ICONS OF CINEMA

A review requested by André Robichaud, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The apparent subject of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky's second feature, Andrei Rublev, is indicated right in the title: it's a story of the life of the most renowned painter of icons in medieval Russia, Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn). Which is not, as film loglines go, a lie - but it is painfully reductive. At a minimum, the film also uses Andrei's life as a surrogate for examining the history of Russia in the first quarter of the 15th Century, during which time the Grand Duchy of Moscow began to wrest control from the Mongol Tatars, thus setting the stage for the country we now refer to as "Russia" to come into existence under one government. It is a story of how Orthodox Christianity was a driving engine of proto-Russian identity, and of the tense relationship between artists driven by their need to communicate spiritual truths, and totalitarian governments who saw no value - or were outright threatened - by those artists. And what do you think, but the Soviet government was leery of the movie, sending Tarkovsky to the editing room twice, shortening a 205-minute version of the film (the one universally available now) to 190 minutes, thence to 186 (the version Tarkovsky officially claimed to prefer), for its solitary screening in 1966; it was this version that was notoriously shown at 4:00 in the morning on the last day of the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

Taking the film as a historical argument about religion, art, and psychology that became yet another one of the many films in the second half of the 20th Century that ran afoul of Communist government censors isn't giving it enough credit either. In its gargantuan, three hour and 25-minute grandeur (whatever Tarkovsky might have said later, I couldn't imagine losing one frame of it), this is the one film, if ever there was such a film, that strikes me as truly being about the whole experience of life. Told in a prologue, eight parts, and a non-narrative epilogue, the film finds a setting to address virtually every facet of the human experience, using its radical narrative structure and mise en scène to express Deep Ideas about the relationship between God and the individual, the individual and society, society and history, history and God, and it does this elliptically, symbolically, and implicitly rather than at any point taking the viewer's hand to say "here's what I think about these very important subjects". It is one of the essential films ever made, and also, perhaps the apotheosis of the great tradition of Russian literature of ideas, using the medium of cinema to explore its profundities in a more glancing, complex manner than even the best prose of the 19th Century could muster.

In order to get at this grand, sprawling content, Tarkovsky and his collaborators - co-writer Andrei Konchalovsky, cinematographer Vadim Yusov, production designer Evgeniy Chernyaev, costumers Maya Abar-Baranovskaya and Lidiya Novi, and the three-person editing team of Tatyana Egorycheva, Lyudmila Feyginova, and Olga Shevkunenko being among the key names to know - worked to the goal, not of fleshing out a narrative (talking about Andrei Rublev in terms of its plot is faintly impossible), but of building a complete, immersive world, which is then filled with symbolic objects rather than events. But they're also actually events. It's hard to describe the feeling of it. The film's opening, for example, is of a man played by Nikolai Glazkov prepping a hot air balloon and launching it just in front of a mob trying to tear him down. After a few moments, he crashes. And that, like, happens.We're not given any reason to doubt the literal truth of what's happening, particularly given its succulent physicality.

But at the same time, this isn't "about" a hot air balloon crashing - it is about the desire to rise above while being pulled down, and about human overreach ending in disaster, but also the way that life continues on despite individual failures. For it is followed by the first of the film's many horses, a symbol of the greatest importance in Andrei Rublev's universe: horses represent the animal instinct to survive, the life force if we want to be more upbeat about it. And the film, despite being 3.5 hours of suffering in medieval Russia, is perfectly willing to encourage our being upbeat: it is about surviving and finding joy as much as it is about being beaten and bloodied by the onslaught of history. In fact, its final, longest, and best sequence, in which a giant bell is cast over the course of a year is all but explicitly a tribute to the human ability to endure and triumph against all odds including self doubt. It sounds ludicrous, and when I first saw the movie it was as much out of a sense of baffled curiosity why the hell a movie would see fit to end with a lengthy sequence about medieval bell-casting techniques as because I expected for it to be even slightly interesting. But it is gripping: as human drama, while we watch young Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev) find himself suddenly thrust into a position of responsibility and authority that he's not prepared for, and finding the fortitude to survive it; and as cinema, for the film's overall aesthetic reaches its finest expression in this sequence.

That aesthetic deserves plenty of explication, because it is maybe the most important thing about Andrei Rublev. This is, more or less, the spring from which all of "slow cinema" emerges: long takes, frequently so wide that individual humans fall into a blur, with the camera set as restrained, unblinking observer. Watching the film, one starts to feel that each frame is inspired by painting, yet Tarkovsky and Yusov don't take the expected route of basing their style in Andrei's own icon painting - in fact, if there's any specific tradition of art that the film evokes, it's the pageant-like art of medieval France and England, emphasising and exploiting the width of the anamorphic widescreen frame. I'd say that the film is made out of tableaux, if that didn't suggest a certain posed, static quality that's nothing like the unconstrained movement onscreen.

What this all means, in any case, it that the film does greater work than anything else I can name of simultaneously: A) presenting medieval life in full detail, lingering steadily within sets to capture the full texture and rhythm of a centuries-dead world, while B) being so aware of the organic human component of that life that it feels like we've been dropped squarely in the center of a vibrant, tactile, living world. The only film that comes even close to matching this is Ingmar Bergman's earlier The Seventh Seal, which has a much smaller scope focused on a much less naturalistic scenario, and isn't as extraordinary in its reach - Bergman's interest in death and suffering starts and ends in Scandinavian Lutheranism, while Tarkovsky's study of belief in goodness and faith driving a man's life starts in Russian Orthodoxy, but moves beyond theism or any other specific belief system by the end, in its wide-ranging consideration of what gives meaning to human life and why.

The film is at once stately and lively, glacially paced over its 3.5 hours but so quick in its moments that it's preposterous how quickly it moves towards its meditative finale (a reel in full color, studying in wide and close shots the paintings that are Andrei's legacy). It evolves along the way: the first half of the film is full of greatness, but the second half is on an entirely different level, one unmatched by anything else in world cinema: the bell-casting passage, like a preceding sequence that finds the city of Vladimir sacked by Tatars, could be separated from the movie entirely and presented as a self-contained short, and either of those shorts would make a strong claim towards being one of the key texts of artistic cinema. The Tatar sequence, "The Raid", is a particularly extraordinary case study in everything that makes Andrei Rublev a masterpiece: its depiction, in the script, of the individual being affected by faceless collective history is perfectly complimented by the way that wide shots full of activity allow us to simultaneously appreciated specific character beats against the backdrop of crowded tumult and violence (this is also the scene that makes it impossible to issue an unhesitating blanket recommendation for the film: an actual cow is actually set on fire and tears off camera, where I hope it was doused. But still, the movie contains unsimulated bovine torture). The contrasts that the filmmakers are able to pack into individual shots are incredible and deeply moving: a shot of snow and ash falling onto a smoking church - into which, of course, a horse wanders - is one of the highest moments in any film from the 1960s, or ever.

It is entirely possible that one could eventually exhaust Andrei Rublev, but I don't know what that would take. There's simply so much in it, expressed in such dense visuals and under-stressed performances and elliptical thought. And hacking through all that density is among the most rewarding experiences I have ever had in my life of watching films. If cinephilia has a literal holy text, to be referred to and examined in times of joy and stress and sorrow, it is this.

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THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST

A review requested by Julian D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The career of director Michelangelo Antonioni is not the kind that can be neatly summed up in blunt descriptions like "culmination", so I can't use that word to describe his 1975 triumph The Passenger. It does, however, clearly punctuate the director's career: the seventh feature in a chain of hyper-modern masterpieces stretching back to 1960, and his last film before an unintended six-year break that left him an old master whose new films we should dutifully consider even though we probably don't like them very much. A far cry from being one of world cinema's handful of true visionaries, using his movies to anatomise the character of modern society in the same breath and in fact by the same means that he pushed the boundaries of representational, narrative cinema.

In fairness, The Passenger doesn't push boundaries as hard as some of the director's other films. But I think it might very well be his best social document: it dissects and lays bare the paranoias and neuroses of the 1970s even more strikingly than Blowup does the same for the 1960s, and without feeling nearly as dated. The subject is Western Europe and the United States in the aftermath of Vietnam and the social revolutions of the 1960s, blindly hunting for a sense of purpose in a world where Western dominance has been dealt its most serious setbacks of the 20th Century. In the screenplay by the director with Mark Peploe and Peter Wollen), the embodiment of this collapse of identity and purpose is David Locke (Jack Nicholson), a presumably American-born BBC journalist making a documentary on the civil war in Chad. After failing to scrounge up any war or warriors, he loses himself in the Sahara Desert, and walks back to his hotel, where he finds that David Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), the only other white person around, whom Locke has befriended in a vague and noncommittal way, has died. On the spot, Lock decides to swap identities with the dead man, following Robertson's date book to complete whatever task the other man was in the middle of. This turns out to be gun-running. In the meantime, Locke's wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre), has asked her husband's colleague Martin Knight (Ian Hendry) to look for "Robertson", to learn what he knows about "Locke's" death, meaning that Locke finds himself dodging his friend in addition to faking his way around a group of impressively dangerous men who think he has a cache of weapons for him, aided only by an architecture student (Maria Schneider) he meets in Barcelona.

