Written on the wind (1956)

Of course I've heard about Douglas Sirk. Most critics talk about his films as having not only kitsch value, but they are said to represent an unusual form of subversive critique of the American lifestyle. Watching Written on the wind, I can only agree and join the voices of praise. Sirk is funny. Sirk is witty. Sirk is cheeeesy. The film contains more than enough of veiled sexual imagery and exaggerated artifice. In one of the leading roles, we see an excellent Rock Hudson. He plays to poor kid who hangs out with the son of an oil millionaire. While his best friend is a carefree playboy, Hudson plays the man set on becoming the next big name in oil business. But of course this is not what the film is about. What we have here are several messy love triangles, the heads and tails of which we cannot always be certain. There are ... many undercurrents. These romantic ailments are set in a world of oil derricks, popular bars and huge mansions. I hope I will watch many more Sirk movies soon.

Silent running (1971)

Silent Running is a hippie version of 2001: A space odyssey, a prequel to Stars Wars and well, A VERY BAD MOVIE. If this were a parody of the hippie movement, I would have some mercy. But I suspect it isn't. But this film undoubtedly has some entertainment value because of the retrofuturistic technology and the embarrassing scenes of nursing an ailing robot. If there was an award for the most awkward use of music in any film of the history of sound film, the award would go to this film. Congratulations.

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Truffaut's classic sci-fi film Fahrenheit 451 is, as we all know, set in an eerie fascist country where books are prohibited and where firemen patrol people's houses in search for hidden books. The film's dingy futurist look is splendid. The images are humorous and chilling at the same time (I didn't expect the film to be funny but I suspect this is mostly due to reasons unintended by Truffaut). As an intellectual effort, I'm less convinced. It's a silly little film, but a nice-looking one.

The Temptation of St Tony (2009)

I'm not familiar with the character of St Anthony. This might or might not have limited my understanding of The Temptation of St Tony, a surreal journey into the heart of darkness directed by Estonian Öunpuu (who has featured in this blog before). Yes, this is the story about temptation, but in a very twisted way (is it the good that tempts the evil?). Öunpuu knows how to use the medium, that is for sure. Even though the first scenes left me with an impression of exaggered darkness, the last hour of the film, with its abundance of warped images, was more appealing to me. Tony is a middle manager. His boss tells him that he has to fire some people. He submits. His girlfriend cheats on him. He accepts this, too. The character of Tony is a walking void. He is not evil in the same sense as most of the other character. He simply doesn't seem to act in the situation he is in. When he acts, his entire being is awkward. It is as if he never knows what he is saying and how he should say things. This is the most concrete part of the film. Then I have said nothing about a quasi-fascist club, munching on a corpse and skating in what seems to be the world of the dead.

As a film about raw capitalism, this is a film that focuses on the life of the ambiguity of figures and corporeality. In one scene, we see a "sophisticated" dinner party. Suddenly, the chat stops. A haggard man stands outside the enormous window. It is as if the room stops breathing. The man doesn't move. Nobody reacts. Tony is the only one to do something. He seems to assume that the man is an alcoholic, so he offers his bottle of wine. The man takes it, pours out the content, and puts it in the plastic bag in which we see other empty bottles.

If you are interested in this movie, expect the style to be more interesting than the content. This is a film about the visual. Even though many scenes are beguiling, everything does not work on all levels. The reason why I was not fully convinced by the film's aesthetic language is that it overstates it's references; you see Andersson here (an almost tender scene about Tony's confrontation with fence-makers, "You say we are not real??"), Tarkovsky (Stalker's dog!) there, and wait, here we have an ode to Béla Tarr (the drab, yet evocative, surroundings). And without David Lynch, some scenes would not be what they are now (the scene at the club echoes Fire Walk With Me).

But yet, somehow, this is a mesmerizing film.

Basquiat (1996)

Films about artists tend to be pretentious and dull. Even though Basquiat doesn't belong to the worst category of the mentioned type of films, it's not a masterpiece either. What disappointed me about the film is it's recycling of almost every theme that we expect from a film about an artists. The artist has a troubled relationship with his girl. The artists turns out to be a genius, sometimes a misunderstood genius. The artist has a conflictual attitude towards the conventional world of artists and art dealers. However, there's a few unexpected elements here that made me sit through the entire film. Unlike most films about art, this film (for obvious reasons) discusses the widespread racism in art circles. What this shows us is that as soon as art starts to be about the artist or the role of an artist, we are already situated in yawn city. I'm not sure this point is something the director (Schnabel) would acknowledge, but the film is clear enough.

And it is hard NOT to like any performance by Dennis Hopper.

Bad day at black rock (1955)

I'm not sure HOW Bad day at black rock slipped through the fingers of the censors, but apparently, it did. Or maybe I am just over-interpreting it, but the story seems to be quite politically controversial from the point of view of post-WW2 50's in the US. I know the film is about a thousand other things, but one dimension here seems to be the hatered agains Japanese people during and after the war, even those Japanese people living in the US (as you remember, internment camps were erected). But what do I know: perhaps this was discussed during the fifties? Some have read the film as an allegory for contemporary Hollywood blacklistings (not far-fetched).

The story in the film: a man arrives by train in a shabby-looking town in the middle of the desert. Right from the start, he is treated with hostility by the locals, ranch-owners, thugs, hotel-owners - all with a very masculine demeanour. They suspect he is in the business of poking his nose into local affairs. It turns out that the man wants to contact a certain Japanese farmer. And here the trouble begins.

The story of the film is told with due economy. Some scenes get a bit heavy on words in the sense that the film becomes too stagey. But most of the time, the actors manage to create just the right atmosphere of antagonism and a secret that is not to be revealed. The downside of the film is that it is badly structured, so that some things are obvious at the wrong time, and that, for this reason, a necessary level of suspense fails to develop.

The Match Factory Girl (1990)

Aki Kaurismäki's films consist mostly of silences (he has also made a silent film). For the first 20 minutes of The Match Factory Girl, we hear no spoken words, but other sounds unravel the life-world of Iiris, a young girl who lives with her parents. We hear the rumbling sounds in the factory she works in. Snippets of news are presented (it's 1989 and the world is in turmoil). The first word we hear by a character, in this case Iiris, is, if I remember correctly, "a beer". These drawn-out silences are heavy with sadness, but Kaurismäki is also evoking proletarian gloom from a humorous point of view.

OK, so the story here is flooding with dead-pan humour and tongue-in-cheek miserabilism. Iiris has a lousy job. Iiris' parents are oppressive. When Iiris meets a man, he tells her, after one night together, that he has no intentions whatsoever of initiating a relationship. But Iiris is pregnant. He is not interested in having a child. An appointment at the doctor's. Iiris rests in a hospital bed. Her dad enters the room, utters a sentence of dour and insulting words, and equally dismissively, places an apple on the table next to her bed.

It's easy to describe the film: it's a blunt, dark, humorous fairytale. All scenes are extremely austere, in terms of dialogue, camera angle, composition - even set design.  One person at an internet discussion board called this film "a Finnish Jeanne Dielman". To me, that is a very apt, yet quite surprising comparison. Akerman's and Kaurismäki's vision of urban drabness have many similarities, and their sense for meticiously composing every frame can be seen as related as well. Or maybe because these two belong among my favorite movies. Unlike Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, diegetic music plays a big role in Kaurismäki's work. There is tango, rock n roll schmaltz. The scene in which Iiris, whose parents threw her out, sits in her brother's bachelor's pad, gazing at a pool table and listening to the jukebox (!) is simply heartbreaking. And FYI: The world can't have enough of Olavi Virta.

Un dimanche à la campagne (1984)

A lazy day in the country side. An artist expects his son's family to come and visit him and his housekeeper. They do come. The sons' kids run around. The parents dutifully scold them for misbehaving. The artist languidly chats with his son and his son's wife about ordinary things. While most of the grown-ups are asleep, the artist's daugther arrive in a fancy automobile (this is the 1910s). Her arrival puts a sudden end to the tranquility we've seen so far. The daughter is admired by everybody. Will she stay for dinner?

This sounds like a meagre plot. It's not. Or: the plot is not so important. Nothing out of the ordinary happens in the movie, the story of which spans a few short hours. A family is spending leisurly time together. Most things have an air of rituals that have existed a long time, comments that are uttered against a background we are not completely aware of. On some level, they seem to be a happy family (even though this is put in a somewhat new light as the daughter arrives from Paris, a favorite child of the father). This is not the type of movie that hints at dark secrets or never-ending neurotic preoccupations. Yes, there is friction, but it is not the kind of friction that threatens the possibility of communication. What Bernard Tavernier tells us about is rather an unspoken sense of disappointment or an equally unspoken feeling of having disappointed somebody else.

One could say that this film is just as idle as its lazy surroundings. Proust could have written the script. In one eerie scene, we see the family having dinner. Need I say that nothing spectacular happens (they praise the food, one kid brags about having experienced the state of drunkenness) The strange thing is that the picture fades out to a black screen quite a few times so that we expect a new scene to begin. It doesn't. The dinner scene goes on and on, and just as in some moments in Proust's book, we gain a sense of time having freezed. This is the eternity that everyday life sometimes can lull us into (which need not be a sign of false consciousness).

The film's aesthetic builds around a hazy yellowish green that permeats almost every scene (in an exquisite way, I might never have seen such greens!), and produces a dream-like quality. Of course, the dialogue reveals some personal things about the characters (how the son has a complicated relation to giving up art or how the father quietly scornes the son's having changed his name), but mostly, we hear small talk, irritating repetitions, idle chatter. Actually, except for the artist's glamorous daughter, Irene, and her father, who has sunken into a nostalgic form of sadness, most of the characters are dull, respectable, in line with what is expected of them. In the hands of a less imaginative director, this would make for a boring film as well, but instead, we have a film that without a trace of bitterness or glacial irony attempts to give a fair picture of the dull life of the rich.

