Ill Stills

Biutiful (2010, Alejandro González Iñárritu; Cinematographer: Rodrigo Prieto)

Hey, Ill Stills fans.  I’m going on vacation, but I’ll be back in May with a whole boatload of new stills.  Until then, spread the word, stay safe, and don’t ever trust a small town cop.

Rebel Without a Pulse,

Kevin Hinman

The Last Days of Disco (1998, Whit Stillman; Cinematographer: John Thomas)

From the Erudite Beauties of Stillman 2012 calender.  Seriously, this shot is amazing.  Looks straight out of Hitchcock.

Fallen Angels (1995, Wong Kar-wai; Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle)

Watching Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels was less like watching a film and more like stumbling onto 90 minutes of deleted scenes from Chungking Express.  The world is the same.  Christopher Doyle’s camera work is still some of the best in the game.  Many of the sequences are extraordinarily clever and well shot, but every story feels like a subplot of something larger, and, unfortunately, there’s no one like Faye Wong, or Tony Leung to make it all cohere.

That said, I’m sure there are people who dig Fallen Angels more than Chungking Express, since it’s more action oriented, though as it’s a Kar-wai film, romance is integral to the universe.  Here, Karen Mok’s Blondie takes refuge from the rain in a bar, eating chips and playing pool.  Is she thinking about love?  Of course.  I’ve always loved the way Kar-wai approaches romance.  A man and a woman can’t meet without falling hard.  Every kiss is passionate, and every conversation deep and dreamy. If it wasn’t for all the people getting killed left and right, it’d be a pretty great place to live.

I Saw the Devil (2010, Kim Jee-woon, Cinematographer: Lee Mo-gae)

“On top of that, you explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this.” – Adaptation

There may be nothing new under the sun, but Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil banks so hard on its trite psychological subtext to give its grisly tale legs that it’s almost insulting.  Add in the savage cyclical nature of revenge that’s been a thematic stalwart since Shakespeare, and that’s the entirety of the film’s depth.  The rest is beheading, and dismembering, and rape, and cannibalism.  It’s done well, and if that’s for you, hey, I’m not judging, but I seem to have lost my taste for that sort of fare a few years back.

Luckily, Jee-woon and cinematographer Lee Mo-gae know their way around a scene, and there’s a brutal urgency to even the most placid shots in the film.  When I Saw the Devil kicks into high gear, as in a sequence where crazed murderer Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik, of Oldboy fame) slaughters two men unfortunate enough to give him a lift while their car speeds down a back road, it’s an all-out frenzy, and the camera works double time, as if attempting to frantically decipher for the viewer just what they’ve stumbled into.  Other scenes, as in when the first victim is found by a group of terrified policemen, captured by a beautiful crane shot, seem to borrow heavy cues from David Fincher’s Se7en, or perhaps Zodiac, and suggest not just a singular storyline of desperation, but an entire web, unrelenting and grey.

Most of Jee-woon’s movie, however, is surprisingly intimate.  Faces are studied closely, as lenses search for what, if any, humanity rests behind the cold eyes of the warring antagonists.  Min-sik oozes psychosis so well that even when not drenched in blood, as he as in this still and much of the rest of the film, he’s absolutely captivating.  The yellow hue that fills the room during his final confrontation with Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hun) conveys a thick, physical sickness and decay that mirrors the men’s final mental degradations, the two having broken from reality some time ago.   So, heads are severed, jaws torn open, and skin punctured, ad nauseum, as the men struggle to reach a catharsis that will never come, and the film flails violently in its own closed abyss.

Punch Drunk Love (2002, Paul Thomas Anderson; Cinematographer: Robert Elswit)

Not only is this a great kiss, my favorite on-screen kiss, passionate and romantic, it’s a beautiful example of lesprit de l’escalier wish fulfillment.  There’s this moment after every date where that possibility of a kiss just hangs in the air between two people, and maybe it should happen and maybe it shouldn’t, but if you leave and you don’t do it and you should have, you know it.  That missed opportunity, it nags at you.  The kiss between Adam Sandler and Emily Watson in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk love is a perfect realization of that missed moment, and of the fantasy that the opportunity for redemption is always there, lingering with you on the staircase.  Barry (Sandler) rushes to Lena (Watson) from the lobby, getting lost at every turn, but when he reaches her door, she’s there for him, waiting.  Him in his blue suit, her in her red dress, they fit.

Robert Elswit’s color coded cinematography creates a landscape in which the boldness of character is constantly at war with the bleak functionality of modern living.  Barry’s bright blue is smothered by the dull greys and whites of his office, and ever escalating clutter of noises that accompanies this space.  His apartment is even sparser.  Barry’s blue suit screams out his loneliness, his desire to connect, but the world is unreceptive, that frustration can only turn inward, and his problems multiply.

