Shame

In his l968 film Skammen (Shame) Ingmar Bergman tied the personal to the political in exploring the emotions of a couple who escape war torn Europe by living on an isolated Island. Bergman famously lived on the Island of Faro though that didn’t spare him the shame of pursuit by Sweden’s tax authorities and the humiliation of self-imposed exile to Berlin as a result of the scandal. Shame is a potent emotion in many Bergman films and it's certainly a universal. Shame was also the title of Steve McQueen's 2011 film in which Michael Fassbender played a sex addict. Remember those childhood dreams of being caught with your pants down and how they anticipated the humiliations of adulthood in which you lived in fear of having your foibles exposed? You may have acted like a coward when you wanted to be a fearless tough guy. You found yourself troubled by an attraction to someone of the same sex when, however enlightened you might have been sexually, you still gloated over being straight. At the end of the film Bergman’s protagonists Eva (Liv Ullmann) and Jan (Max Van Sydow) find themselves on a boat riding through a sea of bodies.  In this crossing of a figurative Styx even their Charon has perished; their purgatory is to drift without direction to the underworld. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” says Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus. But what is the eponymous shame that constitutes Eva and Jan’s literal and metaphoric hell and is it real? You are ashamed of being naked because there's nothing to cover up what you’ve become, what you are. Bergman made his film during the height of the Vietnam war and of course if you are responsible for the My Lai massacre you have something to be ashamed about. But the average human being suffers from a shame that’s an embarrassment at being. Even if they aren’t guilty of any crimes, no one wants to be known, no one wants to have their limitations exposed. “Like a dog,” he said. It was as if the shame of it would out live him,” are the last lines of Kafka’s The Trial.

Longines DolceVita

Gloria Perkins the sexy American actress (played by Dorothy De Poliolo) is back. If you recall she lured Sandro (Gabriel Ferzetti) away from Claudia (Monica Vitti) in Antonioni’s L’Avventura. Wherever Gloria goes she causes rioting by horny Italian men and if you follow Longines DolceVita campaign (in which Kate Winslet appears, along with Bollywood’s Aiswarya Rai) her persona is attracting a gaggle of paparazzi too. Yes it’s actually Fellini’s La Dolce Vita that the sequence is alluding to, but the memory of the scenes Gloria created is also at work. Advertising can be extremely irritating, especially the kind that you see mixed in with previews at your local quadruplex. But it’s comforting to know that scenes from great Italian classics, like L’Avventura and La Dolce Vita still reside in the collective memory of the culture, if only to sell a watch or bottle of perfume. Another recent commercial for Louis Vuitton, for instance, featured a masked ball that recalled  Eyes Wide Shut. Commercials and music videos require a very high level of film artistry—since they have to communicate a good deal of information in a very short period of time. The juxtaposition between a memory and a product is often an example of simple filmic montage, executed with the high production values that commercials require. However, what's next? Will a scene from Bergman’s Cries and Whispers appear as a plug for Obamacare?  Will Fellini’s circus characters from 8 ½ be used to advertise Six Flags? Commerce and art can often sometimes be strange, but effective bedfellows.

The Influence of Anxiety

Franz Kafka

Harold Bloom wrote a famous book called The Anxiety of Influence. The subject was really the weight the past holds over the present. Eliot also wrote Tradition and the Individual Talent which treated a similar subject in terms of the impersonality of the artistic sensibility. But what about a tome called The Influence of Anxiety or The Anxiety of Anxiety? In order to sell, the book would have to deal with some famously anxiously individuals, Kierkegaard in philosophy, Bergman in film and Kafka in literature, but such a book would probably derive its greatest power from dealing with the average Joe. After all anxiety is a great motivator. In Manhattan children grow up anxious and they read the anxiety on their parents faces when their early rejection from pre-schools presages a long life of pink slips and unfulfilled dreams. They face further anxiety when they grow into adolescence and realize the symbols of male and female sexuality they see in advertising, films and television have little to do with their actual anxiety fraught interactions with the opposite sex (this is one of their first experiences of meta-anxiety or the anxiety of anxiety). Later in life they will go through anxiety about the fate of their IRA’s or retirement plans, realizing that in a bull market theirs has the singular distinction of having been managed by a bear. Anxiety comes in big time when they themselves become parents, burdening their own children with the task of living out a parent's unfulfilled dreams—a task that most children deal with by openly rebelling against the unreasonable expectations that have been placed on them. Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence was an important book, but The Influence of Anxiety will be a blockbuster that'll make its author rich enough to pay for an unlimited supply of serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Repulsion

