BFI Top 50: Sátántangó, Released in 1994, Directed by BélaTarr

 Special note: I will be watching the film through Netflix. I can only have one disc out at a time, so I will be watching the film over several days. I will write up initial reactions for each disc I finish, do an overview once I finish the whole film, and then write about it again once I have read some other opinions.

 

What I know Going In

That the film is over 6 hours long and is about a Hungarian farming collective.

 

Initial Reaction

First Disc (This includes the first three parts of the movie)

 

Sátántangó seems like a film that doesn’t actually exist in our world. It would feel out of place even during the 60’s. It seems almost perverse that it somehow got made during the 90’s, a decade defined by emergence of independent films that were made cheaply and quickly. For example, this was year that Pulp Fiction exploded onto the scene, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and made its director, Quentin Tarantino, into a rock star. Compared to Pulp Fiction, Sátántangó looks like it was made on an alien planet, or at least a post-apocalyptic version of our own. Aside from a few modern appliances, the film could almost take place in a pre-industrial revolution era.

 

It seems pointless to recount the plot of the movie, but here is what I have gathered so far. The movie takes place on an extremely rural farming collective in communist Hungary. Two people are attempting to leave the farm with money that everyone has earned. A third person overhears their conversation and insinuates himself into their group in order to leave as well. Two rabble-rousers are returning to the farm after being away, possibly in prison, for two years. Finally, a frail, old doctor patiently observes everyone else and attempts to walk to an out of the way barn to get more brandy.

 

That’s the entire plot that occurs in the first two hours. The rest of that time is taken up by very slow camera movement and long takes. The camera frequently lingers on shots of the landscape (perhaps wasteland would be a better term?), animals, and different barriers such as windows and doors. The film is also content to quietly watch its characters walk or sit in complete silence (much like the doctor watches the other people). The film seems only slightly concerned with what is going one with its human characters. It seems equally interested in their surroundings and grubby animals that scrounge around it. The film seems to be suggesting that humans aren’t really that important and are either overpowered by, or equal to their surroundings.

 

Surprisingly, the film kept me engaged for its first two hours. The films slow nature, grim settings, well-worn characters, and low key black and white cinematography combined to form a haunting experience. It reminds me of the few silent films I have seen. In fact, with a little tweaking, I almost think Sátántangó could be a silent film. It has the old, ghostly quality that many early films have acquired over the years.

 

2^nd Disc (Includes parts 4 through 6)

Well, I was very pleased with myself for staying engaged with the film during the entirety of the first disc. However, I snapped about halfway through the second disc. I actually started laughing during the dance scene in the pub when I realized how long that scene would keep repeating itself. I reached a point where all of the little stylistic touches Tarr employed that had intrigued me at first blushed, actively annoyed me here. The long stretches of little to no dialogue, the seemingly mis-framed shots that have no people or focal point in them, and the vague way everyone talks to each other really grated on me. I think I know what the “point” of it all is, to show a place in all of its tiny details, the way people walk, the ambient sounds present when no one is talking, the small motions people go through in their daily lives, the way the foliage rustles in the wind, and the sound of the rain. If all of the aforementioned themes are what the movie is building to, then it is well on its way to accomplishing them. This may be another Jeanne Dielman case where the film’s goal, and its method of reaching that goal, is inherently uninteresting to me.

 

This portion of the film has two main parts, a gathering of the villager in a local pub to discuss recent events, drink, and eventually dance, and following the day of young girl. The young girl sequence contains the most shocking (an odd word to use in relation to this film) moment. The girl violently wrestles with a cat, ties it up to hang from the ceiling, kills it with a solution of milk and rat-poison, and walks around with it in a confused state. I actually began screaming at my TV, because the girl’s torture of the cat is definitely real. I actually don’t know if the girl fully knew what would happen to the cat when she gave it the rat poison. I also don’t know why she killed herself. We see a few glimpses of her mother, who is obviously a drunk, at the pub and, like every other character in the film, her existence is rather miserable. Perhaps the girl saw suicide as the realistic way to leave the village.

 

3^rd Disc (Includes parts 7 through 12)

Fuck this movie.

 

Further Thoughts

Satantango is a mesmerizing, haunting film. Its images have a ghostly beauty that reminds me of looking at photos of abandoned amusement parks or Chernobyl. As its long tracking shots and striking black and white (sometimes gray) compositions show, it is also an immense technical achievement. In its first shot, it is effective in establishing its theme of humanity as a lost, directionless mass that will remain so no matter what system they are governed by. It forces viewers into the stark reality of living at the end of the world. It is one of the few films I have seen that seems inimitable.

Unfortunately, all of those descriptions apply only to the first two hours. After that point, Satantango becomes a disengaging, uninteresting slog. The experience of watching it feels like trudging along a muddy trail against the wind and rain, much like the characters in the film. Every aspect that makes the film work in the first few hours (the long shots, the silence, the repetition of certain scenes), becomes absolutely maddening soon after that. I actually started laughing at several points just to break up the tedium of watching the film. This is a huge understatement, but I really do think the film is too long. Its aesthetic and basic themes are explored well enough within the first 2 hours, that the next 5 seem somewhat unnecessary.

 

I should say that I really do want to like this and see it for the masterpiece that others claim it to be. But it just didn’t grab me like it has with so many others. I’m not against slow films at all, but I did need some emotion or spark to latch onto, and Satantango eventually lost that for me. Every review I have read says that the only way to see the film is to catch on the big screen in one sitting. That may be true, but the way critics have stated it reeks of snobbery. That experience is impossible for anyone who doesn’t live in LA or New York, so I will most likely never be able to the film that way.

