The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
Directed by: Thom Andersen.
Written by: Thom Andersen.
Narrated by: Encke King.

I have been hearing about Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself since it debuted on the festival circuit back in 2003. Unless you were lucky enough to see it then, it has pretty much been impossible to see ever since – yes, apparently it was on Youtube for years, but that isn’t the best way to experience any movie – especially a nearly 3 hour documentary about how the movies portray Andersen’s home city of Los Angeles. It took 11 years, but now the film is available on DVD – and Netflix – and it most likely took that long to get the rights clearances for all of the films shown in the movie. This is essentially 3 hours of movie clips, under narration written by Andersen, and read by Encke King, that challenges the viewer to see the films he is siting – mainly Los Angeles set crime films – in a new light. Andersen throws a lot of information at the audience during the runtime, and has a lot of controversial opinions littered through (he loves the original Gone in 60 Seconds, calling it a masterpiece, while he is not overly impressed with Chinatown or L.A. Confidential). You are not likely to agree with everything Andersen contends in the film – that isn’t necessary to make it a great movie. What he does do is challenge the audience to look a little deeper into the movies they see, and what they show us. Some will argue that he is looking too close here –that like the various commentators in Room 237, about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, where they don’t see the forest for the trees. The difference is that Andersen isn’t looking for something that’s not there – he’s seeing things that are in plain sight that most people don’t notice.

Andersen has a lot of opinions about the way his beloved city has been portrayed in film. He doesn’t like it when the city’s name is shorten to L.A. – he finds it disrespectful to the city – and doesn’t like how the city is often portrayed as being so corrupt that there is no way to fight back – that the entire history of the city is built on vast conspiracy theories. This is where his rejection of L.A. Confidential or Chinatown comes into play – both films take a little bit truth to spin their wild conspiracy theories about the founding on the city, and how violent it is. He challenges the assertions made in both films – as well as films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit – and wishes films would be a little more truthful about Los Angeles.

He also has issues with the way the films play with geography – hating the way that a film as silly as Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra has a car chase that  goes from Venice Beach to the Los Angeles harbor in a matter of seconds, when in reality there are 30 miles apart from each other. He contends that “silly geography makes silly films”. I’m not quite sold on this assertion – Cobra is a silly film, but not because of the car chase. The original Gone in 60 Seconds, which Andersen loves, is also a silly film – even though it is scrupulously accurate in its depiction for the geography of the city. He’s on stronger ground on a film like Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which also is accurate to the layout of the city. That the film is grounded in reality, allows it to spin off more wildly into its conspiracy theories, while keeping the film believable. Or even a film like Robert Altman’s Short Cuts – a film I love, that Andersen clearly doesn’t, since while the film is supposedly set in different suburbs of the city, they all look the same – because Altman didn’t shoot in the different areas.

There are a lot of other points that Andersen makes in the film – the way he examines how the movies use different modern architecture is fascinating. It’s also fascinating to watch Andersen make connections to the movie industry itself, and the movies that they make. Andersen’s ultimate point, I think, is a good one. He says early in the film that while many people appreciate the dramatic qualities in documentary films, fewer appreciate the documentary qualities of dramatic movies. The movies that are shot in real locations around Los Angeles allow us a glimpse into the city’s past – a past that may not be viewable anywhere else.

As with any film like this, there are holes – or at the very least, some movies that are left out that I would have loved to see what Andersen thought of. While he delves into 1990s films like Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), he pretty much ignores the Los Angeles films of two natives who got their start in that decade – Quentin Tarantino (there is one, small clip of Jackie Brown) and Paul Thomas Anderson (who uses a variety of Los Angeles neighborhoods and people in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, all made before Andersen made this film. I also would have loved to see what his take on more recent films – Michael Mann’s Collateral, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler for example (that’s not a flaw in the movie in any way, just a curiosity).

Overall, Los Angeles Plays Itself is one of the best movies of its kind that I have ever seen. It’s fascinating, funny, controversial, contentious and brilliantly edited. I don’t agree with everything Andersen says in the movie – but then again, I’m not a native of Los Angeles – I’ve never even been there. I just know the city from the movies – and as Andersen contends, that I means I probably don’t know it at all.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Johnny Guitar (1954)

Johnny Guitar (1954)
Directed by: Nicholas Ray.
Written by: Philip Yordan and Ben Maddow (uncredited) and Nicholas Ray (uncredited) based on the novel by Roy Chanslor.
Starring: Joan Crawford (Vienna), Sterling Hayden (Johnny 'Guitar' Logan), Mercedes McCambridge (Emma Small), Scott Brady (Dancin' Kid), Ward Bond (John McIvers), Ben Cooper (Turkey Ralston), Ernest Borgnine (Bart Lonergan), John Carradine (Old Tom), Royal Dano (Corey), Frank Ferguson (Marshal Williams).

Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar is one of his very best movies – a Western that ranks among the most wildly over the top films ever made, and yet, somehow, hits all the right notes. Read 10 different reviews of Johnny Guitar, and you’ll likely read 10 different interpretations of what it all means. One of the great things about Johnny Guitar is that it seems to support all these different views on what it all means – and is also deliriously entertaining to boot.

The movie may be called Johnny Guitar, but he is far from the protagonist of the movie. Sure, his arrival in town helps to set in motion the plot, and in some ways he will “save the day” in the end, but for most of the movie, Johnny takes a backseat in the proceedings. The real protagonist is Vienna (Joan Crawford), an ambitious businesswoman, who Johnny rejected five years earlier when he was a gunfighter, and didn’t want to settle done. In the intervening years, Vienna made a lot of money as a prostitute, and now owns a gambling den and saloon on the outskirts of a town who doesn’t want her there. She doesn’t care. She knows the railroad is coming, and with it, lots of people who will want her. The townsfolk are scared of this development, and are futilely fighting progress.

No one more so than Mercedes McCambridge’s Emma Small. Crawford, whose baby this was, wanted Claire Trevor to play the role, but the studio insisted on McCambridge. Apparently Crawford hated McCambridge, and the feelings were most likely mutual, and while that didn’t make for a comfortable set, it aids the movie greatly. Emma is one of the great screen villains of all time – a seething ball of pure hatred who cannot take her eyes off of Vienna. She is apparently in love with The Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), another outsider to the townspeople, who are convinced that he and his gang held up the stagecoach and killed Emma’s brother. The movie starts with them all coming to Vienna’s saloon to arrest the Kid and his gang – but Vienna stands up for them. Nonetheless, town elder John McIvers (Ward Bond), gives the Kid and his gang 24 hours to clear town – and Vienna 24 hours to close up shop. He has no real authority to do this, but who’s going to stop him? Besides, it’s Emma who is calling the shots – she runs the bank and with her brother dead, is now the richest, most powerful person in town. What Emma wants, Emma gets.

