Africa Addio (1966, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi)

The macabre pageantry and audacious provocation of Africa Addio, transmitted in every authentic portrait of murder and despair, masquerades as the unflinching journalistic eye, deceptively shrouding racist ideology beneath sophistry and subtle insinuation. Employing technical skill to divert from their odious methods, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi create contrast through montage, juxtaposing snapshots of white stoicism with the frenzied streets of black Africa, attempting to vindicate Apartheid and validate European colonialism through staged footage and redubbed dialogue.

Keen to betray both of its subjects, this uncomfortable merger of travelogue and exposé uses violence as set dressing, repurposing riot scenes and armed conflict as the expense of progress and confirmation of black inferiority. Little context is given to elaborate on the visceral procession of images, permitting the narrator to act as omniscient voice and steer the discussion away from sociological study and into superficial comparison. Shown relishing in the grandeur of the fox hunt and cowering in fear of “Mau Mau” retaliation, the noble white African is hard to refute when held against unflattering portraits of native hygiene and an inferred propensity for brutality, legitimizing the ironic portrait of “justice” that acts as the film’s centerpiece.

Ostensibly filmed in Kenyan court rooms, trials of African mutineers held by their non-native sovereigns have an unintended effect, generating empathy instead of calculated demonization. As the filmmakers envision the defendants’ crimes in staged reenactments, wallowing in the details of their barbarous malefactions, the accused are paraded before the leering camera, made to widen their eyes and gawk like inhuman monsters.

The filmmakers are also complicit in the desecration of unwilling animal participants, treating mortality as fodder for their unethical geek show. Images of dead primates, rotting and hung from trees, are accompanied by grim synthesizer and shameless close-up, adorned with the same prurient fascination of a pornographic money shot. The inhumanity of sport hunting is also confused for artistic endeavor, as safari-goers are afforded the liberty of staging elephant executions and the crew posits their cruelty as harmless adventure.

Momentary bouts of conscience shift the focus to humanitarian efforts, though most lean heavily on sentimentality and prefer audience tears over actual insight. The crux of a sequence on anti-poaching efforts seems to be ignored entirely in favor of a grieving baby zebra, shown prodding the corpse of its dead mother before the lingering camera eye. A single, surreal image of the foal before the setting sun, carried on a harness from an ascending chopper, is exquisite and rousing enough to inspire a lapse of memory, but malice in the name of art overshadows fits of evocative photography and the closing din of the firing squad reaffirms Africa Addio’s vampiric motivations.

Africa Addio (Rizzoli Films, 1966)
Written and Directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi
Photographed by Antonio Climati

America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014, Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan)

Prescient in its vision of a society divided, the cinema of the 21st Century strayed from its vocation as mass-scale opiate, honing in on niche markets under the guise of grassroots rebellion. Employing Christian and conservative ideologies as an alternative to Hollywood’s prevailing mores, studios like Pure Flix Entertainment and Affirm Films have created a Second American Cinema, placing praxis at the forefront and abandoning the supposed superficiality of aesthetics, technical innovation and erotic stimulation.

As the marquee documentarian of this burgeoning movement, Dinesh D’Souza’s work strategically balances between prescribed doctrines, constantly contorting to maintain its position beneath its sacred benefactors, repackaging capitalistic ideals as contemporary morality. In a structural sense, his agenda-heavy essays only differ from those of his left-wing peers in their political outlook and Dinesh stretches beyond his pre-designated audience with obvious appeals to the tech savvy and surveillance weary, making attempts to increase the flock from the ever-swelling pool of the disenfranchised.

When not mired in pallid reenactments of the Revolutionary War, facets of D’Souza’s America: Imagine the World Without Her even border on plausible, nearly ushering revisionist history up to legitimacy from the philosophical ghetto of white nationalism and paleoconservatism. An inquiry into the perpetuity of the “conquest ethic” and a spiritual approach to the cutthroat world of free enterprise are the most compelling arguments, but precious few of Dinesh’s bounty of broad notions coalesce into a coherent thesis statement and the lopsided pomposity of his oversimplified logic winds up ostracizing the secular audience he so desperately wants to indoctrinate.

D’Souza’s abridgment of archival sound clips is also suspicious, betraying the integrity of the form by drawing parallels between antithetical ideals like armchair liberalism and Saul Alinsky’s methods of political extortion, illustrating all dissent as traitorous in contrast to his own rose-hued vision of patriotism. At his most dangerous, D’Souza is even willing to manipulate fact as a weapon against his opposition, treating the vitality of the abstract “American Dream” as a license to define the borders of free speech and whitewash injustice.

Utilizing a framing device to address and justify atrocities committed by the United States since its inception, D’Souza sketches a short outline of “Indictments,” treating his slant on historical evidence as a defense of the republic. Concentrating on slavery, theft of Native American and Mexican property, foreign policy and free market economy as points of contention, D’Souza uses sweeping generalizations to vindicate and gloss over malfeasance, treating Barack Obama’s presidency and expansionist rhetoric as a cure-all for the disgrace surrounding racism, consumerism and appropriation.

The key orchestrator of this “narrative of American shame” is Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States and D’Souza’s scapegoat for the ascendance of a self-loathing, immoral America. Labelling Zinn as a celebrity and opportunist (not unlike President Obama and Hillary Clinton), D’Souza excoriates his investigation of the elitist exploitation of the working classes as libelous smear campaign, favoring the dated and overtly-religious chronicles of Alexis de Tocqueville as the bona fide American origin story.

Though Tocqueville’s outsider status provides an even-handed depiction of the slave economy, it does represent the American experiment as one with religion at the heart of its politics, which is the antithesis of James Madison’s Establishment Clause and decidedly unconstitutional. Despite his amiable nature, D’Souza willingly buys into religious oligarchy, thinly masking bigotry beneath a self-righteous disdain for atheists and agnostics, whom he aligns with corruption and anarchism despite their ability to objectively consider his plutocratic rhetoric.  

As an educator and political journalist, Dinesh D’Souza acts a mouthpiece for a treacherous brand of ideology, but the singularity of his perspective can’t be denied or cast aside whole hog. Seeing “The New World” as sanctuary for the merchant class and project worthy of continued effort and adaptation are core concepts any viewer can empathize with, but his inclination to pervert social issues as a hinderance to progress is a diversion worthy of the craftiest slave master. By basing his argument on faith instead of fact, Dinesh D’Souza muddies the truth in favor of a “greater good,” smothering any flower of an inspired idea beneath the edicts of his prevailing “isms.”

America: Imagine the World Without Her (Lionsgate Films, 2014)
Directed by Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan
Written by Dinesh D’Souza, John Sullivan and Bruce Schooley
Photographed by Ben Huddleston

The Wild One (1953, Laslo Benedek)

Acting as antecedent to the lurid motorcycle cinema of the 1960s, The Wild One constructed a template for its forthcoming homages, particularizing the parlance, fashion and customs of the “one percenter,” fostering conflict from a delicate balance between allegiance and anarchy. Its throng of acolytes were hip to the chaos and street slang, revelling in willful criminality and broad characterization at the expense of ambience and authenticity, furnishing product that exploited the outlaw lifestyle without interpreting its desire for detachment. Through Johnny Strabler, Marlon Brando imparted a vulnerability and coy sexuality that evaded his crudest imitators, winnowing away at a coarse, macho exterior to expose the wounded, betrayed child at the heart of the American malcontent and the hypocrisy inherent in social order.

As commander of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Johnny upholds his cabal’s zealous belligerence with a dispassionate shrug, veiling his discontent for the whole lot beneath a brooding pose and pounds of creased leather. Championing delinquency over politics or moral agenda, his clamorous outfit is comprised of smart alecks and anti-authoritarians, sustaining themselves on the promise of cold swill and the adrenaline rush of a street fight. Standing in stark contrast, Johnny is nearly mute and rarely animated, gazing boyishly from beneath his conductor’s cap with an immiscible coupling of hubris and insecurity.