Purely at the level of narrative, there's a lot to unpack, from Locke's indeterminate Anglo/American status, to the complexity and slitheriness of gender roles in the movie (Schneider's character is literally only ever identified as "The Girl", but Locke is in some ways "The Not Even a Man"), to the relationship between Europe and its former colonial holdings bubbling in the background. All of that's not even mentioning the film's most prominent characteristic as a story, which is its merciless portrayal of Locke as a hollow thing, worn down by the speed with which the world is changing and by all available evidence for the worse, to the point that he's a human-shaped signifier of an identity without actually possessing a concrete self. The one word that describes Antonioni's filmmaking is "ennui", and The Passenger is his ennui-est movie; L'avventura and La notte might showcase characters with a complete detachment from the shallow culture containing them, but The Passenger goes one step further, taking away the culture itself.

It's not merely psychological and social vagueness that the film depicts; its indefinite sensibility goes clear to the structure. Antonioni's own stated interpretation of the movie is that it took place over the course of one day, and he and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli filmed it to match (the lighting, mostly natural, grows more and more afternoon-like as it goes along, and it's only in the very last shot that dusk arrives), even if at a practical level it's hard to see how a narrative that moves from Africa to Germany to Barcelona to rural Spain can possibly all take place in ten or twelve hours. Literalism or plausibility aren't the point, though: what is clearly the case, both in the writing and in the visuals, is that The Passenger doesn't seem to have chronology: time moves wrong in the film, in those moments that it moves at all. It is immodestly slow-moving, which has been used a criticism as far back as 1975 (Roger Ebert was an earlier detractor, though he later changed his mind), but of course the fact that the movie is stretched out and not apparently going anywhere in a hurry, or at all, is hardly incidental. Life itself, in The Passenger, isn't really going anywhere; anyplace you go is equally likely to be dead zone of anomie.

The visual scheme Antonioni and Tovoli use to explore this sensibility is broadly familiar from the director's earlier movies: there's a great deal of empty space, whether it's the open sky or featureless walls, against which the characters are set from a far enough distance and low enough in the frame to feel crushed by the size of the composition. The film uses a fairly straightforward and simple color scheme, influenced by the natural earthtones of its locations, the lend a feeling of blanched-out energy, with everything stronger tending to feel oppressive, such as the blue skies or, in the film's most visually and narratively aberrant scene, the toxic-looking neon lights in a metal and concrete hell of an airport. What primarily marks the film as its own thing is the magnificent use of location photography: The Passenger is set mostly in corners of the world and Europe that have a heavy sense of history on them, finally ending in a Spanish town that has tacked elements of modern technology onto streets and buildings that look ancient, hewn from the ground itself in some ways. These are locations bigger than human stories, and Locke seems small and forgotten by the end, finally getting his wish to lose his self figuratively.

Also literally, in the film's incredibly famous penultimate shot, one of the two big showy long takes Antonioni uses (the first is a shocking attempt to bring us into a flashback without cutting, and it's beautifully organic, suggesting the displacement of Locke's thoughts even before the plot starts to make the scope of that displacement clear). It's a long slow track past Locke and through the narrow window of his hotel room, focusing our attention on the geography of the town and the architecture of buildings while its characters die and come to other crises points largely offscreen, the perfect summary of the film's exhausted humanity. Ultimately, it's not even worth showing what happens to the character we've spent two hours getting to not know. Stuff just happens. This is all deeply pessimistic and inhumane, but The Passenger so persuasively argues that pessimism and inhumanity are two of the key traits of Western culture in the 1970s that it doesn't even feel depressing: just "yeah, I guess that's about it". Not a film for a happy, transporting mood, then, but as a diagnosis of purposelessness the film is the most intelligent, engaging kind of misery.

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THE ART OF LYING

A review requested by Robert Lovejoy, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

In all the annals of unclassifiable films, I can't think of anything quite as unclassifiable as 1973's F for Fake, the penultimate completed feature of Orson Welles's directorial career (only Filming 'Othello' followed it). It's customarily identified as a documentary, and then customarily the hedging begins to the effect that, whatever the hell it is, "documentary" is a misleading word. It's part of the vaguely-defined tradition of the "essay film", movies which are ruminations on themes divorced from storytelling and intoxicated with using the medium itself to build an argument; but inherent to the notion of the essay film is that all of the best ones (and F for Fake is, I think, easily one of the best) don't resemble anything but themselves. They are sui generis.

The ingredients that go into F for Fake are, already, rather twisted up to the point that it's a matter of some controversy as to what existed at what point, and who's responsible for assembling it. But the basic shape of the thing is that French director François Reichenbach was preparing a documentary about Elmyr de Hory, an art forger who had just been the subject of a biography by Clifford Irving, published in 1969, with the monolithic title Fake. This was shaping up to be an intimate but stylistically conventional work of cinéma vérité, based on the footage that pops up in F for Fake, and that's when the bomb dropped: Irving's follow-up to Fake, an "as told to" autobiography of the legendary recluse Howard Hughes published in 1971, was discovered to be a complete fabrication. Around the time that this was discovered - one of the controversies concerns in exactly what order things happened - Reichenbach gave his de Hory footage to Welles, and signed on as cinematographer for the new project that the American filmmaker was going to build out of that foundation.

That new project was a treatise on the concept of fakery in multiple guises, including the act of making F for Fake itself; although Welles, narrating in full raconteur mode, promises us at the three-minute mark that everything we're told in the next sixty minutes of film is going to be the simple, pure truth, the editing and implications of his film are at the very least misleading, if not patently untrue. But then, by the two-minute mark, he's already freely owned up to being a charlatan. And that means laying claim to footage directed by others (Reichenbach and Oja Kodar, Welles's partner for the last quarter century of his life), re-assembling that and his own footage into mixtures whose implicit meaning is quite different from unadorned reality, and generally letting his subjects and himself spin a good story and worry about of the details lining up perfectly only as a tertiary concern.

Nor, really, does the film ever pretend otherwise. Welles clearly learned a lot from the Godardian Wing of the French New Wave that was still quite fresh in memory in the early '70s; by the third shot of F for Fake, in which we openly see the film crew making the movie we're watching, it's clear that this will be an enthusiastic participant in the trend of self-aware formalism by which a movie spends its entire running time reminding us that it's a movie, and that it was assembled by people with some kind of agenda. And still before that spurious "the next sixty minutes" claim, we've already heard Welles describe fakery, fraud, and lies under the affectionate umbrella of "hanky panky", the phrase cropping up at exactly the moment that the editing ramps up into a whirlwind of shortened attention and confusing jumps between unconnected images.

The rest of the film blasts through fragments of the de Hory and Irving stories, blended with snippets of Welles sharing anecdotes about them, himself, and other people he's known, the director appearing as a garrulous spectre all in black with a bushy beard to dominate the foggy empty spaces where he talks directly to us or the fancy restaurant table where he entertains a group of hangers-on with his theatrically-scaled way of talking. From the opening, which finds Welles on a train platform dazzling a child with magic tricks - the editing working double-time to make sure we can't tell if the little boy is truly seeing the marvels Welles is playing, or if he's just an actor responding to the most boring kind of cinematic sleight-of-hand - the topic of the film is at least as much Welles as a showman, desperate to please and keep us off-balance with the twists and turns of his tale-telling. "Sorry, I've been jumping around like this because that's how it was", he apologises at one point, but of course that's a lie too. He's jumping around because it delights him to do so, and it gives the film the frenzied patter of a magician who lets himself appear to be sloppy and confusing because that's the actual way he keeps us from looking. For among all its other charms, F for Fake is, essentially, structured as a feature-length magic trick with a single punchline that has nothing to do with Elmyr de Hory or Clifford Irving.

It's a hellaciously daunting movie, throwing curveball after curveball at high speed throughout, bragging about the lies its tells and inviting us to enjoy being lied to; for that is, ultimately, the real theme of F for Fake. Not that liars exist because people like de Hory, Irving, Welles, or Oja Kodar's grandfather, another art forger, can monetise tricking people; liars exist because people like to be tricked. It is the amateur magician Welles who recognises that, not the world-class filmmaker Welles, which perhaps explains why this is so unlike anything else in his career. But it's the filmmaker who translates that observation into purely cinematic terms, using some of the canniest editing I've ever seen to misdirect and guide the viewer to exactly the responses that Welles wants, while telling such colorful true and somewhat less-true stories that it's a delight to be manipulated.

