March 6: Martyrs of Love/Mucedníci lásky (1967 -- Jan Němec)

★★★★★

Here is a beautiful little film in the mannered, sweet vocabulary of the silent era, a film that invests in that vocabulary and uses it to communicate rather than taking it just as a formal affectation.  Jan Němec uses sentimentality, gentle irony, caricature and slapstick humor to characterize his three martyrs of love and create a gentle yet experimental portrait of lovable characters who fail at love.

Martyrs of Love consists of three stories.  In the first, The Junior Clerk’s Temptation, a nerdy office worker finds himself restless and unable to stay at home one evening and decides to go out on the town in search of excitement.  With his black jacket, white gloves and bowler, the clerk echoes Charlie Chaplin, and he has some of the hapless Little Tramp’s ineptness.  Naturally, he’s widely ignored at the bars until they close, at which point a woman asks him if he has any liquor at home.  She and two friends go to his place to party, drink his alcohol, and one couple has passionate sex while the clerk’s woman passes out.  It's just what would happen to the Little Tramp.

In Němec’s hands, though, The Junior Clerk’s Temptation goes beyond the conventions of silents.  As the clerk is initially restless at home, visions of leggy women preoccupy him as a whining jazz score animates the scene, and the film quickly takes the narrative pace of a boozy night on the town.  Miroslav Ondrícek’s black-and-white cinematography exploits the sparkle of artificial light and scenes of choreographed dancing to create images of the bohemian nightlife that attract the clerk.  But of course, for all the allure of that life, the clerk ends up back at his office the next day with only his dreams and memories.

The same mix of dreamy whimsy informs Anastasia’s Dream, the tale of the second martyr. Němec’s wit is

quickly apparent in this section.  In contrast to the male clerk dressed in black, the woman here wears a white dress.  And rather than jazz in a nightclub, we encounter classical music in an elegant, baroque palace.  In keeping with the thematic continuity of the film, though, the innocent maid Anastasia can only gaze longingly at her beloved soprano soloist, discovering awkwardly soon after the performance that he already has a companion.  The mood of this section is dreamlike throughout, from the quiet soundtrack in the palace to the surreal narrative as Anastasia jilts the officer at her military wedding finds herself seduced by a gypsy with a guitar on the train.  Reality intrudes at the end of section as she comes full circle as a server with a tray on a train.  The section has the marvelous cohesion of a reverie.

While the clerk wears black and Anastasia white, the main character of the third section, Orphan Rudolf’s Adventure, wears grey.  This meta-cinematic costuming highlights the cinematic self-conscious throughout Martyrs of Love.  In this third section, it’s the silents’ slapstick humor that predominates.  Chaos reigns as a family plays musical instruments badly, chases each other, trips over each other and breaks records over each other’s heads.  The merriment is so great that that when the family discovers that the man they thought was Jacob is, in fact, the orphan Rudolf, they burst into laughter and continue their celebration.  On imagines that, for an orphan, finding such a family would be wonderful, but since Martyrs of Love is about loss as portrayed in the sweet sentimentality of silent film language, Rudolf eventually finds himself alone again.

Martyrs of Love doesn't end with the final story.  Instead,  first the clerk, then Anastasia, appear and walk slowly up a hill to join the disappointed Rudolf.  Black, white and grey assemble and then walk off together into a woods.  In this way, this wonderful tribute to the power of silent film gives us a fitting end to Němec’s experimental appropriation of the language.

March 5: Diamonds of the Night/Démanty noci (1964 -- Jan Němec)

★★★★★

Diamonds of the Night is an unexpectedly beautiful, intense film that shows Jan Němec's control of the medium from his first feature.  Short, it consists of little story: Two prisoners on the way to a concentration camp escape the train and run for their lives.  The film opens abruptly with shots and two men running and stumbling up a hill as fast as they can.  The tracking camera is close in as we hear their feet in the brush, the shots echoing behind them and their fast, tiring breathing.  The scene runs for minutes, and we catch glimpses of them helping each other get away.

The visceral intensity of Diamonds comes from such close, physical detail.  The first boy wears only a loose-fitting, thin shirt that offers little protection from the snags and needles of the conifer forest they escape into, and every time he falls or snags on a stick, we viewers wince.  And the boy has no shoes, no protection from the cold, wet elements of the forest.  The second, taller escapee has a coat and ill-fitting shoes that hurt his feet, and he lumbers as though he is walking in pain.  As the weather varies from cold to wet, the boys take us through their intensely physical trials.