The surface of Johnny Guitar is wonderfully colorful and over the top. Critics in 1954 were distracted by the melodrama on the surface of Johnny Guitar – they complained about the goofy plot (it is), overwrought score (which it is, unless you’re attuned to Ray’s wavelength) and the undeniable camp of the movie. They dismissed the movie, but right from the start the French loved it – both Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut were big fans, and they saw everything going on beneath the over the top surface of the film.

For one thing, it appears clear now that Johnny Guitar was a commentary on McCarthyism. While the screenplay is credited to Philip Yordan, we know now that the real writer was Ben Maddow, then blacklisted. How more people didn’t see this at the time is a commentary about how shallowly many people watch movies – because it is impossible to watch the scene where the townsfolk brutally question Turkey, one of the Kid’s gang, telling him “just tell us Vienna was one of you and we won’t hang you”, only to, of course, hang him after he does precisely what they say.

But that’s just one level of Johnny Guitar. The film has also been called a “Freudian” Western, for the way it deals with sexuality, and questions everyone’s sexual motivations throughout. Nearly every character is drawn sexually to Vienna. The Dancin’ Kid is in love with her, but she simply uses him for sex – and even that stops when Johnny rolls into town, looking to make up for lost time. Johnny loves her as well, and in perhaps the film’s best scene, they talk long into the night, and he gets her to “lie to me”, in a conversation dripping with cynicism between these two. And Emma, of course, is in many ways in love with Vienna herself – which is precisely why she hates her so much. McCambridge’s performance is wildly, madly over the top, and yet it is perfect for the movie – one of the greatest portraits of self-loathing ever put on screen.

Johnny Guitar plays with Western clichés from the outset – from gender reversals (Truffaut said the film was like Beauty and the Beast – with Sterling Hayden as the beauty), and as one character says of Crawford – “I’ve never met a woman who was more  man” – and later Vienna will say of Emma, when she is questioned why she wants to hang The Kid if she loves him – “He makes her feel like a woman – she hates that”. The men in the movie are weak, easily bent and played by the two women – and eventually the men realize that the smartest thing to do is just stay out of their way.

Nicholas Ray had a long, distinguished career as a filmmaker – although he is undeniably more highly thought of now than he was when he was working (he only got one Oscar nomination in his career – for writing Rebel without a Cause). Johnny Guitar is as good as anything he has ever made – films like In a Lonely Place (1950) or Bigger Than Life (1956), which like Johnny Guitar are more interesting the deeper you delve into them. At long last, Johnny Guitar was finally given a proper DVD and Blu-Ray release, and it’s now available for all to savor. It is a true masterwork.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Fires on the Plain (1959)

Fires on the Plain (1959)
Directed by: Kon Ichikawa.
Written by: Natto Wada based on the novel by Shohei Ooka.
Starring: Eiji Funakoshi (Tamura), Osamu Takizawa (Yasuda), Mickey Curtis (Nagamatsu), Mantarô Ushio (Sergeant), Kyû Sazanka (Army surgeon), Yoshihiro Hamaguchi (Officer), Asao Sano (Soldier), Masaya Tsukida (Soldier), Hikaru Hoshi (Soldier).

Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain is one of the bleakest war films I have ever seen. Set in the waning days of the war, in the Philippines in 1945, the film depicts the final days of the decimated Japanese army who have been roundly defeated, but have not yet surrendered. The few surviving Japanese soldiers are basically split up into small groups, making their way across the island to join the last Japanese stronghold – which may or may not still exist. During the course of the movie, we will see the Japanese soldiers do the most inhumane things to each other imaginable.

Yet for all the bleakness in the film, Ichikawa infuses the film with some gallows humor as well. When the film opens, the main character, Tamura (Eiji Funkoshi) has returned from the hospital to his unit after being treated for tuberculosis. But his superiors don’t want him back – they tell him he cannot possibly have been cured in such a short period of time, and order him to go back to the field hospital – and if they refuse to admit him, then he should just blow himself up with his lone grenade. This plays almost like a scene out of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 – Tamura is damned no matter what he does. There are other moments of dark levity – a seemingly dead soldier who takes his face out of the mud just long enough to respond to his commanding officer, or a reference to Chaplin, when Tamura tries to replace his worn out boots with some that aren’t quite as bad. Fires on the Plain is as bleak as movies gets – but Ichikawa still sees the absurdity of it all.

Fires on the Plain contains haunting images – stacks of rotting corpses, that Tamura and his fellow travelers pass by without even noticing – as if the sight is so common its lost all meaning to them. The fact that Tamura is still alive is nothing short of miraculous, but he soldiers on. He eventually teams up with two other soldiers to make their way across the island. They consider turning themselves in – the Japanese code of honor that we often see in WWII movies about the Japanese that said they could never surrender doesn’t seem to apply here. They don’t much care anymore. They try and shoot monkeys for food – and when that runs scarce, the talk turns to cannibalism – and soon the men are not just fighting the enemy and the elements – but each other.

The film never really looks at the enemy with any clarity. The closest it comes is when Tamura considers surrendering, but witnesses what happens when one of his fellow soldiers finds the Americans to surrender – and figures he’ll be better off on his own. The enemy is hardly the point anymore anyway – Tamura and everyone else knows they have lost the war. Now, it all a matter of survival. Tamura is basically an insect who refuses to die – like the ant that crawls across his skin. But unlike his fellow soldiers, he holds onto whatever little humanity the war has left him. Those around him are giving in to their base urges – but to the end of the film, Tamura holds onto his humanity – although wherever he’s walking at the end of the movie, you get the sense that he’s unlikely to get there – and even if he does, he probably won’t see anything different than what he has already seen.

In short, Fires on the Plain is a bleak vision of hell – but one that like it hero maintains it view of humanity. The movie shows, as good as any, the horrors of war, and the suffering it causes. It is a haunting movie – one I will not soon forget.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Man's Castle (1933)

Man’s Castle (1933)
Directed by:  Frank Borzage.
Written by: Jo Swerling based on the play by Lawrence Hazard
Starring: Spencer Tracy (Bill), Loretta Young (Trina), Marjorie Rambeau (Flossie), Glenda Farrell (Fay La Rue), Walter Connolly (Ira), Arthur Hohl (Bragg), Dickie Moore (Joie).

Watching so called Pre-Code films today can be a somewhat odd experience. The Hay’s Code came into effect in 1930, but wasn’t really enforced until July of 1934. This meant for a few years, filmmakers could get away with a lot of things that they would not have been able to for years after the code started to be enforced. Frank Borzage’s 1933 film Man’s Castle is one of the best pre-code films.