Everything about the film is densely packed and even a bit wearying; 89 minutes is as long as this could dare to be, though it has the decency to end with a nice cool-down to ease us out of it. The filmmaking throughout is giddy and self-infatuated, and I will concede that of all the movies I've ever firmly believed to rank among the very best ever made, F for Fake is one of the most absolutely frivolous; its demolition of filmmaking technique is intellectually stimulating but not, ultimately, very complex in the annals of self-aware cinema. But very great it nevertheless is: a bold, brazen movie that could only have been made because a top-notch talent decided to show off for a little bit. Sure, it's indulgent, but indulgence is rarely this captivating.

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THAT DIZZY FEELING

A review requested by Matthew Blackwell, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

One doesn't get too many chances to write about the reigning Best Movie Ever Made, as 1958's Vertigo was anointed by the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, the closest thing we have to the official definition of that title. And it's all the more daunting when one comes within a few notches of agreeing with that assessment. But we're all here now, so let's just dive right into the most complex film made by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most terrifyingly gifted men to ever direct a movie.

Vertigo being the kind of film that plainly invites superlatives and hyperbole, let me give you some more of it: it is perhaps the single film in existence that most interestingly uses subjectivity. For it is a profoundly subjective movie, as it should be given its role in the auteur's career: this is closest that Hitchcock ever came to a personal confession of his sins on celluloid. Those sins being an obsession with blondes and a tyrannical disposition towards abusing them emotionally and, every so often, physically, in order to get them to be exactly what he demanded to make his movies as perfectly as possible (one of the cruelest of those abuses took place in the filming of this very movie: he forced lead actress Kim Novak to jump into the freezing San Francisco Bay for take after take, to no genuine purpose).

And it's not just that Vertigo is subjective; it uses that subjectivity to fuck with us. Which of course it would, being a Hitchcock picture - eight years earlier, he'd directed Stage Fright, a movie whose entire purpose in life was to smack the viewer around a little bit for daring to assume that movies always take place in the third person, and for much of the following decade, his films were all about finding ways to use the audience's expectations about how movies worked against us, causing us untold torments (this would, of course, culminate in his dauntingly modernist Psycho two years after Vertigo). Like a great many people, the first time I saw Vertigo, I was baffled by its odd decision to reveal its twist ending at the three-quarter mark, apparently robbing it of an entire act's worth of tricks and surprises (there are indications that Hitchcock himself had misgivings about including the reveal, and was overruled by producers). The director's famous image of a bomb exploding under a table in his interview with François Truffaut - shock is blowing up the bomb, suspense is showing the audience the bomb and then having people converse for ten minutes while they sit at the table - explains one reason for placing the reveal where it is, but it only leads to a deeper wrinkle. For the suspense we feel isn't on behalf of the protagonist we've been following for an hour and a half, but on the character hiding a secret from him, who has been totally deprived of any interiority for that same hour and a half. What's really unsettling about the Vertigo plot reveal isn't simply that it confounds our expectations for how thrillers should be structured, but that it spontaneously breaks the thread of absolute subjectivity that the film has, till that point, thrived on. From that point onward, in fact, Vertigo becomes a tug-of-war between two POVs, putting us inside the mind of the controlling erotically obsessed antihero while also letting us look at the dreadful impact of his obsession on the object of his desire. It's some of the most psychologically acute cinema I am aware of, and it's entirely situated within the realm of polished Hollywood genre fare. Not a bad trick.

But since there is a full three-quarters of a movie leading to that point, and not everybody has seen Vertigo, let me back up. The situation: Det. John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) has retired from the San Francisco police department following an unfortunate incident where a sudden flare-up of his previously unsuspected acrophobia leaves him incapacitated while another cop falls off a roof to his death. Looking to toss him some work, an old college friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) offers him a curious job: Gavin's wife Madeleine (Novak) has been wandering around town every day in an apparent trance, and Gavin is convinced that she's being possessed by a ghost. But he needs someone to track her movements before he can do anything to help her, either through parapsychological or psychiatric means. And so Scottie follows Madeleine, eventually discovering that she's grown obsessed with the portrait and legend of Carlotta Valdes, a woman who killed herself after her child was stolen away from her about a century prior. Scottie's urge to save Madeleine from the influence of the past quickly goes beyond professional courtesy; he's falling desperately in love with her, in fact, and it's doing a real number on his ability to do his job objectively.

It's a fine story - novelists Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac wrote their D'entre les morts primarily so that Hitchcock would be able to adapt it into a movie, after he lost the chance to make Les diaboliques to Henri-Georges Clouzot - but not in and of itself the stuff of Best Movie Ever Made territory. Really, what it is it but a paranormal riff on the film noir classic Laura? But on this fine, not tremendously unique story, Hitchcock and his immensely gifted crew hang some of the most portent visuals ever committed. Vertigo is, among other things, one of the cleverest color films ever made: the director, costume designer Edith Head, and art directors Henry Bumstead and Hal Pereira (with an enormous assist from cinematographer Robert Burks) rely on a controlled color palette to do a stunning amount of work for them. It's not as simple as color-coding the film, as Hitchcock would do six years later in Marnie (where, by all means, it works wonderfully). It's a much subtler way of using color in a relative way: what matters is not, inherently, that this scene is red and that scene is green, but that this scene is redder than the scene preceding it, that scene is greener. The film idles in a very plain, moderately saturated mode, with Scottie's world - especially the apartment of his best friend and solitary anchor, Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes) - decked out in calm browns and greys, with the colors that show up having that soft, pastel look of '50s color film stock. But when he first encounters Madeleine, she drags in a whole range of aggressive colors: lush red walls bright blue sky, harsh pink flowers, vibrant blonde hair, shiny green cars, and the orange grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Color, in Vertigo is clearly linked to dream states, whether they're actual, literal dreams (Scottie's nightmare at the three-quarter mark is triggered by garish filters bathing the whole image in solid sheets of color), or simply the dazed state that following Madeleine for the first time puts him in. Their first encounter is one of Vertigo's signature gestures for a lot of reasons, in fact: besides representing only the second time (following the blue-soaked opening scene) that the film has boasted rich, vividly saturated colors, it also does away with dialogue for almost ten straight minutes, in favor of Bernard Herrmann's gorgeous score, circle round and round on the soundtrack. It's mesmerising and dreamy itself, the most subjective sequence in the whole enormously subjective feature, keying us in to Scottie's dazzled mind by means of deliberately leeching all the realism from the filmmaking and replacing it with intense, heightened style.

And yet, through all of this, Madeleine herself is the most emphatically grey thing in the movie, thanks to the suit that Head provided for her, on the logic that it boasted a particular shade of grey that no blonde woman would ever wear. I can't speak to that, but there's no denying that centering all of the lavish, luscious color around a woman in grey feels distinctly "off", and the way Novak wears the uniform stiffly, moving in studied, inorganic lines ends up serving as the best kind of foreshadowing, since it doesn't feel like foreshadowing - it's easy to read the color and movement as signs of Madeleine's mental detachment, since our understanding is connected to Scottie's limited, obsessed appreciation of her.

The first three-quarters of Vertigo do an extraordinary job of portraying that obsessive state through everything from Stewart's fearless performance - the most uncharacteristic of his career, full of sweat and dagger-like stares and feverish line deliveries - to its constantly limited camera angles to its unspoken emphasis on the titular state. The word "vertigo" is stated only once - acrophobia gives Scottie vertigo, and the vertigo is what makes hims cease to function, as he explains to Midge in the film's second scene - but a vertiginous state saturates the movie, right from its opening credits, with their iconic spiral shapes devised by John Whitney, Sr. Much of the aesthetic of Vertigo is centered on spirals, on going round and round in circles: Madeleine's characteristic whorl of hair, spiral staircases, the twists and turns and ups and downs of San Francisco itself. Herrmann's score keeps looping around into itself, presenting a swoony state that could be read as Romanticism - his music owes a clear debt to the "love and death" themes in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which the score openly quotes at points - but could just as easily identify the increasingly insular, mad mental state of the main character.

