The Circus (1928)

The Circus involves several things Charlie Chaplin is most famous for. He plays the hapless Tramp who ends up in a situation he can't control but where he excels with a wide range of acrobatic tricks. The Tramp has arrived at a circus as a penniless property man. He wreaks havoc with this job but it turns out he does it in a way that entertains the circus audience, and he's hired as a member of the crew. He falls in love with the ringmaster's daughter, and he is sure they are to be lovers. - - - I'm not a fan of physical humor but what held my attention in the film is the meta-comments it delivers on humor. What is it to be funny? The tramp is funny without being aware of being so. When he tries to be funny, he no longer is. The hired clowns are dreadful and the rehearsed stunts are perceived to be boring. It's mishaps and the muddles that entertain the audience, but of course the movie itself is a tightly scripted and acted. Still, the moments that I react to as funny are moments where I feel that there is moments of spontaneity, something beyond skillful acrobatics. The Circus could be read as a critique of the contemporary circus industry, but I'm not totally convinced whether that's a plausible reading. On the other hand, this is a film that trades in acrobatics and sentimentality. Perhaps it makes more sense to understand the film as a homage to the era of silent movies that was coming to an end?

Even though the Tramp does not get the girl at the end, there was too little that surprised or moved me in this movie. But I have to admit that I simply could not resist being amused by some of Chaplin's stunts. 

Sofia's Last Ambulance (2012)

Rember Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mister Lazarescu? A brutal film about the erosion of society and the lack of basic forms of institutional support needed to protect and people in need. Ilian Metev covers similar territory with the documentary Sofia's Last Ambulance. It is a very strong film that keeps close to the protagonists, a team of ambulance workers. We are quickly thrown into their daily job routines and we immediately learn that their situation is an impossible one. There are very few ambulances in the city and the underpaid crews must work extremely hard to access as many people as possible. The viewer does not doubt that there are many tragedies that are merely hinted at in the movie. What makes the film so engaging, and so sad, is that the desperation and the strain implied by the working conditions are directly seen, heard and felt. The camera is planted in the ambulance and we see the weary faces of the crew members and we hear their daily banter and their survival techniques. This is shattering material, because the pressure is rendered so nakedly: a doctor smokes incessantly, there are bursts of anger and lots of frustration. Almost every image in the film is limited to the faces of the crew members. Thus, we see very little of the patients or the streets of Sofia. This is, I think, a strength of the film. It really puts trust in its way of capturing these people's jobs. This is not E.R.

Soul Kitchen (2007)

Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite were overwhelming viewing experiences for me. They are films that have stayed with me through the years. Soul Kitchen plays in another league, the lighthearted comedy league. Zinos owns a dingy restaurant/bar and his girlfriend has moved to China. Life is hard for Zinos: he misses his girlfriend, he's having back problems and he's employed a new chef who likes to do things his own way. The true love of his life, his bar, is invaded by tax officials, health inspectors and real estate scumbags who are making the daily grind even more painful. The reason why I can't complain about the movie is all the affection that it contains. The characters are milling about the industrial parts of Hamburg and I really start to care for them, even though the film itself offers rather conventional humor and a meat&poptato storyline.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

A kid is playing a small piano in an alleyway. This is one example of a scene that makes Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 so great: even a small detail of urban life, like this one, is full of life in this movie, that is set in Paris during two hours packed with emotional scales. Cléo is a singer worrying about the diagnosis of a cancer tumor. The film follows her - from 5 to 7, and it goes through the tumult of her emotional life with a lightness and liveliness that makes the story all but a lugubrious brooding on mortality. The complexity, but also sometimes strangely fleeting quality, of Cléos emotions is beautifully captured. Thus, the film contains both seriousness and a sense of playfulness. Even when the film seems to burst with urban life and detailed settings we never lose track of Cléo and the things she goes through. She is used to being admired, looked at, desired. In the film, we see her differing attitude towards this attention. In one moment, we see her flirting and singing with a bunch of guys playing at a piano. In another scene, Cléo is walking on the street, pondering her impending diagnosis. The scenes is filmed from a subjective point of view, so that what Cléo experiences as the intruding gazes of the passers-by are highly present. She worries about being sick, losing her good looks, and thus the gazes remind her of the ambivalence of the kind of attention she is constantly the object of. These scenes remind the viewer of hir own perception and hir own conclusions: how do I view Cléo? What do I take her to be? What happens when I start to deride what she says as superstition? What do I perceive as masks, and what do I see as the 'real' Cléo? The dynamic and playful cinematic techniques employed in Cléo from 5 to 7 keep those questions at the heart of the film. One of those questions are, of course: what do I think happens in the last 30 minutes of 'Cléo from 5 to 7' that are not captured in the film, that runs at 1 hour, 30 minutes?

