In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò, or, the 120 Days of Sodom, was screened at Italian art houses just a few months after the controversial filmmaker was murdered. By that time, Pasolini had distinguished himself as one of the great filmmakers and cultural critics of post-WW2 Italy, using his films and novels as a medium for his critique of consumer capitalism and consumer culture. Salò, which portrays acts of unspeakable violence and brutality being enacted upon helpless teenagers by a wealthy and degenerate fascist officialdom, shocked and scandalized audiences everywhere. Since then, the film has become something of a cult phenomenon amongst devotees of vintage grind-house and exploitation films. However, what its fans and detractors fail to realize is that the film was just another installment of Pasolini’s ruthless and enraged attack against what he labeled “neo-capitalism” and “consumerist civilization.” It is this that makes Salò different from the average grind-house and exploitation film. Pasolini described himself as a Marxist, and indeed, was for a time, a member of the Italian Communist Party. Yet he held a cornucopia of unorthodox and contradictory political views, views which (along with his publicly avowed homosexuality) led him to be expelled from the ICP. What were his views, then? And how are they relevant for today? What’s more, did his prediction of the 60′s hippie counter-culture degenerating into an a-political conservatism, come true?

Pasolini was, in many respects, the first critic of mass consumerism. For him, consumerism, unlike, say, Italian fascism, or German Nazism, was able to carry out the “homologation” and “anthropological transformation” of  European man in a way that was never thought possible. This is because consumerism is tied to a hedonistic ideology, an ideology that teaches us that we do not have to, nor should we, delay our own personal individualistic gratifications. Paradoxically, however, by adhering to this new type of hedonism, one does not achieve, according to Pasolini, individuation.

Rather, by defining who you are by what you possess or what you wear, as well as by what others own and wear, one loses one’s individuality and sense of personal worth. And if there should happen to be any individual who refuses to conform to this scheme of things, and refuses to let herself be defined by whether or not she owns a Play Station 2, then that individual is looked upon as “weird,” or “abnormal”;  she is someone who doesn’t know that its “human nature” to buy and consume.

In short, for Pasolini consumerism was the new fascism, the new conformism. The fascism of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, at least, demanded that the individual sacrifice himself for the sake of the collectivity. In German National Socialism, the collectivity was represented by the German “race,” in Italian fascism, by the Italian nation. It was an ideology requiring some degree of asceticism and self-sacrifice.  Consumerism on the other hand, requires no sacrifice of the self, but rather invites a kind of self-indulgence. It is precisely this hedonistic element in consumerism that enables it to captivate the individual soul in a way that fascism was never able to do. (The infamous scenes of copraphagia  in Salò, in which the victims  and their ‘masters’  are served a gigantic meal of cooked  human feces, days old,  in a “Banquet of Shit,” were described by Pasolini as a critique of the processed and fast food industries, and of  mass production, which , according to him, produced  “useless refuse” that we then consume).

Everyone wears the same mass produced clothes; everyone buys the same mass produced furniture. In a gentrified, neo- liberal world, a world of gray skyscrapers and uniformed office workers,  a world where brand names like Prada and Gucci dominate the landscape of the city, and where reality T.V.  Has become the principal intellectual staple of the average American, Pasolini’s gloomy predictions take on a chilling reality. The French Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously implied that the youth of the 1960s were the children of Marx and Coca Cola. For Pasolini, they might, more appropriately, be considered the “children of Mussolini and Coca-Cola.”

Because Salò is often considered by most critics as Pasolini’s greatest film, it would be fitting to give a lengthy synopsis and history of the movie; especially since it is also the most virulent expression of his anti-consumerist views ever shown on the screen. The film is set in Italy in 1944, during the Republic of Salò, the Nazi and SS backed puppet regime of Benito Mussolini, which was established after his liberation from Allied captivity by Hitler. Whereas Mussolini had previously shared power with the Savoy monarchy and the Vatican, he was now, with the Nazis’ backing, enabled to create a true totalitarian dictatorship. This is probably why, in Pasolini’s writings, the Salò Republic is often used as a metaphor for absolute tyranny.

Four fascist officials: a duke, a bishop, the president of the local court, and a banker—the very pillars of bourgeois respectability and morality—kidnap 18 teenagers and bring them to a deserted villa near Marzabotto, in Northern Italy. (Marzabotto was, in fact, a town that was razed to the ground by the Germans in 1944 in retaliation for the murder of SS officers by Italian partisans.)  They also hire four middle-aged prostitutes whose job it is to tell arousing stories of sexual acts, which will “inflame the passions.” They then begin to torture, rape, and abuse the youngsters for three months, before finally killing them by means of mutilation, while the four officials look on at the executions through binoculars.  Among the brutal tortures and humiliations the young men and women are subjected to are: being forced to eat food laced with nails and shards of glass, being raped, having to crawl on all fours on a leash, and barking like dogs, being forced to eat and drink their own and each other’s’ feces and urine, licking the four officials’ boots, and finally, being mutilated by scalping, having their tongues cut out, etc. The film, parodying Dante’s Divine Comedy, is divided into four parts, or “circles”: The Ante-Chamber to Hell, The Circle of Manias, The Circle of Shit, and The Circle of Blood. The brutality that is shown in the movie is so extreme that it sometimes descends into the ludicrous and, in a sick way, the comic.

Salò is often looked upon as a modern transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, or, The School of the Libertines. And it is. Whereas de Sade set his novel in Central Europe during the Thirty Years War, Pasolini has the events of his film take place in Fascist Italy, during the Second World War. Yet there is more to the film than just the switching of historical periods, which nevertheless was a stroke of genius. De Sades’s novel, which he wrote during his imprisonment in the Bastille in 1789, was only discovered and published in 1905. Even though he was born into the French aristocracy, de Sade was very critical of the moral degeneracy and corruption of that class, and, when the French Revolution broke out, he immediately joined the revolutionaries. Indeed, The 120 Days of Sodom was meant to be a scathing critique of the degeneracy of the aristocracy, of the silliness of their views on property rights, and an affirmation of the Enlightenment view of man’s agency trumping the Divine Will.

In Salò, Pasolini is attempting to accomplish something very similar. In one of his last interviews, Pasolini stated that by coming up with the idea of setting de Sade’s novel in the time of the Salò Republic, he finally had a real insight into the “true choreography of Fascism.” In fact, Pasolini himself lived in Salò in his early twenties.  He personally witnessed horrible acts of brutality committed against the local population by the Fascists and the S.S., particularly against the region’s Jewish inhabitants (which, before the German invasion of Italy, had always been protected by Mussolini). Pasolini, then, had a first-hand experience with the brutality of fascism.

Like de Sade, Pasolini wanted to expose the moral degeneracy of a particular class (the Italian bourgeoisie), and its collaboration with fascism. However, unlike most Italian Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci who saw fascism as a “progressive” phenomenon because it supposedly drew segments of the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie into power, Pasolini had a much more radical viewpoint. In his view, fascism is all about the transformation of the human body into an object, a commodity. Many of his critics accused Pasolini of wanting to make just another exploitation film, since the only connection Salò has to fascism is in its setting. Oppression, torture, the dehumanization of people that are looked upon as “subhuman”-all of that is in Salò.  And what was fascism, but the systematic oppression, degradation, and torture of humanity? The Nietzsche and de Sade-quoting-“masters” in the film treat their victims as things, as objects to use and abuse for their pleasure; they are things to be used, ”consumed,” and destroyed. And it was this objectification of the body that Pasolini saw as the ultimate connection between fascism and consumerism. For fascism and consumerism are not tied to each other just by the fact that they force the individual to conform to an ideology and mode of behavior. The ultimate connection between the two is the process of objectification; that just as fascism attempted to turn its victims and their bodies into dehumanized objects, mass-consumerism , in a less obvious, but even more insidious way, turns the individual into a soulless thing, always eager to conform.

It was his views on the sub-proletariat, or, as many liberal and conservative sociologists today like to call them,  “the underclass,” that scandalized Pasolini’s fellow Communists the most.  He (correctly) viewed the working class with suspicion, as capable of being infected with the middle-class mores of the Italian bourgeoisie. The real opponent of bourgeois hegemony, according to Pasolini, was the peasant and the ragazzo di vita (young man of life), the young, unemployed hustler of the Roman borgate (slums), projects, and shantytowns. These were the people who Pasolini described to the Italian journalist Furio Colombo, in his last interview, as being “poor and real people who struggled to defeat the landlord without becoming that landlord.” According to him, “Since they were excluded from everything, they remained uncolonized”). These were people who refused to accept bourgeois, middle-class values, who refused to accept the white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant work ethic. These were people who fought against their oppressors, without wanting to become like their oppressors. Like Richard Wright, who also came to the same conclusion in his struggles with the American Communist Party, Pasolini saw that what the bourgeoisie should fear the most are not the workers, but rather those “abnormal” and “bohemian” types who refuse to accept its values, norms, and work ethic.

Of course, this did not sit well with most orthodox Marxists. Pasolini’s almost Weberian emphasis on  social attitudes and lifestyle instead of on class, his love for the peasant, and his romantic idealization of the lumpenproletariat, as well as his distrust of the laboring classes, was a complete reversal of the schema presented by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. This view of his also runs counter to the goal of every social worker, anthropologist, and sociologist on the planet.  Both the liberal and the conservative sociologist view the existence of the urban underclass as a problem that should be solved. For the conservative, the answer is less government dependency. For the liberal, the answer is for government programs for the alleviation of poverty. Pasolini sees the problem those who study the city have. In his 1958 article, The Shantytowns of Rome, he writes, “Ethnologists recognize the problem (of the underclass), the difficulty of conceiving an irrational state within a rational state in such a way that it does not seem gratuitous and schematic.”

Yet he will have none of their solutions.  For him, the underclass should stay, for it is the only thing standing between the modern city and the process of total gentrification. In Italy, this process of gentrification is described by Pasolini in a 1973 interview as a “process of acculturation, of the transformation of particular and marginal cultures into a centralized culture that homogenizes everything” and that “occurred more or less simultaneously all over Italy.” And in his 1958 article, The City’s True Face, he describes the Roman underclass’s  “acculturation” as an attempt to “mutate the deep mix of anarchy and common sense of these people into a kind of American -style indifference, a ‘standardized’ type, repeated obsessively, hundreds of thousands of times,”

Pasolini’s  romantic love for the underclass, an underclass vibrant and healthy and uncorrupted by middle-class values, as well as his sympathy foe society’s outcasts, were the two ideas that dominated his literary and cinematic works. These ideas are depicted in almost every single one of his films. His first film, Accatone (Street Urchins), which came out in the 1950s was a romantic, homo-erotic glorification of the young hustlers and hoodlums of the Roman borgate. Indeed, so realistic were the scenes in the film, that there were cries for censorship, particularly from the Christian Democrats, the  CIA-backed center-right party that ruled Italy, with very few interludes, from 1946 to the late 1970s, and which, in Pasolini’s view, was mainly responsible for  destroying Italy’s peasant culture in the name of “economic development.” His second film, Ricotta Cheese, depicted a semi-proletarian who is chosen to play Christ in a passion play, and who literally dies on the cross after having eaten some bad ricotta cheese. In The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, which, of all his films, is the most widely seen in the United States,  Pasolini portrays Christ, not as the gentle Good Shepherd found in the Gospels, but rather, as an angry, dedicated revolutionary who cares about the plight of the poor and is ultimately crucified  by the governing elites.