Everything that goes into making the first three-quarters of Vertigo such an excellent marriage of our perspective to that of the increasingly frazzled lead makes it that much more startling when it breaks from it: every time that Midge asserts herself and lets us see the inner life of the woman who could be all the stable, sane, pleasant things Scottie is willfully and needlessly rejecting (Bel Geddes is truly amazing with not much screentime, portraying a good friend and smart sparring partner who is aware of the hopelessness of her own erotic fixations and willing to give up on them when necessary, thus making her the healthy counterpoint to Scottie, while being an interesting character in her own right: her sadly upbeat reading of "I don't think Mozart's going to help at all", her final line, edges out Stewart's angry, self-lacerating "You shouldn't have been that sentimental" as my favorite line reading in the movie), for example, or of course when it enters its final quarter and becomes a totally different movie. There's an easy Vertigo to imagine, in which the blunt-talking brunette Judy Barton (Novak), with her clunky outfits and garish eyebrows, is just the accidental victim of Scottie's fixations, but the Vertigo we get is far more interesting, since it gives us a whole new film's worth of character details in Judy's relationship to her terrible, immoral behavior, and allows us a much more complex counterpoint to Scottie's descent into mad desire than the simply decent Midge. The enormous shift in focus precipitated by the unexpected twist pre-ending makes Vertigo not a film about one man going nuts from obsession; it makes it into a much more challenging, interesting film about different ways of being broken by desire, of trying to ignore one's mistakes or committing to them so fully that they no longer even register as behavior (Midge, who owns her mistakes, is indifferently ushered out of the movie - there's no room for decent people in Vertigo's final half-hour).

In short, there is a Vertigo that's a great psychological thriller about obsession, and for the most part, that's how we like to talk about the Vertigo that exists. But really, Vertigo is more complicated and slippery than that, demanding far more of us as viewers than any other Hitchcock film, more than any other Hollywood film broadly located in the realm of genre. This is, undoubtedly, why it limped through the box office in 1958 while receiving detached, unhappy reviews. He is a great and endlessly important filmmaker, but Hitchcock was still primarily an entertainer; Vertigo is less of a simple entertainment than anything else he directed. That's not the reason it's also his best film, but it's only because he was willing to do something challenging and upsetting that he could reach the depth and subtlety which does make Vertigo a masterpiece among masterpieces.

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FAMILY REUNIONS

A review requested by James Cronan, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

It's entirely possible that Tokyo Story isn't the best movie ever made. But I suspect that it might be the most perfect. Its construction is unthinkably good - not one single shot is wasted, and every cut serves a very clear and deliberate purpose. It is the film out of all films that I would want to show anybody who was curious how cinema works - how duration, framing, editing, and acting all combine to create a particular mood, and to communicate specific meaning about the characters. Meanwhile, the story it tells and the emotions it explores mark it as one of the wisest human dramas filmed: immensely specific in its characters and setting, but able to depict dynamics and tensions that are as universal as it. So it has wonderful form, extraordinarily rich narrative content, and those two things inform each other in the most satisfying, invisible way. So, perfect. It is not, in fairness, the only perfect film made by director Ozu Yasujiro: there are no quantitative ways to measure the difference between it and Late Spring, and I wouldn't bat an eye at the suggestion that his final two films (both in color), The End of Summer and An Autumn Afternoon, are more accomplished than either. But I nonetheless plant my flag in this soil: Tokyo Story is the crowning achievement of the most consistently great director in cinema history. It is as perfect in its craft as any of his other masterworks, and more robust in its emotional landscape. I'm glad we've gotten that sorted.

Though the film never lags, it's not on account of its thin wisp of a plot, as devised by Ozu and Noda Kogo: sometime long enough after World War II that the scars of battle are almost completely invisible in Japan, the elderly Hirayamas - husband Shukichi (Ryu Chishu) and wife Tomi (Higashiyama Chieko) - travel from the town of Onomichi, where they live with their youngest daughter, Kyoko (Kagawa Kyoko), to the big city of Tokyo, to visit their eldest children, son Koichi (Yamamura So) and daughter Shige (Sugimura Haruko), and Noriko (Hara Setsuko), the young widow of their third child, who died in the war. Upon their arrival, Koichi and his wife Fumiko (Miyake Kuniko), and Shige and her husband Kurazo (Nakamura Nobuo) receive them with a chilly formality that makes it clear that they - to say nothing of Koichi's utterly disinterested, impolite children - don't really know what to do with the old folks and would prefer it very much if they didn't have to think about it. After a few stilted days, Shukichi and Tomi return home; she grows sick on the trip, and their children all rush to Onomichi to be with her as she passes away; fourth child Keizo (Osaka Shiro) arrives just too late. And then they all return home, leaving their father and Kyoko alone.

That's the entirety of what happens within the 136 minutes of Tokyo Story, as far as dramatic incident. No, that's not true. I elided the night in Tokyo where Shukichi gets drunk with his old friends and they all complain about their children. Even so, if it sounds like that's not very much content to fill the time, that's because it isn't. And it's what makes Tokyo Story so powerful. The film is not fueled by incident or melodrama - the clearest break it makes from its avowed inspiration, Leo McCarey's heart-rending Make Way for Tomorrow of 1937 - but by character interactions: the film simply places us in the middle of a family situation and allows us to be thrilled and enthralled by the greatest cinematic spectacle of them all, the feelings of human beings.

And by "in the middle", I do mean "in the actual, literal middle": Tokyo Story is the most successful expression of one of Ozu's most characteristic stylistic tricks (and while it's easy to use the director as a shorthand, one should fairly point out that the Ozu style was developed by the director alongside editor Hamamura Yoshiyasu and cinematographer Atsuta Yuharu, who were both as important recurring members of the director's troupe as his regular actors), in which the camera is perched in the exact middle of two characters in the middle of a dialogue, cutting from one center-framed shot of an actor staring right down the lens to another, a rhythmic back-and-forth that offers the dizzying sense that they're talking right to us. This single gesture, which shows up everywhere in mature Ozu (that is, at least everything he made from 1949's Late Spring to his 1962 retirement; I profess total ignorance of anything he made between the end of Japan's silent era and '49), is the most basic no-no in the Hollywood continuity rulebook, which by the '50s had become the dominant mode of narrative filmmaking in most of the world - Ozu's legendary countryman Kurosawa Akira used a version of it, though Mizoguchi Kenji didn't, and that uses up my knowledge of 1950s Japanese filmmaking. It is a way of staging and cutting that totally ignores the all-holy 180° line, which is meant to ease confusion on the viewer's part when the action cuts between largely opposite perspectives.

Nobody ever put the lie to that rule better than Ozu, and he never did it better than here: the smooth transition between perfectly-matched images in shot-reverse shot conversations isn't confusing in the least, and it provides even the most banal conversations in Tokyo Story with a thrilling charge of intimacy. Indeed, that charge comes about because the conversations are so banal; one of the things we learn very quickly is that the gulf between the parents and their adult children is unspeakably vast, and can only be roughly bridged with simple, dull statements of fact, and the limpest kind of small talk. Presenting these conversations in a movie at all is utterly presumptuous, and staging them in such a direct, forceful aesthetic of direct address doubly so; but we are thus involved in the conversations in a way that enthusiastically welcomes us to study the speakers, their body language, their tone of voice, and begin to dig at what they're holding back in talking. Tokyo Story is a drama about not saying things - not telling your parents that they're making it impossible for you to go on with your business, not telling your children that they're rude boors - and in plunging us directly into those forced, shallow conversations, the filmmakers invite us to feel the full weight and impact of how it feels to be part of them.

This goes at least part of the way towards explaining why Tokyo Story is so uniquely able, out of all the films ever made about interpersonal dynamics, to depict with such probing depth and uncomfortable accuracy what those dynamics look like in real time. Even out of Ozu's many films so successfully working on that topic, for if there is one measurable difference between Tokyo Story and his other works in the same vein, it might be that here, the director anchors his images on characters relatively more often, and a bit less on the rooms containing them - though there are, undoubtedly, many shots and even full scenes that play out with the camera crouched at the famous height of an individual sitting on a tatami mat, backed into a corner like an unobtrusive object of furniture as characters go about their miniature plays in a series of fully lived-in shadowboxes. The settings in the film are unquestionably important, and our sense of how the characters fit into space matter. Befitting its place in history, and its story of an old generation that can't understand and can't be understood by the next generation, Tokyo Story is made up primarily of traditional rooms in which individual props and some costumes creep in suggesting the shiny new Westernised Japan that was just starting to coalesce outside. And the quiet imposition of, say, an electric fan in an otherwise totally classical, austere space is monstrously important in dramatising that generational shift without stating it outright.

The rest of the film's limitless humanity comes in large part from its gifted cast. Ryu and Hara, the indispensable Ozu regulars and stars of Late Spring, can't help but stand out to any viewer familiar with that movie, but they're only the leaders of a stellar ensemble; as good as both of them unquestionably are, Sugimura actually gives my personal favorite performance, prickly impatience that keeps spilling out when she forgets to keep it in check, that then triggers silent but palpable waves of guilt. Right up to a brutal final sequence in which she's peremptory and bullying without being aware of it. But let's not go singling anyone out. The very concept of Tokyo Story demands that each and every performance has the necessary subtlety and conviction that we believe in the tiny gestures, facial expressions, and cut-off words as though they were being thought and felt in the moment by actual humans. One raw performance, and the film stalls out. And this never happens.