Lili Marleen (1981)

Lili Marleen is far from Fassbinder's best work. It's a decent film, but also a rather unfocused and perhaps a bit uninspired one. The story is about a singer, Willie (fabulous overwrought Hannah Schygulla), whose career is linked to Nazi era sentiments. She is enamored with a Swiss guy involved in the resistance movement. Willie scores a big hit, a favorite among the German troops and among the nazi party elite. The cheesy song is played countless times in the movie and through his hyperbolic sense of melodrama, Fassbinder lets Willie stand for a hapless naivety. 'I only sing'. She's the diva who is known to the German people mostly as the 'woman who sings Lili Marleen. She considers herself to be against the Nazis, but her acting shows nothing of it. Her lover saves Jews and tries to reveal the truth about the nazis. He marries another woman and becomes a celebrated conductor. German soldiers ar heard roaring along to Lili Marleen and Willie perform the song in glossy evening dresses. These are colorful big budget images and I suppose the aim is to present a dreadful image of entertainment as a distortion, a lie or as a manifestation of the kind of skewed self-undertanding that Willie nurses about herself. However, Lili Marleen is not a film that digs out the contrast between surface and brutal reality. That contrast is not at all present here. Glamor, gloss and people's desperation and love-sick disappointment are rendered in the same bizarre and kitschy style. That Fassbinder focuses on a bombastic love story rather than the brutality of war is of course part of the irony of the film. If you will remember something from this film, it is probably Lili Marleen, the song we hear a thousand times in this movie, accompanied by crashing bombs. Even though the effect is striking, this remains a minor film.

A Prophet (2009)

A Prophet is an ambitious film. Malik is doing time in prison. The film follows him through the hierarchies of the prisons that ultimately leads him to a gangster world that extends outside the gates of the prison. When we first meet him, Malik is an insecure, quiet guy. Gradually, he toughens. This may sound like a cliché but somehow Jacques Audiard, who directed the film, keeps enough interest in his protagonist so that the project never really slides into the territory of the all-too-familiar images of tough and masculine competition of who is on top of the prison gangs. Audiard focuses on the vulnerability of the newcomer and the way this vulnerability rather quickly transmutes into an almost invincible presence. Malik meets César (Niels Arestrup - brilliant in this role), the Corsican king of the prison. From the get-go, César has his eyes on the new guy, whom he incessantly calls a dirty Arab good for nothing but cleaning and servility. Malik is played like an errand boy, but who starts to become a player in his own right. In the prison, Malik learns to read and he takes economics classes. He also learns how to inhabit the role of ruthless criminal, a role that at first does not at all come naturally to him. At the end of the film, I am not at all sure whether it is proper to call what he is engaged in as performance of a role.

One thing A Prophet reveals is the moral irreversibility of these events. Malik becomes a murderer. Prison has changed this person forever. Malik starts to get a reputation in the prison and he treats his mobster protector with a mix of fear, reverence and disdain. He is given more and more tasks outside the prison, and he learns the skills of dispassionately doing what he is assigned to do. // Skeptical remarks could of course be raised against A Prophet. What I appreciated about it was that it, for all the explicit display of violence, or perhaps even because of it, kept an attention to vulnerability throughout and it is seen in the places we least expect it to exist: we see the anguish in the experienced killer Malik and in the mobster leader who wanders around the prison court, exuding a sense of loneliness amidst his power. A Prophet never tries to reveal what these character 'really' feel or think. They act, and we see their agility or clumsiness. This is the virtue of the film: it makes us ask, over and over again: what is this life really like, what would it be like to do these things? What separates A Prophet from many other prison films is that nothing of the life of violence and reputation is made to look cool. There are countless gruesome scenes that reveal the world in which the protagonist comes to inhabit.

Some of the scenes have a strange almost contemplative character. Two of these scenes are enhanced by music by one of my favorite bands, Talk Talk. An excellent choice!

Matewan (1987)

How many American films about strikes have you watched? In my case: not many. I was curious about Matewan, a film directed by John Sayles (who has crafted some films I like) about a 1920 coal miners' strike in a small town in West Virginia. The film tells the story about labor union organizing and the violent resistance it met. The protagonist, Joe, is a professional union man who comes to Matewan to organize the workers. He finds lodging at a coal miner's widow's house. Her son is a preacher. The employer threatens the workers with lower pay and replacement of organized workers. Joe seeks to organize workers of different backgrounds. One of the messages - a beautiful one, I think - is the internationalist and anti-racist potential of the worker movement. Racism is seen both in the company's strategies to break up the unions but it is also seen in troubling tendencies within the union. A question that is kept alive throughout the film is that there is a controversy within the union about whose union it is. The conflict with the employer escalates. An infiltrator tries to manipulate the union members, trying to convince them that Joe is a spy. Two company agents arrive in town where they take action by evicting miners from their former residences.

The major weakness of Matewan is how clumsily it deals with the situation in which the conflict turns into a violent one. Eventually, the violence and the company men start to look like evil gangs in a Western movie. The last couple of scenes are strongly inspired by a foreboding Western aesthetic. For my own part, I felt that this dramatization took the political edge off the story. Characters are often reduced into good guys and bad guys and some situations are extremely bluntly staged into a struggle between evil intentions and almost saintly deeds. In these moments, the film reels from political narration to sloppy moral drama in which letters are stolen and conversations are overheard by malicious ears.

