Pain & Gain (2013, Michael Bay)

Can we sympathize with a villain without rooting for him?

Pain & Gain poses that question as it smudges the line between comedy and tragedy, daring us to pity the leads as they commit callous acts in the name of prosperity. If it was a work of fiction, advocating three muscle-bound goons as they shakedown Miami’s nouveau riche would be second nature, following in the footsteps of cinema’s storied history of exalted scoundrels. The only snag here is that the Sun Gym Gang was real and the violence they bestowed on their victims actually transpired, a harsh fact that lends a queasy discomfort to the film’s nihilistic passages of dismemberment and torture.

Told in a resolute voiceover that ricochets wildly between characters, Pain & Gain is a tale of “developing potential,” self-actualization gained through weight lifting, positive thinking and barbaric extortion. Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) is an enthusiastic, but simpleminded, personal trainer, rippling with muscle that tests the elasticity of his flesh, obscuring the inadequacy that lies just beneath the surface. Lugo’s spirited bouts of rhetoric carry a nationalistic thread, marrying fantasies of the “American Dream” to a bitter resentment of immigrants, speaking in hollow platitudes lifted from self-help seminars. His imagination knows no bounds, but reality finds Lugo as an average salesman with an above-average physique, suffering from a limited skill-set, empty bank account and severe case of mythomania.

Hearing opportunity knock in the form of sandwich mogul Victor Kershaw’s (Tony Shalhoub) unfiltered blabbering, Lugo takes note of the speed boat, off-shore accounts and Schlotzsky’s franchise, dreaming up a heist that will sufficiently milk the Colombian-born miser dry. Compiling a team that somehow exceeds his own ineptitude, Lugo places his trust in the ungovernable violent streak of Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and child-like naivety of reformed felon Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), an ill-advised measure that results in a bungled snatch-and-grab mission outside of Kershaw’s prominently-located deli.

Michael Bay mines the opening heist sequences for laughs, arming his small-time crooks to the teeth like out-of-work mercenaries and staging their failures with a frivolity akin to the Three Stooges. When the tone dramatically shifts and Kershaw is finally captured and looted, it’s intended to knock the wind out of us, paralleled by the victim struggling for breath as a plastic bag is forced over his head and his chest is pummelled with the bulbous end of a dildo. Bay precariously tips the scales even further, testing our limits, staging Kershaw’s forced suicide like an action setpiece, replete with a high-speed crash into a bulldozer, immolation and cranial trauma by way of truck tire.

As the trio circles the drain and their behavior becomes increasing ghoulish and sadistic, Bay sneakily wavers between stern glance and wink, leavening bits of bodily dismemberment with pitch black humor. When the boys ask for a refund on a saw with human hair kinked in the chain and Paul burns fingerprints off of severed hands on a charcoal grill, we’re dizzied by the drastic tonal shift, laughing out of disbelief as much as amusement. The baseness of the character’s actions and mean-spirited nature of the humor also curiously clash with the sleekness of the visual palette, an intended maneuver which mirrors the superficiality of the gang through the eroticization of symbols of wealth and veneration of their sinewy bodies.

At once humorous and harrowing, Pain & Gain purposely toys with our emotions, indicting the participatory nature of cinema and the allegiances it nurtures between audience and protagonist, despite the real-life implications of on-screen brutality. Whether Michael Bay intended for his viewers to question the ethics of aestheticized violence is up for debate, but the composition manages to strike a complex dichotomy between craft and content, succeeding as experiment, despite its culpability.

Pain & Gain (Paramount Pictures, 2013)
Directed by Michael Bay
Written by Pete Collins (magazine articles), Christopher Markus (screenplay) and Stephen McFeely (screenplay)
Photographed by Ben Seresin

The Island (2005, Michael Bay)

A flood of reverse motion images captured in colored filters and fisheye lens, The Island bursts onto the screen in a frantic fever dream, caterwauling through faint remembrances of childhood, destruction and persecution before submerging into steely blue water. The nightmare belongs to Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor), a resident of an authoritarian society that shelters itself from chemical contamination in a domed structure, one lined with lofty elevators and chilly arctic columns, resembling a pressure-washed variant of Metropolis’ underground factories.

Lincoln inhabits a cell that monitors his sleep cycles and temperament, governing his clothing, dining habits and work schedule, all through soothing, but autocratic, loudspeaker dictation. The strictness of his labor regimen is offset by the promise of reward, a lifetime of relaxation and procreation at an island refuge, “nature’s last remaining pathogen-free zone,” gained only by weekly lottery and conformity to the compound’s “rules of proximity.”

Discontent with the lack of variety and physical interaction in his life, Lincoln desperately wishes “there was more” and stresses the doubt and fear that plagues his dreams to Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean), the staff psychoanalyst and shadowy patriarch of their community. Surprised by the subject matter of Lincoln’s nocturnal visions and perturbed by his disputative nature, Merrick stresses cooperative behavior and healthy mental outlook, implanting sensors into Lincoln’s brain to track the firing of his synapses and emphasizing the paradise that awaits the devoted.

Uninspired by Merrick’s platitudes, Lincoln’s lingering questions compel him to creep through restricted areas of the complex, seeking answers to the ominous manifestations in his nightmares. Following a moth as it flutters through the rafters of the structure, Lincoln confirms his greatest fears, discovering a lottery winner dissected on an operating table, mined for his vital organs and deliberately allowed to plummet into cardiac arrest. Startled by the true intentions of the organization, which synthesizes human clones and grooms them as surrogates and organ donors for silk-stocking celebrities, Lincoln seizes Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), the subject of his innocent hormonal desires, and dashes for an indeterminate exit.

In a heartbreaking moment, the pair discover the genesis of their people, stumbling into an incubation chamber where memories and personalities are impregnated through subliminal images, beamed directly into the synthetic womb. It’s a moment rife with symbolism, intended to parallel an American culture indoctrinated by religion and consumerism, unflagging in its devotion to a power-fueled machine that exists to exploit superstitions of the ignorant and widen the gap between wealth and poverty.

Michael Bay does a satisfactory job illustrating the pitfalls of faith, pinpointing the oppressiveness of the afterlife myth on the clones and their symbolic counterparts, documenting the exchange of free will for the promise of eternal pleasure. As expected, his role as a proponent of the Hollywood blockbuster machine doesn’t mesh well with his attempts at anti-consumerist rhetoric, evident through rampant bits of product placement, which reach their nadir in a sustained shot of a glistening bottle of Michelob Light.

Bay’s aesthetic tendencies further betray the philosophical aspects of the story, favoring stylistic gimmick over natural plot progression. Tinting the color of the film, intended to lend the picture a sun-drenched, bleached sheen, only dulls and softens the focus of the image, forcing the viewer to strain in hopes of capturing photographic detail. Tired visual motifs from previous films also work their way into the narrative, providing enough extraneous footage of flowing fabric and aerial whirlybird shots to successfully choke the suspense out of an otherwise engrossing piece of science fiction.

The remaining specimen is a heap of twisted metal and bone-crunching violence, a compelling narrative perverted into the type of motorhead pornography that has become Michael Bay’s stock-in-trade. The promise of the opening reels hinted at a more sophisticated filmmaker, one free of immature predilections and enthusiastic about crafting a spellbinding story, but the moment Bay refashioned Lincoln and Jordan’s quest for experience into an interminable car chase, the film shed its emotional core and became the consumerist product it claimed to despise.

The Island (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2005)
Directed by Michael Bay
Written by Caspian Tredwell-Owen (story/screenplay), Alex Kurtzman (screenplay) and Roberto Orci (screenplay)
Photographed by Mauro Fiore

Bad Boys (1995, Michael Bay)

High on a potent cocktail of screeching tires and sassy dialogue, Bad Boys is a jumbled mess of a buddy comedy, far too invested in its bewilderingly swift action sequences and trite mistaken identity scenario to nurture genuine chemistry between its leads or inspire anything aside from ambivalence. Emotional resonance may be a bridge too far for a brainless actioner, but it’s impossible not to envision a deeper connection between the protagonists, a bond reduced to broad strokes and glib exchanges in favor of brevity and superfluous f/x work.

Polar opposites in every way, Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) are Miami narcotics detectives that bicker like Felix and Oscar, wholly discordant in their demeanor, tax bracket and sexual prowess, only bonded by a mutual profession and undisclosed backstory. Marcus is diminutive in height and self-confidence, too delicate for police work or the struggles of a sexless marriage, relegated to a perpetual state of distress and emotional overeating. Mike is his casanova counterpoint, shuffling through paramours and greenbacks with a devil-may-care bravado, incensed only by questions of his charmed upbringing or Marcus’ passion for spilling french fries between the seats of his pristine Porsche 911.

Tasked with tracking down the architect behind a police department vault heist, Marcus and Mike have 72 hours to retrieve the contents of the coffer before Internal Affairs figures the caper for an “inside job” and curmudgeonly captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) is forced to shutter the doors and maniacally gnash the head of his cigar at an alternate location. After a trail of fresh corpses proves to be fruitless, Mike spreads the word to his army of informants to keep their eyes peeled for hot-shot crooks blowing through wads of cash, a tip his prostitute ex-girlfriend Maxine (Karen Alexander) heedlessly pursues. Gunned down in grandiloquent fashion by a double-dealing detective’s criminal cohorts, Maxine’s death spins the story off into two equally clichéd and insipid directions: an underdeveloped vengeance plot for Mike and comedy of errors for Marcus.

