Julien Donkey-Boy (1999, Harmony Korine)

Building a narrative from sight and sound instead of story, Julien Donkey-Boy prevails through Harmony Korine’s desire to augment the medium, confronting the formality of fiction with the amateurish and idiosyncratic. His eye for contrast and knack for reanimating outmoded equipment work to democratize the form, conjuring breathtaking images from discarded objects, elevating the smeared color of videotape and harsh light of a Polaroid camera to an ineffable grace. By placing the rudimentary and sophisticated shoulder to shoulder, often through the juxtaposition of arias atop degraded photocopies, Korine redefines beauty, begetting an elegance that lifts the ordinary to the sublime.  

Exhibiting a breathing, impressionistic palette, Korine and Anthony Dod Mantle employ the jaggedness of stop-motion animation to blur each gesture and flicker of light, shifting the focus from the inhabiting action in a scene to its physical appearance. Superimposition also contaminates the frame, reducing structures to shapes and spawning startling, alien landscapes from an amalgam of floating heads and the brittle vertebrae of tree branches.

The low-resolution of the camera often enables Korine’s grimmer tendencies, but efforts are made to embrace the film stock’s static-laden warmth, lending the sunlight a warped reverberance that bathes Korine’s muse (Chloë Sevigny) in an amber halo. The drone of radio waves and Valdís Óskarsdóttir’s spasmodic edits also blanket the composition in messy decadence, reflecting the bewilderment of its lead, Julien (Ewen Bremner), through an assemblage of jump cuts and tinted stills that reproduce the psychosis of schizophrenia.   

Despite the wealth of technique on display, Korine never bastardizes Julien’s disease in the name of style or shock, demonstrating tenderness towards his peers and restraint in the depiction of domestic abuse. Each elaborate use of collage is intended as an exaltation, upholding the optimism and exuberance of the “disabled” cast as opposition to a segregated cinema and shield from parental cruelty, personified on screen by Julien’s intoxicated patriarch (Werner Herzog).

Though the catastrophe of the closing passages possesses a despair at odds with the hopefulness of his ensemble, Korine’s directorial eye is far more benevolent than in previous endeavors, regarding each peculiarity and parlor trick as endearing trait rather than carnival sideshow. Through the rigid tenets of Dogme 95, Korine absolved himself of exploitative tendencies, repurposing his nostalgia for obsolescence into a statement on cultural disenfranchisement and indifference. By gazing upon his subjects with respect and empathy, he treated their lives as worthy of the melodrama of tragedy.

Julien Donkey-Boy (Fine Line Features, 1999)
Written and Directed by Harmony Korine
Photographed by Anthony Dod Mantle

The Idiots (1998, Lars von Trier)

Aspiring to free cinema from the “deadly embrace of sensation,” Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg sought authenticity through obstruction, liberating the form by restricting its access to optical effects, musical cues and narrative tropes. The resulting movement, known as Dogme 95, would strip film culture of its adherence to fantasy, disconnecting from Hollywood escapism and European intellectualism in equal measure, favoring unfettered honesty at the expense of aesthetic superficiality.

Von Trier’s The Idiots bears the mark of this primitivistic ideology from its opening shot, presenting the film’s title in bone white chalk on the planks of a hardwood floor. His photography captures the imperfections of handheld camera work, wavering with the quiver of a palm and settling for off-kilter angles, probing each location based on an actor’s position or the continuous flow of dialogue and sound. Background noise and music infiltrate each scene diegetically, lending a cluttered veracity to sequences filmed in a cafe and succeeding passages of impropriety, emulating the human ear’s ability to interpret multiple frequencies.

Despite the outwardly organic appearance and lack of directorial credit, von Trier still possesses artistic conceits, utilizing a documentary-style framing device to reveal specifics about his esoteric subjects, permitting his stylistic preoccupations to bend the rules of a self-imposed “vow of chastity.” His theme also boasts the impertinence of an instigator, employing the taboo as a metaphor for Dogme’s tenets and noble motivations.

Yet, these infractions feel arbitrary when surveying the finished product, due, in part, to the sentiment lurking beneath the charade and von Trier’s capacity for self-reproach. Using a commune of pranksters as his avatar, von Trier paints auteurs as sadists and liars, finding insincerity and contempt in their provocations and self-serving code of ethics. Though his protagonists treat the public space as their stage, as opposed to the confines of the arthouse, their manipulations are no less sinister, exploiting societal mores for pleasure and money at the expense of human suffering.

“The Idiots” primary mode of expression is “spassing”: an act that entails bellowing like a petulant child, contorting palms and fingers into palsied fists and pounding feverishly at pulsating temples. Von Trier realizes the crudity inherent in this symbol and harnesses its negative energy for many fraught moments, chiefly an awkward restroom vignette where a biker is persuaded to steady the urinating penis of a purportedly disabled teenager.  

Each viewer is permitted to determine the comedic value of these performances and von Trier has positioned Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), his nearly silent lead, as their representative and objective witness. Her permissiveness, despite trepidations about offending the masses, reflects the complicity of the audience, exposing the innate voyeurism of filmic art and immorality of unbiased spectatorship.

Thankfully, the man behind the camera has not freed himself from blame and von Trier’s acts of self-deprecation are far more scathing in their frankness. Stoffer (Jens Albinus) embodies his headstrong temperament and exhibitionist spirit, obscuring a prurient nature beneath a thick haze of rhetoric and bravado. Though he chides bourgeois lifestyles and unearned wealth, he possesses both and survives on a charlatan’s living of confidence scams and familial goodwill. Each act of liberation in his name ultimately denies reality and his desire for control and superiority culminates in a cruel impulse to film and ridicule a party of handicapped visitors.

As penance for his corresponding trespasses, Lars von Trier transforms a vulgar stunt into an act of sacrifice. Appointing Karen as his proxy, he parades her before her estranged family, allowing the misery of a departed son to spring forth in a cathartic “spass.” His camera exalts her and the cinema to sainthood, aligning the blood and wine streaming down her worn face to Christ’s wounds from the crown of thorns, regarding dramatic torment as the purest reflection of actual sorrow.

The Idiots (October Films, 1998)
Written, Directed and Photographed by Lars von Trier

Shine a Light (2008, Martin Scorsese)

Functioning as reverent concert film and abridged history lesson, Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light regards the vigor and passion of The Rolling Stones as emblematic of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s perpetuity, employing their eclecticism and longevity as a rock-solid representation of the genre in its entirety. Though he often confuses controversy and celebrity for substance, captured in his preoccupation with stadium-tour excess, Scorsese never strays far from Keith Richards’ fingers and Mick Jagger’s hips, understanding that the roux for rhythm and blues is the fervent vibration of electric guitar and insinuation built into every sway.