At best, Sayles chronicles the organizing of the union and the community of evicted workers that gradually evolves. The solidarity among the workers who not always share a language is beautifully portrayed in quiet scenes. So is the tension that occurs from the differences among the strikers with regard to the use of violence. Joe, the professional labor organizer, is against violence. Some of the strikers accuses him of being too professional, and thus no real voice in the conflict. The verdict on violence is a mixed one. The recourse to violence in the union is presented as destructive and dangerous, but the way Joe and the others are rendered powerless is also troubling. We also see examples of how the company had to back down simply because of the strikers being armed, and, for that reason, posing a real threat. A point Sayles seems to make throughout is that the capitalists acted like thugs, with brute violence, and that this created a very specific situation.

When looking at these tensions, the film has something very interesting going on. A crucial observation made by the story is how the mining company uses conquer-and-divide strategies in order to break up the union and how the reaction against those tactics have both existential, practical and political stakes.

One thing that should be mentioned is the way very common clichés are evaded. The film shows a pro-union chief of police and a preacher who transforms biblical parables into fiery union speeches. Wisely, Matewan doesn't even opt for cheesy love stories, even in the places where it opens for that possibility.

Rififi (1955)

A while ago I wrote about Le cercle rouge. Jules Dassin's heist movie Rififi is definitively a predecessor that shares the same spirit and attitude towards the crime genre. Also in this film there is a drawn-out near-silent scene that conveys the methodical work of criminals, in this case a gang cracking a safe in a jewellry shop by first sneaking into the apartment above the shop, silencing the inhabitants and then cutting their way through the roof in order to access the safe... It's a brilliant scene that ends with some screeching drills. However, I can't say Rififi made a deep impression on me. The personalities of the thugs didn't really get a hold on me: I simply did not see much here beyond the routine toughness and snappy dialogue and showdowns against women. The only character that stands out is Tony, who likes to play with his grandson. I will remember it for its depiction of a wintry, damp Montmarte and the memorable last sequence of the film in which we see Tony going home with his gdson (whom he has gotten hold of from kidnappers) in a car. A car ride to remember, for sure. As has been pointed out, what makes Rififi special is the way Dassin uses locations. In one scene we see a jazz band jamming. The scene has no particular purpose. We just watch these types playing in a cavernous club, and that's all. Of Dassin's films, I prefer the equally gloomy Night and the City.

Boyhood (2014)

Newspaper articles have raved about the unusual long-term use of actors in Richard Linklater's Boyhood. Even though I can understand the originality of using the same actors for many years, I don't think this in itself makes a film brilliant. Boyhood turns out to be a rather captivating story about growing up as a kid in the USA. It also deals with parenting in a refreshing way. However, there is little that truly stands out in the film. Perhaps I was fooled by unanimously over-enthusiastic reviews, but I simply did not, for all its sympathetic perspective and sometimes moving moments, see the greatness of Boyhood. Yes, the film managed to hold my attention for over 3 hours. What bothered me was how lazy some of the film's choices seemed to me. There are the Moment of growing up, the Hardships of being a parent and the ill-advised relationships we end up in. What I mean is, that the film tries too hard capturing a specific stage in life in a specific typical moments. The protagonist, Mason, is seen in the typical situations growing up involve. The family moves. The mother is involved with an angry drunk. The father is a rather immature guy who still cares about relating to the kids. There's adolescence and romance, schools and boy-father bonding. All of this is fine, weren't it for a certain eagerness to churn out Epic Moments that capture the big changes in life. There's the "watchful, reflective intensity".

Not only are they Epic Moments, they also contain what at time - not always - can be felt to be calculated aims of capturing the touchstones of a specific year. In one such scene, we see the protagonist and his sister campaigning for Obama. In another, we see them lining up to buy Harry Potter books. To me, these scenes seemed to function mostly as such touchstones of time.

There's also the Boyhood thing. Even though I would not say Linklater prescribes to a strict traditional masculinity the role of gender in the movie was a bit puzzling. On the one hand, this is a film about fighting with one's siblings, going to parties, falling in love, dealing with one's parents. (And parents caring about or worrying about their kids.) On the other hand, I don't think reviewers are wrong when they claim that Boyhood is about becoming a man. My problem is the image conjured up here. Mason is a kid who learns that being a boy involves certain rules about how to express oneself and how to act. We see a certain independence in him as he matures, he chooses his own way. I don't doubt that this can be a good description of how people grow up and turn out different from their sexist environment. The only problem with how this independence is rendered is a tiny element of self-satisfactory Universalness this boy comes to inhabit. To make my point a bit crude: what would you imagine a film called Girlhood to be? Could you even imagine an equally solid image of Growing up and Maturing? I'm not so sure. I have a hard time articulating my worries here, but some of it concerns a certain non-resolution when it comes to gender in this movie.