Roger Ebert....R.I.P.

If I could name any film critic that had an influence on me, it would be Roger Ebert. I think it was his conversational approach and emotional honesty. Something was personal for me when I read his words. I felt like even if I disagreed with him, I still always understood where he was coming from. Just yesterday I read his most recent blog post where he admitted that cancer had come upon him again. Yet he was still so optimistic. We have lost him now. This is a sad day.

On two occasions I met the man. I attended the University of Illinois, his alma mater. While there, I had the opportunity to volunteer for his "Ebertfest", which was his film festival that he holds every year in April at the glorious Virginia Theatre in downtown Champaign, IL. I remember greeting him and opening the door for him at the back of the theater, as I was a "crowd-support" volunteer. It was at the beginning of the opening night showing of Patton, back in 2002. He was gracious to me.

A few years later, while living in Chicago, I went to see him speak at a Barnes and Noble store, at the Orchard Creek Mall, back in 2005. Well he was signing my copy of his "Great Movies volume I" and I told him that I had a lot of fun volunteering at his festival. He told me that he really appreciated my help and thanked me for that.

In the book, he signed it, "Thanks for Ebertfest".....Roger Ebert.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) - Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Wow. Is there a better way to describe this film? Is it possible to have a one-word review of a film? Wow. Maybe that’s all that’s needed. It’s hard to know where to start when talking about this one. Do you talk about its sheer massiveness? Do you talk about the acting? Do you talk about the brilliant lighting and cinematography? What about the captivating musical score? Or maybe it’s best to just start with Rainer Werner Fassbinder himself? The man was so prolific during his short career that it’s nearly hard to take in everything (or even to find it all). He made over 40 films in roughly a decade. And perhaps his greatest achievement is this film, Berlin Alexanderplatz. In the annals of epic filmmaking, Berlin Alexanderplatz makes most “epic” films seem very small indeed. Clocking in at 940 minutes, including 13 “episodes” and 1 epilogue, it is as big and epic as they come. And that’s an understatement.

Originally aired as a mini-series on German TV, this film has finally become more accessible with Criterion’s release several years ago, in a huge 7 disc set. I have watched it for the first time, after spending the last couple years digging through Fassbinder’s canon of films. I’m actually glad I waited to see this until now, because I feel like I was better able to appreciate the scope and breadth of the film and understand how the themes and design of the work fits with Fassbinder's other works. Based on Alfred Doblin’s novel of the same name, Fassbinder’s film details the troubled life of the hulking man-child Franz Biberkopf (an unforgettable Gunter Lamprecht), from his murder of his girlfriend, to being released from prison, his delving into alcoholism, and troubled relationships with various women, involvement with a group of criminals where he ends up losing his right arm due to an accident. In the film’s final episodes, he finds fleeting love with a beautiful woman he calls Mieze (Barbara Sukowa), but she meets an untimely death, whereupon his despair is unquenchable. In the absolutely outrageous 2-hour epilogue, we see his experiences in a hell-like place, where he is subjected to horrific visions and experiences as one of cinema’s most unrelenting, and unforgettable passages is told.

I’m not so sure that the film could necessarily be considered enjoyable per se. But it’s the sheer weight of the thing and the incredible command of the screen and the material that Fassbinder puts on display that makes it so good. I started out watching episodes rather infrequently, but as I worked my way through, I found it to be more and more compelling and watched with more rapid fervor. What
Fassbinder is able to do with such a long running time is create a literary arc. Rewards for watching this film come from the depth, slowly built throughout the story just as one would find in a great novel, and it really compares very well to literary storytelling, perhaps even more than cinema itself.  If you asked me to pick a few favorite episodes, I would probably choose 7 and 11 as my personal favorites. Episode 7 is filled with some incredible lighting and suspense, and contains some of the best acting in the entire series. Episode 11 remains unforgettable due to the knock-down drag-out fight between Franz and Mieze. This extended moment of conflict and human violence is incredibly troubling, as he nearly kills his love out of jealousy and rage, but simultaneously "loves" her all the same throughout. It is a devastating scene and one of cinema’s most memorable clashes, as they brawl along the floor for what seems like an eternity. Mieze’s screaming pleas at the top of her lungs echo as an expression of life’s pain and misery. It is a moment of pure, agonizing release.

