At the mid-point of the newly restored edition of “Metropolis,” the transformation of beauty to beast takes place with a series of gorgeously designed and impeccably executed composite shots depicting the world’s first sex drone’s fabrication and release. Born on the silver screen, in a genetic engineering lab circa 2026, this replicant is brought to its feet to the beat of a lavish score by Gottfried Hupperts. Come watch the inaugural motion picture melding of woman and thing and lift your senses to the sights and sounds of some all-time great science fiction scenes.
In his epic dystopia, Fritz Lang contrasts Maria, the human being with Maria the insatiable machine. Appreciate, with me, the filmmaker’s decision to cast the fine-boned ingénue Brigitte Helm for a parable in which she transforms from pale maiden into erotic hardware. Note how, in the progression of scenes in which Helm appears, Lang shrewdly uses her to court one side of our nature and then the other.
The opulent pagan pageant set at the film’s center seems calculated to launch audiences into primal passion. The media’s a bit saturated with sex these days, but try to imagine the effects on the early 20th century audience of this nimble, naked robot fatale. The segment’s aimed to drive you into your most animal core, where you become engine-like as well, programmed to procreate, come heaven or hell. If you fall under her spell, place yourself in that chaos up on screen, a creature of craving, a slave of desire compelled by the biological imperative to dominate the queen.
So this mechanical mistress makes her debut as a high society whore and pussy whips the flock of fortunate sons into a frenzy on the dance floor. The fantastic art direction takes its cues from biblical prophecy, updating the vision in St. John’s Book for the modern day. Note how the baddest babe in Babylon was outfitted for the 21th century. Lang’s android is a corporate mole, robot rapper and psycho-slut rolled in one. The only detail about our 21st Century wonder widget that Fritz Lang got wrong is that she can fit into the palm of our hand.
Meanwhile our reluctant hero’s dad, Joe Frederer, the industrialist sends the sexy thing into the streets impersonating a saint. She’s been programmed to pull the strings of the masses and operate the populace like one of his machines. Never before had the manipulation of a crowd been so blatantly exposed, nor had we been provided with such a prescient preview of unwieldy industrialization tipping the ecological scale.
In the first act, Maria predicts their deliverer will rise up among her fellow poor. The one to whom she refers she calls the “Mediator.” Her words of faith transfix the weary workers assembled in a catacomb beneath the town. After demoralizing hours of repetitive tasks, her beatitudes help them relax. But before long, her appearance is cooped by the machine and she inflames them to engage in a violent uprising.
I saved these thoughts on “Metropolis” for the final posts in this yearlong inquiry into the Man and Machine because its accuracy at envisioning our present day jamb is unsettling. Despite the countless uncanny forecasts we’ve examined in other films in this series, I worry that this one is the most succinct in describing one that we are currently living.
The nearer we come to the 100 year anniversary of this landmark silent film, the more our modern world resembles it. An elite class is living in luxury, ignorant of ecology, insulated from adversity, obsessed with technology, reliant on slavery, or what we now refer to as income inequality and determined to keep it that way. The rest of us are living day to day.
What is perhaps most prescient about Fritz Lang’s forecast is that his metropolitans, rich and poor, will be visited by a Tsunami-like deluge. Pumps will fail and shafts fill up. Everyone is threatened by a nuclear screw-up. At the height of this film we are watching waves of panicked children fleeing their homes. The once vibrant city becomes an exclusion zone.
“Metropolis” proved early on that, with the invention of motion pictures, we are given the opportunity, not only to review the past, but to peer into the future. Alas, almost ninety years later we have barely begun to take it’s lessons to heart. The filmmakers whose movies mimic this film have given us endless additional opportunities to take it apart.
“Metropolis” was not intended to vilify machines. Lang understood they are just ideas born in the imagination, copied from nature, manifest in the physical world, operated under our guidance. If machines were evil we’d have to condemn the movies as well. And if motion pictures, in the world of automated things, indeed prove to be among the greatest ones ever invented, then we may yet still learn to thrive in a world of machines.
