Ferdy on Films, etc.

Black Test Car (Kuro no tesuto kaa, 1962)
Director: Yasuzo Masumura

By Marilyn Ferdinand

One stop I make almost daily on my Internet travels is Cinebeats. Kimberly Lindbergs makes all things 60s and 70s fascinating and always offers gems to people like myself who want to learn more about this seminal time in cultural history. In her recent rundown of her top 30 DVDS of 2007 was a Japanese film from the early 60s I just had to see. Black Test Car promised a suspenseful ride through the revving-up capitalist economy in Japan by focusing on the industrial spying of rival car manufacturers Tiger Motors and Yomato.

The film opens on a road where two vehicles are assembled. One of them is completely draped in a black cover, the other contains employees of Tiger Motors. Using walkie talkies, the occupants of the two cars confer and once it has been determined there are no cars in front of or behind them, the black-draped car takes off. It accelerates, weaves, and finally goes off the road and crashes. The twisted metal and blazing chassis are photographed by spies who had hidden themselves on a bluff above the road. The embarrassing pictures surface, and it’s back to the drawing board for Tiger Motors.

Department head Onoda (Hideo Takamatsu) reveals his plans for the love of his life—the Pioneer, a four-door sports car that he hopes will help Tiger overtake their larger and more successful rival. I originally thought Onoda was in the design department, but as the film progressed, I thought perhaps he headed the industrial espionage department. He got regular visits from a portly, laughing slime of a man who provided him with intelligence on Yomato, and asked his entire team to get one step ahead of their rival by spying.

Young Asahina (Jiro Tamiya) is Onoda’s ambitious protégé. Onoda promises to make him department head if the Pioneer succeeds. Asahina wants the promotion so that he can afford to marry Masako (Junko Kano), a hostess at a cocktail lounge. Masako warns him about his ambition, wondering if the conservative Tiger corporation would approve of him marrying someone like her. He sloughs off the question, but makes her promise to start work at Pandora, a nightclub frequented by Yomato’s president Mawatari (Ichiro Sugai), a former colonel and a secret agent in the former Imperial Army in Guangdong who surrounds himself with men from his former command. She is to listen for information he can use. Reluctantly, she agrees and begins from her first night on the job to cozy up to Mawatari.

Still, Yomato stays one step ahead of Tiger, producing a plan for a sports car exactly like the Pioneer. Onoda knows a spy is at work among the Tiger executives and works to sniff him out. There are a great many double-dealings, with Yomato bugging a Tiger executive's room, and Onoda and his men filming a board meeting at which Yomato is expected to set the price of their rival sports car and then having a lip reader interpret the film. Unfortunately for Onoda, Mawatari does not reveal the price. The crisis in the film occurs when Asahina asks Masako to sleep with Mawatari so that she can get the price from an envelope in his briefcase. Masako does his bidding in a rude and rough scene, then returns to him with her payment for prostituting herself—a precious ring. She writes the car’s price on Asahina’s pillow with a lipstick, kisses the ring repeatedly (“It’s warmer than you are"), and storms out. Tiger is able to undercut Yomato’s price and immediately jumpstart their sales. But Yomato isn’t done yet, and the web of betrayals starts to unravel and leads to scandal and death.

Black Test Car most resembles a film noir in look, tone, and storyline. People with whom we initially sympathize become cutthroat, amoral competitors jockeying for position in the new capitalist order. Onoda is married to his job, and his wife passively remarks to Asahina not to emulate him too closely. But ambition and money cause Asahina to lose himself. As riveting as the corporate espionage becomes—a first-rate spy thriller even though its gadgetry is as simple as it gets—the moral tragedy between Asahina and Masako really forms the heart of the film.

It is tempting to think of Masako as traditional Japan and Asahina as new, industrial Japan, but it’s not that simple. Masako is no fool and has no qualms about sleeping with Asahina even though they are not engaged. She’s a modern girl, but she doesn’t fall into the alienation seen in other films of this era, particularly those of Michelangelo Antonioni, a classmate of Masumura’s at Italy’s famed Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and a great admirer. (Indeed, this film has a lot in common with Antonioni's views and shooting style.) Alas, Asahina is all too like Antonioni’s cruelly romantic men. The other characters form a tight ensemble, but Onoda’s turn to the dark side, though getting progressively worse through the film, seems excessive by the end.

Black Test Car seems at first to be a candidate for a What's Up Tiger Lily? treatment, which may be why it is being marketed as a dark comedy. It's not, however. This film is an intricately plotted, caustic tale of the price of human frailty in a competitive, money-obsessed world. Thanks, Kimberly, for the turn-on! l

Clips of the film can be viewed at Wildgrounds: Cinema de Sentiers.

The Rape of Europa (2006)
Directors: Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newnham

By Marilyn Ferdinand

In Greek mythology, the supreme god Zeus fell in love with Europa, a beautiful Greek woman, and decided to seduce (rape) her. He turned himself into a bull and carried her on his back to the island of Crete, where he revealed his true nature to her and made her queen of the island. This myth has been interpreted many times through the centuries by unknown fresco, mosaic, and decorative artists, as well as such known masters as Rembrandt van Rijn, Maarten de Vos, Francois Boucher, and Henri Matisse. The film The Rape of Europa, based on the nonfiction book, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War by Lynn H. Nicholas, discusses a similar covetousness by Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring for Europe’s great art and antiquities and their systematic plans to acquire thousands of pieces for themselves and a planned museum in Linz designed to be the grandest museum of art in the world. In this case, the contemporary use of the word "rape" applies.

I have been fascinated with the art obsession of the Third Reich ever since I saw the traveling exhibit, “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany," at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991. This exhibit reassembled many of the works by abstract and Jewish artists that Hitler labeled “degenerate" and toured through Germany to enforce Hitler’s preference for and ideology of a representational, romantic aesthetic. The exhibit reproduced as nearly as possible the original show as presented to Germans, including slanderous slogans painted on the walls and the arrangement of objects in the show.

A painting by aspiring artist Adolf Hitler

I suppose Hitler’s thwarted plans to become a professional artist fed into his desire to impose his artistic vision on the world, but Hitler also understood the power of images. He sought to control them every bit as much as he attempted to dominate the world. Most world leaders are very aware of the power of art to move and transform; in present-day America, the suppression of “obscene" art by Robert Mapplethorpe and the financial strangling of the National Endowment for the Arts show a similar impulse to control artistic expressions and the emotions they evoke.

The Rape of Europa begins by contrasting the astronomical selling prices of master works of art in today’s market with the “fire sale" prices these same kinds of works fetched during the Third Reich to help fund the war. So great were the number of precious paintings, sketches, sculptures, and objets d’arte looted and confiscated by the Nazis from all over Europe—Göring alone amassed more than 1,000 works of art—that whatever Hitler, Göring, and buyers at auction did not want was destroyed. Indeed, as part of their invasion campaigns, the Nazis drew up detailed plans that catalogued and listed where desired artworks could be found.

The film methodically describes the various targets for looting and destruction that occurred during the war—in Poland, the leveling of the perceived inferior Slavic city of Warsaw and the preservation of the Germanic Krakow, whose art museum was thoroughly looted of such objects as Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine." In the Soviet Union, curators of the great Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) evacuated more than 1 million pieces of art, but still had many more to protect. Museum staff hid in the cold basement for more than two years during the Siege of Leningrad to keep watch over the remaining works of art. After the siege ended, dozens of these workers were dead of starvation and exposure, along with an estimated 1.2 million citizens of the city.

The Louvre in Paris was another gigantic art museum that mobilized an art evacuation of epic proportions. The film tells of the delicate, nerve-wracking task of moving “Winged Victory of Samothrace," a large solid-looking statue that is actually an assembly of more than 1,000 pieces, down the long, central staircase of the museum. Paris was not bombed back to the Stone Age, as the French feared it would be, but the actions of the museum staff and especially a nondescript heroine of the art rescue named Rose Valland saved most of France's treasures from falling into the hands of the Nazis. Mainly works in private collections and art galleries were confiscated.

Perhaps the most intriguing story, one that bookends the film, is that of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer," which was confiscated along with the rest of the exquisite collection of the Jewish Bloch-Bauers after the Germans entered Austria. The painting ended up in the Austrian National Gallery because of a will Adele Bloch-Bauer left that said she wanted the painting to go there after her husband’s death (she died in 1925). However, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had fled Austria and died in exile without ever reclaiming his property. Maria Altmann, niece to the Bloch-Bauers, disputed the museum’s claim of ownership, and the tangled details of the ongoing struggle—one mirrored by families all over the world—to reclaim her family’s property creates a certain amount of suspense (spoiler at the end of the article).

Camposanto frescoes before fire shattered them. Restoration continues.

More stories abound, such as the dedication of a German to returning religious objects to their families and various Jewish communities and the advance U.S. soldiers called “the monument men," who were sent into villages to try to save buildings and other works of art. In Italy, bombers received city plans drawn up by a team of art curators in Washington, DC, that led to the successful bombing of the central railway yard in Florence without destroying priceless buildings and art. Elsewhere in Italy, bombers eventually destroyed the monastery of Montecassino and the magnificent frescoes of the Camposanto cemetery in Pisa.