But that scene is also a microcosm of Fassbinder’s filmmaking. His stuff is often difficult to watch. His approach is often very raw, awkward, and nakedly emotional, leaving one feeling uncomfortable and troubled. At times the film is all of these things: glorious, breathtaking, inspirational, but also annoying, disturbing and exasperating. One cannot sit and watch this film passively. This is a film that will slap you in the face and shake you up repeatedly. And I realize it’s also probably not everyone’s cup of tea.  There is no arguing with the high degree of acting quality on display though, and this film contains a cavalcade of Fassbinder regulars….everyone from Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Brigitte Mira, Volker Spengler, to the absolutely perfect Barbara Sukowa as Mieze and Hanna Schygulla as Eva. Every performance in the film is spot-on and there isn’t a weak link in the bunch for the entire 15 hours. Furthermore, the lighting and cinematography adds emotional and psychological depth. I would also be remiss if I didn't mention the musical score, by Peer Rabin, which is haunting and enigmatic throughout. After hearing so much about this film for several years, I was thinking it would be hard to live up to expectations, but this film surpasses them. It is without a doubt, one of the very best films ever made.

Interiors (1978) - Directed by Woody Allen

Looking back on it, Interiors is one of the most drastic 180 degree turns that any cinematic director has taken. Coming on the heels of his Oscar-winning romantic comedy, Annie Hall, and prior to that, several really funny flat-out laugh fests like Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death etc., he turned to a film which was entirely dramatic and in fact a Bergmanesque homage, deliberately recalling the Swedish Master in both form and content. Yet Interiors was not just an homage. It was a coming-out party of sorts for Allen. It was a film that would allow him to explore other darker dimensions of the human existence, the likes of which he would return to again in everything from Manhattan, to Hannah and Her Sisters, Another Woman, September, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and even Match Point. It’s not just Allen’s best dramatic film though, it stands as one of his best films period.

Interiors concerns an extended family. Geraldine Page stars as Eve, who had three daughters….Renata (Diane Keaton), Joey (Mary Beth Hurt), and Flyn (Kristen Griffith) and is an interior designer. Her marriage to Arthur (E.G. Marshall) started falling apart after she had a nervous breakdown and other psychological problems. References in the film to Eve’s ice-cold demeanor and calculated intentions throughout her daughters’ upbringing have left the 3 daughters floundering in their adulthood and in their relationships. When Arthur announces he’s splitting from Eve to “take a break”, it leaves Eve on the brink of suicidal despair, even though she hopes they will get back together again. After Arthur returns from a trip from Greece along with a woman named Pearl (Maureen Stapleton) with intentions to marry her, it sets the family on end.

Allen’s film examines all sorts of relationships here: husband to wife, father to daughter, mother to daughter, and sister to sister. It is remarkable how deeply the film examines the human condition in its most paralyzed, impotent state. So many of these characters are lifeless and cold, fearful it seems of even being able to get through the day. Even the set design and costume design, reliant on grays and tans, is drab and lifeless. Allen’s consistent fascination with death throughout his career is something he had in common with Ingmar Bergman, and it’s no wonder that Allen would make a film like this at some point. Allen also wants us to recall Bergman in those tremendous scenes near the end of the film at the beach house which recall Bergman on the island of Faro in so many films. But it feels like a springing-off point for Allen, not just an exercise, using his quick wit to inflict insults and verbal injury here in Interiors, where in Annie Hall those efforts were used to inspire laughter.

