Stalker (1979)

I watched Stalker for the nth time today with some philosopher friends and I couldn't stop thinking about one thing. Have I completely ignored the music in the film while watching it or is it indeed the case that there are several versions of the film? The ethereal flute sounds on this score should be generally prohibited (maybe restricted to the world of dancing elves) for human ears to hear. As a matter of fact, composer Eduard Artemyev made two versions of the soundtrack. But then as I read further it turns out that the final version of the film contains the soundtrack with synthesizers. I'm confused. But apart from these small mishaps, the use of sound and music in the film is extraordinarily evocative (trains, dripping water, wind). When reading this conscientious review, it seems like the version I saw now is some particular DVD version. Mhm. As the reviewer points out, what sets these two versions apart is that one is more trance-like than the other. That is, in my opinion, the better one. But I will consult the VHS version to resolve this immense mystery.

What was striking about Stalker when finally having the opportunity to devor it on a bigger screen is how the haunting transition from black-white-sepia grainy monochrome to colors really comes as a shock to the eyes. Not to mention the switch back and the vivid ending image. Wow!

Especially the last mesmerizing hour of the film is an overwhelming journey through doubt, disenchantment and faith. The interesting thing about Stalker is that even though it contains lots of philosophical conversations on various topics, the dialogue never exhausts the content of the film. There's really a rich interplay between dialogue and - what should we call it - quiet moments and this prevents the dialogue from becoming heavy-handed. One must also say that Stalker is surprisingly funny - even though this is something I've come to see after finally having had a look at the book on which the film is based, Roadside picnic. Actually, I was quite taken aback by my own reactions (On the threshold of the room in which one's truest desires are said to be fulfilled, a phone suddenly rings, "No, it's not the clinic!" That was funny on several levels.). Tarvosky masterfully grapples witht existential fear and he does this in a very ruthless way, not shying away from the petty desire to spare oneself. There is no "existential hero" here. Tarkovsky's treatment of most important theme of the film - desire - leaves no room for easy interpretations. While watching it now, I realized it being far more complex than what I remembered it to be.

2001: a space odyssey (1968)

2001: A Space Odyssey was on TCM yesterday and I decided to re-watch it. What always moves me about this film is how quiet it is and how piercingly evocative all sounds therefore become. The humming of machines intermingled with human breathing is just one such example that lends depth to the images of technological functioning and human struggle. I still have no idea what happens during the last 30 minutes of it, but that doesn't matter. The whole thing is extremely close to tipping over into evolutionary mumbo-jumbo, but Kubrick never steps over that line. Thankfully.

A Wedding (1978)

Robert Altman is one of those directors I have an ambivalent relationship to. Some of his films are splendid, others not. I love the weird, mysterious 3 women and I have perhaps never seen a worse movie than Dr. T and the women. A Wedding is a goofy film about, well, the fucked-up state of humankind. It's almost a farce. But that is not a negative judgement. This film bustles with people and when I saw the opening credits I was quite impressed by the list of actors included. The film opens on a grand note with a fancy church ceremony and pompous church music. From there, everything tends to deteriorate. The film consists of buzzing conversations, some of them overlapping, creating one hell of a crowded soundscape. This is 2 hours of endless human cackling: "culture clashes", gossip, bullship, plain weirdness, revelations, indecencies, backstabbing, slander. Altman provides us with a list of the different ways in which we use language to fuck up life for ourselves and for others. The funniest scenes involve the person responsible for the ceremonies of the wedding reception. She gives instructions as she were an anthropologist visting another planet, trying to clarify to an alien species the secret rites of humanity.

Zombieland (2009)

I try not to limit myself to watching deep-shit movies about old people who sit on chairs in a gray, naked room, contemplating death and the severe human condition to the soundtrack of Arvo Pärt, three buzzing flies and a tractor. Hell, zombie movies are fun. And sometimes they provide some stark post-apocalyptic images of all-too-none-too-human humanity. Zombieland is not like that. Zombieland is pure beer-belching entertainment, but pretty good at that. My blessings go out to the scene in which guns are shooted in Bill Murray's mansion to the sweet tones of Hank Williams' I'm so lonesome I could cry. Now pass me another lager.