The film stars Spencer Tracy as Bill, who we first meet on a park bench in New York, wearing a tuxedo. This is where he meets Trina (Loretta Young), a young woman, crying because she has no money, no food and nowhere to sleep. After inquiring as to if she has considering becoming a prostitute (“Oh no, I couldn’t do that”) or throwing herself into the river (“I’ve thought about it”) – although never, of course, using the words, Bill whisks her away to a fancy restaurant. Judging on his clothes and the restaurant he chooses, Trina understandably thinks Bill is rich – but after the meal when he calls the manager over, he informs him that she has no money, and “neither do I”, and then begins to give a speech about 12 million men out of work, before the manager shoos them from the restaurant, telling them they don’t have to pay. That tuxedo, it turns out, is just a demeaning uniform for one of the odd jobs Bill has. Bill brings her back to a shanty town along the Hudson River he sleeps in – and after some late night skinning dipping, the two of them shack up together.

Man’s Castle is a strange film indeed. The film is undeniably about the Great Depression, even if the words themselves are never used, the film certainly doesn’t shy away from the mass of poor people America had at the time. And the film is also very frank about the sexual relationship between the unmarried Bill and Trina – she even gets pregnant! – and Bill’s attitude about sex (as Trina washes and irons one of his shirts she says “He doesn’t like anything touching his skin that isn’t clean”) – although this doesn’t stop him from pursuing Fay (Glenda Farrell), who in the parlance of the day could be described as a “good time girl” (in a review I read, they used the term “easy lay”, and that’s pretty accurate as well). Bill hates himself a little for soiling Trina – trying to push her constantly, by reminding her they he isn’t going to “tied down”, and insulting her for being “too skinny to be a real woman”. Trina stays though – she loves him too much to leave – and even builds a little sun roof for him, so when he gets claustrophobic in their shack, and wants to see the great outdoors, he can gaze out into the sky – the very sky that will eventually lead him to realize he does love Trina, when the blue of the sky reminds him or her eyes.

It’s moments like that, that make Man’s Castle so strange – because while on one hand, it is a film about the Great Depression and sex, the film takes the form of a fairy tale in many ways. Borzage has often been called a romanticist (having not seen any of his other films, I cannot say if that’s true or not), but he shoots much of Man’s Castle in soft focus, which certainly makes the film feel more like a fairy tale, than a hard-hitting, “realistic” film. Despite the fact that Tracy’s Bill outwardly seems hard and cynical, Tracy doesn’t deliver his dialogue in a cruel way as he easily could have, if he wanted us to hate Bill. You like Bill almost because he can be a little cruel. And Loretta Young delivers one of her best performances as Trina – who at first seems rather one dimensional – a little too chipper and perky and naïve to be believed. But as the movie goes along, Young shows her strength – she is the stronger of the two characters, the one who has to do all the heavy lifting in their relationship.

The movie, of course, needs to add in more plot than it really needs. This basically revolves around three other residents of the shanty town – the drunken Flossie (who doesn’t seem to serve much of a purpose until her final scene), the lecherous Bragg, who leers at Trina when she goes skinny dipping, and finds one excuse after another to try and get her alone, and Ira, a former minister who gives Bill a bible and tries to do the right thing. You know Bragg is up to no good well before he suggests a crime – that will bring the movie to its climax.

Man’s Castle is a great Pre-code film. The performances by Tracy and Young are both top notch, and the supporting performances get the job done. The film combines its realistic and fairy tales elements far better than I would have thought possible. The film isn’t as well-known as many other pre-code films (like the infamous Baby Face with Barbara Stanwyck sleeping her way to the top), but it’s better than most, because it is not simply using the elements that they wouldn’t get away with later for shock value, but to deliver a fascinating story. Track this one down – it’s worth it.

The Best Movies I Have Never Seen Before: Oasis

Oasis (2002)
Directed by: Chang-dong Lee.
Written by: Chang-dong Lee.
Starring: Kyung-gu Sol (Jong-du Hong), So-ri Moon (Gong-ju Han), Nae-sang Ahn (Jong-Il Hong), Seung-wan Ryoo (Jong-Sae Hong), Kwi-Jung Chu (Jong-Sae's Wife), Jin-gu Kim (Mrs. Hong), Byung-ho Son (Sang-Shik Han), Ga-hyun Yun (Sang-Shik's Wife).

Lee Chang-dong is probably the least known great director working in the world today. Festival audiences know his films, but in North America, his films haven’t really made a ripple outside of those festivals. His masterpiece, Secret Sunshine (2007) was one of the very best films I have ever seen at the Toronto Film Festival – and one of the least known masterpieces of the 2000s. It took almost 4 years for it to get any sort of theatrical release in America – then it was a one week run in New York before Criterion put out the DVD addition (and if you haven’t seen Secret Sunshine – I urge you to do so RIGHT NOW). His follow-up film, Poetry, which I saw at TIFF in 2010, did get a theatrical release in North America the following year – but for some reason didn’t make a dent in the speciality release market. Like Secret Sunshine, it is a brilliant film (not quite as good, but close), and deserves to be seen by far more people in North America. A lot has (justly) been made about new Korean cinema in the past decade, but as good as Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother) and Chan-wook Park (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, Thirst) are (and no, I didn’t forget Kim-Ki Duk – he’s a talentless hack), to me Lee Chang-dong is the best Korean director working today.

Before he made Secret Sunshine and Poetry, Lee Chang-dong made Oasis in 2002, which for whatever reason, I never checked out before now. Like his later films, Oasis takes on challenging subject matter, that in lesser hands (like say Kim-Ki Duk) may seem exploitive, but in Lee’s hands is intelligent and sensitive. Oasis is a movie about two social outcasts – for two radically different reasons – who really do fall in love with each other, even if no one around them can see why.

We first meet Hong (Kyung-gu Soi) as he is released from prison. He spent a few years there because of a drunk driving accident that killed a man. While he was inside, his family moved and changed their phone number without telling him – and it’s easy to see why. Hong is one of those people who doesn’t seem to “get” normal social protocol – he stands too close to you, assumes an oddly familiar report with people he just met and says wildly inappropriate things. He has no ambitions in life, and is wildly irresponsible. He may well have some sort of mental disorder, but if he does, it has certainly gone untreated. Despite their best efforts, Hong eventually tracks down his family, who begrudgingly welcome him back.

For some reason, Hong thinks it would be appropriate for him to visit the family of the man he killed in that drunk driving accident. Rather than go over to their apartment solemn and begging for forgiveness, he shows up with a fruit basket and acts as if he is an old friend. The family is undeniably incensed, and ask him to leave. But before he does, he meets Han (So-ri Moon), the daughter of the man he killed, who has severe cerebral palsy. Her brother and sister-in-law, have had enough of taking care of her, so they are moving out of the apartment they share with her – leaving her in the hands of social services and neighbors, neither of whom seem to care that much about her. Hong and Han develop a relationship after that inappropriate first encounter, and the even more inappropriate second encounter – when he tries to rape her.