The Rape of Europa breaks no new ground in documentary style, weaving archival footage with talking heads in a style reminiscent of History Channel offerings. What it lacks in style, however, it makes up for in comprehensiveness, in a longish, but interesting unspooling of its many stories. The film reminded me of The Longest Day in the way it covers virtually every aspect of the struggle for the artistic heritage of Europe. It also manages to move. Watching two returned scroll caps being placed on a Torah in New York sent my heart to my throat. Seeing that Deane Keller, an artist and monument man who worked tirelessly in Italy, received a grave at the Camposanto was a tribute of appreciation I’ll never forget. Trying to reconcile the anger of soldiers at losing their friends to dug-in German and Italian forces while Allied forces decided whether to bomb Montecassino was troubling. Hearing how entire Jewish households were not only stripped of their occupants, but also of every mattress and teacup in order to erase the Jewish presence in Europe was a sober, bleak reminder of what has been lost. Indeed, many artworks also have disappeared, such as Raphael’s “Portrait of a Young Man." Perhaps one day, these artworks will resurface and help restore the spirits of people damaged to the core by the savagery of World War II and every war thereafter. l

"The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" was finally returned to Adele's niece. In 2006, it was auctioned to Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics magnate, for $135 million. It will reside in his Neue Galerie, a tiny museum in New York dedicated to displaying German and Austrian fine and decorative arts.

There are no monument men in Iraq.

Oscar's 2007 Best Pictures

By Roderick Heath

It may surprise some people to learn that the pinnacle award of the Oscar evening, Best Picture, wasn’t given out amongst the first Oscars. In 1927, two awards were given, one for “Best Production," to William Wellman’s Wings, and “Most Artistic Production," to F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise. The following year, The Broadway Melody became the first actual Best Picture, receiving an award, then, that one might describe as a balance of those two previously cited qualities—standard of production, and artistic merit. It’s a vital point to remember in contemplation of the award, establishing that it is never merely about either the mechanics of filmmaking or the artistic purpose animating it.

The Oscars were established basically as an exercise in personal aggrandizement by Louis B. Mayer and his fellow studio cronies. But, if there’s anything more boring than the self-admiration of Hollywood, it’s the guy who whinges about it all the time. Like it or not, they soon became a fixture of the industry and, ultimately, a major cultural event—the most famous, widely seen, widely known film awards in the world, the eye of the cinema storm. Lately, more people have commented that Hollywood has become essentially divorced from the mass market it otherwise services with such felicity in giving out its awards. If the Oscars were honest about the audience it services, they would more resemble the MTV Film Awards and give out Oscars for Best Explosion. Only the French give prizes to four-hour-long movies shot with handheld cameras about crack addicts with epileptic children and magic-realist fables about flying goats who represent the history of Uzbekistan.

The Best Picture is a vote of emotion more than of either the mind or the hip pocket, though success in filling the latter is never a negative. It’s an award that admires force of effort and appeal to the senses rather than originality, ideas, or risk. It’s been through many phases. It can look relevant and inspiring, if one looks to the general excellence of the winners of the 1970s—The French Connection, The Godfather I & II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter. It can also look blind and cowardly, as in the ’60s, with victories for bloated musicals outweighing the cream, or, indeed, for most of the last decade, arguably the worst in the award’s annals. By my reckoning one great film has taken the prize since 1993—Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, not exactly an intellectual feast, but a true triumph of cinematic vision, standing tall above dribbling, clichéd dramas (American Beauty, A Beautiful Mind, Million Dollar Baby, Crash); substandard efforts by auteurs (Gladiator and The Departed); dim-witted romantic epics (Braveheart, The English Patient, Titanic) and glib showbiz put-ons forgotten five minutes after watching them (Shakespeare In Love, Chicago). If I never saw half of those films again, I wouldn’t give a damn.

1994 Best Picture Forrest Gump, a globulus pustule of soft-headed nostalgia

Perhaps the defining year for the modern Oscars was 1994. Three quality nominees—Quiz Show; The Shawshank Redemption, and Pulp Fiction—and the entertaining, popular Four Weddings and a Funeral. All were beaten by Forrest Gump, a globulus pustule of soft-headed nostalgia and ill-focused satire. Truly, stupid is as stupid does. Still, there were days when the Best Picture had self-respect as an award. It didn’t always go to films that were the best of its year, or even amongst the 10 best of the year, but then, the Academy isn’t composed of clairvoyants who could predict that shifts in taste would herald a tacky little genre film like The Maltese Falcon and a rambling, bizarre experimental epic like Citizen Kane over the refined sentiment of How Green Was My Valley.

It’s surprising how many good films have won the award (in case you’re wondering, I’ve seen 69 of the 79 winners), like the miraculous run in the mid ’50s of From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Marty—small, black-and-white, human-interest films at the height of Hollywood’s most gaudy, absurd period. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), the first major film since WWII to suggest warfare wasn’t necessarily endless heroism and moral rectitude, made a fitting partner to the mighty 1930 winner All Quiet On the Western Front. Two other 1950s winners are virtually pop-art and post-modern: An American in Paris and Around the World in Eighty Days engage with a host of cultural ideas, celebrating and satirizing them all at once, and being colourful and fun whilst doing it. Admire the guts in rewarding a film as entertaining as Casablanca (1943). For all its hectoring moments, the intellectual dexterity and solidity of the character drama in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) makes Crash looks childish. The Life of Emile Zola (1937) wimps out of mentioning the issue at its core—anti-Semitism—but its study of the self-importance of the militarists and politicians behind the Dreyfus Affair is so corrosive it could have easily been about the Bush administration. Two bookend winners of the ‘60s, The Apartment and Midnight Cowboy, ravaged and buried official fantasies about what modern life was about. Teenage radicals had little look-in, but found surrogates in the political and emotional confusion of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), the unfettered sexuality of Tom Jones (1963), and the righteous stand of A Man for All Seasons (1966).

1942 Best Picture Mrs. Miniver didn't age well.

And yeah, a lot of indifferent winners, some dire ones, some that just didn’t age well, like Mrs. Miniver (1942) or The Lost Weekend (1945) or Rain Man (1988). The Greatest Show on Earth (1953) remains a carnival barker yelling in your ear for two-and-a-half hours. Cimarron, 1931’s champ, is numbingly creaky compared with Frankenstein or The Public Enemy. Kramer Vs Kramer (1979) laid down the template for an entire generation of Hallmark channel productions. Gandhi (1982) begins as a stirring drama and finishes up as Great Interviews Gandhi Gave to Impressed White Guys. Rocky (1976)? How did that happen? Who the hell cares about Driving Miss Daisy (1989) or even seen Cavalcade (1933)?

To a large extent the indie revolution, in relieving Hollywood from the responsibility of making the more artistically viable films, has deeply wounded the Best Picture prize. The industry has almost abandoned mid-budget dramatic films that used to be the mainstay of the Best Picture, fragmenting the scope of the Best Picture by defining it as a crown awarded an establishment on its members and its friends. Likewise, alternative cinema can reject the necessity of selling itself to a mass audience that used to make for films of artistic worth and great public appeal, like the works of Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and David Lean. It is all too easy for modern Hollywood to freeze out the more radical fare offered up by outsiders, and difficult for films without the huge clout of public love and the money that generates, as well as the backing of powerful studio chiefs, to take the prize. This is why the pre-packaged drivel of a Paul Haggis can easily best the efforts of a Paul Thomas Anderson.

And yet, this year, each of the high-budget nominees is considered an “independent" production. This designation means virtually nothing in such a context. Indie means something different today than when it meant Jim Jarmusch, black-and-white 16mm stock and bad sound. Yet it also means everything.

Juno, the most “indie" of these indies, isn’t exactly a Dardennes Brothers film. This story of a pregnant teen is only radical to anyone whose concept of family life is still defined by The Donna Reed Show. A late charger, Juno has attracted an audience mainly delighted by its Gilmore Girls-style TV-was-my-babysitter dialogue, and the fact that it’s the one li'l-folks tale amongst this otherwise foreboding, socially critical bunch.

Atonement is the lone blast of the familiar Oscar-bait prestige picture, an adaptation of a best-selling novel with literary cred and a period English setting. Problem is, it’s a densely layered study of perspective and artistic and moral duty that essentially performs a suicide bombing on its third-act resolution—not exactly the way to becoming a heart-tugging, easily beloved romantic classic. Imagine Titanic if it was revealed at the end that Rose made up the whole idea of Jack and got into the lifeboat with her mother.

No Country for Old Men similarly explodes its own familiar elements. This counts more in No Country’s favour, however, in giving its audience all the chills and thrills of a thumping crime drama before delivering a solemn, rule-breaking finish, without which it would be a shoot-‘em-up with a pretentious title. The favourite for the award, No Country similarly possesses literary cred as an adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy, and would finally crown the Coen Brother’s rambunctious career as Hollywood’s resident, acceptable eccentrics.

Michael Clayton is another thriller with pretensions, in this case ’70s style corporate paranoia, and the closest thing to a solid, safely built, liberal message picture. In another year, it might have had a better chance, but it’s got too many capital-A Artists competing with it this year.

