The Hospital (1971)

“The Hospital” (1971)

IMDb

the big character

I’ve been having a growing interest in George Scott. He is something of a unique kind within film actors. He never embraced the Method revolution as deeply as so many of the American actors of his generation, but also he is not old-fashioned. His acting, even when he is closer to go over the top is always fluid, and his films, if dated on any respect, always work still today, because of him (at least). He is theatrical in that words, and not anything else, command his performance. His phrasing bends the text and delivers us all the nuances he requires for it. He carries a film.

Here we have his talents summed up to a clever script, and a wonderful use of space, in a cinematic way. What we have is a goofy detective story, mapped into the troubled life of an undesignated detective, mapped into one single well explored set. On top of everything, we have native American mysticism, thrown under the disguise of an interesting screen woman. So this is an accidental police story. Some murders happen, few clues are given. We follow these murders from a clueless point of view which, nevertheless, does not coincide with the point of view of the tormented doctor, who will partially act as a detective, to the point of bending the outcome of the story. So the curious narrative trick here is how the narrators eye is anchored on the space of the hospital, even though the story has to do with how the doctor deals with the facts. We watch the doctor’s version of the world from an point of view external to him, this is interesting.

**spoilers** Than a woman gets into the story, a sexy mystic beast, who deviates us from the back story, only to the point in which we learn she has (unaware) the key to the enigma. And than we have the story of the burnt out doctor, suicidal, hopeless. This 3 threads start as separate lines that we follow, bound together by the action of the doctor. The beauty of the script i show in the end these threads have one single conclusion: the murder is the woman’s father, and the woman is the healer for the doctors depression. So he protects the insane murder and intents to run away with the woman.

Oh, but we have the hospital. Now we know that was the ultimate character, all the time. The doctor understands this, so he can’t leave it. His existence as a character depends on the existence of that hospital, as a space. It’s that space that bends everything that happens inside, as the character of an horror film which you never see even of you know he’s there.

Notice how this is underlined by the protesters. All the time they are outside, wanting to get in, and as the film ends and the story unfolds, it’s their invasion of the hospital that makes us aware of how much we are into that character now. It’s the hospital, all the way.

My opinion: 4/5

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The Artist (2011)

“The Artist” (2011)

IMDb

the smile

We’ve seen things like this before, haven’t we? Films that are not about films, but instead a love letter to other films.

I’m not nearly as fascinated about such incursions as i am for anything really new that comes out. As far as i know, the most fascinating referenced cinema is the one that captures the lessons of great previous films, and extends its notions a little bit. Or break them. You have people, like the Coens or de Palma, who made a career twisting the ideas of people before them. If we talk about silent films, than Guy Maddin is someone who really picked up what we stopped caring about with The Jazz singer, and twisted every notion to create something new. That’s the kind of reference that i’m looking at with passion.

This one enters the Cinema Paradiso drawer: expansive genuine passion for a certain type or moment of cinema history, poured into a vessel of nostalgia. You will understand these films if you understand that nostalgia, not necessarily the films that it addresses. Unashamed sweetness tops these attitude. You decide to play in that world or not. I’ve entered it several times. But i don’t stay there more than a few moments without feeling that i’m bypassing something really important, in other films being made.

That said, this one is a pretty good homage, in that flat sense. Some elements work amazingly well here, and one is even interesting from a cinematic point of view:

the one thing that works incredibly well is the main male actor: Whoever chose him understood his potential, he understood what it took for a silent actor to live on screen, and the director definitely understood his face, every angle of it. He smiles in a way that i’ve seen very few times. That smile carries the film, when he doesn’t smile, we easily enter the depressive mood of the character represented by the absence of its actor’s smile. Actors representing actors is something always interesting. To do it pretty much with a smile alone, makes him worthy of the Oscar. By the way, he is always an actor on the film. When he is acting for the silent films in the film, he has a similarly camera aware attitude as when he is in the real world of the film.

The narrative unfolds around and is finished with films, of course. That’s why our on screen lovers get together making a film, and his love for her is reaffirmed by the scenes of another film they made together. It’s the necessary self-reference, required for films like this to work.

And there is one remarkable scene. The “sound” dream. Our silent character dreams the world gains sound, objects, everything starts to produce sounds, except his own voice. This is remarkable because nothing is explained, everything is in the eye. The mere editing of simple sounds in an other than that silent scene makes us understand the drama of this character on verge of extinction. That was a cinematic moment.

My opinion: 4/5

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Escape from New York (1981)

“Escape from New York” (1981)

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postmodern blinks

Carpenter has a very special talent to give his films a mood, an environment, the taste of a specific world. That mood is almost always associated to a very strong sense of place. Many of his films are physically located within some recognizable area, related or not to our real world and if so, always twisted in some cinematic (visual) way.

I believe he always starts the conception of each film with this idea of place and mood. Than he builds a story that allows him to explore that mood, usually something trivial and unimportant, existing to support his cinematic vision.

Here we have it. Manhattan, one of the most recognizable places in film world. Twisted to become an assumed apocalyptic world. (the fact that Plissken enters it by plane, landing on top of the WTC is an unintentional irony, 20 years before the attacks).

He uses Kurt Russell, someone who can be trusted to the kind of role he has: physically self- aware, stylish, deliberately empty. He is a nice guy, because he plays this parts with a second layer of self-reference, a blink to the audiences, always: he’s playing a role which he knows can’t be taken serious, and we get that, we know we are watching a guy acting a role while he makes fun of it. This something Bruce Willis or George Clooney are also capable of doing. It’s fun that 25 years later Russell would participate in a Tarantino film that references with a similar sense of irony these films already not serious, and the ones before this one. Russell participated in the 2 layers of irony. That’s good.

But Van Cleef is even better. He was a supporting actor in first generation westerns. He lived to become a main actor in 2 of Leone’s ironic genius westerns. And here he still has the opportunity to enter a new stage of film irony, playing a character who manipulates and observes this western of a solitary hero fighting low moral for self-benefit. 3 layers in film world, he was in them 3. That’s remarkable.

After this, Carpenter gives us all sorts of visual treats, to enrich the bizarre feel of this world. This is a worthy experience, a kind of Blade Runner without anything serious to say. It doesn’t change you, but it’s worth the ride.

My opinion: 4/5

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The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

“The Hitch-Hiker” (1953)

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opened eye

Road trip films are a very powerful genre because they convey a deep sense of oppositions merged to create a vision of unity. This something that, apart from this sub-genre, maybe only western can create so aptly, but with western we are always attached to the meaning of the films: western film is viscerally linked to a certain American vision of values, moral and ethics, and its Italian connection, to cinema itself, meta-narrative.

But the road-trip is free from so many conventions. They come in all shapes and sizes. So you can produce a road-trip movie in anyway, without being forced to obey the laws of a genre, because in the end, it’s not one.

So we have the Bonnie and Clyde, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, My blueberry nights. Each a very shiny light in its own cinematic galaxy. Each creates its own rules.

But what works all the time as a key element in these films, and what it shares with western, is how it invites the filmmaker to shoot wilderness, wide spaces, infinite roads, to portrait solitude, inner voyages, personal dramas. That’s the one thing that makes the film live or die.

This one lives. I have a growing admiration for Ida Lupino. A woman in the job mostly done by men. Giving us new versions of masculine genres. Feminine intimate calculation placed against (and over) men’s intuitions and symbols. This is a film with no relevant female characters. She delivers, I think, a kind of deeper version of this genre, specially compared with the generality of films done in these days, when the medium was not so developed as to allow emotion to be shown from such an inside point of view.

So here we have a film of tension, instead of violence. The promise of the next thing that will happen is always superior to the perspective of actually seeing that. And that’s what builds the shape of the film: the next thing. Talman gives us a very fair version for his typical character, more remarkable if we think it was still given when Brando hadn’t broken the rules for cinema acting. And naturally, a film like this necessarily depends in important parts on the performance of the actors.

So this is a film of sketched but unfulfilled actions, tension as opposed to realizations. The promise of the next landscape, the next town always mirrors the evaluation of the situation by each of the 3 characters. That’s why our bad guy keeps one eye always apparently opened, even when asleep.