Nervously spinning quarters on a laminate countertop and flirting with the subtle roll of his eyes, Johnny captures the attention of a lonely sodajerk, alluring her with erroneous tales of second-place victories and the guise of individualistic freedom. His sarcastic smile acts both as erotic fantasy and escape plan for the stir-crazy Kathie (Mary Murphy), functioning as a diversion from a self-imposed prison of small-town servitude and counterpoint to the concessions of her spineless, police-chief father. Sadly, her swell of hormonal desire can’t compensate for Johnny’s inferiority complex and any attempt at sexual compatibility leads him into a frenzied surge of physical aggression and verbal dehumanization.

Brando’s gesticulatory performance wavers between this nuanced stoicism and domineering irascibility at a whim, finding verity in a range of unbound emotion, transforming manic episodes from disorderly conduct to juvenile defense mechanism. This structural flexibility extends from his performance to the narrative, jettisoning conventionality for a moody and capricious exchange of loyalty, fluctuating between biker and burgher based on their capacity for corruption.

Reinterpreting the generation gap as a grave miscommunication, Frank Rooney and his screenwriters use codified language as cultural currency, treating outlaw argot as underworld passport and bourgeois rhetoric as justification for malefaction. The fact that both parties only share a figurative vocabulary in the midst of transgression elucidates the bond of brutality between “upstanding” citizen and non-conformist, aligning humanity under an umbrella of its basest instincts. If unity through barbarity seems like the bleakest of philosophies, the slightest glimmer of hope blossoms from Johnny and Kathie’s awkward attempts at coupling, demonstrating that transcendence survives despite our solipsistic nature.

The Wild One (Columbia Pictures, 1953)
Directed by Laslo Benedek
Written by Frank Rooney (story), John Paxton (screenplay) and Ben Maddow (screenplay)
Photographed by Hal Mohr

Scorpio Rising (1964, Kenneth Anger)

Without the benefit of dialogue or the progression of plot, Scorpio Rising unearths the spirituality at the center of American biker culture through its iconography, detecting the substance inherent in the process and attributing religious significance to the swivel of a socket wrench and tautening of a belt strap. By transmogrifying mechanical rigor into divine ritual, Kenneth Anger forges a sacred communion between the erotic and the morbid, conjuring the mystique of the outsider through the contours of tight jeans and the lingering threat of the quietus. The result is a hallucinatory and orgiastic windfall of imagery, powered by the oneiric resonance of nostalgia and its accompanying sexuality.

Objectifying polished metal like the subject of a pornographic centerfold, Anger’s camera lingers on fragments of glistening motorcycles and shirtless men with a synthesis of the salacious and reverent, ameliorating the sex object to the stature of the theological totem. Overlaid with the ornate and gently melancholic sounds of Little Peggy March’s “Wind-Up Doll,”  the camera evinces the literal and the figurative from its photographic portraits and soundtrack selections, scanning and observing vehicular maintenance with the delicacy of a slow dance, treating each wrenching motion and burnished fender as a metaphor for the song’s unrequited love and an eroticized representation of physical labor.

Anger expands upon these variances between connotation and denotation through subliminal editing techniques and visual juxtaposition, insinuating an equity of symbols through jarring comparisons between celebrity and sexual identity. As his subjects model for the camera, resembling flesh-and-blood mannequins adorned in skintight leather jackets, Anger draws parallels between their affected carriage and the defiance extolled on the silver screen, identifying a direct line between Marlon Brando’s slouched demeanor in The Wild One and the languorous posturing of his bonafide iconoclasts.

These bonds between the corporeal and spiritual are further strengthened by provocative collages of stock footage and ideological emblem, invariably imbuing the sacrosanct with danger by stitching together portions of an educational short on Jesus Christ with snippets of chapped asses, swastika-adorned flags and scowling grim reapers. It is at this intersection between idolatry and blasphemy that Kenneth Anger reveals the essence of biker chic, defining their flirtation with death as a dogmatic principle and superficial fashion statement. Scorpio Rising’s lurid obsessions possess a similar polarity, occupying the rift between bewitching occultism and ghoulish nihilism, impregnating each glossy image of piety and apostasy with unabashed prurience and childlike wonder.

Scorpio Rising (Puck Film Productions, 1964)
Directed by Kenneth Anger
Written by Kenneth Anger and Ernest D. Glucksman
Photographed by Kenneth Anger

Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (1970, Yasuharu Hasebe)

A trippy, pop-art riff on noir’s criminal underbelly, Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss replaces pulp’s grim sensibility with dreamy bursts of pastel, surrounding its starlets in color-filtered lights and brightly-stenciled panels like feminist superheroes. Fetishizing fast bikes, tight denim and dense smoke, Yasuharu Hasebe’s vision adopts a distinctly gamine aesthetic, identifying more with its leads’ fashion sense than their common spirit, compensating for its absence of character development through self-conscious cool and a subtle, androgynous eroticism. By catering exclusively to this artistic excess, Hasebe sacrifices narrative backbone at the altar of photographic fluff, smothering the Stray Cats beneath a blanket of overpowering, kaleidoscopic visuals.

By devoting the lion’s share of the storyline to the inner workings of an all-male criminal cabal, Hasebe positions the Cats as supporting players in their own myth, focusing instead on a fixed boxing match and the existential distress that comes with a surrender of masculine integrity. Sequestered to the sidelines as a clichéd, distraught sweetheart, de facto gang president Mei (Meiko Kaji) sticks her neck out to protect a stool pigeon suitor, inadvertently exposing her sisters to the retaliation of the politically-intertwined Seiyu Group. In an effort to balance the scales, the Stray Cats take on a nonnative member, one as tall and tenacious as their macho opponents, but brimming with ambiguous sensuality.

Sporting cigarette jeans and a wavy, bobbed coiffure, Ako’s (Akiko Wada) mode and mettle afford her a position of carnal and martial authority in the club, galvanizing the strung-out membership into gender-fueled reprisal. Intoxicated by sapphic insinuation and the croon of a Janis Joplin-esque wail, Ako’s army splatters the halogen-lit Shinjuku streets in crimson corn syrup, snuffing out their enemies with an absence of fear and a jewelry box of switchblades and razor-tipped brass knuckles. If a flair for accessorizing seems like a sorry substitute for sexual politics, chalk it up to the comic-book tradition of transforming minutiae into meaningful talisman and Hasebe’s willingness to exploit femininity as a prop.

Despite this lack of emotional marrow and accountability, the photographic technique is irreproachable,  playfully tinkering with foreground and background through tactfully-employed split diopter and blurred pools of twinkling color. Utilizing shadow for contrast and cramped close-up to infer intimacy, Muneo Ueda conjures a claustrophobic humidity, lending fisticuffs and gunplay a naturalistic tension that diverges from the histrionics of slow-motion and thundering buckshot echo. His eye coaxes out the pinkish hue of flesh and resonating glow of artificial light, fabricating a complex visual world that is forsaken as wallpaper beneath Yasuharu Hasebe’s vapid montages.

Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (Nikkatsu, 1970)
Directed by Yasuharu Hasebe
Written by Hideichi Nagahara
Photographed by Muneo Ueda

Lemonade (2016, Kahlil Joseph and Beyoncé Knowles Carter)

An exercise in contrast and duality, Beyoncé’s Lemonade carries an existential weight uncommon for a music video, manifesting humanity in toto through the dissection of a broken marriage and its spiritual fallout. Portraying conflict by wavering between melancholy and antipathy, Ms. Knowles wrestles with her conjugal bondage through penetrative visual metaphor, utilizing infidelity as the MacGuffin on a sociological quest to unravel the gnarled roots of sexual and racial persecution. By experimenting with an unorthodox fusion of Christian clemency and vulvar eroticism, she spawns a daring artistic provocation, esteeming cultural unity beyond the boundaries of melanin and championing intellectual rebirth in the face of phallocentric morality.

Despite the bellicosity at its center, Lemonade’s prologue is notably stoic, somnolently drifting through empty tunnels and solitary bandstands, expressing desolation through intoned poetry and the sway of nodding wheat stalks. Echoes of Antebellum architecture are employed as a backdrop, lingering behind the action as constant reminder and object of oppression, swept away only by an act of symbolic renewal. Captured in an evocative transformation shot, Beyoncé’s limp figure plunges to the earth from a lofty roof, only to sink into water instead of splatter on stone, each of her delicate subaqueous actions reverberating with psychedelic trails.

