Suspiria (1977)

DIRECTOR(S): Dario Argento SCREENPLAY: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi CAST: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé, Barbara Magnolfi, Udo Kier, Joan Bennett, Aida Vallli DISTRIBUTOR: International Classics Inc. RUNTIME: 97 min. RATING: R YEAR: 1977

Dario Argento has always been a point of interest for me--partly because of the great critical acclaim he has received over the years as a giallo filmmaker, but also because I had never seen, besides snippets of Tenebre and Deep Red, a full Argento film in its entirety. While I was discussing what directors to follow up on in this month and a half study with my mentor, Argento's name came up and, happily, I agreed I would begin an Argento retrospective after I had completed my half-assed study of New German Cinema. A free upload of the film on Netflix later, however, tempted me far too much to wait another week, and so I saw Suspiria late at night in my cramped room...

Dario Argento's 1977 classic is a visual feast, an incredibly realized, insanely artful evocation that masks its incredible aesthetics in a self-reflexive and even campy development of plot and character. Anyone, I think, who complains about its hilarious writing and campy cookie-cutter characters is missing the point; Suspiria's magistery is in its images, and their construction. Take the film's most famous sequence, a four minute freak-show involving Pat (a ballet student expelled from the school that the main protagonist, Suzy, plans on attending) in her friend's home: the pictorial elements interlock at various points while becoming independent from each other as the wallpaper nears the room's window. Pat is hung from a telephone wire and violently thrust through the stained glass ceiling of the apartment complex; the falling glass, in turn, slices Pat's friend to death. The shattered glass, Pat's dangling corpse and her dribbling blood become glorious elements of the apartment building's already phenomenal artificiality.

Argento's mise-en-scene is always manipulated, exploited, so to speak, to create his synthetic over-glow of haunting red colors or overtones. This artificiality is the crux of Suspiria, a film that is scary as hell not because of its characters, but simply because of this isolating synthetics. The delirious Goblin composition that accompanies the film brings to mind the sounds of a little girl's ballerina music box--or just plain craziness. It's also annoying as hell, and that's the point: Suspiria is all about affecting the aesthetic response, a stab at the viewer to respond to what's going on no matter what.

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975)

DIRECTOR(S): Rainer Werner Fassbinder SCREENPLAY: Rainer Werner Fassbinder CAST: Brigitte Mira, Ingrid Caven, Armin Meler, Irm Hermann, Karlheinz Böhm, Anita Bucher, DISTRIBUTOR: New Yorker Films

If Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was a direct exploration of a society plagued by myopic racism, then there's no question that Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1975 Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven is its political counterpart. The film centers on Emma Küsters (Mira), an elderly woman who learns that her husband Hermann (a tire-factory worker for twenty years) has killed his supervisor and then committed suicide; the reasons are unknown, and one of the film's masterstrokes is in never outwardly professing the reasons for her husband's death. The question that emerges is rather simple: was her husband's death the work of a lone, horrible man or was it the work of a lone revolutionary who, after hearing layoff announcements, saw no other option but to fight?

The brilliance of Fassbinder's film is precisely in the two-sided approach: in the first part of the film, yellow journalists exploit Mother Küsters, painting her husband, indeed, as a horrible family-man with a temper. Rather unexpectedly, however--and quite hilariously--Fassbinder's political tenets emerge through two wealthy, bourgeois Communists (Böhm and Carstensen)who believe Küsters's husband's death was political, that he was a lone revolutionary and a victim of capitalism. To add to the political scheme, after being disillusioned with the two wealthy communists who believe they must put the upcoming election above her husband's case, Mother Küsters is eventually swayed by a young Anarchist who criticizes the left-wing for not doing anything. In the midst of all of the emerging political tension, Fassbinder never answers the question of what really happened to the elderly widow's husband.

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, is not subtle; the didactic quality, which I believe emerges somewhat from Fassbinder's theatrical work and the specificity of his mise-en-scene, is just as much present here as it was in his previous films. What is masterful about Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, however, very much like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, is its canny depiction of the petty bourgeois political climate. In its didacticism, Fassbinder's criticism is pitch-perfect.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

DIRECTOR(S): Rainer Werner Fassbinder SCREENPLAY: Rainer Werner Fassbinder CAST: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin, Irm Hermann, Elma Karlowa, Anita Bucher, Gusti Kreissl, Doris Mattes, Margit Symo, Katharina Herberg, Peter Gauhe, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lilo Pempeit DISTRIBUTOR: New Yorker Films

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was the first Fassbinder film I saw and, is to date, perhaps one of the most influential films I've ever seen. I first saw it 5 years ago in my cousin's cramped room; I was 12, naive, and, although I do admit I expected differently, the film shook me very much. 5 years later I saw it fitting to re-watch it first to commence my study of the German new wave of the 70's and, this time in my cramped room, I was equally shaken.