Lena’s colors, variations on reds, project her warmth and capacity for passion.  Her fuchsia dress and top in Barry’s office is like a breath of fresh air, and when she leaves, the screen fills with streaks of color, symbolizing another catharsis for Barry, a vision of hope (the colors appear also after Barry finds a harmonium on the side of the road, and again before he confront the film’s antagonist).  Shortly after Barry and Lena’s kiss, Barry begins to wear a red tie, a blossom of her love inside his blue jacket.

That Punch Drunk Love is considered “lesser Anderson” is understandable since it’s chronologically wedged between a flat out masterpiece (There Will Be Blood), and a movie that might as well be one (Magnolia, in which a goodbye kiss at a restaurant comes terribly close to taking the throne), but it is a damn good film.  The casting of Sandler as Barry is inspired, and he, in turn, delivers a nuanced, human version of the “angry fool” role that has largely defined his career.  Watson’s Lena is a beautiful, but emotionally small woman, reserved, troubled in her own way, and this texture is what allows the audience to believe in her requited admiration for Barry, despite his problems.  They are just two people who have found in the other that missing bit of happiness on which to hold, and the film closes on them, together in Barry’s dull office, in love, embracing, radiating wildly.

To Each His Own Cinema (2007, Atom Egoyan et al; Cinematographers: Nick de Pencier, et al)

The 2007 anthology To Each His Own Cinema encapsulates the entirety of the medium so precisely that, despite being fictional, it could be the greatest documentary on film ever produced. Nearly every important, contemporary auteur is accounted for to explore, in thirty-four three minute shorts, the form that defines his or her life, making for an anthology that’s as personal as it is historical and theoretical.  Is cinema dead?  Can movies break racial barriers?  Can they even matter when so many peoples are repressed, or at war?  Can film transcend itself, or is it forever destined to eat its own tail?

Atom Egoyan adroitly tackles this last question (at its root lying the even larger, metaphysical question whether or not one’s passions have objective meaning) in his segment “Artaud Double Bill,” in which two girls see two separate movies in two separate theaters. Or, is that one girl is seeing two separate movies in one theater, while the other sees four separate movies in another?  Or, are they separate movies?

Allow me to clarify.  Anna watches Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie by herself after her friend, Nicole, flakes to see The Adjuster (directed by Egoyan!), also by herself.  In each girl’s respective theater, the characters in the movies are also watching films; Anna watches Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie watch The Passion of Joan of Arc, while in Nicole’s theater a couple in The Adjuster watch a pornographic movie.  The two girls, watching their separate films, text each other, and Anna, infatuated with one of the male stars of The Passion of Joan of Arc, sends Nicole a video message of the film within a film.  Nicole views Joan of Arc on her mobile phone, while in the background an uncontrollable fire has started in The Adjuster, and for a moment, the films sync perfectly.

The Joan of Arc star who has caught Anna’s attention?  He is none other than Antonin Artaud, whose collection of philosophic treaties, The Theater and Its Double, contains an essay advocating a theater of cruelty, a deconstruction of the medium’s conventions and falsities often through the use of violent sounds, images, and lighting, in order to reconnect playgoers to the metaphysical possibilities of the form.  Thus, the “Double” of Egoyen’s title is multifold.  Nicole views two films simultaneously, there are two films within two films, and Anna and Nicole mirror the scopophilic femmes in Vivre Sa Vie and The Adjuster, as the films mirror their lives as scopophilic femmes, the girls becoming the “Double” of Artaud’s work.

The final frame of “Artaud Double Bill” is a title card from The Passion of Joan of Arc that reads only “La Morte”.  Is it the death of the cinema that Egoyan suggests?  The girls in the theater seem to be the oft derided teenage types who cannot sit through a film without twittering away on their cell phones, or mooning over a movie’s stars regardless of the context.  Whereas Anna Karina starts to weep at the sight of Renée Falconetti’s Joan weeping, Anna never engages.  Are the films too old, and the girls too young to grasp the importance of cinema, or has the emotion been removed so many times there cannot plausibly be a reaction to it?  Or, alternatively, does a real human moment happen between the Anna and Nicole through their texting?  Is there a shared universe of understanding in those theaters, on those screens, of cruelty in the Artaudian sense?  As viewers, are we included?  Does the film move us?  Do we, it?

