Tulpan (2009, Kazakhstan, Dvortesoy)

Ben Begins:

I remember you mentioning some time ago that you had seen a film and it featured a Boney M tune that you couldn't get out of your head. When I asked you if it was Rasputin - the only Boney M title I can ever recall - you confirmed that it was not, but were unable to identify the song that was playing in your brain. Now I know, of course, that the track was Rivers of Babylon, which the credits to Tulpan indicate was indeed performed by Boney M. But I want to mention that theirs is a cover version. The original was by one of the pioneer reggae bands (name?) and was the theme song for the early 70s film The Harder They Come. It stars Jimmy Cliff sort of playing himself in a parable about exploitation in the music business. I've never seen it but I've been led to understand that it's a worthwhile critique of neo-colonialism with considerable aesthetic merit as well. I believe The Clash reference it in one of their tunes. Of course, Boney M belt it out for nothing but disco dance-floor fun.

Which makes their version entirely appropriate for the water truck-driving character in Tulpan. His chief desire is a wealthy consumer lifestyle, motivated by the ear candy that is Boney M and candy literally, the man's own teeth are capped with metal. Naive and perfectly likable, this fellow is nevertheless representative of the most incorrect cultural option, everything misguided about abondoning your enthnic heritage in order to emulate Western values and styles. The latter Tulpan equates with pornography, which some Western viewers may take as offensively reductionist but which I consider pretty accurate these days. But even without assessing the character at this contemporary international level, he is the classic hick who dreams of the big city where he may partake in what Hobbes called commodious living. And Jesus, can you blame him? Talk about a simple existence!

This simple existence is portrayed in Tulpan with a respect that borders on reverence. The film comes quite close to nostalgia in its depiction of a nomadic way of life that is very near extinction. I can't recall the last time I saw a film that was so emersed in a wholesome rural ethos, complete with traditional family values and a deep connection with nature by way of a pastoral livelihood. It's Little House on the Prairie in Kazakhstan. The film's near Romantic presentation of these indigenous people in that nation shows that - contra Borat - the county is not some totally underdeveloped, anti-modern, Islamo-barbaric Soviet leftover. It's ironic that the progressive tendencies of the place have to be acknowledged in this manner. Hey folks, Kazakhstan is advanced enough to notice what it is losing in the process of advancing. I suppose it is relevant that the film is a co-production with Germany, Russia, Poland and Switzerland. One thing is for certain, we have the Krauts to blame for the Boney M.

None of what I have just said should suggest that I was not completely captivated by Tulpan and won over by it too. The domestic drama is more akin to the stage than the cinema, yet the dialogue is sparse and the isolation of the characters in the middle of nowhere is the key to both the film's cinemagraphic impact and its emotional charm. How can you resist the love radiating out of that yurt all over the landscape? And what a landscape! Canadian viewers might be reminded of the Inuit topography. It's like the Arctic with all the ice globally warmed away. How they manage to live at all is remarkable. I gather the setting is one of the more hard-scrabble regions of the steppe but it may as well be the surface of the moon as far as I'm concerned. It is a great relief when they are given the bureaucratic permission to relocate at the end, but I reckon they will set up camp in a spot only marginally more hospitable. I interpreted the move as a scientific recognition about that particular area being unhealthy for the herd for whatever reason, perhaps identified by the visiting veterninarian. Be this as it may, clearly their move signifies the closing of the first chapter in the story of the protagonist's coming of age as a genuine herdsman. Insofar as him finding a wife and him obtaining his own herd are inextricably linked, it is fair to feel after his success with the birthing of the lamb that he will eventually get married to a woman and a flock.

This brings me to my favourite aspect of the film. As if the contra-Borat quality was not enough - hey, the hero says wistfully that he wants to improve his standard of living through the use of solar panals, how hip is that? Beyond this, I believe the goodness of womanhood in Tulpan is essential to the film and it really touched me. Front and centre, there is the dignified nurturing of the main female. Then there is the obvious matriarchal authority of Tulpan's mother. And even without being seen, there is the wisdom of Tulpan herself who realizes all too well that her suitor does not suit her because he is not yet able to fend for himself, never mind be the head of a household and a herd. Yet for me the deepest issue in the film is that the skilled substance of animal husbandry ultimately comes down to midwifery. I use these terms with their full etymological implications to make the feminist point. The "husband" holds the house, owns the property, including the chattle that is his cattle and his woman and his kids. The "wife" wears the veil. These are the definitions. But in Tulpan, the wannabe husband only begins to become one when he becomes a wife. Yes, it's a dialectic. But forget about theory. The practical reality is that he must literally pull a baby from a womb and breath life into it before he can even think about bagging pussy and butchering steaks.

Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world. Although it does touch the Caspian and Aral "seas," these are themselves landlocked; i.e., lakes. Mind you, if a sea is a body of water that is designated "salty", the salinity of the Caspain is ancient whereas that of the Aral is increasing due to anthropogenic causes and reflectes ecological degredation. Ya gotta love progress. But I digress down a Wikipedia research session. I am curious to know on what waters the sailor sailed in Tulpan. Perhaps more properly inquired - does Kazakhstan even have a navy? Forgive me but this does sound like something Sacha Baron Cohen should make fun of.

But of course,it doesn't really matter. The presumable point is that our man has returned home after running away to join the circus, the three rings of which he found to be proverbially chaotic. In short (speaking of proverbs) the lad is a prodigal son, (no wait, I've confused the old and the new Testaments, oh well). On how to interpret the parable of The Prodigal Son, the following may be brought to bear on what I regard as feminist in Tulpan. It explicitly addresses the difference between a reactionary reading of the parable and a moral of unconditional love, supposedly a difference between the West and the East:

In The Prodigal Son parable, it is often said that the turning point is when the younger son “comes to his senses,” confesses his sin, and returns home a repentant sinner—BUT THIS IS NOT WHAT JESUS IS SAYING. And the difference between this popular interpretation and what Jesus is saying is the difference between a God who is "just" and a God whose love is as far as the East is from the West... The son is starving and mostly naked. He knows when he reaches his village, he must walk through the narrow village street where he will be mocked and taunted by the villagers. He must make it to his father. Yet even when the son is at a far distance and before the son says a word, the father sees the son and runs to him. He kisses and hugs him. It is at this point—AND ONLY AT THIS POINT—that the son sees his father's love for him. Now the son sees how he had broken his father's heart. He sees how his father ran to him which in the Middle East is a shameful act. He sees how undeservedly he is being restored in love. NOW PLEASE DO NOT MISS THIS POINT: Had the father not been willing to show a costly demonstration of unexpected love, the son would not know the father's heart. And there would be no right-relationship. Interestingly, the early church didn’t use the symbol of the cross for Christianity but instead used, among other things, the image of a joyful shepherd carrying the sheep back to its fold... [because] Jesus talked about the heart of God in the picture of a joyful shepherd carrying his lost and terrified sheep back to the fold. (From: http://www.eprodigals.com/?gclid=CNWvsJfEoZ0CFSNQagodc0YzAA)

According to this website: "Without a Middle Eastern perspective, Jesus' message is missed." About this I know nothing. I only observe that the son's-repentance interpretation of the parable rejected by the website and the father's-benevolence interpretation advanced by the site are both equally patriarchal, as indeed befits the parable however you read it. This does not befit the prodigality in Tulpan, however. Certainly the brother-in-law is a surrogate father figure who is punishing the protagonist for his prior prodigality. Or is he? This minor mistreatment is actually not punishing rejection at all. It is merely impatient frustration with the agricultural inexperience and matrimonial immaturity of his household-invading relative. Even more telling, the protagonist has already forgiven himself and self-forgivenes is the only sure sign that everyone else has long ago fogiven and forgotton our sins. We know our hero has forgiven himself because, shucks, he symbolically wears his heartfelt reattachment to his home almost literally on his sleeve; that is, literally on the collar of his sailor suit. All of this is backstory that he once wore on the back of his neck when dressed in the uniform of a seaman far away from home. That's water under a bridge now. Tulpan is all about his homecoming. And I do insist that his retreat from the navy and return to the fold is a kind of feminist reconsolidation. He tried his hand in an industry geared for murder on water but figured out fast that he's meant to be in the business of giving birth on firm and familiar ground.

And could it be significant that these lines are written in Rivers of Babylon: "For the wicked carry us away. How can we sing King Alpha's song in a strange land?"
 

And Dan Replied:
 
As I have reported to you more than once, I adore this film.


As for the Boney M tune, that also could have been in reference to Touching the Void, when the mountaineer is on death's door and all he can hear is an annoying Boney M song rattling around his head. But, yeah, I'm sure i was also referring to Tulpan, where the song's annoyance factor is more than countered by the endearing qualities of the characters who populate this landscape.

And what a landscape this is. For such a quiet and intimate drama, Tulpan features some of the most impressively oppressive landscape this side of Laurence of Arabia. You would think that such epic imagery would be employed to emphasize the minuteness of the characters, a la David Lean. And you'd think that the temptation would be for the filmmaker, first time director Sergei Dvortsevoy (a documentarian by trade) to lean heavily on the naturalistic imagery to drive home his point out the disinctly Hobbesian nature of the lives of these herders. But while the bleak setting does elicit awe and wonder, as it is hard to comprehend exactly how these folks can carve out a living in such a formidable setting, seldom does it elicit despair. The characters are simply too full of affection, fortitude and determination to allow such a response to do much more than flit by. Further, Dvortsevoy allows scenes to linger long after the human drama has played out; this is a world where humans are simply a part of the surroundings, not masters of it. As one scene played, the director keeps the camera rolling for several seconds, which allowed the cameraman to pick up the story of the frisky livestock in the background, whose act of consummation is captured in a deliciously Herzog-ian moment of magical serendipity.

