by studioxadmin | Oct 16, 2014 | Seven Greatest Films Ever Made
After more than a year of constant analysis we’re about to move on.The final film in our series on Tarkovsky is “Stalker” (1979), which turned out to be his last film made in the USSR. When you watch his movies, or become familiar with the work of Russian masters, it is hard to understand why Russians and Americans are so often portrayed as enemies. Who can become acquainted with the likes of Stravinsky, Dostoevsky, Chagall, Chekov and Tarkovsky and not be moved. One would expect such countrymen to be our natural friend. Why should we want to be at odds with them?
Here is where world cinema comes in. What better way for Americans of average education and limited economic means, like myself, to obtain an accurate understanding of foreigners and their lands than by watching their films. We can’t all afford to be world travelers. So the world’s greatest artists, from every country, keep pushing the boundaries of their art form, giving their audience a far more accurate assessment of our potential relations than other media sources.
We should make it public policy to turn off the TV and view the flicks of our so-called opponents on the global stage, particularly those countries with which we are most polarized. It would straighten out our thinking on a mass scale about the supposed chasm that divides us. World cinema makes the case that Americans and Russians, for instance, do not have big differences. Films help us see how the little differences make us better allies than adversaries.
In thinking about what to zoom in on next, I am contemplating a survey of movies made by our present day so-called enemies. I’m talking about nations of people, not gangs of thugs, which can be found in every country. Film is the antidote to such animosity. A motion picture can have the opposite effect of a gun.
In counterpoint to what we are told about Russia on the evening news, think of their indelible cultural contributions. Their arts and sciences give more than enough proof that Russians are among the greatest pathfinders, poets, philosophers and prophets in history. Likewise, masterworks by filmmakers such as Tarkovsky, Paradjonov, Konchalovsky and Shepitko convince me we have more in common than not.
For example, I would have felt honored to have a friend such as the hero Ivan from Tarkovsky’s first film “Ivan’s Childhood,” Just like the army officers in the story who loved and protected him, I could never have mistaken him for an enemy.
My heart went out to Sotnikov in Shepitko’s “The Ascent” (1977) as well. He was not perfect, nor was his sacrifice. Who doesn’t relate to that?
I bring up “The Ascent” again because it was released in 1977. Shepitko is it’s director. My favorite woman director of all time. She and Tarkovsky were friends. They were both rising stars. Larissa was a first-class artist of the Soviet era, also a student of the same teacher, Mikhail Romm. Both would have been aware of being their mentor’s favorite students. Ever since those days, there was a friendly competition going on between them.
Production on ”Stalker“ was begun at relatively the same time period as “The Ascent” but the entire first year of shooting on the film was destroyed and Tarkovsky’s fifth and greatest film almost miscarried. I chose to focus on this one last, because of this complicated twist of fate, and also, because I like “Stalker” the best. In fact “Stalker” may be my favorite film, period.
Incidentally, actor Anatoly Solenitzyn performs in both “Stalker” and “The Ascent.” Let me confess, I disagree with Tarkovsky completely on one thing. He publicly dissed Larissa Shepitko’s film for being possessed of some lame performances. Tarkovsky was out of line. The acting is fine in “The Ascent.”
I have a theory. Since the Soviet critics were supportive of Shepitko’s film, Tarkovsky was compelled to belittle it. They submitted “The Ascent” to the Motion Picture Academy for the Best Foreign film. That should have been Andre’s honor, except for a botched film development process that resulted in critical loss. As it turned out “Stalker” wasn’t released until two years later.
Think of it. The film had to be funded and shot twice, which must have been an utter slog. But, fortunately, by then, the director, actors and their stories were are a lot further along into the emotional arc than they had been. A sense of maturity set in. It had to have felt totally stressful at the time, but the result is something sublime. Both were tests of Tarkovsky’s resolve. He and his cohorts somehow rose to the call.
The movie he made that year was as good as any movie ever made. It just so happened to cost him his life but that’s a story that has been told elsewhere. It would be a sin to pity him. Even though he died at 54, he lives on. Time is sculpt able. No one knows that better than Tarkovsky.
He doesn’t just sculpt with time in “The Stalker,” he railroads it into alternate dimensions. I agree with his assessment that very few filmmakers seem to be interested in exploiting the unique power of cinema. Not to the degree he does anyway.