The digital images that accompany her ponderous introduction are expressive and precise, maintaining cohesion despite an impatience with lens and technique. Natural environments are met with fluid and observant cinematography akin to Alexis Zabe’s work in Silent Light, taking inspiration from his majestic rising and setting suns and limitless patience. Utilizing steely, monochromatic color, the camera stares heavenward, detailing every ray of sunlight as it peeks from beneath a halo of flora, illuminating the Spanish moss as it sags from drooping branches.

Slow, roving steadicam and bleary neon signal a change in tone, picking up layers of reflection in metropolitan puddles and rear-view mirrors. Beyoncé, stepping out from her aquatic slumber, struts in a sun-kissed yellow frock, smashing vintage sedan windows as a radiant dynamite blast brings up the rear. Playing proxy for a cheating beau, the camera suffers the brunt of her aggression in first-person point-of-view, getting struck point-blank with a baseball bat and careening to the pavement with a protracted thud.

The cycling through style and perspective continue by way of extreme juxtaposition, as the reggae-inflected buoyancy of “Hold Up” slips into the soft tinkle of Swan Lake, each pluck of a music box acting as sonic substitute for an on-screen monster truck, decimating a line of street-side automobiles. This destruction signals a catharsis and subsequent variation, moving to spartan parking structures and a voyeuristic shooting style, employing blinding spotlight to channel the masculine gaze as it ogles the “second sex.”

Beyoncé uses this discomfort as a forum for antagonism on “Sorry,” playfully flashing a middle finger and appropriating male vulgarity into righteous rallying cry and significant artistic statement. Marrying modern, bass-heavy electronics and haute couture, Bey molds each of her personas and genres into timeless artifacts, incorporating the empowered, Lilithian aura of Claudette Colbert and Grace Jones into an anthem for autonomy.

Yet, despite its wealth of visual and structural innovation, Lemonade still speaks in the language of its adversaries, muddying the fragility of its poetics through patriarchal obscenity. This boorish posturing renders otherwise exquisite emblems of menstruation and orgasm inert, revealing a dated dichotomy that compartmentalizes woman into two roles: Madonna and whore. By accepting these limits, Beyoncé cheapens fidelity into a battle between one “bomb pussy” and another, distracting from an array of complex parallels that draw psychological lines between her father’s love, her lover’s lies and the perpetuity of the domestic quarrel.

Lemonade (Good Company, 2016)
Directed by Kahlil Joseph and Beyoncé Knowles Carter
Music by Beyoncé
Poetry by Warsan Shire
Photographed by Khalik Allah, Par Ekberg, Santiago Gonzalez, Chayse Irvin, Reed Morano, Dikayl Rimmasch and Malik Hassan Sayeed

The Work of Director Spike Jonze (1993 - 2000)

Discovering the happy medium between homage and critique through gleeful duplication, Spike Jonze composes giddy and celebratory visual confections out of mid-to-late century kitsch, enlisting the artist as co-conspirator in a venture to repurpose the past as high art. Employing Georges Méliès-inspired camera tricks and optical illusions as built in selling points, Jonze’s shorts evade the cultural graveyard of spoof by championing their artistic subjects, sprucing up sitcom sensibilities with contemporary power chords and technical innovation. By avoiding a self-righteous wink, Jonze makes postmodernism personal, reinventing the music video as a catalog of sacred items, interlacing stylish nuance with reflective nostalgia.

Encapsulating the sensory overload of a Manhattan childhood into a song’s length, Jonze packages “Sure Shot” as a love letter to the Beastie Boys’ encyclopedic knowledge of ephemera, utilizing subliminal shots as a visual representation of their rapid-fire references. Abandoning narrative in favor of artist-appropriate hyperactivity, Spike shifts photographic methods as swiftly as his edits, rifling through reverse motion, submarine shooting and fisheye lens with a childish exuberance. His infectious impetuousness galvanizes the band into fits of inspired mugging, etching their contorted gestures into the public consciousness through the quirkiness of jagged jump cuts and stop-motion animation.

“Drop” ushers this excess to its ne plus ultra, compelling The Pharcyde to spout their rhymes in reverse, then inverting the footage to reveal the disparity between their unnatural poses and the lyrics that pour from their lips in sequence. The band’s exaggerated physicality and forward motion confuse the mind into assuming the action is linear, that is, until bandmembers rocket from the street to the sky without warning and clothing leaps from puddles onto their bare backs.

Jonze treats the elaborate conceit at the center of his work as a sacrament, bonding with the artist through the labor-intensive process and extolling their virtues in the finished product. This is never more evident than in “It’s Oh So Quiet,” where Spike adorns Björk’s gorgeous rendition of a jazz standard with an equally blissful choreographed dance number. As the songstress prances through the drab decor of an auto body shop, the environment blooms around her, displaying mechanics in full twirl and umbrellas fanning out like flower blossoms, bearing all the hallmarks of a Busby Berkeley musical, but adapted to the tarmac.

Despite the diverting hullabaloo, the sea of hoofers are only the chorus, functioning to sing the praises of the jubilant chanteuse as she ascends into the clouds. Jonze wields these gimmicks exclusively in service of his artists, a policy that affords him free rein to indulge in elaborate ruses, whether it be guerilla performance art or the retrofitting of modern power pop into an iconic television property.

The contrivance in question is Spike’s “Buddy Holly” exercise, which implements modern footage of Weezer into a 20-year-old episode of Happy Days with chroma key technology, misleading the viewer into perceiving interaction between the band’s performance and members of the cast. The concept reads like a hollow stunt on paper, but Jonze’s sentimentality mutates the art of his youth into a vessel for his musical taste, eulogize the sincerity of the 70’s and repurposing it as 90’s fashion sense. His bookish attention to detail and spirituality spawns transfigurative images of nostalgia, exuding passion and heft that mirrors the vigorous riffing and crooning of the band, who share in his participatory excitement. It’s as if, by modifying epochal fragments of culture, Spike Jonze and his fellow outsiders can enter the zeitgeist and stake their claim on it, resculpting pop art in their likeness.

The Work of Director Spike Jonze (Palm Pictures, 1993 - 2000)
Music by Beastie Boys, The Pharcyde, Björk, and Weezer

The Work of Director Jonathan Glazer (1995 - 2000)

Conveying a wealth of information in limited intervals of time, the music video functions like subliminal stimuli, churning out provocative imagery in momentary bursts, serving as optical interpretation of intangible sound. Its thematic and temporal constraints, all of which are dictated by outside sources, seem to be at odds with author-driven filmmaking, leaving a director to fabricate contrivances at the behest of an employer. This textual rigidity limits most examples to the scope of a press release, relinquishing attempts at experimentation to the trash bin of ephemeral advertising.

Accepting the challenge of commissioned artistry with a wink and a snicker, Jonathan Glazer exploits the limitations of the form as a springboard into equally restrictive spaces, morphing the sterility of hotel hallways and cramped back seats into deceptive games of sight and sound. Reveling in shadow and distorted motion, Glazer fashions simple visions of tossed feathers and flailing bodies into poetic waltzes, perfectly fleshing out musical motifs through painterly compositions and cross-over diegesis.

Delighting in the bondage of claustrophobic widescreen, Glazer shoots “Rabbit in Your Headlights” in a squint, mounting tension through swift edits and the bleary illumination of passing headlights. His subject is a drifter (played by Denis Lavant), haplessly staggering through a high-traffic tunnel, fueled only by the rapidity of his rambling gibberish. Awash in the glow of overpass bulbs, our walker is propelled into flight by the bumpers of indifferent motorists, wiping his face of blood each time he hoists himself from the sodden pavement.

Glazer stops the track to give his subject a brief respite and expand the length of his narrative, a technique that interrupts the flow of the music, but brilliantly draws parallels between Lavant’s shuffling feet and the stomping drum track sampled from David Axelrod’s “Holy Thursday.” His closing snapshot is just as epiphanic and rhythmic, glorifying Lavant as he sheds his coat like a dead skin and repels an oncoming sedan with his stiffened back, each shard of glass and metal drifting in the air like a passing constellation viewed in time lapse.

