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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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR

Having been shot in color and on media that doesn't look like a 30-year-old VHS camcorder, telling something that resembles a story pretty much no matter how you look at it, and gliding in at a whimsical four hours and ten minutes, Norte, the End of History certainly earns its reputation as director Lav Diaz's easiest movie.* This means it's also probably in the top 300 easiest films released commercially in the United States in 2014. It's downright scrutable in fact, it's basically just a Filipino riff on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and who doesn't like a good literary adaptation?

The Dostoevsky angle is useful primarily in that it lets a viewer get a handle on a project that's other so broad and ambitious that it would be hard to know where the hell to start with it. But it's also reductive in the extreme to try and use that as a shortcut to "solve" a movie that's as minutely obsessed with class distinctions in the Philippines in the 21st Century, the political history of that country's radical intelligentsia, the impact of modern communications technology, and the representational capacity of cinema, as it is with the moral questions that could have consumed a 19th Century Russian novelist. Although those questions matter, too. The fact of the matter is, Norte is a film of wild ambitions, considering as many topics with as much complexity as it dares to. And with that much running time to play with, it gets to dare a lot.

The content seems simple enough: Fabian (Sid Lucero) is a law student, celebrated by his social circle as the most sophisticated thinker among them, and when we meet him, he's holding court on moral and legal theory. Something he apparently does quite a lot of, getting himself good and worked up about the depravity littered throughout the history of the Philippines, declaring that those who deserve to be punished have not been and that social justice shall never be achieved, and the sort of passionate fiery declarations typical of smart students. It so happens that he's borrowed money from the local loan shark, Magda (Mae Paner), and she's starting to get antsy about him paying her back. Also starting to feel Magda's angry pinch is the extremely poor Joaquin (Archie Alemania), trying to get a business off the ground to provide for his wife Eliza (Angeli Bayani) and their children. The desperate Joaquin is a bit more mercurial in his frustrations with Magda, leading to an angry, loud, public shouting match. But he simmers down. The outwardly calm Fabian, however, ends up exploding with rage and murdering Magda. And with perfect dramatic inevitability, Joaquin is sent to prison for the crime. And thus does the bulk of the movie follow the three strands thus set up: Eliza's exhausting attempts to survive by any possible means, Joaquin's eye-opening experiences in the Filipino prison system, and Fabian's descent into madness as he finds himself a prime symptom of the very arbitrary amorality and failure of accountability that he has spent his academic career decrying.

Befitting an (uncredited) adaptation of 19th Century social issues literature, Norte is greatly serious about explicating its themes under the assumption that the audience is smart and willing to think about the state of society, and its refusal to make good on its promises (the second half of the title is a fairly obvious, and entirely sardonic, reference to the "end of history" musings in the West when Russian Communism finally collapsed, and which the 21st Century has thoroughly shown to be pie-eyed optimism of the hollowest sort). But Diaz and his superb team don't rest on the script (which the director co-wrote with Rody Vera) to do all the intellectual heavy lifting; and given the enormous length of the film, that's certainly for the best. An unrelentingly idea-driven Norte would be an enormous slog, and even granting the more generous standards offered to this kind of long-take, wide-shot cinema, the film proves to be impressively full of energy and kineticism. It's brilliantly shot: cinematographer Larry Manda and Diaz manipulate their images on two axes, wide and deep, to explore the characters and the places containing them. It's impressive enough that the anamorphic widescreen is used so smartly, combining groups of people, and isolating individuals; but where Norte shines is in its exceptional use of deep focus - or, as needed, the absence of it. The ingenuity of moments like the murder of Magda, boldly combining off-screen space with careful management of where characters and shapes reside relative to the camera, is one of the best individual sequence of the year, but impressive shadowbox-like staging is very much the norm, rather than the exception.

The film's color palette is quite fantastic, as well; given Diaz's success with black-and white films, it's a little surprising, maybe, that the contrasts of blue water, pale sky, brown and green land, and the sickly wash of the prison interiors, would be so confidently employed in directing the viewer's emotions and engagement within scenes. And, too, for a director so accustomed to static shots - and Norte is made up largely of static shots - the handful of punctuation marks of camera movement are brilliant as well (between the deep staging and the cunning about what camera movement means when it's only sparingly employed, Norte feels something like an heir to Ozu Yasujiro, though for different ends).

The formalism in the film is very strictly used as a function of the storytelling and philosophy, mind you. This is very much a movie about Grand Ideas, and the images primarily serve to situate us relative to the characters, their words, and their actions, such that we either feel involved or distant in individual moments of thought or revelation (the way that the imprisoned Joaquin is framed, and Alemania's performance, suggest at times a modernist update of a medieval martyr painting into cinematic form). It's a complex and elaborate and extremely precise piece of filmmaking, that is to say, but one that's intuitively watchable and philosophically accessible far more than its on-paper content would suggest. I'm not a damn fool, and I won't go so far as to suggest that Norte is "fun", but four hours of academic moralising could be a hell of a lot more opaque than this crafty, organic film presents them as being, and the result is one of the year's best films, but better still, one of its smartest.

9/10

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COLD HEARTS

There's no good in hiding the obvious: director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's seventh feature Winter Sleep, winner of the 2014 Palme d'Or, is three hours and sixteen minutes long, with most of that time given to people talking. This is a shallow observation, but the film emphasises the weight of its running time to an extreme degree even for the 3-Hours-and-Over club; it has an inexorable quality, marching towards its destination with slow, heavy steps, all the better to focus our attention on the unyielding psychological gamesmanship at its center. You feel that 196 minutes, but the film is not trying to prevent you from doing so.

We are all friends here, so I will risk coming off as a philistine by floating the possibility that Winter Sleep doesn't really earn that running time. It hasn't any denser conversations, nor is it more reliant on making the audience feel duration, than the director's last picture, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which winsomely clocked in at just 157 minutes (and, for good measure, it's the more interestingly shot of the two films with much fresher and more challenging themes, but if we start playing the "you won the Palme for the wrong movie" game, I might as well give up on the review now). Its repetitions are hardly pointless - they're designed to show how the characters can fail to observe their own behavior and therefore fail to take steps to correct themselves - but they are, nonetheless, repetitions, and it is a lot of movie, when all is said and done.

Anyway, let's meet those characters. Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) is our protagonist; he owns a hotel in a remote, hilly part of the Cappadocia region of Anatolia in Turkey, as well as several properties he rents out to local farmers, he writes an editorial column in the local paper, and he clearly supposes that all of this makes him the hottest of shit. We're invited to see through this pretty quickly in moments that reveal him to be a little bit pathetic: the way he allows his assistant Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan) to deal with his irate tenants, the fatuous way he has of talking to the guests at his hotel, and his genial bullying demeanor to everyone, whom he plainly regards as the intellectually diminished serfs inhabiting his remote fiefdom. Though most everybody appears to regard him as something of an ass, the only people who call him on it are the women sharing his home: his recently divorced sister Necla (Demet Akbag), and his young-enough-to-be-mistaken-for-his-daughter wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen), who each get their turns in the film's longest individual scenes to try and talk him down to size, to which he responds with some withering erudition of his own; in a movie dominated by slow moments and conversation, these two epic-scale dialogues count as the biggest setpieces.

The script, written by Ceyland and his wife, Ebru Ceylan (this epic-length study of a strained marriage in its death throes must have been the funnest family project ever), plays a lot more fair than just painting Aydin as as blustering know-it-all who needs to get knocked down a peg. It's quite free with observing, in a very subdued and entirely nonjudgmental register, the ways in which all of its characters act with a degree of unthinking arrogance, relative to their position. Nihal may be uniquely capable of outflanking Aydin, but one of the film's strongest individual moments finds her repeating his smugly patriarchal tendency to look down on the poorer classes as things to be attended to, not humans to be engaged with. The film's not merely an indictment of blind male authority, or the assumption of power by the educated and moneyed classes, though both of these things are primary targets. Overall, though, Winter Sleep sets its horizons much broader than that; it is, fundamentally, about disconnects between people, born in arrogance that takes all sorts of different forms, not just the overt ones represented by Aydin. Though he is certainly the most openly self-deluding member of the cast, able to skillfully argue about religion, morality, relationships between people, and all the other things discussed at length throughout the movie, but always more for the sake of arguing than because he clearly understands or cares for what he's talking about.