People don’t understand mental illness is probably the simplest way to describe Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. The film which is currently being revived at Film Forum is an essay in at least two forms of subjectivity: that of the omniscient viewer of Carol, the disturbed woman played with such enigmatic brilliance by the youthful Catherine Deneuve, and of Carol herself. Carol is not some urban neurotic out of a Woody Allen film. She exhibits the kind of symptoms (she hallucinates and hears voices) that cause sufferers to jump out of windows. In her case, the violence is unleashed on those around her, an infatuated young man Colin (John Fraser), a greedy and lustful landlord (Patrick Wymark) and her sister’s husband Michael (Ian Hendry), the only one who escapes unscathed. Deneuve’s beauty is a perfect foil for the subjective states of those around her since she is such a cynosure (particularly when she walks around wraithlike in her diaphanous nightgown). This is epitomized in the scene when the landlord, her second victim, comes into the apartment, looks around at the disarray, which unbeknownst to him already includes a corpse in a tub, and says it looks like a “nuthouse,” a piece of humor worthy of Hitchcock. Before coming to his own end as he attempts to rape Carol, he tells her “a cup of hot tea and an aspirin and you’ll be as right as rain.” The world of insanity is where Polanski is expert and the film was oddly prescient since the director himself would come home to face the carnage wreaked by the Manson gang on his own home only a few years later. The iconography of madness begins with an eyeball, segue ways to a beauty salon customer receiving a mud facial and ends with the camera closing in on the eyes of the already distant Carol in family snapshot from childhood. A rotting piece of rabbit is the centerpiece of the decay, but roots of sprouting potatoes soon replace the ticking of the clock as indicators of time passing. Polanski has at least as good a grip on the subject of subjectivity as Bishop Berkeley and maybe better, but the Bishop’s universe had built-in insurance against implosion in the form of God. Repulsion, shot in wonderfully stark black and white, was made one year before Blow Up and much of the shooting take place in what looks like Chelsea’s Sloane Square, the epicenter of the swinging London that Antonioni would capture in Technicolor a year later. La Dolce Vita (l960) is also referenced in the form of a mocking Leaning Tower of Pisa postcard Carol receives from her sister’s boyfriend. But Carol’s episodes, the famous crack in the wall, the fantasy of being molested, the “repulsion,” she experiences, all center on sexuality and in that sense, for all Polanski’s reputation, the film functions as a kind of psychiatric jeremiad against the liberties of the era in which it’s situated. Repulsion also antedated Bergman’s Persona, another film which dealt with the break from reality, by one year though perhaps the character closest to Carol is Shakespeare’s Ophelia who was created almost four centuries before.

Melancholia

Lars von Trier is a party pooper. Dunderheads don’t you get it? The whole performance at Cannes was a set up. It’s Melancholia played right before our eyes. Here he is in the limelight at Cannes, creator of Dogma, lionized with Kirsten Dunst, his star at his side, and he reprises the role she's just played in the film. He makes anti-Semitic remarks and finds himself banned from Cannes. Similarly Justine, the character Dunst plays, throws her whole life away, rejecting her marriage and the employer who has just given her a promotion to art director, at the agency at which she works— remaining loyal to the spirit of her depressive mother (Charlotte Rampling) who has instilled in her a deep and abiding hatred of life. All of this mind you while Wagner’s famed Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde plays again and again and again, underscoring the death in life which constitutes what amounts to a passion or calling for her. The lighting is spare and real and so is the message that that there is nothing, no transcendence, no life beyond the aberration known as existence—nothing except, art. The initial montage sequence is a homage to Bergman’s Persona. In Persona you are dealing with an actress who’s had a psychotic break. Freud defined melancholia as a response to loss which includes a lack of interest in the outside world. The close-ups of Dunst’s face in the early montage of Melancholia evince the shrinking from the will to live characteristic of the condition Freud describes. The  planet on a collision course with earth that constitutes the second movement of the film is called Melancholia, but it’s as if the catastrophe had already occurred to Justine before the collision ever takes place. She is suffering about something which has yet to be, a brilliant little touch on von Trier’s part  (there is another particularly brilliant directorial touch in the little piece of wedding cake on Justine’s face that precedes the breakup the marriage on the very night it’s begun). The parallels with Persona continue in part two of the film which, along with the collision, is devoted to Justine’s sister Claire. If Justine is afraid to live, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is afraid to die, but like with Bergman’s nurse and actress the roles switch and then with the big ball of destruction called Melancholia hovering overhead, Justine is exultant. She is finally in her element. As the world comes to an end, Justine becomes a latter day Grand Inquisitor, The Grand Facilitator, helping her frightened sister and nephew to die.

