Greed (1924)

Sadly, the original 9 hour version of Greed (dir. E von Stroheim) was destroyed in a fire. We watched a 4 hour version that comprises original moving images as well as reconstructed stills. I read reviewers who claimed that this version is of interest for expert only. I believed them - well, how interesting can it be to watch a bunch of stills? Yes it can! It was surprisingly fascinating to look at these stills, that were zoomed in and out so as to be kept more "lively". I wasn't bored for even a minute: the film grabbed me by the guts even in this 'technical' version. Greed is an impressive film in many ways. Yes, one can complain that the story is overly dramatized and didactic (some of the characters are shamelessly one-dimensional). But to me, that didn't matter. The film's experimental, eerie approach to editing and images was simply stunning: the last scenes, set in Death Valley, two of the main characters chained to each other with handcuffs, are some of the most beautiful/desolate images I've ever seen on film. Overall, Greed is a dynamic affair. It goes from dreamy to realistic and back again. Especially the exploration of urban scenery managed to convey a realism-before-realism. It is not only moods that swing in this movie; in a very successful way, the story shifts from neutral account, to comedy (the intertitles are often very funny), to melodrama and then horror story. Greed certainly has it all, and doesn't lose its coherence in the course of these stylistic and emotional transitions. And do check out the colors - the use of coloration along with the addition of gold in some dreamy frames of gold coins and moving, scary fingers.

The story is a simple one. A poor miner, McTeague, learns the trade of dentistry from a charlatain. He opens his own practice. There, he meets his friend's darling, and falls in love. He makes a deal with his friend, and the girl is his. She wins the lottery, and here all hell breaks loose. Their world starts to revolve around money: to have it, not to have it, to gain it. The wife is portrayed as a greedy devil who takes any measure in order to get more money - she is even willing to sacrifice her husband. The husband, in his turn, is corrupted by his life, as he loses his practice (after he has been revealed as a charlatain) and hits the bar for consolation. - - A few more turns of the story, and bad turns into worse. On a psychological level, the film paints a gruesome portrait of how some unplanned events set others in motion. The film's only representations of goodness are a couple living in the same boarding house as McTeague. They are an elderly gentleman and an elderly woman who have been living in adjacent rooms for a lengthy period of time - and for many years, they have been in love with each other, without taking any steps to reveal it to one another. At last, they confess their feelings. This humble love is shown as simple and unproblematic - a striking moment of the film is the rendition of their mutual bliss in full color.

I have a hard time imagining what contemporary movie bosses thought of this movie. This is not exactly a pro-American cheery movie about the happy rich people with the future in their hands. This must be one of the darkest depictions of money ever made (of course it may matter that the money appeared in the characters' lives 'out of nowhere' but I am not sure how to interpret this.) The film has no happy end nor does it give any redeeming image of money (the carefree elderly couple seem completely uninterested in money.)

If you decide to watch a silent movie - give Greed a shot. The story might be dated, but the style is a thousand times more innovative than any 3D blockbuster produced in these days.

Edward Munch (1974)

Clearly, Edward Munch (dir. P. Watkins) aspires to be as artful as the painting's of the artist in the title. I am torn between regarding some of the segments of the film as preposterously pretentious and appreciating the film's sense for rhytm and adventurous stylistic jumps. One at least has to admit that this is not your common biopic trodding along the familiar path of an artist's life with predictable emotional peaks. Interestingly, the film has a a mostly Norwegian cast but the narrator is English. The life of Munch is contextualized by means of a dry voice enumerating historical events during the relevant years. Sometimes this technique works, at other times not at all (I am still not at all clear about what the director aims at here, what kind of contextualization). I was not familiar with the ouevre of Peter Watkins before watching the film, but now I would surely like to see his othe films (about the Paris commune for example, or The War Game). At least, Edward Munch fights against conventional cinema - it tries to rely on the cinematic form to create a new style of film, a new way of assembling material. Does it succeed? Sometimes. Some of the films convey how different forms of art intersect: it is fascinating to watch Munch scrape away at the canvas, you even hear a very detailed world of sounds in Munch's work on his paintings. - The film manages to capture the texture of the paintings in a way that was both thrilling and interesting. The lopside of the film is predictable enough: emotional artist who gains recognition late in life, but who stoically bears the spite of the reviewers and the audience. And: sexual frustration, always sexual frustration in the artist's life that is then of course transported right onto the canvas (one image: a girl's body from the point of view of the male gaze in coitus, yesyes).

Rusalka (2007)

Rusalka (dir.: A Melikyan) is clearly a film that follows in the footsteps of Lola rennt: restless cinematography, quirky story about fate and love - and a punky girl with odd hair (Amelie also came to mind). This is not really a complaint. Even though the story of the film is nothing to write home about, I was entertained (but not moved); it is fair to call the film a type of fairy tale (references to HC Andersen). Aliza grows up in a small town by the Black sea. The girl loses her capacity to speak and attends a school for the mentally handicapped. Her mother takes her along to Moscow and there she meets Sasha, a rich, self-destructive man with a flashy job. She decides that Sasha must be a part of her life. Aliza thinks she has a personal power to make wishes come true, so why not this one? It is the vivid documentation of surroundings that make Rusalka a memorable film. First, the breeziness of seaside Smallville, then the big, cruel city. The camera pans along anonymous skyscrapers, vibrant streets and traffic jams, only to keep returning to commercial texts all over the city. If we look at the actual content of the film, things get more shady - much more. The lively girl Aliza saves the guy's life two or three times and reminds him that he has a heart as well. You know the story: the simple girl and the rich boy, full of himself. The meaning of the end is puzzling, and I am worried that if I mull it over too much, I will like this film less (the big question: is it a terribly cynic ending or is it a critical gesture?). The film contains enough memorable scenes to make it a good film, despite some disappointing erratic scenes. Even though there are plenty of gender stereotypes here, the main character is surprisingly elusive and unusual - she is not our ordinary heroine. I hope I get to see more films directed by Anna Melikyan.

For 80 days (2010)

I must confess that I liked For 80 days (dir. J Garano), fully aware of how bad the plot was, and how primitively the characters sometimes were developed. One of the reasons to like it was the forceful acting of the two leading actresses, who play a pair of friends that meet in a hospital after 40 years. One of the women visit her daughter's ex-lover at the hospital. The woman's husband is a quiet, demanding man. The other woman is a teacher at a conservatory. We come to understand that these two had a sort of fling going on when they were young, but the fling was never expressed or acted on, even though it was somehow acknowledged by them both. In their sixties, they are different people, but they are still attracted to each other. So, basically, For 80 days is a love story about people who haven't seen each other for many years. It's a sad tale about people who want to reach out to each other, who fumble and try to find the right words. Regrettably, the film often choose to take a conventional road in telling the story, so that the film ends up with creating exaggerated and simplistic scenarios along with characters, at least some of them, are so one-dimensional that it is hard to take them seriously. For all this, the film has some beautiful scenes and it is good to see a film about lesbian love that is based on other types of characters than the chic, career-minded adventurer in New York. Had the script been worked on in a different way, this could have been a beautiful film about love and hope.

Daisies (1966)

Daisies (dir. V. Chytilova) take an anarchistic approach to the process of film-making as well as the topics (or can we talk about topics here?) the film explores: gender and sexuality. This is yet another film in which two girls (they are both called Marie) are friends in a mysterious, hilarious and inexplicable way. This stereotype about the unintelligible nature of girls' friendship worries me. But this film is surely not stereotypical in an ordinary sense: instead of showing two girls wrapped up in their private games that exclude the surrounding world, creating a little private sphere of their own, Daisies conjures up a much more subversive image of play and imagination. These girls are not innocent and in the process of "growing up" to become mature, responsible women. No, no, no! These girls have grander schemes. Constantly at play, they mock ridiculous gender patterns, they play with a world of architecture and "tasteful things". The girls world don't end in maturity and child-rearing - no it ends with a grand finale of food throwing and general fuck-up. These girls are part of the situationist international, rather than a private party of two confused girls in need of some adult guidance. The film shows that sometimes girls have to disrupt the logic of being cute and cuddly beings for men to caress - sometimes girls have to indulge in a spree of causing mayhem. We need to talk about the style of the film. This is surreal stuff, one of the most experimental films of the Czech new wave, but it is (I think) not that famous among movie buffs. The aesthetics of pop art blends in with twisted little scenes of social critique - it is an aesthetics of performativity that is all the time rooted in a sense of how weird the contemporary "tasteful" world of men and woman (involved in "tasteful" mating games) really is. The colors of the scenes are constantly changing, only sometimes to erupt in fantastic little swirls of shapes. Daisies is a fun, wacky and experimental film. You should watch it.