Commencing days before the band takes the stage, Scorsese complicates his narrative by examining the technical aspects of event planning, implying a looseness with grainy, hand-held photography that contradicts the painstaking detail applied to stage lighting and ornamentation. His endorsement of the dubious union between art and politics is also antithetical and inappropriate, diminishing the danger and sexuality inherent in the Stones’ music with every posed photo of President Clinton and on-screen deliberation between financiers.

Thankfully, the performance footage broadens the color spectrum and trains its eye on the entertainers, stranding the reality of the music industry behind the curtain. Robert Richardson’s keen instincts capably capture depth and frame shots in a chaotic environment, evading the glare of spotlights and flash of cell phones to reproduce the emotional bond between performer and audience.

Mick Jagger’s flair for working a crowd into a frenzy is also undiminished by the pageantry of the production design, finding his form and footwork as lissome and flirtatious as it was at the height of the British Invasion. He’s even ushered a sense of humor into the autumn of his life, coquettishly smirking through “Some Girls” funniest verses and playing roué to Christina Aguilera’s sultry chanteuse.

Yet, this propensity for playfulness doesn’t betray a lack of consideration, as Jagger and company have manifested a coherent theme from an array of back-catalog favorites and tried-and-true standards. Pivoting between styles during Scorsese’s montages of archival footage, the boys honor country, soul and blues with intimate renditions and an aesthete's rigor, welcoming Buddy Guy and Jack White to the stage to inject authenticity and juvenility into their guileless interpretations.

A spirited cover of “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)” finds the band at their most excitable, as each strum of Keith Richard’s low-hanging guitar embodies the “ecstasy” lingering within Barrett Strong’s words and enkindles a nostalgia for the neglected facets of rock history. By championing these forebearers and contemporaries, The Rolling Stones have ushered the form into the 21st Century, supplanting the vapidity of fame with a scholarly approach to the art and sexuality of the recent past, transforming the transitory nature of popular culture into enduring folk tradition.

Shine a Light (Paramount Classics, 2008)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Photographed by Robert Richardson

Cocksucker Blues (1972, Robert Frank)

Suppressed by its subjects and prefaced with half-hearted swatches of legalese, Cocksucker Blues betrays any attempts at authenticity before its opening shot, transforming the backstage shenanigans of The Rolling Stones and their associates into a montage of decadent playacting. Lingering outside of Robert Frank’s camera eye, the Stones play supporting roles as penance for the violence of their Altamont Free Concert, forcing the photographic team to shift focus to the disreputable aspects of the recording industry. Left without a compelling narrative core, Frank can only allude to the band’s tour-borne malaise and repressed guilt, digging for meaning in the monologues and writhing bodies of junkie courtesans and revelrous stagehands.

Emulating the gaunt profiles of the primary cast, the film stock is weather-worn and ragged, stripped of color either by design or through decades of bootlegging and videotape generation loss. Edits are just as frayed, carrying little chronology and interrupting pertinent story threads with incongruous clips of stacked studio equipment and dangling light fixtures. This unseemly clutter even carries over to the natural sound recording, melding cacophonous conversation, background noise and diegetic music into an inaudible sonic puddle.

A staggering compositional indifference smothers the piece entirely, leaving lurid bursts of carnality and drug abuse unrecognizable beneath an amateurish color palette unsuited for observational photography. Nudity functions as the only visual leitmotif and emblem of rebellion for the duo of cinematographers, who leer at the artists in various states of undress, splicing in clips of a roadie coaxing his flaccid member to imply an all-embracing promiscuity. These acts of transgression further develop into a “pornographic party” film, treating oral sex and its biological aftermath as childish provocation and inserting the performers into an airborne orgy that crosses the line between frisky and felonious.

The band’s complicity in these unsimulated sex acts is suspiciously obscured by the camera, lending a dubious nature to each explicit endeavor, directing guilt away from the Stones and towards the prurient glance of the filmmakers. If only this avarice for on-screen orgasms and needle injections carried over to the performance footage, which bears a muddiness and intangibility that distances the viewer from the vigor of each uproarious set and directs their attentions towards Frank’s esteemed objects of revulsion.

By making “band-aids” the primary mouthpiece for Mick Jagger and company, Robert Frank betrayed the band’s trust and implied an immorality and indulgence manifested by disingenuous editing and the veil of journalistic integrity. Left with only fleeting moments of musical majesty and witty repartee, the remaining picture bears the vapidity of a green-room gathering, coasting by on its distant association to cultural prominence.

Cocksucker Blues (Marshall Chess, 1972)
Directed by Robert Frank
Photographed by Robert Frank and Daniel Seymour

Gimme Shelter (1970, Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin)

Bearing the reflexive chronology and confessional introspection of reality television, Gimme Shelter denies the triviality of celebrity exposé, humanizing The Rolling Stones by transforming them from performer to observer, allowing each member to recount fears and frustrations from their seats at the editing bay. The resulting oral history is “behind the scenes” without feeling sanitized, uncovering the ecstasy and exasperation of artistic endeavor in the face of human antipathy.

As hushed and solitary as a police interrogation, the introductory passages preface the dread of the Altamont Free Concert by observing the artists after the fact, capturing the confusion and frustration on Charlie Watts’ face as radio broadcasters and Hells Angels blame his band for the stabbing death of an intoxicated spectator. Unfurling footage from a jovial New York City gig plays silently in the background as ironic counterpoint, perverting the pleasures of a stellar performance into a point of embarrassment, as the participants contemplate the cataclysmic events that would occur within one week of their on-stage extravagance.

The grain of the handheld concert footage is as intimate and tightly-shot as a home movie, soaking up the glow of the stage lighting and reflecting pools of sweat, harnessing the energy beneath the clamor and feedback. Sheltered from portraits of the forthcoming chaos, the viewer is permitted to indulge in the expressiveness of the camera, swaying along with double-exposed snaps of Mick Jagger’s gentle, spiraling motions, kneeling in reverence to the spirituality of a communal, aural experience.  

The Stones also bow to the transfigurative power of music, narcotically bobbing their heads and mouthing the words of “Wild Horses” from beneath wet lips, as the track takes its maiden spin on Muscle Shoals’ four-track mixing console. Glimpsing the impact of the ballad on its creators is incredibly stirring and inclusive, welcoming the audience in as participant instead of voyeur, eliminating the divide between artist and aficionado.

