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.”

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

20 Days in Mariupol (2023)

QFS No. 135 - The invitation for March 13, 2024
Long time QFS members know that we rarely select documentary films due to a long-standing bias against them within the ranks of our QFS Council of Excellence. This is only our third documentary selection. The other two – Honeyland (2019, QFS No. 5) and Flee (2021, QFS No. 69) were also both nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards, with Honeyland taking the prize in the 2020 Covid year Oscars. Flee did not win, but was the first film ever to be nominated for both Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature – a feat which is still pretty astonishing. It remains one of my personal favorite films of the decade. 

What both those films had in common were that although documentary films, they felt as if they were scripted narrative features. Honeyland followed an old lady  in Macedonia harvesting honey the old-fashioned way as if it was a scripted movie, in a sense. Flee also had a scripted animated feature film feel – both because of the story of the protagonist’s life and the masterful manner in which it was told.

Which brings us to 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) – a documentary which will likely have a similar narrative action film feeling. The story was introduced to me last year by my brother who sent me this link to an Associated Press story by and about AP journalists trapped in Ukraine as the Russians invaded. They had been reporting from the battlefield and soon discovered that they were also being hunted. As most of you know, my brother is a journalist and he first learned of this incredible story while serving on a committee that selected these reporters for an award. Of course upon reading the story myself, I immediately knew this was a movie and started to look into whether the rights were available. Little did I know that the documentary was being finalized with footage from the frontlines by the journalists themselves. A movie, in some fashion, was already in the works. 

The story is incredible and let me give you the lede right here: “The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.”

If that’s not the way to begin a great story – on screen or in print or otherwise – then I don’t know what is. The fact that it’s also a true story and one that we can watch, well I think we ought to do that.

20 Days in Mariupol (2023) directed by Mstyslav Chernov

Reactions and Analyses:
What can a documentary do that a scripted feature film cannot? This is one of the questions that went through my mind as I watched 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) and one of the first aspects of the film we discussed. In a narrative film, even a bleak film featuring war, desperation, doom and destruction all around – you would be hard pressed to find a movie that didn’t have some inkling of hope. Some path to escape, at least, if not victory outright for the protagonist.

In a documentary, however, there’s no expectation that you will receive that olive branch or lifeline from the filmmaker. The film can be as relentless as it needs to be because this is real. In a feature film, the filmmakers would (rightly?) be trashed for putting the audience through something relentlessly harrowing. In a documentary, you can turn that feeling into something like a duty to watch it. Because providing witness is what the filmmakers are hoping for in showcasing it for an audience.

One in our group put it that way – it felt like our duty to watch 20 Days in Mariupol. In part because the filmmaker-journalists made it their mission to make sure the world knew what was happening in Mariupol. Going into this film, I had some knowledge of what the filmmakers went through, having read the Associated Press reporting and also the story of the filmmakers being personally targeted by the Russian troops. I expected the filmmakers to include themselves in the storytelling, much in the way The Cove (2009) did – also an Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature – as someone in the QFS group brought up that parallel.

Refreshingly, the filmmakers of 20 Days in Mariupol did not give in to making the film about themselves beyond what was necessary to tell the story. Although Mstyslav Chernov’s voice guides us in voiceover, the camera is never turned inward. He reflects on occasion about being Ukrainian and there are artistic vignettes of a hand covered in sand and images of his children playing in safety, for example. But they are, thankfully, very few and used at just the right times and just the right ways to break up the constant movement and bloodshed we witness on screen.

To that point, another in our group brought up the moments where the filmmaker sits down, camera still rolling, and we see a hallway sideways or the ground, not focused on anything in particular. The filmmaker catches his breath, taking in the horror and pausing from showing more if it. The moments are needed relief and are a fascinating way of involving the filmmaker in the story in a subtle way. An editor and director could have easily cut those parts out as they don’t advance the “story” or any narrative, but keeping those moments in both help to humanize our filmmaker guides through the film but also to emphasize that we are in this with them – experiencing this with them.

One member of the group mentioned that we never see the filmmaker’s face (until the very end). And yet, we are riveted – we want him to survive. He is us. In that extraordinary action sequence when they have to escape the occupied city with a Ukrainian special strike force, the filmmaking is as good as any you’ll see in a modern war film or a video game. We’re running, we see the soldier in front of us talking when paused around a corner, we dive when an airplane screams overhead. We’re on the edge of our seat, wondering how the filmmaker will survive. And yet – we’ve never seen his face.

That’s a pretty remarkable feat. Perhaps it’s because it is us. We are looking and experiencing the world with this filmmaker and exclusively through his eyes throughout – which is perhaps another thing documentary does that a feature film wouldn’t be able to get away with necessarily. Not seeing the protagonist at all and playing the film entirely through point of view is a hallmark of “documentary style” but often you see clever ways a narrative filmmaker will at least give us a glimpse of the person holding the fictitious camera. But in the documentary, we don’t see the person holding the camera, favoring instead the horror but not in a gratuitous way – it’s real, seen how a person would. At times directly, at times looking away, searching for something else but drawn back to the calamity. The blood, the babies dying or living, the people grieving the death of a child or other family member. We experience it in what feels like real time through the filmmaker’s eyes.

And finally – since this is such a recent war, one still going on, there are so many elements that make it feel truly “modern.” There’s the mission to get internet. Seeing the dozens of power strips so people can charge their phones just to use them as flashlights. The familiar buildings (e.g. Crossfit gym!) being used as shelters or bombed out malls. And then, the entire social media storyline in which the Russians accuse the reporters of faking the bombed out maternity ward and using crisis actors. “Fake news,” if you will. History isn’t just written by the victors, it’s being written in real time – as one of our QFSers put it.

In Chernov’s Academy Award just a few days ago, he said:

“But I can't change history, I can't change the past, but we are all together, you and I, we are among the most talented people in the world. We can make sure that history is corrected, that the truth prevails. And so that the people of Mariupol who died and those who gave their lives will never be forgotten. Because cinema shapes memories, and memories shape history."

Chernov’s use of footage he shot which then later appears as news footage in television programs around the world is incredibly effective in so many ways, but in one way in particular. It reminds us that one of the main driving narrative thrusts of the film is we need to get the story to the world. To prove it happened and so no one forgets. The fact that it was real, that it was a documentary, makes it more urgent for the filmmakers to share it and for the world’s eyes to see it. They got it out to the world and we’ve seen it. We were witness and it was, indeed, a duty to help shape memories and history.

Black Narcissus (1947)

QFS No. 131 - The invitation for December 13, 2023
Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell are the powerhouse directing duo from England whose legendary work includes The Red Shoes (1948, QFS No. 52), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), 49th Parallel (1941) with Laurence Olivier, The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), and of course this week’s selection The Black Narcissus. I’ve only scratched the surface myself with their career work but everything I’ve seen has been incredibly impressive. It’s no wonder they are so influential to the following generation of filmmakers – Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee to name two – and I feel they need to be studied further by us and future filmmakers.

One of the hallmarks of Pressburger and Powell is their masterly grasp of film craft. The cinematography in their films is legendary and was duly awarded throughout their careers. Their art direction, costumes and set design are unforgettable. I point you to The Red Shoes for a textbook in the complementary usof all those elements as a case in point. Their numerous Oscar nominations for screenwriting and several for editing illustrate their excellence in storytelling for the visual medium.

Black Narcissus is one of those films I should have seen already. I know about its enduring cinematography and some of the story elements, but I’ve never seen it. It’s a big oversight in my viewing history that I’m happy to remedy now. I’m excited to finally see it and continue with my exploration of Pressburger and Powell.

Black Narcisscus (1947) Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Reactions and Analyses:
The wind. Besides the sweeping vistas, the first thing you really become aware of in Black Narcissus is the wind. Before we even physically arrive at the monastery, the characters make mention of how the wind is unavoidable up there, on the cliffside in the Himalayas above the village in the valley below.

And throughout the film, the wind is a nearly constant. It blows the fringes of the habits of the nuns, shakes the flowering tree branches and the tassels on the drapes. No matter what anyone does, the wind can never be dominated. There is an uncontrollable force that can never be mastered out there all around you and it’s folly for anyone who tries to master it. Worse – the attempt to control an unseen force like that can lead to suffering and madness.

To me, this is one of the overarching metaphors of the film. A group of white nuns come to a palace no longer used in order to turn it into a missionary, to bring their teachings, medicine and religion to a place and people who believe in other ways of being. The group is small and recent; the people already there are ancient and vast.

One way of looking at Black Narcissus is that it’s an interpretation of British colonialism, specifically in South Asia. A small group of people, atop a hill looking down on and away from the locals, are trying to remake a world they’re not normally part of. And they cannot. They can’t control the primal, human nature of the place. (The nuns, are temporary – the winds live forever. India achieves independence from England in 1947, which is the year Black Narcissus is released so this is a very plausible interpretation as it would’ve been on the mind of writer-director Brits Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.)

From Black Narcissus (1947) where you can see branches pushed back and the nun’s habit fluttering.

The wind took up a good amount of our discussion about the film. To one QFSer, the wind felt as if it represented the spirit of one’s past, haunting you. Another said he felt the wind revealed yourself to yourself, like a mirror in which you are forced to look at your own image and reflect. It reveals yourself to you. Several of the nuns have joined the order because they have a past they were trying to leave, especially Sister Clodaugh (Deborah Kerr). The solitude of the place, the natural elements, the long vista horizon – Sister Phillipa (Flora Robson) mentions she’s staring to lose faith upon seeing the infinite up there – forces each to confront something about themselves.

For Sister Clodaugh, she hadn’t even thought about her old lover since joining the order – not until she was up on the mountain at the monastery. Then the place, the wind, brought those memories back to her. The primal forces bringing to life primal emotions and urges.

It’s impossible to watch this film and not be utterly swept away by the filmmaking craft. If ever there was a film in which you could feel the hand of a master filmmaker carrying you along, it’s this. (Or master filmmakers to be more accurate.) Everything is tightly constructed and deliberate. The camera pushes in slowly in mid-conversation, but only when needed. Sister Coldaugh puts out her hand to shake Mr. Dean (David Farrar)’s hand, but he instead grasps it gently and squeezes ever so slightly – an intimate moment played entirely in a medium 2-shot with a wide enough lens that the action in the background of the nuns leaving can still be seen. I couldn’t help but say that producers on shows I’ve directed would’ve been horrified if I didn’t shoot a close ups on each person and then an insert on the hand to really hammer it home. But here, the directors choose to play it in a medium 2-shot – so simple, so perfect, and conveys intimacy, sensuality and their connection.

Pressburger and Powell also use canted/Dutch angles selectively but that are so well composed that one QFSer mentioned that they convey motion and movement without actually moving the camera. The close ups fill the frame, with extreme close ups on the eyes or on lipstick being applied to the lips. Contrast that with the wide vistas throughout the picture. The control and firm tightness of the film definitely evoked their The Red Shoes (1948) that the duo makes the year after this movie.

Speaking of those vistas, those matte paintings – for me, this is one of the greatest films ever shot on stage that looks like it wasn’t shot on stage. (One in the group disagreed with me so there’s a difference of opinion on that.) Another QFSer brought up that by using the images of the Himalayas in that particular style (black-and-white photographs painted with chalk), the filmmakers set up the painterly aspect of the film from the start. It’s not “reality” but it’s a painted reality – something that’s heightened and even more beautiful than reality. This painterly set up allows you to accept those vistas and the disappear into the story.

Epic matte paintings throughout Black Narcicuss of the vast vistas and grandeur around them, giving the film a painterly quality.

But it’s not just that they are beautiful, it’s what they represent. The vastness, the superiority of creation all around them, to me, makes the nuns not only smaller, but their mission almost meaningless and futile in the face of the abyss, the infinite around them. In particular, the part of the set with the huge church bell. The staging of this is astonishing. Not only is it on the edge and gives us a feeling that these nuns are all teetering on the precipice of stability, but the sheer (pun intended) technical feat of this – the directors had to have multiple matte painting backgrounds to simulate reality. There are the wide shots from behind the bell looking out towards the mountains. Then there are angles that show the bell, the nuns on the left of the frame, and the valley stretching out into the distance. And then, to top it off, there’s a high angle matte painting – a shot from above the bell looking down into the distant canyon floor below. All of these had to be conceived, planned out, then rendered in advance. The filmmakers couldn’t just walk on set and choose where to put the camera because they had to create that reality beforehand according to their vision in advance. It’s all so astonishing and inspiring.

This is perhaps my favorite shot of the Black Narcissus, just from the sheer (pun intended) complex planning this required to ensure there was a matte painting created for this perspective. It also enhances the distance of the characters from the village, introduces an element of danger, and symbolically shows the nuns living on the egde - literally and metaphorically.

It's been documented that Pressburger and Powell took inspiration from the Dutch painter Vermeer and his landscapes. A member of the group pointed out that it has a lot of single source lighting as well, evocative of the painting of Caravaggio. Which is no small feat for Technicolor stock that required far more light to properly expose than the human eye requires. Painterly is definitely an apt word for this film.

Vermeer has been cited by cinematographer Jack Cardiff as a reference for the vast lanscapes of Black Narcisuss, but we could see also detect similarities to Caravaggio, as depected here in The Calling of St. Matthew (1600).

What genre is this movie? That is a question someone in the group asked. Of course, it’s drama – but could it also be a thriller, with a horror-like climactic resolution? There’s a warning early on by Mr. Dean that they won’t make it until the rains come. And, ultimately, that happens. But Black Narcissus in one way of looking at it is akin to a closed-room thriller where they all start to go crazy and then one attempts to kill one of them.

In an admittedly strange comparison, I brought up Danny Boyle’s overlooked Sunshine (2007) that features a mission to the sun to launch nuclear weapons into it in order to kickstart the failing sun’s heat. In Sunshine, everyone is on a mission, they start going crazy, and there’s somehow an entity on board who tries to kill them as the film goes on. It’s not a perfect parallel, but after seeing the slow burn of Black Narcissus there’s an argument to be made that this can be considered a thriller in many ways. (Another in the group brought up Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, 1940, for its feel in the same filmmaking era.)

A QFSer brought up this exchange and its potential importance, which reflects the film’s title:

Young Prince: Do you like it, Sister Ruth? It's called Black Narcissus. Comes from the Army-Navy Stores in London.

Sister Ruth: Black Narcissus. I don't like scent at all.

Young Prince: Oh, Sister, don't you think it's rather common to smell of ourselves?

The group member’s assessment is that this is the thematic statement of the film. Here is something that’s being done to cover ourselves, to mask our natural scent. We humans all create a natural smell but we tend to hide it with something. For the nuns, it’s their faith masks their natural self (literally and figuratively), obscures their personal pasts. But you can only cover it – there’s the inner animalistic nature that we all have that either remains suppressed or emerges with time. And it can emerge in scary, deadly ways as it does with Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron).

In the scene where Sister Ruth puts on her make up – something that covers up something natural – Sister Clodaugh picks up the bible. Is this her cover? Is that what the directors are saying, that religion is a cover for the natural animal of ourselves? Perhaps, which sounds like a pretty subversive criticism of organized religion if that’s their intention.

There’s also something to the sadhu, the holy man who sits in reverent silence on the mountain top. Different religions orders come and go, but he remains there, unfazed. The image of an ascetic praying at the mountain, selfless, having achieved enlightenment and a oneness with everything around them is a common one in Hindu literary and religious traditions. Lord Shiva is often portrayed this way, long locks of matted hair, seated atop the Himalayas. This feels like the filmmakers are tying this into theme of colonialism trying to corral an ancient people and its faith, but it could also be an endorsement of a more mystical an ancient spirituality that worships out in the world and not confined within stone walls.

Left to right - Shiva statue atop Shiva Mandir in Bangalore (credit Darshan Karia), the holy man (uncredited or least I can’t find it) from Black Narcissus, Illustration of Shiva (artist credit unknown). Note Jean Simmons (Kanchi), the Indian bowing before him who is, notably, not actually Indian.

Which leads me to brown face. Do I Iike all the brown face, all the white actors playing South Asians in this film? I do not. I understand this is a “product of the time” and that argument is used as way to blow past criticism of using Jean Simmons (Kanchi), Esmond Knight (The Old General) and May Hallatt (Angu Ayah) as South Asians. But … come on. At the time they’re making Black Narcissus, India has a robust and growing film industry with many terrific actors who all are fluent in English. And though the film is being produced when the British are being finally kicked out of India, they are still intertwined in the Subcontinent. Pressburger and Powell could have easily gotten an Indian actor up to the standards of an international production and gotten them a ticket to London. I would almost buy the dearth-of-local-talent argument if Black Narcissus had been shot in 1946 Los Angeles where South Asians would’ve numbered at best in the dozens, as opposed to 1946 England where there are literally hundreds of South Asians at this time. As (soon-to-be-former) members of the British Empire who could study in London, just as Mohandas Gandhi and others had, there was a South Asian diaspora already living there. The production could easily have had a casting search for these actors but the fact is (and by that, I mean my educated guess) they simply didn’t want to because “at the time” people didn’t really care if they cast white Europeans and painted their face brown to make them ethnic. So it’s not lack of South Asian talent at fault here, but a lack of production effort. (Okay, end of rant. As a South Asian American, this rant has been my special privilege to contribute here.)

Aside from this (and from the utterly preposterous series of costume choices for Mr. Dean) Black Narcissus is an essential work. The conclusion is masterful. I was clutching my seat, not knowing who would die in the final scene. The deranged look of Sister Ruth – a look that one of our group pointed out must’ve influenced Stanley Kubrick a generation later – as she emerges, skeletal and red-eyed, as she emerges from the doorway is pure horror film perfection. And then that shot, looking up at Sister Clodaugh with the bell swinging behind her head as she gazes in horror down into the abyss has left an indelible imprint in my mind.

The final harrowing confrontation between Sister Ruth and Sister Clodaugh with its gripping imagery.

The rains eventually come and indeed, Mr. Dean is right – they made it until the rains but no more. You know it’s not a Hollywood film of the era. Here, someone at the beginning predicts the protagonists will fail and then they eventually do just that. There are scores of other films that would’ve seen these nuns triumph and overcome adversity. But the mission is doomed from the start. And in one of the final shots, the fog covers up the monastery high above as they are all leaving. This, like all of the shots in Pressburger and Powell’s masterpiece, is deliberate and not just a beautiful and poignant image. There are forces in the world that are too powerful for humans to control – from the external world to our inner nature – let alone comprehend, and an attempt to do so will certainly lead to doom.

The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

QFS No. 130 - The invitation for December 6, 2023
As I know you’re aware, this here is simply your standard Soviet-Armenian fare that we’ve been bombarded with in the cinemas over the years.

Truly, I know almost nothing about the film except that it is frequently included in filmmakers’ favorite movie lists. It’s even in the top 250 in the British Film Institute’s expanded Best Films of All Time list, clocking in at No. 122* (No. 93 on the Director’s Poll). For list lovers, The Color of Pomegranates is in a six-way tie at 122 with There Will Be Blood (2007), The Matrix (1999), Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), the French film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Only Angels Have Wings (1939), which is a Howard Hawks classic.

Martin Scorsese compared The Color of Pomegranates to “opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed.” I am here and ready to walk into another dimension.

The only other thing I know about the film is that it is short (1 hour and 19 minutes) and will be the second-shortest QFS selection since A Christmas Carol (1938) that we watched over our first lockdown Christmas in 2020, a slender 1:09. So at the very least, this will take up only a small amount of your precious social media doomscrolling time.

 Anyway, do join me to discuss The Color of Pomegranates.  

*Interestingly, a four-way tie just before that at No. 118 includes three QFS Selections: The Thing (1987, QFS No. 115), Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972, QFS No. 40), The Conformist (1970, QFS No. 107) and to round it all out, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), which we haven’t selected… yet.

The Color of Pomegranates (1969) Directed by Sergei Parajanov

Reactions and Analyses:
A common question that we tangle with at QFS is what can you consider a film versus art? Of course, a film can be both. But when approaching an experimental or surrealist work made for the screen, it’s a valid question. Does a film require an overt narrative, or at least a narrative that can be interpreted? Or is a film anything you point a camera at, that a filmmaker assembles and showcases for an audience? Is it somewhere in between?

From our discussion, everyone agreed that The Color of Pomegranates (1969) is undoubtedly a work of art. One QFSer said that you could imagine seeing this projected or displayed at a museum of modern or contemporary art. Or even a selection of the images could be placed on display. Indeed, even the director Sergei Parajanov stated that instead of bringing “art to life” he was bringing “life to art.” And you can see in his compositions that they resemble illuminated manuscripts or two-dimensional artwork common to Persia and in the Transcaucasus region - Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan - where the story takes place. Select a frame from the film and you could imagine seeing it literally framed and in a museum.

Scene from The Color of Pomegranates (1969) directed by Sergei Parajanov.

But does that make it a film? There’s no answer to the question, and I personally have trouble tangling with distinguishing between a film and art and whether a line exists between then, fuzzy though it may be. For me, as I watch a film, my mind immediately tries to latch on to a narrative, a story, a character whose journey we’re following. I have tolerance for vagueness, but it’s on a scale. Ambiguity and vagueness are fine if I’m brought into the film through the craft, the style - dare I say, the art of the filmmaking. So when I watched The Color of Pomegranates, I had to actively suppress my desire to understand what it “means” or to tease out a story. And yet, I was transported into the tableaus and the world created enough to be brought along for the ride.

Early on in QFS we selected Eraserhead (1977, QFS No. 22), a film I hadn’t seen before (I was shamed to admit this especially since I share an alma mater with the director). When watching it back then, I remember having to turn off the part of my mind that was trying to find the story and instead I allowed myself to just experience. I had the same feeling while watching this movie. A QFSer pointed out, rightly, that Eraserhead teases a narrative enough to draw you in, but then pulls the rug out from you and you’re left with the film’s haunting imagery.

Others in the group brought up Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, QFS No. 98) - a film that required merely observing a life. One member of our group brought up the differences between how each Jeanne Dielman and The Color of Pomegranates grab your attention. In Jeanne Dielman, you’re brought into the film - a slow film with very few edits - because you feel like you’re a fly on the wall of a life that’s rooted in a familiar reality. In The Color of Pomegranates, you’re brought into the film because of the visuals and that it’s unfamiliar and surreal. You don’t know what’s happening next and even if you do, you don’t really know why or what it means. What’s fascinating is that this is enough to pull you along and to see what happens next.

After watching the film, I needed to learn more about the filmmaker, the poet, Armenia, early Christianity - basically everything. My curiosity was very much piqued. I highly recommend the Criterion Channel’s 40-minute visual essay by James Steffen about the film. He goes through shot-by-shot and helps give context and suggests meaning throughout. If you look closely, you can definitely see that it follows a boy as he grows up into a man and ultimately dies at the film’s conclusion, leaving behind only his muse and his work. I’m not saying I knew this when I watched it, but having a guide with me in this way was a boon. Much like a guided tour at an art museum.

How do you visualize poetry? Or how do you render the life of a poet - someone who looks at the world and tries to synthesize all around him or her and turn it into an exploration of existence. How in a film do you go about doing that? One way is a more straightforward biopic about the person’s lived life. Another way is Parajanov’s way - tell it as a visual poem, bringing the poet’s creative work to life. Parajanov’s telling is laced with Christian metaphors (which evoked, for me possibly because we recently watched it, The Seventh Seal, 1957, QFS No. 127) and imagery that evokes childhood (the books, his teachers), adolescence (spying on a woman bathing, the chicken-blood ritual), adulthood (learning the instrument, working as a priest), old age (surrounded by angels and holding a helmeted skull), and death (lying dead among candles… and chickens). It’s not a filmmaking style that comes naturally to me, but it’s something that I deeply admire and enjoy watching on screen - and will likely use as a visual reference in the future.

“Sergei Parajanov, the Serious Wes Anderson.”
Top: Asteroid City (2023) Directed by Wes Anderson. Bottom: The Color of Pomegranates (1969) Directed by Sergei Parajanov.

One final thought - a member of our group said that the filmmaking was like “a serious Wes Anderson.” Which is a terrific insight. When you see the film’s flat space framing and use of colors, you can seemingly draw a straight line to Wes Anderson, but through Andrei Tarkovsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch. It’s easy to see why The Color of Pomegranates continues to inspire filmmakers even know. His imagery, abstraction and experimental surrealism carves out a unique legacy for a filmmaker - artist? - that keeps Parajanov relevant for us to study today.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

QFS No. 127 - The invitation from November 8, 2023
Sweden’s legendary director Ingmar Bergman is one of those essential filmmakers whose work you’re required to familiarize yourself with if you go to film school and intend to be a director. And with good reason. His films are deeply empathetic and explore what it means to be human in a style that I would characterize as part of the Neorealist movement that swept through post-war Europe. But Bergman’s films have something even deeper and more meditative, a true journey into the soul that grapples with questions of morality and spirituality at their core. 

Incredibly influential to filmmakers after him, Bergman wrote most of his own work and was a true auteur in film and television. Just look at some of his accolades – it’s pretty impressive to be Oscar-nominated five times for Best Original Screenplay when you’re not writing in the English language. To me, that’s astonishing. It’s a high bar for Academy members to look past the language barrier and to nominate a film for its written work - and Bergman did it five times over several decades! 

For me, I’m still making my way through Bergman’s work – especially Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972) and Fanny and Alexander (1983) which are high on my list of movies to see. His Wild Strawberries (1957), however, is a film I’ve seen in the theater and is a true masterpiece in its structure, style, pacing and exploration of a complex life lived. And, amazingly, he made it in the same year as he made this week’s selection The Seventh Seal. Two classics released in the same year has to be up there as one of the greatest single-year outputs by a filmmaker, rivaling Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 (The Godfather Part II and The Conversation) and Steven Spielberg’s 1993 (Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park).  

As for The Seventh Seal – I’ve seen it once before but never in a theater so I’m looking forward to catching it at The New Beverly. I don’t want to ruin it for you if you haven’t yet seen it, but it’s probably the best Swedish movie to be spoofed in one of the films in the Bill and Ted’s Adventure Trilogy.  

The Seventh Seal is an iconic, classic film and I’m excited to watch it again and discuss with you.

The Seventh Seal (1957) Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Reactions and Analyses:
Volumes have been written about The Seventh Seal and it has inspired a generation of filmmakers after it. The film comes out in 1957 and is perhaps one of the first instances in the West where the main thrust of the film is a philosophical one - is there a God and if there is, why is He/She/It silent? Not that a philosophical question hadn’t been posed in a film before, but here the film openly debates in both dialogue and in metaphoric action the philosophical question of whtehter or not there is a higher purpose. The knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) spends the entire time literally dealing with Death - an embodied death (Bengt Ekerot) in the form of a grim reaper with whom he plays chess. So the existential question of what comes after death is more than just an undercurrent - it is the current. Philosophizing about the existence of a higher power is not just theme it’s also plot in The Seventh Seal.

As someone who was not raised in the Christian tradition but grew up in a mostly Catholic neighborhood, some of the symbolism was familiar to me but there is a lot that I missed. So I turned to members of our group who had that religious background to fill in some details. One idea that came up was - is the knight dead the entire time? The film opens on the shoreline and the squire Jons (Gunnar Bjornstrand) lies facedown - dead? Sleeping? Even the knight is lying on his side when he sees Death approaching. Is it possible that he, like Christ, is close to death and dying himself and actually on a metaphoric cross contemplating the existence of God, begging for an answer? It might not be as straightforward as that, but there are definitely nods to this aspect of Christ’s divinity and story throughout.

The knight played by Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal (1957), showing reverence towards Death.

Examples abound. There’s Jof (or “Joseph” played by Nils Poppe) and Mia (which is a Swedish abbreviation of “Maria,” played by Bibi Andersson) - Jof literally sees visions of the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus, of ghosts, of Death at the end, and Mia has an infant son Mikael (reference to the Archangel Michael?) with whom they travel around as itinerant performers. They gather a band of misfits and travel a ravaged, doomed countryside, rife with sinners and stricken by the plague at the end of the Crusades. The parallels to the life of Christ are easy to find if you just scratch the surface.

Aside from the symbolism, the central question Ingmar Bergman asks: with all this evil and destruction in the world, how is it possible there’s a benevolent God out there? From interviews, we know that Bergman was raised in a religious family and was terrified by death, seeing Albuertus Pictor’s church paintings depicting death playing chess against a knight. He says he wrote the film “to conjure up on his fear of death.” In the film we see a woman burned alive, a parade of people self-flagellating, people who died and just rotted away in place, others consumed by the plague. An entire village is empty. The group felt clear that Bergman answered the question, that the silence from heaven is what he fears - we are alone in a cruel world.

Parade of the flagellants from The Seventh Seal (1957) Directed by Ingmar Bergman.

And yet, there’s the one scene where he is picnicking with Jof and their family. In the idyllic setting, with a slow pullback as he talks to reveal more of the setting, the knight says he’s truly happy. He’s saying that life is worth living here and now, and not for the afterlife because who knows whether there is one or not. For me, this scene is the one that gives me hope for the film. That there is beauty in the world, and that it lies in friendship and moments of sublimity. QFSers in the discussion pointed out that Bergman provides an answer of what to do if there is indeed no higher being - do good acts. “One meaningful deed” as the knight strives to do.

A film is not the same thing as an essay, and except for the most experimental films, generally speaking a film needs a plot. So aside from a parallel Christ story, Bergan borrows from other familiar literary traditions of the knight returning home, his squire at his side. There are echoes of Don Quixote and Sanch Panza, but without the fool’s errand aspect. Here in The Seventh Seal, the knight is the serious, questioning soul and the squire is the cynic, who says, for example, “Our crusade was so stupid that only a true idealist could have thought it up.” This is quite an indictment of someone who was part of waging a literal holy war. Although lightly plotted, the knight has a mission to ensure the life of that family - his one meaningful deed - all while keeping Death at bay. It’s this adventure tale, interwoven with the mystical, that keeps the film moving through the more philosophical aspects. And, for me at least, herein lies Bergman’s genius - you’re pulled in by the intriguing plot device and narrative, and you’re led to contemplate the meaning of something bigger as the story unfolds. Bergman asks: Are we alone? Bergman also answers: If we are, let’s do something righteous and live for the here and the now.

This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019)

QFS No. 124 - The invitation for October 11, 2023
I know this will come as a shock to many of you, but this will be our first Quarantine Film Society selection from Lesotho. The country has about 2 million people – which is, I believe, still smaller than what the population of Los Angeles would be if the San Fernando Valley succession happened in 2002. Lesotho is completely surrounded by South Africa and the country’s motto was “No, not Swaziland – the other one.” (At least that’s what I assume it was before Swaziland changed their name to Eswatini.) Lesotho remains a really great answer in geographic trivia. That’s about all I know. The fact that there exists a film from Lesotho (pronounced “le-SUE-to”)* that’s available for us to see it pretty terrific and I want us to see it.

Also, this is our first film from anywhere in Africa since our seventh ever selection way back in 2020, the obscure Air Conditioner (2020, QFS No. 7) from Angola. This is a shameful tally, I admit, and it’s mostly due to me and the QFS Selection Committee knowing almost nothing about films that come out of Africa. It’s also true that very few films from Africa are being widely distributed in the US. Nollywood – the moniker given to Nigerian films, the most prolific filmmaking nation outside of India – is still completely obscure to me, but I hope to select a film from there in the future. Regardless, three years is a long time between films from an entire region of the world. The QFS Selection Committee Member responsible for this digression has been reassigned.

As for This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection** – this is not a movie I know a whole lot about, other than it was featured on the Criterion Channel which got me curious to read a tiny bit about it earlier this year. Enough to get me interested in seeing it. As you all know by now, I firmly believe in film’s ability to transport you into a person, a being, or a place completely and utterly unknown to you and, if done well, can take you on a journey that is extremely unique and specific to that world but touches on something of a shared humanity we have with people unlike us. I hope this week’s selection is able to do just that.

Either way, it will be pretty fun to take a trip to Lesotho for a couple hours. Join me in watching This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection and we’ll discuss!

*Believe it or not, I have actually been to and stayed in Swaziland for a week, back in 2010 (before it was renamed Eswatini). I was helping a friend shoot a documentary in Swaziland and South Africa. It is here were I learned, crucially, how to correctly pronounce “Lesotho.”

 **This is one of our few QFS selections where the title could also be a complete sentence. The others: Knives Out (2019, QFS No. 6), A Man Escaped (1956, QFS No. 9), Dolemite is My Name (2019, QFS No. 15), The Lady Vanishes (1936, QFS No. 24), You Can’t Take it With You (1938, QFS No. 47), Escape from New York (1981, QFS No. 61), Flee (2021, QFS No. 69), Enter the Dragon (1973, QFS No. 73), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975, QFS No. 75) and though it might be not intended this way, How Green Was My Valley (1941, QFS No. 121) could be an exclamatory sentence or a question. True, Knives Out, Escape from New York, Enter the Dragon and Flee all would have to be commands (imperatives, if you will: “Flee!”), I think it’s hilarious that someone could order you to “Enter the Dragon” in a non-ironic way. This is the important high level analysis you can expect from the crack team here at QFS.

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019) Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese

 Reactions and Analyses
I can safely say, this is my favorite film from Lesotho. The best way to describe this movie is that it is a visual poem. Everything is lyrical, from the narration to the vistas and the composition. There’s quite a long time until a plot device appears, and when it does it has a familiarity to it - a simple person fighting for tradition and standing up to “progress.” A faceless march of time that will literally wash away this place.

The pace is languid and so much rests on the window Mantoa’s face. Portrayed by the late Mary Twala Mhlongo, her face tells so much of the story. She is the strength of the story as much as the visuals are. This is Not a Burial is more fable than movie.

The unforgettable face of the late Mary Twala as “Mantoa” in This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019) does much of the heavy lifting in a languidly paced film.

Pace is such an fascinating thing in film. This movie isn’t that long as a matter of real time, but it feels long. In part because the plot is thin but it also makes sense because it feels like the pace of village life. The pace of the film mimicking the pace of the locale.

The “burial” in question is her own - she prepares for it and asks a fellow villager to dig a grave for her. She ends up having to do it herself, covered in sweat, under the cover of darkness. The “resurrection” - here’s where the group had some disagreement about. Not that the resurrection as such doesn’t happen, but it’s very subtle and at first I didn’t quite grasp it. Mantoa decides to stay on the land and not leave with her fellow villagers who are being relocated to the capital Maseru (yes I had to look up the capital of Lesotho), moving towards … soldiers? Government workers at the very least. And she disrobes, moving towards them to a certain death.

But - how does it, her death, happen? Do they shoot her? It doesn’t seem like they’d concern themselves too much with one 80-year-old (naked) woman to actually kill her - they could just simply work around her. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, what matters is that this is her death or it will be soon. Her “burial,” and her “resurrection” is the little girl who watches her in this act of martydom - yes?

Mantoa (Mary Twala), digging her own grave (literally, not figuratively).

To me, that felt a little thin. To others, it made sense. For a film that’s a visual poem and rests on lyricism, concrete answers are not necessary. The film is a tone, a mood, and on that alone it’s really quite lovely to watch and explore its meanings. The film’s title could easily be This is not a film, it’s a fable - a lyrical visual poem that feels as if it’s a local legend one would share with a friend. A fable that’s bittersweet, hopeful and a cautionary tale of indigenous peoples facing the unreleting march of time and modernity.

Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

QFS No. 122 - The invitation for September 27, 2023
Another Italian* film, you say? Well, you longtime members of QFS will remember that Sharat is making his way through the film requirements he was supposed to be have finished before beginning as a grad student at the American Film Institute. We previously watched A Man Escaped (1956, QFS No. 9), Burnt by the Sun (1994, QFS No. 58) and Swept Away (1974, QFS No. 82). Rocco and His Brothers is another one of those films** that Sharat needs to complete 22 years ago.  

Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti is a favorite of Martin Scorsese, calling him “one of the greatest artists in the history of cinema.” Scorsese listed Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) as one of his favorite films from the Criterion Collection, and I was lucky enough to catch The Leopard at the Aero Theater recently in Santa Monica. The Leopard is a lush production with a great cast unfolding a story over nearly three hours.

 I can’t say if Rocco and His Brothers will be the same, but the length sure is. I really enjoyed The Leopard and need to expand my knowledge of Visconti more in order to be a more effective filmmaker at the AFI Conservatory circa 2001. So thank you for helping me complete my AFI coursework! Join me to discuss.

*With this selection, Italy vaults back into the lead with most QFS films from a single country with six, over taking India’s five. Related, the best restaurant in Los Angeles is Pijja Palace in Echo Park which is an Indian-Italian fusion sports bar. Pijja Palace is No. 1 on the QFS Restaurant Critic’s list of Best Places for Sharat to Attempt to Eat More Food Than He Can Physically Consume list.

**The remaining, since you asked: Intimate Lighting (1966) directed by Ivan Passer; Les Enfants Du Paradis (1945) directed by Marcel Carne; Blue (1993) directed by Krzysztog Kieslowski and part of his “Colors” trilogy; La Guerre Est Finie (1959) directed by Alain Resnais; Vagabond (1985) directed by Agnes Varda. Either my final boss to defeat in this game will be La Guerre Est Finie – not available online and French – or Les Enfants Du Paradis, which clocks in at more than three hours long and is also French. Stay tuned!

Rocco and his Brothers (1960) Directed by Luchino Visconti

Reactions and Analyses:
Early in the film, when the family has moved into their basement dwelling in Milan fresh their migration from the south, Nadia (Annie Girardot) seeks refuge in their home. We’ve barely met the brothers and they all are somewhat indistinguishable from each other. Each handsome in different ways, a couple of them seem a little younger. But they feel somewhat broadly drawn.

As the film unfolds, we get a gradual fleshing out of each brother, as if from a fog with a detail of one becoming clearer. And then another and another as the film evolves. This continues, interwoven, as each “chapter” introduces a brother one-by-one. But the narrative continues forwards as well and at some point, perhaps halfway through the film, I felt as if I knew each of these brothers intimately. I did, because Luchino Visconti makes sure of it.

This is a remarkable feat for a film that has five main male leads in it, a mother, a female lead, and a few supporting characters as well. Rocco and His Brothers (1960) is a thoroughly rich world created by a director who's known for creating rich worlds (case in point: The Leopard, 1963). If I hadn’t already known it going in, I would’ve guessed this influenced the likes of Francis Ford Coppola (his inspiration for the brothers in The Godfather, 1972) and Martin Scorsese. Scorsese in particular - the boxing sequences in Rocco and His Brothers are incredibly intimate, with the camera inside the ring right next to Rocco (Alain Delon) in his fight enhancing its intimacy. Scorsese goes even further in Raging Bull (1980) with his use of speeds and cutting. But in Rocco and His Brothers - the use of the crowd, the black and white cinematography, the lighting on the boxing ring, the cutting to the crowd - all of it feels like an origin story for Scorsese. For Coppola, it’s been well documented how he fashioned the Corleone brothers after the Parondi brothers. Not to mention hiring Nino Rota to create the score for The Godfather (1972). The Rocco and His Brothers score definitely gives birth to The Godfather’s.

Boxing sequences in Rocco and His Brothers (1960) Directed by Luchino Visconti. Twenty years later, Martin Scorsese makes Raging Bull (1980), influenced by Visconti’s work here.

What’s additionally fascinating for a film so long and sprawling is that Rocco and His Brothers has no central narrative. It is the tale of a family, an “immigrant” tale, and how a family evolves, fractures, and attempts to survive in the city. To tell a story about without a gripping plot, you need to have fully realistic characters - people who feel like real humans who you care about or at the very least are curious about.

Simone (Renato Salvatori) starts as sort of a lovable brute with base instincts, undisciplined, but when driven by jealousy or shame, he drops the “lovable” almost entirely - and yet, you understand him. Or at least, I feel like I’ve known “Simones” in my life. Rocco (Alain Delon) is selfless, blinded by loving his brother but also genuinely in love with Nadia. And Nadia genuinely falls in love with Rocco as opposed to using Simone. And she gets revenge on Simone by dragging him down by using his obsession against him - but it kills her too. It’s all sordid and when written out like that seems more like a soap opera. And yet, Rocco and His Brothers rarely feels overly melodramatic (caveat: this is a film from Italy; some melodrama can be excused).

The film, of course, takes an incredibly dark turn and features what is probably one of the most disturbing rape scenes in cinema history. Not the most graphic, but definitely among the most disturbing. And, I’d argue, perhaps one of the most disturbing knife killing in cinema history.

A QFS member brought up that this felt like a dark Grapes of Wrath. Which is a pretty spot on way to look at it. A family, driven by poverty, forced to migrate within their country and find shelter, comfort, and a living in a strange place.

I’ve noticed a common thread I’ve noticed in many QFS selections, that of this immigrant or migrant story. Human migration is a source of so much drama, such fascinating stories - and it spans eras and nations. Our most recent selection, How Green Was My Valley (1941, QFS No. 121), is in part about the causes of migration. America America (1963, QFS No. 87), directed by Elia Kazan only three years after Rocco and His Brothers, tells that tale from Turkey through poor Greeks leaving their homes. Apur Sansar (1959, QFS No. 16) is in many ways a story about what happens when a migrant from the impoverished countryside tries to make it in the city. And even L’Avventura (1960, QFS No. 116), made in a vastly different style by fellow Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni in the same year - there’s an undercurrent of class. The protagonists are wealthy but there are plenty of interactions with the poorer class and there an undercurrent of post-war Italy that both L’Avventura and Rocco and His Brothers portray in their own ways.

Close up of Alain Delon (“Rocco”) in Rocco and His Brothers (1960).

Rocco and His Brothers is a textbook in character portrayal, but it’s also a textbook in cinematography. The night work in this film are astonishing with big broad light and sharp shadows thrown against buildings. The close-ups are gorgeous (Pauline Kael criticized the lighting on Alain Delon: “who at times seems to be lighted as if he were Hedy Lamarr”) and the cathedral rooftop scene in particular could be a masterclass in blocking for actors and the camera. Rocco turns into a close up and a tear falls from his eye perfectly. I loved it - a QFSer who is an actor felt it was a little too much. He also felt that everyone in Parondi family needs therapy. Absolutely true, and yet it would’ve been a much shorter film had they done so.

As mentioned in the QFS invitation above, Rocco and His Brothers was on my list of films to see before starting at AFI. I’m more than a little upset it took me so long to finally see it. Not only is it historically important given how many filmmakers it influenced, but it is truly a spectacular film in all aspects - performance, cinematography, music, storytelling. One that AFI is right to require its incoming directors to watch. Rocco and His Brothers is, for me, an ideal balance of realism and artistry to tell a very true, human story of a family struggling to stay together.

Honeyland (2019)

QFS No. 5 - The invitation for May 27, 2020
In keeping with the randomness of the movie selection, it’s time to switch gears and watch a documentary feature film because who’s there to stop us? Though I’ve made a few of them, I’ve never selected a documentary to watch in any of the predecessor film societies before QFS. But Honeyland (2019) I’ve had on my watch list from last year so I figured why not.

I know very little about Honeyland other than the raving reviews I heard from trusted sources. I would’ve known even less but for the first time I permitted a guest selector to join me in choosing this week and I watched the trailer with her. Valarie found this trailer to be the most compelling of the five films I narrowed down for her.

So there you have it – a peek into the rigorous selection process that happens here at QFS Studios and Educational Institution for the Barely Stable. Also – not that this should be a sole reason you watch anything – this film won thirty four (34!) awards last year.

So this week we’ll watch this nonfiction film and apply our rigorous, unflinching, inebriated evaluation of its narrative as we would with any film. Join us if you can!

Honeyland (2019) Directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov

Reactions and Analyses:
Written in March 2024 - Honeyland (2019) was a perfect selection for our first documentary film selection for the nascent Quarantine Film Society back in 2020. To date, we’ve only selected three nonfiction films, and all three have crossed over from documentary into traditional narrative film in some way. Our most recent documentary selection, last week’s 20 Days in Mariupol (2023), won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, just as Honeyland did four years ago. 20 Days in Mariupol is an action-driven film that could easily be a narrative fiction film if it wasn’t crafted as urgent reporting from the frontlines. Flee (2021), was also nominated for a Doc Feature Oscar and though it didn’t win it similarly crossed boundaries as both nonfiction and animated - a feat so rarely pulled off.

Both of those QFS selections are documentary films that are not pure docs in the way that nonfiction films had historically been considered. The deft hand of the filmmaker was evident in crafting the story, and it very much feels like a “movie” rather than a “documentary.”

And while the filmmakers have made themselves virtually invisible in Honeyland, the film too defies the conventions of nonfiction storytelling. The narrative storyline of the film feels deftly crafted as a scripted tale - a woman, using an ancient craft, struggles against nature and time to provide for her family as she attempts to survive the encroachment of a modern society. If you squint just hard enough, you could imagine this film told in black-and-white in the 1960s as a neo-realist classic.

Except that it is “real” and not “realist.” Hatidze Muratova is one of the last keepers of wild bees, selling honey to local markets. Newcomers, an itinerant family, settle next door and while it starts off well - havoc ensues. This setup is a time-honored narrative convention - a person’s sense of normalcy is disrupted, setting off the story and a chain of events that test the protagonist. This is why this film was perfect for a group of filmmakers who mostly in the world of fiction. Not to mention, the cinematography was stunning and evoked a certain movie-like quailty.

Some of the stunning cinematography and landscape of Honeyland (2019).

I didn’t take detailed notes of our discussions when the QFS first started, but I remember one aspect of our analysis, and that was the role of the filmmaker. Some questioned whether the filmmaker has a duty to intervene or assist the subject if that subject is in danger. In particular, the boy from the family nearly drowns in a river. Were the filmmakers supposed to help? Would that violate a code of ethics? Or is there a greater moral obligation and duty to save the child? The child survives but it brought up questions that you don’t get when you watch a scripted film. There are many skeptics who question how much is real and how much is staged - another dimension of nonfiction filmmaker that does not come up for those of use working in fiction.

“Half for you, half for me.” (From Honeyland, 2019)

When we watched the film, the world was a strange place. Everything was shut down. We though we had to scrub our groceries and local officials shut down walkways and public spaces even though they were outside and could offer respite from our homes. Social order and democracy itself seemed to be crumbling all around us. So perhaps it was some comfort to watch a film taking place in the glowing sun of Macedonia and to hear a woman say to her bees “half for you, half for me.” If only to transport us elsewhere, which is what the best films - fiction or nonfiction - can do.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

QFS No. 2 - The invitation for May 6, 2020
SR note: Since this was only the second time we had a virtual film chat, the invitation format had not been standardized as this was a novel concept for all of us. Enjoy!
Thank you to all of you who joined our first ever Quarantine Film Society get together last week. It featured filmmakers, filmmaker adjacents, and civilians. It was a lot of fun and technology only failed us (well just me) once.

But it was a success in that we talked about the movie, about filmmaking, and went off topic a reasonable amount of times. So wonderful to see you all who joined – we spanned three time zones!

So this week, let’s pick something perhaps totally opposite from the elegant, graceful, fantastical imperial China depicted in last week’s selection. Since we’re all living in the apocalypse or perhaps the early stages of it, let’s watch something informational and perhaps a little cautionary.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). Yes.

Okay, two confessions: first – I truly love Road Warrior and Mad Max: Fury Road. Second – I have never seen Thunderdome save for a few glimpses on WGN while growing up in Chicago.

As perhaps with you, “thunderdome” is my stand by phrase for anything that has no rules with chaos as its only governing principle and where destruction is the norm. It entered the zeitgeist after this film and entered our collective lexicon even if you haven’t seen the movie.

Related point – if you come to our home you will see that we have our fenced-in children play area in our main room which we have dubbed “Baby Thunderdome.” No holds barred, very few rules and the only directive is “to survive.” So far, both children have. But for how long?

One of my crowning achievements as a parent is to make the term “thunderdome” part of our family’s daily vocabulary. Truly, nothing will top that. It has become canon.

Anyway, I really admire George Miller’s commitment to this kinetic and unflinching version of the apocalypse and I want an excuse to watch it – and to help prepare for our real-world version thereof. And also I’m looking for additional tips to make our baby version of thunderdome approach this on-screen version even more.

So here it is. Join us if this crazy departure is worth your time.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) Directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie

Reactions and Analyses:
Written in December 2023 - In hindsight, this seems like an odd choice for our second film. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is not exactly a work of art that has endured the test of time. (You could argue that The Road Warrior, 1981 and Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015 have.) But in May 2020, it definitely felt like we were on the brink of an apocalypse and, well, let’s prepare ourselves with the insights from a film that shows our possible near-to-distant future.

Why is this film so vastly inferior to its predecessor and its successor? It has the same basic set up and premise as those films do - a single man, in a post-apocalpytic wasteland, looking out only for himself, finds himself bound by his moral code to care about others and to guide them in their quest - despite his desire for solitary survival.

Not knowing anything about the film other than the word “thunderdome” becoming a part of the standard English lexicon and that “thunderdome” appears in the titles, it seemed as if Thunderdome would have a more definitive narrative role in film. The title prepares the viewer to imagine that that Thunderdome will perhaps represent a climactic or thematic aspect of the film. “Fury road” certainly does - a mad escape route, a main thoroughfare literally and figuratively for that Mad Max movie.

But here, Thunderdome happens almost at the beginning of the film. Very early on, Max (Mel Gibson) has to fight in this gladiatorial arena against Master Blaster (Angelo Rositto, Paul Larsson and Stephen Hayes - which is amazing that it took three people to portray this wild creation). Ultimately, Max survives, does not kill Master Blaster, but Aunty (Tina Turner) wins and exiles Max into the Wasteland.

Mad Max (Mel Gibson) swinging through Thunderdome in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) directed by George Miller. The sheer inventiveness of the Thunderdome concept is pretty astonishing and worth examining for its art direction, costume design, special effects and stunt work.

Brief aside about Thunderdome - the set piece is a true stroke of George Miller genius. It’s perfectly conceived, and I mean that in a filmic sense. It’s entirely impractical as a way of adjudicating disputes and is almost illogical in how it could’ve come to be. Setting aside that, it’s a perfect terror-dome by which all other terror-domes are measured - the art design, the filmmaking, the novelty of it - this is all pure Miller.

The rest of the film doesn’t really follow suit, in part because when you showcase your most ingenious idea up front, it’s hard to go anywhere after that. There are exceptions, of course - you could argue that the battle on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back (1981) puts its greatest set piece up front with the battle on the snow planet to start the film. Following that model, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome would have to have its emotional “set piece” at the end. It’s not a film that sets up an emotional set piece, and certainly not in the way The Empire Strikes Back does of course.

The chase sequence on the railroad tracks is also pretty spectacular so there is a companion action piece in the film. But our criticism of the film is certainly not in its action pieces, which remain top notch even when seeing the film thirty-five years after its release.

It’s entirely possible that this film is far too unusual compared to the others in the series. Road Warrior is straightforward in its concept, as is Fury Road, in its basic plot. But the plot in Beyond Thunderdome is convoluted. The film focuses far more on the world created than the plot. So then you’re forced to reckon with how unusual it all is. In that I mean - let’s start with Bartertown. It’s powered by literal pig shit. The Underworld is really a disgusting place that, even now, I’m wincing just picturing it. The interlude of the tribe of children and teenagers is long and trying to be overly sentimental but it’s odd and defies logic. They are descendants of a crashed 747 when the apocalypse began, which is a truly inventive creation - but thinking about it for a few seconds it doesn’t really make sense how they exist. I know that all of the Mad Max films stretch credulity, but there are aspects in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome where the stretch is either a bit too much or there are one too many. Throw in a weak plot, then you have a recipe for a film with astonishing visuals but very little else.

Aunty (Tina Turner) and Max in the Thunderdome. Just give us more Thunderdome, that’s all we want.

I don’t think we gathered valuable insights into what to expect or how to survive our own seemingly inevitable apocalypse by watching this film. Still - no one pictures a post-apocalyptic world as inventively as George Miller. This film reminded us just how difficult it is to create that world and how masterfully he has done it in the other iterations of the Mad Max saga.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

QFS No. 1 - The invitation for April 29, 2020
SR Note: This email invitation contains the QFS origin story - our first ever email sent out to the group that would become Quarantine Film Society. The format became slightly more standardized as we went along. Enjoy.

If you are receiving this this email electronically that means (a) society has not fully collapsed and technology still exists and (b) you have been on the list of our “monthly” gathering in LA, Wednesday Night Film Society. Or (c) you have just now been added to WeNiFiS’ risk-averse cousin …

Quarantine Film Society!

The original premise of WeNiFiS was to get us out of the house to watch a movie in the theater and then talk about it afterwards. A way to see movies in the way they are meant to be seen and also an excuse to hang out in the capital of MovieTown. We watched one (1) film this way in 2020 (Parasite) before the plague stretched across the lands. So alas no more theater outings until the plague subsides. But we can still talk … at least until the virus further mutates and renders us speechless. UNTIL that happens, here’s what I’d like to try for QFS.

I’ll pick a film for you to watch at home or in you bunker. It will either be a film recently released or perhaps we’ll revisit an old classic. It may or may not be a film you have already seen. But that’s okay – revisiting a film is wonderful and I find myself doing that so rarely these days. It’s nice to cook comfort food sometimes while also trying to bake something new. 

Anyway – after I’ve emailed the choice of film, you have essentially a week to watch it at your leisure on whatever streaming service you can find the film (or DVD/BluRay/VHS/16mm if you happen to own it). Then on, at the listed time and date, click on the provided Zoom link and we shall discuss it in a civilized manner at first followed by childish name calling and eventually direct threats.

So think of it as a book club for movie nerds. The Zoom get together will give you an excuse to wear a shirt that day, but depending on the framing of your device you could probably still not wear pants should you so choose. You could also remain intoxicated regardless of framing.

Speaking of – since we won’t be meeting at a bar or restaurant like we usually do after the movie, everyone is encouraged to drink at home and turn the music up a little too loud so you have to lean in to hear each other speak.

ENOUGH WHAT MOVIE ARE WE WATCHING?

Let’s escape the rapidly encroaching walls in the confines of our homes and disappear into - Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000), directed by Ang Lee.

It’s hard to believe it’s been twenty (!) years since Crouching Tiger was in the theater. I saw it in the first few months after I moved to Los Angeles in 2000 at an IFP screening, and have seen it maybe one more time since. Thinking about it feels comforting and appropriately escapist, so I figured now is a good time to revisit it. I’ll say no more if you haven’t seen it so we can discuss then.

I’ll send a reminder and I guess a Zoom link next week some time. Though I’ve never hosted a Zoom meeting so bear with me. Also – this may or may not work but hell, it’s worth giving it a try. At worst, you’ll have put on a shirt that day.

 Stay safe, be well, disinfect everything.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) Directed by Ang Lee.

Reactions and Analyses:
I didn’t write extensive notes during this first discussion, but I’ll reflect on the time and the nature of the get together, as well as some details I remember from that conversation. As part chronicle of our times and part film analysis, this one will lean a bit more into a chronicle of our times.

Zoom was a relatively new tool for many of us. My wife had been using Zoom for a year at this point to communicate with her staff in other cities. I had been on it a few times after everything shut down in mid-March, but mostly to talk with friends about how their lives had changed and what their fears were a few weeks into the shutdown.

Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) Directed by Ang Lee.

I invited people to watch Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) and to join me on Zoom to discuss. Our turnout was incredible. This was before I kept track of the numbers because I thought I was only going to do this once, but we had I believer more than two dozen filmmakers join the conversation. It’s not just because of the film or anything I did - everyone was yearning for human connection outside of their homes. It was still early and we hadn’t yet paced ourselves or gotten used to being isolated at home.

As for the film - it remains a stunning piece of filmmaking. I had not watched it in many years, but all of it showcases a filmmaker at the very apex of his powers - the cast, the filmmaking craft, the storytelling, the mythology created, it’s all riveting. It feels like a fable, like a tale from antiquity told anew on screen. The fight in the treetops is a masterpiece. Michelle Yeoh (as “Yu Shu Lien”) is as magnetic as ever on screen, as is Chow Yun-fat ("as “Li Mu Bai”), and Zhang Ziyi (as “Jen Yu”) is perfectly cast and her heartbreaking leap at the end is still wrenching to witness.

Jen’s (Zhang Ziyi) leap in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000).

Ang Lee remains one of the filmmakers I most admire. After Life of Pi (2012), an essay he wrote went around about how he nearly left filmmaking early on to get his Masters in computer science or something like that, because he was failing to break through. His wife found his acceptance letter to the program and confronted him, imploring him not to give up on his dreams. He threw away the letter and did just that, to the good fortune of us all. It’s something I think about often that keeps me going as well.

His directing is what I call “invisible.” He tells the story the best way he can with the tools of a filmmaker. He doesn’t have a style that you can point to the way a David Fincher or a Wes Anderson does. For an Ang Lee film, the story comes first - what is the best way to tell this story - the style comes naturally from that.

In addition to that - here’s an Asian filmmaker who has made films that reflect his identity but also others that have nothing to do with being Asian. He directed The Ice Storm (1997) for crying out loud - a film with all white people fraying at the seams. And it’s excellent. He directed a film about two men who love each other in a time when they can’t in Brokeback Mountain (2005) and won an Oscar for directing it. What I mean to say - he’s a filmmaker who is treated as a filmmaker, not an “ethnic” filmmaker. This, to me, is the highest praise for someone like him - and like me. As a South Asian American filmmaker, I always strive to be recognized first and foremost for the quality of my work and not who I am or what I look like. I know that’s true for most all of us, and Ang Lee represents that ideal.

Anyway, we had a fruitful discussion that was a lot of fun and gave me the idea to keep doing it. I had no idea it would continue for years - both the group and COVID. Here’s hoping the group endures longer than the pandemic.