1970s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 2)

[colinr0380]

I would be fine with that zedz, not only would it give me longer to view films and track down films from comments made in the discussion threads for each decade, we also would not have to worry about the greatest film of the decade turning up in 2009 and then having to wait through another cycle to include it! (I would like to live in hope and not completely write off 2009 as it could be another 1939, or 1959! )

[zedz]

OK: a done deal. I'll formally announce this in the Lists Project thread.

[GringoTex]

My first recommendation, though, has to be The Hired Hand, as far as I'm concerned the greatest American film of the decade. It's one of the most exquisitely beautiful films ever shot, but its extreme aestheticisation (also expressed through constant, ambitious optical-printing montages) is underpinned by a startling toughness, not just in the sporadic violence, but in its unprecedented (and scarcely followed-up) frankness about female sexuality.

Finally caught this one on your recommendation. It is beautifully shot and has an aching sparseness as if running on the fumes of the Western genre. My two reservations are Fonda's bad acting (his non-performance was distracting- especially in the company of Warren Oates); and there seems to be a reel missing in the abrupt conversion of Verna Bloom's character from sexual feminist to pining wife. Or maybe I missed something?

[Don Lope de Aguirre]

Great stuff guys but off head here are three of big omissions:

The Passenger (Antonioni)

The Travelling Players (Angelopoulos)

The Devil Probably (Bresson)

[zedz]

Finally caught this one on your recommendation. It is beautifully shot and has an aching sparseness as if running on the fumes of the Western genre. My two reservations are Fonda's bad acting (his non-performance was distracting- especially in the company of Warren Oates); and there seems to be a reel missing in the abrupt conversion of Verna Bloom's character from sexual feminist to pining wife. Or maybe I missed something?

I can see the Fonda reservation, but I think the extreme buttoned-down quality of his performance is its strength, particularly as a set-up for his last moment with Oates, where the emotion finally breaks through.

With Verna, though, I assume that she had been through all the pining wife stuff already, and her independence was extremely hard-won. This is why she's so resistant to Fonda when he returns, and resentful that they're falling back into their relationship. If she truly believes he's back for good (and if he does, why not her?), then it's plausible that she would 'revert' to her original 'good wife' persona. Which in turn makes her feel even more betrayed and hurt when he leaves again, because he's failed to live up to her hopes and she's allowed herself to become vulnerable.

At the same time, she can't feel too aggrieved if she understands the reasons for his departure, so the keynote of her character - frustration - remains the same.

[GringoTex]

Cockfighter (Hellman) - In my opinion a much better film than Two Lane Blacktop (which is no denigration of that film), with possibly Warren Oates' greatest performance.

Thanks for this recommendation. Just watched it tonight. Cockfighter is one of the great American movies. Hellman is the John Ford of subculture and Warren Oates is John Wayne with a bad case of Sartres.

[Cold Bishop]

Cockfighter is one of the great American movies. Hellman is the John Ford of subculture and Warren Oates is John Wayne with a bad case of Sartres.

You know, I'm not sold on Cockfighter... I wanted to love it: Hellman, Oates, hell, even a little Dean Stanton, but the whole thing just left me cold.

[zedz]

Cockfighter is one of the great American movies. Hellman is the John Ford of subculture and Warren Oates is John Wayne with a bad case of Sartres.

You know, I'm not sold on Cockfighter... I wanted to love it: Hellman, Oates, hell, even a little Dean Stanton, but the whole thing just left me cold.

You're welcome, Tex. I find it hard to articulate just what's so wonderful about the film (apart from Warren F*ckin Oates!), but it's partly to do with how rambling and ambling it seems for much of its length - and agnostic about the morality of its subject matter - and then it throws everything into pin-sharp focus at the last minute. It's a film that has way more going on inside than its surface immediately reveals, but then the same can be said for several Hellman works.

[colinr0380]

Don't Look Now

Just some quick notes on probably my favourite Nicolas Roeg film, though from this period it is like choosing which child you love the best! I love the way that the story deals with psychic powers and how the theme combines perfectly with Roeg's fragmentary editing style - the opening and final scenes are some of the most powerful in 70s cinema, not to mention the justly celebrated love scene intercut with dressing for dinner (I would like to think that the similarly beautifully edited scene from Out Of Sight is sort of Don't Look Now but in reverse, with the dinner conversation intercut with the later love making!)