Exposing this vulnerability to their vast fan base would eventually become a curse for The Rolling Stones, despite best intentions. Their goodwill would be exploited and sacristy breached by the drug-addled attendees and self-serving security at Altamont, which was created as a West Coast-variation on Woodstock’s bountiful “good vibes,” but would devolve into a stateside manifestation of the Vietnam War.

Tensions seeped into the euphoric gathering from the moment the Stones disembarked from their chopper, as crowds rushed the dwarven, slapdash stage and bikers struck the interlopers with splintered pool cues. As hedonism and blind rage butted heads and opening acts got caught in the crossfire, Mick pleaded with the crowd to “cool out,” but his yearning fell on the deaf ears of drunken revelers. His vocals even began to emulate the anarchy, as words spewed out in a tortured wail and cymbals clashed behind in utter cacophony.

The conflict culminated during a somber rendition of “Under My Thumb,” as a teenager in a verdant leisure suit directed his pistol at the stage and sunk to the dirt beneath a sea of descending knife blows. As frames of the maelstrom are rewound and scrutinized in slow motion, Mick turns pale with indignation and the image freezes on the chilling vacuousness beneath his eyes. Through this haunting portrait of disillusionment, the Maysles Brothers encapsulated the anxieties of a culture incapable of detaching its ideology from the militaristic temperament of its government.  

Gimme Shelter (20th Century Fox, 1970)
Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
Photographed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Gary Weis

Case for a Rookie Hangman (1970, Pavel Juráček)

Fracturing its various moods and themes into isolated chapters, Pavel Juráček’s Case for a Rookie Hangman refashions excerpts of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels into a paranoid and disjointed nightmare, indulging fits of farcical humor and surrealistic imagery in the name of sociological discourse. Where Swift intended to disguise his contempt for the scientific and political elite beneath obvious fantasy, Juráček reins in the supernatural aspects, zeroing in on Gulliver’s subconscious guilt and utilizing it as the chief metaphor in his literal trial by jury. The resulting work wavers between madcap and nerve-racking, snickering at man’s attempts at dominion in an absurd world, while admiring each character’s capacity for faith in the face of corruption.

The opening duo of chapters stray the furthest from reality, placing Lemuel Gulliver (Lubomír Kostelka) at the mercy of his environment and the darkest corners of his own mind. Our initial introduction is shot from over his right shoulder, lending access to Gulliver’s perspective and enlivening the humorous and preposterous circumstances that befall him, spearheaded by a speeding car without a driver and a dead rabbit bedecked in a three-piece suit.

The score’s ethereal harp and festive keys imply congeniality, but gradually unfasten into abstract bits of shrill sound, mirroring the macabre tenor of each subsequent section. As memories peek out from Gulliver’s prattling narration, lucid metaphors flood the screen and landscapes shift like the curved glass of a funhouse mirror, manifesting floorboards akin to struck piano keys and ominous structures fit for a Franz Kafka novel.

The leitmotif of Lemuel’s delusional visions is a drowned schoolgirl, either acting as reinterpretation of childhood shame or flicker of repressed sexuality. Pursuing the phantom through the pandemonium of his dream world brings her no closer, but each passing glance and prurient sensation unlocks a facet of his persecution complex, prompting leering faces to peer out from pockets of light in the darkness and descend upon him like a pack of ravenous wolves.  

Tracking shots follow Gulliver’s frantic motion with the ebb and flow of a pendulum, exemplifying fluidity in spite of the anarchic volatility of the narrative. The dialogue is just as unrestrained, pouring forth from Gulliver’s head like a faucet and adding abstract layers of rhetoric atop an already befuddling scenario.

Forthcoming vignettes are far more conventional than the cerebral commencement, stranding Gulliver in a sea of interchangeable characters in realistic settings, examining his culpability before a criminal court in a foreign land. His role as an observer to the contradictory nature of his captive nation’s laws and superstitions lays the base for Pavel Juráček’s incisive tinges of irony, perverting scientists into fundamentalists and kings into woebegotten baggage clerks.

This mélange of sarcasm and symbol can be perplexing, even maddening, but beneath its cynicism lies an understanding of why man makes myths and shelters itself in hope, making Case for a Rookie Hangman an empathetic study in human folly and not an act of condescension.

Case for a Rookie Hangman (Barrandov Studios, 1970)
Directed by Pavel Juráček
Written by Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) and Pavel Juráček (screenplay)
Photographed by Jan Kalis

The Joke (1969, Jaromil Jireš)

Narrated with the remoteness of a passing thought and edited with the swiftness of memory, The Joke wrestles between the mirth of youth and resignation of middle-age, laying bare the narrow divide between love and hate and the fragility of human relationships. By ensnaring beauty and song in the prison of the past, Jaromil Jireš uncovers the swelling rancor within communist Czechoslovakia, revealing student politics as a bourgeois social club held over from the Third Republic, corrupt in its blind faith and detached positivity.

Repurposing the revenge thriller as wistful rumination, Jireš exchanges the prerequisite rage for mournful misanthropy, permeating the dejected Ludvik’s (Josef Somr) notions with poetic turns of phrase, transforming his sarcastic barbs into acts of opposition. Passages of reminiscence even carry a whiff of this sardonic subjectivity, morphing communal events into a singular, bitter mindset, further intensifying revelations of betrayal and collusion.

Enkindled by a chance encounter with an ex-comrade’s spouse (Jana Dítětová), Ludvik plots a game of sexual humiliation to compensate for a decade of ostracization, reliving his college years in panicked flashes that pour over into the banality of adulthood. As sentiments from his hopeful past rush into the bleak present, Jireš expounds upon the permanence of Ludvik’s expulsion from the Communist Party, constructing a broken character from the taunts of his harshest critics and scars of his most traumatic experiences.

The cruelty of Ludvik’s memory, which maliciously inserts his middle-aged body into adolescence like a thorn, wholly contaminates the form, introducing acerbic irony into the anthems of yesteryear, perverting them as the soundtrack for aberrant sex and chain gang labor. This juxtaposition not only stirs up a sober, unsettling ambience, but exposes the hypocrisies inherent in socialism, exhibiting the chasm between the privileges of the educated elite and the desperation of the working poor with each edit between hymn and hardship.

This fatalistic approach deliberately drains politics and vengeance of their cinematic intrigue, leaving behind a diatonic, acrimonious declaration of human disconnection. Its lack of paranoid hysterics and mercurial lighting, which benefited kindred spirits like The Ear, nurtures thematic continuity at the expense of rising action, stranding the narrative in a metaphorical limbo without the capacity to illustrate its intellectual conceits on screen. Left without an emotional or visual anchor, astute points about the treachery of nostalgia and persistence of social class are trapped behind glass, suffocated beneath the scowl of a stone-faced gallery piece.