Romulus my father (2007)

Watching Romulus my father was weird. The reason: Raimond Gaita. For me, Gaita is the philosopher who wrote Good and evil and A common humanity and The philosopher's dog. I haven't really reconciled myself with the idea of Gaita as a character in a movie. I am not sure why. I am not upset by the idea of Tony Blair or Keith Richards or any other famous person, politician or celebrity having their lives disentangled and (de-)constructed on the screen. It's something about philosophers on film that I find really unnerving. Maybe that reveals something unnerving about my relation to philosophers and philosophy. Philosophers are Minds and they have always been so, even as five-year-olds they are the Great Mind to come. Dammit, that's hell of a bad image of what philosophers are. I remember watching Iris, and that was similarly weird. To me, Iris Murdoch is not the woman who was sick with Alzheimer. She wrote the great Sovereignty of Good, and no matter how much I explain to myself that philosophers, too, are mortal beings with ordinary lives, there's something I can't really put my finger on here that I find a little spooky. The cure to all this would be big-production films about philosophers. Kant: the movie (Kant pacing the streets of Königsberg / Kant throwing a party / Kant doing whatever he used to do with Lampe-the-servant / weepy ending scene, transforming the purity of reason&morals into glossy images).

But this is way off topic. Romulus my father is a sensitive movie about Raimond the child, his father, Romulus, an immigrant from Yogoslavia and his afflicted mother, Christina. I haven't read Gaita's memoir on which the film is based (my friends have praised it so much that I've become a little afraid of my expectations being let down). But having read Gaita's philosophy, I know his perception of misfortune and affliction is humane without being the kind of wishy-washy "humanism" that does not really take anything seriously.

The rural setting of the film is brought to life magnificently; the grim beauty of nature, his father's friends, quiet moments on the porch or with the animals in the house. However, throughout the film I cannot help feeling that Roxburgh's take on the relationship between father and son, and especially between son and mother, could have been explored with more poignancy and more originality than what Roxburgh's movie contrives. It's not that the movie is sentimental or that it is shoddy. The problem, for me, is that I remain distant to the story. Somehow, it fails to engage me in a deep way. Even though the viewer gets hints of the characters' problems with themselves and with others, some scenes bring out heightened drama rather than exploring the complexity of the situations at hand. I felt that this was especially a problem in how Raimond's relation to his mother was dealt with. As it is now, she remains a character with erratic behavior. I'm just confused by this part of the story (what I crave is not some simple "psychological explanation" but what was missing were rather more - to use one of Gaita's own favorite expressions - lucid descriptions.).

I will have to read the book and find out for myself whether the film's perspective differs from the book's. Somehow I suspect that it does, but that is an unfounded suspicion of course.

Carandiru (2003)

I tried to watch the Brazilian film Carandiru (2003) tonight. Even though I found this depiction of a sao paolo prison interesting enough, I was too fed up with "male honor" & gangstas to go through with it. Yes, it is an unusual film in how it explores themes like sexuality in prison, AIDS, illnesses, the daily routines of prison etc. But structurally, it was a tangle of stories and characters for which it was hard to keep up interest. And hey, telling stories in flashback is rarely a good idea.

A history of violence (2005)

A history of violence wasn't as weird as I thought it would be - on the surface of it, that is. Cronnenberg's later stuff hasn't matched up to the earlier films (Spider...). In fact, I found this to be quite ordinary thriller material with some Cronnenbergian themes thrown in. Cronnenberg's depiction of violence is gritty and there's good stuff here about what violence do to people, but still he doesn't really have a clear focus (but maybe that's off the point with most Cronnenberg films anyways). Some scenes just leave me in the dark. Is this supposed to be about redemption? Oh, don't think so. Rather, this is about a film about lack of identity and pseudo-identity. But why did Cronnenberg make it so easy for himself by making this into an issue about "are you Tom or are you Joey"? And if this film is supposed to be about flatness (no depths etc.) I'm not sure if I get the point. Stylistically, this could be a TV movie. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. This is one more of those film that show you that small-town bliss isn't what it appears to be. Viggo Mortensen plays the decent family man who works at a diner and lives a cosy existence with his family. What is interesting here is how Cronnenberg plays with the notion of "justified" or "heroic" violence and puts it into a questionable framework. Some has interpreted the film as a film about "the survival of the fittest". I can see that - but I'm not sure what perspective the film itself stands for ("there's no real moral self anyway"?). As an exploration of "history of violence", darwinian or not, this is not convincing to me and some points are rather cheap (how the son of the father turns out to be just like dadddy... what a discovery). So I'm not saying boo-hoo, Cronnenberg is a hideous anti-humanist. I'm just saying I don't get it.

