The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky; 1975)

There was a specific moment in The Mirror when I realized it would be a favorite movie. It’s the scene where the father recalls a scene from a childhood when he looked at a girl walking in the snow. The camera then cut to a close-up of his face, which then cut to a barrel of a gun. Do I love it because it has some rich allusive meaning that explains it all? An allegory about how violence intrudes upon the simple pleasures of life, or something along those lines? Fuck no. I think that too often people talk about films in terms of “And this means this, which means this in the context of scene C, which ties in perfectly with the allegory presented in the opening, which means this and explains why the monkeys touch the monolith.” [Admittedly, this is a practice I too often follow]. The Mirror works both on a level far beyond that, and is also much simpler. I love sequences such as the aforementioned for the simple reason that they contain such a raw power and evoke such strong emotions in the viewer [well – me]. That’s what makes it simple – it doesn’t require any unearthings of unholy symbolism to appreciate. The only real question is why it evokes those emotions, which is naturally a much more complex issue. Incidentally, it’s also an issue I don’t really care about. The film is what it is, that’s that. I’m happy with it.

The film switches willfully and almost spontaneously between color and black&white and past and present. This, combined with the previously mentioned lack of a simple unifying subtext, has led some to call the film a difficult piece of work, but I find that simply ludicrous, as the film is anything but difficult to appreciate. I think that that label is best left to such works as Zorn’s Lemma or L’Âge d’or [at least for me], which may ultimately bear the same fruits, but I find I would have to work much harder to draw any sort of enjoyment, entertainment, much less any sort of stimulation at all from the films. Indeed, I think that The Mirror is one of the easiest films out there to watch: it’s not incredibly long or demanding, like Andrei Rublev or Satantango, a dullness like Saving Prvate Ryan, an intelligent dullness like Battleship Potemkin, and it doesn’t even have the pretension [not something that I personally believe is there] that people like to accuse Lynch of having. Quite simply, it’s aesthetic unrivalled by any other film that I’ve seen, and one that perfectly expresses the elemental purity of film language.

The best film I’ve seen? Yeah, sure. Maybe. I dunno.

Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Fritz Lang; 1922)

For several months, Fritz Lang has had the unique honor of having directed two of my most treasured silent films, Der Müde Tod and Metropolis [if he were alive, I think he would be very proud of this]. Sadly, before tonight, these are the only two silent films I’ve seen from him.

Well, he can now boast three silent favorites. Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler is one of the most wickedly entertaining films I’ve seen. And as silent crime serials (sort of) go, it’s far beyond Les Vampires (which is indeed about crime, not vampires) or Judex – although I certainly like both of those. And that may be ultimately because Dr. Mabuse isn’t just about crime; it’s about people. The upper class, in all their rich glory, have all the wealth but no purpose. This is alluded to be a few lines of dialog, such as:
“We are bored and tired, Mr. von Wenk! We need sensations of a very special kind to keep us alive!”
But not only are there intertitled cues – it’s in the very visual approach. The rich are generally shown to in muted compositions, in dynamic-less poses (picture below). Compare this to almost any shot with Dr. Mabuse (such as the one in the image above), who almost always commands the visual center and focus of the screen. Of course, this could be interpreted as glorifying crime [“Here's some boring old fuddie-duddies in all their wealth, but heeeere’s…DR. MABUSE, KING OF CRIME!”], as I believe Les Vampires was accused of being (which is really the only reason I’m bringing it up). That may be true on a technical scale, but it turns out to be rather unimportant. On one hand, I can’t imagine anyone walking away from the film thinking “Crime: fuck yeah!” and more importantly, Mabuse eventually goes insane from his crimes. Not cool.

It may not be the most poignant social commentary [I suppose you could mutter something about the depression of post-war Germany – but I won’t go there], but it’s effective enough for what it is. Any sort of quasi-depth aside, the film’s terrifically entertaining. Dr. Mabuse, with his trusty variety of disguises, robs a train, messes with the stock market, and hypnotizes people to cheat at blackjack. One of the film’s best sequences arises out of his blackjack schemes: as part of Inspector Von Wenk’s ruse to track down Mabuse, he plays blackjack with Mabuse as dealer. As Mabuse stares at Von Wenk, trying to hypnotize him, the people surrounding Mabuse gradually fade into black, and the camera zooms in as Mabuse’s face enlarges the screen. While not exactly modern in its approach, it’s easily one of the most visually striking moments in silent films [equalled only by, say, Metropolis?].

