September 29: Destiny/Der müde Tod (1921 - Fritz Lang)

★★★★

In Destiny, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou finally give up convoluted storytelling and settle for a plot that starts at the beginning and goes to the end.  They remove confusing references whose explanations await a flashback and instead give us a clear, direct story here.  And rather than engaging us with cleverness, Lang creates a deeply atmospheric film here that touches its audience though mood rather than narrative showmanship.

Much of Destiny’s evocative atmosphere comes from the figure of Death.  Instead of a dark, pitiless, inescapable Grim Reaper, Lang’s Death is a figure who regrets the suffering he presides over but who nonetheless performs his duties.  As created by Bernhard Goetzke, Death is sad about what he does, but as a part of the order of things, it's the only thing he can do.  In this portrayal, Death’s black robes and wide-brimmed hat are as much about his own mourning as the grief he must inflict.  This Death, echoing a similar portrayal in Victor Sjöström’s Phantom Carriage of the same year, gives Destiny an eerie tone, both repulsive and attractive.

Art design contributes to the mood, too.  The Apothecary’s crow, which we initially see standing on a skeleton, is unnerving as it hops among the Apothecary’s bottles while the man is looking for ingredients.  And low-angle expressionist shots distort and disturb, too.  For example, the wall around Death’s domain, which has no door, appears huge when Lang shoots it from below with the Young Woman standing outside it.  Similarly, the figural lamp in the bar takes on a macabre life as our attention is directed up to it and its candles from below.  Grotesque close-ups also bring us too close to people who we don’t want that proximity to, and Lang uses Expressionist low lighting to project threatening shadows when figures pass, as in the Carnival section of this film.  Some of the décor also evokes the darkly mystical.  Death, for example, follows the length of people’s lives in a vast room filled with candles, each candle representing a human life.  It’s a beautiful, if chilling, scene.

Another important element of the atmosphere is Lang’s use of special effects.  One tour de force moment is when Death goes to a candle, opens his hands above it as the candle flickers out, and a baby fades into his hands.  Effective as that moment is, Lang shows greater creativity when the scene dissolves into a mother grieving over the death of her baby.  With that one effects-laden sequence, Lang shows us Death’s terrible job and the burden he carries in doing it.  Lang uses this same dissolve technique effectively elsewhere in Destiny.  Death fades in to meet the coach at a crossroads, establishing his other-worldliness early on, and the Young Woman fades into Death’s lair when she poisons herself and then fades into the Apothecary’s lodgings when Death sends her back among the living.  The otherworldly procession of the dead into Death’s kingdom uses a similar in-camera effect, as does the poignant reunion of the Young Woman and the Young Man as the latter rises to meet her and the two are led off by Death.  Other effects – like the stop-motion moving letter, the flying carpet and the crying statue – also maintain the unnatural tone in the film.

Destiny is the first film to show Lang’s ability to create and maintain such a compelling mood, but even in doing so, he builds on strengths from his preceding work.  Most conspicuously, Lang keeps the frame filled with opulence and décor, and he did as early as Spiders.  From Persia to Carnival to China and the village where Death has taken up habitation, Lang stuffs Destiny full of showy costumes and decoration.  The Third Light, the Middle Kingdom in China, is especially rich in these, climaxing with a pagoda turning into an elephant that has a pagoda on its back.  There are fascinating details throughout the film.  Another carryover from Lang's movie-making include using the same actors to play different roles in the film and Lang’s attraction to showmanship.  The conflagration at the end of Destiny is compelling even today in its size and reality.

While Destiny certainly succeeds, it still has some rough edges.  The frame of Death and the Young Woman works well, but the three interposed stories don’t engage us.  Their small run time barely lets Lang tell the story, much less develop characters.  Five years earlier, DW Griffith had likewise tried to portray one idea as manifest in different eras with Intolerance, and he achieved some success.  But Intolerance runs more than double the time of Destiny.  Another odd Lang choice in Destiny is to make the Chinese section a comedy, thereby misaligning it with the other segments.  After the dark moodiness of the first 2/3 of the film, it’s jarring to have a fat, petulant, immature Emperor as the Son of Heaven with fingernails longer than his hands groping at the heroine.  What problems there are in Destiny arise in the interposed tales.

