Category: The Classics

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Can a child understand war? Can any of us, really, understand war?

A child cannot grasp why people must die or why violence must destroy everything they know, but they do know emotion, perhaps more purely than we ourselves can express it.

Despite being a cartoon, “Grave of the Fireflies” is not a children’s film. But it envelops us with pain, sadness and loss on a simple level such that perhaps a child could understand and embrace this Japanese film’s otherwise tough, gruesome images.

Isao Takahata’s film is an early masterpiece from Studio Ghibli, which also spawned Hayao Miyazaki and this year’s “The Secret World of Arrietty.” The animated style is a bit rough around the edges compared to its more contemporary siblings, but it shares the natural world’s stark and colorful beauty that wash over our eyes like visual poetry.

The look and feel of this film is bleak and war-torn, but Takahata uses animation as a way of instilling a sense of magic serenity. An early scene shows a radiant red bloom of fireflies rising from a grassy field. The moment is hardly lifelike, but it is stunning.

It tells the story of a teenage boy, Seita, and his toddler sister Setsuko in Japan during World War II. Their father is a naval officer and their mother has just been killed in a bombing raid. Seeing the charred remains of Seita’s mother is no pleasant site for the queasy, least of all for children. The animation however makes watching it grippingly possible.

The brother and sister try to stay with their aunt, but she’s cruel and stingy in a time when everyone is rationing for the war. She eggs Seita on to join the army or battle the unbeatable napalm fires, but he can neither bring himself to die, nor to abandon Setsuko.

As they set out to live on their own free of their parents, “Grave of the Fireflies” becomes one of the most powerfully saddening films you’ll ever see about independence, hardship and loss.

By centering on these two children, the story becomes instantly more relatable and heart wrenching. Takahata builds a lovely bond between brother and sister through enchanting musical montages. Whether it’s a scene of the pair sharing a laugh on a beach, doing chores at home or scurrying during an air raid, everything they share is handled artfully as though it were one of their most tender moments.

Can any war film ever made boast so many moments of beauty and levity peppering the film’s otherwise desolate landscapes? Live action filmmakers can learn from how elegiac “Grave of the Fireflies” can be. This is such a sad movie, and yet it’s all so delicate and simple.

Perhaps it’s because animation grants the film a level of emotional range almost not capable with human actors. Whether or not these anime figures with big eyes and even a lack of nipples look lifelike, the faces of Seita and Setsuko have such an engrossing level of expression. Their tears are anything but artificial.

One of “Grave of the Fireflies’” most devastating segments is a pair of quick shots as Setsuko aims to bury her collection of fireflies in the same way her mother was likely buried. A morbid image of a mass grave in the city flashes through Seita’s head, and we’re left with a grim sense of mortality after war.

This is a child who has drawn this parallel. “Grave of the Fireflies” is great not because it is painful and beautiful, but because it is universal.

The Gold Rush (1925)

It might not be the most flattering of praises to say that Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” was the first movie to make cannibalism funny, but that’s the irreverent charm of one of the Tramp’s finest films.

Watching it can immediately reveal two things. Firstly we take notice of just how committed Chaplin is to every one of his gags. He doesn’t exactly play everything with a straight face the way Buster Keaton would, but when he aims to eat his own shoe as though his laces were spaghetti and the sole was a bony fish, he makes a point to get a laugh out of it. Not to mention he will continue walking without a proper shoe even in the most pathos filled moments.

Even his face in the film’s famed “Oceana Dance,” with two bread rolls stuck to forks acting as legs, is made so endearing thanks to his immersion and dopey charm within his miniature character. Further, Chaplin’s cinematographer isolates him in a darkly back-lit scene to allow the routine to stand on its own as a clever vaudevillian number. It’s as if he made a point to make that moment famous. Continue reading “The Gold Rush (1925)”

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

“They think because they are afraid. To be afraid is to understand nothing.”

Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s perplexing masterpiece “Werckmeister Harmonies” is rightly terrifying, both as a challenging, endurance-testing art film and as an awe inspiring, devastating expression of filmmaking. It’s enormity, its profundity and its artistry provide for the film an immense metaphor for existence with no parallel.