The Birds (1963; Alfred Hitchcock; Cinematographer: Robert Burks)

There’s not a lot to admire in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.  After a brilliant run with Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho, Hitchcock jumped into the horror genre head first, only to sustain some major contusions.  The movie is so wrapped up in special effects, and it is technically deft, that almost every other aspect of the film suffers.  Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor couldn’t have less chemistry as they attempt to navigate The Bird’s dreary first third in which, as perhaps an attempt to replicate the complex bait-and-switch of Psycho, nothing much happens, and the horrors to come are merely hinted at.  Even cinematographer Robert Burk, who needs no introduction for Hitchcock fans, struggles to convey the allure of rural California, or the subtle sexuality of Hedren, though the above shot of the gas station catastrophe, and the rear-projection boat scenes are a treat.

That I’m missing something is a thought that’s nagged at me, that the key to the film is the bird’s unexplained presence, and that there’s some allegory to the animals beyond the usual nature fights back garbage of so many “B” pictures.  Or, maybe the specific animal is incidental.  Perhaps the point is that terror looms overhead for everyone, regardless of provocation, or morality.  Hedren’s Melanie and Taylor’s Mitch are some of the only Hitchcock protagonists to be punished so pointlessly, and though the wrong man accused is a well noted trope of the director’s, the wrong man is inevitably cleared, whereas the horror of the birds plagues its heroes without end.  When the credits roll, Melanie and Mitch’s futures look grim, and the presence of death completely envelops the pair.  There will be no escape.

If The Birds hadn’t been a Hitchcock film, I have no doubt it’d be completely ignored, classified as a below average monster movie, forever destined to appear in AM time slots on trashy cable channels.  Who is there to care about?   What, if anything, about human nature is explored?  If The Birds is an existential work, as I hope it may be, why so obtuse?   And while many feel that Hitchcock’s final films were his worst, I’d take any of them (barring the mean-spirited Frenzy) over The Birds.  It’s like Hitchcock joked, originally the movie had a three word title, that first word being “For.”

Blazes (1961, Robert Breer)

*As a lay person who never went to film school, I didn’t stumble onto the American avant-garde until last year, and sadly, had never even heard of Robert Breer until he passed away, and the Anthology Film Archives ran a tribute to him and fellow pioneer, Owen Land.  So, if you are a former film student, to whom Dern and Brakhage are old friends, this post, a ham-fisted grope in the backseat with experimental film, probably isn’t for you.  This post is for those like me, the uninitiated, for whom avant-garde cinema is a simultaneously confounding and wildly exciting departure from tradition.*

“One hundred basic images switching positions for four thousands frames. A continuous explosion.”

This is Robert Breer’s description of his 1961 short, Blazes, and that’s pretty much the entirety of conversation circulating about the film.  How do you approach a short like this, one that eschews narrative and boils down cinema to its rawest form – the moving image?  The first, and hardest, step is to shift, or abandon, all of your expectations.  Personally, I find it best to get into MoMA mode, and try to think about an atypical piece of cinema as an exciting painting amongst other paintings, instead of a movie that fails to cohere to the conventions of other movies.  “Wow,” I think.  “Here is a painting that moves!”  Stupid?  Yes.  But effective.

And we live in the era of YouTube, so studying experimental film has never been easier.  Not only can you watch Blazes repeatedly, which, in my opinion, is the best way to absorb the movie’s chaotic pace, but you can pause it and examine the frames as individual drawings and paintings.  Some of these individual frames are beautiful, colorful blotches over a deep black background.  Some, like the frame above, are sparse line drawings, harking back to earlier, simple Breer animations such as A Man and His Dog Out for Air.

However, even more so than traditional movies, gestaltism reins in abstract film, and frames, while meticulously crafted, and often visually engaging outside of their entire context, are meant to be viewed as part of the whole piece.  This line drawing on its own may look like nothing, but between two darker frames gives a sense of negative contrast and enriches the rhythm of Blazes.  White, white, black.  Pause, pause, beat.  It’s almost musical.

While Stan Brakhage would use silence to isolate the rhythm of his work, Breer’s Blazes is complimented by a barrage of strange percussive noises.  The sounds, wood blocks, maybe a dripping faucet, perhaps meant to simulate the crackles and pops of fire, give form to the piece and when, at the three minute mark, a dizzying zoom technique is introduced, new layers of sound are added as well.  What could be an empty projector whirring fills the aural landscape and the emotional blaze reaches its apex.

This is what is all comes down to in the end.  Emotion. How does Blazes make you feel?  Stimulated?  Uncomfortable?  Nausious?  There is no wrong way to perceive a work like this, and with the author deceased (Barthes for the win), and there being so little dialogue on the piece, your interpretation will always be as valid as the next person’s.  If it aroused you, or sent you into an epileptic fit, the film did its job, and so did you.  And maybe you hated it, but maybe not.  Either way, a door was opened, and the perimeters of your comfort zone were tested, maybe proven porous.  This is what it’s all about, anyway, that new space outside of yourself.  Art.

