Schindler’s List - Spielberg (1993)

Spielberg has succeeded in bringing life to Europe’s defining ethnic cleansing event. The opening scenes are abuzz with a Rockwellesque multiplicity of Jew-types filing en masse into ghetto-life. Spielberg may be more than a commercial artist, as Rockwell has been dismissed as being, but he definitely has something to sell us. Don't be put off by the dreary subject, or the fact that Schindler didn't make Cahiers du Cinema's 10 best of the year list. Schindler, I mean Spielberg, finds a way of making the unspeakable saga of dispossession and murder entertaining.  

Schindler’s List, which might have been called Schindler’s Memorial, would, for all its well-oiled mis-en-scène, have benefited from some old-school studio intervention. Instead of leaving it up to the movie-maker-business-man in one. Given that he wasn't attempting an edge-of-your seat thriller but something between action-packed biopic and period drama with an epilogue, the observation that he allows the punch of the film to dissipate in solemn commemorative festivities, is somewhat gratuitous. Still, it points to a basic flaw in the work, setting up a tension between the prerogatives of aesthetic vs. moral judgment which informs the problematic nature of all Holocaust renderings. I will exploit every opportunity to highlight those aesthetic cum moral discontinuities in my review.

Lest I dissuade anyone from seeing the film, there is plenty of graphically staged and expertly shot ethnic shooting, er--cleansing, making Spielberg's felicitous production an instant classic. It's originality outside the context of its prototypes--Jakubowska's The Last Stage (1947), Pentecorvo's Kapo (1959)--may be overstated, but it's iconography of Holocaust horrors is indisputably unique.

There isn't any actual shooting until forty minutes into the film, which is remarkable considering it's reputation as an endless series of horrific executions. The wait seems calibrated for optimal effect.

Framed in zoom by columns of ghetto residents clearing the street, we see the figure of an old man--the one-armed senior Stern transferred to Schindler's workforce at the eleventh hour. He stands slumped over facing a wall between two implacable SS officers as shovel-fulls of snow are thrown left and right, briefly obscuring our view. Culled from the line of workers for his want of productivity, the man points out his special status but makes no further appeal for mercy, frozen still where his over-seers position him. Having for all purposes exited the world of humanity, his execution seems a mere formality. And it is carried out with understated 'dash.' 

 

The sequence feels slight-of-hand, but is unforgettable in its matter-of-fact precision and great but too-brief visual beauty. I hesitate to call it "tastefully executed," but that is exactly what it is.

The conscripted Jews assiduously apply themselves to shoveling. When two siblings peer in the direction of the men their mother, attempting to redirect their curiosity, exhorts them to ‘look at the snow!' In deep focus one officer stands imperiously behind the old man, his pistol-wielding arm stretched out in the direction of his head. Snow is flying across the screen as the shot is fired. A dot of white signaling the bullet’s ejection is answered by what looks like ink shooting out of the man’s head as his body sinks to the ground like a sheet from a clothes-line. It's a kinaesthetic marvel in a film replete with visual master-classes. 

Cut to Schindler in an office decrying the loss of work-force and demanding compensation. Then back to the old man lying face-up, slowly imbuing the snow with his blood.

Spielberg makes no attempt to spell out what made killing Jews so irresistible to Deaths' Head functionaries. It suffices that the perpetrators of the slaughter are there--the ciphers of Pure Evil. This is warranted enough, as the liquidators themselves were frequently mystified by their 'duties-are-duties.' It took less antisemitism than simple obedience. That is to say--conformity. Whence the "authoritarian personality" and all the attendant nonsense. As if the invitation to conform were not universally accessible and required a special morally degenerate type.

 

Spielberg's film focuses on explaining why one man, untouched by eliminationist zeal, would go out of his way to throw a monkey wrench in the orderly process of ethnic liquidation. Spielberg is at pains to leave the all-too-entrepreneurial soul of Schindler untransfigured for the duration, repeatedly underlining that Schindler’s motivation was largely economic. Or in some perhaps unparseable ratio moral and economic.
 

The nocturnal arrival of a train in Aushwitz as snow falls and the chimneys glow is genuinely eerie. We see figures descending into the bowels of the crematoria throwing up their endless clouds of glowing ash. On repeat viewing I discovered that my memory had assembled a single master-shot of the sequence that exists on film only as separate shots of the various elements. A fact for which I credit the magic of film-construction (= editing) rather than the suggestibility of my imagination. The two work in tandem to create such totalizations, in any case, illustrating the synergy of spontaneity and convention at the assimmilative end of artistic creation.

It is during this scene that the disparity between a formal, shot-analytic approach to the horror of the Holocaust becomes conspicuous. One could of course just acknowledge that the spectacle of mass extermination has its own distinct beauty as visual production, but then one must also accept that the aesthetic point-of-view over-rides the moral. That displacement is precisely what the taboo against  the cinematic treatments of the holocaust was concerned to obviate. The pleasures of the visual-auditory perspective are beyond the morally crucial disjunction of good vs. evil. Not because that perspective is cynical or immoral, but because it is abstract; it brings to bear the same power of concentration (focus/selection, therewith omission/elimination) which informs both the artist's construction and, here, the act (= art) of making entire communities disappear.  

Has Spielberg put this dilemma to rest? has he vindicated the capacity of the medium of cinema to 'mount' the Holocaust in such a manner as not to dishonor or trivialize the memory of its victims? Perhaps. I'm not certain, but at least I am not convinced that he has traduced that memory. It is his prerogative and perhaps even his duty as an artist to conceive the inconceivable. For is there not a danger comparable to misconceiving the inconceivable? namely to mythologize as irreducibly unique the brutalization of Jews during the Holocaust? to institutionalize historical fact as untouchable and sacred?