His so-called “Trilogy of Life” films—The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights—were immensely popular and became huge hits. In fact, it was the immense popularity of these films that, at least in part, prompted Pasolini to make Salò; for one of his greatest fears was that, in producing popular entertainment for the masses, he was helping to keep them in their condition of oppression; hence the shocking brutality of Salo. Unlike Chaucer or Boccaccio, though, who centered their tales on the heroic escapades and sexual adventures of the Italian and English aristocracy, Pasolini, in his film adaptations of their stories, like a true socialist, took a different tack.  In his versions of the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, the action is centered on the moral struggles waged by a hardy, but oppressed, peasantry, in their conflict with a dissolute aristocracy. In Porcile (Pigsty), two social outcast—a homosexual and a coprophiliac—find themselves in their fight against a society that oppresses them and views them as outsiders. And in Torema, (Theorem), which some critics say is his greatest film, we see a middle-class Italian family take in a stranger as a lodger. The “lodger” is really a bi-sexual extra-terrestrial who winds up seducing the mother, father, and the teenage son, and ultimately destroys their bourgeois susceptibilities. There is a constant theme, running like red thread, throughout almost all of Pasolini’s films. The theme of the young ragazzo and street hustler, and the social outcast and outsider who is oppressed by society and its “respectable” value—these twin loves of Pasolini’s are the very heart and soul of his films.

It is this concept of an oppositional subculture being co-opted by the culture of the establishment, that led Pasolini to formulate his critique of the beatnik and hippie counter-culture of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. For Pasolini, the hippie was the quintessential symbol of acculturation and cultural co-optation. At first glance, the hippie represented the very apex of cultural resistance to the bourgeoisie. The long hair, the drug use, the sexual promiscuity—all these things are the antithesis of bourgeois respectability. The hippie chooses a lifestyle that is contrary to the typical middle class norm. And it is precisely this emphasis on personal choice, on lifestyle, that Pasolini sees as the chief danger in the hippie’s world outlook. Many of the flower children of the 60s later became conservative. They kept the weed, but not the values. Pasolini saw that there was something inherent in the hippie counter-culture that led it, in an almost deterministic fashion, to become subsumed by the dominant establishment ideology. Why? Because of the inherent, hedonistic, consumerist character of the worldview of the hippie. The hippie of the 1960s, (who usually came from a middle-class background) emphasized the importance of the freedom to choose one’s lifestyle, one’s sexual orientation, one’s style of clothing, etc. It is a very personalized, customized ideology, an ideology that was co-opted in the late 1970s and early 80s, by the attempt of neoliberals to portray capitalism as a post-modernist utopia, where everyone is free to choose his own personal brand or style. Ultimately, it degenerated into an a-political and even anti-political, worldview. In his brilliant essay, The Hippie’s Speech, written in 1973, Pasolini commented on the middle-class snobbery of the hippie, and of the possibility of his being snatched up by a consumerist, and even fascist, culture. According to Pasolini:

That long hair (of the hippie) was hinting at right- wing ‘stuff’. The cycle is concluded. The subculture in power absorbed the subculture that was in opposition and took possession  of it with devilish ability, and passionately made of it a fashion that, if we cannot  really call it fascist in the classic sense of the word, is after all extremely right- wing….Now the long hair is saying, in its inarticulate and obsessed  language of non-verbal signs, in its vandal symbolism, the ‘things’ of T.V. and commercials, where it is now inconceivable to foresee a young person without long hair, something that nowadays would be a scandal for the power in charge….Nowadays no one could ever distinguish, from the physical presence, a revolutionary from a provocateur. Left and Right have physically merged.

In the early part of the century, one knew who was a fascist and who was not. The fascist had either a shaven head or a crew cut, he wore a black or brown uniform and armband, and raised his hand in the Roman salute. Now, one can have a short haircut, a clean shaven chin, and look like a “square,” and be on the Left, and a long-haired hipster can be on the Right, all as a result of a-political hedonism.

Pasolini may have been an unorthodox Marxist, but his views shocked those of the Left and the Right. His advocacy of what Furio Colombo called “a sort of magical paleo-Catholic and neo-Chinese monasticism” may sound a little strange, but his ruthless criticisms of a new, heartless capitalism that stultifies the intellectual life of modern man with shiny baubles, is as relevant today as when he began his crusade in what was then still an industrially backward nation. In an age of reality shows, of Entourage and America’s Next Top Model, Pasolini’s gloomy message should be hearkened to. And in a  United States with the largest underclass in the world and one of the highest poverty rates in the Western hemisphere, Pasolini’s prediction that “The core of the struggle for the Third World revolution is really America,” should be taken seriously.

So why is Pasolini’s social philosophy still relevant? Why should we read his essays and poems now, at this particular historical junction? We are living in an era of neoliberal capitalism; a capitalism that is trying to stamp out any form of cultural and political resistance. It is an insidious form of capitalism that tries to dull us with Gucci hand-bags and reality T.V. shows. By remembering Pasolini and his message, we can learn that what the bourgeois fears the most are oppositional cultural norms, rather than mass strikes. Let us hope his message will be remembered for as long as the bourgeoisie remains with us.

Share on Facebook

One of the first glimpses of The Social Network came in July, when an early trailer appeared on YouTube. It was a music video of sorts, featuring a children’s choir singing Radiohead’s first single, “Creep,” over images of typical Facebook photos and status updates—the latter typed into the blank text box in faux ‘real time,’ as in the recent Google ads. The pictures were the standard utopian scenes of youthful recreation that mark the many related genres of online photos: all-too-perfect snapshots of daytrips, candid clips of backyard BBQs, careless grins showcasing the finest balance of composed spontaneity. We see anonymous smiling faces frozen in scenes resembling an Urban Outfitters fall catalogue, which is what Facebook photos have essentially become.

They pop on-screen and disappear the way you click through a friend’s party. Click, click, click, and entire chains of happy days blossom and fade in split seconds. What takes hours to plan, document, sort, and upload then provides your third-grade best-friend with less than twenty seconds of entertainment on their iPhone, 2000 miles away and twenty years later.

A cursor arrow clicks on “add friend” and “confirm friend,” while recent graduates smile, arms wrapped around each other. Then a moody profile shot appears, with a hand reaching toward the camera lens and covering it. This is the other genre of the social network: the solo pose of self-representation, as tired as a freshman year art project. It signals an interruption to the fun. Suddenly someone types on a friend’s wall, and reveals the burrowed longing nestled in the heart of Facebook users everywhere: where are you?

Instructively, the choir answers through the point-blank confession of Thom Yorke’s stripped down loner: “I want you to notice when I’m not around.” What was grunge pathology becomes a prescient analysis of the emotions fueling the dot-com boom still to come. One asks to know, one wants to show, and billions of dollars follow. Time, distance, and desire converge in new wires that no longer require real-time communication between the curious and lonely, such as a phone-call, but instead function like a mass email to everyone. Connecting everyone is Facebook—a corporation that, as founder Mark Zuckerburg exclaims mid-way through the film The Social Network, takes the entire experience of college and puts it online.

The Radiohead lyrics overlaying these otherwise ubiquitous images are beautiful and eerie. They stamp what is perhaps a central and controversial theme of the film: that Facebook is not a technology of communication and connection, but one that exists to exploit alienation and exclusion. Any brouhaha about the truthfulness of the film’s representation of Zuckerburg is completely beside the point. Alienation and exclusion are the subjects of The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, and what appear again and again in the brilliant performance by Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuckerburg as the film chronicles his years before and after Harvard earlier this decade.

The riveting opening scene is an awkwardly dark conversation about social status between Zuckerburg and his date, Erica (Rooney Mara). Zuckerburg wants to join the elite Harvard social clubs where the children of the rich and privileged mingle, party, have sex, and build the affective bonds that will connect their professional and social networks for the rest of their careers. Erica is incredulous and more than a little disturbed by Zuckerburg’s open and cynical ambition. Over the course of the discussion they break up, and Zuckerburg return to his dorm to humiliate her in a blog, and subsequently invent a “hot or not” Harvard website with the help of his only friend, Eduardo Saverin. The site crashes the server.

The desire that Zuckerburg first channeled into a hierarchy of hotness is the same that animates the arrows that click “add friend.” Behind the spectral glow of the screens and photos are the missing bodies that these images and updates represent and display. This desire has many gradations and circulates with different intentions. It flows and morphs far beyond the urge to peek through the binoculars at the neighbors. Facebook isn’t about looking at strangers. Weirdly, it’s about looking at your friends and family, and also the people you only kind of know. It provides intimacy where intimacy is desired.

This desire for intimacy doesn’t necessarily come from lonely people. It doesn’t expose an overflow of information. It reveals the infinite desires that bodies make. It connects a disconnected, insatiable generation. It reveals that we can never be connected enough, despite our protests that we are too visible.

Zuckerburg’s loneliness and isolation inadvertently produced a technology to distribute the infinite waves of desire that flow through all relationships. This is in part because users themselves extended the logic of college friend profiles and began using them to mediate all social relationships. This caused some weirdness a couple years ago, when recent graduates found friend requests from their parents, or from “friends” they made in dance class the summer after eighth grade.

Discussions about the flattening of the past, the meaning of “friendship,” or the impracticalities of contemporary privacy miss the essential point of Facebook’s expansion. The growth of this entire company was propelled almost entirely by the desires of people everywhere to connect to one another. The company’s sole task, as Zuckerbug realizes in the film, was merely to provide channels to define, categorize, and capture that desire. It didn’t need advertising or need to convince anyone to join, aside from a few recalcitrant and independently minded individuals.

No one had to sell anyone else on Facebook, or Myspace, or even Friendster. The purpose of social networks was and remains obvious. People need to connect because they feel disconnected. They’re alienated. They’re distant from the people they love and care about. We live in a culture and in an economy that demands we act in our own self-interests. At best, some of us are able to live with people we love. Many don’t, or can’t.

Facebook—like communication technology in general—reflects a need that goes beyond putting the experience of college online. In the film, Zuckerburg uses Facebook to make friends, even as it alienates him from the one or two he already has. Facebook, then, isn’t so much a technology of connection as it is a revelation about the fractured and mediated nature of contemporary friendship.