In an effort to assuage the concerns of a petrified witness, Marcus must fool Maxine’s roommate Julie (Téa Leoni) into thinking that he’s the debonair Lothario they’ve always gossiped about, a gambit that spins a tangled web of lies and familial drama that strains for laughs while it paints each character into a one-dimensional corner. Marcus’ wife suffers the brunt of these ham-fisted narrative shortcuts, settling uncomfortably into the role of nagging wife, existing only to bust Marcus’ balls and misconstrue the objective of his detective work and devotion to his family. Surely the wife of a veteran police officer would have a better understanding of the job’s requirements and long hours, but the character only exists as a device to turn the gears of the convoluted plot, never developing beyond the cinematic glass ceiling of “disapproving spouse.”

The technical aspects of the film feign elegance on the surface, but are just as vapid at their core as the written material. Sapped of richness and natural color, Michael Bay and photographer Howard Atherton shoot Miami in washed-out, burnt siennas and oranges, visually reproducing the humidity of the region and the sun’s irradiance, creating a visual desert to match the barrenness of the discourse. Alternately, interiors are shot in cool blue filters and muted greys, mirroring the sterility of the precinct and the psychological implications of the color itself (representing loyalty and stability). This artistic choice holds water when held against the relationship of the male leads, but does not couple well with the litany of civil rights infringements that occur in the field.

Flashes of flowing curtains and trickling water recur incessantly, shaping the sort of tacky visual motif that passes muster in a music video (where Bay cut his teeth), but feels tawdry and amateurish on the big screen. Unnatural camera motion and ground-level shooting perspective prove to be just as jarring, further besmirching the composition with rapid-fire tracking and impatient editing, effectively morphing the succession of images into an incomprehensible puddle of color.

Despite these glaring flaws, Bad Boys is actually one of the most subdued efforts in Michael Bay’s catalog, relying far more on performance and practical effects than expected for a director who plies his trade staging CGI battles between sentient sports cars. It even shows signs of restraint, waiting for the final reel to introduce his trademark arc shot and crash a garbage truck through an airplane hanger.

Fusing the raw materials of Bad Boys together must have been strenuous work and Bay is an undoubtedly talented filmmaker, but he desperately lacks finesse, favoring brute force over methodical pacing. What’s ironic is that this adherence to breakneck speed renders most of the explosive setpieces inert, resulting in a blur of displaced shots and tinnitus-inducing gunshot echo.

Bad Boys (Columbia Pictures, 1995)
Directed by Michael Bay
Written by George Gallo (story), Michael Barrie (screenplay), Jim Mulholland (screenplay) and Doug Richardson (screenplay)
Photographed by Howard Atherton

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones)

A satire of religion and nobility produced by a cross-dressing English comedy troupe, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is as ridiculous as it reads on paper, a free-form foray into the surreal and sacrilegious that operates on the steam of its own irreverence. Everything on screen is a deconstruction, spoofing the authority of religion, politics and the artistic elite to create a film as incensed by structure as it is by the powers that be, liberating in its disregard for the confines of society and logic.

Even the opening credit sequence is drenched in sarcasm, but don’t confuse flippancy for lack of passion, especially when the Python team crams more jokes into the open seconds than most films have in their first reel. Capturing the sturm und drang of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal through pounding drum and icey keys, the stark black and white scrolling credits even boast counterfeit Scandinavian subtitles, replete with English words bastardized by a “slashed O” and rampant misspelling.

Not content to simply smirk at the austerity of art cinema, the pranksters slowly morph the titles into a tourism advertisement for Sweden, “sacking” their translator in favor of whooping mariachi music and a jarring array of strobing lights. These interruptions occur incessantly, creating disorder through disjointed animated sequences, clips of a historical documentary gone haywire and a flashy intermission in the final reel. The objective is to remove meaning from space and time and the only way to laugh at the joke is to disregard your predilection for plot and coherence.

That isn’t hard to accomplish when dialogue and narrative are nothing more than a platform for absurdist humor. Following King Arthur and his motley crew of knights, the storyline progresses from assembling the team to searching for the holy grail, diverting along the way to debate the carrying capacity of an African swallow and the preeminent method for detecting a witch. The best gags deal with incongruity, whether it be the ferocious fangs of a bunny rabbit or a group of mud farmers who chat about “imperialist dogma” like first-year political science majors, rubbing King Arthur’s repressive behavior in his unsullied face.

The production design is appropriately mucky, benefiting from the Scottish Highlands’ rainfall and lush greenery, captured through natural photography and faint clouds of artificial fog. Interspersed bits of animation are painted onto the landscape, carrying the delightfully blasphemous stop-motion work of director Terry Gilliam, who emulates period art in an effort to pervert the sacrosanct. His most memorable mortal sins consist of cherubs farting out a song of praise, a nun marvelling at an exposed backside and an impatient God chastising the miserable hymns of his groveling, insufferable acolytes.

Reluctant to settle for a mere merger of cartoon and comedy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail churns through a myriad of styles, lampooning the musical, fairy tale, police procedural, porno and documentary, rarely settling to catch its breath and shouting “Get on with it!” when the pace threatens to flag. Adjusting to the rapidity of the jokes and contrarian attitude does require some compromise, but embracing the recklessness and structural complexity can lead to ample laughter and aesthetic admiration.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (EMI Films, 1975)
Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones
Written by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin
Photographed by Terry Bedford

Blazing Saddles (1974, Mel Brooks)

Broader in scope than the average genre spoof and far more impolite, Blazing Saddles takes the conventions of the Western and refashions them into an uproarious indictment of American race relations, skewering intolerance by confronting it head-on and making it the brunt of the joke. The plain-spoken dialogue, often trading in the taboo, crude and bluntly pejorative, toes the line between wisecrack and insult, zeroing in on a certain term that made the film controversial in 1974 and makes it absolutely incendiary now. Yet, it’s this candor and eagerness to offend that generates the most profound insights, transposing the social issues on screen into a modern setting through the shock of laughter, allowing the viewer to directly address intolerance by unmasking its ignorance.

We open on a vista of golden desert sand, the vastness of the landscape broken only by a string of railroad workers, hammering away at the blunt side of rail spikes. It’s an inconspicuous opening shot, differing very little from the “oaters” that Mel Brooks saw as a child, barring the bevy of whip cracks that diminish the sincerity of Frankie Laine’s themesong. Thankfully, the similarities end there, as the sheer stupidity of the denizens of Brooks’ American West makes its way onto the screen, parading on horseback and belaboring the exhausted, multi-racial “gandy dancers” into singing a minstrel song, despite the brutal 104-degree heat.

Always keen to make his intellectual inferiors look even sillier, the mischievous “Black” Bart, played with impeccable comic timing by Cleavon Little, gives his superiors an anachronistic taste of Cole Porter instead of “Camptown Races,” confusing the shitkickers into performing their own rendition of the racist tune in response. It’s a trivial bit in comparison to the bigger laughs en route, but it sets a precedent early on, defining racists as buffoons worthy of our derision, even if they’re too dull-witted to pick up on the joke.

Speaking of buffoons, corrupt Attorney General Hedley Lamarr (not Hedy Lamarr) bankrolls the expansion of the railroad and sees dollar signs in the property lying just beyond the tracks, despite its current occupation. His primary focus is Rock Ridge, an unsophisticated village settled by one incestuous family and fostering a dialect primarily consisting of “authentic frontier gibberish,” which remains steadfast in its residency despite the violent siege Lamarr and his gang of convicts has waged against the townspeople. Try not to snicker during the mayhem, particularly when an old maid pouts into the camera, “Have you ever seen such cruelty?” as a gang of ruffians punches her in the gut.

In a stroke of genius or sheer insanity, Lamarr joins forces with a brain-dead, cross-eyed hornball of a governor (played by Brooks) and constructs a plan to “so offend” the citizens of Rock Ridge that they’ll run for the hills and leave their land free for the pilfering. Pulling Bart from the lengthy queue of the local executioner, Hedley assigns him the role of town sheriff, despite his “crimes” against his white foreman, predicting the reaction of the townspeople to a black lawman to result in abandonment or murder by committee.

Spinning a genre cliché on its ear, the new sheriff trots into town to save the day, but isn’t met with a ticker-tape parade or hero’s welcome. “The sheriff’s a ni----!” shouts the town cryer as Bart rolls into city center, a moment that leaves the jaws of the citizens and moviegoers hanging wide open, for very different reasons. While the slur is obviously meant to illicit laughter, it’s not a joke made at Bart’s expense, since he always has the upper-hand and relishes playing right into white prejudice. In one of the funniest line deliveries in film history, Bart smirkingly declares “‘Scuse me while I whip this out” as he reaches for his induction speech, having a laugh at stereotypes of black male sexual potency and the people who cling to such preconceived notions.

Mel Brooks also wants to demolish audience presumption, particularly in relation to the three-act structure and boundaries of fiction storytelling. Bucking narrative “law” in favor of anachronism and an ill-defined fourth wall, Brooks allows his characters to directly address the audience and is more than willing to step outside of reality to tell a joke, even at the expense of confusing the viewer. The disorientation of the final reel, which pans back from the predesignated melee between citizens and convicts to reveal a soundstage, destroys the fantasy of moviemaking, both adding an infectious frivolity to the affair and alternately injecting some gravity into its focus on real-world bigotry.

The anarchy on display is invigorating and for all its transgressions, ranging from racism to homophobia and sexism, Blazing Saddles is never anything less than hysterical, wearing down our better judgment through an equal opportunity willingness to offend and an endless stream of irresistible gags. In a world obsessed with progress and exposing injustice, could Blazing Saddles be American cinema at its most progressive, wholly righteous in its refusal to shy away from the root of the problem?

Absolutely.