The artist continues his studies in unnatural movement with “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” taking Maya Deren’s work as a model for ruminations on the intoxicating anti-gravity of suspended beings and objects. Shot in a broader, 4:3 aspect ratio, Glazer entombs this abundance of space beneath a stark black scrim, further obstructing the plain of vision with flickering white bits of flesh, reflected in beaming spotlight. Though the perpetuity of the edits renders each portrait temporary, the use of double exposure and overlay spawns a magnificent richness that conjures forth the grace of the music, culminating in a trio of grands jetés that fuse into an orb of ascending limbs.

“Into My Arms” expands on this graceful simplicity by slowing the pace, reproducing concise images of sorrow on crisp, black-and-white film stock. Glazer sustains a penitent and regretful ambience, his succession of shots showing only Nick Cave and the faces of his spiritual victims, each word crooned acting as a plea for forgiveness before the series of quivering, tear-stained countenances. As a hand peaks from behind the camera and gently strokes a trembling cheek, Glazer discards any ironic distance, transcending the machinations of his craft and inserting the celestial into a commercial medium.

The Work of Director Jonathan Glazer (Palm Pictures, 1995 - 2000)
Music by Unkle, Radiohead, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Photographed by Stephen Keith-Roach

White Men Can’t Jump (1992, Ron Shelton)

Imparting poetry and philosophy onto the physicality of pick-up basketball, White Men Can’t Jump weaves an illusory beauty from perpetual motion, morphing passion and arrogance into a scrappy concrete ballet. The hypnotic game footage, lingering behind the rush of sound and emotion, boasts a delicacy that stands in contrast to the rivalries at play, lending a certain mystique to a tragedy of an almost Shakespearean gravity. By refusing the fleeting fantasy of competitive glory, Ron Shelton transforms his heroic athletes into thieves and hustlers, perverting their talents into an external representation of wounded masculinity.

Banking on pride and prejudice to cloud their opponents’ judgment, Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) and Sidney Deane (Wesley Snipes) construct elaborate ruses to align themselves on the court, using Billy’s pallid skin and Sidney’s persuasive patter to swindle their inadequate adversaries out of cash and credibility. The ironic twist is that both men bear the fatal flaws of their befuddled marks, permitting unbound narcissism and irresponsibility to propel them into an ever-growing abyss of self-destructive machismo.

Shelton employs their braggadocio as a vehicle for his waggish monologues, peppering each player’s vocabulary with an uproarious array of jibes and barbs. Snipes’ improvised adjective selection is the most scathing, each well-placed “momma” joke and shouted slight exuding a confidence matched only by the peacock’s plumage of his flipped-up painter’s cap. The lithe loquaciousness of his forked tongue couples well with the mobility of the camera, supplying a lived-in scrappiness to tight close-ups and a sense of exhilaration with each exaggerated pan and boastful remark.

Tender whispers are just as competitive and verbose as the trash talk in Shelton’s universe, conveying intimacy and hostility through spirited gender debate. Playing the perfect foil to Harrelson’s plain-spoken and volatile banter, Rosie Perez bestows complexity and sensuality onto Gloria, defiantly chomping gum and jawing back at Billy as he reveals his latent misogyny and incapacity for vulnerability. Sidney even picks up on this emotional unavailability, perfectly elucidating Billy’s faults by explaining the difference between “listening and hearing,” utilizing Jimi Hendrix’s music as a metaphor for romantic comprehension.

Sadly, Hoyle’s insecurities sour each athletic and amorous victory, pushing him to gamble on pride in the face of logic and love. Ron Shelton has built a career out of exposing the frailty of stubborn men and Billy Hoyle is at once his least hopeful and most sentimental subject, acting as our avatar for the narcotic joy of sport and the emptiness that lies out of bounds. Despite the comic nature of his downfall and the jocularity of the dialogue, Billy’s sorrow yields an unforeseen profundity, exposing the truth inherent in failure and the inadequacies of the alpha male.

White Men Can’t Jump (20th Century Fox, 1992)
Written and Directed by Ron Shelton
Photographed by Russell Boyd

Cobb (1994, Ron Shelton)

Uncertain whether it aspires to be a farce or a tragedy, Cobb matches the hubris of its titular slugger and stretches for the pair, paradoxically emerging as callous and sentimental, despite attempts to impart emotional complexity. While the truth of its tabloid source material is eternally debatable, Ron Shelton’s admiration for the outfielder is not, making each uncomfortable shift in tone an unspoken justification for the violent mood swings of an amoral athlete. By laughing off aberrant behavior as eccentricity, Shelton buys into the cult of personality, mirroring a reluctance to rebuke celebrity malfeasance that has contaminated popular culture.

Unfurling in a newsreel-style montage, the film commences at the height of turn-of-the-century nostalgia, focusing on journalist Al Stump (Robert Wuhl) and his clique of outspoken beat reporters. Tucked away in a dimly-lit Angeleno dive, the roundtable debates sports’ superlatives, shouting out favorites like floor brokers at the New York Stock Exchange. Despite his soft-spoken demeanor, Stump is the most career-driven of the rowdy bunch, gladly leaving his post at the bar to accept an open-ended invitation from aging hardball icon, Tyrus Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones).

Inadvertently assuming the role of transcriber, Stump acts as middleman for Cobb’s blend of revisionist history, relinquishing his authorial voice at the cock of the power-hitter’s Luger pistol. The hyperbole of the fallen star’s tall tales are matched in absurdity by Shelton’s permissiveness, presenting Tommy Lee Jones with carte blanche to chew scenery, dulling each act of wild-eyed brutality by conveying an air of slapstick irrelevance.   

A snowbound, whiskey-soaked drag race to Reno embodies this triviality at its apex, cartoonishly painting Cobb as spirited reveler and Stump as his gobsmacked enabler. Wuhl’s gesture-heavy acting does little to temper Jones’ excess, welcoming every maniacal bender and bout of violence with a reciprocal schmaltziness. Sadly, his intermittent narration, which could have benefitted from some mannered oration, is as stilted as his acting is melodramatic.

The tone is as manic as the lead performances, intentionally wavering between madcap and maudlin to the point of utter incoherence. Efforts to wrangle with the polar opposites of a complicated man, particularly the gulf between his talent and depravity, are abandoned for a gratuitous subplot that further uncovers the film’s decadence, recklessly veering from meet cute to sadistic sexual violation within minutes.

If Shelton had allowed the rape scene to have a ripple effect on the rest of the narrative, it would have been less jarring and incongruous, but left as a vignette in a film chock-full of them, it loses all resonance to a concluding revelation that pardons a long-suffering “hero.” Overwhelmed by this disingenuity, Shelton’s attempts at witty discourse and photographic majesty are rendered moot, stranding a handsomely-mounted character study somewhere between compelling and catastrophic.

Cobb (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1994)
Directed by Ron Shelton
Written by Al Stump (biography) and Ron Shelton (screenplay)
Photographed by Russell Boyd

Tin Cup (1996, Ron Shelton)

Dispensing with the hoary rise-and-fall of the orthodox sport saga, Ron Shelton’s Tin Cup starts the narrative at the epilogue, settling in with its self-sabotaging golf pro at the point of resignation, hiding on a dilapidated driving range miles from a competitor and worlds away from a tournament berth. Obscuring the tumultuous nature of his hero in a flood of flirtatious banter, Shelton masks anxiety beneath red-blooded bravado, forcing intermittent outbursts to disrupt the story as much as they disrupt the hacker’s swing and sex life. This warts and all complexity produces genuine laughs and palpable drama in equal measure, marrying new-age psychoanalysis and old-world macho bluster with a linguist’s aplomb, furnishing a bewitching tale of romance and redemption from outwardly low-stakes material.

Nursing beers and an undiagnosed chemical imbalance, Roy McAvoy (Kevin Costner) wastes his days cracking wise with a coterie of hangers-on, always one shot away from a blackout and one shank away from a meltdown. His belligerence is disguised by a crafty coyness and the slightest pinch of a Texas accent, affectations that would charm anyone outside of his growing army of creditors and ex-lovers. Even his clubhouse witticisms have a touch of class, that is, until Dr. Molly Griswold (Rene Russo) saunters in for lessons, her high-end duds and grad-school smarts providing the perfect antithesis to his sweat-soaked undershirt and tacky brain teasers.