Examining the opening of the seventh and final title in our series, “Stalker” (1977), the sound of a tumultuous train barrels through the soundtrack. It’s loud-ass presence contrasts incongruously with an overhead tracking shot, in a desolate bedroom, gazing down on a trio of figures in a bed. Middle-aged ma stares off camera in profile, she’s back to back with a head-scarved, adolescent who appears to be dreaming. Finally, the male figure comes to view with eyes cast sideward toward his daughter and wife.
The ramshackle flat begins to rumble and rattle. Not one of them acknowledges a thing. Gradually they are absorbed in an envelope of railroad racket. This radically retro, sepia and spinning whine of grotesquely swollen sound lashes up a mythical, moody dissonance that draws in our primitive sympathies.
Train clatter that would overwhelm normal sleep invades the soundtrack to such a degree now, the vibration causes a glass of water to skitter slightly across the seat of a wooden chair beside the bed. It makes you want to laugh, but then tragedy and comedy mesh, and you could weep for any child that has to sleep in such a mess.
Later, however, at the very last scene of the film, in fact, that same young girl appears to magically make household items slide across the table under their own power.
This little cinematic spell possesses a rich dream logic. The intense vibrations of the train passing make things in their apartment move involuntarily all the time. It was only a matter of time before a young girl would fantasize about being able to move them with her will.
To end the movie on Monkey (the young girl), whom we’ve been hardly more than introduced to, and to focus on her having a private moment that invites us to be swept up inside her imagination with, strikes me as a supremely poignant and beautiful conclusion.
What exhilaration to start out with, that little clip of existential wit. It’s a shame so few people I know have seen this flick.
So we will ease into the new subject with a cross-dissolve out of our 13-part series on seven of the greatest Russian films ever made and we will go on a quest for films from countries like North Korea, Afghanistan, China, Iran and Venezuela.
Be back soon,right after this, our enemies through the eyes of world cinema…
by studioxadmin | Aug 25, 2014 | Seven Greatest Films Ever Made
We continue with “Stalker” (1979) from last month as we gradually wind down the yearlong survey of films by Andre Tarkovsky. In the opening shots, after the introduction, we begin by pushing in through half-opened doors, but notice how we immediately find ourselves hovering over the face of the stalker’s wife before introducing the rest of the family. His daughter’s face will be the last to grace the screen at the finale.
The stalker’s family is of paramount importance to this story, even though they make up only a fraction of what we see and hear. It’s not his wretched living quarters next to the tracks nor that dismal drinking establishment in the shadow of the cooling stacks, but the man’s wife and child that bring him back. It becomes his heart’s desire to take them with him to The Zone.
It’s a sly touch of comedy to have such a lost clown lead a prominent scientist and a celebrated writer on an expedition into the unknown. The stalker is occasionally referred to by his companions as a “chinkgachook.” It translates as something like “restless soul” or “holy kook,”but he alone can provide safe haven through a place where, years back, on account of some cosmic fluke, nature rid itself of humans. Almost everyone who ever went in there since was lost.
This chingachook’s been there and back so many times he’s a master. Where you or I see a safe path, the chinkgachook sees traps. We can only comprehend the complications of the labyrinth we inhabit by watching him pilot his companions through its funky kinks and cul-de-sacs. Tarkovsky trusts his audience to feel and think. His synthesis of time, through sound and image, maximizes space for audiences to fill in lots of blanks.
There’s a fence around The Zone and guards won’t let anyone in. They won’t go in either; they wouldn’t dare. It’s like chutes and ladders in there. You risk hell in following a stalker’s advice, but if you make it, you’re a citizen for a spell in paradise.
Actually, The Zone is not pure bliss. Like our own biosphere, it is equidistant from extremes. The Zone is merely Nature coming back from the effects of industrial blight, but the fact that she’s been spoiled makes her all the more precious and delicate. As a composer does with counterpoint or a painter does with darks and lights, Tarkovsky ups the emotional pitch of his subject by depicting polar opposites.
Light as it sounds, something seems to be pressing down on everyone in The Zone. One can hardly hold oneself up and it hardly matters where you lie down. Even when it’s soaking wet, nobody minds. Pilgrims slog and scale about the bag-end of Eden wrestling with inner demons, eventually penetrating an abandoned power plant with serpentine tunnels, treacherous currents and murky crossings. It makes a compelling visual context for characters to self-isolate, conspire, then snap back to ordinary again after each of them confronts the pros and cons of their most private desire.
