December 16:Wreck-It Ralph (2012 -- Rich Moore)

★★★

October 17: The Leopard/Il gattopardo (1963 -- Luchino Visconti)

October 15: Le Notti Bianche (1957 -- Luchino Visconti)

★★★★

The ending of Le notti bianchi was no surprise to me since I was thinking of Brief Encounter all the way through.  The movie is a scaled-down, black-and-white love story propelled by the dynamic of two characters managing a love attraction that the man is ready to act on but that the woman has reservations about.  The woman’s reservations triumph and the man is left alone.  I saw it coming.

But that’s a glib comparison because Le notti bianche emerges naturally from Visconti’s career and because it moves to a more philosophical statement than the sad romance of Brief Encounter.  In the Lean film, we follow Laura’s perspective more than we do Dr. Harvey’s, and the sadness we feel at the end stems from our understanding of the dreary, middle class, married life that Laura is returning to.  Le notti bianche, though, follows Mario’s perspective, and his character trajectory leads to a philosophical statement rather than a personal disappointment as he goes from loneliness to hope for human contact and back to loneliness.  Mario’s struggle is an existential one, a desire not to be alone that is frustrated by a world of individual agency rather than communal.  And Mario’s philosophical voyage bears the mark of Visconti’s neorealist roots.  The world in Italian neorealism oppresses and frustrates characters who struggle against it in the same way Mario’s efforts are thwarted by the world of Le notti bianche.  Through no fault of his own, Mario’s best efforts are unable to overcome the isolated, individual situation he confronts.

It’s also not hard to find neorealist imagery within the stark artificiality of Le notti bianche.  The film’s elaborate set, though clearly artificial, includes bombed and burned out buildings that would look fine in Open City, and the film spends time in working class neighborhoods peopled by characters who work hard to transcend their circumstances.  Natalia’s aged grandmother repairs rugs and hosts lodgers to make ends meet, and the prostitute who continually solicits Mario eventually gives in to her frustration and calls out the thugs to beat him though she soon recovers her basic sense of human fairness.  She’s a neorealist figure.  And Mario’s landlady creates a whole community with her bustle and shouting as she tries to get Mario out of bed in the morning and out the door.  She’s a lower-class figure of enormous charisma.  We see even more energy in the dance sequence at the working class dance hall when the hipsters gyrate frantically to Bill Haley, eventually catching up Mario and Natalia in their energy.  Even the forlorn dog that is Mario’s only friend at the beginning and the end of the movie hearkens to films like Umberto D.  So despite the unlikely theatricality in Le notti bianche, there is more than a little neorealism.

Natalia also hearkens back to an earlier moment in Visconti’s career, Senso.  Livia, the obsessed heroine of that film, drives most of the action in that film with her monomaniacal fixation on Franz.  Her obsessive, passionate love for him compels her to ignore the duties and dangers around her as she pursues the object of her love.  Three years later, Visconti’s Natalia does the same thing in Le notti bianche.  Despite the oppressive, neorealist world of the film, Natalia dedicates herself to a man she doesn’t fully know, and she ignores everything around her, including her budding love for Mario, in fixation on a near stranger who left her a year ago, the Lodger.  One would expect that such a naïve love would only find neorealist frustration, but Le notti bianchi instead rewards her obsessiveness by reuniting her with the object of her affection.  However, the film must do this because its real focus is Mario.  The message here isn’t that obsessive love gets rewarded, because the focus of the film isn’t on Natalia.  Instead, the film shows how Natalia’s abandoning Mario leaves the main character still alone and victim to the vagaries of an arbitrary and uncaring world.  These philosophical implications prevent Le notti bianche from being mere melodrama and move it into something more profound.

Le notti bianche is a gem.  Staged and artificial, Visconti’s film still honors its neorealist roots while transforming that into portrayal of man alone in the world.  It's far more than a story of frustrated love.

October 14: Senso (1954 -- Luchino Visconti)

★★★★

When I think of Visconti, I think of rich visuals, and that’s right on the money with Senso.  The film starts in the gilded La Fenice, replete with candle light and lavish mid-1800s costumes, and then it moves out to sweeping views of Venetian plazas and canalways that Livia walks along as Visconti paints the stained walls with light.  Some shots resemble a David Lean image with a small figure slowly moving through a large landscape.  