Apparently Dvortsevoy had the actors live as nomadic shephards over the course of shooting, a sort of method directing that always struck me as rather gimmicky when deployed by American directors, but which appears to have produced such a uniformity of thoroughly natural and seamless performances that it is hard to fault the man for his approach.

I love your feminist take on the film, Ben. The wife/sister fights to keep the family together, and to promote the empathetic values that will allow them to endure a life that most of us couldn't imagine in our worst nightmare. And the two birthing scenes seal it, as the men rally behind life-giving over death-pursuit. Not only has he left his naval service, but the hero knows that opportunities await in the city, and even threatens to pursue them from time to time, but his heart isn't in that game. He wants a wife, a flock, a life of his own in the land that he knows. In fact, the birth scene is representative of the film as a whole. The apparently routine tranformed into something extraordinary.

And I hear you when you say that the film veers near nostalgia, because the summary of the protagonists' choices and actions mentioned above could certainly read that way, but the harsh cruelties of this life and the warm honesty of these performances is matched by the calm naturalism of the director's approach to ensure that it does not ever settle there. While not exactly a slice of Italian neo-realism--it dips into sentimentality a bit too easily--but it is nontheless a film of great heart and real soul.
 

Then Ben:
 
Wow. I think this is my first: "I love your... take on the film, Ben." Thank you.
 
And Dan:
 
You are most welcome.  Well deserved.
 
Then Ben:
 
I don't care what else happens in your movie. I don't care whether it's a documentary or staged. I might care whether it's actual photography or CGI, but I doubt it. When you show live birth - human, lamb, tree frog, you name it - it's fucking profound. It's just so... well, life-affirming in Tulpan when he is the midwife to that lamb. You know those disclaimers that appear in the closing credits of films (that aren't by Tarkovsky or Herzog) stating that no animals were hurt in the filming of this film? Well, Tulpan deserves to have a byline in the credits which points out that some animals were helped in the filming of this film. That alone makes it a special picture.

The scene when the family is retiring for the day is just so sweet. Especially, the way the father caresses his youngest sleeping child. This is the motherload in the heart of gold of the father. Truly beautiful. The REAL Waltons.

My Year in Film Studies (part 7)

If you missed part 6, you can find it here.

Rashomon (1950, Japan, Akira Kurosawa) 400 Blows (1959, France, Francois Truffault)

And but so the question once again arises: Where to go and what to do next? I wanted to look our study of the auteur theory as a way into a more extended look at the ways in which directors distinguish themselves from each other, in both form and content, while also moving students out of their comfort zone by giving them a taste of global cinema. I felt it was time to move students out of their comfort zone, and into a more challenging place, one where they might be encouraged to alter their perceptions of the cinematic world (yes, it is larger than Hollywood), even if only a little bit. Finally, I wanted to examine films that were game changers in their day, movies that were in their own way the thin edge of a cinematic wedge. At the same time, while I was hoping to expose them to artistic challenges, I still wanted the films to remain accessible to a high school audience. So, after evaluating the wealth of criteria, I settled upon two films from wildly different places, and completely diffent contexts. From Japan I chose Akira Kurosawa's medieval era Rashomon, and from France, Francois Truffault's contemporarily set 400 Blows.


Movies, like all art, emerge out of a specific cultural context. Filmmakers build their works upon the efforts of their antecedents, using the language and techniques that they've inherited from them. Often memorable films are not tremendously innovative so much as they integrate their encyclopedic knowledge of the cinematic art form. Citizen Kane is a particularly apt example of such a film, wherein Welles borrowed liberally from the greats who had preceded him, weaving together a tapestry of artistry and innovation that still stands as a pinnacle of the art form. What's the old adage: artists steal, hacks pay homage?

That said, I chose Rashomon and 400 Blows because they also represented significant breaks with their own past, and pointed us towards a future, both cinematic and otherwise, that was both unknown and terribly uncertain. Both films were produced in the 1950s, as we struggled to observe the lessons of a war that left men like Kurowawa and Truffault living in a setting ravaged and in decay, and left all of us hovering under a nuclear shadow. Both men's films deal with this milieux of decadence and fragility, and like most good filmmakers they found a way to meaningfully reflect and comment upon this world. Now I don't want to get off on a prolonged tangent, and would prefer not to go down some lexigraphic rabbit hole the requires me to define terms like "meaningful" (I ain't no David Foster Wallace. Like that needed to be said). I hope that you, dear reader, will cede me this ground by accepting the premise that we probably have a vaguely common enough understanding of the term that we can just take that as a given, and move on.