Oasis is really about that private world that two people in love go to together. This is even more profound for these two people, because neither of them “fit” anywhere else – both their families wish to be rid of them, because it’s too much of a “burden” on them. I have heard people say this is a critique of Korean society, which casts off the “undesirables”, but the same could be said for any society. Lee makes this world the two go to real, with several flights of fancy – from our first introduction to Han, who is using a mirror to make “lights” on the ceiling, that we see as beautiful doves, and two occasions where Han seems to be “cured”, her body no longer crippled and twisted, her speech normal, as she is happy with Hong. Hong is certainly not a “good” guy, but he is the only one who seems to understand Han. Of course, this world cannot last – and both families are aghast at their “relationship” – first when Hong brings Han to a family gathering, which brings out dark family secrets, and then the misunderstanding with her that sets in motion the film’s climax.

That climax is the weakest part of the film. I’m not sure if Lee didn’t know how to end the film or what, because the last half hour of the movie (which like Secret Sunshine and Poetry runs well more than two hours, but unlike them, doesn’t have the plot to sustain such a running time) doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie, and worse doesn’t even seem logical. Surely at some point the truth would have come out, but it doesn’t here.

That doesn’t mean Oasis is not a wonderful movie. For the most part it is – highlighted but two excellent performances, and a great screenplay by Lee that sees past their outward appearances and views them as real people. This is a challenging, thoughtful film that despite its subject matter is never in bad taste or exploitative. If Lee had figured out a better way to end his film, Oasis may well rank alongside Secret Sunshine and Poetry as a masterwork. But just be a very good film with a flawed ending isn’t bad.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: The Seasons (1975)

The Seasons (1975)
Directed by: Artavazd Peleshian.

Renowned Armenian director Artzvazd Peleshian is said to be the inventor of a film style called “distance montage”. Unlike many of the reviews online that I have read after watching probably his most famous work The Seasons (aka Four Seasons), I am still confused with what exactly that means, despite the director himself trying to explain it several times. Watching The Seasons it is certainly clear that he was inspired in part by two Soviet montage masters – Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein – and he has also been compared to someone more his contemporary – Bruce Conner. Perhaps I’m just not smart enough to see what he means by “distance” montage, and how it differs from those other filmmakers as Peleshian has claimed. He does talk about how his films are not about single, isolated moments – but the entirety of the film itself. That no one single image has meaning unless it’s taken in context with the rest of the movie. It makes a certain amount of sense – although I certainly think you could argue the same thing about Conner.

Perhaps I need to see more of Peleshian’s work to truly grasp what he is talking about – because judging on my reaction to The Seasons, I’m clearly not getting what Peleshian is talking about. And that is because The Seasons is a movie full of beautiful, haunting imagery – and yet to me, it is these isolated moments in the film that stand out, and not the totality of the film itself – which is the exact opposite of what Peleshian is talking about.

The movie opens with a scene of a sheep herder madly clinging to one of his flock as the two of them hurtle down the rapids of a raging river. We will get many scenes like this over the half hour running time of The Seasons – the film ends with a very similar scene, bringing everything full circle once again. The images are undeniably beautiful – which explains why this is apparently the first film in which Peleshian didn’t use any archival footage in his montage, just images he shot with his cinematographer. But let me also say this – despite the beauty of the shot itself, for some reason Peleshian decides to use slow motion in the scene as well – and like most instances of people using slow motion, I don’t think it really works. It just draws out the image in a way we don’t need.

A better scene in the movie, with a similar view, is farmer running ahead and pulling down what looks to be huge haystacks down a very steep hill. You think there would be a better, safer way to do this (if one of these haystacks goes out of control, you could easily see someone getting crush to death). The images are once again beautiful, and brilliantly edited together. If Peleshian knows nothing else, he knows how to edit.

But finally, I must say that to me, I just didn’t much care for The Seasons. Yes, the images are beautiful, but to me they never came together in terms of making a larger statement – or really any statement at all. And there comes a point where beautiful images just isn’t enough – you have to have something to sink your teeth into, to challenge your mind, and The Seasons didn’t do this for me.

Even if Peleshian is not a very well-known director – that is what happens when you make shorts for your entire life – and even if I didn’t really care for The Seasons (unlike Conner, I don’t think I’m going to try to delve deeper into Peleshian’s filmography), he is undeniably an important filmmaker. His work has been said to inspire the later career of Godard (not Peleshian’s fault, folks), as well as Werner Herzog. Parts of this film even reminded me of Terrence Malick’s brilliant The Tree of Life (2011) – as both films look at the connection between man and nature. But as a film, The Seasons contains some beautiful imagery – and for me, not all that much else.

The Best Movies I Have Never Seen Before: A Movie (1958) & Report (1967)

A Movie (1958) and Report (1967)
Directed by: Bruce Conner.

Bruce Conner made over 20 shorts in his career, that spanned 50 years, and also saw him dabble in the other arts. His films are all (as far as I know anyway) are all montages, editing together pre-existing found footage in innovative, often brilliant ways. He has been referred to as the “father of MTV” (to which he responded, simply “Not my fault”) – and even directed a few music videos himself (like Mongoloid for Devo). Probably his two best known films are his debut – A Movie from 1958 and Report from 1967. A Movie is only 12 minutes long, Report only 13, but both are masterful, innovative and brilliant movies.

A Movie is Conner’s best known, and the most widely available (you kind find it on Youtube easily). The film combines stock footage from B movies, newsreels, soft core pornography, and other sources into a brilliant montage, that one supposes, tells mankind’s violent history, and then perhaps looks into the future.

It all starts out innocently enough, with shots of cowboys and Indians in battle from some old B-movie. Set to a wonderful score (Respighi’s Pines Of Rome), and featuring Conner’s brilliant montage editing, the film starts there, and then seamlessly transitions to other shots – an African epic with elephant instead of horses, scenes of a train racing, car crashes, onto daring water stunts, that all ends in spectacular wipeouts. This part of the movie is thrilling, and it must be said extremely entertaining. Conner is showing us cinema as spectacle, and just how exciting that can be.

And then, the film takes a much darker turn. He moves on from these “fun” scenes, in a brilliantly edited sequence that shows us a man in a submarine looking through a periscope and seeing a beautiful, scantily clad woman – and then we immediately cut to the first of many images of an atomic bomb exploding. This is when the movie gets much more serious, and darker. Conner uses the same music and the same editing technique that made the first half of the film so thrilling, but now his images are darker – not just the atom bomb, but shots of firing squads, shots of dead bodies in a huge pile, what I think is the Hindenburg, although it hardly matters, as it is once again a spectacle of death. His editing grows even more frantic, more “exciting”, but suddenly the audience is confronted with real world death and destruction – the cinema as spectacle can make anything exciting, if edited together properly.