At times this movie calls to mind the mind-bending paradigms in tales by Castaneda and Borges. Ordinary reality cedes to the outrageous. Passage through The Zone is a struggle between feeling and numbness, spontaneity and habit, pressure and suction. Characters plunge into unconditional reality and must sink or swim. Stalker cautions his entourage to hang close to him and takes the responsibility seriously–almost mystically. Rumor has it some legendary stalker named Porcupine lost his only son.
Great story. Now set it aside and shift the emphasis to what most interested Tarkovsky, the thing he called “sculpting time,” or how he frames the stuff of Nature in space to achieve awe-inducing spells. The artist’s pet pursuit programs cinematic progressions and rests at fluctuating rates and intervals. “Time pressure” is how he relates. A breeze lifts vapor and dust through the landscape, turning it to liquid space; time itself becomes visible as backgrounds and foregrounds dislodge. Actors pause and pace, water drips, steam rises, the camera dips and dodges to a tempo in which life itself thrives and bathes.
There are no literal mirrors in “Stalker.” Instead, dried silt in an arid lake bed lofts into the air on sudden gusts and with this image Tarkovsky somehow epitomizes the sodden journey of three conflicted men, each confronting their deepest desire.
Like a dune in the wind, never appearing the same twice, reality is in continual shift and flux inside The Zone. In other words, these mens’ very presence irreversibly alters the balance of space; as human presence has always done, conquering wild places. I consider this cinematic sequence as enlightened a statement of our predicament as any ever attempted by anyone before or since.
“Stalker” was well received internationally but back home its director was harassed. I wonder, did the maestro make a conscious decision to do away entirely with the mirrors in this film in an effort to transcend them, or was it just coincidence? We began this series over a year ago with his third film called “Mirror,” a movie that got the most heat from his detractors. Not everyone liked what they saw in the looking glass. Its intensely personal subject matter put off some viewers while exhilarating others. Within the state-run movie system of the Soviet Union, the negative response to “Mirror” probably sealed Andre’s fate as an ex-pat in the future.
Mirrors were never limited to shiny glass in this director’s films anyway. They can be found in placid ponds or on burnished shields too. They are equally abundant in both metaphor and simile as well.
Looking in the mirror means taking personal responsibility–our most pressing business on the planet. Like the best of the great artists, Tarkovsky was an oracle overlaying an enlightened frame on the future, using every thing available to him to settle technology’s debt with nature.
by studioxadmin | Jul 13, 2014 | Capital Punishment, HD: Film Commentary
We have been talking about Lars Von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac Vol. 2 (2014). It’s been the better part of a year since the film’s release. Unless someone else has something to add, I will wrap up my analysis in this post. If I had to describe it to someone in a single line I’d say Vol. 2 unspools like one third act of contrition, another third true confession, shedding light in cracks on his persona, as well as a few embedded in the collective unconscious, and one third jabbing at the eyes of his audience.
Might as well digress at this important intersection, in regard to the most heinous images in the film. I keep ragging on about a reviewer in a local independent weekly that neglects the vital issues by simply pronouncing the movie “shit.” A more eloquent reviewer put it something like, “a singularly hateful two hours of movie watching.”Isn’t the issue how these images reverberate though culture over their lifetimes and in what ways they morph in meaning with age?
Imagine what an opportunity it is to make the first contact from your culture with a person from another completely different one. You are a doorway, their first impression, a shaper of his or her point of view. I ask myself, what kind of greeting or communication would befit such a privilege? I must confess, some self-righteous voice inside me answers, “Certainly not the ass-whipping we’re given in “Nymph()maniac Vol. 2.”
I will turn this question on the filmmaker, Lars Von Trier himself. What is your salutation to the world with these extreme scenarios in your latest release? Less educated people might not understand your illustrious cinematic ancestry, your omnivorous assimilation of art or rigorously Nordic conditioning. Did you keep in mind, when composing these frames, how the life of a one-eyed, illiterate, deaf, mute at the furthest outpost of the wired world might be changed?
Eventually the sequence of clips where your character Jo volunteers to be strapped to a sofa and savagely whipped may just take on a life of its own. That horrid little snippet could be stripped from your movie, maybe already has been, and be circulating like smack, among dark digital subcultures, touching down a million times more swiftly than our father’s girly magazines did last century.