Don't look now (1974)

Few horror movies succeed in being scary; most of these indulge in gore and blood without evoking any emotions deeper than the kind of sudden shock elicited by an unexpected sound or violent image. In that sense, Nicholas Roeg's Don't look now is an example of a more visually profound, character-driven horror movie, one could call it psychological drama with some supernatural overtones. It is partly the editing technique that makes the film something out of the ordinary: instead of ordinary plot, the film creeps upon you with loose threads and unexpected turns, along with strange connections. An English couples has lost their daughter in a drowning accident. They go to Venice, as the husband has business there (he reconstructs churches). If you are used to James Bond-styles lush Italy, think again. This is more Death in Venice - foggy, haunting images of a city that seems to dwell on many secrets. Roeg uses colors to great effect here, how the dead child reappers just as a color: it is a certain hue that evokes her. The general style of the film is also quite minimalist, no lavish special effects are thrown in for entertainment value. The film, from its initial scenes onwards, builds on premonitions and feelings, rather than concrete events. Don't look now takes place in the realm of guilt and memory - Roeg shows how ordinary life itself seems to bear elements of the supernatural, the ghosts within our minds and the associations and dreams that mark visual perception.

Father and son (2003)

I watched Father and son in a state of half-sleep, after a long day of champagne and sun. This, I think, is the ideal state of mind for this movie. Even if my mind had been less foggy, I think I couldn't make much of the story. The film opens with a long, erotic scene in which a barely clothed father comforts his barely clothed son, who is having nightmares. The erotic tension between them continues. There is jealousy, fear of losing the other. The son is going through military training. The mother is absent. The boy has met a girl but we only see her through a window and standing on a balcony. It is the father-son relationship we see, and it seems to be all about quasi-religious bonds, depicted in religious language (a father must crucify his son! Tough love. I had a hard time developing a religious interpretation of the events in the film, even though there were clearly references to be picked up.) We see father and son at play on a rooftop. Their neighbor joins in - he wants to become them to form a trinity, but the others hesitate. The locations and the cinematography (a strange, soft light) of Father and Son are stunning, as always in Sokurov's films (esp. Mother and Son, to which this film is connected). The same can be said about the use of sound: Tchaikovsky, static noise, electronica. (I have read that Sokurov's own explication of the movie is all about rejecting homoeroticism and explaining how the film can provide a sense of moral edification.) To call Father and son opaque is an understatement. Still - it was a pleasure to watch it.

Céline and Julie go boating (1974)

Having seen some of Jacques Rivette's crime stories, Céline and Julie go boating was something completely different. For the first twenty minutes, we see one girl chasing another, or is she chasing her, what is she doing? The quiet, strange scene sets the tone for the rest of the film, a whimsical, weird affair a librarian bewitched by magic and a nightclub magician who performs her tricks in a seedy club. I must confess that after 1 hour, I just felt confused. After 3 hours and 5 minutes, I had been dragged into the world of the two leading characters, Céline and Julie, who after the longish initial scene became friends. Because this is what the film at least partly seems to be about: creating a world of one's own. With Julie and Celine, we enter a mysterious house, and with them, we have mysterious amnesia afterwards. They finally 'remeber', or wait, they 'make up', or wait, they 'hallucinate', or what, they 'imagine' what goes on in the house. The second part of the film is made up by a film-within-the-film, a melodramatic story about jealousy and murders! We see Rivette smiling somewhere behind the scenes; a film about acting, pretending, playing... Oh, what a French movie this is, and not in a bad way particularly - but a chronically academic and complex one - deconstruction, baby. Julie and Céline (re)enact film as fantasy, play and nightmare at the same time - somewhere between reality, dream and the land of ghosts. Freud himself would probably have cheered enthusiastically had he seen this movie. But of course, when I said this film is academic I didn't intend to say it is dry: no, the opposite is rather the case. This, if anything, is whimsy. But what is real and what is not and who are the ghosts? You guessed it: the answer is a messy one.