Shelton loves their bodily exchange as much as their chatter, proliferating sexual tension through the swivel of Griswold’s hips and the glint of arousal in McAvoy’s eye as he places his hands to demonstrate stroke and sexual dominance. Molly preaches the purely cerebral, stressing the “gathering” of knowledge and spouting a string of philosophers, medical techniques and ideologies at the feet of her confused coach. Roy is the corporeal response to her intellect, emphasizing the arc of the swing through heavy insinuation and excessive force, inadvertently revealing his professional shortcomings (“Short follow through... unfinished look.”)

McAvoy evades these character flaws through doublespeak and misdirection, chalking up every disaster to a failed quest for immortality or “defining moment” foiled by a cunning adversary. His scapegoat for personal responsibility is David Simms (Don Johnson), a duplicitous PGA tour leader known for a calculated method of play and talent for cocksure trash talk that nearly rivals his “crapped-out” ex-teammate’s. If Simms’ meteoric rise to fame and courtship of Molly seem like trite narrative shortcuts, it’s only because Shelton is endeavoring to resolve Roy’s fear of success and intimacy in one fell swoop, positioning the closing U.S. Open dogfight as a cathartic venture for his brain and balls.

By ushering these insecurities to the surface, Shelton skewers male competition, both in sport and love, exposing the “dick measuring” as a self-perpetuating exercise in emotional dishonesty. Though Roy’s maturity on the green and in the boudoir can be attributed directly to therapy, his greatest victory is an acceptance of self by refusing to “play it safe,” embracing an uncompromising attitude on and off the links. Ron Shelton’s denial of melodramatic cliché is just as fulfilling, providing his audience with a salty underdog who merits an unlikely brush with greatness and fidelity.

Tin Cup (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1996)
Directed by Ron Shelton
Written by John Norville and Ron Shelton
Photographed by Russell Boyd

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964, José Mojica Marins)

Transporting the dense fog and menacing shadows of gothic fiction to São Paulo, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul shuns Cinema Novo’s staunch realism, favoring operatic performance and lurid, sanguine images. The thundering force of the sound design, culled from snippets of static-laden moans and warped laughter, creates an agitated atmosphere, bearing a striking resemblance to the sonic overload of a carnival funhouse. Though the milieu is pure horror fantasy, right down to its highly-stylized villain, a chilling sadism bubbles beneath the surface, bridging the gap between the innocuous creature features of the 1950s and the forthcoming wave of brutal exploitation pictures.

Advising his audience to exit the theater before they lay eyes on a decomposing corpse, José Mojica Marins gleefully trades in structural gimmicks, opening his film with two content warnings, each bursting with horrific hyperbole and baleful waves of echo. His lead performance as Zé do Caixão is just as extravagant, sporting a Stygian three-piece suit and towering top hat, each persuasive point of his finger embellished by curled fingernail and demonic cackle.

Refusing to subscribe to the tenets of Catholicism, Zé spurns the communal fast on Good Friday, demanding a dinner of flesh from his browbeaten wife (Valéria Vasquez), even if it requires a human sacrifice. Fiendishly gripping his horned billiard pipe and smirking at the superstitions of the devoted, Zé vigorously dines on a leg of lamb before a passing holiday procession, demonstrating his mental fortitude and freedom from conventional morality. His narcissism has transformed him into a god, expressing an atheistic temperament that would be commendable, if not for his future transgressions.

Zé exposes his corrupt nature during a hand of poker, severing the fingers of a fellow gambler with a splintered wine bottle after he declines to cough up his monetary losses. Marins personifies this fury through a constrictive “Italian shot,” closing in on the whites of Ze’s eyes as they turn bloodshot with rage. The source of this wrath is his wife’s infertility, severing his bloodline and forcing him to seek a more appropriate vessel for his seed. We hear the cold calculation of his thoughts as he binds his loving spouse and plots to covet his best friend’s fiancée, depositing a scurrying tarantula onto the chest of his scantily-clad victim, spawning an uncomfortable marriage of the tortuous and titillating.

A latent eroticism seeps into all of Ze’s methods of execution, each smack of his black-gloved palm and thrust of his pelvis producing a jubilant chuckle and pool of crimson blood. This indifference to human pain and adoration of sexualized cruelty even extends to his male counterparts, making his desecration of a detractor’s lips and cheek with a miniature crown of thorns an intriguing merger of the prurient and sacrilegious.

Unfortunately, a whirlwind of supernatural retribution falls upon Zé do Caixão during a nocturnal stroll, contradicting the boldness of his practical atheism and validating blind faith. Political unrest and audience allegiances may have twisted José Mojica Marins’ arm in the opposite direction for his finale, but the strength of his inspired direction and profane protagonist are enough to ensure absolution, solidifying At Midnight as a startlingly modern and antagonistic vision of ideological autonomy.

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (Industria Cinematografica Apolo, 1964)
Directed by José Mojica Marins
Written by José Mojica Marins (story and screenplay), Magda Mei (screenplay) and Waldomiro França (screenplay)
Photographed by Giorgia Attili

Vidas Secas (1963, Nelson Pereira dos Santos)

Vidas Secas tells its story through oppressive silences and deafening wails.

The stillness of the desert is captured in its first instant, the camera observing a duo of vague figures in extreme long shot, distant enough to be mistaken for a mirage. The din of a horn penetrates the soundscape, representing the punishing heat of the sun through aural torment, decelerating the panning shot to a sedate crawl. As the human silhouettes enter the frame, carrying the weight of their possessions atop their heads, an unspoken despair couples with the cacophony, immersing the viewer in an earthen inferno.

A minimalist approach strips the canvas bare, allowing the camera to patiently observe and fragmentary dialogue to hang in the humid air. Conversations are incongruent and cluttered, words pouring out onto images of the blistering noon-day sun and craggy terrain, rarely emitted from mouths or communicating intelligible ideas. The slow, deliberate recitation and blunt phrasing flourish into rough-hewn poetry, transforming quotidian desires into starry-eyed reverie.

The procession of snapshots bears the authenticity of photojournalism, beholding the quiet beauty of rainwater trickling from terra cotta eaves and dusty hair dancing in a cool breeze. An air of sincerity permeates the picture, lending credence to the core relationships at play, particularly a pair of real-life siblings that bond over mutual responsibility, smiling heartily as they corral a flock of iron-willed billy goats.

Empathy builds through this austere and realistic tableau, heightening dramatic tension and compounding the forthcoming disgrace and dehumanization. Nelson Pereira dos Santos brilliantly utilizes livestock as his symbol for this subjugation, analogizing the branding of petrified cattle to the brutal lashing of Fabiano (Átila Iório), employing the patriarch’s squandering of funds and wrongful imprisonment as a statement on bureaucratic corruption and the inevitability of suffering. As hope recedes and the film veers into the purely metaphorical, dos Santos paints a grim portrait of innocence lost, revealing a fatalistic worldview through the eyes of his cherubic shepherds and their ailing hounddog.

The demoralization of the eldest son creeps forth from tales of fire and brimstone, transforming the fruitless plains and precipitous peaks of his barren home into the orange flames and sharpened pitchforks of perdition. Employing a child’s imagination to articulate his themes, dos Santos stresses the anguish of an existence not far removed from the hyperbole of Hell, steeling the audience for the misery of the closing passages.

Perpetuating a claustrophobic atmosphere through stationary shots, each taken at ground level, the camera stares death in the face, witnessing the euthanization of a hunting dog and fathoming the fear in his eyes as he tumbles to the brittle sand. As he nears expiration with each labored gasp, the camera pans to his scurrying prey, their swift motion bordering on elation, reflecting the human apathy that engenders the vicious cycle of poverty and desolation.