The Joke (Barrandov Studios, 1969)
Directed by Jaromil Jireš
Written by Milan Kundera (novel/screenplay), Jaromil Jireš (screenplay) and Zdeněk Bláha (dramaturge)
Photographed by Jan Curík

Daisies (1966, Věra Chytilová)

Teeming with silent-era affectation and ebullient editorial handiwork, Daisies conceals political allusions beneath slapstick and stylistic extravagance, transforming mischief and chaos into egalitarian protest. Weaponizing art and femininity against the constraints of a communist state, Věra Chytilová championed technique and aesthetic as personal catharsis, deriding the feigned unity of collectivism by revealing the pleasure in independent creation.

Eschewing the conformity of narrative, Chytilová constructed a quilt of images and symbols, tampering with the origins of sound by replacing its natural cadence with clanging gears of war. The opening credits are powered by militant bugle and churning mechanism, punctuated by abrupt silences that lend an eerie calm to footage of detonating bombs and airborne fire fights. Her human avatars (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová) are just as robotic as her machines, creaking like unlubricated hinges with each gyrating limb or swiveling head. She allows the ticking of a clock pendulum to spur her puppets into motion, shifting between lens filter and setting to mirror their physicality.

Transitions are jarring and without precedent, employing the score as onomatopoeia in an experiment with tone and texture. Pigments shift from pink to orange to green as jump cuts dash through dining sequences, condensing the superficiality of small talk into forgotten moments between sips of coffee and cigarettes. A postprandial train ride even transforms into an impressionistic painting, as radiant tones trail behind the caboose like bleary neon lights on the tracks.

Chytilová finds freedom in this artistic frivolity, utilizing semantic games buried within her images to impart meaning, applying sharpened scissors as the literal and a flatbed film editor as the figurative. Anarchic visions of rapidly-diced eggs, bananas and sausages act as an affront to the biological necessity of sex organs, defacing the pragmatic restraints of the nuclear family and demanding autonomy by force. Shears even dissect bodies into pieces like a butcher’s cleaver, leaving superimposed limbs and heads to ghoulishly dance about the screen, calculating human value by the sum of its anatomical parts. The transgression of the content is even strong enough to alter the form, resulting in a dissection of the image, dissolving it into contorted, rectangular blocks within the camera eye.

In a final act of defiance, the director and her fictional peers find transcendence through gluttony and vandalism, shuffling off the plow lines and coaxing the image to polychromatic life by gorging on pheasant and ripping the chandelier from the ceiling. Through this host of recurring symbols and mutinous declarations, ranging from the captive beauty of the butterfly to the vulgarity of indulgence, Věra Chytilová inserts her interchangeable pranksters into the harnesses of radical socialism, marvelling as their indomitable spirit prevails in the face of an automated society.

Daisies (Barrandov Studios, 1966)
Directed by Věra Chytilová
Written by Věra Chytilová (story/screenplay), Ester Krumbachová (screenplay) and Pavel Jurácek (screenplay)
Photographed by Jaroslav Kucera

Walker (1987, Alex Cox)

An act of transgression under the guise of truth, Alex Cox’s Walker adulterates textual history with spurting blood squibs and proleptic product placement, slaughtering the sacred cows of colonialism’s past with the media tactics of the distant future. Through William Walker and his thuggish Central American wanderlust, Cox unearthed the perfect preamble to U.S. involvement in the Nicaraguan Revolution, parading out every display of brutality as a sardonic analysis of military occupation and an erudite, if faintly smug, excoriation of celebrity.  

Revelling in the clash between the sincere and the sarcastic, Cox impregnates mannered performances and ornate parlors with screeching violin and shouted dialogue, mocking the propriety of period filmmaking by drowning it in its own embellishments. Every setpiece is slightly askew, contaminated by contemporary curse words and vivid fits of carnality, transforming the glory of war and grandeur of politics into a mess of strewn corpses and vociferous bluster.

The juxtaposition of this brazen artifice atop genuine moments of tenderness forges a tonal incongruity, accentuating the contrast between the director’s stylistic excesses and the intended progression of the narrative. When viewed in isolation, spirited signing and intimate gesture shared between soldier of fortune William Walker (Ed Harris) and the hearing-impaired Ellen Martin (Marlee Matlin) fosters profound emotion, but seeing these passages interspersed with the overarching product’s stilted political rhetoric and sly spoofery exposes their dubious nature, squandering Martin’s disability as a facet of the film’s endless cavalcade of quirks.  

By sacrificing integrity in the name of symbolic innuendo, Cox better serves his obsession with popular culture, repurposing Walker’s sanguinary seizure of Rivas as an exercise in spaghetti-western parody. Through persistent use of extreme close-up and balletic violence, the chaos of battle is transfigured into a surreal soap opera, untethering further from reality with each subsequent double-cross and public execution.

As El Presidente struts through combat unharmed, like a spectre, backed by the disjointed piano and haunting throb of Joe Strummer’s score, Cox forces the chronology of time to fray, inserting modern commodities into antiquated scenarios. The shock of Walker gorging himself on his enemy’s organs and the folly of a silver Mercedes speeding past a horse-drawn carriage function to destroy the languor of the biography, corrupting cinema much like the protagonist corrupted language and politics. By fashioning an absurd presentation to match an equally absurd situation, Alex Cox exposed the barbarity of “Manifest Destiny” by dragging it into the limelight, making a belabored point even less subtle by amplifying it to a deafening volume.

Walker (Universal Pictures, 1987)
Directed by Alex Cox
Written by Rudy Wurlitzer
Photographed by David Bridges

A Knight’s Tale (2001, Brian Helgeland)

Blithe humor and a sense of chivalrous adventure exalt the whimsical A Knight’s Tale above the grim “realism” of its counterparts, capturing the zeitgeist of the Middle Ages without allowing the propensity for violence to overshadow the evolution of character. By substituting classic rock and contemporary arena culture for omnipresent barbarity, Brian Helgeland has transformed the period piece into pop confection, demonstrating the analogous nature of history instead of exploiting cultural differences at the behest of latter-day sanctimony.