Destiny shows us a director who has made genuine progress and produced a noteworthy film.  He’s learned to tell a story in a way that the audience can follow, and he can control tone to engage us.  And Destiny points in the direction of Lang’s next project when Death looks at a group of quarreling burghers and apparently uses mind control to calm and manipulate them.  Lang’s next works will demonstrate further consolidation of the silent film language he's most clearly developed here.

September 24: Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016 - Jeff Feuerzeig)

★★★★★

Among the many surprising delights of Author: The JT LeRoy Story is that Jeff Feuerzeig doesn’t put the title character at the center of the film.  Instead, JT LeRoy is a story, and the film delivers us the author of that story, Laura Albert.  Feuerzeig has produced a fascinating, complex, suspenseful and insightful documentary here that goes beyond the what-happened of the JT LeRoy story  to consider its challenging implications.

People use the word “hoax” to describe Albert’s creation of JT as the author for her work.  When she invents a fictional biography for him and recruits her sister-in-law to play JT in public, it’s easy to see how people might feel that way.  But Feuerzeig undercuts this conclusion very early in the film as Albert describes for the camera the first time she created JT.  She had been feeling down, so despite her age, she called a teen suicide hotline and JT came into being as the voice for her to talk to a phone counselor there.  Part of the excitement of the film is that Albert has preserved a cassette recording of that initial and countless other phone conversations, so we can hear the creation of JT at the moment he comes into being.  And Albert also tells us how this creation felt, how she was able to say things she hadn’t been able to express and how she feared she’d lose him the way many of her other boy characters had gone away.  From this compelling opening, we see right away that Albert has created JT in order to help her understand and navigate the world, the very definition of what art does.  JT is her work of art, a voice that enables Albert to create.

Feuerzeig had access to a veritable treasure trove of documentary artifacts for the film, and he uses them ably.  Albert had recordings of all her conversations with agents, councilors, authors, celebrities and friends, a compulsion that might be related to her effort to establish her own identity and is certainly analogous to her mother’s compulsion to document her daughter.  Albert’s mother had taken many photos and home movies of her daughter, artifacts that Feuerzeig also had access to for this film.  The director makes skillful use of all these materials, and as Albert’s story of JT’s rise and fall proceeds, Feuerzeig draws on the recordings to flesh out the events and the old film clips to develop Albert’s back story.

From what we learn about Albert’s background while we’re watching JT become more and more famous, we come to understand that Albert has had an unusually difficult childhood of sexual abuse, abandonment, bullying, drug use and neglect.  As we learn more of this background, it becomes clear that, while Albert simply made up some elements of JT’s story (she’d never been to a truck stop, for example), she’s also drawn on elements of her harsh life to create not only JT but also his writing.  The voice of JT enables Albert to access her terrible experiences and communicate them.

We even discover roots for Albert’s getting her sister-in-law to play the role of JT in public.  As a child, for example, Albert had used her Barbie dolls to enact her various fantasies, as we hear from Albert and see in some photos.  An even bigger exteriorization of her inner life was her dressing her sister in punk style and sending her out to experience the scene and report back to her.  Despite her love of punk, Albert couldn’t bring herself to go out, so she dressed, coiffed and counseled her sister on what to do, and then she waited at home for her sister’s return with descriptions of the punk experience.  It’s a short step from this behavior to creating JT and sending him out to literary gatherings.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story also documents the celebrity scene that adopted JT and made his unmasking such a scandal.  While some celebrities were outraged when they discovered the real person behind JT, others seemed to recognize the psychology at work in Albert, and they remained supportive of her throughout the exposés and press onslaught that followed.  The first time we see Albert owning up to having created JT is with Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins, and we’re pleasantly surprised when Corgan openly accepts it and remains friends with everyone in her circle.  Later, as revelations about JT mount, Albert is writing for David Milch on Deadwood, and Milch, too, supports her and seems to understand the importance of JT to her writing.  As the story breaks, her therapist, director Gus van Sant, and Tom Waits all call to offer further understanding and support, and if you’ve never had a warm spot for Courtney Love, her recorded response to Albert’s situation will create one.  An unexpected warmth and humanity in celebrity circles is one of the nice surprises Feuerzeig delivers here