I like the way that the seeming psychic experts completely misread the situation and focus on Laura while ignoring John, suggesting that they are amateurs who have never really encountered a real situation such as this before as well as showing the way women feel much more comfortable talking about such subjects together and that Laura is much more receptive to being comforted by the thought that her daughter is still with her in spirit. Julie Christie's performance is magnificent, showing someone utterly crushed and yet after being given an unprovable assurance of her daughter's presence as a spirit is able to find the inner strength to carry on and return to the real world to be with her son, while her husband stays trapped in an oppressive Venice purgatory.

Yet the film seems to keep her more at a distance as the real focus in placed on John. This allows us to regard her more dispassionately in a way - it shows how spiritualists can prey on the vulnerable (either by making things up or by making seemingly authoritative statements explaining things they can barely understand themselves) but at the same time how belief in something greater can provide the strength to carry on after a terrible tragedy. John does not have that (making it ironic that he is restoring churches!) and while Laura at first seems to be by far the weaker character that is another misreading as John is driven by unexpressed grief into searching out his death.

It is such a devastating film that builds on the already impressive short story through the performances and editing to become a true masterpiece, if one of the most painful and devastating to watch ones.

[zedz]

I've been a bit distracted from 70s stuff of late, but this magnificent film was another essential rewatch:

The Ceremony

If I had to select a single film to convince a neophyte of Oshima's talent, it would probably be this one (maybe with Boy second), simply because so many of this film's virtues are classical ones. Selecting a film to convince them of his originality and gutsy brilliance would be a different matter entirely.

In many respects, this is a very novelistic film. It has a fearless density to its narrative, with extremely complex familial relationships you need to parse in order to understand the full significance of what's going on (this time around I kept notes, and the act of doing so very quickly drew me deep into the film). For example, the key secondary figure of Setsuko is: the illegitimate daughter of the patriarch's sister; the former lover of the protagonist Masuo's father (Masuo is the patriarch's grandson); Masuo's object of desire; the occasional lover of Terumichi (the son of Masuo's father's fiancee – not his wife – and scion of the family); the mother of Ritsuko (cousin and potential wife of either Masuo or Terumichi). And then, behind these explicit relationships lies another layer of actual relationships that knits together three generations of incest or proto-incest, so that every relationship noted above threatens to turn into something darker.

The film's themes, metaphors and motifs are also developed in a thorough, formalised, rather literary fashion. The family is an obvious metaphor for Japan itself, and Oshima builds multiple references to recent Japanese history (the war, Manchuria, the ‘humanisation' of the Emperor, 1950s student protest, 1960s neo-imperial radicalism) into the family saga. At times, the metaphors come right to the surface, as when Terumichi attacks his family with spray, yelling, “All of Japan will be disinfected!â€

[Michael Kerpan]

My problem with Oshima --

I don't care what happens to any of the characters in either Ceremony or Boy -- and don't believe he cares all that much either. He does exhibit a certain kind of brilliance -- but he is about the "coldest" major director I've ever run across.

[sidehacker]

Maybe a viewing of The Sun's Burial or Cruel Story of Youth could change your mind around on that? Those are probably his most emotionally accessible films but I would tell you to approach with caution since they are both filmed with a much more spontaneous spirit. There's a lot of silly action sequences and unnecessary plot details but I think The Sun's Burial is one of the greatest love stories ever told and quite a bit funny as well.

[zedz]

My problem with Oshima --

I don't care what happens to any of the characters in either Ceremony or Boy -- and don't believe he cares all that much either. He does exhibit a certain kind of brilliance -- but he is about the "coldest" major director I've ever run across.

You're probably right, but a lot of my favourite directors are similarly chilly (Pasolini springs to mind, and Oshima's a roaring log cabin fire next to Jansco), and sometimes I crave work that operates on those levels. Although he generally has a different kettle of fish to fry, there are human relationships in Oshima's films that I find compelling and crucial, such as the connection between the two women in Violence at Noon and Yasuko's attempt to break into Motoki's destructive feedback loop in The Man Who Left His Will on Film. Now that you mention it, I find the insularity of Boy in Boy - the negative imprint of his human relationships - very moving. But in each instance, these elements of the films are just one of many vying for attention, and the political, social or stylistic dimensions are often more to the fore.

I'm not sure about the recommendation of those early films. They're a lot more traditionally structured, but the protagonist of Cruel Story, at least, is monstrously unsympathetic. Oshima made it clear from the outset that eliciting conventional empathy was not where his interest lay.

[Steven H]

I think the humanity in Oshima's films isn't within the characters, but within Oshima, period. What I mean is that it's through his filter that we see the world, however polemical and/or unnerving it is, and it's his humanity that we should be experiencing. The emotion and depth lies outside the film, and it's almost like Oshima selfishly keeps the characters from taking too much of it. It's just amazing to watch his 60s and early 70s work drift to and fro from narrative to experiment. Maybe Orson Welles did this too.