And while the films were made within and comment upon this common historical setting, they also had a mutually concussive effect upon the film scene. Rashomon and 400 Blows exploded upon their relative scenes, helping to herald in some radical changes in the way we perceived and appreciated film as an artistic medium. These films were game shifters. At the most superficial level, Rashomon's vistory at the 1950 Venice Film Festival almost single-handedly opened up Japanese cinema to Western audiences. At a more profound level, the film challenges much that we think that we know about the nature of truth and reality. Not only should you not believe what you read, but you should be wary of trusting what you see, hear, smell, feel and taste as well. 400 Blows, on the other hand, came on the heels of the Truffault penned, Jean-Luc Godard directed Breathless, the films signalling the emergence of the cinematic tsunami that was to become known as La Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave. The theories behind the French New Wave were hateched by these same two young filmmakers while they were critics (along with their mentor Andre Bazin) for the influenctial Cahiers du Cinema. In fact, it was Truffualt himself who first coined the Auteur Theory which informed much of my discussion in parts 4 through. The New Wave movement challenged the staid, middlebrow cinema made in the literary tradition that had dominated the French landscape for decades, and urged a return to more energetic, personal filmmaking in the tradition of the neo-realists, while also emphasizing cinematic technique over literary conventions. The New Wave movement proved immensely influential, and sparked the emergence in America of the last golden era of cinema, marked by films of intensely personal nature and brimming with energy, irreverence and anti-authoritarianism. It is a period that most critics believe started with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and ending around the time of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), when the immense success of Jaws (1975, Spielberg) and Star Wars (1977, Lucas) marked the resurgence of the Hollywood blockbuster popcorn film and spelled the decline of the filmmakers like Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, The Last Detail), Alan Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View) and Robert Altman (MASH, Nashville). For more on this, the definitive resource is probably Easy Riders Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind.

Turning back to Rashomon for a second, the film would also mark the arrival of Akira Kurosawa on the global stage, and from this triumpant position he would produce a series of intelligent, provocative films for the better part of four decades, with the 1950s being a particularly fertile period for the master (Ikiri, 7 Samurai, Throne of Blood among others), but none would have the impact of Rashomon because it dared to challenge conventional beliefs about narrative and cinema (you cannot necessarily believe what you see). The notion of the unreliable narrator is explored with heady sophistication, taking us deep into the realm of cubist thought and surrealist nightmare. If we no longer could believe what is place before us on the screen, can we trust our own thoughts and memories? Are our own perceptions up for grabs as well? For more on Rashomon, you can trip on over to The House Next Door, where you will find a conversation/review by Ben Livant and I on its considerable merits.

What Worked:

The films were certainly revelatory for many students who had rarely if ever seen (a) foreign language films (b) black and white pictures (c) game-changing cinema.
Putting the films in the proper context and examining the effect each had on cinema and audiences at the time was fruitful. 400 Blows was considerably more accessible, as the style of acting and directing was more familiar to the audience. As a means of once again examining the Auteur theory in action, who better to study than Truffault, the auteur of the auteur theory? Truffault's film received a rating a little below 4/5, and ranked in the lower 1/3 of the 20 films we watched. As the film is one of my all time favourites, this was a little disappointing.

What Didn't:

Many students Rashomon particularly challenging, not just because we were transported to a time and place so exotic and unfamiliar, but also because the style of acting that Kurosawa favoured was deeply influenced by both traditional Japanese theatrical styles and silent film, both of which very few students had any experience with. As a result, the film proved a hard nut to crack as a piece of entertainment (which was, after all, one of my criteria). Rashomon was one of the lowest rated and ranked films in the course, placing above only Jerry Maguire on both fronts (3.5/5, 19th out of 20).

What I'd do differently:

Ease students into the viewing of Rashomon by (a) showing 400 Blows first, not second (b) showing clips from some of the aforementioned Kurosawa films, especially 7 Samurai. I did show parts of Morris Engels Little Fugitive while we watched 400 Blows, and it did help to bridge the cultural gap between French and American films. I could also read and discuss the source material for Rashomon (stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa) to give them solid footing before plunging into the film's racing waters.

Overall Grade: B

District 9 (South Africa/New Zealand, 2009, Neil Bloomkamp)

District 9, an energetic and tantalizing sci-fi action flick, is being given a bit too much credit. Perhaps the films long list of admirers (and, yes, my name appears as a fan of said film. I like it, I really do. I just don't LOVE it, as so many here clearly do) shows us just how hungry audiences are for intelligent as well as exciting action flicks. The film is certainly a cut above your standard summer fare (say, The Transformers, a film to which it bears a passing but thankfully superficial similarity) but it remains several steps below standard bearers of the genre, such Cronenburg's The Fly, to which it is often compared. District 9 is vigourous and energetic film, and clearly has its heart in the right place, but not only does it come up a little lacking in the sense of humour department, but it also comes up a bit short in the depth and rigour departments, elements that are vital to any truly thought-provoking science fiction film.