Blazing Saddles (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1974)
Directed by Mel Brooks
Written by Andrew Bergman (story/screenplay), Mel Brooks (screenplay), Norman Steinberg (screenplay), Richard Pryor (screenplay) and Alan Uger (screenplay)
Photographed by Joseph Biroc

Horse Feathers (1932, Norman McLeod)

Anemic and a tad exasperating, Horse Feathers finds the Marx Brothers flailing wildly between serpentine verbal shtick and prop-based visual gag, throwing so much material at the audience that the prospect of retention or laughter seems improbable. Flickers of the family’s wit are present, seen in fleeting bits of Groucho’s sarcastic banter and Harpo’s cartoonish jest, but inexpressive camerawork and structural inconsistency cripple the anarchic spirit of the performers, leaving them to overcompensate for technical mediocrity.

The adherence to a traditional narrative is particularly frustrating, especially when considering the emptiness of the dialogue and the lack of restraint on behalf of the performers. Discourse is nothing more than a springboard for Groucho’s smart-assed quips and conversational misinterpretations, many of which fall flat as the viewer rushes to catch up to the rapid-fire chatter. These semantic games only bear fruit when the joke is detached from the progression of the plot and allowed to operate as surrealistic art piece, not as representation of the whole. The best of these sketches is the “swordfish” gag, which takes a cryptic game of password and corrupts it with a gaggle of near rhymes and silly word associations, humorously flipping “sturgeon” into “surgeon” and “haddock” into “headache.” The segment reaches its zenith when Harpo interrupts Groucho and Chico’s discussion to hold up a rubber fish with a sword stuck in its throat, pronouncing the password through pantomimed gesture and wide-eyed grin.

Comedic stylings of this nature have their roots in vaudeville and are better suited for an episodic structure, a point made blatantly obvious by Horse Feathers’ superfluous plot and static camera angles. Revolving around a college football rivalry, a pair of bootleggers and an opportunistic gold digger, all elements of the narrative stand in contrast to the objective of the comedy troupe, which is to lampoon authority and romance by any means necessary. Groucho’s opening song seems to be the only number that captures this gleeful negativity, relishing the opportunity to honk the noses of Huxley College’s elite board members and bellow “Whatever it is, I’m against it” at their suggestions for administrative restructuring and a renewed interest in education.

This disillusioned attitude and distaste for polite society is better suited for a more substantial target and stronger script, one capable of eliciting anything besides scant laughs and passive viewership. As it stands, the desperation of the weaker bits only magnifies the slapdash nature of the production, making for an intermittently funny featurette coasting on half-baked ideas. The poetic physical comedy of Duck Soup and rigid framework of A Night at the Opera remedied these flaws behind the scenes, proving that a lawless quartet like the Marx Brothers functions best when afforded absolute freedom or reigned in by dictatorial restraint. Horse Feathers is stuck in purgatory between these two methods, flagged by a lack of devotion to both story and satire.

Horse Feathers (Paramount Pictures, 1932)
Directed by Norman McLeod
Written by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
Photographed by Ray June

Touki Bouki (1973, Djibril Diop Mambéty)

Inscrutable in its rebellion against both traditionalism and modernism, Touki Bouki represents the prison of both ideologies through a haunting and illusive succession of images, revolutionary in its disparity of tone and willingness to provoke. Its defining symbol lies in the struggle of an ox to avoid the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, wrestling hopelessly against the ropes that bind its legs. As the startled beast falls to the ground, unable to find balance, a butcher opens the animal’s throat and blood sprays from the wound, forming a pool on the white tile beneath its quivering form. It’s an unforgettable, potentially unethical, vision, one that encapsulates the lives of the protagonists as they struggle beneath the knife of a repressive culture.

Squeezed between a claustrophobic mass of colorful shanties and a sea of hostile foot traffic, life in Dakar is too close for comfort for the restless Mory and Anta, a pair of young lovers out of step with the morality of their parents and philosophy of their peers. Blazing through town on a motorcycle adorned with an ox’s horns, Mory has “no class, no job, no shame,” earning his keep through elaborate cons and sporting the care-free demeanor and shaggy locks of an American “hippie.”

Standing in direct opposition to pre-assigned gender roles, Anta abandons a life of scrubbing linens and housekeeping to attend college, finding a new form of oppression at the hands of her horny classmates, whom she rebuffs at every given opportunity. In retaliation for her prudence, a gang of student activists tie up and assault Mory, dehorning his mechanical steed and desecrating his symbol of individual freedom and masculinity. Helpless to the attack, Mory is brutalized and strapped to their truck like a trophy kill, resembling a cow awaiting its turn at the abattoir.

Desperate to abandon Africa and bewitched by the soulful cadence of Josephine Baker (“Paris, Paris, Paris” is prominently featured), the pair set their sights on a romanticized version of Paris, paying their way by swindling a state-sponsored wrestling event and raiding the closet of a decadent, homosexual acquaintance. Swept up in delusions of grandeur and drunk on their pilfered riches, the prodigal couple fantasize about their return home after years abroad, deified by the locals for their haughty French mannerisms, signified in their daydreams by Mory’s boater hat and tailored suit and Anta’s en vogue cigarette holder.

Ironically, the qualities they admire most in the French (class, wealth, autonomy) are the means by which they are ostracized, resulting in an uncomfortable realization atop an ocean liner intended for Gay Paree. As the French patrons loudly discount the Senegalese people as intellectually barren, unrefined and unartistic, Mory has a pang of conscience and dashes back into the capital, searching for his abandoned motorcycle. Discovering the bike in the middle of the street, totaled beyond repair, the boy learns a harsh lesson about human isolation, one that will follow him no matter his location or destination.

Merging the emotional with the aesthetic, Touki Bouki is a shade more personal than Badou Boy, but no less interested in blurring the line between reality and fantasy, often at the expense of narrative clarity. Djibril Diop Mambéty prefers to abandon coherence in favor of formal maneuvering, carrying the storyline on the viscera of his imagery, a tactic that functions through the photographic contrast between poetic beauty and crushing brutality. These opposing aspects often contend for space in a single sequence, best exemplified through the feverish dicing of shots of Anta’s sylphlike contours with the bleeding out of a frightened goat.

Whatever symbolic mileage the film gains from unsimulated depictions of animal cruelty is up for debate, but it’s hard to excuse exploitation for the sake of dramatic impact. In this case, it severely limits an otherwise exceptional work, forcing the audience to reflect on the responsibility of the artist in lieu of the despondency of the story’s characters.

Touki Bouki (International Film Circuit, 1973)
Written and Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty
Photographed by Georges Bracher

Badou Boy (1970, Djibril Diop Mambéty)

Driven by the hypnotic energy of percussion and a frenzied blur of edits, Senegal’s Badou Boy reflects its political motivations through a dizzying manipulation of form, stitching together a comedy of exaggeration from the scraps of the French occupation. Wielding Western cinematic technique as a weapon, Djibril Diop Mambéty mocks the constraint of Gallic social strata through the lumbering of an entry-level police officer, one too overwhelmed by weight and blinded by aggression to capture his perp, the roguish “Badou Boy.” Motivated by the perpetual groove of Dakar’s street performers and an enthusiastic imagination, our crafty protagonist’s perseverance acts as a symbol for Senegal’s renewed vitality; a defiant smirk in the face of oppression.

Utilizing sound design to heighten narrative pace and experiment with scene transition, Mambéty juxtaposes incongruous voice-over with dialogue-free action sequences, allowing discussions to run through multiple scenes without relying on expository shots or talking heads. He also employs cheap post dubbing in a radical fashion, lending a surreal nature to characters’ damaged, off-beat vocalizations, effectively morphing the hacking cough of an old beggar into a churning, bestial din.

The Godardian self-awareness of his soundtrack works two-fold, both referencing genre and place in time, while permeating, even interrupting, the plot’s progression. An allusion to the American Western illustrates this technique brilliantly, creating a wall of Ennio Morricone-style guitar and yelping cowboys for Badou Boy’s one-horse carriage race, manifesting a musical accompaniment for his fantasy tangible enough to overshadow the Kora of a roadside busker, who comically scowls at the rambunctious racket.

The use of non-diegetic sound is jarring in its ambiguity, requiring the viewer to think about the placement of sound effects and their application into the narrative. When Badou Boy breaks to urinate on the bicycle of his adversary, in one of his many acts of defiance, we hear the flush of a toilet, despite the al fresco location of the transgression. Our initial response is laughter, assuming the gag to be a brief passage of potty humor, but pondering the sequence reveals solemn intentions. Mambéty is applying the formality of domestic life to the squalid conditions of Dakar, dignifying Badou Boy’s behavior by aligning it to middle-class amenities, despite the sharp contrast in environment.

Mambéty loves sneaking his agenda into inconspicuous settings, using benign objects like boomboxes to function as his mouthpiece. Interjecting acerbic barbs between Bossanova tracks, the acid-quilled satirist takes foreign and domestic on in equal measure, airing grievances with cowardly French politicians and the Senegalese officials that mimic their opulence. His bitterest indictment lies at the feet of administrative wealth, a powerful faction of society uninterested in public well-being, superficial enough to abandon peacekeeping conferences to revel in the glory of an “African species of luxury dog.”

The amplification of sound and subtlety of message make for an interesting contrast, especially when considering that the story is seldom motivated by the conveyance of dialogue. Plot and character operate as a canvas for symbology and the foot chase that occupies most of the film’s lean 55-minute runtime functions as a metaphor for conflicts between the old guard and new, the past and present, and the organic and inorganic.

Badou Boy is representative of both Senegal’s past and future, adorning the grill of his bus with a bundle of polychromatic flowers (pairing organism and machine) and defiantly riding a horse into oncoming traffic. Officer Al is his polar opposite, perpetually in a state of consumption, wiping his sweat-soaked brow with the petals of flowers before stuffing the crumbled remains into his mouth, subjugating the powerless as a means to attain authority.

