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The Tempest Confined: Seasons of Change in "Amarcord" (Kelsey)

Puffballs float into a tiny Italian town on a gust of wind, and they usher in spring: so begins Federico Fellini's 1973 film, Amarcord.  We are informed of this seasonal change by screaming children, whose hands are stretched towards the sky, hoping to catch spring as it falls.  We are also told by random passersby, who stop to stare as the puffballs drift to the ground.  And we are told once again by a senile old narrator, who stumbles over words he must have been saying for years, as though the prognosticating puffballs were floating down not from the sky, but from a memory half-forgotten.  The entire film, in fact, has the feel of half-remembered, half-improvised nostalgia: a year long memory of Fellini's, embroidered with his own personal brand of ridiculous.

And the film is quite often ridiculous.  From the uncle who climbs a tree and refuses to come down, to the overly sexualized daydreams of the young boys of the town, the film deals with the ordinary and makes it loud and colorful and strange.  There is Gradisca, who seemingly owns one outfit (red, of course). She features prominently in the fantasies of men and boys alike, and features even more prominently in the town's urban legends.  And yet, despite her role as town temptress, she is content to sit in an empty theater and watch Gary Cooper movies, hoping against hope that she could find a real life facsimile for her film idol.  And then there is Titta, the young boy around whom this episodic film revolves.  He argues with his father, is doted on by his mother, and lifts up the buxom cigarette girl in a display of teenage masculinity.  Titta is an obvious Fellini stand in, a character whose thought on woman and religion and the beauty of the world are only beginning to coalesce.  And these things, the women and the world, are always most beautiful in the spring, when the puffballs all.

But spring, that season of blue skies, hellos, and goodbyes, is not the only important season in the film.  There is also fall, the time when the fog comes.  It's impenetrable, and an old man stands in its midst and asks it: "Where am I?  I don't seem to be anywhere.  If death is like this, I don't think much of it."  And here, for an instant, Amarcord becomes a bit tragic.  But instead of decrying the tempest in his mind, the old man merely responds with an emphatic "Up yours!"  And with that, we are returned to Amarcord, where moments of true emotion are always undercut by the carnival of life.  But the man lost in the fog finds his home, as he was standing in front of it the entire time.  And then the camera follows the leaves blowing through the air, and finds a group of people waltzing without partners to music only they can hear, asking the question "Where are you my love?" to no one in particular. 

After fall comes winter, a time where peacocks perch on great mounds of snow and unveil their feathers.  But in the midst of this image of beauty is sadness, as Titta's mother dies shortly after.  Her funeral dirge acts as the transition between piles of snow to puffballs.  And when spring has returned, we follow the puffballs as they waft towards the wedding of the lovely Gradisca, who may have finally found her Gary Cooper.  Sadly, however, it is not that simple.  Gradisca's new husband is a fascist politician, the type of person who could irrevocably change the town's way of life.  And the threat of fascism is presented as almost a joke in the film.  Dictators take the form of overgrown cardboard clowns in this particular circus, but beneath the facade is real danger.  And the aftereffects of Italian fascism were portrayed through neorealism, a filmic movement that Fellini was a part of at the beginning of his career.  But with Amarcord, he goes back to the beginning; the world that came before the Italian people fell into poverty and tragedy.  Because before that tragedy, the only things falling were puffballs. 

Out of Time: The Passion of Joan of Arc (Kelsey)

Carl Theodor Dreyer directed The Passion of Joan of Arc in 1928.  And yet, despite this unequivocal fact, the film does not belong to the year 1928.  It doesn't seem to concretely belong anywhere; indeed, the film is strangely atemporal.  Instead, the film belongs to a world where a close up can be stretched out over 85 minutes; where an entire world can be built on the physiognomy of a face.  And this world is built upon the face of Maria Falconetti, a face unadorned by make up but imbued with the ability to turn the most subtle of facial ticks into a moment of emotional anagnorisis.  The entire film is like a prolonged flash of revelation, and though Falconetti's eyes get increasingly wider and more desperate, they never stop conjuring up that which remains unspoken.

The film, if the opening titles are to be believed, dutifully follows the written record of the trial, imprisonment, and death of fabled martyr Joan of Arc.  She is not the only character shot almost exclusively in close-up; the men who decide her fate are shot in a similarly close range, though admittedly to very different effect.  If the camerawork acts as an hour an a half long elegy to Joan, it is effectively putting the men who judge her on trial.  They are captured in harsh black and white tones and even harsher facial expressions.  They are the ugly, jeering men whose faces keep no secrets but tell only lies, and the camera pans across their faces as if they were Roman portrait busts riddled with imperfections, at home in a museum but never at home in Joan's psyche. 