This film firmly engages us 0n a technical level, too.  Feuerzeig tells Albert’s story with so much tension that it’s hard for an audience to look away.  From the earliest moments of Albert creating JT in order to talk to a therapist on the phone -- and then visiting the therapist in person as a “friend” of JT’s -- we’re left in uncomfortable disbelief at her actions.  The creation of JT’s public figure amps up the tension even further as JT/Savannah Knoop attend readings of JT’s work, engage celebrities, go to Cannes and participate in a film adaptation.  Through all of these, the audience is expecting that the deception will be uncovered at any moment, but even the several days that JT spends with Asia Argento in Italy leaves the secret intact.  And as Albert creates a network of identities for the people in her circle, the multiple layers of false characters adds to the tension that the film only relaxes when it turns to Albert’s past.

Feuerzeig also uses visual techniques to keep us focused on the screen.  Much of the film is an interview with Albert, and the director has enlivened that visual with a backdrop of two enlarged, written pages, a visual that not only engages but adds signification.  He also breaks up the interview with animated interpretations of what’s being said, and he breaks to cassette recordings of conversations and old home movies of Albert.  One of the more interesting of interruptions is when Albert says that her husband, Geoffrey Knoop, liked to talk music with Billy Corgan and Feuerzeig superimposes the two spindles of a cassette recording over the heads of the two men in a photo precisely while they’re discussing music on the tape.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story is chock-a-block full of compelling elements.  There is celebrity, psychological compulsion, deception, tension and engaging cinematic techniques.  And the story challenges us to consider the strong links between creativity, art and identity itself.  And truth and morality.  This is a lot to pack into one documentary, but Feuerzeig succeeds in doing so, and in making it interesting.  And in perhaps a happy ending to the story, Albert is still writing, but she no longer needs JT or any other identity to do so.  She can claim her story as her own.

September 20: Desert Migration (2015 - Daniel F. Cardone)

★★★

There's a great idea at the heart of Desert Migration.  A description of this community of older gay men who are AIDS survivors from the 1980s reaches out and touches many populations.  One of its major contributions, of course, is to talk about the lingering effects of the horrible AIDS epidemic that swept the gay community in the 80s and what it’s like to have survived that.  The film's concept also gives insight into what it's like to simply be an older gay man.   And for all its focus on the gay community, it deals with things that any older person has to deal with.  It's a great idea that reaches into a number of areas that we don't see represented in film very much

And Desert Migration succeeds in many of these points.    People thought an HIV diagnosis meant almost certain death in the early period of the epidemic, and several of the men here describe how they responded to that.  Michael, for example, went on an alcohol and drug binge until he realized he wasn’t going to die, and several others talk about spending all their money until the same realization came to them.  In these cases, living through the epidemic meant the men faced not only rebuilding their lives, but doing so with compromised health and few resources.  This is a unique aspect of the epidemic, and one rarely addressed.  The men in this film also talk about surviving friends and lovers who were their age or younger, reminiscences which have poignancy in Desert Migration and speak to a lasting legacy of the AIDS epidemic.

Beyond the effects of surviving AIDS, the men also find themselves coping with issues common to both older gay men and to older people in general.  One of the major challenges they face is loneliness and isolation, and Desert Migration shows us how its dozen or so subjects cope.  Joel, for example, volunteers as a clerk in a nonprofit shop, and Juan-Manuel has launched himself as an artist.  A half dozen of them maintain a friendship, and we see them at a dinner.  In a more gay-oriented direction, Erik and Doc have a leather relationship, and Doug dates at a local gay bar while Steve participates in Western dance classes at another.  They all try to cope with being alone by using the resources available to them. However, some of the men don’t break out of their isolation and remain alone and lonely.  Will, showing us the sores on his back, remains unhappily solitary, and Keith philosophically accepts being alone.

