Identification of a Woman (Antonioni, 1982) – 8/10

If the protagonists presented in the works of Michelangelo Antonioni seem almost like apparitions, like figures that hover desolately above and disengaged from some facet of the films’ compositional or sociocultural arrangements, it’s with good reason:  They practically are.  Antonioni is one who bequeathed to the cinema gifts of portentous proportion, each of his film a coalesced arras of the cerebral and the majestic.  Usually adorned with a centripetal character emphasis—be it consciously acknowledged or insidiously impacting—pieces like L’avventura (or any installment of the “alienation trilogy,” really) Il deserto rosso, Zabriskie Point, and The Passenger all establish, at the very least, a communal, baseline dynamism between human ecology and environmental demand.  Characters come dressed with varying degrees of self-awareness, sure, but there’s always a sense that they’re never fully overcome by the gravity of their exacting surroundings.

And yet, each offering portends of different personal and cultural pitfalls, as the director himself constantly adapted his style to epochal permutations and modish social and artistic demands.  Antonioni realized that ennui is not simply ennui—that even the individual persona is an ever-evolving mechanism at the mercy of emotion, perception, feeling, and circumstance.  It’s this notion that propelled some of the (r)evolutionary shifts in the filmmaker’s oeuvre, and the results materialized relevant due to his insistence on cultural and formal acuity; his films were those of the moment, both in terms of unseen but omnipresent concerns and his personal synchronization to them.  Whereas his masterwork—well, one of them anyway—L’avventurapresented pervading malaise and apathy as if they were symptomatic of the bourgeoisie condition, Il deserto rosso, in a leitmotif far ahead of its time, delineated how humans, thanks to the natural perversions accorded by relentless industrialism, have taken over the reigns of our own biological impetuses.  The common thread of sweeping change and the individual effect seems to pervade each of his pieces, only in their own organic applications.

More overtly fawning verbosity here.

Harakiri (Kobayashi, 1962) – 9/10

At the heart of Harakiri is an exploration of environmental economy, one that goes beyond a merely corporeal interpretation of the word and conceptualizes circumstance as if it were a physical state.  Of course, the anxious, surveyingly supple frames of director Masaki Kobayashi adroitly caress the architectural impositions of the picture’s Edo milieus—most notably the interior textures and ornate rigidity of the house of lyi, the samurai homestead from which the narrative threads unspool—but the story is as vested in where one stands situationally as it is in the agency of physical surroundings.  Kobayashi exercises a mosaicist’s hand in conflating these arenas, employing the hallowed innards of the castle as a foundation on which to lay his perceptionally piecemeal narrative.

Harakiri is a work of notable narrative conceit, as its story is bookended by Kobayashi showing its happenings being chronicled in an event log—a gesture meant to evince the story, as we’ll eventually learn, with notions of historical censorship, factual perversion, and traditional favorance.  At first this motif reads mostly as innocuous, with the journal’s transcription acting as a device that accords the film’s temporal slide into the as-stated accounts of May 16^th, 1630.  Though beginning as a day of an uneventful if not dogmatic tribute (it’s stated that some trout caught within the lyi domain were subsequently presented to the clan as a gift—exciting stuff), the afternoon winds carry with them a suspiciously laconic and expressively distant ronin, Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai).  The samurai wishes to commit the eponymous evisceration within a ritualistically suitable context; that is, the lyi castle is to be, he hopes, but decadent, spiritually acceptable frame for his mortal liberation, his suicidal centerpiece.  But before the honorable final rite can be consummated, those native to this Edo backdrop wish to impart a cautionary tale on Tsugumo, a Hiroshima transplant.  Eliciting a eulogistic tenor for violence—which, of course, is meant as a facetiously corrosive lamentation for the residual terrors bequeathed upon a nation in the shadow of the Second World War—Kageyu Saito (Kageyu Saito) warns the pitiful ronin that a surplus of masterless swordsman have recently infested the area, extorting those occupationally sound by requesting the honor of committing harakiri but balking when offered monetary or vocational compensation.  Master Tsugumo is even regaled, in specific detail, the events of wayward warrior poseur, Motome Chijiiwa (Akira Ishihama), and how the lyi clan cruelly upheld its own honor in making him disembowel himself with but the blunt, bending tip of an—in a world where swords evoke one’s soul—emasculatingly impersonal bamboo blade.

These initial ramblings come full-circle here.