Beyond his playful injections of anachronistic ephemera, Helgeland manages to insert his source of inspiration directly into the action, personifying Geoffrey Chaucer’s irreverent, innuendo-laden authorial voice through Paul Bettany’s magniloquent and sarcastic performance. Not unlike Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reinterpretation of Chaucer as amused overseer in The Canterbury Tales, Helgeland treats the father of English literature as charlatan and gambler, plying his poetry as master forger and hype man for a peasant in knight’s armor.

Masquerading as a jouster for filthy lucre and the affection of a modish sport enthusiast, William Thatcher (Heath Ledger) rides in place of his deceased liege, falsifying “papers of nobility” and a globe-trotting backstory with the help of Chaucer’s flowery boasting and a forward-thinking female blacksmith. Despite a painless ascension to the top of his field, conflict ultimately contaminates William’s “rags to riches” scheme, embodied by a ruthless blueblood (Rufus Sewell) keen to bed his object of affection (Shannyn Sossamon) and act as the classist thorn in his blue-collar side.

Spiking these well-worn narrative tropes with comedic levity and editorial flair, Helgeland avoids slipping into self-seriousness by allowing William’s squires to act as the chorus, their jests and squabbles furnishing the film’s bouts of slapstick and covert attempts at profundity. Their sincerest moments stem from immense loss, as recollections of fruitless affairs pepper William’s letters of love, revealing that a lifetime of servitude even renders memory as property of the kingdom.

This adherence to honest portrayals of fictional characters imbues the central romance with the self-absorption and cruelty common in youthful courtship, failing only when confusing submission with endearment. Bouts of dissent between the couple also merely function to intensify passions before a rousing Londonian finale, standing out as erroneous and overly emotional in the face of Helgeland’s jocular employment of cliché (see turkey leg vendors, joust hooligans, “the wave”).

Yet, for every familiar story beat and err in judgment, Helgeland boasts a marvel of imagination, epitomized by a ballroom dance sequence that fuses maneuvers of ancient refinement with the liberated, sensual grooves of David Bowie’s “Golden Years.” This marriage of organic majesty and conscious artificiality reflects modernity in thought instead of superficial appearance, drawing parallels outside of era, carried within the strands of our DNA.

A Knight’s Tale (Columbia Pictures, 2001)
Directed by Brian Helgeland
Written by Geoffrey Chaucer (“The Knight’s Tale”) and Brian Helgeland (screenplay)
Photographed by Richard Greatrex

We'd like to thank Kiss Them Goodbye for the high-res screengrabs!

Marie Antoinette (2006, Sofia Coppola)

Brimming with effervescence and ingenuity, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette fuses the lust of teenage rebellion to the baroque architecture and ideological rigidity of Versailles, building anachronistic parallels between punk-rock aesthetic and aristocratic opulence. Though power chords and petits fours bear little semblance, Coppola uses both to reveal the bonds inherent in juvenile frivolity, aligning Madame Déficit’s passion for pastries and champagne to 21st Century neophilia. By drawing allegiances between time, place and social class, Coppola has made a spirited recreation of Marie’s ascension to adulthood, satirizing female subordinance by viewing it through the archaic edicts of the French monarchy.

Emigrating from her native Austria to strengthen alliances with the Ancien Régime, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) stumbled into maturity at an accelerated rate, climbing from biological adult to queen to mother at the behest of a conflicted and impoverished France. Strapped with an often contradictory set of rules and utter lack of privacy, the Dauphine was stripped of her Germanic identity and canine companion, only to be occupied by a coterie of virulent critics, each spouting barbs like Macbeth’s hags, but draped in embroidered gowns and drunk on carbonated libations.

Her only defense against the monotony of the “morning dressing ceremony,” which bears an audience worthy of the theater, is a healthy dose of adolescent sarcasm, met only by context-deficient adherence to tradition or willful indifference. Her equally green husband, Louis-Auguste (Jason Schwartzman), shares this passive noncompliance, preferring a locksmith’s hobby and the morning fox hunt over fulfillment of his marital duties. Despite a shy demeanor and courteous nature, his puerile fear of mating puts Marie’s future at risk, making each evening of abstinence a step closer to annulment and expulsion. Coppola visualizes the future queen’s crippling anxiety from atop a balcony, panning back gradually to use the immensity of the structure to dwarf her diminutive form and symbolize her impotence in the face of sovereign ritual.

Forcing motherhood upon her with extreme prejudice, the royal court uses Marie’s femininity as a scapegoat for Louis’ cold feet, perverting their erotic coupling into a game of political cunning. Her budding sexuality is further confused by the Comtesse du Barry (Asia Argento), whose illicit relationship with Louis’ grandfather and open prurience are treated as taboos by the army of chambermaids that primp and perfume Marie for nights of restless sleep. Du Barry’s fashion sense even stands in stark contrast to Marie’s prude pastels and muted blues, boasting dark purples and pomegranates that threaten to upstage the exotic vibes of her primate companion.

Agitations provided by du Barry and the rumblings of gossipy servants only serve to strengthen the bond between our shrinking violets, elevating their fumblings with sexual congress to a more honest and modern point of reference. Their nervous interactions and pleasant quirks of character manifest flesh and blood from historical corpses, lending emotional resonance to Marie’s manic swings in temperament and Coppola’s passion for excerpts of atmospheric new-wave.

Coppola soundtracks our protagonist’s impetuous fits of spending with the fizzle of champagne and the teasing prance of Bow Wow Wow’s take on “I Want Candy,” transforming the extravagance of retail therapy into sexual placebo. As frocks and half-eaten eclairs are hurled to the ground in dizzying montage, polychromatic plates of macarons and rows of backless mules shake along with the drumbeat, gyrating in a jerky shuffle reminiscent of stop-motion animation.

Cinematographer Lance Acord ups the kinetic ante even further during the Parisian masquerade sequence, taking a page from The Leopard’s formal decadence and heightening the energy to a frothing lather through dazzling hue and subtle flirtation. Marie’s wandering eye echoes the motion of the camera and ecstasy of the evening, glancing southward and delicately stroking her bottom lip to communicate urges to a salacious Swedish count (Jamie Dornan).

Their brief tryst is pure schoolgirl fantasy and Coppola pairs their thrusting hips and vigorous kissing with throbbing percussion and soft, airy photography, tempering the authenticity of the set design with an oneiric, subjective haze. By gently removing the action from reality and avoiding overtly-modern edits and story beats, Coppola keeps her knowing glances on the score and screen as subtle indicators, allowing each metachronism to project, but never cloud the crux of the narrative. She masterfully handles spectacle and authorial theme, never allowing either indulgence to corrupt a lesson in innocence sacrificed at the altar of experience.

