Kwaidan (1965)
The great Masaki Kobayashi directs this anthology of four ghost stories from a book written by Lafcadio Hearn (interesting story), who translated them from traditional Japanese texts. Shot almost entirely on lavish, beautifully crafted sets, Kobayashi puts the photography (aided by his training as a painter) at the forefront of the film. The lush artificiality of the forests, courtyards, and oceans that are created on Kobayashi's soundstages are complemented with some of the most complex and intricate lighting I've seen, continually shifting with the changing moods of the narrative.
The most striking of the four tales, Hoichi, the Earless, begins with an incredible, stylized recreation of a samurai battle at sea, composed to match classical paintings of the battle. Hoichi, a young blind musician, is coerced by a ghost of the fallen samurai to play for his infant lord, who died when the whole household plunged into the sea of blood rather than be captured. Unaware that he has been playing for ghosts, the priests in the village attempt to save him by covering his body with holy texts, but they forget his ears.
Kwaidan makes absolutely no concession to western sensibilities. It is ponderously slow, artistically exact in its editing and timing, and scored minimally by the famed Toru Takemitsu. Even in the cold formailty of the filmmaking, the episodes are wholly engaging and affecting. Like much of the great Japanese cinema of the 50s and 60s, it is basically a simple morality tale, told carefully with exquisite aesthetic properties. I join in the chorus with certain others hailing Kobayashi as one of the most currently underrated directors.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973)
Fassbinder always cited Douglas Sirk as one of his major influences, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is his remake of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. Sirk was famous for his intensely melodramatic Hollywood films of the 1950s, and the middle portion of Fassbinder's career focused on using the Hollywood melodrama form as a platform for intensely personal, political, and artistic statements.
Following these conventions, Ali not only deals with racial tensions, but explores the "everyday fascism" of family and social relationships. The film follows Emmi, an aging housekeeper, who falls in love with a Moroccan immigrant 20 years younger than her. Their decision to marry only crystallizes the racial prejudices that had been growing around them, forcing them necessarily apart and together in an endless cycle as they attempt to fit onto a social structure that won't accept them. It's quite a beautiful film, with Fassbinder not only directing but acting, producing, desigining the sets, and writing the script. His cinematic prowess is evident in the film's heavy, oppressive silence, and careful editing.
The Last Wave (1977)
Peter Weir followed the wonderful Picnic At Hanging Rock with this film, a pyschological drama with a similar tone. The film stars Richard Chamberlain as a lawyer defending five aboriginal men accused of murdering another aborigini. As you may have guessed, something insidious seems to be up, and our hero becomes obsessed with the deepening mysterious phenomena, soon finding reason to believe that an apocalyptic tidal wave is approaching Australia.
The film opens with an effective and harrowing portrayal of a freak hailstorm in the cloudless desert. From that point, it rains almost continuously through the rest of the film, and Weir provides some wonderful outdoor photography. Much of the ethereal spook of Picnic at Hanging Rock is maintained, though there are a few weak links (moments of subpar writing/acting, some aesthetic decisions) to put up with. All in all, a very interesting and enjoyable film that manages to be more unsettling than not.
Wings of Desire (1987)
Wim Wenders is an enigma to me. He's an enigma to me because my exposure to his films thus far has been The End of Violence (1997) and The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), both of which feel drastically short of some standard. This is the first of his films of some critical import that I have seen, and it is quite nice. The film allows us to observe angels wandering through West Berlin, listening to the spirits of the humans around them. There certainly is much to bear with, but the pacing, the lyricism, all fall into place quite frequently. I think the payoff at the rock concert (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, no less) is relatively unsteady, but the final moments of the film pull it back together. The inclusion of Homer, and the discussion of the poet and muse is striking and moving. The things that bother me about The End of Violence and The Million Dollar Hotel can be found seeping in a little at the mushy edges, but in such small quantities that it is negligable. I am a fool who has not seen Paris, Texas (1983), so I look forward to that (as I hear) substantive piece of art.
Finally, the thought that Peter Falk used to be angel is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes.
Camera Buff (1979)
This was essentially Kieslowski's breakthrough film, a perfect instance of his deft political cinema that always pushes inward to become an examination of the soul. For the first hour, every shot is a revelation. Mostly handheld, he glides and shakes through the desaturated concrete and glass structures of Communist Poland, stopping to point out milky lens flares and television transmissions of a classical pianist that seem to be from another universe. The film follows a young factory worker, newly a father, who excitedly begins to make films of his daughter. The eagerness he has to put a lens between himself and the world is contagious enough to have seeped into Kieslowski's mis-en-scene: despite the bleakness of Polish winter, there is joy and vibrancy to the filmmaking that is more exuberant than the studied elegance of his Trois Couleurs trilogy.
Kieslowski proides no easy answers to the relatively common questions posed in his film about censorship, the artist in relation to society and family, the easy destruction artistic eagerness can bring. However, contrary to the popular use of that phrase, he does actually provide answers in abundance: complex ones. The final sequence is both a blessing and a curse to Filip: a sign of vast progress and infinite regression simultaneously.
Time of the Wolf (2003)
While my exposure ot Haneke is not extensive, this is a film that makes me want to see more. Haneke's film opens as a middle class French family reaches their country home for vacation, only to realize that somewhere during their transit there was a global apocalypse. The film becomes a fairly straightforward chronicle of their struggle to survive, as the world falls into chaos. Despite the subject matter, it is a quiet film with no bombastics. At the same time, it is sometimes unbearably tense, and always harrowing as man's capacity for evil (in usual Haneke form) takes center stage.
The strictly cinematic aspects of this film deserve a standing ovation. While Haneke's visual style has never immediately appealed to me, his understated expressiveness in this film is astonishing at times. An extended sequence occurs in a barn at night as the family realizes the young boy, Ben, is lost. In a country without a single light, the screen is completely black, flaring for a second as a family member lights a fistful of hay, and plunges back into horrifying blackness as she is forced to drop it. It is a virtuouso sequence and there are several like it in the film. Perhaps the most frightening device of Haneke's is his non-responsive characters. As a character pleads for his life to another, making rational and moving arguments, the character with the gun stands staring in wide-eyed fright, unwilling or unable to respond.
The shocking thing, for those familiar with Haneke, is the incredibly strong Christological imagery throughout the film. The final sequence is exceedingly powerful, and difficult to talk about without castrating the experience for anyone who has not seen it. However, Haneke's depiction of sacrifice and its ability to transform the "least of these" is exceptionally beautiful, and oddly sacramental in its demand of absurd physical action. I had spent all day reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and the parallels (specifically dealing with the act of faith and the strength of the absurd) were eerie.