 

Why is it on the list?

Satantango is a monument of cinema that still stands defiantly out of time of any cinematic trends. Even though, I didn’t stay engaged with the whole experience, I would still agree with the film’s placement based solely on its first two hours.

BFI Top 50: Vertigo, Released in 1958, Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

What I know going in

I have seen the film twice before and look forward to seeing it again.

 

Immediate reaction

Vertigo has a lot in common with The Searchers. Both were made by established Hollywood directors at the height of their powers, on the surface both seem like straightforward entries in the director’s output, and both feature lead performance by icons. Finally, also like The Searchers, Vertigo has a dark heart that subverts what is ostensibly a typical mystery film and plants the seeds for various ideas that would become major preoccupations of the New Hollywood Era.

 

Things start off pretty normally. John “Scotty” Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) is introduced chasing a criminal across a series of San Francisco rooftops along with his partner. Scotty slips, inducing the titular affliction, and his partner falls to his death trying to save him. Cut to a few months later and Scotty is almost fully healed and hanging out with ex-fiancée, current friend Midge, who drops a few hints that she has mixed feeling about their current relationship status. Scotty then gets a call from old college buddy Gavin Elster, who asks Scotty to follow and observe his wife (Madeleine Elster) and insinuates that she is haunted by the ghost of grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. This scene foreshadows one of the main themes of the film, men fucking over and controlling women, when Gavin reminisces about the San Francisco, and sets up that Scotty’s personality is going to get the best of him. He lightly protests when Gavin asks this of him, saying he’s retired, but you can see a hungry glimmer in Stewart’s eyes that reveals he’s too intrigued to say no to this opportunity.

 

Eventually, Scotty begins tracking Madeline and everything he sees seems to support Gavin’s supernatural explanation. Scotty follows her to the San Francisco Bay and rescues her after she falls (or JUMPS!) in. The two quickly become romantically entwined after a ghostly walk through the redwood forest and strange/passionate scene where Madeline confesses her fears of committing suicide and falls into Scotty’s arms as ocean waves crash behind them (a nice, overtly sexual touch if you ask me). Again, there is nothing incredibly weird at this point in the film. By that point in Hollywood history there had been plenty of films about private eyes getting wrapped in something too big and plenty of tales of infidelity. There is some nice ambiguity about whether or not Madeline is truly haunted or simply mad, but even if Vertigo suddenly turned into a ghost story, it would only be original or off-beat because it combined two different genres. What makes Vertigo a weird, psychologically disturbing film will come later on.

 

Things come to a head when Scotty takes Madeline to an old Mission that she has described from a dream she had. She freaks out and seems to recall events that Carlotta witnessed, runs up into the belfry, and throws herself off the ledge, while Scotty looks on in horror, unable to do anything because of his vertigo. The film could probably end after Madeline’s death without being totally unsatisfying. It would be a pretty standard tale of an ex-cop getting involved a torrid romance that ends in tragedy, but it would still be a functional film. However, if Vertigo ended here, it wouldn’t be the masterpiece we know today.

 

After Madeline’s death, Scotty finds himself under investigation for what happened. He is freed of all guilt, but only after the top officer gets in a few snipes about his illness and his relationship with Madeline. This is where the film’s diptych-like structure starts. Scotty finds himself haunted by thoughts of Madeline (much like Madeline was supposedly haunted by the ghost of Carlotta), and visits the exact same sites seen earlier in the film while he was tracking her. The film then drops in one of the earliest examples of an attempt at visually representing a hallucination or nightmare. I don’t think the effect wholly works to day, but it is interesting precursor to the trip-like effects in 2001 and Altered States. Scotty’s nightmare is, for me, the exact point where Vertigo becomes something unique and frightening. Scotty falls into a deep depression, again mirroring Madeline’s madness, which he eventually overcomes in a few months’ time. Scotty then randomly bumps into a girl who looks exactly like Madline, Judy. She is introduced wearing green, much like Madeline (another element of the film referencing itself). Scotty follows her up to her room and convinces her to go dinner with him.

 

This is when we get to the meat of the film. In a process that not only mirrors how Gavin must have molded Judy, but also has an eerie resemblance to the way directors mold actresses, Scotty slowly, but surely forces Judy to change her appearance. This includes getting her the exact right apparel, dying her hair platinum blond, and forcing her to pin it up in exactly the same shape as Madeline. This transformation culminates in one of the greatest scenes in all of cinema history. Judy steps out, and the light hits her in just the right way so that she looks like a ghost. She and Scotty embrace, drenched in green light, as the camera twirls marvelously around them.  It also works as a callback to Scotty and Madeline’s embrace by the ocean edge. I have no idea how the latter part of the film played during its initial release. Stewart totally foregoes his typical nice guy persona and acts like a controlling dick. Furthermore, there is a hugely uncomfortable layer to these scenes when you consider Hitchcock’s obsession with blonde it girls. I’m very interesting in learning what he thought of the film. In addition, Madeline keeps laying these hints that what Scotty is doing is crossing some terrible, metaphysical line.

 

-        Judy: If you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?

-        Scotty Yes. Yes.

-        All right. All right then, I’ll do it. I don’t care anymore about me.

 

-        Judy: Couldn't you like me, just me the way I am? When we first started out, it was so good; w-we had fun. And... and then you started in on the clothes. Well, I'll wear the darn clothes if you want me to, if, if you'll just, just like me.