All this works very well, save for the, in my view, unnecessary ending scene. A Sunday In the Country will perhaps not change your life, but it is a charming little film nonetheless - or one might even say that it is a beautiful film about the magic patterns of everyday life. Some have compared Tavarnier's film to Yoshiro Ozu. To me, that makes sense: both have eyes and ears for life beyond the dramatic or the poignant.

Grand Canyon (1991)

Excavating my library of VHS:s, I find many movies that I've seen a long time ago that I remember having liked, but the only thing I can actually recall is some sort of atmosphere. What I remember about Grand Canyon is its slow pace and depiction of the urban jungle where almost any situation can take a dangerous turn. Re-watching it, this proved to be a quite apt description. What I didn't remember is the many clichés, the horrible music and a "social" agenda that is so rediculously over-stated that this film is, at times, rather embarrassing to watch. There are, however, some nice scenes, too. In one of them, we see a father teaching his son to drive a car. The boy is not really focusing on the driving. He talks to his father about family problems. The father is nervous. They end up in a messy traffic hub. The boy is supposed to make a left turn. Red light. We see the boy's impatience and the anxious expression on his father's face. It's time to press the speed pedal. But another car swooshes by and the boy reacts too slowly. A severe car accident is avoided in the last second. In this scene, the director, Lawrence Kasdan, makes the best of the actors and the surrounding. The scene is simple, but it works. It is not too talky, there's music (I think), but it's discreet. Here, Kasdan has discovered the exact pitch for conveying a sense of, first, foreboding and, later, a real and very concrete sense of fear.

But Mr. Kasdan; if I were you, I would have sued Paul Haggis' (director of Crash) ass. As a matter of fact, Grand Canyon is a thousand times better than Crash. At its best, it really has something to say about urban fear. Which Crash doesn't.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

Having seen only of Pasolini's ... works (which I regret having seen, it was awful) I did not quite know what to expect from The Gospel According to St. Matthew. That the film patiently, without eerie digressions, follows the events & words of the gospel itself makes reviewing no easier. The film's restraint surprised me. I expected Jesus to preach Das Capital, foam dripping out from his mouth, a few Roman sadists lurking around the corner. But it wasn't like that. Yes, the emphasis of Jesus preaching was on social justice, but whether that should be ascribed to the film or the gospel of Matthew I am too unenlightened heathen to say.

The scenes containing preaching were perhaps the least interesting ones, except for one quality. In most films about Jesus, the way the preaching scenes are filmed tend to be very predictable: Jesus in the centre, people standing around him in an orderly, quiet way. Pasolini makes all crowds bustle (true to the spirit of neo-reaolism, perhaps). He works with long shots that capture the movement and disorganization of the crowd. What is quite mesmerizing is that the crowd is never transformed into one entire wobbly, anonymous body. The crowd consists of people, the camera focusing on a group of people, a face, a piece of cloth. The crowd comes to life as something else than a dumb, beastly organism ruled by some demagogue (yes, Pasolini was a marxist, which might be of importance here). One can perceive this pattern throughout the film.

Another very successful element of The Gospel is the use of music. The soundtrack (sensitively mixed so that it is somehow on a par with sounds of people and nature) is a bold mix of African folk music, American blues/gospel, Bach and choir music. The sometimes dramatic pieces of music don't stifle the scenes, they bring out something new in what we see.

Actually, The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a good film. Undoubtedly, also a religious one. I.e.: his is NOT Mel Gibson.

PS: The history on philosophers on film is, I think, not a very extensive one. Here, we see Giorgio Agamben acting as one of the disciples!

Things to do in Denver when you're dead (1995)

Things to do in Denver when you're dead is the type of neo-noir that is somehow fun to watch but upon re-watching it you're quite not sure whether you've seen it before, because which neo-noir doesn't have:
a) sickly neon lights
b) a plot driven by men and women are reduced to lovers
c) people end up dead in every second scene
d) a poker-faced Andy Garcia
e) poetic imagery revolving around food
f) a drab place (like Denver)
g) a few lurid jokes
h) mafia talk
i) sleazy diners
j) silly names
k) Steve Buscemi in a minor role, Christopher Walken in another.
l) one ... more .... job (just one more)

The Snapper (1993)

The Snapper was released in 1993 and that's exactly what it looks like. It's a movie where everything looks kind of scruffy, kind of worn-down, kind of homey. That's what's so charming about it. A re-make in Hollywood would certainly be impossible: the reason why I love The Snapper is that you get to see Colim Meaney wearing ugly jumpers and that nobody looks as if they have had five nose jobs. Meaney is a good actor (I want to watch The Van again!) - sometimes. Here, he is heart-wrenching as a father who learns something about himself. If there were more films like The Snapper, the world would be a better place. Better beer, too. And philosophical wonder on a par with "how come a dog can have so much shit in it" you will surely fail to find anywhere else...

Playtime (1967)

In Playtime, Jacques Tati has constructed yet another world of never-ending mazes and technological monstrosities. This film inhabits a planet of its own. Welcome to Tativille (which cost a fortune to build). Well, if you've seen some of Tati's own productions, you'll know what you are in for. There is no "plot", no "characters" (only one or two have actual names) and no "dialogue" (mostly blurry English) - but it does have world. Most of the time, you'll find yourself busy: just to keep track of what goes on in these medium/long shots takes some effort. A lot goes on, all the time, everywhere (don't forget the blood pressure medication). Playtime is a giant torrent of people, vehicles and eerie noises. This torrent is systematic and perspicuous at first, but towards the end of the film, the order is abolished.

I'm surprised how contemporary Tati's futurist vision feels - Tati could have been the architect of my work place: gray/white/black, steel and glass; endless corridors; every place look like the place next to it, and so on, and so forth. A non-place, a passage, something to travel through, if you have some business there. The people populating Playtime do seem to have "business", at least for a while. But the world of business, errands and intentionality gradually fall apart, and we end up with a joyous and anarchic sense of disintegration. 

Mr Hulot - and his umbrella - is the anonymous "hero" of the film (you might recognize him from Mon Oncle). Mr Hulot wreaks havoc. Mr Hulot is hailed by people who seem to know him. Mr Hulot walks from place to place, without seemingly really going anywhere. Do we here him utter any words? Maybe a quiet "yes" or "hello". Mr Hulot is slapstick humor at its classiest.

I know too little about Tati to say anything about the politics about the film. What I know is this: Tati is a far more observant interpreter of the anonymity of modern space than a bunch of conservatives and marxists alike. Like some contemporary critics of modernity, Tati shows us a world in which an airport is hardly distinguishable from a cafe or an office building. Often, it takes some initial work to figure out where the characters are located. Hell - that is an apartment! Wow, it sure looks like .... everything else! Everything looks the same. The diference is that Tati is never whiny. His rendition of modern standardization and technical "progress" never fail to be surprising, moving and disturbing. In Tati's world, humans are never totally immersed in the steel&glass dystopia/utopia; he shows the enormous humorous potential of human reactions of confusion and reverie in the face of escalators, beeping buttons, skyscrapers - and the total indifferent shown by these glorious inventions. Walls are knocked down, doors are bumped into, invisible doors are closed, chairs are messed with, elevators are accidentally boarded, ceilings are ripped apart, floors are destroyed - etc, etc. The interesting thing is that what this surrounding IS will be shown over and over again in a multitude of ways in how people interact with it. Totally indifferent, and yet ---.

I guess Deleuze might have been a fan of this film. Like Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus, Tati places his hopes in disorder, but also in a change of perspective: humans are no longer humans, but a sort of weird appendage to machines. It's just that people are not the slaves of machines. They don't adapt. They don't fit. Nothing fits. The point is that new matches and mismatches emerge all the time, so that new situations appear, but not "situations" in the familiar sense of the word, where a situation has a clear direction. What makes me think of Deleuze (and maybe some marxist situationists, too) is the film's merry purposelessness. For Tati, like for Deleuze, the world is not "going" anywhere. Mr Hulot makes his way through the city - and the city makes its way through Mr Hulot. (If you want to watch a deeply anti-foucaldian film - watch this.) For the first 30 minutes, I thought that Playtime would be a grave attack on urban alienation. Instead, it turned out to be a film about our notorious ways to always inhabit the world, to always make the world our own, no matter how standardized and clinical it appears to be. 

Playtime is a mess. But a wonderful one at that. It's one of the most strangely optimistic films I've seen in a long time.

Days of Being Wild (1990)

In Days of Being Wild, the ever-recurring themes of a Wong Kar Wai movie are already present. It's a film about obsessive love, obsessions that spread like a disease, love that doesn't leave its prey in peace but feeds on the heart. Usually, Wong Kar Wai is quite successful in exporing this dark side of "love", but here, it seems to me that only a handful of scenes evoke the appropriate quiet & implicit maelstrom of emotion. Most of the scene baths in a mysterious darkness. Most scenes are composed so that an eerie light is situated somewhere on the edge of the frame. In one scene, we see a girl talking to a police officer doing the night shift. They wander through dark alleys and talk about what goes on in their lives. This is a very good scene. It work just the way it should. I wouldn't consider it an insult to say that Wong Kar Wai makes mood films. It's just that in this film, he doesn't really have the skill to strike the right note. Too many scenes appear unfocused and the conversations seem idle and unncessary. In the best Wong Kar Wai films, every word functions as a dagger. Here, those moments are few.

(One interesting aspect of the film is how it is one of the male characters that is eroticized to an extent that is very unusual in mainstream films, where it is usually female characters that are treated in this way.)

