Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962)

The creators said they were striving for the look of a Bergman and the feel of a Cocteau. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an earlier Bergman film, but I definitely felt a bit of Beauty and the Beast in there—surreal, haunting spaces abound. But I also felt a good bit of Last Year at Marienbad with all that organ music and an almost psychic reality that appears to manifest in the more eerie scenes (though given how close together these films were released an influence is doubtful). And there’s a lot of Hitchcock in there. The voyeuristic neighbor who approaches the door while the heroine is bathing is straight out of Psycho, and the mechanical, circular dance of the zombies resembles the similarly non-contextualized interludes in Shadow of a Doubt. And the centerpiece montage reminded me of a similar sequence in Metropolis for several reasons.

I essentially reached the conclusion that it is more fun to spot the allusions to other films than it is to actually experience the film for what it is. Besides its cool stylistic tributes, it’s sort of run-of-the-mill. The heroine can see the zombies but no one else can and all that. Ending is kind of expected. The arty techniques definitely enhance the horror—they don’t exist just for the hell of it—but Harvey can’t disguise his rather bland story, which spirals toward a predictable climax in the eerie pavilion, and after the suddenness of the ending wears off I started to realize how neat and predictable it was. Also there’s a sequence that’s too Twilight Zone-esque for my liking, in which Mary comes out of a dressing room in a clothing store to find that no one can see or hear her. It even arrives at an extremely dated encounter with a psychiatrist who dryly explains the source of her psychological dilemma, only for Mary to respond with the expected clichés.

But hey, I still liked it. Those zombies are pretty cool looking, and some scenes really are effective. It definitely offers a neat look into the world of artistically ambitious low-budget American films.

La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)

La Dolce Vita is seems to vaguely tackle the same subject matter as L’Avventura (part of why the two are so often compared), the emptiness of an increasingly modern Italy, but while L’Avventura’s characters are forced to confront this emptiness within themselves, La Dolce Vita’s protagonist Marcello never really comes to terms with it, or more accurately doesn’t really have to.  I like La Dolce Vita because it loosely explores this topic but doesn’t make such an intellectual point about it, choosing instead to use its three-hour runtime for episodic fun.

Every scene in the film is bound by the characters and chronology and not much else.  There is not a real narrative.  Its structure fits with the open-endedness of the only thing remotely close to what can be called the film’s message; there may or may not be a sweet life found within the depths of this gradually expanding, contemporary, cultural underworld and it may or may not matter.  Fellini seems to care only for the deliriously exciting content, and he seems almost intentionally, playfully pretentious by throwing in several parallels and motifs that can certainly be analyzed to mean something significant (ascents within religious structures and descents into chaotic nightlife venues obviously juxtaposing religion and profanity for example), but which probably don’t really matter.

But what strikes me about this, as well as 8 ½, is that even if Fellini’s attempts at philosophical depth or figurative technique are not necessarily successful (I’d say La Dolce Vita probably has a far lower hit-to-miss ratio, but maybe I need to watch it more times before I say that for certain), he cannot be faulted for faux-intellectualism because he’s such a joyful, comedic filmmaker that there’s usually a case that Fellini takes his own, perhaps, more pretentious elements less seriously than his critics do.

What 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita both do is make me want to educate myself about the technicalities of black and white cinematography and art design.  In both films I find myself enamored by his mise-en-scene in that the frame always seems perfectly illuminated by some kind of light source and yet the contrast between black and white remains sharp and defined.  Both of these early Fellini films look so photographically similar that I’m surprised that both films used a different cinematographer, though Piero Gherardi’s art direction is undoubtedly part of the force behind the visual similarity.  Of all the specific examples of scenes that bridge the two films from a visual standpoint, the one that stands out the most is Fellini’s use of empty nighttime landscapes lit by lone imposing artificial lights, both of which are the most harrowing arenas for each protagonist’s personal conflict.