My opinion: 3/5

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Murder, My Sweet (1944)

“Murder, My Sweet” (1944)

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Detective, the epicenter

Chandler is a tricky guy, because he always builds his stories in a deceiving way. He creates a simple thread, which at first you can very easily follow. Something about looking for some girl missing, or some old coin, or find some blackmailer. This we start doing always with the detective, usually Marlowe, as our surrogate. We know what he knows, from the facts that get to him, to his thoughts – easily transpired in the books, but many times tawdry represented in films, as off voice. But every time, the unfolding of the initially simple investigation becomes filled with contradictory events, an incredible amount of new characters, and endless possibilities for explanation of the story. We get lost. So does Marlowe. And that’s the point. We find ourselves suddenly pushed around, by everybody, all our mental mechanisms of understanding the story betrayed at every moment. We fall into the black hole, like Marlowe when he gets hit in the head. As if we experienced the hallucinogenic effect of the drugs that take Marlowe’s notion of time and space away.

This is truly powerful writing, when you think of the concept. Not great literature in the specific qualities of literature as art, but very good narrative concept. These detective stories are never about exactly how everything happen. In the end the explanation is so complicated that it becomes impossible to make credible, or so simple that it lacks interest. This is no Agatha Christie, where the intellectual mechanics of the story is what drives you to go with it. Here what matters is the world in which the story takes place, the rules of the universe where the characters live. These are literary characters, living in a literary world of their own, with very specific rules.

When you bring this powerful concepts, and mix them with film, than you have something really worthy. That’s what happened when filmmakers working in Hollywood, supported by visual ideas developed in Germany 10 years before, started to use this otherwise minor literature. In 1941 we had the Maltese Falcon, the first truly developed noir film, in this narrative sense. This means that when we get to this film, 3 years later, the genre is still developing, but already totally in inscribed in the mind of the viewer.

This film understands what this is all about. It is competent in how it is able to cast us into the chaos of an unexplainable world. Marlowe is a pawn, from the beginning, when he finds Moose inside his office without being able to put him out or refuse his request. Actually I find it interesting how this Marlowe is much more vulnerable to the pushing around by every character than Bogart’s typical Marlowe. I suppose without Bogart on the boat, the writers were able to take liberties with the character. What we have here is not the character of Chandler’s books, but it’s interesting to see Marlowe as a poor manipulated fellow, permanently on the edge.

The problem is actually the actor. It is very rare for me to be put off by a poor performance, but in a film like this, with the central role of the detective as our surrogate in the narrative, if the actor fails so deeply as Powell failed here, the film is seriously damaged. Bogart was always limited as an actor, but at least he had enough self-awareness to project his own unique character and carry the film with it. Not Powell, all those facial gimmicks, denounced expressions. The director doesn’t help, the editing is not fair for the actors (specially the men), but that’s no excuse for all the distracting elements of Powell’s performance. And Anne Shirley shines much more brightly than Claire Trevor. Hard to believe the man would ignore the first one to become bewitched by the other one.

My opinion: 3/5

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Pickup on South Street (1953)

“Pickup on South Street” (1953)

IMDb

floating narrative

This is not groundbreaking and it will not change you in any fundamental way. But it is deeply noir, and that is something always worth seeing.

We have a story centered on a character who is, among every character, the one who knows less about what’s going on. He is the only one totally outside the juicy plot he gets sucked into, and yet the only one that everybody (police and communists) believe to be in control of everything. Everything happens to him, he fights to control the events, but ends up being swept by them.

Notice this: he literally gets into the story by randomly picking a girls’ pocket, and steeling some very important film. He doesn’t have a clue about the importance and value of what he has, and acts accordingly. In the meanwhile he tries to outplay both the police and the communists, using the girl as his arrow girl, as a shield. He ends up loosing control both of the story (but not quite), as he falls in love with the girl. So here we have a cute sense of chaos in the story, agitated narrative where we find ourselves lost, as much as our surrogate detective, in this case the pickpocket.

Fuller has a great sense of pace and mood, and this film has a very special extra thing: the floating shack where many of the fundamental twists in the narrative happen. That is one great set that I will have with me for a long time. As an explored space it is good enough, in studio context. As a metaphor for the unstable mood of the whole narrative it works fine. In the end, this space becomes the odd center of the bizarre noir world of the film, and to root a film so strongly in a place is something I always appreciate.