The featurette begins and ends with portions of Al’s daydreams, glacially-paced murder fantasies that find the recalcitrant Badou Boy cowering in fear as the public servant looms over him. As Al chokes the breath from the boy’s lungs, the dying child clings tightly to the chainlinks of an adjacent fence, arms stretched out in an "X," equivalent to the crucified Christ. The violence of Al’s reverie betrays itself, carrying a prophetic image of the future of Senegal, one led by the collective resilience of the people and sustained tradition, only capable of imprisonment in the dreams of corrupt leadership.

Badou Boy (Maag Daan, 1970)
Written and Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty
Photographed by Baidy Sow

Hyenas (1992, Djibril Diop Mambéty)

Marrying the rhythmic pace and sweep of comedy with the symbol-rich dogma of mythology, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s cinema occupies the space between contemporary and archaic, reflecting his native Senegal as it struggles for an identity in the modern world. Hyenas identifies this figurative struggle as one between morality and practicality, painting an unflattering portrait of a village desperate enough to murder their way out of destitution. Understanding the woes of poverty, but never sympathizing, Mambéty masks his intentions under a veil of good-natured humor, playing coy, just like his mob of best-intentioned townspeople. Beneath the surface lies a bitter condemnation of community, revealed by the increasingly insidious actions of his characters, who treat friendship as a smile to the face and an opportunistic knife to the back.

Broke and reeling in desperation, Colobane’s citizens clamor to solve their economic woes, laughably conducting town meetings under the scorching sun, as they are far too deep in debt to get the city hall furniture out of hock. The only shade comes in the shape of Dramaan’s general store, an oasis of booze and cigarettes, conveniently sold on credit and run without enough backbone to demand cash or refuse service. The emptiness of the desert landscape completely envelopes them, leaving the village as blank as an unpainted canvas, wanting for factories or motor vehicles or precious anything to alleviate the hopelessness.

Miraculously, a savior arrives in the shape of an ostracized prostitute named Linguere, who is both exceedingly wealthy and suspiciously generous. She once shared a child with the aforementioned shopkeeper, who’s done his best in the passing years to forget this pre-marital transgression, mostly out of embarrassment. Despite bad blood, the two share an amiable reunion, revealing an undying chemistry as they relive their life together and reflect on the unfortunate passage of time. These reminiscences carry a surprising depth and the film’s primary strength is its willingness to color in the characters through their reactions and interpretations of past events, refusing to pass judgment in the process.

Overjoyed by the couple’s happy reunion and clamoring for a taste of Linguere’s cash, the townspeople hold a ceremony in their honor, begging that Linguere help Colobane re-attain “its lost splendor.” They even nominate Dramaan for mayor, hoping to benefit from his association with Linguere and his modest successes as a businessman. Expecting a free handout, the greedy mob is surprised to learn that salvation comes at a price; Linguere’s sole prerequisite for replenishing the town coffer is seeing Dramaan executed for his crimes of abandonment.

Initially pompous and righteously offended, the townspeople refuse to kill one of their own, sighting religious convictions and benevolent banalities. Dramaan is comforted by their solidarity, but doesn’t realize that their kindness also comes with a price tag. The town raids his storefront the following morning, seeking kickbacks for protection like a band of Mafia enforcers, demanding his finest cognac and Cuban cigars. Unable to find a sympathetic ear with cop or clergy, both of whom have been handsomely rewarded with plush digs and gold jewelry, Dramaan desperately tries to skip town by railway car, only to be surrounded by the angry mob and forced into servitude.

Despite serious implications, Hyenas carries the peaceful flow of its landscape, moving like wind rustling through the trees and wholly unrushed by narrative drive. Drenched in ambient synth and subdued string, it drifts like a dream, converting the purely organic into the surreal, lending dialogue an almost hypnotized lull. This sense of separation repurposes what would often be played for suspense into dark comedy, forcing us to laugh at the otherwise reprehensible.

The casual poetry of the repartee, which is wryly amusing in passing, but resonant in the afterthought, carries Mambéty’s underlying meaning. When the police chief’s flashy new fangs distress Dramaan, he pacifies by saying “Let’s not make a mountain out of a gold tooth.” It’s an amusing response with heavily ironic undertones, since the townspeople have done just that, traded in their values and compassion for triviality and temporary financial security. Their vain lust brought corruption and violence to Colobane, with Linguere acting as their Golem; a representation of base instincts and superficial desires. However unpopular and undesirable, Mambéty infers that financial poverty is certainly better than one of the conscience and for Senegal to remain vital in contemporary times, both artistically and professionally, it must retain traditional values. It’s a cliché-laden greeting card in less capable hands, but Mambéty imbues a time-worn theme with righteous anger, delicacy and Wildian vivacity.

Hyenas (Kino International, 1992)
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty
Written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (play) and Djibril Diop Mambéty (screenplay)
Photographed by Matthias Kälin
 

Pinocchio (1940, Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen)

Avoiding the darker implications made by Carlo Collodi’s novel, Disney’s adaptation of The Adventures of Pinocchio focuses solely on the innocence of a child in the face of temptation, using the eponymous puppet’s perilous journey as a funhouse-mirror version of adolescent life. By skipping school, lying and swilling ale, Pinocchio suffers surrealistic consequences for common youthful transgressions, becoming more inhuman with each avoidance of his conscience’s better judgment.

Told from the perspective of the boy’s conscience, a grasshopper puzzlingly named Jiminy Cricket, the cautionary tale opens by firelight in the workshop of woodcarver Geppetto. Without wife or child, the lonely craftsman fills his time by giving life to mechanical items, adorning his ornate cuckoo clocks and music boxes with pink elephants, happy families and carousing drunks. Geppetto captures his aspirations in his elaborate creations, but none more so than his boyish marionette, dubbed Pinocchio, whom he prays will transform into a flesh-and-blood child before his eyes.

As the craftsman rests, The Blue Fairy, summoned by his nocturnal yearning, grants the old man’s wish and converts the mass of carved wood and string into a sentient being. Though it resembles and behaves like an ordinary child, the transfiguration remains incomplete, only to be finished when the puppet proves that he can discern between right and wrong and avoid the seductiveness of youthful rebellion. The prospective boy agrees, but doesn’t comprehend the effort required to become a well-rounded human, merely mimicking the behavior and emotional responses of those around him, never questioning intent or seeking advice from his conscience.

The child’s inexperience begets blind faith and Pinocchio finds himself confronted by avarice, gluttony and dishonesty, succumbing to vice on every available occasion. Outside of Geppetto's care, the naive babe stumbles into the clutches of two anthropomorphic street urchins, a wily pair that hoodwink the lad into enslavement through the promise of fame and unrestricted pleasure. Miles away from home and abandoned by Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio finds solace in his exotic locale (ironically named “Pleasure Island”), sucking down cheap cigars, playing billiards and chugging pints of cold beer.

Symbolizing the woes of blue-collar creature comforts, Pinocchio’s slide into amorality has serious repercussions and every child enchanted by the island’s lack of restrictions slowly morphs into a braying, ornery jackass. Sprouting a tail and floppy ears, Pinocchio fears the irreversibility of his actions and nearly gives up the fight to become a “real boy,” spared only by the arrival of his voice of reason, Jiminy Cricket.

The reunited pair traverse water and land to make the long journey home, but find Geppetto away from his post and his once vibrant workshop completely vacant. Crestfallen, the duo sulk before receiving a mysterious letter by way of white swallow, detailing the disappearance of the craftsman and his clipper ship. On a mission to locate his lost son, the heartbroken father’s vessel went adrift and was swallowed by a hulking sperm whale. Utilizing the resolve gained through personal experience and human error, Pinocchio manages to track his creator and save him from digestion, starting a fire in the stomach of the great beast that sends a plume of dense smoke into its throat, forcing expectoration and spewing the raft back into the ocean.

The sharpness of the animation emphasizes the size of the great creature, shown through deep blues and bulging eyes, swimming through the foamy water at magnificent speed and with maximum force. Color stenciling also adds a natural texture to the characters, not unlike a charcoal drawing, particularly in the subtle smear of the image, as if it was smoothed by a human finger. The darker woodgrain of interiors is nicely off-set by a wide array of shading, reflected in the colorful coat of the "Pleasure Island" coachmen and the knickknacks on the walls of Geppetto’s shop.

Pinocchio excels mostly through these minute artistic details, rarely capturing the flights of fancy found in Snow White’s kaleidoscopic visuals or Fantasia’s thematic complexity. Its symbols are fairly easy to decipher for a mature audience (i.e. whale = burden of loss) and its premise may be a thinly veiled plea for conformity, but the intended audience will find common ground with the title character and connect with his struggle to develop into a functioning adult. In this capacity, Pinocchio is a success, but when held under a microscope, it never strikes a comfortable balance between its fairy-tale roots and its contemporary satirical targets.

Pinocchio (Walt Disney Productions, 1940)
Directed by Hamilton Luske (supervising director) and Ben Sharpsteen (supervising director)
Written by Carlo Collodi (novel), Ted Sears (story adaptation), Otto Englander (story adaptation), Webb Smith (story adaptation), William Cottrell (story adaptation), Joseph Sabo (story adaptation), Erdman Penner (story adaptation) and Aurelius Battaglia (story adaptation)

Fantasia (1940, Norm Ferguson)

Fantasia is the most enchanting and perceptive of Disney’s animated features, interpreting the emotional resonance of song as bursts of radiant color and motion, personifying sound through image. Broken into seven segments and bookended by scholarly introduction, it has little in common with the children’s fairytales that preceded it, eschewing narrative structure in favor of formless abstraction, reimagining the orchestral symphony as stream-of-consciousness comic strip. What it loses in structural consistency, it more than makes up for in ambition and eclecticism, grasping at concepts as solemn as the genesis of Earth and the transformative power of faith, while maintaining a youthful whimsy and boundless imagination.