Overall, yeah, the film is 4+ hours long, and silent to boot, but it flies by faster than most other films, silent or no. And you can no doubt thank Fritz Lang for that.

Of course, if nothing else, it’s great because it opens with the intertitles of
“You have taken cocaine again, Spoerri! You know that I do not tolerate that! If I see you one more time in such a state I will drive you out like a dog!”
“If you drive me out…I shall shoot myself in the head -- !”
Brilliant.

#2 of 5 for Lang.

Way Down East (D.W. Griffith; 1920)

“He has three specialties:
ladies-- ladies--
and LADIES.”

It’s easy to knock a good deal of silent films for their obviously dated intertitles (such as the above) or melodramatic acting. Personally, such things have never bothered me, as they’re just a product of the time, rather than any real flaws in production. It also hardly helps that many techniques that silent films pioneered are standard practice today, so that when we see them in their original context, they seem unremarkable – or moreover, we don’t even notice them (think of the Kuleshov effect, cross-cutting, etc.).

And if these were problems for most silent film directors, they are certainly problems for Griffith – or at least the modern perception of Griffith. Universally regarded as one of the first true film pioneers and innovators, his films are also credited as moving film technique forward more than any other director. And that is to say: he was among the first to employ such things as the Kuleshov effect and cross-cutting. As mentioned earlier, the problem is that we now take these things for granted. As for me, when I watch old(er) films, I don’t think of any sort of specific technique (“oh, Griffith’s employing cross-cutting now to amplify the suspense”), but watching Griffith, it is undeniably clear that he was miles ahead of his peers in a visual sense. I lack the specific film grammar to be able to say why, but his films have better rhythym than his contemporaries, better visual flow, a better sense of editing and framing, and so on. Even going ten to twenty years later into the 20s and 30s, he still knew better what he was doing with the camera than anyone else. At least in the 40s, we got Welles who – shall we say – shook things up a bit.

Griffith’s filmic intelligence is most clear in The Birth of a Nation – which sadly, of course, is his most morally…dubious. I find Intolerance a boring piece of intelligent construction, and I love Broken Blossoms, despite some…dubious…stereotypes. Orphans of the Storm is…well, it’s there. Way Down East falls somewhere between The Birth of a Nation and Broken Blossoms. Except for Broken Blossoms, it may be Griffith’s most consistently engaging and interesting, though I don’t feel all of the cinematic craft present in The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance. I suppose that could be seen as a good thing, in that it feels more naturalistic.

As seems usual for Griffith, it’s a Victorian morality play with some social commentary to boot (which is actually more engaging than that sounds). There’s the foppish rich dandy (described by the quote preceding this review) who takes advantage of the simple country girl (Gish, of course) who fools her into thinking they’re married, throws her away when she’s pregnant,tries to come back to her when the baby’s dead, and so on. Then there’s a real You know, the usual stuff. It works just about as well as such stuff has the potential to work.

I’m not feeling the desire to write too much more, so I won’t. In short: worth seeing if you have the patience for silent films. #3 on my list of 5 Griffith features.

A Summer at Grandpa's (Hou Hsiao-Hsien; 1984)

Avid readers of my reviews [I suspect that I have an immense number of strangely unvocal followers due to my one review to date…] may recall that I loved A Time to Live and a Time to Die and wasn’t all too wild about Dust in the Wind. A Summer at Grandpa’s, at least for now, falls decidedly between the two. While it doesn’t have nearly the effect on me that A Time to Live and a Time to Die did, it’s a minor masterpiece in its own right.

In terms of general plot, it follows much the same path as A Time to Live and a Time to Die did: a young person grows and matures due to external forces, from globalization to the simple strifes of maturity that life presents. I think that A Time to Live is the more effective film, mostly due to the fact that we see almost all of Hou’s childhood life mapped out. Here, well…it’s just a summer. I suppose it’s more a personal thing than anything else: films that chart out a life tend to be more effective than those that only do it for a small period of time. In A Time to Live, Hou lives his life and, after a number of years, an event such as the death of his father happens, and it’s absolutely devastating, because so much of his life has built up to that moment. There’s something to be said for poignancy of rabid change, but it doesn’t hit me quite as much.