Even Dwarfs Started Small (Herzog, 1970) – 6/10

As typified by the contextual abstraction of his second feature film, the 1970 release Even Dwarfs Started Small, Werner Herzog has always channeled his works through elisions of bald cultural depictions, favoring to evoke societal arbitraries, absurdities even, by presenting them in a light that’s germane in its desultoriness. Later in his oeuvre, the German-born director would further build upon such conventionally defiant gestures, as even his films with varying degrees of documentarian interest – such as Fata Morgana, Lessons in Darkness, or even the final chapter of this year’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams – seemed to be conceived within an unseen, aeriform dimension between reality and the phantasmal. Rather than let the perceived actualities of life, and moreover art and film, dictate his pieces’ narrative and ideological unfurling, Herzog tends to revel in circumstantial hypotheticals, as he allows his cinema to underscore our increasingly evolved need of contextual frameworks for our social and survivalistic drives, no matter how silly (religion) or inconveniencing (bureaucracy) they may ultimately be.

And the rest.

Melancholia (Von Trier, 2011) – 8/10

Though often labeled as a film orbiting about depression and its personal and interpersonal effects, Lars von Trier’s insidiously meditative Melancholia exudes a tenor far more aligned with a different psychological principle, expectation, and how it shapes our perspective on social and mortal will.  As humans, we’re hard-wired to precognize nature’s more malice stimuli.  We’re fastened with carnally-evolved mechanisms – which were cinematically evoked to their most darkly humorous and disorientingly lysergic depths in von Trier’s own Antichrist – that come loaded with the capacity to biologically subvert our bearings of social credence.  But Antichrist dealt with our nervous system’s penchant for misfiring; it posited grief as an impetus for war between sensorial agency and intangibles of conscious living: cultural constructs, emotional lenity, social tact, and so on.  Melancholia too explores our ambit of physical reflexivity, only on a more sweepingly felt, elegiac level.  You see, from the picture’s onset we learn that the Earth is going to be destroyed, reduced to smoldering ash by a planet tenfold in size.  The connate weight of human transience is at first blurred in the edges of this opening, only coming into focus later when refracted through the familial aperture of Justine (Kirsten Dunst), her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and her son Leo (Cameron Spurr).

Perhaps the most affectively lingering segment of the picture is its eight-minute prologue, a series of painterly tableaus bearing subjects who move with glacial kinesis.  (Think the moving-picture elements of Antichrist, only with more effusive symbolism.)  These near-still entities elicit not only an apprehension for compositional beauty but also the cosmically languid pace of human fervor, a dichotomy that at once extols our evolutionary endowments while acknowledging the overall triviality of our cultivated efforts.  Von Trier sequences these textural depictions in a mesmerizing rhythm, stripping them of any temporal or ecological context and allowing them to exist, however fleetingly, as beauteous articles strewn across a crumbling campus.  Sure, we can later contextualize them within the narrative, later attempt to arrange and decipher them a la Raul Ruiz’s Hypothesis of a Stolen Painting – but to what end?  There’s a certain majesty in the absurdity of the prologue, a certain poeticism in the notion that universal grandeur is beyond our meager comprehension.  The stilted imagery and the ever-climbing crescendos of the accompanying score act as a death rattle for humanity’s accomplishments, a flourish meant not to evoke despair but our fragility and insignificance in the shadow of space eternal.

Clicky, clicky.

The Phantom Carriage (Sjöström, 1921) – 7/10

Victor Sjöström is a filmmaker with a penchant for delving into his characters’ emotional apogees—the moments in their lives in which they’ve drifted so distantly from their normative bearings that they come to question the value of human life.  In exploring such extremes, Sjöström often leans on exploiting the vulnerabilities inherent to familial agency, positing unprecedented loss and unmet expectation as incitations to abandon one’s mental and moral faculties.  Such events are rarely immediate; rather, misfortune comes to be manifested through social and circumstantial amassment, as the Swedish pioneer demonstrates a grasp on the delicate, overlaying folds of our changing ecological fabrics.  It’s in these films—such as 1917′s A Man There Was or 1924′s He Who Gets Slapped—that he crafts elegies for what could have been, juxtaposing the romantic transience of dreams against the harsh gravities of reality.

The Phantom Carriage is a work defined by this there-but-for-fortune tenor, as Sjöström employs alcoholism, and one’s proximity to it, as a way to explicate both the contagious nature of behavior and the pungent remains of dreams left to rot.  At the heart of the film is David Holm (Sjöström himself), an addict who perpetually turns to the bottle as a way to alleviate his hydra-headed social hang-ups.  A vertiginous relationship exists between Holm and the drink, as he relies on its effects as not only a social agent—which gives way to home-life woes, naturally—but also as his primary but delusive modality for emotional catharsis.  In this, Holm’s path explores the ambit of one man’s torturous existence, allowing him to glimpse the hellish effects of his actions in a manner that speaks to the connectedness of the human condition—how the consequences of others’ actions shaped him, and how his current state shapes that of others.  And by using this sot as a narrative hub, Sjöström is able to meld his universe through the perspective-specific recollections of a handful of players, evincing an adroit understanding for the synergistic intricacies of the individual persona.  