Easing the viewer into the unconventional format, the opening segment introduces us to the Philadelphia Orchestra as they tune-up, shrouded in mystery by backlighting and a moody, cerulean scrim. Commentator Deems Taylor clues us in on the players and the concept, explaining the three types of sequences to follow: the story, the portrait and the autotelic composition.

The opening number will be in the third vain, acting as “art for art’s sake” and demonstrating a collective chromesthesia, one that hypostatizes heard musical notes as splashes of ink or lines rolling over stenciled dunes. As the menacing strings of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor build, the shadow of the orchestra is shown illuminated in fuchsia light, changing in hue as the composition progresses, settling into a soft blue for the harp interlude. As the players intersect on screen and the rising sun encompasses the form of the conductor, the shot transitions to a bed of clouds where disembodied pieces of instruments and flecks of light symbolize sound. Each image is open to interpretation, welcoming you to see a face, jewels, the crest of a mountain or icicles amidst the formless mass of ink.  

Shifting toward traditional cartoon animation, but not necessarily into a conventional narrative, the Nutcracker Suite segment imagines the change of seasons as a magical event, initiated by insectile fairies that adorn the plant life with a glistening dew of light, inspiring growth or death. Insignificant natural objects, ranging from spiderwebs to mushrooms caps, are inseminated with supernatural power, sparkling like translucent glass and wobbling beneath the weight of their oversized helmets. As temperatures cool and the ice nymphs prepare to skate on the surface of the water, flower petals wither and fall from their stalks, morphing into waltzing dancers in hoop skirts as they skim the frigid surface of the water.

The least engaging, but most ambitious, portion depicts the birth of life on Earth by way of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, encapsulating our planet from a swirling starscape of “nothingness” to the domain of the dinosaurs. As lunar orbs of heat and tufts of gas give way to a volcanic landscape, the music swells to meet a rush of hot magma, spewed upon the rocks and reshaping the terrain, giving way to water and much cellular development. Though the color palette is not as lustrous as the rest of the feature, focusing far too much on earth tones and muted greens, the concept is rather progressive, painting a “coldly accurate” origin story without the involvement of a deity or artistic modesty.

Fantasia saves the divine for the finale, depicting the struggle between the “profane and sacred” atop the mythical Bald Mountain. As Satan stands on the precipice of the towering mass of rock, enveloping the valley below in his baleful shadow, ghastly skeletons rise from their graves and ascend toward his beckoning hands. Monochromatic apparitions ride cadaverous horses in praise of the black, winged beast, rising with the build of strings into their master’s clutches, swept up in the wind of a nocturnal cyclone. As the demonic beings gyrate before him, morphing from men into swine, Lucifer flings their bodies into the foggy blue abyss of Hell, conceptualized through swirls of incandescent light and blasts of psychedelic nightmare imagery.

The fallen angel halts his reign in response to faint church bells and harsh blasts of blinding light, frantically receding into his realm of eternal darkness. In the valley below, a troop of chanting monks stoically traverse an arched bridge, illuminating the water beneath with the flicker of their kindled candlesticks. As the cooing of their vocals soars and the fog lifts above the treetops, each beacon of light shines a rosy glow onto the wooded backdrop, revitalizing the landscape. Our final glimpse is captured through a slit of rock, slowly zooming into a verdant forest at dawn. As angelic female voices sing the Ave Maria, the golden sun peeks from beneath the mountaintop, symbolizing the power of virtue over malevolence.

The slow build of these closing moments is profoundly moving, perfectly capturing the transcendent nature of the imagery and its accompanying symphony. Disney’s animators have created an illustration that reacts to notes of music and interprets their meaning, realizing that film need not depend on the written word, but function as a physical representation of our collective imagination through a union of sight and sound.

Fantasia (Walt Disney Productions, 1940)
Directed by Norm Ferguson (supervising director)
Written by Joe Grant (story direction) and Dick Huemer (story direction)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, David Hand)

As pivotal as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was in the development and popularization of the animated feature film, it’s easy to lose sight of its achievements next to the constantly improving technology behind Computer-generated imagery and its cinematic product. Here is a film without the benefit of computer rendering, predefined demographic, celebrity vocal talent or hip source material, stubbornly out of step with its era (World War II was right around the corner) and little more than a relic in the Digital Age.

Yet, after 78 years, hundreds of successors and much industry “progress,” Snow White lingers in the cultural zeitgeist, maintaining significance through the allure of its imagery and the simplicity of its themes. You can feel the human touch behind every pencil stroke of Snow White’s hand-drawn environment, producing a crisp and radiant color palette overflowing with powdery whites and royal blues. Cheeks and noses are rosey as if blood runs through each character’s veins and every motion is poetic in its fluidity, making for a limber and organic human alternative to CGI’s coldness.

Its themes are just as rapturous as its sketches, but never overly complicated, functioning off of a template that would prove timeless, dealing in heroes battling villains and love conquering evil. Though fear and jealousy would play a big role in the film’s primary conflict, these emotions are transmitted through a heightened melodrama that never betrays its environment, always protecting the audience through the cloistered world of fantasy. The end result is as beautiful, scary and enchanting as fairy tales could ever hope to be, impossible to resist despite the passage of time and streamlining of the genre.

Walt Disney, the producer and creative force behind the project, understood the importance of ritual in cinema and used the opening moments of the film to transport us to a world of make-believe. As the camera pans over a white, live-action environment, the shot zooms in on the pages of a storybook, gradually transitioning us into the animated world with the turn of each leaf.

Our first vision is the cold stone wall of the Queen’s castle, slowly descending into a maze of shadowy corridors and crimson drapery. The narcissistic monarch sways before her mirror, beckoning the disembodied spectre that lies dormant within to tell her that she is the “fairest one” in all of the land. In a moment of defiance, the usually subservient oracle reveals the truth, bestowing the honor of most beautiful upon the humble Snow White, the Queen’s maid and reluctant stepdaughter.

In a fit of rage, the Queen yearns for the slaughter of the humble child, demanding a huntsman lure the girl into the woods, dismember her body and place her still heart into a bright red jewelry box. Though the hulking brute nearly goes forward with the plan, stalking behind the maiden with hatchet withdrawn, he comes to his senses and releases Snow White into the woods, an environment that proves to be as frightening as his attempts at murder. As the virginal princess scampers through the forest, the shrubbery comes alive around her, morphing branches into gnarled claws and logs into the snapping jaws of crocodiles, perfectly embodying a child’s imagined vision of the unknown through the frenzied handiwork of the animation team.

Sensing the innocence of the frightened child, the denizens of the forest rush to her aid, calming her through an avian harmony that matches the exquisite fragility of her own vibrato (gracefully sung by Adriana Caselotti). The affable creatures even guide her to an empty cabin for a moment’s rest, but the ever-subservient Snow White sees this as an opportunity to spruce up the dusty hovel, engaging the critters in a lively cleaning montage that humorously repurposes a tortoise as a washboard and birds as bedmakers.

Despite her best efforts at housekeeping, the diminutive diamond miners that occupy the cabin are initially suspicious of her “feminine wiles,” reluctant to scrub their grubby hands before dinner or share their beds with the modest chambermaid. It was only after taking an intense sniff of her simmering soup on the kettle and collaborating with her in song that they accepted the transient princess, vowing to protect her from her diabolical matriarch and keep her company until a noble prince whisks her off to “happily ever after.”

The collective behavior of these Seven Dwarfs carries on in the slapstick tradition, primarily consisting of awkward stumbles and painful pratfalls, the type that wouldn’t be out of place in a Chaplin short or Marx Brothers’ farce. Their names even smack of the absurd, mimicking their physical traits so closely that Snow White can pick out each one simply by gazing at their faces and pairing it with the appropriate moniker adorning their bedframe.

Just as the octet began to adjust to their new arrangement, the Queen got wind of the huntsman's ruse, uncovering the pig’s heart disguised as Snow White’s in the gold-encrusted jewelry box. Realizing that she has to execute the child herself, the Queen descends a spiral staircase into her cobwebbed potion room, mixing a toxic concoction intended to shock Snow White into a coma, curable only by “love’s first kiss.”

The transformation sequence that occurs in her occult lair is the closest Snow White comes to “pure cinema,” visualizing the Queen’s metamorphosis from elegant waif to cackling shrew through the juxtaposition of her changing form over the swirl of a bubbling cauldron and the winds of a torrential downpour. The glimmering candlelight and sublime shadowplay of her witch’s den also enhance the mood, proving more evocative than real-life experience and wrapping the viewer in the narrative while eliciting goosebumps and a genuine sense of fear.

This feeling of trepidation will evolve into elation in the closing moments and it's the range of emotions elicited that makes Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs so vital, compelling its audience to succumb to a world of make-believe unencumbered by modernity and cynicism.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Walt Disney Productions, 1937)
Directed by David Hand (supervising director)
Written by The Brothers Grimm (fairy tale), Ted Sears (story adaptation), Richard Creedon (story adaptation), Otto Englander (story adaptation), Dick Rickard (story adaptation), Earl Hurd (story adaptation), Merrill De Maris (story adaptation), Dorothy Ann Blank (story adaptation) and Webb Smith (story adaptation)

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003, Ki-duk Kim)

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring is an astounding work of visual majesty, one that is structured like a religious allegory, but far less entrenched in the symbolic or willfully abstract, illustrating its lessons through images rather than wordy sermonizing.