But all that’s just why I prefer A Time to Live and a Time to Die. As I already said, A Summer at Grandpa’s is its own minor masterpiece. In the opening, we have what seems to be somewhat random footage: we see a high school graduate giving a speech about how heavy her heart is to be moving on. At least, it would seem to be random. What it indicates is a lack of willingness to change, to move on: we don’t want to mature, we would rather be children forever. Moreover, it represents the simple change – regardless of the feeling about that change – from childhood to maturity. We even see this in those that would seem to have already made that change: for example, the uncle that is travelling with Tung-Tung and Ting-Ting [awesome names] leaves them on the train as he goes elsewhere with his girlfriend. Not cool.

Of course, that change isn’t exactly for the better: consider one of the opening sequences where Tung-Tung arrives in Grandpa’s town. He drives his toy motorized car [what are those things called, anyways?] into and over the turtle that belongs to one of the country children. While on one hand, this could be considered to be a simple contrast between city and country [product of industry driving over thing of nature], it also serves to compare to a later scene where Ting-Ting finds a dead bird. At the beginning, while Tung-Tung is still young, he and the other children attempt to exhibit mastery over nature, and by the time that they have matured at the end, that nature is dead.

That also ties into the more minor theme of nationalization – which is more directly related to the country/city contrast. Tung-Tung and Ting-Ting’s mother is ill in the city, and when they arrive in the country, everything seems great. But it’s discovered that even in this idyllic place, there are mental illnesses, unwanted pregnancies, crimes, and so on. It all represents the qualities of the city seeping into the country. This was also excellently shown in the quick scene where the grandfather, after kicking his son in law out of the house due to the pregnancy that arose out of wedlock, attempts to bash his motorcycle with a log. Only his log breaks – a clear piece of symbolism I won’t bother going into with any more detail.

As I said, it’s not quite the masterpiece that Hou’s clearly capable of, but it’s nonetheless an excellent piece of work. As of now: #2 of 3 Hou films.

A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-Hsien; 1985)

After having a certain lack of enthusiasm for Dust in the Wind, which is the only other Hou film that I’ve seen, I was reluctant to try another. While I thought that Dust in the Wind occasionally attained moments of genuine poetic beauty, on the whole, I found it rather uninteresting. A Time to Live and a Time to Die, however, is like a movie that’s a collection of nothing but what I enjoyed about Dust in the Wind.

The opening hour (or so) in the film consists of relatively sentimental scenes of Hou’s childhood. They’re not sentimental in that wacky saccharine Spielbergian sense of “I could have saved one more! Just one more! Oh noes…” but rather, they have a genuine ethereal quality and affection for that period of Hou’s life. This, more or less, represents to the ‘Time to Live’ part of the title. This period, however, ends abruptly with the death of Hou’s father, in which Hou is first introduced to death and mortality – the ‘Time to Die’ part of the title and the end of that period of ‘living,’ so to speak.

When we next see Hou, we see that he’s been (at least metaphorically/symbolically) tainted by his encounter with death: he’s with his friends plotting the mugging of a street vendor. While even from the beginning of the film, he was always a bit of a troublemaker, his earlier escapades had the quality of innocence to them. Touched with a contemplation of mortality, that innocence is lost.

As it seems with 99% of all acclaimed Asian films and directors, there is little camera movement, and there is not much motion within the frame (which is not to say I found it boring). Looking at each shot, I found that, true to a certain Asian aesthetic, what surrounds the actors is almost as interesting to look at as the people in the shot. The people, while they’re the center of interest, don’t command the visual interest, as they so often do in Western art. Hou does not seem (I can’t quite say with certainty, considering that I’ve seen only 2 films from him) to be a director that creates power or emotion through flashy camerawork or the collision of shots – he’s not a Welles or an Eisenstein. Rather than using the varied faculties of film/the camera, it seems, he uses the concept of film to create depth. For example, different shots exist to elongate physical distance. While Hou’s father is alive in the opening, he is generally shown to be in different shots than Hou, stretching the physical and emotional distance between them. One of the few moments where they are in the same shot, and even the only moment where they eliminate the physical distance that film editing creates, is after the father dies and Hou holds his hand. As alluded to above, it’s only the realization of death that eliminates the emotional cavities.

The film cycles back to its halfway mark near the end: as Hou’s mother is carted away due to her own illness, the musical themes from the beginning of the film returns: as Hou reflects, his friends continue with their street wars. The meaning is clear: this second realization of mortality forces Hou himsef to cycle back to how he was at the beginning.

In other words: a real masterpiece for the soul.