My opinion: 4/5

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Carnage (2011)

“Carnage” (2011)

IMDb

group Repulsion

This film is very aligned to what Polansky has done throughout his career. Here we find most of the superficial elements that we know, and for which we love his work.

The space containment. Polansky is one of the absolute masters of environment exploration, to make a film inside one single space, multiplying the possibilities for our usage of that space, and mashing it into the narrative, until the moment It becomes narrative. He has a perfect sense of framing, camera movement, and shot timing. The problem in this film is that the banality of the environment, obviously required to be the home of what is supposed to be an ordinary couple, just isn’t interesting enough to make the skills of the master be superlative.

There is the sense of absurdity in the original material that totally mirrors Roman’s own twisted sense of humor, that kind of bizarre weirdness we found in Vampire Killers, or the Tenant. *minor spoilers* Here we actually have something interesting, because we start watching one film, and end up watching another. The premise is one of simple drama, personal relations, the apparent discussion about education, child violence, etc. But than it takes weird turns, and we enter a world of total absurdity, specially from the moment of Winslet’s throw-up. It’s as if Polansky was diluted into the whisky the characters share, and they become increasingly possessed by his spirit. We digress from one film, of a relatively normal reality, to another one, fabricated in Roman’s incredible cinematic eye, many years ago, which now has this quite different approach.

All the actors collaborate positively in the ride. All four are at least competent. Waltz surprises, he has a remarkable sense of timing in lines, and posture. Jodie and Kate are fine actresses, among the best, I wish we could have more of Jodie in interesting projects.

Polansky now films in a more relaxed manner. It’s as if he was officially retired and now began to film for himself, as if he was having dinner with some friends. I hope we can have at least a few more of this relaxed walks. He never fails us. This is another fine chapter of his artistic life.

My opinion: 4/5

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The Big Knife (1955)

“The Big Knife” (1955)

IMDb

breathing space

By coincidence, I saw Carnage, the new Polansky, shortly after this one. Polansky is a master of small spaces, and moving inside them, and making them part of the dramatic fabric of the film. Space as drama, as metaphor, that’s one of the things that made me want to watch films seriously, one of the concepts dearer to me. Robert Aldrich is also a spatial man, a cinematic architect, who also considers and bends the space to take from it wherever he is making out of the material he is shooting. That’s specially well done in Kiss me Deadly, a must-see on many levels, but also here in this smaller film. Here we have filmed theater, a one set film. The first problem is that the set is a little bit studio like, and thus is more contrived, giving Aldrich less possibilities for breaking the camera angles and camera moves.

Shooting studio was norm, and had advantages, light control, etc, but the downfall proves bad for the kind of visual work that Aldrich liked to try. Well, it’s a little bit like Palance’s character, trapped inside his golden cage, living profitably at the expense of artistic compromise.

But this film is still a worthy experience. The text helps. The inner tensions of Charles Castle, mapped into Jack Palance’s own Method approach to acting. All that wrapped about the brilliant vision of Aldrich, supported by the also brilliant Laszlo, a fine cinematographer, we have such great films produced by his camera. This is a one space film, but also a one-man show. It’s all about how the environment mirrors how Palance reacts to the world. In that sense this is a kind of noir, in how he only reacts to the adversities, a pawn in an odd world, where he is the odd center. But this is not noir in the wider sense, in the definition that Ted applies to it, which i embrace. Ida Lupino was a clever artist, and she knows enough to support Palance’s act. She really helps. We tolerate Steiger’s excesses because his character is not too much exposed, but he does go over the top.

Anyway, stick to the camera, how it reacts to Palance. The characters movements, what’s usually defined as mise-en-scène, is remarkable in how it is reflected always in how the camera moves. This is something that started with Hitchcock’s Rope. Sidney Lumet toped this game with his Angry Men, but this is a sensible use of the camera in that respect.

My opinion: 3/5, a very pleasant minor work of a very fine director.

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Notorious (1946)

“Notorious” (1946)

IMDb

pre-rope

Hitchcock is one of the most important directors ever, someone who changed film rules, film codes, who introduced a huge number of new terms to film grammar.