Most of us who watch a lot of movies share a fascination with human nature. I could say I’m a movie lover or that I am in the midst of a lifetime research project, either would be accurate. I’m particularly interested in examples of heroism such as the kind exhibited in our movie this month.
Just like every art form before it, movies will pass out of fashion some day. This may come to pass far in the future, or maybe way sooner. The mode in which they are told will continue to evolve, but stories and storytelling will never die.
A story is a product of our necessity to ruminate with language. It is the tongue of the soul. Stories began sophisticating our human brains long before they could be applied to any commercial pursuit or conscious artistic statement. Stories are a shared context inherent in everything we do. As storytellers humans themselves are the living record.
Motion pictures, coupled with the digital domain, are morphing into something more that we can’t yet fathom. Even as we speak, something more wondrous than cinema is being born in a way similar to how painting and music delivered us to the doorstep of motion pictures, but let us not forget that humans are the repository of these stories.
Neither the libraries, nor universities, not Netflix, Amazon or any religious institutions, nor even the gathering clouds of digital domination will ever have a corner on the market of story. We are supplying the stories to them. Nevertheless, while new mediums of storytelling are always being born, in our day and age, the common tongue is still spoken most eloquently with cinema.
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), directed by Josh Zeitlen, has already garnered the film world’s most prestigious awards. It achieves awe-inspiring performances, gritty splendor and universal relevance with amateur actors, a miniscule budget, and a script adapted from a one-act play.
The most universal stories are also the simplest and this is the great achievement of “Beasts.” With stubborn, giddy pride and self-reliance, a motherless child and her undomesticated father obtain material sufficiency, one day at a time.
None of the three antagonists in this story are human. The foremost is Nature, with whom the characters collaborate for survival. The next most formidable threat is everything beyond the levee–our world in other words–regarded as a kind of modern Mordor by those gentle folk.
The opening shot elegantly represents the entire microcosm of the pre-adolescent protagonist’s ordeal as she coddles a little bird in one hand while fashioning a pillar of mud for the creature to stand on by itself. This procedure comes across as both child’s play and a demonstration of maternal instinct. If the bird represents the little girl, then the little girl represents a benevolent influence providing refuge in a dangerous world.
Who is the protector, while her six-year-old figure wanders half-naked through a shabby, littered landscape, interacting familiarly with a turtle, chicken and hog? When she confides how little she understands them, the filmmaker is inviting us to discover how inadequately we comprehend his subject and the squalid environment she calls home. A visual clue is inserted in the introductory shots to listen for the heartbeat, the mystery that unites the greater universe.
Her immediate universe is revealed to us as a rag-tag regiment of raunchy revelers on Fat Tuesday. They savor their seclusion and simplicity relying on meager livestock, abundant booze, and semi-regular boons of gulf shellfish for subsistence. In that universe life is a party and the party goes on pretty much uninterrupted on top of whatever calamity happens to befall them.
With the glow of moonshine and fireworks on their faces, an assortment of sodden misfits, young and old, parade, royalty-like, down the same single track that most of them will jamb in order to escape nature’s wrath the next day. Among them are fishermen, freeloaders, saloon owners and a witch/teacher that warns her of global warming and the cowardliness of “pussies.”
The imagination of our child hero concocts an apocalyptic myth, woven through her voice-over, about how she prepares for the return of prehistoric predators unlocked from the melting ice-caps. The quest for her present day mother is contrasted with this and her future, destined with the fate of mother earth, to be drowned by the flood. It’s either that or be domesticated and formally introduced into institutionalized poverty.
Most of humankind huddles closely together over the dividing line between poverty and self-sufficiency and Josh Zeitlen’s lens stands squarely over that fulcrum in “Beasts.”
“When you get sick over there,” she says, “they plug you into the wall.” Is this meant to epitomize the sacrifice of the “wild” who become domesticated? The country they are talking about is our country. We must be the “pussies,” they keep referring to.
Like any animal in her jungle, the turns of events in the life of this little girl are fateful and decisive from the beginning. In an early scene her daddy collapses from a mere thump of her fist. Shocked and bewildered, she skedaddles to the witch,” I think I broke something.” When the flood does come, engulfing everything, she faces fear valiantly, while her juiced-up father calls out the rain groping with shotgun blasts for the jugular of the hurricane.
In nature, there are always casualties. This film is an ode to the offspring that survives. “For all the animals that got caught in the flood, the end of the world has already happened.” The little moppet grows philosophical under pressure, with wisdom well above her years, yet never do any of her quips seem fake spilling from her lips. “They’re all down at the bottom now trying to breath through water.”
This film speaks so elegantly in the common tongue to anyone that feels the constant dread of impending disaster hanging over their head. It articulates the pressures of living on the shifting sands of modern existence and it indicts preceding generations for inadequately providing for and preparing us to meet the future.
Therein lies the real antagonist in this rural chamber piece and how you would identify it depends on your social orientation. It’s been called poverty, ignorance, the ravages of alcohol, the existential crisis of being human. I grant it a distinct regard from the previously described beasts because, while we can not tame the monstrous destructiveness of Nature, or reverse the damage our bad upbringing has had on the modern world, we can, and this diminutive heroine does, confront the adversary at her core and does so in a way that is an example to us all.
From a certain angle, “The Skin I Live In” makes a fascinating time at the movies out of some au courant medical ethics issues. More importantly to my own fascination is the fact that one more master has held up the fable of “Beauty and Beast” before the eyes of a modern audience.
Re-imagening our fable in his characteristic, tawdry, telanovela fashion, if I were called upon to name Almodóvar’s 2012 masterpiece, it would be, “The Recently Widowed Super-Surgeon’s Revenge,” but thematically “The Skin I Live In” lovingly teases apart our obsession with human perfection and makes art out of the slick sciences that promote it.
Sr. Almodóvar imagines his story at the junction of where art and science are increasingly intertwined and how that phenomenon, coupled with the film medium itself it would seem, along with the characters in the story, all combine to reflect our current disposition towards gender. His characters also conveniently embody all the archetypes of the popular fable we have been discussing in the past three posts.
The fable “Beauty and the Beast” fits perfectly under the surface of this “Skin,” with an opening identical to the other three–the Beast eavesdrops on Beauty through a glass. From there on out,“The Skin I Live In” takes the notion of scrutiny, surveillance and invasion of privacy to outlandish lengths through the character of Robert, the super surgeon who uses every means at his disposal, from giant screens to microscopes to get to the bottom what makes Beauty immortal.
At home he sits in front of a monitor zooming in and out on his captive with the leer of a peeping tom. At work Robert busies himself in the operating theater with research, examinations and invasive procedures upon his unwitting model.
The story threads together a panorama of relevant scenarios involving the sculpture of skin, the culture of clothes, assorted aspects of gender identity that relate to flesh, fashion, hide, masks, mirrors, armor and genitals.
As far back as we look there exist stories of gods and mortals who suffer from such dire cases of unrequited love that they simply must sculpt an idol to their ideal and make love to it. Almodóvar assumes we are still caught up in this preoccupation in modern times.
In this case Robert’s ideal is a dead ringer for his wife. He just happens to be fashioning her out of a young man who Robert believes ruined his daughter’s life. In the most perversely artificial way imaginable, Robert’s revenge conveniently manages to keep his love for his wife alive as well.
Addressing the artist/model relationship from the previous posts, there is always a predicament for the model in having to share the attention of the master with the creation he is working on, “The Skin I Live In,” imagines a case of the model being literally transformed into his creation.
Gender hybrids in art interests me in the light of the fact that Leonardo and Michelangelo, among others, painted women’s heads as well as their organs on men’s bodies to communicate the Renaissance concept of God-given human perfection. Though this all sounds chauvinistic now, we cannot possibly judge the mentality behind such choices with accuracy from the cultural reference point of our times. Was this really blatant disregard for woman, or some desire to imbue her with man’s strength? In other words, if only you could take the best of men and combine it with the best of women, that would be perfection. But who knows if that’s what was intended or something else?