The film celebrates lighting effects, of which it is a kind of compendium. One obvious example: the panning beam that illuminates Goeth’s villa in the background while Schindler and Stern negotiate. Some of the indoor shots are elaborately lit in German expressionist style, the high-contrast luminescence flattening features and obliterating detail. Figures seem to loom in light that has no source in the locations they occupy.

The zoom lensing during Schindler’s hill-top epiphany evokes the documentary feel of films like The Battle of Algiers, with its epic crowd scenes. I was frequently reminded of Toland’s use of ceilings to frame his figures. A rather mannered approach, but then Kane was the brain-child of one of cinema’s most manic stylistic maximalists.

 

One shot in the sewers that looks like a wide-screen version of the famous sequence in The Third Man. Near the end there are a couple of miraculous shots of snow-covered rural landscapes traversed by a smoke-spewing locomotive that recall the conclusion of Grand Illusion. Not just a work of remembrance and a gesture of tribal solidarity, Schindler’s List, in its black & white Sachlichkeit, is a magisterial homage to the art of cinematography. 

The duality of light and dark enforces moral clarity. Or at least--the polarity that informs a dualistic version of the world riven by the forces of good and evil. A vision which, in its Judaic embodiment, is inseparable from the dialectic of obedience and transgression, repentance and forgiveness. 

 

It is a tribute to his post-dualistic appreciation of the grey zone which complicates simple oppositions that the portrait of Schindler emerges as ambiguously as it does. The portrait of an opportunistic profiteer and well-nigh unwitting humanitarian who embraces his philanthropic potential almost as an after-thought. The fact that lives destined for extinction were saved strikes us as miraculous.

During he evacuation of the ghetto a father obstructs the line of fire of an SS man attempting to shoot his fleeing son only to be shot down himself to blood-curdling and horrific effect. It is the first time in the film when I felt taxed by the excess of violence, though the frisson that surged through me was as much a response to the formal brilliance of this sequence as the abrupt brutality of the SS man’s "order-keeping." A dovetailing of literal and formal executions that will only seem problematical to those indifferent to the formal requirements of art.

By canceling the reflective distance between audience, perpetrator, and victim, the cinema-vérité style heightens not just our sense of immersion, but of our complicity. Cinematically, qua instrument of entertainment, it constitutes an effective tool of the trade. But if all imitation--including cinematic 'emplotment' or mis-en-scène--implies a moral dimension (Rousseau), then seduction and holding imaginations captive are subordinate to supra-aesthetic criteria. From this perspective it represents a gratuitous heightening of immediacy.

As for the cast, Kingsley just looks too jewish, while Liam Nesson resembles a hapless bear and has difficulty conveying a believable level of callousness. Fiennes' bloated fairy-prince may appeal to pre-pubescent girls, but is a bit delicate to portray the colossal Goeth. He does manage to convey an appropriate level of malice, progressively modulated by a sense of quasi compassion.  

 

Schindler's pointing out that real power resides in refraining from the gratuitous violence to which the work-camp tempts some is enough to make him question his proclivity to torment Plaszow inmates. Though not to the point of rising above his need to randomly pick them off from his perch above the campground. Besides a spell of clemency we don’t get any sense of Goeth's ideals, beyond his love of absolute freedom. In archival footage of his execution he can be seen hailing his Leader seconds before a chair is kicked out from under him.

There is one brilliant sequence which plays with our expectations of moral regeneration that I can’t praise enough. Having pardoned a young servant for using soap instead of lye in his bathtub, Goeth sends him away. The lad descends from the villa while Goeth stands in close-up scrutinizing his own dark reflection in a mirror. He raises two fingers in a Christ-like gesture, in mesmerized incantation announcing, “I...pardon you.” As if he were trying on the part of pardoning judge to gauge it's potential to empower before reverting to the baser yet more accessible thrill of playing actual executioner. 

 

Cut to the boy at the bottom of the flight of stairs proceeding across the camp grounds. Then back to Goeth, his self-transcendent moment dissolving in the here & now as he examines his fingers for what appears to be an irritating spar. He looks pensively up in the direction of the youth. Shots are fired. The youth pauses, casting a glance in the direction of the villa, before continuing on his way. Just then Stern passes. A tracking shot follows him as he overtakes the youth lying face-down in the dirt. Cut to an extreme close-up of Goeth’s hands being manicured by his Jewish love-interest. The scene ends on a close-up of Goeth looking almost innocent. He is in love!

We've come a long way since Adorno’s exhortation that to write poetry after Aushwitz would be barbarous. Evil seems less and less ineffable these days. Or we have grown a lot less pious. In Schindler’s List we are led with the huddled masses covering their nakedness in a modern-day expulsion from paradise. They wail and moan awaiting a fate no one believed the German Geist could impose.

But this is Hollywood, so rather than cyclone-B, actual water streams out of the shower-heads, to the ecstatic relief of all and sundry. The end-of-the-road has not yet come for these Schindler Jews--they really are being disinfected. 

 

However historically accurate the scene, it feels like the vicarious collective miracle Hollywood’s miracle-workers have always been at pains to produce. The fact that it is staged with sweeping gestures and swelling chords makes it at once instantly effective and instantly offensive.    

This film might have ended less tendentiously had Spielberg saved his commemoration for the extra features of a DVD. As it is, he has made a masterful film with an epilogue that feels tacked-on and sanctimoniously manipulative. What made Schindler's List exceptional was the relative absence of sentimentality, so its ponderous implementation seems like a return of the suppressed. Or the suppression of better judgment. 

Appending a sermon, even a wordless sermon to a fact-based world-historical tragedy, renders dramas tendentious. Especially when the film already contains an explicitly stated morale in the form of a speech from the mouth of its eponymous 'hero.' Spielberg's humanitarian commemorative gesture constitutes a dual violation--it detracts both from the film's formal dramatic integrity and from the genuine solemnity of honoring those exterminated.