Fucking Åmål (1998)

The human faculty of judgement is fickle and unreliable. That was my point of departure as I, a while ago, sat down to re-watch Lucas Moodysson's Fucking Åmål, a film I first saw at the age of 18. 12 years later, I am still impressed by the smooth treatment of the story, the dedication to the characters and a good ear for how kids talk (plus: how hapless adults talk when they try to convince themselves that they mean what they say). The film has just the right kind of restless intensity. No LOL:s, no obvious jokes. Fucking Åmål still strikes me as a good attempt to depict the oppressive habitus of small-town life. Of course, Fucking Åmål has its "feel good"-moments, the application of the blueprint of what a movie about rebellious youth should look like. But Moodysson's film rarely feels like an adaptation of the rule book. It is a likeable film that never patronizes its young characters. Immaturity is never glossed over (this is actually a film in which kids don't talk like small business CEOs), nor is the characters' joy and hope portrayed as the cute yet capricious feelings of people too inexperienced to become jaded and world-weary.

By the way, films where teenagers play the main roles often tend to be written off as less insightful than films about older characters. This is a misconception. I'm not saying this is Shakespeare, it isn't. But it is too easy to fixate a pre-conceived idea on a film like this one. Another misconeption is that adult film-makers cannot make movies about teenagers without becoming creepy voyeurs capitalizing on the innocent lives and lusts of the young ones. Moodysson is no voyeur.

Wittgenstein (1992)

 Few films about philosophers or philosophy have ever been made. OK, made philosophers are not blockbuster material. Iris hardly counts. Wittgenstein does. Derek Jarman was a director that sometimes made films that were interesting rather than good, but somehow, I have always liked his work. If you know the slightest bit of fact about Jarman's filmography, you will know that Wittgenstein cannot be an example of conventional docu-drama. It's not. Instead, Ludwig W is thrown into a bustling, yet stripped-down, milieu of aristocrat young men, Austrian family members and --- an Über Gewissheit-framed creature from Mars. The film builds on Wittgenstein's life, and if you've read his books, or read some biography about him, you will recognize most of what is said here. Yet, if there are many familiar things that the philosopher can rest her head on while watching Wittgenstein, the style proves all the more striking. This could have been a theatre play. The background is black. The set design is made up of colorful, striking objects. So is the clothing; remarkably lavish and colorful, extravagantly over the top, no single piece of garment displayed in the present film fails to make an impression on the viewer's eye. Except, of course, Wittgenstein's unchanging drab outfit (but no tie!), that mirrors his overall psychological tendencies towards the ascetic.

Wittgenstein employs an eerie sense of humor that is hard to explain. The philosopher whose philosophy was transported from the strict arena of logic to the rough ground of everyday life, is characterized as a person with very mixed attitudes towards "the everyday" in his own life; tired of his aristocratic surroundings, he dreamt of "a simpler life" of work and honesty (not only for himself, but also for his lover). This striving is depicted with a warm, gentle form of humor. Wittgenstein is less a film about this particular philosopher's thoughts than it is a humorous account of an ever-problematic relation between the thinking life, a life of work and a life of leisure and play. In one of the funniest scenes, Wittgenstein is interviewed by a Soviet bureaucrat. Wittgenstein has set his mind on going to the USSR to be - a manual worker. Of course, that doesn't happen. A recurring theme in the film is the idealized image of work within the mind of an aristocrat (even the über-aristocrat Russell seems to take a more sober attitude).

Like Wittgenstein's philosophy (and love of musicals and detective stories) Jarman does not eshew what to most people appears silly. But that particular silliness augments one important quality of the film: its tenderness.

Actually, I found the film to be a rather moving portrait of Wittgenstein. Moving, because it doesn't deal in "genius cult" but rather strips Wittgenstein down to very humane forms of fear, doubt and loneliness.

No matter how much Bertrand Russell's work bore me in real life - I absolutely adore Bertie the character in this film. Plus: Tilda Swinton is (unsurprisingly) making magic with her sheer presence. Ergo: YOU should watch it.

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

A man drives a big car through a herd of sheep. The man is hollering, "hello, hello" into his ancient mobile phone. The car trudges up a hill. The man steps out of the car and starts talking in the phone with his employer. Everything is wrong. His project is stuck. Gently, he kicks a turtle that happens to walk by. The camera focuses on the turtle. The car drives away. The camera zooms in the turtle again. The turtle starts to abscond from the camera.

This is one of the brilliant scenes from Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, a slightly absurd study of frustration and human encounters. A group of men, we are not sure of their profession, arrive in a village. Something is to be done. The only man we see in-camera, a slightly dour middleaged man, mostly trods along aimlessly in the village, talking to people, asking for milk, asking about the old lady who is rumoured to be dying. Why is he inquiring about the lady all the time? Eventually, it is clear that they are to document a mourning ceremony, if only the woman were to die...

Nothing much happens in the film. We see almost the same scene repeating over and over again, ritualistically. The man drives up the hill, and down the hill again. Make no mistake: Kiarostami does not bore us. His film, one might call it a comedy, is full of life. Of course, I am not a speak of the languages spoken of the film, so should not really say this, but from the contexts, it seems as if language is used very fluidly here, not as a conveyor of information, but as a part of the life people are living, the way the understand one another, or don't.

Winter Light (1963)

So you like Bergman? You like to watch sonorous people sit in a dimly-lit room, talking about the silence of God? OK, I admit: Winter Light is one of my favorite movies. I've watched it as many as ten times. But still, everytime I re-watch it, I think about new things, as new details become the focus of my attention.

The film opens with a church service. This segment is long, but rich in detail. Here, all characters in the story are presented. The pastor, Tomas (excellent, excellent Gunnar Björnstrand), preaches as if he had said all these words too many times before. It is clear that they mean next to nothing to him. The organist coughs and attempts to muster up the energy to finish his business. Most of the church-goers seem bored, or distracted. After the service, Tomas talk to his colleagues. He has to go through with yet another service in the evening, because the other pastor is busy driving his new car. Tomas has caught a cold. He is grumpy but a string of people has unfinished business with him. A fisherman's wife talks about her troubled husband. Tomas' on/off girlfriend Märta, who is a schoolteacher, gets on his nerves with her well-meaning attempts to nurse and take care of him.

This is what happens in the first 30 minutes of the film. The main themes, dis/belief and human frailty, have already been introduced. Winter Light treats its subject matter with care and depth (not without an ounce of irony, of course, this is Bergman). We see the kind of twists and turns in a relationship that we can get a glimpse of talking to somebody for several hours. Therefore, it is not surprising that the story takes place during less than one day. In scene after scene, characters go through minor tribulations, but there are also outbursts of emotion and pangs of honesty. None of this feels contrived. One could perhaps criticize Bergman for writing theatrical lines, but the content of the film still rings true. Bergman hits a spot. Masterfully, the film portrays moments of extreme intimacy and the harsh words uttered in a situation the end of which is impossible to guess. All of these scenes are somehow open-ended, in the sense that they point at a life that the characters will lead afterwards (the film itself ends very abruptly, in a scene full of contradiction and mixed emotion). This open-endedness has, however, nothing to do with vagueness. The reason why Winter Light is so good is that it wrestles with a cluster of questions in a way that strikes me as absolutely serious (yet, not losing a strike of dark comedy out of sight). This is not to say that the film is theoretical or abstract. The opposite is rather the case.

As a film about belief, this is a well-made, non-dogmatic affair. Bergman does not, I think, argue for or against anything. Belief (or the lack of it) is far from an abstractt theory about how the world is. Bergman connects questions about religion and questions about human relations. As Tomas says several times: God is quiet, but his own world is contaminated with human blabber and mundane trifles. Gradually, we see that Tomas' obsession with God's silence is an expression for his lack of commitment to human relations. People bore him. People disgust him. Their physicality repels him. Tomas, like every other (or almost every) character of the film is extremely complicated, and this is what drives the film onwards: the inner conflicts within and between people. Bergman makes nothing to lull us into a conviction that these conflicts can be resolved in a specific way. He wants simply to explore what these conflicts are about.

Aesthetically, the film is a peculiar affair. Sven Nykvist makes the film bath in harsh, merciless daylight. There are almost no shadows. This makes the faces so often placed in the foreground, appear all the more naked. There are no traces of mystery, or forced beauty. Non-diegetic music is thankfully non-existent. The sounds of the film are used very efficiently. In one particularly dramatic (not melodramatic) scene, the only sound we hear is the white noise from streaming water.

Of course, I could go on and on writing about this film. What I want to say last is that Ingrid Thulin makes a harrowing performance as a masochistic/unsure/self-loathing/dependent/strong schoolteacher. Every single second with Thulin in the movie contains so much expression that it is almost hard to watch. The strenght of Thulin's face matches Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc.

Some call this film a symbolic treatment of theological dogmas - other calls it a buster keaton movie made by Bresson. This is a proof of how many dimensions Winter Light has. Yes, it is dark comedy. Yes, it is a film about religion, one of the best, even. And still: it is also one of the boldest portraits of what it means to be unable to love.

Palindromes (2004)

Todd Solondz' Happiness might not have been the #1 masterpiece of cinema of the last century, but it contained a bunch of really funny, unnerving scenes. The same is true for Palindromes, which I watched in the middle of the night a while ago. My bleary eyes appreciated the pastel-eerie aesthetic of the film. A much weirder film than Happiness, Palindromes takes an offbeat trip in the ever changing bodily shape of "Aviva" (who is played by eight different actors). Aviva, whomever s/he is, lives in a world of strangeness and abuse, flag-waving religious people, sex-crazed men and odd sects. Aviva travels the landscape of childhood / adolescence. Despite occasional acquaintances, Aviva is alone in the world. We recognize Aviva no matter what shape s/he takes. What struck a note with me here was the tone of the film. We see lots of gruesome things happen, but all of it is unraveled in a quiet and melancholy way. Were it not for this way of handling its topic, Palindromes would probably have been an almost unwatchable film. In this way, Palindromes becomes less a provocation, than a sad meditation on insecurity and life as a teen.

