Two Movies About Magicians

The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet, 2010)

This is Sylvain Chomet’s animated version of the lost Jacques Tati film, based on a script by Tati himself; Chomet is known for the awesome animated film The Triplets of Belleville, while Tati is the creator of classic French slapstick comedies Mon Oncle and Playtime. The latter two are part of a series starring Tati as Monsieur Hulot, a bumbling but good-natured man who stumbles into odd and often satiric situations. Instead of making another Hulot film, Chomet casts Tati (here "Tatischeff") as a bumbling but good-natured magician who travels around looking for work. Along the way he adopts and abandons a young girl (representing Tati's real-life abandonment of his daughter). The image here is of Director-as-Magician, one whose work is not appreciated by the modern crowd, and whose transient life cannot sustain typical relationships. Chomet has made a sentimental film, pouring on the nostalgia for an old Europe and an old art-form: magic, slapstick, animation, fatherhood, fill-in-the-blank. Tati's cinema was equally nostalgic, but more biting and less tidy. The Illusionist reinforces the greatness of Tati by its inability to match his satiric vision; instead it is more openly sincere and obviously gorgeous.

The Magician (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)

Another example of Director-as-Magician, the Swedish great Ingmar Bergman's autobiographical mood-piece The Magician has many characters, all of whom gain our sympathy to some measure. It is simple enough to read the film from the magician’s point of view, who is here a mute man played by Max von Sydow, but Bergman gives strong, sympathetic insights into the antagonistic characters as well. The plot follows the interactions between the magician's troupe and the government officials who kidnap them and force them to perform their routine, under the pretense of scrutinizing its acceptability for the public. These officials are obviously and sometimes comically villainous. At one moment they seem cruel, yet at another they appear to be players in a much more difficult play. The backstage drama involving the servants is (in contrast) sexually awake and sometimes light-hearted, giving the film an upstairs-downstairs dichotomy to accompany its spoken themes of scientific realism vs. faith in fantasy. As rich as any Bergman film, and one of many precursors to Fanny and Alexander.

Three Media Satires

In the hopes of keeping tabs on what I'm watching, and writing short capsule reviews on the reg, I'm keeping a movie journal here at Maximum Continuity. In the week or two that I've avoided blogging, I watched many movies; one film in particular ("No") I have watched many times, because I am still projecting it at the CCA Cinematheque in Santa Fe. Of all the downsides of projection, one is that a movie repeats itself whether you desire it or not. I believe this lack of control is what has sped up my consumption of other, non-work related films, and that is what the last two entries, Herostratus and Sweet Smell of Success, represent. 

Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

An iconic 50s noir. Tony Curtis stars as Sidney Falco, publicity agent, who is a snake and a rat and damn good at it. Burt Lancaster is a highly influential columnist and tv show host who uses people like Curtis to gather gossip and spread malice around NYC. Much is made of Lancaster's political influence and nationalist identity, a topic recurring in all three films in this journal. He makes everyone around him cower. The other top-level performance (among many) is Tony Curtis playing two-faced but somehow self-aware as he runs in and out of nightclubs and jazz joints. He plays against type in a way similar to Andy Griffith's role in A Face in the Crowd. Like in that film, very few characters come off looking good in this flick - everyone is mean and out to hurt each other, and the only characters who aren’t vile get destroyed. Sharp dialogue manages to maintain a dark tone while being funny, even as the film teeters towards hopelessness.

Herostratus (Don Levy, 1967)

Helen Mirren laying it on thick as an over-sexualized glove salesperson

British experimental feature about a young nihilist who asks an ad exec to advertise his suicide. An early scene where the main character thrashes his apartment because his neighbor asks him to turn down his music is one of the first indications of the film's slow descent into the same anarchy and nihilism that the main character preaches. Long and numbingly absurd scenes of dialogue between the nihilist and the ad executives are interspersed with strange montages of fashion models, Allen Ginsberg, Hitler, cow-butchering, and coarse animation. Advertisements in particular are skewered and butchered. (Helen Mirren is in this movie for about 4 minutes, selling orange rubber gloves, pictured above) A sharply worded letter from 1960s Britain, and from the viewpoint of the lowest figures in society. Thanks to the BFI for releasing this strange film on Blu-ray.

