Nonsense

Film: Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I try very hard to maintain an open mind when I watch films with which I am unfamiliar. This is particularly true if the film comes from another culture, and even moreso when it comes from a culture with which I have little experience and knowledge. But try as I might, there are times when I seriously get the impression that the filmmaker and critics are having a laugh at my expense. Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates) is such a film. It is highly acclaimed by film critics and considered the masterpiece of Sergei Parajanov, and it is without a doubt one of the most incomprehensible 90 minutes I have spent in my lifetime.

I mean this in all seriousness. I am unable to say whether or not this is a great film or some sort of gigantic prank played by the film snob community, because I have not a single clue as to what much of anything in this film means. Quite a bit of it reminds me of some of the classic old Monty Python skits like Confuse-a-Cat, or Pasolini’s The Third Test Match, or perhaps the Find the Fish film from the middle of The Meaning of Life.

Evidently, this film is a sort of depiction of the life of the Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat Nova. Rather than taking a literal interpretation of depicting his life, however, filmmaker Sergei Parajanov elects to attempt to recreate Nova’s inner life through images and selected pieces of the man’s poetry. All I can say is that if this is truly what the man’s inner life looked like, he was either constantly drugged, or one crazy mo-fo.

Sayat Nova doesn’t even try to be comprehensible. We see, for instance, a foot crushing some grapes. Then we see a fish between two pieces of driftwood. Then the fish turns into three fish, one flopping around. People stand as in tableaux, staring at the camera. A man lying on his back turns his head and faces the camera. Then the same thing happens again. A man stands in the middle of a church digging a hole with a shovel. He is suddenly surrounded by sheep. There are weird jump cuts and weirder dancing. Women come out in a line and flop tapestries on the ground. Then, a nun is hoisted up and down in the air on a rope while more tapestries are held behind her. A cherub in a picture frame rotates around while the picture frame swings back and forth.

I’ve said this about surrealist film in the past, and it’s just as true of art film—I have no idea how to take this seriously. It’s so completely out of nowhere, that my immediate reaction to it is to treat it very much like an extended Python skit and start laughing it just how ridiculous it really is. Undoubtedly someone finds this all very meaningful and powerful, but I can’t bring myself to think anything but how incredibly random it all is. How do I take this seriously?

I think the only way I might be able to get something out of this is with a massive amount of illicit chemicals, which is simply not in my nature. I didn’t even have a drink while watching this, although there were many times throughout when I thought about it. I don’t think alcohol would have helped me make sense of the film, but it at least would have made the pain of it, the utter nonsense of it, and the boredom caused by being constantly confused caused by it a little more palatable.

I can be happy that this is in the rearview mirror, but I’ll never get this time back, and I hold Sayat Nova personally responsible for my missing 88 minutes of my regularly scheduled life.

*** EDIT ***

So I've slept on it, and come to a realization. I have a hypothesis of how a film like this comes to be seen as a masterpiece of the style when it's really a weirdness souffle with psycho-cream on top. My thinking is that someone--a critic, a college film professor--tripping balls and out of his mind saw this and declared it the greatest thing he'd ever seen. Then strictly for fear of being seen as stupid everyone else followed suit rather than admit that this film makes less sense than a suit coat made of tortilla chips. So to hell with it; I'm saying it: this film makes no sense, and it's not worth the time to watch.

Why to watch Sayat Nova: It's incomprehensibly striking.
Why not to watch: It's strikingly incomprehensible.

Through the Looking Glass

Films: Neco z Alenky (Alice)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Some stories stick around forever. Every few years, it seems that a new version of “A Christmas Carol” shows up (although for my money, none will ever be better than the one with Alistair Sim) to retell a classic tale in a new way. The works of Lewis Carroll are similar in that respect. Generations of children have gone through the looking glass, and generations more will continue to go through. For as much hype as the Tim Burton version got, and for as stylized and bizarre as Burton’s version is, there is no stranger place than what is found down the rabbit hole of Jan Svankmajer’s Neco z Alenky (Alice).

I’m going to say this right off the top here: I’m not going to even try to summarize this film. Svankmajer’s vision here is completely off the charts weird, and yet completely accessible, provided one is at least remotely familiar with the story of Alice in Wonderland. It follows the basics of Carroll’s tale without feeling at all like it is in any way derivative of anyone else’s vision of this tale. There is a thick, creamy layer of surrealism in this film that makes for a very interesting viewing experience, to say the least.