What spoke to me then about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most famous film, I think, speaks to me now as well. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is many things, an intimate story of two people caught in the gaze--literally--of a heinous societal tension, a film of grand intimacy in the tradition of Douglas Sirk, but one thing it is not is subtle. It's in the way the film is shot, or even in the way Fassbinder's characters speak: the film opens with a stunning shot of a lonely old woman (Brigitte Mira) entering a sleazy bar late at night, cutting to a reaction shot of the people inside staring. A "foreign" tune plays in the background, as the camera tracks all the way from the door to Ali. The moment is stunning for its bluntness and lucidity: everything from the camera to the dialogue--the lady asks for a cola--is marked by a sense of specificity.

I hesitate to call this type of openness didactic, but for a film that is dealing with the social malaise of the time, maybe didacticism isn't such a misnomer. Fassbinder's film is an open, clear-eyed stab at bourgeois racism, but what's fascinating about the film is its openness in its presentation. Ali doesn't speak great German--he speaks in third person with limited verbs--and this grammatical deficiency manifests itself as a metaphor for his lack of being in the German society. "German people no like Arabs," he says. Ali recognizes the racism that haunts Wester Germany--so does Emmi--and the social malaise that surrounds them is always present, gazes that never cease in their racism. Their gazes are always documented, Fassbinder shows us, and, like them, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is timeless in its documentation of a society caught by hatred and malaise.

Lapse in Reviews/Recap

I've been a little behind on the writing part of my film-watching, as I've been sick for the past few days. I've been watching the classic films of the 70's, however--films that, for better or worse, have already been written about to the point of dullness. Among these are Apocalypse Now, A Clockwork Orange, and--yes--The Godfather.

But among my favorite of these sort of seminal 70's films is Roman Polanski's 1974 Chinatown, a film that blows me away every time I see it. If there's one thing you read on this crummy blog, it should be this: watch it.

Anyway, the reviews above are for the more essential/less known films that I've watched this week (and my justification for why Bonnie and Clyde is really, really a 70's film.)

The Makioka Sisters (1983)*

DIRECTOR(S): Kon Ichikawa SCREENPLAY: Junichirô Tanizaki (Novel), Kon Ichikawa CAST: Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yûko Kotegawa, Jûzô Itami

The Makioka Sisters is Kon Ichikawa's intimate portrait of a family caught in time. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Junichirô Tanizaki, the film is very much in the tradition of mid Ozu, as echoes of Late Spring filter into the story of four Osakan sisters left as caretakers of the family name. The film's happenings center on the crucial balance of tradition and the outside world: the big dilemma for Taeko (Yuko Kotegawa), for instance, is who she is to marry; Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi), the eldest, and her husband, meanwhile, attempt to keep the family name in check.

Time is a moving force in the film and it's in how Ichikawa shows it that the film becomes a work of art. Cherry blossoms become a motif for the fall of the family and the passage of time; "we won't get to see the cherry blossoms," one character says near the end of the film after [Spoiler Alert!] it is revealed the family must move to Tokyo. Ichikawa is always contrasting the outside with the inside: on the outside his camera is open, absorbing the nature around it; on the inside his camera moves, Mizoguchi style, closely--tracking, panning carefully, always observant. By the heartbreaking end, when both the inside and the outside match in one beautifully observed sequence, time seems to have, at least for a second, stopped, its characters walking away from the fall of the house of Makioka.

The French Connection (1971)

DIRECTOR(S): William Friedkin SCREENPLAY: Ernest Tidyman CAST: Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Blanco, Marcel Bozzufi, Bill Hickman

William Friedkin's 1971 classic The French Connection is a film about spaces, a work that uses, unlike Dog Day Afternoon, New York City as a constant setting to frame the movements of detective Jimmy Doyle (Gene Hackman) as he tracks French drug traffickers across the city. Friedkin's film is not a rigorous psychological study of character; rather, it is a relatively straightforward police film that masterfully uses its mise-en-scene to evoke environment and atmosphere, an ambiance that is always present regardless of setting.

It's Doyle and Russo's (Scheider) city, and it's no coincidence that the best scenes in the film are when French traffickers--foreigners to the city, as far as the two detectives are concerned--attempt to escape the detectives' gaze. Friedkin's camera is always playing with space, manipulating shapes and camera movements to evoke closeness of setting and character. It's winter in New York, and Friedkin evokes the city's gray colors and weak sunlight. The most famous sequence in the film, the chase scene in which Hackman chases one of the drug traffickers (Marcel Bozzufi, the famous killer in Costa Gavras' Z), is remarkable for its pacing but also the tension that arises out of its background setting--the way, for instance, the claustrophobia of the Subway manifests itself in hand-held shots, or the way Hackman looks up at Bozzufi as he attempts to assassinate him from a New York building. The film's brilliance is here, in the tension between setting and narrative. The French Connection is, after all, nothing if not an essential New York movie.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

DIRECTOR(S): Sidney Lumet SCREENPLAY: Frank Pierson CAST: Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning, Chris Sarandon, Sully Boyar, Penelope Allen, James Broderick, Carol Kane, Sandra Kazan

Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon begins fittingly--through establishing shots of a hot afternoon in New York city as Elton John's early "Amoreena" plays in the in the background. The camera, eye-like, is always relatively still and measured in these shots; nothing is over the top nor showy, no aesthetic furnishes nor surprises--just New York city. Even in the opening sequence, Lumet makes it clear that Dog Day Afternoon is nothing if not a New York movie, and, like his 1973 Serpico, everything that occurs in the film would be nothing were it not for the ambiance that lies around the story of two crooks (the very young Al Pacino and John Cazale) whose bank robbery goes awry.