*Author’s Note: Kinetoscope Film Journal wouldn’t be possible without the support of my loving wife. I dedicate my 100th review to her and commend her for having such impeccable taste in movies (Marie Antoinette just so happens to be her favorite).

Marie Antoinette (Columbia Pictures, 2006)
Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola
Photographed by Lance Acord

Lincoln (2012, Steven Spielberg)

Awash in a handsome, sensualized nostalgia, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln flirts with a dramatic solitude outside of his repertoire, briefly nurturing a muted profile of the American Civil War from droll discussion and hazy bedchambers. Daniel Day-Lewis follows suit, capturing the man behind the monument through hung head and restrained sorrow, never bending into impersonation or synthetic mannerism. His humanization of the Abraham Lincoln legend feels like a succinct coda to a momentous career, tarnished only by Spielberg’s inability to remain evenhanded, diluting any attempt at urbanity through false solemnity and trite grandiosity.

Drifting off topic like a sentimental drunk, Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is far more reminiscent than present, decorating his diplomatic negotiations with riddles, quotes and jests, each standing in stark contrast to the gravity of the political climate and frankness of his advisors. Spielberg uses his emotional isolation to depict a life in extremis, forging a man of “semi-divine stature” before moonlight, eulogizing his achievements in the earnest recitation of Union soldiers and reverent glances of White House servants. Ironically, the strongest demurral to Lincoln’s piety stems from his own family, reflected in a son’s distaste for social class and wife’s overwhelming grief, which pools over into passive-aggression in the polite company of a White House gala.

Janusz Kaminiski delicately encapsulates Mary Todd’s (Sally Field) misery over a departed son into the mise en scène, morphing the sole candle flicker and scant rays of daylight in her boudoir into an eternal séance. His use of restrained lighting also repurposes organic spaces, using dusky blue sky as natural camouflage, alluding to the anonymity of battle by obscuring the faces of exhausted soldiers in charcoal shadow. Kaminski's troops are prisoners within the portrait, just like the weary Mrs. Lincoln, fenced off by acute angles and the stifling claustrophobia of hand-to-hand combat.

The narrative stride mirrors this restraint, diverting only in service of muddled montages, which repurpose bribery and deception as scoundrel’s adventure. Incapable of honing in on the studied pace provided by fascinating passages on presidential autocracy and legal duplicity, Steven Spielberg resorts to blockbuster cliché over deferential facsimile, obfuscating the artful endeavors of his script in favor of moralistic frenzy. His fits of comic relief are just as extraneous, reducing the staid gestures of cast and painterly focus of photographer into portentous wrapping paper on a tawdry gift. The profundity garnered through quiet exchanges, often whispered between forlorn parents and stoic generals, is smothered in crowd-pleasing melodrama, squandering an abundance of aesthetic beauty at the behest of awards and accolades.

Lincoln (Touchstone Pictures, 2012)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Doris Kearns Goodwin (book) and Tony Kushner (screenplay)
Photographed by Janusz Kaminski

Frost/Nixon (2008, Ron Howard)

Lifting the partition between legend and reality, Frost/Nixon treats archival footage from the Watergate scandal as living tissue, allowing snapshots of visual media to impart truth onto a fictionalization. As the film dances between journalistic montage, mock documentary and melodrama, Ron Howard extrapolates personal turmoil from the pages of history, reanimating the iconic figure of Richard Nixon into a reflection of late-century cynicism and human fallibility.

The politics surrounding Nixon’s presidential resignation and subsequent ostracization are merely a pretext for Howard’s fascination with the influence of television, transforming his infrequent fits of moralization into forgivable peccadillos. He structures his exposé like a broadcast news package, swiftly cutting between interview excerpts and meticulous period recreations before panning back to reveal a mirror image on an adjacent screen. By juxtaposing the camera eye atop the naked eye, Howard fashions a metaphor for the infinite access of televised media, evincing the power of the picture tube and its ability to reinterpret fact.

The irony of criticizing the subjectivity of the medium with a feature film isn’t lost on the production team and they reinforce Peter Morgan’s words with robust characterizations, escaping the cult of personality by way of interpretive nuance. Michael Sheen’s portrayal of talk show host David Frost avoids the “white knight” accolades, quivering delicately before the prospect of failing at his greatest endeavor: eliciting an apology from America’s crooked commander-in-chief on national television. Frank Langella’s Nixon is just as anxious and uncertain, paralyzed by his own paranoia, but willing to mask the pain beneath layers of camera-ready bluster.

Both men’s desires intersect at The Nixon Interviews, positioned here as Frost’s ploy for American celebrity and Nixon’s plea for re-entry into the political sphere. Howard parallels shots to draw the leads shoulder to shoulder, marrying glimpses of lifted cocktail glasses and furrowed brows, observing the pair in despondent states of self-medication and internal conflict. Contrarily, the external “battle” they conduct in conversation is tête-à-tête and thoroughly dominated by Nixon’s crude masculinity, elevating each verbal assault on Frost’s “effeminate” loafers and swinging lifestyle to the ferocity of chemical warfare. These hawkish “anecdotes” of militaristic rule, which occupy the lion’s share of their four-part series, only serve to make his undoing all the more tragic, ultimately playing out before his eyes as Cambodian fatalities flickering on an A/V screen.

In a bout of conscience or intoxication, the 37th President shows his hand to his opponent in an unsolicited phone call, compelling Frost to take their dialogue “no holds barred.” As each petty and furious word spills forth from Nixon’s salivant mouth, exposing a wealth of personal insecurities to an equally desperate listener, our empathy deepens, redeeming a black mark in American history by humanizing its culprit.

Frost/Nixon (Universal Pictures, 2008)
Directed by Ron Howard
Written by Peter Morgan
Photographed by Salvatore Tonino

W. (2008, Oliver Stone)

Released in the twilight of George W. Bush’s presidential term, Oliver Stone’s W. works best as an examination of the discord between father and son, exalting universal themes of jealousy and doubt to the theater of international diplomacy. Cursory viewings imply the depth of a crass joke, disfigured by parodic supporting performances and insulting punchlines, which prop up political paragons like statues in a wax museum. Further analysis reveals a cunning compositional strategy, one that fights to humanize the whipping boy portrayed in American media (see Fahrenheit 9/11), mining the depth of his vulnerability for mutual understanding. By draining George’s advisory team of their human properties and lifting his patriarch to the role of deity, Stone establishes the Bush family black sheep as an eternal outcast, confining his wealth of imperfections to an Oval Office inhabited by automatons and haunted by the ghosts of his old-man’s accomplishments.