Following the life of a Buddhist monk from childhood to middle age and demonstrating the passage of time through the changing of seasons, the film uses religion as its guiding spirit, but never as a rulebook, aligning itself to the whole of humanity instead of the whims of its narrative. This breadth of vision makes the film a truly personal journey, one that bonds the viewer to the characters through shared experience and empathy.

The first chapter, “Spring,” focuses on a child apprentice and his abbot, a pair that reside in a floating monastery, surrounded only by serene, blue water and dense forest. The monk instructs the boy in the art of holistic medicine and herb foraging, delighting in the life of quiet contemplation he shares with the excitable child, whom he regards as a son. Despite his innocence and best intentions, the boy occupies his spare time by tying stones to snakes and fish, giggling wildly as they struggle to free themselves from the restraint. Unbeknownst to him, his master has observed these transgressions from a distance and plans to teach him a valuable lesson.

Awakening the next morning, the novice finds a hefty piece of stone fastened to his back, knotted just out of his reach. He begs incessantly for its release, but the monk, disgruntled by the boy’s cruelty, orders him to lug the burdensome weight into the forest and liberate his helpless captives. If the creatures die, the monk warns, “You will carry the stone in your heart forever.” The boy heeds this ominous warning, wailing uncontrollably upon finding the serpent crushed under the burden of the stone, finally realizing the weight of his irresponsibility and indifference.

As Spring fades and “Summer” blossoms into full bloom, we are introduced to the boy as a teenager, now tall and studious, despite an adolescent awkwardness and lack of social skills. When a distraught mother brings her depressed daughter to the temple for spiritual treatment, the young man quickly develops a childish infatuation, sharing his first sexual experiences with the girl in the seclusion of the rock bed that surrounds his aquatic abode. The couple remains undetected during theses dalliances, only getting caught after they take out the monk’s rowboat by night and fall asleep in a state of post-coital bliss. The wise mage, in an act of retaliation, pulls the plug from the boat and lets the cold morning water wake the sleeping lovebirds.

“Lust awakens the desire to possess,” the Monk scowls, expressing the jealousy inherent in sins of the flesh, but his strong-willed student doesn’t heed the lesson and abandons the temple, chasing after his object of affection. The young man releases a cock into the woods upon his exit, symbolizing his venture into the “world of man.” Above him, the clouds cover the sun, only revealing the passage of time and nature’s indifference to the matters of the heart.

Nearly a decade passes before the monk gets to lay eyes on his pupil again, only discovering the boy’s whereabouts through a mugshot printed on a crumpled piece of wet newspaper. Regrettably, the young man has lost his way in the secular world, violently murdering his adulterous wife and fleeing police custody in a state of frenzied panic. The report disturbs the aging cenobite, but he sees it as a final opportunity to instill wisdom into the fallen apprentice, and he waits patiently for the return of his prodigal son.

“Sometimes we have to let go of the things we like,” the Monk explains upon the boy’s arrival, but hubris and rage cloud the fugitive’s judgment and he attempts ritual suicide when untended at the temple’s altar. Realizing the young man’s intentions, the monk flogs him mercilessly with a switch, ordering him to carve a prayer into the dock as a way to purge the hatred from his heart.

The repetition and solitude of the task bring a calm to the tempestuous nature of the apprentice and the monk willingly releases him into police custody after he completes every step of the healing process. In a sad moment of realization, our stoic voice of reason reflects on his own loneliness and replicates the boy’s death ritual, gluing bits of cloth over his eyes and mouth before immolating himself atop his drifting rowboat. Beyond the growing flames, we see yellow and amber leaves shuffle off tree branches, a sign that Nature remains unphased by the melodrama of human crises.

Returning to his nest in the dead of “Winter,” the reformed apprentice resurrects the temple from a state of stasis, refurbishing the grounds and actively pursuing inner peace through meditative exercise. Finding the shell of his master’s boat frozen into the ice, he removes the monk’s teeth from the wreckage and sculpts a Buddha into a frozen waterfall, depositing the teeth between the statue’s eyes as a symbol of respect and honor.

In one final act of reverence, the monk ties a weight to himself as he carries the Maitreya Buddha up a mountain, reenacting the first lesson from his childhood. As he prays at the mountaintop, he observes the valley and woods from above, humbling himself to the power that nature holds over him and permanently separating from the selfishness of ego.

The last chapter circles back to “Spring” and shows the new master taking on a child apprentice. Left alone to play on the dock of the temple, the young boy shamelessly pounds on the shell of a frightened turtle, unknowingly repeating the sins of his father. It’s an image that would be easy to misconstrue as negative, but writer-director Ki-duk Kim only values an honest interpretation of life, elucidated through the repetition of images, drawing parallels between our experience, that of our parents and the communal experience of mankind.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (Sony Pictures Classics, 2003)
Written and Directed by Ki-duk Kim
Photographed by Dong-hyeon Baek

Orgazmo (1997, Trey Parker)

Occupying the bottom rung of the cinematic step ladder and maligned as morally corrupt and misogynistic, the “sex comedy” is a staple of American popular culture not for its crudity, but through the enduring power of its lurid imagery. Pubescent boys, the primary audience for this type of hot-blooded fare, blossom into sexuality by way of the buxom coeds and unrepentant horniness on display, embodying the desires and fetishes of each film’s protagonist, indoctrinated into the sub-genre’s culture of male supremacy and skewed version of sensuality.

Despite the worst of intentions, the reliance on photographic and eidetic attributes actually lends the “sex comedy” a certain merit, capturing raw emotion through the coded progression of image and sound, working in unison like an orchestra to wring out sexual desire and snickers in equal measure. If deprived of this attention to detail, we’d be left to focus on the quality of the storytelling, which is often as plausible as a Penthouse letter, and usually written with far less aplomb.

Orgazmo suffers this fate at the hands of an unskilled crew, plagued by haphazard framing and poorly blocked shots, making for a messy field of vision that limits the potency of its sight gags. Any goodwill generated by the amiable protagonist and surprising lack of objectification is immediately washed away in a sea of cheap phallic pyrotechnics and pictorial redundancy, further exposing the limited scope of the writing and staggering amount of racial stereotyping.

Spearheaded by Trey Parker, creator of TV’s South Park, Orgazmo beckons comparisons to that series, particularly in its willingness to push boundaries and confront religious hypocrisy, but fails to transplant the gleeful absurdity of the popular cartoon to a live-action environment. It succeeds in some capacity as blue comedy, getting extra mileage from an utter lack of prudence and profane penchant for porn-industry buzzwords, but has shocking little subtext, rarely utilizing its fascination with pornography or the Mormon faith as fodder for anything beyond a two-bit punchline.

Struggling to make ends meet as an LDS missionary, Joseph Young (Parker) accepts the lead role in a pornographic superhero movie, exchanging his moral piety for a $20,000 paycheck and an old-fashioned wedding at the Salt Lake Temple. An ex-theater major at Brigham Young and proficient martial artist, Young’s acting chops and physical build attract the attention of an enterprising producer, one that sees the crossover potential in his uncommonly wholesome leading man.

Though Young’s performance is purely platonic (a “stunt cock” handles the dirty work), his sidekick, “Choda Boy,” sees the sex industry as a natural outlet for his overactive libido and an easy way to subsidize his homemade science projects. The most amusing of these contraptions is the “Orgasmatron,” a raygun that incapacitates its victims through knee-weakening orgasm, something the pair humorously test on Orthodox Jews and geriatric women along the Sunset Strip.  

The story of this budding friendship and the hijinks of porn production are tolerable enough for the opening 30 minutes, harmlessly riffing on the business of selling sex to an undiscerning audience. The film’s rickety foundation is completely thrown off when Parker tries to make a statement on consumerism, morphing the eponymous tawdry skin flick into an international hit, replete with action figures and a cover shoot for Time Magazine. If that wasn’t enough to induce a roll of the eyes, it manages to get even more implausible after its twist, mutating into a tale of superhero vengeance that consists of nearly 60 minutes of crudely choreographed “chop-socky” spoofs and a cornucopia of illogical resolutions.

Nevertheless, all infractions could have easily been forgiven if Orgazmo had managed to be a tad insightful or intermittently funny. Only one moment elicited a chuckle, a stereotypical montage sequence that wittily name checked its cinematic point of reference, following a blur of spinning newspaper headlines with an image of Orgazmo adjacent to Citizen Kane on a theater marquee.

Apart from this brief moment of clarity, Orgazmo is a foundation built on half-baked ideas, masquerading as satire without the acerbic wit or conviction required to lampoon its subjects. As it stands, this is just an early curiosity from a talented social critic not yet developed beyond creative puberty.

Orgazmo (Rogue Pictures, 1997)
Written and Directed by Trey Parker
Photographed by Kenny Gioseffi

Teorema (1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Overwhelmed with a narcotic dreaminess and possessing a supernatural allure akin to its lead character and primary symbol, Teorema merges the secular and the divine, drawing parallels between the physical response to sexuality and the emotional depth of spiritual devotion. Through “The Visitor,” Italian poet Pier Paolo Pasolini personifies the transformative nature of religion, depicting faith as both inspiration and frustration.

Acting as a link to his early work as a Neorealist, Pasolini opens on a colorless, flat, industrial landscape. It’s the workplace of the impoverished, disenfranchised and forgotten Italian people. Standing in a non-descript lot, a well-dressed factory boss conducts a television interview, turning over his stake in the company to the workers that fabricate its product. One journalist opines that this may lead to a “transformation of all mankind into a middle class.” It’s a striking thought, but the moment passes, whisked away in a quick edit to fog rolling over a barren desert.

This sneaky cut is the first instance of visual symbolism or, more accurately, the conversation Pasolini intends to conduct for the next 95 minutes. His mission is to engage his audience in the mystery of the narrative, knowing that the use of cinematic syntax will provoke a response. This revelatory moment compares the birth of a unified middle class to a sun-scorched landscape, completely drained of life, metaphorically linking corporate progress to passivity. This contentment will sap the worker of the drive to subvert, fight, be inspired and even create.