Simply watching it is a captivating endeavor. Discussion of Tarr’s films always begin with mention of how few shots compose its running time (this one has a mere 39 at nearly two and a half hours), and watching its gradual dance in the most serene black and white cinematography is enchanting.

And yet understanding the gravity of Tarr’s metaphor is its own endeavor. “Werckmeister Harmonies” uses the appearance of a whale as part of a travelling circus as a way of equating third world war and rebellion with the tumultuous anarchy of the end of the world and such an occasion’s effect on the human psyche.

This is the sort of film that would make “The Tree of Life” haters reconsider their meaning of the word pretentious.

But the cinematic bravura of the film’s elegant opening sequence alone will soothe skeptics. The local paperboy Janos (Lars Rudolph) arranges three drunks in a pub to represent the movement of the Sun, the Earth and the Moon. He halts them in the position of a solar eclipse and laments the stopping of the world, of life and of light. And when all the drunks begin again in their celestial ballet, we realize the grace and tranquility of existence.

The scene is lovely. A gorgeous score by Mihaly Vig makes the moment wholly resounding. The camera captures close-ups, long shots and multiple perspectives without so much as an edit or a quick motion.

Tarr’s minimal editing and lengthy shots is common of Eastern European cinema, but his camera is mobile and stealthy. It hardly even resembles American filmmakers who experiment in extended takes, with the motion being contained to small rooms so that the camera can wonderfully embody the entire space rather than evade endlessly into a growing landscape.

And Tarr uses this confinement to his advantage in conveying his message. Consider the film’s third shot inside the home of Janos’s uncle Gyorgy (Peter Fitz), in which the camera begins and ends in the same living room as it follows Janos through daily routines of life. Like the Earth completing a revolution around the Sun, life goes on and the camera completes its own natural rotation.

But for all its stunning photography, “Werckmeister Harmonies” is a harrowing film. As the massive whale arrives in this small town, beaconing rumors of theft, disappearance and local turmoil, its gigantic container invades the entire frame as though blocking out the sun that would allow life to continue.

The activity in the town from here on out comes to a stand still, with crowds aimlessly flocking to the town square to be overwhelmed and confused by the whale’s purpose in their town. The bleak, foggy lighting of the film makes every moment seem monstrous and threatening, from a disturbing couple dancing at gunpoint to two children chillingly embodying their own anarchy as they shout and bang drums.

I confess that I did not grasp all of the film’s themes along with their images, but such moments like one of the film’s longest in which a mob invades and trashes a hospital, are some of the most immensely powerful singular shots I have ever seen, regardless of their meaning.

The one last thing I have still not attempted to explain is the film’s title. A Werckmeister harmony refers to a German composer who first imagined the idea of an octave, which the film argues contradicts with natural tonal progressions in the world. The character Gyorgy studies this intently, and his deep and complicated argument boils down to the idea that all the established principles of modern art are wrong.

Such can maybe also be said about Bela Tarr and “Werckmeister Harmonies,” a film so polarizing and resolutely different than most films ever made, it defies explanation in envisioning what a film can be and can evoke.

David Copperfield World Premiere

I live in Indiana. The chances of me getting to see a World Premiere for any movie are slim to none.

But IU Cinema Director Jon Vickers has granted me that opportunity with a strange, but certainly not unwelcome selection.

The 1922 Nordisk Film adaptation of “David Copperfield” had its World Premiere Saturday with the performance of a student performed, conducted and composed score by IU Jacobs School of Music sophomore Ari Barack Fisher.

The film had never existed in any digital form, had no existing score and may have never screened in America, but the Library of Congress and the British Film Archives provided a surprisingly pristine film print to the world-class cinema Saturday night for the special occasion.

Having reported on the film for the Indiana Daily Student (which you can read here), I knew to expect good things, but I’m now proud to report that “David Copperfield” is a quaint, lush and lovely silent film that now has an equally moving, touching and complex score to accompany it.

Here is a film made in Denmark that has the stunning production values of a Hollywood film, and in that way it is a dense movie full of changing tones and moods. Fisher’s score adheres to that wonderfully. Continue reading “David Copperfield World Premiere”

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

James Dean’s character in “Rebel Without a Cause” is desperately searching for a type of masculinity he can actually relate to. What’s ironic about the film is that James Dean himself, along with Marlon Brando, expressed a new idea of masculinity in Hollywood actors.