Abandoning chronology in favor of atemporal editing, Stone constructs an ingenious logic outside of organized time, displaying Bush’s tumultuous past before sprinting forward to expose the resulting psychological bruises in the present. The amorphous nature of the story functions like memory, spawning subplots and tangents from W.’s wandering mind, allowing the triggered emotions of the character to plot the story’s progression. Each recollection even bears the subjectivity of personal experience, building on the transitory state of the figureheads in the opening bureaucratic pow-wow, transforming their enlightened banter into a monotonous drone.

Their topical roundtable discussions, covering subjects as broad as warfare, recoverable oil and terrorism, carry the cadence of sports commentating, dually operating as satire of political gamesmanship and peak into Bush’s creature comforts. By repurposing combat as pastime, the chameleonic George is able to insert himself into his father’s milieu, fabricating a “forever war” to eclipse H.W.’s lack of long-term vision and cement his dedication to global democracy.

Stone often snickers at Bush’s attempts to proselytize in the name of freedom, backing each naive monologue with bursts of the “Robin Hood” theme or hints of Alan Jackson’s honky tonk. These knowing glances are meant to discredit the man, but it’s impossible not to be swayed by W’s sincerity, especially when channeled through Josh Brolin’s ebullient performance and in contrast to the duplicitousness of his cabinet. Stone even relents in the face of Bush’s demons, using a harnessed camera to capture the paralysis of alcoholism and visual symbolism to illustrate religion’s warm embrace, supplanting the judgmental eyes of the parent with a healing glimpse of the divine.

His strongest metaphor is also his most persistent, observed from the outfield of “Dubya’s” dreams. As the Texan ascends the ladder from businessman to governor to president, his slumber finds him shagging fly balls before an adoring crowd, acting as victor in a world outside of class and lineage. The film’s closing passage perverts this fantasy into an ironic nightmare of nonfulfillment, revealing a solitary man scouring an empty stadium, scrambling for a forthcoming triumph that will never descend into his open glove. It’s a disturbing closing chapter for the leader of the free world, exposing power as a paper tiger before the cerebral snare of parental expectation.

W. (Lionsgate Films, 2008)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Written by Stanley Weiser
Photographed by Phedon Papamichael

The Five Venoms (1978, Cheh Chang)

Benefiting from a refreshing lack of subtext, The Five Venoms treats the lore of the Wǔ Xíng as beguiling trifle, costuming its lethal assassins in polychromatic masks, each acting as avatar for the deadly strike of a predatory beast. By obscuring the identities of its malevolent forces, it channels the mystique of serial fiction, treating each minute detail of dress and technique as a building block of the mythology, garnering suspense from the urgency of battle and a sanguinary, gothic interpretation of the duality of man.

Modeling their craft after the fluid gestures of the snake and defensive dexterity of the toad, The Poison Clan possesses an unfathomable power, one so vast that any deviation from sectarial doctrine is a threat to national security. Seeking the hidden treasure of their former masters, the Venoms administer brutality in service of illicit desires, peppering a senescent tutor with enough blows to conjure blood from his lungs. As whirling fists thrust deep into his midsection, swaying in esoteric, indefensible patterns, the Clan paints the elder’s frail torso with purple palmprints, endowing the lifeless husk with a macabre calling card.

Anointing each distinct coup de grâce in opiatic slow-motion, director Cheh Chang repurposes sport as sacrament, heightening acrobatic feats and toxic blows with soft candle glow and pigmented lighting. Sonic cues and weightless wirework even transform the harsh, violent gesticulations into reverie, allowing arched hands to hiss like vipers and nimble figures to balance and repel from bamboo walls.

The fantastical elements only enhance the subtle echo of occult horror, which seeps into combat through the soundtrack, imparting a menacing chill to each ruptured eardrum and act of excerebration. The ascending and descending plucks of violin and deep, ominous fits of xylophone stoke atmosphere out of tight, stone quarters and flickering firelight, fashioning a hollow, chambered drone that would lend its paranoid bent to late-century hip-hop and cinematic homage (see Kill Bill: Vol. 1).      

Despite its bizarre and nearly incongruous pairing of action trope and diabolical dread, The Five Venoms manages to manifest a sustainable universe, one shrewd enough to treat violence as deviant behavior and not the primary language of a dominant protagonist. By bestowing the role of hero on a spectator, brilliantly disguised as the village idiot, Cheh Chang has astutely modeled his comic-book examination of good and evil on Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, proclaiming the victor to be the strategist that permits the corrupt and pugnacious to vanquish each other.

The Five Venoms (Shaw Brothers Ltd., 1978)
Directed by Cheh Chang
Written by Cheh Chang and Kuang Ni
Photographed by Mu-To Kung and Hui-Chi Tsao

Heroes of the East (1978, Lau Kar Leung)

In an effort to subvert the single-minded phallocentrism of kung fu cinema, Heroes of the East employs marital strife and misogyny as thinly-veiled metaphors for Sino-Japanese relations, using rival schools of martial artistry as a vehicle for examining cultural diffusion and gender politics. Despite the intellectual heft of its narrative facets, the cataloging of contrasts functions to fabricate a screwball romance, treating sex and race as fodder for comic relief instead of a recipe for discord. The opening fragments even hint at the erotic gamesmanship of a “bodice ripper,” building arousal through playful competition and period-appropriate flute, basking in the bleary light of sconces that adorn its ornate decor. Unfortunately, this ardor builds, but never crests, as subtlety and lust are sacrificed before the tense rattle of combat, surrendering any emotional thrust to the appetites of a core audience.

Finding common ground between the bonds of matrimony and an artist’s devotion to craft, Kuang Ni’s script positions an arranged marriage between a Chinese playboy and gamine Japanese teen as an uncomfortable clash of customs, allowing their diverging forms of fighting to represent their domestic mores en masse. Beneath the patriotic superficialities of their verbal barbs and deftness of their art lies an inequality of the sexes, transforming each exposed inch of Koda’s (Yuka Mizuno) bustline into a libidinal blow far more dangerous than the impact of her judo strike.

Wielding his chauvinistic principles as a means to discredit the legitimacy of her body and budō, Ho Tao (Gordon Liu) treats taut flesh and aplomb as immodest traits for a submissive housewife, forbidding the practice of ninjutsu as a culmination of these duplicitous attributes. Though his rage may signify more about cultural inequality than racism, the plot avoids any cerebral exercises in emasculation, repurposing irreconcilable differences into an excuse for an olympiad of weaponry and technique. Ironically, the character dimensions provided for each tournament combatant, etched onto the screen like the menu of an arcade game, possess more depth than ascribed to Koda, left here to languish outside of the arena as a tertiary participant.