In addition to the scope of Cardone’s concerns, he brings several other strengths to this film.  For one, he accepts many elements of gay culture as a given and simply uses them without excuse or explanation.  Doug has a Peter Pan complex, but in the film, he is coping with age and AIDS by flirting and staying as young-acting and feeling as he can.  And he’s happy.  Leather is also an element in several of the men’s lives, but Cardone treats it as blithely as an Appalachian director might show a quilting bee.  And the gym and bars play outsized roles here without getting much explanation.  It’s a directorial approach that normalizes unique aspects of gay culture, showing the world from within those norms.

And Cardone brings several stylistic flourishes to the documentary.  His clips follow something like the pattern of a day, with morning activities among the subjects followed by those of midday and evening.  It’s a documentary structure familiar to people who know the city symphonies or classics like Man with the Movie Camera, but it works here to show how a specific group lives.  And within that structure, other loops connect between events.  For example, we see Erik setting up a sling assembly (late afternoon) and only later see Doc showing up to use it (evening).  These elements give some structure to the many snippets of information we get throughout the film. 

Cardone isn’t afraid to use showier techniques in his documentary either.  He often uses time lapse photography for effect, as in the scene that shows the sunrise progressively illuminating the mountains near Palm Springs or the few cars on the streets of the city.  The technique calls back to Godfrey Reggio, who uses it to great effect in Koyaanisqatsi and subsequent films.  More affective still is the way that Cardone fuses soundtrack with visuals.  We often gaze at clips of the silent subjects, who themselves stare back at us, while we hear the voice track of comments from an interview with the subject that was done at another time.  A technique like this could be tremendously informative, giving us two information feeds at the same time – the visual and the verbal, the present and another time – and freeing up the filmmaker to be able to use only an interview's sound track without the video footage that could be weak or distracting. 

However, in Desert Migration, Cardone often misses the opportunity to use this technique to strengthen his film with the result that the technique soon becomes shallow flash.  It would have been enlightening, for example, to hear the men reflect on the lingering effect of seeing the loss all around them in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, but Cardone doesn’t seem to have pushed such questions;  instead, he leaves us to listen to remarks we might have expected to hear.  This weakness in interviewing is well-illustrated in a comment by Juan-Manuel about excluding negative words from his vocabulary.   Because Cardone doesn’t include elaboration of the remark, Juan-Manuel’s comment is left to hang, sounding almost frivolous, because we don’t understand the background for it.  A disappointing part of this film is that Cardone is content with trite or clichéd comments when a few follow-up questions could have yielded insightful remarks from these men.

There’s an echo of this interviewing weakness in the way Desert Migration looks, too.  Most of the visuals are striking, but they often seem more flashy than purposeful.  When we see the time lapse of sunrise on the purple mountains, it’s an appropriate visual for a voiceover talking about the healing energy of the area.  But most of the time, we watch clouds, palm trees, and sparse traffic that isn’t related to the content at all.  Perhaps more objectionably, some of the footage in the film seems like gratuitous stimulation.  We didn’t need to see the horrible sores on Will’s back to understand that he feels like he’s rejected because of them, and it’s unclear why we watch Doc do a nipple piercing.  It’s a graphic, compelling moment, but one that is more sensational than informative.  We learn nothing of Doc from this footage or the accompanying voiceover.

With so much attractive stylistic veneer in this film, we can almost be forgiven if we don't think much deeper.  For example, many of the men here are strikingly muscular, and working out clearly plays an unusually big role in their lives, but the film hardly addresses the motivations behind it or how it makes the men feel.  A man like Doc, who we first see in full-frontal, multiply-pierced nudity, never talks about his extravagant body art.  And we watch Bill flipping Post-its a couple of times, but we never learn what is behind that action.  Likewise, why do we hear the long discussion of real estate? 