By this point, I am going to assume that readers of this review are familiar with the film's premise, that an alien spacecraft appears suddenly 20 years ago and settles in over Johannesburg South Africa air space, provoking the curiousity of the entire planet, and that once humans breached the ship's hold to discover that there were thousands of ill and malnourished aliens cowering there, later determined to be "workers" not "leaders" so we decide to put these "worker" aliens into a slum, ever to be known as the District 9 of the title. Conditions in District 9 rapidly deteriorate, as the aliens--because of their tentacular faces soon to be known derisively as "prawns"--are treated as second class citizens, and popular opinion quickly turns against them as people decry their alien behaviour and lifestyles, and soon wonder when the aliens are going to leave, and what can we do with them in the meantime. It is in these passages that the film bristles with energy and intrigue, as first time director Bloomkamp, working from his own script, uses the faux documentary style to convey the pertinent information, moving from news footage to talking heads, from on the street interviews to captured footage of the aliens in action.

Entering into the discussion at this time is MNU, a multinational company who have won the contract to reassign the now 1.8 million aliens to new digs, while using the relocation as an excuse to capture contraband alien weaponry in order to figure out how to make use of it ourselves, which many feel is the real purpose of the relocation. Leading the job is Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a fellow of limited wits who only got the job because he is married to the boss's daughter. When he accidently sprays himself with some alien gunk and begins a Kafka-esque transformation, his allegiance to the mission begins to shift, and the film suddenly alters course as we are taken more deeply into the alien reservation and encouraged to see life from their perspective. At this point the film becomes more clearly a statement about apartheid (though perhaps a statement made 20 years too late), but also is redolent with imagery and ideas that hint at a large purpose, to comment on the plight of the displaced, the refugee, global victims of all sorts who suffer because of all forms of political and economic oppression.

If only the film had really delved deeply into these ideas, District 9 might have really been something to behold. At this point the film shifts from its earlier documentary perspective into a more predictable and conventional action flick mode, and announces this choice by taking us inside the life to human-monickered Christopher Johnson and his loveable progeny, delivering shots of domestic life that the documentary filmmakers would have been unable to capture. This shift fractures the film to some extent, but had the filmmakers used the change to examine how human oppression affects the aliens by delving into how slum life affects their culture, values and beliefs, it would have been excusable. However, Bloomkamp settles for short circuiting a thoughtful approach to the matter by tugging at the heart strings instead. He does this by relying almost entirely upon the endearing qualities of the spunky and doe-eyed child of Christopher to pull us onside. It is certainly commendable that I empathized with the prawns, but it is to the film's discredit that I never really understood them, providing a gaping hole in the middle of this apparently thoughtful film that clearly aspires to meaningfulness. Squaring the circle of my complaints about the film is the problem of its rapid descent into a series of blow-em-up real good sequences that do little more than pander to the lower common denominator while mining familiar sci-fi action cliches.

I want to commend District 9 for being more than typical science fiction fare, but I was left wanting more from this film, wherein the filmmaker's unfortunate and rather lazy choices limit its potential, a film that promises much more than it can ultimately deliver.

Inglourious Basterds (USA, 2009, Quentin Tarantino)

I am no scholar on war movies, which would seem to counsel my silence on (a) the matter of how well director Quentin Tarantino deploys and/or subverts the conventions of the genre (b) where Inglourious Basterds, his latest cinematic offering, should ultimately reside in the pantheon of the genre. However, I will say this: Inglourious Basterds, despite its flaws, is one helluva lot of fun. Grisly, bloodly, revisionist, revenge fantasy fun.

As anyone who's been paying even the slightest attention knows, Inglourious Basterds is the entirely fictional account of a World War II platoon of Jewish-American soldiers who have been gathered for the sole purpose of terrorizing, torturing and killing Nazis. Led by Tennessean-raised good old bay Lt. Aldo Raine (an apparent tip of the hat to war veteran/movie star Aldo Ray) played with a tongue-in-cheek sassiness by Brad Pitt, his accent jutting out nearly as far as his Brando-esque jaw. And let me get thes matters out of the way up front. Firstly, Brad Pitt should only make comedies. Seriously. He is a really funny cat, with good comic timing, but he has yet to convince me that he has the depth and gravitas to pull off anything approaching a dramatic role (Anyone Seven Years in Tibet? Yikes!) And he's really good here as well, as the part never demands that he do anything more than be a hillbilly philosopher, a wise-cracking cracker with a simple agenda: Kill Nazis. Secondly, can we stop pretending that Pitt is the star of this picture? He's worth, at best, third billing behind the amazing Christopher Walz (more on him below) and wonderful Melanie Laurent, whose character represents the film's heart and soul.

Let's finish off this sketch of the film's plot. While Pitt and his platoon roam around Vichy France capturing, killing and scalping Nazis, a couple of other stories unfold around them. Firstly, we have the "Jew Hunter," Col. Hans Landa, who has a nose for ferreting out Jews, and an oily skill at manipulating those around him into helping him in his cause. As mentioned above, Landa is the real protagonist of the film, a true anti-hero, in that his actions drive the plot, and his character proves most intriguing . And thankfully Christoper Waltz is up to the challenge of the role, which requires us to be peculiarly attracted to this hideous man, whose facility with several European languages matches his talent at reading people.
Waltz captures the sinister nature of Landa's character, but underplays is wonderfully, choosing wisely to play up the Colonel's undeniable charisma and charm. He effortlessly commands the screen in every scene, almost daring us to look at anything else. A revelatory performance.