The personal interiors are no less impressive.  Livia’s homes have classical staircases and frescoes, which themselves add interest and content to the film, and her bedrooms are furnished with swags of cloth, rich upholstery, and ornate items.  Throughout, mirrors expand the space in the frame while creating more visual interest.   There’s a similar attention to detail, though of a different sort, with respect to Franz.  While Livia’s rooms are always rich, tasteful and arranged, Franz’s quarters are usually simple and disorderly, as at the military barracks.  When Franz has his own apartment, it’s furnished with items that seem slightly crass and are tossed about in a haphazard manner, visual indications of the difference in background between him and Livia.  In fact, Visconti’s attention to detail in Senso goes beyond finding props appropriate for the characters and into the settings being expressions of the characters.  In the way he uses the settings of the film to develop the characters rather than merely reflect them, Visconti reminds me of Soderbergh in Erin Brockovitch and Magic Mike. The settings in all these films communicate information that's important to the characters rather than simply being suitable.

Not only does Visconti’s camera love the public and private spaces, but it also lingers appreciatively on his actors.  At La Fenice, Alida Valli looks like an impossibly perfect statue that moves as she wears her stiff, gauzy wrap, and Farley Granger’s impeccable white uniform shows not a wrinkle or a stain.  The two move like characters from a dream.  Later, we see them in more intimate surroundings, slightly disheveled and lounging comfortably or touching while the camera positions us as part of the intimacy.  This cinematography, too, keeps us involved with the two protagonists.

All the intimacy and beauty in Senso make its terrible characters doubly shocking.  Franz is a ladies’ man and a con from early on.  While we share Livia’s initial trust and attraction to him, we soon begin to have doubts as we find he’s lied about having her cousin Roberto exiled and, when he tosses her lock of hair in order to pawn its expensive container, we have real doubts.  He’s soon missing their rendez-vous, and we realize he’s not interested in her.  Livia, however, doesn’t, and it’s at this point that we begin to sense something amiss with her, too.  Her love for Franz becomes so obsessive that she ignores society, nationality, politics and even family in her pursuit of him.  When he makes a gallant appearance at her countryside estate, she even gives him the money entrusted to her by Roberto to fund the partisan resistance to the Austrians.  The low point of her self-debasement, and his abuse of her, comes when she flees to his apartment and he reproaches her, telling her how he’s been using her before throwing her out.  Furious, she denounces his evasion of military service, and he’s executed.  There is little in these two characters to match the beauty of their surroundings.

With such extremity, it’s not hard to see opera in the background of Senso.  The film starts in an opera house, and the intense, one-dimensional emotions have an operatic feel.  Much of the movie is over-the-top, from the military battles through the ornate scenery and the stakes for the lovers.  And the film is touching in the way opera can be, too, with its heightened sense of love and dark betrayal leading to death and madness.

October 11: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 -- Don Siegel)

October 8: Godzilla/Gojira (1954 -- Ishirô Honda)

★★★★

It’s clearly not reading too much into the film to see it Godzilla as about Japanese concerns with nuclear weapons.  There’s a clear reference to the Daigo Maru incident at the beginning of the movie, scientists amply warn and speculate about H-bomb testing, Godzilla leaves radioactive footprints and Serizawa’s ethical qualms about the Oxygen Destroyer parallel the same concerns that the early atomic researchers famously had.  Of course, they made one decision, and Serizawa made another.  Add all this to the contemporaneous revelations about the extent of atomic bomb devastation in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and there’s a definite concern here with nuclear weaponry in the nuclear age.

But Godzilla is also a thriller with a big beast, and there are some familiar elements here.  For one, the movie has an easily recognized, engaging structure.  It starts with a big disaster like many thrillers do today, and we’re drawn into the film the same way Spielberg draws us into Jaws, showing us effects and glimpses of the beast before we get the full impact of what we’re dealing with.  And Godzilla falls somewhere between Kong and the shark in Jaws as a movie device – Godzilla’s path of death and destruction leave us without the sympathy we have for Kong, but the dinosaur at least represents an idea in Godzilla, unlike the shark in Jaws, who functions only as a thrill plot device.

Godzilla puts some familiar characters around its monster, too.  There is a young couple to give us a sympathetic point in the film, just like we have in King Kong and Island of Lost Souls.  And like in those two films, the couple doesn’t develop the theme of the movie a lot.  The idea content, instead, comes from leadership figures; in Godzilla, the leaders are the two scientists.  One scientist thinks in the intellectual world where Godzilla is a unique zoological specimen that should be studied, and the other scientist more pragmatically realizes that science has an effect on the real world and that such effects should factor into research.  With the radiation monster on the rampage, Godzilla urges prudence through the portrayal of its scientists.  In King Kong and Island, too, the leader figures develop the intellectual themes of the movies: the sociopathic director Carl Denham shows how destructive obsession can be, and the mad Dr. Moreau epitomizes the brutal in the human.  In all three films, a young couple gives us a someone to identify, but it’s the scientist/leader figures who lie at the center of significance.