-        Scotty: The color of your hair…

-        Judy: Oh, no!

-        Scotty: Judy, please, it can’t matter to you.

 

With these scenes, Vertigo also becomes a film about films. Scotty becomes obsessed with recreating Madeline. He becomes obsessed with someone who wasn’t real. He becomes obsessed with his image of that person. This is the subversive heart of Vertigo, that no matter how much we want a fantasy, an image, an idea, or a film to be real, it simply can’t, and to attempt otherwise is to court tragedy. Scotty’s obsession with the unreal leads to Judy’s death and the final piece in completing the film’s doomed diptych.

 

Random notes:

-        I saw a lot of Mad Men in this rewatch of Vertigo. The famous opening of a black outline falling is directly taken from a similar design in Scotty’s nightmare. And one of the main themes of the show is the rampant sexism of the era, which Vertigo deals with through Gavin and Scotty’s dickish manipulation of Judy. Vertigo also has two characters (Gavin and the book-store owner) lament the fact that women can’t be tossed aside as easily as they used it.

-        I wouldn’t classify Vertigo as a noir, but it makes good use of the sun-dappled exteriors of San Francisco nearly two decades before Chinatown made sunny L.A. seem like the most dangerous place on earth. And, much like how Chinatown attempts to grapple with the dark, secret history of L.A., Vertigo, with the story of Carlotta, delves into some of San Fran’s hidden past.

-        A much later film, Mulholland Drive, owes a debt to Vertigo as well. That film’s themes of duality and shifting identity seem directly inspired by Hitchcock’s uncomfortable masterpiece.

 

Further thoughts

One thing I forgot to mention in my original piece was the backstory I imagined for Judy. We don’t really learn about her history, except that she is from Salina, Kansas. Solid information about her relation to Elster isn’t give either. It’s implied that she was his mistress and decided to help him in his murderous quest due to money and a power imbalance. The backstory I came up with involved Judy as naïve Kansas girl, hoping to go west to Hollywood and break it big on the silver screen! Once she gets there though, she can’t catch a break, and, on her last dime, is contacted by Elster for a shadowy job. With no other way to make money of her acting talent, she takes the job which launches her on her doomed collision with Scotty. I don’t know why I thought this up, except that it fits with the film’s twisted relation to Hollywood filmmaking.

An aspect of the film I came to appreciate after reading through some of the reviews was its second act change in perspective. During the first part of the film, the camera is very focused on Scotty. It even literally adopts his point of view several times, as can be seen in the sequences of him driving around and tailing Madeline and her iconic introduction at Ernie’s. After Madeline’s “death” however, there’s a switch in focus. After Scotty leaves Judy’s apartment, the camera doesn’t follow him out the door, it stays with her (something that has only happened 2 or 3 times throughout the film at this point). The film then reveals its big mystery by having Judy flashback, write a letter, and perform a voiceover narration. This is an incredibly important scene in the film. Both Robert Cumbow (Parallax View) and Brian Eggert (Deep Focus Review) mention how this scene shifts audience sympathy away from Scotty and onto Judy, and, as Hitchcock himself described, it turns standard surprise into suspense. The letter scene shifts the question from “What will the twist be?” to “What will Scotty do once he finds out Judy’s secret?”

 

Why is the film on this list?

It’s ironic that the top film on this cinephile list is a warning sign to film fans not to become to obsessed with their favorite art form, lest they find themselves looking into the abyss of unreality like Scotty in Vertigo.

BFI Top 50: The Rules of the Game, Released in 1939, Directed by Jean Renoir

What I know going in

That the film is a famous upstairs-downstairs story.

 

Immediate reaction

I didn’t mention this before the review, but, while I didn’t know much about The Rules of the Game before watching it, I had seen a film heavily inspired by it. That film is Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. Both films concern the divisions between members of the upper and lower classes, the complicated relations between servants and their masters, complicated (and sometimes conflicting) rules of etiquette, and the age when such systems were about to collapse. Comparing the two also helps me pin down some of the problems I had with Altman’s film and why I think Renoir’s film is stronger (controversial opinion, I know). My main issue with Altman’s film was that there were just way too many characters to keep track of, add the myriad of complicated relationships the characters had to each other, and it became a frustrating experience at times. Gosford Park also tossed in a convoluted murder mystery (I’m still trying to figure out how Kelly McDonald knew the murderer was Clive Owen). The Rules of the Game also has lots of characters and a web relationship, but it’s just enough to be manageable and there is no murder plot to muck things up.

 

Just to help myself, I’ll start by plotting out the main characters and how they are all connected. The film starts with pilot AndréJurieux landing in France after a record-breaking trip across the Atlantic. The scene quickly shifts to a lavish Parisian household where Christine (and Austrian ex-pat), her husband Robert, his mistress Geneviéve, their friend Gustave, and maid Lisette are all present. Eventually they all travel to a huge manor out in the countryside to drink, cavort, and hunt. While there they meet Marceau (a poacher who Robert employs), groundskeeper and Lisette’s husband Schumacher, the niece of Christine (Jackie), an old general, and St. Aubin. How do all these people relate to each other? Well the meat of the film is watching how those relations are teased out, how they shift, and how they finally erupt. Initially, André is obsessed with Christine, has misinterpreted friendly affection as signs of attraction, and Robert and Geneviéve realize they can’t continue as lovers. The film goes on in a low-key mode for about 2/3rds of its running time, with the various characters puttering about, trying to stave off the ennui, bickering with each other, and making witty remarks.