And suddenly after Dean’s tragic death, “Rebel Without a Cause” spoke to America’s teenagers in a way Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne were no longer reaching them.

Nicholas Ray’s film tells the story of a teenager struggling to fit in at a new school and being forced to prove himself at every turn. We meet Jim Stark (Dean) as little more than a kid at play, awkwardly and drunkenly playing with a monkey wind up toy until he’s hauled into the police office.

His high-pitched voice and peculiar mannerisms seem to channel a different kind of masculinity from the get go, and he attracts the attention of two students, the orphan Plato (Sal Mineo) and the popular Judy (Natalie Wood), who is trying to feel closer to her distant father as she blossoms into womanhood. All of them confused by the emotions they’re feeling and the rigid catering and rules of their parents, their actions hinge on reckless but their reasons are hopelessly vague.

“Gotta do something,” Jim’s rival Buzz says to him before their Chicken Run to prove who’s the bigger man. The meaningless social rules of masculinity have turned teenagers against one another and forced them all into becoming rebels.

“Rebel Without a Cause” plays on these paradoxes to the point that the ending outcome comes across as bitter and pointless, even after Jim, Judy and Plato have all briefly lived a touching nuclear family fantasy that gives them a taste of the masculinity they’ve been missing.

The film remains very attentive to the many different angles at which a human being can feel diminished. Almost always is Jim framed at a high angle over his father, looking down at him at how little masculinity he seems to represent.

One of the film’s most powerful scenes takes place on a stairwell with Jim sandwiched between his parents in a canted angle shot. The cinematic technique is obvious, but the pathos provided by Dean’s performance is immense.

It also squanders the characters during a trip to a planetarium. The stars tower over the kids as an old man recites the truth that Earth is a miniscule part of a universe that won’t notice when we’re gone. With education like this, no wonder the kids feel conflicted and unimportant.

Dean only starred in three films in his career, and “Rebel Without a Cause,” his second to be released after Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden,” was also his first posthumous role. “Rebel” became a cult film as the legend of Dean began to blossom, and it wasn’t long before every kid on the block wanted one of Jim Stark’s bright red jackets.

But the film was even loosely intended to be a cult, exploitation film for teens in the same spirit of Brando’s “The Wild One.” The massive CinemaScope aspect ratio and vibrant colors is more suited for a lush Western than a teen drama, but the film even tacks on a couple of extended action set pieces, including a knife fight, a drag race and a shootout, that do little more than make use of the soon outdated technology. Today, some of these sequences, along with a few other light-hearted moments in between, are notoriously dated.

Dean’s mannerisms and presence as a fashion icon cemented him as a pivotal male figure in the early ‘50s, paving the way for the rise of Brando and Method Acting, the French New Wave, Elvis and the abandonment of Old Hollywood altogether. The kids watching “Rebel Without a Cause” in the ‘50s would be the young adults in the ‘60s making counter culture fare like “The Graduate,” and although the two films are drastically different, you can almost see the natural progression from Jim Stark to Benjamin Braddock.

Young people watching “Rebel Without a Cause” may giggle more than they feel the movie resonating with them on a personal level, but this remains a touching and influential American film.

Rapid Response: Once Upon a Time in America

What’s funny about “Once Upon a Time in America” is that 1984 Robert De Niro made up to look 35 years older doesn’t look all that different from the way Robert De Niro actually looks today only 28 years later.

But what is noticeably different is the fantastically storybook world of early 20th Century America in comparison to the bleak present. Maybe blame Steven Soderbergh, but it’s hard to imagine a fairy tale set in the 2000s. Sergio Leone however takes pleasure out of envisioning a picturesque America as it once was, with orchestral elegance and lilting pan flutes filling the city streets and with lively color and sound paired with every romance and every knife fight.

There’s a scene nearly two-thirds through Leone’s nearly four hour gangster fantasy where Noodles (De Niro) takes the lovely Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern) to dinner on the seaside. The dining room is sparkling white, expansive and occupied only by handsome waiters and a full string ensemble. Only in America can you have something so schmaltzy, so over the top and so gaudy and still be touched by the magic of it all. That’s the not so subtle beauty of this great nation.