Our only human character in this film is Alice herself (Kristyna Kohoutova). The other characters in the film are bizarre creations that sometimes approach the well-known characters from the story. Everything but Alice, and sometimes Alice herself, are depicted as stop-motion animated things—taxidermy animals, socks with over-large eyes, and cardboard cutouts. Alice is often depicted as a stop-motion character herself; parts of the film look as if Svankmajer removed a couple of frames per second, while other pares are obviously as animated as the non-human characters. Frequently, when Alice shrinks, she is depicted not as the actor playing her, but as a doll.

Alice, both the actress and the doll version, is a straw-haired little waif with that odd look that appears in so many Slavic children. She has a young/old face, still obviously a child, but with eyes that appear to have seen a great deal of privation. Her pale coloration and faded pink dress only add to the oddly washed-out look of a great deal of this film. Few things are vibrantly colored, and even those things (like the White Rabbit’s red coat) seem somehow faded.

The creatures of this disturbing wonderland are the stuff of nightmares. The best analog I can think of for these creatures is to think of them as the hybrid toy creations of the toy nemesis Sid in Toy Story. To truly get the effect of what these beasts look like, though, substitute taxidermy animals and skulls for toys. The White Rabbit, for instance, is a taxidermy rabbit with horrifyingly large googly eyes. A carriage is driven by some sort of taxidermied beast with a miniature human skull (a monkey skull?), with the carriage pulled by chickens with the skulls of different animals. For adults, these creatures are bizarre representations of real things. For children, these would be the things of nightmares. Of these, the White Rabbit is perhaps the most horrible, if only because he gets the most screen time. His teeth jut forward from his head, and the large gap in his chest constantly leaks sawdust, forcing him to ingest sawdust to replace the loss.

Svankmajer enjoys the idea of repetition. One continuing event, for instance, is Alice being unable to open drawers. Repeatedly, she pulls off the knob of a drawer and then is forced to wedge the drawer open with either her fingers or a knife. Nothing here is what it seems. Tin cans are opened to reveal live cockroaches, while pots reveal living, moving meat that crawls from place to place. Alice in fact enters Wonderland by crawling into a drawer that is far too small to hold her, revealing a much larger place once she gets inside. At one point, Alice returns to the room she begins in, although this new version is a doll house that appears at least on the outside to be made of stone building blocks.

This is not a film to watch without a basic idea of the story that spawned it. With no knowledge of Alice in Wonderland, this film is nothing more than a series of weird images. Svankmajer loses almost all of the intelligent wordplay of Carroll’s story, favoring visual storytelling. While this presents a very different vision of the story, it is not so different that it can’t be recognized.

A few things are worth noting here. First, the stop-motion animation is really good. While obviously animated and surreal, it comes across quite well. It’s not as polished as, say the more recent Aardman films like Chicken Run. Actually, it’s very reminiscent of Aardman’s first “Wallace and Gromit” short films. On the other hand, there is a disturbing trend throughout the film to show close-ups of Alice’s mouth. The entire film is narrated by Alice, who speaks the dialogue of the other characters. Each time she speaks a line of dialogue for someone else, we see her mouth in close up. Alice’s voice says, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” and then we see her mouth say, “said the Mad Hatter.” While I got used to the bizarre creatures and animation, I never got used to this.

Neco z Alenky plays like a full length short film. That’s as close of a description as I can think of for this film. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to see as an animated short created by a particularly visionary and gifted film student. It’s just close to 90 minutes long.

While visually fascinating, I got a bit tired of this film eventually. It’s too much to take in, and despite the fact that it is less than 90 minutes long, I felt overwhelmed by it at the end. It’s an experience and worth watching for its unique visual style. Don’t think about putting this in front of kids, though. And don’t look for the Cheshire Cat; he’s not in this.

Why to watch Neco z Alenky: A unique and singular vision of a unique and singular story.
Why not to watch: It’s a direct assault on your cerebral cortex through your eyes.

...And This Factory Makes Angst

Film: Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Good directors tell stories. Great directors try to do a lot more. When Michelangelo Antonioni decided to film in color for the first time with Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert), he did so with more in mind than simply using color. The goal was to use color for specific purposes, not simply have it on camera just to have it.

Antonioni naturally went to Monica Vitti, his muse, as the centerpiece of this film. She plays Giuliana, a woman who has undergone a nearly complete mental breakdown and who has not yet completely returned from it. After an accident, she spent a great deal of time in the hospital, where she also tried to kill herself. She feels disconnected to everything around her—her husband, her son, and the rest of her world. Giuliana is in the middle of an existential crisis, and it’s not clear at all if she’s climbing out of it or spiraling deeper into it.

