SCREENING LOG - HIGHLIGHTS FROM FEBRUARY, 2005

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"Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. In a word, EMOTION." Thus spake Samuel Fuller, who at this moment is my favorite American filmmaker after spending last month in his world, through three movies and his book A THIRD FACE: MY LIFE OF WRITING, FIGHTING AND FILMMAKING. It's no wonder that Fuller was so loved by younger filmmakers and critics, as his autobiography feels like a long fireside session of sitting on Grandpa's knee as he spills all the vivid details: his days as a beat reporter in New York, a screenwriter in 30s Hollywood, fighting with the First Infantry in Africa and Europe, and becoming a bigtime director in the 50s before the collapse of the moguls left him a struggling independent, eventually reinventing himself as a celebrity in Europe. His sentences mirror his filmmaking: short, salacious, punchy and to the point. It's an aesthetic that needs to be brought back in an era where the ultra-composed long take is becoming the enervated standard in art cinema.

His characters seem buried miles inside gritty survivalist landscapes, like scarab beetles scrambling to find a heap of dung big enough to sustain them until the next dungheap. Gene Evans in THE STEEL HELMET is a wiseass Korean War sergeant who gets colder and cockier about his own instincts with each mistake made by the ragtag outfit he falls into. He has no time to sympathize with the worm's meat walking around him -- the scary thing is that we think he's right to feel that way. That is, until he can no longer deny the undying devotion of an orphan Korean boy named Short Round (yes the original Short Round), while a heartless *beep* of a Commie P.O.W. provides the sarge with his doppelganger.

There's a similar tension between streetwise pragmatism and irrational devotion in PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET, Richard Widmark's two-bit hustler playing Commie spies and federal agents off each other to score big time for the microfilm he picked off dum-dum floozy Jean Peters' purse. Peters falls inexplicably in love with Widmark (even after he cold cocks her), triggering a massive disturbance in a social order where everyone must use each other or get used. This masterpiece is Fuller at his most cinematically virtuous, with a dozen memorable scenes chock-full of elaborate stagings, each person's physicality influencing the others like an orgy of seedy mannerisms.

At the twilight of his life, Fuller trekked to the Amazon with hipster cineastes Mika Kaurismaki and Jim Jarmusch to film TIGRERO: A FILM THAT WAS NEVER MADE, revisiting the site Fuller had scouted for an abandoned 50s project about Amazon hunters. The native Karaja tribe (now dressed in t-shirts and pants) marvel at seeing movies for the first time, footage Fuller filmed of their ancestors from 40 years ago. The film is mostly a disheveled assemblage of staged quirky interactions (Jarmusch and Fuller's dynamic is an interesting study in the relationships of contemporary hipster film buffs with their idols) and reflections on the land, the people, and the film that never was. Fuller's cranky, grizzled voice gives the film its center, ancient yet full of life and interest in the present. His original pitch for the Tigrero project is priceless: "A beautiful white crane lands in the middle of a green jungle swamp. A crocodile leaps out of the water and thrashes it by the legs. Another crocodile comes, and they fight each other for who gets to devour the crane. Then, a school of flesh-eating piranha come and rip both crocodiles into pieces. And then a crane swoops down from the air and plucks one of the pirahna from the water and swallows it whole. And I'm going to get this all in one shot!"

Claire Denis gets better with age (i.e. less words, more cinema). As much as I like her very smart observations on race and post-colonialism in CHOCOLAT (life on the plantation with drunken stupid French people, smoldering native servants and lots of sun-baked atmosphere) and NO FEAR NO DIE (a film about cockfights, literally and metaphorically), I have to say that FRIDAY NIGHT -- a dangerous one-night chronicle of a woman's fantasy, subjugation and ultimate liberation -- is truly a foray into masterpiece territory, in terms of conveying a specific state of mind and feeling through visuals that live and breathe in the present tense.

Pop Goes the Hou. The Anthology Film Archives featured a retrospective of as many Hou Hsiao Hsien and Edward Yang films they could get a hold of. Sadly they were missing several Yang films that they had asked the director personally to lend to them, but Yang was unresponsive (understandably as he is presently battling liver cancer). Thankfully, Yang's 1985 breakthrough TAIPEI STORY made the schedule. Yang's second feature established a startling view of contemporary Taiwan as a boulevard of broken dreams and fragmented distractions swirling around a moral and spiritual void. Hou Hsiao Hsien proved his acting chops (in the same year Zhang Yimou did the same, starring in THE OLD WELL) as a grown-up, washed up graduate of the National Little League Team (Taiwan won the Little League World Series for 12 years straight back in the 60s and 70s). He's still addicted to baseball and a half-baked dream of making it in the U.S., watching imported video recordings of Major League games compulsively while the world passes him by.