And then A Movie ends on a much quieter note – that of a scuba diver swimming through the water, before disappearing into what appears to be a whole in the ocean floor. Mankind, having destroyed the earth with the atomic blasts we see, is returning to the sea.

A Movie is a masterpiece of editing that makes the audience confront the artifice of movies themselves – how the movies lie to us all the time, and most of the time we don’t even realize it. By using shocking imagery, but using the same editing technique that makes Hollywood spectacles so thrilling, and the same background music, the audience is forced to confront the reality of what movies show us all the time. It is a masterpiece of its kind.

Report, made nine years later, is an even darker, more disturbing movie – perhaps not as endlessly watchable as A Movie, but perhaps even more powerful. Report was made in 1967, and looks at the Kennedy assassination of four years prior. It starts with a wonderful montage of images from that day in Dallas on the President in his motorcade, slowly down the footage, and repeating it often, as we hear frantic radio reports of mass confusion as to what is happening. We never see any of the footage of the Kennedy assassination itself – Conner substitutes a brilliant image of a bullet passing through a light bulb in its place.

This sequence – roughly half the film – is brilliant in and of itself, a wonderful, powerful “recreation” of the frantic events of that day that Conner drills home with his images and the radio announcers voices. As much as any other depiction of the Kennedy assassination on film – from Oliver Stone’s three plus hour JFK, to Martin Scorsese’s own brilliant montage in the Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home (set to Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall), Conner capture the mass confusion and sadness of the event.

Yet, I think it’s the second half of the film that is even more brilliant – and pushes Report into the realm of the best shorts of its kind ever made. After the depiction of the assassination itself, Conner flashes back to earlier in the trip to Dallas, with more calm new reports telling us mundane details – like what the President and First Lady are wearing, etc. In part, this seems like a more innocent time – if he had done this segment first, like many would have, it would be thick with foreshadowing, except of course, he also showed us what happened. What Conner also does is flash forward to the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination – Lee Harvey Oswald’s killing by Jack Ruby, the parading around of the gun that killed Kennedy, and splices these images together with ads from the time – a washing machine for example. By doing this, Conner is making clear how the media sells everything – they sold the image of the President and the First Lady, elevating their status, and then sold the President’s death – they do the same thing with the people we admire, and exploit their deaths, much like they sell anything else. This makes the film even more complex and fascinating.

Judging on these two films alone, Conner was a master at editing – taking images most people would not associate to each other, and making their connection clear. If his reputation isn’t quite on the level of some other avant-garde filmmakers of his day, it could be because he never liked his films shown on home video, or the internet. While many short films have found their way to Youtube, the only one of Conner’s that is readily available there is A Movie. (I also saw Report on Youtube, but when I went back the next day to watch it a second time, it had been removed – so I guess I watched a copy of Report that was illegally uploaded – although I did not know this at the time). Hopefully at some point, we will get a proper collection of Conner’s films for home viewing (if Criterion can do Brakhage and Frampton, why not Conner?). Reading about his other films – especially Cosmic Ray (1961), Luke (1967), Marilyn Times Five (1973), Crossroads (1976), Mongoloid (1976), Mea Culpa (1981) and America is Waiting (1982) all sound fascinating, but appear to be unavailable for any type of viewing. Here’s hoping that sooner or later, they are available for all to see. Conner was undoubtedly right – like all films, his are best seen in a theater – but the reality of the situation now is that if films aren’t available for home viewing, they run the risk of being forgotten.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Zorns Lemma (1970)

Zorns Lemma (1970)
Directed by: Hollis Frampton.

According to Wikipedia Zorns Lemma is “a proposition of set theory that states: Suppose a partially ordered set P has the property that every chain (i.e. totally ordered subset) has an upper bound in P. Then the set P contains at least one maximal element.” Now, if you can understand what the hell that means, you are much smarter than I am, or have at least studying advanced mathematics, because try as I might, even when clicking on the links that describe the various parts of that sentence, I still don’t really understand it. It made for some fascinating reading however, and discussion about the Axiom of Choice, and other mathematical principles, that let’s face facts, is of use to no one except mathematicians. For someone like me, who struggled his way through Grade 12 math, all of this is clearly WAY over my head. It wasn’t until I read Howard Thompson review of Hollis Frampton’s 1970 film, named after the principle, where he stated it much more simply “Zorns Lemma is named after mathematician Max Zorn's "lemma," an axiom which states that given a set of sets, there must be a further set containing a representative item from each individual set.”, that I felt at least had a tentative grasp on what the hell it was trying to say.

The majority of the hour long film is about a “set” of images, that changes as it goes along. It starts with simply showing us the alphabet – albeit an incomplete alphabet, as Frampton chooses to “cut out” two letters (J and U, I believe). Apparently he did this for two reasons – earlier alphabets only had 24 letters, and of course, film has 24 frames per second. Each of these letters stay on the screen for 1 second (24 frames), until the next one flashes up. He then replaces the letters with signs out from New York City – with each sign beginning with the next letter of the alphabet, and again, holds each shot for 1 second, or 24 frames. This is repeated for 47 minutes of the films running time, although with changes as it progresses. The signs are different each time, true, but there is a bigger change, as gradually, he replaces each sign with a snippet of film, which he also holds for just one second. Sometimes, these images are the same each time (for example, X is always the same shot of a fire, Y the same shot of grass blowing in the wind, Z, the same shot of waves – or at the very least, they looked like the same shots to me). And sometimes, they aren’t. I believe it is K that shows a man slowly painting a wall – starting off blank, and by the end, it is covered. H eventually becomes a shot of what looks like a hippie wandering around aimlessly – although each 1 second snippet is different.

And so, what Frampton seems to have done is make all those “set of sets” described by Zorns Lemma. He bookends this 47 minute segment with two segments with narration – beginning with a teacher reading from a grammar school textbook (I learned from Thompson’s review that this is the “Bay State Primer”). The film ends with a shot of a man, woman and dog walking across a snowy field, as alternating voices read, one word at a time, from On Light or the Ingression of Forms by Robert Grosseteste. Thompson states that the film is about “how we learn”, and I guess that’s as good a theory as any – we start off being taught by someone, then move on to independent learning, making connections in our own minds, and end up with a larger perspective, in the end.