No (Pablo Larrain, 2012)

Docu-drama-comedy with re-enactments of Chile’s 1988 referendum on the dictator Pinochet, interspersed with real footage of the tv commercial campaign that helped the “no” side win. Hero Gael Garcia Bernal attempts to use new media tactics in a political realm; he complains about the negativity of the Left's anti-dictatorship propaganda, and instead attempts to sell democracy as if it were a nice and fun product, like Soda. The commercial segments that bookend the film provide its strangest delight, that of watching propaganda age. The jingle, Chile, la Alegria ya viene, is worth a look; good-natured propaganda of the most wholesome kind. This stands in stark and humorous contrast to the "Si!" counter-advertisements, which have all the pomp and pageantry of a dying regime. The Si moments reminded me of the footage in Chris Marker's Grin Without a Cat of communism's media evolution (or lack thereof). The No moments, in contrast, reminded me of Obama’s 2008 campaign, which almost looks like a copy of this very clever but highly manipulative marketing plan: both campaigns associated the people's political choice with a personal and lifestyle revolution; both de-emphasized specific polices in favor of broader messaging (here the Rainbow of political diversity, which will presumably result in "la Alegria."). But aside from the politics, which are sly, and the subtle humor, this is one of the most gorgeous films shot on video I've ever seen. Almost entirely handheld, the sun often flares right into the camera, resulting in richly colored character silhouettes.

Goodbye Roger Ebert

Yesterday I randomly opened my RSS feed reader and, doing what I normally do, read the posts from my favorite bloggers, organized by category. At the very top of the Movies category sits one giant name: Roger Ebert. He died today. But yesterday he was alive, and he posted another of his many updates about his health, his work, and his appreciation of life. He told us that his cancer had returned, and that his life would be changing again (this guy has been through so much in the past five years, how did he find the strength and resolve to keep soldiering on?). This guy changed my life, plain and simple, from the first day I knew he existed. Siskel and Ebert were household names when I was growing up, and every Sunday I dashed for the TV listings to find out when his syndicated program would play (syndication causing his show to have no consistent schedule). I loved watching these two guys argue about movies, previewing what films were coming up and having strong, definitive opinions about them. When Gene Siskel died, I remember the sadness and weird absence: what does a critic do for a person's life, in the end? The answer is: a lot. For a lot of people, Roger Ebert's name doesn't inspire confidence. Disagreeing with a movie critic is proof that they're always wrong, or something - but I disagreed with Ebert all the time, and loved every minute of it. His argumentative show proved that this was not only allowed, but required: movies were about things, and they needed to be considered on their own merits, as well as challenged. If two people saw things differently, all the better. This is why Ebert's latest love, blogging, has been a way to submerge himself (and all of us) in the art of "talking about the movies." You can't do that alone. Roger Ebert was never shy about his opinions. He was a reviewer who made sure audiences were kept up to date but also pushed to their limits: why don't we go see more foreign language films? Why do we let the MPAA censor our movies? What's wrong with silent film, or black and white? Movies were Ebert's life force - he could absorb so many of them and then turn right around and tell us his thoughts. These thoughts were never inconsequential. Not being a shy guy, he would also speak his mind on politics and religion, and I always appreciated that the movies, of all things, pushed his mind to consider high ideals and tough subject matter. In particular I loved Ebert's Great Movies series. Here he recommended for me all the movies that would fill in the gaps in my film history timeline, and expose me to transcendent and totally unknown aesthetic experience. I read a beautiful article by Ebert (I believe it was called "Awake in the Dark," also the name of one of his books) about what movies have meant to him, and he mentioned the personal movie theater in his house. He said he would watch something every Sunday, and to him this was a form of church. Movies have been a temple for me as well, a place where thoughts and feelings go to wrestle with each other. Ebert would be one of the first to say that movies have enriched his life; his love for movies has enriched mine. I am sad to say goodbye to one of the most potent voices on art that I've ever heard.