If you are an artist absorbed in the act of creating, you work at all hours, often in the middle of the night, imagining, observing, probing, shaping, and caressing. The work becomes like a lover with whom you gladly elude sleep. Robert’s falling in love and sleeping with his Vera would be nothing scandalous if it weren’t for the revenge plot which makes a twisted horror flick out of our familiar fairy tale.
Most, if not all, of Pedro Almodóvar’s films portray situations of abduction and victimization. He’s well known for trafficking in images of rape, incest and assorted taboo which I’ve always assumed relates to the director’s feeling like a female trapped in a male body.
Within the first forty minutes of “Skin,” we’ve been shown kidnapping, drug abuse, burglary, a flaming car wreck, rape, bloody murder and several shameless breaches of medical code. Vera’s story should be interesting to anyone that feels trapped in a male dominant paradigm. Almodóvar’s story should be interesting to all genders when it addresses anxiety generated within our rigidly enforced hierarchy’s dominant sexual codes, and Beauty’s story should be interesting to all humanity in any way it might articulate our frustration when we are confronted with any of life’s polarizing dilemmas.
Indeed, one could read endless comparisons into the dynamic between the super-surgeon and his subject, not the least one being the corporation vs. consumer relationship and perhaps that is what makes the horror of Vera’s situation so disturbing to us.
Irregardless of connotations, intended or otherwise, the quality of the film making is superb. His country’s illustrious fine arts heritage seems to have taught the director well. Visually speaking, the flourish with which some of the technological imagery is presented recalls the most poetic science sequences in cinema from Lange to Kubrick.
“The Skin I Live In” expresses an undeniable dedication to the goddess of beauty. The filmmaker’s deeper allegiance is made obvious for us, for example, by posting enormous reproductions of “Venus D’Urbino” by Titian, along side “Venus in a Mirror” by Rubens, in the upstairs grand hallway. Like those masters before him, this one lavishes loving attention even on the most obscure element in the piece, investing painstaking care in the way it contributes to the refinement and dimensionality of the finished product.
A meticulously matched soundtrack selection, for instance “Shades of Marble,” by Anders Trentemøller evokes, with strident strings, the violent occlusions of geological upheaval. Almodóvar repurposes it ingeniously to express the fragility and vulnerability of flesh to intrusion by the scalpel, or the violent will of rapist against victim while, at the same time, paying homage to the classic Greek sculptors that labored to encode our modern obsession with flawless beauty.
Beginning with this past June’s post, I have been discussing Bertolluci’s charming coming of age flick, “Stealing Beauty” from 1996. Along side it, I have compared Jacques Rivette’s artist/model drama “La Belle Noisseuse.” From 1991, and proven that all are re-workings of the Jean Cocteau’s venerated classic, “La Belle et la Bete,” from 1947.
This final variation is the most exotic extreme. Whereas, in “La Belle Noiseusse”, the role of Beauty was stripped down and exposed, by the rigors of the master’s process, to possess a kernel of the beast inside. The genius of Almodóvar turns the screw a notch deeper, forcing man to be changed into woman against his will, for the purposes of sexual slavery, effectively transforming the Beast into Beauty to let him feel what it’s like to be preyed on.
In the opening credits of “Stealing Beauty,” Bertolucci casts his audience as the Beast to achieve essentially the same thing. All three are cinematic stunts designed to place the Beast in all of us, in Beauty’s point of view in order to foster compassion and respect for her. All three are acts of homage to idealized feminine and an appeal for her welfare which is too often taken advantage of in real world scenarios. All the more reason why she must be defended in our make believe ones.
This begins a multi-part series on magic and movies. Does magic really exist? If so, what is its definition and who are its practitioners?
The digital reproduction above comes close to being, itself, a kind of magic spell by depicting the famous encounter between Circe the sorceress and Ulysses, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. The painter’s treatment of his subject is an example of the kind of visual tour de force that storytelling artists were able to draw on and enchant motion picture audiences with as soon as they were invented.