 

These scenes are a pleasure to watch, but the film has much more on its mind. While the characters are hunting, Christine spots Robert and Geneviéve embracing and realizes that he has been cheating on her. This sparks the battle royale that will occupy the last third of the film. During an amateur theater show put on by the guests and staff, the main characters explosively deal with the insecurities and jealousies that have been simmering underneath the film up to that point. St. Aubin attempts to go off with Geneviéve, André and Robert fight over who should get to be with Christine, Schumacher chases Marceau around the house with a loaded gun because he’s been flirting with Lissette. The craft in this sequence is outstanding, with Renoir deploying deep focus to create insanely complicated compositions of multiple people fighting, watching fighting, or trying to avoid fighting. My favorite such moment comes when the camera is at ground level watching Marceau and Lisette flirt, and you can just barely see Schumacher running angrily toward them through the window. The finale also has an excellent use of sound, with the noises from the various fights going up and down in volume as the camera jumps around to the different groups.

 

The film ends on a disturbing note, with Schumacher killing André after mistaking him for Octave and Christine for Lisette (the movie sets this misunderstanding up very slyly and has possibly the most tragic coat shuffle in film history). What’s even more disturbing about the ending though, is Robert’s fatalistic attitude to it. He tells everyone that André’s death was an accident, which is closely followed by an ominous march (shown with shadows) back into the house.

 

Further thoughts

The Rules of the Game, like several other films on this list, had a long, tortuous before it was canonized as one of the greatest films of all time. Due to the ease with which we access films today, and the nichefication of everything that’s not a blockbuster, it’s very easy to forget that there was once a time when films could cause protests, be banned by wrongheaded governments, and come to the brink of complete of destruction. All of these happened to Renoir’s film. It was made on the edge of the largest tragedy in human existence, and was met with riots for daring to portray the upperclass as fallible, sometimes infantile, people. It was banned twice, both before and after the war, and its original negative was destroyed during Allied bombing. No one went to bat for the film on its initial release, and the only reason it survives in its current, masterpiece status today is due to the efforts of two intrepid French film technicians, and the subsequent reappraisals by the French New Wave critics on its re-release.

 

Renoir’s film is an invaluable, detailed, realistic, and humane portrait of humans “dancing on a volcano”. In The Rules of the Game there are no heroes and villains, no protagonists or antagonists, and no one that is purely good or evil. There are simply people, bound by a set of rules that allows marital indiscretion, but not extramarital love; witty, self-deprecating jokes, but not serious reflection; and “accidents” but not murder. Renoir’s masterstroke was realizing that we all play by those rules, or at least some version of them, and recognizing that we all deserve a small measure of empathy for it.

 

Why is the film on this list?

The Rules of the Game is the definitive, technically-perfect depiction of an era that would soon be gone forever. For that, it is one of the most important, and greatest, films of all time. 

BFI Top 50: Citizen Kane, Released in 1941, Directed by Orson Welles

What I know going in

I have seen the film once before, but it was around 4 years ago.

 

Immediate reaction

I’m totally not intimidated at the prospect of having to talk about such a great film!

 

Citizen Kane is one of the first films, if not the first, to deal explicitly with both the subjective nature of storytelling and our own largely subjective perception of the world itself. The film opens with a “No Trespassing!” sign, a slow pan up a mountainous chain face, and then a few establishing shots of the foreboding Xanadu. The film then cuts to Kane on his death bed as he whispers his last word “Rosebud!”

This is to be the last thing we learn about Kane from the man himself. Every other fact about Kane’s life we learn is either from newsreels, personal diaries, or retold by the people who knew him. We learn that Kane is many things to many people. To the public at large he was a brash, idealistic newspaper-man who had a fall from grace and eventually became a recluse, in the vein of a William Randolph Hearst or Howard Hughes. To Thatcher he was a failed heir who threw away his fortune on political pursuits. To Bernstein and Leland he was someone to look it to, who eventually forsook his ideals to live a life of isolation and pleasure. To Susan he was a charming stranger and then an overbearing, emotionally-isolated husband. Finally, to Thompson, he was ultimately an enigma. The reporter neatly lays out what the film has been saying all along with the following: “I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a... piece in a jigsaw puzzle... a missing piece.”

 

Because films are a visual medium, and we humans are programmed to take things we see as real, I don’t think this fact really hits home until a second viewing, or at least until the very end of the film. For example, on my first viewing, my eye for film wasn’t nearly as developed as it is now and I missed several visual motifs that give away Citizen Kane’scentral theme. One of the most repeated, expressive shots in the film is of two people conversing with Kane placed firmly in the background. This style of shot makes it seem like Kane is a memory or dream that two people are conjuring long after they met the man. Examples of this include the scene at Kane’s childhood home where his parents converse with Mr. Thatcher about the young man’s future while the boy can clearly be seen outside, framed by both the window and the people talking. Kane’s father even closes the window, trying to put his son’s life out of mind at the prospect of $50,000 per year.  Another example comes when Thatcher and Bernstein are discussing Thatcher’s will and Kane walks way into the back of the room (in what has to be a forced-perspective shot), looking tiny between his colleagues’ heads. There is even a scene where a reflection of Kane is placed between Leland and Bernstein, which takes the dreamy nature of this shot to another level.