In telling this story, Ceylan situates his characters against a nearly primordial landscape of enormous rocks against which human dwellings nestle incongruously, as the titular winter lays a chilly grey pall over everything even before the snow falls with its metaphoric inevitability. It is a world in which human concerns are weirdly out of place, making the doggedness with which the characters pursue and relentlessly define those concerns, seem even more self-defeating. Aydin's disregard for everyone he claims as his inferiors, and their disregard for him, are mirrored in the way that the landscape seems utterly indifferent to everyone in it. Tellingly, the exteriors are almost always wide shots, stressing the openness of the scenery and minimising the humans in the frame, while the interiors are all closed-in and boxy, giving no sense of the geography within the buildings they occupy; the human element of the film is always conditional in a way that the natural setting isn't.

It's powerful stuff, no two ways about it; and yet, I left Winter Sleep feeling a bit detached from it. The sheer volume of film has a lot to do with that, of course: conversations that are all individually interesting and enlightening both about the human condition and the mental state of the persons having those conversations get a lot less interesing and a lot less enlightening when they wear one down through sheer glut. It's also hard to shake the feeling that it's a decisive step down from Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which used lighting, framing, and editing with a consistent precision that isn't nearly so true of Winter Sleep. It is bold filmmaking and screenwriting, beyond a shadow of a doubt, with at least two absolutely terrific performances (Bilginer's and Sözen) rising out of a top-level ensemble. But it's tinged by the disappointment that comes from a work of art that's so close to greatness that its failure to quite bridge that last little gap is all the more frustrating.

8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: LARS AND THE REAL GIRLS

And so, Nymphomaniac; or is it Nymph()maniac? There are more than just cosmetic reasons for the latter to count as the actual title, since the dividing line between nymph and maniac is even more important to the film's project than the fact that an open parenthesis followed directly by a close parenthesis looks in the vaguest possible way like a vagina. But Nymp()maniac is cumbersome to type out and a bit pretentious so I will, not without regret, let it go.

At any rate, the film is the latest project by international cinema's most important and reliable provocateur, initially came to us in the form of two volumes of about two hours each that debuted, with all possible showiness, on Christmas Day in 2013 in Denmark, before the director's preferred cut surfaced piecemeal over 2014. And it is this longer cut, coming to a total just shy of five and a half hours, that we shall be considering now. For Antagony & Ecstasy believes in honoring artistic intent, even in the case of artists who we do not much care for.

I will say this much for Nymphomaniac, though: it wasn't nearly as diabolically unpleasant as I was prepared for it to be. It finds von Trier in a surprisingly overt comic mode; for those of us accustomed to viewing most of his films with a dispirited "he has got to be kidding, right?" reaction, this is the film where he pretty clearly admits that he is. The film takes the shape of a memoir in eight chapters, narrated by a middle-aged woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg, reigning von Trier muse) to the older Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård, reliable von Trier mainstay), the man who found her bloody and bedraggled in an alley by his home one snowy night. The story is about her life as a nymphomaniac, ever since the fateful day she began to perceive her own sexuality; "I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old" begins her narrative, delivered over a shot of a bare-chested toddler staring down out of the frame, because Lars von Trier does not believe in starting slowly. For the rest of the night, Joe tells Seligman of her lost virginity to the dashing Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), who is in and out of her life forever after); her teenage adventures in casual sex (Stacy Martin takes over for the pre-30 version of Joe); the way that having sex constantly with a broad variety of men came to dominate her young adulthood; the crisis that happened when she lost all feeling in her clitoris and began to seek out more extreme ways of coming to orgasm; and eventually her career as a mob extortionist. And in all of this, we see so, so much genitalia.

But the real purpose of Joe's tale isn't to convince Seligman that she's insatiably addicted to sex, but to convince him that she is a morally unjust person, and therein lies the comedy. Throughout her long recitation (which increasingly seems to be made up, Usual Suspects-style, of the things that come into her head while she sits in Seligman's empty rooms - not a reading the film insists upon, but certainly one it welcomes), the action frequently reverts back to the two of them sitting across from each other, with Joe asking some variation on "didn't that bit completely offend, shock, titillate, or disgust your?" to which her audience responds with labored theoretical frameworks justifying her behavior. First, he eagerly compares her sexual hunting to his own beloved hobby of fly-fishing, and by the time dawn roles around, he'll also have dragged into polyphonic theory and the history of the Eastern Orthodox church, among many other random tangents. Eventually even Joe seems to find him fatuous and boring and over-written.

These cutaways with Seligman offering baroque readings of Joe's life are, for one thing, the funniest part of a movie that's often prone to going for weird comedy rather than the sober drama of most of von Trier's work, especially in the first three hours. For another thing, it doesn't take knowing that the director has basically admitted that he views the women in his films as his authorial stand-ins to realise that we're watching Joe-as-von-Trier trying to provoke Seligman-as-film-critics, with Joe's life including several obvious references to the director's past work, whether in images or plot points, and even to the details of his public life; there's even time to have a chat about the morality of the Nazis, recalling the most famous controversy of von Trier's career. Through the characters' dynamic, von Trier is both repeating his claims to telling something important and challenging that must be said, and also asking, somewhat aghast, "do you people actually buy this shit I'm selling?"

Which, for as impenetrably self-regarding as that it is, it definitely gives Nymphomaniac a peculiar goofiness that makes it far more watchable than the story of yet another woman mortifying herself to find transcendence ought to be, especially at such a monstrous running time. And, throughout, Nymphomaniac also reverts to more traditional von Trier territory: there is much that is visceral and angry, whether the melodrama of a spurned wife (Uma Thurman, in a disorienting, almost cartoonish depiction of rage that's perhaps the film's single best performance); or the frequent explicit sex scenes in which there is no hint of eroticism, only the compulsive movement of mechanical beings; or what has to be the most gut-wrenching abortion scene in cinema history. Or the atrocious final scene, a violation of all character and story logic that exists, as far as I can tell, solely for von Trier to laugh at us on the way out of the theater, having ruined anything resembling a character or thematic arc across the whole immense beast of a movie.

In all of its modes - self-regarding, absurdly comic, clinically unsexy, violently distressing - Nymphomaniac never quite gets around to justifying the why of all this. Any insights into human interaction, sexual behavior, or gender politics are filtered through so much visually staginess and tonal insincerity that they hardly feel authentic in any way; the film is so long, repetitive, and predictable in its arch-European sexual chilliness that it doesn't even work as a provocation. It makes outrageous sex look absolutely tedious, and while I am sure there are those who would be shocked and outraged by this, and whose prudishness would thus give the film some merit as a "gotcha!" exercise, they wouldn't ever end up watching it. Besides, the idle emotional punishments von Trier ladles out on his characters for the sexuality is prudish enough on its own.

Essentially, it's a hollow plaster cast of a movie, acerbically funny enough to give it some personality, but devoid of any real meaning; it is an artificial construct of suffering than hardly feels painful even when we're watching it, an exercise in watching the director demonstrate once again that he can push buttons, even as he announces right there in the dialogue that he's just pushing out buttons for the hell of it. There are plenty of impressive shots throughout, some comic, some moving, some astonishing; and the way sound is used (especially the way it gives the film a broad structure) is clever, though the songs that crop on the soundtrack frequently are virtually never anything but obvious and dopey. So it's not poor cinema. And it's certainly varied enough that even as slow as it moves and as long as it lasts, it never feels pokey. But it's self-referential and self-rewarding to the point that it has virtually no other content. Although, in a film with this many close-ups of human orifices, I suppose it makes sense that the film basically takes place up Lars von Trier's ass.

