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.

October 6: Jean Painlevé VI -- Painlevé through his Films (1988 -- Denis Derrien and Hélène Hazera)

★★★

This is a thoroughly enjoyable series of TV interviews with Jean Painlevé shortly before his death.  Rather than having two people sitting in chairs talking, Hazera shows only Painlevé speaking while the film cuts to relevant photos and parts of his films.  There's even some variation in the settings for the interviews, from a house, perhaps Painlevé's, to the research station at Roscoff.

The first half of the series is full of history, and I enjoyed hearing about Painlevé and his occasional interactions with contemporaries in the French art scene.  Seeing how moved he was in talking about Jean Vigo, I also understood how close the two had been.  He doesn’t speak nostalgically about his youth, either; he has more of a historical approach.  When the second half of the series moves to the post-War period, I especially picked up how dedicated Painlevé was to science.  His comments about the Research Film reinforced and clarified his writing on the subject.

There is also some of his personality and values in the film.  He describes at length his conflict about controling animals in his films, citing the octopus specifically, and he sometimes brings such a wry wit that you can miss his joke if you're not paying attention.  He could clearly be a prickly guy to handle, too, as demonstrated by the way he wouldn't forgive the man who put the wrong sticker on a fim can, which resulted in the film being ruined.  And for all this, I found it odd he didn't talk more about Geneviève Hamon.

Still, Painlevé through his Films is far more interesting than I’d expected it to be.  It’s a good way for Lou and I to end our series with a review of the films and some extra information about the works we’ve watched.  And over two hours conversation with the director behind the films.  What a great, eye-opener of a film experience this whole series has been.

October 5: Jean Painlevé V -- Films for Le Palais de la Découvert

For this group of films, Lou and read several articles related to Painlevé and efforts to define the documentary.

• Science Film: Accidental Beauty (Andre Bazin, 1947) -- An interesting article by Bazin written on the occasion of Painlevé showing a series of films.  Ever erudite, Bazin categorizes some films as actual scientific discovery (time lapse shows how yeast reproduces) and surgical (preserving expert surgical techniques for future doctors).  His most interesting comments are about how beauty emerges from Painlevé's work when the filmmaker is simply recording data and, by chance, beauty is created.  This is a point where Surrealism and Painlevé's work intersect.
• Castration of the Documentary (Painlevé, 1953) -- Using the 1947 World Union of Documentary Filmmakers definition as his standard, Painlevé laments the lack of originality and commitment in his contemporary documentaries.  He wants a documentary to "consciously increase human knowledge...expose problems and offer solutions." He sees his contemporaries as timid in the face of their audience and worried mostly about making profit.  He believes filmmakers focus on pleasing images rather than energy, art, creativity, challenge and dedication to the subject.  He'd hate the Travel Channel though I think he'd like Ken Burns, who always offers his perspective on his subject.
• The Ten Commandments (Painlevé, 1948) -- This little list could be an outline for the ideas in the later "Castration of the Documentary": Be dedicated, don't use cinema tricks, don't persuade unfairly, don't bore, and report reality honestly.  
• Scientific Film (Painlevé, 1955) -- Interesting article about examples of using filmmaking for research. It covers examples like time-lapse, high speed, ultraviolet/infrared film and endoscopic filming.  He also gives industrial research done with film including analyzing harbors and steel production.  These he calls "scientific film," meaning that filming is a research technique.
• Painlevé Reveals the Invisible (Hélène Hazéra and Dominique Leglu, 1986) -- In this interesting interview for Libération, Painlevé tells gives backgound to his life and work, including the ultimate fate of the vampire in his film and amusing stories like the one about André Breton.  

FILMS FOR LE PALAIS DE LA DÉCOUVERTE

★★★★ The Fourth Dimension (La quatrième dimension), 1936 --  This is vintage, creative Painlevé, a science film unlike any I ever saw in school.  Explaining the fourth dimension, he makes the point that it would depass our comprehension by having hands emerge from walls to pinch a subject's ears and showing an x-ray view of a body with all the organs working.  He shows a 2-D flat world of mice shadows that look surrealist, and he plays with the population by inserting an animated mouse.  Adding time to the mouse-world, he slides an orange through the 2-D plan and shows how it would look to them at different moments; he compares this to how we view atoms, speculating that atoms might be strings that we see only moment by moment.  And finally suggests that a human at any moment might just be the temporal manifestation of a fixed, unchangeable being.  La quatrième dimension is crammed with stimulating images and speculation.  This is the type of film Painlevé calls for in the essays Lou and I read before we watched these.

The Struggle for Survival (Images mathématiques de la lutte pour la vie), 1937 -- Not a riviting short about animal population dynamics and statistics.  Lots of graphs and lines with a few illustrative images of species like barnacles and mussels.  My 21st cetnury takeaway is that human populations can't expand indefinitely.