Vidas Secas (Sino Filmes, 1963)
Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Written by Graciliano Ramos (novel) and Nelson Pereira dos Santos (screenplay)
Photographed by Luis Carlos Barreto and José Rosa

Black God, White Devil (1964, Glauber Rocha)

Black God, White Devil is a film as harsh and pitiless as the sertão (desert), thoroughly bleached of color and beset with woe. The camera hangs its head to echo the desperation, refusing to advocate or glamorize hard labor and poverty, only rising above the action as an ironic statement on the artificiality of the cinematic gaze. It even keeps a sardonic inventory of its characters’ motivations through song, wryly imitating the theme music and mythology of the idealized Western, varying only in the depravity of its characters and hopelessness of its message.

The stifling heat of the barren Brazilian outback is the setting and source of anguish, embodied in every drop of sweat on Rosa’s (Yoná Magalhães) brow, her visage personifying destitution as her weary arms crank the handle of a crumbling grain mill. The torment of hunger has nurtured a practical pessimism, leaving her to balk at the aspirations of an optimistic husband, Manuel (Geraldo Del Rey), and the empty promises of a seditious cleric (Lidio Silva).

A slow, pensive tone permeates these opening forlorn passages, allowing the pace to reflect the all-encompassing vacuity of the arid landscape and stand in contrast to the forthcoming violent retribution. Pandemonium sets in as Manuel becomes untethered, each severe and hasty edit keeping time with the slice of his machete and the scamper of feet. The initial homicide, brought forth by a combination of starvation and humiliation, precipitates an erratic and disorienting horse chase and cluster of murders. As the narrative intensifies, so does the soundtrack, abandoning its humble ballads for operatic crescendo, elevating an unexceptional fall from grace to the heights of religious allegory. The emotional heft of the strings even impacts the characters, each orchestral upsurge tempting passion to the surface and momentarily humanizing the sadistic and cruel.

Glauber Rocha utilizes sound as a vehicle for satire, jumbling the singing voices of the Black God’s congregation into a grating sonic puddle, paralleling the indoctrination of prayer to the systematic subjugation of the poor. Suffering for the absolution of his sins, Manuel acts as the symbolic representation of religion’s duplicity, lugging a hefty stone to the peak of a steep mount, embarking on an interminable and Sisyphean spiritual quest. The grand irony is that, with each act of selfless devotion, Manuel steps further away from family and redemption, acting only to promote the agenda of an opportunist in hope of a divine reward.

His concluding acts of desecration spawn an unbound delirium, at once impenetrable and enchanting, marrying abstruse, Godardian political rhetoric to paradoxically epiphanic and macabre visual imagery. The close-ups are radiant, capturing human faces atop beaming sunlight, sun-burnt skin and silver facial hair hanging like constellations against the achromatic terrain. Occupying this gray area, balancing between the aesthetics of cinema and tenets of an ideology, Glauber Rocha hits his directorial stride, fashioning a film that functions as political dissent and bold artistic provocation.

Black God, White Devil (Copacabana Filmes, 1964)
Written and Directed by Glauber Rocha
Photographed by Waldemar Lima

Coneheads (1993, Steve Barron)

Disjointed and clumsy from its inaugural splashdown, Coneheads coasts on the goodwill bestowed upon its cult characters, never realizing that the rudimentary aspects of a 5-minute Saturday Night Live sketch aren’t enough to sustain a feature-length film. Its bloodless caricatures, impassive aside from deafening shriek, mug to conceal the vapidity of their dialogue, inspiring confusion in place of emotional resonance. Verbal exchanges drag the pace to a grinding halt, allowing the mind to wander to the curious state of the props and set design. The distraction of strewn junk food and crude gadgetry beget a budget phantasmagoria that unintentionally engages an otherwise dazed audience.

Our extraterrestrial visitors, sporting heads shaped like fleshy traffic cones and prominently-collared spacesuits, attempt to commingle with their Earthly peers, perplexing neighbor and viewer alike through a verbose and barely discernible prattle. This endless feed of technobabble, dribbling from Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin’s frothing mouths, is intended to be humorous, but it’s impossible to snicker as your mind backpedals through a sea of garbled jargon. The exaggerated clip of their speech is matched by accelerated-motion photography, speeding up patches of mechanical ingenuity and mild sexuality for comedic effect, but upsetting the natural rhythm of the film. The narrative itself is just as jumpy, excising subplots and leaving decades in its wake as it tramples towards the foregone conclusion of a tidy climax.

In spite of this hackneyed premise, a rather modern critique of naturalization lies just beneath the surface, presenting planetary aliens as proxies for undocumented immigrants, progressing the plot based on their desperate efforts to evade capture by a draconian INS. Additional insight may have elevated the concept to shrewd political satire, but painting each government operative as a one-dimensional villain seems partisan, establishing the writing staff’s argument as poorly researched and absolutist.

The emigrants themselves fare far better, having their assimilation documented in a Super 8 home movie that eulogizes the “American Dream,” propelling the film further into the abyss of bald sentimentality with each note of Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome.” Despite the triteness of this extended montage, the film improves as its characters shift into bourgeois roles, finding footing through the addition of a teenaged daughter that inspires engaging bits about parenting and dating that transcend the first half’s army of failed gags.

The application of old-fashioned practical effects also succeed against the odds, delighting and disgusting in equal measure by way of a stop-motion karkadann and the cavernous layers of Aykroyd’s comically unfastened jaw, overflowing with rows of arrow-shaped teeth and a protuberant pink tongue. If the style and verve of these creatures and the space opera epilogue were applied to the central domestic drama, Coneheads could have matured into a cult item, but its melange of conflicting elements were never made to cohere, miring otherwise brilliant ideas in a wave of inanity.

Coneheads (Paramount Pictures, 1993)
Directed by Steve Barron
Written by Tom Davis, Dan Aykroyd, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner
Photographed by Francis Kenny

Wayne’s World (1992, Penelope Spheeris)

A deceptively simple spoof of suburban eccentricity and corporate duplicity, Wayne’s World conceals its ingenuity and technique behind its emphatic, hockey-haired protagonists, inserting piece-to-camera narration and swift editorial work around each sarcastic quip and lecherous daydream. Though the genre requires little more than competency, the craftsmanship on display actually benefits the scenario, providing Wayne and Garth with an insular world to amplify their personalities and cinematic style to match the breadth of their cultural obsessions.  

Utilizing montage and comic-strip surrealism borrowed from Saturday Night Live’s mixed-media sketches, Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers) and Garth Algar (Dana Carvey) escort us on a subjective Chicago travelogue, curating a tour of their favorite donut shops, heavy-metal venues and airport landing strips, cataloging the outlandish locals along the way. Though their sense of humor leans towards the puerile and parlance borders on the esoteric (“Ex-squeeze me? Baking powder?”), adjusting to the pair’s lingo occurs in an instant, negotiated by an inclusive and immediate form of storytelling.

The communal vibe evoked by the leads yields honest and uproarious moments, sequences and asides that skewer the avarice of network television and channel nostalgia into era-defining visual art (see the “Bohemian Rhapsody” sing-along). Thankfully, this sentimentality never drifts into reverence, freeing the team to scoff at the same cinematic cliches they’re gleefully exploiting, transforming “extraneous” scenes, excessive subtitling and happy endings into self-reflexive film criticism.

Sadly, these formal triumphs don’t always overshadow the faults of the writing staff, revealing the jejune romances and pious posturing at the center of the script. Wayne’s dueling love interests, Tia Carrere and Lara Flynn Boyle, are only furnished with enough dialogue to reinforce their characters’ stereotypes, trapped as little more than an exotic chanteuse and self-loathing ditz at the beck and call of unrepentant male libido. Themes of artistic integrity are just as dubious, considering the compromises inherent in SNL’s composition and the prominent roles of the primary cast in a corporate entity. Biting the hand that feeds is noble, but each statement of defiance feels more like an easy story arc than rallying cry of artistic autonomy.

Aside from misguided agenda and chauvinistic state of mind, Wanye’s World constructs an authentic and inspired universe around it characters, mining laughs from their relatable struggle with the banalities of adult life. Though the trappings of their hair-metal subculture seem tacky in retrospect, a bond is shared through the religion of popular music and American ephemera, forging an alliance with teenagers unrestricted by generational cohort.