There Will Be Blood, generally regarded as the most ambitious and most messy of the nominees, could be mistaken for a contemporary remake of Giant until seen. It’s unlikely to win, and most likely to become the future Taxi Driver, Citizen Kane, or The Conversation—an eccentric, cultish, polarizing effort that may just stick around longer than its rivals.

Three of the five film’s directors are feature-film rookies—Tony Gilroy’s first feature, and Jason Reitman’s and Joe Wright’s second—and only Anderson’s fifth film. Times sure have changed when such untested directors are responsible for Best Picture nominees; John Ford had 84 directorial credits before gaining his first nomination and the Coen Brothers can now be considered the old guard.

Whatever the individual merits of these nominees, it’s a roster that promises the Best Picture award has caught up with the recent acting nominations in embracing new talent, and points a way out of the swaggering mediocrity of most of the recent winners. l

Oscar's 2007 Live Action Short Films

By Marilyn Ferdinand

If ever there was a category that seems almost entirely irrelevant to the Oscars, it is Live Action Short Film. These nominees have been the province primarily of first-time directors, perhaps even projects for graduation from film school. They don’t get general releases in theatres, at least, not here in the States. In fact, the only short I can remember seeing in conjunction with regular theatrical runs was The Heart of the World (2000) by Canadian director and cult favorite Guy Maddin. In fact, it got played over and over with various films until I was pretty damn sick of it.

However, the very first films ever made were live action shorts. An entire industry was built on these short stories of the screen, which may be one reason the Academy has been reluctant to eliminate this category from its Oscar ballot. The first year of Oscar, two awards in this category were given: Comedy and Novelty. Novelty seemed to have encompassed adventure/documentary films, like the 1933 winner Krakatoa, which I presume showed the volcano exploding. Mack Sennett and Hal Roach films were well represented in the Comedy division.

By 1935, big-name studios like Warner Bros, Paramount, RKO, and MGM were being nominated in three new divisions: Color, One-reel, and Two-reel. (The Color division was eliminated in 1938, presumably because the technology was now well-established and not worthy of special technical recognition.) A producer for Warner Bros named Gordon Hollingshead dominated nominations in these categories for some time, with Disney Studios poking up its head now and then.

In 1957, the award got its current title, and although well-known names such as Disney, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Ismael Merchant, Claude Berri, and Jim Henson could be found among the nominees, the category was headed toward obscurity. Today, the only short films we see at the movie theatres are commercials. I can tell you, after viewing the five nominees for the 2007 Live Action Short Film Oscar, I’m ready to start a movement to kick the commercial assault to our senses off the screen and replace it with the witty and often stunning works to be found among this neglected type of film. Here are the 2007 nominees for Best Short Film (Live Action):

Tanghi Argentini (Belgium)—Guido Thys (director) and Anja Daelemans (producer)

This 14-minute short set at Christmastime is about André (Dirk van Dijck), an officer worker who persuades his bah-humbug colleague Frans (Koen van Impe) to teach him to tango so that he can pursue an online romance with a woman who loves the dance. The characters are sketched quickly, but indelibly, with not a speech or movement wasted in telling this charming and surprising story. Director Thys has spent much of his time in television, so he’s got the experience to work this very short short for all its worth. A real crowd pleaser, it has won numerous international awards. It would be in keeping with the early history of this category to reward such a delightful comedy, but it may seem too slight to Academy voters, particularly against some of its competitors. (Very short clip here.)

Om Natten (At Night, Denmark)—Christian E. Christiansen (director) and Louise Vesth (producer)

Another Christmastime film, this 39-minute short has the kind of gravitas the Academy seems to like in its Best Pictures, but it’s a real downer that plays more like an Afterschool Special than a well-constructed short feature. Mette (Neel Rønholt), Sara (Laura Christiansen), and Stephanie (Julie Ølgaard) are three young women desperately ill with cancer who give each other companionship and strength on the hospital ward nicknamed Death Row. The women are types (the religious good girl, the woman allied with her divorced father against the world, and the troubled smoker/drinker/wearer of black nail polish who hasn’t seen her parents in five years). Christiansen, who has a couple of directing credits, has spent most of his film career as a production manager. He simply does not have a director’s touch, letting his actors flounder and his story meander and descend into cheap melodrama. The hubby was moved to tears, but then he spent a lot of time in a hospital and so identified with the characters. I, on the other hand, was bored to tears by this predictable, morose entry. Some people are picking it to win. They might be right, but if it does, it will show Oscar really has no taste whatsoever and is all about its image. (Trailer here.)

Il Supplente (The Substitute, Italy)—Andrea Jublin (director)

This 15-minute film that seems to say that we never really grow up makes its point in a bizarrely original fashion. We are taken to a high school, meeting up with the various nerds, stuck-ups, and artsy types who war away among themselves. Into one rowdy classroom comes a man (Jublin), a substitute teacher who behaves just as savagely with the students as they do with each other. He confiscates a toy soccer ball that has been autographed by an Italian player, locates the class ass kisser and gives him a bad score on his imitation of an ass-kissing snake, is told “no" by a student when he tells her to give him a poem she is writing, and incites the class to rough up the soccer-ball kid. He is found out to be not who he was presumed to be, and ends up confronting the same challenges in the adult world he forced on the kids in the classroom. This is well executed, with energetic performances by all the players, but a philosophical voiceover by the man ruins the anarchic tone of the short and sets us up for a predictable ending. This will not win the Oscar, nor does it deserve to, but it shows the makings of an original talent in first-time director Jublin. (Very short clip here.)

Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets, France)—Philippe Pollet-Villard (director)

Pollet-Villard wrote, directed, and costars in this 31-minute romp through Paris’ petty criminal world. Philippe (Pollet-Villard) and Richard (Richard Morgiève) are crime partners who live in a tiny pension and barely survive as part of a pickpocket ring that works the various street markets. The pair is dumb and inept, but gets lucky one day when they evade the police that round up their partners, partly because a young boy (Matteo Razzouki-Safardi) inexplicably goes up to Richard and holds his hand. The boy follows them home. He doesn’t speak or seem to understand them, so they assume he is deaf. But they incorporate him into a new pickpocket ring, which ends as quickly as it began with Philippe getting punched in the nose. Fortunately, the boy has ideas of his own about how to lift wallets. Richard exclaims to Philippe, “I’d never have thought of it in 10 years." Yes, these sad sacks need this boy prodigy far more than he needs them. Pollet-Villard plays a wonderful blowhard and directs his actors with great skill. The film has a spritely pace and great situational comedy that never feels cheap. Young Razzouki-Safardi is so cute that he melts your heart, and his gigantic smile at the end of the film is more than winning. This film could be a contender, though I don’t think it will win. Again, it might be too slight for the Academy, and it has stiff competition. (Clips and a “making of" in unsubtitled French here.)

The Tonto Woman (United Kingdom)—Daniel Barker (director) and Matthew Brown (producer)

This 36-minute adaptation of an Elmore Leonard short story is the best of the bunch—easily one of the best films of any length in 2007—and the one that should take the Oscar if there is any justice in the world. It’s hard to believe that this assured, taut drama about the redemption of a Mexican cattle rustler named Ruben Vega (Francesco Quinn, Anthony Quinn’s son) is the film debut of director Daniel Barker. Certainly, he had a lot of help from veteran cinematographer Ben Davis (Layer Cake, Miranda, Imagine Me & You), whose compositions are spectacularly beautiful and evocative. Film scorer Dan Jones also provides a soaring score that is definitely influenced by Elmer Bernstein. The film opens in a confessional, then is told entirely in flashback from an omniscient point of view. Vega hides on a hillside and watches a beautiful woman walk topless to a tub and water pump outside a desert shack. She pumps water into the tub and starts to wash up. After she goes back inside, Vega comes to call on her, the picture of benign politeness. She stands in the shadows for a while, then confronts him, saying that she knows he was watching her—just like all the others. She has a startling tattoo on her chin, a remnant of the 11 years she spent as a slave to the Tonto-Mohave Indians. She is Sarah Isham (Charlotte Asprey), wife of the largest cattle rancher in the area. Her husband searched for her, but when he found her, he couldn’t keep a woman who had been defiled by the “red niggers" at home with him. She remains exiled in the desert, watched over by three thugs, hired by her husband, who act as drovers of his human piece of property. Vega’s actions for the rest of the picture to redeem her back into society are also his redemption. Every scene is packed with emotional truth and dignity, acted out by a top-flight cast.

All these films and the nominated animated shorts are touring in select cities courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. I would expect a DVD release sometime soon. Perhaps home viewers will embrace this unique and wonderful form of cinema that the big studios and distributors have all but forgotten. l

The Quiet Earth (1985)
Director: Geoff Murphy

By Marilyn Ferdinand

So-called “last person on earth" films have a small, but respectable place in the scifi genre. Among entries in this subgenre are Last Man on Earth (1924), The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), The Last Woman on Earth (1960), The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (1967), The Omega Man (1971), Virus (1982), Testament (1983), Night of the Comet (1984), and last year’s Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend. The New Zealand film The Quiet Earth is a cult classic that brings an interesting sensibility to the premise of having the world to yourself, in great part due to the touching, nuanced, and utterly original performance of Bruno Lawrence.