This type of painting makes use of our imaginations the same way as movies do, which is to prompt us to fill in essential information that is left out of view. In order to help his audience fill in the missing story with strictly visual cues, a pictorial storyteller must exercise complete control over the frame. The same goes with a magic spell or enchantment.
Whether attempted by a painter, filmmaker, magician or any other artist, a well-performed trick keeps our reasoning brain busy while it plays with our subconscious. Film appears to defy nature’s laws by shaping the action at 24 frames per second. Magicians can swap sets and props to string together a series of illusory events. Painters have only a single canvas with which to cast their spell, but we can study it for as long as we wish.
The convenience of being able to freeze the action in painting will give me an opportunity to read into every detail of Waterhouse’s interpretation of Homer and see if we can dodge Circe’s trap.
To be effective a spell or enchantment must be worked out in intricate detail. In “Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses,” we see a gorgeous woman garbed in silvery gauze, seated on some kind of throne. Sunlight accentuates her left breast–a rosy nipple peeks out over the sharply slanted whisper of her gown. On a totemic footstool, her naked toes bathe in the sunbeam with her breast. On the floor to her left is an intoxicated swine–one of Ulysses companions that drank from Circe’s cup. A wary Ulysses, which you will detect in the circular glass that comprises Circe’s backrest, stands before the sorceress. He appears behind her in the mirror, like he is bowing to her breast.
Her face tilts back in a wily, come-hither gaze while she raises the potion in her right hand and steadies a long wand over her head with her left. Gold-cupped incense fumes waft up from lower right toward the raised-cup in the upper left. Her forty-five degree neckline ups this rapport. The painter invites us to notice how these details combine to stupefy Circe’s subject with multi-sensual assault.
Supported on the backs of roaring lions, each with a serpent coiled around its neck, the painter poises the sorceress, literally, between the man and his reflection. She reigns there on her altar, capturing his eye, her ready cup and rod held high. Classic columns fill in the glass, interspersed with shards of Aegean sky.
Circe’s leonine throne recalls the wild cats Ulysses encountered outside, wandering her domain. They were strangely tame and approachable, having been drugged by this demonic dame. So the painter manages to articulate the essential mark of a good magician, who begins weaving his or her spell even before the audience has entered the dark. Let us not overlook the profusion of purple flowers tumbled down from the diabolic shadows. No doubt this is the wicked herb. It looks so fragrant and appealing.
I have left out, until now, the erotic charge of the image. It portrays a naked woman most desirably and represents a clear case of high-class smut. Sexually stimulating paintings, for the past 500 years, have been socially accepted in the west. Why? Their ability to arouse and enchant is highly prized. If you wore the fashions of The Guilded Age, long before porn went pop, this picture could put you in touch with your passion, provoking potent and inspired thoughts.
Even today, if your imagination is given to flights, you might readily put yourself in this scene with a keen thirst for her drink and the aftertaste of regret. For it is quite intentionally the same moment when you will be close enough to appraise her exquisite skin, navel, knees, hips. Voila! Are we swine yet?
The circular censor and tiled rings repeat the cup and mirror in shape and theme. Graduating circles emblemize the enclenching cinch of Circe’s ingenious scheme. Notice too the stoop that raises her above the rabble has a radial indent, to impress upon us one more way that we are ensnared already by her intent.
Now she may be imposing her illusion on you and me, but Ulysses was warned about Circe’s treachery. He has drugged himself to resist her with the Holy Moly. Holy Moly! To this day, when we see something unexplainable, those two words are sometimes exclaimed. It stems from ancient superstition, invoking the antidote with which Ulysses foiled Circe’s aims.
With that in mind, there is a peculiar detail in the upper right corner–a very important feature of the painting–that slice of light above the sorceress’s left hand. Why that shape in that position? It appears most distractingly strong up there in the darkest zone of the composition and makes her hand look deformed, projecting from it like a dagger or a talon.
