Intermittens

Alain Resnais’ early works obsess over fractured limerence, often by repeatedly alluding to—ruminating over or disavowing—a traumatic past-that-was-or-wasn’t. Je t’aime, Je t’aime (1968), his fourth feature, is possibly his least coy indulgence of these fixations: Even the title desperately signals the theme of love repeating or cycling. And indeed, the romantic and somewhat conventional plot delivers. Dialing back on his usual abstruseness, Resnais jumbles a tragic relationship between a moody writer (Claude Rich) and a patient, nurturing redhead (whom he betrays, confusingly, with other redheads). We watch the granules of their life together, falling out of order, collecting like miserable residue.

A dummy sci-fi premise is conveniently provided to give the chronological fragmentation some diegetic urgency: The writer, after having attempted suicide, is chosen to participate in a time-travel experiment that forces him to re-live the last 7 years of his life, non-sequentially. (The time machine looks like a monstrous, beige bean bag.) But rather than meeting the desultory visions of his past with Billy Pilgrim-like disorientation, the writer behaves precisely as he did when living these events initially, without hesitation. So it becomes clear—to us, if not to the film—that he’s traveling through his memories, and not necessarily through time. We’re rather watching one’s man’s adult life flash before his eyes in random spurts, and “life” here is synonymous with “depository of regret”.

For all its choppiness, however, the story’s thrust is relatively formulaic—at the start, we know the writer is despondent, and the herky-jerky odyssey through his past explains why, saving the most revelatory bombs for the third act. It’s a lame-o plot, abstracted until it becomes a smirking puzzle that requires art-house patience. (I mean that in the nicest way possible.) The movie’s not quite the editing tour-de-force it’s been touted as, either; it hops from scene to scene without mercy, but most are comprised of a single, well-positioned angle that favors Rich’s angular face. (Consider that structuring a film’s narrative and sewing together footage from multiple cameras to render a single legible sequence are fundamentally distinct grammatical exercises; perhaps no other movie better illustrates this.)

Still, this is a triumph of the free-associative storytelling style, once you’re lulled into its purposeful clumsiness. I most admire the repetition that renders unspectacular objects—most of them domestic, like cats and fireplaces—eerily crucial, likes clues to a mystery that never quite congeals. In one shot, the writer is complaining to his lover that he’s hungry; we cut a second later to the writer gnawing on celery a few years earlier. Not all of the skips are quite that gloriously mundane, or hospitable, but they at least aspire to a Spalding Gray-like furious elegance, and some are even funny—especially when the time-traveling lab rat from the film’s prologue begins to superimpose itself on the writer’s history. (Terry Gilliam would appropriate this rodent-trope as the 12 Monkeys hamster, though that’s nothing compared to the debt owed to Resnais by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s beach imagery and human-mind-as-a-flipbook gimmickry.)

Americans, for Samuel Fuller, exist between two extremes—complete objectification that clips their humanity to a sterile nub, and liberating emotional chaos. (Neither is much fun.) The Naked Kiss is a hologram-image, representing both of these poles across what appear to be three, genuine dimensions. Consider the opening, where a prostitute beats her pimp with a purse for withholding payments and cutting her hair, her source of beauty and income, off as a humiliating gesture. The smooth, bald bulb distracts us momentarily from the violence and the seedy milieu—shamefully, we don’t sympathize as much with a shorn-headed woman. Then she dons a wig, breaks the fourth wall while dolling herself up in a mirror, and becomes a smiling Constance Towers. And a confusing panoply of feelings are freed.

The hooker is Kelly, who throughout the next ninety minutes attempts to build an honest life in a small midwestern town despite a few obnoxious locals who’re hip to her past. But she proves more mercurial than two-faced—after she gets a job at a small hospital, playing mother hen to a (laughably interracial) group of crippled children, the scion of the town founder falls for her.

Each of these new contexts crams us deeper into her prismatic personality, and eventually she becomes such a sylph shifter that we don’t know how she’ll react to anything. She might sexily refuse to break a twenty dollar bill or angrily stuff the paper money in your mouth; she might patiently attend to a child’s hyper-specific needs or heave its body apart in desperation. Along with Skip, the self-destructive pickpocket from Pickup On South Street, she’s Fuller’s most able embodiment of that most American of tropes: “Pained, ambiguous humanity.” It’s no wonder that a crowd gathers at the movie’s end to stare at her vacantly.

But that only covers the “liberating emotional chaos,” what of the “complete objectification”? Fuller offers a wealth of characters who speak through objects—tape recorders are a telling motif—are obsessed with them, or are imprisoned in them. (Totems-as-character.) Kelly works with boys who walk on crutches and live in wheelchairs, casualties of the war between medicine and malady. Kelly also lives with a spinster who displays, and creepily confides in, the military uniform of the fallen man she was to marry; with this single (and somewhat tawdry) device, the film evokes battles between both nations and the sexes.