This probably sounds nuts, but hey... s'been a long week.

[jonp72]

I just wanted to let everybody know that my Alternative AFI lists are due on December 31st of this year. (See the AFI thread for more details.)

So far there are 53 films eligible to be on the list (i.e., they have two or more votes). I'd like to see at least 100 films eligible to be on the list, so keep those lists coming. As an added incentive, I can privately send a current Top 10 list to anybody who sends me a list (or anybody who has already sent me a list).

I won't divulge more details, but the current top 10 includes two directors with two films each. There are three 1940s films, three 1950s films, three 1970s films, and one film from the 1980s. For people participating in the 1970s List, this is definitely an incentive to start watching (or re-watching) some unheralded 1970s American films.

[zedz]

Coup d'Etat / Martial Law

Yoshida's version of the Kita Ikki story is one of the most constantly visually astonishing films I've come across. It's not just that every shot is strikingly composed – though films in which every shot could be the most original and memorable composition in any other film are mighty rare – but that every shot is practically unanticipatable (yes, this is a film that drives me beyond the limits of my dictionary). You have no idea from moment to moment what the next shot will look like. Conventional syntax and suture are not sustainable. This makes for both invigorating and exhausting viewing, and at the end of the film I felt like I'd been deprogrammed.

The visual surprises come from every direction: any given shot could be presented from an unexpected angle (e.g. we'll suddenly switch to an extreme high angle shot), with unexpected framing or composition (outrageous use of negative space), from an unexpected distance (sudden extreme close-ups or retreats to long shots), or with unexpected obstructions in the frame (half or more of the screen masked by a blurry foreground object, a wall or a ceiling; the lower half of a character's face grotesquely distorted by a foreground drinking glass). Every cut brings with it a sense of anticipation. Inevitably, this becomes less surprising as the film progresses, but the visual invention remains at a high level.

Although the radical unusualness and diversity of the film's images creates a disjunction in terms of how we normally process cinematic storytelling, Yoshida's sequences have their own structural logic, as if they were developed in a parallel, anti-Griffith universe. There's a wonderful sequence about midway through in which a confrontation is viewed from two levels, alternating ‘unmotivated' tracking shots from a low angle looking up and a high angle looking down, the pairing of complementary shots creating a gorgeous kinetic symmetry. A later sequence, an assassination accompanied by the loud cawing of birds, also has this satisfying sense of completeness and internal logic, however it departs from traditional syntax.

In narrative terms, Coup d'Etat seems to be much less complex in its organisation than Eros Plus Massacre (but what isn't?), though I'm no doubt missing a lot of its subtleties. It'll probably take another few viewings before I can get past its stylistic boldness to the heart of the story.

The Beguiled

A fascinating film (Hollywood trying to push thematic boundaries while remaining its old sexist self), and often a beautiful one, shot by Bruce Surtees, son of Robert, but I found it more than somewhat flawed. Don Siegel – sorry, apparently it's “Donald Siegelâ€

[yoshimori]

... or with unexpected obstructions in the frame ...

One shot - three quarters of the frame blocked by a ceiling beam, at the very bottom of the bottom quarter of which we see the protagonists' tiny heads - was shocking even in this amazingly composed film.

This will surely make it onto my 70s list, along with Yoshida's Heroic Purgatory (1970) and Eros + Massacre (also 1970), Jissoji's Mujo (also 1970) and Mandara (1971, mesmerizing wide angle lens work), Terayama's Throw Away Your Books (also 1971), Jissoji's Uta (1972), Hara's flabergastingly indelicate Sayonara CP (also 1972), and Terayama's beautiful (but, for me, a bit too schematic) To Die in Country (1974).

zedz' description of how Coup d'etat works seems dead on to me.

And, while I'm at it, I'll leave a few other likely 70s orphans at y'all's doorsteps:

Three by Francesco Rosi, Cadaveri eccellenti (1976), Il caso Mattei (1972), and my favorite, Uomini contro (1970). Dylan and Pennebacker's Eat the Document (1972) - way better than the official 1967 Dylan doc. Klimov's Agonia (1975) - though imdb strangely lists it as a 1981 pic. Too bad, I'll never remember to include it in the 80s list. And finally, having rewatched a bunch of Wisemans last week, I'd especially recommend Juvenile Court (1973) and Welfare (1975). And don't forget to put Zabriskie Point on top of your lists.

[zedz]

La Gueule ouverte

Aside from his magnificent magnum opus, La Maison du bois, this is probably my favourite seventies Pialat, and I'm determined to squeeze it into my top 50. It's excruciatingly severe and powerful, a horror film in which the horror is our own mortality. It opens with austere, silent credits. Pialat is one of cinema's most precise deployers of music, and he's saving up his Mozart for something special.