To give all of the delicate staging and acting room to make an impact, the film is silent and slow-moving, composed entirely of still images, with only one camera movement in the whole feature: and it is a powerful, jarring moment, perfectly timed and devastating (there's also a bit of a cheat: one scene involves a still camera looking out the windows of a moving bus, but the visible window frame helps to keep the shot feeling static). There are some tremendously dramatic wide shots, establishing exterior space as a series of open skies and graphic, angular lines, and these somewhat temper the potential monotony of all the largely similar interiors, but for the most part, Tokyo Story allows itself to breathe steadily and smoothly through its repetitive interior set-ups, preferring not to excite us through style but through the accumulated effect of its character drama. It does this magnificently - no film has ever been so flawlessly attuned to the way family works and sometimes doesn't work, no film has ever made domestic space so enthralling cinematic. And no film has ever been more natural and honest in its depiction of what normal human behavior looks like and feels like.

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STANLEY KUBRICK: LUCKY BASTARD

I'll ask you to forgive me for being perverse enough to start a discussion of the most notoriously impersonal and inhumane film of Stanley Kubrick's career with a personal statement, but I don't really know what else to do. The thing is, y'see, I love Barry Lyndon - not because it is great, but because it's so much damn fun to watch; the kind of three-hour movie wherein, when it arrives at the end of its first hour, I find myself gawking because, like, didn't I just start watching it? And this is not merely contrary to the received wisdom about the film - it is unbearably, even unwatchably ponderous and slow - but perhaps even to Kubrick's intentions in making it. There are, after all, very good and obvious reasons why you'd want this exact movie to be insufferably static and slow-moving, both because of the setting of the story and the manner in which the story is told. And yet, watching the movie, which I have now done four times in my life, I never have the slightest awareness of time passing.

This speaks, maybe, to the different reasons we watch movies. Barry Lyndon, as a narrative, is not quick to make its points; as a character drama, it has a bitterly, smugly ironic delight in presenting its central character as a complete blank inhabited by one of the most generic actors of the 1970s giving a deliberately undernourished performance. But it is one of the most perfectly appointed costume dramas in the history of the medium, with compositions that rank among the most exact and perfect ever staged; Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott and production designer Ken Adam and costume designers Ulla-Britt Søderlund & Milena Canonero weren't primarily interested in bringing to life William Makepeace Thackeray's breakthrough 1844/'56 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, but in recreating a series of living paintings by which the culture and art of 18th Century England and Europe could be re-imagined using the filmmaking technology of the 1970s. It's less a movie than a gallery exhibit: one of the most graphically-driven, purely audio-visual of all nominally narrative motion pictures.

Mind you, the film's debt to fine art (many of the individual shots were inspired, not just by the idea of 18th Century art, but by very specific paintings) and its heavily aesthetic-driven approach isn't at the expense of narrative; on the contrary, the intense formality of it (including its revolution in cinematographic technology, but we'll get there) is intimately tied with its themes. The basic plot of the thing is thus: middle class Irishman Redmond Barry (Ryan O'Neal), after a disastrous romantic misunderstanding that leads to a duel, flees his rural home to make his way in the world, both in Ireland and Europe; during the Seven Years' War, as a soldier for the Prussian army, he's assigned to spy on an Irish con-man, the Chevalier du Baribari (Patrick Magee), with whom he instead forms an alliance, and they gamble their way across the continent, making and losing fortunes. After enough of this, Barry forces his way into the life of Lady Honoria Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), one of the wealthest heiresses in England, marrying her and making a wreck of her fortune before her son by a previous marriage, Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali as a young man, Dominic Savage as a child), finally comes up with a plan to drive the rascal, now going by the name Barry Lyndon, out of their lives for good.

In Kubrick's film, whose sympathies aren't entirely identical to Thackeray's novel (which is far more ironic and comic in approach, and if anything is even crueler in its concluding details), the whole thing is an exercise in revealing how utterly loathsome of a man Redmond Barry is, inch by inch; it is, in fact, not at all a poor companion piece to his immediately prior work A Clockwork Orange - both of them are about how a very particularly-detailed setting reflects and is reflected by an antihero whose behavior is unrelentingly vicious. The chief difference is that A Clockwork Orange reveals all at once what a terror its protagonist shall be, while Barry Lyndon obsessively and exhaustively explores all the surfaces of its characters and scenarios before letting the full brunt of Barry's venality come to the fore. And here we come to the single best piece of bad-actor casting in all of Kubrick; he made a bit of a habit out of it, between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, but it was a masterstroke of an entirely different order to cast the painfully bland prettyboy star of Love Story in the role of an utterly ruthless, misogynist shitheel like Redmond Barry, for a multiple reasons. There's the element of subversion, for one. There's the element of surprise, for another: for much of the film,. O'Neal seems barely able to keep up with the demands of a here-and-gone Irish accent, let alone to create a character, and when he suddenly reveals the full depth of his meanness, it's stunning and shocking - we've been taken in by his harmless mien as much as poor Lady Lyndon. There's the element of horror: O'Neal doesn't really alter his performance much, so the generic leading man gaze he wears during his characters heroic moments is identical to the one he wears during his brutality and downfall, which sells the idea that Barry is an honest-to-God sociopath better than any calculated actorly tricks could ever do.

And above all, there's the way that Barry Lyndon is about surfaces and the absorbing need to Project The Right Look To The Right People, and casting not just a pretty movie star but a pretty movie star with literally nothing in his wheelhouse but his looks makes perfect sense in that context (I'm being harsh on O'Neal: anybody who has seen Peter Bogdanovich's neo-screwball What's Up, Doc? knows how talented the actor could be when he needed to. But then there's Bogdanovich's caper comedy Paper Moon, which finds O'Neal effortlessly out-acted by his nine-year-old daughter, as well as the costume design, so who knows). It's a film about surfaces; or rather, it's a film about facades, and how exacting standards of form in daily life give a rigid, imprisoning structure to life that zaps the humanity out of the people living according to those standards, while also making it impossible to tell a liar and rogue and all-round menace until it's too late, as long as he can move the right way and occupy spaces correctly. The film's monstrously long climactic pistol duel is a perfect example: it proceeds with aching, ritualistic solemnity, in which Barry fits perfectly, and in which his most implacable foe, Lord Bullingdon, absolutely does not; and it's maybe not a coincidence that the character who can't handle the elegant dance of Georgian life is the one able to put a stop to the movie's spiral of miseries.

So back, back, back we go, to where I said that the film's overarching formalism and its themes are intimately tied; and that is all I meant by it. Barry Lyndon is, in the best sense, like a museum piece, embalming and preserving its characters right before our eyes as their devotion to an aesthetic-as-life dooms them. The act of re-creating a historical moment with profound accuracy and scrupulousness is also the act of showing how that life turns everyone involved into a display of stuffed and mounted animals. Hence the reliance on period artwork in guiding the compositions, hence the film's overwhelming slowness, hence the lack of affect from virtually the entire cast.

And yet, for all that, the film is incredibly beautiful: that is seen to by Kubrick and Alcott's famous revolution in using lenses that had never been used in motion pictures to reach unprecedented (and never-equalled) low light levels, using candles to illuminate whole frames, and capture the physicality of the era like no other movie. At the same time, they left a certain gauzyiness of focus that leaves many frames look exactly look flesh-and-blood oil paintings; even in the act of bringing the period to life with an immediacy unheard of in costume dramas, Kubrick still throws a wall between the viewer and the material. It is the most remote and coolly observational of all his films; as though, to make up for the grueling immediacy of A Clockwork Orange, he immediately wanted to make a film with a similarly depraved hero but with enough distance from the material that we, the audience, weren't being run through the muck along with the story. Or perhaps it's as simple as the closing card has it: "good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now".

Whatever the case, for all its moral bleakness and disenchanted views on humanity, Barry Lyndon invites - begs! - us to look at it, something movies do not frequently foreground, at least not narrative films financed by American studios. It really is a gorgeous film: beautifully lit, beautifully composed, beautifully appointed, and intelligent about the way its images work in concert with each other at a level that is uncommon, at best. But of course, Kubrick was a photographer; and that's never more clear than in this, his most picturesque of movies. Nor is it just the admirable landscapes and interiors of gorgeous Irish castles that stand out; Barry Lyndon is suffused with enough visual personality and dry wit that even something as barbaric as a shot-reverse shot set-up is clever and nuanced and primarily driven by image, not by narrative content, and certainly not by dialogue, of which there is none:

I'm powerless to resist that, myself: a good graphic match will get me every time, and those candles are an exquisite graphic match, while the contrast in the empty vs. populated backgrounds offers its own cutting little commentary on what appears to be a generic "they're falling in love" edit. And this is two brief shots in one short, wordless scene, out of 185 minutes! Treasures abound in Barry Lyndon, a film to be gazed upon with rapture and studiousness, and even if the plot offered up absolutely nothing (and it certainly lacks the liveliness and cunning of Thackaeray's novel, though it also doesn't aspire to those things), there'd still be nothing but reasons that I loved the film. I can't use the word "masterpiece", since an artist can only have one of those, properly speaking, and Kubrick's was 2001; but I wouldn't trade Barry Lyndon in for anything, and I can name hardly any movies that feel as fresh and inexhaustible after every revisiting.