Nazarin (1959)

I had a very hard time suppressing my prejudiced conceptions about Bunuel. And well, for all my effort, Nazarin turned out not to have been a very good movie. The biggest problem I had was that it was difficult to follow what the film tried to say. Was it a critique of the catholic church? Of religion? Of “saintliness”? One could of course argue that the film took an open approach to these things, and did not churn out a thesis about this or that. But I rather felt that there was too little good material to reflect on here. From a more technical point of view, the film was mostly a rather bland experience. There were, however, a few nice scenes toward the end. In one of them, we see a small town stricken by the plague. The only thing we hear is the harsh sound of church bells. The streets are empty. The main characters walk around in this desolated landscape. That scene did a far deeper impression on me than all of those scenes with the suffering Christ-like figure who is torn to pieces by the cruelness of Humanity. That is basically what we see in the film: cruel people. All forms of goodness are depicted with an air of tired bitterness. To hell with goodness, it won't survive anyway. What is goodness anyway. That, to me, seemed to have been the message of the film.

Skammen (1968)

In Skammen, Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow play former musicians. They live on an island (the film was filmed on Fårö, of course). They argue, make love and go into town to buy a bottle of wine. A war is hovering somewhere in the country. It is clear that the lovers do not want to think about it. von Sydow’s character break into weeping spells, and is somewhat sullenly comforted by his girlfriend. Suddenly, they find themselves dragged into the war. Bombs are crashing nearby. A band of soldiers arrive at their yard and force them to make false confessions. The lovers are no longer innocent bystanders. Later, another party in the war seems to have gotten the upper hand in the country. As many others, the lovers are interrogated as to their allegiances. A colonel (Gunnar Björnstrand!) visits them now and again. What does he want? And how do they respond?

Skammen is not a traditional film about war. In fact, we see very little of the war, except for some forceful scenes toward the end. Instead, Bergman evokes a form of loss of reality, which is somehow both shattered and strengthened by the violent occurrences the couple go experience. As Ullman puts it at some point: I live in a dream - somebody else’s dream. They have many difficulties with each other, but seem to be united in their desire to flee the world. In the middle of the film, when the reality of war has finally broken into their lives, they ract differently. Bergman never overstates this difficulty.

A sombre movie in which all forms of excess are avoided, Skammen is one of Bergman’s best movies. The dialogue is sometimes idling, especially in the beginning of the film, but that remains a minor flaw.

The white ribbon (2009)

Among Michael Haneke's films, The White Ribbon might not be the most interesting ones, but it is not a bad film either. The film, in stylish monochromes, tell the story of a village plagued by a series of eerie and repulsive events. Somebody places a ribbon on the doctor's gate so that he trips with his horse. A child is tortured. There is a mysterious fire. The voice-over of the films, an old man, tells about his youth. He does this in a very neutral, detached way. The voice belongs to one of the characters, a teacher. We follow the villagers for a few years from 1913 onwards. The families in the village are connected in many ways. The pastor, the teacher, the worker, the doctor all have clearly defined societal positions. It is a patriarchal society in which men rule over women. It is also a society in which adults seem to live in one world, and children another. The children are not yet assigned with these societal roles, but they are still very much their families' children. The relation between children and adults in the film is often antagonistic and anguished. Adults abuse, give orders, uphold order, make excuses, institute prohibitions - and do their best to uphold the appearance of "innocent children" - tightly connected with the appearance of "responsible grown-ups". A group of children roams around the village. We usually see them together in the group, or at home, with their family. Rarely alone in a non-family setting.

The film seems to ask the same question as the villagers themselves do: who are responsible for these crimes? Haneke's film resists a straightforward reply. By and by, I start questioning the question. Is it that one which is the most important issue? Or rather: isn't it rather that Haneke makes us look at flight from responsibility, collectivity and false innocence? To a great film, this is a film about guilt and what it means to attempt to find a guilty party.

The White Ribbon plods through a massive sea of information. Scenes change quickly and I often found myself wondering about some fact or other.  

Holy Smoke (2000)

I was surprised how disturbed I was by Holy Smoke the second time I watched it. This is one of the purest examples of films that depict gender injustice as an eternal, seemingly insoluble power struggle. The war between the sexes: man wins, woman loses, woman wins, man loses. Here, we see the power dynamics played out between a young woman and an older man. The girl has been coaxed home from India. Her mother is worried that she is exploited by a cult. The family has contacted an American “expert” who is to deprogram the poor girl. For most of the film we see these two, the girl and the man, trapped in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. He has his agenda. When he thinks he has “gotten through”; mission completed, the situation turns back on him. The girl uses her sexual allure and – WHAM! – She has got the man, the big, macho man, under her thumb. Now it is HE who is in bad need of deprogramming. MEN AND WOMEN WOMEN AND MEN MEN AND WOMEN – and so on in all eternity. OK, I disagree. 

(Yes there are redeeming things to say about Holy smoke, too. Let's begin and end with Harvey Keitel.)

The Social Network (2010)

I was a tad bit sceptic about watching a film about .... Facebook. How interesting can that really be, I thought. Oh well. David Fincher made an entertaining film about a ruthless, antisocial world from which "new social media" evolve. It's an interesting contrast, and a scary one, too. What makes the film a little bit creepy is that it takes place in the present. We get a story (I'm not really interested in how true it is) about how Facebook evolved from idea to multi-million network. This has happened in a very short time. Nobody knows what Facebook will become and it is hard to spell out its meanings. Even though The Social Network did not make an eternal imprint on my heart, it was told gracefully so as to create the right kinde of surge. And David Fincher has an impeccable sense for surroundings and scene construction. The major problem is perhaps the dabblings with psychology. What was it that drove Zuckerberg - really? The Social Network is dangerously close to saying: well - it was because of a girl.

What is more, The Social Network does not buy into the glorified image of creativity and the self-made entrepreneur. At least: an American movie that does not celebrate "the business opportunity" and that does not serenade the virtue of being ambitious. "We have to expand" is here depicted as a rather uncanny catchphrase. We have to expand because we can ... and we must ... for some reason.

Marie Antoinette (2006)

What sets Sofia Coppola apart from other directors is her perfect grasp of atmosphere. She showed it in Virgin Suicide, Lost in Translation excelled in it and Marie Antoinette provided further proof of how attentive she is to those aspects. Does this mean that her films lack substance? I wouldn't say so. Even though it is a masterful excercise in style, costumes and hair-dos, Marie Antoinette is also a film about loneliness, youth and the idle yet shallow life of the rich. This makes it a far better film than the conventional costume drama tends to be. Coppola both fetischizes a certain historical period and screws with all common ways of how to go about when treating "historical material". What I like best about Marie Antoinette is its lack of reverence. No, true, it is not a film about political history. But it doesn't attempt to be one either. As I see it, it's a film about leisure, the leisurly class, the occupations of this class. The best scenes convey the meaning or lack of meaning of ritualization and distribution of roles: inherited roles, expectations, scolding, tolerance, role-playing - and revolt. Sofia Coppola brings out many aspects of roles, which is a virtue of a film like this.

This film should be taken for what it is: a mood pic. I see nothing wrong with that.

Satan's brew (1976)

If you think that RW Fassbinder was a serios guy who made bleak films about human alienation, think again. Satan's brew is wacky, in the spirit of outlandish, ebulient dystopia. In some sense, it also aspires to be a film that treats serious topics (self-delusion, masochism, contempt, anarchy/fascism). If you have a slightly obscene sense of humor, it is also a funny movie. (As a matter of fact, I might have enjoyed this a little bit more than I should.) But hey, Fassbinder also wants to say something about the origins of totalitarianism, so I might be excused.

The leading role is played by Kurt Raab, one of my favorite Fassbinder actors. It's just that in this movie, Raab's role is a little bit .... different. His acting style is, to say the least, outrageous. He's the anarchist poet, Kranz, who needs GELD. Geld! He lives with his wife, whom he hates, and his brother, whose major interest is flies. Kanz wanders from mistress to mistress, copulating & trying to secure some money. A mousey admirer follows him around. Kanz starts to realize that he IS the romantic German poet Stefan George. But wait, then he must be gay!

If you can stomach a John Waters' film, you might appreciate this. And if that subtle analysis of totalitarianism passes you by, and if the Nietzschean one-liners leave you cold ("That is the finest humiliation: to expose oneself to an inferior.") what you can learn from this tutorial film are many useful German invectives.

But how the HELL did Fassbinder raise money for this film? The idea for the film must have appeared quite bizarre.

L'Intrus

Claire Denis' film L'Intrus is a confusing experience only if you stick to certain expectations about what a film should be. Say good-bye to linearity and reality/non-reality. The film is dedicated to a book written by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, a book in which Nancy talks about having survived a heart transplant. The heart transplant is also the node of Denis' film. As elusive as this film is, it is hard to say anything about characters, story and so on. It is, however, clear that the film has a focal point, a central idea, or should we say a central cluser of images: an elderly man's heart and one a more metaphorical level, the alien heart as the intruder.

In the first part of the film, we see some relatively straightforward scenes that follow the man's dealings with his dogs, a lover and an antagonistic son. But these scenes are intermingled with far less explicable ones. A murder, dream-like arctic landscapes. During the second part of the film it is far less clear on what level of reality we are moving. The man travels to South Korea to have his operation. After that, he goes to Haiti, apparently on a quest for finding his son (oh wait there was something about a cargo ship, too...!). We see a dying man, now an intruder in his own right, haunted by consience.