Voyage to the Sky (Voyage dans le ciel), 1937 -- The imagination that Painlevé praises comes into play here again.  After a straightforward graph showing how to calculate celestial distances, the camera goes on a tour of the universe.  The Martian seasons are interesting, but the view from the planet orbiting a sun in a star cluster is thrilling with stars so bright that they're visible during the day and give the night a glow.  This is the creativity he praises in his writing.

Similarities between Length and Speed (Similitudes des longeurs et des vitesses), 1937 -- Towards the end, this short starts to resemble Images mathématiques with its avalanche of formulae, but the first part with shrinking and growing men is fun.

October 4: King Kong (1933 -- Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack)

★★★★

King Kong is big, and it’s still exciting 80 years after the fact.  The story pushes forward at a dizzying pace with rapid development in NY quickly superseded by visual extravaganzas like native ceremonies and culminating in the arrival of the colossal special-effects beasts.  And King Kong doesn’t rest with the introduction of these monsters but goes eight on to fights between the monsters and between people and the monsters.  Then there’s the monster in New York.  This is the breathless narrative that Steven Spielberg resurrected in the 80s. 

Action thrills is the focus here, so we don’t have real characters.  Instead, we have claymation monsters that are oddly compelling.  King Kong’s fur may get ruffled irregularly while he stalks his island, but there’s enough plausibility when he breaks the jaw of the allosaurus to still make today’s audience wince.  And then he gives it an extra thump to be sure it's dead.  Things are even more tense when he adn other animals are matted into shots with real actors.  For 1933, the action is pretty seamless when he tears a piece of fabric off of the dress of live actress Fay Wray and holds it.  And we feel a thrill after Kong breaks into the village and a woman dashes in front of the monster foot to snatch her child out of harm’s way.  And ditto when natives on a platform throw spears at him and he walks over to knock the platform down.  Live action and stop motion merge well here, and generally to give the audience the thrill of the uncanny confronting the normal.

The animation in King Kong also has a lot of expressiveness.  The scenes in Kong’s lair capture the strained, unsteady Romanticism of a Doré print with their dynamic light differences in foreground and background and their starkly vertical lines.  More than that, the clay Kong emotes sensitivity.  He is curious, and he is tender.  His body language at the tragic end of the film speaks of both his desire to continue protecting Ann and his simultaneous recognition that he can’t.  It’s a posture of defeat and regret as good as any we might see from Charles Laughton.

In fact, King Kong is a more developed character than any of the people in the film.  With the focus on action, King Kong treats its characters as story elements and setting more than anything else.  Ann and John are the screaming, shallow blonde and the distant, cool hero.  Our most annoying character is sociopath Carl Denham, and his failure to get his just desserts is as painful to watch as is Kong’s demise.  Denham ignores every caution, and when society declines to place a woman at risk for a Denham project, he goes recruiting among the vulnerable.  He exploits Ann for his purposes, putting her in harm’s way.  He manipulates the ship and crew, knowing they’d object to the danger he’s putting them in and, in fact, ends up getting many of them killed.  Ever with an eye on his glory and achievement, Denham goes on to capture the noble Kong and cause the beast’s death, along the major swaths of destruction.  And at the end of King Kong, he blames Ann as a femme-fatal who has destroyed Kong and ends the film blameless. 

King Kong is not deep, but it is a great, fun film with a surprisingly strong action narration.  It's thrilling to be touched by such an old story with such old effects.

October 2: Jean Painlevé IV -- Silent Films: Popular and Research

Lou and I read several early, contemporary articles by and about Painlevé before going on to watch his films:

• Neo Zoological Drama (Painlevé, 1924) -- This one-page article in the journal Surrealismé clarifies for me how Painlevé fit in so easily with the Surrealists.  The article has a density of language that lifts the prose out of a communicative mode, but more importantly, Painlevé offers language we know -- "sweet," "dull color" -- juxtaposed with latin names and scientific vocabulary like "proboscis."  And in this language, a variety of creatures interact in vaguely-distinguishable but clearly unusual ways.  This very early article could be an abstract version of the scripts of many of his upcoming film like Comment naissent des méduses.
• Mysteries & Miracles of Nature (Painlevé, 1931) --This little article is very relevant to what we see in Painlevé's films.  His main idea here is that a casual observer could feel unsettled because of all the profound variety in world that doesn't fit into clear, simple patterns we're used to and comfortable with.  It's an idea similar to Rugoff's.  But unlike the serious epistemological questioning that Rugoff does, Painlevé celebrates the complication and uniqueness.  His examples and his language communicate joy and enthusiasm about realizing the world is bigger and more complicated than we might think...that god is dead, as Nietzsche might phrase it.  I see this same tone of excitement and wonder in his films.
• Institute in the Cellar (Léo Sauvage, 1935) -- A fun article that describes the underfunded, messy circumstances Painlevé worked under.  Sauvage portrays a basement work area with electrical wires everywhere, specimens in little bowls and equipment in the process of development.  Amid the messy excitement, Painlevé is at work with Geneviève Hamon at her microscope and André Raymond at his latest camera innovation.  Sauvage communicates this trio's excitement and pride in the discovery and creation happening in this dark little basement corner.  Today, there's a different look at 12, rue Armand-Moisant. I wonder if the former basement entrance is the door on the right of the building and if there's a cinema nearby.
• Feet in the Water (Painlevé, 1935) -- Painlevé would have been 32 at the time of writing this article, and he has the excitement of a cable TV host describing his travails in achieving his goal.  After Berg's description of how Painlevé loved cars, I got a chuckle out of his lengthy description of his car problems.  More related to his films, though, it was interesting to hear him talk about how the equipment, lighting and heat affected his work, especially how they affected the behavior of the animals he wanted to film.  After reading this, I've rethought that opening sequence of Les amours de la pieuvre, where the star of the film is in constant motion crossing the tidal flats.  Now I think that, rather than restlessly foraging, the octopus was probably trying to get away from Painlevé and Raymond and the animal's camouflage behavior was probably motivated by the same.  Which in itself raises an interesting question about film and science.
• A Clay Blue Beard (Patricia Hutchins, 1938) -- Sight and Sound article about Painlevé's stop-motion project.  Since stop-motion was far from unknown at this time (King Kong was 1933, after all), it looks like the point of interest here is Painlevé's camera innovation and the naturalistic movement René Bertrand brings to the project.

