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SCREENING LOG
-5/10-5/16, 2004
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The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067227/
A lowly fruit vendor, whose inexpressive visage conceals
the psychic scars inflicted by a scandal that cost him his
job as a policeman and subsequent horrors while serving in
the Foreign Legion, suffers marital discord and the contempt
of his family until he manages to make his profession highly
profitable by exploiting others as he has been exploited.
In some respects the premise is a bit obvious, but Fassbinder's
directing and storytelling gifts (which seem to have evolved
every year throughout the 70s) endow it with numerous fascinations.
The deadpan, inexpressive approach to acting only intensifies
the feelings of contempt, sorrow, and unquenched yearning
that lies under the skin of each character -- awkwardly staged
scenes of violence and suffering (the weird erotic charge
of Irm Herrmann's bare legs and panties exposed as she's getting
smacked around by her husband in bed with their young daughter
trying desperately to intervene) create uncomfortable multi-layered
responses that refuse to fit easy emotional categorization.
In fact even the socially-lubricating routines that bind people
together (drinking round after round of Bavarian gold at the
local pub; taking turns picking on the family black sheep)
in Fassbinder's hands acquire a tone of everday nausea, as
if these rituals were small, throttling acts of torture on
our ability to be ourselves. Somehow all of this didn't leave
me as devastated as I'd expected (or as I have been with BITTER
TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL or FOX AND
HIS FRIENDS) but it is certainly chock full of sharply drawn
moments, especially of the pint-sized variety, that leave
an unsettling residual impact. yes, maybe YES (#6 for 1972
between THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE and LONE WOLF
AND CUB: SWORD OF VENGENACE)
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940, Dorothy Arzner)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032376/
I think it's a small, decent, flawed but entertaining film
that happens to have quite an interesting subtext concerning
women's submissive roles as performers, whether as lowbrow
entertainers or highbrow artists. It seems to me that most
of this subtext is more or less available in the source text;
I can't say how much Arzner's participation adds to the proceedings.
There's a camp energy to the whole thing, esp. Lucille Ball's
ham-and-legs burlesque, and there's a fair amount of sado-masochism
involved in the young ballet dancer's painful climb to the
top, subjecting herself to nightly humiliation as the high-brow
"stooge" in Ball's unpretentious, totally-ingratiating stripteases
for a predominantly male on-screen audience. In this regard
I think this kind of feminist cinema is about as substantial
as Verhoeven's SHOWGIRLS (but make no mistake, I mean this
as a compliment) -- as both films make provocative points
about how women relate to and perform their roles as sex objects
for a spectatorial gaze that may or may not be categorically
"male" in nature, irregardless of who's doing the gazing (see
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" http://www.richmond.edu/~lmcwhort/restricted/Mulvey.html).
They should have remade this film in the '80s with Roseanna
Arquette and Debra Winger (talk about two major talents who
somehow couldn't conform to the rules of being a Hollywood
actress). yes (#5 for 1940 between THE GREAT DICTATOR and
THE LETTER)
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