Marcello Mastroianni proves to be an indispensable actor.  In 8 ½ he never really makes an effort to act out what his character is thinking, and it’s because his face expresses such blankness, with a dabble of nervousness and trepidation, that the audience can immediately see his expressions as social defenses and then through Fellini’s more extravagant sequences, truly probe the depths of his mind.  His acting is more defined in La Dolce Vita, because his gossip columnist is instantly more of a social being than his tired film director.  Yet this time Fellini’s refusal to dramatize his feelings (not a surreal fantasy in sight) and the lack of coherency obscures him just as well.  When Steiner shares his musings with Marcello, we are witness to no response.  Marcello is surely saddened by Steiner’s suicide, yet does this have any bearing on his inexplicable behavior at the beach house party later that night?  We only glimpse Marcello in social situations and only one scene, which depicts a frantic argument with his girlfriend, can we see past his enigmatic exterior.

When the film ended, I felt it slightly anticlimactic, but in a sense the film could only end with an anticlimax, given there is no narrative action that builds throughout the film, one of the few ways it differs from 8 ½.

Of all the artsy 60s filmmakers, Fellini seems to get the most flack for his autobiographical, sometimes surrealistic and often unflinchingly nonsensical films made after his early period, one of which I have seen (Amarcord) and which indeed left me less than impressed.  I got to noticing that 8 ½ is the only Fellini film that just about every cinephile loves, whether they are Fellini fans or not, which got me worrying that I would not be able to find another Fellini film I could truly enjoy.  But La Dolce Vita, while certainly a lesser film, is such a companion piece and so similar in all the best possible ways, that I fell in love with it on a first viewing.

Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)

Maybe it is a stretch to think Bresson when thinking of Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, but I could not help but think of his views on necessary images and capturing what is essential.   Kiarostami cuts back and forth between one real event, the trial of a man, Ali Sabzian, who has been accused of passing himself off as noted Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and a handful of recreated events, all of which are filmed with a certain complacency, using the same people involved in the case to reenact them.

In the moments that are non-documentary we are aware of the interventions of Kiarostami’s camera, the image quality is improved, POV shots emerge, and so on.  I personally felt an authenticity in these moments because of the interplay between the actual people involved; I felt that they were channeling their real feelings, apprehensions, and subtle misgivings, even as these scenes were so obviously constructed.  But even in Sabzian’s trial, which is the actual event as captured with two cameras, Kiarostami seems to make us aware of his own intervention.  After all, he speaks briefly before the trial begins, telling Sabzian that he may use the camera to provide his own side of the issue.  His subject is on trial for acting, and there is something multilayered in that even as he defends himself, he is being caught on camera; one of the plaintiffs accuses him of still acting, even though his stint as his idolized director is assuredly over.

After several extended close-ups of Sabzian’s face during the trial, the final moments, in which Sabzian meets Mr. Makhmalbaf, Kiarostami films from a distance and makes that distance known.  We hear him and his crew talking about the faulty lapel microphone, and we understand the unreliability of the directorial control Kiarostami has thus far been able to exert.  What I took from this finale, that closes on a freeze-frame of Sabzian’s bowed head, is that it is either the most authentic sequence in the film because of its real-life immediacy and Kiarostami’s apparent difficulty in capturing the event completely, or it is the most manipulative, as Kiarostami almost deliberately beckons us to imagine, in my case with a sympathetic eye, what the two men are saying to each other, and then closes with yet another close-up, freeze-framed, and a surge of uplifting music.

Close-Up is hard to figure out.  I find it a noble film in what it did for the plight of this poor, strange man.  I find it fascinating in that I can’t in good conscience claim artificiality for any of it, even in its recreated scenes.  Is the real Sabzian the man playing himself in Kiarostami’s reenactments, the man defending himself on trial, perhaps still playing some kind of role, or is it the man captured imperfectly through the broken windshield of a moving car and with a faulty lapel microphone?  Are they all valid?  Or is Kiarostami only claiming Sabzian’s pure essence in the final shot?

My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)

I wish more films could be as unashamedly happy and cheerful as My Neighbor Totoro, my choice for greatest children’s film ever made.  It is remarkable in its absence of conventional narrative; it becomes one big glorious mixture of sensory moments and lush, atmospheric long shots of meticulously painted backdrops.  A mystical Japanese folk musical score sparks that peculiar feeling of childhood bewilderment and total abandonment of the constraints of the real world.  Luscious painted landscapes with a palette of vivid greens and blues that become soft and dreamy come the fantastic nighttime sequences.

