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)

Dan Begins:
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.

Then Ben:

Perhaps the key concept in the theory of fiction is the "willing suspension of disbelief." Coleridge provided this concept in the second decade of the 19th Century to justify the use of romantic and fantastic elements in literature for an audience increasingly moving away from religious faith to scientific rationalism. His argument- on behalf of achieving an aesthetic experience - was for delimited unreality in relation to a generally empirical outlook or common sense consensus. By the end of the century, the willing suspension of disbelief had long detached itself from its original ontological mooring. It had become a purely formal concern; in effect, a rule about internal consistency with respect to imaginative premises in a given work of art. Today, the concept is almost a definition of "fiction."


Ironically, though, we can be very willing to suspend disbelief, but we have to be able to . And in order to be able to, we have to keep believing in the very reality which a fiction simply takes for granted and upon which it rests. But it's the darnedest thing about reality. When you take it for granted, it can undermine your imaginative premises. Wikipedia provides a good example from the world of cartooning:

Gary Larson discussed the question [of the willing suspension of disbelief] with regard to his comic strip,THE FAR SIDE; he noted that readers wrote him to complain that a male mosquito referred to his "job" sucking blood when it is in fact the females that drain blood, but that the same readers accepted that the mosquitoes (in "fact") live in houses, wear clothes, and speak English.

I have not seen all of Tarantino's films but of those I have seen, Inglourious Basterds is the first time he has entered into historical subject matter. Of course, it's a farce. Horrific infamy from the actual past is thoroughly lampooned, reducing real figures of supreme heinousness to mere caricatures of villainy to ridicule. But unlike Mel Brooks, who does this absolutely as a matter of total schtick, Tarantino only does it in a relative degree because Inglourious Basterds is just as committed to scenes of serious drama as well as action that is obviously meant to deliver moral retribution and not just silly thrills. I was engrossed by the film and bloody entertained by it too. But in the end, I have to say that his English-speaking, clothes-wearing, house-residing mosquitoes are undermined by the director's inattention to the factual differences between the males and the females, as it were.

The imaginative premises of Tarantino's fiction are undermined by the very facts of history upon which they are based. The plot simply cannot withstand the strain it puts upon itself in the WWII setting. It is beyond the willing suspension of disbelief that a runaway teenage Jewish girl in occupied France would a few years later own and operate a movie theatre, that a Nazi war hero would play himself in a movie, that such a topical celebrity would be at the movie house all by his lonesome self, that he would hit on a lowly, local labourer changing the marquee sign at midnight who just happens to be said Jewish girl - and so on and so forth. This is not contrivance allowable according to Coleridge's poetic license. It's just flat-out, ahistorical bullshit; pulp fiction, so to speak.

Tarantino brings this criticism on himself this time out for daring to move into the war movie genre. However fictitiously stylized, war pictures are about real, specific wars. They are ipso facto historically contextualized. By disregarding certain concrete particularities of WWII, Tarantino disables the willing suspension of disbelief required for his fiction. In case it is felt that I am being too prosaic about this, let me extend the point beyond my complaint with the plot to the cathartic logic of the film. Tarantino turns "WWII" into a detached signifier for the fabrication of his revenge fantasy. He utterly departs from the historical record so we can all vicariously revel in the fun of killing Hitler. Fantastic, fun nonsense, of course. Yet at the same time, the serious moral retribution which the fantasy delivers taps into the embedded historical consciousness of the audience. So there is something disingenuous about how Inglourious Basterds works on us emotionally.

I suppose we are supposed to be good postmodernists and let this pass ironically. What else could the misspelling of the title be telling us to do? It would appear that Tarantino - whose style is famously hyper-textual or internally-referential within cinema itself - is comfortable treating historical entities as detached signifiers. Hence, the most ambitious thematic content of Inglourious Basterds comes by way of a meta-statement about film as propaganda. This centers on the metaphor of the annihilation of the bad guys through the noble use of a movie theatre and a big pile of celluloid. In the film, these literally become military hardware for a heroic freedom-fighter. But don't be diverted by this literalness. What is at stake here is the status of cinema itself in the formation of consciousness. Tarantino is addressing the power of propaganda, not in some narrow ideological sense but at the most general level of staking out the terrain of the human imagination. So, the fantasy of Inglourious Basterds certainly has to do with revenge; but the even more fantastic aspect of the film is the presentation of image-casting as grenade-throwing, movie projection as armed struggle. Personally, I find this sort of fantasy a bit too close to the idealist edge, almost free-falling into the thin air of simulacra.

On the other hand, there is a materialist semiotic in Inglourious Basterds of tremendous power. And on this score, the most violent business in the film is justified. The carving on the forehead of the swastika - the branding of the sign of evil literally into the flesh - this is the triumph of reality over spin, the physical world over propaganda, fact over fiction. Tarantino has Landa say in the first chapter of the film that he has no need for facts, he much prefers rumors for their utility. The concluding moments of the film demonstrate the defeat of this way of power. And as squeamish as I am, the graphic depiction of Landa's forehead being carved is not at all gratuitous. It is absolutely necessary. This visceral presentation is mandatory not just for the catharsis of the revenge drama. It is the vital reality-check in an otherwise ludicrous fantasy for which I was ultimately unwilling to suspend disbelief.

The trailer: