City Lights (1931)

QFS No. 159 - The invitation for December 4, 2024
It’s that time again at Quarantine Film Society – time to watch a Silent Film! Long time followers may recall our first one The Freshman (1925, QFS No. 20) and our most recent Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans (1927, QFS 104) – both exemplary works of filmmaking, especially F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise. So now we return to the land of not speaking words out loud as we do about every fifty or so selections it seems.

City Lights is one of the classics of the Silent Era (or any era), directed by and starring the most iconic personality of the beginning of Hollywood. The funny thing is that this film was made after “talkies” have taken over movies. City Lights came out four years after The Jazz Singer (1927) introduced sync sound into motion pictures, but Chaplin preferred staying in the silent realm and made arguably his two greatest films in the decade after movies became almost universally a full sound-and-picture affair. His fantastic Modern Times (1936) incorporates some sound effects and voices in the film to enhance the storytelling, but his character and the others in the film communicate mostly nonverbally.

This week’s selection City Lights is not only one of Chaplin’s finest as The Tramp character, but also considered one of the greatest films ever made, to the extent that you trust the oft-cited/derided British Film Institute Greatest Films of All Time list. City Lights checks in at No. 36, just after Pather Panchali (1955) at No. 35 and tied with M (1931), Fritz Lang’s early sound film masterpiece from Germany the same year. This is one time where I feel like maybe, just maybe, the BFI list has got it right.

In any case, City Lights is a film I haven’t yet seen. Mostly because, you know, silent film and I’m late to watching the great ones. Still I continue to learn more and more how important these silent movies are to watch for today as a filmmaker. Without language and dialogue as a crutch, the filmmaker is forced to be visual, innovative, and engaging to keep the audience interested. Framing and juxtaposition of actors in space become crucial to tell the story without sound. In that era, Hollywood, too, was in its infancy so there was no “algorithm” (to use today’s parlance), no accepted structure to make a successful film. So the films have a loose, free feel, unmoored by storytelling convention and cliché. And if a movie has endured until the next century, as City Lights has, then all the more reason to watch, study and, more importantly, enjoy it.

So let’s cozy up with Chaplin and City Lights – and join us to discuss.

City Lights (1931) Directed by Charles Chaplin

Reactions and Analyses:
Everything in City Lights (1931) pays off in the final shot – the very final shot – of the film. This is a remarkable feat of filmmaking and storytelling. The entire film, of course, contains and exhibits Charlie Chaplin’s extraordinary command of the medium and there are moments throughout that contain beauty and pathos and humor and realism.

But it’s the final image that pays it all off. How few films can claim that, that everything builds to a final, joyful, emotional apex? There’s little wonder City Lights has endured into the sound era, through the ubiquity of color films, and into the next. And what we see that allows this film to endure is Chaplin mastery of setups and payoffs. The entire film is a masterclass in paying off the ending, but he does it throughout in ways big and small. There’s not a wasted moment in City Lights.

Along the way, we’re treated to Chaplin’s Tramp, the downtrodden, well-meaning everyman and the first image we see of him sets the tone. City officials are unveiling a new statue, giving meaningless self-important speeches. We don’t even know what they’re saying, but Chaplin uses a sort of “kazoo” in this hybrid silent-sometimes-sound film, as he does later in Modern Times (1936). The kazoo sound has the officials quacking away – which is perfect on so many levels. First, Chaplin was pressured into using sound for City Lights so we put ourselves in the mindset of the 1931 viewer, this is both a nod to that pressure and also a jab at it. (Or, a middle finger, if you will.) It’s Chaplin saying oh you want sound? Here ya go!

The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin), with the prefect place to sleep overnight in City Lights (1931).

But also, this is a clever use of sound. How often do we hear city officials blather on about the unveiling of a new public work or a monument, as opposed to using what they can to prevent people from sleeping on, say, that new monument during it’s unveiling. And here is where Chaplin is a visual comedic genius. He juxtaposes city elites proclaiming greatness all while a homeless man sleeps on that very symbol of greatness, bursting their bubble so to speak.

This man only speaks kazoo.

It’s all about the class divide and class struggle in this and other Chaplin films. Although specific for the 1930s, it’s definitely recognizable today and it’s the underlying theme of City Lights. Take the storyline with the Eccentric Millionaire (Harry Myers). When drunk, he’s magnanimous, grateful that the Tramp  save his life by preventing him from committing suicide. He treats him to a drunken night on the town and even later offers him his car. Not to use, to have. He doesn’t need it.

Alcohol has removed the live between the classes, has removed class distinctions and instead allows the Millionaire to see the Tramp as a human, a person worthy of being seen as someone good and decent. But when sober, he has no idea who the Tramp his. He’s never seen him before and he definitely would never ever been seen with someone of Tramp’s standing.

This man (Harry Myers) should probably not be driving. “Am I driving?” he even says.

Again, this is all set up for the ending of that storyline. Later when the Tramp is given money by the drunk Millionaire to save the Blind Girl (Virginia Cherrill) and her grandmother (Florence Lee) from being evicted, it’s all thwarted when the Tramp is accused of being a burglar due to sober Millionaire realizing his money was missing.

Even in the scene when the Blind Girl and the Tramp first meet, there you get the perfect set up for the main premise of the film. In it, Tramp is smitten by the flower girl. But how to convey to a person who is blind that the Tramp is someone rich? With sound, oddly enough. She hears a car door slamming and driving away, assuming it’s the Tramp who left without taking his change. And only wealthy people have cars, so it stands to reason that’s what he is - one of the elites.

And the Tramp plays this up – shows up later in a very fancy car, buys all her roses with money from the Millionaire, then later still promises to save her from eviction. (This too shows Chaplin’s attention to detail – when at her home, the Grandmother is never around because she would’ve seen the Tramp’s clothes and know he’s destitute.)

The Tramp with the Blind Girl (Virginia Cherrill) who has no reason to believe he’s anything other than a wealthy elite.

So later, when the Blind Girl has gotten surgery to give her vision, thanks to the Tramp’s money “stolen” from the Millionaire, she does not know what the Tramp looks like but only believes that he’s wealthy. And he, having spent time in prison for that alleged theft, can’t find her at her usual corner. He doesn’t realize that he helped them start a corner flower shop. So when he sees her and knows who she is, she doesn’t think he’s anything but another homeless man shuffling along, picked on by the same kids who picked on him earlier in the film.

The Tramp, seeing her, astonished, realizes she can see. But speechless – I found myself urging out loud at the screen for him to say something – surely the sound of his voice will be what makes her realize this is her long-lost love. (I realize the irony in this, a silent film.) And then finally, it’s not words but touch that do it – how perfect in this film that Chaplin is making at the start of the sound era. He doesn’t use sound at all, but the tactile visual. She feels his hand and knows – this is the hand she felt before, when she couldn’t see.

It’s touch not speech, not sound, that let’s the Blind Girl know that this is the man she fell in love with before she could see.

And then, the delicate last lines. You can see now? Yes, I can see now. Followed up by that masterful final shot, that endure close up – probably the only real close up in the film – in which the Tramp, overcome with glee, joy, and also something of a bit of sadness or maybe regret. The grin, the flower. It’s utterly perfect. I found myself unable to restrain tears from welling up.

The very final, masterful shot of the film.

And it’s the final shot of the film. No embrace, no kiss, no montage of them falling in love or getting married. We just know that this, this is the most satisfying, earned conclusion to this story.

When you eat soap, you talk in soap bubbles - that’s just science!

All of this would be enough of a fantastic dramatic narrative, but I’m leaving out the thing that sets it apart as a film – the humor. There’s the entire boxing sequence – also rife with setups and payoffs – that is an uproarious balletic performance. One QFS discussion group member pointed out how this is clearly inspiration for Looney Toons cartoons that emerge about a decade later. The soap versus cheese bit, when the man eats the soap and bubbles come out of his mouth – this becomes a cartoon convention for the rest of time, but City Lights must be where it began. The entire boxing sequence could be straight out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Even the drunken revelry at the club shows Chaplin’s astonishing gifts as a physical comedian.

Bugs Bunny was likely in the audience of this fight, taking notes.

The Tramp launching himself at his opponent is a spectacular feat.

The boxing sequence does get special note in that there’s a moment in which we think that the Tramp might win, might then get the money he needs to save the Blind Girl’s home. But he’s knocked out and loses – his opportunity lost. One member of the QFS group pointed out it would’ve been disappointing and too easy if he won. The Tramp was unlikely to win but by pure spirit and moxie had a chance. In the end, though, reality settled in and he was defeated.  

And that’s what Chaplin also does extremely well – he doesn’t live in sadness for too long, but also not in joy. His pacing is superb and we don’t spend time in one emotion for too long. He stares longingly at the Blind Girl after she think he’s left and he’s now cowered nearby by the fence. But the revelry doesn’t last – she dumps her dirty flower water towards the fence, not knowing it’s his face that gets hit. After he’s knocked out, he runs into the Millionaire again and this leads to maybe there’s a chance he’ll give him the money to save the Blind Girl’s home.

The drunk Millionaire, social and class boundaries dissolved by alcohol, permit him to see the Tramp as a human, a friend, and, apparently, worthy of a smooch.

Chaplin brings us high and low and we end where he intends – in joy, as seen in the Tramp’s eyes and expression. I tried to think of other films where the final shot, the very final shot, pays off the entire film and I’m struggling to find one that’s as satisfying as this. Planet of the Apes (1968) is probably the greatest final shot in its surprise and punch. The last image of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is clever and ingenious. THX 1138 (1972) gives us the glorious sun, the final escape of 1138. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is certainly a candidate in its enigmatic way. Inception (2010) is a great one that leaves your head scratching and debating. Before Sunset (1999) – the last line of the film, when I saw it in the theater, elicited an audible gasp and reaction. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), the duo going out in a blaze of glory is certainly memorable. I’d even throw in The Wrestler (2008), with his the final leap from the ropes in what we assume is his last is truly terrific.

(Below - spoiler alert: final shots of note from THX 1138, 1971, Before Sunset, 1999, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969, Planet of the Apes, 1968, The Wrestler, Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981, and of course City Lights.)

And on that list belongs the last moment of City Lights. Earned, a climax, simple. And, importantly, nothing more to be said. Which is how Chaplin wanted it.

Brazil (1985)

QFS No. 158 - The invitation for November 27, 2024
Brazil is directed by Terry Gilliam, the mad-genius behind (and part of) Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the still-quotable Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Time Bandits (1981), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), The Fisher King (1991) in which Mercedes Ruehl* won an Oscar, the terrific 12 Monkeys (1995) and other films that are all a little ... askew. What a fascinating career Gilliam has had as a comedian, animator, actor and filmmaker. This is our first of his movies we’ve selected for Quarantine Film Society.

And this one is a favorite of mine – darkly funny, unpredictable and visually captivating, stunningly so at times. I first saw Brazil after someone recommended it to me while a student (…fellow…) at the American Film Institute and the movie stuck with me immediately. The story of how Brazil was made and released has become something of a dark tale itself. There are three versions of the movie that exist in the world – the original European release that’s 142-minutes long, the American version that’s 132-minutes long (probably the one you’ll find out there on streaming), and the so-called Sheinberg edit also known as the “Love Conquers All” version that’s only 90-minutes long. I’ve seen some aspects of each of these, and whatever you do, do not watch the Love Conquers All version because it’s an abomination.

Is now the right time to watch a film about trying to live under the gaze of a dystopic government with a crippling and heartless bureaucracy on the eve of what could be the downfall of representative democracy in this country? Sure why not. Good to know what’s in store for us! Eh.

Anyway, join watch and and discuss below!

*Not only was she later to be directed by yours truly in an episode of television, she also has the distinction of her first and last name sounding like a complete declarative sentence.

Brazil (1985) Directed by Terry Gilliam

Reactions and Analyses:
There’s a sequence in Brazil (1985) that captures so much of what the film attempts to say about society, progress, perception versus reality and also captures director Terry Gilliam’s unique vision, all in one 20-second (or less) moment and series of shots.

Sam driving in his miniscule car in his futuristic city.

Sam (Jonathan Pryce) is driving in his ludicrously tiny car, dwarfed by the wheels of a huge construction vehicle driving next to it. Then, the shot cuts from Sam’s face to what we presume is a POV shot of him driving through the city which we haven’t yet seen. This sort of cut is a conventional type of edit where we as the audience sees what he’s seeing.

Oh what a nice looking city they’ve got in Brazil.

It’s a driving point-of-view through a sleek, futuristic world with what appear to be cooling towers above uniform, efficient-looking buildings. But then, as the shot keeps moving (again, as though we are in the car looking out the domed windows as Sam is doing), suddenly a giant head of a disheveled-looking man holding a beer bottle appears above the buildings.

Wait, what’s going on?

The moment is long enough to give us a sense of what is going on? Is this some sort of giant? But then it cuts to a wide shot of the actual city – this was just a model in a glass case of what the city was proposed to look like, with this drunken fellow now peering into it and Sam’s car driving past the model in the background through what the city actually turned out to be.

It was just a model!

This sequence is illustrative of Gilliam’s work generally and themes of Brazil specifically in the following ways. First, it toys with filmic convention – we have an expectation of what we should be seeing (a POV) but the gag is a misdirect, played for laughs. But it’s also a commentary. People (government or businesses) promising one thing but the reality ends up being something totally different – both the shot and the subject in the shot (the cityscape). The wide shot shows the same towers as the model, but run down, graffiti covered. It’s no mistake that these buildings are named “Shangri-La Towers,” an elevated name for a dilapidated place.

Hidden in this is a third aspect: who is to blame for these promises not being kept? And are we simply powerless to hold anyone accountable?

We are victims of indifference to our circumstances in an uncaring world, Brazil tells us. Bureaucracy (paperwork!) is dehumanizing – no one takes responsibility because in a world where authority is both decentralized and opaque, there’s no one person to blame. Everyone is at fault therefore no one is. As perfectly described in this exchange:

Sam Lowry: I only know you got the wrong man.

Jack Lint: Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the right man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?

Mr. Buttle - whose fault is it that this is the wrong man? The paperwork said it was Buttle.

That wrong man was poor Archibald Buttle (Brian Miller) who later died after being taken away in a case of mistaken identity – in that, they have the wrong name entirely and are looking for Archibald “Harry” Tuttle (Robert DeNiro). Jill Leighton (Kim Greist) attempts to find out what happened to her neighbor Mr. Buttle but since he’s considered a criminal, she’s only met with institutional indifference, given the ol’ run-around.

Sam, however, is in the system. So surely he can fight it – that’s where we think the film is going. Someone who is of the system but doesn’t really care for it will use his knowledge of the system against it to take it down and make the world a better place.

Will Sam take down the system? If this was a simple film subject to studio tinkering, then yes. If it’s a complex film about our real contemporary world, then no.

Gilliam, however, isn’t one for the Hollywood convention of a happy ending (as is thoroughly documented in his fight with Universal Studios and Sid Sheinberg to get Brazil released back in 1985). Instead, Sam, who has apparent privilege as a worker drone in the Ministry of Information and as the son of a prominent member of the government, in the end can’t defeat the system nor can he prevent himself from being a victim of it either.

One of our QFS group members brought up this phrase that I’ll try to remember when talking about Brazil in the future – it’s Kafka meets Capra. Comparisons to George Orwell and his 1984 are of course impossible to miss, but it’s not entirely accurate. The seminal book paints a bleak and ultimately joyless world living under a totalitarian state. Brazil’s world isn’t quite as bleak – in fact, the rich among them are very happy. They can endure routine terrorist attacks as “poor sportsmanship” and can continue to eat brunch so long as a barrier blocks them off from the horrors unfolding behind them. Or they can completely change their appearance with the right cosmetic surgeon. And Sam’s inner mind is full of fantasy and light - he’s actually fighting the system in his dreams, as opposed to being swallowed by it in reality.

Winged hero Sam Lowry, in flight during a dream.

Although the less wealthy and poor are victims of an uncaring world – the Buttles, for instance – Gilliam plays all of this for absurdist laughs as opposed to bleak sadness. The film is satire, not a post-apocalyptic look back at a world lost as we inhabit a brave new world. Gilliam has said that Brazil does not take place in the future and even the title card says “somewhere in the 20th Century” (which now of course puts this film firmly in the past). So it’s about our present day where consumerism is most important, a world where a child asks Santa for a credit card, a procession marches by with people holding up “Consumers for Christ” banners, and the guard implores Sam to confess quickly otherwise his credit score will suffer. Twentieth century “satire” here comes dangerously close to full on 21st Century reality.

Consumers For Christ banner parades through the city.

And, I dare say, the film does find a way to have something resembling hope. Well maybe not as far as hope, but one can interpret that, in the end, Sam has found a place unreachable by the overbearing State – his innermost mind. The ending – the very ending, not what appears to be ending with Sam being rescued by the very terrorists he’s accused of being a part of – but the final moment of Sam in the chair humming the tune that’s the film’s namesake. He has gone off into the sunset with a woman he loves, free from paperwork and the dirty city.

Perhaps this is a happy ending? Sam smiling, lost in a fantasy for good.

Or, maybe they’ve already performed the lobotomy and it’s as bleak as saying – whatever you do, the State wins in the end (as does Big Brother in Orwell’s work). It’s unclear here in Brazil, but what’s clear is that the filmmaker shows a man in a chair surrounded by darkness, only to have that darkness dissolve into clouds and the world of his dreams. To me and to several of us in the discussion group, that is a glimmer of something brighter from the outside world.

Sam enters Information Retreival.

Much has been written about the groundbreaking production design and imagery in the film and what’s striking about seeing it now, in the 21st Century, is that this film was made at all. In our current movie landscape, only a two or maybe three directors are able to create an entire world something as big, bold and maniacal as this – perhaps only Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and maybe Denis Villeneuve – without relying upon pre-existing source material. “I.P.” to use the language or our times. And Brazil is a lot for a first-time viewer, we discovered – it’s full of visual gags and stimulation, extraordinary camera work, clever dialogue with that Monty Python-esque British humor inflected throughout. You could watch the film all the way through just for the propaganda signs throughout (“Suspicion breeds confidence.”) And it’s just a utter stroke of genius that this whole thing is set off by a bug falling into the printing machine. A system so confident in its infallibility but yet the tiniest of creatures can cause it to fail.

This set is both excellent in its design but also photographed nearly perfectly by Terry Gilliam and cinematographer Roger Pratt with one of the all time great camera dolly movies.

Brazil is full of big ideas packed into a madhouse of a film. If there’s one thing we’re missing, one sadness at revisiting a work as innovative and inventive as Brazil, is that there are so few of its kind since then. So few original films on that scale that are about ideas. Perhaps Nolan is the only one making inventive big world creation films about ideas. There’s a bleak homogenization in our movies, one big action or comic-book based film looking almost exactly like the next. It’s our version of being surrounded by gray walls.

Are we living in Gilliam’s Brazil or some version of that now? I don’t think it’s as bleak as all that. After all, we’ve all but gotten rid of paperwork.

Paperwork reigns down after Sam disrupts the tube system in Information Retrieval.

Princess Mononoke (1997)

QFS No. 157 - The invitation for November 20, 2024
We are all long overdue to be taken away to a different land. At least for a couple of hours.* And there’s perhaps no one better suited to take us elsewhere than the Japanese master of animation, Hayao Miyazaki. We have technically never selected a Miyazaki directed film, but his Studio Ghibli produced Grave of the Fireflies (1988, QFS No. 23), which was the first animated film we selected to watch for Quarantine Film Society.** Studio Ghibli films’ streaming distribution opened up more widely recently, which is an exciting development and will make it easier to see all of these great Miyazaki masterpieces.

Princess Mononoke is high on that list. In 1997, there was not yet an Academy Award for animated feature. Had there been, Princess Mononoke would’ve been the odds-on favorite to win that year. Disney, who dominates the category, had the above average Hercules (1997) and Anastasia (1997) – not classics, which is how Princess Mononoke is often described.

Fast forward a few years when the Oscar category was created, and Miyazaki takes home the statuette for Spirited Away (2001), a truly magnificent film that I’d rank among the greatest animated movies of all time. And just last year, at 80-years old, Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (2023) won the top animated prize again. My Neighbor Totoro (1988) remains a favorite around the world. Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) are among the titles that are celebrated by anime fans and others alike – and there are dozens more.

Miyazaki’s storytelling contains magic on par with Disney’s, but I’d argue even more so with stories that are layered and contain even deeper explorations of character and the soul. His stories take on complex emotions and never pander to the audience – which we definitely saw in the post-war tale of Grave of the Fireflies. Though animation as a medium is often aimed at children, his stories cater to adults as well, often with haunting imagery and disturbing sequences. Miyazaki has elevated the medium and the genre and has made an indelible mark on the film industry as a whole.

I’m very much looking forward to finally seeing Princess Mononoke. Disappear into Miyazaki’s world for a couple hours and join us to discuss here!

*Ideally, longer.

**Flee (2021, QFS No. 69) is the only other animated film we’ve selected due to a long-standing bias among some members of our QFS Council of Excellence (QFSCOE).

Princess Mononoke (1997) Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Reactions and Analyses:
At the end of Princess Mononoke, the victor is nature. The enraged, decapitated Forest Spirit has just decimated Iron Town, the human-made walled outpost that’s been mining ore and decimating the forest in its path. Iron Town’s ruler Lady Eboshi (voiced by Minnie Driver in the English dubbed version) has had her arm bitten off by the wolf goddess Moro (Gillian Anderson).

But San (the titular Princess Mononoke, voiced by Claire Danes) and the story’s main protagonist Ashitaka (Billy Crudup) have retrieved the head and returned it to the Forest Spirit, healing it and the cataclysm has ended. In the spirit’s wake, the Iron Town is destroyed - but it’s not the end of the story. Instead, over all the destruction, sprouts being to spring and grass grows and nature reclaims the land. In the end, nature is victorious.

Nature has reclaimed Iron Town, now a grassy hill, near the conclusion of Princess Mononoke (1997).

If there’s a central idea of Princess Mononoke - and there are several, some that were a little harder to discern for us in the QFS discussion group - it is this: nature will endure and prevail, if we help it. If we, as humans, can live in harmony with it, symbiotically.

It’s no surprise that several movies including Avatar (2009) are influenced by Hayao Miyazaki’s epic story in Princess Mononoke - from both a story perspective and also visually. But what sets Princess Mononoke apart from Western fare including Avatar is that neither humans nor nature are all entirely good or entirely bad.

Take Iron Town. The town is clearly destroying the land and exploiting its resources. Lady Eboshi is an unrepentant capitalist hell bent on ruling the world. (In fact, she holds up a newly created rifle saying that it’s a weapon that you can rule the world with.) But even she has more layers than that - she is not the villain of the film, to the extent that there is a villain of the film.

Iron Town busy extracting resources from the forest.

And using fire-laden rifles to attack the wolf spirts and wipe out the countryside.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite - she is extremely benevolent. We learn she took women out from working in brothels and gave them dignity and power - but also putting them to work in the bellows of the iron works. She’s taken in lepers who were cast out from society - but also has given the task of making weapons for Lady Eboshi’s growing empire.

Lady Eboshi has empowered the women of Iron Town, rescuing them from brothels

But also employing them in the ironworks.

In this way, Miyazaki is pointing out something that we see every day in real life. Large corporations whose business is tearing up the Earth for resources to fuel modern economy and industry, claim that they are benevolent. Sure we’re extracting fossil fuels and poisoning the atmosphere, but we’re also providing jobs, education, and look how many renewable energy projects we’re funding!

Look how happy we all are living in Iron Town - how could a place this joyful also be causing grave harm to the world? Miyazaki’s juxtaposing these two realities in fantasy medieval Japan reflects our current reality today.

All of the characters are complex in this way. Even nature isn’t all good either. The wolves are particularly nasty, threating to bite off Ashitaka’s head at any given moment. The boars in particular are brutish, headstrong and unwilling to compromise. It’s their inability to let go of hatred that brings on the demon - or something like that.

I found the apes the most unsettling of the forest creatures.

The boars - just listen to reason, please!

Which is one aspect of the film we all found confusing - the rules and the mythology. Narratively speaking, the first half of the film or so is breathtaking in its scope and clear in its vision of a journey for Ashitaka to find a cure for his arm and “to see with eyes unclouded by hate.” But in the second half, Ashitaka encounters humans at war - samurai versus Iron Town, messy allegiances, even in the forest with the animals including the apes. And in the end, after all is said and done, Lady Eboshi and the conniving Jigo (with strangely aloof voicing by Billy Bob Thornton) receive no comeuppance. Eboshi does have an arm cut off, but even when nature is restored there is nothing to suggest, necessarily, that she’s going to change her tune and live in more harmony with nature. And Jigo - whose mission was to decapitate the Forest Spirit at the Emperor’s behest - survives and shrugs it all off.

The Forest Spirit, whose head is valuable - all of this is allegory that is up for analysis and discussion.

Perhaps this, too, is Miyazaki’s point several in our group contended - that these people continue to live among us. People who would live in discord with nature, with ill intentions who are only looking out for themselves. So this balance between nature and life will continue. And it’s also true that we, as American filmmakers and viewers, expect a narrative arc or change in a character. But in the East, perhaps that’s less necessary or expected - even in an animated film. After all, Ashitaka doesn’t really change at all, if you consider him the protagonist - he begins righteous and stays righteous. If anything, he’s trying to have everyone fight against resorting to anger and destruction and he loves the people of Iron Town but also Princess Mononoke and the denizens of the forest. San (Princess Mononoke) in fact still distrusts humans and her human self and doesn’t actually end up with Ashitaka.

San (Princess Mononoke) and Moro - not all good, not all evil.

Despite this lack of a narrative arc we’re hoping for as Western audience members, Miyazaki is painting a picture of there is no good and no evil. Nature itself destroys and brings to life. The Forest Spirit saves Ashitaka but also kills plants and destroys the countryside, just as life springs forth beneath its feet.

Miyazaki has mastered the animated film. But what he’s done to elevate it is that he manages to make the fantastical feel realistic. He manages to make the world three-dimensional, as if it’s there’s a camera on that hillside filming the wolves as they carry the masked San/Princess Mononoke, dodging real rifle shots. It’s a truly remarkable experience to disappear into a Miyazaki world.

But the world he’s creating, especially here in Princess Mononoke is a mirror to our world - a plea for what he hopes is ultimately balance in a world living in the absence of that balance, teetering on mutual destruction.

Near the end of the film, Princess Mononoke/San says, “Even if all the trees grow back, it won't be his forest anymore. The Forest Spirit is dead.”

Ashitaka replies, “Never. He is life itself. He isn't dead, San. He is here with us now, telling us, it's time for both of us to live.”

“It’s time for us both to live.”

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

QFS No. 156 - The invitation for October 30, 2024
Shaun of the Dead is directed by Edgar Wright, wacky genius behind one of my favorite Quarantine Film Society selections Hot Fuzz (2009, QFS No. 29), selected in our group’s first year.

And since my involvement with zombies and zombie fare as a filmmaker has been long documented, Shaun the Dead seemed like an appropriate pick to discuss on the eve of Halloween. If this movie is even remotely as funny as Hot Fuzz, it’s going to be a very satisfying viewing experience.  

So for now let’s ignore our current apocalypse and watch Shaun of the Dead (one of the great plays on “of the dead” you can find) and discuss.

Shaun of the Dead (2004) Directed by Edgar Wright

Reactions and Analyses:
For a comedy about zombies and a zombie apocalypse, Shaun of the Dead (2004) actually has something very pointed to say about humanity – especially at the beginning and the end of the film.

That commentary begins in the opening credits which roll after the opening teaser sequence where we meet Shaun (Simon Pegg) and all the main characters. During the opening credits, director Edgar Wright shows humans sleep-walking through life, zombie like. They sway in unison with their music devices, drugged out, waiting for the bus with vacant expressions and checking their watches simultaneously. Or they go through the motions as cashiers or in the supermarket parking lot. Even Shaun, when he wakes up, lurches like the undead.

Zombies or people? Or can we even tell the difference?

In Shaun of the Dead (2004), Edgar Wright asks the question if we’d even notice a zombie apocalypse at all.

The filmmaker appears to be saying – we’re already acting like zombies. So if an actual zombie apocalypse happens, would we even notice?

The answer, for a while, is no. At least not for Shaun and Ed (Nick Frost) – roommates and disconnected from the world and occupied by their own concerns. (Or lack of them, in Ed’s case.) Meanwhile, a strange disease or occurrence is turning people into the undead. The fact is, we are so distracted and going through the motions of life that we can easily avoid knowing that an apocalypse is at our doorstep.

Shaun, moving zombie-like through the world already.

Wright cleverly continues to show us that we’re already among people who are the walking dead already. A homeless beggar asks Shaun for cash and later, when that beggar has been turned into a zombie, Shaun barely notices the difference. In another scene, Shaun looks out at the park and sees what appears to be a homeless person with mental health issues who goes after pigeons. Is he about to eat one? Before we can find out, a bus comes between Shaun and the man, and both the pigeons and the – homeless person? zombie? – are gone.

Shaun even stares, zombie-like, at the television, a television set that is desperately trying to tell him that the world is crumbling and people need to take cover because humans are mutating into some sort of animal-like undead creature. It’s an incredibly brilliant device – Shaun is flipping through the channels and each one is filling out a statement, telling us (who already know this) and Shaun (who still isn’t hearing it) that the world is ending. It’s terrifically funny and a perfectly clever coordination of exposition, character development, and plot setup.

Even when one of the undead women nearly kills Shaun, they think she’s drunk and coming on to him. It isn’t until they see her impaled and survive with a hole in her torso do they finally understand that something is very very very wrong. It’s fantastic.

Shaun still doesn’t quite get that there are zombies now in the world, even when one is literally on top of him.

He finally finally gets it.

As several us in the discussion pointed out, Wright and his collaborator Pegg are clearly fans of genres. We screened and discussed Hot Fuzz (2009, QFS No. 29) four years ago, a film that’s a perfect homage and satire of action films that could only be done by someone deeply immersed in the genre. Same goes for Shaun of the Dead – it’s clear that Wright and Pegg are zombie movie nerds. The film contains a multitude of reference and possibly my favorite one is Shaun’s mother, named “Barbara” (Penelope Wilton) which gives the perfect set up to reference a line from Night of the Living Dead (1968, QFS No. 44) – “we’re coming to get you, Barbara!” Not to mention that they can’t say the “zed word,” a reference to the fact that zombie movies and shows go to painstaking lengths to call the undead anything but “zombies.” Even the Hindi-language broadcast in the Indian-run corner convenience store is broadcasting about the zombie apocalypse - but in Hindi so Shaun doesn’t get the news.

This tactic of smearing zombie guts on your body to move among the zombies will be used later in The Walking Dead series. 

The flowers for Shaun’s mother Barbara are an example of a simple gag set up and paid off much later.

Wright’s comedic setup, timing and use of dialogue are unmatched in contemporary filmmaking, I feel. His comedy isn’t based on improv or relies on clever characters the way a Judd Apatow film might, but uses visuals and filmmaking in the way that Charlie Chaplain may have done to enhance comedic scenarios. It’s true directing to enhance a story. And for Shaun of the Dead, it’s his clever use of satire to make a sideways dig at humanity that elevates this film from something like Zombieland (2009) that’s a funny action zombie-genre film but nothing much beyond that. Shaun of the Dead is an insightful film about our current civilization – still “current” even though it was made 20 years ago. I’d argue it's even more relevant now, frankly. He’s saying – we’re already in a semi-catatonic state of detachment. How much different are we than the zombies of movie lore?

Watching useful zombies on television in the aftermath.

And what cements his apparent commentary is the film’s denouement, the final moments after the climactic finale. Humanity has now learned to live with the undead around them. Shaun and Liz (Kate Ashfield) watch TV and see that there are the mundane type of shows we have now – talk shows, game shows, news documentaries – but with one key difference. They all have folded zombie-life into their world. Zombies have been utilized to do daily labor tasks humans once did. Others are part of a game show where they’re raced or used for sport. There’s a sensationalized talk show where a woman talks about the love of her life is a zombie. It’s so perfect – humanity hasn’t so much as learned from their mistakes and made life more vibrant, they’ve just adapted to the reality of having zombies living among them.

The clincher for this is the final scene – Ed, now a zombie, is chained in a little shed in Shaun and Liz’s yard, where he’s hooked up to a video game system. Just as we saw him at the beginning of the film. And Shaun plays with him. Ed is living the same life as before. Just now, as a zombie. Which is basically what he was all along.

Shaun and Ed, living on the couch in front of a video game console.

As Ed was in the beginning - on the couch, playing video games with his friend  Shaun.

Is this a scathing criticism of people, society, of men in particular? After all, Shaun’s journey throughout the film is evolving from an overgrown child into a man who can take charge and actually prove his love to Liz. Regardless, the commentary or criticism would be nothing without humor, the performances, and the execution from the deft hand of an elite-level filmmaker.  

Carnival of Souls (1962)

QFS No. 155 - The invitation for October 23, 2024
We go from low-budget drama for our previous selection to low-budget horror this week. This is going to be an incredibly short invitation, compared to the usual, because I deliberately know nothing about Carnival of Souls. I know that it’s a film that has been influential to filmmakers over the years, enough to be in the Criterion Collection, and that it from the 1960s. And maybe it has a carnival of sorts? Or perhaps its metaphoric!

Also, importantly – the film is originally in black and white. In my briefest of research, Amazon Prime is offering a color version. My suggestion is to eschew this colorized film and go for the original because we’re purists here at the Quarantine Film Society, as you know.

Okay, watch Carnival of Souls and join us to discuss this our 155th film!

Carnival of Souls (1962) Directed by Herk Harvey

Reactions and Analyses:
Although Carnival of Souls (1962) is not the origin point for person-is-dead-but-doesn’t-know-it-yet film, it certainly must be considered one of the first. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961), a short film from around the time Herk Harvey was conceiving of his story for Carnival of Souls is perhaps the first – that film is based on a 19th Century short story so it wasn’t a totally new concept. The “Twilight Zone” was incredibly popular on television in the early 1960s and featured a number of episodes where a main character is not alive who may not know it.

And now, in 2024, after we’ve had more than 60 years of films with this premise – most successfully executed in The Sixth Sense (1999) – is the surprise ending of Carnival of Souls really a surprise at all? Most everyone in our QFS discussion group had determined that Mary (Candace Hilligoss) is likely dead and doesn’t know it.

Mary (Candace Hilligoss) emerges from the river after the car she was in plummeted off of a bridge in Carnival of Souls (1962). Or did she?!

So given that, the ending doesn’t really pack a surprise. But perhaps that doesn’t matter all these years later. A film, made on a miniscule budget by a director who worked in industrial and educational films primarily and never made another theatrical feature again – how does a film like endure the test of time?

Herk Harvey, bound by the constraints of the budget and what available locations and resources he had, leaned into his limitations instead of trying to mask them. And beyond that, he uses a true artist’s eye for unnerving and enduring visuals. Take for example an early scene. Mary plays a massive pipe organ in an organ factory. Harvey shoots much of the scene from high above, the long verticals of the pipes reaching upwards like rigid fingers. It evokes a queasiness too, the verticals accentuating the height and creating a sense of unbalance.

Mary surrounded by massive pipes from pipe organs at the factory where they’re made, early in the film.

On the one hand, this is a great premise – an organ player being hired to work in a church who doesn’t feel particularly religious and treats it as a job. On the other hand, we know now that Harvey had access to this particular location in his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. He adapted his story to fit what he had.

One could say that about the actors as well. Candace as Mary is the only professional actor and the rest of the cast are “amateurs” which is a little generous. Many of them were Harvey’s co-workers, and their performances feel out of the ordinary. Something’s amiss with Mrs. Thomas (Frances Feist) the landlord of the home where Mary rented a room. John Linden (Sidney Berger) is extremely, perhaps extraordinarily, aggressive, ready and willing to sexually abuse Mary at the first chance. Dr. Samuels (Stan Levitt) is quite an aggressive doctor. No one acts in a manner that seems quite human.

Candace Hilligoss as Mary, the only professional actor in Carnival of Souls - something that director Herk Harvey turns to his advantage.

Now, on the one hand, this could be just the pitfalls of working with a cast of primarily amateurs. On the other hand, if you write and create a film to use your production’s weakness as an asset, you’re able to use the fact that no one acts quite human to help enhance the feel of the world you’re creating.

The abandoned (is it?) bathhouse occupies Mary’s mind and her nightmares for some reason.

And that’s the overall feel of Carnival of Souls – something is off. Nothing quite fits and that’s likely the point. Mary is in purgatory. And in purgatory, you’re neither alive or dead. Nothing is quite there and nothing is quite gone. In this purgatory, as opposed to Dante’s Divine Comedy where he’s attempting to pass through Purgatory, in Carnival of Souls we meander about throughout it. There’s no driving narrative, no main story in which the protagonist struggles to succeed. Instead, Mary is just mostly wandering around, trying to figure out why things are so off, why she’s obsessed with this abandoned bathhouse on the shore of the Great Salt Lake.

Mary exploring the abandoned bathhouse complex.

This uncertain feeling and mood allows for genuinely creepy imagery. I confess, the first time Mary sees the ghoulish man (NAME???) out the window while driving, I jumped in my seat. Mary looks forward, her reflection in the passenger window with the world going by as the sun’s going down, but then when she looks back it’s not her reflection she sees but our first glimpse of the man who haunts her throughout the film. Then he appears at night in front of the car as she’s about to hit him. It’s so effective at creating a sense of unease, and the film peppers these moments throughout.

This image was incredibly effective in creating an unsettling feeling as Mary drives to her new town.

This image, with a fast car-POV push in, punctuates the driving scene and is really effective in creating horror and suspense.

The man appears to be stalking her, but only she can see him. Then, she’s haunted by him so much that she is unable to sleep and has a nightmare with crash zooms and wailing organ music, images of the Saltair bathouse filling her minds. Later, when she’s playing the organ at her new church, she becomes possessed, playing decidedly un-spiritual music, seeing visions of the ghoulish man dancing with similar-looking people in fast motion, a danse macabre.

Later, she’s in the department store and suddenly no one can hear her or see her, as if she doesn’t exist. She’s driven out, crashing into the arms of a dubious medical professional who isn’t all that helpful. Mary, at wits end from seeing the ghoulish man stalking her, moves her furniture around to block her door, and the filmmakers shoot from outside her lit window – the only thing in the darkness, and her frantic movements inside with the organ music playing. All of these are low cost, high impact storytelling techniques that creates this unsettling feeling.

And Harvey accentuates this with clever filmmaking. His use of high angles makes Mary small and lost in her world, both in the street then later in the abandoned bathhouse. The abandoned bathhouse sequence itself, as many in our group pointed out, displays real cinematographic acumen, using the location and it’s emptiness in an effective way to enhance our sense of unease – especially later when Mary is there and sees all the ghouls with her, trying to pull her down into the afterlife. And they eventually do.

Harvey uses high angles very effectively to make Mary small and lost in the strange world she’s found herself in.

The film is, of course, flawed in many ways. The feeling we had as a group is that the rules of this world are not yet solidified in the way they do years later. For example, there are a number of scenes that Mary wouldn’t be privy to – when the doctor and the landlady talk about Mary’s decision to leave or even after Mary succumbs to the demons at Saltair. The sheriff traces her footsteps and says they know that her car is there and this is where she fell but then the trail disappears.

Mary’s final moments, chased down by the undead.

So… are these people real and Mary existed among them but is gone? Or was this entire extra, post-death life just in Mary’s head while she was drowning to death in the car? And what happened in the bathhouse retreat – were people horribly murdered? Why are they there? These are not major flaws but are story holes that get ironed out later on in films that feature the dead-but-doesn’t-know-it protagonist.

The undead, but … why are they here? What happened? Or does it not matter?

In the end, of course, Carnival of Souls succeeds despite much of its short comings. The fact that the filmmaker knew he had shortcomings all around him posed no obstacle. Instead, he embraced these limitations, wrote his story to fit what he had available to him, and used his meager resources to his advantage. Harvey created a film that should remain a model for scrappy, savvy independent filmmakers – and not just ones who work in stories of horror or fantastical realms. Embrace your limitations and find ways to make your disadvantages into advantages.

Low-fi scares through simple imagery abound in Carnival of Souls (1962).

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

QFS No. 154 - The invitation for October 9, 2024
Not to be mistaken with Ali (2001), the Michael Mann biopic about Muhammad Ali. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, as far as I know, has very little boxing and probably even less Muhammad Ali in it. But who knows!

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of those filmmakers whose work I, as film snob and student of film, should have seen. But instead, I pretend I know about Fassbinder – of course I do. I went to film school, you see.

Consequently, I know very little about Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but more than one person has recommended it to me in recent years. One institution gives this film high marks as well – specifically the British Film Institute, where it came in at No. 52 on the Greatest Films of All Time List. You’re familiar, of course, with the oft-cited/derided BFI/Sight & Sound list that comes out every decade. Well, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is tied in 52nd I’ll have you know. Tied with (checks notes) News From Home (1976) directed by Chantal Akerman – you all know her as the director of the No. 1 Greatest Film of All Time, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, QFS No. 98).

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing my first Fassbinder film, which will be our third German film after Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972, QFS No. 40) and Downfall (2004, QFS No. 28) – so it’s been about 112 films since our last time with the Germans. See Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and add Fassbinder to your snobby film cred as well!

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) Directed by Ranier Werner Fassbinder

Reactions and Analyses:
There’s a scene more than halfway through Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) that feels like a fulcrum of film. Moroccan-born Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) and the older German widow Emmi (Brigitte Mira) have fallen in love, but their uncommon pairing has drawn the ire of nearly everyone they encounter. Emmi is shunned by neighbors and co-workers. Her grown children stormed out in anger, with one son Bruno (Peter Gauhe) even kicking in the screen of her TV set.

All of this Emmi accepts with grace, and feels that people, though surprised at their relationship, are eventually going to come around. She knows she’s old and people are prejudiced against people from the Arab world. But in this scene, her fortitude has run out. They’re in an outdoor café, in a plaza, surrounded by yellow chairs. Not one sits next to them, they’re in the center of their own world. All the café staff stand back and away from them, simply staring.

Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) and Emmi (Brigitte Mira) hold hands in a sea of emptiness. The scene feels like the fulcrum of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) directed by Ranier Werner Fassbinder.

Emmi and Ali hold hands across the table and Emmi breaks down. She lashes out at them, at the world, for treating them this way when all they want is love. Ali tenderly strokes her hair to console her. The scene feels like a tipping point, the moment in which Emmi’s underlying belief in the ultimate goodness in people has cracked.

Emmi lashes out at the staff, but also the world, finally cracking. 

The staff looks on with apparent disdain at Ali and Emmi.

Ali consoles Emmi, displaying a tenderness that sometimes is elusive from the stoic husband.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul feels as if it could’ve taken place today, that it could be a contemporary story. It is a contemporary story – you can imagine these characters swapped with someone who is African American or Latinx or, well, Arab. Prejudice and racial discrimination is not unique to any one country.

What makes this film so unique, however, is that this is Germany not quite 30 years after the end of the Second World War. The references to Hitler are surprisingly casual and off-handed and suggests to me that director Rainer Werner Fassbinder is making a comment about his own country’s lingering difficulty with race and prejudice. Instead of blaming Jewish people for their ills, characters throughout blame the immigrants from Arab-speaking countries.

Emmi’s son-in-law Eugen (played by Fassbinder himself), a vile misogynist, bristles at the notion that his superior at work is Turkish. He sulks at home “sick” but clearly just lazy and drunk, demanding beers from his wife Krista (Irm Hermann), The two couple are miserable with each other, constantly insulting and clearly hate each other. Fassbinder seems to be deliberate about the juxtaposition of this scene with the previous one, which is after Ali has left Emmi’s place and the two have made love in the night. People may look down on Arabs for being “swine” and lazy, cramming in homes instead of buying their own place (according to the ladies Emmi works with), but Fassbinder forces us to see that this is untrue – just look at how miserable Eugen is and his home life with Krista. If anything, native-born Germans are the ones who are taking their good fortunate and privilege for granted.

Emmi’s daughter is in what is clearly a toxic relationship. 

Which is directly juxtaposed with the preceding scene - a relationship that people don’t approve of but is clearly more loving than the other.

But everything is deliberate with Fassbinder, we found. The compositions are steady still, often using doorways or the staircase to provide a frame within a frame or obstacles to our viewing. He moves the camera only when needed and with great effect to bring our attention to something in particular.

The striking, mysterious wide shot - from Emmi’s point of view - of the bar she’s entered, lured in by the unique Arabic-language music.

But Emmi, as the older woman, is the oddity here.

Take the opening scene. There’s beautiful, hypnotic Arabic music playing and a woman steps in from the rain into a place, drawn by the music. She’s a stranger here – the frame is still. The reverse angle, her perspective, we see everyone straight upright staring back at her. Their posture speaks volumes, as if to say something’s not right here. Then the bartender Barbara (Barbara Valentin), comes around the bar and the camera pushes in, she passes buy which creates extra dynamism in the camera move and it pushes closer to Ali, who we are introduced to here, in a way.

This frame is the end result of a very deliberate push in by Fassbinder, drawing attention to Ali.

There are numerous instances when the camera’s movement is precise, purposeful, and helps tell the story in this way. Or lack of movement. Emmi and Ali go into an Italian restaurant (“Hitler used to go here!” is an unsettling plug for this place) after they’ve been married in court, and Fassbinder keeps his distance, playing much of the scene from another room through a doorway. It’s cold, like the reception they’re getting from the waiter as strangers in this place.

The cold, distant, empty space utilized by Fassbinder in the Italian restaurant where the claim to fame - among other things - is that Hitler used to dine there.

Although it had been well documented, I was previously unaware of Fassbinder’s connection with Douglas Sirk and about how he was inspired by the German ex-pat’s work in the American film industry. Sirk, who we just recently selected two films ago (Imitation of Life, 1959, QFS No. 152) mastered melodrama, but also mastered the ability to take on socially provocative subject matter. In Imitation of Life, it’s race, just as it is in Ali: Fear East the Soul. Several people over the years have pointed out that All that Heaven Allows (1955) is a direct parallel to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul – an older woman and a younger man fall in love – but Fassbinder supercharges it with race. But he does it in a way that’s even more evolved than Sirk, in my opinion.

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman play an older woman and younger man couple in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) - an inspiration to Fassbinder

Where Sirk does an admirable job tackling social touchpoints, specifically race in Imitation of Life in during a time where racial discrimination was high in America – Jim Crow laws still very much in effect throughout the South – Fassbinder inflects his story with another angle. Both characters are lonely. We can see the stress it inflicts on Ali as an Arab in that it actually starts to kill him. But he strives for any sort of comfort from home – couscous, for example. (Which led to this trenchant over-simplification by one in our group: “Can you make me couscous? No? I’m leaving.”)

It’s this loneliness that bring these two together. Is that enough to sustain a relationship? No, and it frays. But they come back together and there’s a sense that they truly do love each other, even though Ali is stoic and speaks in broken sentences.

Ali confesses his wrongdoings and returns to Emmi’s accepting embrace.

If there’s a shortcoming of the film, is that Ali at times is objectified. This is possibly a comment as well by Fassbinder – he’s seen as one-dimensional if it fits someone’s needs. The woman feel his muscles, ask him for help, admire how young he is once people start to suddenly accept their relationship. Even the son comes and apologizes for breaking the television and sending a check. But even he is angling for something – he needs childcare from his mother to look after her grandkids when they need it.

Emmi’s friends marvel at Ali’s physical attributes - youth and muscles. 

So we don’t see Ali’s perspective enough, in my opinion. Had we been given a chance to see Ali speak in Arabic, for example, we wouldn’t see him as a brute as much, would see that he’s intelligent and thoughtful, perhaps, in ways that don’t come out as much when he’s struggling to speak in German. And see him comfortable in the other half of his dual identity as an Arab German.

One member in our QFS discussion group pointed out that we only see the racism and how people treat them after their married, and no other sense of their homelife. It becomes a bit too much, overly taxing, and gives us the feeling that the only thing they experience is racism. True, that’s the feeling conveyed, but if they love each other we could do with at least one or two scenes of domestic bliss. After all, we’re led to believe that they truly love each other and not that Ali is in this for some other gain or that she’s using him to stave off loneliness.

Fassbinder uses the set to block parts of his frame in deliberate ways, making our subjects harder to see. He’s a master of the use of distance to convey a feeling - in this case, loneliness and detachment.

All this aside, Fassbinder’s stripped down film is somehow captivating. It’s this bare-bones feeling, this lack of cinematic tropes – which is far different than Sirk, by the way – that gives the impression of realism. Not Realism in formal sense, but a feeling that this is a very believable, realistic story that’s happening right now as we watch it unfold. And probably that’s because it is a story happening right now, every day, in many places around the world.

Sicario (2015)

QFS No. 153 - The invitation for October 2, 2024
I’m sure many of you saw Sicario (2015) when it came out or in the ensuing nine years afterwards. I, however, am not one of them, hence this pick. It’s been on my list for a while, especially because of the filmmaker at the helm.

Denis Villeneuve is one of my favorite directors working right now. Arrival (2016) is a modern classic that got short shrift at the Academy Awards that year but I know will endure the test of time (really solid movie year with Inside Out, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, Ex Machina, Creed, The Martian, Spotlight, Brooklyn, The Big Short and the new Star Wars trilogy launched). For Villeneuve, I’ll go so far as to say his Blade Runner 2049 (2017) rivals or perhaps surpasses its legendary predecessor (come at me!). Dune (2021) is arguably his “worst” of those three it’s still a monumental and fantastic (half) a movie.*

All of these films above are likely vastly different than Sicario, which is what I’m most interested in seeing. He’s mastered atmospheric other worldly stories and landscapes, I’m very curious what he does with the Mexico-US border.

If you haven’t seen it or even if you have, please watch or rewatch join the Sicario discussion!

*I somehow haven’t seen Dune: Part Two (2024) yet which is why it’s left off this list but I’ve heard good things which is just as good as seeing it right?

Sicario (2015) Directed by Dennis Villeneuve

Reactions and Analyses:
Moments before the climactic sequence of Sicario (2015), there’s a shot in the film that evokes a specific genre of movie. It’s low light, the sun has set but there is striking reds and oranges and light in the distant horizon. The figures move in silhouette, in unison as the camera moves parallel to them, wide. The figures – some close in foreground and others in the back all wear military helmets and hold military weapons.

Classic soldiers-at-dusk shot in a war movie, which is how Sicario (2015) portrays border of Mexico and the US - as a war zone.

When I saw this shot, everything in the movie clicked for me – this is a war film. The shot is appropriately similar to imagery in Jarhead (2005), a film about the futility and Sisyphian nature of war – also photographed by the legendary Roger Deakins who is the cinematographer in Sicario as well. It’s a classic shot you’d see in a film about the conflict in Vietnam or in Middle East or Afghanistan. But here, in Sicario, the battleground is the US-Mexico border, not some far off world.

Not a shot from Sicario but from another Roger Deakins shot film, Jarhead (2005) - another film about war.

The composition here – as well as the narrative and themes that precede it – is no accident. The screenwriter Taylor Sheridan and director Denis Villeneuve have a thesis, and that thesis is that this conflict, this so-called “drug war” is indeed war. Full-blown war. Not a criminal enterprise of cartels and traffickers and something to be dealt with by the justice system. It is war. And thus, quaint rules of due process, legal procedure and the rule of law don’t apply. Because this is war, and your attempts to treat it differently are at best naïve and at worse a danger to the people of America. After all – look how brutal the faceless cartel is – they’re beheading people and hanging their bodies in major cities.

And in war, you must do what is necessary to defeat the enemy. To destroy these monsters, we need to become and embrace monsters. 

This thesis, if accurate, explains so much of the behavior of the characters in the film. Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt) is a proxy for the American people. An FBI agent, but she’s in the dark just as we are for most of the film, only given a little bit to know when it’s right. But the men around her – they know what’s best. Rest your pretty head, you don’t know what it really takes to get the job done, or so the message comes across in Sicario. It takes men willing to do ruthless things, bend the rules, break laws. That’s what it takes.

Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt) stands in as a proxy of the ordinary American - kept in the dark, just as she is as they cross the border here in Sicario.

Perhaps this is the cynical way to look at the film, but it feels very much in line with what Villeneuve and Sheridan are trying to say. In this way, it also feels deliberate that the character cast is a woman, unable to be taken seriously in a world where the only solution to our problems lies in bravado machismo and brazen law breaking in the service of “national security.” I hesitate to bring this up, but the only Black man in the film Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya) and the only woman are the only two who are portrayed as naïve wimps following “rules” like wimps do. Another way of looking at it (that one of our QFS discussion group members brought) up is that they are the only two following a moral compass. That is giving the filmmakers more credit than I’m willing to give them, but it’s valid. The other way to look at it, however, is that this Black man and White woman are diversity hires who don’t have the stomach to do what needs to be done to keep us safe. Yes, this is very much a cynical take but the evidence in the film itself suggests this interpretation.

Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya) and Kate are the only two people standing up for American ideals of justice. Is it a coincidence that they are also the only Black character and woman character in Sicario? There's a cynical way and a more gracious way to interpret this.

Sicario feels very much like a post 9/11 film. People entrusted with keeping America safe explicitly violated American moral values in order to do so. The film very much has that tone and I, for one, don’t love this aspect of the film. (I can disagree, of course, with what a film espouses while still thoroughly enjoying it – as I did with Sicario.) Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), after all, specifically does not want to select someone who went to law school, as Reggie has, because they know their at best skirting the law and at worst overtly breaking it.

Matt Barnes (Josh Brolin) has mastered the condescending look that "tough guys" give to people who want to follow quaint and outdated "rules" and "the law."

And throughout, the team condescends to Kate, keeping her in the dark and in the end it’s even clearer – they’re using her, including her loneliness as bait to lure in a corrupt cop (Jon Bernthal). Specifically, they’re using her status as an FBI agent to justify the CIA operating on American soil, which is otherwise against the law. But law doesn’t matter when you’re at war, as the filmmaker appear to contend.

Some in the group believed the filmmakers are just presenting the world as it is, showing what it’s really like. And here’s where I disagreed with them. It’s not just a simple expose, if you will; the filmmakers are expressing an opinion. For example, at the end Alejandro (Benecio del Toro), the shadowy international double agent of some type, has broken into Kate’s apartment to put a gun to her head and force her to sign a document saying that everything they did followed the law. But now, after Kate has seen Alejandro kidnap and kill in Mexico with impunity – in fact, he shoots her to disable her when she tries to stop him. Now in her apartment, she reluctantly signs the document, knowing that Alejandro will go through with it.

As he leaves, he says: “You should move to a small town where the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now.”

Alejandro (Benecio del Toro) says here "You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now." This is as close to a thesis statement as you can find in a film. 

If this is not a thesis statement, I don’t know what is. As well, the opening title card says The word Sicario comes from the zealots of Jerusalem, killers who hunted the Romans who invaded their homeland. In Mexico, Sicario means hitman.

“Invaded” and “homeland” here are deliberate, as is the framing. The Roman Empire was the ruling governmental authority, so if you swap America for Rome and the “zealots of Jerusalem” as Mexican drug dealers and drug lords – well, that’s a pretty stark interpretation. I’m not saying it’s completely inaccurate, but when you’re using those terms it definitely justifies violence for some folks out there.

Filmmakers should have an opinion, a thesis, An opinion makes a film better, gives it direction and that driving force is felt throughout the incredible craft of the film. Villeneuve is a master of showcasing scope, perhaps one of the best filmmakers using aerial photography working today. The sequence of black SUVs crossing the border from the US at Nogales into Mexico is hypnotic, ominous and incredibly effective at building tension. Similar work can be seen throughout Villeneuve’s recent work – Dune (2021), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Arrival (2016) are masterclasses in portraying scale and scope.

But Sicario, with all the stunning craft work helmed by Deakins and Villeneuve, it still comes down to something personal. Alejandro breaks into Kate’s home and forces her to sign the document, he leaves her apartment. She gathers herself, grabs her service weapon, and rushes out to the balcony in the cobalt dusk.

She points it at him in the near distance and he turns to her, opening himself up to be shot. Kate, shaking with a bloody eye from the firefight in the tunnel earlier, is unsure what to do. Alejandro opens himself up to her, giving her a clear shot. This moment is one of the most powerful in the film. It’s where performance, cinematography, directing, story, and theme all intersect. What will she do? Will she act as they would, act outside the judicial system and be judge, jury and executioner? In the battle’s aftermath, she told Matt she’s going to report all of it to the higher ups – but will she? Is this better?

She relents. She can’t go through with it, and he walks away. It’s a fascinating scene and we all had varying interpretations of it. Some felt that Kate realizes that Alejandro is right, that this is the way it works. She may not like it, but his way is the right way. Others felt that perhaps she knows killing Alejandro will not end anything and she, herself, will become like him – a fate she does not prefer.

The final sequence is open to a lot of fascinating interpretation.

Kate, small and insignificant at the end.

I took it to mean – Kate is bound by law, by the moral code of America. If you believe she’s a stand in for us, the general public, she has an obligation to follow that code. After all, she tells Matt this after the raid and battle in the tunnel. And Alejandro knows that. He knows she’s powerless in this world. She’s not a wolf.

And in the end, is Alejandro right? Are the filmmakers right, is the drug war only winnable if we commit to it as if it is a war? One member of our QFS group is a political scientist shared that he has a mentor from Mexico that works on issues of jurisprudence in that country. To paraphrase, though she is committed to the rule of law and governance in Mexico, she entertained the idea that perhaps maybe in this circumstance – you indeed need wolves.

Perhaps. But isn’t it true that wolves beget more wolves? In a land of wolves, what happens to the sheep? Are they all eliminated? The filmmakers pay some service to the sheep, with the somewhat innocent Mexican police officer (Maximiliano Hernandez as Silvio) who transports smuggled drugs in his police car. We see his son, his very modest homelife, and you get the sense that he’s not a violent criminal but just someone who is getting by, bending the law to survive. Until he’s callously killed by Alejandro and left to die on a dark highway. In the film’s coda, the officer’s son plays soccer near the border when gunshots are heard in the distance and everyone stops and turns towards it, before resuming play.

One of the few acknowledgements of the real victims in Sicario, somewhat tacked, here near the border wall. 

This is the only nod, really, the filmmakers pay to what is happening to the sheep in the land of wolves. It feels tacked on, an afterthought and thin compared to the complexity of the other characters and their storylines in Sicario. This has all the hallmarks of American arrogance – the story focuses on the American side of it, told through the American’s point of view. Matt, after all, accuses American drug users of being the ones who are causing all the harm. The true victims are the people of Mexico, however, where the sheep are being slaughtered by wolves. Perhaps the last thing they need are even more wolves.

Imitation of Life (1959)

QFS No. 152 - The invitation for September 25, 2024
Director Douglas Sirk’s name is synonymous with melodrama. As someone who studies film and works in entertainment, this is one of those givens you know about even if you don’t know his movies. I first learned about Sirk when Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002) hit the theaters. When it came out, Haynes made it clear it was an homage to Douglas Sirk films, in the story, the time period, and the style of the filmmaking.

Sirk, a Danish-German filmmaker was one of the many artists forced to flee persecution from the Nazis in the 1930s, just as Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder had to in the same era. Sirk made several German films before leaving the country and even directed short films into the late 1970s long after retiring from Hollywood filmmaking. I’ve been eager to see one of the classic Sirk melodramas – All that Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), and this week’s film Imitation of Life – for some time. And this one stars Lana Turner who has a fun connection to our QFS No. 150 screening of L.A. Confidential (1997).

So envelop yourself in lush color tones, sweeping music, and likely overwrought emotion for our next film, the Douglas Sirk classic Imitation of Life (1959).

Imitation of Life (1959) Directed by Douglas Sirk

Reactions and Analyses:
A girl struggling with her racial identity, trying to find acceptance and ashamed of her mother. Her mother trying to convince her that she has nothing to be ashamed of, that she is enough. Another mother striving to achieve in her profession and follow her ambitions in a competitive, ruthless industry – the cost is time with her daughter, who feels a sense of neglect when she’s older despite all the comforts the mother has provided.

These all sound like story elements for a film in 2024, and yet Imitation of Life (1959) takes on all of this. The word our QFS discussion group kept returning to was “modern.” For a film that’s 65-years old set in a very specific time, this was surprising to all of us given Douglas Sirk’s approach to filmmaking.

While the narratives within the film are modern, Imitation of Life wouldn’t be mistaken for modern in its style. The film isn’t a gritty realistic portrayal of American life in the 1950s nor does it feature Method performances that were on the rise at this time (this film is only a few years after On the Waterfront, 1954) that mirrors today’s style of acting. Instead, in Imitation of Life we quickly find the popping color of the costumes, sweeping orchestral music, theatrical lighting with brightness punctuating the darkness, Lora (Lana Turner) emerging from shadows at the exact right moment.

Embrace the wonderous theatricality of the stage lighting in Imitation of Life. 

These are all hallmarks of melodrama, production elements intended to enhance the emotions of the scenes, to create something that’s just slightly more elevated than reality. Take just the opening sequence – it’s set on a beach in New York City. It’s clearly a stage, a clever rear projection or painted backdrop juxtaposed with the live foreground of a beach.

Lora (Lana Turner) and Annie (Juanita Moore) clearly on a stage, but it's all an "imitation" of life, you see.

But we forgive this detachment from realism quickly. One member of our discussion pointed out that it’s this lack of adhering to pure realism which allows us to accept the melodrama, to allow us to be swept along with it because we don’t question as much as we would something that’s more realistic. If you’re taken up by it, you can easily forgive the somewhat flimsy setup of a woman who meets a stranger at the beach and invites her and her young child to stay the night and eventually move in. For some reason, this didn’t bother me but perhaps in a film that commits to a broader cinematic realism, I would’ve been lost right away.

Breaking into song and dance on top of a moving train in Dil Se.. (1998).

This elevated reality is what serves musicals very well, and I thought immediately of Hindi cinema a.k.a. Bollywood. In Hindi films, we are keenly aware of the theatricality because, of course, people don’t break out into song in real life, strictly speaking. So the melodrama inherent in Bollywood is forgiven because the cinematic language sets up this deviation from reality.

All About My Mother (1999) is rife with melodramatic twists, but somehow is rooted in reality.

I was also reminded of another country’s master filmmaker, Spain’s Pedro Almodovar. At QFS we watched his All About My Mother (1999, QFS No. 109) and what struck me then is that the film felt like a telenovela with its plot twists and turns. Almodovar’s mastery of balancing melodrama and realism is one of a kind and is perhaps the only filmmaker I know who’s been able to pull off authentic emotion with twisting and turning plots that defy reality.

Somewhere in the spectrum between Bollywood and Almodovar lies Douglas Sirk. More than half a century ago, Sirk uses melodrama in Imitation of Life to probe the problematic racial dynamics in his adopted country, the United States. Originally from Germany, the filmmaker fled Nazi persecution and made a career in the American movie industry. I’ve noticed that often it takes a foreign-born director to keenly see some of the divisions of America and render them into art on the screen. In college, I had a terrific course that explored America through the lens of foreign-born directors. Though Sirk wasn’t in the course, he very well could have been where he would’ve joined the ranks of Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975, QFS No. 75), fellow German émigré Fritz Lang (Fury, 1936, QFS No. 37), and Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, 1984), among others.

One of the commonalities those directors displayed was a foreigner’s ability to both admire their new homeland and also criticize it, warts and all. Which is also a way of expressing love of their adopted country. In Imitation of Life, Sirk sees that a white person can flourish, reach their heights, seemingly on their own. But in the background, working in the kitchen unseen, is their black counterpart toiling away. Lora ascends to the top of her career while Annie (Juanita Moore) supports her faithfully.

Lora has a chance to flourish while Annie supports her in the background, out of focus.

But at what cost? Annie is unable to convince her daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) – a girl who can pass as white – that being black is nothing to be ashamed of. Perhaps the love and care she spent supporting Lora and her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) is the cost for Annie. While Sarah Jane’s struggles are deep, existential, and wrenching, Susie’s amount to feeling as if her mother wasn’t around to spend time with her. Not to trivialize Susie’s angst, but Sirk feels like he’s making a sly commentary here. A black girl’s struggle in America is very deep and profound while a rich white girl can have the luxury of not worrying about her personal identity but instead can worry about the usual things children worry about.

Annie spends the entire film attempting to help Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) that she shouldn't be ashamed of the reality of who she is.

Susie (Sandra Dee) feel neglected, which is valid but perhaps less existential than Sarah Jane's struggle.

What struck me throughout the film is that the characters don’t live in a time where they have language to address or understand race relations. Lora doesn’t offer meaningful support other than to suggest that things will get better. And Annie is unable to talk to her daughter about race in a nuanced or meaningful way. Of course, they are living in a time where divisions are very real between white and black families – the decision that struck down legal segregation, Brown v. The Board of Education, only happened five years before Imitation of Life was released – so it’s understandable that they don’t know how to talk about race in a constructive way. We’re still struggling with it now, but we have more language and tools. What I’m saying is: everyone in this movie would’ve benefitted from being in therapy.

For me, the entire film is worth it for this one particular payoff: the scene where Annie in essence says goodbye to Sarah Jane. Annie has discovered that Sarah Jane has moved across the country to Hollywood with a new name, working in a chorus line as an object of desire (or as lascivious a job as could be permitted to portray in 1959). Annie goes to her and is done fighting with her daughter, but instead only wants to hold her. As a final act of motherly love, she does what Sarah Jane asks – to leave her alone and pretend they aren’t related.

This extraordinary scene also is worth watching Imitation of Life. The performance, the writing, the staging - superior work by Douglas Sirk.

Annie, telling Sarah Jane that she will leave her alone but is there if she needs her.

Annie, relentlessly mothering, gives Sarah Jane her final act of love - the freedom Sarah Jane thinks she wants. 

The hold each other and both cry in each other’s arms. The roommate enters and as Annie leaves, she tells the roommate she used to raise “Miss Linda” – Sarah Jane’s new name, tacitly acknowledging her daughter is someone else now. After Sarah Jane closes the door, she cries sans says she was raised by a “mammie” “all my life.”

It’s devastating, and I did my best to keep from crying as much as they did. Throughout the film, Annie attempts to relentlessly be a mother. And in the end, what’s the most motherly thing she could do? Set her daughter free and assure her she could come back any time and her mother would be there to love her.

Sarah Jane collapses against the door in a way that I was prepared to do by the end of this scene. 

The melodrama builds and crescendos to this and somehow, even though the film doesn’t adhere to strict realism in anyway, I felt like I knew these people, these characters. As an American-raised child immigrants, I too have felt in many ways the way Sarah Jane felt in the film. I didn’t want to be seen as different than the other kids at school and at times not want my parents around where my classmates could see them. Sarah Jane is mortified when her mother comes to school to bring her an umbrella, revealing to the others that she’s actually black. I can’t say that I had experiences exactly like that, but I completely understood the character’s struggle in those scenes in a deep way.

Douglas Sirk gives the heft of the narrative to this story of identity, of race, in a way that’s uniquely American, and puts the burden on Juanita Moore in a titanic performance as Annie. In a meta way, Annie, the black character, has the bigger character arc, the bigger struggle, than Lora, played by one of Hollywood’s biggest stars Lana Turner. But it’s Turner that gets top billing, gets the posters and the recognition and, of course, the money. This too is a commentary, though unintended, about America, about life, and about Hollywood. In that way, Imitation of Life penetrates on more layers than maybe it even intended.

How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt? Juanita Moore shoulders the emotional load in Imitation of Life. 

Halfway through the film, Annie deeply knows Sarah Jane’s struggle and says to Lora, “How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt?” To utter this in a mainstream film in 1959 is no small feat. The fact that it’s probably still relevant is the real tragedy of Imitation of Life. Yet another aspect of what a modern 21st Century film this 1959 melodrama truly is.

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

QFS No. 151 - The invitation for September 4, 2024
Godzilla Minus One (2023) is the first kaiju film selected by Quarantine Film Society. Kaiju, of course, is the film subgenre in which giant monsters destroy things. I think it’s amazing that what seems like a very limited type of film has a named subgenre, but this is where I’m wrong. There are tons of these movies and television shows varying in quality in the 70 years since Godzilla (1954) came out from Japan. I’m certainly no expert on these films, but I do enjoy a good giant animal picture now and again.

Godzilla Minus One created quite a buzz last year and I really wanted to see it. I’ve heard good things about it from a filmmaking and storytelling perspective, but also in the visual and special effects. If I’m not mistaken, they had a very slim VFX team compared to say big studio movies. And yet, they took home the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, beating out a Marvel film, a Mission: Impossible film and Ridley Scott who is no stranger to Visual Effects. The first foreign language film to win the Visual Effects Oscar, which is cool.

Speaking of, this will be our fifth selection from Japan but our first Japanese film from this century. So curl with Godzilla Minus One and watch a giant lizard break things! (#spoiler) Join us next week for Godzilla Minus One.

Godzilla Minus One (2023) Directed by Takashi Yamazaki

Reactions and Analyses:
Is Godzilla’s destruction purposeful? Does he (it, she, they) know what he’s destroying? Is it intentional? Or is the destruction indiscriminate?

That was one of my main questions for the QFS discussion group and several were curious about this as well. And perhaps, for a mega-superfan of kaiju films, this is a question that’s very basic. But for someone like myself, it seemed an important question.

Perhaps the reason why I’m curious about this is that I’m not sure how to feel towards Godzilla. In some sense, if the destruction is unintentional, there’s a bit of sympathy one can feel towards the creature. It doesn’t know what it’s doing, it’s primal and a production of human tampering with nature – then it’s almost justified in its actions. A force of nature. After all, you can’t be angry with the actions of a hurricane or a volcano because it’s something unlocked by the Earth.

Is Godzilla an avenging god, a force of nature, or something of both in Godzilla Minus One (2023)?

But if Godzilla is an avenging god, wreaking havoc on a populace already suffering from the toll of devastating global war – then, it gets a little complicated. Godzilla, portrayed for seventy years on the big and small screens, appears in Godzilla Minus One as being fueled - or at least “embiggened” - by human’s insatiable need for bigger, larger and more destructive weapons. A scene, almost a cutaway scene, depicts the US dropping experimental nuclear bombs on the Bikini Atoll – with an insert shot of an underwater monstrous eye opening and powering up. The implication is this is what humans hath wrought. Nuclear war and self-annihilation.

Or as metaphor, a giant uncontrollable lizard getting larger and larger as it destroys more and more. A stand-in for the arms race writ large.

All Godzilla films are metaphoric and perhaps cautionary, from the original 1954 version to this one in 2023, borne of post-war Japan where nuclear annihilation was not theoretical but actual. It’s astonishing to realize that only nine short years after World War II and on the heels of the nuclear bombs wiping out Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that Toho Studios would make a film about a creature that was destroying Japanese cities. I even had this feeling while watching the 2023 iteration, that these poor people had suffered enough from fire bombings and nuclear weapons – isn’t it a bit too much to also subject them to a giant destructive lizard?

Haven't the Japanese people gone through enough in World War II? And now a giant lizard monster?!

Perhaps this is where cultural tastes and takes diverge between the US and Japan, which came up in our conversation. It’s easy to imagine that if the roles were reversed, that US filmmakers would very much make a film of giant monsters attacking Japan or Germany – their enemies in that war – as opposed to attaching its own populace on the shores of the Untied States . We found ourselves pondering what would’ve happened if Japanese filmmakers did indeed decide to make a 1954 film of Godzilla attacking the US, a revenge fantasy film in the way that would make the likes of a young Quentin Tarantino proud. Retribution through art is something we’ve seen before, but the Japanese have resisted that and instead turn inward with the Godzilla films.

And especially in Godzilla Minus One. Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) was a naval flyer in the war but when we discover him, he’s abandoned his duty as a kamikaze pilot honor bound to die in a suicide attack against the Allies. Although this is shameful, culturally, in 2024 looking back the filmmakers turn this around and seem to say – yes, that was your duty then, but now we need to live and build our nation. And by ejecting just before he flies into Godzilla’s mouth with his bomb-laden plane, Shikishima saves the day, lives honorably, and lives on – even rewarded by discovering that Noriko (Minami Hamabe) is still alive. So living is worth living for, you see.

Don't do it!

Don't do it!!!

Ohhhhh....

The nationalistic pride in Godzilla Minus One evoked another recent film we’ve screened from another part of Asia - RRR (2022, QFS No. 86). In S.S. Rajamouli’s revisionist period piece, India is a place that had physical might and used violence and warfare to overthrow British rulers. Never mind the fact that this never happened and India is well known for its nonviolent moral and intellectual revolution that truly changed the world (as portrayed in Gandhi, 1982, QFS No. 100) – the India of 2022 is trying to assert a new world dominance. One that shows its military, technological and physical might as opposed to its intellectual and moral one from the past. RRR is a virulently nationalistic work of fiction that seeks to scrub that past and recast India as a mighty nation, ready to do battle. I, for one, found this appalling and will discuss further in the RRR QFS essay that remains TBW.

The violent conclusion of RRR (2022) reimagines Indian independence from the British through force and might. 

As seen here in blood splattered across an icon of the British crown.

And yet, there’s a parallel we found in our discussion with Godzilla Minus One. Japan was demilitarized after World War II and there was a sentiment that they might prefer to live that way, to build their society and give up their imperialistic past. In 2024, the world is a vastly different place. With a resurgent and belligerent China at their doorstep, is Godzilla Minus One recasting Japan’s past, to show that they have might in numbers and a national pride? And that this means their love of the Japanese country fuels their current military force for good and will keep the Chinese at bay? The former soldiers in Godzilla Minus One fight not because it’s their duty as soldiers, but it is their collective duty to build a nation of people, assembling a “civilian” navy to fight an enemy at their shores. One can interpret that this is all proxy for regional domination and moral superiority over a foe, even if it’s not overt. (Though, to me and others in the group who brought this up, it feels overt.)

The civilian feel comes together in Godzilla Minus One and can defeat monsters (which might include China?)

Saluting Godzilla's demise, having done their patriotic duty to save Japan. 

But while the film does have this national pride coursing through, there is ample criticism of the Japanese government. The former admiral Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) says:

Come to think of it this country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats and finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That's why this time I'd take pride in a citizen led effort that sacrifices no lives at all! This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future.

There you see this pride, but also damnation of nation’s leadership. It’s a fine line for the filmmakers to walk and they do so pretty well. Which got us to thinking – this is about as good as you can make this type of film, isn’t? The filmmakers balance politics, human drama, and action in a film about a giant lizard destroying everything in its path. There’s ample metaphor, there are emotional stakes – it all comes together in an science fiction film.

"Is that ... Godzilla?" is unintentionally hilarious. 

I does feel, however, of the scant Japanese Godzilla films I’ve seen, this one has taken some of the worst of American action film schlock and absorbed it, much the way Godzilla absorbs ammunition rounds. There’s the extremely cheesy lines, the overwrought emotions and overly convenient storytelling. Unfortunately, Noriko is saddled with several of these – Is your war finally over? As her first line to Shikishima when they reunite at the end feels straight out of the worst Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay collaboration. Is that … Godzilla? Is one of the more useless expressions of dialogue you’ll find in a movie but it did make me laugh out loud (unintended comedy laughter is still laughter I guess). And of course, Noriko somehow survives Godzilla’s energy breath blast giving us the happy American-style (or Bollywood-style) ending we’ve come to expect with a massive film like this. Not to mention the somewhat predictable climax, where Shikishima ejects and survives as well.

Many of the action scenes are excellent, but the flying sequences featuring Shikishima zooming past Godzilla are exhilarating. 

Are these flaws or features? Any way you slice it, to make a film about an indiscriminate killing force that destroys on a large scale, is no small feat (pun intend… small feet… never mind). But to make it memorable, you have to make it about people, not about the lizard. And even if their emotions are not totally believable, they sure are more believable than a giant monster reigning terror across a nation. The bringing together of both make for what might just be the apex in kaiju – specifically Godzilla – movie making.  

Godzilla gonna Godzilla. 

L.A. Confidential (1997)

QFS No. 150 - The invitation for August 28, 2024
I’m fairly certain that everyone or nearly everyone reading this has seen L.A. Confidential, one of the great Los Angeles movies and truly a modern classic in so many ways. You’ve got a young Russell Crowe, not yet a household name, the steely-eyed Guy Pearce, Kim Basinger with probably her best performance, director Curtis Hanson’s exacting detail of the period and his fantastic adaptation of James Ellory’s period novel. And, well, okay, it does have Kevin Spacey but we don’t have to talk about that right now.

Aside from him, I’m partial to the overall excellence in the cast, which was put together by casting director Mali Finn. Mali cast L.A. Confidential and Titanic (1997), both of which came out the same year. Three years later, I moved to Los Angeles and was hired by Mali to be her assistant – my first job in the industry. To my additional great fortune, in the spring of 2001 we started work casting Curtis Hanson’s follow-up to L.A. Confidential, the Eminem-starred 8 Mile (2002). A cinephile who was closely involved with the UCLA Film & Television Archives, Curtis told us early on that he was approaching 8 Mile as a modern Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and hosted a screening of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) for insight into the tone. What I’m saying is that Curtis would’ve enjoyed being a part of QFS or at least the idea of it.

Curtis, James Cameron, Joel Schumacher, Sharat Raju* and dozens of other directors loved having Mali as their casting director and she was known as a director’s casting director. She cast “real” seeming people and didn’t fall for beautiful faces, something I came to appreciate in my time working in her office alongside her. If you look at the films she worked on – and there were a lot of them – you would likely see a commonality in the actors who make up the fringes of the supporting cast. The ensemble for lack of a better term. I would argue (I mean, I have argued this point) that Titanic’s supporting cast are just as compelling as the main stars and possibly more so. That’s Mali’s fingerprints on Titanic, and you’ll be able to see that care in populating a cinematic world in this week’s selection as well.

L.A. Confidential is also part of what is truly an incredible film year, 1997. Check it out –  joining this week’s film and Titanic, at the Academy Awards alone you’ve got As Good as it Gets, Good Will Hunting, Life is Beautiful and The Fully Monty hitting the big categories. Then throw in Boogie Nights, Contact, Princess Mononoke, the first Austin Powers, Jackie Brown, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Wag the Dog, The Fifth Element, Tomorrow Never Dies (the best of the Piece Brosnan Bond films?), Con Air, The Game (underrated Fincher film), Face/Off, Gattaca, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Donnie Brasco, Gross Pointe Blanke, My Best Friend’s Wedding (solid Julia Roberts romantic comedy), Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm – I mean good lord we could have a screening series just on 1997!

I remember watching L.A. Confidential in the theater before I had ever even visited Los Angeles, and loved it. I’ve rewatched the film numerous times since moving to and living in LA and there’s an additional level of enjoyment you get from seeing sites that still exist – which can be an oddity in LA – as well as areas that feel very much a part of the city's past. Curtis Hanson, a native Angeleno who was probably a child when the events of this film take place, is meticulous in his recreation of that time. The DVD (which I still proudly have on my shelf) has terrific featurettes that are basically Curtis giving a tour of shooting locations in LA and they’re bite-sized and lovely.

Our 150th selection just felt like an appropriate time to revisit this film and its cool, stylish take on 1950s Los Angeles that has the slightest of connections to yours truly. I’m looking forward to revisiting it with you all and raising a glass for crossing a new QFS milestone. 

*Shameless, I know.

L.A. Confidential (1997) Directed by Curtis Hanson

Reactions and Analyses:
Closer to the end of L.A. Confidential (1997), Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) holds a conference with his Los Angeles Police Department officers announcing the details of the death of one of their own, Detective Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) and instructs everyone to find the killer at all costs. This is all misleading, of course, since it’s Dudley himself who killed Vincennes. But only we, the audience, know that.

The press conference about Jack Vincennes death from L.A. Confidential (1997).

Captain Smith (James Cromwell) asks about "Rollo Tomasi."

As the officers are filing out, he summons Detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) and mentions that Vincennes had a lead, and maybe it was in regards to his killer. The name, uttered in Vincennes final breath to Dudley, was “Rollo Tomasi.” The name is a fictional moniker Exley gave to the name of the man who killed his father and was never found – and only Vincennes knows about it.

It’s here that Exley now knows the truth – Dudley killed Vincennes. It’s the final piece of the puzzle that solves the Night Owl killings and answers a host of other questions for which Exley had been searching.

Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) knows. Director Curtis Hanson and cinematographer Dante Spinotti capture it in a simple, tight close up that holds long enough to register. A confluence of performance, writing, directing, and cinematography.

The shot has remained on the back of Exley’s head throughout this exchange. But once this name is mentioned, it cuts to his close up. And lingers on it – long enough for the audience to know, but we also want to know what is Exley going to do or say? It’s suspenseful, it’s tense and it’s simply a cut to a close up. Exley has to register it, decide, not betray any emotion, and come to a realization – all in a simple close up.

The next shot, it’s back to the back of his head, Dudley leaves, and Exley turns to camera, a close up again – and he’s shaken and something has changed.

It's an extraordinary moment in an extraordinary work of directing. It’s a bringing together of performance, cinematography, writing, and directing. It encapsulates what a great director does – bring together all the elements that make up a movie and synthesize them into something greater than their parts. Curtis Hanson does this masterfully throughout L.A. Confidential and re-watching the film for the seven hundredth time (give or take) gave us the opportunity to revel in the true excellence of his craft.

Perhaps it’s easy to forget that Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe (as Bud White) were total newcomers to American audiences in 1997. And take Crowe’s Bud White in Hanson’s hands as both director and writer. When I first saw the film in the theater 27 years ago, I remember loathing Bud White but also fearing him, which I think is the point. But this time, I picked up on something that might seem obvious but was new to me.

All the characters in the film are hiding something or angling for something. Dudley clearly is hiding his corruption. Exley is a climber – on the surface he’s a good cop, and truly he is. But he’s playing the angles, understanding how to get higher in the ranks. Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger) is literally appearing to be Veronica Lake but is actually a girl from Bisbee, Arizona – and cheats on White with Exley to get Exley in trouble or killed. Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn) appears to be a businessman but he’s caught up in prostitution and drugs. The D.A. (Ron Rifkin) is a closeted homosexual. Vincennes appears slick but loathes what he does. And so on.

Bud White (Russell Crowe) is the only character not playing an angle in L.A. Confidential.

But the only one who is “pure,” who we can say is what you see is what you get – that’s Bud White. In a way, he’s the least corruptible. That’s not saying he’s a clean cop. On the contrary, he’s part of Dudley’s squad that beats up rival gangsters off the records. But he’s true to himself, the boy who watched his father beat his mother to death and has the physical and mental scars to prove it.

If there’s a thesis in L.A. Confidential it’s this – to have people protect us from the evils in the world, you can’t do it with just brawn and you can’t do it with just brains. You need both. So while Bud White is the brawn, he uses his brain to connect the dots and discover that his former partner Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel) lied to him and was part of a heroin racket.

And Exley, in what is probably the best glasses-wearing police officer portrayal in history, goes from what we believe is bookish, shrewd, and prestige-chasing to someone willing to plant evidence and shoot someone a fleeing suspect in the back. The very things he tells his superior, Dudley, he’s not going to do because that’s not the right way. And it’s Dudley who he shoots from behind after all is said and done.

Moments before does what Dudley asked Exley asked him he's capable of doing - shoot a suspect in the back to prevent him from causing more harm. 

This convergence of brain (Exley) and brawn (White), and how each transform into the other, culminates in the scene where the two nearly kill each other. Exley barges into Lynn’s home and they then have sex – but it’s all a setup with Sid Hutchins (Danny DeVito) taking blackmail photos “accidentally” given to White by Dudley so White then is driven to kill Exley. And he very nearly does until Exley reveals that he knows Dudley killed Vincennes. White, still enraged, ultimately burns off and does not go through with destroying Exley.

White doesn't kill Exley. This is the moment, the fulcrum of the film. It's this moment when he uses his mind and not his muscles that allows them both to team up and find the real villain. 

It's this turn, this moment where brawn gives way to brains, this moment that saves both of them and sets them on a path to ending Dudley’s secret reign of terror. Brain without brawn is feckless and powerless. Brawn without brains is primitive and intractable. Both are needed to balance each other, a yin and yang.

L.A. Confidential succeeds in being rooted in reality, and while it starts with the cast – every single one of them is a full three-dimensional human, fleshed out and realistic – the world created by Hanson makes the film feel as if it was something that actually happened in Los Angeles in 1953. Of course, though some storylines are based on a handful of real stories in James Ellory’s original novel, Hanson’s visually recreates 1950s Los Angeles with exacting detail. But he doesn’t do it for show or make a big deal of it – it’s all in the background. The pushing back of the details gives the film a verisimilitude that brings it to life.

There’s one example in particular that is detailed in a terrific museum piece at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Production designer Jeannine Oppewall and set decorator Jay Hart talk about Lynn Brackett’s home – it’s filled with flowing, silky, “lounge-y” fabrics in a home with archways and layers. But in the back of the home sits Lynn’s bedroom, hidden away and small. It’s simple and the camera pans over to a little pillow that’s clearly homemade of Arizona, with the town of Bisbee highlighted.

The Arizona pillow, a symbol of the real Lynn Bracken, deep in the recesses of her home.

That’s the real Lynn Bracken – a girl from Bisbee with layers of glamour on the surface, hiding the true person inside. It’s a symbol of the film, the story, and frankly of Los Angeles. And it provides an example of the attention to details that are in the background and though you might not notice them, they do their work on you, the viewer, to root it in a reality. And with that in the background, the performers have a chance to in the foreground of the film.

The details in Lynn Bracken's home and throughout L.A. Confidential are in the background and service to the story.

This is also another example of what it means to be a director, to pull in those elements and create a world what is this richly layered and detailed.

This use of foreground and background, enhanced by the strong horizontals and angles of the Pierce Patchett's (David Strathairn) Neutra home, is the masterwork of filmmaking - the combination of production design, cinematography and directing. And one of the many great character introductions Curtis Hanson pulls off throughout.

One of those elements that routinely shines is Dante Spinotti’s immaculate cinematography. In particular, how he and Hanson use close ups in the film. As described above, closeups are used as punctuation – of Ed Exley realizing that Dudley is Vincennes’ killer. But one close up in particular stands out and it’s the moment that White discovers Lynn at the liquor store. At first he can’t see her face – she’s in a black clock with white trim. But then, she turns to him – to us, the camera – into a stunning close up, Kim Basinger/Veronica Lake/Lynn Bracken in all her glamorous beauty.

Dante Spinotti and Curtis Hanson's stunning close up of Lynn Bracken as she snaps her head towards camera and Bud White - their fates eventually will intertwine. A classic frame evocative of early Hollywood glamour headshots.

It’s evocative of the glamour headshots of the era, of the stunning shallow focus, frame-filling shots of the time. And it’s a powerful character introduction. This is a person of consequence to the story. Throughout the film, Spinotti and Hanson push the limits of the close up, cutting off top of heads in the 2.35 aspect ratio, to bring us very close to the subject. For a film with so many main characters, it’s never confusing whose perspective we’re in at any given time. We always know whose eyes we’re seeing a scene through. Whether it’s looking up to see a Santa Claus decoration on a roof that’s about to come down or looking at two suspects in an interrogation room, we always know whose story we’re following and when – that’s the work of a director, a cinematographer, and an editor telling the story visually.

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L.A. Confidential is one of those rare films in which every single person involved in it is at the top of their game. Everyone is hitting home runs. It’s a powerhouse of collaboration which means it’s a powerhouse of directing. A textbook film to watch if you’re interested in production design, period costumes and props, locations, history, cinematography, editing, music, performance, writing – therefore a textbook of filmmaking. Let’s hope we’re still studying now and for years to come.

Scarface (1932)

QFS No. 149 - The invitation for August 21, 2024
In 1931 and 1932, there were a few gangster pictures that helped established the genre – Little Cesar* (1931), The Public Enemy (1931) and this week’s selection Scarface. Any of those would’ve been fun to watch, especially with stars like Edward G Robinson and James Cagney (who you may remember as being wonderfully bonkers in White Heat, 1949, QFS No. 74). So perhaps we’ll visit one of these other Pre-Code gangster films in the future.

“Pre-Code” of course refers to a film that predates the Production Code Administration censorship era that befell Hollywood starting in 1934. In 1932, the year Scarface was released, the film industry’s distribution oversight commission – called the Hays Code – had no real authority to mandate the removal of controversial elements from a film. Their notes were suggestions which were adhered to or not adhered to depending on the filmmaker’s or the studio executive’s muscle. This self-policing model gave rise to conservative vanguards of moral decency who threatened widespread boycotts of films with content they deemed immoral. The PCA was established and its stamp of approval began in 1934 and aimed to quell the discontent from these voices. That system continued for the next 36 years, finally replaced by a rating system that’s a precursor to our letter-based one we use today.

So there was a window of time from about 1922-1934 where many films pushed the boundaries of content, tone, style, and story. Scarface fell in that realm and faced real opposition with heavy censorship efforts from the studio. The PCA code intended to make sure that films didn’t glorify gangsters and other evil-doers, and instead they should receive comeuppance. Crime doesn’t pay, is the acceptable moral takeaway. To be somewhat fair to these censors, the 1930s was still rife with mafia-driven crime in major cities. Al Capone – upon whom Scarface is apparently based – was still very much alive and influential in Chicago in the ’30s.

Speaking of Capone – though loosely based on a novel, the Scarface script is co-credited to the legendary Ben Hecht who is almost certainly the most prolific writer in movie history (though he was one of five writers on this script – five!). Hecht apparently had once met Capone and based the main character on him, so much so that Capone had two men “visit” Hecht in Hollywood to make sure it wasn’t … too much based on Capone. (We’ve watched a Hecht penned film before, Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Notorious (1946, QFS No. 117)

All of this is compelling enough to want to see Scarface, and that’s before mentioning that it was produced by the most famous wealthy future recluse of all time, Howard Hughes. With Hawks at the helm, you’ve got a double Howard film. The Full Howard, as it’s known by no one.

Watch the 1932 Scarface (not the 1983 one!) and let’s discuss!

*Not to be confused with the pizza, though both are made out of celluloid (ZING!).

Scarface (1932) Directed by Howard Hawks

Reactions and Analyses:
“The World Is Yours.” This is the advertisement Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) – the titular “Scarface” – sees when he looks out the window of his gaudy new apartment, financed from moving up in the ranks as the strongman to Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins). There it is, a literal big, bright, shining sign, illuminating his vision forward.

If there’s a thesis statement for Scarface (1932, and by extension the 1983 version), it would be that exact statement. The ambition of a man low on the totem pole, seeking more power, more money, more women, more of whatever it is he desires. You can take it – after all, it’s yours. “Do it first, do it fast, and keep doing it,” Tony says early on in the film.  

The World Is Yours according to this advertisement outside of Tony Camonte's window in Scarface (1932).

And throughout, Tony appears to be angling, smiling, grifting, posturing. His charm and charisma are obvious and as officially the muscle of Lovo’s operation, it’s clear that this is a problematic staff hire Lovo has made. Tony’s proving that he’s not really someone who follows orders and we see the two different dynamics of gangsters – a dynamic that plays out in gangster films for decades to come. The shrewd, calculating and often cautious puppet-master/chess player on the one hand and the violent, unpredictable, hot-headed reactionary who’s not afraid to dive headlong into battle. This is the Michael Corleone/Sonny Corleone dichotomy that’s at center of The Godfather more than 40 years later, for example.

Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) is charismatic, but it's clear that Johnny Lovo's hiring of a maniac like Tony is short-sighted at best.

Scarface, along with the other Pre-Code gangster classics Public Enemy (1931) and Little Cesar (1931), all released within a few years of each other, form an origin triumvirate of the gangster genre that continues all the way through today. Throughout the film there are familiar faces, ideas and themes – but in 1930s, they were likely novel. You’ve got the second-in-command Rinaldo (George Raft) with his coin-flip as a signature tic, the woman who is attracted to criminals and bad boys, the clownish sidekick Angelo (Vince Barnett), the attempt to go out in a blaze of glory, the relentless gunfire, the psychopathic and heartless killer, and so on. It’s actually sort of thrilling to watch this genre in its infancy.

About the psychopathic and heartless killers, Hawks and screenwriter Ben Hecht likely had portray antihero Tony as someone who would inevitably have no chance of ending up on top. This is a contrast of course to Michael in The Godfather who does succeed by vanquishing his foes, killing his sister’s traitorous husband, consolidating his power and earning the respect of his underlings. The Pre-Code censors in 1932, however, would not permit a positive portrayal of a ruthless gangster. He has to have his comeuppance, and Hawks concedes to the censors and places a plea for help in the opening title card:

This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty. Every incident in this picture is the reproduction of an actual occurrence, and the purpose of this picture is to demand of the government: 'What are you going to do about it?' The government is your government. What are YOU going to do about it?

There’s also this aspect of Tony that he isn’t just cruel, but that he must also have a psychosis in the way that James Cagney has in White Heat (1949, QFS No. 74). At the time, Hawks likely couldn’t portray Tony as simply an ambitious Shakespearean tragic figure, about one man’s pursuit of power because that would in a way be an indictment about the American dream. Fifty years later, Brian DePalma and Oliver Stone have nothing in their way to prevent them from reimagining this tale as a saga of an immigrant coming up from nothing and earning his place in a twisted version of the American dream. The World Is Yours, after all. Both go down in a blaze of glory, but Tony Montana in 1983 goes down, guns blazing, crashing into a pool. Tony Camonte in 1932 goes down sniveling, afraid of being alone and distraught at what will happen to him. A “hero’s” end in 1983 but a coward’s end in 1932. This is perhaps the biggest distinction between the films and between the eras. We sort of admire Tony Montana, ruthless as he is; it’s hard to say that same about Tony Comonte.

In 1932, Tony Comante dies sniveling and begging. 

In 1983, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) goes out in a more "heroic" or honorable blaze of glory in Brian De Palma's Scarface.

In the 1932’s Scarface, Tony gets his hands on a new weapon of mass destruction – the Tommy Gun, ubiquitous in gangster films from here on out. And he’s filled with murderous glee, looking to turn the North Side into Swiss cheese. He lashes out furiously at his sister Cesca (Karen Morley) for dancing with men at a club and strikes her. Later, he kills his best friend Rinaldo in a rage later on when he finds Rinaldo and Cesca together not knowing that they secretly were married while Tony was away. Perhaps a way to show that this is not a man to admire is to show that all of this behavior is aberrant. In a way, it ends up being an anti-gangster film. A member of our group pointed out that for about two-thirds of the way into most gangster films, the lifestyle seems pretty great. It’s the downfall that’s brutal.

Look how similar these two images are! And the joy in Tony Comante's face.

Both the 1932 and 1983 version feature weapons capable of doing maximum harm and serve no appropriate civilian purpose - more explicitly addressed in Howard Hawks' film than in De Palma's. And here, in this photo, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) has a little friend. You must say hello to it.

Members in the discussion group pointed out one particularly unfortunate and dispiriting aspect of Scarface, but not in a story sense. Mid-way through the film, a publisher and a politician who appear in essentially only this one scene, lament that these automatic weapons gangsters are now using have no purpose except for mass murder – and that they’re powerless against them unless the government does something about it. We’re still having this problem now, in 2024! It was actually a very depressing scene – and overtly racist unfortunately, arguing that half of these Italians aren’t even American citizens and thus should be rounded up and deported. We’re still having people argue this now, in 2024! The scene goes on to have one of the characters enumerate other ills of society in a list that almost exactly mirrors the text in the Hays Code of 1932 and the Production Code in 1934 – a scene clearly meant to appease the censors. The scene also features the publisher of the Chicago paper defending their work, saying that they have to report on the news while the government takes the position that the newspapers are simply glorifies gangsters and violence. We’re still having this discussion now, in 2024!

If you're a gangster, just don't down sit near windows during a gang war. 

Gun control debates, racist tirades and media complicity aside, Scarface is surprisingly advanced for 1932 and artistic in the seasoned hands of Hawks. The car stunts are exciting and clearly dangerous. The gunfire is realistic because, well, we learned they had to use real bullets firing around the actors to create bullet hits since this film predates the use of squibs. Nearly every single picture window gets utterly demolished, which leads one to question why any gangster would openly sit near a window at all during a drug war. They are liberally spraying bullets all over the place in the film and it’s quite thrilling, I have say. Hawks is an underrated artist in the grand arc of American cinema history, but this film showcases his artistry as a director – the use of the letter “X” somewhere in the frame whenever someone is about to die might be the first ever Easter Egg in a movie? But his use of action is very effective and it’s clear that he’s mastered the use of early special effects to simulate cinematic reality – all only a handful of years after the end of the Silent Era, which is amazing.

In so many ways, gangster films have come a long way. But in a lot of aspects, the fundamentals of the genre can be traced to this film and others from this time before American censors really crack down on portrayals of criminals as heroes. One commonality is the idea that if you are ruthlessly committed to the pursuit of power, then glory awaits. The world, after all, is yours.  

End credits of the 1983 version pay homage to filmmakers of the 1932 original.

Blow Out (1981)

QFS No. 148 - The invitation for August 14, 2024
Brian Da Palma is one of the great polarizing filmmakers of our time, I think I can safely say. He has made some of classic films – Carrie (1976), Obsession (1976), Scarface (1983), The Untouchables (1987), the first Mission: Impossible (1996) – but has also made several bombs. Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) was a legendary box-office disaster and Mission to Mars (2000) is a truly terrible film and I dare you to convince me otherwise. But it’s not the financial failures that have made him polarizing.

His thrillers are dark psychological affairs with often erotic storylines, disturbing imagery, and bloody violence. Dressed to Kill (1980) ignited protests over the portrayal of a transgendered person as a deviant psychopathic murderer. Body Double (1984) upset his studio so much that they ended his multi-picture deal. Scarface (1983) was criticized for its brutal violence and glorification of drug use. His admirers are legion, but his critics point to misogynistic tendencies in his films, in particular his thrillers. (Speaking of misogyny, he's been accused – or praised, depending on your perspective – of ripping off Alfred Hitchcock a little too liberally.)

But De Palma never made the same film twice and his filmography is impossible to characterize or really fathom. His work includes: a Stephen King-horror film, a violent immigrant gangster opus, a slick Chicago-set period piece with an homage to a Russian silent film, the launching of a major movie franchise, a war film, science fiction, musical, comedy, thrillers. It’s really astonishing the breadth of films De Palma made, especially for an auteur. The sheer fact that the studio system rewarded De Palma in the 1980s is fascinating, and a sign of the times perhaps. It’s harder to imagine a De Palma-type succeeding now.  

Still, you could make the argument that Quentin Tarantino – who is De Palma Fan #1 – did do just that in the 1990s. Tarantino and De Palma are two filmmakers who have a committed and deep following, in almost a cult-like manner. It’s safe to say that many of his films are indeed being rediscovered as cult classics these days.

This week’s Blow Out is a film that has endured, at least for many cinephiles. Perhaps in part for John Travolta, as he was near the apex of the first half of his career and this is another early star turn for him. Whatever the case may be, this has been on my list of films to see for some time now, so I’m looking forward to finally adding a De Palma film to the QFS List.

Blow Out (1981) Directed by Brian De Palma

Reactions and Analyses:
Early in Blow Out (1981), Jack (John Travolta) is on a bridge recording sounds as part of his work as a sound engineer for a movie production company. It’s a scene that becomes the inciting incident of the film, but at first it simply shows the character’s particular skill and expertise as Jack scans with his shotgun microphone through the night over the river. The scene also serves to show Brian De Palma at his best, putting his directing genius on display. If there’s one sequence I’d show someone from this (or any) film on what it means to tell a story visually, this might be it.

Jack (John Travlota) listening in on a couple while out field recording for his day job, from Blow Out (1981).

We first hear a couple talking near a bridge, in a wide shot while Jack is in the distance who’s listening in. The sound then trails to something mysterious, only to be revealed as a frog croaking. We hear some sort of clicking but don’t yet know what it is, but it leads to the owl hooting. The owl turns its attention, as we the viewer does and Jack does, to the sound of an approaching car. A pop – was it a gunshot or just a blow out?! – and the car spins out of control and goes over the bridge, which sparks the entire narrative journey of the film.

Jack hears the owl.

Hears something else, and a car approaching.

What De Palma does, and what Alfred Hitchcock also did so well, was to bring out attention to whatever the director wanted us to see. He puts the owl in close up, with Jack small in the frame behind him. We see the frog in foreground, but small and little, almost invisible the way it was to Jack but for hearing it. When we need to pay attention to something, De Palma puts it front and center.

Jack sees the car, then hears the blow out - or is it a gunshot?

Then, when the “accident” happens, we’re far away and don’t have all the details – which is exactly how Jack is experiencing it. This is textbook filmmaking, a sequence that should be mandatory for directors to show how to accurately direct the audience’s attention and to show first-person perspective in filmmaking.

Jack sees the car launch from the bridge. 

De Palma, however, tops this by returning to the sequence and scene of the accident when Jack finally has a moment in a motel room with Sally (Nancy Allen) passed out on the bed after returning from the hospital. Jack listens to his recording and we return to the scene, hearing it and seeing it through Jack’s eyes. But now, we’re in different points of view, a fleshing out of the scene. The couple on the bridge is now seen from Jack’s perspective. The frog is clearly visible, now from a new angle. The owl, in close up, looks right at us and turns to the car approaching – but a new angle.

Then, the terrific shot of a flash in the bushes, the tire exploding – all with Jack and his headphones superimposed on the action, as if we’re in his head seeing and hearing it happen. It’s extraordinary – the stakes of this scene are high, this is what is setting up the central tension of the film. Jack has proof it wasn’t an accident, but an assassination attempt. Will anyone believe him?

Jack "hearing" the gunshot and hitting the tire while we see it - the shot is one of De Palma's masterstrokes in Blow Out.

Throughout Blow Out, De Palma’s work with cinematographer Vilmos Zigmond brings an elevated artistry to a suspense thriller, much as Hitchcock did a generation earlier. De Palma and Zigmond seem to know always where to put the camera to tell the story in the most compelling way possible. Take the opening sequence. In what feels like it could very well be the actual opening sequence of the film – a tawdry Halloween-esque opening that explores into a sorority house – is actually the film-within-the-film that Jack is working on. The scene goes on past what we expect for such a misdirect and it goes on for quite some time, finally revealed after a woman is about to be stabbed in the shower where her scream defies credulity and the images freezes. We’re now in the sound mixing room with Jack and his co-workers.

The sequence is itself a work of technical mastery – as much De Palma’s and Zigmond’s fine construction as it is Garrett Brown, inventor of the Steadicam, who executes the vision with his new device with perfection. Without having seen Blow Out before, I truly thought this was the beginning of the story. And what is serves to do (other than perhaps a comment on De Palma’s overt misogynistic tendencies, which we’ll get to) is to introduce us to Jack, his area of expertise, and also that he’s living in a sort of trashy B-movie world. The scream is a bit that will be returned to again and pays off at the end.

Film-within-a-film opening sequence ends in the mixing room.

Introduction to Jack and his line of work.

But before Blow Out ends, we’re treated to De Palma’s masterful attention to detail. For three quarters of the movie, roughly, De Palma’s attention to extreme detail is exacting, the way it is for Jack. We see close ups of the photos of the crash, frame by frame, as an editor would have to do. We watch all the practical and technical manipulation of the esoteric machines that shoot animation cells or string audio tape through a splicer, with chalk marks on the frames for reference. It’s tactile, the way filmmaking was, with physical levers and tapes that can be demagnetized. For a filmmaker who is part of what is likely the last generation to be trained in both analog and digital formats, all of this warmed my heart to see and that of several of us in the QFS discussion group.

The tools of sound and filmmaking.

Jack studies the stills of the car crash.

Jack cuts sound the old fashioned way.

Speaking of old-time filmmaking – Travolta portrays a sound engineer with utmost accuracy. Having known and worked with several, I can say that Travolta doesn’t feel like an actor playing a sound engineer, he somehow brings an authenticity to the role with his clear love of careful listening and focus. He fits perfectly into the role of Jack and I would’ve bought all the Travolta stock I could after this film – which is only funny in retrospect considering the following nosedive his career suffered until his resurgence in 1994 with Pulp Fiction (directed by De Palma Fan #1 Quentin Tarantino). But here in Blow Out, Jack is compelled to do something, anything he can, with the knowledge he has. He can’t believe how no one belives him and encounters forces out there, unseen, that are dangerous and are trying to manipulate our world.

This post-Watergate paranoia remains a fascination of mine. It was in the air - something or someone is manipulating you; you are being watched; no one can be trusted - and maybe not even your own eyes. Not too long ago we selected Klute (1971, QFS No. 128), one of Alan J Pakula’s paranoia films of the era or even Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful The Conversation (1974). Blow Out fits right in. But the conspirators here are almost comically incompetent. They hire a … hitman? Or maybe just a psychopath in Burke (John Lithgow). Looking at the entire picture, Burke reveals himself to be utterly terrible at his job. He’s supposed to disable the car with the presidential candidate, but instead he kills him. (The plan, of course, was pretty faulty from the start.) Then he kills the wrong woman who he thinks is Sally. And then – he does kill Sally but gets killed in the end too. That’s not to mention that Burke, for no apparent reason, kills a prostitute in the train station just for fun! This is not the “professional” you should hire when attempting to commit political violence.

Sally dies before Jack can arrive with fireworks from Liberty Day igniting above them. The conspiracy wins.

In the end, the unseen forces win. Not only did they eliminate the candidate from the contest, but they’ve essentially eliminated all trace back to the conspiracy. Only Jack knows, but he has no proof and is haunted by the burden of being the only one with the truth.

The QFS group mostly agreed that the film would be an unqualified masterpiece had De Palma was able to stick the landing. The final quarter of the film is something of a disaster, which lead us to speculate whether De Palma felt the need to amp up the action given the larger budget he received when casting Travolta in the lead role. For some reason, Jack drives directly through the Liberty Day parade to get to the subway exit to where Burke is heading with the captured Sally. In an attempt to save one person, Jack nearly kills hundreds before crashing into a wall, getting knocked out, an ambulance comes (off screen) and when he comes to, he escapes the ambulance and gets to Sally too late. It’s preposterous and in many ways doesn’t fit the tight thriller that De Palma crafted leading up to it.

Jack's "superpower" is his attention to detail and sound.

The film showed Jack as an intelligent artistic type with a “superpower,” for lack of a better term – to be able to discern specific sounds. The story is setting up for him using this skill to solve the puzzle or to save the day – perhaps by hearing the clicking sound of Burke’s watch garrote, or by being able to hear Sally’s whereabouts more readily. Instead, De Palma focuses on Jack having to overcome past demons by wiring Sally – something he did in the past before he got one of his undercover informants killed. That haunts Jack, and so the story focuses on overcoming that part of his past. He fails with Sally, just as he did before, which led one of us in the group to conclude that the moral of the story is: don’t let Travolta put a wire on you because you’ll end up dead.

It's one of a number of plot and logic holes, including loose ends that never are addressed. The news guy (Curt May), is he on the up-and-up? How did he know all that about Jack? We’ll never know because that doesn’t pay off. How could Jack possibly be left unguarded in the ambulance after nearly running over people in his Jeep and crashing into a department store display? Why would it matter about the dead man’s reputation now that he’s dead? Just to protect his family? And why didn’t the people who were trying to embarrass the candidate simply just go with the usual plan Sally and Manny (Dennis Franz) do all the time – burst through a room and take pictures of the candidate in bed with Sally? Did Sally kill Manny or just knock him out? And so on.

Despite all of the above – including the questionable third act of the story – the film remains an essential piece of filmmaking. The sequence on the bridge alone is worth the price of admission. When Jack discovers all his tape has been demagnetized, De Palma has the camera spinning steadily on its access, panning around the room as Jack gets into a panic, heightening the anxiety. It’s incredibly effective and I found myself feeling the same thing the character felt - which is exactly the goal of a director in telling a story cinematically and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done quite as well as it’s done here. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, it would be gimmicky. But here, it’s perfect.

The shot after the continually panning shot is this overhead that shows all the mess left after Jack's frantic attempt to see if any of his tapes still work.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up one particular aspect of Blow Up that’s dogged De Palma in much of his work, and that is his misogynistic tendencies. First of all, Sally is portrayed as an utterly clueless ditz, incapable of fighting for herself and seemingly out of it the entire time. She is so thinly portrayed and not even given a moment on screen for her to grasp that she almost died if it wasn’t for Jack saving her. In the only scene in which Sally shows any depth comes as she’s sharing with Jack her dreams of being a makeup artist in the film business. To which Jack blows her off as unserious and childish. The opening itself, the salacious POV through the women’s dorm ending in the shower, is fun for teenage boys and of course is evocative of those types of slasher pics De Palma may be lampooning, but is definitely on the gratuitous side.

But if you look more closely at this opening section – the final shot is of a naked woman in the shower, as mentioned above. The actress’ scream is inadequate and it’s Jack’s job to fix it. And he does in the final scene of the film – he uses Sally’s final moments of her life that he recorded and puts in the film. The only worth this woman, Sally, brings to the filmmakers is her sound, her primal cry out to the world. And it will live on as coming from the mouth of a naked woman in a shower. For someone like De Palma who delved into the deep psyche of humans and often has darkly sexual storylines, this feels like it’s no accident.

One of Sally's (Nancy Allen) final screams, eventually used in the trashy film Jack is working on.

A charitable way of looking at the ending is that this final sound of Sally will haunt Jack him, and will be his torment, and only he will know how she exists forever in this film. The less chartable way of looking at this is that all a woman is worth is to be seen on the screen as sex objects, to be used even in their final moments for entertainment and as a commodity. Perhaps there’s something in between, but it’s bleak nevertheless.

How do we square De Palma? I have trouble with him, to be honest. I love much of his work, but he revels in the profane, the salacious, and seems to be able to only make male characters fully human. (People level this latter critique against Hitchcock, too.) Yet, there is true artistry in his best films. He creates iconic images and uses the language of past filmmakers to his advantage, creating something new and indelible. Hitchcock’s legacy appears in most of his films, but there’s also of course Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up, 1966 for Blow Out), Sergei Eisenstein (from Battleship Potemkin, 1925, for The Untouchables, 1987) and others along the way. Tarantino, for his part, takes inspiration from De Palma and thus the circle of filmmaking continues.

It's hard to place De Palma in the pantheon of great American directors, but he must be among them. And it’s easy to argue that Blow Out is his finest work, warts and all. Perhaps like the filmmaker who crafted it.

Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959)

QFS No. 147 - The invitation for July 17, 2024
Let’s complete another chapter in our on-going Introduction to Indian Cinema 101!

Guru Dutt is one of the unheralded filmmakers from India. “Unheralded” is in quotes because he’s quite ... heralded? ... in India. Though recognized as a great in his own country, he never achieved international acclaim in his lifetime the way that Satyajit Ray did, for example. For me, I was first introduced to Dutt’s work about twenty years ago when Time magazine’s legendary film critic Richard Schickel listed Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957) as one of the 100 greatest films ever made. Pyaasa is a classic that’s moving and also has the unofficial Hindi film mandated musical numbers. But the musical numbers in Pyaasa are not superfluous – they serve the story, bringing poetry to life and enhancing the story. His follow-up Kaagaz Ke Phool – which translates to “Paper Flowers” – is known as one of the great films from the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema.

Now is a good time to recap our course materials for Introduction to Indian Cinema. Here are the films the QFS has selected (in chronological order):

1. Apur Sansar (World of Apu, 1959, QFS No. 16) – part of Ray’s “Apu Trilogy” and the origin point of Indian independent and art cinema.

2. Sholay (1975, QFS No. 62) – a glimpse of a big mainstream Indian movie during an era when such films were uninfluenced by global cinema. Also, our first viewing of Amitabh Bachchan, the most famous movie star in the world.

