine that he runs. The enlisting officer thinks he is too valuable with his engine to be a soldier for the South. Soon enough though, Johnnie is forced into the heart of conflict when The General (with Anabelle Lee aboard) is stolen by Union soldiers as part of an elaborate attack on the South. A strenuous and hilarious pursuit from both sides ensues, making way for Johnnie to save the day, his girl, his engine, and the Confederacy.

How could this not be completely fantastic?

Metropolis (1927)

" There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator."

Director: Fritz Lang

Metropolis was startling, poignant, and in every minute perfectly entertaining. The missing scenes were sorely missed, but the summary cards were fine and within minutes of sitting down to write this I came across this article --> http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/jul/03/news.culture3
So there you go.

If anything the film was really just a pooling together of all the conflicts, allusions, and general themes I've been really into recently. Science-fiction, dystopian society, strong juxtaposition, time, pursuit of love, religion, class struggles and the silly habits of the wealthy (straight from watching "The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie" a few months back)...you get the idea. Between the Eternal Gardens, the tower of Babel, and Moloch (finally incentive to look it up, something I'd been meaning to do since I first read Howl) within the first twenty minutes or so, the strong religious undertones were obvious. Until the introduction of Maria, I was even working on the hunch that the protagonist, Freder, was going to follow a Siddhartha-style path toward realization (athough I was unsure about how much eastern religion was floating around the Weimar Republic c. 1927).
Sheltered from the real world by his noble father, the prince Siddhartha lived a golden, pristine life until a series of discoveries (the existence of disease, senility, and death) prompted him to escape from the palace. Having realized collective human suffering, Siddhartha sought a real escape from it rather than the intricate fallacies that his family had built for him. I thought the same idea would work for Freder, fleeing the Eternal Gardens and his father (after Maria shows him the workers' children) and submerging himself in the Worker's City until he found some sort of reinvented urban Enlightenment. I suppose it sort of worked that way.

Freder was charming and foppish in all the right ways, growing into the warm, kind-hearted hero he was always meant to be with the modesty and masculine grace every protagonist deserves. Brigitte Helm as Maria and the Maschinenmensch was by far my favorite though. She was brilliant. I'm always instantly charmed by the body-rooted acting of the silents, but she was really something else.