 

Granted, there are notable lapses in the rest of the film, mostly pertaining to sentimental scoring (the children’s choir during the liquidation of the ghetto; a chorus to soaring strings accompanying the exhumation and burning of corpses at Chujow Gorka, etc.). These lapses would be less objectionable in the absence of Schindler’s self-reproach-filled speech and the grave-site tribute of modern day survivors. Feeling compelled to spell out what should have been left to the viewer’s imagination does not render the film more moral, only more formally commemorative. That is to say, it heightens it's propagandist valence.  

 

The common-thread of all these failings is a certain heavy-handedness. 

Its camp-scenes are incomparable, in any case. Polanski may have been able to avoid the melodrama of Schindler’s confession, but it’s hard to imagine he or anyone could have improved on the mis-en-scène of concentration camp life. He himself confessed he would probably have failed to muster Spielberg's "objectivity," given his own 'brush' with Auschwitz (his mother died there). He certainly would have been able to avoid the heavy-handed sentimentality Spielberg pours like syrup of his production.

 

A film that matter-of-factly emplots the systematic destruction of persons and goes to great lengths to show Schindler in all his pragmatic fallibility, ends with an old-fashioned paean to...character. Instead of leaving the theater in state of moral outrage, we exit feeling morally surfeit. 

Postscript: German Guilt

 

I've never been able see ethnic cleansing as the inevitable out-come of Germany's history. Though to many contemporary lecteurs of Peter Viereck's famous diagnosis (Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler), including Thomas Mann, it seemed self-evident. 

 

The obligation to attempt to comprehend the motivation of Hitler's henchmen--the duty of attempting to understand the crimes and sacrifices of those who could have been my brothers in arms--imposes itself. As descendant of the Tätervolk, I feel the shame of the perpetrators more intimately than those whose ethnic identifications allow them to view the Holocaust as the unique derangement of a hateful foreign people. At the same time, against all better judgment, I feel a preparedness to understand. As if there could be some supervenient post-historical reconciliation with the perpetrators of Zivilisationsbruch.

 

There are limits to understanding. To see an entire ethnicity as carrier of contagious degeneration is too fanciful. Though perhaps no more than the belief that Germans were collectively Jew-haters of eliminative propensity. As has been demonstrated by historical inquiry (see: Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101), shooting entire communities into ditches required no particular animus towards Jews, just a sense of obedience. 

 

It is at least questionable whether believers in the 'misfortune' of the Jews were any more numerous among Germans than Europeans of other nations. Ethnic identification that is more than a linguistic-territorial sense of belonging always runs the risk of distortion and xenophobia, as present day Israeli policies towards Palestinians bear witness. 

I do not subscribe to the idea that one can humanize National Socialists too much. A film that normalizes the unthinkable by putting us in the hearts and minds of its perpetrators further humanizes the victims. It drives home not just the evil of those who murdered, but the absurdity of the whole racist distortion. 

 

Perhaps it is unavoidable that the work of mourning confronting anyone who contemplates the fate of Europe during the Second World War picks and chooses its victims. That Spielberg's film does so by focusing on his own people rather than Poles, gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, POWS, or some other group, is understandable given that he was telling a specific story. Its specific fate is intended to be emblematic of the fate of humanity writ large. 


In spite of its shortcomings, Schindler belongs on the short list of great World War II films: Rome: Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero, Le Silence de la Mer, Murderers Are Among Us, Decision before Dawn, Mr. Klein, Lacomb, Lucien,  The Ascent, Das Boot, The Tin Drum, The Wannsee Conference, Europa (Zentropa), Les Misérables (Lelouch), Black Book. 

 

Memory, for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005)

Memory, for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005)

Alan King’s documentary about a Jewish retirement home in Toronto beautifully illustrates the adage that destiny is character. That it does so in the context of a fate shared by most of us who survive to senescence--marginalization in a world in which we serve no further purpose--makes that insight all the more poignant.

An array of pre- and quasi-scientific discourses has accounted for human character, with varying degrees of perspicacity. With every disposition resembling a set of unexamined prejudices, an interpretive strategy wearing the mask of self-evidence--the sheer variety occasions wonder. Each claims singularity, but in life as in art the collective range of individual difference readily reduces to a cast of repeating characters. King's documentary captures this compendium of coping strategies at their closing days and hours. 

The intersection of proclivities, afflictions, and fixations, a single life does not suffice to develop its myriad possibilities, nor exorcise the ghosts that haunt it. Yet each of us, in our terminal stage, is called to offer summation of a game rigged form the start. It's never obvious what is in and what out of our hands, but everyone has a play on the ball speeding toward them like a freight train. 
 

The room of every Baycrest resident sports a wall of memorabilia--remnants of irreducibly individual lives reduced to a curated display. An afterlife of sorts is already underway, with each guest showing as much as they can fit of the distinctions that accrued to what must now be reckoned the lost cause their lives. Portraits, certificates, and trophies attesting mastery and successful integration. Their self-substantiation as citizens a fait accompli, each prepares to become the same stranger to their public self as when first embarking on life's journey--unburdened or bereft, as temperament decrees. 

A yawning indifference towards the guarantors of identity haunts Baycrest's halls, where people of not altogether sound mind lounge about awaiting the inevitable. As memory and family ties attenuate, the fabric of formerly autonomous selves frays to reveal a delicate yet still distinctive weave.

Diminutive Max Trachter shuffles about in suit and fedora like an old vaudevillian, a brow raised in perpetual bemusement. His bewildered innocence may be an inch thick, but it disarms all comers. Blithely unaware of the magnitude of his situation, he laughs up his sleeve at a joke no one else seems in on. When it's revealed that he never married we can't help wondering if bachelorhood was the key to his surreal self-enchantment.