5/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1980: In which the New Hollywood Cinema dies of autoerotic asphyxiation

The classic version of the story goes that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ruined everything, just absolutely every god-damned thing, when they released their big ol' popcorn movies Jaws and Star Wars in 1975 and '77, and made all the studios go "Whoa! We don't want to keep making little movies about the lives of real people anymore! We want to make big dumb movies about paper-thin stereotypes that make umpty-jillion dollars!" Which isn't true for a lot of reasons, one of which is that Jaws itself fits pretty comfortably into the New Hollywood Cinema wheelhouse (and Star Wars actually kind of does too, depending on what part of it you're looking at, and what angle you're looking at it from), that plenty of movies that weren't at all part of the New Hollywood made huge piles of cash throughout the '70s, and that Star Wars probably wouldn't have set records that nobody even dared to dream existed to be set if there wasn't a wide desire among the audience for some big, glitzy, largely mindless adventure cinema as a palate cleanser from all those severe stories of people on the edge getting made by the film school brats. The Age of Blockbusters was surely going to happen sometime around the turn of the '80s; Star Wars just made sure that it took a very specific form, perhaps a somewhat more openly mercenary and merchandising-driven one than it would have otherwise done.

It is, unfortunately, much easier to blame the death of the New Hollywood filmmaking generation on its own increasingly deranged sense of importance. The thing is, we like brave filmmakers to get all the resources they want; we like seeing what happens when they can work without limits. We, however, aren't fiscally responsible for those filmmakers. And far from being the fault of Lucas making the GDP of any randomly-selected half-dozen African nations combined for his one space picture, the end of the greatest period in auteur-driven American filmmaking was the result of those same auteurs losing all sense of proportion. The costly, showy failure of Martin Scorsese's New York, New York in 1977, right at the same time that Star Wars had people waiting in line for hours to see it, put a huge dent in the notion that American directors were indestructible visionaries whose work spoke so profoundly to the audience that was a moral obligation to support their work; and while 1979's Apocalypse Now made quite a lot of money (though not an amount that was so very exciting, post-Star Wars), it only did so after a legendarily awful production where Francis Ford Coppola shat away enormous amounts of money and time while devastating his own health and the health of many people around him. The timing was becoming perfect for somebody to slip up big, and prove to an increasingly nervous industry that the self-styled artists of the '70s need to be reined in, and hard. And that proof came in the form of one of the most notorious bombs in the history of the motion picture, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, a Western epic that cost $44 million - in 1970s dollars, mind - and made a grand total of $3.5 million between two releases in 1980 and 1981, effectively destroying United Artists, where all the boldest of the bold filmmaking happened in the '60s and '70s.

It's not hard, on the face of it, to see why Cimino would be trusted with such an ambitious project. His The Deer Hunter is one of the very best counter-arguments to the "Star Wars ruined everything" argument, making a very robust sum of money during its 1979 box office run (it opened in 1978, and won the Best Picture Oscar for that year). And this despite being New Hollywood to its bones. So when you are the forward-thinking studio for whom Cimino just made a great big basketful of cash on the strength of a three-hour movie about normal people living hardscrabble lives and fighting in Vietnam, all of it accomplished without a trace of gloss or romance, surely you give him the keys to do it all again. And that is perhaps the biggest reason that Heaven's Gate scared the moneymen and called an end to the New Hollywood game: its failure was built in to the auteur system that had been so vibrant over the preceding decade, and it was totally unpredictable. At least from the start - by the time of its November, 1980 premiere week, in a 3 hour and 39 minute cut (that was already shorter than Cimino's dream version by longer than a full hour) that was poisoned by the widespread reporting of the film's ballooning costs and out-of-control shooting schedule, it was clear that the film was DOA. And by the time of its wide release in April, 1981, at a condensed and incoherent 2 hours and 29 minutes, it was all over but the weeping.

I would consider it appropriate to keep this review from getting as wide-ranging, sprawling, and exhaustively long as Heaven's Gate itself, so with the history lesson out of the way, let me get right to the good stuff: I pretty much love this movie. That's no real bravery on my part; by the time I first had a chance to see it, the film had very clearly entered the "rapt critical re-evaluation" phase that eventually lended it a berth in the Criterion Collection, about as close to an agreed-upon canon as anything that doesn't have the words "Sight" or "Sound" in its name. While there are, as with any film, the cluster of people who still regard it as a failure - and by all means, there are plenty of obvious reasons why one would find Heaven's Gate a failure, such as like how it has about 35 minutes of plot stretched across the 217 minutes of its current incarnation (the 1980 premiere version without the intermission card and music, basically) - it's no longer a cultural joke. By this point, there are probably as many people who regard it as an all-time fantastic portrait of Americana as those who think it a colossal, ass-numbing botch, with the greater majority coming somewhere in between. As happens.

For now, let's go ahead and try on "all-time fantastic portrait of Americana", just to see how it fits. Certainly, it's what the film wants to be: an almost entirely fictionalised retelling of American history - the Johnson County War of 1892, in particular (the film sets it in 1890) - that both pays full tribute to the richness of history as a living, sloppy thing, making a strong statement about the immigrant experience in America (one of the thematic spines in The Deer Hunter, as well), while also drawing oblique but fervent and angry connections between that period and the recently-concluded era in American history in which Vietnam and Kent State and Watergate and police crackdowns of protesters and all had created the first major generation gap. I wonder if that, in part, explains the film's inability to find any kind of respect when it was new: the social wounds Heaven's Gate speaks to so potently were finally starting to heal themselves, the country had just loudly signaled a desire to retrench from the social upheavals of nearly 20 years by electing Ronald Reagan to the presidency in a lopsided election, and Cimino standing there with his enormous slab of cinema demanding that we all grapple with the ugliness and violence of America was hardly what audiences wanted. In the same year, it was possible for Martin Scorsese to smuggle his own indictment of American violence with strong critical support in his great Raging Bull, a remarkable transition out of the New Hollywood while Cimino stood roaring while the New Hollywood crumbled around him, because he disguised it with genre trappings and unusual aesthetics and a personal story that acted as proxy for social critique. Cimino was, comparatively, blindingly anti-subtle: the length of his movie, the story within it, the way it was filmed, the way it was structured, all essentially force the audience into submission. I love Heaven's Gate, but I don't deny that it's an enormous bully of a film.

Enormous - slow, long, taken up to something like three-fifths of its running time with luxuriant wide shots that find the director and no less a cinematographer than Vilmos Zsigmond using a painterly lighting and framing aesthetic like battering rams against the viewer's eyeballs. That is to say, enormous, but also gorgeous in its enormity: unnervingly so, given the desperation and cruelty that make up the story, but it never feels like Cimino and Zsigmond and production designer Tambi Larsen (whose re-creation of what feels like the entirety of the American West is as picturesque as anything in the dust-soaked, silhouette-heavy, exaggeratedly soft cinematography) are aestheticising depravity or suffering, but instead dramatically presenting the central conflict at the heart of a national myth: the beauty and perfection of the continent as a physical place, with its enormous range of ecosystems and natural resources, and the multiple centuries of almost uninterrupted violence it took to wrangle that physical place into the United States of America.

It is a film that invites pretension, as you can see.

Granted limitless resources and virtually no oversight thanks to a remarkably indulgent contract, Cimino and his crew were able, over the course of a maddeningly perfectionist shoot that left the director with the reputation of a mad visionary dictator, to create one of the most exciting depictions of the West as a living, sweaty, bloody, sexed-up place that has ever been filmed, while also depicting it in such a consciously constructed way that it manages to feel stylised and remote - a living, breathing world, but not our world at all, as attested to by the geometrically claustrophobic images and the oddball cast that includes, besides Christopher Walken as a charismatic hitman and one-third of the love triangle that gives the film its general dramatic shape for most of its middle, no performances that feel really natural and unforced. And when Chris Walken is giving a film's most relaxed performance, you know something's up. I wouldn't go so far as to say that people are bad - an ensemble containing John Hurt, Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, and Brad Dourif is certainly incapable of being bad. But in the leads, Kris Kristofferson (a singer-songwriter who has done a great deal of acting, some of it truly wonderful, but has more of a natural screen presence than what we might necessarily call "acting talent"), and Isabelle Huppert (who obviously does have acting talent, but there's a reason she's only made just a handful of movies in English, which is that her accent could be used to mortar bricks together), however much of an impact they make as psychological presences don't feel like people you could meet walking down the street on a weekend afternoon. They are abstractions, and they fit perfectly as the anchors to a film that exquisitely brings life back to history, but does not also bring that history up to the modern day to meet us. The only film that I can immediately think of that works in a similar way, for similar ends, is Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, from which Heaven's Gate is taking so many of its lighting cues that I take it for granted that Cimino & Co. must have seen it.