 

Beyond that, the film uses long takes and an almost-invisible editing style to make the whole thing feel like one long continuous take. I often found myself in the middle of a scene wondering how long the current take had gone on and when the last cut was. Examples of this include the smooth transition from the outside to the inside of Susan’s nightclub, the cut from the white snow to the white paper that moves Kane from boy to adulthood, and the maybe-a-bit-too-clever transition from a picture of The Austin Chronicle team to Kane’s ownership of them. Even when the movie transitions in and out of the various retellings, cuts that could feel very abrupt and disruptive, it’s careful to do so very evenly by employing slow-fades and superimpositions. This can be seen in Thompson’s discussions with Leland, which, whenever they move in or out of his reminisces, have him imposed against the scenes set in the past. Leland is also revealed to be senile; another way the movie reminds us that not everyone shown should be taken at face value.

 

As with any great film, it isfun to play spot-the-influence, and it’s especially fun with Citizen Kane because you can go both ways. Citizen Kane is famous for taking the film techniques and style that had been developed up to that point, adding a dash of new technology, and using it to tell a new type of story. In addition, the film landscape is littered with visual and structural reference to Orson Welles first film. The foreboding, establishing shots of Xanadu look like something out of a German Expressionist film and the rapid editing in the opening newsreel and in the progressively hostile conversation between Kane and his wife are straight out of Soviet montage films. There is even a shot that quotes The Passion of Joan of Arc. It comes when the camera pans slowly across The New York Inquirer crew while the dancers are in the background. The dramatic shadow play, such as when Thompson enters Thatcher’s library, simultaneously looks back at films like Sunrise and looks forward to the darkness of noir films. I could probably write a whole other article charting the impact of Citizen Kane, instead, I will just quickly mention a few movies that owe a debt to the film. Echoes of Kane’s story structure can be seen in the subjective, head-spinning masterpiece Rashomon and in the nesting-doll-like narrative of The Grand Budapest Hotel. The dreamy, half-remembered mood can be felt in fellow Sight and Sound listees8 ½,Taxi Driver, and Mulholland Drive. And visual quotes from the film pop up in everything from Persona to The Shining.

 

Further thoughts

In the beginning I was worried I wouldn’t have enough to say about Citizen Kane. Now I’m worried I don’t have enough space to say it all in. First, I would just like to say that Roger Ebert’s commentary for the film is outstanding. Not only does he give an excellent, informative overview of the film’s themes style, special effects, and history, but he also does so with such gusto that it is impossible not to get swept up in his geeky movie-love. Speaking of special effects, Like Sunrise, Citizen Kane features a lot of complicated, but invisible, effects work. The only technique I mentioned in my earlier review was the use of deep focus. That was because the other special effects are so seamless that I didn’t notice them. A few neat tricks I learned from Ebert are:

 

-        The film frequently deploys matte drawings to make certeain set appear much larger than they actually are (Xanadu, the New York Inquirer bulding)

-        Welles and Toland were able to create the illusion of huge spaces from small sets with the use of clever angles and lighting (Susan’s opera house, the interiors of Xanadu)

-        Optical printing was used to combine multiple images when keeping several planes in focus wasn’t possible (Susan’s suicide, Leland’s firing by Kane)

 

Of course, what makes Citizen Kane a great film isn’t its special effect, but the way in which they are used to tell the story more economically, advance the themes and mood of the film, and reveal more about the characters.

 

Another aspect of the film that I glossed over is the use of sound and dialogue. In the instances where an edit isn’t eased by a visual cue, Welles uses dialogue, sound, or music to push the viewer into the next scene. This can be seen during the sequence when Kane grows up and Welles links the two scenes by having Thatcher say “Merry Christmas” and then complete the phrase with “Happy New Year” after the cut. An additional, advanced use of sound is the way the characters talk over each other. Even though I had seen the film once before, this surprised me since (now being more familiar with cinema of the time) I know that overlapping dialogue was not common back then. This gives the film a screwball vibe that also predicts the chaotic language of Altman and Cassavetes films from the 60’s (more influences!).

 

Reflecting on the film, I appreciated how easy it was to get lost in it. The multiple flashbacks go on for so long that it’s simple to forget when you’re in a memory, when you’re not, and whose you’re in. This isn’t helped by the fact that some of the scenes set in “real-life” are so stylized that they break with reality. I had to look up what happened in Bernstein’s and Leland’s flashbacks because the two had fused together in my memory.

 

I’ll leave with one last thought. I have been reading a lot of Jim Emerson’s blog (Scanners) over at Ebert’s website. Something he frequently rails against in modern films is the “one-thing-at-a-time” style of shooting, or what David Bordwell calls “intensified continuity”. Basically, the terms refer to films that use quick-cutting and ample re-focusing shots that forego the more complicated and economical compositions in films like Sunrise, Citizen Kane, and, one of Emerson’s examples, Alien. Emerson often discusses the pleasure of letting your eyes wander and soaking up small details in these films. That was something I really appreciated about Citizen Kane on my re-watch. It is true that Welles uses small movements and subtle character positioning to draw your eye to different parts of the frame, but I intentionally broke that during my second watch. This worked even for a scene as small as the one where Thompson first talks to Bernstein is visually pleasurable. There are multiple elements in this scene that are interesting to look at. You could notice the way Kane’s picture looms over the room, the way Bernstein’s chair seems to tower over him, bliss out to the patter of rain outside, or watch his reflection in the desk.

 

Why is the film on this list?

I don’t know what else can be said, so I’ll put it simply. Citizen Kane is fan-fucking-tastic.

BFI Top 50: Tokyo Story, Released in 1953, Directed by Yasujiro Ozu

What I know going in

That the film concerns an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children, only to be ignored by them.