Wayne’s World (Paramount Pictures, 1992)
Directed by Penelope Spheeris
Written by Mike Myers, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner
Photographed by Theo Van de Sande

Ghostbusters (2016, Paul Feig)

Winsome and appropriately jovial, Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters is a benign comedic enterprise forced into politics by the peanut gallery, flourishing through its disregard for the shackles of legacy and hegemony of polite society. Avoiding the sarcasm of the original in favor of a juvenile absurdity, it plays to the quirks of its cast and the expectations of the genre, sweeping the viewer into its spirited marriage of gag humor and computer-animated set piece. As the acrid taste of internet speculation vacates your short-term memory, you’ll find a warm-hearted adventure of considerable merit, bolstered by radiant visual effects and a surprising lack of comedic malice.

Bearing a striking similarity to internet crusades fought over the film’s supposed agenda, our all-female Ghostbusters team skirmishes with Rowan North (Neil Casey), a Reddit-era version of Travis Bickle, devoted to washing the streets clean in a rain of supernatural malignance. His coup de grace, entitled “The Fourth Cataclysm,” attempts to untether the boundaries between dimensions, freeing the malignant creatures that reside outside of our physical realm. Laying conjuring contraptions amidst the storied architecture of metropolitan New York City, Rowan’s harbingers of the apocalypse inspire awe in their emergence, summoning luminescent bolts of light that dance atop the art-deco buttresses and steely subway tracks of lower Manhattan.

Subtextually, it’s telling that our team of shamed scientists have written the book that inspired their adversary, since both parties endure the scorn and ridicule of authority in equal measure and clash despite this shared marginalization. Drs. Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) and Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), co-authors of the pseudoscientific text, even sever their professional relationship due to academic backlash, a broken bond that the film nurtures back to health in lieu of an arbitrary erotic relationship.

The gender debate that prefaced the film’s release is only vaguely insinuated on the surface, hinted at by wardrobe choices (a “One of the Boys” t-shirt) and the casual misogyny of their arch-enemy, particularly when his spirit inhabits Chris Hemsworth’s chiseled husk. This lack of direct acknowledgement makes the product more empowering, providing women with a superhero vehicle that doesn’t subsist on sexual platitudes, but doesn’t ignore their individual femininity. These are multi-dimensional characters that are capable of being adept physicists, logical thinkers, witty pranksters and unapologetically female.

As for the performers that interpret these modern heroines, each takes a unique bent on a previously conceived role and fashions it to their taste. Kristen Wiig turns in a subdued rendition, playing straight woman to her ebullient co-stars, saving her strength for a vivid reminiscence of a childhood encounter that rivals the actual poltergeists. Kate McKinnon’s idiosyncratic version of Dr. Spengler manages the jargon-heavy syntax quite well, drolly quipping despite the occasionally infantile dialogue, sprucing up the material with a jokey glance when a recycled bit doesn’t sing (see The Exorcist-inspired possession sequence).

The striking computer-generated spectres collaborate well with the vivacious acting of the primary cast, incandescent and sparkling like firecrackers as they parade about Times Square. Director Paul Feig does an admirable job of wedging in all of the original film’s landmarks and properties (Slimer, Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, etc.), often at the expense of his setpieces, which are cluttered with excess personnel and poorly blocked. His misuse of master cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman is the film’s only grave error, since the precision and symmetry of his previous work (Drugstore Cowboy, The Royal Tenenbaums) would have helped to tighten the sprawl of the climactic brawl.

That being said, the Ghostbusters series has never succeeded solely on technique, thriving instead on the fellowship between its investigative team and its willingness to laugh in the face of peril. The latest entry in the series produces two moments that perfectly embody these characteristics: McKinnon’s closing speech of dedication to her compatriots and the unification of the troop as they spray proton rays at the groin of their antagonist. The fact that the recipient has morphed into a colossal version of the proprietary ghost logo as he’s emasculated is a wink at the pious hordes that rallied against this revisionist success, proof that nothing is sacred and film is an artform in flux.

Ghostbusters (Columbia Pictures, 2016)
Directed by Paul Feig
Written by Katie Dippold and Paul Feig, adapted from the 1984 film written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis
Photographed by Robert D. Yeoman

Quo Vadis (1951, Mervyn LeRoy)

A philosophical counterpoint to the militaristic bombast of the historical epic, Quo Vadis expels the grand battles and superfluous strategy, favoring dramatic richness and a contemplative examination of faith and authority. Forthright in its Christian perspective, but never obstinate, the narrative paints pagan Rome in a harsh light without shielding its eyes, retaining the decadence and promiscuity of a culture bewitched by conquest and pleasure.

Satirizing the delusions of grandeur that propelled Rome towards oblivion, the camera pans slowly to reveal material wealth, poring over marble columns, amethyst gowns and golden imperial uniforms, fineries that stand in stark contrast to the venal words pouring from the mouths of the magistrate. At the fore of this despotic monarchy is Nero, embodying the duality of man through his artistic sensitivities and bloodthirsty carnality. He is a petulant child in the role of God and the peppery Peter Ustinov lays him in perpetual recline, imbibing liberally and bellowing in amateurish lyric poem.

Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor) is Nero’s polar opposite, building a reputation through military campaign and resolute comportment, denying himself the amenities of celebrity aside from absolute vanity. His fixation on possession extends beyond the fray, inserting itself into lustful desires that couple the bondage of slavery with the catharsis of sexual congress. The target of his affection is Lygia (Deborah Kerr), the adopted daughter of a retired general and devotee of the spiritual and intellectual; a woman indifferent to the libidinous cravings of a violent narcissist.

Manipulating Roman law to his advantage, Marcus exploits Lygia’s patronage, enslaving her as a way to sate her concupiscent thirst, though she’d much prefer to drink from the metaphorical cup of Christ. This clash between body and mind further stresses duality, positing Marcus and Lygia’s tempestuous relationship as a key symbol for strain between Roman wealth and virility and the modesty of evangelical Christianity.

Despite broad shoulders and a square jaw, characteristics that epitomize noble fortitude, Robert Taylor’s stone-faced line reading stalls the pace of an otherwise refined chamber piece, leaving the camera and cast to counterbalance through sweeping tracking shot and exaggerated performance. The only rendition that remains unscathed is Deborah Kerr’s Lygia, her wit and beauty perfectly representing disharmony, each wrinkle of her anxious countenance clashing with strawberry locks that flit atop her pearly breast. The camera is appropriately transfixed, bathing in the radiance of her crimson lips and the sparkling ornaments of her cobalt robe, nearly legitimizing the covetous nature of Marcus’ courtship.

The biblical flashbacks are just as sumptuous, reproducing Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper and the tale of the four fishermen, animating the Gospel by the soft glow of orange torches and wondrous close-up shots. Each character portrait is potent and lovingly produced, searing tan flesh, pink lips and blue eyes into our memory banks. Al fresco shots of Roman flora are treated with as much esteem, each elaborate exterior replete with verdant olive trees and azure trickling pools, adding tranquility despite the tumultuous nature of the times. The claustrophobia of a collapsing imperium only develops as the aesthetic beauty gives way to a litany of sorrows, each Christian suffering the cross to gratify the demoniac Nero. As his scramble for absolute power canonizes a peaceful legion of monotheists, Nero triggers a regime change, one not only of fidelity over idolatry, but the evolution of the mind over the lust of the body.  

Quo Vadis (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1951)
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Written by Henryk Sienkiewicz (novel), John Lee Mahin (screenplay), S.N. Behrman (screenplay), Sonya Levien (screenplay) and Hugh Gray (lyrical compositions and historical advisor)
Photographed by William V. Skall and Robert Surtees

Spartacus (1960, Stanley Kubrick)

Playful in exchange and clinical in execution, Spartacus profits from its pairing of strange bedfellows, generating suspense through the crackle of Dalton Trumbo’s eloquent banter and the unflinching ferocity of Stanley Kubrick’s direction. The richness of performance and context flourish in riveting vignettes, keeping the action compact and diverse, despite the film’s marathon length and the immensity of the production. This episodic nature provides an uncommon intimacy, one capable of fleshing-out complex characters without overshadowing the bombast of a grand saga. It’s a unique approach that works in fits, ultimately lagging under the restriction of its genre and the demands of a director uninspired by pre-packaged studio product.