In a deliberate, powerful, opening sequence, the camera tracks a sunrise on the ocean. The sun is huge, red, and when it breaks free of the horizon, its reflection in the water creates the impression of a figure 8—the symbol for infinity. Next, we have a high overhead shot down on a naked man laying on a bed. The sun pouring through the blinds stirs him. He looks at the clock on his nightstand. It reads 6:12. He gets up, walks to a mirror, pulls an identity badge off his neck in disgust, and looks back at the clock. It seems stuck at 6:12. Finally, the numerals flip to 6:13.

The man, Zac Hobson (Lawrence), drives away, stopping for gas. When he goes into the office to pay, nobody is there. Further explorations show cars apparently abandoned on the highways, water left running until it floods a house, beds unmade and breakfasts half-eaten. In the most chilling sequence, Hobson comes upon what looks like a warehouse site, blanketed with flames. Amid the charred and twisted steel, Zac finds an airplane engine and a row of seats, empty, but with their seatbelts fastened.

Zac drives with purpose to a secure facility crowned with a huge radio satellite dish. He uses his security clearance card to enter the empty facility, where computer monitors show that Project Flashlight has been successfully completed. Reaching the bowels of the facility, he sees a body slumped over a console. The skin is dessicated, the eyes bulging hideously. “Now you’ve done it," despairs Zac. He seems to suspect that the disappearing of all life on Earth—except him, of course—was the result of this project gone horribly wrong.

At first, Zac attempts to contact anyone who might be around. An electronic/computer/engineering expert, Zac records a tape loop broadcasting widely with instructions on how to contact him. After five days, he changes his lifestyle and his message, telling to whom it may concern his new address and phone number—those of a stately home on a hill, replete with all the luxuries. He christens his new digs by drinking a raw egg with champagne. Then, he runs through a mall, eating confections at a bakery, grabbing new clothes, guns and ammunition, electronics, anything at all. He gets destructive, mowing down buildings with large earth-moving equipment and shooting out a television set whose videotaped program annoys him. He puts on a silk slip found in the closet of the house he is occupying and wanders onto a stadium field, madness and fury written on his face. He enters a church and, angry at God, yells, "If you don't come out I'll shoot the kid!" With no response forthcoming, he empties his rifle into a large crucifix of Jesus. In his existential despair, he puts his rifle inside his mouth, contemplating suicide.

Still, Zac pulls himself together somewhat. He abandons the home he has wrecked and moves to a modern-style mansion on the ocean. He seems more peaceful, more purposeful as he plans to plant a garden for food staples. He might just make it after all and perhaps figure out what happened to life on Earth. Then suddenly, from around the windblown draperies to his veranda steps Joanne (Alison Routledge), a beautiful redhead pointing a pistol at him. After a few startled moment, they hug each other in relief.

Zac is aware of how much younger Joanne is and keeps their relationship respectable. Eventually, they become lovers, prompting the most memorable scene of a memorable performance by Lawrence. Joanne comes into the bedroom wearing a maid’s outfit and places a tray with his breakfast on his lap. Then, she turns to leave, revealing her bare ass. He is so overcome by the sight that he leaps to grab her and burns himself with hot coffee. The spontaneity of the two actors is delightful and very human.

Of course, despite some respite from their despairing loneliness, the pair continues to look for others, and Zac continues to try to understand the exact nature of what Joanne calls “the effect." In fact, they experience the effect again, and Zac explains that New Zealand was part of a worldwide consortium cooperating with the Americans in setting up an energy grid so that planes could fly great distances without refueling. This scheme is an obvious allusion to the “Star Wars" air defense network proposed by President Reagan in 1983, but never implemented. The allusion goes further in critiquing privatization of such important functions by making the fictional grid system a corporate initiative that certainly has military implications.

Zac measures the effect and proves that the immutable laws of physics have been broken. Are they in an alternate dimension, and are the rest of Earth’s inhabitants living in a different space-time continuum? Before Zac arrives at an answer, a Maori man named Api (Pete Smith) turns up, creating a greater sense of community for the three but also setting up a love triangle. Eventually, the trio discovers the reason they are existing in the same dimension—the effect occurred at the very moment of their deaths—and Zac comes up with a strategy to deal with the effect, which is getting more intense with each passing day. What happens to him when he sets his solution in motion provides an end to the film as memorable—and just as puzzling—as that of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Pete Smith is a scary alpha male and spiritual, sensitive soul all at the same time. I was quite moved by his account of the moment of his death and appreciated his friendly-ferocious sparring with Lawrence. Routledge, frankly, is a piece of fluff playing a piece of fluff. She has a certain hippie sensibility when it comes to their circle of three, and her taste in outlandish costuming fits that ethos to a tee. She was a perfect object of desire, but not much more.

If this movie hadn’t cheated by not allowing Zac to be the last person on Earth, Lawrence would have made the best sole survivor in history. His fearless performance took him to the very edge of insanity and suppressed desires in an extremely well-modulated performance. Zac is a character who enjoyed his own company before the effect, despairs at having it foisted on him, yet clings to his self-isolation by lying to Api and Joanne about the origins of the effect and his plans—a sin neither of them can understand. Lawrence’s haunted eyes tell us volumes about his fears and his resignation to actions he must take. His joy, well tempered, bursts out like a brief laser blast. He is simply one of the most incredible actors I’ve had the pleasure to watch, accomplishing what would be said about Heath Ledger a generation later—seemingly effortless truth in the roles he played.

The spectacular scenery of Auckland adds to our appreciation of the world in which we live and signals the nostalgia overtaking our three survivors, but most especially Zac, even as they walk along its beaches and plunge into its oceans. This film has an ache, one I’ll be feeling for a long time to come. l

Persons of Interest
A semi-regular feature on the underappreciated, the promising, and the very cool

Roy Scheider

By Roderick Heath

One of the first films I ever saw was Jaws. My first viewing of Jaws was an auspicious event—a double bill with Raiders of the Lost Ark at a university movie theatre when I was five years old. I caught lice from some unkempt member of the collegiate crowd, and my dreams were haunted for weeks afterwards by melting faces and people being masticated by massive teeth. But a love affair with a medium had begun. Once we obtained the movie on videocassette, I memorised it. It’s also the film that made me appreciate acting. With Jaws, Spielberg perfected his Everyman hero, in the shape of Roy Scheider’s aquaphobic but resolute Police Chief Martin Brody. Brody reminded me of a skinnier edition of my father, with whom he shared a propensity for singing shanties after sinking a few beers.

Spielberg chose Scheider, passing on the studio’s pick, Charlton Heston, who, at that stage of his career, was guaranteed to have reduced Brody to a pillar of smarm. Scheider was a bony, self-contained screen presence, pushing 40 when he lurched into the public eye in 1971 with the one-two punch of Klute and The French Connection. Playing Buddy Russo to fellow late bloomer Gene Hackman’s explosive Popeye Doyle, Scheider’s cool provided a perfect counterpoint and the kind of distinctly real presence beloved of the American New Wave. He’d been around the block a few times by that stage. Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1932, he had been a young sportsman, playing baseball and boxing, where he gained his jagged nose, thus joining the long list of male actors who had their features interestingly rearranged in the ring (Yves Montand, Bob Hope, Gabriel Byrne, Mickey Rourke, Liam Neeson, etc). In college, he became interested in theatre, a passion that survived his conscription service.

Scheider’s stage career began professionally when he played Mercutio in a 1961 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet, and reached its height when he won an Obie award for the play Stephen D in 1968. His film debut at the age of 32 was in a trash horror epic, The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964). His work in TV and film was sporadic until his 1971 breakthrough. His lean physique and toughened, fairly proletarian demeanour first made him appeal as a modern heir to a tradition of screen male presences like Gary Cooper and James Stewart.

Klute and The French Connection established Scheider as a star of the new urban-noir genre. He followed them up with a memorable turn as Lenny, a creepy hired killer, in Jacques Deray’s uniquely cool Franco-American thriller, Un homme est mort (The Outside Man, 1972). Tracking down Jean-Louis Trintignant’s on-the-lam patsy, Scheider anticipates future merciless forces of underworld thuggishness, like Karl Urban’s super-assassin in The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men (2007), taking out hippies and housewives without a blink. At one point, Trintignant attempts to convince him that they’ve both been used, and Scheider promises they will now join forces, but tries to shoot him anyway at the first opportunity.

Scheider was a self-effacing actor, not given to exercises in cunning ham and award grabs that made notable careers for costars like Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, the latter his costar in John Schlesinger’s gritty 1976 opus Marathon Man. Scheider played Hoffman’s older brother, a shady CIA operative who survives one brutally memorable scene: when an assassin tries to garrote Scheider, Scheider gets his hand between the wire and his throat, the wire digging into the flesh of his palm. Scheider played the Yves Montand role in William Friedkin’s big-budget, big-flop remake of The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer (1977), and appeared in two Hitchcockian dramas, making for a soulful stand-in for Jimmy Stewart in Jonathan Demme’s Last Embrace (1979) and Robert Benton’s Still of the Night (1982), opposite Meryl Streep’s mysteriously comatose impression of a Hitchcock blonde.