And it is in Joan's psyche that the film takes place: these leering men stand in for the Satanic visions they constantly accuse Joan of having, and the look in Joan's eyes as they turn upward towards heaven does in fact seem to emanate the ethereal.  And these awful faces get closer and closer until they seem to close in on Joan entirely, violating her space and the space of the film.  And all of this is filmed with extreme attention to detail: from the warts on the faces of her accusers to the insects that occasionally land on Joan's face.  And it is this strange detail, enlarged and crystal clear, that allows the film to escape any form of realism.  By creating a film based on minutiae, tiny little flaws and facial movements that would be unremarkable in a wider shot become absurd and surreal, and through attention to the mundane, the film is able to portray the ethereal.     

In the last scene of the film, Joan is burned at the stake.  As flames engulf her tiny body and her shorn head, the camera pans across a different sort of people: not the judges who assigned this fate to Joan, but regular people, openly weeping at the sight before them.  And the claustrophobic close-ups all of the sudden seem a bit less claustrophobic, as Joan begins to disappear into the smoke and tears roll down the faces of grown men.  The image of birds soaring across the sky is intercut with the flames of the stake and the mounting anger of the people.  And with this moment of emotional synchronicity, the disparate close-ups are no longer at odds.  It is as though the discordant elements of Joan's tale have come together, and the film, which oftentimes feels like an 85 minute reconstruction of a second, is finally able to end.  And the stake goes up in flames, and Joan is finally set free.     

 

What is the Cleanest Way to Kill Male Chauvinism?: Divorce Italian Style (Kelsey)

Marcello Mastroianni enters the film "Divorce Italian Style" with his hair perfectly slicked back, his ubiquitous sunglasses covering his world weary eyes, and a cigarette holder dangling from the side of his mouth.  He is the picture of over-coiffed, under-worked, chauvinistic hauteur.  He also happens to be exiting the bathroom of a train.  And this entrance sets the tone of the entire movie: a bored aristocrat with a very distinct image of himself, perpetually undercut by the image being presented to us by Pietro Germi, the director of this 1962 Italian film.

The film is not merely Italian; however, it is very specifically a film about Sicily.  In Sicily, sons of Barons have nothing to do but sit around in their fathers' decaying castles, ruminating on their lineage and their honor while the voices of overbearing wives and screaming parents echo throughout the halls.  Such is the fate of Ferdinando, called Fefe by his adoring wife, who wanders about the overcrowded rooms in the family estate with the air of someone who is one last gasp away from asphyxiation.  So when this thirty-seven year old "falls in love" with his sixteen year old cousin, a pretty girl who lives on the other side of the crumbling castle, a viewer is less inclined to see it as true love and more inclined to greet the burgeoning relationship with a resounding "ew."  However, longing looks soon give way to physical affection, and in a way only acceptable in Italian films and E.M. Forster novels.  But while Fefe and his cousin Angela are off playing garden of earthly delights, there is still the problem of his wife, Rosalia.  And here we come back to Sicily.  Because in Sicily, divorce is completely, utterly, it's not even negotiable illegal.  Murder, however?  Is kind of okay, as long as there is sufficient reason.  So, Fefe hatches a plot to kill his wife, involving one of Rosalia's old flames, a tape recorder, a hole in the wall, and a fair amount of falsified evidence.  And his attempts at playing the mastermind work almost perfectly, until one night when the entire town has gathered to watch "La Dolce Vita."  Just as Anita Ekberg implores Fefe's onscreen counterpart to "Follow me, Marcello, follow me!"  Rosalia and her once upon a lover are following the last train out of town.  And of course they leave on a train, because in this tiny little world of Sicily, where the only thing people have to do is sit around in stifling rooms and narrate their own lives, trains don't merely give people momentum: they give the narrative momentum as well.

So poor Fefe is left in something of a quandary.  He has been dishonored, women spit at him in disgust, and he receives bags of hate mail.  However, he greets these new circumstances with the same level of detached disinterest with which he greets everything.  Indeed, when shuffling through his mail, when he comes upon a letter sympathetic to his plight, he tears it up, deeming it detrimental to the inevitable court case to come.  And come it does.  It is every bit as wonderful as Fefe had imagined it would be, as the lawyer touches on every topic from emotional distress to disreputable fathers.  And Fefe, of course, gets off with three years of jail time, the minimum sentence for crimes of passion.  And when he gets out, Angela has waited for him.  Sort of.  So perhaps life really does begin at forty.  Or perhaps Fefe is just sinking, sinking, sinking, just like his reputation post Rosalia's runaway and just like all those fantasies he had of Rosalia's death (death by boiling vat of soap and death by quicksand were the standouts).  But there is little else to do but sink, in this world where one day the news headline is about a man in space and the next day it's about a man killing his wife and getting away with it.  The times are changing and this world of Fefe, coated as it is in layers of hair pomade, sweat, and male chauvinism, is inevitably going to sink.  And personally? I vote death by vat of soap.     