What to Bring on the Ark

Biblical level catastrophes have been making headlines with increasing frequency. So here is a list of essentials to take with you on the Ark:

Don’t go anywhere without the DVD set of Antonioni’s trilogy, L’Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse  (the stock exchange sequence in La Notte with Alain Delon is as essential as K rations). Life as we know it could not continue without Bergman. How could we understand personality without Persona, endure the absence of god without The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Lights, comprehend marriage without Scenes from a Marriage (Paul Mazursky would never have been able to make An Unmarried Woman without it), or appreciate life in general without Fanny and Alexander, which has nothing to do with the Romanovs, and has still less to do with Franklin J. Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra? Tolstoy told Chekhov that his plays were almost as bad as Shakespeare’s, but we need to make sure there is room for War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Three Sisters, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, along with Lear to deal with problems of aging, The Tempest and The Winter’sTale to reinforce the notion that nothing is over until it’s over, and yes, Cymbelline to remind us that beauty can exist without perfection. Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf is great to have in any storm, along with The Wasteland  (a poem that is starting to have practical applications in our polluted world). Make room for Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Balzac’s La Comédie humaine and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, along with two chickens, two turtles, two lambs, two snakes etc.  

Diasporic Dining: Episode IX (Art House)

Photos by Hallie Cohen

Not that all cinema isn’t art, but the true art cinema, redolent with the smell of espresso and Gauloise cigarettes—or Italian Nationali, which are no longer made—is a relic of the past. In those halcyon days, brilliance was purchased at a price. Artists set themselves on fire like Buddhist monks. Pasolini was murdered on a dangerous prowl, and Pollock’s intoxication spread from art to alcohol, leading to his untimely demise in a drunk-driving incident. There was no innocence in the art cinemas, which breathed not only the fumes of strong cigarette smoke, but of the Cedar Bar, Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus and Bazin’s Cinematheque, the archetypal art house.

Across America, there were little covens of European Cinema that also played the films of Ozu, Mizoguchi and Teshigahara. The Brattle in Boston, The Bleecker Street and New Yorker in Manhattan, and the Uptown, which still proudly reigns over Minneapolis, with its worn neon sign reaching towards the heavens. With the din of the marching band and the cacophony of invading armies in the background, The Battleship Potemkin survived, along with Ikiru and Persona, Ashes and Diamonds and L'eclisse.

Lovers of Antonioni, Bergman and Kurosawa worshipped by themselves in these temples of celluloid.  Women wore black stockings when they went to see Room at the Top. The self enforced solitude was disquieting, but was also, like the smoke, what made the experience.

Broken Embraces

Ambivalent or enigmatic paternity is one of the themes of Pedro Almodovar’s recently released Broken Embraces, as is the question of artistic patrimony. The provenance of the cinema-obsessed, fledgling filmmaker who lingers at the periphery of Broken Embraces is British director Michael Powell’s classic meditation on voyeurism, Peeping Tom. In his famed essay, “Contre Sainte-Beuve,” Proust criticized the autobiographical interpretation of art. Is the character of the abandoned son of a wealthy industrialist, who inadvertently films the scene of his father’s mistress’s infidelity and death, a stand-in for Almodovar, a voyeur at the scene of an accident?

   

Broken Embraces opens with another filmmaker, the blinded protagonist Harry Caine, unable to visually identify the woman he is possibly impregnating, and ends with him gaining paternity of a child he never knew was his.

   

Wordsworth famously wrote, “The child is father of the man.” But who is the father of the father? Are the claims of the flesh in fact too weak to take precedence over history, or, in the case of Almodovar, film history? Is the Oedipus complex irrelevant to Almodovar’s cinematic universe? Harry Caine steals the mistress of a powerful producer; he is blinded like Oedipus, and yet he goes on to live and thrive as an artist.

    

Art, rather than passion, is ultimately Almodovar’s lingua franca in Broken Embraces. One of the great transgressions of the movie is an act of vengeance by Harry’s longtime editor, who mutilates his art in a jealous rage. Substitute edit for castrate. The esthetic world that Almodovar creates situates its major rivalry in the act of creation. The real father of Broken Embraces is Bergman, whose Fanny and Alexander makes a cameo appearance as a reminder of the filmmaker’s patrimony.