And secondly, there is the story of Jewess on the run, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Laurent) who is the only survivor of one of Landa's ambushes, and who assumes a new identity as a gentile cinema owner in Nazi-controlled France. She attracts an admirer in the form of Nazi war hero/movie actor Freidrich Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), who uses his clout as the star of a propaganda war film to set his film's debut in Shoshanna's beautiful art deco theatre. Coming to the film will be all the high Nazi brass including Goering, Goebbels, Bohrmann and, it turns out, the Fuhrer himself. When the titular Nazi hunters and the undercover Jew learn of this development, both plot independently of each other to use the opportunity to purge the Nazi war machine of its highest ranking members and, in the case of the Allies, bring the war to an immediate cessation, while in the case of Dreyfus, avenge the murder of her entire family. Laurent is compelling in the role that forms the film's emotional heart. She puts a human face on the Nazi atrocities, and her quest for revenge is one we can feel and empathize with.

But for all the talk of the actors and their thespian skills, the film is a Quentin Tarantino production, and since his fingerprints are all over every frame of every film he makes, any assessment of the film's success must come down to a judgment of Tarantino's writing and directorial skills. And though I have minor reservations about some aspects of the film, Inglourious Basterds is terrific, one of Tarantino's best. As it is a period (and genre) piece, Tarantino was challenged to look at the restrictions presented by such matters, to see if he could work within them, and to determine when he could push beyond them. It is, in fact, in those few moments when Tarantino falls victim to his own hubris that the movie occasionally and momentarily faulters. For example, while the score for the film is pretty effective throughout, there are moments when Tarantino indulges his desire to be seen as a musically hip cat and his inclusion of the anathemic Cat People, a David Bowie tune that has no place in a World War 2war picture, merely serves to remind us that Tarantino has good taste in music. Further, he sometimes indulges a weird desire to break the cardinal rule of filmmaking (Show, Don't Tell) by not only telling us what we are about to see, but then rather redundantly showing us. Why do both? It is a clunky self indulgent exercise that interrups the flow of the narrative.

Fortunately, these moments are few. Overall, Inglourious Basterds shows us Tarantino at the top of his game. The movie is beautifully paced, both as a whole, and within individual passages. Many scenes in the movie, of which there are actually very few considering the 150m running time, are like mini-films, with a dramatic arc, tremendous tension and a catharctic payoff of their very own. The opening scene, which establishes Landa's sinister charm and Shoshanna's horrifying secret, as well as a later scene set in the basement tavern, are particular standouts. And while he tells the story in chapters, as he did in Kill Bill, as if this were a book, the movie never feels literary. It is consistently cinematic, from the subtle editing rhythms to the impressive set design; Tarantino does a solid job of dropping us into the film and (despite the missteps mentioned above) allowing us to stay there. The scenes in Inglourious Basterd are calmly paced, tension is built quietly, then is ratched up as the stakes grow at the same rate as our sense of dread. Rarely does Tarantino fall back on the sort of stylistic flourish that mark some of his self-indulgent inclinations, rarely does he draw attention to himself or his craft in this well-controlled effort; surely this is the sign of a maturing and confident director. So confident, in fact, that his film's audacious final shot is laden with chutzpah, almost daring the critics to attack its claim, made through a cheeky sound bite proclaimed by Pitt, his golden boy proxy.

Ultimately, Tarantino's is a comic world view. Good is rewarded and evil punished. Which presents something of a problem given the historical context, which is Vichy France in 1944, a full year before the end of the war. No matter. Tarantino is not making a historical epic, he's making a revenge fantasy, wherein revisionism is the name of the game. Hell, he even conjures up the spirit of Leni Reifenstahl, the queen of revisionist cinema, as she appears not only on the movie marquee, but her spirit is invoked (and parodied) in the spectral smoke of the burning movie theatre. In fact, by setting the climatic assault in a movie theatre, even using film stock the spark the hadean fire, Tarantino is indulging a bit of wish fulfilment himself. Perhaps movies cannot change history, but in the movies, you can change history. So in the end, when Tarantino has had his say, everyone is in his place, stasis has been returned and all is well in the world. Peace out.

One Love (Canada, 2009, D.J. Matrundola)







Beautifully shot and uniformly well-acted, One Love is a short film that manages what many full length features cannot: It is a probing, provocative and intelligent treatment of a (quite literally) motherhood issue. Given that One Love tells the tales of four different couples in distinctly different situations as all prepare for the birth of a child, it is indeed one very neat feat of filmmaking that director Daniel-James Matrundola successfully weaves together each story in fifteen short minutes. One couple arrives at the hospital to pick up their adoptive child, another jokes while the father records the birth on video, a third is in the hospital to have the husband's broken nose attended to, while the fourth (and most fascinating) are a pair who meet (and bicker) in the bar when the drunken mother's water breaks.