There are indelible moments galore: the prologue, set at Harvard's graduation in 1870, ends in an outdoor waltz where the sheer fact of moving human bodies takes on a force that lingers simply as an expression of kineticism, color, and shape, and a later dance sequence (the most notorious part of the film) does much the same, stopping the film cold for nine straight minutes of just plain watching and listening to human activity in a moment of pleasant repose. There are shots that use impossibly deep staging with Wellesian élan. Walken's introductory shot, through a whole he's just blasted in a bedsheet hanging to dry, is as iconic a moment as you could ever want to find in a Western. And there are moments which are indelible for being bad, to be fair: the violent death scene that closes out the main story is embarrassingly staged, a knock-off Bonnie and Clyde with none of its impact, only schmaltziness.

But in general, the sense lingering after Heaven's Gate isn't of its moments, but of its entire, bulky self: the very last scene, a coda set on a boat outside of Rhode Island in 1903, suggests that the whole thing has been as much a dream as a reality, and like a dream it's easier to remember it as a shifting series of impressions than as a specific chain of events of development of ideas. The only idea that matter is American History In Motion, and as Heaven's Gate has, itself, receded into that history, I find it has become easier to appreciate it than when it had the inappropriate patina of the new clinging to it. It's hard to say that by any objective standard, it's a masterpiece - other than a vague sense that it would lose its richness and lived-in feeling if it was shorter, I can't imagine how to explain why I think it earns that running time - but it's essential cinema no matter what "good" or "bad" judgments we lay against it, and if it had to destroy a studio and a generation of filmmaking for that one mad genius filmmaker to have that much power at that moment, I would consider that a fair price.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1980
-The Blue Lagoon becomes a huge hit on the strength of its implication that you get to see teenagers naked and screwing
-In slightly more dignified sociological news, 9 to 5 is an even more enormous hit that tells women that it's OK to be self-reliant, and tells men that it's not OK to be chauvinist dicks
-Disco is ruthlessly murdered by the epic failure of three of the most gloriously shitty musicals in history, Can't Stop the Music, Xanadu, and The Apple

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1980
-After many years wandering in the wilderness, an aging, ailing Kurosawa Akira has his first major hit in more than a decade with Kagemusha
-From out of nowhere, South Africa's film industry suddenly scores a major international hit with the comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy
-In Italy, director Bruno Mattei and writer Claudio Fragasso tag-team on Hell of the Living Dead, which if you put a gun to my head and asked me, might be my pick for the worst film I've ever seen

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1963: In which so much money is spent

Having arrived in 1963, our Hollywood Century project now completes its first half. And it pleases me greatly that such a milestone should be commemorated with one of the quintessential Hollywood films of all time - maybe the single best example of the grand, epic, stupid indulgence that only Hollywood filmmakers could ever fully enjoy. A legendary sinkhole of money (there's never been a completely reliable figure offered up, but it's still among the most expense films of all time, adjusted for inflation), visiting exotic locales that were filmed in the flashiest technology available, with a whole costume shop worth of fussy, glamorous dresses being paraded through massive sets, literal armies of human beings milling around as extras, with the script a hacked-together afterthought that became the victim of the filmmakers' need to work around the unexpected and unwanted by-products of the movie star culture that was primarily responsible for hauling the project off the ground to begin with. It is a perfect storm of Hollywood driven by its uncontrolled id, with all the suffocating grandiosity and astonishingly inept storytelling that could possibly imply. I give you - and please, feel free to keep it - Cleopatra, the infamous Elizabeth Taylor vehicle that very nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox.

The story of Cleopatra, the most famous queen in the history of the world, has been irresistible to filmmakers throughout history, for all the obvious reasons; indeed, it was Fox's second film of that title, following a long-lost 1917 film starring Theda Bara in the title role (an intervening film also titled just Cleopatra was made at Paramount in 1934, with Claudette Colbert; many other films primarily or incidentally about the Ptolemaic queen came out in several different countries along the way). But there was no epic like a '60s epic, and it would honestly seem inevitable that a major Cleopatra would come out some time between 1955 and 1965. That the Cleopatra we ended up with took the form it does is do to a great many matters: over the course of its tormented five-year production, the film had more problems and internal conflicts than even the costliest epic could endure including multiple stars, multiple directors, multiple screenplays, and a public that watched its journey to theaters more closely than just about any film had ever been scrutinised in those days long before the faintest inkling of the internet. That was, of course, thanks to the legendary torrid love affair between Taylor and co-star Richard Burton that started up during the shoot, and would last until Burton's death.

There are simply too many things that happened during the making of Cleopatra for any one of them to be "the big problem", but in terms of the finished product as a contained narrative drama, I think it's clear enough that everything boils down to a primary cause. That being that Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a greatly respected writer and director of highly literate character pieces about realistic adults, who after inheriting the massive (and already massively over-budget) production from Rouben Mamoulian concluded that the best way to structure the thing to give it some semblance of reason was to divide it in half. His intention was to release two three-hours films, Caesar and Cleopatra, with Rex Harrison playing Julius Caesar opposite Taylor, and Antony and Cleopatra with Burton as Marc Antony (that these titles had already been claimed by George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare, respectively, did not apparently bother Mankiewicz), but studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck reasoned, undoubtedly correctly, that by the time the film was released, nobody would care about anything but watching Liz and Dick canoodle. So Mankiewicz's six-hour two-parter was sliced down to one single bloated beast of four hours and eight minutes, separated by a deeply necessary intermission slightly earlier than the halfway point (in '63, the film was further cut to three hours and twelve minutes for some exhibitors; this version, which was apparently mostly impossible to follow, is effectively invisible today, with the original roadshow cut the only one released to DVD).

Two observations immediately present themselves in relation to this little fact: one of them is that as a standalone film, Caesar and Cleopatra would have been way the hell better than Antony and Cleopatra, but we'll get into that soon enough. The other is that the attempt to carve the movie down resulted in an impressively choppy piece of storytelling which lurches forward erratically in between lugubrious sequences of historical pageantry. It seems positively indecent to say of any movie that crosses the four-hour mark that it's not long enough, but the chronology is so battered (at one point, the narrator voiced by Ben Wright idly mentions that two years happened in between scenes, and it feels like an especially desperate stopgap measure to keep the film stitched together), and it's occasionally unclear exactly why things are happening and how, that I frankly can't see how a longer Cleopatra couldn't help but be a little bit more satisfying. Though I am sure that it would be no less boring, and being even a touch more boring is a fate Cleopatra most certainly cannot afford.

The film has a spectacular variety of liabilities (and, to be fair, strengths as well), but the most visible and crushing is that's an utter dud as a star vehicle, and that's pretty much always the way it has been sold, from 1963 on down to the present day. It's Taylor herself who comes off the worst, naturally enough, if only by virtue of how besotted the film obliges itself to be with her and her character. Judith Crist's magnificent, career-making pan of the film, in the New York Herald Tribune, famously compared Taylor's strident line deliveries to a fishwife, but given some of the ludicrous Historical-Esque sentences the polyglot screenplay requires her to recite, it's hardly fair to blame her or anybody else in the cast for tripping over them (though I still feel crabby towards Hume Cronyn, playing Cleopatra's political adviser, for how openly and dismissively he doesn't even try). But there's more to acting than speaking words, and that's where Taylor really fell apart: playing a woman who has been famous for over two millennia for her commanding presence and ability to make the most powerful men in the world bend over backwards to do her will requires an imperious presence on the part of anybody tackling the role. Clearly, Taylor has more of that native charisma than Colbert (a charmingly counter-intuitive choice for the role if ever there was one), to pick the most obvious example. But she's too glaringly contemporary, ill at ease in her many elaborate costumes (some of which are more dubious than others - some truly moronic hats, like shower caps with flowers sewn on, find their way onto her head) and goofy, cartoon-Egyptian make-up, and stranded by Mankiewicz and DP Leon Shamroy in their lopsided, spacious compositions in the Todd-AO 70mm process. She only ever feels like a very pretty but largely unexceptional woman dumped in over her head, in a grand theatrical spectacle that she never sufficiently modifies herself to accommodate.