It’s not a sign we’re more connected than ever—not quite. It’s a sign our bodies have never been more isolated from the bodies we want to be with. At the same time, the bodies we want have never been so visible. Facebook has more in common with porn than one might think.  Not coincidently, Zuckerburg stumbled onto the idea only after he created a “hot or not” site that crashed the Harvard servers. And that site came only after he was dumped.

In the film, Zuckerburg wants to be inside the Harvard clubs, and he wants to be with the girl he offends in the opening scene. The other half of that desire, however, is the desire for status, since it’s also status that makes the otherwise undesirable desirable. Zuckerburg can’t rely on an athletic body, and he doesn’t have the charisma that is so valuable in a US social culture that more and more resembles US corporate culture, where who you know, how energetic you are, and how positive you seem has as much to do with your success as talent or hard work.

The most important function of the “status update” is that it literally signals a status update. One’s friends have become one’s fans. The psychology of celebrity has been democratized – it’s no accident that the site rose to fame alongside the success of reality television and Youtube. Facebook is the logical extension of MTV’s The Real World. It’s a site where status and desire intersect, and those intersections are also where the film engineers its plot.

Status and desire are inseparable and fickle—and profitable. And so it’s impossible to separate what’s creepy and desperate about Facebook from its utility as an instrument of self-production and self-promotion. As an instrument for self-production, Facebook primarily encourages users to promote themselves and their way of life. Its function is in that sense reproductive of status, of class life, and of the digital architecture that provides actual maps to the bars, apartments, houses, concerts, and restaurants that physically sustain and excite the body. It’s one giant “app” for friendship.

To the extent that friendship accompanies the rituals that nourish and pleasure the body, Facebook is the prosthetic skin that envelopes collective relationships. It’s become the digital skin of friendship that allows us to graze each other from afar, like a touch in the hall.

As such, the site is perhaps the ultimate product of the neo-liberal era of privatization and modern corporate power.  Facebook has privatized social communication, class status, and, at the extreme point of this logic, all the human relationships that use it. It’s done this by monetizing friendship itself. It has turned the last location without corporate branding into a space of corporate intervention. Facebook is the first corporation to capitalize on relationships between people, and not simply the relationship between people and products, or between people and celebrities that sell products.

Embedded too within the company’s 25 billion dollar value is also the free promotion of products, companies, and businesses that people can “like,” and thus promote for free. It’s a site that captures the entire ethereal chain of viral marketing and solidifies it. Facebook has digitized desire. It’s channeled affections into categories. It has discovered how to formalize relationships by setting up a system for their public legitimation: one is “in a relationship” or “engaged to,” or “married to.”

In addition to providing a space for individuals to upload their lives—to digitize their values and desires and turn them into usable information and media for other companies—Facebook has allowed consumers disconnected from the production, promotion, and even consumption of products to push those products for free.

People push for what they “like” as naturally as they push to promote themselves and their friends. This is the privatization of advertising, propelled by human desire, and thus inaugurates the creation of a new kind of consumer-producer. One has become the ad for oneself. In one’s pictures one can create an ad campaign for his or her own lifestyle. One links this lifestyle to products. In some sense, Facebook has become the marketplace for selling our lives to each other. This is how we reproduce ourselves: we make ourselves desirable, and we link our affections to sites that ultimately make money.

Mark Zuckerburg turned his desire to be intimately close to desirable bodies into a technology that allowed everyone to do the same. He made billions turning friendship into a brand. Using that technology, we made profiles that essentially function like brands. Our profiles link to businesses and ads and companies. This is the synergy of US-style capitalist democracy. We are all Mark Zuckerburgs.

Share on Facebook

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1980 film Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie), known in the United States as Everyman for Himself and in the United Kingdom  as Slow Motion (on account of its most conspicuous special effect), has just finished a welcome revival at Film Forum.  Often hailed as Godard’s “second first film,” a moniker that originated with Godard himself, on balance the film both fits and eludes this definition.  What is not in question is that the film marked Godard’s return to the European film industry, and it was his first film to have a theatrical run in the United States since Tout Va Bien in 1971.  He has been working steadily, if not as prolifically as in his unsurpassed first decade, ever since: promoting his work at the usual festivals, granting interviews, and doing his best to remain the enfant terrible of the cinema with his generally oracular persona.  While even by Hollywood’s low standards the last thirty years have marked a coarsening of movies (with the rise of the Steven Spielberg “Blockbuster” as an emblem for this trend in Godard’s own view), Godard’s work has become more difficult, relentlessly so in some cases (see King Lear), to the point where critical opinion, noblesse oblige aside, is thoroughly divided between enthusiasm and bewilderment, to say nothing of the experience of the casual viewer or even the fan of Godard’s earlier work.

But Godard would not have had it any other way.  As his most recent biographer, Richard Brody, has noted, Godard’s offhand comment to an interviewer at Cannes in 1960, two months after the premiere of Breathless, accurately predicted what would become a tumultuous relationship with critics, audiences, and the industry.  Godard observed, “I have the impression of loving the cinema less than I did a year ago – simply because I have made a film, and that film has been well received, and so forth.  So I hope that my second film will be received very badly and that this will make me want to make films again.”  Part of why Godard had this impression about his “first first film” is because of how well it was received, a fact that is difficult to overstate.  Because of Breathless, Godard was touted as the next Orson Welles or D.W. Griffith: a director whose first film both reached a popular audience and revolutionized the medium.  Positivists might speculate that Godard bristle at such praise on account of his privileged upbringing and background.  He didn’t need the money; unfortunately, his underwriters did. 

At the beginning of Everyman , twenty years of fighting and bitterly compromising with the cultural establishment is clearly wearing on Paul Godard (Jacques Dutrunc), Jean-Luc’s avatar and the protagonist of the film, as we find him making phone calls from his room at what could also have been Adorno’s residence, “The Grand Hotel Abyss.”  Despite the tenseness exuded by Paul, the scene has a comic charm.  His neighbor in the hotel is a soprano wailing the “Suicidio!” aria from La Gioconda.  Godard bangs on the wall when her singing interferes with his phone call.  Then in an inspired absurdity, they both leave their rooms and the hotel alone but together.  She continues singing as they navigate to the giant hotel’s exterior: as they wait for the elevator; while they descend the escalator in the lobby. 

If there is a meaning to this unreal coincidence it is perhaps that the properties of an out-of-place fragment of an opera are transferable to Paul and by extension Godard himself.  La Gioconda is making a heroic sacrifice in killing herself, after selflessly helping her lover escape, to avoid a life of servitude to the villainous Barnaba.  It is not simply that such a heroic sacrifice for love and freedom is no longer possible in the film’s modern context.  Rather, it is as if the possibility of heroism is a nagging question for Godard, one that will not go away.  He wants to be a ruthless businessman of a director, a TV producer who doesn’t look for inspiration or worry about political struggle anymore, and yet romanticism is following him into the elevator and fighting with him over a taxi.  But if it won’t go away, still it isn’t possible for it fully to return.

“If I had enough courage I’d do nothing. But since I don’t I go on making films,” remarks a embitter Paul later that day to a classroom of aspiring students.  The saddest thing about this line, as Paul himself doesn’t hide in the least, is that it isn’t even his.  It belongs to Marguerite Duras, who he was supposed to bring to the class but failed to deliver.  The quote from Duras, like the a cappella aria, is nothing new in Godard’s films.  He has always been fond of borrowing fragments from cultural and artistic traditions.  Far from signaling a lack of inspiration, the accumulation of such fragments signals Godard’s underlying aesthetic, that of the melancholy allegorist.  Godard is painfully aware that the tradition of art has been subsumed and corrupted by capitalism; but he refuses to give in, holding up fragments from that tradition as a badly damaged moral compass within an a-historical consumer society.

The twist that Every Man gives to this well-known pattern is that Godard, through his avatar, steps out from behind the camera and into the frame. (Finally two films later, in Prenom: Carmen, he dispensed with avatar and began to play himself.)  Thus one experiences the dying, noble tradition not as a multimedia collage interpolated into Hollywood pastiches and peppered with leftwing cant, but as the cross Godard feels he must bear.  And it makes a difference when he is pestered by the classical music instead of the audience, or has to say his deep thoughts to a half-bored classroom instead of whispering them in voiceover to shots of beautiful women.  In both cases the melancholic as tragic hero has become a clown.

Another result of implicating himself in such a wilted, self-loathing protagonist is that the roles assigned to women are freed of the victimhood and scapegoating of the “first” Godard.  Paul’s girlfriend Denise (Nathalie Baye, who won a Cesar for her performance) is leaving him, but not, as in earlier Godard, for another man or with no plan at all.  She wants to escape the city, the relationship, and her stressful job at the television studio.  The film is masterfully ambiguous on the meaning of her new dream.  Is it a regression to want to live on a farm in the country and write for the local newspaper?  Or is it an attempt to grow up and move on?  Perhaps it’s both.  In any case, Godard’s camera loves Baye in the film, particularly when she rides her bicycle on country roads in slow motion.  The same roads where cannibals and interminable traffic once resided in Weekend are now safe for a bit of carbon-neutral afternoon exercise.  If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.

Denise’s double, the film’s other woman and the only one not physically repulsed by Paul, is the most conspicuous remnant from earlier Godard: a prostitute named Isabelle, played with robotic precision by a young Isabelle Huppert.  The film is divided into a series of chapters with titles that recall Godard’s cinematic essays from the Sixties: “The Imaginary,” “Fear,” “Music,” etc.  Isabelle first appears in the film around the beginning of the chapter marked, unsurprisingly, “Commerce.”  She picks up Paul outside a movie theater; I guess he didn’t really want to see the film.  Though the Every Man marks her for its more desperate and humiliating acts, she’s not just a victim.  And even as victim she seems to have been instructed to play the part so as to inspire as little sympathy as possible.  In any case, in a scene that would have been impossible for the first Godard because of censors and a certain antiquated patriarchal version of authority he naïvely presumed, Isabelle’s sister comes to visit her.  In need of money to help friends make bail, she wants to join the oldest profession.  Isabelle doesn’t try to convince her not to; she just wants to make her aware of what it will mean.  When her sister remains intent, she asks to see her breasts; judging them acceptable, the conversation moves on as if nothing traumatic had occurred.  At the end of the film the car that runs over and kills Paul is driven by one of the sister’s clients.  What’s left of her humanity compels her to roll down the window to examine the body.  It’s the most sympathy Paul has inspired in the entire film.  Her john decides it will be a hit and run; Paul’s ex-wife and daughter similarly abscond.   