Zorns Lemma is an example of “structural” filmmaking, although Frampton objected to the term, mainly because he didn’t like “labels” (don’t all artists complain about being labeled). Like filmmaker Michael Snow (a friend and collaborator of Frampton’s), Frampton’s film is more about “film” than it is about what it’s content. If Stan Brakhage was trying to get to something elemental and primitive in his avant-garde films, than Frampton and Snow were trying for something more ordered, and minimalist.

So is Zorns Lemma a good film? I don’t know. For about 20 minutes or so, I was drawn into Frampton’s structure, and his imagery. Unlike Snow’s Wavelength, which I found terminally dull from the outset, I enjoyed part of Frampton’s film. But like Wavelength, I think his film goes on far too long. For the first 20 minutes, I was enjoying the film – Frampton at least seems to be enjoying himself, unlike Snow in Wavelength, and his images are more playful and fun. Than you full grasp what he is doing, and then have to wait another half hour or so before Frampton moves onto the final segment. During that half hour, I grew restless and finally bored by the film. I have a feeling that most audiences would grow bored quicker than I did, as at least I knew what to expect going in.

But I will say this. In my review of Wavelength I wrote:

“On one hand, it is precisely the film Snow wanted to make; it makes it point clearly, and had the effect on me that I think Snow wanted to have. On the other hand, it is an extremely boring film about a room that for the most part is completely empty. I have described the film that I saw, and what I think it all means. If you are still reading this, you already know if you want to see this film or not. Something tells me 99% of people fall in the not category.”

Make a few changes to that paragraph replacing the content of Snow’s film with the content of Frampton’s, and I think it aptly describes Zorns Lemma. This is precisely the film Frampton wanted to make. And if even that film doesn’t really appeal to me – and for that matter to the vast majority of people out there – you have to kind of admire him for making it all.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Mothlight (1963)

Mothlight (1963)
Directed by:  Stan Brakhage.

What is one to make of a “film” like Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight? At under 4 minutes long, it is the shortest “film” on They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? top 1,000 list, and isn’t really a film at all. Film implies the use of a camera, and Brakhage didn’t use one to make Mothlight. Instead what he did is take physical objects – most often moth wings, but also blades of grass, leaves, bark, dead insects, etc – and pressed them between two clear pieces of Mylar film, and than used an optical printer so that what he made could be projected.

The result is a four minute film that is unlike anything you have ever seen before – or since, really. Viewed on the Criterion Blu-Ray, Mothlight certainly looks different than any other film – and I’m not talking about the what you see, but rather, how you see it. Brakhage’s technique means that images come out differently. Most film, of course, is really a collection of still photographs of the same thing as they move – so each individual frame gives you the entire picture. But because of how Brakhage made the film, each frame is only a fraction of the “picture” – one image – say a moth wing – is split up on many different frames. Even though the film is now transferred to DVD, and hence there are no real frames at all anymore, the strange quality of the images are still there. Having never seen Brakhage’s film on film, I’m going to defer to the experts – who have seen Brakhage’s film both on film and DVD – when they tell me the Criterion disc gets this effect right.

The film, which has no soundtrack, is mesmerizing to watch. I really don’t know what else to say about it other than that, but the images are strange, and fly by so quickly much of the time that you only capture fragments of them at even given time through the film (and I watched it several times in a row).

Does Mothlight mean anything larger than it seems however? I’ve heard theories that Mothlight is a film “about life from the moth’s point of view during flight” – but I’m not sure I buy that, because, well, it doesn’t look like what I would think a moth’s point of view would look like (why would a moth being looking at its own wing?). I’ve also heard people say that Mothlight is about “death and decay”, and that makes more sense, since everything we see is dead, and in some sort of decay, but then again, I’m not sure showing dead things necessary means the film is about “death”. It just means, your showing the audience dead things.

Would I be completely wrong to suggest that at least part of the reason why Brakhage made Mothlight is to see if he could make Mothlight? I’ll admit, that when it comes to avant-garde filmmaking, I am pretty far away from an expert – often times I seem to completely miss the point (for instance, I have no idea what Brakhage was going for in all his art collage films of rapidly edited abstract art paintings he made in the 1980s). But before Mothlight, Brakhage made films like Cat’s Cradle (1959), which is an odd film to say the least, where you have to watch and try to figure out the relationship between the four human, and one feline, characters in his film, as it first appears to be little more than the morning routine of two couples, before it slips into the subtlety erotic. Perhaps what Brakhage wanted to do with Mothlight was simply make something completely different – a different way of making a film, with a completely different visual aesthetic

 

But, like I said, I’m hardly an expert on Brakhage. I’m slowly making my way through the Criterion Discs of his work – watching a film here and then when the mood strikes me, because I think if I were to sit down and watch the entirety of these discs in one sitting, I would eventually become numb – not because of the films themselves, but because of the epic length of the discs (all told, unless I miscounted, the discs include 53 of Brakhage’s over 400 films, ranging from 9 seconds to 74 minutes in length – so his epic, 4 hour The Art of Vision, is not included here). And don’t worry, I’m not going to review most of the individual films.

Getting back to Mothlight itself, I don’t think it has to mean anything deeper than its visuals, which like I said are mesmerizing. They are a good enough reason to spend 4 minutes watching Mothlight. At that length, what possibly do you have to lose in trying something completely different?

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Land Without Bread (1933)

Land Without Bread (1933)
Directed by:  Luis Buñuel.
Written by: Luis Buñuel and Rafael Sánchez Ventura and Pierre Unik.

How does one classify Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread? It is, on the surface anyway, a documentary, although it is now well known that Bunuel staged much of what he shot. Some have claimed that it is a parody of a documentary – which I guess would make Bunuel the father of “mockumentary” films, but that really isn’t the truth either. Bunuel may well have staged scenes for his camera, and he certainly exaggerates the suffering of the people in the Las Hurdes area of Spain. But he is not making this up, like Christopher Guest does. Why is the narration (for the record, I saw the version with French narration and English subtitles) so dispassionate, and matter-of-fact, even when telling of all the misery he shows. And why, if this is a documentary, is it seen as the final installment in Bunuel’s surrealist trilogy, also including Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L’Age D’Or (1930), especially since on the surface, Bunuel’s documentary seems completely and totally serious and realistic?