The other big problem - and I imagine it must have been magnified in '63 - is that Taylor and Burton make for an absolutely lousy pair of screen lovers. Sometimes, backstage shenanigans translate ti the performance well, and we end up with tangible lust that feels almost dirty to watch it; think the unbridled desire passing between Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Sometimes... that doesn't happen. The very different acting styles that two actors brought to the table meshed poorly, more so when both were individually as bad as they are here; I don't know if it says anything about their home life, or just their screen presence, that their most credible, highly-praised onscreen teaming was playing the toxic marriage in freefall at the center of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? three years after Cleopatra. But between Taylor's insignificant exoticism and Burton's obvious fatigue and hungover eyes, there's nothing credible about their world-altering romance, and the longer second part of the movie, all 128 minutes of it, oozes by all the more slowly since it doesn't even succeed at the level of melodramatic love story in ancient world drag.

Which returns me to my contention that the first half of Cleopatra is better: one of the most important reasons is simply that Rex Harrison acts circles around the other two leads, and he's dead at the midway point (in a profoundly gaudy bit of staging, seen in an augury, with flames surrounding the action and Taylor's aghast face superimposed). He has considerably more exciting chemistry with Taylor; her love scenes with Burton are all grim paint-by-numbers passion, but there's a sparkling naughtiness she shows with Harrison, a sense that these two character really can't wait for the camera to cut away so they can start pawing at each other (favorite money: their dirty little teenagers' smiles when she asks him to keep his laurel crown on while they have sex). Besides, Harrison has the imposing authority of the man who was, for a brief period, the most powerful individual in the Western world; he sells a grand, theatrically imposing Caesar while Burton's Antony is just a puffy old man who barely seems able to impose his will on a group of his closest friends and allies. Which could be an interesting reading of the character, but it's not the one Mankiewicz is interested in.

Harrison is no better than anybody at swallowing the dialogue (only Roddy McDowall, as a haughty, cruel Octavian manages to make every word that comes out of his mouth seem plausible; he's easily the best performance in the movie, though he only appears in the second half, mostly in the very last hour), but he brings ripe, Shakespearean life to the proceedings, and manages to help sell the complicated politics that dominate the story. Take away his crafty ambition, and there's nothing to drive the second half till McDowell shows up in earnest, and that leaves a lot of stilted In Olden Tymes nonsense while the plot takes a nap.

Acting issues are hardly the only thing going wrong: though the film has a huge variety of costumes and complicated sets, it never looks like a richly-appointed historical epic. Everything is too clean and crisp, too obviously new; the Rome of Caesar was an old city, the Alexandria of Cleopatra hardly any younger, but both of them look like immaculately buffed movie sets, and never anything else. Without any other obvious culprit, one is inclined to blame Mankiewicz; he was by no means an intuitive choice for material of this scale, and there's not really any part of Cleopatra where he makes the material come alive like Cecil B. DeMille - hell, like Anthony Mann - could do falling asleep. Mankiewicz was a great director of close-ups and domestic interiors: Bette Davis having her "infants behave the way I do" epiphany in All About Eve, the titular characters trapped with their memories in A Letter to Three Wives. Bombast doesn't suit him, and bombast is the one and only card Cleopatra has to play: erotic bombast in the handful of scenes where Taylor wears hardly anything; emotional bombast in the wall-to-wall lovemaking scenes; production bombast in the high pageantry of the parades (the film stops dead for fifteen minutes of Orientalist dancing around the 90-minute mark) and what little we see of the battles; auditory bombast in Alex North's raging score tinged with bullshit "Egyptian" tones, the one part of the whole movie that I'm completely in love with, purely for its ripe shamelessness and unapologetic emotional manipulation.

It's a movie crying for the gaudy, excessive touch of somebody who will run as far away from anything resembling realism as possible, and Mankiewicz does not, and probably cannot do that. His Cleopatra is sedate and small, and a four-hour epic of heaving emotions, heaving history, heaving bosoms, and heaving audiences trying to keep up the purple nonsense of the dialogue can be many things before it can be sedate and small. It might be the Hollywood film at its most unbridled and opulent, but it is also the Hollywood film at its most slack and ill-managed, and it is far too much drudgery to be camp, to be escapist, to be any fun in any way at all.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1963
-Message movie guru Stanley Kramer switches gears to put every living comic actor into the epic farce It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
-John Ford and John Wayne collaborate for the last time, on the South Pacific action-comedy Donovan's Reef
-Samuel Fuller makes the muckraking journalism psycho-thriller Shock Corridor

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1963
-Federico Fellini turns navel gazing into post-modern art with 8½
-In Israel, future mega-producer Menahem Golan directs his first movie, El Dorado
-It's not "cinema" as such, but no global history could be complete without noting the premier of Tezuka Osamu's Japanese cartoon series Astro Boy, which effectively invented the form of anime

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1960: In which contemporary history gets the epic treatment

The signal characteristic of Otto Preminger's Exodus from 1960, a story of the founding of the modern state of Israel, has nothing to do with the film's sensitive political content; nothing to do with the iconic, stirring Romantic main theme of Eric Gold's deservedly Oscar-winning score; nothing to with the fact that this is the only movie to pair Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint, two of the most beautiful people in midcentury American cinema. The signal characteristic of Exodus is its length - at 208 minutes, it is not the longest movie ever made, or even close to it, but those 208 minutes take their goddamn sweet time in expressing themselves. After Gold's music, probably the best-known thing about the movie is a story too perfect too be true and too good not to repeat, that comedian Mort Sahl stood up a few hours into the film's premiere to loudly proclaim "Otto, let my people go!", and while perhaps impolite, it's hard not to sympathise with the sentiment. I find myself irresistibly drawn to compare the film to Lawrence of Arabia, made two years later, in broadly the same part of the world and running to a slightly longer length; while that film is beautiful, and full of driving incident, it has that bit towards the end where it starts to grind and get bogged down in talking and politics and even the main character seems impatient for the thing to end. Exodus is like that draggy 20 minutes of Lawrence of Arabia stretched over the entirety of three and a half hours, instead of just coming at the wrong time near the end of three and a half hours.

In this regard, Exodus is a fine representative of what had just about started to become a trend at the beginning of the '60s and would turn into a full-fledged addiction by the decade's end: exhausting, pointless bloat. For all that it's fun to bitch and moan about how, in the 2010s, we can't have a movie about superheroes or giant robots that can find its way to a genre-appropriate running time, contemporary cinema doesn't have anything on the heaving immensity of a real good Indulgent Monstrosity from the 1960s. Some of these movies were good, or even great: Lawrence of Arabia, for one. Many more of them are just enervating, endurance tests which make the cardinal sin of assuming that a broad sense of capital-H History and enough widescreen panoramas justifies plodding through a narrative with far too much attention to detail in every last tiny way: Doctor Zhivago jumps to mind, David Lean's very next film post-Lawrence.

Exodus is damn near the patron saint of this latter group. Carved out of Leon Uris's 1958 Zeitgeist-dominating novel by screenwriter Dalton Trumbo - allegedly leaving a great deal of plot and depth of backstory behind, which makes one gawk to think how jam-packed the book must have been - it follows a handful of key people during a specific chain of events in 1947 and '48, all of which contribute to the partition of Palestine and the formation of a new country to serve as save haven for the world's Jewish population, reeling from the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust. And it follows this people with extremely close attention, though not necessarily historical precision (the event it portrays as being the key event in the events of those years plays out in literally the exact opposite of how it did historically). And this focus is more invested in minutiae than dramatic momentum: even if you read a scene-by-scene description of the film's plot, I don't think you could rightly fathom how it could cross the two-hour mark, let alone three.