Even the movie’s histrionic centerpiece becomes horrifically inanimate. Fuller stages a pungently cloying musical number at the hospital, needling us with close-ups of the infirm kids singing off-key until the performance becomes a hallucination. And then we learn that Kelly’s beau has recorded the prepubescent voices for the most nefarious form of playback imaginable—and that the unsettled editing in the previous sequence was transcribing a shadow of lysergic, predatory sexuality.

Put another way, The Naked Kiss derives its energy from symmetrical recasting: A hooker goes straight, a cute, innocuous song becomes a pedophile’s delight. One notes, too, that the American dream has always pivoted upon similarly dramatic transformations. Metamorphosis is a steep gamble, and though Fuller revels in it, he forces us to confront the noisomeness of the process.

2.5/4

In the progressively dour second act of Oslo, August 31st, twenty-something protagonist Anders interviews for an editorial job. The publication’s chief is as impressed with the youngster’s writing as with his gentle effrontery—when the ever-popular “What’s wrong with my magazine?” bait is dangled in front of Anders, he bats it around with feline aplomb, pocking it with enough nibbles to suggest the size and shape of his teeth. But then the conversation turns to a gap in Anders’ career history, and eventually he’s prodded into a confession he wasn’t planning to make. “I was a drug addict, ok?” he says, his pale eyes agitated less with fury than with a corrosive kind of resignation. Anders awkwardly shambles out, embarrassing himself and his potential employer in the process.

The scene appeals to me, when isolated, because Anders’ post-rehab shame becomes a sideways metaphor for the curse of job-hungry jeunesse. We all (I’m only a few years Anders’ senior) might as well be crackheads—the couple of years of vocational experience and wealth of promise we hold come cheap in the big, nasty piss-basin known as “the real world”. And if we view this job interview-segment as a short film outside of the movie’s remaining context, Anders’ revelation becomes a spiteful barb, a survivor’s riffing guilt-trip that may or may not constitute reality, as well as a bomb that levels the pitifully gussied up CVs that no doubt litter the mag chief’s inbox with pleading bullet-points. Heroin—now THERE’s a professional reference on which you can count to make an impression, at least.

As for the rest—the young adult misery is surprisingly hokey, if not at Zach Braff levels. Anders really IS a recovering addict, making his rounds on a single day outside of the clinic that’s protected him from his temptation-riddled life for the last few years, and his various encounters with old friends and family suggest that all available roads, even those paved with passion, lead to a stifling graveyard of maturity. Anders, once an aspiring writer, isn’t exempt from Joachim Trier’s observation that we’re all selfish, soulless assholes who’d rather play video games (which become an eye-rolling motif symbolizing sterility across all walks of life) than read or socialize—most of the buddies into whom he bumps call him out on old bullshit or note how his multi-step recovery has only emboldened his earlier arrogance. But Trier clearly empathizes with the depth of Anders’ disappointment in his cohort, and the intimacy makes every other character seem like a humiliating foil to the downward-spiraling protagonist. (In one grating scene, Anders’ mood becomes curdled when he overhears an attractive young woman listing off the generic aspirations she’s posted on a dating site—she wants to “write a great book” and “go skinny dipping”—but it’s not clear if Anders is frustrated with her lack of imagination or the desires of his own that he senses will go unfulfilled.)

I admire that the film’s specific milieu—both temporally and geographically—yields a few usefully universal morsels, like the sequence mentioned at the top, and some introspective montages where Anders is remembering an earlier, more innocent Oslo and his never-quite-secure place in it. (He affectionately describes his childhood, though he admits—and this is a common Scandinavian complaint—that he enjoyed too much domestic and cosmic freedom.) But Anders’ encounters with friends and family, most of whom have seen their ambitions calcify into varying forms of complacency, are freighted with unruly symbolism, each of them seeming to demand that the kid pick his poison and get on with the drudgery of being. And Trier crams this tour of adult-inferno into a single, circadian swoop, leading to some painfully stagey moments. When Anders finally goes his own self-destructive way with the aid of lots of calming, tragic shadow, it’s bloodless and facile.

By the end I had checked out, but I have to wonder what the same material would look like through a more austere lens, like Aki Kaurismäki’s. Speaking from experience, the horror of assimilating into a nation’s workforce plays out more like a series of comically detached moments of brain-addling frustration than a decline into denial and rejection spiked with hopeful interludes. Afterward, we’re not dead—just deadpan.