"People Only Die of Love in the Cinema": Searching for the Normal in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Kelsey)

The very first words spoken in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are "Is it finished?"  This question, a less than auspicious start to a film, is posed by a man to his mechanic.  The mechanic, a young man in a bright blue jumpsuit, replies: "The engine still knocks when it's cold, but that's normal."  So begins Jacques Demy's 1964 film; with this relatively normal, almost colorless exchange between the two men.  Of course, these seemingly mundane lines are sung, because every word of the film is sung.  And the seemingly mundane mechanic shop is infused with every color imaginable, because Jacques Demy turns car repair into a feat requiring Technicolor.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, however, does not deal with these Technicolor trifles with the over the top pageantry of an American musical.  There is no musical number about how much they "gotta dance!" here, and indeed, there is no dancing.  The camera is the thing that follows choreographed patterns, as the film has numerous long takes that move from one character to another without missing a beat.  In fact, the entire film is choreographed, and it is only the characters that remain almost motionless, emotionally stagnant amidst Demy's always mobile, always surprising visual splendor.  The story at the center of the film is as seemingly banal as the dialogue: a girl loves a boy, the boy goes away to war, the girl gets pregnant (of course), and the boy returns home to find that the girl isn't waiting for him.  So goes this bittersweet tale of love and loss.  But the film does not just rise above its uninspired plot: it uses its uninspired plot to explore these uninspired people who are its center.  And while their real life, provincial French counterparts may not be surrounded by pink patterned wall paper that perfectly matches their pink cardigans, their pink headbands, and their pink umbrellas, there is a fundamental melancholy to the film that belies its candy coated exterior.  And those bright colors only serve to heighten the intensity of the emotions: the two main characters, Genevieve and Guy, "je t'aime," "je t'aime," "je t'aime," so often that by any right the words ought to lose all meaning.  And yet, when set to Michel Legrand's lovely score and surrounded by the always colorful set design, their repeated proclamations reach a sort of emotional fever pitch.  So when Genevieve falls to the ground; in a faint at the merest suggestion that Guy has forgotten her, it's almost believable.  Because in this world, where a pretty, pink clad Catherine Deneuve almost fades into the pretty pink background, the visuals and the sound don't just heighten the emotions, they give them an air of verisimilitude that they would otherwise be lacking.

The last scene of the film is set in December, and it is no longer raining but snowing: there's no need for umbrellas in Cherbourg when it's December.  And it is at a gas station that Genevieve and Guy have their last meeting: her in a fur coat and mourning, him in another blue jumpsuit.  The first thing she says to him, after all of their years apart, is that it's cold.  He tells her to come into the office.  There are no declarations of love, only a sad lingering sense of what might have been.  When asked what type of gasoline she wanted to fill her car with, normal or super, Genevieve chooses super instead of normal, just like she chose fur coats over car mechanics once, a long time ago.  So it's cold, and things are fine.  They're normal, perhaps.  And yes, they are finished.  But as she drives away with her child, and his wife returns with his, we realize that maybe, even outside this world of fuchsia wall paper and pseudo operettas, normal might be alright.   

 

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Kelsey)

The pivotal scene of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul occurs with the two main characters seated outside, their figures almost lost amidst a sea of bright yellow patio chairs.  Their hands are intertwined, and tears run down the woman's face as she says to the man: "Sometimes I wish I were all alone with you in the world, with nobody around us."  And they are almost alone, isolated by the yellow chairs, but even here they cannot escape the cruel gaze of onlookers, who stare at them contemptuously from across the courtyard.  But despite this onslaught of societal disapproval, they declare their love for each other, and the scene ends with the woman deciding that they need to leave for awhile.  She promises him that when they return, it will be better.  That perhaps people will be nice to them. 

The woman is Emmi, a middle aged German who cleans floors for a living.  The man is her husband, a Moroccan immigrant who works as a mechanic.  He is called Ali, not because it is his name, but because in Germany, all Arabs are called Ali.  They are also called much worse things.  So when Emmi invites Ali home one night after dancing with him at a bar, and they develop an affection for each other that leads to marriage, their world reacts with almost universal scorn.  They try to stay afloat amidst this tide of disapproval, but their love does not go unchallenged.  Fassbinder creates a minimalist microcosm of racial intolerance and societal injustice by mapping it onto fairly standard melodramatic tropes.  The plot itself is taken from the Douglas Sirk film All that Heaven Allows, wherein a widowed Jane Wyman falls in love with a much younger Rock Hudson, only to meet with the disapproval of her friends and family.  Sirk's film is melodrama at its finest, where pretty exteriors and calculated mise en scene mask the deep cut of societal scorn.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul has calculated mise en scene as well: Fassbinder's characters are perfectly groomed, as Emmi wears heels and patterned dresses to clean floors and Ali wears sharp grey suits to go to seedy bars.  Their world is insular, with only a handful of tertiary characters that, despite appearing regularly, seem to blend into a single person with a single expression.  And these bit players are constantly separated from Emmi and Ali: by staircases, by window grates, by an opened door.  This visual scheme serves to isolate the central couple, but it also acts as an indictment of the herd mentality that leads to blatant and unchecked racism.