But I'll stop bitching about that before this review becomes as long as Exodus itself. The film opens in Cyprus, in 1947, with American widow Kitty Fremont (Saint), a nurse whose photojournalist husband died recently covering a story about the Jewish agitation to be permitted entry into the British-controlled Palestine. She is given a tour by General Sutherland (Ralph Richardson), commander of the British forces on Cyprus and a sympathetic figure for the Jews; he convinces her to volunteer as nurse for the internment camp where displaced Jewish refugees are kept while the British government flails around trying to figure out what to do with them. This puts her in a perfect position to see firsthand the act of rebellion by which Ari Ben Canaan (Newman), formerly of the British Army and now of the revolutionary group Hagannah captures a ship which is renamed the SS Exodus, and peopled with over 600 refugees. Ari plans to take these people to Palestine, and stages a hunger strike and also threatens to blow up the ship if the British try to interfere; eventually, the Brits cave in and allow the Exodus to go on its way. In Palestine, the plot blossoms into a kaleidoscopic view of the radical attempt to form an independent Jewish state: Ari's father Barak (Lee J. Cobb) is the leader of a diplomatic group working for that goal, while his brother, Ari's uncle Akiva (David Opatoshu) is a high-ranking member of Irgun, a group preferring more violent means. This makes it greatly appealing to Dov Landau (Sal Mineo), a refugee from the Exodus and survivor of Auschwitz, who has meanwhile struck up a close relationship with Karen (Jill Haworth), a Danish-Jewish refugee who has been unofficially adopted by Kitty, hoping to take the girl back to America and a better life. And Kitty, in the meantime, has begun to fall in love with Ari.

Confusing and convoluted, but not enough for three and a half hours which are not, anyway, mostly taken up with character material, but with scene after scene after scene of talking. Talking about the hunger strike, talking about the negotiating with the British government, talking about dealing with the UN, talking about performing acts of terrorism, talking about the encroaching hostility of the Arab populations surrounding and inhabiting Palestine. There is, probably, no other way to dramatise the events of this scenario than to show people talking, but there's not a whole lot that's less interesting in cinema, unless the filmmakers are keen, aggressive stylists, and this is not something that is typically true of Preminger. He was a talented director, and a phenomenal journeyman when making something like Laura; as he began to grow in stature as a producer-director, he demonstrated fine instincts for picking controversial projects that would allow him to grip Modern Society by the balls and twist and tug and force it under his unforgiving microscope. Sometimes this worked out brilliantly, and we get Anatomy of a Murder or Advise & Consent (the films he made on either side of Exodus). Sometimes, this resulted in the idiotic frippery of The Moon Is Blue. While Exodus is undoubtedly better than that film, it's on the same side of the Preminger Scale, where the desire to do important, edgy, groundbreaking things in his storytelling (which included hiring Trumbo, whose script for Spartacus in '60 was the first time a blacklisted artist had received onscreen credit) outweighs such trivial things as entertainment or human interest.

Exodus is appallingly boring. That's a subjective word, but I can't think of a better one. And the main reason why is its central pair of Newman and Saint, neither of whom works in the film's interests whatsoever, and whose portrayal of Ari and Kitty, protagonists and the source of all the alleged emotional involvement in the human-sized drama playing out amidst all the Important History, is completely without warmth or interest. Newman, the WASPiest half-Jew on the books in all the history of Hollywood filmmaking, played every moment of his performance as a cold, angry rageaholic, admitting nothing but glowering contempt for anyone and everything, even the people who agree with his goals and his methods, and it's both tedious and unenlightening to have him as our primary guide to the human story of Israel. But at least his simmering anger is an emotion - Saint's performance is so devoid of affect or inflection that it would be hilarious, if it were in the context of a movie that wasn't so goddamn long that every little thing that makes it feel more stilted adds hours to the subjective experience of watching it. If it's not her mechanical depiction of physical attraction to Newman, its her false smiles of warmth towards Karen, or worse things still - the film opens with a scene in which, among other things, she discusses her past miscarriage without altering her tone of voice or facial expression even slightly. It's all so contrary to anything that the movie or the character needs at any moment that I'd almost guesss that Saint was a rabid anti-Zionist hoping to single-handedly ruin the film by torpedoing its emotional throughline with her wooden non-acting.

There are, thankfully, some stronger performances around the edges, with Richardson standing out heads and shoulders above everybody, though Mineo's gaunt expressions of pain and resentment, which are likely what earned him his Oscar nomination for the role, are moving and vulnerable like nothing else in the movie is. But it's always pretty clear that Preminger wasn't chiefly interested in telling the story of Ari and Kitty and Barak and Dov and Karen and whoever the hell else, he was making an advertisement for Israel's moral right to exist. I'm not getting into the argument over whether or not that was a worthy goal in and of itself; for one thing, I have absolutely no idea what kind of opinion most of the world had about the state of Israel in the late '50s, a full decade before the Six-Day War changed everything about Israel's place in global politics. My only claim is that it makes for rough cinema, especially in the bluntly detached, observational style that Preminger always favored. A spoonful of sugar helps the propaganda go down, if you will, but Exodus lacks any visual flair or clever structure to sweeten its reeling off of scene upon scene of social studies lessons and recapping what was then recent enough history that the film allows itself to skimp on some details that would be awfully nice to have available nearly 70 years after the events the film depicts.

It's not exactly ill-made, though sometimes it's awfully sloppy - the lighting is sloppy, the sound is often tinny, and the refugees on hunger strike look awfully hale and well-kept. But even if Preminger and his collaborators - cinematographer Sam Leavitt, editor Louis R. Loeffler - weren't in a particularly inventive mood when it came to making and combining their images, this was still a movie made with obvious talent and resources, with handsome location photography of Israel giving the film a sense of place that suits it well. When it allows itself to loosen up, as happens somewhat regularly in the last 90 minutes, after the intermission, there's even some genuinely great filmmaking. The chaos in the aftermath of Irgun's bombing of the King David Hotel (which is pushed back by a year to fit into the dramatic chronology) is captured with tense momentum, and later on, there's a prison break sequence that's a triumph across the board: well-choreographed, scored with bellicose impact, sharply cut.

More moments like that, and the living history of Exodus could have been genuinely involving, its retelling of Israel's dramatic, contentious founding turned into something rich and moving and exciting. But it's such a lecture in its current form, and a particularly dry and inhumane one to boot. I understand having motivations that have nothing to do with entertainment, and the urgency of Exodus is apparent throughout - oh my, is it ever an urgent, urging movie - but there has to be something compelling to watch or all that impassioned political argument adds up to nothing but a bunch of noise, playing out for what feels like an eternity and never adding up to anything.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1960

-Director-star John Wayne makes the tiresome, bullying epic The Alamo, which he then humiliates the Academy into nominating for a Best Picture Oscar
-MGM's The Last Voyage births the modern disaster picture
-Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho changes everything

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1960
-Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura also changes everything
-Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless changes everything that hadn't been changed yet
-Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid changes nothing, but it is one of the essential masterworks of South Korean cinema nonetheless

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TARR BÉLA DANCES WITH THE DEVIL

Just the name can send a shiver down the spine of the ill-prepared cinephile. Sátántangó. For Tarr Béla's 7+ hour signature work is one of the endurance tests to tend all endurance tests in the art form of film. It is not the longest movie; even without leaving the realm of (relatively) conventional narrative cinema, we find Out 1 and Berlin Alexanderplatz are significantly longer, right off the top of my head. But neither of them is typically held to a one-day viewing prospect. And neither of them is held to be as massively unpleasant, for after all, neither of them has "Satan" right there in the title.

In honesty, though, Sátántangó's claims to misery are blown substantially out of proportion to it's nihilistic content. Stories of 7-minute opening shots of nothing but cows wandering around in the mud, and little girls poisoning cats that die in disconcertingly realistic long takes are true, by all means, but they tend to obscure the equally true reality that the film is astonishingly, compulsively watchable, attention-grabbing from the first moments and unwilling to relinquish its grip for any part of its hypertrophic running time. Speaking personally, I didn't watch the film in a single sitting - the three discs of the Facets DVD set (which remains the best chance most Americans outside of New York will ever have to see the film) were interspersed with a shower and a meal - but I have virtually no doubt that it would play that way, with enthralling abandon. For all its mass and famously glacial cutting pace - the tally I got was 152 distinct shots over almost precisely seven hours - the film moves, surprisingly quickly.