Once every now and then I hade the feeling that David Lynch must have taken a cue from this while making Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire - there are several Lynchian themes here.  

Afterwards, I thought about the way Celine and Julie portrays friendship. The image is just so familiar: two girls who form a friendship so strong and affective that their personalities starts to blur; two girls with a friendship that locks the external world out, creating a world of its own. Can you remember one single film about dudes that develops these traits?

Elephant (2003)

I've seen Elephant many times and I will probably watch it again. It is one of those films that haunts my mind in a way that I am quite unable to explain;  I simply come to think of it in the most various situations - it is an emotionally complex, striking film. The film, as you all know, is a meditation on school shootings, but it deals with this theme with no pretensions of giving a psychological explanation to what happened. One might even say that the film is not driven by an attempt to depict "what led up to" these gruesome events. Van Sant's sense of time is different, less dependent on ideas about causality, reasons, what-happened-afterwards. This is evident in the film's loose structure. There are lacunas, discrepancies, overlappings.

Elephant follows a bunch of kids in their school surroundings. The camera tracks kids walking, mostly in school surroundings, a snippet of conversation is heard, we rarely know the context. The film is structured so that we follow one character for a while, then we see the events (which in most of the film remain completely unremarkable and everyday) from another character's point of view. The point is not, I think, to gradually reveal new information. Van Sant is more interested in subjectivity than storytelling. The sense of repetition creates an eerie, foreboding atmosphere. Rather than opting for social analysis of the traditional sort, van Sant puts his ear close to the clichés and colloqial patterns of everyday language. The kids in the movie are not walking social symptoms (there are a few problematic scenes, as for example one scene in which a gang of girls walk into a toilet to perform a synchronized vomiting act). The camera is often stationed behind a kid who is walking down a corridor. This particular type of scene is repeated often, to great effect. Ambient sounds and noise is used in a way that makes me remember how overwhelming social life of high school really was. Places could be completely empty but still packed with meaning. The use of music in the film could have been sentimental - Beethoven's best known work! - but here van Sant rather approaches the continuum between sadness and sentimentality. Some have considered the film as too dispassionate, too distant, the characters too insignificant. I don't agree with this. What makes Elephant a good film is that it doesn't move away from the everyday into a strange dimension of Evil. Van Sant doesn't make the killers look interesting or cool. They are kids who play music, eat their mum's pancakes and chuckle ironically. Victims are not portrayed as victims but rather as people whose life end in a sudden, violent way. The film, instead of taking on the perspective of sensationalism, is or seems to be intelligible as an account of mourning, and that it is precisely important that mourning the dead is about looking at people as real human beings rather than social stereotypes.

Some of the scenes in Elephant are on the verge of the overwrought and the simplistic, but then I realize that a particular scene is not as cheap as I initially felt. One example of this is when John and Alex sit in the livingroom waiting for the delivery man. The telly is on and a man talks about the Nazi era in a flat voice while images of cheering Germans are shown. One of the boys nonchalantly asks whether it is possible to buy a Nazi flag. Only if you're crazy, replies the other. The point is of course not to show these kids as small extremists. This is what happens to be on TV, and hapless words are uttered. The dry voice in the tv program makes the scene almost comical.

The Unbelievable Truth (1990)

A film can hardly get more lo-fi than Hal Hartlay's The Unbelievable Truth. A scruffy, humorous film reminding me of both Jim Jarmusch and Twin Peaks, this is something both weird and humorous. Josh plays the guy who got out of prison and who is now returning to his home town, where he is received with both admiration and hostility. He gets a job as a car mechanic and of course there is a romantic thing going on between Josh and the boss' daughter who is not very interested in going to college. Lines (often blurred in [intentionally?] bad sound quality) are often stiff, always delivered in a sincere, deadpan way, which creates a comic effects. The settings have a minimalist feel and you end up with the feeling that you inhabit a strange planet where people say familiar things, dress in black and look cool, talk cool. It's a movie where nothing special happens - but then ... Hartlay for sure knows his understatements. The Unbelievable Truth is a blacker-than-black comedy (black melodrama might be a more appropriate term) about suburban life, redemption - and moeny.