Hoffman later beat out Scheider in vying for the 1979 Best Actor Oscar, Hoffman for the egregiously bland Kramer Vs Kramer, Scheider for his emotional and physical high-wire act in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. Playing Fosse’s alter ego, Joe Gideon, Scheider is dynamite in one of the few parts that stretched his capacities to the limit, requiring him to sing and dance as well as put across with compulsive force the drama of a man whose lust for life and creation rapidly destroys him. All That Jazz was and is a litmus test, unbearable to some, hypnotic to me, but I don’t think anyone can doubt Scheider’s commitment to and impact in the role, whether in scenes as grimly memorable as when Gideon tries to ignore his heart palpitations during a cast reading or when he escapes his hospital bed to yak it with a cleaner, or when he sings, in Gideon’s imagined farewell extravaganza, “Bye Bye Love," with its suddenly meaningful lyric, “I think I’m gonna die!"

At this point, Scheider decided to go back to the stage, winning a Drama League award for Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, before returning to the screen for Still of the Night. In 1983, he played another policeman in John Badham’s cheesy techno-crime thriller, Blue Thunder, a film stuffed with almost every fashionable “Screw The Man" cliché of its period. The hero is a haunted Vietnam veteran who tries to expose government corruption and the fascist threat represented by the titular chunk of super-expensive steel, an Apache helicopter, ready to deal with any potential civil disturbances (read “race riots") during the L.A. Olympics. Scheider’s boss (Malcom McDowell, another terrific actor in B-movie purgatory) was also his ‘Nam commander, lending an edge of national, psychological struggle to their final confrontation as Scheider’s sturdy hero repurposes Blue Thunder to kick authoritarian ass.

Peter Hyams’ 2010 (1984) the sequel to Kubrick’s mighty 2001: A Space Odyssey, was a good film that has been deliberately forgotten mostly because it substituted Kubrick’s poetic mysticism for a more spelt-out, standard, scifi drama. Scheider played Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester in the original), the man who conceived the disastrous Discovery mission to the Black Monolith at Jupiter, and hitches a ride with a Russian salvage expedition to find that HAL 9000 was reprogrammed by evil government types, and that the aliens behind the Monolith are now protecting a new experiment in life-creation, apparently disappointed by the still-festering tribalism of their human progeny. Amidst an excellent cast (including Helen Mirren, Elya Baskin, and John Lithgow), Scheider is laid-back and so unutterably down-to-earth, he slices through the bunk with barely a raised eyebrow and provides an easy emotional centre, like when he holds onto a frightened Russian girl as their spaceship makes a dangerous entry into Jupiter’s gravity. It’s easy to imagine him circumventing the original by demanding in his Jersey honk, “Hal, just open the goddamn pod bay doors, for chrissakes!"

He also contributed to Peter Medak’s sadly trashed but intriguing The Men’s Club (1986), an adaptation of Leonard Michael’s novel, about a group of professional men, aging golden boys all, who attempt to start an encounter group and end up fleeing to the boyish dream world of a high-class brothel. With a few flops behind him and now over 50, Scheider ceased to be a star around this time. He did feature in two substandard John Frankenheimer films, 52 Pick-Up (1986) and The Fourth War (1989). A solid TV movie, Somebody Has to Shoot the Picture (1990), saw him play a photographer documenting an execution who tries to save the condemned man’s life. Steven Spielberg had found a younger, better-looking actor in the Cooperesque mould, Harrison Ford, for the Indiana Jones films, but handed Scheider a good role as the stoic captain of a huge futuristic submarine in the expensive TV series SeaQuest DSV (1993-1995), an ambitious enterprise that unfortunately proved a dull update of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, something Scheider publicly bitched about.

After this, Scheider was officially an aging character actor with more roles than good films to his credit, and a smattering of genuine cult films: David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch (1991) and, working for Peter Medak again, the utterly perverse Romeo Is Bleeding (1993). But the last 10 years of Scheider’s career are not much to look at. He had made some missteps from which he never recovered, like not taking the role offered to him in The Deer Hunter that eventually went to Robert De Niro; instead, he made Jaws 2 (1978). He never achieved that sort of late-career recharge that Michael Caine gained with The Cider House Rules or Peter O’Toole had with Troy. Scheider died on February 10, 2008, of bone cancer.

For most people, he will always be Chief Brody—and that’s fair enough. Jaws still rocks, and remains a rich, tart study of male behaviour. Brody is one of a trio of men engaged in a primal rite of hunting a rampaging beast, the utterly ordinary man between Robert Shaw’s Quint, the ancient mariner and bullying blowhard full of patriarchal arrogance and a Conradian sense of horror, and Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper, the rich kid with a billion-dollar brain, convinced of his own brilliance. Hooper’s willing to go toe to toe with Quint in a game of one-upmanship, whilst Brody, whom we’ve seen barely able to hold his own against his chaotic family life and politicking small towners, is reduced to watching as they compare scars—he can only glance furtively at his appendix scar. And yet, both Hooper and Quint’s attempts to be technological in taking on the Jungian nightmare gets one of them killed and the other very nearly. Brody is the only one to confront the beast directly with no protection other than his guts and wits, building to one of the great climaxes in cinema, where Scheider’s joyous, triumphant whoop rings in the ears. He’s just as good in the inevitably contrived sequel, Jaws 2, where Brody’s warnings about history repeating get him sacked, even more impotent than before in confronting the indifference of civil authority. He gets drunk and mopes, and the next day, embarrassedly kicks aside a stack of beer cans from the front lawn. You just gotta love the guy. And you know he’s gonna be proved right. l

Happiness of the Katakuris (Katakuri-ke no kôfuku, 2001)
Director: Takashi Miike

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Life in the United States is getting pretty squirrely right now. The election season is in full bloom, and partisans for the various presidential candidates still in the race are getting more wild-eyed, offensive, and addle-brained by the minute. I fully expect to hear claims of miracles or evidential documents showing that a candidate’s soul belongs to Satan. Compared with the fool’s circus going on around me, Happiness of the Katakuris, a domestic comedy/musical/horror flick that dabbles heavily in claymation and natural disaster, seems almost mundane.

Takashi Miike has a reputation as a director of ultraviolent films, but in fact, he has made many different types of films within the studio-like system of the Japanese film industry. Interestingly, Happiness of the Katakuris is a remake of the dark Korean comedy called The Quiet Family (Choyonghan kajok, 1998), and from reading the synopsis of The Quiet Family, it appears to be a faithful one.

Household head Masao Katakuri (singing star Kenji Sawada) and his job in shoe sales part company. Rather than feel miserable, Masao feels freed to pursue his dream of family togetherness. He hears about plans to build a major road near a volcano in a remote part of Japan. Masao thinks it’s time to get in on the ground floor of the tourist industry that is sure to explode, and moves his wife Terue (Keiko Matsuzaka), his delinquent teenage son Masayuki (Shinji Takeda), his divorced daughter Shizue (Naomi Nishida) and her daughter Yurie (Tamiki Miyazaki), and grandfather Ojîsan Jinpei Katakuri (Tesuro Tamba) to the area to live in and run a bed and breakfast called the White Lover’s Inn.

Unfortunately, work on the road is delayed, and the venture seems doomed. One evening, however, the Katakuris greet their first guest, a deranged-looking man who stumbles in and asks for a room. The entire family moves in well-rehearsed unison to register him and tend to his every need. The next day, they find he has paid back their hospitality by stabbing himself in the neck and dying on their clean floor.

Worried that guests will shun the inn if they hear it was the site of a suicide, the family decides to bury the body themselves. After a time, a new pair of guests, a sumo wrestler and his underage girlfriend, check in for some extremely vigorous and loud sex—Miike signals what’s on the Katakuris’ mind in a shot of the full moon with craters shaped like two bunnies humping. The next morning, the wrestler is face down on the bed—dead—and his girl nowhere to be found, that is, until they lift the heart-attack victim and find her smothered below him. Out come the shovels again.

There is one more death and hurried plans to dig up the corpses and move them when the road construction starts with the bodies in its path. Eventually, the family, brought together through adversity and shown to be better than they thought they could be dance in a Sound of Music style meadow and sing about the true meaning of happiness.

In between, absurdity reigns supreme. A woman tries to drink soup. Her spoon keeps hitting something and then pulls up a claymation figure that looks like a sea monkey. She turns into a claymation figure and screams. The sea monkey grabs her uvula and tears off the end, which looks like a heart. We are then spun into a love song of sorts in a claymation world. Other wonderful moments include Grandpa’s skill knocking crows out of the sky by flinging pieces of wood at them, a glamorous nightclub duet in which Masao and Terue sing of their love, a song-and-dance number by the Katakuris and the corpses, and the family weeping over the bloody body of Masayuki, stabbed by a crazed wife murderer, and then discovering he has suffered only a flesh wound.

The funniest part for me is when Shizue goes into town and meets a very scruffy looking man who claims he is Richard Sagawa (Kiyoshiro Imawano), an American naval pilot and also a captain in the Royal Navy of Great Britain. Shizue falls for his cheap flattery and imagines a rainbows-and- daffodils wedding. When Miike returns us to reality, Shizue is writhing on the floor in happy delirium, while onlookers back away from her. Richard shakes her from her reverie, but the two are parted. He later turns up at the inn, much to Shizue’s delight, claiming that he would like to marry Shizue, but that he needs permission from his aunt Queen Elizabeth. They walk though a dump near the property, where Richard speak bitterly about the royal family and how they were unfair to Princess Diana, and then tries to hit Shizue up for plane fare back to England. Grandpa moves into action, and claymation Richard ends up going over a cliff and splashing into the river far below.