Painlevé's writing has so much energy, curiosity and enthusiasm...and intelligence.  Lou and I have decided we like this guy and would've enjoyed having a beer and talking with him.

EARLY POPULAR SILENT FILMS
The Octopus (La pieuvre), 1927 – Painlevé's 1967 film on the octopus is one my favorites, and this one is good, too.  Aiming to entertain and educate, this film covers a lot of the same ground as the later one.  Both talk about the eyelid and breathing syphon, and both show the image of water rippling because a hidden octopus is breathing.  This 1927 version goes a bit further in the direction of entertainment, though, when we see an octopus on a window, in a tree, and slithering over a skull.  These surrealist images aren't part of the 67 version.

Sea Urchins (Les oursins), 1928 --  This silent, too, introduces some details that Painlevé would return to in 1954.  Aesthetic elements like the beauty, and variety, of the urhin's quills are in both films as is their hypnotic motion.  In fact, many of the silent images are cleaner and better composed than those of the late films.  Les oursins is a little heavier on science than the later version is, though.  Here we get to see a dissection that reveals sand-filled intestines in the Sand Urchin, and we have some Art Nouveau lettering on a diagram of the Rock Urchin to help us identify the various stems.  

Daphnia (La daphnie), 1928 -- Less entertaining than the other two films, La daphnie excells at microscopic imaging.  Two of the most interesting shots are the one showing the muscles manipulating the daphnia's antennae and the one showing the muscles controling the daphnia's single eye.  Geneviève Hamon at work, I suspect.  In nature's way of confounding our expectation and standards, daphnia have only one eye, and they use their antennae for swimming.  These little monsters engage in their epic battle with the hydra in buccolic streams whose images open and end this film.  Tellingly, the stream is less inviting after we've learned what lives in its waters.

SILENT RESEARCH FILMS

The Stickleback's Egg (L’oeuf d'épinoche), 1928 -- Cinema-wise, L’oeuf d'épinoche is a major snooze with lots of biological vocabulary and pictures of cells and egg development.  It uses the predictable say-show-say-show structure many of us suffered through high school with.  I couldn't tell what the parts of the egg were, so I was pretty lost through most of this half hour.  But there is interesting biological info here: Lou and I both understood that the blood for the fetus migrates from the yoke to fetus, which has already developed a circulatory system and beating heart by the time the blood arrives.  And the twists and torsions inside the egg, which reminded me of information in the much later Les amours de la pieuvre, echoes the type of information Painlevé champions in "Mysteries & Miracles of Nature." As the microscope focus changed in this film, I could imagine Geneviève Hamon turning the knobs the way Léo Sauvage describes in his visit.

Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog (Traitement éxperimental d'une hémorragie chez le chien), 1930 -- Before watching these films, Lou was talking about how abstracted life has become from biology, referring to how few people these days have killed and plucked  a chicken.  Such was not the case a hundred years ago when scientists performed vivisection on a dog, drained most of its blood and replaced it with a chemical composition.  This is science film, showing every aspect of the operation from cutting into the dog, finding an artery, draining the dog's blood out until it's legs stiffen, and then injecting the solution to restore the animal.  Later, we see the dog happy, and the scientist even holds the dog's incision up to the camera so we can see it's the same dog.  Traitement  is an empirical report on an animal experiment, though the subject matter certainly causes an unintended response in today's audience.

ANIMATION

Bluebeard (Barbe-bleu), 1938 -- While I'd guess that Painlevé's major contribution to to the stop-motion  Bluebeard is technological (as Patricia Hutchinson implies), the appeal here is that Charles Perrault's fairy tale doesn't pander to children and that the animation itself is creative and clever.  Contemporary American children wouldn't have been seeing an ambassador's head cut half off, leaving the mouth talking, and a clay spear go through the mouth of a warrior, out the back of the warrior's head, into the head of the soldier behind him and out that soldier's mouth.  There is a lot of such detail in the film, and knowing that René Bertrand's children did a lot of the work on the film, I wonder how many of these ideas were theirs.  The Busby Berkeley-style extravaganza of dancing dresses probably came from an adult though.