I commend Miyazaki for placing me within the bubble of childhood innocence; he is devoid of the irritating compulsion of American children’s filmmakers to conform to formulaic stories and flat characters.  That’s not to say Miyazaki’s protagonists, Mei and Satsuki, are terribly complex.  But they are one-dimensional in the most honest, credible, childlike way.  They are not cute because Miyazaki molds them to be cute; they are cute because he molds them to be like real little girls and there is so much unbounded joy in watching them pursue their youthful curiosity.  Miyazaki cares more about momentary beauty and poetic associations than about story, and though a conflict does emerge toward the end of the film, it also emanates from childhood and not from forced intervention.  The worry that Miyazaki evokes stems from the side of childhood that is frightened and irrational.

I don’t know what more I can write without either leeching off the tired point that this is such a wonderful film about childhood or taking some unnecessary ‘animation is an underrated medium’ type of angle.  Before I became a lover of the cinema, I was a lover of animation, cartoons, and comic books, for their picturesque.  I then discovered that cinema could achieve comparable visual splendor and yet be more emotionally engaging.   My Neighbor Totoro remains one of the few animated films I have seen that I would place among my favorite films of all time.

Experimental film (1923-1954)

Over the course of two days my film professor screened five short experimental films, all of which were interesting and a few of which really got to me.  The lecture began with a screening of Joris Ivens’ Regen, from 1929.  As far as I’m concerned, anything shooting for pure cinema should strive to be something like this.  A series of images, thematically connected, each of which stands alone as a wonder of photography but that when viewed sequentially take on an undeniable poetry.  There is a beautiful tranquility in sixteen minutes’ worth of shots of rain that is so enlightening in its minimalism.

From there we watched Man Ray’s The Return to Reason (1923) and Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique (1924).  The former is a short Dadaist clip intended to introduce us to that type of filmmaking but which left absolutely no impression on me.  The latter is a hodgepodge of mechanical objects and recurrent recognizable forms that move in a peculiar rhythm as they are edited together with a peculiar rhythm.  I was hypnotized for the most part, but eventually its charm wore off and I found it monotonous by the end.  However its achievement in abstract filmmaking is not to be overlooked.

The night culminated in a screening of Lus Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), a film I had been waiting to see for quite some time.  Having recently seen L’Age d’Or, I noticed several surrealist similarities, the fascination with sexuality and insects, strange links between scenes and an odd sense of time and space.  I find Un Chien Andalou better because of its brevity and far more potent imagery.  The slicing of the eye is every bit as effective and disconcerting as I had hoped, and the film’s dream logic was not simple randomness, but a real portrait of a dream world, following some loose narrative but with plentiful excursions and non sequiturs that conceivably pertain to the subconscious.

The lecture concluded with Stan Brakhage’s Desistfilm (1954), an awesome experiment in disorientation that places the camera in a room with partying hipsters, the space impossible to gauge.  The camera darts around, zooms in, moves in and out of focus, and frames the mise-en-scene with imbalance.  The soundtrack is plagued by an almost painful buzzing noise, and the entire film achieves a sense of intoxication, taking the ordinary events of these partygoers and filming them with an invasive, uncomfortable camera.

Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

Manhattan is the most beautiful tragic comedy I have ever seen, partly because of my reaction to its aesthetic properties and partly because of my emotional reaction to the story.  The lush, dreamy black-and-white Manhattan atmosphere and the entrancing Gershwin create an utterly romantic vision of New York, and yet this romanticized city conceals characters too forcibly complex, neurotic, and hypocritical for their own good.  I went in expecting the quirky Annie Hall Allen, ever reliant on playful technique and the endless idiosyncrasies of the Allen persona.  The same neurotic Allen is the star of Manhattan, and yet here he is inserted into a far more subdued reality, devoid of split screens and cartoons.

There are two couples and one woman who garners the attraction of the men in each relationship.  Parallels are frequent.  Isaac (Allen) blames his wife for leaving him for a woman, flabbergasted that she could prefer anyone to him.  Yet he leaves his seventeen-year-old girlfriend Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) for Mary (Diane Keaton) because Tracy is young and Mary is available.  Ah, but Isaac’s friend Yale was initially in love with Mary, cheating on his wife with her.  The way Yale leads on Mary parallels, yet again, Allen’s leading on Tracy.  Break-up is inevitable in each case, and yet the two men prolong their doomed relationships.  Meanwhile Isaac’s ex-wife is writing a book exposing all the sordid details of their marriage and Yale’s wife sticks it out with him even though she knows of his cheating.