I know, Maestro Von Trier, your heroine must be getting in touch with something very deep by asking for such punishment. We both hope you’re right-on about what kind of medicine your latest adventure in hyper-reality provides to millions of truth-starved, self-loathing, culture-shocked impressionable minds worldwide, don’t we? Because, there could be no excuse for being taken into their confidence and then poisoning them.
Over the lifetime of your movie in the digital universe, imagine all those that don’t speak any language at all, have never read a book or can’t, in any other way but literally, with eyes only, comprehend your artfully angled, eloquently sepia-toned intellectually ripe digressions? What’s the information contained in the image, stripped to its most basic? That’s your greeting to the world.
Sure, whenever the camera stops swaying and that eunuch and courtesan exchange gripes, they justify, in very mature and philosophical terms, the movie’s reason to be. Bravo! The night I went to see Vol 2, I couldn’t hear most of it because of sound problems in the theater, so all your talky second act was wasted, H. Von T. Without all that blabber it becomes a different movie altogether. Boo! Hiss!
You can’t control everything downstream of your creation, I grant you, but the image you make is your responsibility. As its maker, it has your intentions written all over it. What impression do you wish to leave behind and why, with that deranged footage of a woman’s bloody behind? I know its owner claims, in the last half of the last act, she might just be something God or nature put on earth in order to make society acknowledge its sickness, but who needs that? It’s what the nightly news is for.
The conclusion I took home is the girl can’t help it. She doesn’t know how to be normal and so she must accept herself as the other. A reluctant freak, she despises and belittles her embedded human failings because they are unfitting of the beast she identifies herself to be.
This is undoubtedly Von Trier’s most personal and confessional film to date. I find its purpose more fascinating than the film itself. We encounter his subject when she’s toying with her self-image as a misfit. She embraces being a monster but at the same time resents it.
Gifted storytellers have always helped illuminate dark passages for us. Does that make artists freaks or monsters? Does Von Trier’s provide us a harmless, relatively healthy scenario to help us as a society embrace our inner freak or does it plunge us more hopelessly into self-rejection? I trust that he’s well meaning, but again, if that is so, I wish he’d think more in terms of the antidote when glorying in the sickness. We absorb more than enough toxins from screens as it is.
As an example, a movie that portrays extreme disease as “Nymph()maniac,” but provides more of an antidote, is David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” (1980). In place of graphic social deviance, in Von Trier’s film, we pan across directly to its grotesque physical twin in Mr. Lynch’s. The scene in which the beast becomes human is played with Dickensian sentimentality yet succeeds beautifully thanks to an acting duet tour de force between Anthony Hopkins as a compassionate doctor and John Hurt as the Elephant Man John Merrick. The exchange moves me to tears each time I witness this thing that resembles a giant corn fritter, as much as a human, turns out to be an intelligent, sensitive and lovingly-reared young man.
Antonin Artaud christened a trend in drama called the “Theater of Cruelty.” He popularized it, extolled its virtues and applied them to living. He also passed extended periods in an insane asylum. From inside hospital, at least, the Theater of Cruelty looked to a tonic for society’s ills.
Artaud’s instinct, it seems, was in conditioning the audience to push back, so we don’t loose that impulse and turn into hat racks. From that standpoint, I subscribe to the concept. Keep the muscle strong. Use it or loose it. But the counter-argument is, by subjecting ourselves to increasingly sensational experiences, in the movies and other entertainments, some of the audience will grow desensitized to violence, fall increasingly indifferent to moral order and ultimately become homicidal themselves in demand for the next big thrill.
I’m with Artaud, up to a certain point. In as much as drama is capable of it, I look for all sorts of ritualistic, shamanistic, initiatory possibilities in motion pictures, or any dramatic form. It has the potential to be good medicine. I think we need more of that.
I’ve never been surrounded by mental patients, nor the international media. Very likely Artaud and Von Trier know some things I don’t. I wonder, is “Nymph()maniac” supposed to work like some kind of homeopathic on the audience? With such a harsh lashing, Von Trier could be working toward a social cure, I suppose. In breaking the limits of our tolerance, he presumes to help us regurgitate something from the depths of the collective soul, shoving a finger down our throat, through our eyes, as it were. As a social study, I hope it works. At Vol 2’s climax, I chose to close mine.
