I had a holiday last week, which meant I could catch up on a lot of movies I have been meaning to see that I haven't gotten around to. Some highlights:
Watched Georges Franju's JUDEX. The film is an homage to silent movie innovator Louis Feuillade, the creator of many original and still quite watchable serials about crime. Feuillade's criminals are witty and seductive, and their drive to cause ruin to bourgeois riches and bourgeois families seems to stem from a pure anarchists' drive to topple social norms. Feuillade's JUDEX served to redress the concerns of the very bourgeois that funded the movies, and so Judex himself is a hero comparable to Zorro, The Shadow, or Batman. Rather like Feuillade's Fantomas, who operates an empire of crime, Judex operates an empire of vengeance against criminals.
Franju's film makes Judex himself a magician and a master of disguise. The hiring of a real magician for the part is very inspired, simply because Channing Pollock, the magician playing Judex, is so deliberate and inexpressive. His heroism is rocklike, granite in the face of Edith Scob's graceful gamine and Francine Berge's preternaturally calm villainess. The cinematography has a dreamlike quality to it, but as in EYES WITHOUT A FACE, I don't get the sense that Franju is overly concerned with choreography or placement of characters. The only times in which these things seem relevant are when some surreal setup is created, as in the end of EYES WITHOUT A FACE, when Edith Scob sets the dogs and pigeons free.
My favorite moment in the film is when the clumsy detective is stuck on the curb, waiting for Judex to return (he doesn't know Judex has been captured by his nemesis) from a tower, and a traveling circus passes by. An beautiful acrobat reminding me of Lee Meriwether disembarks and runs to the goony detective. The detective recognizes her as his lost love! She tells him the circusmaster has died and now she is free, presumably at the goonish detective's disposal. Immediately she helps him out by climbing the outside of the tower and freeing Judex. It's a very surreal arrival, magical in its timing and in its off-center emotional payoff. As viewers, we want the foolish detective to be happy; so Franju provides him with a love interest who is also a woman of action, capable of freeing the hero and going on to topple the villain from the rooftop as well.
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Watched Eric Rohmer's THE BAKERY GIRL OF MONCEAU. Very beautiful, and mostly interesting to see Rohmer's producer Barbet Schroeder as a young man playing the lead. He is lanky and, just as in CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING he seems to restrain his movements. An interesting guy, who perhaps should have acted more. I saw him in Chris Doyle's segment of PARIS JE'TAIME, but I think his time as a relevant non-pro actor has passed. . . .
Saw Mizoguchi's WOMEN OF THE NIGHT and CRUCIFIED LOVERS (Chikamatsu Monogatari). CRUCIFIED LOVERS has many Mizoguchi moments of poetic humanism, but it feels quite awkward and slow at times. Some of the payoffs were less felt than they should have been. WOMEN OF THE NIGHT was much more impressive. It has a loose narrative style that moves from setting to setting. Characters appear and disappear from the narrative - principally Kinuyo Tanaka, who in her disappearance makes a startling transition from dutiful war widow to spitting, huffing, hard-case streetwalker. Most startling is when she exclaims that she is getting revenge on Japanese men by infecting them with diseases.
A few shots bear comparison to Seijun Suzuki's GATE OF FLESH and of course the subsequent Hideo Gosha remake. The shots of police rounding up prostitutes and driving away with them look awfully similar. Perhaps all these directors witnessed such events in postwar Tokyo, but it also calls attention to the contrasting tones of the different pieces. In both WOMEN OF THE NIGHT and GATE OF FLESH the prostitutes are fierce and territorial; contemptuous of both their johns and other women moving in on their scene. But Mizoguchi plots out the transformation of "respectable" postwar women turning into streetwalkers, as if illustrating a social thesis. We understand the situations that have brought them to this point. Suzuki's film doesn't emphasize the prostitutes beginnings, but rather focuses on the hothouse atmosphere of the prostitutes territory. The women in GATE OF FLESH rarely reflect on life outside of their work, and Mizoguchi's judgement of the prostitutes - that they are in this position because of hardship and they need to be restored to where they come from - is irrelevant in Suzuki's film. In GATE OF FLESH, things are the way they are. The world is hard and crazy, and these women are right in the thick of it. Worth exploring further.
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On a similar note, watched Jean-Luc Godard's MY LIFE TO LIVE. Great film in which Anna Karina plays a young, modern woman whose money and rent troubles lead to her slipping into prostitution. She approaches this world in a dreamlike way, and there are several scenes in which she drifts through a "love hotel" opening doors and gazing on other "working girls" and their johns as if they were painters tableaus. Godard sections the film into thematic ideas with chapter headings and descriptions of the inner context of each scene. There's a wonderful intertitle which read "Nana wonders if she is happy." Never in the scene are we drawn explicitly to Nana's musing. Therefore, we have to assume that the entire scene bears out this context, and that, indeed, throughout the section Nana's experiences are prompting her to evaluate her relative happiness.
The film ends with Nana getting shot dead on the street by two different pimps (vying for their right to her earnings). Anna Karina falls onto the street, right next to one of the pimp's cars. The pimp drives off. Then the other pimp drives off as well. Both of them look as if they run by right next to Anna's head and hand. The shot is harrowing! Absolutely harrowing! And it is so simply because the risk involved for the actress looks terribly great. She lies right next to these cars, and the actors driving seem to be playing out their own little wild west movie, barely cognizant that she is there. Obviously part of Godard's point, but the risk to Karina in shooting this scene is awe-inspiring.
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Watched Glauber Rocha's ANTONIO DAS MORTES, which is another hyperpoliticized treatise on Brazilian politics. The film's color is garish, and the shootout at the end is quite arresting. There are many musical scenes that are interesting. But the dialectical debates played out throughout the film grow somewhat tedious. This was less noticeable in Rocha's previous two films, BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL and THE EARTH ENTRANCED. Both of those films feel more alive with action and interest, whereas ANTONIO seems more like a protracted communist reworking of a western.. . .
Rewatched an old Shaw Bros film, PURSUIT OF VENGEANCE. Honestly, I slept through the middle of it. But the fights and the very thin setups to the fights were still fun.
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I am now eleven-and-a-half hours into BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ. I picked it up again this week after a hiatus of almost a month. The film came rushing back to me and about 10 minutes into the picture I was completely immersed again, as if no time had passed.I have seen several Fassbinder films prior to this one, but ALEXANDERPLATZ recontextualizes the director's whole filmography for me. I finally get it; the criticism of postwar German economy and society, the criticism of commercialist philosophy, of communist and capitalist dogmas, the use of the buildingsroman story structure and the clever reference to Sirkian melodrama. It all fits into place. I've seen a lot of great movies this year, but ALEXANDERPLATZ beats them all. I will have to write at length about the experience when it's through.
That's all for this week. I also watched MAD DETECTIVE three more times, and will post on it soon.