Bunuel’s film really is an absurd black comedy taking on the form of a documentary. There is certainly a disconnect with the narration and what we actually see. On its surface, the documentary is much like any other documentary of its time – showing us images, while an all authoritative narrator explains what we are seeing. However, the narration is often contradictory of the images, and of itself. The film’s title for example is Land Without Bread, but while bread is scarce in Las Hurdes, it is not unheard of, as the narration says. Hell, there’s even a scene in the movie called Land Without Bread of children eating bread! Other strange examples of the narration comes when the narrator tells us that as they travel through the streets, they constantly encounter sick people – while the image the film shows us at the time is that of empty streets. Or bizarre, pointless non-sequitors like telling us that “balconies are rare in Las Hurdes”, as if balconies are a sign of prosperity. Or the infamous sequence of a little girl lying in the street, who the crew is told has been lying there for three days, and must be sick. They inform us that when they return two days later, the girl has died. The sequence is absurd – who the hell lets children die in the streets? This is blatantly contradicted later in the film, when the narration makes the outlandish claim that 3 men and 11 mules were recently killed by honeybees (really?), and the film does in fact show a mule being stung repeatedly (according to some stories, Bunuel smeared the mule with honey to get the effect he wanted). Later, when a baby dies, the film tells us that “death is a rare event” (contradicted by the absurd honey bee stat) in the village, and that everyone comes out to mourn the loss of the baby – remember these are apparently the same people who let a young girl die alone in the streets.

The most telling example is perhaps the film’s most famous sequence, detailing how meat is rare, and the only time people get to eat goat meat is when one dies accidentally – the film then shows a goat falling off a mountain. Now, unless Bunuel was remarkably fortunate to catch a goat falling off a mountain at precisely when he tried to film a goat falling off a mountain, this has got to be a big tip off that the documentary isn’t really to be trusted. And, in fact, it is now well known that the crew shot the goat, and then threw it off the mountain. But even if all this would be fairly obvious by itself, Bunuel makes it more obvious. He actually has not one, but two shots of the goat falling, from different angles. Now how do you suppose he got that?

The music is another clue that everything is not as it seems. Since the film was released, people have complained that the music doesn’t match the images – but those are the people who take the movie at face value. The music, of course, is entirely inappropriate to what they show. Brahms’ romantic Symphony No. 4, in used, which makes no sense to what we see. You either have to assume that Bunuel was tone deaf to what kind of music to use in a film, or that he is subverting the entire endeavor by picking the most absurd music possible for use in his film.

So what then is Land Without Bread? Does it mock the people of Las Hurdes, who although they are not as bad off as Bunuel portrays them, certainly was then a place that was forgotten by the government, and was desperately poor? Even now, 80 years later, many people of Las Hurdes resent Bunuel’s portrayal of them, as people still think they are some sort of backwater, Spanish hillbillies. But Bunuel doesn’t really mock them he mocks the audience who takes everything that he is saying – even the most absurd things – at face value. He mocks them for being naïve, and not thinking critically about what they are seeing.  And he mocks the whole patronizing genre of documentary that thrusts a camera in the face of “forgotten” people, to let the audience both feel pity for the people in the documentary, and at the same time superior to them. He is also, of course, mocking the Catholic Church (Land Without Bread could very easily be called Land Without God, since bread does play a fairly central role in the Catholic Church).

Whatever you define Land Without Bread as being – and I’ve heard it called a mockumentary, a documentary and a surreal documentary among many, many other things – to me it is undeniably a masterwork by Bunuel. The film clocks in at under 30 minutes in length, but packs so much absurdity, dark comedy, surrealism, and also – it must be said – tragic imagery – into its running time that it boggles the mind. Bunuel was a genius – one of the greatest filmmakers in history. And Land Without Bread, while lesser known than either Un Chien Andalou or L’Age D’Or, to me is the greatest achievement of Bunuel’s early films.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Flaming Creatures (1963)

Flaming Creatures (1963)
Directed by: Jack Smith.
Written by: Jack Smith.
Starring: Francis Francine (Himself), Sheila Bick (Delicious Dolores), Joel Markman (Our Lady of the Docks), Mario Montez (The Spanish Girl), Arnold Rockwood (Arnold), Judith Malina (The Fascinating Woman), Marian Zazeela (Maria Zazeela).

Never doubt that banning a movie will make sure that far more people see it than if you just left it alone. As an example, take Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures from 1963. The film was confiscated and deemed obscene upon its premiere in New York, and was for all intents and purposes banned. To this day, it is still technically banned, although no one really enforces it anymore. The film was even shown in the U.S. Senate in 1968 as an attack on nominee for Chief Justice, Abe Fortas, as an example of what he didn’t think was obscene. Fortas was not confirmed. Now, 50 years after it was made, Flaming Creatures still shows up on many Must see lists. It has been included in the 1,001 Movies to See Before You Die Series, and ranks on They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Top 1,000 list. To me, Flaming Creatures isn’t that good – it is the type of campy movie that I just never really respond to. The film certainly has its defenders – chief among them J. Hoberman – but I have a feeling the reason it still shows up on all these “must see” lists has at least as much to do with the fact that it was banned than anything else.

The film is high camp – it plays like something Josef von Sternberg would have made with Marlene Dietrich if they had absolutely no restrictions on them. The elaborate, over the top costumes and production design certainly bring to mind Sternberg, as well as cheap, exotic B-movies of the previous decades. The film has no real story, and no dialogue – we hear scratchy records playing in the background – and is really just a series of erotic set pieces. Shot very cheaply (apparently $300), using old film stock, the film does everything on the cheap – especially it’s earthquake finale, whose effect was created by literally shaking the camera.

The film was banned because it was apparently obscene. This is because for the most part, all the roles in the film are played by men. The characters are men, women and transvestites. The film shows nudity of all kinds, and certainly doesn’t shy away from the fact that many of the men in the movie are gay – shots of female breasts are often intercut with the men’s flaccid penises – and the film’s infamous “rape” sequence doesn’t involve any actual penetration.

Viewed 50 years after it was made, Flaming Creatures isn’t all that shocking anymore – we’ve all seen much, much more than what is shown in Smith’s movie. But it was revolutionary at the time. When the film was banned, it got some champions like Susan Sontag, who argued that the film was high art, and not pornography, and was really a serious film. Smith apparently didn’t like that view very much – the original audiences who he showed the film to privately got that Smith was going, at least in part, for camp value, and found the film hilarious. Once it was “high art”, people stopped laughing.

Flaming Creatures is an important film because it was groundbreaking at the time, and inspired many other filmmakers along the way – it’s impossible to watch the film and not think of someone like John Waters. Like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, released the following year, Flaming Creatures is a film that is more important for what it inspired than what it actually is. Personally, although the film is only 43 minutes long, I was rather bored by Flaming Creatures. It didn’t hold the same curiosity value to me that Scorpio Rising did – which is a more polished film than this one. Flaming Creatures will forever be an “important” film. But for me, that doesn’t mean it’s necessary a very good one.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Outer Space (2000)

Outer Space (2000)
Directed by: Peter Tscherkassky.

One of the reasons I have been delving into so many shorts lately is because there are things you can do in a short film that you simply cannot do as a feature. A feature length Outer Space would be both unnecessary and unwatchable. But at just 10 minutes long, what director Peter Tscherkassky has done is disturbing, hypnotizing and extremely unsettling.