In Vol 2, Jo offers a hypothesis poised as the existential crux of story and I paraphrase: “Perhaps the only difference between me and other people is that I’ve always demanded more from the sunset; more spectacular colors when the sun hits the horizon. That’s perhaps my only sin.” When Jo confesses this, is this not the filmmaker here ruing his obsession with misanthropy?
Through his subject’s mouth, Von Trier bemoans having grown desensitized. A filmmaker is the archetypal magician, enchanter, seducer and creator of artificial realities. Some grow so accustomed to the hyper-reality, real life pales in comparison. An artist can become so wrapped up in artifice he gets addicted. We encourage this. The audience eats it up and pushes him ever further out in to space to find more. Call this, the filmmaker’s dilemma. We laugh about it again and again while watching that famous farce “8 ½.” by Fellini. In his hands, the impasse manages to warm the heart. In Lars Von Triers’ it breaks the skin.
Von Trier has courted controversy with his public personality while cultivating an illustrious reputation with his films. Let’s hope he will be remembered more for his cinematic contributions, than for being that naughty fool in the news.
by studioxadmin | Jun 21, 2014 | Capital Punishment, HD: Film Commentary
We’ve been talking about Lars Von Trier’s “Nymph()maniac” Vol. 1 & 2.
When Von Trier’s predecessor, C.T. Dreyer, placed his camera in the homes of Danish Luthern’s in the early 1900’s he was dissecting an emotional tumor in the prudish mentality of a bygone day. Von Trier sets his lens on the same view of the opposite end of the spectrum, our modern, sex-forward culture. His characters are no longer hounded by sin and forgiveness but by obsession and repression. A Christ-like character, the compassionate fisherman and good-Samaritan, Seligman, rescues Jo from lying beat in the street. It must be Christ himself that Seligman emulates. He’s a virgin and claims never to have met a bad person in his life. He turns out to be one.
With a protracted digression. at the mid-point of the Vol. 1, about the schism between the eastern and western Christian traditions, Seligman connects sex and religion and Von Trier finds an eloquent visual impression with which to introduce it. In this case he does with the solitary eastern orthodox icon of the Madonna hanging on the wall behind where our modern day harem girl and eunuch are arguing. Without wasting dialog, the filmmaker is commenting on how the iconographic trends in the ancient sacred arts have been hijacked in the presentation of modern movies and he draws a comparison between Madonna and the girly pin-up in one skilled stroke.
The icon and pin-up were one-in-the-same when they debuted on the cave walls that sheltered our earliest ancestors. Humans are compelled to fetishize, ritualize and sanctify the human reproductive process. It’s almost as old as the act itself. Ironically, it is the male and female organs on parade, not the persons having sex, that make modern porn what it is. What we see carved and painted in stone caves and on the modern porn screen is essentially the same content. Our taste hasn’t changed since the dawn of history. The ritual, visually speaking at least, revolves around the genitals. Because that pathway in the brain is so primitive, its going to appeal, in vastly different ways of course, to the widest range and largest number of people.
With this new movie, Von Trier is not making porn. He couldn’t even appeal to the writer at the small town independent newspaper that rebuked him. The reviewer I read, anyway, castigated Von Trier as if he’d pushed the gross-out film to new heights. I admit, that some of this movie was very hard to watch. You want to push back somehow. One way, I suppose is to label it perverse. The movie reviewer that I read did just that to “Nymph()maniac,” still, I seriously doubt he was even conscious of all the people he was insulting with his cry of misogyny.
He is implying, to name just one of the other artists involved, that Charlotte Gainsborough, the star of Vol 2 is diseased. I don’t see any evidence of it in her history. The leading lady in this movie made her name playing burly roles for women. I would think she took this job to expand her chops and meet a challenge with some other artists that she respects.
Von Trier is not breaking particularly new ground in these scenes of degradation. The tradition can be traced as far back as the late silent era classic, “Haxan” (1922), and hails from Von Trier’s home country by the way as well. The soil of cinematic excess is further amended with Pier Paulo Passolini’s “Salo, 120 Days of Sodom.”(1975), one of those movies about excrement that I already named. That film offended my senses a great deal more than “Nymph()maniac.”
There is some parallel being drawn intentionally by the director between himself and his protagonist in this film. I wonder if this is Von Trier’s attempt to make amends; not apologize, but answer for some trouble he got himself into with certain mischievous remarks.