Allen’s sense of pacing is terrific, building to a climactic wedding party and fateful night at the beachhouse in winter, complete with gray, crashing waves. Pearl’s attempt to rescue a nearly drowned Joey, whilst wearing a bright red, waving nightgown allows for a striking use of thematic color. In fact more than once Pearl appears in the film is bright red, which is just about the only time the color shows up at ALL in the film. This use of red highlights her passionate and fun existence, exemplified by her discussions on rare steak, card tricks, and her carefree dancing, which are in complete opposition to the mother figure as portrayed by Eve, who is cold, anxious, fearful, regretful, bitter, and suicidal. This display of the human condition, the great acting turns from Page, Hurt, and Stapleton, and Allen’s rightful choice of utilizing Gordon Willis to create some spectacular cinematographic compositions make this one of Allen’s truly memorable films, and places right near the top of his canon. 

Bitter Rice (1949) - Directed by Giuseppe De Santis

When all Criterion films on HULU became free for streaming over President’s Day Weekend last month, I happened to find out if only a bit too late to take full advantage of it. I didn’t learn until Saturday evening, so it became a mad scramble to determine which films I hadn’t seen, and which of those were also NOT available via DVD. So once doing that, I settled on a few films, some of which turned out to be neorealist films from Italy, a movement in film that I really like. One such film I saw, was Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro), by Giuseppe De Santis. Not only was I completely surprised by the film, but I was wholly entertained by its near-lurid amounts of exploitation and camp, film noir, and of course that humanist quality found so often in neorealism. It is the odd blending of these elements that makes the film stand out and is really not like anything I’ve ever seen before.

Bitter Rice sets up a scenario whereby a thief named Francesca (Doris Dowling) ends up running from the law and boarding a train full of women who are being shipped up to the Po Valley in Italy to plant and harvest rice. She meets Silvana (a hyper sexed-up Silvana Mangano), a rice worker who takes Francesca under her wing. When Francesca learns she has to have a work permit to be able to work the rice fields, she is initially discouraged, but begins to work anyway, and along with several other women, begins to work harder than all the “legal” workers. Now this social aspect of the film, considering legal versus illegal workers and the moral implications of the situation would be a more typical scenario for a neorealist film. Yet it’s such a small component of the film in fact, as it quickly devolves into something else entirely.

About 1/3 of the way through the film, things seem to change and Bitter Rice veers away from a more conservative Italian approach to a more lurid Westernized romp. In fact, a surprising amount of shenanigans take place, from “cat-fights” (including some mud wrestling between women in the rice paddies), to love triangles, to late night talks (in lingerie of course) in the women’s barracks, to an absurdly fun fatal shootout (where the women do the shooting) which takes place in a meat processing facility, complete with cow carcasses hanging from meat hooks. It’s a wild movie and great fun and in fact contains a shifting point of view and conflicting sense of purpose not easily found in this era of Italian filmmaking. I suppose the closest thing to this might be found in the wild melodramas of Matarazzo of this era, but his films were more catholic-leaning in nature, portraying penitential characters forced to endure through trying life situations. De Santis is less interested in messages here and the film works on a more instinctual nature.

Apparently this film did really well internationally, and turned Silvana Mangano into an overnight sensation (how about all that armpit hair?). It’s not hard to see why American audiences would have found lots of things to appreciate here though, not the least would be the sex and violence. It’s an unsubtle film, but it also doesn’t take itself too seriously and that’s why it works so well today. It’s hard to really know whether to consider this film a true masterpiece or more of a guilty pleasure. I actually think it’s both and really deserves to get attention, as it seems to draw future parallels in the films of Samuel Fuller and even Quentin Tarantino. But whereas Tarantino seems sometimes to be embarrassingly aware of his own provocation, Bitter Rice maintains an earnest dose of entertaining fun, without pretense.  For aficionados of noir, camp, neorealist or exploitation films, Bitter Rice is a goldmine.

Affirmation

The fleeting moments of life’s affirmations can occur so seldom that sometimes you forget they exist at all. They come at moments unexpected. It might be a word, a gesture, a look, a touch. And although often small, they can be as bright shining as the Sun. In that moment, your life can flash before you like a film playing in your own personal cinema. But you are watching from the seats. You see yourself in your own film....the directions you’ve gone in….and the choices you’ve made. You see yourself up there on screen and you think to yourself…."Is that me? Did these things really happen?" And in the moment of affirmation you are given the courage to say yes; that is me. I am me. These moments occur rarely, but they are needed in order to keep going….even if just for another day. They cannot be planned, earned, or bought. They are given as gifts. Enjoy them….whenever they may reach you.