 

Immediate reaction

Tokyo Story plays like an alternate version of a typical Hollywood melodrama. The basic setup would be right at home in a Douglas Sirk film. Elderly Japanese couple Shukichi (ChishuRyu) and Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama) Hirayama decide to leave their small village and travel to Tokyo to spend a week with their middle-aged children. The Sirk version of this tale would have histrionic scenes about the generation gap and big city versus small town values. It would also be chock full of expressionist bursts of color and immaculately artificial sets (Note: this is not a knock against Sirk, I just recently watched All That Heaven Allows for the first time and found it interesting to compare American and Japanese takes on similar material).

 

Instead, Ozu’s film is subtle and quietly devastating. Shukichi and Omi deal with the parade of difference they are treated to by their children with a surface-level pleasantness that hides the despair and end-of-life melancholy the couple is filming. That it makes it sound like the children are outright antagonistic towards their parents. They aren’t. While the movie doesn’t necessarily portray them positively, there is a frankness to their dismissal of their parents that rings uncomfortably true to even to this 23 year old. The film acknowledges that the children are busy and have lives outside of their parents, which slightly excuses their actions. Even Noriko, the only character who goes out of her way to treat her parents nicely, and it should be noted they are technically her parents-in-law, acknowledges that if the circumstance were different, she probably would have acted in the same manner as the other children.

 

Overall, it was just nice to see a film that deals with big, generational issues in a small way. There has been a string of films in the past decade that treat old age problems as an excuse for wacky hijinks (The Bucket List, It’s Complicated). Tokyo Story is a pleasant antidote to that type of film. The scene where Shukichi and his old friends go out drinking could have easily come off as grating and unfunny, but Ozu transforms it into a sad, mournful reverie for days gone by with a spoonful of humor to make it go down a bit more easily. The only time the film dips into melodrama is when the youngest, unmarried daughter lashes out her siblings, but given that this scene comes right after Tomi has passed away, it works as a welcome release to the desperation that has been underlying the film.

 

Visually, the film is directed with Ozu’s trademarked style. This means a lot of low-angle shots of characters navigating the cramped interiors of their Japanese homes, confronting, head-on shot-reverse-shot conversations, and lingering on rooms even when there are no people within them. Indeed, Ozu gets a lot of mileage out of the sliding doors and frames of Japanese houses. Frequently, Ozue will set a scene with different characters in different receding frames, which sometimes creates an infinity-mirror-like effect. Even the scenes set outside are slashed by pieces of modern architecture creating an uncomfortable claustrophobia when one wouldn’t expect.

 

All that being said, there is still something keeping me from fully embracing Ozu. I don’t know what it is. I appreciate the delicate way he treats human relations and his stylistic rigor, but I would never call Late Spring or Tokyo Story favorite films. I think it has to do with some of the subtlety and connection in the dialogue being lost in translation. If I was fluent in Japanese, or if Ozu’s films were in English, I feel like I would connect with them a lot more. However, I think having to do the subtitle dance of glancing at the bottom of screen to quickly read the dialogue and then looking up to watch the actors’ expressions, is causing me to lose focus and miss some of the more subtle emotions.

 

Further thoughts

I honestly have no idea what else to write. People far smarter than me have written extensively about both the technical and emotional side of Ozu’s film. Again, I don’t know why, but I am just not connecting with Ozu’s films on the level I would like to, which is preventing me from writing anything more insightful.

 

Why is the film on this list?

Ozu’s static, tatami mat camera, focus on small-scale drama, and the cluttered surrounding in which two inhabit, forces intense introspection.

BFI Top 50: The Searchers, Released in 1956, Directed by John Ford

What I know going in

I have seen the film once a decade ago.

 

Immediate reaction

The Searchers is a film at odds with itself. The basic plot, and a few of the characters, is incredibly dark and subversive for a western from the 50’s. The word “revisionist” was just a twinkle in the genre’s eye at this point in time, but The Searchers was already paving the road for the boom of nihilistic westerns that came out in the 60’s and 70’s. Here are just a few of the major events in the film:

-        At the start of the film, Ethan’s entire family is slaughtered or kidnapped.

-        Ethan stumbles upon his kidnapped niece and discovers she has been raped and killed

-        Ethan and Marty come upon an army base where several rescued white women have been reduced to the point of screaming or staring into the void

 

That’s not really light, turn-your-brain-off entertainment. In addition, many of the character turns and acting choices are twisted just enough from typical western archetypes that they warp into something wholly new and iconic. There is of course John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, but I’ll get to him in a bit. Ethan has a tiny, blink-and-you-miss-it subplot with his brother’s wife. Just as he and Clayton are setting out to look for the Comanche, Clayton looks through a doorway and sees Aaron’s wife, Martha, gently caressing Ethan’s outfit. Martha then enters the main room, passes the outfit to Ethan, who then embraces her for a split second and kisses her on the forehead. Ethan then exits and Martha silently grasps after him, all while Clayton is standing awkwardly in the foreground. The movie tells a mini-story in the span of few minutes, with no dialogue, and all based on a few simple gestures. It’s an amazingly subtle sequence that, in addition to Ethan’s hinted-at past, quickly tells the viewer why he has been out in the wild for so long. Even the villain, Scar, gets a few minutes of backstory to explain his actions against Ethan’s family and turn the film into a commentary on the cycle of violence.