One of the thrills supplied consistently by Von Trier is his penchant for wit and sarcasm when he knows he’s being quoted. He fancies himself like Oscar Wilde and this trait often devolves, over time, into a lust for controversy. The press scoops it up and prints it. Who is the nymphomaniac here? The press, audience or director? Whoever remains least satisfied, of course.
I’ve written about how some filmmakers worship the female form and archetype with their films. Ironically, some of the same one’s reputations are tainted by scandal for doing the opposite. Misogynistic scenes have gotten other filmmakers in trouble in the past, so Von Trier must have anticipated the hot water he’s plunged himself into with this one. He knows history tends toward extremes.
Judging from the outcry, movies such as these serve to prove that social restrictions and taboos, are not at risk of being loosened when they are scrutinized in the arts. On the contrary, they are reinforced. Is it because Lars Von Trier has brought so much surprise and novelty to modern movie making that he is being singled out for his depictions of misogyny?
Martin Scorsese’s most successful movies graphically portray a woman being physically abused by a man and it is usually her husband. So, if we say the guy that whips the stuffing out of Jo in “Nymp()maniac” Vol 2 is her husband, will that bring the movie back in line with acceptable standards?
The stakes are quadrupled in Vol 2. Jo returns for punishment repeatedly, under her own power. This is not domestic violence. No one hurts her without her consent. Excuse me, but isn’t this is a slightly softer position than domestic violence. Aren’t Jo’s circumstances, if we were to come across them in real life, superior, in theory anyway, to those of say Ginger’s in Scorsese’s “Casino”? So, rather than being an unwitting victim of someone’s abuse, Von Trier’s heroine puts herself there and he gets called for misogyny?
The small town free press film reviewer who’s review I read said the end of this movie was totally predictable. On thing for sure, his reaction was. I felt sympathy. Watching Jo’s predicament unfold to that extreme extent made me fret that suicide would end her story. I was glad to be wrong about that.
I hate some of the images in this movie. It makes me sick to think of such things but I suppose that’s the point in showing them. If the reviewer I’m referring to saw that Jo’s ordeal on screen, in any way, condoned the torture of women or, in any way, rewarded the exploits of nymphomania, then that was his movie not mine. The story I watched flat out warns us that violence breeds violence, as we watch Jo seesaw from being the punished to punisher in Volume 2. In the movie I watched, the protagonist finally learns to accept herself for what she is. That was not a predictable ending for me. It made sense afterward, but I was surprised. Of coarse we don’t know what exactly happened, in the end because it happened in the dark.
While that movie reviewer that I disagree with and I, as well, have had our rear ends in chairs and our eyes glued to screens, either writing about or watching films, Von Trier and his company and others like them, have met, agreed to organized, prepare, craft and release a feature film. They chose a story with a social dilemma at its core, just so we can identify and talk about critical dysfunctions, like the effects of misogyny in our society.
by studioxadmin | May 28, 2014 | Capital Punishment, HD: Film Commentary
The movie I wish everyone to watch before reading this post begins with a man and woman in bed. It is impossible to experience today the same movies that American moviegoer’s saw in 1963. This is especially true in the opening scene of “Contempt.” First of all, it was risqué to introduce his leading lady in full-length nude. Godard raises visual parody to a high order, using the image to distract the audience from comprehending the critical turn in the heroine’s life that is transpiring before our eyes on onscreen. It’s intentionally and cleverly misleading. The director presents her posed like a sex pot, but she’s really more like a piece of stone sculpture. It’s the pivotal moment when Camille’s love for Paul begins to go cold.
Camille is played by Brigit Bardot. Under an assortment of candy flavored light temperatures, the naked secretary is tucked into a hairy chested hunk. Godard presents her, hind-end up, across a shaggy spread. There jiggles a perverse mix of raw materials for exploring the range human instincts. Camille’s body marks the crossroads between classic sculpture and pop pin-up. The man she is talking to is no less than her boss, her lover, a celebrated writer Paul. Because of Paul’s bland dialog and the fact that Camille’s naked body is taking up ninety percent of the frame, its an effort just to apportion even a little attention to Paul’s presence.
They’ve just had sex. That much is obvious. Why else would Paul be so sedate in the company of this naked goddess? It wasn’t until the third time I watched that I suspected the sex they had must not have done it for Camille. More to the point, the most audacious filmmaker of the French New Wave collaborated with the most identifiable international sex symbols of the early 1960’s to test the emotional IQ of their audience. “Do you like my nipples more or my breasts?” she asks. “I like them both the same,” Paul murmers like some satiated pussy cat.