Much has been made about the film’s length and complexity reaching over 50 years with dozens of characters and intricate plot layers all building to a twist in modern day 1967. It has been reasoned that the last shot in which Noodles is seen smoking opium and is left with a big stupid grin on his face indicates that the entire fairy tale was nothing but a pipe dream, and this wasn’t helped when the movie was butchered in America by 90 minutes into an incomprehensible mess when it was theatrically released in 1984.

But I think it hardly matters. In its essence, “Once Upon a Time in America” is a simple film between two friends about nostalgia and loss. The film begins at the end of Prohibition with a few scenes of ruthless violence because it signals the end of a period of true decadence.

The rest of the film recalls that period through flashback in a surprisingly touching coming of age story of a few gangster hoods in New York. Between the antics of trying to get laid by the village whore Peggy and pulling their first jobs, the film has a goofy innocence, and every moment is treated as an elegiac fantasy through the shimmering bright cinematography and Ennio Morricone’s swimmingly saccharine score that recalls Old Hollywood. Not even “The Godfather” is this romanticized.

And when we flash forward to the ’60s, the world is not nearly as pretty, and the scene is underscored twice by what other than The Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Noodles has lost the past and been wandering in the future for over 35 years, and Max, as we will learn, has been desperately clinging to that lost decadence from the days after Prohibition.

There’s certainly a lot more to be analyzed here, and that’s why this is a somewhat shorter and faster response to such a long, epic film. I’m curious for instance to understand why each of Noodles’s sexual encounters breaks the film’s element of fantasy, with him taking advantage of Peggy and raping Carol and Deborah. I also didn’t really get why Joe Pesci wasn’t in the movie more. I was sure that little kid that got shot early on would grow up to be him.

But if there’s a real answer to the film’s complex riddle, I think the truth is nothing more than a beautiful and unreal time has passed us by, never to return, but even if it takes smoking opium, there is still some giddy joy of that lost time frozen forever in our memory.

The Man Who Knew Too Much: 1934 Original and 1956 Remake

People perhaps scoff at the idea of a remake today, even if it’s a director redoing his own film. But Alfred Hitchcock is not George Lucas, and when he chooses to remake “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and both versions are equally great, that’s the sign of a master director.

Hitchcock said in an interview with Francois Truffaut that the original 1934 version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” was the work of an amateur whereas the 1956 remake was the work of a professional.

That seems believable, as there are only so many liberties Hitchcock takes in tweaking the story between versions. Each is about a family who has befriended a man who has just been killed. In his dying words, he reveals to them a need to deliver precious information regarding a diplomatic assassination attempt to the British consulate. But before they talk, each family is informed that if they say a word, they will never see their child again.

The newer, American version starring James Stewart and Doris Day is certainly a more polished film, making use of bold color cinematography and elaborate travelogue sets in Morocco and Britain. But Hitch was hardly an amateur when he made this in 1934. He was already building a reputation as a great auteur of the silent screen now breaking out into sound, and he would even make his first masterpiece, “The 39 Steps,” a year later. That said, the quality shows in the original as well, and Hitch actually preferred the original because of its rough edges. It’s an unpolished gem rather than a processed studio thriller.

And while both films are arguably equally good, the battle will rage on deciding which is best and which history will remember more.

Superficially, the original is 45 minutes shorter than the remake and is in so many ways a more immediate, instantly gratifying thriller. The remake on the other hand has star power on its side, a big budget and the inclusion of the Oscar winning song “Que Sera Sera.” Continue reading “The Man Who Knew Too Much: 1934 Original and 1956 Remake”

Solaris (1972)

The introduction was given by IU President Michael McRobbie. He’s a bit of a celebrity and authority figure on campus, so it was a bit of a surprise and a treat to hear him introduce “Solaris.”

But the real reason it was a surprise is because “Solaris” is not a movie you select lightly. If you have seen it, it is likely not the only movie you’ve seen like it. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, no director ever demanded more of our patience and few films were as challenging and obtuse as his.

