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.