This (not inaccurate, in my opinion) portrait of contemporary Taiwan as the most f-ed up place in the planet is a far cry from the rustic nostalgia imparted by Hou in one of his early commercial forays, THE GREEN GREEN GRASS OF HOME. A chronicle of a city schoolteacher who sojourns in the southern countryside, this film amply demonstrates an early populist streak in Hou's work, marked especially by his remarkable handling of child actors and themes (to think that 1982 was the year when Hou and Steven "E.T." Spielberg were most aligned in their sensibilities). There's an incredibly Farrellian sequence devoted to how the kids handle their teacher's request to produce their own stool samples for tapeworm inspection, and a musical number about drinking cola that comes out of nowhere (right before the hero gets his ass kicked while attempting to stop a poacher from fishing illegally). Despite the wacky sequence of events, Hou's understanding of social milieu is already pronounced.

Yang's bleak urban visions seem to seep into one of Hou's rare early entries into urban drama, DAUGHTER OF THE NILE. Hou would later disown this work, it being a commercial vehicle for a popular singer to pose as a hard-working college girl trying to keep her family together as her brother enters an unwise gang-related business venture while incurring the wrath of their father. Hou may disown the film all he wants, but his awareness of the uncertain rhythms of contemporary life are already evident, a full decade before GOODBYE SOUTH GOODBYE, MILLENNIUM MAMBO or CAFE LUMIERE. His use of long takes and fixed camera angles that try to pin down living moments like a lepidopterist only accentuates the raw instability of 20th century life -- without an obvious plotline to hold this world together, there's a queasy feeling throughout this film that all hell might break loose, and eventually it does.

Wartime paranoia (and Ingrid Bergman) did George Cukor some good. THE WOMEN, Cukor's last film prior to the outbreak of World War II, is an ambitious and laudable attempt to make a symphony out of women's voices (at least 100, if I'm not mistaken). But after an hour all the gossiping, backbiting and nattering my eardrums were weary. Couple that with a dubious "true love means winning back your man, never mind that he's an unfaithful prick" premise makes the film undubitably dated. It would have been more interesting if the story revolved around the other woman, played with relish by Joan Crawford, the only modern actress in the bunch.

Within the next few years, Cukor must have discovered film noir, because GASLIGHT makes remarkable use of light and shadow to intensify your average drawing room stage material and load it with psychological nuance. Replacing 100 yammering women with Ingrid Bergman wandering through a silent tomb of a house certainly contributes to the noirish proceedings. There's something so darn earnest about her acting style -- I think it's the way she breathes, she's constantly exasperated. Even as she plays the victimized innocent young wife and squeezes it for every bit of sympathy she can get, you can't help but submit to her show of vulnerability. Lars Von Trier would have had a ball working with her.

The Pain of Regarding Others - Two new films from the corners of the world confronted me with the difficulty of bearing witness to others' lives, existences that seem to happen on another planet. At first I had misgivings about TURTLES CAN FLY, Bahman Gobadhi's latest missive from Iraq (how does he, an Iranian, get to film there?), but his first in the post-Saddam era. The man who made A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES offers some sobering visuals of limbless orphans wandering through minefields, among other surreal and maddening images. At times I was wary of the Kusturica-inspired mania that chugs the storyline at 60 miles an hour as the protagonist, a pre-pubescent boy named Satellite (because he's the cheif satellite dish technician in the area, in addition to being de facto leader of a couple dozen orphans, and an aspiring casanova to a shy refugee girl -- whoever the kid is that plays him should get an Oscar for multitasking). Just as in the well-meaning but grating MAROONED IN IRAQ, characters shout dialogue at the top of their lungs (is this a cultural thing?). The narrative seems sloppy, roving back and forth between different subplots -- but in retrospect it's an apt way to depict a world that's out of control. This film has haunted me upon reflection, the things that bothered me becoming things that challenge me to wonder about these people, their problems. This film implicitly demands its own set of criteria to be fairly judged, requiring the viewer to step outside his own narrow frame of reference and try to relate to things too horrifying to think about let alone believe are real.