She doesn’t have a very nice location in which to attempt her recovery. She exists in the middle of a bleak, industrial landscape in which it appears that everything that should grow has died. The trees are withered and dead and the landscape is dominated by huge factories. The film has no musical soundtrack; instead, the “music” is the hum of electricity, the whir of giant machines, and the clank of the factories. It is a completely industrialized world, a world of human creation and destruction. The factories pump their waste products into the nearby rivers, killing the wildlife—people complain that their food tastes of petroleum.

Giuliana’s personal life fares no better than her external world. Her husband, Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) runs one of the factories and is emotionally distant. Giuliana also seems separated somehow from her son (Valerio Bartoleschi). Into this bundle of angst and existential drama walks Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris), a colleague of Ugo. He is immediately attracted to Giuliana, and there seems to be some reciprocation, but she is too emotionally shattered to handle much. Eventually, she confesses her fears and anxiety to Zeller, who takes advantage of this moment of weakness for his own pleasure.

Like many exceptional films, Il Deserto Rosso is not a story with an actual plot (although it is not plotless), but is instead a character study. Giuliana has been thrust into this landscape of human creation, but it is a landscape inhospitable to humans. It is completely unnatural and it disconnects her from her natural surroundings. In this environment, since there appears to be no escape from it, Giuliana must learn to adapt herself—and this is where the problem comes in. She is unable to adapt to this human-made and simultaneously inhuman world of the modern day, in which clean ocean water is replaced by industrial sludge and factory smokestacks stand in for trees.

What is most impressive here, even though the focus of the film is on Giuliana as a character and her own (lack of) progression through her own illness, is Antonioni’s skillful use of color both to add meaning to particular shots and especially to focus the eye of the audience precisely where he wants it to go. Initially, especially, many of the landscapes may have just as well been filmed in black-and-white. They are soot-covered and virtually all black with flecks of white, and really look like black-and-white photography. And yet, in many of these shots, there is a single point of color—a flame from the top of a large chimney, or Giulianna in a resplendent green coat walking past the factories. Why green? Because at least at that point, Giuliana still exists in a natural world, even though her world is not natural. Her son, who will grow up in this world, is typically dressed in brown and beige. Later in the film, Giuliana dresses in far more neutral colors, switching back to green only at the end, when we also see actual living plants for the first time.

I also love that there is no soundtrack through the film, that our music is instead played by industrial machinery and passing ships. It adds another layer of disconnection from what we are used to both in our everyday life and in our expectation from a film. In essence, it forces us out of our natural world and into one that is artificial by design.

Sadly, this artificiality doesn’t work for everything. Richard Harris is obviously dubbed into the Italian; watching him speak, it’s evident that he’s speaking in English, and this is very disconcerting throughout.

This is the third Antonioni film I have watched, and I find that I like him more and more as I continue to watch his films. L’Avventura, which was alleged to be a revelation, left me somewhat cold. I liked Blow-Up more. Il Deserto Rosso is better still, and it makes me wonder if perhaps I shouldn’t go back and give L’Avventura another shot. No matter. Antonioni’s work here is superlative, and this is a film I will return to and watch very carefully in the future.

Why to watch Il Deserto Rosso: Antonioni…in color.
Why not to watch: The dub on Richard Harris looks really weird.

Emphasis on the Last Syllable

Film: L’Annee Derniere a Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

[Author’s note: For slightly more than 14 months, I have kept this blog rated PG-13. I have toned down my normally obscene self and kept the swearing to a minimum. I knew that someday I would come across a film that pulled my naturally profane nature to the surface. I didn’t know when it would happen; I only knew it would. Well, today I discovered the film that brought me at least temporarily out of my swearing shell.]


Years ago, my brother Tom had a book called “The 50 Worst Films of All Time.” Naturally, a book like that was going to be wrong on virtually every count; there are certainly at least 50 films worse than every film included in that book (proof? It didn’t include Manos: The Hands of Fate). But it was a fun book to flip through. Imagine my surprise to see at least four films from that book on The List: Zabriskie Point, Ivan the Terrible, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and today’s entry, L’Annee Derniere a Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad).

This is the first of these films that appear as both must-see and wretchedly bad that I have encountered thus far. Since its initial opening, Marienbad has received a number of positive reviews. It has a divided reaction from its viewing public. There are those who find it filled with meaning and great possibility (Roger Ebert, for one), and those who find it to be 95 minutes of smelling its own exhaust and applauding itself. I was curious to see which camp I’d fall into.