For more of this too-close-to-home assessment, go here.

Carlos (Assayas, 2010) – 5/10

“Behind every bullet we fire, there will be an idea,” pontificates Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (Édgar Ramírez) within a breath’s reach of declaring, with a wholly undeserved sense of triumph, his eponymous nom de guerre, Carlos, for the first time.  This particularly self-aggrandizing utterance does more than act as an exercise in rhetoric—one that’s as imperatively slanted as it is idealistically sophomoric—for it also functions as a neat encapsulation of the less-disingenuous-than-credulous filter through which the so-labeled “Peruvian playboy” views the Zionist and capitalist exorcisms he fights so verily for. You see, Carlos is a romantic revolutionist; he’s ever-ready to act, yes, but he’s a man more concerned with the modish sheen of activism than he is with understanding the causes and nuances of bureaucratically entrenched policies.

Unfortunately, the narrative makeup of Olivier Assayas’s latest may be modeled a bit too closely to its subject’s perfunctory take on politics.  Both the aforementioned character and the film as a whole seem accordantly defined by superficiality, with neither exacting enough exegetic force to disrupt the topic’s implicative surface tension.  Instead, Carlos exists on a corneal plane, gallantly chronicling the terrorist’s most famously fecund years without ever traversing potential sociocultural underpinnings.  Impressive is the way that Assayas rhymes his protagonist’s fleeting conscience with a flippant emphasis on mortality, shuffling through scenes expediently in order to convey the fervor of fusillades, executions, and the like.  And yet, there’s a hollowness to both the literal and metaphoric shells we see fired onscreen.  These disruptive discharges behave less in an ecologically Newtowian sense—that is, they don’t exist within a cerebrally-felt environment, and leave naught that consequentially ramifies—than they do in an immediate, reflexive one.  In this, it’s not ideas that propel the film’s featured projectiles or its aesthetic flourishes; rather, it’s a frantically organic need for improvisation that pushes the action, one that’s apropos not only to criminal operations but also, as is the case here, rogue filmmaking.

Five (count ‘em five!) more grafs here.

3 Women (Altman, 1977) – 7/10

Be it intended as primordial or amniotic, nourishing or sanguine, the oft-felt presence of liquids in Robert Altman’s 3 Women is but one analogous formal nod to the idea that, throughout all human life–perhaps especially, as evoked by the title, that of women–a connectivity exists that blurs our sense of individual character.  Shot through a veil of dream-inspired ambiguity, Altman weaves a work that purposefully eschews a logical interpretation or deconstruction of its events, favoring instead to let it exist within a state of nebulous distinction.  But in spite of this purported air of impenetrableness, it’s still possible to breakdown the piece’s oneiric flourishes and unearth its creator’s still-relevant social innuendos.  Rife with symbolic and narrative layering, the film shows an artist with a definitive vision for conveying progress and power struggles as things corrosive to our grasp on personal identities.

The titular trio of the film represents but a microcosm of a larger implicative picture, with their link to each other taking the form of a social and maturational mis en abyme.  From the opening scene–which features a glacially moving low-shot that seems to glide across the surface of a therapeutic pool for the elderly, at once establishing a dynamic of human bodies and personal gravities whilst arranging life, as we so often do, within a linearly temporal context–Altman furnishes his picture with themes of social orientation and arrangement.  When we’re introduced to Pinky (Woman 1 played by Sissy Spacek) during her first day working at the aforementioned clinic for the aged, she’s but an impulsive naiveté, an on-the-nose personification of puerile individuality.  It’s after meeting her mostly-unknowing mentor, Millie (Woman 2, Shelley Duvall), that she begins shedding her jejune shrillness, turning what’s initially a case of idolism into a warped pattern of self-redesign.  But this is just a stitch in the film’s matryoshka fabric.  Just as genealogy is perpetuated throughout generations of biological coupling, behavior, natural imperatives notwithstanding, also follows a sequence of sociocultural pairings and impressions.  Pinky, through proximity and inexperience, comes to imitate Millie, who, due to media influences and accordant expectations, molds herself into something of a cosmopolitan poseur.  In this, Altman employs one of myriad examples concerning perceptional dualities, as he underscores the battle between personal projection and interpersonal repute.

Read the rest here.