When the film was originally released in 1980, it was mostly at odds with the satisfaction of many on the French Left who had just swept the socialists and Mitterrand into power.  Thirty years later, with its vision of a society connected seemingly only by exploitation, Every Man’s time has come.  It’s an art film for after the neoliberal crisis from the moment when its seeds were just being planted.  But alas, the timeliness of the film for current political and economic realities is hardly worth dwelling on.  Most people go to the movies to forget such realities; and even the small fraction of those that do go to see Godard will be more interested to know the fortieth anniversary print of Breathless returns to Film Forum just after Every Man leaves.  After all, something has to wash away the bitter taste of the latter.

Share on Facebook

Klaus Lowitsch in Fassbinder's Welt am Draht

Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

Few, if any, film careers come close to the star-crossed wonder and terror that was the life and work of German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who burst onto the scene in the late 1960s and who blazed, a baleful, maleficent, darkly beautiful comet across the nighttime sky of ’70s cinema, making a little over forty films in some thirteen years. These numbers alone are extraordinary, all the more so when looked at against the energy and turbulent life of the work, the high quality of so many of the films, and their daunting formal and generic diversity, ranging from the dramatic character studies of Fassbinder’s early and middle periods—Katzelmacher (1969, literally, Cat-Fucker) and Angst Essen Seele Auf (1974, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul)—to Fassbinder’s reinvention-by-destruction of the gangster film (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod: 1969, Love is Colder than Death), the Western (1971’s Whity, a Gothic-Western-family-incest-with-torture drama), and the historical-pastiche classic-novel-adaptation film (Effi Briest, 1974, from Theodor Fontane’s novel of the same title), to the great, definitive Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or BDR, trilogy, the crowning work of Fassbinder’s late period and career: Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979, The Marriage of Maria Braun), Lola (1981, a retelling of Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel]), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982, Veronika Voss). 

Along the way Fassbinder created a genre of film reminiscent of Douglas Sirk’s but uniquely his own, the camp psychosexual melodrama, aided by a rotating cast drawn from a commune of actors, friends, and lovers. These films are devoted, unsurprisingly, to the troubled lives of flawed, conflicted people, many marginalized by outlook, habits, and desires (Fassbinder’s favorites, in art and in life, rampant drug use and all kinds of paraphilia and fetishism), all of them touching (and touched) in the manner of Warhol’s Superstars and People You Know: the film-scene trash of Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (1971, Beware of a Holy Whore), the fashion divas in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), and the gullible, innocent Fox in Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975, Fox and His Friends). Fassbinder wrote all of these films, as well as the others, and acted in many of them, even starring in some, further adding to his legend. Along the way he managed to turn out the fourteen television episodes of his adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berliner Alexanderplatz (1980, at 894 minutes, some fourteen-and-a-half hours long, one of the longest narrative films ever made), plus a number of plays and short films,—a demonic, almost satanic, output, redolent of folklore and myth, like the damnation of Faust, who traded his soul for unlimited knowledge, or Paganini’s rumored-at trading of his soul for a fiendish virtuosity with the violin. Unlike the breakout careers of many auteurs—Jean-Luc Godard’s unprecedented ’60s films, which yielded to his less-celebrated work in the ’70s and ’80s, come to mind, as does Robert Altman’s defining ’70s work, which ended with Popeye in 1980—Fassbinder’s meteoric successes kept on coming until he died, from an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills, at the age of thirty-seven. 

One of Fassbinder’s works for television is the three-and-a-half-hour 1973 science-fiction Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), recently restored and on view at the Museum of Modern Art. While certainly not Fassbinder’s best work, World on a Wire has enough interesting and diverting moments that make it worth viewing; its style (if not its subject matter) and technique, in addition to its obscurity (it wasn’t screened in the United States until the MOMA run), make it a fascinating, if flawed, addition to his canon, a radiant cinematic gem, multifaceted and shimmering. A lot of this glitter is quite literal, a product of the film’s meticulous, on-a-television-budget set design: as with so many of his films, Fassbinder fills his interior spaces—here, largely a suite of offices and the private homes and playgrounds of the technocrats who staff the IKZ Cybernetics Institute—with all manner of mirrors, windows, screens, glassware, and other reflective and refractive surfaces. Often we see the actors’ faces and bodies broken into many shards by these image-making props, a formal quality that mirrors one of the film’s dominant themes, the fracturing and shattering of the human psyche and humanist philosophies of the self, language, and knowledge, by the assault of mass media and modern technology and by the challenges posed by twentieth-century philosophies and movements usefully labeled postmodernism. This theme, which displays several key postmodern concepts—the self as a performance, the contingency of identity, the instability of memory and perception; the constant presence of technology as a mediating agent between humans and the world; the challenging or discarding of enlightenment, humanist, and democratic values—is also reflected in the film’s plot, which centers on the scientist Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), who becomes increasingly paranoid after the mysterious death of his former superior at IKZ, Dr. Henri Vollmer (Adrian Hoven). Vollmer’s death is somehow connected to IKZ’s current project, the construction of Simulacron 1, a virtual-reality world that houses nearly a thousand electronic lives, all programmed by the doctors and scientists at IKZ to provide a dynamic model by which to predict future political, social, and economic events and long-term trends. As Stiller desultorily investigates Vollmer’s death—World on a Wire is part picaresque police procedural, a genre dear to many postmodern narratives—he begins to suffer an increasingly disturbing sequence of events: he first imagines the disappearance of IKZ’s security chief Günther Lause (Ivan Desny), only to learn that no-one, not even the firm’s computer, has ever heard of Lause; he cannot recognize, and cannot trust, the “real” security chief, Hans Edelkern (played with silky menace by Joachim Hansen); he suffers hallucinations, acts erratically at work and at home, and is almost killed in a bizarre construction accident. Worst is Stiller’s growing dissatisfaction with IKZ and its head, Herbert Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau), who has been promising private test-runs of Simulacron 1 for private corporations looking to make a killing in the brave new market of the cybernetic forecasting of the future: Stiller sees Simulacron 1 as having untapped social benefits that would be traduced by commercial co-optation and the dominance of his research by profit imperatives. 

Fassbinder (second and third from left)

Stiller, like so many postmodern antiheroes trapped in worlds and narratives not of their own making—one thinks of Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, also from 1973, or any number of Philip K. Dick’s slouching, addled, incompetent protagonists (of which Jason Taverner, whose official identity disappears, all records of his life gone, in 1974’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, is not a bad example)—is quite clearly losing it, but the film is clear from the start that “it” wasn’t much to begin with, a bit of neural smoke and mirrors, linguistic computations, false memories stored and looped again and again, but nothing approaching a stable, whole, grounded human psyche or soul, as earlier generations had maintained. Many of the scientists are aware of this, and discuss epistemological issues while tinkering on Simulacron 1 or sitting in meetings—“You are nothing more than the image others have made of you,” is one such chestnut, a line both dorkier and more portentous than most water-cooler chatter, but one that nevertheless serves to reiterate the film’s themes. If all of this “Do-We-Have-Souls” chatter begins to sag a bit during Stiller’s quest—along the way he learns that his reality is itself a computer simulation inside the “actual” Simulacron 1, a fun idea but one that’s been drained of its shock by later films like The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor (both 1999, the latter based, like World on a Wire, on Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 novel Simulacron 3)—one has to give Fassbinder credit for trying, and on television, no less: the film is a bit dutiful in its exposition of the ills of postmodern, corporatized, mediated life, but it’s a beautiful dutifulness, all chrome and fluorescent lights and long echoing corridors (themselves an echo of the long echoing corridors of Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville, an important predecessor for World on a Wire and whose star, Eddie Constantine, makes a brief cameo here, a nice film-geek mise-en-abyme), with chunky, bright-colored plastic telephones and thick glass ashtrays, each meticulously arranged object seeming somehow weightier, more solid and real, than the humans moving and speaking among them. Seen in its cultural contexts, among novelists like Pynchon and Dick, or critical and cultural theorists like Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard—whose The Society of the Spectacle and Simulacra and Simulation, published respectively in 1967 and 1985, thematically and temporally bookend World on a Wire—the film is both of its time and uncannily prescient, an anticipation and dress-rehearsal, if not for the total affective heat-death of the modern world, then for the various challenges to (and opportunities for) life and survival that are posed by our own post-postmodern, post-human, post-everything present. 

If anything, World on a Wire is a sunnier, more naïve version of post-humanism than the ones we’re steadily being acclimated to, with our apocalyptic visions of anthropogenic climate change, the Pacific and Atlantic Garbage Gyres, resource wars, economic crises and looming energy crunches: if the world of the film is only a simulation, at least it’s one in which the omnipresent, sinister security staff (one of whom is played by Fassbinder regular El Hedi ben Salem, who is unforgettable as Ali in Angst Essen Seele Auf) wear immaculately-tailored pinstriped suits and echt-’30s-gangster fedoras. Fassbinder’s vision of an icy, mortified, denatured future is infinitely preferable to our own present’s rape camps and forced migrations, paramilitary assassination squads, and illiterate child soldiers. This is a vision of a weightless, gleaming postindustrial information age before cyberpunk—in the form of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)—came along and finished it off with its edgy haircuts, body mods, leather jackets, and mirrorshades. World on a Wire presents postmodernity without the crumbling cities and the ubiquitous grime and drip of these later works: a kinder, gentler dystopianism, a vision of the world as an endlessly gleaming shopping mall-cum-office park, as if the city-in-a-dome of Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976) had been populated with the dissolute elites and murderous professionals of J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) and Super-Cannes (2000). Fassbinder’s ruling passions—gay sex, cruelty, drugs, transgression—may be largely absent from World on a Wire, but his directing, all sinuous glides and quick close-ups, and the overall look of the film make it compulsively watchable; while not his best work (a fraught notion with a director as prolific as Fassbinder) there are nevertheless brilliant glints of fire and light at the heart of this icy diamond.

Share on Facebook

The skies in Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island are one of the most remarkable special effects I’ve ever seen at the cinema: lowering and grey, impenetrably thick, and wholly impassive to human suffering, they’re a perfect doubling, visually and symbolically, of the claustrophobic atmosphere that pervades the film from start to finish. The skies are sublime because they’re so terrifically fake: ever the b-movie pasticheur, Scorsese and his special effects crew (most notably Visual Effects Supervisor Robert Legato and Production Designer Dante Ferretti) have opted against realism and have made the skies vibrantly, triumphantly unreal, like the skies seen in the process shots in older films—or, better, like the uncanny skies in the luminously contrived combination prints of Victorian photographers O. G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson: fictive skies, then, mental weather, a dystopian, world-smothering air. Seeing such a self-conscious and unapologetically bad use of CG in 2010—a few months after the commercial and artistic apotheosis of Avatar, harbinger of brave new standards in the realistic, immersive use of CG—is a lovely moment, a point of Benjaminian rupture, with Scorsese the cinematic prophet-flaneur looking, instead of forward to the sleek new contours of twenty-first-century digital cinema, defiantly backward to the glorious ruins of twentieth-century movies in all their meretricious splendor.