It is indeed a testament to the film's effectiveness that I was left wanting to know more about each of the characters, as the film's length necessitates that what we will receive is little more than an extended introduction (perhaps if the film is well-received, the filmmakers may choose to use this short as a springboard into a more detailed exploration of these characters.)

Evocative and open-ended, One Love compellingly captures the conflicting and heartrending emotions of this most elemental of mammalian activities. And while some may argue that the stories' lack of resolution is a problem, I would contend that it is another of the film's many strengths, as the uncertainty and ambiguity invites the audience into these situations in a way that more pat endings would not.

One Love is a tiny gem of a film.

My Year in Film Studies (part 6)

If you missed part 5, you can find it here.

Stanley Kubrick Meets Alfred Hitchcock As We Stay Immersed in the Auteur Theory

And so now came the decision of whether or not the study of the auteur theory could be put to rest solely on the evidence of the ouevre of Kubrick. Much as I love SK, it felt like I would be short changing the students if his feature film work was the only evidence we had to go on. So the next decision had to be: Who's Next? And Why?

For a number of reasons, of which I will state the three most salient, I settled upon Alfred Hitchcock. One, there is a wealth of scholarship to draw on, including a lot of horse's mouth stuff as Hitch never seemed to tire of talking about his work. Two, he's very accessible, and after the challenges presented by some of Kubrick's work, I figured that might be welcome. And three, Psycho had been pretty well received, so his work had already been "broken in." Furthermore, there is something of a natural bridge between these two seemingly very different filmmakers. That is, both Hitch and Kubrick have been described as "cold" directors whose meticulous attention to detail is the stuff of renown. However, while their overlapping cool-ness relates almost entirely to the relative asexuality of each man's work, I will argue that there is much more that separates them than unites them.

While the two men's films share a common attention of detail borne out of type A need for complete control, that hardly distinguishes them from hundreds of other filmmakers. Furthermore, as I will show, there are ways that their approaches differ in this regard as well. For example, Hitchcock considered his work pretty much done by the time he set foot on a film set. He had worked the film out so thoroughly, from script to set and production design, from
storyboarding to casting, that the process of turning the film in his head into actual celluloid was almost tedious--an afterthought, if you will. Kubrick, on the other hand, while equally dedicated to the preparation process, being a notorious researcher who would spend years, if not decades, digging into subject matter that fascinated him, was not so rigid when it came to the making of film. Kubrick believed that the real art of film was in the editing process. Scriptwriting was borrowed from other arts (theatre, fiction writing), acting predated cinema by thousands of years, and even cinematography was a direct descendant of photography, whereas editing was the one are unique to film, and the one realm where filmmakers could exercise their artistic vision in unique and memorable ways. In order to give himself as many options as possible in this phase of the creative process, Kubrick would film scenes many different times, sometimes using multiple camera angles, and other times varying the instructions he gave to the actors.

Likewise, these two director's bloodlessness hints at types and levels of WASP-y repression that would be familiar to students of the work of many directors from this era. And even in this, they are not entirely alike. Hitchcock's coolness reflects his own behaviouralist approach to film, whereas the chill that falls upon Kubrick has much more to do with the sort of intellectual detachment that distinguishes his work. Put bluntly, for Hitchcock film is a Skinnerian box, wherein the audience is to be entertained through sensory manipulation. Rather than challenging us intellectually, Hitch is satisfied with pushing our metaphorical emotional buttons. Kubrick, on the other hand, is a product of an Enlightenment era-style rational curiousity about the universe and man's place in it. To state it perhaps a bit over simplistically, Kubrick ascribed "human" emotions to and applied "human" motivations a computer, whereas Hitchcock treated people like mice. Whereas Kubrick was interested in the social, political and ethical implications of a government employing the the Lodovico treatment in A Clockwork Orange, Hitchcock was simply interested in how the damned thing would work.









Stanley Kubrick aimed for relevance and insight in his films; sometimes his reach exceeded his grasp (Lolita, Eyes Wide Shut), but he would have never been content with merely entertaining his audience. Alfred Hitchcock, on the other hand, rarely strayed outside of his self-made Skinner's box, giving the audience exactly what they wanted on most occassions. This became a prison of sorts, as we will see, for when he did attempt to say something more personal, to challenge his audience's preconceptions, as he did in Vertigo, the films were not box office successes.













Vertigo (1958, USA, Alfred Hitchcock) and Rear Window (1954, USA, Hitchcock)

So, with all that as a weird kind of caveat, the Hitchcock movie I chose to study next as we wandered further down auteur lane was the nearly surreal psychological thriller Vertigo, which was followed immediately on the heels by the taut murder mystery/thriller Rear Window. Vertigo is probably Hitch's most personal and in many ways most psychologically disturbing film, but as we will see, there appear to be early hints of Vertigo's obsessions in Rear Window. Stylistically Vertigo and Rear Window are both very similar to most of Hitch's Hollywood-era films (which makes them a good choice for auteur study), while also continuing many of the themes that those familiar with Hitch's films will immediately recognize.