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STANLEY KUBRICK: BEYOND THE INFINITE

2001: A Space Odyssey is the sort of movie that frequently gets called "difficult". Which is, ultimately, never true of a film that costs that much money laid out by a major studio (MGM, in this case), though I'll concede that if by "difficult" one means "the ending is a deliberately obscurantist explosion of borderline nonsense", then I can see why you'd think that.

Here's my notion: 2001, it is generally known, came about because Stanley Kubrick, fresh off the triumph of Dr. Strangelove, wanted to do hugely ambitious things. And it was in that capacity that he reached out to Arthur C. Clarke, the great science-fiction author who was the most concept-driven and technology-oriented of the big names in genre fiction of the mid-'60s, and suggested that they make "the proverbial 'really good' science-fiction film". Through a great deal of wrangling that needn't bother us here, Clarke and Kubrick ended up collaborating on a pair of virtually identical narratives, both released to the public in 1968: one of these was the screenplay to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the filmed version of which premiered in April, and the other was the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was published months later, so as to avoid stepping on the movie's toes.

There are many tiny details, and a couple of substantive ones, where the book and the film split, but the biggest one is more a matter of tone and focus: Clarke's novel is, generally speaking, explicit about what's going on, and Kubrick's film is, generally speaking, cryptic. I think this is no accident, and not a flaw with either version of the story; it strikes me and has always done so, that the book and the film are complementary to each other. Both of them address roughly the same themes using the tools which their respective media are best at: the book is about the communication of ideas in a clear way, while the movie is about the relating of moments and sensations in a series of fluid images. The one is concrete, the other is intuitive. The one is descriptive, the other is experiential.

Shorter: if you don't understand what the plot of 2001 contains, and it really matters to you, read the book. That's what it's there for.

Anyway, this is begging the question, a little bit. To be frank about it, I think that getting too tangled up in the "why" and "what" in 2001 is missing the point of the whole thing, which is that the film specifically intends not to clarify things - it is a story about events beyond human conception, very literally. The final 30 minutes of the film depict a process that we, are homo sapiens are insufficiently evolved to comprehend; the greater sin would be if the film did make any sense in this passage. In seeing what happens, and not knowing what it means, we're occupying the exact same place as the human protagonist, until such time as he ceases to be the "human" protagonist.

That's the ending, anyway. At almost two and a half hours long, 2001 is about much more than its visually transporting, narratively obtuse conclusion. It's part mystery, part "what if?" ethnography of a speculative future (that was, in virtually every regard, wildly optimistic about what life in the year 2001 would look like; though in retrospect, the most shocking thing is that the film would predict video chatting and self-aware computers, but not touch-screen control of either of those things), capped with a depiction of spiritual development that would seem altogether New Agey if the film weren't so rigidly materialistic in every single detail. Most of all, it's a good old-fashioned space adventure as warped into new forms by an author noted for his fixation on scientific plausibility and a director whose approach to genre had consistently been to subvert norms; the most significant element of 2001 is, in fact, that it's an early example - among the earliest in the English language - of an anti-genre film, in this case an anti-thriller. Take the details of the plot (hidden objects on the moon, insane killer computers, aliens), and give it to just about anybody, and you get a snazzy little blunderbuss of intense moments, probably clocking in at about 70 or 80 minutes. But in Kubrick and Clarke's hands, these materials are grist for one of the most purposefully boring movies ever made on American studio dollars.

Which sounds like a criticism, but I mean it to be the highest praise. Thematically, 2001 has one overriding interest that it examines from multiple, wildly different angles: the human's interest in interacting with the world around it by means of technology. We are the tool-using animals; we are the animals that manipulate reality using labor-saving devices. And with that as its primary focus, the film spends an utterly, wonderfully absurd amount of time watching people utilising future technology. There might not be any other hard sci-fi film in history where the lingering over future tech feels so focused and keenly tied into the theme as this: the languid, almost endless shots of people manipulating buttons to make spaceships go, or watching people walking in zero gravity environments, or studying the rules of weightless toilets, or eating food in space; all of these individual moments build up to one statement, which is "this is how technology will enable us to live". No film to boast such groundbreaking, still magnificent visual effects work - and 2001 is probably the single greatest triumph of visual effects in the 44-year window between King Kong and Star Wars - has ever done it with so little interest in providing spectacular entertainment. Quite the contrary: the immensely convincing effects work (which, according to the credits, was all designed by Kubrick himself, though it is known that he somewhat bullied his way into that credit, which rightfully should have been more fully shared with several other men, among them future VFX icon Douglas Trumbull), eye-popping in itself and still fully convincing on even the sharpest 70mm print or in the bright crispness of Blu-ray (and I have seen the movie on both formats), the superbly involving and immersive effects work, is all presented in the most confoundingly banal way.

A film about humankind and technology; but not a terribly optimistic one, you see. There is the way that the first tool ever used by a proto-human is seen in the film as having been a weapon; there is the legendary cut from a falling bone to a drifting orbital nuke, bluntly suggesting that after millions of years we're still using all our cunning in the most savage, animal ways; there is the fact that such drama as the film actually possesses hinges on an artificial intelligence created so perfectly that it can have nervous breakdowns and go on murderous rampages, at which point the only thing left is to kill it - killing it being, in 2001, the one thing we're really good at. At any rate, the film's major thesis about the marvels of interstellar travel is that it's depersonalising and tedious, and the way that people live in its fantastical vision of the year 2001 is full of the same bullshit and nonsense as life in 1968, or every other year in the history of civilization. It's such a well-worn argument that I'm embarrassed to even bring it up, that the only character in the movie that has real feelings and whose fate is genuinely affecting is the mad computer HAL-9000 (voiced in the incomparably bland and soothing tones of Douglas Rain), while the actual people - including the ones that HAL kills - are dull ciphers. The astronauts Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) - the latter is our nominal hero and the focus of all future human evolution, which is undoubtedly why Kubrick and Clark gave him a surname referencing weaponry - are for all intents and purposes indistinguishable, and completely untouchable by emotions; Frank's birthday message from his awkward parents elicits barely any kind of response from him at all. The first human lead we meet, Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), says virtually nothing that's not mindless small talk, even when he's presumably briefing a team with information that can hardly be all that revelatory to them, mostly coming off as bureaucratese. It is the first film where Kubrick played a game that he'd return to frequently in his career: cast lifeless actors and use their very lack of affect or personality to comment on the character they're playing. Sylvester appeared in the 1964 horror film Devil Doll, which put in an appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000; there, one of the snarking robots observed during a particularly leaden moment of vacant staring, "This is the scene where Kubrick said, 'That's my Heywood Floyd!'", and even as a joke, that has a tang of truth to it.

Now, all that being said, the film is still magnificently watchable. Depicting tedium does not have to be itself tedious, and the actual effect of the movie is both mesmerising and invigorating, I have found; Kubrick, his cinematographers Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott (the latter receving only an "additional photography" credit, in his first of four collaborations with Kubrick - the only cinematographer to come back for more of the director's micromanaging after the first time), and his editor Ray Lovejoy collaborated to make one of the small handful of movies that fully and legitimately deserves to be called visionary; and that's without mentioning the music, which is a foolish thing not to do. 2001 was the first film of the director's career where the music choices were consistently thoughtful and extraordinarily important, especially his use of three pieces by György Ligeti (without Ligeti's permission), with the composer's jarring micropolyphony creating a sense of unearthly aural sensation, chaotic without actually being formless, that ideally suits the film's depiction of human beings getting in out of their element (of course, the iconic use of the fanfare from Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" - itself based on a Nietszche work where he discusses, among other topics, the idea of the Superman, which makes it thematically cunning and aurally pleasing - is also brilliant, though a bit damaged by almost a half-century of parodies). I can only complain about the pairing of the first space travel sequences with Johann Strauss's waltz "By the Beautiful Blue Danube", which though it creates an exquisite marriage of image and music, also serves to make the sequences that are, presumably, meant to especially showcase the tooth-grinding dullness of space travel, instead come across as especially poetic and lovely.