 

And now to get to Ethan himself. I have unfortunately little experience with Wayne outside of The Searchers. Of course, I know that he his famous for playing tough, simple men of action in war films and westerns. Even without the knowledge of Wayne’s other films, I can tell that his performance here is special and a commentary on his typical persona (whether that is because of Ford’s direction, or a choice of Wayne’s, I’ll leave till later to find out). He takes his typical tough-guy charisma and curdles it. He is essentially an early example of an antihero and even starts the film by wearing a black hat! This a man so racist that he shoots a dead Indian’s eyes to make sure he wanders the spirit-plane forever, shoots at retreating Indians, and indiscriminately kills buffalo to make sure they won’t be feeding his enemies. He is gruff towards Marty for maybe being 1/8 Cherokee, and, up until the very last seconds of the movie, is trying to kill Debbie for being forced to adopt the ways of the Comanche. He is not sympathetic least, and to make him the protagonist of a populist 50’s western is a daring choice.

 

No discussion of The Searchers is complete without talking about the film’s visuals. It needs to be said that this film is fucking gorgeous. It’s taking all of my restraint to not turn this piece into a collection of pretty thumbnails. Like the previous entry, Sunrise, there are shots in The Searchers that took my breath away just from their sheer beauty. Of course, if the film didn’t go beyond that, it would be a little shallow. Fortunately, there is a lot of thought to the way the film is shot. There is the famous motif of people and vistas being framed by entranceways. In addition, Ford makes Monument Valley seem like a strange, almost-alien place at times, more like the surface of Mars than a desert on Earth. There’s a shot, right before the Indians attack Aaron’s farm, where it looks like hell is spilling into his homestead. The actors always looked dwarfed by the ground, the sky, and the valley’s rock formations.

 

So why did I hedge my opinion of the film at the beginning of this piece? The issue with The Searchers is that it builds to epic sequence and attempts to carefully subvert some basic tropes of the western, but destroys that balance with terrible comic relief and annoying subplots. This is a film that has a character saying “Some day this country's gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” followed quickly by a blatant Jewish stereotype kvetching about. This wouldn’t be that big of a problem for me if it was kept to a minimum, but there are four comic relief characters in this film. In addition, the subplot between Martin and Laurie is terrible, and the film devotes so much time to it. Vera Miles is incredibly one-note as Laurie and pretty much just shrilly yells at Martin, and the plot adds absolutely nothing to the film. You can say it’s a bit of a breather from the action, and that it’s part of Marty’s arc of becoming a man, but there are better of ways of accomplishing that without completely tanking the film’s momentum.

 

That focus on comic relief and random subplots is why I can’t get fully behind The Searchers. I would never hesitate to call it a great film, but to grant it masterpiece status would be to ignore a few serious flaws.

 

Further thoughts

All of the films on the BFI list are either established classics or widely acclaimed modern masterpieces. As such, it is very rare for me to find dissenting opinions on these films, and when I do, it is usually on random, poorly written blogs. It was a bit strange when I discovered a handful of mainstream critics dismissing The Searchers and calling it corny and outdated. This has caused me to reevaluate my initial opinion of the film. Originally, I said that the comic relief bits in The Searchers prevented it from attaining all-time-great status. I should rephrase that. The comic relief bits, and some of the relationship drama between Martin and Laurie, are mediocre, and feel like leftovers from bygone era of oater. Everything involving Ethan, his family, and his quest however, deserves its masterpiece status.

 

The critics who denigrated the film wanted to strike it from the record, and I cannot agree with that. The Searchers’ influence is just too great for it to be forgotten or condemned to the “dated” category. I already knew of its relation to Taxi Driver from reading about that film. Both have essentially the same arc: a disturbed man rescues a young woman, who may not want to be rescued, from what he assumes are predatory captors. Taxi Driver twists that story to its most disturbing extreme, but they are similar nonetheless. Going through literature about the film, I discovered that the violent incidents that jumpstart the plot in both Once Upon a Time in the West and Star Wars (two wildly different films), are taken from Ford’s film.

 

Beyond the obvious influence the film had on the New Hollywood era, I can little bits and pieces of The Searchers flitting about and getting stuck in a huge variety of movies and TV shows. The way the desolate, red-soaked environs of Monument Valley provoke changes in Ethan and Martin’s demeanor reminds me of landscape-heavy films like Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock, and I think part of the reason the nature montage in Koyaanisqatsi begins in Monument Valley is due to Ford’s predilection for the place. The Searcher’s influence is still being felt today. In the mid-to-late 200’s there was a huge wave of dark TV shows about obsessed antiheroes, the show to cap this trend was Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad’s epic use of the New Mexican desert and Walter’s alternating obsession with saving killing Jesse can be traced all the way back to Ford’s seminal film.

 

Why is the film on this list?

Before the western would get exploded and deconstructed in the late 60’s, The Searchers was already questioning some established tropes of the genre. That Ford did this with his favorite actor, one of the most famous men on Earth, and in such a picturesque locale, makes it all the more remarkable. 

BFI Top 50: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Released in 1927, Directed by F.W. Murnau

What I know going in

That the film is a story about the infidelity and later make-up between a central romantic pairing. I also know the film is famous for its technical and artistic accomplishments.

Immediate reaction

Sunrise begins with the following text: “This song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere, at any time. For wherever the sun rises and sets, in the city's turmoil or under the open sky on the farm, life is much the same; sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.”