What is so poignant is how comedy and tragedy intertwine.  Isaac’s trademark Allen dialogue is a social crutch, funny until he cannot rely on it to alleviate the situation.  He makes a joking remark about Tracy’s school friends right before she breaks out in tears, shocked that he is choosing to break up with her.  So somehow, as the result of a masterstroke, the Woody Allen prototypical protagonist becomes the star of a devastating romantic drama.  It all all erupts when Isaac confronts Yale, lambasting him for the terrible things he does and for rationalizing them with the familiar ‘I’m only human’ remark.  Even as he makes quips and one-liners, his speech is harsh, thorough, both sadly true and utterly hypocritical.

And so Isaac comes to terms with his own flaws, hypocrisies, and mistakes.  Realizations seem to unfold in his mind as he tries to convince Tracy to return to him.  Though I am far from completing Allen’s oeuvre, I would be surprised if he ever reached the level of subtlety he demonstrates in this final scene.  It is a moment of self-examination, half-hearted persuasion, and a tacit admission of guilt.  The film ends with a beautiful, romantic image of the Manhattan skyline, and as it turns out, the only character to end up with any measure of self-respect is the girl with the capacity for romanticism and idealism.  The opening voice-over narration muses on both the dreamlike allure of the city and its crippling moral decay.  Allen’s characters are morally flawed and yet his is not a misanthropic vision.  There are many reasons this is so, but the one that stands out is that he wholeheartedly adores Manhattan.

Our Hospitality (John G. Blystone and Buster Keaton, 1923); Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)

Finally, I arrive at the world of Buster Keaton, and I find myself smiling unrelentingly.  I began with Our Hospitality, a film that pits the naïve Willie McKay against his family’s rivals, the Canfields.  I was already aware of the titular joke, that the Canfields are unable to fire at Willie while he is a guest in their home.  But it wasn’t until I watched it that I understood what an ingenious play this is on the idea of Southern hospitality, how intrinsically funny it is that the same people who were part of well-mannered families known for their generous behavior were also so devoted to these families that feuds could erupt between two families at any time for little reason other than some vague or arbitrary occurrence that happened long ago.  I thought that this joke would dominate the film, but it’s only part of the narrative, which begins with an extended train sequence surely indicative of Keaton’s fascination with engineering.  The climax with the remarkable waterfall stunts also had me impressed by the editing, how seamlessly we arrive from the Canfield house to a train depot, through the woods and finally at a waterfall.

Ah, but then I saw Sherlock Jr. and felt almost guilty for loving Our Hospitality as much as I did.  Sherlock Jr. left me speechless.  It is a goody bag of stunts, gags, and effects, topped with a story that plays with the very concept of cinema, made when such meta-referential films were rarities.  Keaton not only tackles genre in his romantic contrast between the daily detective work of a dreaming young man in an ordinary town and the fancy, polished worlds of detective films, replete with stolen pearls and slimy murderous deceit, but he also makes light of accepted notions of editing in the tour-de-fource sequence in which the scene changes but Keaton doesn’t follow suit.  The ending makes a similar joke at the expense of implied information within a scene transition, as Keaton, again a bashful young man, uses his romantic screen counterpart as a guide for passionately embracing the girl he so boyishly loves, only for the film to fade to black before revealing the couple as a settled husband and wife, the former with two babies on his lap and the latter knitting.  And even to ignore this peculiar deconstructive genius is to still be left with a plethora of expertly constructed sight gags, a few which still have me scratching my head in bewilderment.

I never knew what to expect from Keaton’s comic persona, which has been famously described as stone-faced.  But he exceeds my expectations, fulfilling the role of silent clown and going further with it in his daring stunt work.  I am currently going to tie him with Tati when it comes to my favorite comic directors.  Each of them has a superb eye for mise-en-scene and takes great joy in constructing things, be they mechanical contraptions or sprawling feats of architecture.  If I had to guess, I would say that had Keaton seen Tati’s Mon Oncle, he would have been quite impressed with the house of tomorrow as Tati presented it in all its modernistic glory.  Though I have only seen City Lights from Chaplin, I will say that he sadly comes up short.  I love his film for its poignancy, but in retrospect, and my view on this may change, his gags seem a little repetitious.