As pure entertainment, each kinetic vignette and magnificent physical contortion work as a distraction from authorial laziness, but abandoning its amatory core breaks faith with any high-minded attempt at sexual or global impartiality. By betraying its better judgment, Heroes struggles to reconcile its incongruous halves, concluding with a glib resolution that makes its stylistic vigor and acrobatic magnificence seem like vain narcissism.  

Heroes of the East (Shaw Brothers Ltd., 1978) 
Directed by Lau Kar Leung
Written by Kuang Ni
Photographed by Arthur Wong

The One-Armed Swordsman (1967, Cheh Chang)

Defining genre like a record label embodies a “sound,” Shaw Brothers Studios and their indelible “Shaw Scope” logo signify a distinctive product, commingling elements of ancient Chinese history and contemporary pop music into an intoxicating cocktail of pure fantasy and warm nostalgia. As the treble-laden reverberation of drum roll and bombastic wail of horn cue a separation from reality, the viewer is transported to a hypnogogic universe outside of time, constructed of ornamental colors and nurtured on archaic nobility, but spoken in an unnatural, asynchronous, English-language voice. The surrealistic properties of these divergent components thrive despite their modesty and artificiality, seamlessly coalescing with the anti-gravity choreography of the martial arts, spawning an action cinema fit for the theater and drunk on the sensuality of acrobatics and operatic gesture.

Distorting the rules of auditory perception, wuxia (Chinese sword-fighting fiction) benefits from an excess of foley work, boasting breathing, kicking and panting that resonate with the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer and guttural grunt of a wild hog. These hyper-realistic sonic properties are accentuated by tight zooms and swift editing, adding urgency to each overstated facial reaction and repurposing vivid fits of violence into the petit allegro of ballet.

Juxtaposed beneath this overstimulated and ceaseless aural onslaught are muted, cerulean scrims and hoary terrain, inspiring a glacial chill and morphing the bones of obvious sets into realms of otherworldly mystique. By constructing an insular environment through obvious artifice, art director Ching-Shen Chen manipulates hue and space to fabricate a broad expanse, using clean lines and deep purples to imply depth and add ceremony to humble surroundings.  

Changes in landscape also function to fracture the action into narrative signposts, condensing complex ideas into tight areas and aligning location with theme through subconscious hinting. Though plot progression isn’t necessarily the focal point of Cheh Chang’s work, often ending up as red herring in an endless parade of spirited sparring, he does understand how the mind operates and he treats each snowdrift and flickering candle as a subtle reminder of grief and loss for his angst-ridden lead.

Bearing his father’s sacrifices at the altar of honor, Fang Kang (Jimmy Wang Yu) wrestles between seduction and repulsion with the warrior’s code, using his confusion over his father’s death in battle as an excuse for continual confrontation. Crippled by seething rage and a desire for vengeance, Fang’s emotional handicap symbolizes the foolish pride of the powerful men that reared him and the severing of his right arm during swordplay externally manifests his cerebral maladies.

Chang’s idealized, nearly pastoral, vision of Imperial China romanticizes Fang’s dismemberment into a marvel of style and vision, simulating the dizziness and delirium of warfare into a swirling kaleidoscope of polychromatic tones, nestling horror just beneath the warm glow of hanging lanterns and frail outline of frostbitten trees. The contrast struck between the aesthetics of his shot composition and viscera of his combat mirror the mentality of his characters, reflecting their antiquated alignment of class, wealth and fighting prowess. By injecting the subversive element of sexuality, Chang signifies betrothal as the remedy for a history of violence, imparting the sentimental sweep of the Hollywood love story into androcentric cinema and giving brutality a fitting rebirth as benign, graceful motion.

The One-Armed Swordsman (Shaw Brothers Ltd., 1967)
Directed by Cheh Chang
Written by Cheh Chang and Kuang Ni
Photographed by Cheng San Yuan

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005, Robert Greenwald)

Eschewing subtlety in a manner that corresponds to the expansion methods of its subject, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price hammers home the ubiquity of the Arkansawyer megachain through rapid-fire montage, using a parade of jubilant adverts and stark parking-lot footage to summarize a clandestine economic coup. Approaching their antagonist through a distinctly subjective point of view, the documentary team obtains statements from ex-employees and disheartened small business owners, sourcing the legwork of economists and reporters through second-generation YouTube clips. The intimacy of the interview segments benefits the narrative progression, but the lack of independent research fosters a discernible imbalance between sentiment and truth, inadvertently transforming each passionate testimonial into fodder for yellow journalism and clickbait-style sanctimony.

Utilizing Middlefield, Ohio as a microcosm for America en masse, Robert Greenwald positions the strategic decimation of the Christian working class as an inside job, exposing Wal-Mart’s core value system as a grand misdirection intended to anesthetize the flock to predatory business tactics. By concentrating on the illusion of piety and contrasting hierarchy of power, Greenwald reveals a culture of intimidation, giving a voice to personnel that suffer through dashed unionization prospects and competitors that struggle to keep their businesses in the black. Through a taut assemblage of archival footage, the editorial staff paints an overarching portrait of collusion between political power and financial wealth, linking government subsidies and tax breaks to a monopolistic market and unemployed workforce.

Adopting community activism as the cure for this corporate cancer, Greenwald relishes in lively b-roll of peaceful protests and fervent oration, substituting a soundtrack of Americana and evangelical platitude for veritable statistics. Though conjecture makes for a compelling argument, insult is far more alluring, and Greenwald shapes his demonization of former CEO Lee Scott into an expeditious bit of character assassination, transforming a noble piece of nonfiction into blue-collar nightmare, replete with reclusive bluebloods and Dickensian misers.

Nevertheless, the passage of eleven years has enabled the affluent to inch closer to absolute power and the laboring class to further sink in a quicksand of mounting debt and misplaced blame, making the film’s penchant for vilification forgivable in the face of forthcoming mercantile turpitude. Virtual industrialization may be held accountable for the demise of the family-owned business, but Wal-Mart’s cheapening of the American workforce is far more conspicuous and rapacious, crippling the proletariat by stripping it of autonomy and agency. If only The High Cost of Low Price had the foresight to scrutinize this forfeiture of independence, instead of distracting from its central thesis by way of cheap melodrama and languorous direction.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (Brave New Films, 2005)
Directed by Robert Greenwald
Photographed by Kristy Tully

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