The film begins with Monique (Monique Melinand in a performance gutsily vanity-free) undergoing treatment in the hospital, accompanied by her son Philippe. The second scene is a marvel: in a single ten-minute take, Monique and Philippe have a brief conversation, then listen to a favourite piece of music (from Cosi fan tutte), while the shot continues on them, silently listening (how rare to see so everyday an activity as listening to music captured on film!). The music ends, Monique gets up and immediately collapses. This is her last fully human moment in the film: over the ensuing hour we watch her slowly die, her decline both precipitous and lingering. The icy shock of a loved one changed hits us every time we see her, weaker and more marginal, and Pialat characteristically tackles really big emotions without any really big emotional gestures. Nobody's begging for our sympathy, and Monique herself is 'there' so briefly that she's not a traditional figure of pathos. The adult children are well drawn, but less fully invested in the 'tragedy' than cinema convention demands: they've got their own lives to lead.

Pialat wants us to identify with the situation, not the characters. I think this is one of the reasons why I find his films so much more emotionally powerful than the work of most other filmmakers. You're not merely occupying some character's fictional headspace for an hour and a half, you're investing the fiction with your own history and experiences. Thus the impact of the film stays with you much longer. The character who responds most dramatically to Monique's eventual death is her estranged husband Roger. In most other films, this would make him the focus of the viewer's catharsis, but Pialat has been careful to insert an extremely sleazy scene into the middle of the film that completely precludes identification with Roger. So at the end of the film, when he's falling to pieces, he functions more as an embodiment of grief than as a vessel for our specific sympathy.

La Gueule ouverte was shot by Nestor Almendros, and it's somewhat grimier and more prosaic than his work with Rohmer at the same time, but it's nevertheless pitch-perfect. There's a superb attention to changing light values: a diffused green in the countryside, cool blue indoors. The death-steeped wallpaper of Monique's room changes in the changing light: a very subtle exercise in getting the most out of a single, modest setting. There are flashier visual flourishes as well. The film has a casual, demotic look, but everything is very precisely composed, and Pialat and Almendros let their art show from time to time. When Philippe has his encounter with a lover, it's described in a concise, complex, multi-layered mise-en-scene (like most of the film, the entire scene is conveyed in a single shot): the woman occupies the right-hand side of the frame, head to knee, facing Philippe and us. She's balanced on the left-hand-side of the frame by a full-length mirror, reflecting Philippe reclining on her bed in its lower half and a print on the wall above him (possibly Manet's Olympia) of a nude reclining on a bed. Not only is the composition striking and beautiful, and beautifully, moodily lit, but the complex pattern of mirroring and doubling adds a depth of commentary and analysis to the characters' relationship (who's the courtesan, here? - the woman refuses Philippe's offer of money). At the low-key wake the mise-en-scene is much more naturalistic but just as charged. It's just a few minutes of halting small talk, but at the edge of the frame, silent, Roger is imploding.

The operatic penultimate shot, which I discussed some time ago in the 'tour-de-force camera movements' thread is one of the most expressive grand cinematic gestures in French cinema. (There's another great tracking shot a little earlier as the camera glacially moves around the local church, peering around a corner to reveal the mourning family). Like the music, the climactic reverse track works so beautifully because Pialat withholds grand gestures until they really matter. He uses pacing in a similar way. Monique's decline proceeds at a stately pace, her laboured breathing towards the end providing a metronomic beat that's hard to shake. Until it stops. There's no death scene, but this ellipsis is even more chilling. The deathwatch is instantly supplanted by a frenzy of activity as the body is prepared and the deathbed unceremoniously stripped. Such cinematic effects are sparing but utterly strategic.

The Bill Douglas Trilogy

Easily one of the greatest achievements of British cinema in the 1970s, which I actually think was a pretty strong period for British filmmaking, although you have to look in unexpected corners to find the most interesting stuff. This autobiographical trilogy is phenomenally powerful, as you'd expect from an it's-grim-up-north tale of hardship and degradation, but it's got a stark, poetic edge few other filmmakers ever approach.

The first film, My Childhood, is perhaps the most 'classical.' It's stark, moving and personal in the neorealist tradition, but Douglas' compositional eye raises it to another level. He makes striking use of natural and unnatural landscapes, and the film is predominantly non-verbal: the characters are isolated and don't talk much even when they are together. It's the epitome of a Great First Film.