Lantana (2001)

You change your mind about the quality of some films. I watched Lantana maybe 8 years ago. I found it excruciatingly boring. But now I gave it a second chance and it is as if I am watching another film. Lantana revolves around a few people whose stories are connected in several ways throughout the film. This was maybe the one thing that bothered me, the many connections. Why this hang-up whith coincidences? Is it a cultural thing? Leon is a cop who has an affair with a woman called Jane, who has separated from her husband. Valerie, a psychologist, have issues with herself and her husband, too. These issues which are projected onto her sessions with a gay man who has an affair with a married man. Leon's wife Sonja attends Valerie's treatment, and we get a picture of an unhappy marriage. This is the build-up for a story about infidelity and moral weakness in the sense of temptation but also in the sense of cowardice. The opening scene is dominated by jarring sound of crickets and images of colorful flowers - and a glimpse of a corpse. It has a very elegiac feel to it. This atmosphere is maintained in the film, and it is propulsed both by the restrained soundtrack (which I find unusually sensitive to the images) and the very short, but content-heavy scenes. I would call Lantana a mature film about moral problems. It dodges the overly dramatic and instead it focuses on the inner life of the characters and the relations between them. The dialogues are convincing and some scenes are very beautiful. In one scene, we see Leon, the cop, running. ("Why do you work out?" "I don't want to die.") He runs past suburban houses and neat garden. Suddenly he runs into another jogger and in the next image we see that both of their faces are bleeding. Leon shouts indecencies at the other man. The other jogger is sitting on the ground. He is crying. Leon walks up to him and embraces him. The scene ends. The character of Leon is brilliantly acted. Just watching his face you get to understand how he knows he has fucked things up and he regrets it but does not really want to deal with it. Leon is not portrayed as a symphatetic character, but he is still portrayed as a man who grapples with conscience. Infidelity is dealt with in a way I have rarely seen in other movies, maybe because Lantana, in a very detailed way, portrays the way people become strangers to each other and still they mean a lot to each other. It is not moralizing over ambivalent feelings but deals with it rather honestly. This is a little gem of a film. I didn't expect it to be after having been so bored by it the first time around.

Tid till förändring (2004)

Jag hade sett Tid till forandring (2004) en gång tidigare. Det jag mindes av filmen är att det är en dansk, rätt konventionell feel-goodfilm. Jag blir inte överraskad när jag ser filmen en andra gång. Det är fortfarande en dansk, rätt konventionell feel-goodfilm. Av regissören Lotte Svendsen har jag inte sett något annat. Som så många andra filmer i den här genren handlar Tid till forandring om vilsna människor som flyr in i sociala former eller overklighet. Psykologen försöker maskera sitt drickande som "kultur", hans fru rustar upp den perfekta inredningen, den perfekta myshörnan (hyggehörna?). En man med medelklassjobb och steril våning försöker locka till sig en vacker modell. En kvinna försöker lösa sina livsproblem genom att upprepa en selfhelpfras. En marxist lever i en ensam tillvaro i ett samhälle som inte är intresserat av solidaritet med latinamerika. Problemet med filmen är kanske inte att karaktärerna reduceras till typer. Problemet är att ett antal svårigheter radas upp bredvid varandra utan att filmen gör någonting annat av dem än att skapa en viss komik (som när psykologen välter vinflaskan som står vid hans arbetsbord och försöker avleda klientens uppmärksamhet genom att be henne blunda och upprepa en fras). Själv hade jag gärna sett en film som ägnats uteslutande åt den ensamma marxisten Erik som hänger upp banderoller i ett Danmark som slutat lyssna. Det här är en liten, elegant film där speciellt musiken fungerar för att skapa en viss stämning. Men det är inte en film som gör något eget.

Om bloggen.

Det här är en filmdagboksblogg. Jag ser mycket film men irriterar mig på mitt eget oreflekterade filmtittande. Den här bloggen är, hoppas jag, ett sätt att komma igång att tänka mera och djupare på de filmer jag ser.