Well, now I know.

Marienbad is not the worst movie I have ever seen. It probably doesn’t rank in the bottom 100 of films I have seen in my lifetime, and that’s even if I don’t include what I watched on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It is, though, the most pretentious, filled with itself, navel-gazing piece of shit I have ever encountered. This movie is so filled with its own artistic pretense that it farts Picassos in waltz time.

Here’s what you get: we have three main characters and a bunch of other people wearing fancy clothes and standing around like J.C. Penney mannequins. Our first character is A (Delphine Seyrig, who pissed me off last year by starring in Jeanne Dielmann). A is nothing more than an attractive, sometimes mobile thing to hang slinky dresses and feathery dressing gowns on. She’s in a gigantic hotel with M (Sacha Pitoeff), her skull-faced maybe-husband. While they are supposed to be relaxing, what they really do is go to an occasional show, stand around, and stare at things. Also at the hotel is X (Giorgio Albertazzi), who claims to have had a passionate affair with A the previous year. It might have been at Marienbad. Or it might not have happened. Or something. Anyway, he spends the whole movie trying to convince her that they are madly in love with each other. She has no memory of this, because evidently in addition to being someone who moves exclusively in slow motion, she’s also a fucking amnesiac.

That might actually be interesting if the film had done anything with it. Instead, virtually the entire film consists of three things. First, X walks down the endless corridors and hallways of the giant, Cleveland-sized hotel and narrates it. When I say he narrates, what I mean is that he says the same thing over and over about corridors and empty rooms and walls and more corridors and rooms and doors and statues and people and things and air and fucking molecules and Jell-o pudding pops and fruit bats and…

Sorry. He doesn’t talk about fruit bats or Jell-o. Or air molecules.

Second, X talks to A in the second person, telling her all about what they did the previous year at another giant hotel with big fuckin’ statues that are possibly the same statues at this hotel or maybe not because maybe it never happened, and she certainly doesn’t have any memory of it. Regardless, he tells her all about her room there in great detail, and what she wore, and what they talked about (mostly the statues), and everything else. When he gets done with one of these monologues, she usually says that she doesn’t remember and that she’d like him to leave her alone, which he never does. Also during these scenes, we frequently change locations between sentences, and almost as frequently change times of day. Night time, day time, night time, lunch time, morning, night. These time changes do not appear to matter to the flow of the conversation.

Third, X and M play Nim. M always wins. Always.

That’s it. There’s 95 minutes of people standing next to each other, looking in opposite directions, and not moving while one of them talks about what they may have done or not done together or alone at a similar hotel that might have been this one or was possibly Marienbad when they were or weren’t there the year before.

Fuck!

I hated this film with the sort of passion I typically reserve for televangelists, people who interrupt constantly, and those motherfuckers who don’t use their turn signals. I want to punch everyone involved with this film. I want to punch this film in the celluloid equivalent of its uterus and/or testicles. I want to gender-neutralize it so that it cannot procreate and fill the world with its incomprehensible little art babies. It makes me feel like the narrator in Fight Club when he says he wanted to kill every panda that wouldn’t fuck to save its species. I want to let the original negatives rot and I want to film this happening, because that will be more interesting than this film.

I don’t mind art films. I genuinely don’t. Sometimes, they’re a lot of fun or at least have something interesting to say. This film was as fun and interesting as picking lint from my asscrack. Fuck this movie, fuck the people in it, and fuck Alain Resnais. I hold this film specifically responsible for why Americans think French people are snooty bastards and for why the French think Americans are incestuous, brainless primate sphincters.

50 Worst Films of All Time? Probably not. 50 Films I’d Like to Throat Punch and then Watch Drown in its Own Vomit? Top of the list, baby. Top of the list.

Why to watch L’Annee Derniere a Marienbad: With so many possible interpretations, it’s like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book.
Why not to watch: The adventure sucks.

Hedonism

Film: Satyricon
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.


I’m not a big fan of hedonism as a philosophy. On the surface, it looks like a pretty benign way of thinking. Pleasure for the sake of pleasure is, well, pleasing. At its fullest expression, though, it becomes indistinguishable from sociopathy. Essentially, at its extreme, hedonism is less about pleasurable experiences and far more about doing anything for one’s own pleasure regardless of consequence. On the more benign end of the spectrum, you get people doing things they like and carrying those pleasures to an extreme that affects them, but not others. At the other end, you get something along the lines of Salo.