The title comes from Ali's broken German.  When Emmi expresses her mixed emotions at the very beginning of their relationship, he tells her that "fear eat the soul."  Ali's linguistic difficulties preclude him from making any melodramatic speeches: he expresses how much he loves Emmi with the span of his arms, and his ability to flatter her never moves beyond such trite adjectives as "good," and "nice."  But his sayings have a broken, aphoristic quality that suggest a sort of innocence, and which force the viewer to remember that it is not merely Emmi that is bearing the brunt of societal disapproval.  Though she expresses her fears through tears and he expresses his with taciturn naivety, they are both affected by their situation.  But the titular fear, the gnawing, soul-crushing fear that the film is exploring is not really their fear: it is the fear that they elicit.  It is the fear that every other character in the film has when they catch a glimpse of the Emmi and Ali walking hand in hand; a fear that all too quickly turns to hate.  So while Emmi hopes to find a "little piece of heaven," the rest of the world will never quite let this happen.  Because even if society begins to accept Emmi and Ali, a piece of heaven is more than this world allows.

Le Samourai: The Stuff that Dreams are Made of? (Kelsey)

The first shot of Jean Pierre Melville's 1967 film Le Samourai is of an impossibly sterile apartment room, a cold and impersonal place so drained of color that the film begins to echo the black and white film noirs from which it gets its inspiration.  But Le Samourai is saturated not with color but with an indefinable cool, and the mixture of film noir visuals, samurai ethos, and French existentialism creates a self contained world that is not so much Humphrey Bogart as it is Humphrey Bogart's fever dream.  Welcome to a world where fedoras are perfectly straight and trench coats are perfectly belted, where a hired assassin operates on a strictly regimented code of honor, and where such a code of honor is not only acceptable but, indeed, almost rational.   

The titular "samurai" is Jef Costello, a hired killer who says little and emotes even less. He has no past and no future, and he moves through the film like a ghost lurking in the shadows, surveying his prey with the detached eye of an observer.  He is invariably methodical about his job, but one day he is seen leaving the scene of a crime by a night club singer and his carefully constructed world begins to unravel.  He is questioned by the police, who have no proof of his guilt and to the very last can find no proof of it.  Thus begins the essential dilemma of the film: there is a man, a detective, searching for a concrete answer to a crime when the perpetrator of that very crime is an enigma, a character who has no reply to the question "What sort of man are you?"  If that question was posed to the anti-hero in an American film noir, it would be met with a pithy quip and perhaps a lingering shot on an inscrutable close-up. In Le Samourai, however, the question is answered by silence and an abrupt cut to a new scene, a fact that makes sense in this film, where dialogue is replaced by wordless overtures and where extended sequences are uninterrupted by speech.

In this mostly silent world of unanswered questions, the only way to answer the all-important "what sort of man are you?" conundrum is with a meticulous devotion to order.  The only way out of a world devoid of order and meaning is to impose order upon it, and that is exactly what Jef does.  In his world, this existential problem is solved by the perfectly straight row of mineral water on his bedside table and by his perfectly anachronistic Humphrey Bogart attire.  The problem is, as soon as he dons his genre-defining outfit, his fate is essentially sealed.  Because not only does Jef Costello operate on a code of ethics, the film itself does as well, and in its adherence to the generic precepts of both noir and samurai films, Jef is essentially left with a pre-ordained future.  And this future comes when he inevitably violates his own code of honor: when he establishes a personal connection with an intended victim, and when he steps out of the shadows and into the line of sight, his fate is as sealed as it is self-inflicted. 

At the end of The Maltese Falcon, when Humphrey Bogart is asked by a detective what the falcon is, he replies: "The stuff that dreams are made of."  Jef Costello has no such emblem of wasted effort and unreachable goals, but he too has a bird: a sad, molting thing that sits in the corner of his apartment and chirps.  It is grey, just like the rest of the room, but it is strangely anomalous, this tiny bird living in the midst of Jef's sterile orderliness.  And yet it is details like this that make the film so potent and that come to define the strange world that Melville has so fastidiously created.  And at the end of the film, when no platitudes or definitive answers are offered (in fact, the last spoken word is translated into English as "wrong"), one can't help but wonder what happened to Jef's sad little bird, left alone in his cage in that sad grey room.  But in this minimalist dream world of taut suspense and hired killers with a code, this is perhaps the least of the unanswered questions.