Street Angel (1928) - Directed by Frank Borzage

A few weeks ago I went on a Frank Borzage binge, a deep dive into 7 films of his that I’ve never seen before. In fact, until that week, somehow I had managed to never see a Frank Borzage film…..ever. This was the list of films I watched: 7^th Heaven, Street Angel, Lucky Star, Bad Girl, After Tomorrow, and The Shining Hour. Borzage represents a style of filmmaking that would seem to me to have almost been completely eliminated from our consciousness. Here we have a director who pulls together some fantastically staged visual themes of love and sexuality, complete with some wonderfully expressive use of atmosphere: streets, apartments, rooftops. Yet he throws in heavy doses of wild melodrama. Now melodrama, in the hands of Sirk, tends to be something that modern audiences have received well. There’s something about Sirk’s use of color and tone that adds a layer of subversion to his melodrama. But Borzage tells his stories with a straight face, in black and white. There’s really nothing inherently funny or campy per se lurking beneath the surface. Borzage’s version of melodrama is irony free, and I don’t think today’s viewers know what to do with that.

Although 7^th Heaven gets most of the attention, and Lucky Star is a hidden gem, Street Angel is Borzage’s best film of the bunch that I’ve seen and is a romantic masterpiece, standing with the greatest love stories of all time. It is the story of a woman named Angela (Janet Gaynor), who in need of some money to purchase medicine for her mother, attempts to prostitute herself on the street, and winds up getting arrested for robbery and sentenced to a year in a work house. She runs off before being imprisoned, and escapes to find her mother dead at home. She avoids the cops and runs off to join the circus, where she meets a painter named Gino. They strike up an awkward friendship, but soon bond and fall in love. Their blossoming love, and impending marriage is threatened when the police find her again. She is taken to prison while Gino is unaware. He thinks she is lost forever, and things get really interesting when she is released a year later.

Janet Gaynor won the first Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayals in three films: Sunrise (1927), 7^th Heaven (1927), and Street Angel (1928). AMPAS first designed these awards to be based upon an actor’s body of work for that entire year. If you had to ask me, I think her performance in Street Angel is the best of the three. I don’t think Sunrise capitalizes on her sincere and varied emotional qualities as well as the Borzage films, and in fact Borzage makes far greater use of melodramatic elements than Murnau ever did. She has a girl next-door quality about her and also a burgeoning sexuality that was not an easy combination to pull off for other actresses in this era like Garbo, Brooks, or Gish (all of whom were either too beautiful or too saintly for those descriptors to match up). She has great chemistry with her leading man, Charles Ferrell, whom she appeared with in a total of 12 films together! His performance here is very solid, and much more understated than in 7^th Heaven. Her character hovers in the realm of the Madonna/Whore complex, which is used here to illicit some specific choices that Ferrell’s character must make regarding his view of her. She is in fact, neither all good nor all bad, but in fact, a real woman whom he must decide if he can love her the way she is.

Borzage’s use of wildly ridiculous melodramatic elements is to my mind, highly entertaining and emotionally satisfying, and part of what Borzage is all about: the obstacles thrown in love’s way forces us to sacrifice, make tough choices, and is a true test of how devoted one really is to one's lover. Love is not proven true, until it perseveres beyond adversity, and this is most apparent in his silent films especially: 7^th Heaven, Street Angel, and Lucky Star. His emphasis on depth of field, set design, and lighting were also great choices. Street Angel includes some fantastic tracking shots and pans, use of silhouette and shadow, and of particular note, the intense scene among the thick fog along the docks at the end of the film. This is a spectacular shot, filled with suspense and romantic desperation that then culminates in a perversely emotional climax that finishes in a church. It is one of the greatest romantic endings to any film I’ve seen and caps the film with a feverish pitch. I wish that audiences of today could appreciate this stuff more, but we’ve been so trained to snicker and doubt the sanity of films like this. Street Angel is too well made, and too spectacular to be left by the wayside though. It’s a masterpiece to my mind.