Along those lines one can also regard a remarkable new Argentinian feature, LOS MUERTOS. A cold-eyed chronicle of a double murder convict's first few hours of freedom, the film shares a lot with the work of Thai filmmaker Apitchatpong Weerasethakul -- the plain details of human activity, set within the lush backdrop of tropical nature, captured in shimmering hues of orange and green. As the man roams through dusty rural streets, buys clothes for a relative he's on the way to visit, and gets off with a local prostitute, it takes a while for us to realize what the movie is really about. Whatever it is, the extended sequence of a goat getting hunted down, slaughtered and disemboweled certainly raises the stakes, and any feelings of confusion over this movie settle into a profound sensation of being creeped out. Something like a South American NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, it bespeaks of uncomprehensible primal horrors lurking behind two facades: a middle-aged parolee and the untameable landscape that surrounds him.

I liked Brian DePalma most when I was fourteen. THE UNTOUCHABLES was my idea of the perfect movie back in junior high. It remains a favorite because watching it reminds me of a child-like, giddy attitude with movie enjoyment that I should never lose sight of. Nonetheless, it's hard to drum up that kind of enthusiasm in earnest when watching DRESSED TO KILL or SCARFACE at my present station. They both feel thoroughly like clinical film school exercises stretched to feature length -- everything is a twist on Hollywood genre, Freudian theory, or an homage to Hitchcock or Hawks, and little if anything is derived from direct observation from real life humans (except those sitting in a movie theater). The weird thing is that I find myself trying to rationalize my way into finding things to praise or enjoy in these films, which seems totally backward; it's like finding intellectual or artistic reasons for why a 12 year old should enjoy watching things blow up. But there is pleasure in watching Nancy Allen in a g-string wrestle with Michael Caine in a wig, or Stephen Bauer get as much mileage out of tilting his head confidently to one side as Al Pacino does with three hours of manic scenery-chewing in a bad accent. But these pleasures are precisely where the conceptual and contrived get transformed into flesh and blood, and actors are generous enough to invite the viewers to have fun with their cardboard characters, instead of holding them in contempt for buying into formulas that the filmmakers themselves can't get beyond. DePalma's calculated cinematic kicks don't hit the gut as deeply a director who loads his punches with genuine emotions, like Hitchcock or Fuller, no matter how much these visceral thrill moments may look similar on the surface.

Watching 187 silent films in one month was probably not such a good idea after all. In my eagerness to complete my project of watching at least 10 films from every year in cinema history, I pillaged several video sources for silent films: the Kino 5-disc box set The Movies Begin, two discs from the recently released More Treasures from American Film Archives, and the out-of-print Kino disc The Lumiere Brothers' First Films featuring 85 Lumiere films from 1895-1897. Still eager to get my hands on the newly released Kino four disc set Edison Studios: The Invention of Movies.
So what did I gain from all these hours spent in silence? Well for one thing, there was a helluva lot of creative activity on display from the get-go of cinema. Watching the animated films, I was surprised by how many of them mixed live action with animation, especially in the films of J Stuart Blackton, Winsor McKay and the Fleischer brothers. The fantasy films of Melies and the Pathe studios didn't impress me as much this time -- you see a few of their films and they start to feel repetitive. What else...

-D.W. Griffith rarely met a moralizing position he didn't like. Man that guy was full of Truth and Humanity -- titles like "The Redman's View" and "What Shall We Do with Our Old?" make one wonder if he shouldn't have run against Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson in 1912. His plots sometimes do cartwheels in order to make their message: In "for His Son," a soda tycoon adds cocaine to his formula to get people hooked and boost sales -- he does this so that his son can inherit the profits. Little does he know that junior has gotten major shakes from guzzling gallons of coked-up coke. Actually, this kind of resembles the storyline of TRAFFIC, which goes to show who we have to thank for getting Hollywood stuck in its present rut 90 years later. Even so, a film like "The Girl and Her Trust" can still make the case that Griffith was a genius, the man who pretty much invented modern editing.

- Possibly influenced by Griffith, Louis Feuillade was a remarkably versatile director of melodramas and comedies. In his work from the early '10s you do see a bit of his interest in fragmented spaces, deceptions and social stratification, which of course would emerge full-blown in his masterpieces FANTOMAS and LES VAMPIRES.

- It's reasonable to argue that it was all downhill for British cinema after George Albert Smith and R.W. Paul, two brilliant innovators in the use of point of view, onscreen staging and offscreen space, the building blocks that would also fascinate Alfred Hitchcock among so many others.

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