It might be a cheap interpretation, but it is tempting to read the alien heart as the intrusion of conscience.

Denis knows everything about how to work with images. Sometimes I don't know what's going on, but I still find myself gasping for air: what a scene! What combination of movement, colors and sound! To be honest, I cannot spell out the exact relation between a woman driving a pack of dogs across an Arctic landscape, a corpse buried under the ice, the christening of a ship, a silent looong take where we simply gaze at the sea - but in the movie as a whole, I can look for certain threads, certain contrasts, associations. But I should pause here to say that if you like clever movies - don't watch it. If you like clever, dig somewhere else.

I would say that Claire Denis is one of the most important film-makers today. Few, if any, of her colleagues challenges the viewer's imaginative faculties like she does. My second reason for saying that is that few directors have such a physical grasp of what film can be about.

Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)

American comedies tend to be ... well, not so funny. Drop Dead Gorgeous has its moments. What it does best is to portray teen culture in a very cruel setting, without sugarcoating the cruelness. Yes, femininity is something to die for... Or, something to kill for. Usually, American movies made between 1995-2010 nurse gender roles from the McCarthy era. In that respect, this film is different. It has a clear feminist agenda.

Rosa Luxemburg (1986)

Margarethe von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg tells an interesting piece of political history, but it is regrettably tepid film. Stylistically, it is conservative, and I never get the feeling that the grasp of Rosa Luxenburg departs from the very, very traditional image of woman-AND-politician/scientist/adventurer. It's a shame, because this could have been an excellent movie, had von Trotta taken a more adventurous path. von Trotta's depiction of Rosa Luxemburg as a person and as a political agitator (we do not see the philosopher) is not one-dimensional. In that respect, the film has its merits. The problem is rather that very few images transcend the story, the written text. Apparently, making films about political history is not an easy task. von Trotta's film shows us why. Indeed, it has a political message. But that message is told too crudely. I am sure there must be better examples of films that have come to terms with this task better than this one.

Nanook of the North (1922)

I tried to watch Man of Aran but I gave up soon enough because I found its depiction of the struggle of man against brute nature waaay to romantic for my taste. The perspective Robert J Flaherty adopted in his earlier documentary, Nanook of the North, in which his crew follows a group of inuits in the icy surroundings of Hudson bay, is not radically different. Romantization of "brute necessity" appears here, too. The inuits appearing in the film are described as strong, noble and simple people who are completely at the mercy of the forces of nature.

Even though Flaherty makes it look as if he is following the group's unchanging way of life, this is not an ethnographic film - some argue that it is not even a documentary. Instead, the events in the film reflect Flaherty's own agenda. Evidently, he tries to evade all references to modern life, for example by making the characters use other tools than guns when hunting. "This is what their lives has always been like." This makes watching the film problematic, even though the viewer's aim is not to dig out THE TRUTH.

This is not to say that the film lacks fine scenes. There are plenty of them. In my favorite scene, Nanook, who is the main characters, attempts to drag a giant seal from a hole in the ice. For many minutes, we follow his perseverance. But even here, I am worried about the way the film opens up a certain way of viewing the on-screen events. The man struggles with the big mammal - but we are expected to extrapolate from him, to the Human Condition.

There were still plenty of things that impressed me. The cinematography, for example, was used brilliantly to convey the vastness of the arctic landscape.

PS: The film was funded by a fur company.

Buried (2010)

The concept of Kammerspiel is a familiar one. Many directors have used it, often to great effect. Buried takes the concept to its conceptual limits: the entire movie takes place in a space of 2,3x1x1 meters. What makes this film fascinating to watch is to a great extent connected with its limited space. As a political thriller, it is a little bit too thin to make an impression. As a character study - well, it's not about that.

Paul wakes up in darkness. He finds himself lying in a wooden coffin, with a mobile phone and a lighter. Paul is a civilian contractor working in Iraq. He was taken hostage while driving a truck in a convoy. With the mobile phone, Paul tries to reach the outside world. This is the most fascinating part of the story, the total reliance of the film on technology. Other characters are mediated by a telephone line. The mobile phone suddenly turns into a possibility of survival, but from other perspectives, a political threat (Paul is asked to record a video of himself in the coffin - American authorities desperately try to prevent that scenario from happening). In the film, the mobile phone occupies the role of THE outside world and that is something that one can, if one wants, read stuff into.

Buried could have been a much better film had it not relied to such a great extent on traditional elements of the thriller genre; the director should have trusted the core themes more, that they are interesting enough, that the viewer do not need dramatic moments of "what will happen next".

Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972)

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, one of Fassbinder's best movies (though I haven't seen all of them) is stuffed with odd moments and bleak dialogue. A designer, Petra, lives in an apartment with her slave-like servant Marlene. Marlene, to whom the film is dedicated, hovers over the film with her silent presence. We see her tending to Petra's every need, we hear her typewriter. At crucial moments, Marlene's statue-like gaze is a necessary contrast to the animated behavior of the other characters.

The film's characterization of human relations is, to say the least, bleak. At first, Petra is the one patronizing others. Then she meets beautiful Karin, with whom she has a relationship of dependency and self-depreciation and -glorification. Karin, on the other hand, is dependent on Petra's business reputation. The story is beseal by the insight that a turning away from the strict rules of dependency will have drastic consequences.

Everything in The bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is stylized, from Petra's apartment to the outrageous clothes all characters are dressed in to the mask-like facial expressions. Some have criticized the film for being to melodramatic. But within this formalized setting, the melodrama becomes something else altogether, less a psychological prop than an attempt - I suppose - to turn away from a certain grasp of what psychological realism is supposed to look like. "Psychological realism" might contain some not-so innocent presuppositions about how human life is to be depicted. Fassbinder's films, by turning to the intentionally overblown or formalistic or stylized, resist the temptation of false naturalization.

But I don't know. This is how I understand Fassbinder and this is also the reason why I appreciate his work.

The "Thing" from Another World (1951)

In my heart, there is a special place for trashy sci-fi movies from the fifties. The Thing from Another Planet is not as trashy as some of the "worst" representatives of the era. In fact, I fell asleep three times. The funniest part of the film is perhaps its cynical message that goes against the grain of the utopian elevation of science that was very common at that time, especially on film. Here, scientific curiosity is not praised for being the propulsive force of civilization. Instead, "scientific " curiosity is characterized as naive, detached and world-alienated (cheap pun intended).

Things to come (1936)

I knew nothing about Things to Come when I sat down to watch it. Good for me. This turned out to be quite something. It might not be a very convincing movie, but it has some stunning scenes that I wouldn't like to have missed. The aesthetics of the last 40 minutes is a mix of Soviet machine-fetichism, futurism and a weird antiquity-Rome-set-in-the-future. When I started watching it, I was sure the film was a post WII production. It's not. In the film, a global war breaks out in 1940. The conflict lasts a few decades and brings with it a horrenduous plague, sending the population of Everytown back into the Dark Ages. There are conflicts and local warlords. An aviator pacifies the town, and builds a new science-based civilization. In 2040, Everytown has turned into the dream of Marinetti. Hardships have been overcome. So, what is progress? Is there progress? And what are those barbaric forces lurking around the corner? Reason & non-reason - that is the primary conflict portrayed in this movie. As I said, this is a flawed movie, but hell, those sets look nice.

The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)

Billy Bob Thornton is one of my favorite actors. Don't ask. He just is. If you've seen U-turn, you know what I'm talking about. In The Man Who Wasn't There, an excellent movie directed by the Coen brothers, Thornton plays Ed Crane, a mere shell of a man. Under the shell: there is nothing, or next to nothing. Ed Crane goes through life as a ghost. He is uncomfortable in most settings; most of all, he doesn't like the endless stream of talk that people around  him unstoppingly engage in. Ed Crane is a barber. One day, one of this customers, a shabby businessman, talks about his business plan. At first, this is just an example of yet another chatter-box invading Crane's precious headspace. After a while, Crane starts thinking. He doesn't want to continue working as a barber. Maybe he should get in touch with that dry-cleaner businessman. What follows from this is an endless series of tragedies. Ed Crane's only consolation is the sentimental piano tunes played by a friend's kid.

Why is this an excellent film? Well, it has the looks. Silver-sepia images create a world of their own.The Coen brothers know how to create the kind of mood that will transport us into the realm of meaningless that Ed Crane's life exemplifies. The film evokes a sense of detachment, bordering on the depressed. Thornton embodies that state very well. He has just the right kind of quiet expression of desolation. Crane lives a life as it were somebody else's. He doesn't react to anything very strongly. Of course, he is supposed to be some sort of Everyman. The product of a society that erodes all possibilities of emotion. The only thing that provokes us out of passivity is the promise of Money. Luckily, the Coen brothers don't press that point too hard (after all, Herbert Marcuse didn't write the script, and I am glad he didn't). The film is told in voice-over. I am surprised how well it works. 

Like Bad Lieutenant, The Man Who Wasn't There is a zany take on film noir. Both films have got just what it takes to be good movies in spite or because of the genre obsession.

Blade Runner (1982)

3 things make Blade Runner a funny movie:
a) 80's idea of what a cityscape is supposed to look like. It rains all the time. Lots of neon. Future-noir & futurism & apocalyptic vibes. A bit of Hong Kong and Tokyo. It rains all the time. 
b) Rutger Hauer - how could I forget?
c) The synth-kitch crafted by Vangelis.
It's a rather nice movie, mostly because of how it looks.