Why did the artist paint that? Why there? What are we looking at? He fails to completely conceal some background behind a large curtain or tapestry which subtly dilutes the illusion of Circe’s magic trap.
We can escape the fate of Ulysses friends, through this brilliant detail, in which the set is left slightly open for us to see, so that we don’t fall victim to Circe’s spell. Ulysses sees through her deception and anyone who finds this antidote in the painting can too and avoid becoming plump, languid and jowly with a snout and a squiggly tale. That little up thrust dagger of light becomes our counter-spell.
Needless to say, this is superb pictorial storytelling. It took more than 800 words for me to briefly make plain the narrative evident in one single pass over Waterhouse’s exquisite frame. We will have to leave it now in order to take Homer’s allegory to it’s logical extreme, but we’ll take it up again in a subseqeunt part of this series in which we introduce the first magician of motion pictures, Georges Jean Méliés.
To conclude the tale, when Ulysses leans over to sip the potion, Circe taps him with her wand and is shocked when he does not go porcine. Since he can resist Circe, her yearning for Ulysses grows. Swine are turned back into soldiers. Circe now moves to Ulysses’ tune. His men stay on her island with him for a year, eating, drinking, and nursing their wounds.
By the end of the stay they are such good friends Circe sends her lover to seek council from the ghost of the prophet Teirisias in the underworld. She wants Ulysses to avoid certain pitfalls that await him on his way home.
When I recalled this episode of the Odyssey and decided to explore it as an allegory for connecting motion pictures to magic acts, I had forgotten about the Holy Moly. It ends up providing the perfect metaphor for how movies themselves are the antidote to the many spells of our modern day.
Nyat Nyat and Boo Hoo. Let us name those iconic twins. He is groaning, she is giggling–flip sides of the same clam. If comedy’s mutable, tragedy’s irrefutable. One forecasts fickle fates. The other portends bitter ends–an artificial beginning vs. an artificial end. It’s not just about the gag, but which way it jabs. Tragedy’s not about death, but the agony of defeat. Storytellers manipulate comedy and tragedy to perform an ongoing autopsy on culture. We talk about comedy and tragedy as different things, but “truth” is the subject, a singular reality that we pry apart for clues.
If I am late on this post, it is because of the philosophical essay “Laughter: On the Meaning of the Comic,” by Henri Bergson. Until I read Bergson’s essay, I was content with a lame explanation that comedy achieves itself through surprise. Now that seems very broad and obvious, not to mention imprecise. Bergson defines comedy as a perceived encroachment of anything inhuman or mechanical imposed on the human. This sounded not very funny to me when I first heard it, but what I think the philosopher means to say is comedy plays against our common sense.
According to the essayist, any mechanization of man’s words, thoughts, behaviors or appearance is humorous to us. To give some straightforward examples, consider how stuttering, repetition, nervous ticks, outlandish looks, rigidly staged rituals or excessively flamboyant flexibility all become instant capital for the comic. It is Bergson’s keenest notion that laughter is a form of social correction. We laugh to expose and straighten-out the out of step.
Preoccupation is another thing we laugh at. Automatic Man provides endless amusement. All we need is to see some day-dreamer stub his toe and we go bug eyed, become something of a machine ourselves, a bellows, gasping and snorting, far funnier to look at than the fool himself. He’s jumping up and down holding his foot. We’re doubled-over shitting bricks.
It is remarkable how laughter is so instantly conspiratorial and connection building. A good laugh flourishes like rhubarb, communes with infectious ease, leaves behind a pleasing after breeze. We owe much to comedy for delivering us from tragedy.
At the same time, good jokes can be funny as well as tragic. I’ll give it a try.
Compared to losing my Mother, my left macula was nothing. It did not love me unconditionally.
Do you ever have to beat back a grin when a friend confides some personal pain they’re in? Bergson says we are not evil. It’s nothing personal. We trip back into a psychic stronghold to preserve ourselves from harm. If we feel like laughing at another’s bad luck, maybe it is so we can forget our own for an instant.