It’s not quite feminist, but Robert Siodmak’s female-centered Phantom Lady is girl-noir par excellence. A socially awkward civic engineer, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis), picks up a fretting woman in a bar after a fight with his wife; the two lonely souls take in the follies, she lets him down in front of her apartment with timidity, and then Henderson returns home to find his wife strangled with a necktie from his own closet. From there, it’s up to his loyal, gushy secretary Carol Richman (Ella Raines) to save him from the electric chair so he can go on designing urban housing, or whatever. She heaves herself into a queasy-angled and light-speckled underworld in an effort to find his only alibi, the skittish theater buddy that for some curious reason no bartender or cabbie or horny drummer will admit to having seen in Henderson’s company. Eventually, Henderson’s “best friend” Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), a twitchy and enigmatic sculptor, returns from a sojourn to South America to “help” the search.

It’s almost pulp as Ayn Rand might have written it, minus an exordium extolling the society-bettering virtues of Henderson’s travail (in the film his occupation is basically interchangeable). The roles open to women in this universe range from abetting the efforts of industrious men to leading astray male artists who’ve grown drunk and misanthropic on their own vision. But borrowing Rand’s loopy aesthetic dichotomy—ie, industrial design=GOOD, art for art’s sake=BAD—fuels the grit-flecked, acid-rained expressionism: The off-kilter beauty of the black and white cinematography increases with the danger facing the protagonist. (When Carol seduces a drummer and key witness in an underground club that’s empty save for a turbo-swinging jazz band, the movie turns into a surreal music video—horns and drum sticks sprout from the her long, bare neck in tight, tilted shots.)

Marlow’s eventual intrusion marks a sharp shift in narrative visual tone that cuts the mystery’s langor; in the first 45 minutes or so it’s what isn’t revealed visually that advances the story, from the corpse of Henderson’s spouse (kept sacredly sheeted and out of frame, though we learn later that she was perfidious) to the variously sensual disguises Carol uses to out-sex barkeeps and hatters who hold crucial information (scenes often linger on the faces of others reacting to her). After Marlow, the movie becomes far more explicit—even going so far as to have a police inspector unnerve the killer with a pseudo-psychological diagnosis—though the most violent events are swathed in shadow. Still, this operation runs on feisty womanhood in a fashion seldom seen in noirs, B or otherwise, and the last act’s revelations are oriented around distaff objects and unfairly broken relationships without a daub of condescension. Carol does wind up winning the heart of her boss, but the final shot is of her, alone and ecstatic—it’s her desires that complete her, and not the men who provoke them.

A lot of people seem to be talking about lists. Well, really just one list—the Sight and Sound “best of film,” a poll infrequently administered to legions of filmmakers and critics around the globe. It is one of the few organic canons of its kind, shifting every few years to accomodate trends of opinion on world cinema (AFI’s similar beast is wonkily US-centric), and it’s inspired a number of nascent cinephiles to seek out certain mainstays that they may not have otherwise.

The Sight and Sound poll may also be partly responsible for reviving CITIZEN KANE’s reputation, or at least for broadcasting the range of its influence through a cloud of ignominy. Which, in a sense, signals what the poll/list is all about: It’s less a measurement of quality than one of inspiration. The list compiled in 2002 might very well enumerate the most films most alluded to by others that came later. With entries like the GODFATHER’s and L’AVVENTURA, it has felt increasingly like a collection of particular movies that have challenged young directors and screenwriters to do better, and have provided critics with a kind of aesthetic benchmark. Whether KANE is the best film ever made is unanswerable, and less intriguing than the fact that it’s hard to imagine cinema today without it.

The poll has been picked to death. Kevin Lee posted a mammoth discussion of the poll through the years. Roger Ebert wrote a personal blog entry on how he plans to vote. Indiewire asked a bunch of bloggers what films they’d attempt to canonize. Twitter erupted with reservations and pontification. There’s very little left to say about it until the poll is completed and the results published.

I was thinking yesterday, however, how I’d vote if my critical stature ever rose to the requisite heights. The first film that came to my mind was Eric Rohmer’s MA NUIT CHEZ MAUD, not only because it is a favorite, but because the poll has skewed towards spectacle (2001, VERTIGO) and grammatical innovation (POTEMKIN, SUNRISE), and less towards movies that have attempted to re-conceptualize the artform’s roots in literature and theater. You may say that books and stage productions are not film. I’d argue that anything put in front of a motion picture camera is cinema, and can become a canvas for personal expression and human commentary—both of which the poll is also soft on (8 1/2, TOKYO STORY).

I have, however, changed my imaginary vote. Somewhere in a parallel and not-too-distant universe, perhaps films are assessed against the canon not by their ability to inspire or to the extent that they apotheosize cinematic gestures, but by the intelligence with which they comment on the culture of film. Several movies in the real Sight and Sound list do this, most obviously SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN. I’d add to it, if given the opportunity, MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, the 1970 flop directed by Michael Sarne and starring Raquel Welch, John Huston, and Mae West.