Pasolini brings the sterility of the desert to the city, landing on a Milanese street draped only in bleak, sepia-tone photography and carrying dreary echoes and moans regurgitated from mouths and mufflers over the soundtrack. Five humans wander through daily activities joylessly, only converging for an evening meal that feels machinated, as if it were enforced. They have no defining qualities except for the roles given to them by Pasolini: father, mother, son, daughter and servant.

Change rushes in without warning. The family has welcomed a guest (Terence Stamp), and with him come brilliant bursts of color, from the yellow cover of his book to the earthy hue of his khakis. The servant (Laura Betti) observes him from a far, unable to stop herself from focusing on the prominent bulge between his legs. She musters the courage to approach, sheepishly wiping ash away from his pant leg before scurrying off like a field mouse.

Stopping to reflect in the mirror, the servant is overwhelmed with guilt for her open display of sexual desire, slowly fingering for the religious images adorning the mirror’s frame, quietly asking for forgiveness. In a moment of insanity, she removes the hose from the stove and prepares to asphyxiate herself, only to be saved by our nameless object of affection, whose angelic face and piercing blue eyes relieve her of all inhibition. Freed of her self-consciousness, she voluntarily lifts her skirt and succumbs to his will.

Her fellow housemates also bare their souls and bodies to “The Visitor,” basking in his grace and figuratively stripping themselves of all allegiance to class and culture. These passionate moments share a striking similarity, structured like the movements of a symphony, opening with guilt and reluctance and building to a crescendo of acceptance and elation. Each encounter differs only in the resulting emotional response, brought on by “His” swift and unexpected departure. Those left behind struggle, channeling this frustration into miraculous acts or uninhibited hysteria, permanently out-of-step with the superficiality of the secular world.

Through the tangibility of sexual intercourse, Pasolini explains the abstractness of faith, comparing life experience, outside of the shell of the middle class, to an epiphany. Audiences screamed blasphemy in 1968, but none of his detractors ever seemed to grasp that his vehemence wasn’t directed at religion, but at the wealthy and politically powerful. Teorema was meant as an affront to the growing capitalist mentality in Rome and Milan, preferring intangible beauty and liberation over rationality and the banality of social status. Never has a rallying cry been so exquisite or metamorphic, possessing images as rich as an oil painting and enduring as Christian iconography.

Teorema (Koch-Lorber Films, 1968)
Written and Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Photographed by Giuseppe Ruzzolini

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971, Robert Fuest)

Transporting the moody pipe organ and mythology of the Universal Monsters to 20th Century England, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is basically a modern reinterpretation of Dracula or The Phantom of the Opera, preserving the gloom, but abandoning the modesty. In place of that dated concern for good taste and subtlety are lavish set designs, inspired by the geometry and bold color spectrum of Art Deco, and a modern thirst for grisly excess, albeit one with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Nevertheless, this “more is more” style of filmmaking is actually what makes the film tick, resulting in a highly visual work that sparingly relies on dialogue, generating tension and titters through reaction shots and novel methods of execution (both literal and figurative).

The theatricality of the film is transparent from the first reel, introducing us to Dr. Anton Phibes (Vincent Price) and his nefarious plot exclusively through sensory cues. We ascend to an ornate marble stage from the subterranean depths of Phibes’ secluded mansion, carried by a pulley system and the pulsating sound of his pipe organ, accompanied gently by his animatronic, and remarkably creepy, mini-orchestra. As his symbolical rise from the grave concludes, Phibes takes his “fashionable” assistant, Vulnavia (Virginia North), into his arms and waltzes her through the desolate ballroom, rhapsodized by a sweeping overhead shot and the harmony of the pneumatic brass band.

This performance is the opening movement of their homicidal ritual, a step directly followed by an ingenious method of murder modeled after the Plagues of Egypt, boasting “ancient maledictions” like a mischief of rats or hailstorm, accomplished through comically convoluted measures. Phibes is both an acclaimed organist and Doctor of Theology and he utilizes his fields of expertise to pull off these highly ostentatious acts, all constructed to wreak vengeance on the nine-person surgical team that left his young wife dead on the operating table.

Phibes himself is as ceremonious as his acts of reprisal, constructing his battered body in the mirror much like one would assemble a costume, fabricating his face from rubber prosthetics and speaking through a tube stuck in his neck, attached by lengthy cable to a phonograph. His upper body scorched and vocal cords shredded in a fiery automobile explosion, Phibes’ only verbal communication is now in somber soliloquy to his dead wife’s photograph, emoted by Price through mournful and bitter facial expressions.

The surrealistic vibrancy of Phibes’ screen time is contrasted by the darkly humourous nature of the accompanying police procedural, which is always a pace or two behind and more of a highlight reel of ineptitude than a paean to shrewd detective work. Heading the investigation, Inspectors Trout (Peter Jeffrey) and Crow (Derek Godfrey) realize Phibes’ scheme early on, but are met with such hostility from their superiors and are so beleaguered by their own clumsiness that they usually arrive at the scene well after the carnage, left to gasp in amazement at a blood-drained corpse or skeleton sucked dry of its flesh by a voracious swarm of locusts.

The most tragic of their miscalculations results in the death of a surgeon in protective custody, sashayed directly into the spiked horn of a brass unicorn, a trap orchestrated by Phibes and completely unnoticed by the gabby and easily distracted head detective. The biggest chuckle of the film accompanies their efforts to conceal this cadaver, a sight gag that finds them twisting the lifeless body on one side of a partition as the screw of the unicorn’s horn drips blood on the other.

Delicate sensibilities will certainly be distressed by the levity of this sequence, but those with a stronger constitution will find much to smirk at and admire in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, particularly its ability to juggle tone and artfully compose a shot. The symmetry of its visuals and rich primary colors of the decor influence the tone, varying between earthy browns and wood grain in farcical moments and scarlet red and lime green in moments of tension and panic.

This unsavory marriage of humor and horror would be intrinsic to fright films of the forthcoming 21st Century, but not nearly as significant as the film’s closing sequence, which pits the only surviving surgeon against the clock in a mad dash to save his first-born son from a vat of acid. The Saw series would exploit puzzles and traps of this nature ad nauseum, but could never elicit the delight and disgust of Phibes’ conceits, favoring an over-crowded narrative to the simple pleasures of visual storytelling.  

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (American International Pictures, 1971)
Directed by Robert Fuest
Written by James Whiton and William Goldstein
Photographed by Norman Warwick

Witchfinder General (1968, Michael Reeves)

An ironic re-interpretation of the pastoral, Witchfinder General maintains the mode’s dewy pastures and vast exteriors, but replaces the romanticized viewpoint with a cruel cynicism and macabre palette. It strikes a unique juxtaposition between its content and landscape, shooting its sordid tale of torture and vengeance in natural light, swathed in shadowy dusk and fading blue skies, accompanied by the howling wind and creaking of tree branches against the night chill. For a horror picture, particularly one about a witch hunter, it completely abandons the supernatural, telling its tale of human avarice through an all-too-real and more frightening organic environment.

Our setting is 17th Century England, a nation divided in civil war and overwhelmed by a criminal element that exploits the lack of municipal law enforcement and superstitious nature of the populace. Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), our protagonist and an enterprising member of General Cromwell’s army, rides from camp to the neighboring Brandeston to set eyes on his lover, Sara (Hilary Dwyer), and perhaps ask for her hand in marriage. Regrettably, his visit isn’t met with jubilation, as his betrothed and her uncle (an aging ecclesiastic) are in hiding from local allegations of idolatry.

Responding to a request from the Brandeston magistrate, Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price), a lawyer and self-proclaimed “Witchfinder General,” and his brutish assistant, John Stearne (Robert Russell) travel to the village to interrogate and try the supposed blasphemers, a process that requires much physical torture and very little detective work. The technique used to break the will of Sara’s uncle is particularly brutal, consisting of needles strategically stuck in the back and waist to reveal the “Devil’s Mark,” a space on the skin consecrated by Satan that won’t bleed upon penetration.

The duo always garner a confession, but Hopkins never participates in the more sadistic aspects of coercion, leaving those to the aberrant imagination of his barbaric associate. Taking a backseat to the “action” is new for Vincent Price, but he turns in an admirably pared-down performance as the witchfinder, broodingly quietly, seeking only his due in silver and the bodily delights of a female subjugate.

Hopkins selects Sara as his latest conquest, allowing her to buy her uncle’s freedom through a litany of sexual favors, none of which will truly save the old man from the gallows. The abuse she endures at the hands of Hopkins and Stearne is truly repulsive and it’s hard not to notice that the female cast get the brunt of the sadistic interrogation sequences. Thankfully, this behavior is never advocated and only depicted to elaborate on the misogyny of the era, perfectly encapsulated in Hopkins’ statement on femininity as a “foul ungodliness.”

The only savagery that comes with the filmmaker’s stamp of approval is Richard Marshall’s retaliation, painted as Grand Guignol spectacle, drenched in cerise, fake blood and boasting a vivid eye gouging and the thudding cleave of a blunt axe. It was certainly provocative for the period, but the succinct flashes of grue don’t detract from the simple and evocative camerawork, which generates more menace through quick zoom and low-angle than gory retribution. Witchfinder General is also of philosophical merit, showing the contaminating nature of power and the profitability behind the “justice” system and prison industry, a theme that’s rather timely despite the archaic setting.