My Ain Folk is so much more. Without losing any of his compositional acuity, Douglas has made great leaps forward as a filmmaker, and the film's twin motors are brutally simple, devastating montage and a highly evolved soundtrack, employing startling silence and off-screen sound. In one wrenching scene, while Jamie is savagely beaten, we dwell on his Grandmother's impassive face.

My Way Home continues the filmmaking sophistication, though the subject matter is (probably fortunately) less intense than the previous films, with Jamie finding male companionship in North Africa (evoked on a still tiny budget).

All of the films thrive on their visual storytelling, often presenting us with mysterious or fragmentary details, and they've got the rare visual intensity of great experimental films, that sense that if you stare at the everyday long and hard enough, it will become strange and alien. I find the films incredibly evocative. They have the extremely rare effect of engaging all of my other senses. Watching them, I can feel the splash of cold water or the warmth of a teacup, smell mud, taste a sweet.

A good DVD release of these masterpieces (and Douglas' completely different but just as impressive epic Comrades) is way overdue.

[zedz]

I've been catching up with or revisiting some 70s glories lately. You really do need to look outside the obvious English-subtitle markets to access some crucial films. Here's an especially thrilling 'find' (not really a find since I've wanted to see the film for about 20 years and it was only my own slackness that prevented me picking up the Greek disc sooner).

The Travelling Players

A stunning film. Watching this, Effi Briest and Jeanne Dielmann in the last week has left me with little patience for dumbed-down spectacles (specifically the latest Bladerunner reversion, which seemed longer than all three of those combined). After four hours of this dense, sparse crypto-epic, the first thing I wanted to do was watch it all over again.

Those three films all have certain common characteristics: their reliance on sequence shots, generally one per scene; their eschewal of conventional film syntax (e.g. absence of reverse-fields); their rejection or reinvention of traditional dramatic narrative structures. All three films have underlying narratives that could have been rendered in conventional genre terms (historical epic, period melodrama, psychological thriller), but in each case a specific, original film language has been developed that creates a unique and much deeper experience. Despite the similarities, the films are stylistically nothing like one another. Akerman’s version of the long take in her film is an austere fixed frame, with solitary figures moving in and out of it; Fassbinder’s long takes are baroque, with frequent lyrical movement around densely decorated spaces; Angelopoulos combines austerity with fluidity, keeping his human figures at a distance but moving with them through streets and rooms. A fourth rigorous sequence shooter from the period, Miklos Jancso, exhibits still further variations. Although he is in the same neighbourhood as Angelopoulos, the balletic movement within his frames and of his frames creates a completely different viewing experience. Watching these films, you feel like you're using bits of your brain that more standard films don’t even acknowledge exist.

The few Angelopoulos films I’d managed to see before this one (all 80s / 90s titles) had clearly communicated his potential greatness as a filmmaker without themselves being great films. Ulysses’ Gaze, for example, is near the top of my “great filmmaking, shame about the film” list. This, however, delivered everything I’d hoped for and more.

The received notion I had about the film was that it was impenetrably allusive to mid-century Greek history, after a Jancso fashion. In fact, Angelopoulos very clearly spells out the stages and events we’re observing (he even gives exact dates): no special knowledge is required to follow the action, though there are no doubt a lot of subtexts and allusions that would enrich the film for the better-informed. Where the perceived impenetrability (and Jancso comparison) comes into play more strongly is in his treatment of the central characters. Like Jancso, he’s employing a collective protagonist, albeit one with more grounding in traditional dramatic and narrative development, and individual personalities are distinctly secondary. There’s a significant attrition rate involved, so the “travelling players” of 1939 are not the same individuals as those of 1952, and none of the major characters are formally introduced. If I’m not mistaken, there are several main characters who are never even identified by name onscreen.

There’s also potential confusion arising from Angelopoulos’s beautifully deployed flashback structure, but on closer examination the structure is very straightforward. The film’s present is 1952, when the players return to Aegion. We return to this time period, on the brink of the democratic elections that will signal a new phase in the history of modern Greece, a handful of times throughout the course of the film. The flashbacks which form the core of the narrative proceed in straight chronology from 1939 up to 1952, but Angelopoulos shifts into those flashbacks within continuous shots. The camera will wander from the players walking through the streets of a town (a group of figures standing around, or walking together, in long shot is the film’s signature image) to a campaign car urging citizens to vote in the coming elections, follow the car off into the distance, then pan back with an older car coming in the opposite direction to find the previously seen streets transformed and occupied by German soldiers. And these marvellous sleight-of-hand transitions are far from the most impressive plans-sequences on display.