3. Dil Se.. (1998, QFS No. 32) – where we could see the influence of MTV’s arrival into South Asia, in which a movie produced standalone music numbers that felt separate from the main film. Also showcasing the ascension of Shah Rukh Khan as global heartthrob and second most famous movie star in the world.

4. 3 Idiots (2006, QFS No. 118) – closer to present-day Hindi filmmaking ripe with broad humor, earnestness, and adapted from a popular contemporary novel.

5. RRR (2022, QFS No. 86) – example of a regional language film (Telugu) that exploded into the world consciousness, showcasing modern filmmaking India style.

That’s not bad for a four-year, unstructured and barely planned course into the filmmaking of the largest movie producing country on earth!

You’ll notice in the above list that Apur Sansar and this week’s film are both from 1959. But they represent completely different branches of Indian cinema. Apur Sansar is from Bengal and not considered part of the national films of India (which we now call “Bollywood” but is really known as “Hindi Films” you may recall from our previous lessons). Ray’s Apu Trilogy was more popular abroad than in his own country, where he produced and directed from outside of the national movie industry. He is the first known filmmaker to make a successful film outside the traditional Indian movie studio. The independent scene in India remained very thin for the next 50 years, but the Apu Trilogy is where it begins.

Whereas Guru Dutt was already a Hindi film star known all over India by 1959. While Ray toiled as what we would now call an independent filmmaker, Dutt was a studio filmmaker. He operated within the Hindi film ecosystem, casting stars (including himself) but told deeply personal stories in between the songs and the dances. Kaagaz Ke Phool represents our QFS selection from the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema.

And while Dutt made commercially viable films, his personal life was marred by strife. Perhaps the melancholic storytelling he showcased on the screen came from his world at home. Tragically, he died before he turned 40 possibly from an accidental overdose or possibly, he committed suicide. This is his final film as a director (he acted in eight or so more after this) and though his life was short, he left behind an incredibly impressive body of work as a filmmaker. Dutt remains a revered artistic luminary in India and in film circles – both Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool appear on “Greatest” lists in India and internationally, including the latter once appearing on the BFI/Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time list in 2002. I believe India also issued a stamp in his honor as well. 

So join us in watching Kaagaz Ke Phool – the first Indian film in Cinemascope! – and we’ll discuss in about two weeks.

Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) Directed by Guru Dutt

Reactions and Analyses:
In Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), there are a few scenes that concern horses and take place at a horse racing track. For a movie set primarily in the world of the 1950s Hindi cinema industry and very little to do with horses, this feels superfluous. And, for the most part it is superfluous – it doesn’t have much to do with the main storyline. But it pays off in a way later on thematically.

Rocky (Johnny Walker), who owns and bets on horses, reveals late in the film that one of his prized horses had to be shot and killed because it broke its leg and couldn’t race any more. Not much good now, but the horse had made me millions before, Rocky says. So we had to shoot the horse, he reveals, almost as an afterthought.

At the same point in the film, the protagonist Suresh Sinha (played by Dutt himself), a director who was successful and made many hits for his studio, has hit rock bottom. Drinking, depression, and abject loneliness left him a shell of a man – unemployable and forgotten. Not much good now, but this director made them all millions before. Suresh is not being put out of his misery in the manner of a horse, but perhaps he should be?

The metaphor is clear, and it’s brutal. Fame is fleeting and also no matter what you’ve done before or how successful you once were, you end up dead and alone. Which is what happens to Suresh, who, in what is the most savage scene of the film, dies quietly on the soundstage in which he had once flourished. The morning crew comes and finds him dead in a director’s chair, but the producer doesn’t care. He just wants the body moved (“what, you’ve never seen a dead body before?” he shouts) because the show must go on. The camera rises up to the heavens in a wide shot as light pours into the stage from the outside as Suresh’s lifeless body, small in the frame, is carried off.

Suresh (Guru Dutt), slumps into the director’s chair, now a broken old man left only with memories.

And the crew enters the soundstage to start the day, Suresh’s lifeless body callously removed as the production marches on.

It’s an incredibly cynical portrayal (and likely accurate from Dutt’s experience) of a ruthless world, specifically the movie industry. The fact that this is in a 1959 Hindi film – a film industry very well known for cheery, elevated and escapist fare – makes it even more surprising. What’s less surprising, perhaps, is that audiences at the time weren’t too keen on seeing Kaagaz Ke Phool, a notorious flop, only to be rediscovered and cherished now. Perhaps that says more about the times we currently live in than the quality of the film itself.

And to that quality – Kaagaz Ke Phool is a stunning masterwork of directing. Someone in our QFS group pointed out that not only do the shot selections evoke Orson Welles – deep focus, wide frames, low angles utilizing Cinemascope lenses for the first time in India – but Guru Dutt himself looks a lot like a young Welles himself. Both were prodigy actor-directors, both fought inner demons. And while Welles lived with his for a long lifetime in which he fought to regain the fame and power he had when Citizen Kane (1941) reached its ascendancy, Dutt’s demons proved too much for him, and instead died before he was 40. Dutt left behind a legacy of classics and a the tragic feeling that we were deprived of more great and meaningful films to fortify the Indian film industry.

It's easy to find parallels between Suresh in Kaagaz Ke Phool to Dutt’s own life. But beyond that, the film is a masterclass in portraying loneliness. Dutt with VK Murthy – one of India’s legendary cinematographers – has Suresh move between shadows and silhouettes, throwing the focus on the background and trusting the audience with extracting meaning from his imagery and juxtaposition of characters in the frame.

Beams of light, shadows, darkness - all part of the language Dutt uses to portray loneliness and distance.

Dutt’s use of framing foregrounds versus background evoked the work of Orson Welles, another actor-director prodigy.

Perhaps the most evocative scene comes about halfway through the film. Suresh has discovered and clearly has fallen in love with the luminous Shanthi (Waheeda Rehman), a non-actor who reluctantly becomes a star in his movies. He’s still technically married to Veena (Veena Kumari) but has fallen in love with Shanthi, and Shanthi, has definitely fallen for him. But they can never be together. To portray this visually, Dutt has music playing between the two characters on a darkened soundstage, featuring the now-legendary Mohammed Rafi song “Waqt Ne Kiya Haseen Sitam” which roughly means “What a beautiful injustice time has done (to us).” There are only shafts of light in an otherwise dark space with each going in and out of shadows and light. It begins with his wife Veena in the scene (possibly imagined), looking distraught as the camera pushes in to a close up, cut with a similar closeup of Suresh as well.

Next, in a wide profile angle, Veena and Suresh are on opposite sides of the frame, the light is shining down in a shaft between them. Then, ghost-like, their translucent “spirit” selves separate from their bodies and move towards each other. The spirits come together in the center of the frame, a special effect shot dispatched for emotional utility. Then, Veena walks into a shadow, but when the figure emerges - it’s now Shanthi, the lover he cannot be with, smiling at him as the music swells.

Dutt uses special effects to convey an imagined connection instead of a physical one, the characters in love but never able to be together.

It’s beautiful, it’s magical realism, and it feels as a definitive example of this is the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema. What characterizes the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema? My admittedly scant knowledge is that the Golden Age is this: all the hallmarks of Hindi film as we know now – melodrama, plot contrivances, depths of extreme emotion, goofy comic relief, evocative musical numbers – but told with a level of cinematic artistry and a trust in the audience’s ability to make meaning from the visual language made by the filmmakers. In the decades to follow, it’s clear that many of those hallmarks continue but two aspects don’t as often – the artistry and trust in the audience.

Not to say that Hindi films today aren’t awash with art and color and life – they surely are. But where Dutt uses all the language of cinema through camera, movement, performance, blocking, light, shadow, and nuanced performance (relatively speaking), modern Indian filmmakers tend to rely on spectacle and over-wrought performance and emotion. This is, of course, broad and my own observation as an Indian American filmmaker born and raised outside of that country’s film industry. But to me, it’s clear why so many Indian film goers who are old enough to remember the Golden Age lament the state of modern Hindi cinema. It simply was better in its basic storytelling, if not the technology and craft. Also, note the musical numbers. They express emotion and flow into the story, as opposed to the standalone numbers that follow and become the standard as Indian cinema progresses in the 20th Century.

Shanthi (Waheeda Rehman) beautifully photographed in a musical number, riding in a car. The scene is quintessential Golden Age filmmaking - music used to convey the inner emotions of the characters as we see them falling in love.

One thing that was surprising for all of us in the QFS discussion group was how “modern” Kaagaz Ke Phool felt – a movie about movies and movie makers. The opening shots, if you weren’t paying attention, could’ve been out of Welles or John Ford or Michael Curtiz, reminiscent of American cinema of the 1940s. The film, though indigenously India and about India’s own cinema industry, could’ve been very easily the Hollywood of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) or All About Eve (1950). There’s a timeless elegance to it – and perhaps that, too, is a hallmark of Hindi cinema’s Golden Age.

Dutt (here, as Suresh) and his filmmaking style feels modern - a movie about movies and the movie industry - or at the very least reminded us of timeless American cinema.

Dutt suffered from depression and addiction, as is now well known and was perhaps known then, too. He attempted suicide at least twice before his actual death, in which he may have killed himself (or perhaps accidentally overdosed – it’s not known for sure). This internal melancholy may have led to the abundant and drawn-out final quarter of the film where we watch Suresh’s deep and inexorable decline. This underlying melancholy is a feature of what is considered his preeminent classic, Pyassa (1957) which came out before Kaagaz Ke Phool.

Towards the end of the movie, Suresh, now at true rock bottom – an alcoholic shell of himself – has been cast as an extra in a film where Shanthi is the star. When she realizes who he is, she desperately runs after him but can’t catch him, cut off by adoring fans – an echo of a scene with Suresh from the beginning of the film. The song that plays is “Ud Ja Ud Ja Pyaase Bhaware” and in it, the lyrics say “Fly, fly away thirsty bee. There is no nectar here, where paper flowers bloom in this garden.”

At the beginning of the film, Suresh reminisces about being swarmed by adoring fans

At the end of the film, Shanthi is swarmed by adoring fans and cannot chase down the old, broken down Suresh.

Perhaps Dutt is saying here, as one QFSer pointed out, that there is no glory here in this world where things appear beautiful, like paper flowers, but it’s all an illusion. Paper flowers and fame are not real, will not give you nectar. If you want true meaning, true love, true fulfillment, then you need to seek it somewhere else.

If that’s truly what the filmmaker intended, then this sequence, this final sequence in this master filmmaker’s final film, is a cry for help, placed in a beautifully downcast work of true art. Not all films from the Golden Age of Hindi Film have endured in this way, and perhaps it’s because Dutt placed his finger squarely on something universal, deep, tragic, and true.

Death Race 2000 (1975)

QFS No. 146 - The invitation for June 26, 2024
The late great Roger Corman produced Death Race 2000 set in a dystopic, mayhem-ridden future. And I, for one, have been keen on seeing it for some time. It takes place in the distant future, the year 2000! What will life be like then? Who knows! Well, the late great Roger Corman will tell you!

In Death Race 2000 you’ve got the red-hot stardom of David Carradine to contend with alongside upstart nobody Sylvester Stallone. Made on a Corman-style budget, this feels like an even more appropriate Corman selection than our previous one, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963, QFS No. 89). Corman directed that masterpiece himself. This one, he produced it on his B-movie assembly line and is one of the films that actually (sorta?) penetrated into the broader mainstream.

And this is our first return to a Corman film since the legend passed away last month. Let’s honor him by easing back on our critical thinking skills a touch and watch one of his classics. Kick back, relax, and watch the soothing tale that I’m sure is at the heart of Death Race 2000. 

Death Race 2000 (1975) Directed by Paul Bartel

Reactions and Analyses:
There was something in the air in the mid-1970s. Part of our QFS discussion about Death Race 2000 (1975) debated what could be the reason for the glut of post-apocalyptic films in the 1970s and into the early 1980s.

The filmmakers of this era grew up as children with memories of the horrors and heroism of World War II and came of age in the Cold War, a time fraught with the very real possibility of global extinction from nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, The studio system no longer had a stranglehold on filmmakers and a parallel film track from auteurs was starting to penetrate the mainstream.

So given some of these conditions, we see films like A Clockwork Orange (1970), Logan’s Run (1976), Soylent Green (1973), Mad Max (1979) and its sequels, Omega Man (1971), Rollerball (1975), Planet of the Apes (though from 1968, the film franchise continues in the ’70s), and perhaps you could argue THX 1138 (1971) and Stalker (1979, QFS No. 25) as well. And of course, Death Race 2000.

The future! New York City in the year 2000 as depicted in Death Race 2000 (1975) in what is in the running for the worst matte painting in history.

Many of those films are attempting to make a commentary about something – overpopulation (Soylent Green), reliance on fossil fuels (Mad Max), nuclear war (Planet of the Apes, presumably and maybe Stalker), totalitarianism (THX 1138).

And then you have commentary on violence in society and our fascination with it (A Clockwork Orange), how we’re inured to it and, in the case of Rollerball and Death Race 2000, how that fascination is literally turned to sport.

How much social commentary Roger Corman and director Paul Bartel are actually interested in is probably very little. The film is perhaps best summarized as one QFS called: the perfect hangover movie to watch after waking up at noon after a night of drinking. This is, of course, high praise.

The premise of the eponymous “death race” is … simple? Simple, but convoluted. Annually, as a way to appease the masses, racers speed across the continent racing from New York to Los Angeles while trying to kill as many people as possible with their vehicles. Killing the elderly or children will give racers the highest number of points. But also – whoever finishes first wins? It’s not entirely clear.

But it really doesn’t have to be. Just take one segment in particular and you can see exactly who this film is intended to reach. After the first day of racing early on in the film, all of the drivers and their navigators (who, we all agreed, are just there to “service” the drivers in all ways practical, emotional, and physical) are naked lying down getting massages. It’s so amazingly gratuitous without really any reason for its inclusion other than attracting the target audience – adolescent males. And given some of the laughable B-movie blood-splattered scenes from the race, it’s almost impossible to refute that the American male ages 16-30 are the ones Corman was after.

Violence and gratuitious nudity. Target audience: American males, 16-30.

Still, the film is engaging even beyond that demographic. The racing sequences, sped up to amply the scenes, are propulsive. Much of the action follows people in motion, the world whipping behind them. The film introduces the drivers in the most efficient manner, almost akin to a video game with each car and its unique killing apparatuses detailed for the viewer. Add to the fact that this was made on a shoestring budget, and it’s quite an achievement in filmmaking.

But with that shoestring budget comes risks. Namely in performances that lack any sort of attachment to reality - what is more simply can be described as “bad acting” – in particular from the supporting cast. But it’s not like David Carradine (as Frankenstein) or Sylvester Stallone (as Machine Gun Joe Viterbo) are lighting up the place with their performances. They don’t have to, of course, but it all contributes to Death Race 2000 feeling more like a product of its time than a trenchant analysis of American society.

Watching Death Race 2000, I was reminded of two movies that are seemingly vastly different from each other. First, The Hunger Games (2012) and its sequels and also Network (1976). The Hunger Games books and film franchise take place in a world in which a deadly game is watched by all in a post-apocalyptic agreement between nations to quell civil war, where teens are sacrificed for the sake of peace and stability. The idea of a violent sport as a way of a nation together after some cataclysm felt very similar to Death Race 2000.

Network explores the line between news and entertainment. There’s an element of watching something horrible on screen – in this case Howard Beale (Peter Finch) having a breakdown on television – and going through with it because the ratings are high and that’s all that matters. There’s something similar in Death Race 2000. Everyone is watching this national event with glee, even actual Nazis cheering an actual Nazi car in front of people in the stands with swastikas on their sleeves.  

Going back to – what are the filmmakers trying to say? At first the film seemed to be a critique against the glorification of violence. Frankenstein wants to abolish the race and return to the rule of law in the country. When he has an opportunity to kill dozens of elderly patients who were about to be euthanized – and thus getting more points – he does not. So this appears to be a point for the idea that violence is not the way or something to that effect.

Frankenstein (David Carradine) and Annie (Simone Griffeth) both want to take down the president and restore order. Or something like that. He also continues to kill people in the car so it’s a muddled message at best.

But what does Frankenstein do instead? Runs over dozens of doctors and nurses! He gets fewer points but he still goes through with killing for the sake of the race. The commentator Grace (Joyce Jameson) defends the action, saying those doctors were smug and they deserved it but the low point total might cost Frankenstein in the long run. Quite the sacrifice!

Obligatory image of the literal hand grenade.

Okay, but then Frankenstein still does intend to change things. How? By using his prosthetic hand grenade (built into his hand!) to kill the president. He ultimately kills him, with the help of Annie (Simone Griffeth). And then, in the coda to the movie, he’s now president (how?) and is about to leave on his honeymoon with Annie. But that annoying announcer Junior (Don Steele) is in the way, so he just runs him over. Presumably, old habits die hard.

So there are logical issues with the underlying desire of the main character. But there are logical issues throughout so this is par for the film. How are they watching all of the races? Why are people taking different routes when they all should take the most direct routes? Why would anyone be out at all on this day knowing they can be killed? Why again do we hate the French? How is Frankenstein president, what kind of succession plan is in the United States of the future?

The answer to all of these questions is – it doesn’t matter. Of course it doesn’t. Or Corman knows that you don’t have to answer every single logic question a movie raises, just as long as you have all the right elements for film. A premise, a world created, and speed to plow through all logic. And, of course, gratuitous nudity and violence. Is Corman criticizing sensationalism by clever use of sensationalism? It’s hard to say and perhaps that’s the lasting genius of Corman’s work in Death Race 2000 and beyond – the ambiguous nature of the theme, but the unambiguous enjoyment of fast cars hurtling across a post-apocalyptic landscape.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

QFS No. 145 - The invitation for June 19, 2024
We haven’t yet selected a John Cassavetes film here at Quarantine Film Society and this shortcoming has sent shockwaves throughout the organization.* What’s just as shocking is that I, your humble narrator, have never seen a Cassavetes film. In 2013, The New Yorker, wrote that Cassavetes “may be the most influential American director of the last half century.” The last half century, mind you, included the likes of Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and a lot more! So this is a pretty bold claim. And even more shameful I haven’t seen a Cassavetes film yet.

Oh sure, I’ve seen Mr. Cassavetes as an actor in such films as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). And his auteurist spirit lives on in John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch and especially Scorsese. So I feel as if I have witnessed his influence, if not having seen any of his actual work as a director itself.

I write all this just to make myself feel better because I know, I know, I should’ve been familiar with Cassavetes’ work from the second I stepped foot onto the American Film Institute campus lo those many years ago. His Faces (1968) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) have been on my list for a while, just as this week’s selection has.

A Woman Under the Influence is considered Cassavetes’ most beloved work and stars his wife Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk (as not Columbo). I’m eager to finally watch one of the true fathers of modern cinema, especially modern cinematic performance and independent filmmaking, to fill in a gaping hole in my film knowledge. 

Join us to discuss A Woman Under the Influence! Feel free to be under the influence of something as well – it’s summer, after all!

* The QFS staffer responsible for this oversight has relinquished their proper name and has been remanded to a farm upstate.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) Directed by John Cassavetes

Reactions and Analyses:
A Woman Under the Influence (1974) offers no answers. Is it about addition? Is it about toxic relationships? Is it about mental illness? Is it about double standards between how men are treated versus how women are treated? Is it none of these or all of these?

Director John Cassavetes does not seem to be raising awareness about addiction or mental illness or any of the other aspects listed above. If anything, A Woman Under the Influence is a portrait of a relationship between two dysfunctional people. Neither change, neither seem to learn or grow. One doesn’t know how to communicate with the other and one may not be capable of behaving in the world as a functional adult. From a storytelling perspective, the movie fights against all filmmaking convention, where scenes seem to continue on past their natural end, creating a feeling of uneasiness, that we’re watching something we shouldn’t watch but we are not released from having to watch.

This scene halfway through A Woman Under the Influence (1974) continues on for a longer time than it seems like it ought. John Cassavetes gives you no way out, just as the characters are trapped in their circumstances.

In a word, the film is relentless. There’s no escape from these two and their manias. Everyone in the QFS group felt that way – the exhaustion, the cringe-inducing awkwardness, the uneasy witnessing of a dysfunctional marriage. Cassavetes traps you in this film in the way that the characters are trapped. In that way, it’s truly a remarkable achievement of filmmaking.

One of the members of the group brought up the ending, which I agree is pretty perfect and apt for the story. In fact, the entire final sequence contains the rest of the film in a nutshell. Nick (Peter Falk) has slapped Mabel (Gena Rowlands) for standing and singing on the couch, and the children are trying to protect her and refuse to stay in their rooms after he physically carries them upstairs (twice!). He has just shouted at them all, saying he’s going to murder her and their kids. It’s terribly upsetting and wrenching, especially since Mabel may just attempted suicide but instead cut her hand and now lies there bleeding slowly from the wound. Everyone, then, calms and Mabel gathers herself and tenderly puts the kids to bed.

Nick washes Mabel’s hand with equal tenderness – a man who had just hit her moments earlier and threatened mass homicide – and they’re both silent as the water cleans her hand. The Mabel talks in low tones and asks if he loves her. Nick can’t answer. He looks up at her a couple of times and back down at the bandage and the wound. And he seems like he wants to say something, but he can’t - or won’t. This is someone who has professed or at least demonstrated that he does care for her deeply. But he’s also someone who has hit her several times in the film. This moment contains so much without saying anything – which is what he does. He says nothing. It offers no answers.

Nick (Peter Falk) is unable to answer Mabel at the end when she asks him if he loves her.

But perhaps the most brilliant part of this sequence is the next and final one of A Woman Under the Influence. As the music plays, both clean up the living room and put everything back the way it was. Not fixing anything, just rearranging as if it’s all back to normal. This also speaks volumes – nothing has changed. They’re going to continue on in the same manner as when they began the film and presumably the cycle will continue.

The story unspools. We’re dropped into this family and watch what they’re experiencing as if we’re a part of it but we gather information as it goes along that changes our perspective. At first, Nick seems to tell co-workers that his wife is loving and takes care of all the household needs. He tries to get his fellow workers the night off but instead they end up having to fix a water main and he can’t spend the night with Mabel. She, for her part, has given the kids to her mother so Mabel and Nick can have a night together.

So for the first 10 minutes or so of the film, it feels like a happy, healthy family with support and a couple who are hoping to spend more time together. But then Mabel drinks heavily, goes to the bar on her own, picks up a man, brings him home, and (we think) they sleep together. So at first it appears that Mabel has a drinking problem brought on by loneliness because her husband works so much.