 

Robust and deep-throated Claire Mandell is the resident voice of reason. She enjoys the authority a sense of responsibility brings, in her own estimation and that of the community. Comfortable in her skin, she requires no one's permission to be who she is. For all her earnestness, her enchantment with Max inspires genuine silliness. She strokes his cheeks and showers him with kisses; new-born with every encounter. “Oy, oy, oy,” they chant, dancing about in second childhood. The dearest thing in her world--Max is the blessing reserved the righteous. 

At ninety-three Fay Silverman periodically breaks into tears as she peers out a window like some lost school girl. Everything in her life has diminished except her expectations. “I wish my son would come,” she confides with weary emphasis. “I’m so lonely...I wish I was dead.” Now dejected, now beside herself with glee, she wears her emotions on her sleeve, lamenting, exulting, and railing away. Theatrics that once moved mountains now only raise eyebrows.

She waves impishly from across the hall in a game of virtual peekaboo, making reference to a new boyfriend downstairs. “I like men!” she exclaims with defiant resignation. An instant later she's turned inward, riveted by a sense of abandonment. When her son brings a watch from China her amazement knows no bounds. “I’m so excited!...I can’t help crying!” Maybe she just enjoys shedding tears, her daughter-in-law dryly suggests. In her gentle, maudlin volatility Fay is as out-of-place at Baycrest as her antiquated Christian name.

When not despairing she puts the bravest face she can on her situation. “I'm still here because I said I want to be here. I’m a strong woman. I don’t give up.” In the fullest sense one only gives up once, of course. But Fay means something else: that to live is to look-forward. To expect gifts, if not miracles. 

“I’ve been happy my whole life. As bad as it was...” she affirms in closing judgment. Thereafter she disappears from the documentary, leaving us to wonder not if but under what circumstances she passed from the world of the expectant. Protesting to the end, no doubt.  

Of all the characters in King's documentary Fay--in her credulousness vis-à-vis her own affective indications of reality--comes closest to embodying Sartre's verdict that man is a "useless passion." A being who begins and ends in the same want of purpose. Unless it be simply--to go on existing.

Ida Orliff, a retired nurse and doctor’s assistant, had a blessed life. She considers herself lucky to have positive memories. Her one regret is not having anything to keep her occupied. “Life is funny,” she muses, preternaturally cheerful--"but the last years are not good.” As if asking for permission to be candid, reluctant to draw definitive conclusions whose weight barely registers, she appends words of grateful gladness with a convivial smirk. She knows the world will go on in all its crazy glory and does not presume to speak for the dead. Life is all there is. Even in the ending. Diminished, yet still ardent. 

Certifiable Helen rants in toothless, free-associating dementia to the annoyance of her cohabitants. “What kind of a home did she come from?” Ida inquires disapprovingly. Helen doesn't recognize her own daughter, who continues to visit, resigned to being just an acquaintance. At times acutely cognizant of her surroundings, Helen's not above deflating an unusually up-beat Fay with questions about her son’s whereabouts. Habits of the heart--the malicious no less than the life-affirming--defy the infirmities of age.

The day comes when the news of Max’s passing must be broken. Residents and staff members gather in support. The favorite of Fortune, little Max had a fall, was hospitalized, and promptly gave up the ghost. Cradling her head in her hands Claire remains incredulous, roundly defeated by the necessity of grasping the imponderable. “Where was I? Why wasn’t I told?” 

Try as she might, there's no sense to be found in his sudden exit. Her perplexity channels itself in queries about the circumstances of his death; interrogating the mundane markers of time and place in an attempt to dissipate the inconceivability of his demise. As if fixing the chain of events leading to obliteration would refute the remorseless fallacy of natural consequences.

What remains of life will go on in a profoundly diminished capacity. “I’ll never get over this,” she prophesies. 

Lingering in her mind may be the sense that death is punishment for the violent presumption of birth. In the ensuing days she has repeatedly to be told of a disappearance she keeps forgetting. Each time it’s broken the news is a revelation. One night she dreams about it.

“I dreamed he passed away. Does that mean anything?” 

“I think it does, Claire. Max has passed away.” 

“What? When?”

“Five days ago.”

“Five days ago? I just had that dream last night...Why didn’t you tell me before...?”

Claire struggles to make a connection that seems to require a leap of faith. “... I’m not dreaming now,” she insists, as if to reassure herself. 

Thus do perception and reality diverge as life approaches in-difference, never having revealed the seam of its unmendable rift. 

“He was the captain of his ship of soul,” the Rabbi announces at a make-shift service in the lounge. He celebrates Max's friendship with Claire, who sits dabbing a handkerchief in her sunken eyes, exhausted from weeping. Ida, comfortingly folding her hand over Clair's, looks on respectfully. The Rabbi concludes with the standard appeal:

“May his soul be bound up in the bond of life.” 

Given the enormity of the change death effects, the request seems modest. Fittingly for a religion that sees pride--the forgetting of one's origin--as the basic sin, and salvation as a collective transformation. Yet in bridging the breach opened by death, the plea to be resumed in life's bond performs the essential work of all eulogies--pledging continuity on behalf of the discontinued. 

Beau Travail - Claire Denis (1999)

Long on my list of most revelatory films directed by women, re-visiting Beau Travail resulted in a decidedly less effusive appraisal. Before articulating the reasons for my reevaluation, lets recall why the film was singled out for accolade in the first place: exotic North African landscapes stunningly photographed under pellucid skies, an elliptical narrative style, a moody, quasi-tribal staging of a homosocial hierarchy of soldiers to the beat of primitive choral music; the mesmerizing pulse of events. Thematically inspired by Billy Budd, Beau Travail celebrates the aboriginal virility of men cultured to be instruments of destruction in the context of a first-person confessional narrative that lends the unfolding episodes the feel of memories (the past perfected). At once elemental and stylized, the film's construction reflects the thematic synchrony of a sublimely desolate natural order and the rituals of legionnaires stationed in it. For all its stylistic sophistication, Beau Travail propagates a bracing, oneiric primitivism.That is and will remain the secret of it undeniable power.