October 1: Branded to Kill/Koroshi no rakuin (1967 -- Seijun Suzuki)

★★★★
If the Coltrane of his "Love Supreme" period had made a movie, it might’ve looked similar to Branded to Kill.  There’s a storyline that runs through the film, and we know we’re on that line at certain touchstone moments.  The film also has many parallels and repetitions that occur, giving us yet another line to follow through the film.  And there are occasional moments of intense stylistic beauty when everything stops for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the viewer.  With all these elements of beauty, there is more than enough in Branded to Kill to hold us, but this isn’t a Classic Hollywood movie.

The main thrust of the film is fairly clear -- the work and love travails of a hit man – but our path through that story is jump cut and presented with gaps in causality and motivation.  Even in the beginning, Hanada picks up a car to do a job and finds a body in it.  We don’t know how or why the body is there, and the body isn’t important to the rest of the film.  In fact, it’s there in one scene and gone in the next with only a mention that it had been there.  Branded to Kill regularly introduces elements like this without explaining them or going on to use them, and the film jumps to circumstances with little explanation of how the characters got there or why.  Moves like these follow a logic of viewer pleasure rather than tight causality or temporal necessity.

The job that Yabuhara assigns Hanada is another example of this pleasure principle.  Hanada is to kill four different people, and we later learn that the victims were part of a plot to defraud Yabuhara.  However, that fraud is irrelevant to what has come before and what comes after in the film, and even though the Suzuki uses the job to introduce Hanada to Misako, Branded to Kill doesn’t need four hits for that.  Rather, the individual hits give Suzuki an opportunity for some visual riffs which include an assassination though a sink, a killing from behind a billboard with a moving part, and an escape atop a hot-air balloon.  The hits are visual fun for visual pleasure, improvisations on the main theme but certainly not integral to the storyline.

Another part of the pleasure here is the inconsequential repetition, which we certainly take note of but which bears little significance; the recurrences are less thematically important that they are fun to notice.  The butterfly, for example, would seem to have some significance since it’s the reason Hanada misses his victim on one of the hits, masking in the shape of butterflies fill part of the screen at another point, and Misako’s apartment is filled with dead butterflies.  Ultimately, though, these are just little moments of imagery that give viewers a thrill, a suggestion that an idea is in there somewhere.  Lighters, too, make frequent appearances: several smoking close-ups feature the smoker striking a lighter, and Hanada hides behind a moving lighter advertisement on one of his killings.  Again, it’s fun to notice this recurring image, but the thrill resides only in noticing.  And how many times do we see Hanada savoring the smell of rice?  Yet this fetish doesn’t figure in any important way in the movie.

Branded to Kill also has lines of script that seem to have some import.  As Kasugo drives Hanada and his new wife from the airport, we hear a conversation to the effect that the two most destructive things for a hit man are love and drink.  Soon after, a drunk Kasugo is killed while taking out the number four killer, Ko, and it seems the moral is set.  However, our good guy Hanada is soon madly in love with Misako, and he starts to drink about that same time.  Unfazed, Hanada still takes out several would-be assassins, so drink and love hasn't slowed him down.  And later, Hanada kills hit man number one but is killed by the man at the same time, a parallel scene to the one earlier in the film.  Clearly the law about alcohol and women isn’t proven as number one doesn’t have those weaknesses but dies anyway.  The moralizing and repetition here only serve to draw us in and give us titillating points that suggest but don’t lead to wisdom.

This is the beauty of the film.  Like a long, skillful jazz improv, Branded to Kill follows a narrative line while giving us delight and pleasure in its embellishments.  As long as the film moves like that, it’s a delight.  However, when the film becomes too predictable and too repetitious, it loses interest, awhich happens in the concluding quarter as Number 1 controls Hanada, beating him down psychologically and menacing death.  After the fast pace of the first part of the film, this section moves very slowly and very predictably with Number 1 first placing long calls, then moving into the apartment, then taking Hanada out with him.  The only problem with this film is that this section makes so much sense.  Otherwise, there’s more than enough imagination and pleasure in Branded to Kill to satisfy even the most jaded film-goer.

September 30: Tokyo Drifter/Tôkyô nagaremono (1966 -- Seijun Suzuki)

★★★★

Life imitates art.  The last film I saw by Suzuki, Take Aim at the Police Van, was in black-and-white and ended in a train yard.  Tokyo Drifter starts in a train yard in black-and-white, focuses on a single red gun, and then shifts into the full-blown color it’s famous for.  It’s as though a director were managing my film watching.