Unlike Serpico, though, Lumet's film possesses a much more intimate ambiance. Even from the beginning of the film, after the film's establishing opening sequence, when Sonny and Sal begin robbing a bank, there's a detectable matching of character and setting: although characterization, as always in Lumet's films, arises progressively and surprisingly as the film moves along, it's not hard to tell that these are two New Yorkers, attitude included. The people they rob, though, are New Yorkers too, and both the film's brilliant intricacy and hilariousness arise out of circumstances that would not exist in any other city. (Vincent Canby, in his 1975 review, is right to point out that "Mr. Lumet's New York movies are as much aspects of the city's life as they are stories of the city's life.")

Like Taxi Driver, the brilliance in Lumet's film is not in the standard cops-and-robbers tale it presents--it's in its setting and characterization. The brilliant moments in the film occur as a result of a straightforward plot set-up: take Charles Durning's negotiator, for instance, who is hilarious because of his incompetence; or how both Sonny and Sal realize their plan to escape is nothing if not naive; or, how most of all, crowds of people stand outside the bank cheering every time Sonny comes out to negotiate. Moments like these shape the film's amazing finale: that a film like this could never leave New York.

Taxi Driver (1976)

DIRECTOR(S): Martin Scorsese SCREENPLAY: Paul Schrader CAST: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle, Harvey Keitel, Albert Brooks, Leonard Harris, Martin Scorsese


What is there left to say about Martin Scorsese's seminal Taxi Driver that hasn't been said already? Not much. Since its inclusion as 47th greatest American movie of all time on AFI's trite "100 Years...100 movies" list, Scorsese's masterpiece has been consistently praised as that 70's classic--a label that, although certainly true, misconstrues the rather modest scope of the film. In its seedy, gritty presentation, Taxi Driver is, without a doubt, an essential 70's movie; yet what is essential about the film is not the milieu which the film evokes, but how it is evoked.

Taxi Driver is as much an aesthetic accomplishment as a historical one. Like Carol Reed's classic 1949 The Third Man, Scorsese's film arises more in everything that is occurring around its main character, Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle, a loner who takes up the job of a taxi driver in order to cope with his chronic insomnia. A war veteran from Vietnam, Travis serves as the film's eye: everything that occurs around him, often internalized by his stream-of-conciousness voice-over, is very much aestheticized to fit his own subjectivity. His view is that New York is filthy--a corrupt city crawling with lowlifes, drug-addicts, prostitutes and pornos. Taxi Driver operates around this setting, a mise-en-scene marked by its gritty color-palette--a mixture of toned down street colors--and remarkable claustrophobia. Shots are always measured to match Travis's subjectivity, such as when a disgruntled man asks Travis while in his cab if he sees his wife in an apartment across the street: reverse shots are measured, and the claustrophobia is measured more in the framing of the cab and its containment.

But despite the feeling of claustrophobia that the film exudes, it's the spacing in the film, what lies around Travis and his lonely cab, that gives Taxi Driver its wonderful historicism. Even when the camera focuses on Travis's lonely nights, everything is in the background: shots of New York City--movie theaters, shops, other cars, people-- are measured upon his own voice-overs and Bernard Hermann's jazzy score; the camera always lingers, for at least a second, to absorb the greater ambiance of a city caught by its sleaziness. That sleaziness, as Travis would view it, is the 70's itself, and in documenting, through one eye, a greater atmosphere, Scorsese's film becomes a much more intimate film than immediately realized--a film essential not for its grand scope but its modest pitting of a man caught in the masses of a society he cannot stand.

Overview

As part of my senior options, I am required to write daily about the films I see. As a way to actively publish my writing, and as a way, also, to organize myself, I saw it fitting to create this haphazard and cheap-looking blog.

The focus of my study is film in the 70's. At the end of my one and a half long study, I plan to create a list of 50 essential 70's movies--an endeavor which, given the short amount of time and the great material the decade has to offer, will be most likely shortsighted and naive. Film has always been my passion, and although the project is, without a doubt, ridiculously ambitious, I figured watching 2 or 3 movies a day and writing about them would nonetheless be what I'd want to do the most for my senior options at Scarsdale High School.

The focus is, indeed, 70's movies; given certain limitations, I do feel the project might be too ambitious. Part of my requirement is to attend retrospectives in the city at least twice a week--and given that 70's movies are not always constantly in retrospective, the focus may change. In any case, I look forward to writing daily about what I see, and this blog is where I will do it.