Unfortunately, the skies are not the only thing in Shutter Island, which for the most part is a cold porridge of a movie, a lumpy, unpleasant goo that one forces down unwillingly, hoping for a stray raisin or two before the mess is finished. The film is chiefly bad in that it’s a bore, a tedious, self-important exploration of that hoariest of Hollywood clichés, the troubled mind of the noble hero who fights against all odds a corrupt, unseen force that conspires to destroy him. Scorsese has swum in similarly unpromising waters before, in his neo-noir masterpiece Cape Fear, but whereas that tiny, tawdry gem was illuminated from within by its baroque flashes—Max Cady’s catalogue of tattoos; the overpowering air of fear, guilt, violence, and sex; the delirious ending (that 360-degree camera spin when the out-of-control houseboat hits the big tree branch in the river!)—Shutter Island is weighed down by its own, from the rusty catwalks and dripping pipes and peeling walls of the island’s mysterious insane asylum to the frequent, Technicolor, wholly sappy dreams of Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), a US Federal Marshall who is first sent to the island to investigate the disappearance of a female patient. Along the way he must investigate a conspiracy he thinks lies behind the patient’s disappearance, and also plumb the recesses of his soul, this latter a frequent Scorsese trope, familiar from films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Casino, etc., but one that here is flattened into banality by an over-earnest, over-talkative script by Laeta Kalogridis (based on a novel by Dennis Lehane), and a sense of heaviness and portentousness that ill fits the film’s deliciously schlocky premise. At times the feeling is uncannily close to those old ’40s and ’50s b-noirs, where an entire plot hinges improbably on a jury-rigged, deus-ex-machina folderol of the screenwriter’s, reeking of third-rate Freudianism and a leadenly deterministic view of the human psyche: one might be tempted to say of Shutter Island that “it’s just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis,” as Alfred Hitchcock said of his own Spellbound. For right from the start Daniels’s quest for the missing patient dovetails too conveniently with his exploration of his own inner demons, and we sense that the conspiracy he’s investigating is really the product of his own warped imagination: it isn’t long before we understand that Daniels is himself insane, an inmate on the island condemned to repeat, forever, his memories of having once been free. While the silliness of the concept might have been redeemed by some combination of virtuoso imagery, sound, editing, all working to create a portrayal of the inner experience of madness—think the recursiveness of Last Year at Marienbad crossed with the stark imagery of Claire Denis’s The Intruder, and scored by Bernard Herrmann—Shutter Island insists on an incessant literalism, a reconfiguration of the psyche’s unnamable monsters as so many seen-before cinematic props and mannequins: the lost wife, the madman in the cell, the doctor who might be evil. (At the film’s climax, Daniels actually has his madness spelled out for him via chalkboard, a new low in the cinema of mental-illness-as-cheap-plot-device.) When Daniels’s insanity is finally formally “revealed”—anyone not asleep in the audience has guessed it long before, likely within the first fifteen minutes—I couldn’t help but think of another Hitchcock film, his 1950 misfire Stage Fright, in which a false flashback that has provided the bulk of the film’s plot is finally, disastrously revealed as being false, thus invalidating the viewer’s entire experience of the film in favor of a hastily-tacked-on (to us) “real” ending. (Hitchcock called it “one thing . . . that I never should have done,” a rare admission of aesthetic failure from a notoriously imperial, mandarin director.) Shutter Island’s final revelation is even more objectionable in that we’ve seen it coming for some hours, have long since stopped caring about the plot’s tortuous (read: torturous) efforts to surprise and beguile.

There are actually some quite wonderful things in Shutter Island, moments of light and levity that sidle up uncomfortably against the taxidermied ghouls and goblins. Mark Ruffalo is great as Daniels’s partner/therapist Chuck Aule: rumpled yet earnest, Ruffalo brings a seedy gravitas that’s yet another of the film’s borrowings from the visual landscape of noir from half a century ago. John Carroll Lynch is suggestively creepy as Deputy Warden McPherson, and Ben Kinglsey as Dr. Cawley, Shutter Island’s head doctor, is occasionally terrifying, especially when he’s not expounding upon this or that treatment or theory. At times, the film’s investment in Daniels’s madness reaches operatic heights, offering indelible images—Daniels entering the asylum in a truck, the walls and towers soaring over him like a vast medieval castle, the home of evil giants; or Daniels rising from Boston Harbor and approaching the asylum’s iconic lighthouse, where he’ll either find the final truth behind the conspiracy or die trying (in a sense, he does both, as his madness is revealed to him here): with these images Shutter Island reaches for, and achieves, a visual poetry that shows, rather than merely tells, the heroic dimensions of Teddy Daniel’s lurid delusions. And there’s a bravura overhead tracking shot that seems to come straight from the opening of both The Night of the Hunter and They Live By Night, as we see from far off Daniels entering the asylum, and zoom in on him with a vertiginous, dreamlike speed: more of these shots—where the visuals do the work of advancing the narrative, embodying its themes without the need for tendentious exposition—would have been better. Unfortunately, these moments pass by in fits and starts, and we’ve lurched off once again into another long scene rife with dialogue, extraneous characters (Max von Sydow as a perhaps-once-a-Nazi-doctor? But why?), faux-symbolist dream montages (in which Michelle Williams as Daniels’s dead wife doesn’t have much to do, despite her ravishing ’50s housedresses), and yet more dialogue (the Warden, played by Ted Levine, delivers a particularly unconvincing “life is violence, killing, and death” speech that reads as if cribbed right out of the Judge’s great paean to violence, killing, and death in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian) and more dialogue again. The bathetic apotheosis of all of this comes during Daniels’s final, traumatic flashback, in which we learn that it’s he who is responsible for his wife’s death: that Daniels killed her in retaliation for her murder-by-drowning (she was mad, alas) of their children. Cradling the sodden corpses of his children, standing chest-deep in the lake in which they’ve drowned, Daniels rears back and lets forth with a bloodcurdling “Noooooooo!” that’s a perfect gloss—both shining example and absurdist deconstruction—on all other bloodcurdling “Noooooooo!”s ever bloodcurdlingly “Noooooooo!”ed on film. The moment made me and my companion chortle uproariously, easily my most honest, most heartfelt response to the film: such a necessary catharsis, such a purgation through laughter of pity and fear!

It’s a bit of a drag to have Shutter Island come on the heels of Scorsese’s wonderful late-period work, after the luridness of Gangs of New York, the glittering surfaces and frank cinemaphilia of The Aviator, the lean-and-dirty nastiness of The Departed: even compared to the Rolling Stones’ concert-film Shine a Light (which is hardly The Last Waltz but is still completely watchable), Shutter Island seems like a bloated, misshapen mess. What strikes most about the film is its irrelevance: let’s call it Scorsese’s Marnie (with DiCaprio as Tippi Hedren), another long and drasty psychodrama that reads today as either an attempt at a final masterwork or as its maker’s artistic cenotaph and mausoleum. Shutter Island is thankfully neither, but it’s bad enough to make me feverishly await the next good Scorsese film.

Share on Facebook

Tahir Rahim in A Prophet

In the final sequence of Jacques Audiard’s engrossing crime drama, A Prophet, the attentive viewer will notice a deft choice of soundtrack.  The tune is a familiar one, Brecht and Weill’s ubiquitous classic “Mack the Knife,” but the rendition is obscure: a droll country arrangement sung by Jimmie Dale Gilmore (who himself achieved screen immortality as “Smokey” in The Big Lebowski).  Gilmore’s “Mack the Knife,” with its mixture of the familiar and the unexpected, is a nice emblem for Audiard’s film, which is able to refresh some of the most conventional aspects of the American gangster film—the improbable rise to power, the double-cross, the camaraderie amongst criminals, and of course, the charismatic anti-hero—by relocating them to contemporary multicultural France.

The film follows the survival, education, and triumph of one Malik El Djebena (played with understated aplomb by Tahir Rahim), a young man we meet at the beginning of the film on the first day of his new life in the French penal system.  His crime is vaguely defined and like everyone else in jail, he proclaims his innocence.  The rest of Malik is equally inchoate.  He doesn’t know his parents and has no connections in the outside world.  He can’t read or write.  He’s Arab, but when asked what language he learned to speak first, French or Arabic, he answers, “Both.”  In response to questions about his religion at the beginning of the film, Malik is similarly divided.   When a prison guard asks him if he has dietary restrictions, Malik appears not to understand the question.  When the guard simplifies it to “Do you eat pork?”  Malik first answers “No” and then hesitantly “Yes.”

In Mike Judge’s Office Space, we learned that in order to survive in prison you either have to kick someone’s ass or become someone’s bitch.  To play it safe, Malik does both.  The Corsican mafia that dominates the other inmates with the help of the corrupt prison guards is ordered by its home office to liquidate a new prisoner and underworld rival due to inform at a trial within weeks.  Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), the informant, is Arab and gay.  Malik is handsome and conveniently located on his cellblock for temporary stays and new entries.  For these reasons and because they prefer not to risk one of their own for the mission, the Corsicans, led by their diminutive, Napoleonic elder statesman Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup), decide that Malik will do the killing for them.  The short story of Reyeb’s assassination is a cinematic tour-de-force.  Malik is in way over his head, and thanks to Audiard’s visceral direction, so too are we the viewers.  In the yard when the proposition is made to him, his fear is unrefined.  He shakes and shifts his eyes unsteadily amongst his “protectors,” especially as he’s warned that any attempt to shirk responsibility will result in his death rather than Reyeb’s.  Foolishly, he tries to back out anyway.   But rather than meeting with the warden per his request, the Corsicans visit his cell to remind him of the extent of their power with a mock execution.

What follows is the beginning of Malik’s education.  Getting to justly suspicious Reyeb will not be easy.  Malik must learn to put a razor blade in his mouth and act natural; then call it forth into his teeth at a second’s notice to slash his target’s throat.  It is one of cinematic murder’s more athletic forms.  Malik’s training sessions, in which he first pretends to stimulate his instructor’s genitals and then leaps up and puts the blade to his throat, are thorough and he practices diligently, but he lacks talent.  In the event, he’s shaking with fear and adrenaline, which Reyeb seems to mistake for nervousness about their impending sexual encounter.  But when Malik realizes blood is dripping from the side of his mouth that contains the razor, he gives up waiting for his victim to enter a more vulnerable state.  The struggle that ensues between them is contained by the film, but just barely.  The murder is a chaotic masterpiece and the audience is more witness than spectator.  The scene recalls the realisms of Hollywood’s greatest contemporary purveyor of violence, Paul Greengrass, and its greatest critic, Michael Haneke.  But Audiard manages to surpass them both: not so much in the way the event is depicted, though arguably there too, but in the way it inflects the rest of the film.  In dreams, in waking life, Reyeb obstinately haunts Malik’s coming-of-age.  The idea that murder afflicts the murderer’s conscience is one of the least represented in all of cinema.  Just before Malik offs him, Reyeb encourages Malik learn to read while in prison.  After he learns that his deed has earned him Corsican protection, the first thing Malik does is enroll in the prison’s language arts class.