Khadak (2006)

Khadak boasts several nice scenes. It shows beautiful/horrifying pictures of the Mongolian steppe, run-down post-Soviet industry and small towns. Beyond these few scenes, Khadak is a mess consisting of heavy symbolism, overblown gestures and a muddled plot. Some things can be said for it: even though it attempts to portray a state of alienation, it doesn't rely on a romantic view of the rural life. What we see of life in and around the yortha, it is a life of hardships. The main characters' (he is a sheepherder) relationship to nature is visualized in a satisfactory way. For all these beautiful images, Khaled remains an insubstantial film. It uses too many clichés of art house cinema, such as forced repetition and details that are loaded with symbolism of which the viewer (at least not this one) has a very fuzzy grasp.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a film about boozing, arguing - and, if you look deep enough, it is a film about attraction, repulsion and love. Above all, for two hours, we see these people - 4 of them in total - energetically engaging in the art of boozing. I'm not dead-sure, but this film outranks any other movie I have seen in terms of how many drinks are consumed. These folks drink a lot, with the add-on effect of slurring, puking and incoherent speech. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a very good portrait of a night of heavy drinking.

The boozing part is straightforward. The love and repulsion part is not. What do these people, and then I have George and Martha (a married couple) in mind, feel for each other? We witness the disappointment that poisons their relationship. The half-lies they tell each other; for petty entertainmant, just for the pleasure of watching the others' enraged reaction. Their daily existence is taken up by cruel jokes and evil remarks. Martha is a housewife who feels trapped in her role. Her daddy is the president at the university in which George is employed as a teacher of History. Martha offends him by constantly reminding him that he is not Head of the department. Their bitter verbal battles bear witness of a fucked-up version of mutuality and dependence. There is also something else going on: as much as they fight and bully one another, they seem to care about each other.

This, however, is not stated in any direct way, except, perhaps, for the outburst and possible reconciliation taking place in the very ending scene. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf is not afraid to lean on the viewers' interpretive skills. We are forced to figure lots of things out for ourselves. There are a few slips, when things get too obvious, when the film resorts to explaining their relationship. But that is rare.  

Good morning (1959)

Good Morning, directed by Yasujiro Ozu, is perhaps not a film as groundbreaking as Tokyo story. Yet, in tracking the slow pace of ordinary life, Good morning is a remarkable film, a film that treats its characters tenderly. Some has called this a comedy. I would hesitate to label the film in that way. What I would say, however, is that Good morning is a far more lighthearted film than, for example, Tokyo story. The film is filmed in beautiful, bright colors. It follows a small community. We see their houses, situated under high-power lines. This is only one reference to modern life. The entire film revolves around that theme, it seems. Two boys decide to stop talking to grown-ups until they convince their parents to purchase a TV. Their desire is to watch sumo wrestling - and baseball. Their parents chat with each other, and the neighbors. Their lives are taken up by gossip and back-stabbing. The kids who decide to take a silence vow upset their parents by claiming that adults engage in idle chatter. I might not have been impressed by this film in general, but I must say that the performance of the child actors was really impressive. It's a good film, but not on a par with Ozu's best work.

Up in the air (2009)

I'm not quite sure what to say about Jason Reitman's recent film Up in the air. It's not a bad film. It is an elegant excursion into contemporary blockbuster-indie, the rules and conventions of which this movie obediently applies; "cool" indie music, quirky characters, stripped-down colorful cinematography. To this genre also belongs an appropriate dosage of political critique. Not too much, though. Let it end with happy pix of the Family waltzing through big-wedding night.

George Clooney's character, Ryan Bingham, grooves on his job. He travels, by air of course, from city to city, letting people know that they have been fired. Their employers have chosen to outsource that particular greasy task. No probs: Clooney is the man for it. So is his young colleague, Natalie, who has developed a brilliant new system: let go of the face-to-face situation, it's more conventient to fire people with the mediation of a screen. Up in the air is a blatant critique of shallowness. In being so blatant, it stumbles in its own trap - it risks becoming just as shallow as its subject matter. There are, however, a few good scenes in there. One of them is the anti-climax of Bingman's dream-come-true; he receives membership of a very exclusive club that has travelled so-and-so many miles up in the air. He gets to talk to the captain of the plane (brilliantly played by Sam Elliott) and his face spells d-i-s-a-p-p-o-i-n-t-m-e-n-t.

Bad lieutenant (2009)

Bad lieutenant is Werner Herzog at his most unhinged and zany. Call it post-Katrina New Orleans, a hellish city of gambling, shady police officers and coke-dealers. Nicolas Cage is up-ranked to lieutenant after having saved a man from death. Cage is involved in solving a murder mystery. A family has been slaugthered. Cage is baaaad lieutenent, vigilante-style. His girlfriend is a prostitute and when he is not taking his dose of Vicodin (a bad back) he is snorting interesting substances.

At first, I actually expected this to be some kind of mystery movie. You know the drill: a puzzle / bits and pieces of information / resolution. Well - Herzog's mind is not bent on that. Herzog is more interested in freaked-out paranoia and eerie digressions about alky daddy and a dog that needs a temporary home. This is a film about bad cop demons. You know, this is the kind of movie in which we witness an iguana blinking its eye against the backdrop of Engelbert Humperdink's rendition of Please, release me. Like that. Then I haven't said anything about Cage's acting style; it is, as they used to say, far out. In the very best sense of the term.

And I love it. Of course I do. I love it for being blizzed-out seedy. I love it for being goofy James Ellroy. This is bad-ass PULP as it should be. This film will warm my heart like, forever. Just thinking about it brightens my mood.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (2007)

During the last few years, quite a few Romanian film makers have received some deserved attention. 4 weeks, 3 months and 2 days is the only film I've seen by Cristian Mungiu. It is, indeed, a good film, a film that grabs your attention and you're hardly breathing during those two hours. Mungiu made a film that doesn't compromise. It's a harsh story and the way it is told is just as hard. There are no props that will sugarcoat those gruesome images. Sometimes, hints of bleak humor can be traced, but that is quite rare. One of the things I like about this film is how unselfconscious it is. It tries nothing. No tricks, nothing.

The story is set in a wintry Romanian city during the late 80's. A college girl, Gabita, is intent on having an abortion. There is no legal way to do it. Her friend Otilia helps her. Otilia meets the grim-looking abortionist. She takes him to a hotel. There is bargain / a gruesome event. Otilia has agreed to meet her fussy boyfriend's familia...

Mungiu pays close attention to surroundings. The story, which spans no more than ten hours, transports the viewer from a drab college dorm to wintry city backstreets to a drab hotel and to the upper-middle class home of well-to-do family. What makes Mungiu such a damn fine director is that he doesn't clutter the scenes with needless "markers" guiling us into the mental sphere of "Ceausescu's Romania". In other words: Mungiu focuses on what is important. That doesn't mean that the story is a very straightforward one. In one sense it is: we follow a few eventful hours experienced by a college student who does what she can to mend off catastrophies. In another sense, "what is important" has very little to do with "progression of a narrative". For example, we see an endless bullshit discussion between folks who like to brag about themselves. In the centre of the frames: Otilia's pale, impatient face. For perhaps 1/2 hour we watch how painful waiting can be. I am not sure if I have ever seen that kind of anxious impatience portrayed so ferociously on film before.

This is just one example of how 4 weeks excel in evoking emotions and the way emotions express an understanding of a situation. But, what is most important of all, Mungiu doesn't overstate the case. The treatment of the subject is always subtle, always exploratory.

Rosetta (1999)

Asked about the focus of their cinema, the brothers once noted that when films have a working class subject matter they are labelled "social cinema", whereas films with bourgeois characters are referred to as "psychological dramas". (link)

Few contemporary film directors make movies with such moral depth as Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne. Their understanding of remorse/forgiveness/wrongdoing - but also their committment to depicting social injustice and poverty - is raw and unsentimental, yet very sober & clear-sighted. Rosetta is a case in point. If anybody else tried to make a film like this, it would easily turn into miserabilism and/or social pornography. The Dardennes' feet are nailed to the ground. They focus on things that nobody else cares about. They are not afraid of making political films. Many dislike what they do for that particular reason. To me, what is so admirable about the Dardennes as political film-makers is that they avoid showy resentment. Show/don't tell.

Rosetta lives in a trailer with her mother. They live by a busy roundabout. The roundabout, ironically, is called "Grand canyon". Obviously, Rosetta and her mother are very poor. The mother is an alcoholic. Rosetta tries to find work. In one of the first scenes, we see her being physically dragged out of a factory in which she worked but which won't give her any more work. Not because she did anything wrong. She is no longer needed there. Rosetta fights back. She insists. Two police officers carry her away. Her friend works in a waffle stand. She finds out the guy makes the waffles himself, thereby cheating his employer. Rosetta, desperate to find a job, rats on him. But of course she cannot live with having stolen his job like that, either.

There is almost no frame in this film that Rosetta is not in. The film stalks her around; she runs across a busy street, she runs through the woods, she is chased, she chases somebody else. Rosetta is not only a very bleak movie, its rawness is all over its cinematic technique. The film progesses in restless, anxious movement, of the main character and of the camera. We are not always sure what is going on (oh, she's fishing, that's what). As a matter of fact, most actions are tracked from over Rosetta's shoulder. It's a weird angle to shoot from, but of course there is a point about making the film in that way. There is a conservative dualism that the Dardennes break with. It has to do with how "subjectivity" and "objectivity" are normally put into pictures. Subjectivity is usually the point-of-view shot. We see what the character is defined to see. Objectivity, of course, is conventionally hinted at using long shots ("we see the whole scene"). The Dardennes fucks with these kinds of stereotypes. The peculiar visual style in Rosetta evokes a more complex point of view than crude definitions of subjectivity and objectivity. That everybody talks Bresson in relation to this movie is no surprise. Like Bresson, the Dardennes are interested in a very material dimension of moral reality. (I think that Simone Weil would have appreciated this film*.)