But anyway, the images, the editing; 2001 is an impeccably well-crafted piece of cinema. Visually, it is anchored by a handful of repeated shots and images that echo each other (the alignment of celestial bodies and the film's famed black monoliths; the repetition of set-ups within the spaceship Discovery that especially stresses the limited scope of the ship and life within it), giving it a consistent visual shape - it is a movie deeply in love with circles, for reasons that are obviously linked to its theme (cycles, repetition, species replacing species only to be replaced by other species). The stillness of its images and the length of its shots gives it a hypnotic, insinuating sense that is occasionally pierced by quick or dramatic cuts at certain moments - the interpolation of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" with the image of an ape-man wielding a bone and non-diegetic shots of a tapir dying is not the film's most famous sequence, but one that I particularly admire for its quick transposition of triumph, awe, and cruelty. Later, HAL's murders are committed through piercing beeps on the soundtrack and the brutal cuts between the sterile white sets of the spaceship interior (the three production designers do excellent work throughout of making a future that looks both plausible and lifeless) and blaring right lights. Editing is not only used to indicate violence in the film, though it does an outstanding job of doing so.

All together, this is extraordinary filmmaking, creating intellectual arguments mostly through image and music, with its story shoring up its form, rather than the other way around, as is typical of mainstream filmmaking. The only thing that the film can be knocked for is that the sheer scale of its themes makes it an easy target for accusations of being kitschy, or pretentious, or overly pop-sciencey; all of which are criticisms I've heard leveled against it, and they all strike me as coming from the same place. Most art doesn't deal with the actual big questions - What, if anything, is the nature of God? What is moral behavior? What is it to be "civilized"? Where does humanity fit into the rest of the universe? - and there are plenty of people who get very irritated when it tries to, for reasons that I'll not pretend to understand, or care about. At any rate, that 2001 asks questions in these areas is, I think, an absolutely noble trait; that it asks them in such a well-formed, bold mix of experimental and mainstream filmmaking technique, with such one-of-a-kind images and structural conceits, is why it's a brilliant achievement of cinematic art. To me, it's enough to make it Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, and one of the greatest films ever made.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1928: In which we bid a fond adieu to the silent era at the very peak of its artistic sophistication

In the waning days of the American silent film, the artform was at the arguable peak of its sophistication as a visual storytelling medium. And there are four films in particular that I would suggest are the very best of the best, among the most sublime examples of what American filmmaking could achieve in the hands of its best practitioners. The greatest of these is F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, from 1927; then there is Frank Borzage's 7th Heaven, also from 1927, and Victor Sjöström's The Wind from 1928. And then there is a film that comes almost up to the level of Sunrise itself, King Vidor's The Crowd, from 1928. Incidentally, The Crowd was nominated for the same award Sunrise won in the first year of the Oscars, the one-off Most Unique and Artistic Production. The romantic in me likes to think that the award had to be retired after honoring two of the most perfect movies that had been or would ever be made in America; the cynic supposes that the Academy took only that long to decide that honoring truly great and important works of cinematic art was the kind of pretentious business that had best be stopped right now, in order to better focus on handing out trophies to middlebrow crap.

For by all means, The Crowd is a truly great work of art: a one-of-a-kind blend of domestic drama and a depiction of urban geometry that most resembles the "city symphony" films of the '20s. Compared to the three other films I have entirely arbitrarily lumped it with, it stands out as the one quintessentially American film in its technique, borrowing some touches that had been pioneered in Europe but bending them into a broadly naturalistic shape that has more in common with the storytelling clarity and character-driven focus of Hollywood films. It was, by the standards of 1928, considered an "experimental film", and one that MGM honcho Louis B. Mayer felt was a poor use of his studio's resources. In all honesty, it does feel like quite an aberration, by MGM standards: that studio, above all studios, favored heaving melodramas played out on gorgeously lush sets with fantastically beautiful movie stars waring rich clothes as they made love to the camera and each other. The Crowd is a grim pre-Depression story of the isolating effects of urban poverty, starring nobodies at their dowdiest, living through a miserably ordinary story of everyday suffering.

Such a thing was not at all the sort of movie that audiences gobbled up in the '20s, any more than now, but producer Irving Thalberg was a believer in both the quality of art that maybe wasn't supposed to be so commercial, and in keeping directors who had made lots of money for him happy by letting them pursue their pet projects on the cheap - and Vidor, who had directed The Big Parade into one of the biggest smash hits of the silent era, certainly had earned such a privilege. The Crowd was not, accordingly, a high-profile project (though it did scrape up a meager profit), but you can tell in just about every camera set-up that it was a passion project made by people as anxious as they could be to make something truly beautiful and extraordinary. It's not claiming more than the film can bear that it's one of the most ambitious movies ever made in the United States, pushing the medium to its absolute limits in certain key moments, while telling a story about a largely unexplored sort of life with such power and precision that more than three decades later, as prominent a figure as Jean-Luc Godard could be heard to opine that it made any further stories set in the same environment redundant and unnecessary.

The Crowd is about normal people living in New York: John (James Murray) and Mary (Eleanor Boardman), who meet and fall in love and marry and have children and squabble and suffer, all in the most unspectacular way you could ever imagine it happening. Other than a slight escalation in drama near the end, killing off a character for reasons that have more to do with miserabilism than naturalism, there are no "writerly" moments in the film: it lacks meet-cutes or ginned-up conflict, relying instead on a scenario that was about to go from common to horribly normal as the economy readied itself to plunge off a cliff in 1929, that of the underemployed husband with too much pride to deal with a shitty job and the wife who has to make decisions about how long she'll put up with him. In the words of one of Joseph Farnham's title cards, John was "one of the seven million that believes New York depends on him", and this willingness to reduce its protagonists to absolutely nobody special is the cornerstone of the film, burned into its very title. For if it wasn't obvious to begin with, the crowd depicted in The Crowd quickly establishes itself as the undifferentiated mass of humanity to which we all belong and in which we either find our place and our somewhat happy as such things go, or do not find our place and feel perpetually "wrong" about life.

To emphasise the plainness of John and Mary, Vidor made a point of casting unfamiliar actors and refusing to glamorise them: Murray was an extra plucked up because of his easygoing way with the camera (his story is an immensely sad one: unable to deal with the rocket-like pace of his career, he quickly descended into alcoholism, ended up on the streets, and died a suicide in 1936, at age 35), while Boardman was Vidor's none-too-prominent wife, deliberately made to look drab and everyday, though never unattractive. The lack of movie star affectation is astonishingly effective: there might not be anywhere else in late American silent cinema where the actors feel like they're acting so little, instead just goofing around, comfortable and unforced, like people who are thoroughly comfortable in each other's company and not inclined to play act for one another.

In contrast to the extraordinarily spare, simple characterisations and acting, the way that The Crowd was shot is unfathomably fussy and viscerally cinematic. The film is, above all else, invested in defining New York - and by extension all cities, and all places where people interact with other people - in terms of its geometry and architecture, a place where people are pressed into anonymity by rigid lines of buildings, rooms, streets. Everything from office suites to maternity wards are presented as geometrical patterns dominated by smoothly intersecting straight lines; the film's most famous shot is an apparent tracking shot up the face of a skyscraper which loses definition as anything but a series of rectangles and lines, with every rectangle leading into a room that could tell stories just as rich with humanity as the one we finally land in - and the combination of that tracking shot (done sideways, with a model) and the cut to the diamond-shaped grid of desks where John is merely one of many workers, is one of the most sublime moments in silent film.

The Crowd is a film that manages to have it both ways, thrillingly: depicting the city as a trap of anonymity and conformity that anybody would want to escape in its visuals and editing, while exploring in its narrative the idea that happiness and contentment are, after a fashion, the result of not trying to feebly fight for individuality as it becomes clear that it can only hurt you and those who love you to refuse to be part of the greater flow of society. In the final shots, our heroes literally recede into a teeming mass of humanity, finding private happiness within the greater crowd (a modestly happy ending that was a compromise between Vidor's vision and the studio's desire for an outright tacky affirmation of traditional morals). The film's message is pragmatic and nuanced: it is right and good that we strive to carve out our own selves, but we are also social creatures that need to exist alongside all the other social creatures; finding the balance between those two points, in the film's view, is the most important thing, and also one of the hardest. In a medium that tends to favor stories about individualists doing their own thing and being lionised for not giving a fuck, that might be as mature a lesson in applied sociology as any film has ever expressed.