However, that director wouldn’t be Suzuki because such a transition would be far too fluid.  One of the style flourishes that stands out here --  and in Suzuki’s work in general, I think – is the jump cutting that makes a viewer work to figure how to get from scene A to scene B.  The first attack on Tetsu after he leaves Tokyo is typical of the abrupt cutting.  We see a gang attacking the hideout, we see Tetsu fighting them, we see him walking in snow whistling, we see the face-off with Viper on the track and then we’re back in Tetsu’s hotel where he’s having his wound tended to.  Figuring out how one of those scenes leads to the other is quite a task.  In other places, I nearly missed who shot the girlfriend/secretary, I still don’t know what happened with the attempted kidnapping, and I’m not sure why the car is destroyed in the junkyard.  Tokyo Drifter isn’t afraid to rush forward while challenging you to keep up.  Changes in camera angles challenge, too, like the sudden cut to overhead views when Tetsu is trapped in a pit and when the secretary is shot.  Or the noir-ish low-angle shot of the business meeting.  In another scene, we see Tetsu talking while leaning over a desk with some vague chair detail in the background.  After he talks awhile, he stands up and turns around, continuing to talk.  You do a double-take and see that he’s been pensively leaning on the desk and that the person he’s been talking to all along is, in fact, behind him.  There is a lot of such creative editing and camera work here, all the more surprising given how pre-MTV this film is.

Character development in the film is analogous to story development.  We see Tetsu assume a series of poses and attitudes, but we don’t see how he gets from one to the other.  Tetsu is in love, then he isn’t; loyalty suddenly looms large in the plot.  Just like we get two different scenes and must figure out the connection, we get a series of character attitudes and have to fill in the psychological blanks.

If, in fact, filling in the blanks is at all a concern here.  Tokyo Drifter could accurately be described as a series of ecstatic scenes put together with some exposition.  Suzuki gives us one strikingly-colored composition after another.  The hero wears his robin’s egg blue suit and white shoes throughout, and we’re treated to a series of brilliant sets in yellow, red and pink.  The bar is yellow, the meeting room fuchsia, and the office of building owner is decorated with classical imagery.  The final showdown occurs on an classically-inspired, abstract, white theater set with a large, oval sculpture that changes color as the action proceeds.  Tokyo Drifter is a series of such striking, abstract images.

The abstraction in the film is wonderful.  The highlight is the shootout at the conclusion.  By the time we finally get to this point, the film has even given up trying to create rooms.  We have some stairs that don’t go anywhere, a column that doesn’t support anything, a door with no room behind it and the color-changing abstract sculpture.  These are simply theatrically-lit stage props, and the action here is similarly stylized with something close to dance choreography.  I can hardly imagine what a B-film audience would have thought of this movie if they’d come in expecting a gangster flic. 

Or perhaps a Western.  Tokyo Drifter has many echoes of the Western.  Obvious links are ones like the name of the saloon – Western Saloon – and the typical brawl that erupts in it.  But Tetsu himself is also a Western hero, a tough guy who’s a good fighter.  In this character and others, Tokyo Drifter addresses the Western concern with defining masculinity.  Like in many Western films, the tougher a character is, the more masculine he is, and when Tetsu resists fighting, he’s seen as weak.  He earns his masculinity and the attendant respect by fighting.  Just as the film is concerned with honor, Tokyo Drifter comes to focus on loyalty.  Tetsu's character arc is from being a loyal protector of his boss to renouncing loyalty and becoming a wandering drifter, reminiscent of both the wandering samurai of other Japanese films and the Western hero.  The women here are from a Western, too, accessories to the men.  While we may root for Chiharu to win her man as she pursues him, we know that the real Western hero’s life is just going to be too hard for a woman.

Tokyo Drifter is thoroughly enjoyable, and it has distinctive links to films that followed it.  Although it’s easy to see Tarantino’s abstract violence (Kill Bill) and Jarmush’s stylization and color (Mystery Train), even films like Coppola’s One from the Heart and Scorcese’s New York, New York have some affiliation.  And it’s hard not to think of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s colors and abstraction in Diva, which also includes Asian gangsters and a character with a musical fixation.  Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter even provides some small context for Ohbayashi’s later, incredibly creative House.

September 29: A Scandal in Paris/Thieves' Holiday (1946 -- Douglas Sirk)

★★★

A Scandal in Paris doesn’t quite gel the way Sirk’s later Hollywood melodramas would, and it’s not quite as playful as its contemporary Lubitsch comedies, but there are a few elements of both in it.  There’s an artful deftness in Eugéne Vidocq that has the attraction of some of Lubitsch’s villians: the guys are bad, but you can’t help having at least a little sympathy with them.  And when it comes down to it, they aren’t completely bad.  Also, the film has the structure of sophisticated comedy with complex plot turns and surprises like the Vidocq’s evolution from criminal to police chief and his discovery that an old conquest is now married to the police chief he ousted and looking to restart her relationship with Vidocq.