The story has brief moments of narration by an older Yurie. The fantasies of the tale remind me of when I was six and turning a Chinese restaurant I ate at with my family into a mandarin’s palace for my playmates. It’s fitting that the last, heroic act Yurie remembers is of claymation Grandpa rescuing Yurie’s dog Pochi, who is floating on a river of lava from the just-exploded volcano in the distance. Hanging by his knees from a tree limb, Grandpa yells to Pochi to reach up his paws and whisks the mutt to safety. In the end, the lava flow covers all the land around the inn, but leaves the structure standing—a real tribute to the durability of the family.

It’s an odd combination of horror, comedy, fantasy, and romantic musical Miike juggles. If you can go with the absurd tone, you’ll find that this film really has a heart. There are many kinds of loving families in the movies including, I suppose, the vomit-inducing, murdering Fireflys of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. One might have supposed that violence-prone Miike would have turned to this film as a model for the Katakuris. But he’s more interested in how people are brought together and stick by each other through disaster, death, and disappointment. The Happiness of the Katakuris is the kind of circus I love. l

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Director: Stanley Kubrick

By Marilyn Ferdinand

2001: A Space Odyssey is a true landmark in the history of filmmaking. Eschewing conventional storytelling techniques and showcasing the most technically accurate environment ever committed to film to that point (including defying the movie convention that there is sound in space, which, of course, there is not), all without the use of computer animation or manipulation, Stanley Kubrick’s monumental achievement still has not been bettered in its genre. It looks better, probes deeper, and unsettles more effectively than any scifi film—or many other types of movies, for that matter—I can think of.

Yet, I have read more times than I ever expected to how boring 2001 is, how pretentious, how unengaging. It blows my mind that I even feel the need to defend this masterpiece, but perhaps that’s exactly what makes it a masterpiece—even now, audiences have not caught up with it. Like every great work of art, it continues to challenge, confound, and inspire. So, I’m here to try to show you what I see in this work and try to convince naysayers to give it another go.

The story can be summed up fairly easily. Starting in prehistory with the emergence of proto-humans, we see apelike men and women in a pack feed at a water hole somewhere in Africa and squabble with other family groups. One day, a piercing vibration attracts one pack. A mysterious black monolith has seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Fearing it at first, then fascinated, the members of the pack end up stroking and hugging the object. Shortly thereafter, they learn to use tools. They learn to kill their rivals with these tools.

In the longest flash-forward in movie history, we find ourselves on a space shuttle, empty except for one sleeping passenger and the shuttle’s crew. The passenger, Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), is on his way to the moon to investigate a strange phenomenon—a monolith like the one we saw in prehistoric Africa has been dug up. It, too, emits a powerful electromagnetic burst that the men on the moon find piercing.

Eighteen months later, we are on a spaceship headed for Jupiter, where the burst from the moon’s monolith was aimed. Two astronauts, Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea), are active on board, while three of their colleagues are in hibernation to conserve energy and food. The HAL 9000 computer watches over the entire ship, its flawless brain, calm voice (supplied by Douglas Rain), and vacant pinpoint of a red eye making it the sixth member of the crew. One day, HAL seems to go a little wacko with power and decides the human component of the mission is flawed and needs to be jettisoned. HAL kills everyone but Dave. Dave then “kills" HAL. The mission to Jupiter continues, where Dave finds the monolith that received the transmission from the moon monolith. What happens to Dave may signal a change in the course of human evolution.

What I love about Stanley Kubrick is his macrocosmic engagement with humanity, not just its situation comedies and dramas. Even when his films zero in on specific characters (e.g., Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut) he successfully links their actions into the larger scheme of things. 2001 is the apex of his engagement with human existence, spanning as it does the first appearance of human beings to what appears to be a rebirth as another, more evolved form. Not only does 2001 examine the ultimate challenge of the human project—understanding the nature of life in the universe—but it also creates ultimate images of enormous beauty and power that seem prescient when compared with photos taken by the Hubble telescope at the outer reaches of the solar system, for example, the so-called stargate of speeding and swirling colors. He also seems able to mine innerspace, creating an environment for Dave that is both alien and familiar to reflect the singular experience the astronaut is going through.

Kubrick was known for his incredible skills with a camera, starting his working life as a photographer and managing, from his very first directorial effort, every aspect of the images in and about his films—from camera movement and framing to movie posters and marketing literature. He uses his circular setting and sweeping camera work—for example, following Frank as he jogs and shadow boxes on the ship's circular deck—to create a sense of disorientation, even alienation, in the audience.

He was a true visual artist with a strong appreciation for fine art. Art shows up in his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, which features Kubrick’s wife’s paintings adorning the walls of the Harfords' Manhattan apartment, and in 2001, in which Dave’s drawings of the ship and his hibernating colleagues are critiqued by HAL as showing improvement. In fact, they are very good, and in this, one of many small details, Kubrick signals a major theme in 2001: the hubris that comes from assumed superiority.

This exchange between a television interviewer talking with the crew and HAL sums up the philosophical issue Kubrick is exploring:

Interviewer: HAL, you have an enormous responsibility on this mission, in many ways perhaps the greatest responsibility of any single mission element. You’re the brain and central nervous system of the ship, and your responsibilities include watching over the men in hibernation. Does this ever cause you any lack of confidence?

HAL: Let me put it this way, Mr. Amor. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.

The television interviewer comments that he detects a certain pride HAL has in his abilities and asks Dave and Frank whether HAL has real feelings. Dave answers that HAL is programmed to behave in a humanlike way to make the mission easier to manage for its human crew, but whether HAL actually has feelings is anyone’s guess.

The way Kubrick directs this film clearly shows that he believes HAL has feelings, maybe more than his human protagonists do. I can feel a presence, an intelli- gence beyond programming, in the red aperture HAL uses to keep watch on everything. Unbelievably, HAL does seemingly make a mistake when a part the computer predicted would fail proves to be in full working order. Dave and Frank, fearing for HAL’s competence, make the hard choice to disconnect his higher functions and proceed on their own. Like any sentient being, HAL fights for his life when he kills Frank and the hibernating crew members, and attempts to lock Dave out of the ship.

HAL’s pride is severely damaged by his mistake and Dave and Frank’s loss of confidence in him. In addition, HAL is the only crew member who knows the true purpose of the mission to Jupiter—to contact what scientists believe is an extraterrestrial life form. HAL may even feel threatened by aliens that might be more intelligent than he is; after all, he was programmed by human beings who didn’t send monoliths all over the solar system. HAL’s hubris, then, is his tragic downfall, leading to the most poignantly disturbing scene in the film. When Dave enters the giant computer to disconnect HAL’s higher functions, HAL tries to reason with Dave, reassure him. Then realizing that the end is near, he pleads, “I’m afraid" and repeats over and over that he can feel his mind beginning to go: “I can feel it. I can feel it."

Where HAL takes his mission very personally, the humans seem relatively unconcerned. For example, Frank half-listens to a transmission from his parents wishing him a happy birthday and politely acknowledges HAL’s birthday greeting. Dr. Floyd is the essence of chilly politeness as he deflects questions about his mission from several Russians he meets on the space station that is the waypoint between Earth and the moon. The entire scene is deeply superficial, projecting a jaundiced view of humanity that began when the first proto-human clubbed another back in the African prologue.

Kubrick saves his awe for the things we can’t know. Does HAL have feelings? Is there other life in the universe? Are we being watched? He is, so far, the only filmmaker who has captured the awesome nature of space. With so many stunning images, I went nuts trying to choose the photos for this article.

The Space Baby—an obviously conscious, aware being waiting to be born—has to be one of the most primal and effective images in film history, perhaps even human history. It has invaded my dreams more times than I can remember, particularly at times when I was going through a sea change in my life. It is an archetype of enormous power. The alignment of heavenly bodies illuminated by a dawning sun is inspired and breathtaking. The monoliths themselves, those mysterious, black, featureless slabs, tap into the unconscious, both fascinating and frightening. The image of Frank in his orange space suit and blue shoes, struggling with his severed air hose and then spinning lifelessly in the vastness of space, is a nightmare made real.

Kubrick’s musical choices tell his story with the utmost beauty and economy. The optimistic view of humanity’s progress in space just after the prologue is accompanied by the buoyant sounds of Johann Strauss' “The Blue Danube" waltz. The intrusion of the alien presence is scored by the hair-raising atonalities of Romanian composer György Ligeti. Richard Strauss’ heroic rendering of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of the superman and will to power, “Also Sprach Zarathustra," perfectly conveys the hubristic dimensions of the narrative.

There isn’t a detail in this film that’s extraneous. Therefore, while dialogue is spare, a wealth of information is being imparted to us visually, aurally, and through the emotions of the unconscious. The everyday world discourages a deep connection to any of these senses, preferring that we put them in service of everyday tasks that ultimately have little meaning. Through 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick has given us both the time and the space to reconnect with our grandest aspirations. l

No Country for Old Men (2007)
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen

By Roderick Heath

There will be spoilers.