A typical setup and familiar story. But then, when Mabel wakes up and the man (Garson Cross played by George Dunn) tries to slink away in the early morning, Mabel calls him by her husband’s name and is confused where the children are. We had seen her just the afternoon before as she put the kids in her mother’s car. Her behavior is jarring, and we start to realize that Mabel’s problems aren’t only substance-related – she has some form of mental illness.

For Nick’s part, at first he seems like a garrulous but likeable middle-class working man, doing his best to live with a woman who suffers from mental illness and doesn’t know what to do. He expresses regret on the phone that he has to stay out late working, and we’re led to believe this is a reasonable caring man – until we seem him shouting at Mabel in front of his co-workers at dinner the next day. (Setting aside for a moment how unusual it is for Nick to have invited a dozen guys from work over to dinner after being gone for probably 40 hours straight and missing a night with his wife...) Throughout that dinner scene, Mabel is so hard to watch – smiling and enjoying, but clearly not all there. So then when she insists on someone dancing with her and Nick shouts in front of everyone, we feel as if we’re in that dinner and can feel that awkwardness the others feel.

Nick seems caring at the beginning, and he mostly is. But also prone to unreasonable overreactions and violence. Or has he been driven to that?

Mable (Gena Rowlands) in the Top 10 most awkward dinner scenes of all time.

Because she starts caressing this pretty face and insists on dancing, leading to Nick;s first outburst.

At this point, it seems as though Mabel has a clear mental problem. But with Nick, we start to get close. Is he abusing her and that’s what’s driven her to this point? Or is it Nick driven to this rage because he’s lived with a person with mental illness and has no tools to address it in a time where these conditions were even more stigmatized than they are now 50 years later? Soon, we do see Nick strike Mabel so we know he’s capable violence as well. This unspooling continues as we learn more and more – the introduction of the doctor who knows her condition, Nick’s mother, Mabel’s mother and later her father. It’s clear this has been going on for some time and we’re just catching up.

One question that came up in the discussion is – does Nick have a mental illness as well? He seems prone to outbursts and violence, mood swings of his own. He wants to control everything, show everyone that everything is normal. Take the scene at the beach with the kids. He insists they go to the beach but then Nick chases down his daughter even though all she was trying to do was going to work on the sand castle. He preferred her be over by him on a beach towel, I guess?

Nick is also prone to extreme overreacting. He comes home when Mabel has been “babysitting” her three kids and two friends. Nick arrives and the kids are all trying on clothes in a costume party and their daughter is running around naked, as kids sometimes do. He flies off the handle, threatens to kill the other kids and their father, Harold (Mario Gallo) in what can only be described as an unnecessary escalation. 

To me, it seems clear that Nick also has a mental condition of some kind. Others weren’t so sure, they felt he was perhaps behaving in a way that someone might behave living with a loved one who has manic mood swings the way Mabel does (not that they condoned the violence of course). Whatever it is – perhaps some combination of both mental illness and driven to the edge (again, Cassavetes provides no answers) – it’s clear that the combination of Mabel and Nick is combustible. They go up in flames.

It says volumes that Nick can get off by behaving the way he does without so much as a mention of him having a problem that needs to be addressed, but it’s Mabel who gets carted off to an institution for six months. She’s subjected to shock therapy and separation from her children, but no one tells Nick that he’s got to seek counseling for rage or domestic abuse as well. He definitely definitely needs it. But it’s 1974, he’s a working class male in America, there is likely no way it’s even on his radar – or on anyone else’s in the family – that he has problems that need to be addressed.

Everything’s fine. We’re all fine here. So she’s got a couple of screws lose and is in the nuthouse, so what? (Paraphrasing Nick

Instead, he’s free to take his young kids out of school, ride in the back of a pickup truck with them, give them Hamm’s beer until they’re drunk enough to sleep as soon as they get home. It’s both a product of the 1970s and also the double standard of how the “hysterical” woman is treated versus how a man is, as reckless as his behavior may be.

Nick tries to get convince everyone, and maybe himself, that you can just force yourself to act normal and things will be normal. He plans a large, ill-conceived party for Mabel’s return from the institution. He invites all of the guys over for dinner after the work shift. He shouts at Mabel to just flip the switch and act normal. But that’s not how it works, and nobody in the film knows how to deal with Mabel’s problems – least of all the family doctor (Eddie Shaw). Dr Zepp communicates with Mabel in a way that we would, in 2024, recognize as profoundly unhelpful. Telling a manic mental health patient to simply “calm down” or the like is definitely not at all useful in any way.

Great sequence that is pure 1970s - a smoking Peter Falk riding in the back of a pickup with children who’ve been taking big swigs of Hamm’s beer.

A Woman Under the Influence is not easy – not to watch and also not easy to discern what meaning to derive from it, if any. And yet, it does feel like essential viewing. There are scenes where the filmmaking is top tier. When Nick’s drinking with the children (that’s so strange to write…), it’s a very tight closeup on Nick as the frame bounces violently, but solidly holding the closeup on Nick. The world speeds past him, out of focus and in a blur behind his head and the red railing of the truck. And he speaks very earnestly with the kids, apologizing for having to send their mother into the institution. The contrast between the dynamic background and what he’s saying is incredibly effective and affecting, giving the feel of that’s what his life feels like.

Mabel returns home after her time at the institution and goes to see their children.

When she sees them, it’s played in tight disorienting closeups, evoking how Mabel feels.

Also, when Mabel comes back home, she finally gets to see the children. She steps into the adjacent room and it cuts to a close up on her face. All of the shots are tight – there is no wide shot that holds the room and the family. It’s tight on her, then tight on the kids, it’s a little disorienting and you can’t quite get your bearings. This is how Mabel feels, and it’s done with the camera, without any gimmicks or special effects. Just simple shot selection, cinematography, choice of camera, and performance. Basically – directing. Cassavetes pushed his performers to the brink to expose their raw insides, photographed that rawness, and made a wrenching, relentless film.

In A Woman Under the Influence, he pushes his audience the same way, giving them no way out. Just as the characters in the film are trapped by their circumstances and each other. Is the moving saying anything about that? Is it saying nothing about that? I still don’t know for sure. So if if for nothing else, the movie is worth enduring exactly because it offers no easy answers in the way that life often does not. 

Superbad (2007)

QFS No. 144 - The invitation for June 12, 2024
Last week we selected a somewhat abstract narrative art film from Southeast Asia. It only stands to reason that our next film should be a raunchy teen comedy, the likes of which are churned out regularly by Hollywood. I give you… Superbad.

I have, oddly, not seen Superbad. There is no reason for this other than perhaps I thought it was too silly to bother back then. But more likely, I was no longer the target audience when it came out seventeen years ago. Still, since it’s endured, I’ve wanted to see it. In part because the cast is superb – Jonah Hill (before he was slim and serious), Bill Hader (before he was a formidable auteur), Emma Stone (before she won two Oscars!) Seth Rogan (basically the same) and Michael Cera (also basically the same somehow).

Superbad feels like it has remained a worthy modern stupid comedy all these years later. Stupid comedies are the lifeblood of the industry – just look at Animal House (1978), to pick one school-related stupid comedy as an example. That has endured and is still referenced by at least a subset of the American public (men 45-75 years old). And with summer now starting, won’t it be something nice just to turn off the old noggin and watch a couple of nerdy teenagers just trying to do (super) bad things? I think so.

Anyway, join us to discuss Superbad!

Superbad (2007) Directed by Greg Mottola

Reactions and Analyses:
Is it possible that a film which includes a very long tangent about a 4th grader with an uncontrollable compulsion to doodle penis drawings can also be a film that has deep meaning about relationships, outward appearances, and observations about American society?

Yes. Somehow Superbad (2007) pulls this off.

Beneath all the vulgarity, the obsession with pornography, the underaged drinking, the cops behaving like children and the chaos throughout, Superbad has heart – just as the main characters Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Sera) do. In another era, Superbad (2007) would simply be a tale of high schoolers who set out to find booze for a party and comedy ensues and nothing more. (I dare you to find broader meaning Animal House, 1978). And on its surface, Superbad is that. But without too much digging, you can readily find some deeper themes and meaning.

Of course, the central love story in the film is between Seth and Evan. And in that story, we see one of the filmmakers’ themes that are a little less overt than the obvious – American males are incapable to expressing true emotion with each other unless their guards are down. The two high school best friends are going to miss each other next year and the film winds its way to show that they are undergoing separation anxiety.

Superbad is, among other things, a love story between Evan (Michael Cera) and Seth (Jonah Hill).

But we were interested as a group about why they are incapable of just coming out and saying that they’re going to miss each other. And I contend that the filmmakers are making a case about masculinity, that American males are unable to be emotionally open with another male. Alcohol, with its ability to release inhibitions, acts as the only facilitator for these kids (and adults) to actually talk to each other about how they’re feeling. The only way American men can be true with each other is with help, and that “help” is usually booze.

Finally, after about two-thirds of the way through the film, Seth and Evan have an extended argument and it comes out that Seth feels betrayed by Evan for enrolling in Dartmouth – even simply applying – because Seth isn’t going there for college and could never have gotten in anyway. It isn’t until a later scene when they’re both exhausted, drunk, and in sleeping bags next to each other that they can finally say that they love each other, and that they’ll miss each other.

So the movie is a breakup film and almost a romantic comedy about a platonic relationship between two young men. And the final way they can actually confess their love is when the illusion they present to the world has dissolved.

Finally, Seth reveals he’s upset with Evan and feels he’s being abandoned.

Later, when they’re both exhausted and have their guards down, they’re able to say they love each other.

And here is the second major theme – public persona and perception versus reality. Both Evan and Seth want to portray themselves as something they’re not. They want to show that they know how to party, that they can provide alcohol for everyone, and are part of the “in” crowd (even though no one can remember having seen them at a party before). They believe that sex is the most important thing in the world, and that having sex and being able to be good as sex is so vital before college. Illusions are a major part of Superbad.

The filmmakers here are also making a comment on American society as well. Seth and Evan are led to believe that the world will not accept them as who they are, therefore they have to pretend they are something else. Evan tries to show off for Becca (Martha MacIssac) by exaggerating their previous night’s adventures – which in reality were watching porn, shot-gunning beer, trying to get into a strip club – and tries to act “cool” but of course he’s incapable of it. Seth brags to Jules (Emma Stone) about being able to get alcohol but he needs Fogell/McLovin’ (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and his ridiculous fake ID card - of course that fails. This illusion drives the two guys, that their ticket into the elites is providing alcohol and acting more important than you are.

Evan brags to Becca (Martha MacIsaac) about how much the guys party together.

But the night actually entails watching porn.

And drinking beer in a basement, followed by not getting into a strip club.

And here’s where the filmmakers are overt about their solution to this problem: be yourself. Seth eventually “wins over” (unclear, but at least as a friend) Jules and not because he got booze for the party like she asked. She doesn’t even drink alcohol. But she’s charmed by him – she saw his open vulnerable side when she caught him crying the previous night – and will even hang out with him at the mall the day after the party, even though he accidentally headbutted her and gave her a black eye the night before.

In that same scene, Evan reconnects with a hungover Becca. The night before she attempted to have sex with Evan but he objects to doing it while she’s drunk (even though Seth earlier in the film said “we can be that mistake!”) because she’ll regret it and won’t even remember. But it’s this act of earnestness that makes her realize he’s special and they go on an impromptu date at the mall to buy new comforters. He was his true self, not trying to put on a metaphoric mask in order to get laid before college because that’s what they were led to believe they needed to do.

Both of them act like themselves for the first time and are rewarded. Of course, this means that Seth and Evan have to awkwardly say goodbye to each other – still incapable of true emotion in public with each other – and they don’t know either to hug or to handshake. It’s a perfect moment. And here the filmmakers use perhaps the most artistic and cinematic sequence of shots in the film – the escalator, and the teeth on the steps separate the two platonic lovers as they go off their divergent paths , cleaving the two. It’s a perfect scene and ending of the film.

Seth looks back up at Evan from the escalator.

And Evan keeps his gaze on Seth, the two platonic lovers separated.

Further commentary about masculinity? Officer Slater (Bill Hader) and Officer Michales (Seth Rogan) and McLovin’s storyline. The cops are given the authority of a badge, and are given a license to behave like adolescent men. They can drink beers at a bar for free, raid parties, ignore responsibility, trash a police car and fire a gun in public at a stop sign with impunity. They’re living an adolescent dream, two men who were unable to be themselves when younger but now look who’s in charge? The kids you picked on are now the boss. Even all the penis drawings probably speak to this obsession with sex and masculinity that’s more about just a cavalcade of ludicrous penis drawings in what’s an otherwise seemingly superfluous tangent.

Setting aside all the actual commentary embedded in the film, Superbad is still, at its core, a comedy. Humor is subjective, and not everyone in the QFS group was taken by the antics depicted. But for me, the film made me laugh and I cringed whenever I had to witness the protagonists’ public awkwardness. In part because I didn’t want these two to look like idiots because I cared about them. (That cringe-inducing behavior was too much for some in the group.) I wanted Evan and Seth to succeed in bringing booze to minors at a party. Not because I felt like this was a great idea, but because I felt I knew an Evan and a Seth in high school. Cera and Hill’s performances are so excellent and spot on for the characters. The uncomfortable-in-my-own-skin feeling that Cera is able to bring in all of his performances work so excellently here.

Hill’s Seth, however, was more polarizing. While several in the group found him irredeemably off-putting, I had sympathy for him. He’s just a foul-mouthed, witty, overweight, awkward kid. And the reason I rooted for him can be found in an early scene. Seth and Evan walk out of a convenient store near the high school and Seth gets spit on Jesse (Scott Gerbacia), a bully who taunts him for no particular reason. That scene illustrated for me at least that Seth isn’t a kid who is all he claims to be, that he’s actually very low in that society and despises he’s at that level. I most craved for both to just be themselves because they were really funny and had a sweetness to them when they were just with each other and not putting on a social performance.

In Eight Grade (2018, QFS No. 19), Kayla (Elsie Fisher) tries to be something she’s not, as we watch her final week of eighth grade.

And the kids in Superbad all are attempting to be something they’re not, as we watch in their final few weeks of high school. (Obligatory shot of the famous McLovin’ fake ID.)

Several in the group were reminded of Eight Grade (2018, QFS No. 19), and there are a lot of parallels. Both take place at the end of the school year with a seismic life shift – Eight Grade of course is the end of middle school and Superbad is the end of high school into college. And while the humor in Eight Grade is rooted in a realism and Superbad is more on the screwball-comedy end of the spectrum, both feature sets of protagonists that are attempting to be something they are not, to project an image of importance or popularity. And both films root the stories in characters who seem realistic and familiar, because the emotions are true. Both films offer broader commentaries on American society, but in Superbad those commentaries are masked by the raunchy comedy the smothers the film. If you see past that (and past the avalanche of penis drawings), just as if you see past the illusion presented by Seth and Even, you can find that the film and the characters have something to say.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

QFS No. 143 - The invitation for June 5, 2024
There are a lot of great things about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) even if you don’t know about it at all, just as I don’t. First, look at that title! It’s our second longest QFS selection title after Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, QFS No. 98).

Second, the director’s name – Apichatpong Weerasethakul – is the longest of any directors we’ve previously selected. Between his name and the film’s title we’ve now got the longest filmmaker+title combo yet for a QFS selection. And third, this is our first selection from Thailand. As you can see, the selection process here is rigorous!

I’m very excited by all of these facts. I know almost nothing of the film, other than it has its share of critical accolades and it might be very, very weird. Or it might be just a simple tale of a man who can recall his past lives and that’s that. I’ve come across Weerasethakul’s work on the BFI/Sight & Sound list – this film is No. 196 in the extended Greatest Movies list and Tropical Malady (2004) is tied on the 100 Greatest list with Black Girl (1966, QFS No. 141), Get Out (2017), The General (1926), Once upon a Time in the West (1968), and A Man Escaped (1956, QFS No. 9). Also, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives* won the Palme d’Or at Cannes back then, in case that sways you. And thus concludes all I know about the film and filmmaker.

Anyway, do watch with us and let’s find out about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives!

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Reactions and Analyses:
The first impression I had of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is that of a fable from India. Though the film is from Thailand, I was reminded of fables I heard from my parents or read from the land of my ancestors. Thailand, of course, is its own country with its own set of traditions and legends and mythologies. But it shares quite a bit with nearby India, from Buddhism to Hindu mythological traditions to its language which has Sanskrit origins just as most of the languages in India do.

So in a film which blends the stark realism of its filmmaking – locked off camera, long takes and very limited first-person perspective of scenes – the interweaving of fantastical elements into that tapestry makes it feel like it’s less a film and more a tale or folklore.

To be more concrete about this, here’s an example: the first fantastical thing we encounter is Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk), Boonmee’s dead wife, materializes out of thin air at the dinner table. It’s mundane, done in a wide shot, as she fades in suddenly during the meal, just sitting at the table. Everyone reacts with surprise, but not supreme shock. Then, they talk to her and are amazed she’s there but it’s all folded into the normalcy of the scene.

And then, to top it off, moments later a demonic creature with red eyes that pierce the darkness appears. He emerges from the darkness into the light and we learn that this is Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) and Huay’s long-lost son who disappeared into the jungle one day ten years ago.

Just your regular dinner but with a ghost in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).

But then, another mysterious figure appears.

Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), the long-lost son, has returned. And there have been changes!

All of these beings are materializing in part because they know that Boonmee is dying of kidney failure – at least, I think that’s why they’re coming. Boonsong disappears in the next scene but Huay hangs around until Boonmee’s final end later in the film.

In our QFS discussion, I found myself trying to grapple with the narrative. Not all films have to have a strong narrative – of course, many great ones rely upon a feel or a mood or emotion above a direct storyline. But Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives doesn’t have a straightforward narrative trajectory, but it also isn’t totally abstract. We know he is dying so are these family members visiting him as he slowly drifts away?

That sort of end-of-life visitation by ghosts is of course known throughout the world (in some ways similar to England’s A Christmas Carol). And though it’s a familiar setup, this is not what the filmmaker attempts. An entire middle section of the film is its own short film – a tale of a princess (Wallapa Mongkolprasert) who is aging and saddened by her appearance, but is lured into the water by a catfish who loves her and finds her beautiful and then makes love to her. Again, I found myself returning to fable-like storytelling. The princess first sees a reflection of herself as young in the water’s reflection, but soon it fades away and she knows the catfish (or lake spirit perhaps) manifested the illusion. There are numerous stories from Indian folklore and Hindu mythology of interactions between a human and an animal or a spirit of the lake or river, and they are not considered unusual but rather from some divine providence or hand of fate. That’s how this scene and sequence felt like to me. But … what is it saying about the rest of the film? It has almost nothing to do with Boonmee’s story.

The princess storyline tangent was fable-like but unclear to a lot of us its narrative purpose.

Unless… the catfish was Boonmee in a previous life! We have no basis for this, but someone in the group thought perhaps that’s the case. The film offers no real clues, so we’re left speculating and reaching for meaning.

Is this a negative? Depends on your perspective. So I asked the group – are we capable of rendering judgment on something like this? Are we tied to Western narrative semi-linear storytelling and incapable of evaluating a slightly opaque artistic film from the East for what it is?

Someone, helpfully, pointed out that we’ve seen The Color of Pomegranates (1969, QFS No. 130) and This is Not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection (2019, QFS No. 124) and were able to evaluate those films as both art and visual storytelling. The Color of Pomegranates is a series of vignettes with meaning that are hard to decipher but they are there, telling the story of Sayat-Nova and his life. Whereas This is Not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection has a central story point – the old lady and everyone have to leave that land before it’s turned into a lake. The narrative is concrete but thin, and the film relies on a feeling, but it’s not totally abstract as there is a premise and a deadline that This is Not a Burial is inching towards.

The structure and story of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is looser than that and falls somewhere in between those two films on the narrative spectrum. There’s the story about Boonmee’s remaining days for sure, but that’s only a small aspect of the story. He tells Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) he regrets all the Communists he’s killed and he’s being receiving karmic retribution now. And there are these encounters and interactions with his family who have passed away or departed, but they don’t seem to offer meaning and the film doesn’t feel like it lives up to a “recalling of past lives” necessarily. Or at least not in a way that’s easy to decipher.  

Some of the really evocative imagery of the film appears in the penultimate chapter, as they trek through the night and ultimately to Boonmee’s end.

The glittering caves give the appearance of the infinite celestial heavens.

The creatures - or ghosts - come to witness Boonmee’s final moments.

And then, in the end, the film tails off with a very long coda after he dies. It’s a bit of a headscratcher. Boonmee died in the cave, and we’re witnessing final rites in the Thai Buddhist tradition at the temple in a city. His sister-in-law Jen and her daughter (who we haven’t met until this point) and Boonmee’s nephew Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), who is a monk too (that surprised us all), are spending time in a hotel room. Tong and Jen experience a sudden and nonchalant out-of-body experience where they watch the others transfixed to the television while the other Tong and Jen go to a restaurant with karaoke. The film ends this way, in the restaurant, with somehow appropriate abruptness.

Perhaps the most mundane out-of-body experience depicted in cinema.

In which they end up at dinner with karaoke, but don’t do karaoke and we never see karaoke.

As in all films, I try to find something that will stay with me. When I was watching Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives I felt that every time my attention started to drift when the narrative felt like it was losing steam, something unusual or surprising would happen. Huay’s ghost appearing, or the Boonsong creature coming out of the darkness, or the middle interlude with the princess and fish love, or the end night journey where it’s truly unnerving and it’s shot handheld and they’re in the jungle with monkey ghosts and then they’re in the glittering cave – all of it adds up to a haunting series of imagery that will remain in my memory. Perhaps that’s what I will recall when remembering Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – that movies aren’t always a roadmap from point A to point B and don’t have to be clear to be compelling.

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

QFS No. 142 - The invitation for May 29, 2024
Time to curl up with a classic Hollywood movie. And The Philadelphia Story is about as classic as it comes. Jimmy Stewart? Check. Cary Grant?! Check. Katherine Hepburn?!? Check. The great George Cukor at the helm?!?! Check and mate.

I have never seen this film, which is a strange blind spot. The Philadelphia Story frequently comes up as one of the films of the era that has endured the test of time so I don’t have any explanation as to how I missed this in my viewing history.

George Cukor – you might recall from the QFS email about Gaslight (1944, QFS No. 106) that you likely have printed out and framed like you do with all of these – is one of the great workhorse elite Hollywood filmmakers of the day, eventually winning an Academy Award for 1964’s My Fair Lady. So you know it’s going to be a solid film even if you hadn’t already knew about it.