You may complain: but come on! The use of hand-held camera and the way it trades on "authenticity" is just as problematic! I would protest by saying that the point is not to depict the grimmest, waffle-snarfing place on earth and betoken it with Social Reality. The film seems much more ambitious. So where is the "inner life"? Well, it's all there: Rosetta's attempts to land a job is an example of capitalist reality as a psychological maze: a normal life / an unbearable situation / nothing makes sense, you do what you can / it is not the job that matters, but really, it is, or it isn't.

It's hard to describe what makes Rosetta special. Some have claimed it to be a gloomy evocation of social determinism. That interpretation is off, way off. Nor do the Dardennes dapple with something that some older film reviewers would call "European humanism", at least not if that label is to be understood as a elegiac bemourning of the human condition.  One thing that strikes me about their film (those I've seen, that is) is how observantly they register a very everyday sense of surrounding. In Rosetta, it's the roundabout, the myriad paths of the camping spot, drab corridors, the waffle stand. I have a very strong feeling that these things are not there as mood props, just to make it hit home: Rosetta is poor. Rather, by looking at the details of her surroundings, how she moves about there, what she does, what things limits her, we get to understand something about who she is and what kind of life she leads. Not only do Rosetta evoke embodied experience (wrestling on the grass, drinking a glass of water, listening to bad music, to give only three examples), but the film pays a very close attention to the surroundings as lived - and that is why the shabby look of the places hit so hard. I am repeating myself, but let me say it again: the Dardennes' approach is marked by a very un-dualistic tendency.

And that is one of the things I admire them for.

*BTW: Luc Dardenne studied philosophy!

Le Mépris (1963)

I have a principle. Now and then, I try to watch movies I don't like. This is not yet another pang of masochism (or not only that). I want to learn stuff about film. This implies watching films that I, for different reasons, "don't like". Godard, of course, is a director for whom I have not-quite warm feelings. I try to suppress those reactions whenever I watch yet another Godard movie, but with faint results. His films are interesting, but they bug me.

And here we are; Brigitte Bardot's well-shaped ass; sarcastic meta-comments about women's asses on film (soooo conscious of how women are objectified in film); meandering, never-ending conversations (do you love me / no / yes / I despise you / forget what I just said); beautiful scenery; Men and Women, Women and Men, homme & femme; some tricky effects, ha, ha, get it; snazzy (anti-)culture references; snazzy references to trash culture & high art; art-ificiality (a blue screen! music that stops and continues and stops! intentional 'errors'! film-in-film!); blue-eyed, ominous-looking statues (great shots). Beyond this - beyond everything: Fritz Lang. If Godard had filmed F. Lang doing random things (including quoting Hölderlin) for 1 ½ hour (no shit about women's asses) I would have adored this film. Lang's performance was top-notch and saved this from bugsville. Lang was fun.

BTW: the only essential question posed about this film: "Doesn't Prokosch look like David Hasselhoff?"

La cérémonie (1995)

Reasons for calling a film "weird" may be of several kinds. Some films do their very utmost to appear smart & weird. Others are weird in spite of their fairly straightforward agendas (well - watch Point break....). It's hard to say whether Chabrol's La cérémonie fits any of these categories. On the surface, this a film that doesn't take radical measures with film conventions. We have a fairly uncomplicated story: a girl acquires a position as a maid in a rich family's household. We find out she is illiterate. She does everything to hide it. The girl, Sophie, becomes friends with a woman who works at the post office. Her relations to the family she works for becomes more and more strained.

But afterwards, thinking about the film, it's really hard to come to grips with what the film was about. And it's even harder to say anything about in what spirit the story was told; was it a comedy, tragedy, social critique? And even though the details of the story seemed quite easy to grasp, it is hard to tell why a certain scene is important for the overall story. What is the significance in the film of Sophie's illiteracy? Why do they show the daughter fixing a car when nothing in particular seems to have been revealed in that skill of hers? Or, more to the point, the film seems to lack an "overall story". This is where I am starting to think that the film is less the result of a careless script than it is a conscious play with expectations. In a conventional film, we expect scenes to provide us with certain pieces of information and/or emotions and/or twists that result in character development. La cérémonie takes liberties with all this. Nothing seems to make sense even though, on the surface, there is no real mystery either.  In each scene, in some sense, we seem to "know" what is going on; the patriarch has a fit of anger; Jeanne talks about her son; Sophie watches bad game shows on TV. And, for Christ's sake - the film is based on a Ruth Rendell novel! How hard can it be? And on a primary level, it is not even the ending, the acts of sudden and shocking violence, that makes me say that La cérémonie fucks with my sense of sense. Because haven't we seen that kind of violence a thousand times before? What is so troubling to me is not the inexplicable acts of violence, but the schizoid approach of the film.

There are too many anti-climaxes, overstatements, (intentionally?) mannered acting and eerie blind alleys for this to be interpreted as a clumsy attempt at thriller-comedy. When looked at in this way, the film actually gets kind of interesting. But isn't that quite strange: the film is so pointless that I start thinking that there must be a point on some other level?  - This, again, is related to the many ways in which a film might be said to be pointless. I am not perplexed by a Jackie Chan film being, in some people's eyes, pointless. The strange thing is that La cérémonie in quite brutal ways cuts short the viewer's quest for meaning. And that was, to me, both disturbing and interesting.

71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (1994)

Watching too many Michael Haneke movies: TV makes me queasy in the stomach. 71 fragments have lots of queasy TV moments. Repeated images from the news, dead bodies & Michael Jackson's ghostly face; a TV is blaring in a room, a TV is streaming images but noboby is watching.

It's not the first time I watch 71 Fragmente. It doesn't hit me the way it did. I cannot resist comparing it to other films. I find the fragmented technique too heavy-handed. The emphasis on chance doesn't really work. I don't know what bearing "chance" is supposed to have on my viewing of the film. Ok, ok, get it, the film fucks up the notion of "chronology". So; I'm getting used to how Haneke is messing around with cutting techniques. I'm getting used to the black screen in between scenes. I'm getting used to detachment/alienation/viewer nausea. It doesn't surprise me the way it did when I watched this film without having seen the earlier ones (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video). Last time I watched it, I saw some depth in 71 fragments. Now, I find too many cheap solutions, too many empty spots, a few clichés.

The most aggravating question that pops up in my mind is: should I take Haneke's social critique seriously? Haneke's films are cluttered with metaphors about seeing. But the essential question is how his films affect the viewer and what picture of human relations Haneke's films express.

This said, the scene in which a young man is playing ping pong by himself is still superbly multi-faceted. Haneke manages to throw in an entire world of relations/concepts/associations into that seemingly static and uneventful scene.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)

Really - right now, I should  watch no films more depressing than Pass it forward. But of course I do. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is not exactly the most optimistic film of film history. But it is one of the most ambitious films ever made. This piece of feminist experimental film-making revolves around a tightly knitted set of themes: work/labor, routines, time and space. Chantal Akerman, largely overlooked by the canonization-controlling, unhinged admirers of male crooks (did I say B---------, ok maybe I did), has made one of the most interesting films I have ever watched. Why is it so good? To answer that question, it is necessary to look into how Akerman works with images.

We follow Jeanne Dielman doing chores in her apartment, which she shares with her teenager son, and in shops and institutions in an anonymous-looking Brussels. We see her making beds, preparing dinner, cleaning the dishes and having mostly silent meals with her son (when she speaks, she reprimands him for reading while eating). These chores nonewithstanding, we get a glimpse into Jeanne's other job: once every day, while the potatoes are boiling on the stove, she receives a john. The film is divided into three days. During the first day, Jeanne's routines are new to us. During the last two days, we have already learned to discern patterns and moments of repetition. As the film spans 3 hours and 15 minutes, we are given some time to ruminate over these things.

It is this sense of repetition (but, as I will talk about later, ruptures) that is the heart of Jeanne Dielman.

Jeanne Dielman is a very restrained movie. All sounds are diegetic. If we hear a snippet of music, be sure it can be tracked to a radio. A large range of everyday sounds are heard; rushed steps, doors closing, the hum and odd screetch of kitchen machines, rattling dishes. In many scenes, we follow an action - almost always Jeanne's - in real time. Even the humdrum event such as peeling the skin off a potato is allowed the time to unravel without cuts. But Akerman does not work with long takes only. Sometimes the rhythm of takes follow the rhythm of the action portrayed (sitting down, silent) and in other cases a longish series of events are broken off with a sudden cut so that we really get only a blurry idea of what is really going on. Where are they going at night, Jeanne and her son? As others have pointed out, the rhythm of the film changes as the story changes. In some segments of the film, the abrupt cuts have an almost humoristic effect (I can tell you, this might be the only traceable element of humor here). Those particular scenes, of a claustrophobic hallway, lights constantly turned on and off, made me think of the great Resnais film Last Year in Marienbad, in which Delphine Seyrig (Jeanne Dielman) also acted (!). It is evident that Akerman is very interested in different notions of time and how time intersects with place and movement. The cinematography of Jeanne Dielman has nothing to do with a conventional sense of "conveying information" (what is 'information' anyway?, and so on).

The camera work enhances the detached style of the film. Almost all frames are long shots, the camera resolutely motioneless. If you hadn't guessed it already, what you may mistake as a shoddy "place the camera and SHOOT" reveals a stern sense of composition (just look at how Akerman plays with the reflection of a blue neon sign on the living room wall - esp. in the last ten minutes of the film. As the kids are prone to say, OMG!).