That Malik’s journey from anonymity to the French equivalent of Michael Corleone is improbable is an accepted convention of the film’s genre.  But advances in the complexity of crime and police procedural genre television, such as The Sopranos and The Wire, are beginning to make the arc of cinematic storylines like A Prophet’s seem strained.  On The Wire, for instance, there is no need for one character to remain in an impossible state of grace while the criminal world explodes around him.  If it is logical or probable that a lead character should meet his demise, the show has plenty of other plot lines to follow through on, given its multivalent narrative structure.  Audiard’s genius in A Prophet, however, resides not in apologizing for the improbability of his hero, but in the way he magnifies the unlikelihood of Malik’s success.  It is literally a divine circumstance.  Malik is a prophet (and a Muslim one at that).  He has visions of the future and a guardian angel in the form of Reyeb’s ghost.  He undergoes a spiritual transformation while in solitary confinement for forty days and forty nights.  In the final battle sequence, his opponents’ bullets travel in slow motion while he playfully hides under a corpse.  Perhaps most notably, at the moment when Reyeb’s criminal partner deduces Malik’s part in his friend’s murder, Audiard resorts to a kind of secular deus ex machina.  Their car strikes an antelope that Malik has seen in a dream, at which point his enemies begin to believe.

But the real miracle of the film is the care that goes into its moving parts.  The camera work is often astonishing.  The film score is moving but unobtrusively atmospheric.  Reyeb’s intermittent and surreal presence is a distant allusion to the work of David Lynch; but rather than terrorizing Malik, Reyeb’s ghost adds depth to Malik’s character.  He is living for them both now.  Audiard uses surrealism to do the most difficult thing in storytelling: to show the inner life of his hero rather than merely recite it.  But above all, the film is carried by its actors.  Tahar Rahim plays Malik with an awkward grace best exemplified by the strange boyish mustache he wears for most of the movie.  It is the one part about him that is equally French and Arab.  But it is Niels Arestrup as Cesar Luciani, Malik’s protector, mentor and archenemy, with his virtuosic oscillations between unflappable calm and rage, who supports the film where it otherwise lacks foundation.  At each step in Malik’s journey toward criminal mastery, Cesar is there to remind him, quite violently in fact, who it is that guarantees his existence.  And yet with each one of these tirades one notices the emperor’s robes looking a little more threadbare.  Of course it doesn’t help that the Corsicans’ numbers in the prison are dwindling while the Arab population swells.

One scene in particular is a testament to both actors, but particularly Arestrup.  With the help of a recently released friend and another who is an experienced hash dealer on the inside, Malik has been using part of the release time Cesar bought for him to begin smuggling hash into the prison and controlling its distribution.  Then in an instance of what business professors call “the curse of competitive markets,” rival hash dealers are angered by the newcomers and kidnap Malik’s closest friend, Ryad (Abel Bencherif).  Malik responds by kidnapping the rival gang leader’s mother and ambushing his brother inside the prison.  When the hostage exchange is made and Malik is riding high on his success, he has the misfortune to happen upon his old boss, who has recently gotten wind of Malik’s new, independent operations.  With a cup of coffee and a fatherly curiosity Cesar masterfully draws out Malik, who is only too happy to confess his recent accomplishments.  Then Cesar shows why he needs anger management courses.  From across the table, he seizes Malik by the neck and forces the spoon he had been harmlessly cleaning with his tongue under his protégé’s eyelid, all while explaining to him that he has risked losing his leave days that Cesar counts on to negotiate his business affairs in Marseilles by proxy.  After this interview Malik never lets his guard down again.  Cesar’s final lesson serves his pupil only too well.

“Mack the Knife” has perhaps the most unlikely history of any American pop-song of its era.  In 1958, more than two decades of The Threepenny Opera premiered and a little over a decade after Brecht improbably cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee despite being blacklisted anyway, Bobby Darrin rode the “communist” murder ballad to the top of the Billboard charts and a Grammy Award at the height of the Cold War.  Similarly, if the quality of a film is any indication of its box-office potential, then Malik, a Muslim gangster who weakens the Corsican mafia while consolidating Arab organized-crime, is destined to endear himself to audiences on the opposite side of “The War on Terror.”  But then again, cultural differences aside, Americans have always loved a good criminal.

Share on Facebook

The White Ribbon directed by Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke’s latest film, The White Ribbon, is easily his least controversial and most audience-friendly work. It has already earned many honors including the Palm D’Or at Cannes, three European Film Awards, and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign picture. It is also the favorite for the Foreign Film Oscar next month. Set in a remote German village, the film follows the lives of its villagers at an auspicious moment, the year leading up to the First World War. But that traumatic event is hardly a concern to them. Their trouble is that someone in their midst is committing violent crimes seemingly at random. A doctor falls from his horse when a trip-wire is set outside his home. A peasant-woman dies in a purported accident at the mill. Months later the Baron’s son disappears and is found traumatized from a sadistic torturing. The police are summoned but the crimes continue. The film’s interest resides in solving the mystery. Its mood is sometimes menacing, occasionally comic, and for the most part austere in the way that cineastes have come to expect from the Austrian auteur.

The White Ribbon’s stated purpose, and Haneke is nothing if not an oppressively didactic director, is to examine the origins of Fascism. To this end it features a first for a Haneke feature film, a prominent voiceover narrator, in the form of the village schoolteacher vaguely recalling the film’s events in his old-age. This accounts in large measure for the film’s accessibility if also for its presumptuous moralization. We get a tentative hypothesis to start: maybe the generation born around the turn-of-the-century turned to Fascism after studying and experiencing the hypocrisy and depravity of their forefathers. The secret message of the film, however, seems to be that these children are at bottom unaccountably evil.

The film is beautifully rendered in monochrome, achieved by filming in color and then reducing the picture to black-and-white. Call it, if you will, an unwitting metaphor for Haneke’s oversimplified account of the rise of Fascism. Or is it instead a programmatic choice made to correlate with Haneke’s first foray into historical period drama? Perhaps it’s both: history in the film is distorted by the narrator’s memory; yet this distortion comes across as an authoritative distillation of the moment rather than the product of an inaccurate recollection.

The dialogue in the film is some of Haneke’s finest, ranging from ribald to brutally honest, and it has the happy effect of counteracting the film’s too general historical claims. Particularly memorable is an exchange between the village midwife (played by Haneke ensemble mainstay Susanne Lothar) and the local doctor (Rainer Bock). The latter undergoes the most dramatic transformation of any character in the film and could be called its antihero. In an early scene he plays the victim and receives our sympathy when he falls from his horse. His children are also probably the most likeable characters in the film. But after this argument he is no longer the victim if not wholly the perpetrator either. The two have been carrying on an affair for some time, but it is hardly the kind Emma Bovary and her disciples dreamt of. The midwife loves him and in addition to working as his personal assistant has looked after his children since his wife’s death.

The nominal reason for their argument is a proverbial one. He can’t get it up and uses this as the tipping point to call it quits. His strategy is aggressive if not effective: tell her in the starkest possible terms that she disgusts you. The dialogue is some of the frankest I can remember in a recent movie. He tells her his imagination isn’t strong enough to conjure other women during sex anymore. She tells him she’ll do something desperate. He says he could care less. She accuses him of molesting his daughter and behaving more cruelly to his wife than he does to her. He gets the final word, which is all the crueler because of how bored and casual he seems when he asks, “Why can’t you just die?”

The Doctor isn’t the only abusive patriarch in the village, although his particular faults –incest, pedophilia—make him something of a team standout. Indeed, each village elder has a fault to match their position. The pastor (Burghart Klaußner) seems to relish punishing his children a little too much. For their part, his oldest two tend to give him a reason. The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) endangers, neglects, and then patronizes his workers. His steward (Josef Bierbichler) viciously attacks one of his boys, which passes for normal by the time it occurs in the film. The only authority figure who doesn’t seem to appreciate a little of the old ultra-violence is surprisingly the school teacher. He’s too young and distracted by love to care as much as he should about beating, molesting, and generally tormenting his students. But in the end he has perhaps the most violent idea of anyone about the identity of the criminal, an idea which even the draconian parson recoils from.

The white ribbon of the film’s title is worth examining here. Early in the film the parson punishes his two oldest children for not being home in time for supper in part by forcing them to wear a piece white ribbon on their person for the foreseeable future. It is something he had them do when they were younger, so that they would be reminded of purity and innocence. He had thought they no longer needed such prompting. Clearly he is unfamiliar with teenagers. But these teens are not ordinary adolescents. Their burdens are both heavier and lighter. Of course, on the one hand, when they come under their father’s cold gaze, they have the audience’s sympathy. But there is also something disquieting about them throughout the film. For them morality seems to be strictly an external institution, not something they feel within. In this sense the ribbon comes to stand for the fact that a message can fail to reach its destination. The only thing the ribbon seems to remind the children of is that they are still treated like children, in the worst sense. But ultimately perhaps the ribbon stands for not purity and innocence, nor even their opposites, but for the superficiality of concepts such as these in the face of a grinding and exploitative social order.

The irony here is that while The White Ribbon condemns purity to oblivion, Haneke’s whole program as a filmmaker up to this point has been in some sense to purify the contemporary cinema of its worst political distortions and technological pretentions. Indeed, Haneke’s output could be said to consist of a three-part logical form. His film’s perform a critique of some aspect(s) of existing cinema practice (usually a genre or an element of film language); but this essentially negative process of critique generates an ambiguous remainder in the form of a fascination with sensational violence; finally, his films, or the better ones at least, redeem this fascination with sensational violence by attempting to make viewers conscious of other more fundamental modes of economic and semantic violence.

The White Ribbon, indeed, contains one of Haneke’s greatest examples of this movement from sensational to economic and semantic violence. When the tenant farmer’s wife is killed in an accident at the mill, he is obviously distraught. But the cruelty of the situation is further compounded by the fact that he cannot complain about her death, let alone demand some kind of inquiry, given the extent of his family’s dependency upon the Baron, on whose property the accident occurred. The farmer’s silence is, as one might expect, drowned out by the righteous indignation of his son, who fights with his father over whether they should take action and later uses his scythe to the destroy the baron’s lettuce patch as revenge. The result of the son’s action is not justice, but its distortion. The baron fires the farmer’s daughter from her steady job and the family can be assured of losing its seasonal employ in harvesting his crops. They go, in other words, from bad to worse; from only motherless to near starvation. And the only act in the whole exchange that society considers a crime is the destruction of the lettuce.