“Solaris” was considered the Russian answer to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a valid comparison given their proximity, their “plots,” their story telling, their breathtaking, other worldly visuals and their enormous themes. But as McRobbie spoke about the film for roughly 10 minutes, he compared Tarkovsky more to Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni than Kubrick.

I said to myself, here is a man who knows his movies. Continue reading “Solaris (1972)”

Killer of Sheep (1981)

“Killer of Sheep” is quite unarguably the greatest student film ever made. I wonder if he got a B on it.

Charles Burnett made this film in the early ’70s when he was completing his film thesis at UCLA. He knew at the time he was very unlikely to become a Hollywood filmmaker. For a black, lower middle class student without any connections in the industry, he took up independent cinema and immediately defined himself as the epitome of the American indie director.

His first feature, “Killer of Sheep,” was a plotless black and white collection of vignettes recreated from his observations growing up in a poor black neighborhood. Produced, shot and edited all by himself, Burnett creates a distinct visual style in his film, one that is gritty, but not without clarity and awareness. It is an aesthetic not unlike the people he depicts, and in this way he envisions authentic human beings striving to endure and persevere in the face of poverty, but worst of all, the mundane and the ordinary.

Burnett believes that this film views humanity as a moral people with basic social and existential concerns through everyday life that allow us to endure. He makes socially oriented films that slam race on the table and yet will rarely be seen by the people who they are actually about.

In an interview, he described himself and his films as a wall with graffiti written on it. To me, this is his way of saying his films are bold, sometimes tough to look at and often ignored, but subtle in their cultural significance and beauty.

All throughout “Killer of Sheep” I got this impression. Here is an unknown masterpiece that captures a truly American slice of life with simplicity, a distinct dialect and authentic recreation of daily life in the ’70s and even a sense of humor. He uses non-actors and tells a story unconventionally, yet he ponders big questions. He asks through his characters’ daily jobs in the kitchen and in a disgusting slaughterhouse “What does it take to be a man or woman in this place?” “What does it take to truly have a life?”

These are gigantic themes, but unlike many indie directors like him, Burnett’s work is never polarizing. As he views the mundane work of these black families, he sees them as anything but beautiful, but they could hardly be described as ugly either. He peppers these vignettes with comical visual queues and lighthearted ragtime soundtracks that encourage a sense of perseverance and human endurance. There are shocking images in “Killer of Sheep,” yes, but the elegance of a husband and wife dance scene that does nothing but convey a perfect sense of human decency with a hint of hidden sadness certainly outweigh the pain.

Critics have lauded “Killer of Sheep” as one of the best American films ever made. It’s social significance as a film that considers class as an issue of perspective, one that draws allusions to the myth of Sisyphus, one that documents an unheard segment of race in America or one that serves as a time capsule to urban ’70s America give it a weight that critics will admire. But regardless, here is a touching film that is amusing but sad at the same time. It gives nightmares, but it even gives hopes and laughs all through a non-traditional story.

“Killer of Sheep” has the perfect, quaint beauty you often don’t see in any film, let alone one made by a student.

Shoah (1985)

 

“They were stacked like wood.” This is how the Nazis disposed of thousands of Jewish bodies in the Holocaust.

“They fell out like potatoes.” This is how the Jews looked as hundreds simultaneously tumbled out of gas chambers.

“They cried like old women.” This is how Jewish prisoners who were forced to work at Auschwitz and Treblinka reacted to seeing their dead families and friends.

And these are the words from the Devil’s mouth himself, a Nazi officer confessing to documentarian Claude Lanzmann the horror he perpetrated and the repulsive stench of the camps that still lingers in his nostrils.

This is one of the more powerful moments from “Shoah,” the most pivotal film ever made about the Holocaust.

Nearly 10 hours in length and mostly subtitled, “Shoah” proved to be the roughest, most demanding cinematic marathon of my life.

It is a harrowing, torturous documentary made by a ruthless director, French born director Claude Lanzmann.

Lanzmann asks tough questions, paints horrid visuals through testimonials alone and educates to an unspeakable degree. For Lanzmann, the purpose of “Shoah” is to document everything that surrounds the Holocaust to serve as a chilling reminder of our dark history. Continue reading “Shoah (1985)”