Camille sounds like she’s trolling for compliments, but this is actually an interrogation. Paul soars on auto-pilot through the afterglow. The blatant way she feeds it to him would have woken me up, had I been he, I hope. See if you agree. Once you are privy to Camille’s inquisition, do you sense her contempt and how it changes the entire movie?
On the one hand, Godard jokes with us here about how sex short-circuits long range planning. With Bardot’s behind exposed in pin-up pose,we’re being played with too. Camille toys with her audience, when she twists her boyfriend in knots, exposing every infantile bone. The man she’s talking to is supposedly an artist. He only ever responds with a word or two and never gives away his thoughts. Even though he’s gazing at a golden goddess and she volleys one opportunity after another to demonstrate his powers, he responds without attaching the slightest personal touch. When she’s had enough of his limp flattery, she says, “So you love me totally?” He answers yes and its all downhill from there.
When this crucial turning point is missed, the movie seems erratic. It seemed sudden, at least to me, on first viewing, when Camille starts acting mean. I admit Paul’s not making much sense by then. In place of his feelings for her, he talks about their flat. The flat is where they hold up and argue for the entire second act.
That clash in “Contempt” became much more interesting when I realized that she was holding back, even before Paul urges her to get in the car with the crass movie producer. Their life and times together had been about Paul’s talent, Paul’s career, Paul’s priorities. The shift of power becomes clear in the crash of dishes, tugs of war and slamming of doors. Things remain unspoken that none-the-less ring loud and clear. Camille was just a mere typist before they became romantically involved and she turns out to be the one with the requisite drive, self-esteem and ear. She simply insists on being treated seriously, not just some dish. I’m such a clod, I confess, I saw it three times before I realized this.
In Act III they no sooner arrive in Capri then Paul flirts with some other kitty. Camille busts him in the act. She retaliates by undertaking an affair with the movie producer for whom Paul harbors some contempt. Then Paul strikes out completely by leaving it up to Camille to decide whether he should return to Rome immediately with her or remain in Capri and work for the great Fritz Lang.
As a writer of film reviews, the person that reviewed “Nymph()maniac, Part 1 & 2” in a local weekly that I read is like the character of Paul in Godard’s “Contempt”. As a reader of his reviews I am like Camille. Well get back to “Contempt” in another post, for now, proceed with me to where we left off in the last one.
I have now seen “Nymph()maniac” Vol. 2, and read the same small town movie reviewer’s blithe dismissal. He called both Volumes of Lars Von Trier’s new movie shit. Lets talk about the subject of shit in motion pictures because, in a movie like, “Salo: 120 Days of Sodom,” there is a different variety of deviance on display but what’s worth mentioning about it is the relevance of excrement in the third act of “Salo” serves the same purpose as the whip in the third act of “Nymph()maniac” Vol 2. If anyone in the audience were, up to this point, able to surf around the unseemly circumstances of the characters in the movie and cling to some shred of erotic stimulus from the earlier setups, both filmmakers rake them out of your grasps, in the Act III climax, when human actions grossly escalate to defy common sense. Not surprisingly, those kinds of images stick in our heads more than any other. The reason why? Memory switches to long-term mode whenever it things venture out of bounds. Brain is caring for our survival by not letting us forget a threat. So I wonder if both films serve to heap more forbiddance upon the very taboos they examine.
Anyway, it is a curious mix of amazement and disgust that sticks with me after watching this new movie of Von Trier’s, “Nymph()maniac,” but that’s not a bad thing. The film is merely churning up some of what’s under the surface of this modern, media-mad culture. Contrary to the movie reviewer I read’s claim of misogyny, Von Trier’s clearly weaving a spell of sympathy for his protagonist and while she’s no role model, anyone that sticks with this movie is going to relate with Jo at some point.
Like Jo, we of the wired world would be wise to beware of becoming numb to ordinary stimulus. Jo’s premature and extreme exploits bleached her senses to such an extent that she could feel nothing without subjecting herself to extreme pain and degradation. Call it shit if you want. Anatomy of self-hate comes closer to it for me. Lots of folks suffer with it. Von Trier exposes this condition so sensitively, he’s practically admitting to be one of them.
to be continued…