And there’s melodrama here, too, that would become Sirk’s trademark.  After a formulaic first two-thirds, A Scandal in Paris does a sudden shift in tone from witty crime to melodrama.  In a particularly compelling scene, former police chief Richet disguises himself as a bird seller and, while spying on his wife, discovers that she is planning to cheat on him with Vidocq.  An intense argument ensues with both speakers being as cutting and hysterical as they can while the bird chirping on the soundtrack gets louder and louder.  The scene peaks with Richet shooting Loretta in a fit of rage, the bird sounds declining, and the hapless man being led off to jail by the very man who wrongly ousted him from his post.  This type of over-the-top melodrama is what I expect from Sirk.  And I ‘m not surprised at the ending of the film either, as Vidocq confesses his sins, gets absolution from the minister, and marries the girl.

A Scandal in Paris is not what I would call vintage Sirk, but there are plenty of elements to engage.  And you don't' have to look hard to see where Sirk is going.

September 28: The Furies (1950 -- Anthony Mann)

★★★

If Douglas Sirk had made Westerns, they would’ve been a lot like Anthony Mann’s The Furies.  With the melodrama, female-focus, intense psychology, ornate interiors and love of reflection, I could easily have thought this film was Sirk work of the 50s.  And I enjoyed the film for the same reasons I like that part of Sirk’s career.

The melodrama is intense.  A powerful woman, Vance takes whatever she wants, so when she is used by Rip to get at her father, she not only fails to get the man, she’s used as a tool to hurt her beloved father.  And her melodramatic response to that episode governs much of the rest of the picture.  We get the same intensity when her father, TC Jeffords, breaks his word and hangs her life-long friend Juan, who has just saved her.  And again when her father brings a sophisticated city woman to the ranch and decides to marry her and give her the ranch.  Emotions are at pitch point through this entire film.

The Furies also has a psychological intensity throughout, centered on Vance.  As the masculine name suggests, there’s a struggle at the heart of the Barbara Stanwyck character, one in which her male qualities of wanting power and authority – mostly to replace her father – conflict with something close to desire for her father.  In the opening scene, we find her in her deceased mother’s room trying on one of her mother’s dresses.  We also see her cracking her father’s back and often closely face-to-face with him.  And then there’s the competitive tension between Vance and  TC’s future wife, which culminates in a physical attack on the soon-to-be new wife.  It’s hard not to see an Electra complex at work in Vance, but there’s also some amount of gender confusion.  After Juan has been hanged, the daughter and father face off with a tall, penis-shaped cactus silhouetted in the background.  This is the beginning of their final struggle for power.

In addition to the psychology, power and gender issues are at the center of this film.  TC Jeffords is a charismatic sociopath who has built an empire that stretches as far as the eye can see, and Vance’s abiding obsession is to wrest it from him.  In The Furies, she realizes her quest for power, even choosing to ignore her father’s last wish.  Her other power struggle is with Rip, who repeatedly puts her in her subordinate place only to have her rebel and push back.  Her heart might love, but Vance has a drive for power that her heart won’t stymie.

In fact, women’s power is an important subtext throughout The Furies.  Not only is the Vance/TC struggle at the center of the film, but every time we encounter women in the film, their primary function is develop the idea of women’s power.  Wife-to-be Flo explains to Vance the importance of being lady-like but wielding power, and she demonstrates her master of that skill by wrapping the giant TC around her finger.  The wife of the bank president in San Francisco plays a similar role.  When Vance goes to San Francisco to ensure that the bank president renews TC’s mortgage, Vance ignores the man’s advances and goes directly to his wife, correctly assuming that she wields the real power in the bank.  The two women play to each other, using the hapless male as their pawn.  And of course there’s the ending of the film where TC has not only been swindled out of his empire by a woman but is then shot dead by another.  The West of The Furies is not like the West we typically encounter in film.

The film develops all these ideas in beautiful, effective cinematography.  Panoramic, John Ford landscapes create the larger context for the drama, but Mann brings his unique touch with the interiors.  Rich as a Sirk set, ornate rooms here are decorated with unique objects that carry significance, like the three-horn lamp on TC’s desk.  And the characters move through the sets with halo lighting bringing the actors out from the background and sparkling off bright highlights and mirrors, which themselves often show what’s happening elsewhere in the room.  Carrying over from his recent previous work, Mann also introduces some noir camera into his Western.  At one point, we view an angry, frustrated Vance through the screen of a heavy banister, and we also see her from below as she casts a large, menacing shadow.  A round-up scene later in the film features a series of close-ups of cow hands, creating suspense as TC decides to wrestle the symbolic, rogue bull.  The landscapes may owe a debt to Ford, but these noir-ish elements are Mann’s.

There are certainly problems with this film.  The tone shifts abruptly, character growth is sometimes unmotivated, and the story logic isn’t always clear.  But even with these problems, The Furies is one of the more unique Westerns I’ve seen.

September 26: Jean Painlevé III -- Eight Films Scored by Yo La Tengo

★★★

For this Painlevé evening, Lou and I looked over some stills by Painlevé and watched a musical suite by the experimental rock group Yo La Tengo to accompany eight Painlevé films.

I didn’t cull much from the stills that I hadn’t already noticed in the films.  Painlevé has a photographer’s eye, and his stills have the same sensibility as his films, only with a more control.  He’s able to manage framing and focus better when he doesn’t have to keep his subjects at the right place in the frame and in the right light.  But it’s the same aesthetic in both.