There is something startling and distinctive about Vertigo (in particular.) It is a film that makes many of Hitch's fans, who are legion, very uncomfortable. The protagonist, police detective John "Scotty" Ferguson, played by Hitch favourite Jimmy Stewart, is not terrible heroic (he fails to catch the bad guy in the opening scene, and his slip up costs the life of a colleague), and in the end not even terribly competent (he is easily duped by a former college buddy into becoming an unwitting accessory to murder, a crime made possible by his deep psychological and physiological defects.) Furthermore, by film's end, he's not even particularly likeable, as his obsession with the entirely fictional and self-made Madeleine (Kim Novak) leads him to slip into near-psychotic behaviour.









No, this man Scotty is certainly not your standard Hitchcockian hero, in either thought or action. So, what is he doing at the centre of this Hitchcock film? The answer must lie somewhere in the notion that this is a deeply personal film for Hitchcock, and that Scotty's neuroses and obsessions are intended to stand in for those of the master of suspense himself. Scotty becomes smitten with the sort of woman who can be seen in so many Hitchcock films. In keeping with the focus of this essay upon Vertigo and Rear Window, look at the similarities between the female leads in both films. The icy blonde. Cool. Distant. Detached. Aloof. Unattainable. Troubled. Sexy without being necessarily sexual. Further, add to this how both films provide evidence of Hitchcock's familiar obsessions with voyeurism (Rear Window, Psycho) and the male gaze (see: Laura Mulvey) as well as the attendant (Catholic) guilt and drive to violence and/or control that attends the resultant arousal. Also jumping to the fore, in the form of the character(s) of Madeleine/Judy are the topics of mistaken identity and the doppelganger effect, previously seen in The Wrong Man. They are also lurking around the edges of Rear Window in the film's casual examination of the dual nature of men and women (can Grace Kelly's Lisa, a bon vivant New York sophisticate, be at home in the rough and tumble world of photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries, again played by Hitch favourite Jimmy Stewart?)










Both films also consider the impossibility of the male-female relationship, though Rear Window is considerably lighter in that regard, ending as it does on an ambiguously optimistic note. People, and women in particular, are not who they seem to be, and all that mask wearing makes permanent happiness between the sexes extremely unlikely. Further, the leads in both films are seen as emasculated in this brave new world. Jeff (broken leg) and Scotty (vertigo) are damaged goods, reliant upon and yet intimidated and confused by women. Here Hitch seems to be tapping into a familiar theme of the day, one which runs throughout most of the best noir of the period, gender confusion surrounding the role of men and women in this post-war era, which helped to create one of noir's most distinctive attributes, the femme fatale. The similarities between the treatment of women in these two films ends there, however, as Rear Window's Lisa finds a way to bridge the gap between genders as the film aims towards happy ending where the status quo in the form of the lead's coupling is affirmed, whereas Vertigo's tragic, open-ended finale refuses to allow the possibility of rapprochement of the sexes, and points to the male lead's desolation, not to mention permanent isolation and alientation. And it precisely in this that Vertigo distinguishes itself (in much the same way as Psycho would two years later) in Hitchcock's canon. In Hitch's estimation, there is no real hope for a happy solution to the gender question in a world where men are losing their masculinity to women.


What worked:

First off, I seem to have argued against myself here a bit, in that it appears that Hitchcock does have something to say about the world, however cynical and despairing it may be. But it is precisely because Vertigo is unique in the Hitchcock canon that I made the original argument. The film is an anomaly in a career primarily dedicated to entertaining the audience, rather than challenging them. There is little doubt that Hitchcock is a master technician, and we spent significant time over the course of the viewing of these two films examining the man's virtuosity with camera. His effortless manipulation of both montage and the extended take alone is worth significant study. And his films have an undeniable familiarity, and similarity of style and substance, that provides a ready entry into the study of the auteur theory. So, reasons aplenty to view the study of Hitchcock's films as a success.

What didn't:

And yet, I am unsatisfied with this choice. As much as I enjoy his films in a theme park ride kind of way, I feel Hitch's work lacks depth and significance. The students liked these films well enough, scoring a little below 4/5, they also sensed a lack of seriousness in the man, and given we had just watched two films by Kubrick this is not terribly surprising. The films rated in the lower quarter of the twenty films we watched over the course of the school year.

What I would do differently:
I will have to look closely at this unit next year to determine who might take the large man's place, for while I want to challenge students, I don't want to baffle them either (so, alas, Tarkovsky is unlikely to rear his head at this point.) Perhaps some crowd pleasing Kurosawa (some of his samurai films?) will do the trick. I'm happy to take suggestions.

Overall Grade: B minus

Next up in Part 7: Kurosawa's Rashomon and Truffault's 400 Blows