Tattooed Life (1965)

About halfway through this movie (after the perfectly choreographed opening sequence has faded from memory), you begin to wonder if Suzuki really directed it. Pretty standard yakuza-trying-to-escape-the-yakuza fare. A younger, artistic brother of a yakuza hitman kills another gangster to save his brother, and both must flee the vengeance of the family.

The older brother attempts to hide the fact that he is "White Fox Tetsu" and covered in tattoos. Eventually, as might be expected, Tetsu's yakuza past catches up and the younger brother pays for it. Suddenly Suzuki bathes the lone Tetsu in a theatrical spotlight, he drops his black robe to reveal a white one underneath, and rushes off to avenge his brother, armed only with an umbrella.

He eventually gets a sword from a one-armed swordsman, and what follows is possibly one of the most satisfying, incredibly stylish one-against-50 fight sequences i've seen. The half-bored reality Suzuki built utterly disintegrates, and the color palette explodes into the bright reds, blues and yellows of Tokyo Drifter. Finally we are on a sparse soundstage and luminescent rain pours on our hero. It's a ten minute finale worth waiting for, and one of Suzuki's best formal pieces.

Though nowhere as expressionistic as Branded to Kill, this film again reminds us of Suzuki's brilliance, borne out of a firm understanding of the possiblities of film, and a purposeful disregard of conventions. The Russian film-ethos, that the brain will find a connection between montaged images, seems to be partly Suzuki's methodology. Branded to Kill is not complex or convoluted the way a film like Mulholland Drive is complex (that is, narratively). It's merely built off the question: why not string a film together like this? What is gained emotively? Stylistically? Can the brain make sense of the experience? Obviously the answer is yes. If more filmmakers had the excitement about the medium that this man did, a mere "B genre director," well....there would be more good movies.

thanks, to the director who always reminds us:

Bed and Board (1970)

The fourth in Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series is my least favorite so far, but still a good film. There's quite a lot of odd tongue and cheek formalistic humor with the soundtrack (big stings and dun dun dun's) and some slapstick. Interesting though, is the kind of chilling humor that can be really poingant: like when Antoine confronts Christine's father on the stairs in the brothel. It's handled with humor but the effect is sobering.

The visuals are just a joy, as they have been throughout the series. And despite whatever shortcomings, it really has quite a few excellent thoughts on married life.

The Silent Aesthetic Revolution

Here's something. In my opinion (and I can have peculiar taste) there was a kind of silent, ineffable aesthetic peak reached in the 80's. Say, 85-89 it peaked. Three films that I think capture this are three films that thematically, could not be more different. And yet, despite their extremely diverse creators, somehow share this almost inexpressable aesthetic bond: Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (83), Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts (85), and Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (88). I'm not sure if there was a specific film stock in use during those years that could account for some of the similarities, but there is something of a stylistic thread that runs through these films, as if they've all tapped into something unspoken. Maybe slightly sterile? I'm really grasping at straws here, and maybe I'm just crazy. But I don't think so. It's also kind of a transluscent quality to the film, and light blue tinge. As well as, stylistically, lots of brightly colored lighting (blues and reds) used in odd places (particularly in ZOO and The Thin Blue Line), and mannered compositions.



Demme's Stop Making Sense (the Talking Heads concert film) could fall into the group too.



As quickly as it came, it went, and I really haven't seen movies that look like this anywhere recently. Even Greenaway's stuff looks different. What a brief, mysterious aesthetic era. I name it the Cameron Era.

The Last Laugh (1924)

F.W. Murnau's visual sense may not be strictly expressionistic, but it comes close in The Last Laugh. Though its pointless to traffic in "firsts" (someone else was always first), this is one of the earliest commercial examples of handheld camera work. And it's certainly as dazzling to watch as it must have been in 1924. The opening shot, a vertical tracking shot through an elevator is just astonishingly beautiful, and visually it's only uphill from there. What appears to be a slightly slower frame rate really lends an otherwordly quality to most of the motion, especially in the "masterwork" tracking shots. Though Murnau uses montage in an entirely different way from Eisenstein and the Russians, his montage effects here are very beautiful (particularly where the revolving door is layered onto the shot of the doorman's head). Also, the sheer scale of the sets were incredible: numerous 12 or more story buildings, all built on a soundstage and shaded in art-deco style.

As scholars have noted, Murnau's camera does not see all, as the camera of the Russians did. He was no realist, but his more expressionistic compositions reveal the structure of the space as it is, they do not add to it. In this film, even more than in Sunrise, Murnau incorporates his character's pysche into that same pictorial space, and the camera is entirely a tool of exploration into him. The pathos created is genuine and completely engrossing. The studio-forced happy ending reads as just that, but hey, I was grateful to leave the doorman elsewhere than that bathroom. This film easily falls into my favorites of the silent era, and really is a "spectacle" in every positive sense of that word.

Stolen Kisses (1968)

"Charm" is something I think of being exceedingly difficult to do well in film. Not only that, but many a terrible film is justified to the public by its "charm." I also shy away from wanting to describe something by one of my favorite filmmakers as "charming," as it seems almost pejorative in reference to film, communicating that the work is of no real importance. However, I really can't think of a better word to describe the third in Truffaut's Antoine Doneil series. Jean-Pierre Léaud's performance is easily the most entrancing aspect: "charming" you might say, but also bewildering and full of the anxious energy of youth. The film's autumnal visuals are equally hypnotic, bathing the action in bright orange faux-wood paneling.

Truffaut's films may seem to some (people without souls) unconscionably sentimental, but their deadpan humor and lack of apology for character behavior I think shields them from such accusations. It's a miracle that Truffaut could emerge out his critical background to create the body of films he did. Could contemporary "film criticism" create a filmmaker of his passion and energy? It seems hard to imagine.

thanks Bazin!

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