As for Yo La Tengo's new music, Lou and I agreed that there were some worthwhile ideas in the performance even if the music isn’t riveting.  I think the soundtrack to Cristaux liquids is one of the most interesting, with its waves of sonic noise reflecting what we are seeing on screen.  The electric guitar chords for Les amours de la pieuvre are a good choice, too.  Harmonically, I like the dreamy sound in the beautiful Hyas et sténorinques that’s cut with an occasional dissonant burst, a sound analog to the sudden, awkward leg movements of the film’s subjects.  Similarly, the frenetic rhythm in Histoires de Crevettes echoes the manic leg movements of the shrimp.

But my biggest pleasure in watching this Criterion DVD feature was rewatching the films themselves.  Percussionist Georgia Hubley points out in the interview in the DVD set that Yo La Tengo generally found a theme or musical idea for each film and worked with that throughout each film.  I heard and enjoyed that theme.  But it was the beauty of Painlevé’s images and the fascinating content that kept me at my screen.  And Lou and I both also like the period taste that guided Painlevé’s original musical choices anyway.

September 25: Jean Painlevé II -- Popular Films (Part 2)

Lou and I continued our PainlevéFest with a couple of longer articles and the rest of what Criterion calls his “Popular Films.”

The first article, “Contradictory Forces” by Brigitte Berg, is a biography, and it fleshes out many of the generalizations we saw in the first set of readings.  Painlevé was an indifferent student who didn’t care for education by lecture -- a bias that would incline him to use film for teaching, I’d think – and he had an appreciation for the sea and for cinema from an early age.  He and life partner Geneviève Hamon were deeply involved with contemporary cinema and left-wing political causes, though they didn’t officially join any movements.  I was particularly interested in Painlevé’s close association with Jean Vigo.  Berg describes Painlevé’s involvement with the development of scuba equipment, so it makes sense not only that Painlevé would go on to work with underwater photography but that Vigo, too, would have underwater scenes in Taris as well as L’Atalante.  It was part of the gestalt of the era.  Starting in the immediate prewar period, though, Berg’s biography loses steam.  She lists a series of organizations that Painlevé tried to create or served in, but there’s not a lot of insight into Painlevé’s work in that detail.  This organizational involvement recalls Painlevé’s father’s political career and shows the filmmaker as something of a renaissance man.

The shorter essay, Ralph Rugoff’s “Fluid Mechanics,” was a fun read that took me back to graduate school while putting a finger on an important aspect of Painlevé’s work: how it can make a viewer feel vaguely uncomfortable.  Rugoff uses Freud’s description of the uncanny as his pretext.  If Freud says the uncanny is the normal made strange, then we can see Painlevé as making human seem eerie.  Shrimp experience tragedy in Painlevé, but they have several kinds of strange legs that make mechanical movements.  Acera dance to attract attention, but they’re hermaphroditic, breed in clusters and look like monsters.  Seahorses struggle for dignity, but the males bear the children.  Rugoff sees Painlevé as making anthropomorphic observations about animals, but unlike Disney's familiarizing the unfamiliar, Painlevé’s anthropomorphism leads us to question the very things we think of as human.  It’s an interesting take on Painlevé’s work and identifies the element of disturbance that I sense in many Painlevé films.  I don’t completely accept Rugoff’s concluding opposition of Western culture/stasis/knowledge to nature/movement/knowledge, but there’s no denying Painlevé’s work is full of motion.  Les amours de la pieuvre particularly comes to mind.  But rather than a critique of Western epistemology, perhaps Painlevé recognized that movement is key to a movie.

★★★★★ The Vampire (Le Vampire), 1945 – Postwar Allied aesthetics didn’t have a lot of good to say about the Germans, and this film fits that context well.  Germans were seen as corrupt, perverse, and distorted in postwar cinema, and Le Vampire clearly links these qualities to Germany.  Nature, the film says at the beginning, has its monstrosities, and the parasitic creature at the center of the film hobbles like a cripple and lives on the blood of its vital victims.  If the German Expressionist titles and the images of Nosferatu weren’t enough to establish the Teutonic quality of the bat, the famous salute toward the end of the film would clinch the deal.  As the bat nibbles on the nose of guinea pig to start a flow of blood, I found myself cringing.  Rugoff would say that my discomfort comes from facing the human in metaphorical form and recognizing its unnaturalness, recognizing that such perversion is part of humanity.  To the soundtrack of Duke Ellington’s “Echoes of the Jungle.”  

★★★★★ Freshwater Assassins (Les Assassins d’eau douce), 1947 – Les Assassins looks like another response to the human brutality the Second World War had unleashed.  Here we see organic perversions like breathing organs at the rear of an animal while its jaw is an actual part of its digestive system.  Brutality abounds in this world though there are flashes of the humanity we know – a vulnerable worm bleeds as it’s consumed, a mollusk “sings” at its escape.  At the same time, the predatory creatures themselves can even get locked into fights to the death with each other, sometimes ganging up on a single victim.  The humanity we see here, Rugoff would point out, is disquieting if not terrible.  And again, to a driving jazz score.