As in the early films of Michael Haneke (who was perhaps inspired by Akerman?) we see a minimum of emotional expression. For a while, this tempted me into dualist thinking: what's going on inside them? But of course, that leads us on the wrong track. I would say that if we are to take films like Akerman's seriously, we must somehow agree to seeing everything as taking place on the surface. That's not behaviorism (cf. Wittgenstein). Rather, Akerman challengus the viewer to scrutinize minute details of expression. With the long takes of everyday routines and short takes of Jeanne's running from room to room, working through her day as a housewife (what's up with on/off thing with lamps?), the film poses a question, what role do the routines have in Jeanne's life? What do we see of her in them? Or, more importantly, what does she become in them? 

As I said, the viewer gradually sees patterns in Jeanne's routines. During the second and third day, something is changed. There are small lapses and mistakes. She washes one plate, puts it into the rack, changes her mind, and re-washes it. She drops something on the floor. A shop is closed. The coffee is bad. In all this, it is as if the stern logic of her existence reveals some subtle cracks, only to be completely disrupted when Jeanne, to our horror and surprise, kills one of her johns. Life will not return to normal. At the last segment of the film, Jeanne is sitting in the living room, quiet. The only thing that moves is the reflection of the neon light. 

The denouement of the film isn't restricted to shock value. It calls for re-watching and re-thinking. What did I see earlier on? How did I view Jeanne? What happens in the film and what kind of change - is it a change - does she undergo? In most films, the role of change is very obvious: a "character" is built and gradually develops through what s/he experiences. In Akerman's film, change is a question mark. It is not a shallow one, either (it has to do with what it means to perceive somebody as having changed).
It is possible to interpret this film in fairly conventional ways (taking account of some strands of /radical/ feminism in the seventies): Jeanne is the typical housewife, trapped in a life as a Woman, trapped in an apartment, confined to the execution of mundane routines. But there is reason to believe matters are not quite that simple. Akerman has no vision of "another life". As my friend says, she does not portray Jeanne as a misunderstood artist who is not given to chance to express her creative spirit. One could, instead, say that Akerman takes a deeper look a domestic space. Space, for Akerman, is not just rooms inhabited by human beings, chairs and perhaps a set of crockery. Space is portrayed as an order (or perhaps dis-order) of things. In this sense, space is not just something that in different ways makes things possible or impossible in a physical (or metaphorical) sense. Here's the thing: we see Jeanne's apartment, her furniture, the lamps, the radio, in connection with what Jeanne does, in connection with her routines and almost-theatrical performance of habits. In the beginning of the film, Jeanne seems to be master of the space (despite and because of her feminine role). She runs from room to room, she makes things happen in an orderly way. There are no unforeseen events. And, then, something has gone askew. Jeanne's apartment is no longer the space of uninterrupted routines. Chance - and, later on, - action come to the fore. (Maybe I should put the blame on Akerman, but you see how it is; I am totally overpowered by Arendtian conceptualizations!)

I would say that habits and routines are understood in a more complex manner in Akerman's film than, for example, in Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent. Haneke (in my opinion) seems to have relied on the notion of an underlying dread beneath the safe pattern of familial- and work relations. (Really, I should watch the film again to have more back-up for saying this.) But as I said, I am very unhappy with saying that there's any "beneath" in Akerman's film (or?). Routines are not rendered with the simple meaning of being "mundane" ("but she could be so much more..."). Jeanne's routines are her life. Throughout the film, the viewer battles the question of what this life is about; what meaning it has (and what is this question?). More and more, I am inclined to talk about Jeanne's routinized life as a sort of compulsion that is not only external (the concrete chores normally expected of the housewife) but also something Jeanne strives to impose on the world. Why? That is a question that haunts me throughout the film.

Akerman's study can be read on quite a few levels; as a study of ethnography, as social critique, psycho-analysis, feminism - even a sort of phenomenology of habits. I would say Haneke does not have an eye that is as compellingly observant as Akerman's.

END NOTE: A large part of the staff that worked on this film is female.

Pandora's box (2008)

Pandora's box is a very good, yet flat-out difficult, film. No, it's not what you think. This is not a film that is difficult to watch because of some screwed-up sense of logic or trying to make sense of five-minute takes of watching a guy eat ice-cream. Rather, this is difficult in the way it is difficult to think about certain memories or the difficulty of being present in a situation. Yeşim Ustaoğlu's film revolves around three siblings living in Istambul who take care of their ill mother after the latter having suddenly disappeared from her home in the mountains. We see the siblings, and their mother, dealing with the situation, and the inevitable tensions arising between them. One strand of the film is the relationship of a mother and her teenage son, who doesn't really feel at home at his mother's place. Surprisingly, he develops an understanding with his grandmother, who doesn't seem to know who he is.

Ustaoğlu works with understatements and capturing a sense of everyday disorientation. Lots of the scenes are quiet. In this way, she* doesn't place the Alzheimer-afflicted woman in a world of her own, ontologically secluded from everybody else. Instead, Ustaoglu seems to emphasize the ways in which we become estranged from the world in many different ways and that we react differently to many things (one scene: the elderly woman makes an attempt to release herself on the carpet, one of the sisters angrily scolds her brother for laughing). Therefore, this is not really a film about Alzheimer's. It's a film about openness and rejection, grief and memory - about the realization of a shared predicament and a shared future. There are a few unnessecary scenes, the omission of which would have made the film a slightly more cohesive affair (how the son is presented). Ustaoğlu's shares an interest in the ugly-beautiful alleys, ports and apartments of Istambul that Nuri Bilge Ceylan so impressively conjures up in Uzak.

Afterwards, googling, I realized I had seen another one of Ustaoğlu's movies, Journey to the sun.

* Shame on me! Before doing some research, I assumed the director was a man...

The Grudge (2002)

The Grudge reminds me of why I don't watch too many horror movies. The reason: very few "horror movies" have anything interesting to say about fear. I can mention a few that do (The Shining) but mostly these films don't belong to the horror movie "genre". The Grudge works with very traditional themes: the haunted house. The aesthetic is also very traditional: the viewer is to a series of stripped-to-the-bones scenes, almost all of them punctuated by a horrendous frame at the very end. And even though this film can boast two or three frightening images, the fear never goes deep. By the way: most of the effects in this movie (and other films of similar style) rely on eerie or sudden camera movements. It's not really about what we end up seeing, but rather the visual confusion or suddenness involved in seeing it.

Ordet (1955)

Not only is Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet a great film about variations in religious and anti-religious consciousness - it is a beautifully executed film that boasts an integration of image, sound and composition. I've watched some of Dreyer's movies. One thing that strikes me about them is how gender-conscious they are. In film after film, Dreyer makes assaults on patriarchal power. Gertrude is maybe the best example, the film about Jeanne D'arc another one. In Ordet, Dreyer shows how patriarchal power (men deciding over the fate of women) is connected with ideas about class and faith. Is he famous for his points about gender? I really don't know.

Detour (1945)

I'm not an expert on film noir. But I know one thing. Detour, (dir.: E.G. Ulmer), a low-budget movie from the mid-forties, might be the ULTIMATE film noir. It's short. It's fierce. It's bitter. It's about Fate. And it looks goood. And: Detour features one of the toughest (male or female) characters in film history; Ann Savage owns the film / the genre / the universe. Al is ditched by his lady who wants to make it in Hollywood. Bad for him. He hitchhikes along deserted highways in the hope of meeting her in the West. He gets a ride by a certain Mr. Haskell. During the night time, Al drives the car. When he stops the car, it turns out Haskell - is dead. Al buries his body and continues the journey in the dead man's car. He picks up a girl, Vera. The girl happened to know Mr Haskell. Vera knows what she wants, and she won't let Al stand in her way. Detour might not work as a philosophical tract, or anything, but it has a hellish, sharp dialogue and a story-line that is simple but clear-cut. Not only that; traditional gender roles are subversed. Here, we have a case study of power and powerlessness that does not follow the normal route. It's a wonderfully one-dimensional film but the only thing that matters is that it WORKS. No bloody nonsense. 

Benny's Video (1992)

Benny's video is yet another early Michael Haneke. Benny digs video. Benny digs watching a pig being slaughtered. Benny brings a girl home. The girl has been standing outside the video rental shop. Benny shows the girl his video camera equipment. The camera is rolling. He kills her. Benny goes clubbing with a friend. Benny eats fast food. His well-to-do family find out about his deed. They want to cover up the murder. Mom takes Benny abroad. Benny gets burned by the sun. Benny goes home and talks to the police... As a backdrop of all this, there is the TV; sports events, news, wars, music shows.

Haneke sticks with his themes: images; violence; the emotional desert. I did have some complaints about The Seventh Continent. The social critique in that movie was, I thought, not entirely convincing. It's hard not to be shocked by Benny's video. It is a brutal movie. It tells about brutal things. It's aim is to depict a brutal society. The style might be slightly less eccentric than the experiments of The Seventh Continent. That does not mean this is a conventional film. It isn't. For example; Benny's brutal act of murder is something we almost do not see; the only thing we see is a small section of Benny's room being shown on his screen. Apart from a haunting Bach motet, Benny's video offers no consolation. Haneke does not say: technology makes us violent. He says: we live in a world in which genuine emotions are impossible; technology is only an expression of that state. In film after film, Haneke turns seeing/watching/imagining inside-out. He explores the technology of the eye, and the moral dimension of attention.

Benny's video is one of the most disturbing takes on violence I've ever seen. Why? Haneke does not see violence as the misbehavior of a few rotten eggs. Haneke pans the camera across a range of scenes we'd rather not want to see. If there's anything this film tells us, it is that there is a huge difference between watching the world with our own eyes (being a full-blown witness to what goes on around us) and using our eyes like external devices, like a tv screen, that we can shut on and off, flicking among the channels - at will. The characters in the film do somehow react to what they see, but it is as if nothing could really get through to them, shake them.