A few years back, Billy Bob Thornton adapted Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses for the screen. The film was mutilated from its original four-hour cut and entirely dismissed by critics and audiences. I liked it. It had a rugged poetry. I liked it much more than this film. No Country for Old Men has gained almost universal raves. C’est la vie.

No Country for Old Men tells of Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam veteran living in a trailer in West Texas with his young wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald). He’s out hunting one day when he discovers the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. Bodies litter the landscape, one Mexican man with a hole in his gut groans for water, and Llewellyn finds $2 million in a suitcase. He takes the money, but in the middle of the night decides to go help the wounded man. When he gets there, the man is dead, and some of his accomplices arrive and chase Llewellyn, who barely escapes. He returns home, tells Carla to pack off to her mother’s house in Odessa, before proceeding south by himself to await his pursuers. He figures on mere human adversaries. What he gets instead is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hulking, soulless psychopath who’s sort of lump of walking Dostoyevskian anxiety about what the world without god, dominated instead by chance and nature, will look like. Llewellyn and Anton match wits as the dead-eyed monster of existentialism pursues the stoic warrior of American ambition.

A Hitchcockian story in Peckinpah country, the film has been paced and constructed by the Coens as a thriller, but it’s not a thriller. Chigurh is, in essence, an Angel of Death, though he’s certifiably “real" in that he has a job, identity, even a disgruntled boss. A Dallas businessman (Stephen Root) who seems to be running the drug deals, has sent Chigurh out, and, realising he’s a loose cannon, assigns another operative, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), to intervene. Chigurh likes to subject random people to coin-toss choices that will determine whether he kills them or not. McCarthy’s thesis is that often crime has no motivation, that an anonymous, senseless type of evil infests modern life, and the representative of old-timey values, local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), bemoans this process and proves impotent to hold off this dissolution into moral turpitude.

I could argue with McCarthy’s point, but we’ll take it at face value for the moment. McCarthy is an exceptionally cagey writer, who, like Hemingway, perceives humans more as phenomena of nature than as individuals. His style is well pitched to evoke the symbolism inherent in his tales. McCarthy, fundamentally, is a poet. The Coens, on the other hand, approach this material with a procedural eye. The sequences of Chigurh’s hunt are riveting cinema, but much ado about nothing; there’s a long sequence where Llewellyn hides the money and then extracts it, trying to beat the clock on Chigurh’s arrival that’s breathtaking filmmaking, but ridiculously clumsy activity. But the Coens find no poetic discourse in the material. They have been poetic, mostly in early films; the wind-driven hat of Miller’s Crossing (1990) and the big clock in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) are some of the most affecting images in modern film. But the template for No Country is Fargo (1996), their last cool, blackly comic crime drama and their most overrated film. When they make serious films, they become watchmakers; the cogs are brilliant and shiny, but they do not sing. They include the usual absurdist epigrams and endless supply of caricatured American types to leaven the brutality, and elide convention by having the real climaxes occur off-screen. For example, Bell and Carla come across Llewellyn dead, brought down not by Chigurh but by some of the Mexican drug dealers, gunned down along with hapless bystanders in an El Paso motel.

Yeah, yeah, I get how wonderfully clever and unclichéd it is to set up a chase thriller and then throw it out the window. You know what? Go take a running jump, Joel, Ethan. No Country for Old Men is a hollow piece of work. The Coens cannot reveal much about their characters to make a statement about the tragedy of death carry weight. We have hints of motivation, but Llewellyn, Bell, and Anton are all robbed of a complex inner life that might make this drama build to tragedy. We’re supposed to be shocked and haunted by the epigrammatic finale where Anton fulfils a threat to Llewellyn, even though he’s dead, by tracking down and executing his wife, but she’s such a pasty character, there’s not much impact there either, even though the wonderful Macdonald does her best to imbue the part with a blowsy appeal. But my irritation with No Country began before it dynamited its own story. The story is thin, and after the central gun fight between Anton and Llewellyn, illogic begins to take a grip. The characters start acting in odd, even stupid ways, and all of the supporting characters were the usual Coen Bros cut-outs.

Anton’s evil is a cipher, a gimmick, an obvious way of summarizing a theme. Wells describes Anton as being driven by a kind of code, an honour system of death, which is as big a load of claptrap as I’ve ever heard. Anton’s actions are occasionally governed by some sort of philosophy of chance, but why he then shoots his own employers and decides to go after the money for himself is entirely opaque. Wait—he’s a self-serving renegade but also a kind of moral force? There seems to be a suggestion Chigurh is punishing the sinners of the world for their sins and the innocents for their blind innocence, and suggests he himself is only alive and in any one spot, performing any one action, through the constant turns of chance.

There’s a deep confusion in this philosophy. Is it about a fracturing, godless universe where all fate is cruel and inevitable, or is it about the notion that what goes around comes around? Either way, Chigurh’s such a blank, bleak creature that the audience laps up his evil appeal; he’s so precise, without caution, mercy, or similarity to any living human, that he’s an almost comforting villain. No scene in No Country is as tense and disquieting a contemplation of psychopathy as the central pas de deux of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a film that demanded infinitely more complex assignations of sympathy.

Llewellyn, too, is an odd beast of a hero. His decision to take water to the dying man, late as it is, signals him as a man of conscience, and he defies Chigurh with Charles Bronson-esque pith, refusing—as Carla does later—to accept Chigurh’s predestination. There is a sense, not developed, that Llewellyn and Chigurh are two sides of the same coin, both skilled, ruthless, cunning, and determined. Llewellyn is casually dispatched, and Chigurh left to go his merry way. What a bust! Why doesn’t Anton kill Bell when Bell almost finds him in Moss’s motel room? Does Chigurh “respect" the lawman? Does this have something to do with the dream Bell recounts at the end, where he’s led through the darkness by a fire lit by an unseen figure—having been passed by the bad angel, a good angel promises a peaceful end for the righteous man? What is righteousness? Is Llewellyn’s taking of the money an act that damns him no matter what he does?

To be sure there’s a political element in all this. Llewellyn wants to save himself and his wife from a life of living in a trailer park after having been used and thrown away by his country; the drug deals are actually run by businessmen who use poor people and psychos to enforce their actions. Not exactly new themes, though. The car crash that almost claims Anton at the end seems to hint at some divine justice, but why leave him with a broken arm? Why was the scene there at all? Some kids are kind to Anton, and he’s kind to them back. Is he then an agent of karmic balance? Or just a bogeyman?

I can’t fault the cast or the technical aspects. Josh Brolin, The Goonies a long way behind him now, provides a sturdy Llewellyn, reminiscent of Kris Kristofferson in look and cadences, and Jones’ aging mug evokes a worn-out soul effortlessly. Bardem has gained the most plaudits as Chigurh, which is fair enough; his droll deliveries, physical command, and occasional vivid flourishes (his eyes grow wide and ecstatic in strangling a policeman) provide the film’s most hypnotic moments. But frankly, it’s a piddling role for Bardem, one of the finest actors alive, compared to his multilayered protagonists in films like Live Flesh (1997) and The Dancer Upstairs (2002). The filmmaking is imbued with the brother’s own laser-edge editing and brilliant photography by Roger Deakins. And the film, deeply flawed as it is once the visceral impact fades, represents a return to challenging form for the Coens after several anorexic comedies.

The trouble is, the Coens just can’t do dread. Bergman could do dread. David Lynch can do it. The Coens are comedians, not tragedians. Their approach to life and death on the cinema screen is capricious. No Country is almost a remake of Raising Arizona, played for thrills rather than laughs; Anton is the straight-faced equivalent of the Lone Rider of the Apocalypse, and about as believable. Unless they’re directly copying a model (like The Hudsucker Proxy imitates Capra), the Coens rarely built a truly compelling narrative. They used to make up for this with shows of energy and invention. They’re admirable in their attempts to always take the road less travelled, but I see few signs of them being capable of making a film that’s more than a generic deconstruction. Most of their films, for all the wit, are little more than ramshackle collusions of blackout sketches, improperly finished and lacking substance, with The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? representing their most frustrating efforts.

Sam Peckinpah used to make movies like this as almost second nature, reinforcing his own harsh worldview with a vivid, gorged sense of life as it is lived and as it is given up. No Country reads like a combination of Straw Dogs and The Getaway with The Wild Bunch’s fuck-it-all philosophy. Compared with them, No Country is schematic and trite. It’s easy to accept the ending because it doesn’t require you to feel for anything of substance being destroyed. Llewellyn and Carla die off-screen and there’s no suffering, no deep fear or agony, no urgency. Late in the film, Bell converses with a wheelchair-bound ex-colleague, who delivers the film’s signature line: “You can’t stop what’s coming." That would be death, of course. Yet the film has failed to supply the feeling to accompany the sentiment. Fate has been reduced to its message. Boiled right down: shit happens. l

La Jetée (1962)/12 Monkeys (1995)
Directors: Chris Marker/Terry Gilliam

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Director Terry Gilliam has sought inspiration from the world of fantasy for his choice of films—from the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm to the fictional adventures of Baron Munchausen to the absurdist-humanist epic of Don Quixote by Cervantes (an aborted project). His attraction to the science-fiction tragedy La Jetée might have signaled a more serious consideration of the dangers of scientific experimentation and the human capacity for cruelty. But in execution, 12 Monkeys is a totally different film from its poetic inspiration. Is that a bad thing? Of course not. 12 Monkeys is solidly, if sometimes annoyingly, entertaining. But if it sends audiences scurrying to see the source of its inspiration, it may do them a disservice; La Jetée is bound to confound the popcorn crowd to which Gilliam always plays. Nonetheless, both films share an important element beyond the outlines of their stories: the strategies people use to escape their lives. Unfortunately, while Marker illuminates the dark corners of human survival to powerful effect, Gilliam provides the escape itself, leaving audiences as unaware as ever of what they are doing.