Rashōmon (1950, Akira Kurosawa; Cinematographer: Kazuo Miyagawa)

Marge - Come on, Homer, Japan will be fun.  You liked Rashōmon.

Homer – That’s not how I remember it.

Rashōmon is not a film exactly, as much as it is a narrative, philosophic exercise.  It’s a fascinating exercise, don’t get me wrong.  There’s a reason it’s had such an influence on so many films, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries for one, the direct shots of the sun, the “dollops” of light through the trees, the disturbing sexual encounter in a grove recalled at a distance all point back to Akira Kurosawa.  Likewise, Tishirō Mifune gives his first of many excellent performances in a Kurosawa movie (he surpasses all expectations set in Stray Dog), the editing is tight, and the film’s structure still feels groundbreaking, despite the handful of nonlinear films that proceeded Rashōmon.

Yet, Rashōmon lacks the vital humanity of nearly all of Kurosawa’s later work.  The movie’s central actions, a rape and murder, are handled so analytically that after the event has been examined from all narrative angles, there is no one, least of all the victims, with whom to empathize.   This is all intentional, of course, and it’s the sort of filmmaking appealing to (relatively) younger directors and screenwriters more concerned with formal revisionism and thematic resonance than conventional character arcs.  But lacking this crucial character base, Rashōmon’s final scenes, in which a baby is found and human self-interest is overtly discussed, come off as painfully didactic, in a way that, say, Ran, a movie entrenched in its players, does not.

And while these are problems that, for me, place Rashōmon at the bottom of the canonical Kurosawa films, it’s still a Kurosawa film, which means above all, it’s a visual feast.  Kazuo Miyagawa fluidly tracks characters through dense forests.  His close-ups are nerve-wrecking, his wide shots despairing, and he is always conscious of the interplay between light and mood, and the subjectivity of the lens.

During the Carpenter’s story, Rashōmon’s last and most thematically illuminating version of the rape and murder, before Mifune’s Tajômaru and Masayuki Mori’s Takehiro’s cowardly duel, there is a wonderful exchange between Tajômaru and Takehiro’s wife, Masako (Machiko Kyô), the victim of the rape, in which she eggs Tajômaru on to murder, disgusted at his apparent weakness.  The camera stays static, but the two begin to slowly maneuver around one another, indicating the turning of tables, and ironically simulating a 360 degree dolly, the sort associated with embracing lovers in big budget Hollywood romances.  The two stop, and in the next shot, their faces rest perfectly in frame opposite each other.  Then Masako spits in Tajômaru’s face, steps back definitely, cackling, and the camera swoops with her, submitting to her victory and the power reversal.  The audience is now on her side (which they should have been all along since she’s the victim of a rape, but this was 1950).  When Tajômaru is shown next, he looks meek, and his sword, an obvious phallic symbol, shakes in his hand during his duel.  He has been unmanned.

The detail in this scene is impeccable, though again, very detached.  There is no investment, just an appreciation of technique and a mild curiosity as how this story may differ from the others.  Two years later, Kurosawa would direct Ikiru, a deeply moving film that, through the exploration of a single, richly drawn character, is able to touch upon profound truths regarding life and death in contemporary Japan.  The leap forward was astronomical. 

Toy Story 3 (2010, Lee Unkrich)

Anyone who’s ever watched a supplementary feature for a Pixar movie knows what an epic undertaking it is to get a computer animated feature off the ground.  There are hundreds of hard-working contributors, but outside of their small animation community, their work as individuals is never recognized, and their egos must vanish under the mighty banner of their production company.  People want to go see a new Pixar film, but maybe one out of one hundred will recognize the name Brad Bird, and only one of one thousand, Lee Unkrich.

And while part of me loves the idea of all for Pixar, the fact is that these individuals are busting humps to, time after time, put out revolutionary animation.  Who is to praise for this beautiful shot from Toy Story 3?  The storyboard artists who turn a conceptual plot point into a specific image?  The woman or man responsible for the uncanny textures that come through in Lotso’s rain drenched fur and the asphalt?  The extensive lighting department?   The film’s three producers? Or Unkrich, who steers the entire behemoth, who, like the animation directors before him, was completely ignored as an individual during most every conventional award ceremony?

And that’s just one shot.  There are dozens of similar moments in Toy Story 3, shots that are framed so precisely it seems that one visionary mind must be responsible.  Instead, it’s a rare, collective genius at work.  Pixar, Studio Ghibli, and, to a much lesser extent, Dreamworks are changing the game under everyone’s nose, and not just for animation studios.  What does it mean to give up everything for a higher vision of art?  Perhaps the days of the auteur are slowly dwindling.  Who knows, the studio may reign again.  No filmmaker is an island.