On second viewing its intriguingly enigmatic quality seemed more oppressive-lugubrious than mesmerizing, as if I were passing blinkered through a beautiful landscape. There is a sense of being removed from the events captured, our access tightly controlled. The sense of abstraction and ritualism the pervades the sequences in the desert follows upon an opening scene in a discotheque in which the music's carefree flirtatiousness cannot quite distract from its almost claustrophobically constraining close-ups of politely revelrous dancers. This establishing mood functions as foil for a bizarre seaside ritual of sun-worshipping soldiers to a brooding chorus of male voices. The music-video episode becomes emblematic of the whole film, encoding our memory of it at the expense of its less stylized dimensions. 

The beauty of revisiting a film is that it restores the context of the memorable (i.e., the forgetable) while forcing a confrontation with one's own initial appreciation, as filtered through one's recollections. The process allows one to discover how deceptive first impressions can be. Memory is like a shorthand system of dictation, it preserves by way of an often grossly schematic simplification--a process of stereotyping that facilitates retrieval at the cost of detail. That fact alone is sufficient argument against the business of reviewing films as they come out. That unavoidable necessity is not conducive to genuine understanding, the ripening of which requires the distance of time. 

The formerly intoxicating sense that we and the characters are dreaming, feels more coerced; the elliptical sequencing almost totalitarian in its rigor. (This may simply reflect the adjusted expectation of revisiting the film; the switch from focusing on plot to how an effect is generated. Focus on technique is subject to its own distortions.) Nothing is allowed to break the spell of the diseased soul narrating the film and the mood of fated events. The film is too mono-thematic and closed for the convergence of perspectives effected by two articulate minds. (Compare the relationship of Galoup and Sentain to that of ... in Ronald Neame's Tunes of Glory.) Denis eschews the relaxed, open cadence of dialogically driven cinema, squeezing out the cacophony of the shared, public world of persons even as she thematizes the community of French legionnaires. Everything passes through the filter of recollection. By isolating the singularity of the individual in his interirority she lends him mythical significance. Her rhythm mimics the evocative-laconic meter of lyrical poetry in which impulse and form converge under the auspices of compelling but inscrutable vision. 

Remembered for its sovereign simplicity, Beau Travail now seems almost fussy with its hand-held camera-work and repetitious juxtapositions of native female against hyper-masculine imperialist army cultures. The soundtrack too, a mix of popular music, subterranean choral droning, and ambient sounds, obliterates the silence I remembered as reigning supreme. I had in fact been recollecting the vast desolate landscape dwarfing the exertions of fighters circling warily around one another like adversaries in a rut. That impression suggests that Denis succeeded in creating an overwhelming sense of isolation, which I, understandably, equated with silence. 

The narration also seemed excessive the second time through. But this too must be qualified by the observation that what is requisite for a first impression is bound to seem conspicuous absent its original orienting function. Denis is too enchanted by surfaces and the adventitious to be considered minimalistic. There is a nervousness and menacing loadedness that builds through the film, which coils about its center of gravity like a serpent. The film I'd remembered as being of Bressonian austerity now abounds in stylistic inflections and feels somehow ‘off’ in its rhythm. A state of affairs that reflects the increased scrutiny of a second viewing, freighted as it is with fulfilled expectations. The majesty of total coherence seems to have gone missing in the plethora of structural detail made conspicuous by critical distance.  

My most basic criticism is regarding the use of the hand-held camera, which seems to be in conflict with the dream-like, enigmatic character of the film. As the tracking-shot, the moving picture-frame connotes relativity and sensation over reflection, canceling contemplative distance and, by implication, authorial omniscience. It represents the attempt to embed the viewer in the happenings as they unfold, therewith removing him from his zone of privilege and comfort. It also suggests a film-maker's immersion in real events, whence 'verité.' But the technique has become a mannerism, stylistically de rigueur yet somehow gratuitous. To me it is less cutting-edge than a sign of disingenuous film-making. It betrays what feels like a lack of faith in the intrinsic interest of the actions filmed; an imposition of disequilibrium as end-in-itself. The static framing of events can be just as disorienting without making the viewer feel like he is at the mercy of mechanical whimsey. 

The camera seems to leer as it circles the scantily-clad legionnaires digging, exercising and saluting the sun. Members of the desert out-post, choreographed like puppets and paraded about for the roving eye of the camera, resemble dancers in a chorus-line. Their Sisyphean exertions seem absurd, not the movements of autonomous individuals, but virile, glistening automatons. Even the scene where F.’s bleeding foot is tended to foregrounds composition at the expense of spontaneity and verisimilitude. Denis seems to encase the men in nameless functionality. Their subliminal homoeroticism is more obscene than any straight-forward love-making could ever be. This, finally, is the most profound offense of Melville's story: its basic falsity lies in its betrayal of the erotic. This could be interpreted as its complicity with the anti-libidinalism of Galoup's invidious paranoia.

How much of this is thematic, and how much the effect of Denis’s stylization and vision, is a moot point. They are one and the same, whence the accusation of a totalitarian method. The elliptical and enigmatic quality is therewith  exposed as a veneer, a short-cut to the sophistication and ambiguity a totalitarian aesthetic excludes. 