One particular six and a half minute shot is justly celebrated as one of the greatest of all sequence shots. At the start of the civil war, the players are caught in the middle while communists, royalists and British occupying forces fight around them. The camera is trapped, like the players, in a courtyard, and it cautiously prowls around with the leader of the troupe looking for an exit. Tracking to the right, it glimpses one group of insurgents marching through the streets, right to left. Scuttling back, looking for another exit, it finds the rival, armed mob coming from a different direction. In between, framed between buildings (which form a proscenium – the complex mixture of theatre and reality is a key theme of the film) we see first one group advance, attack and retreat, then the other, then the British forces. What this results in (with the troupe leader, our surrogate, observing from the foreground) is a battle sequence conveyed largely through sound, the proscenium-framed central field evacuated by one or other side for most of the skirmish. All of this action and inference is packed into a single, masterful shot, and it has resonances with the rest of the film as well.

One of the greatest things about the film is the way in which Angelopoulos develops a sophisticated, rhyming visual structure for the film. Battles or other moments of violent action are frequently represented by evacuated, theatrical spaces. The start of WWII is signalled by an emptied impromptu stage (one of the many incomplete performances of ‘Golfo the Shepherdess’ we see), bursting bombs on the soundtrack and failing lights in the hall; its end is signalled by an empty, darkened wall, a moment earlier occupied by the players lined up for execution as if it were their last curtain call. The partisans’ attack on the Nazis is heard at length off-screen. When a sniper interrupts the players’ performance for British troops, we’re again left with an evacuated theatrical space (the stage backdrop set up on the seashore), save for one unfortunate soldier, keeling over. It’s a trope that occurs again and again: brutal, historical action is conveyed through the evacuation of an image framed as theatre.

This confusion of tragic reality / history and theatre appears in other forms as well. When the partisans kill an informer onstage during a performance (I guess they’ll never get to finish ‘Golfo’), the audience applaud as if it were part of the act. At the very end of the film, there is more ‘inappropriate’ applause, in an even more haunting and moving context.

There’s a third distinctive layer to the storytelling I haven’t mentioned yet, in addition to the ‘present 1952’ and ‘flashback’ elements, and it too demonstrates a self-conscious theatricality and a blending of the film’s various layers. Interspersed throughout the film are three direct-to-camera monologues. These all appear to begin in actual narrative time and space, but ease themselves out of it. The final one only reveals itself to be the third in the series (i.e. a direct-to-camera monologue, not a long explanation to a character within the fiction) at the last minute, though any extended speechifying in such a laconic film should be immediately suspect. Each monologue fills in historical – and, less importantly, character – background, and each bears a different relationship to the film’s narrative. The first relates events from 1922, a player’s traumatic and permanent separation from his family, so it’s giving historical and political background from outside the narrative timeframe. The second relates in specific detail events (the start of the civil war) that we had previously seen represented onscreen in a largely symbolic manner by a long sequence shot at the film’s halfway point: a large, mixed public gathering is disrupted by gunfire (another evacuated theatrical space), a lone piper crosses the abandoned square, and then the communist faction from the previous gathering regoups as an oppositional force. This instance offers clarification and personalization of narrative events already conveyed on-screen in the abstract. The final example fills in a narrative gap: what had happened to the political prisoners (captured Communists) while they had been off-screen (i.e. separated from the travelling players, who are our consistent focus throughout the film, however marginal they might be at any given time to the main historical and political events with which the film is concerned).

Oh, and it’s a musical. Sort of. I didn’t make any kind of official count, but I’m sure there’s more sung text in this film than regular dialogue, and the songs are charged with historical and political meaning. Sometimes this meaning is obvious – whistling the Internationale at a rendez-vous, singing obscene lyrics about General Scobie to the tune of ‘In the Mood’ – but in other cases I’m sure the song choices are freighted with specific subtexts of which I’m ignorant.

A magnificent film, available in a nice subtitled transfer from New Star (Greece). I got my copy through xploitedcinema.

[Awesome Welles]

I too finally got around to The Travelling Players tonight. I agree with your points zedz. I felt like I needed a big fat MoC book after watching the film. I felt that Angelopoulos was saying something about theatricality, the open spaces, the performing of the play - on and off the stage, the monologues to camera, I just don't know what, it really eluded me. However, I never found it frustrating. Angelopolous weaves his film with such magic that to have a puzzle is a pleasure - a film that will continue to entertain and enthrall me for many years to come I suspect. A masterpiece.

I am a little disconcerted to hear your thoughts on Ulysses' Gaze as I bought that with The Travelling Players but am looking forward to it nonetheless!

[zedz]

I am a little disconcerted to hear your thoughts on Ulysses' Gaze as I bought that with The Travelling Players but am looking forward to it nonetheless!