For its artistic successes, The Crowd was one of the first generation of inductees into the National Film Registry, alongside three other silents - including, perhaps inevitably, Sunrise. A wholly worthy fate for one of the most essential and important movies ever made.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1928
-Struggling animation producer Walt Disney introduces Mickey Mouse in the sound cartoon Steamboat Willie, becoming an entertainment titan overnight
-The seminal "flappers lead immoral lives" melodrama Our Dancing Daughters makes a star out of Joan Crawford
-MGM releases the first full-length Technicolor film, The Viking

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1928
-Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, working in France, makes The Passion of Joan of Arc
-Zhang Shichuan's serial The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple begins in China; completed in 1931, it is the longest work of narrative cinema ever made
-Fritz Lang releases the espionage epic Spione in Germany

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1927: In which everything that anybody ever knew about filmmaking comes together in one place

1927 is perhaps the single most important year to date in the development of the film medium. It is the year when first the Hollywood continuity system and subsequently the cinema of the entire world was at a turning point between two paths, that of pure image, or that of image combined with sound. The latter of these does not inherently suggest a greater level of realism, though in practice it has nearly always been the case that sound is used to create a more naturalistic, authentic mise en scène in narrative films, particularly in American cinema. Thus the sound/silent distinction can be sketched as the difference between poetic abstraction versus solidity and narrative clarity, and committing definitively to the latter of these fundamentally shifted the development of American cinema forever after. In recognition of the sheer magnitude of this development, our Hollywood Century marathon will be spending a little extra time in 1927, considering two of the most important and iconic movies of that year. Let us now consider the movie that represents the absolute pinnacle of the image-driven, non-realist tradition that was about to be forcibly retired.

For me, the question has drifted, after five viewings spread over some 12 years, from "what are the arguments that Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is the best movie ever made?" to "what are the arguments that it isn't?". And over that same period, the answers to the second question have grown increasingly unpersuasive. Making an absolute pick for the Single Best Movie Of All Time By An Objective Measure is clear idiocy, of course, but I have to say this much: if all the films that had ever been made were all going to be destroyed, and I was given permission to save just one, I'm pretty sure this would be it.

The brilliance of Sunrise does not lie in its cunning: it's a film that reveals itself quite readily, in fact, requiring very little explication at all. It also does not lie in its intellectual profundity: the very sweet and very sincere themes add up to the utterly groundbreaking message that it's better to love people than to not love them. The brilliance lies entirely in the film's comprehensive perfection: this is, flatly put, a movie in which every single moment is exactly right - the correct compositions with the correct lighting and focus are onscreen for the correct length of time before cutting to the next, when all the same words apply. The people onscreen do the correct things at the correct moments. I think it's fair to say that every technique that anybody had come up with in narrative film by the period of the film's production is showcased within it; it is an encyclopedia of What Cinema Can Do, circa 1927, much as The Great Train Robbery filled that role in 1903, The Birth of a Nation filled it in 1915, and a handful of films have intermittently done it since.*

And why not? It is, after all, the movie that happened when one of the most talented filmmakers in the world, F.W. Murnau, selected precisely because he was one of the most talented filmmakers in the world, was given free reign to do basically any damn thing he wanted to with all of William Fox's money. This is, then, what happens when German Expressionism (if not inherently the best, then certainly the most overt and present of all stylistic movements of the '20s) meets Hollywood's resources. And, moreover, it's an example of Expressionism being employed not in the service of horror, but of domestic melodrama (though one that is tinged heavily with horror of a sort in its first act), making this something of an unprecedented film at the time of its creation: the explicit emotional immediacy in the sets, staging, and acting that are what Expressionism is, and where it gets its name from, applied to a wholly different set of emotions. Love, tenderness, companionship, happiness; these are among the feelings that Murnau and his excellent crew of collaborators were to explore using the tricks of psychological expression that the Germans were perfecting while the French were busy making connections between film editing and music (and if Sunrise falls short of my absurd claims for it, it's in that there's really only very little influence of any non-German European film style of the period, and absolutely no influence at all at all of the Soviet cinema).

The film flags its intention to be about basic, essential emotions over all else early on, giving its central character no names beyond The Man (George O'Brien) and The Woman (Janet Gaynor, in one of the three performances which won her the first-ever Best Actress Oscar). They're a married couple living on a farm in The Countryside, just alongside The Water; their community is apparently a popular destination for summer vacationers from The City, for it is on that note that the film begins: people merrily enjoying themselves in the relaxed rural atmosphere, with one particular tourist hanging on a bit: The Woman From The City (Margaret Livingston), who has been having an affair with the man, and whispering poisonous thoughts to him about how maybe he could drown his wife in the marshy stretch of shore by the farm. Besotted, the man agrees to this hideous plot, but when he takes the woman out on a boat trip and is about to make his move, the look of absolutely pitiable terror on her face melts his heart, and he brings her to shore. She flees, sensibly enough, and he follows; they both end up hitching a ride on a convenient tram into the city, where he begs her forgiveness, eventually finding it when they rest in a church during a wedding, and the solemnity of the occasion breaks him down completely. From here, the rejuvenated and reborn couple enjoys the spectacle and play of the city, falling deeper in love than they ever had before. On the way home, a storm kicks up and the woman falls into the water, ironically fulfilling the exact accident that her husband had planned to fake; a desperate search is enacted to find her, while the man is driven to insane rage against the woman from the city.

Psychological realism it ain't.

But who needs reality, when as an explicitly abstract and untethered fairy tale, it's hard to imagine what could possibly make Sunrise work more perfectly than it does. And fairy tale it is: the wilds look generally like the California mountains, for good reason, and the city (built from scratch) evokes the sort of general sensation of New York without any specific details. Meanwhile, the notion of mountains, lakes, swamps, towns, farms, and cities all mixed up in a space that can be traversed in a few minutes or weeks has the definite tang of a European neverwhere - the Hermann Sudermann short story upon which Carl Mayer's scenario was based had the title "A Trip to Tilsit", Tilsit being a city in Prussia.

The purpose of course was to create a story that took place in somewhere that does not exist in any literal sense, any more than the man and the woman are meant to refer to exact, specific people. This is not a film and story about details about about generalities and feelings, and it explores those things through intense, focused images the directly communicate those feelings either individually or in increasingly complex layered combinations (and music!As one of the early sound-on-film releases using Fox's Movietone system, Sunrise does in fact boast a dedicated musical soundtrack and a handful of sound effects - mostly trains, storms, and crowd noises).

The film is not difficult to parse in the way it presents these things: as great visual geniuses go, Murnau is not like a Terrence Malick, whose work is so wrapped up in philosophy and intangibility that you need a road map to make it through scenes, nor a Michelangelo Antonioni, whose physical spaces are combined with each other in deliberately alien permutations. To stick merely to his contemporaries, he has not Fritz Lang's complicated love of architecture, or the Russians' experimental system of graphic representation. His films, and Sunrise above all of them, are unmistakable in their intent: when he, along with the greatly essential cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, pan slowly along a line of muddy footprints in a gloomy swamp, no viewer could miss how the plotting, heavy steps are exaggerated by the deep pits left in the mud and the effort of walking mirrored in the camera's emphatically slow movement. The explosive use of back projection to put the newly reconciled couple in a quick series of locations from city to nature is clearly meant to mark out the awesome sense of expansiveness and placelessness that their reborn love, stronger than ever, makes them feel. The mix of high-contrast close-ups of the man's sweaty, anguished face in church with medium shots of him crumbling into the woman's lap perfectly and obviously depict the inability to process negative feelings alone, requiring an outlet of either another person or a higher spiritual power to help make it through the dark moments of the soul.

These images, and a whole film's worth behind them, are not puzzles: anyone raised in a European-descended visual tradition could instantly understand every emotional beat that happens in Sunrise. This is what German Expressionism was all about: finding a short cut from the image to the emotional response that didn't need story or intellect to get in the way. It's odd to think that, in Germany, this style was almost exclusively used in what we'd now consider horror; prior to Sunrise, I can think of not a single Expressionist melodrama, though what Sunrise proves above everything else is that the style and the format are uniquely well-suited for each other. Melodrama, after all, is the narrative equivalent of emotions being privileged over sense.

But there we have it: a German working in American generic idioms to create a nationless masterpiece. It is a beautiful film, both visually and thematically: surely cinema's finest expression of the joy and strength that comes from having another human being to rely on absolutely, whether expressing that idea positively (as in the idyll in the city or the triumphant final scenes) or negatively (the moody horror of the opening, and the man's lumbering menace; or the cosmic despair of the hunt for the woman at night, with boats sliding through absolute blackness in some of the most hauntingly potent images that American filmmaking has ever produced). If its impulses are ultimately traditional and safe, they are not less sincere and impassioned because of that; and the mode of expression is so bold, adventurous, and unrestrained that the last word for the film would ever be "conservative". It is an overwhelming and grand achievement, and as long as the art form of cinema exists to be appreciated and experienced, it will always be one of the most essential accomplishments of the medium.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1927
-Taking a page from Murnau's playbook, Frank Borzage makes the exquisite 7th Heaven at Fox
-Hal Roach pairs chubby American comedian Oliver Hardy and scrawny Brit Stan Laurel, making comedy history
-Josef von Sternberg directs the foundational gangster masterpiece Underworld

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1927
-Abel Gance releases the monumental, multi-screen biopic Napoléon in France
-Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt is released, the best-known of all "city symphonies"
-In the U.S.S.R., Vsevolod Pudovkin's contribution to the 10th anniversary of the revolution is The End of St. Petersburg

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