Let us turn now to that opening shot to see what I mean: we're in a rural town, mud as far as the eye can see, staring down an old building. After some while, cows start to pour out of that building, until eventually a whole herd stands in the street; eventually they start to walk off to the left, and the camera rotates exactly 90° counterclockwise, at which point it starts to track left while the cattle meander through the street; frequently, buildings between us and them obscure the cows from our view, and at one point, a cow that came up right along side us moos irritably as it hustles down an alley on the Z-axis, to rejoin its fellows. I could spend the rest of my life trying to describe that shot in a way that communicates how legitimately exciting it is: how, after a couple of moments following the cows, it becomes impossibly disorienting when we lose sight of them for a good minute behind a structure; how gorgeously Tarr and cinematographyer Medvigy Gábor render the streets, buildings and animals in every stop along the grey scale besides exactly black and exactly white, teasing out so much texture and variability in each and every object that they practically go (setting aside the obvious point that watching a 7-hour movie is a wholly different experience in a theater than in a house: it's been months since I last so a movie that I so desperately wanted to see on a clean, crisp film print). It is beautiful and kinetic, and it's also a perfect introduction to the film in that it basically serves as a quick instruction in how to watch the film: Sátántangó is a movie rich with lateral tracking movements, with right-angle turns, and with gloriously touchable physical tactility those things, and everything that will visually dominate the next 7+ hours of the viewer's life is laid out in simple, easily-digestible terms in that very open shot.

It's also a sneak preview of the themes and narrative of those hours as well. Before they start their tour of the town, the cattle stand in the open street before the building, patiently enduring the mud and looking at nothing in particular. A collection of dumb animals caught in a miserable place and totally unconcerned with the actions that might free them up to go someplace more pleasant: that describes the unknown population of this town to a T, and the plot (insofar as it's the draw, which is certainly a debatable matter) is all about how these bored people are led off to slaughter by a fellow who doesn't even present a particularly appealing or compelling outlook for life: he's' merely the only person offering up any idea for the cows to lumber after.

That person, who fills the role of Satan in this dance, is Irimiás (Vig Mihály, who also provides the film with its electronica-carnival score), who exists in the beginning as an unseen figure viewed by the townspeople with dread that goes far beyond the natural fear of a notorious conman thought to be dead for this past year. "The news is, they're coming" is the title of the first of the film's 12 chapters (six forward, six back, the structure of a tango and the structure of the 1985 source novel written by László , Tarr's collaborator on his previous film, Damnation), which finds the residents of an unnamed communitarian farm that has just about puked out its last drop of life in the waning days of Communist Hungary interrupting the sorry little melodramas of their life with real mortal fear of the impending return of Irimiás and his colleague Petrina (Horváth Putyi). And yet not interrupting their lives so much that don't slink right back into the same patterns of petty double-dealing, lazy adulterous sex, and a detached attempt at spying on one another.

For people who are more or less explicitly being painted as anonymous archetypes, the population of Sátántangó ends up making quite an impression, if only because we spend so damn much time with them that they really don't have an opportunity not to. Tarr, Krasznahorkai and Tarr's reliable co-auteur editor, Hranitzky Ágnes don't depict them as having terribly characteristic personalities and behaviors as such, but by dwelling on the rhythms of their behavior at such length and in such detail, the filmmakers mange to tell us in evocative terms precisely who they are. The resentful loner Futaki (Székely Miklós) waits just so before barging in on the unexpected husband of the woman he's been sleeping with; the drunken doctor (Berling Peter) goes through precisely these actions in precisely this order, and it's easy to tell that he does much the same every day.

By the end of the film, the nine individuals making up most of what's left of the population of the town have made themselves very clear to us: they are pitiable and a bit reprehensible, but Tarr does not look to make any kind of emotional or moral judgment: he merely depicts. What he specifically depicts is the crushing mediocrity of a life stripped of imagination or affect; no living hell like the one scene in Damnation, this is much more of a purgatory of endless muddy, rain, and play-acted emotions. It is the perfect place for Irimiás to sell his obvious and not very compelling lies of another, better but only marginally different, way of living if everybody would just give up their autonomy and self-interest; a metaphor for the dogged refusal of Communism on its death bed to just give up and die that openly indicts the willingness of the people suffering most under that system to keep on suffering out of some mixed combination of comfort and self-laceration. It is both a study of the capacity of humans to do harm to other humans, but also the capacity of humans to bring harm unto themselves; most horrifyingly but also intelligently in the notorious centerpiece that finds the child Estike (Bók Erika) torturing and murdering that cat and then killing herself, precipitating the rest of the action and giving Irimiás the knife to twist into the town's collective psyche, and all because she could find no other way to take control in a world where everyone either ignored or abused her, than by first attacking the one thing weaker than herself and then by taking ownership of her own death.

Grim, weighty, extraordinary stuff, presented by Tarr with remarkable vision and sophistication. It is not merely that Sátántangó creates a complex moral universe, but how - as befits a movie of such gargantuan running time that it would have to do something to fill the space, the movie engages in some remarkable layering of scenes viewed in different chapters from different perspectives, creating a gnarled puzzle box of a movie that doesn't even announce itself as a puzzle until it has shown us the solution. In the fifth chapter, "Come unstitched" we see the interior of a bar in which the adults of the town are drunkenly cavorting in a frenzied dance, from Estike's perspective; in the sixth, "The spider's work II (the devil's nipple, satantango)" we look from inside that noisy, busy room to see the little girl blankly looking in, behind a wall of glass; and as we already know that she's going to die early the next morning, it makes her isolation that much more piercing than the image itself communicates. The film is full of mutually-expressive conversations between shots and scenes, culminating in a climax that queasily but not fatalistically suggests that the while cycle of events is going to repeat itself, albeit with some of the principals dead, exiled, or desperately attempting to entomb themselves in their tiny little worlds, blocking all the light out by boarding up windows (the final shot of the whole movie, a brilliant parody and replacement for the traditional fade to black).

It is dense, rich, and beautiful, a visually challenging movie that uses its long takes not so much to create a reality or to draw us into the world (the blocking is much too stiff and presentational for any of this to seem remotely naturalistic), but so that every one of the cuts feels like a profound moment - a violation or a moment of emotional release, depending on the context, and sometimes both. The slow progression of the film through a relatively full narrative - there are sequences in which the conflict changes multiple times in the span of just one shot - creates a tension that makes the film spectacularly electric and even exciting to watch, a peculiar response to a film that, moment by moment, is so languorous and boring. Not as a whole, though. As a whole, this is anything but boring: it is a whirlwind tour of a whole rainbow of unhappy human emotions, presented with fluidity in the writing, the acting, and the cinematography, and it's surprisingly gripping for something so full of miserable people feeling misery. No film of this length, so fixed on human despair with only shallow, trivial attempts to stave off that despair through drunkenness and cheap sex should trigger a response at the end, "it's not over already, is it?", but that's how you can tell a masterpiece: it turns pain into art and static lives into vibrant, kinetic images, without ever cheapening its subjects in the process. It's a great film, as great as they come, and that's all there is to it.

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TELL ME WHAT U.C.

Fairly early in Frederick Wiseman's documentary At Berkeley - "fairly" early in that the usual rules about duration in the context of a 4 hour and 4 minute movie need to be seriously re-evaluated - a UC-Berkeley undergraduate offers up the suggestion that in the past, college students were more motivated by having opportunities to acquire knowledge, and in the present, they are more motivated by the ability to access high-paying jobs that are functionally closed to anyone without a bachelor's degree. On the particulars of this question, Wiseman is silent (in fact, editorial silence is the very heart and soul of what he's up to here), but there's no disguising the way that At Berkeley has been built according to the principles of knowledge acquisition. It is, structurally, nothing but one scene after another of Wiseman's camera stopping in a room where people are talking or going about their work, separated by brief interstitials of the school's campus, frequently with students and faculty wandering by, sometimes not. The longer one lives with the movie, and one does get an awfully long time to live with it before it's over, the more that motifs begin to repeat and messages start to derive from those motifs; but at first blush, the experience of dropping on on these professors, administrators, and students (not a single one of whom is ever identified by name), it to simply sponge it all up, and listen with fascinated attention to what's being discussed, whether it's how humans perceive the flow of time, the differences between government and private research funding, what Thoreau meant in Walden, or how to retain faculty during a budget crunch. The film may be uncommonly long, but it dances by playfully, skipping between different spaces and intellectual modes so quickly that it feels almost like a series of short films, all of them wonderful little exercises in eavesdropping.