Zeroing in on the carnality of the Classical Age, Spartacus investigates the bond between violence and sexuality, uncovering the master-slave relationship that prevails by virtue of these forms of human expression. Our eponymous hero (Kirk Douglas), an illiterate drudge and captive combatant, comprehends the system of punishment and reward through the cruelty of his masters, uncovering the hierarchy of power upon receiving the gift of a concubine as “payment” for his gladiatorial exploits.

The non-physical relationship that develops between Spartacus and the brazen Varinia (Jean Simmons) evolves through fervent glances and seething passion, but acts only as an extension of their bondage, each intimate exchange met with a forbidding whisper or possessive sentiment. Their only common ground aside from lust is a shared confinement, further magnified by the restraints of gender and eventual collapse of their servant rebellion.

Exploiting male bisexuality as an extension of societal misogyny, Spartacus capitalizes on the homoeroticism of a phallocentric Rome, painting gay culture as an ornament of upper class opulence. Treating same-sex couplings as an exotic vestige of a polytheistic civilization, Kubrick presents unctuous male flesh and marble soaking pools behind gauzy drapery and the echo of ambient chimes, characterizing the behavior as foreign and anomalous.

A veiled discussion of desire between Crassus (Laurence Olivier) and Antoninus (Tony Curtis), key figures on opposing sides of Spartacus’ radicalized army, is harder to decipher than the decor, dealing in double entendre and polite metaphor. Propositioning the naive poet Antoninus, Crassus, the most duplicitous of politicians, asks his subject’s opinion on “oysters and snails,” comparing a varied diet to an omnisexual appetite. The argument for diversity is sound, but the mouthpiece is unreliable, lending Dalton Trumbo’s saucy dialogue an air of homophobia, particularly in relation to Antoninus’ desertion of his post and devotion to Spartacus’ slave brigade. The matter becomes even more confounding when the lyricist’s allegiance to Spartacus develops an erotic bent in the closing passages, potentially conveying Trumbo’s preference of a warrior’s libido over a senator’s hissed insinuations.

The fluidity of Trumbo’s prose masks the allusions to forbidden pleasures, but Stanley Kubrick’s directorial eye evokes the displeasure of pain, replacing the bravado of battle with the horror of human degradation. Violence is the focal point of Kubrick’s visual subtext, cutting directly from brutality to an alarming reaction shot, illustrating the fear on Spartacus’ face as he’s branded and the desperate, clawing fists of Marcellus (Charles McGraw), the gladiator trainer, as he’s submerged in a cauldron of blistering soup.

Physical torment becomes its own form of slavery and Kubrick paints the sand of his training facility with sweat and spurts of crimson blood. Uncommonly cruel for the era and the plausible inspiration for Salò’s closing exhibition, the gymnasium serves a dual purpose of training mechanism and gallows pole, binding sparrers between wooden rods and employing oscillating blades as hurdles. Observing these men as they struggle places us in the role of voyeur, paralleling the viciousness of the coliseum's audience as they salivate over the prospect of fresh carrion.

Kubrick incorporates this queasiness into a towering closing battle, choreographing a barrage of swinging swords and whirling bodies, depicting the progression from vitality to fatality as a surrealistic waltz. It’s a testament to his brilliance as a filmmaker that he managed to impart skepticism and ambiguity onto the glories of war and the wide-eyed certainty of the tragic hero, transforming Spartacus from pious martyr to tight-lipped insurgent. The ideological triumph is admirable, but the change in ingredients has upset the recipe, allowing the connective tissue, comprised of perfunctory montages and rallying cries, to weigh down the midsection and telegraph the extraneous runtime. By allowing the pageantry of his aesthetic to overshadow the prerequisites of the form, Stanley Kubrick reduced the splendor of the cinematic epic to an asymmetrical character study.

Spartacus (Universal Pictures, 1960)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Howard Fast (novel) and Dalton Trumbo (screenplay)
Photographed by Russell Metty

El Cid (1961, Anthony Mann)

Constructed specifically for an auditorium, the historical epic is an event of prolonged pleasure, an extravagance bedecked in ornate period costume and wide-shot cinematography, set against the broad backdrop of monarchical politics and star-crossed sensuality. Its narrative sprawl is met with literal mass, as a sea of extras quarrel in the theater of war, each panorama of choreographed bloodshed captured in resplendent Technicolor and blown up to 70MM. The excesses in length and vision can be intimidating, but the ceremony of the cinematic experience, complete with relics of refinement like musical overture and intermission, puts art before convenience, transforming the motion picture into cultural event instead of mundane triviality.

Anthony Mann’s El Cid marries the potent imagery and scope of the medieval epic with a modern sociological preoccupation, putting man’s lust for power under the microscope and exposing religion as a tool of the belligerent and manipulative. Placing his primary combatants on opposing sides of the moral landscape, Mann and his screenwriting team discard ambiguity in favor of a clear-cut ideology, realizing that unwavering support of the hero benefits the gung-ho energy of the battle sequences and tone of Charlton Heston’s gallant performance.    

Playing Rodrigo with chin tilted towards the sky, Heston places honor before strength in his portrayal of the iconic military general, constructing a quixotic character so virtuous and noble that he’d spare water for a leper and liberate his prisoners of war in the name of clemency. Logic may wrestle with the idea of an infallible warrior, but a rousing orchestral score and grandiose cinematography sell the fantasy, casting our hero in warm, ocean-tinted sunlight, representing his rise in rank and subsequent martyrdom as secular passion play.

Complexity is woven into the narrative through Rodrigo’s relationship with Jimena (Sophia Loren), a countess that forsakes her feelings for the misunderstood knight following charges of treason and his unwitting execution of her arrogant patriarch. Poetic exchanges between the conflicted couple are cursed by the ghosts of their pasts and the honest words omitted, each disdainful remark spoken by Loren uttered beneath clenched lips, concealing sincerity and passion. The camera and set design act as accomplices to her discordance, shielding Loren’s face with drapery and tilted window shutters, visually personifying the tempestuous nature trapped within.

The cramped interiors and gloom of Jimena’s quarters are contrasted by the exterior majesty, captured in tracking shots that pivot to reveal an ever-expanding wealth of space and sumptuous uniform design. The peach skies and rolling hills of provincial Spain act as the perfect canvas for the pastels of religious and political iconography, the red and yellow of the Spanish coat of arms juxtaposed atop the onyx black thobes of Ben Yusuf’s (Herbert Lom) Islamic legion, the splashes of color acting as unification of Rodrigo’s multicultural army.

Mann composes these visual setpieces with the utmost elegance, jutting swords and limbs into the frame to give the impression of action occurring out of sight, heightening tension through evocative pans and naturalistic swordplay. Swift edits and crisp foley work represent the brutality of war far better than bloodshed, the thumping of hooves and fluid camera motion adding viscera to the thrust of a blade as it penetrates armor. Sparse lighting and wide shots add to the intimacy of single combat scenes, the stripped down sound design and distance realistically mirroring the voyeurism of violence as sport.

The closing siege is an offensive worthy of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, its wooden palisades, breaching towers and litany of archers channeling that film’s magnitude. Harnessing cameras to catapults and the necks of stampeding horses, Robert Krasker and his team of photographers improve upon Griffith’s artistic feats, imparting realism by simulating the motion of charging soldiers and surging war machines.

Their artistic sleight-of-hand is enrapturing, but El Cid’s greatest feat lies in its guilelessness, not its craft. Never once does the film condescend to its story, a forthright disposition that mounts a production of staggering size without abandoning its message of human allegiance in the face of religious fundamentalism. Sincerity may be a product of a bygone era, but its representation of the errancy of man is more important today than ever, as the lines between faith and fact are blurred and passion steadily morphs into ironic indifference.

El Cid (Allied Artists Pictures, 1961)
Directed by Anthony Mann
Written by Fredric M. Frank (story/screenplay), Philip Yordan (screenplay) and Ben Barzman (screenplay)
Photographed by Robert Krasker