 So join me in seeing the iconic performers in the classic The Philadelphia Story and then join us in discussing it!

The Philadelphia Story (1940) Directed by George Cukor

Reactions and Analyses:
Do you need much of a plot if you have legendary actors and great dialogue? That question, or some version of that, dominated our discussion about The Philadelphia Story (1940). Comedy sometimes cannot transcend eras, but The Philadelphia Story is one of those films that continues to endure.

And why? This is not a cynical or facetious question – but what is it in a comedy that is funny more than 80 years ago that remains funny today? Physical comedy and slapstick can last beyond the time in which it was created – our December screening of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935, QFS No. 132) illustrated that for us. But George Cukor’s comedy has really none of that physical comedy. And yet, throughout the film the dialogue and the performances are genuinely funny.

What do we hope happens in this story? That’s one of the main questions we had about The Philadelphia Story (1940).

At the same time, the plot of The Philadelphia Story is an afterthought. That’s not to say it’s devoid of one – it’s nominally about a wealthy bride (Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Samantha Lord) on her wedding weekend with the wedding coming up. So we have a timeframe, a clicking clock. Throw in a plot to infiltrate this high society with a “secret” photographer (Ruth Hussey as Liz Imbrie) and journalist (Jimmy Stewart as Mike Connor) writing a story for a gossip magazine – all facilitated by the woman’s ex-husband C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant).

But then, what is still the central tension? Is it this question who will Tracy marry? Or is it will Mike and Liz be found out as spies for Spy magazine? The latter gets dispelled rather quickly, so that’s not it. The former – well, that’s not really posed as a question until far later, when it’s clear that Tracy and Mike have some kind of a connection.

And the resolution – that her fiancé George (John Howard), unsure of Tracy’s moral rectitude, decides to leave her, Katharine returns to Dexter and gets “remarried” to him with the guests who should have been there when she first married him years ago.

Just writing all of that made my head spin. And so - is this why this is the quintessential screwball comedy?

One aspect of the film that people have rightly observed over the decades is class, and that came up in our discussion as well. A QFS member very astutely pointed out that this film is ultimately a very cynical take on class. George, the fiancé, has pulled himself up by his bootstraps from middle class (or poverty) into high society with Tracy and her family. But he is derided throughout the film from the start, with subtle jabs at his upbringing.

Take for example a simple scene early on, as pointed out by one of our members. George is at the stables with Tracy and the rest of her family. He is the only one who has trouble mounting a horse – presumably, he didn’t grow up with them on his estate – and everyone sort of laughs at him, even Uncle Willie (played with unnerving creepiness by Roland Young) rolls his eyes and says, “Hi ho, Silver” derisively.

George has difficulty mounting a horse, presumably because he didn’t spend his youth riding them.

Mike also is an outsider and appears to maybe connect with Tracy but in the end returns to a women more in line with in his class category.

Meanwhile, Dexter is still beloved by everyone except his ex-wife Tracy. Her sister, Dinah (Virginia Weidler) openly wishes he came to the wedding and when he does arrive at the house her mother (Mary Nash) can’t keep her hands off of him. This is a man, mind you, the very first scene of the movie we see of him shoving Tracy down physically with a palm to the face! But he’s forgiven by most and perhaps it’s because of a reason unsaid: he’s a member of the class and belongs with his kind.

Watching Jimmy Stewart (Mike) and Katharine Hepburn (Tracy) stone cold drunk is, if nothing else, reason enough to see The Philadelphia Story (1940).

Then comes Mike, played with Stewart’s uncanny everyman persona. He connects with Tracy and she finds depth in his writing and they are drunk and fall in lust or love or something. But even he – he of the working class – when it’s time at the end of the movie and he hastily proposes to Tracy, she rebuffs him.

The film seems to be saying – it’s all well and good to mingle between classes on some drunken weekend. But that’s all for fun because when it comes down to it you’ll get hitched to the one who is of your own kind.

This is a pretty stark take but it’s all there in the film. There seems no good reason to me, at least (and most of us) for Tracy to end up back with Dexter. Is it that Dexter has sobered up and has changed and she sees that? If that’s the case, it’s barely in the film’s narrative at all. Is it that Dexter now sees Tracy as not a goddess but as a human? That doesn’t come out either. If anything, Mike is closest to saying that Tracy has humanity and depth but even he treats her as if she’s this luminescent creature.

In the end, perhaps all of this ultimately doesn’t matter. Perhaps a loose plot is the maximum you need when you have legendary performers behaving badly. Jimmy Stewart is a downright fantastic alcoholic in this film, and Katharine Hepburn is no slouch either. You could do worse than watching ninety minutes straight of these two getting supremely sloshed and hamming it up on screen.

And perhaps, ultimately, that’s why this film has endured, what so many filmmakers today find this film unassailable as a romantic comedy. Maybe that’s all that matters in making a classic – a fun, slightly superficial, dastardly romp with the wealthy behaving in ways we imagine the wealthy to behave behind closed doors. Which is the exact assignment Mike and Liz were given in the first place. We, the audience, are the ones who actually get to see that story play out on screen in front of us.

Black Girl (1966)

QFS No. 141 - The invitation for May 22, 2024
A lot of "firsts" in these next few sentences. Black Girl will be our first ever selection from Senegal, and our first selection of a film by Ousmane Sembene. Sembene is considered the “dean” or father of African cinema. Did I know this before? No. Am I ashamed of that? Yes.

Sembene’s first film, Black Girl, has been on my radar for the last few years. I first discovered it when it arrived at No. 95 on the esteemed* BFI/Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films of All Time list. (Tied with QFS No. 9 A Man Escaped, 1956). As you remember, just a few weeks ago we watched No. 48 Wanda (1970, QFS No. 138). Recently, some of the imagery from Black Girl has piqued my interest, including clips I’ve seen in the great montage on the second floor of the Academy Museum that introduces you to the main Stories of Cinema exhibition. And from what I’ve gathered, Ousmane is finally getting some newfound recognition and his due outside of Africa and France.

For those of you keeping score at home, this is our eleventh selection from the BFI top 100 list. We previously selected No. 1 Jeanne Dielman, No. 5 In the Mood for Love (2000, QFS No. 105), No. 11 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, QFS No. 104), No. 30 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, QFS No. 114), No. 43 Stalker (1979, QFS No. 25), No. 48 Wanda, No. 60 Daughters of the Dust (1991, QFS No. 18), No. 67 The Red Shoes (1948, QFS No. 52), No. 72 L’Avventura (1960, QFS No. 116), and No. 95 A Man Escaped.

Also, at 66 minutes long, this will be the shortest Quarantine Film Society selection since our first Christmas in 2020 when we watched A Christmas Carol (1938) which clocked in at 69 minutes. So watch this week’s film because it’s only barely longer than an episode of Succession. Oh, and for all those other reasons too I guess.

*We’ve discussed at length how I both enjoy and also loathe the BFI list, so “esteemed” is of course sort of facetious. Yet, the list remains an important guidepost if for nothing else but to encounter great works of foreign cinema that I have overlooked.

Black Girl (1966) Directed by Ousmane Semebene

Reactions and Analyses:
Film as symbolism, film as metaphor. These were useful tools for me to finally get my grasp of Black Girl (1966). Recent crtitical revisiting of this early work from the Father of African Cinema Ousmane Semebene has placed this film firmly on the radar of people like us in the QFS viewing group.

But the film is challenging, despite its recent reclamation of glory. Before getting into all the production challenges – of which there were the usual kinds and the uniquely African kinds – we’ll delve into the narrative and the filmmaking craft.

From a purely story standpoint, almost all of us in the group felt the story contained numerous holes and an ending that was shocking, sudden and abrupt. And unearned. Diouana (Mbissine Therese Diop) appears in France, a new maid for a white French couple who also live in Dakar, Senegal – where they encountered and hired Diouana.

But it’s clear there was something missing in the arrangement. Diouana believes she’s arriving in the South of France to take care of children. Madam (Anne-Marie Jelinek) treats her, however, like a maid and not a nanny. Diouana develops a sense that she was duped, is trapped, and has no way out.

Diouana (Mbissine Therese Diop) didn’t sign up to be treated as a maid. But then… what did she expect? Perhaps a well delineated contracted could’ve gotten them all out of trouble in Black Girl (1966).

All of this is a perfectly fine set up. Diouana believed she was going to see France but instead sees darkness out the windows at night and has no encounter with the famous nightlife of the area near Cannes where she lives. France lacks the human vitality of Dakar. In France, it seems, people are stuck in their homes instead of out in the world together.

The strange thing, however, is that Diouana feels shocked that she has to do work at all. And here is where a variety of narrative questions being. Why is she surprised? Was she misled? Is she just young and naïve? Also, when she is actually paid, she says “I didn’t come here for the apron or the money?” But … didn’t she? Surely she didn’t think she was on vacation – she knew she was there for work?

This is not in any way meant to excuse the behavior of her employees. Madam is definitely demanding and it’s not clear why the children are suddenly gone. And for how long? Timelines are unclear in the film throughout – has she been there for a week, a few weeks, months? It matters only because of this – we need to feel as an audience that she is truly trapped, truly abused with no way out. That’s the only way the end is earned and worthwhile.

That’s the face of an irate employer prone to violence.

The end was a major topic of discussion. No one was quite sure what to make of the suddenness of Diouana’s suicide. To me, it’s was, of course, very bleak, but why was this her only answer? The film did not present that she was so trapped and desperate that death was her only way out. She packed up her things and was, seemingly, going to leave. But in the end, she does not and finds that suicide in the tub is her only means of escape.

The narrative is imperfect. But it’s not meant to be airtight as a direct story. It’s film as metaphor, as symbol. When I thought of it that way, and excused the narrative imperfections and some of the inexperienced filmmaker craftwork, the film takes on an importance that is clear in its recent rival.

All of it is symbolism, and what it symbolizes is clear from the start. The power dynamics between the white employers, extracting labor from Africa to do their chores with no cost to themselves. The tantalizing wealth and fun of France, luring poor Senegalese to toil and not experience the joy of the French Riviera in the way the white French are able. The liberal African-loving dinner guests, exoticizing the black girl who serves them food and openly talking about her when she’s mere feet away. Not to mention the extremely creepy guy who wants to kiss a black girl for the first time, treating her as a literal sexual object for his unwanted affection. And the dehumanizing slave market-style scene when Diouana first meets Madam on the street as the group of women are attempting to find work as maids or servants. The refusal of money – a symbolic gesture standing up to the West’s money and holding on to pride, even if it didn’t make sense in the narrative or in reality. 

Dehumanizing dinner featuring a creepiest of the creepy guys who just wants to kiss a black girl.

Dehumanize human marketplace for a maid/nanny.

Even the death – she dies alone, in a tub that, when we next see it, is wiped clean as if she never existed. She’s invisible to the world, and in death forgotten. For a film rooted in a kind of realism or neorealism to some extent, it’s entirely reliant upon symbolism for one to see its value and importance.

Take, for example, the mask. Which many of us felt was the most effective metaphor employed by the filmmaker. Form my perspective, when I first saw the mask on the wall of the French home, I applied meaning to it. I immediately judged the French couple as the type who “love Africa” and culturally appropriate their art in the way that I’m familiar with people who are enchanted by the exoticism of India, but have little care about the actual people and their experience there.

The mask’s origin.

The mask on the wall in France. a gift from Diouana.

The mask “chasing” Monsiur (Robert Fontaine) away in Dakar.

But I was too hasty; the mask evolves in the story, and we discover that it was actually Diouana who gave the mask to them as a gift. It’s genuine and authentic, whether the couple see it as anything other than a fascinating artifact. Then Diouana takes it down when she’s preparing to leave, causing a stir as Madam starts to get very upset with her but Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) says it’s hers after all, she can take it. This, too, is symbolic – is it a hope that Senegal and Africa will reclaim their indigeneity? Perhaps.

Then, the mask returns to Senegal after Monsieur brings it to the mother. A boy takes it and wears it, following Monsieur as he leaves but it has the feeling of dread – almost as if the boy in the mask is chasing the white man out. Out of the village, out of Senegal, out of Africa. This is where the symbolism in Black Girl is most effective – it’s thematic, it has a narrative push, and it’s active. 

It’s amazing this movie was made at all. In Africa, specifically in Senegal but also likely true elsewhere, Africans were banned from making movies due to a Nazi Vichy government law. Illegal! Such work was left to ethnographers, treating Africans as subjects of study instead of creating narrative work about their lived experience. The ban wasn’t lifted until 1960! Only six years before Black Girl is released. One can excuse any inexperience or amateurish filmmaking – by this point the West and Asia had been making films for sixty years. Without any production infrastructure in place, Sembene had to learn on the fly and scrape together the resources to make a movie.

Diouna arriving in France, wide eyed, but it will all go awry.

When you look at it from the production standpoint and look at the film as symbolism and metaphor, Black Girl is a stunning achievement. Sembene practically had to invent African film – hence his well-deserved title of Father of African cinema. Truly an incredible accomplishment, and Black Girl should be seen with all of this context to fully understand it’s value as a film.

Hard Eight (1996)

QFS No. 140 - The invitation for May 15, 2024
This is our first QFS selection of a Paul Thomas Anderson film. You know him from all of his great work over the last 25 years but Hard Eight was his first feature. I’ve seen so many of his films but I’ve never seen the first one so this week’s selection addresses that to remedy that shortcoming.

PT Anderson made Hard Eight when he was about 26 years old. What’s almost as infuriating as that is the next year, in 1997, he makes Boogie Nights and then two years later makes Magnolia (1999). By my count, that’s three major motion pictures before he was 30 – including two of those films, Magnolia and Boogie Nights I’d put up there as downright modern auteurist classics. The amount of stars he directed before 30 years old rivals any of the great filmmakers of all time.

Now, whether you enjoy his films or not is a matter of opinion of course. Although he has been Oscar-nominated eleven (11!) times for screenplay (5), directing (3) and best picture (3), he has never won one. This is probably bad luck and circumstance, but it also could be an indication of how people have mixed opinions on PT Anderson’s work.

For example, if you’re a fan of “The Rewatchables” podcast like I am, you probably know that they consider Boogie Nights one of the greatest films ever made. Personally, I enjoyed Magnolia more than Boogie Nights as a film, but even Magnolia is ripe for criticism – frogs and Aimee Mann and whatnot – and is not universally loved. PT Anderson has the young pre-fame filmmaking pedigree of Steven Spielberg in a way, but Anderson’s films are not mainstream nor are they small artistic and abstract explorations of the soul. He’s Martin Scorsese with less benefit of the doubt from critics. Both of them make movies lauded for artistry even though the narrative may not be so clean, but it feels like Scorsese’s long life as a dedicated artist gives him leeway with the public in ways that Anderson may not.

Of course, there is no perfect film devoid of criticism. For me his greatest achievement is There Will Be Blood (2012) one of three of his films nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture along with Phantom Thread (2018) and Licorice Pizza (2022). There Will Be Blood is a singular accomplishment of filmmaking in terms of its scope and its exploration of power, ambition, religion and will. Not to mention the sheer production feat of making a period film with an oil well explosion.

Apparently, PT Anderson’s next film will be released in 2025. All I know is that it’s his first film with Leonardo DiCaprio, which feels like a good fit when making the comparison with Scorsese. Scorsese is undoubtedly one of the greatest filmmakers of the second-half of the 20th Century, and continued on into this one. When we look back in a couple of decades about the greatest filmmakers at the start of the 21st Century, it’s hard to debate PT Anderson including at or near the top of the list. I’m looking forward to finally seeing his first one.

 Join me in seeing Hard Eight (1996) and discuss with us!

Hard Eight (1996) Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Reactions and Analyses:
When is it too late to reveal a major story point? The end of Planet of the Apes (1968) or Citizen Kane (1941) suggest that it’s never too late. Citizen Kane of course makes sense because that’s the conclusion of the hunt, whereas the why the world exists the way it does isn’t revealed until the last image, but it’s not the central driving why of the film. In Hard Eight (1996), our QFS discussion centered around the revelation of Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) and the central why motivation – why he’s behaving like the guardian angel or savior of man-child John (John C. Reilly).

The movie begins with Sydney taking in what appears to be a perfect stranger and offering him coffee and a smoke. It feels like Sydney knows something about John but it’s very cryptic. And for some reason, John goes on a road trip with Sydney and becomes his Players Card-scheme protégé. John does not ask why Sydney is being so kind to him.

Sydney picks up a “stranger” kicking off the question why in Hard Eight (1996).

And Sydney seems like he knows about John.

This sets off a really strange road trip.

Sydney teaches John how to get a room through Players Card scheme.

And as the film continues – even bridging two years over a first-act title card that advances time – we still don’t know why Sydney keeps being John’s angel. We get some hints about Sydney not having a connection with his own children, so the story evolves to suggest that John and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) are becoming surrogate children for him.

About halfway through the film, the question of why is still not resolved. It’s at this point that nearly all of the QFS members (myself included) started to sense that the film is meandering without a real sense of purpose or direction. To me and several of us, Hard Eight suffers from hiding the ball too long. We know so little about the characters except that John’s mother had died and he lost his money trying to win enough to pay for her funeral. The opening Players Card scam is so inspired and memorable, but then the film relies upon more mood and style rather than versus substance.

Even the revelation, finally when it happens, is not done visually or through some action by our main character. A supporting character, Jimmy (Samuel L Jackson), knows the truth – Sydney was a gangster who shot and killed John’s father – and he blackmails Sydney. Now that Syndey has taken John in as a son, there are personal stakes that we as an audience understand now.

Ohhhhh… that’s why. Samuel L Jackson (as “Jimmy”) tell us. But is it too late in the story to reveal that? Several us felt that yes, it’s too late.

This late revelation backloads the action and drama. Suddenly, there is plot and stakes. But since this happens late in the narrative arc, everything is crammed together as the film builds to a somewhat obvious conclusion: when you threaten a former gangster with blackmail, you’re probably going to get yourself killed.

And that’s exactly what happens. Sydney breaks into Jimmy’s home and shoots him as he’s coming home from a date. We get a simple glimpse of what a young Sydney must’ve been once like – cold, professional, efficient, and compassionate (he lets the date go home). There’s something fun about watching an aged gangster, living with regret, coming to terms with his past and trying to make up for something he’s done. But if we don’t know why he’s doing it, does that take away from our feelings about it? Everything does click a little bit better, but there are a lot of aspects of the story unsaid.

You threatened a former gangster with blackmail - what did you expect would happen?

Sydney comes to help out Clementine and John at a hotel room where a semi-conscious man lies handcuffed and beaten up. We are given bits of information as to what happened, but John and Clementine are so unreliable and distraught that it’s still unclear what happened in what is, up to this point, the only dramatic scene more than an hour into the movie. We learn that Clementine and John were married that day … and yet Clementine is still continuing work as a prostitute? Or is John (and maybe Jimmy?) acting as a pimp in an ill-conceived scheme for money?

The first really dramatic thing in Hard Eight happens about an hour into the movie and introduces a lot of questions.

Questions include - how doomed is this marriage?

Also – had Sydney been keeping tabs on John throughout his life, like Obi-wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker? Was John’s father a gangster too, because why else would Sydney feel so distraught? And why is Sydney in Reno or does he live there because he finds John somehow who doesn’t live there but then…

I’m not bringing up these holes specifically to attack the plot or premise. It’s more a reflection of the filmmaking here. The filmmaker is relying on style and not substance for so long, so then when we get some substance but not enough of it, we start reaching for more substance, as opposed to being brought along with the narrative. There is no obligation for a movie to explain everything; obfuscation can be a useful narrative tool especially in a movie. But Hard Eight keeps the audience in the dark in a way that seems to do a disservice to the storytelling.

Speaking of the filmmaker – of course, we selected this film as it’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie. The next two he makes, Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999) cement him as the next great director of a generation. Our conversation, however, helped illustrate how that’s a contentious claim on greatness. I pointed out in the QFS discussion that Hard Eight has a tonal issue. Are some of these scenes and situations supposed to be played for laughs? Are Jon and Clementine fun doofuses in the Coen Brothers mold? It’s hard to tell, but that balance comes through a little more in Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Others in the group feel that PT Anderson never ever quite gets tone right in any of his movies, as if the director enjoys turning a “tone dial”from one end to the other without any balance. I can see that – Magnolia swings from poignant moments between Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise) and his catatonic dying father to an infamous breaking-the-fourth-wall singing sequence to Aimee Mann’s “Save Me.” It’s bold, but for me personally, PT Anderson can pull off the tonal shifts with a few missteps here and there (the end of There Will Be Blood, 2009, is an example for me where the ending has a really whimsical tune followed by a goofy final line by Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Planview into the end credits).

In the end, we were interested in discerning what from this movie convinces producers, studios, and star cast to be in his next films? One benefit PT Anderson gets in the 1990s is that Hard Eight was made during the golden age of independent cinema. What probably didn’t hurt is that this is also the golden age of ample funding of music videos – a medium in which PT Anderson truly excelled. As far as films, there are a lot of 1990s studios willing to take risks on a fledgling filmmaker with a voice. For me, just seeing Hard Eight that voice isn’t totally clear – or rather, it isn’t totally clear to me what signaled to producers that this filmmaker has something unique that cannot be suppressed and has the instinct if not skill to tell a story expertly. It’s likely that the very real documented problems PT Anderson had in making Hard Eight – in which the studio attempted to recut it – prevented him from making a film fully of his desire.

Yet, his directing is confident, the command of the camera is elegant but at times more sizzle than steak. Comparing this to, say, Quentin Tarantino four years earlier in Reservoir Dogs (1992) or Wes Anderson three years earlier with Bottle Rocket (1993) with their first films, PT Anderson is harder to get a grasp of in terms of what convinced producers and studios of his greatness. One can easily see Reservoir Dogs showcases a writer-director of the highest order and Bottle Rocket suggests the quirkiness that will characterize all of Wes Anderson’s future work. But Hard Eight is harder to pin down. In three short years after Hard Eight releases, PT Anderson directs Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Luis Guzman, Don Cheadle, William H Macy, Heather Graham, Jason Robards, and of course Tom Cruise in a role that very nearly won him what would have been his only Oscar, across two landmark films.

Opening image of Hard Eight mirrors one of the final images.

What I’m trying to get at here is – how. Very much in line with the why we tried to address in Hard Eight. Not that it wasn’t ultimately correct to support this filmmaker at this stage of his fledgling career. However it ended up happening, the American film landscape is lucky someone saw whatever greatness lay in store for PT Anderson and gave him a chance to flourish. Without it, we wouldn’t have some of the more iconic films of the last 25 years.