That quote sets Sunrise up perfectly as a fairytale. Every element of the film fits that designation. The little village where the beginning and end of the film take place looks like it was ripped right out of a nostalgic memory of an old European countryside. Many of the film’s compositions, especially those set around the lake, are so striking and evocative that they have a storybook illustration quality to them. The plot is also fairly simple (I don’t mean that as a complaint) with a man being tempted by a seductress to sell his farm, kill his wife, and leave for the big city. The fairytale aspect of the film is even carried out to the naming of the characters who are given titles like “The Man”, “The Woman”, and “Woman from the city”.

What isn’t simple about Sunrise is its style. During the first ever Academy Awards, it was given the special honor for Unique and Artistic Production, with the WWI drama Wings winning in the more standard “Outstanding Picture” category. Sunrise’s category would be removed after the first ceremony, giving Wings its status as the first best picture winner, and leaving Sunrise as the only film to be given such an award, which seems fitting for a movie as wondrous as Sunrise. I mentioned the scenes at the lake in my first paragraph, but they are so incredible that I’ll bring them up again. We first see the set when The Man sneaks out of his house to be with his mistress. The lake and the shoreline are dark, ominous, and drenched in fog (something playfully reflected in the intertitles in this section). It is the perfect setting for the mistress to lay out her sinister plot to kill the man’s wife. This matching of emotion and setting reflects the film’s German Expressionist roots, which makes sense as Murnau, the director of such classics as Faust and The Last Laugh, was one of the greatest directors of that era. Later the lake descends into an unbelievable storm, which I assume was done in a water tank, but retains all of its power, as a last test of the pair’s strength. The setting also provides one of the most beautiful shots in all of cinema history when the villager set out in boats to search for the woman. The sky and the water are completely black and the only illumination comes from a few handheld lanterns. It looks like the villagers are floating, ghost-like through space. The visual mastery extends to the film’s camerawork as well. The Steadicam, which allows for fluid handheld movement without the use of tracks or board, wasn’t invented until the late 70’s, but there are several sequences in Sunrise that look like a Steadicam was sent back in time to the 20’s. The best example is a long tracking shot going through the entrance of an amusement park. Another is an incredibly fluid tracking shot following The Man’s mistress as she stalks through the village.

The film also takes some of the experimental techniques of a film like Man with Movie Camera and applies them to a narrative. For example, it frequently uses double exposure to suggest dreams, flashbacks, the craziness of the city, and the fears and desires of The Man. I’m worried this is becoming me pointing out various images, so I’ll move on one more. There is strangely a moment that reminded me of 2001. The shot opens with spinning lights surrounded by nothing but darkness. Eventually the film reveals this is a part of the amusement park, but for a few seconds, I thought the planets were aligning for the dawn of man.

Sunrise has plenty to recommend about it outside of its imagery. First, even though it’s a simple story, the script (a weird thing to mention for a film with so few intertitles) is actually pretty well thought out. Two elements seen at the beginning, the bundled reeds and the mistress’s suggestion that The Man tell the village his wife’s slaying was an accident, actually come back at the end of film in an organic manner. The storm pushes The Man to give the reeds to his wife to save her and the mistress assumes that he went through with the murder after he rushes everyone to search for his wife. The film could have forgotten those details and I wouldn’t have noticed, but I appreciated that it tied everything together. Second, George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor are fantastic as the central couple. They are the first silent film pairing I’ve seen that I would actually describe as having chemistry. They also play everything pretty naturalistically. I would be eager to show this film to someone who thinks of silent film acting as broad or over the top. It’s a shame that the other film they made with Murnau, 4 Devils, is thought to be lost. Hopefully it gets re-discovered sometime soon.

Further thoughts

As a part of this marathon I have been luck in that I have been able to discover and revisit a fair number of silent films. These include City Lights, Metropolis, The General, The Passion of Joan of Arc, with the last being Sunrise. I’ve fallen in love with the aesthetics of silent cinema to such a degree that I am starting to worry that it’s negatively affecting my enjoyment of talkies from all eras. For one, silent films have aged to the point where they all have this scratchy-soft texture to them that makes them look like old photographs. This aspect also gives every silent film, from the high fantasy of Metropolis to the first ever documentary Nanook of the North, a certain anthropological quality. It’s engaging just to see what people and places looked like back then, and it’s amazing that various facets of life from the beginning of the 20^th century are recorded, hopefully forever, on film and can be easily viewed today.

I also love that silent films didn’t require over-expository dialogue and convoluted plots. They were free to focus on the characteristics of film that separate it from all other art forms. With their heightened emotions, wild acting, expressive visual styling, and willingness to throw new techniques, silent films sometimes feel more like recorded dreams from bygone era than normal movies.

I have come to love many aspects of Sunrise. I love the gloriously-free tracking and crane shots. I love the beautiful light-play that can be seen in The Woman’s initial outing, the tram ride into the city, and boat search party on the lake. I love Murnau’s marriage of emotion and setting in scenes like the sinister tryst in the ominous bog. I love the complicated compositions that feature a delicate interplay between the foreground and background elements, such as The Woman quietly watch from a tree while the search party comes back from the shore. There are moments in Sunrise that knock the breath from my lungs just from sheer visual beauty, such as The Man’s entrance into the bog, the couple’s reconciliation set to the sound of bells, the lantern-lit boat search, and final shot of the glorious rising sun.

Unfortunately, for some reason, I don’t love the film as a whole, or at least wouldn’t list it as one of my favorites. I don’t really know why either, but even though I love many elements from the film, some part of me can’t help feeling that; overall, Sunrise is a little too slight. That’s not really a criticism of the film, just a subjective statement.

Why is the film on this list?

Sunrise was the last great gasp of silent film before sound pushed movies back visually for a while.