The Fire Within (1963) - Directed by Louis Malle

Louis Malle tends to be somewhat chameleonic. Perhaps to his own detriment among auteur theorists. He doesn’t get mentioned with the likes of other auteurs from his era and yet I continue to find more and more films from him that are so elegantly crafted and intensely felt, even though they occur within a wide range of film styles and genres. Last year I watched his final film he made, which was Vanya on 42^nd Street, basically a stage play, which was just fantastic. He made all sorts of films….drama, neo-noir, comedy, surrealist…..just about everything. He in fact made challenging work for the better part of 4 decades. That’s not something many directors can claim. He continues to gain my respect, even though it’s hard for me to quantify and categorize his work. I just know that I really enjoy them. The Fire Within is no exception.

One of 2012’s most acclaimed films was Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31^st. However, many essays on the film fail to mention the fact that this film is basically a re-working of Malle’s The Fire Within. They are essentially the same stories (both based upon the book Le feu follet by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle), except Malle’s original work regards the addiction to alcohol whereas Trier’s work looks at heroin. The fact of the matter remains that these particular stories are not really about the addiction per se. These are not works that address the clinical aspects of the addiction, rather the aftermath of individuals who reached rock bottom, who entered rehab and who came out on the other side in a deep depression. We get the sense that in fact, though, the depression has always been there, it’s just that the addiction was a way to cover it up for awhile. Without the escape of the drug of choice, the hopelessness and despair becomes something of a siren song leading these men toward suicide.

For me, Malle’s work is an underrated gem in his canon, and an uncompromising masterpiece of elegiac minimalism and despair, filled with the perfect balance of character and situational context, psychological examination, and propulsive, focused writing that allows us to at least understand and comprehend the man’s situation, even if his situation appears irrational from our perspective. What I struggled with in Trier’s modern interpretation, is that the choice to have the man named Anders (played by Anders Danielsen Lie) released from re-hab and set-up with an interview felt like an institutional reintroduction of him into society as an aspect of his re-hab. The fact we realize early on in Oslo that the man is not cured, and yet is essentially patted on the head and told to go on his way, leaves an implication of irresponsibility on the part of the “institution”, which in the case of the Norwegian medical insurance structure, is a government subsidized entity. This failed aspect of “society” to reintroduce Anders and “heal” him leaves the film with an oddly manipulative feel, as if there is a blame aspect to be placed somewhere through this association with the medical irresponsibility and the failed recognition of this man’s intent. It felt hollow to me. It wasn’t a clinical study. It wasn’t an examination of suicide either. I felt manipulated by the fact that the man is shown to perhaps have a way out of his depression and MIGHT just be able to move on. The film has moments toward the end where there is a suspense as to his outcome. But, when the outcome comes to light in the final passages, it revealed how hollow this film was and what a despicable exercise in audience manipulation it was. I realize many saw something else in this film, but I feel something important was missing…..the sense of internal responsibility for one’s actions and the sense that there’s no one else to blame for this.

Malle’s film is another thing altogether. It is a clear-eyed examination of a man named Alain Leroy (played brilliantly by Maurice Ronet) who has a clear intent to kill himself. From the get-go, we see him planning and prepping for the day of his own execution. He goes through the motions of finding brief comfort in the arms of a woman, through visiting his friends one last time, but there is no disguising the fact he has reached the end of his rope. It is this focus of vision in Malle’s film that rings true to me throughout its running time. Malle’s use of Erik Satie’s piano works are also a magnificent choice. Unadorned, and melancholy, these musical interludes provide the right touch of cinematic embellishment, without manipulation. Using the techniques of natural lighting, stark b&w and hand-held camera work gives the film a focus on reality. There’s no flashbacks here. There’s no digressions into potential hope. There’s nothing but depression. This is not an easy film to like. However regarding the subject matter, it is as respectful, focused, and elegant a film as I can think of on the subject.