It’s interesting that, twenty years after Island and King Kong, Godzilla uses a similar cast of characters to develop its ideas.  While Ishirô Honda couldn't  achieve the thrill effects of King Kong or Island, all three of these films focus on an idea and develop that idea using a similar rhetorical structure.

October 7: Island of Lost Souls (1932 -- Erle C. Kenton)

★★★

It’s a year before King Kong, and Island of Lost Souls already has the tension of civilized vs savage, human vs animal, and moral vs immoral.  And it’s already hard to figure out what falls into which category.

Island of Lost Souls doesn’t function at all like King Kong.  Rather than the latter’s nonstop action and special effects thrills, Island is the dark, brooding, moody development of an idea.  We get the theme from a very early shot in the movie.  The shipwreck survivor wakes up and, in a close-up of his hairy, unshaven face, stares directly into the camera with his hand clutched beside him.  This scene gives us the rest of the film in a single shot, the eerie yet challenging feeling created by Edward’s looking directly at us, and the ambiguity of animal in human in his face.  This feral quality is the tension – and thrill – of the movie.

Like in Kong, the animal has many civilized, human traits in Island.  The tribe of beings on Dr. Moreau’s island started as biological animals but have had their human qualities heightened.  In addition, their law prohibits bloodshed; “Are we not men?” they intone.  Dog/human M’ling goes so far as to sacrifice himself for the doctor, and cat/Lota feels human love for Edward and sacrifices herself for him as well.  Like in the case of Kong, these two character’s love and dedication are more than we see from the main human characters.  Moreau’s subjects look much like animals and respond to animal impulses to some extent, but their behavior has major elements of civilization and humanity.

Appearances notwithstanding, the most savage in both Kong and Island are the human characters in charge.  Like the sociopathic Carl Denham in Kong, Moreau cares little for humanity or morality.  He routinely tortures animals in the name of improving them by making them more human, and he smugly manipulates all who come under his influence including his aide, Montgomery, Parker, and later Ruth and Donahue.  When Lota's animal-like nails reveal her origin, the thwarted Moreau matter-of-factly decides to take her back to the House of Pain to remove them.  Like Denham, Moreau believes his goals are so important that he doesn't have to be worried by mere mortal concerns. "Mr. Parker, do you know what it means to feel like God?" he asks.  It's clear that these two leaders are biologically human but more like animals on the level of morality.

Island, like Kong, provides us with a center to identify with, a heterosexual couple with conventional ideas of humanity.  But the films undercut their normative standards by implicating the couples in the tragedy surrounding them.  It's unclear that Ann Darrrow ever saw Kong for the smitten knight he was; we don't see her sympathize or respond to Kong at all aside from screams.  Likewise, the early shot of Edward as an animal suggests that, just as animals have humanity in them, so do people have animal in them.  And since the audience identifies with Edward as a moral center, Island also implies we have some animal in us....in the same way we kill Kong with our planes and weapons where the allosaurus and other dinosaurs have failed.

Despite all these similarities, there's ultimately a justice in Island that doesn't happen in Kong.  The good guy dies in Kong and Denham gets off free, blaming Ann for terrible turn of events.  It's a sad ending that produces neither wisdom nor catharsis.  In Island, though, Moreau breaks one of his own laws when he orders Ouran to kill Captain Donahue, and the animal creations then realize that their laws are artificial constructs rather than real laws.  In a turn of dramatic justice, the sinner is punished as the tribe sets upon Moreau and the innocent escape.  Island's investigation of morality ultimately rewards the oppressed, punishes the oppressor, and lets the innocent off.  Except for the suggestion that there may ultimately be some culpability in even the innocent.

Kenton uses quite a few cinematic elements in developing his theme.  The makeup in Island is rightfully famous, but there is much to be said for its expressionist elements, too.  At one point, Moreau stands at a corner and tells Parker that he hopes the man sleeps well.  As Moreau speaks, he steps back from full light into shadow, adding an ominous dimension to the line.  We also find contrasty lighting throughout the film with ample use of the shadows of venetian blind shadows and palm leaves.  In one scene, the menacing shadow of Ouran dominates Parker and Ruth.  The lighting, composition and imagery of Island create a mood that complements the theme and creates a very appropriate tone.

People think of Island of Lost Souls as an early horry film, but film is interested in more than genre.  Seen with the hit that followed this film, King Kong, Island is participating in a contemporary interest in specifying what is meant by the word human and civilized.  And the movie raises important questions about research, particularly research on living creatures, and about the assumptions of superiority that science can assume.