Satyricon, otherwise known as Fellini Satyricon falls somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, and from what I can see, it leans further toward Salo than it does toward, say, The Big Chill. I had the damnedest time making sense of this film in any sort of context other than witnessing gaudy excess and personal pleasure at the cost of everything else (the personal pleasure of the characters on screen—certainly not mine in this case).

Satyricon is based on what is believed to be the first ever novel, or at least the first one of which fragments have survived. Fellini made this film to match what was left of the original document—the film is similarly fragmented, ending one scene and skipping ahead to the next without any sort of transition between. In fact, the film ends in mid-sentence much like the surviving manuscript.

The film, which evidently takes place at the height of Roman decadence, vaguely tells the tale of Encolpio (Martin Potter). Encolpio is obsessively infatuated with Gitone (Max Born in his one and only film role), his young male slave. Sadly for Encolpio, Gitone has been sold to a flamboyant actor (Fanfulla) by his roommate, Ascilto (Hiram Keller). Encolpio goes to get his slave/sex partner back, and then fights with Ascilto. The two decide to part ways, allowing Gitone to choose where he’ll go. He goes off with Ascilto, leaving Encolpio heartbroken and ready to commit suicide until an earthquake intervenes.

Scene shift. Encolpio meets the poet Eumolpus (Salvo Randone) in a gallery and the two head off to the estate of a wealthy man giving a banquet. The man, Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), considers himself a poet even though he has no real skill (according to Eumolpus). The two poets have a falling out, and then Trimalchio stages his own funeral. We get a little vignette about a widow using her husband’s body to save the life of a young soldier.

Scene shift. Encolpio is now a prisoner aboard a slave ship. Gitone and Ascilto are there as well. Forced to fight the owner of the ship in combat, Encolpio is instead spared because of his looks, and then forced to marry the man, Lichas (Alain Cuny), in a ceremony aboard the ship’s deck. Sadly for Lichas, the current Caesar is overthrown and he is beheaded, once again allowing Encolpio to chase after Gitone and other young boys.

In the struggle for power, a man and his wife commit suicide rather than allow their property to be handed over to the new Caesar. Ascilto and Encolpio arrive at the house and find a willing slave girl still there, so they spend a little quality time with her, leaving only when the soldiers of the new Caesar arrive and burn the bodies of the former masters.

Scene shift. Encolpio and Ascilto meet a caravan headed to an oracle. The people in the caravan are hoping that the oracle, a hermaphroditic albino child, can cure their mistress of her nymphomania. Until they reach the oracle, though, the woman’s husband pays the two men to keep his wife satisfied. To help maintain some semblance of order in the caravan, the woman is tied down in the cart, and left tied down during the “satisfy my wife” sessions. Eventually, they reach the oracle, and decide to kidnap the child by killing his keepers. However, the child can’t stand the heat or sun of the desert and dies, and they then kill the man who persuaded them to commit the kidnapping.

Scene shift. Encolpio is thrown into the den of the Minotaur, who takes pity on him and refuses to kill him. As a reward (punishment?), he is told to get busy with Ariadne, a pretty young maiden, while a crowd watches. He can’t, and is publically humiliated. He then discovers his old friend Eumolpus, who is now ridiculously wealthy and corrupted. He suggests a sea voyage to the Garden of Delights to restore Encolpio’s manhood, but this doesn’t work.

And on and on. Eventually, Ascilto is killed by a ferryman, and Eumolpus dies, leaving his fortune to anyone who is willing to devour his corpse.

Seriously, what the hell?

I have no idea how to react to this film. Fellini has a thing for physical freaks and disturbing images, and nowhere does he indulge in that more than in this film. It’s almost as if he’s giving in to his own hedonistic urges at the expense of the audience’s sanity or enjoyment. I felt assaulted by this film, like it was seeing if it could cause me some sort of psychic damage during its running time.

I’m certain that someone wiser, worldlier, or more scholarly could wax rhapsodic about the true value of Satyricon, but unfortunately, you’re stuck with me. From where I’m standing, this film was a pointless excursion in excess, a film about nothing but itself. It left me with nothing but an empty feeling, a touch of queasiness, and the faint beginnings of a whanging headache. It feels like waking up after sleeping a little too long and having a slight metallic taste in the back of one’s throat. It’s both unpleasant and completely unexplainable.

Screw you, Fellini!

Why to watch Satyricon: You’ve got time to kill and a sense of joy in hurting your own brain.
Why not to watch: It not only makes no sense, it’s ugly to watch.