Daniel Cardone has a great idea for a documentary here, but he leaves us with too much of an attractive cinematic surface and fairly shallow observations.  Desert Migration is a contribution to documentary, particularly documentary about gay men and AIDS, but it also leaves us wishing the film-maker had been more rigorous with the film.

September 5: April and the Extraordinary World/ Avril et le monde truqué (2015 - Franck Ekinci & Christian Desmares)

★★★★

April in the Extraordinary World is a smart film that is fun to watch.  Gallic wit and love of history move forward right away in a somewhat elaborate history of how this alternative era came about.  The militant Napoléon III, killed in a lab accident, is succeeded by Napoléon IV, who promptly signs a peace treaty and averts the Franco-Prussian War.  Science stagnates as leading scientists mysteriously go missing, and we soon see a 20th century world with none of the benefits of early modern scientific discovery.  As imagined by Jacques Tardi, an intelligent design reigns in the look of this alternative world.

Without scientific progress, we find the Twin Towers in this world are designed not by Emery Roth but by Charles Eiffel.  In another witty gesture, Pop’s phonograph doesn’t run on electricity, since that hasn't been discovered, but a small steam engine powers the record player.  And with no internal combustion engines, the film casts witty asides about airships and cable cars; an announcer enthuses about a mere 87-hour trip to Berlin and proclaims the opening of a bridge between France and England, tunnel-drilling equipment evidently being un-invented.  And the summit of Montmartre is now a monument to one of the Napoléons rather than Sacre Coeur.  This extraordinary world is one conceived with great wit.

There’s other cleverness at work here, too.  Darwin doesn’t have as much dialog as one might expect from a talking cat in a French movie, but he’s sharp when he appears.  Near death, Darwin describes  how he's looking forward to meeting Charles Perrault, though he says he’ll tell the author of Puss-in-Boots a few things about cats.  And Darwin is a typically aloof cat with his controlled manner, so his sudden lunges every time a rat appears are quite funny, lunges he unapologetically later explains as instinct.  Neither is he above teasing the humans, especially the not-always-sharp Julius.  “You’re in looooove,” he purrs, like a junior high kid teasing another.  And the portrayal of various famous 20th century scientists is also smart.  It’s not hard to recognize them – Einstein, Marconi –but when we see them giving their overlord lizard a massage or playing classical music in a quartet for him, there’s a humorous irony at play, and one related to a theme of the film.

In addition to having so much wit, April and the Extraordinary World is simply a pleasure to watch.  It has wonderful steampunk machines, like the house that turns into a Jules-Verne-style submarine and a walking machine with gangly, mechanically-jointed legs.  And there’s a flying aircraft that carries its legs like a fly.  The lizards have exoskeletons they’ve designed for themselves that let them walk upright on two legs.  In addition to such 19th century fantasy imagery, we see the Petit Palais as a ruin with steam machines and a giant oak growing in the middle, and when the heroes exit Paris underwater via the Seine, there’s a passing shot of a skeleton at the wheel of a sunken vessel.  This film knows its visual strength, and it borrows an idea from Up in telling April’s later story through photos hung on a wall.  There’s always something worth looking at in this film.

For all this, April and the Extraordinary World is still a children’s movie.  It approaches some heavy subjects, but it only gives passing shrift to them.  April has to learn to trust others and reach out, but that theme emerges from three mostly unconnected scenes.  The film also has an anti-authoritarian bias, but it doesn’t dwell on that idea.  There’s also an ethical warning here about science being turned to bad uses, but that idea surfaces at odd times, sometimes in an on-the-nose comment.  There’s an environmental message here, too, about over-exploitation of resources.  But this film isn’t consistently interested in any of these ideas.  It’s mostly an intelligent, visually-engaging romp, and it is very worthwhile for all it has to offer in that realm.