Love, Death, and Time: Michael Haneke's Amour

typical Portland apartment

I have a not-so-quick and dirty analysis of the movie Amour, which I have had the privilege of projecting at my work (and thus have seen many many times). It is directed by Michael Haneke, whose other great films include Funny Games, Code Unknown, Time of the Wolf, Cache, and The White Ribbon.
Amour is about an old married couple, Anne and Georges, played by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Anne suffers a stroke and begins to die, leaving Georges to play nurse and attempt to cope. (They have a daughter, Eva, who drops by at regular intervals to witness her mother’s disintegration, played by Isabelle Huppert.) Amour is easily Haneke’s most humane film, and showcases his philosophy of life without distracting us with things that are foreign to our experience, like kidnapping or apocalypse. That said, although love and death are common to the human experience, they're concepts too large to be summarized lightly; the film's slow, methodical pacing can make it quite hard to get through, but it's 130 minute running time represents only a fraction of what the real experience of watching someone die is like. This disconnect between the film's sense of time and the reality of a slow-death is part of Haneke’s game, as he dares the audience to sit and comfortably watch what would be grueling and unbearable in real-life. Call it reverse escapism.

My friend Zach remarked to me that among Haneke's films, Amour is most like his infamous Funny Games. I think this is apt: both dare the viewer to keep watching as they slowly descend into darkness, to experience how difficult and jarring the experience will become. Funny Games is a movie about a family kidnapped in their own home by handsome nihilists, and there Haneke slowly ramps up the violent content, challenging the audience to look away. That film made me squirm in my seat. Amour does the same thing, but replaces violence with solemnity and claustrophobia. For most of the movie there are only two characters, and other than a scene in the very beginning they never leave their apartment.

As Anne’s body fails and her mind goes, Haneke demands we observe with rigorous attention, but this is difficult: simple boredom sets in, and the story threatens to unravel into nothingness. I would guess that it is not “interesting” to watch a person die, any more than it is interesting to watch them decompose. Many things may happen during either process that are of interest, but these will not happen in the space of two hours, not in a way that creates a narrative. In this way Haneke pretends that he is able to deliver something as massive as death in a two hour experience, when he really can’t. I imagine watching a loved one die of old age would be a long and drawn out experience, and some of the scenes in the movie are drawn out to such length that we lose the point, grasping to understand why Haneke is showing them to us. Haneke is presenting death as disintegration: as Anne disappears before us, so does the narrative of the film. That Anne and Georges' daughter, Eva, insistently and regularly appears to process her mother's death (to Georges' annoyance) helps demonstrate the distance between the "real life" outside the apartment and the terrifying void forming inside it.

All of Haneke's films to my knowledge center around explosive human outbursts in the midst of repression; these jolts temporarily interrupt his seemingly detached formal rigor. This mix of repression and explosion is present in Amour in a few ways, especially in two moments at the end. The first is a scene where George slaps Anne in the face for not drinking water. This is one of the most cringe-inducing scenes I’ve seen in a movie. Yet it disconnects us from the claustrophobia of Anne dying and refocuses our attention on the characters as characters, if only for a moment This is a strange tactic, and something I don’t fully understand about the film yet. Haneke chooses to follow this scene with a montage of the paintings hanging on their apartment walls. It is a brief, silent, and hopeless moment of temporary tranquility. (I connect this satiric/desperate use of art with Haneke's refusal to let any piece of music finish after it starts; there are three separate scenes of people turning music off)

there are spoilers about the ending below

Equally disturbing is the scene where Georges decides to end Anne’s life by smothering her with a pillow. I can’t comment on how “loving” this action is in the context of the film, but in the terms of director and audience, it’s about the most loving thing Haneke could have done for us. It is his “fuck this” moment (a recurring thought in Haneke's work, probably connected to his explosive outbursts), abruptly ending Anne’s suffering so that Georges (and the audience) can stop suffering too. If we can balance Georges’ decision to end Anne’s life with Haneke’s decision to resurrect her for the ending, we can see two powerful moments of fantasy, both of them relieving the audience from the task of watching the film with eyes wide open. These are the most cinematic, or “movie-like” moments in an otherwise forcefully solemn experience, and they are like breathing fresh air, even if they are ultimately false. I sense here an admission on Haneke’s part that there is something unknowable about the link between death and love, and only movie fantasy can get us over the bridge to the end of the story.

I want to end with another comparison to Funny Games: while that film was almost mad at you for watching it, because you had a choice to get up and say to yourself “fuck this, why am I watching this,” Amour is sad for you, that you will have to watch death happen ever so slowly if you are to love another person deeply. And that’s part of Haneke’s dare: will you watch?


Things I didn't talk about:
-performances of all three leads (all excellent)
-birds

-jennifer lawrence
-what a total hipster Jean-Louis Trintignant is