He mastered and built new things around cinematic uses for camera movement, framing, and he bent narrative in marvelous brilliant ways. His top achievements can and must be studied by us today, they were the milestone for much of what followed, and in narrative terms, some things that he has done are still unsurpassed.

But, even if today, i look at really old Hitchcock films and detect in them bits and pieces of what his intuition might be getting at, I really believe that the 50′s were the the decade when he developed all the things for which i love him today, and believe him to be one of the masters. With Rope comes the first time in which he really builds something totally new, in that case bending camera movement, creating a cinematic eye, bright and new. Dial M… Rear Window, Vertigo, even Psycho. All those are works which you have to see.

But before Rope, what we have are hints. In this film, there are a few bits of framing and camera movement which are really cleverly and conceived. The coffee cup framed while a dialogue is going on. The crane shot that begins opened to the house lobby space, and closes on Bergman’s hand, holding the key. Those are really nice, and do something very hitchcockian: a scene where apparently nothing relevant happens (a trifle dialog, the simple arrival of guests), but through the camera movement and framing, a new meaning is given to a detail of the scene. Purely visual, few people worked as a purely visual mind as well as H..

But the grand picture, here and in nearly every film before Rope, is just not that great. As noir, this fails, because the world of this film is explained all the way, it’s a simple spy story, which we follow based on the tension of the “is she gonna get caught?” scenes. Noir would require a bizarre unexplained world, something about us not knowing what’s happening. This is a “mcguffin” type of construction, that stuff about the wine bottles, which are only good to make us want to follow. And Hitchcock always mastered that device, but his best results come when he uses that distraction to deliver us an incredible visual presentation for it. Not here.

We do have Grant and Bergman, a hot couple back than. They do deliver their performance well enough. They do exhale some cinematic magic. And Ingrid was a real woman, and a real actress. But this film is mostly based upon style. And style, we know, fades in no time. So this film gives us not much today, because the master hadn’t yet reached the perfection of his later cinematic manipulations of our visual minds. A few times before Rope he was close to achieve that. But here, he’s just trying out a few solutions, but this film is a pure exercise in style, a style that is no longer the one we look for today.

But Ingrid Bergman was some kind of a woman.

My opinion: 2/5

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Ukradená vzducholod (1967)

“Ukradená vzducholod” (1967)

IMDb

fly away

There’s something interesting about Czech animation of the 60′. There was talent, and an interesting will to explore, try new things. Plus, the Czechs were probably the most actively discontent people of the soviet satellite states. When this film came out, the Prague spring was about to happen, the country was boiling with tension and will to change.

Creative minds usually boil at higher temperatures under such contexts. So, I assume that some metaphor of search of freedom might be made of this story. Flying away, escaping land, searching for places where one can try the unthinkable back home. Intellectuals not playing along the regimes on the other side of the curtain were having tough times. This would be a suitable metaphor, in the line of what Svankmajer was doing.

Also, the choosing of Jules Verne, so loved by this director, is itself a comment on the kind of thing he was trying to pull off. The reason why we love Verne is the inventiveness of the science fictions he proposes. He didn’t write sci-fi as Philip Dick, where the scientific otherworldliness is the framework for the exposure of a cleverly conceived deep exploration of things close to us, in our “real” world. Instead, with Vernes it’s really about the world, in physical terms, the verisimilitude of the scientific proposal, to live in that world, as it is defined by the writer. He gives us the seduction of hipper-realism, the sensation that what we’re reading might be possible (indeed much of it is right now being done), wrapped around the fascination of a fantasy parallel world. On top of everything, experimenting is what drives this kind of creators.

The trouble with this film is that the codes are outdated. I don’t connect to the visual presentation of this film. This world sounds flat and not fascinating today. There is visual sensitivity here, in how animation and real action are mixed, how the yellow tone is used to unite the whole bits. A lot of effort was put into it, and it may have worked in its day. But not now. It’s a scream for freedom, and we feel it even today, As such, it’s good. As a film, i really think that there are other adventures more worthy of being lived, other journeys for useful to be taken.

My opinion: 1/5

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