This falsity in the portrayal of homsexual eros, it might be objected, simply mirrors the fate of eros in a martial environment, where it is both decried and exalted. While the erotic--as the original essence of gender-identificaion--is a component of all aggregations by gender (homosocial communities), the sublimation of its overtly sexual component is essential for the cohering of camaraderie. In that context all sexual acting-out gets represented as a “sexualization” of identity needs. But this ignores the symbolic dimension of such sublimation; a practice of reducing and banishing the homoerotic, paradoxically enough, by way of its centralization. The defusion of the homo-erotic by way of its playful enactment effectively applies the principle of homeopathy (a dose of poison to cure the infection). 

Non of this is contained in the monological world Denis has put before us, a realm in which individuals--shorn of the mask of personality, but also of their articulate individuality--are constituted by their hidden depths. Denis is less interested in the interface of two personalities than in the collision of two ciphers so loaded with evocation as to be individually mute. To criticize Denis for not transmitting the dimension of overt personality in favor of the unconscious and archetypcal is to fault her for not making a film she had no intention of making. Nonetheless, pointing out a dimension absent from her film helps distill the essence of the one she did make. By means of such negative criticism one turns back from judgment to perceptual immersion.

The enmity between Galoup and Sentain as communicated non-verbally through stares and physical combat, remains opaque, rendering it conducive to multiple interpretations. Such ambivalence is irritating and preoccupies the viewer. It is irritating in the same way that invidious enmity--the prelude of erotic idealization's magical transubstantiation--irritates. (An interpretation that presupposes that romantic love is preceded by hatred, as implied by La Rochefoucauld.) But the transformation never eventuates, leaving enmity untransformed. On this reading, Sentain's death by exposure in the desert represents the fate of the failure of a human heart (Galoup's) to expose itself by submitting to the excrutiating transformation that makes children of men. His elimination is the logical outcome of his failed incorporation.

The final scene, which shows Galoup  in an empty dance club tentatively ‘giving it up’ to the euphoric beat of a disco anthem (Rhythm of the Night), leaves a bitter after-taste. Galoup exalts remorselessly in the hedonistic yet sterile world of his own anti-libidinal narcissism. Unpunished evil exalts before us like a wild animal. 

Denis' refusal to sum-up or pass judgment is the seal of the post-modern aesthetic born of the French nouvelle vague--a movement that, in contrast to the British kitchen sink social realism, cultivates cinema for the sake of cinema. Tavernier's Coup de Torchon represents another example of celebration in default of judgment of human evil. Both thematize the violent potential lurking in the heart of men on the outskirts of civilization, where the moral universe assumes the guise of (reverts to) the ruthless consequentiality of the "jungle." But Tavernier's darker film was wittily conversational where Denis' muffles every utterance of unconstrained intelligence. 

Eros would have been the magic potion that transformed the enmity and envy of Galoup for Sentain into love, obviating the need to send him into the desert to die in punishment for his insubordination. Unlike Billy Budd, Sentain is not the victim of the letter of the law, but of Galoup’s purely personal enmity and envy. This suggests another way in which Denis alters the emphasis of her template: the personages of Melville’s tale are genuine individuals on collision course with the demands of justice (the universal), while Denis’ ciphers are, for all their cinematic individuality, embodiments of archetypal energies damned by one man’s perverse animosity. 

Lonely Hearts - Paul Cox (1983)

 

 
Paul Cox's "Lonely Hearts" should appeal to anyone intrigued by the tragi-comedy that is the human search for intimacy. Here two enfeeblement-prone adults with diminished expectations--a piano-tuner running out of time (and hair), and a case of arrested development striking out on her own to the chagrin of over-protective parents--embark on a series off-kilter and tentative encounters fueled in equal parts by a desire to be known and the fear of loneliness. Deftness of touch and judiciously applied understatement leave plenty of time to register off-beat events and nuances of character. There's quirkiness in play, and disarming straight-forwardness. Though nothing is played for laughs, I found myself inadvertently smirking with delight at the incongruities of human aspiration on display in this charming and profound little film.

Les Cousins - Claude Chabrol (1959)

  
In some regards an improvement over his first film Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins remains a proto-work in which Chabrol continues to grapple with the medium. At least it seems that way in light of what he accomplished with his next feature Les Bonnes Femmes, which, for all its primitivity, unfolds as a compelling cinematic experience and marks the point at which the apparent randomness of its mis-en-scène and plot seems--retrospectively--both necessary and recognizably "Chabrolean." With it a new cinematic form was forged that retains its apparently formless spontaneity and feeling of chaos no matter how many times one watches it. It is not incidentally the film in which Chabrol finds his most persistent and fruitful subject matter--womankind. But it is Les Cousins, with which Chabrol began to find his authorial voice, that first establishes the thematic complex that will typify his future work: the violent perversity of human nature and the reversals to which it is subject.

"Les Cousins," Godard once provocatively, if puzzlingly, observed, "is profound because it is hollow." It's a matter of speculation exactly how his observation relates to Chabrol's film, which was at the time in no way part of any new movement, but simply and startlingly novel. There are many possible interpretations. Evidence of hollowness might be found in the immediacy of the world captured by the mis-en-scene, as in the drive through Paris in an open convertible upon Charles' arrival, an episode anticipated by films such as Jules Dassin's Riffifi (itself likely inspired by Gun Crazy) and emulated in the title sequence of Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups. Hollowness is reflected in Chabrol's thematic and diegetic primitivity and the al fresco vérité style that became the hallmark of French nouvelle vague cinema.

The agitated excess of energy augemented by over-the-top performances, the purposelessness of adolescent posturing, especially Paul's reckless grandiosity--the shameful if not fatal flaw of his character--all convey a certain lack of a center. The distracted impulsivity of Parisian sophisticates seeking transgressive transport represents the hollow ennui hedonistic excess seeks to escape. It's unlikely Godard was referring to this species of moral de-centering, but to me it seems the most salient kind centerlessness, and rather emblematic of the nouvelle vague in toto. Godard's own films are certainly always as much self-conscious and quasi ironic ciphers of the Zeitgeist transpiring at the meta-level of the referential act as they are dramas about human conflicts.