Briefly going off-70s: it's got plenty of the dazzling cinema-cinema moments that are in Travelling Players (e.g. a confrontation in heavy fog), but, in complete contrast to the earlier film, I found the points it was making obvious and heavy-handed, and Keitel's performance gratingly awful. In terms of visual style, though, it's superb.

[denti alligator]

Zedz, thank you for your excellent comments on The Travelling Players. I'm glad you've finally found an Angelopoulos film that resonates deeply with you.

I think you underestimate the difficulty this film can present to some viewers. Sure some of the key dates are mentioned, but the cause-effect nature of historical events is far from transparent. If you had no idea what went on in Greece from '39-'52 you would be more than a little confused. It may be clear that Mussolini's Italy has attacked Greece in 1940, but it's never clearly stated that Greece effectively "wins" that battle, only to succumb to Germany later. In the film we get the crucial scene that announces Italy's threat (made palpable, as you rightly note, by the empyting of the stage), but soon after that we're in Nazi occupied Greece with no sense of how we got there.

This kind of historical ellipsis is confounded by the single scenes or even shots in which (as you also note) we shift from 1952 back to '39 or '47, etc.

My reaction to this kind of discombobulation fed directly into how I proceeded to interpret the film, which is as a staging of historical interruptions. Almost every one of the players' stagings of "Golfo" are interrupted: by the arrest of one of the players, by the Italian invasion, etc. Each of the interruptions points to the ways in which Greece's history itself is constantly interrupted, prevented from taking a course of its own (whatever that may be). 1952 also repeatedly interrupts the narrative of 1939 to 1952. By the end of the film, which is its true beginning (the exact scene with identical voice-over, save for the shifting of the date, is repeated from the opening)--we start in 1952 and end in 1939--it seems that Greece's history (or history itself) only "happens" in these interruptions of "the present." We only learn how to experience the true import of Greece's history in the ways in which it is prevented from becoming history, in one sense.

There is one crucial aspect of the film that you neglected to mention, and that is its correspondence to the Oresteia. We hardly get any character names, but two are indeed mentioned: Orestes and Electra. It soon becomes clear that the story of these famous siblings and their parents is mapped onto the history of Greece from 1939-1952. Agamemnon is the father (first monologue) who is betrayed by Aigisthos and then killed. Aigisthos and Clytemnestra shack up and Electra eventually helps Orestes to kill them both. Knowing this story (Chrysothaeme is the younger sister-turned-prostitute who later marries the American soldier and whose son is effectively christened the next Orestes--by none other than Electra; and Pylades is also in there, though he isn't ever named) helps to place the characters, who, by virtue of this literary intertext, become even less "real figures" than simply representatives of or even allegories of a constellation of Greek archetypes.

Anyway, an incredible film--and a demanding one. I join zedz in urging you to track it down.

[zedz]

Thanks Denti. I'd noticed the Electra / Orestes names but hadn't followed through the allusions to that extent. It's a fascinating film and one I look forward to exploring for the rest of my life.

You're right about the depth and density of the historical references, but I don't think that should be a barrier to a first-time viewer with a little intellectual latitude. You're not going to get the whole narrative and historical context laid before you on a plate, but I certainly got enough to get a through line, and my knowledge of recent Greek history is considerably less than your average Wikipedia page. Your identification of the 'interruption' theme seems dead on to me: it's surely no coincidence that so many of the Golfo interruptions are cued to specific historical interventions, and the film's final return (alongside the various intervening time shifts) is a strong symbol of arrested national development, as well as being extremely poignant on the personal / character level. Even though history may be cyclical, the impact on individuals is catastrophic and irreversible.

It's a joy to find another film that will grow with you, like Mirror or A Brighter Summer Day. The more times you see it, the more you discover, and the more you bring to the film, the more it gives you back.

While I'm here, here are comments on another selection of films, watched while Fassbinder glowers at me from the shelf.

Celine and Julie Go Boating

I love, love, love this film, but it’s very hard to articulate why. The narrative, and the way the narrative elucidates itself, are extremely mysterious (OK, magical), and there’s no way to resolve it naturalistically. And I’m not even necessarily talking about the explicitly head-scratching big old house part of the narrative. At a meta- level, it’s a film about storytelling, or even more specifically, about the stories we tell to ourselves while we’re watching movies. But in this film, Rivette beautifully blurs the levels. C & J spout their rambling, improvised narratives to one another, but they’re also living a rambling, improvised narrative, and the narratives they spout inform and inflect the narratives they live. When they hobnob with the Jamesian ghosts (or whatever) in the big old house, they’re playing roles in an unfolding, refolding movie, but they’re simultaneously watching the movie they’re inhabiting and commenting on it, both as recovered lived experience and movie narrative.