So, the impulse to laugh is a part of our survival brain. Our ancestors cried for a few hundred millennia before they ever uttered actual words, and they laughed too, for much longer, to express what the spoken word has recently been trying. In fact, language is the direct descendant of laughing and crying.
Laughter urges everyone to remain optimistic about the outcome. It is our nature to hold out for a happy ending. If there was a verbal analog to the bodily spasms and convulsions of laughter, it might sound something like, “there then, let that teach’em a lesson.”
If laughter is corrective then tears are instructive. Depressing movies serve up misfortunes considerably harder than our own to digest and dark dramas puts us in touch with all the common character defects. Whether issuing from the real world or the movie reel, common misery confirms our fellowship in the human race. Tears shed by us, under the influence of movies, are no less genuine for having been provoked by fantasy. Sad endings are, no doubt, as popular as they are as a direct result.
Most of us have sought out hundreds of movies and continue to keep watching more, comparing different examples to remind ourselves that what is immensely sad is often profoundly life affirming. Perhaps this has to do with an artificial ending. Since reality is open ended, everything could still turn out for the better in our lives. No matter how bad our misfortunes may appear now, surely the credits will roll soon and the lights will come up.
If we pry further, with Bergson’s help, we may discover that tension and release are the fundamental energies that constitute comedy. Odd or not, it would seem the same with tragedy. Aren’t we talking about catharsis here? Would it follow that there is a little bit of tragedy in comedy and vice-versa? We applaud the movie maker who pilots us back and forth, from one shore to the other, in a single story. With close-ups, long shots, speed changes, mechanical effects and juxtaposition, comedy and tragedy help us embrace life’s most perplexing ambiguities.
Federico Fellini who directed some of the funniest, saddest and most perplexing movies of all time, once wrote, “nothing is sadder than laughter, nothing more beautiful, more magnificent, more uplifting and enriching than the terror of deep despair. I believe that every man, as long as he lives, is a prisoner of this terrible fear within which all prosperity is condemned to founder but which preserves, even in its deepest abyss, that hopeful freedom which makes it possible for him to smile in seemingly hopeless situations.”
In a particularly choice scene from his movie “Fellini’s Roma,”a blustery working class Italian chows down in the piazza with family and friends. He whistles and teases his pouting wife to come downstairs and join the party. One look at him tells me he’s probably given her a good reason to be pissed off. When she arrives beside him at the table he greets her by holding a plump, ripe olive up to her lips. She opens her mouth to receive it. At the last minute he replaces the olive with his thumb.
Fellini’s deceptively simple bit of staging illustrates how comedy and tragedy are integrally entwined. We can’t stop ourselves before we have to burst out laughing. At the same time we hate him, like she does, for his petty, idiotic power play, for taking advantage of her good nature and for god knows what else. “You silly stupid shit,” he says. “You’re the stupid shit,” she replies. “You’re both stupid shits,” says the little sister. Everyone laughs. It may be more funny to us, or more tragic, depending on the mood we’re in that day and how we perceive the consequences.
While we laugh, or shed tears, our native intelligence identifies the consequences which comprise an opportunity for reform. With one single outburst, mad or merry, we identify the perceived errant individual’s failings and avoid them ourselves. “He is so full of himself, I can hardly wait until he gets what’s coming to him.” “Is she really going to stay with him? “She’ll make herself miserable.”
We thank and congratulate Maestro Fellini for this masterstroke of comedy. If only we had more storytellers like him. He had the commitment to make certain we emerge from his fantasies smarter and more sensitized to reality.
Merry Christmas everyone. Happy New Year and thank you for your business!
At the mid-point of the newly restored edition of “Metropolis,” the transformation of beauty to beast takes place with a series of gorgeously designed and impeccably executed composite shots depicting the world’s first sex drone’s fabrication and release. Born on the silver screen, in a genetic engineering lab circa 2026, this replicant is brought to its feet to the beat of a lavish score by Gottfried Hupperts. Come watch the inaugural motion picture melding of woman and thing and lift your senses to the sights and sounds of some all-time great science fiction scenes.