That youth represents style over substance, the inevitable disproportion between claim and fulfillment, aspiration and accomplishment, is only obvious after its passing. The verdict of the classicist who's "seen it all before" feels rather merciless toward the excesses of inspiration. For romantic exuberance sins against the central aesthetic credo of classicism: that less--judiciously gauged privation--is always more. It is effectively and affectively a surplus in waking the desire for more, while more itself leads to premature satiety. This insight is unattainable for those just getting started, and it would be unhelpful if not fatal for the inspiration that fuels youthful creativity. Only the reversal of forward momentum--hindsight----exposes the void at the center of excess. This explains why the classical is paradigmatic: it is essentially reflective and informed by judgments of taste. Its verdicts always affect the faith and impulsiveness of inspiration as an astringent--inducing contraction (reflection). By the same token, the classic aesthetic is less creative than preservative. 
 

Each new generation makes its selection of paradigms. Naively at first rather than on the basis of historical importance. Such a criterion is foreign to it. The historical approach as often as not effects a kind of redemption of works that no longer speak to the full measure of our selves. It performs the work of rescue out of a sense of obligation, a growing sense of a finitude wholly absent from vernal exuberance. 

Judgments of taste and historical import as indicative of a certain resignation are understandably dismissed by new generations. Even in the exercise of judgment when compiling their own provisionally final canons. To chide youth for its want of hindsight is to misjudge what it has to offer. Fearlessness, of which little remains by the age of wisdom, will have its time and season. Even Chabrol's first obstreperous efforts must be grasped in their necessity as expressions of an unrepeatable moment in his personal development and in cinematic history: as flawed but bold rebukes of a standard of classical good-taste. Given time the historical perspective rescues and vindicates the one-time-new. Just this luxury of retrospection is absent in a beginning, rendering it, for all its force of natality, awkward, even impoverished. Modernity took a stand embracing such impoverishment in the artless and ofter brutal unmitigatedness of the primitive.

Measure implies finality and totality; totality implies the loops of life's many reels traversed. Youth's dismissiveness of precedent is part and parcel of its confidence. Youth is only "wasted" on youth in the sense that it consumes itself against a horizon of unendingness and novelty--moved in its extemporaneous self-declarations as much by glandular secretions as ideals. It is "full" of itself, urgent, pompous, and selfish, as exemplified by the over-bearing and histrionic Paul, the survivor (perversely enough) of Chabrol's second tale of mismatched comrades. 

In Chabrol's oeuvre perversity is less a matter of manifestly sick and malign individuals, of which there are plenty, to be sure, than a function of upset expectations and fortuitous inversions. In Les Cousins the ostensible victim of life, callow, over-conscientious momma's boy from the provinces Charles (Blain), winds up the transgressor, perpetrating a heinous crime de passion on the genuine villain of the piece, Paul (Brialy). Even if his motive is understandable given Paul's insufferable grandiosity and flamboyant deceitfulness, it takes malevolence of a decidedly fiendish sort to shoot a friend in his sleep. This reversal, while foiled as action, transforms our estimation of both characters. But it is outdone by a final denouement--a bit of poetic justice whereby Charles dies at the unwitting hands of his intended victim by firing the pistol he assumes to be empty. Whether such actions constitute a satisfactory ending to a character-driven film I leave open. It did feel a bit like someone pulling all the dramatic stops for the final act; an externally applied exclamation point wanting the organic inevitability of Les Bonnes Femmes's final moments. But it may just constitute a requirement of the crime genre (the one where discharged firearms change narrative trajectories) Chabrol has awkwardly and unmitigatedly incorporated into this tale of ill-fated friendship.

Contextualizing Chabrol's film in a cinematic space shared with Vadim's Les Liasons Dangereuses, Fellini's La Dolce Vitta, two other early examples of what would become the anarchic hedonism and perceptual renaissance of the 1960s, facilitates evaluation. Provided examination is made of one's own attitude towards the period's excesses. A judicious evaluation of Chabrol's film will be sensitive to the necessity of hedonistic liberation even as it maintains a critical distance towards its nihilistic consequences. The kind of distance impossible on a first immersive viewing.    

The film is a programatic aperçu of Chabrol's entire oeuvre. It is hollow qua open to the chaos of existence. Chabrol permits chaos to exist in a way that feels both unsettling yet tedious and almost leads one to question the aesthetic and moral judgments that constitute his style. A chaos of unforeseeable incident and anarchic surging within the characters, themselves figuring more as coordinates of conflict than primary focal points.

Chabrol's theme is suspense, the psychological thriller as explosion of reality. He assaults us with unforeseeable events, disdaining to fill-in the lacunae between them, and a permanent state of emergency as imparted by the restless camera, a style soon to be exploited to much greater, near-baroque effect by Truffaut. 

Blain is a mesmerizing fixation point; the picture of symmetry, sensitivity, and callow innocence. Yet Brialy’s impersonation is gratingly over-the-top: a caricature incongruously juxtaposed with Blain’s timorous fumbling. Its hamminess, anticipating the over-solicitous buffoons of Les Bonnes Femmes, and Isabelle Hupert's uppity boorishness in La Cérémonie, frustrates immersion in the dramatic events and helps define Chabrol's preoccupation with reality as action, where action is understood as the unmitigated, or simply, assault. 


The diegetic use of Wagner as the bon-vivant demonstrates his cynical self-transcendence ad nauseum had me cringing. Being bludgeoned over the head with the conceits of youth-culture anno 1959 is no more bearable for being half a century removed. Everything is possible at that age: people hang-out in groups, play records, binge drink, confront one another in dramatic demonstrations of daring-do and truth confession, and fucking afterwards in discrete pairs. Nothing seems so quaint as yesteryear’s iconoclasm. 