In the ‘movie’ they ostentatiously switch identities, both embodying by turns the role of the nurse Angele (even within a single iteration of the narrative), but they do so in the ‘real’ world as well, in the dress-up-box impersonations they effect (in each case effectively rewriting the narrative of their friend’s life by interceding at a crucial moment) and in the fuzzying of the original connections with the big old house, whose back story continually shifts. At first Celine worked there, and tells Julie the address; then it’s Julie who has to tell Celine the address, Celine now, apparently, having no former connection with the place; then it becomes the house-next-door of childhood: Rivette, like his heroines, is trying narrative tropes on for size, then casually discarding them.

There’s a casualness to the film’s visuals as well - simple, loose framing, the mobility of 16mm, tossed-off lingering shots as the actresses crack up – but this masks ambition and brilliance as well. Underneath, there’s a dense patterning of visual motifs that goes well beyond the obsessively repeated shots of the big old house story, and camouflaged by the rambling looseness of everything is a compelling rhythm. This is the most precious thing about the film for me, but it’s the hardest to express. Part of it has to do with the arch roughness of the editing (flash cuts as memories come back to the amnesiac girls, all those momentary black-outs, as if the film is briefly nodding off); part of it has to do with Rivette’s orchestration of silence (those wonderfully wordless first ten minutes, for instance) and gabble; part of it’s his shuttling between different dramatic modes (the arch formality of the big old house melodrama – Marie-France Pisier takes a swoon for the ages, over and over again – versus the stoned anything-goes antics of the framing story); and part of it’s the uncannily Feuilladean treatment of the local landscape – he’s seeing Paris anew with the child-like innocence and imagination of an early pioneer of extravagantly elucidated narratives.

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes

Always a tough watch: disturbing in the best sense but profound in its impact. Although it’s carefully structured (the first ten minutes take us further and further away from the living human body through the increasingly alien texture, colour and plasticity of the first three corpses explored in depth; the last ten take us even further out, and further in. Alternatively, you could see the film as the ‘narrative’ of the pathologist’s little plastic ruler, which dominates the early scenes and returns, steeped in gore, at the end.

I suppose the great temptation with this material would be to aestheticise it. There’s a degree of this in the extraordinary colours of the final section, but the imprecision of Brakhage’s filmmaking – handheld shaking, fragmentary or apparently casual framing, slipping in and out of focus, arhythmical editing and jump-cutting – works against this, and for me it has the remarkable effect that the bodies never become abstract. The film never settles into a comfortable, distancing rhythm, and however far removed from recognisable personhood the corpses become (seen in extreme close-up, from the inside out, radically ‘deconstructed’, or with their faces effaced) there’s always the jolt of recognition: this is us. This applies as much to the grotesquely altered (green-blue skin the texture of an old balloon giving way to bright white subcutaneous fat) as the uncannily lifelike, and the deliberate roughness of the technique makes the seemingly accidental emotional grace notes (e.g. the living holding hands with the dead) all the more resonant.

Hotel Monterey

About ten minutes into this silent, plotless experimental feature I had the horrible feeling that this wasn’t going to work at all on DVD. Silence in your living room is a world away from silence in a cinema, and if the main ‘action’ of a shot is shifting patterns of grain, they’re likely to be ill-served by a digital transfer. However, the film worked despite those constraints, and by the halfway point I was completely in its thrall. It could sort of be considered the anti-Chelsea Girls, prowling around the parts of a down-at-heel hotel that aren’t hosting lively human encounters, or a deeply prosaic 2001, prodding the incipient sentience of architecture and technology (with the elevator standing in for HAL). The glacial back and forth tracks down empty hallways are particularly Kubrickian. There’s an inexplicably mysterious and moving shot (my favourite in the film) of the panel between two elevators, often lit up with mutely expressive blue and red lights, occasionally punctuated by opening doors and the light-traces of the moving elevator through the portholes of the door, but sometimes darkened and abstract. Overall, the banal underlying action manifests itself on the abstracted plane of the image as a complex pattern of light and movement, charged with an underlying symmetry / asymmetry tension.

[GringoTex]

Claude Chabrol's Pleasure Party (1975). This is Chabrol's response to Varda's Bonheur, exploring the infidelity and its consequences of a screen couple played by a real life husband/wife and their daughter. A vicious, vicious film where Chabrol proves he's every bit as nasty as his mentor Hitchcock. My favorite Chabrol alongside Ceremonie.

[denti alligator]

I'm gearing up to participate (again) this time, so when's the 70s due date? End of the month?