★★★ Sea Ballerinas (Les Danseuses de la mer), 1956 – With its intellectual score, Les Danseuses draws a parallel between contemporary dance and the beauty of natural motion. 

★★★★ Diatoms (Diatomées), 1968 – It must have been in the air in 1968 because, with their abstract visuals and electronic sound, the early parts of Diatomées look and sound like parts of the ending of Kubrick’s contemporary 2001.  Diatomées then goes on into Brakhage territory with its abstract beauty and fans of diatoms.  The film is a real delight of cinematic sound and imagery. 

★★★ Pigeons in the Square (Les Pigeons du square), 1982 – As Berg points out, even on his deathbed, Painlevé was making film.  While Les Pigeons is not the master at the height of his game, Painlevé’s last film hews true to his belief that film can teach and popularize science.  He takes the completely banal animal of a pigeon and demonstrates how much we can learn about it merely by looking at it discerningly.  This last Painlevé film almost redeems the animals for me.  

September 24: Shame (2011 -- Steve McQueen)

★★★★★

After this film and his debut, Hunger, Steve McQueen is near the top of my list as one of the most interesting people working in film today.  He has a fine art background and shows in museums and galleries around the world, and he bring this sensibility to feature films.  Shame has a rich visual quality that engages in every scene, often in a unique way.  At one point here, Brandon goes for a late night run, and the camera tracks alongside him for blocks in real time, the rhythm of Michael Fassbender’s strides communicating the character’s intensity in coping with his situation while the blue-tinged streetscape passes along beside him.  McQueen favors long takes.  Several of the sex scenes go on uncomfortably long, and we linger on Fassbender’s pensive, sculptural face in several places, drawn into the character and trying to think along with him.  Similarly, Brandon’s dinner with Marianne is a series of long takes, the opening one the most impressive.  After Brandon arrives late, the camera watches like an anthropologist as the two diners exchange greetings and the server comes to the table to deliver the welcome, menu rundown, and questions we experience every time any of us goes out to eat.  Here, the real-time, available light prise de vue creates an analytic feeling to the scene, asking us to study all the familiars for signs of significance.  And after the many long, deliberate takes and rigorously linear storytelling, McQueen approaches the end of Shame with a series of shorter, non-linear flashbacks anchored in a visit to bar and a beaten Brandon on a train.  And even these two temporal anchors are fragmented and presented out of order.  Not only is this segment of the film more elegantly edited than a David Fincher flourish, but the form echoes the fracturing of Brandon’s monolithic, impassive psychology.  This section of the film is tour de force of cinematic beauty.

Like in Hunger, though, McQueen goes beyond the visual beauty of fine art cinema to create a fascinating, complex character.  Fassbender’s Brandon engages no one in the film, neither at work, with family, nor socially.  Psychologically sealed off from human contact, he is obsessed with sex either with strangers he meets in bars or the subway, alone in frequent masturbatory sessions, or on line with pornography or paid service sites.  Sensual jolt is the only feeling that gets through Brandon’s wall. As portrayed by Fassbender, Brandon’s isolation has a fierceness that borders on frightening. 

Such psychological intensity could only be countered by an equal intensity, and Brandon’s sister Sissy brings that into his life.  Carey Mulligan’s Sissy Is the opposite of Brandon to the extent that she wants involvement with others rather than rejects it, but he matches him in her intensity.  She needs, even craves, interaction with others every bit as much as Brandon rejects it.  We hear her begging her boyfriend to take her back, and we watch as she allows Brandon’s sleazy boss David to pick her up for a fast moment of fun.  We soon find that that she’s cut her arms many times, a gesture calling for attention.  Her demand and his rejection make an oddly necessary sibling pairing in Shame.

We see a couple of clues that the psychological intensity of the two has its base in some early experience.  Sissy’s rendition of "New York, New York" has an intensity that suggests lived experience, and Brandon’s tear on hearing it shows the intensity of his response. Both had clearly wanted to leave where they were to head to the bright, saving lights of New York.  We also hear a phone message that Sissy leaves Brandon that says, “We’re not bad people.  We just come from a bad place.”  Both are intensely damaged individuals, and it clearly takes Sissy to break through Brandon’s repressions.

Ironically enough, the only character in Shame to whom I’d apply the label is David, Brandon’s boss.  This is a man who is perfectly willing to pick up an employee’s sister for a one-night stand, have sex in the employee's apartment, and the next morning complain about pornography on the employee’s computer while chatting online with his child about his wife.  The damaged Brandon and Sissy may not act in an acceptable fashion, but they clearly have a major psychological trauma in their background.  It’s the hypocritical husband and father who should feel shame.

Shame is a unique, tremendously affecting portrait of a man who has been damaged and turns to sex as a substitute for the human contact he can't experience.  For that achievement alone, this film is worthwhile.