This is not a film that eves-drops on itself but one that declares itself ostentatiously over long stretches, then grows suddenly quiet and inward, only to once again clamorously assault, rather than to ravish, our sensibilities. It is as if Chabrol did not trust his audience to get the juxtaposition of meek and mild Charles and Paul the pompous urbanite, endlessly underlining the disconnect as if it were a plot point rather an just a given, manifest incongruity. No slight-of-hand here. 

Everything, including Paul's baffoonery, seems ponderous, as Germanic as the Wagnerian opera played at unconscionably manipulative length late in the film. That parasitic ploy cannot cover up for the inability to cinematically evoke the deep pathos of which Wagner was the master. A romantic impulse that feels woefully out of place in the Jazz-infused post-War Parisian ambient. I struggled to make sense of the sudden emotional depth by fiat in the breezy give and take of the nouvelle vague setting. The playful-satirical and the romanticist are opposing magnitudes, and to meld them creates an incongruous mish-mash one can only feel ambivalently about. 

Put it down the excesses of youth and the ambition of an untried talent to make a strong impression. One that took some time to discover that whispering is an equally effective tactic to that end. 

I am not the first to point out Chabrol’s predilection for broadly drawn, caricatured characterizations. A tendency he rarely completely resisted in his early work, though paradigmatically in his intriguing Betty.

One of his most successful efforts is called La Rupture--a title that would describe any number of his films about human evil. Evil is a concept that would have obviated more abstract circumlocutions at the risk of closing off that which is endlessly unsettling about Chabrol's oeuvre. For we all already understand evil without feeling the need to "mystify," as Chabrol's experiential emplotment of the malefic must appear to do to anyone occupying the reflective high-ground of sound judgment and experience. Such a character-focused account of Chabrol's thematic ties his work to the basic preoccupations of dramatists of the human condition down through the centuries at the cost of obscuring what makes his treatment distinctive. 

Evil in Chabrol's vision is a component of the force of destiny that assaults us. It is the order of the dis-ordering in the face of which nothing human seems inconceivable. As such he makes evil inconsequential, mundane, inevitable. Rather than the fate of a character's derailment, it is inscribed in the context of his existence. Being good is the miraculous failure to do evil. Is the exception to the rule of chaos, fault, and rupture. The paradoxical effect of which is to elevate goodness to the rightful rank of grace. Meanwhile, evil is, obtaining as the default and quotidian modality of the moral universe. Whether by intention or inadvertently, this demythologizes evil. It makes evil acts appear as discrete and isolated from the arc of character; happening with a brute facticity that belies interpretation. As appropriate to the medium of cinema qua revelation of events, Chabrol shows events, but resists drawing conclusions. He does this by eschewing diegetic framings that invite reflective distance or reduction in characterologically necessary terms. Again, the core thematic--"shit happens"--imposes such abstinence. Chabrol isn't interested in helping us draw comforting conclusions, having in some sense aligned himself with evil as the assault of the real. He clearly reveled in his role as disturber of the peace. Of course his delight in disorienting the peaceable bourgeois and forcing him out of his zone of comfort presupposed that his own at-homeness in our domesticated world was taken for granted. He could disturb because he was happily unperturbed by human turpitude. That lent his efforts their innocence, and his character its mischievous fraudulence.

Even when he attempts, or appears to attempt, the emplotment of miraculous malice, as in the swan-trumpeted, snowy landscape of Les Bonnes Femmes, what we experience is one animal ending the life of another, nothing more. It is less shocking than poignant. The result is something else than the perception of an evil man. Chabrol makes us all complicit in murder. He is the cinematic nihilist who succeeds in throwing into relief the grace of existence.

The Grissom Gang - John Aldrich (1971)

I put off watching The Grissom Gang because I’d read it was just a shoot-em-up gangster movie without a lot of nuance; that whenever the character-driven dramatic element started to get interesting Aldrich would crank up the gratuitous violence, etc.

 
Having watched it I can say it’s a thoroughly engaging film full of high-drama and big characters, as one would expect from an  Aldrich production. The performance of Scott Wilson, here in the full bloom of youth, rivets: it's both disturbing and heart-breaking. Kim Darby (as Barbara Blandish), despite one of the worst hair-cuts in film history, is comparably excellent. The two of them together generate real fireworks. O’Donnell and Granger come to mind, but their chemistry pales compared to the sparks that fly between Darby and Wilson.

 
Wilson never had the career he deserved. My first unwitting exposure to him was in Clayton’s The Great Gatsby, in which he playw George Wilson, the avenger of his wife Myrtle's (Karen Black) manslaughter. Few ever did anguished desperation as compellingly. Brad Douriff and John Savage, two other uniquely wounded souls, come to mind. 



As for the look of the film--it does sport one of the ugliest and period-inappropriate interiors ever. It’s gaudiness is previewed by earlier typically mod color miscoordinations (hues of green abutting improbable shades of purple-pink). It’s so outrageously ugly I actually turned off the color for a while. Hard to understand why Aldrich, not known for subtlety, chose such jarring tones. Perhaps it was his way of setting his film apart from the tastefully worn-out, vintage palette of Penn’s trend-setting Bonnie and Clyde.

Thankfully, the performances absorb most of our attention. Ultimately the test of a great film is its capacity to engage us and by making us care about the characters. In this Aldrich completely succeeds. He has crafted a piece of entertainment that in its often feverish intensity feels bigger than life without feeling overly theatrical. So there may very well be an element of genius in the mix. 



That is not to say the film doesn't have its problems. The scene between the father and the detective just before the finale could have been jettisoned. At that point we’re totally invested in the fate of Slim and Barbara and the dramatic flow should have been allowed to take its course as the rest of the characters faded into the background.