Witchfinder General (American International Pictures, 1968)
Directed by Michael Reeves
Written by Ronald Bassett (novel), Tom Baker (screenplay), Michael Reeves (screenplay) and Louis M. Heyward (additional scenes)
Photographed by John Coquillon

The Masque of the Red Death (1964, Roger Corman)

Inspired in equal parts by Edgar Allan Poe’s morbid fable and The Seventh Seal’s cloaked visage of death, Roger Corman’s rapturous rendition of The Masque of the Red Death is the most handsomely mounted of his eight Poe adaptations, seamlessly fusing the melodrama of Gothic horror to the existential malaise of world cinema. It also happens to be the most economical, utilizing overhead shots and novel framing techniques to broaden the physical space, further heightened by the gauzy nature of Nicolas Roeg’s photography, which employs soft focus to eroticize the setting and medium close-up to emphasize emotion.

Ravishing technical aspects aside, the film lives and dies by Vincent Price’s performance and his devilish take on Prince Prospero relishes in every bad deed and malicious act, grinning from ear to ear at the thought of manipulating his human subjects for entertainment’s sake. Price’s adaptability and nuance as a performer are what made him a matinee staple, but the subtle arrogance and vigor of his lead performance in Masque is particularly noteworthy, capturing the essence of Poe’s character as if he tore it right from the page.

Trampling through the shanty town that rests in the muddy reflection of his palace, Prospero, a pompous and pernicious nobleman, pauses to reward his underlings with invitations to a masquerade ball, unaware that a townsperson has been infected with the “red death.” Upon recognizing the symptoms on the blood-soaked face of an elderly woman, Prospero recoils in fear and demands the village be burned to ash, only absconding with three rowdy locals upon the request of his deviant cohort, Alfredo (Patrick Magee, typically wild-eyed and enthusiastic), who intends to utilize them as a source of amusement.

The male captives must live out their days as gladiators at the behest of the host, but Prospero has other intentions for the young Francesca (Jane Asher), the gamine female captor who bravely confronted him as he shamelessly scorched her village. Though her modesty and staunch Christian faith stand in direct contrast to his practical intellect, he is infatuated by her resolve and sees her as a suitable opponent to his belief system (or lack thereof).

Prospero’s sole purpose in life is to attain knowledge and he prays to Satan for supernatural wisdom and immortality, citing his nihilistic attitude as a more realistic alternative to compassion. He only begins to question himself when he sees Francesca shake off his advances, both sexually and intellectually, and is dumbfounded by her faith in an intangible God, one that doesn’t offer wealth or power.

The entire purpose of the masquerade ball is to increase Prospero’s influence over man and death, a desire that may reflect his own building insecurity. Testing his allegiance with Satan, Prospero decrees that his guests must grovel before him as thanks for their protection, a request they all too willingly accept, turning dignitaries and queens into braying donkeys that will scour the floor to sniff out a dropped pearl or discarded piece of meat. Their descent into pure revelry is humorous and decadent, lovingly orchestrated through choreographed dancing and an elaborate mise en scène that morphs pratfalls and stumbles into an ornate, epicurean ballet.

Prospero perceives this exhibition as a sign of his domain over death, but an unknown “guest” dressed in crimson red exposes his folly, unmasking the merrymakers to reveal their blood-splattered faces. Despite power and wisdom, Death divulges its inevitability, completely contrary to man’s whims or the bearings of religion. As a sea of dancing corpses surround the frenzied Prospero, he writhes and squirms in one last ditch effort to escape his fate, succumbing only when he comprehends the futility of his struggle.

Thematically, it’s refreshing to see an unbiased representation of death, one existing completely outside of the superstitions and religious institutions of man. The Masque of the Red Death takes this moral ambiguity seriously and constructs an ending that shows the grave as an equalizer, taking on the humble and the arrogant, completely without malice or partiality. It’s a philosophically heavy closing point for a histrionic horror film, but it’s this thematic complexity that makes Masque the most mature and vivid of Corman’s genre efforts.

The Masque of the Red Death (American International Pictures, 1964)
Directed by Roger Corman
Written by Edgar Allan Poe (story), Charles Beaumont (screenplay) and R. Wright Campbell (screenplay)
Photographed by Nicolas Roeg

Night and Fog in Japan (1960, Nagisa Ôshima)

Generating emotional resonance through interpretive camera work and operatic lighting, Night and Fog in Japan brings a heightened realism to the political drama, revealing clues to its mysteries by taking creative license with time and place. Utilizing a frame story to detail the experiences of members of Japan’s Communist Party, Nagisa Ôshima avoids the clinical nature of fact and allows the visuals to mirror the recollection of each story’s orator, drifting through events with the subjectivity of memory and the grace of a dream.

Directing his camera to move like the human eye, darting between sources of sound and action, Ôshima opens the film with a grandiose tracking shot, gliding stealthily through a wooded area and sneaking between the double-doors of a reception hall, resting in a symmetrical position before a bridal party and their ornate, tiered wedding cake. A speech from the couple’s mentor, a college professor, will be the focal point of this nearly 10-minute opening shot, drawing conflicting reactions from the politically-mixed guests of the bride and groom, elucidated through fluid camera motion and meticulous shot composition.

Roaming between past and present, the camera bases its location on the whims of the character captured in the frame, often marrying elements of the then and now through an overlapping musical theme or dramatic shift in lighting. The lack of editing allows for a seamless transition, moving freely between the manifold story threads, balancing action between the idealistic student revolutionaries of 1950 and the despondent, conflicted adults of 1960.

Chronologically, the narrative opens in an overcrowded college dormitory, one occupied by leftists revolting against the “AMPO” treaty, a military alliance that allowed the United States to intervene in any conflict on Japanese soil. Despite their easily definable goal and tight-knit support group, intraparty conflict quickly arose between the philosophically-minded members of the organization and the bourgeois mentality of the party’s leadership, precipitated in equal measure by youthful hubris and a lack of communication.

The greatest schism that the Zengakuren endured was in relation to a member’s suicide, which was arguably the result of party interrogation and libelous rumors. Two close friends of the fallen soldier tell his story in the present, crashing the nuptials to show opposition to the “with us or against us” mentality perpetuated by party leadership and to point fingers at the supposed culprit, dictatorial party leader, Nakayama. They see the reception as an opportunity to “tear off each other’s masks” and examine the compromises past members have made to attain the comfort of a “conservative life,” an existence that demands uniformity and opposes the true intent of the youth movement.

Ôshima’s film is an act of protest against this hardline political conservatism and the complacency it inspires, favoring the untapped potential of the individual to subvert collective memory. His ability to manipulate structure and time in Night and Fog in Japan was just as revolutionary as his politics, inventing a cinematic language that linked past and present together without the intrusive nature of excessive editing. The resulting work is a rich tapestry of visual beautiful and singular emotion, coasting on the kinetic energy of a constantly moving cinematic eye.

Night and Fog in Japan (New Yorker Films, 1960)
Directed by Nagisa Ôshima
Written by Toshirô Ishidô and Nagisa Ôshima
Photographed by Takashi Kawamata

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Abbas Kiarostami)

Bearing little resemblance to the Western notion of a “movie,” Iran’s The Wind Will Carry Us takes the pieces of traditional narrative cinema and drains them of the artifice of plot, score and kinetic energy. Broken from these constraints and unhurried by suspense, the visual image remains static, changing the medium from a vehicle for entertainment to one of quiet contemplation. Adapting to the flow of Abbas Kiarostami’s work requires some sacrifice, mostly to one’s patience, but the effort isn’t fruitless, as the inert eye of the camera captures guileless, organic beauty and allows us to inculcate our own experience onto the stock-still canvas.

Though natural elegance occasionally infiltrates the visual landscape, seen mostly in the sway of golden fields of grain, Kiarostami’s primary interest is the encroachment of industrialization on the environment, particularly through the automobile, which he uses as a figurative vehicle for shifts in culture values. He even stages his dialogue-driven moments around cars, either shot from a distance or by a camera mounted to the dashboard, passively recording conversations held within or through a crack in the passenger window. It wouldn’t even be absurd to consider the lead’s sedan as a member of the cast and Kiarostami loves playing with this symbol, even personifying the car through the words of his main character (Behzad Dorani), who compares the radiator overheating to a person “giving up the ghost.”

Thematically, the gravity, or lack thereof, with which Behzad talks about life and death reflect a growing “intellectual” condescension to tradition. Temporarily stationed in a remote village on assignment, Behzad treats the locals as if they were antiquities, subjects to be photographed and documented like a species of insect. Though details are scant and provided with little explication, one can infer that Behzad’s trip relates to a dying villager, either as journalistic or financial endeavor. The bitter irony is that, as he waits for a stranger to die, he ignores his own family’s plea for his appearance at a relative’s funeral.

Unstirred by personal connection, unless in relation to his profession, Behzad’s lifeline is his cellular phone and it’s amusing to see him speed along dangerous mountain roads to find a peak with a stable signal. Kiarostami’s prescience picked up on the forthcoming dependence on portable electronics far before it was an epidemic, recognizing our weakness for convenience at the expense of privacy and intimacy. Watching Behzad on his daily hunt for reception gradually becomes less amusing the fourth or fifth time it happens, especially as the viewer relates their own obsessive drive for “connectivity” to his embarrassing charade.

There’s a telling moment, midway through the film, when the camera acts as a mirror for Behzad as he shaves, his face occupying the screen as if it were our own. His reflection is the face of all human callousness, embodying man’s disconnect from natural order in favor of superficial knowledge and cavalier pride. His redemption, in the film’s closing moments, comes with an acceptance of life’s limitations and death’s certainty, seen by Kiarostami’s camera without reaction or judgment, provoking the viewer to find their own truth and make their own penance.

The Wind Will Carry Us (New Yorker Films, 1999)
Written and Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Photographed by Mahmoud Kalari