But all this is merely the set-up for a punch in the gut. After his oldest son returns from prison and all seems to be returning to its place, history repeats itself. One of the farmer’s sons opens the door to the barn in the midst of his daily chores and finds his father hanging from a rope. And like his father before him he is unable to outwardly grieve. He turns around to see his younger siblings laughing and playing. He doesn’t interrupt them. He walks back into the house and we see his older sister, looking tired and anxious, busy preparing a meager dinner. Again he doesn’t interrupt. He sits down at the end of the room and the scene ends.

When Haneke accepts the Oscar next month, it will not be for this kind of inexorably logical storytelling. But it should be. He will get it instead for having made a subdued prequel to the cinema of the Holocaust, the Academy’s preferred genre. Yet Haneke’s explanation of the rise of Fascism is hardly historically grounded, nor for that matter is it psychologically convincing, as it needs to rely on an almost mythic criminality that is tantamount to nihilism. The achievement of this film lies not in its stated relation to events outside itself, but in its details. The story of the tenant farmer’s decline is perhaps Haneke’s finest depiction yet of the violence inherent in an economic system. 

Share on Facebook

Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2009) and Nightwatching (2007), directed by Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway has always been a visually-oriented director. Originally trained as a painter, Greenaway meticulously structures the images in his films, revealing a care and attention to the meaning of visual composition that is almost unheard of in popular cinema. Indeed the compositions of many of his frames look more like seventeenth century paintings than twentieth century film stills. This attention to the details of the visual image, often at the expense of any illusion of narrative reality, has, not surprisingly, been met with very mixed reviews. For those used to the strong narrative focus and action-driven aesthetics of directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Quentin Tarantino, Greenaway’s work may feel overly intellectual, emotionally cold, or just plain boring. Those more interested in the potential visual and structural experiments that are still possible in film, however, will be much more likely to appreciate Greenaway’s attention to the power of the image. His emphasis on the visual and rejection of the illusion of cinema is more in line with the aesthetics of the avant-garde works of directors like Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and Luis Bunuel. Like these directors Greenaway is unafraid of calling attention to the artificiality of his own work as art. For Greenaway, film is no more real than a painting or a sculpture and its aesthetic roots lay not in the theatre, but in the visual arts.

In this sense Greenaway’s career has been an ongoing battle against the prevailing decline of visual literacy. And in his latest film, the documentary Rembrandt’s J’accuse, Greenaway makes explicit this belief in the value of thinking in visual terms and in learning how to see and better represent the world through a close attention to the images provided us by the great masters of painting. “Most people,” Greenaway argues, “are visually illiterate. Why should it be otherwise? We have a text based culture. Our educational systems teach us to value text over image, which is one of the reasons why we have such an impoverished cinema.” This intentionally provocative statement is nothing new however since Greenaway has been obsessed with the contrast, the conflict, and the occasional intersections between the visual and the textual, between words and images, since at least Prospero’s Books, released in 1991. Coming just seven minutes into the film, this argument operates like a thesis statement, setting the tone and providing a much needed context for the rest of this remarkable film.  

The focus of Greenaway’s documentary is the story behind Rembrandt’s well known and controversial painting Night Watch. Finished in 1642, Night Watch was one of Rembrandt’s last paintings before his disastrous decline as a painter. Although art historians argue there is little evidence that Night Watch had anything to do with Rembrandt’s withering popularity, Greenaway makes a different argument, positing a conspiracy of astonishing complexity. Without giving away too much, Greenaway’s essential argument is that Rembrandt’s highly evocative and visually rich portrait is “a painted piece of theatre,” full of hidden condemnations, ridicules, and most importantly, an indictment and an accusation of murder or, as Greenaway puts it, “assassination disguised as military accident.” According to Greenaway, Rembrandt’s famous painting of the Dutch militia company offers a symbolic depiction of the murder of Captain Piers Hasselberg, the commander, as Greenaway tells us, of the Thirteenth Company of the Amsterdam militia.

Greenaway, perhaps playfully or perhaps in earnest (it’s hard to tell), claims that his argument offers an answer and solution to many of the core mysteries that have surrounded the painting since it was unveiled in 1642. Like so many of Greenaway’s works the film is highly formally structured, based upon a set of thirty-three mysteries, which are explained in sequence. From an explanation of the culture of Dutch militia companies, to a discussion of the curiously phallic and homo-erotic placement of William Van Ruytenberg’s partisan, to the incredibly curious and unconventional golden girl who seems to be running through the center of the crowd, Greenaway examines these mysteries one at a time, building his case like a public prosecutor.

A Scene from Greenaway's Rembrandt's J'accusse (2009)

Clearly Rembrandt’s painting is a satirical criticism of the pretentious and arrogant Dutch militias, who by 1642 had largely given up fighting and patrolling and spent the majority of their time drinking, eating, and devising ever new ways of increasing their wealth. The ridiculous dress, the clumsy way they hold their weapons (many of them would never have had opportunity to use such weapons against an enemy) and the diminutive proportions of several of the figures seem to reveal what must have been Rembrandt’s thinly disguised contempt for the Bourgeois militiamen. But Greenaway’s argument takes these insults to a level beyond the plausible.

Playing upon many of these oft-noted visual insults, Greenaway constructs a series of convoluted and complex propositions to prove his point, sounding at times more like a patrician conspiracy theorist than an art critic. But perhaps this is the point. Although these arguments are not always convincing—indeed some of the claims are wildly speculative and there seems to be very little actual historical evidence to support them—historical accuracy is not what this director is after. Greenaway seems to take such pleasure in the story he is spinning and his insights are so dazzling and satisfying that their veracity hardly seems to matter. Greenaway’s real purpose, however, is not to prove his point, but to test how well Rembrandt’s Night Watch is able to evoke and support a story of such complexity and suspense—and indeed, the painting seems more than capable of this. Greenaway’s act of exegetic storytelling bring us full circle back to one of the central aesthetic arguments of his entire oeuvre, which is that the visual is itself a form of communication, and that images, even still images, may also contain meaningful narratives. It is the loss of this sense of visual narrative, Greenaway would argue, that has reduced so much of our current cinema to mere emotional amalgams of dialogue and action, with little, if any concern for the composition of the several thousand still images that make up a film. This, I would add, has also led to a fair share of very bad film criticism, so much of which is obsessed with discussions of narrative and action, often at the expense of any possible discussions of the image.

A Scene from Drowning By Numbers (1988)

 

Rembrandt’s J’accuse is not the first time that Greenaway has tackled the story of Night Watch. In 2007 Greenaway directed Nightwatching, which in retrospect seems a kind of dramatic preparation for the more documentary Rembrandt’s J’accuse. Indeed, Nightwatching makes almost the exact same argument as J’accuse, except that instead of exploring the thirty-three mysteries, Nightwatching focuses more on the painter himself and the psychological, aesthetic, and political maneuverings involved in the creation of this, his great masterpiece. Shot in the same kind of candle-lit chiaroscuro that was so popular in Rembrandt’s work, Greenaway manages to visually capture both the sense of mystery that the painting elicits, as well as the house-bound claustrophobia of Dutch life in the 17^th century. In fact, a good portion of Rembrandt’s J’accuse is borrowed footage from Nightwatching, adding an oddly self-conscious but effective dramatic element into the documentary. Greenaway’s obsession with Rembrandt is no surprise, however, seeing as how so many of Greenaway’s films are filled with similarly structured, intensely symbolic and portentous visual narratives, full of their own sometimes nagging mysteries. Consider, for instance the several odd time-lapsed scientific experiments in A Zed and Two Naughts or the highly elaborate games played throughout Drowning by Numbers.

Scene from A Zed and Two Naughts (1985)

Greenaway is, however, above all else a sensualist, a painter of the world and the human body in light and shadow, and although Rembrandt’s J’accuse is at times visually lush, it is precisely this sensuousness that Greenaway fans will find lacking in the film. This is in part because of the documentary nature of the film, but is also the result of Greenaway’s changing style. Ever since Prospero’s Books, which evoked an enormous amount of digitally composed techniques of text and image overlaid onto the screen, Greenaway has been obsessed with, and has explored in increasingly enervating excess, the possibilities of this technology. In films like Prospero’s Books and The Pillow Book, this technique has the effect of giving greater depth and detail to the shot or sequene in which it is employed, but here its use is increasingly distracting and often feels unnecessary. Indeed, the technological busyness of this film, as if looking at several monitor screens all at once, makes one miss and long for the slower, less frenzied, but still intricate compositions of his earlier work like A Zed and Two Naughts, The Belly of an Architect, or the always delightful Drowning by Numbers.

Share on Facebook

The Baader Meinhof Complex, director: Uli Edel (Germany, 2008)

Revolution is a spectacle and terror is public performance. That, it seems, is the message of the action-filled The Baader Meinhof Complex by German director Uli Edel. Adapted from journalist Stefan Aust’s book of the same title, the film attempts to tell the “true story” of what later became known as the first generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF)—Germany’s Weather Underground, but with a martyr twist. Both radical-left organizations were off-springs of SDS-led anti-war, anti-imperialism, anti-colonial student activism in the 1960s; both shared similar sets of values, strategies—and enemies in the form of a ‘fascist’ or racist state and a profit-driven, ignorant establishment. But in addition to numerous bombings and bank robberies à la Weather Underground, the activities of three generations of RAF members account for over thirty homicides and several iconic suicides of their own, as dramatically commemorated at the end of the film.

As suggested by an exorbitant ad campaign preceding its release, The Baader Meinhof Complex is an impressive movie indeed: with a cast that reads like the who-is-who in German cinema, a scandalous budget (in German standards) of twenty million euros, and the meticulous cloning of renowned historical pictures for the screen, down to minute details of revolutionary dress codes, book shelves in prison, or car brands used for kidnapping. Following Aust’s journalistic chronology of RAF’s rise and fall, the film’s impressive scenes lay out the context for the group’s emergence: brutal police beatings of unarmed protesters at the shah of Iran’s visit in Berlin 1967 and the police killing of Benno Ohnesorg, often cited as the first casualty of the 1960s protest movement; passionate appeals for resistance and action in front of huge student crowds by Rudi Dutschke (a popular SDS leader) and the assassination attempt on him in 1968, which was evidently inspired by German tabloids’ lurid coverage of the student movement. The camera seems like a participant in the scenes depicting the angry blockade of Springer, an infamous publishing house, and ensuing destruction of delivery trucks by protesters.

Also in the thick of it: Ulrike Meinhof, the coolly observing but fiery writing editor-in-chief of a political magazine who leaves her husband because of his adultery. Soon, more protagonists enter the scene, each wrapped in their stereotypical imagery: Andreas Baader, the macho for whom “fucking and shooting” are the same, and Gudrun Ensslin, the cool blond, still without a gun. After Baader is arrested for an anti-war action involving the setting of fire in two department stores, Meinhof is recruited to help with his escape—during which she makes her famous leap, out the window and into the underground. Therewith, somehow, the RAF is born.