But Němec introduces great beauty into this suffering.  Jaroslav Kucera’s black-and-white cinematography makes the boys’ forest a palette of blacks, whites and grays that flicker and shift as the camera looks up at the leaves overhead or in front of the young men to the branches in their path.   The woods become a multi-toned blur, too, when the camera pans the woods as the boys run.  Near starvation, the escapees come to a village, and Kucera’s camera captures the round face of a farm woman with the even light of portraiture.  Soon, though, the same soft, complementary light is showing us the macabre and ugly old men who are awkwardly hunting down the young boys with the brutality they would use in hunting animals.  Throughout their unrelenting cruelty, the film's cinematography gives these old men a grotesque beauty.  The black-and-white cinematography in Diamonds recalls Jean Vigo’s short À propos de Nice, both for its monochromatic medium and for its focus on the distorted faces of the old villagers.

Elements of Diamonds also recall another Vigo short, Zéro de conduit.  In the Vigo short, as the students take over the school, the film moves into a tone that resembles fantasy or reverie with its stylized celebration, and in Diamonds, the narrative of the boys’ suffering is interrupted by similar mental and tonal digression.  Sometimes, we see a memory as one boy thinks back on trading his shoes to the other, and sometimes we something that may be a dream or a memory, like the shots of the boy walking along a field as seen from a chateau wall.  There are scenes of cable cars and fraying city signs, and memories of women.  At other times, the narrative digressions show the character’s thought, as when the boy is trying to decide what to do with the farm woman.  And this eruptive device, which often introduces beauty into the intensity of the boys’ suffering, becomes key to the ending of the film.

At barely over an hour, Diamonds of the Night is both an intense and beautiful aesthetic experience, a rare piece of cinematic art that is truly under appreciated.

February 21: Children of Men (2006 -- Alfonso Cuarón)

★★★

It took Gravity to make me realize that Alfonso Cuarón is simultaneously one of our most gifted directors for visuals and one of our most challenged when it comes to writing or choosing a script.  But that should have been clear from Children of Men.

This film starts with colossally effective visuals, from the tracking shots that follow Theo into and out of a coffee shop to the set décor that shows social order collapsing around him in washed out color tones.  Other tour-de-force camera work includes the ambush on the road as seen from inside the car – where we are inside the car and looking around at everyone else who's there – and the very long tracking shot as Theo runs through a firefight in a Fugee camp to get to Kee.  Long, continuous shots are a fundamental element of the cinematography here, and they’re not only effective story-telling but they bring us into the film in a strong way.

The art décor is likewise powerful.  The film shows us the streets, train stations, advertisements and apartment buildings of our own daily life, but all of these are diluted with filters that flatten the color scheme to cold blues and greens and darkened with smoke scorches, breaks, stains and tears to the sets.  Ruin informs the frame throughout this film.  Even the countryside is littered with burning animal corpses.  Many other elements of Children of Men also start in the world of contemporary life with terrorism, jihad, torture and a banal, lapdog media.  The media promotes escape via painless, drug-induced suicide while the military shoves, herds and beats the population.  And when the military isn't being abusive, paramilitary groups like the Fishes are.  There’s no reprieve in Children of Men from violence, oppression and decay.  It’s Britain “soldiering on.”

Children of Men starts strongly with engaging characters; a fast-paced, unpredictable story; and lots of enigma to be resolved.  Theo is a demoralized, hopeless man walking through the social collapse in a daze.  He begins an arc of change when he reconnects with Julian, his ex-wife, whose faith in and ongoing affection for him kindles some stirrings of hope in him.  His re-awakening continues through her death and his meeting Kee, a woman pregnant with the first human child in a couple of decades.  To this point, Children of Men is a good story told well.

However, after Theo and Kee escape the farm, the story lapses into maudlin cliché and convention, and the air goes out of the story.  We get obvious character gestures (Theo is depressed because he lost his son at a young age, rather like Ryan in Gravity), and the soundtrack starts to carry religion-imbued chant and music.  The first born Son of Man inspires awe and love among the downtrodden in a long, painful apartment building scene where the action stops and everyone reaches out to touch the mother an infant as they slowly progress out of the building.  Once the two leave the building, the war outside stops, too, as Kee carries the miraculously-conceived child past the soldiers and their armor.  The war resumes after the new Prince of Peace passes.  And this new born hope not only assumes the obvious attributes of Christ but is also the catalyst for Theo’s redemption.  Theo dies at the end of the film strong, vital, and committed after his helping to rescue Kee and the baby.  There's hardly anything unexpected or original in the second half of this film.

The visuals in Children of Men are powerful and effective, from the camera work to the scene design, but many of the ideas in the second half of the movie are obvious and trite.  Here’s hoping that Alfonso Cuarón can one day find a script collaborator who can give Cuarón’s characters and story the muscle of his camera.

February 20: (20 -- Spike Jonze)

February 19: (20 -- Spike Jonze)

February 16: (20 -- Spike Jonze)

February 15: her (2013 -- Spike Jonze)

★★★★★