One of the most reviled movies of all time, MYRA concerns a gay film critic (played cheekily by Rex Reed) who undergoes a sex change and plastic surgery in order to trick his evil, lecherous Uncle Buck (Huston) out of a family inheritance. Buck runs an expensive film school in Los Angeles for the talentless; it’s mostly full of drag queens and dropouts. The dybbuk title character (Welch) arrives, claiming to be the widow of Buck’s gay nephew. She teaches a class on “posture,” wherein she surmises that there were no unimportant films released in the United States between 1935 and 1945. There’s a subplot with the senescent Mae West, a talent scout whose office is a revolving door of a bedroom for an endless sluice of studs. Throughout, we see classic film clips salaciously appropriated, such as a monolithic wooden board carried by Stan Laurel that implies, by scenario juxtaposition, penile length.

Gore Vidal wrote the novel on which the film is based, and he hasn’t stopped complaining about the adaptation since 1970—though he claims he’s never seen it. And, indeed, our discourse on the movies often can’t be bothered to respond to what’s actually occurring on the screen, much less to attempt a semiotic pathway of image-symbol discovery. I furthermore do not appreciate MYRA BRECKENRIDGE as camp—eg, an earnest failure—but rather as a cruelly explicit examination of the cult of the moving picture, a colony full of misfits who refuse to play along with plot and taste. (I stopped counting the non sequitur lines after the first 30 minutes.) The archive of cinema is alive in the film as it is in our minds, a gnarl of arousing free radical agents that, despite not being intended to, allow us to resolve sexual tension and social pettiness (cf Bruno Bettelheim on fairy tales).

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE’s meta-awareness and depiction of hipness is dated, to be sure, yet it feels more modern, and more useful, than that of a Tarantino. Tarantino simply loves film as an environment and a tradition, and he wallows in both. MYRA BRECKINRIDGE’s affection for cinema, on the other hand, becomes dangerously phallus-shaped by the narrative’s middle. And whether we use this object to masturbate (criticism) or to sodomize unsuspecting victims (filmmaking) is our choice, but it demands to be put to work.

There once was a Dane melancholy,
Who’d have made Hamlet cry for his mommy.
By turns anxious and Oedipal—
Like Prospero’s incredible
salvos—he indicts our folly. 

There once was a film from the 90s,
Whose themes were much bolder than Spike Lee’s,
But black Zeligs are wretched,
Bloody girls up with ketchup,
Revolution was naught but a fine tease.

The nagging if surreptitious moral premise of this film didn’t quite allow it to live up to its venomous reputation on my second viewing. The spiteful world-builder that he is, Billy Wilder lets his flamboyantly predatory protagonist Tatum (Kirk Douglas as a down-and-out yellow journalist banished to the sleepy southwest) and a row of other selfishly orbiting satellites incubate their schemes for longer than would most directors of the 1950s. But of course what one ultimately takes away is that the vulnerable can only be exploited for so long with impunity, whether they’re sacred Native American pots buried in a mountainous sepulcher, or a hee-haw of a fortune hunter trapped under some rocks in the same. (Wilder even gifts this rugged environ with a stern, upstanding publisher to stare down festering pockets of sin from behind his rotary-fan-cooled work desk.) Still, the landscape is resolutely hostile to decency: The dialog crackles like rancid bacon frying in motor oil—especially the exchanges between Tatum and the streetwise, ready-to-bolt wife of Leo, the trapped man—and the blinding, wide-depth cinematography spares no one from the sun. (The puny, outlining shadows seem to mock rather than provide fissures of definition.)

But the film’s most razor-toothed accomplishment is also its least-acknowledged—for what are probably obvious reasons. Wilder spends the entirety of the running time humanizing the two central characters, Tatum and Leo, while letting the whirlwind of traffic around them rot into stereotypes; what’s only apparent at the close is that we in the audience are numbered among the hateful throng. At the start, Tatum’s ambition is too much fun to watch and Leo’s spooked, maudlin regret seems borrowed from a far more bathetic narrative; our delighted, condescending spectatorship practically enables their parasitic partnering. By the end, we’re guilty that we’d have let Tatum get away with it all, too, for the chance to gawk. He, meanwhile, is revealed as deeply and (until the third act) ignorantly broken, just as drunk on falsehood as a man who’d purloined worthless items from dead subalterns to keep up a charade of domestic bliss. And what Wilder wins by flinging Tatum quite literally in our faces isn’t just pity but shame. It’s an experience that needs to be showered off. 

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

That time I fucked tumblrbot’s mom.