Over the next two years, there are bombings and pamphlets and guerilla trainings in Jordan—a memorable movie moment when topless German revolutionaries (they are sunbathing) face irritated Palestinian freedom fighters (who dismiss their hedonist comrades soon after). Then, in rapid succession, the dramatic arrests of almost all leaders of the group’s first generation in 1972, followed by clippings from their five long years in a maximum security prison—during which they obtained an impressive number of prisoners’ privileges—and their widely televised, two-year long trial. Meanwhile, the so-called second generation was born whose bombings and killings and hostage-takings still wore the ideological signature of previous RAF actions, but which were primarily done in an attempt to force the release of the founders from prison. The state, however, did not comply, leading to the martyr deaths of most RAF members in the Stammheim prison.

In the end, this fast-paced and picturesque rundown of Germany’s revolutionary heyday leaves the viewer breathlessly staring at the rolling credits; wondering after two and a half hours of blazing teargas, flaming pamphlets, dirty language, and untimely deaths: Where have all the ideals gone? And where did they come from in the first place? As detailed as the film is in dealing with historical facts and figures, it fails to offer any real reasons why the sheltered daughter of a Protestant pastor (Ensslin), the journalistic icon of Germany’s left establishment (Meinhof), or the fatherless high school drop-out with a weakness for fast cars (Baader) all ended up among Germany’s most wanted.

If this movie, as was the filmmakers’ stated intention, is meant to educate today’s twenty-year olds about the origins and intentions of the RAF and left radicalism, it might need a second, less-spectacular, more critical sequel. It needs a lot more than beautiful pictures in chronological order to grasp the intense moral purpose behind the violent passions of that era; to elucidate how historical memory, for example of Germany’s Nazi past, influenced ideologies of terror and the resulting political actions of left militant organizations; or to explain the destructive effects of aggressive infiltration and intentional provocation (most of them later deemed unlawful) by various government agencies on various leftist factions. In addition to what the film is missing, even for a German native with a fairly decent education in the country’s radical history, some of the new characters constantly arriving on the film scene remained a mystery, and lots of the movie’s abounding details are lost on the uninitiated viewer. Another minor observation: the translations of the aggressive and intentionally abrasive speech among RAF members appear astoundingly modest in some of the subtitles. An intentional concession to MPAA rating? One wonders.

Hence … sit back and enjoy the entertainment more than education when the revolution is televised: blockbuster-style, Golden Globe- and Oscar-nomination style (the film didn’t win either), and don’t forget the popcorn! If interested in less lengthy but more in-depth investigations into Germany’s recent revolutionary past, films like Germany In Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst by Werner Fassbinder et al, 1978), The State I Am In (Die innere Sicherheit by Christian Petzold, 2001), or Legend Of Rita (Die Stille nach dem Schuss by Volker Schloendorff, 1999) might be more sensible choices. The latter, for example, deals with a little-known and even less discussed detail of RAF history beyond Baader Meinhof Complex, and the communist entanglements of East and West Germany’s pasts.

The movie was adapted from an autobiography by Inge Viett, who together with nine other RAF members escaped imminent prosecution in the 1980s by going into hiding in Germany’s communist east. Provided with fake identities and logistical support for a new life by the East German secret service, they remained undetected until the fall of the Berlin wall when unification entailed the loss of protection from a sympathetic system and led to discovery and eventual conviction by West Germany’s law enforcement. But there is spectacle added to this adaptation, too—differing from Inge Viett’s story, the film’s main character is shot while trying to escape on a motorcycle—as if fictional accounts of (attempted) revolution can’t do without a seemingly necessary blend of drama, romance…and martyrs.

Share on Facebook

 Thirst
With all the teen-vampire fanaticism, the foreign art-film take on Dracula might pass you by. However, Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and the Korean Park Chan-Wook’s Thirst are original romances where bloodlust is anything but skin deep. Park is best known for his vengeance triology, (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). In these films, characters who are subjected to violence become heroes when they retaliate with elaborate murder schemes. One suffers through gore in his films’ first half, but the conclusive proof of justice is in fact more blood and pain. Eventually, the carnage becomes more delicious than disgusting, for it is all bloodshed in the name of fairness.

The plot of Thirst is primarily shaped by Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867). However, Park sets the naturalist French novel in modern day South Korea, and uses vampirism as a metaphor for the novel’s tragic, addictive love affair. Perhaps Park’s most inventive touch was to transform Zola’s Laurent, a gambler who can no longer afford the brothel, into the upright priest Sang-hyien (played by Kang-ho Sang, who also played the lead in Park’s 2002 breakthrough film, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.) The film openly references Robert Bresson’s 1951 classic Diary of a Country Priest as Sang-hyien explains his struggle to suppress sexual desire in a voice-over while vigorously writing in a journal. The priest punishes himself by whacking his penis with a wooden stick when it becomes erect. When this does not suffice, he participates in a dangerous medical study in South Africa. There, ignorant doctors infect Sang-hyien with the vampire virus through a blood transfusion. When he returns to Korea, his sexual desire for Tae-joo (Ok-viri Kim), the wife of his sickly childhood friend, engenders a new obscene desire for human blood.
The sex scenes between Ok-viri Kim and Kang-ho Sang are reminiscent of the best of David Cronenberg and Catherine Breillat, exploring passion from both perspectives with animalistic flare. The sniffing, sucking, licking, and biting, is as audible as it is visual; in a particularly sensuous moment Sang-hyien gives two long strokes of the tongue to Tae-joo’s clean pale arm pit. The film is reliant on their chemistry, as their addiction to blood and to each other spawns the jealousy and torment that become their ultimate downfall. Kang-ho Sang’s striking good looks make him the seductive vampire, while his awkwardness and inconsistent righteousness demonstrate his character’s contradiction. As in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Park transgresses gender roles to make the female a force to be reckoned with: Tae-joo intermingles her desire for blood and her desire for revenge on her in-laws. Ok-viri Kim as Tae-joo shows timing and character development, from a shy and needy young woman to a bold vampire selfish with hunger. Blue costumes and white powder aid her transformation into a shining ravenous imp.

The violence of Thirst is not as startling as Park’s best films, and the CGI that normally ties scenes together, at times appears too animated (Tae-joo’s and Sang-hyien’s bouncing from rooftop to rooftop resembles early Nintendo.) Yet the characters’ complexity and strength, and the modernization of the nineteenth century storyline, render Thirst a fascinating chapter in the recent frenzy for vampires. Park Chan-Wook couples the actors’ intensity with selfawareness, directing a film that is as tragic and true as it is humorous.

The Silence of Lorna (Le silence de Lorna)
The Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre, first won international attention in 1996 with La promesse, a film that dealt with Belgium’s clandestine immigration and which showcased the acting debut of the then fifteen-year-old, Jérémie Renier. Five films later, the Dardenne brothers are still exposing the misfortunes of immigrants and the extremely talented Jérémie Renier—now 28. However, as the title indicates, this film is Lorna’s story, a young Albanian immigrant, expertly played by Arta Dubroshi. Lorna immigrates to open a snack bar in Belgium with her boyfriend. However, her path to citizenship has been paved by an international crook that arranges marriages for foreigners. Junkies are ideal for citizenship marriages, as they accept a small amount of cash in exchange for a ring, and usually die of an overdose within a year. Claudy (Renier) complicates the plan when he sincerely cares for Lorna and attempts to come clean. Lorna’s boss wants to force his overdose, and Lorna feels utterly responsible for Claudy’s life.

The inverse of Hollywood production, the Dardennes’ superb realism is captured with a single camera, natural lighting, and brilliantly honest performances. Even in a secondary role, Jérémie Rénier proves his commitment to performance. Flushed and emaciated, Renier forces us to sympathize with the complexity of addiction. Dubroshi’s restrained expressions and blank stares convey Lorna’s internal conflict in the film’s first half. Eventually, Dubroshi exhibits Lorna’s conundrum with self-utterances and a fearful demeanor. Le silence de Lorna follows a social-realist tradition that comments on the unjust world; frequent shots of money affirm its unwavering importance, and Lorna’s final situation is the outcome of a long struggle to succeed in Western Europe.

Recently at an opening of a festival of their work at the Walter Reade theater I met Luc Dardenne. When I asked him why the brothers always chose to make features about poverty and the underclass, Luc responded, “because traditionally the poor are on the sides of the frame, in the corners. We want to place them in the center.”

Hump Day
It might surprise viewers to know that the writer/ director of Hump day is a woman. Lynn Sheldon’s independent feature is almost exclusively about men, and the awkward line where homosexuality and homosociality meet. Ben (Mark Duplass) is a newlywed happily contemplating the prospect of children when his wild college buddy, Andrew (Joshua Leonard), shows up at his door. Soon after, Andrew finds a party of non-conformist artists and invites Ben along. Late in the night, after untucking his shirt and bong-toking, Ben agrees to participate with Andrew in a home-video porn festival, Humpfest, claiming it is part of a larger statement of artistic integrity, straight men having gay sex.

What begins as intoxicated party babble, begins to take shape as a possible venture. The men question the project’s symbolic value; for Andrew it will mean the completion of a project, for Ben it will prove he is larger than his current lifestyle’s suburban values. Still, both men refuse to directly confront what their desire to participate in Humpfest might suggest about their sexuality. Lynn Sheldon teases the question, and makes every glance between the men questionable. This ambiguity looks to trouble the traditional audience’s expectations of male friendship, and satirizes the typical buddy flic. Nevertheless, the film is wrought with the purest cinema comedy, straight men pretending not to be…or perhaps, the reverse.

Moon
Much of the buzz surrounding Moon was due to the director’s famous rock-star dad, David Bowie. Indeed, it seems the apple does not fall far from the tree when it comes to mythologizing outer-space. Bowie, aka Ziggy Stardust, starred as “the man who fell to earth” in Nicholas Roeg’s 1976 film and his son’s debut continues where his father’s space lore left off.

A script that draws on themes found in 2001 and Solaris further enhances this nostalgic return to a bygone era of sci-fi. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell whose dualism lies in more than his role’s true-to-life first name. A lone technician who sends masses of fuel from the moon to earth, his sole conversation mate is his computer, Gerti (Kevin Spacey), who responds to Sam’s need for human interaction with dead-pan comic relief. When a crash occurs, and Sam Bell recovers to be awoken by his doppelganger, a competition ensues; who will be the real Sam Bell, Sam or Sam? Rockwell’s performance seems incredibly human, especially when his character(s) struggle with the concept of not being so. The film retains some optimism where it might have spiraled into dystopia and is likewise an auspicious debut for its director, Duncan Jones.

Share on Facebook