 

What Tscherkassky does is take Sidney J. Furie’s all but forgotten horror film The Entity (1982) – which I haven’t seen, and based on what I’ve read, feel no need to see – and edits it until its central plot – that of Barbara Hershey being repeatedly raped by an unseen entity or demon in her house – and completely obscures it. If you didn’t know what the original movie was about, you would not be able to tell from this short.

The film is a masterpiece of editing. The screen flashes – people with epilepsy probably shouldn’t watch the film – as we see a lonely house on a hill. The soundtrack is obscured – no real dialogue or music or identifiable sounds really come through. The images have been turned black and white. The house on the hill seems abandoned, lonely and above all extremely creepy. We will eventually flash inside that house, and see Barbara Hershey, terrified of someone or something in the house. But what? We see no one in the 10 minute film except for Hershey. What emerges then is a portrait of madness. Hershey is not really haunted by a real demon – we certainly do not see one – but rather by her own interior demons. The interior of the house seemingly transforms before Hershey’s eyes, as she grows increasingly terrorized.

I have seen the movie compared to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), about the gorgeous Catherine Deneueve going mad inside her apartment because of her sexual repression, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). Both comparisons are apt, because like the Hershey who emerges in Outer Space, the main characters are driven mad not by some external force, but by the demons that haunt their minds. But Outer Space is cut down to the bare essentials – the entire movie like the finale of Mulholland Drive, when Diane (Naomi Watts) can longer handle what has happened in her mind, and finally flips out.

The film is essentially made to play like an intense nightmare – hence the harsh, unrelenting sound, the constant flashing screen, the house that seems to change from one moment to the next. It becomes impossible to orient yourself with what is going on, because Tscherkassky continually changes what it is we see.

Outer Space does not function like a normal movie, and as such, will probably frustrate most viewers. No matter, you know if you’re the type of person who wants to see an experimental short film like this, or if you’re not. Many times, movies like this frustrate me – Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) is an example of another movie re-edited from a nearly forgotten film to tell a completely different story in short form, and I found that film to be dull and pointless (many disagree with me). But Outer Space held me in rapt attention for its 10 minutes – and truly got under my skin as well, in a way that most horror films don’t anymore, because I am so attuned to their rhythms, that I am getting harder and harder actually scare. But because Outer Space doesn’t play by the same rules, it works remarkably well. Normally, I don’t much like films like Outer Space – but this one is a true masterwork of its kind.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Wanda (1970)

Wanda (1970)
Directed by: Barbara Loden.
Written by: Barbara Loden.
Starring: Barbara Loden (Wanda Goronski), Michael Higgins (Norman Dennis).

Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) is one of those rare great films made by a director who only ever directed one film. Like Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955), it is a singular vision – a movie that cannot be put into the larger context of the director’s career, because it is essentially their entire directing career. And Wanda is a great film, which makes it all the more sad that Loden died too young – at age 48 – before she ever made a follow-up film. Yet, considering that her death came 13 years after making Wanda – and that the film was essentially never got a proper theatrical release, she may never have had a chance to direct again. Sadder still that 42 years after Wanda, female directors are still woefully under-represented in Hollywood. A film like Wanda is a good argument for why that so desperately needs to change. Here is a film written and directed by a woman, about a woman, that is more honest about women that practically any film written and directed by a man ever could be.

When we first see Wanda (Loden herself), she is waking up from her sister’s couch. In the sad opening scenes of Wanda, we see her go to her dad for money, get rejected from a job by her onetime boss (“You’re just too slow to be any good for us”), and go to court to grant her husband a divorce and custody of their children. She has essentially abandoned her children – a charge she doesn’t refute – and doesn’t much seem to care either. She spends most of this time with her hair still in curlers.

The one constant in her life is alcohol. The movie takes place deep in Pennsylvania coal country, and she isn’t the only one whose life seems to revolve around alcohol – but she is the only character who has trouble thinking about anything else. Her pattern involves going to a bar and leaving with whatever man will have her for the night. The first time this happens, it is a painfully sad scene, as her “date” for the night tries to sneak out of the hotel room they shared without her noticing, as she desperately chases him down to get a ride back to town.

It is at one of these bars where she meets Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins). She walks in close to closing time, and thinks Norman is the bartender. In fact, he is robbing the bar, and she’s just a little slow on the uptake. She’ll leave with him as well – and spend most of the rest of the movie with him. Norman is not a very good criminal, and certainly not a very nice guy – he has no problem smacking Wanda when she pisses him off. But Wanda sticks around anyway. In part, it’s because this is her pattern – sticking around with whatever man she goes home with for as long as he wants her around. And in part, because no matter his cruelty towards her, he may be the only person who has ever told Wanda that he “believes” she can do something. Norman has a plan – not a very good one as it turns out – to rob a bank, and needs her help to do it. She says she cannot do it – she even throws up because of the nerves (and probably, the alcohol), but he tells her she can do it. The plan involves them both driving to the bank manager’s house, and Norman riding with him to work, so when he opens the vault, he can get the money. Wanda is to follow in their getaway car, and pick Norman up when he comes out. Wanda screws it up – of course – but it doesn’t really matter that she did, because Norman screwed up his end even worse. But, Wanda doesn’t know this, which sets up the painfully sad final scenes of the movie.

Wanda is a fascinating film because it refuses to see its title character in terms we are used to seeing. Wanda isn’t a victim – everything that happens to her, she essentially does to herself, or allows them to be done to her. She isn’t some proto-feminist hero either – like in some movies about women who throw off the chains of marriage and mothering can be. Wanda doesn’t abandon her children in some sort of effort to break free – but rather because she is selfish woman, who would rather be drinking than raising her own children.

What Wanda is though, is trapped. She doesn’t really know what it is that she wants to do, she just knows what she doesn’t want to do. Whether she’s trapped in her marriage, or trapped living on her sister’s couch, or trapped forever repeating the pattern of going home with men she meets in bars, she doesn’t see any other options for herself in her limited life, in her limited small town. For a while, with Norman, she seems to be able to break free. They are like a much more incompetent Bonnie and Clyde, but drained of all romanticism of Arthur Penn’s masterpiece. All they really want is “stuff” – because without it, they see themselves as nothing.

Loden as a writer, director and star sees Wanda clearly. The writing is very matter of fact, only giving us the details of these two characters’ lives that we need. The direction is certainly inspired by documentaries and the neo-realists. There is not a trace of sentimentality in the movie, although by the final haunting image in the film, it is impossible not to feel sympathy towards Wanda, even after everything we have seen of her up to this point. Wanda is a legitimately great film, and sadly, the only one Loden ever made. An under rated, little seen classic.