Thus it is that we immediately start to get an idea of how university works, on two levels: one is what the university does, exposing young people to ideas and resources that can, with luck, deepen their ability to think and function; the other is how the university does this, as the film spends ample time in the meetings of various bureaucratic subdivisions of the school, hashing out problems and solutions. Insofar as there's a hook, it's that the time Wiseman and his crew were at Berkeley overlapped with a fairly disruptive protest held on 7 October, 2010. Before it happens, we listen in on conversations with university leaders trying to pre-plan how to deal with the event; about twenty minutes of the film are spent with the protesters in the library, or with the members of the chancellor's office trying to draft a response. Since this is the only "plot" in the movie, it's tempting to read into this all of the arguments that Wiseman is or isn't making: the way that activists in the 21st Century are a bit more incompetent and unfocused than the activists of the 1960s, Berkeley's political heyday (and it takes no subjective editing to make the "whatta you got?" feeling of the protest seem a little aimless, however passionate); the evolution of individuals from vital, youthful participants in life to inflexible adults who can only uphold the status quo. But the protest is something that happens in the direction of At Berkeley, rather than something that it takes as a focus, or even more of a point of interest than the part of the prospective student tour that goes by Berkeley's very own T-rex skeleton.

My sense, having not seen any of Wiseman's work prior to this (I know!), is that this is all kind of par for the course for that director: put your uninflected, observational cameras in a place that they can watch the function of an organisation. So maybe At Berkeley hardly even makes a blip in the context of all his other films. Taken in a vacuum, as a thing unto itself, it's astounding, mind-expanding stuff, looking at the way a university operates in every detail, from the classes it teaches and the research done in its labs to the process by which faculty members air their grievances to the physical laborers who build and maintain the whole place (there is a single shot of a riding mower, deep into the movie, that serves as a terrific punch line in context). At four hours, it provides a tremendously deep and panoramic perspective of all these things, somehow managing to never quite repeat itself over all that time in any given pair of scenes. Some of it is intellectually captivating, some of it is esoteric as hell, some of it is tediously bureaucratic, but all of it is completely fascinating.

The tissue that connects all of this is not forced by Wiseman onto the material, but comes up out of it naturally: in places from biomedical engineer labs to social issues classes to lectures by visiting experts, people continue to mention, almost by accident, the daunting problems of having, getting, and keeping money in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. At Berkeley is pointedly not a movie "about" the financial crisis, but any wide-ranging consideration of how life is lived in 2010 by necessity needs to touch on that, and the way that the day-to-day life of a hermetic institution like a major university keeps bleeding into the economic climate of the world as a whole is what turns this from a heady intellectual experience to a recognisable, living one. At Berkeley, simply in depicting this place it depicts, is a wonderfully interesting movie; its unexpected resonence with everyday life outside of Berkeley is what makes it as great a documentary as this decade has thus far produced.

9/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (CLAUDE LANZMANN, AUSTRIA-FRANCE)

Screens at CIFF: 10/13
World premiere: 19 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival

There is a great deal to be said about The Last of the Unjust, and since it is three hours and 38 minutes long, this is a good thing - if one invested that kind of time in watching a movie and walked off with the profound sense that ...eh, that would be just awful. There is too much to be said, in fact, in the space of one review propped up by a single viewing and woefully insufficient notes, so I'd like to apologise in advance to the movie for not treating it with the awesome depth it deserves. We have to start somewhere, anyhow, and I think a nice place to ease into it is to regard the film as history about history, taking place in three distinct time frames and meaning different things about each of them based on how the other two reflect upon it.

The movie is Claude Lanzmann's latest (and potentially last, given both its monumental feel and the director's not-inconsiderable age) film taken from the mountain of footage he compiled in the 1970s when, after having cut his teeth on the documentary Pourquoi Israel, he decided to continue his study of modern Jewish identity by looking straight into the eyes of the single most dominant even of 20th Century Judaism, the Holocaust. The most famous product of his great labor is the more than 9-hour Shoah, itself released in 1985, ten years after Lanzmann's first interviews were conducted, but it was not the only film to come from that footage; starting with 1999's A Visitor from the Living, the director has since made three other films containing smaller, more self-contained narratives than the "let's try to talk to everyone about everything" style of his biggest work; these are breathtakingly short by Lanzmann's standards, with the longest, 2001's Sobibór, blasting by at 95 minutes.

The Last of the Unjust is entirely concerned with one of the very first interviews Lanzmann conducted in 1975, with Benjamin Murmelstein. Murmelstein, as we are told in an immensely lengthy opening crawl, was the only Jewish Elder to survive the war, and the Jewish Elders, we are also told, were basically the go-betweens for the Nazis and the various Jewish ghettoes that the Nazis blocked off throughout Europe. He was a tremendously controversial figure, regarded by many as the worst kind of collaborator, and the interviews find Lanzmann both charmed by the older man's immense vitality, and eager to find some point of vulnerability that would win him the journalistic coup of making Murmelstein admit his culpability.

When I speak of The Last of the Unjust as history about history, I mean something like this: the film, created in 2013 by an 87-year-old Lanzmann, consists of footage shot by the 49-year-old Lanzmann in 1975, discussing matters that happened in between 1933 and 1945, and the 87-year-old Lanzmann (who regularly appears onscreen in newly-shot sequences in the 2010s incarnation of places described in Murmelstein's interviews to read passages of "textbook" history) is almost as interested in in examining the process by which the entire Shoah project of the last 28 years has worked as he is in presenting Murmelstein's testimony to the world. The director himself has become something of a controversial figure - nothing to the level of his subject in this film, certainly - with a vocal minority having significant problems with the way Shoah packaged its contents (most famously, Pauline Kael called it "logy"), and The Last of the Unjust can be thought of as being, in one of its guises, as one controversial elderly Jew presenting his impressions of another controversial elderly Jew; it is also a film about Lanzmann's approach to making historical documentaries, in which he draws our attention to himself far more than he's ever done, clarifying that this is a film filtered through one man's historical sensibility, which will necessarily be personal and biased no matter how much effort he brings to bear in making sure that it's as objective and intellectual as possible (by reading directly from his notes on camera, for example).

This is the kind of argument that Lanzmann's career-capping multi-hour epic ought to present, perhaps, but it's also a version of the argument of the interviews themselves, which revolve around the question of how we choose to remember events - Murmelstein does not shy away from telling events in the way that reflects honorably upon himself, even while openly admitting that he was enamored of the power conferred by being an Elder, and even before then, one of the few Jews who had any kind of active, working relationship with the infamous Adolf Eichmann. Yet he also explains bluntly and persuasively why he thinks that his actions during the Holocaust were uniformly in the best interest of his fellow Jews, and that it so happened that serving as a Nazi toady in certain ways (he doesn't hesitate an instant in agreeing that his efforts to keep Eichmann's "model ghetto" of Theresienstadt as shiny and glamorous as possible played into Nazi propaganda) also benefited the community he was trying to keep alive.

It's a damn tough movie, investigating how one man made some very difficult choices and how much of an emotional callous he's had to build up to feel the smallest possible amount of self-doubt over those choices. This would be a remarkable study of a fascinating man, full of apparent contradictions and remarkable candor, even if it weren't set against the backdrop of the most hellish moral crime in the modern history of the species; that Murmelstein's history overlaps to such a degree with that event is what pushes this from "great" to "absolutely top-shelf, instant-masterpiece"; and Lanzmann's construction of the piece ends up creating a weird history lesson of sorts, taking us chronologically from the early conquests of the Third Reich into their creation of Theresienstadt, with the newly-shot footage serving as a frame and conduit for the vintage interviews to fully blossom without the messiness of too much explaining and backtracking. It's astoundingly interesting, justifying each and every second of the running time; even the languid pauses in the new material seem meaningful and deliberate, allowing us to soak in the depth of what we've been told without having to immediately process it.

Along the way, there are moments where Lanzmann stops to pay respect to an atrocity or two, but this isn't, like Shoah, a compendium of tragedies and death. It is a study in intimate detail and epic scope of human behavior: how one man acted in extreme situations, for good and for worse, and while the film ends with the 49-year-old interviewer having reach a point of camaraderie with his subject, Murmelstein is no more exonerated than he is condemned. He is, instead, presented before us, to be judged as we see fit, to be recognised as a fellow human, and to be understood as a figure who lived a life that absolutely none of us will ever come close to experiencing. And for all these reasons, it is as essential as any piece of cinema I have seen in many years.

10/10

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