Chris Marker is a French renaissance man with one of the most fertile, creative minds in cinema. At the age of 86, he is still creating art, unabashedly thrilled with the new technological advances available to him. La Jetée reflects both the horrors of World War II and the tensions of 1962, when he and the rest of the world stood on the precipice, as the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to break out into another world war, this time with nuclear bombs and missiles serving as the conventional weapons of the day. The horrible sense of déjà vu that must have enveloped Marker and his peers must have heightened his existing interest in memory and time. La Jetée uses a straightforward science-fiction device—time travel—to explore the paradoxes of the human mind that allow us to experience simultaneously the past, present, and future.

The film opens on a still photo of the observation deck (called la jetée, or pier, in French) of an airport. The sounds of jet planes are heard and then a swell of mournful choral music that quite reminded me of Jewish liturgical music accompanies the opening credits, which identify the film as a photo novel (the world’s first graphic novel?). Two title cards are shown that translate as: “This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood. The violent scene which upset him and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later happened on the main pier at Orly Paris airport sometime before the outbreak of World War III." The entire film is told using this narrative voiceover (James Kirk in the English translation) and splendid and evocative black-and-white stills. We zero in on the memories of the man as a boy, at the airport with his parents to make a recreation out of watching the planes land and take off. He recalls the face of a woman, then a disturbance, realizing only slowly that he had just witnessed a man die on the pier. His memories move forward to the destruction of Paris in a nuclear bomb attack. Images of crumbled buildings end with a manufactured photo of the Arc de Triomphe with its top span missing. The human race must move underground to avoid the worldwide radioactivity contaminating the surface.

A group of scientists are conducting experiments. These experiments have killed some and made others go mad. The Man of our story (Davos Hanich) is chosen as the next guinea pig. He imagines confronting someone like Dr. Frankenstein, but instead meets a reasonable, rational man (Jacques Ledoux) who explains that they are trying to send a subject back in time to get supplies, food, and information that might help them return to the surface. The Man was chosen because he has an extraordinary attachment to a memory from before the war—the memory on the pier. They place large patches over his eyes and inject him with something. Whispers in German accompany this ritual.

He goes back, viewing “real children, real birds." He comes back. Says the narrator, “They begin again. The Man doesn't die, nor does he go mad. He suffers. They continue." The Man is sent on several forays into the past, where he meets the same woman (Hélène Chatelain) again and again. She comes to see him as her phantom, appearing and disappearing but always kind. The Man progresses through her world, walking with her in the park (“he remembers there were parks" at one time on Earth). They view a cross-section of a giant sequoia tree with different dates in history marked at the appropriate ring. The Man points somewhere outside the circle of the tree: "I come from here."

He unfolds his story to her; she doesn't laugh. She takes him to her home. We see a series of photos of the woman asleep on her bed. Then we are startled by the only moving images in the film—the Woman’s face, full front to the camera. The Man seems to have found an animated image of life by falling in love.

Abruptly, the experimenters tell the Man that his work in the past is finished. He is sent to the future, where he meets apparently mutated human beings living in a sterile sort of world we never see. He is brought back to his present, but learns that the beings of the future also time-travel. They return and invite him to stay with them. He says he would rather go back to the past, to be with the Woman. There he is sent and watches the memory of Orly that started it all, realizing that he was the man who died.

La Jetée uses a novel presentation to emphasize the snapshot nature of memory. But his images are extraordinarily beautiful and put together with great style, suggesting movement and emotion by allowing us to linger on them and fill them with our own experiences of nostalgia and déjà vu. The longing for the past, the sentimental simplicity of childhood, tugs at the Man—an escape from the lightless, seemingly lifeless present. But like all people who yearn for the past, the Man cannot truly live there. The scene at the sequoia tree pays homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo, in which James Stewart as Scottie has a similar scene with Kim Novak as his love Madeleine. When the Man considers the Woman, he realizes that in his time she is, in fact, dead. But he doesn't make the mistake of trying to revive her as Scottie did with Madeleine. Life as we know it is a linear progression forward; without a present or a future, humanity must die. Echoes of the past—for example, Marker's references to German experimentation on humans during World War II—are meant to inform and warn the present. Thus, the existence of all times at once—the timelessness of time, if you will—must be part of the project of living.

That’s a lot to pack into 28 minutes. The hubby and I watched this film three times in 48 hours. We could watch it three more times and still find more to ponder.

12 Monkeys is a long, dense 126 minutes that gives an onscreen credit to Chris Marker and La Jetée. But all Gilliam wants is the story, not the insights. The films starts with the Man transformed into James Cole (Bruce Willis), a criminal locked in a cage in the underground world of the future who is chosen to help the powers that be by going above ground to collect specimens of life forms that have survived the biological plague that has wiped out nearly the entire human race. He does well and is offered the opportunity to be sent into the past to retrieve a pure sample of the virus, before it mutated beyond a cure, and earn a pardon.

The scientists, an assortment of grotesque figures typical of Gilliam films, are not precise in targeting the time to which they send Cole. He ends up in 1990, where his assault on some cops lands him drugged up and restrained in a lunatic asylum. His psychiatrist, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), is unusually sympathetic and drawn to Cole. Once he is properly medicated to avoid addition outbursts, he is released into the day room of the asylum, where he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), a truly wild and woolly head case whose father (Christopher Plummer) is a microbiologist working on some sort of biological manipulation. When Cole attempts an escape, he is put in an isolation room and strapped to a gurney. He disappears, however, when his superiors call him back to his world.

Another attempt to send him back puts him on a World War I battlefield with his fellow time traveler Jose (Jon Seda). Both are wounded. Cole is quickly extricated and sent to the proper time, 1996, just before the virus first appeared. He kidnaps Kathryn and forces her to drive him to Philadelphia, where the outbreak first occurred. She’s terrified, but still drawn to him. When he shows sign of pain in his leg, she extracts the bullet he took on his previous "trip" and is surprised to find it looking antique. She tries to get him to turn himself in for psychiatric care, but once again, as capture seems imminent, he disappears. She becomes convinced that his story is true when she learns that he accurately predicted the outcome of a rescue attempt of a child who fell down a deep well. When he next returns, she does everything she can to help him avert disaster, even though Cole has warned her that he can’t change what happened in the past, only take back information to help in the future.

Gilliam creates a nice little mystery out of his story, as Cole and Kathryn piece together scraps of information to find out who the bioterrorist is. Their feelings of familiarity are explained and brought to a logical and poignant conclusion. In between, there are some great set pieces, particularly during the kidnapping sequence. At other times, the look of the film veers wildly into Gilliamland, with electronic surveillance a prominent feature—from Kathryn and Cole, now fugitives from justice, caught on multiple TV screens in a store window to an orb fixed with cameras moving intrusively into Cole's space as he is interrogated by the scientists. Gilliam even trots out the transmitter in the tooth, now as old a bit as “take my wife, please." Brad Pitt, the head of a band of guerrillas called the Army of the 12 Monkeys that is fighting for the environment in 1996, overacts to the point of disgust. Gilliam also seems to have fitted him with a contact lens to make him look goggle-eyed. It’s pure shtick that does absolutely nothing for this movie. Likewise, Madeleine Stowe lacks depth in her performance, and Gilliam seems to have directed the majority of the cast to create caricatures.

Only Bruce Willis comes near to approximating the anguish and longing of the Man in La Jetée. His concern for Kathryn, for the human race, for his own sanity are moving and painful to watch. The 1990s was a time of psychological malaise in which sarcasm became the dominant form of cultural discourse. It’s completely in keeping with this sensibility that Gilliam finds a way to tell us “don’t worry, be happy" about the end of humanity. He disobeys his movie’s internal logic by creating new evidence for the future that could help them to stop the spread of the virus, not just collect the specimen. This window out of the mess science has created lets the audience off the hook in terms of considering the real implications of biological tampering and getting up in arms to do something about it. It also plays into the primitivist fears of science and AIDS that fueled the religious fundamentalism of the time and its denunciation of homosexuality without critiquing these sentiments. 12 Monkeys really is nothing more than a disaster film.

Each film is a product of its time. Forgive me, please, if I prefer a time that was brave enough to care. l

Criterion has issued restored high-definition digital transfers on DVD of La Jetée and Marker's Sans Soleil (1983), a full-length feature film.