Reviews

It's always odd to me that, when discussing the directors of the German expressionist movement in cinema, Robert Wiene's name is generally omitted from the conversation. Of course, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" specifically is often mentioned, but Wiene himself rarely is. Instead, the "big three" of German expressionist cinema — Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, and Georg Wilhelm Pabst — seem to get all the attention. The reason I say I find this odd is because, from what I've seen, Wiene is clearly the consummate expressionist among the group. Lang, Murnau, and Pabst were great filmmakers, but a lot of their work from the '20s isn't even expressionistic to begin with. One of Pabst's early films was a work of New Objectivity (an early movement in cinematic social realism -- or, in other words, the polar opposite of the formalistically inclined expressionist movement). Half of Lang's and Murnau's respective silent bodies of work could be considered non-expressionistic, and even their expressionistic work pales in comparison to the sheer psychological angst exhibited by films like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "The Hands of Orlac", which embody the expressionist modus operandi far more fully than any film I've ever seen by Lang, Murnau, or Pabst.

Wiene is simply the most unrelentingly expressionistic filmmaker I've seen from the silent era. "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari", with its surrealistic painted backgrounds conveying a distorted, twisted German landscape — and, by extension, a distorted, twisted German mentality in the wake of World War I — was highly innovative for its time. "The Hands of Orlac", if possible, is even more expressionistic, although the overall aesthetic is different here than it was in Wiene's previous film. Firstly, there's no color tinting here. This was crucial to the film. Color tinting in general I think takes away from a film's artistic integrity, and here, especially, the stunning black-and-white cinematography would have been completely destroyed by the use of tinting.

Truly, the cinematography is brilliant in "The Hands of Orlac", as much as I've seen in any film from the silent era. The atmosphere is so thick, the mood so dark, the style so Gothic, the tone of the film so heavy and bleak, that the film's aesthetic takes on an uncannily palpable texture. The lighting is fantastic. The use of darkness and shadows is a hallmark of expressionistic cinema, but never realized more masterfully than it is here. I was reminded very much of the film's of David Lynch, namely "Eraserhead", "Lost Highway", and "Inland Empire", films which refined the expressionist mode of cinema to its most viscerally and sensorily potent form.

Unfortunately, the film's weakness is in the narrative. The mood and tone and atmosphere of the film are so amazingly brilliant that any elements of plot and story are secondary in priority, if not all together superfluous. But the film is based on a novel, and Wiene puts too much emphasis on realizing the narrative aspects of the source material. The actual action of the film is almost entirely redundant. Everything that needs to be said is said through the film's form, not its content, and yet too much attention is given to the content by the filmmaker. The ending of the film, specifically, is where it begins to lose traction. The film falls apart, to some extent, in the last twenty minutes or so, because it offers too much resolution. This is a flaw we see in virtually all German expressionist films, and in silent cinema in general from this time period. The medium of cinema was still in its childhood and hadn't yet learned important facets of the art of filmmaking such as subtlety, ambiguity, et cetera. Lynch's gift was his ability to take expressionism to the next level, by doing what Wiene was unable to do here, which is to apply on a content level, not just a formal one, the anxiety and fear and bleakness that define the expressionist movement. Formally, Wiene captures the essence of expressionism impeccably with this film, but where he falls short is in transposing this essence from the film's form to its content. This can be done in a multitude of ways. Lynch did it by denying his audience almost any resolution whatsoever to the narrative, leaving the viewer alienated and uncomfortable, and thus enhancing the visceral impact of the viewing experience.

That, however, is my only criticism of the film, along with the fact that, at times, the acting is overwrought. The exaggerated gestures and histrionics are somewhat like the horror equivalent of what you'd see in an early D.W. Griffith short for Biograph. This is common in silent cinema, though, and overall the film has more than enough strengths to compensate for any shortcomings.

If "The Hands of Orlac" is narratively flawed, it's flawed in the execution of that narrative, not in its premise, which has a strong thematic core revolving around notions of personal identity, manipulation, submission, and the psychology that drives human action. Where does the essence of our natures as individuals come from? It is physical or mental? Does it originate in the body or in the mind? Wiene's film, as well as presumably the source material that it's based on, seems to suggest the latter, and this is consistent with German expressionist cinema in general, which places a strong emphasis on the psychological (from the psychic powers of Lang's Dr. Mabuse villain, to Pabst's "Secrets of a Soul", the original film about psychoanalysis).

Along with Murnau's "Faust" and "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans", this may be the best German silent film of the thirty-plus I've seen. It's unique and it's formally brilliant by any and all standards. I recommend it to fans of German expressionism, of silent films in general, and of cinema of any kind.

RATING: 7.67 out of 10 stars

Douglas Sirk isn't a director I've explored much. Having only seen a few of his '50s American melodramas, and knowing he had roots as a German filmmaker, I wanted to go back and get a feel for that part of his career. I'd also never seen any films (by any director) made in Germany during the reign of the Nazi regime (i.e. 1933 to 1945), other than "Triumph of the Will", the infamous mega-propaganda documentary by Leni Riefenstahl. So this film had a lot of historical interest for me. What I did not expect, however, was a quality film in its own right. And interestingly, that's exactly what it turned out to be.

"To New Shores" was a 1937 film directed by Sirk when he was still known by his real name, Detlef Sierck. He had directed seven features and three shorts prior to this film, all for the famous German film studio Universum Film AG (or UFA, for short). The history of UFA is dark and controversial, as they became deeply entrenched in the Nazi machine. Prior to the rise of National Socialism in Germany in 1933, UFA had produced some great films, namely the films of Fritz Lang, such as "Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler", "Die Nibelungen", and "Metropolis". When the Nazis came into power, UFA benefited heavily from it. The Nazis' fascist modus operandi extended to the film industry as well, where they essentially made UFA the official film studio of Nazi Germany (UFA churned out the country's propaganda films, including "Triumph of the Will" in 1935), and forced out the other film studios, leaving UFA with little to no competition in the German film industry. Additionally, the Germans' conquering and occupation of so many other countries across Europe was opening new markets to UFA. In a country under German occupation, the influx of cultural materials, such as films, was heavily regulated by the occupying government, so the Nazis could control exactly what films were available to the people of an occupied nation. And, of course, they made sure that UFA's films were everywhere. Put simply, UFA profited immensely from the Nazis' tyranny in Europe during those years. So, naturally, there's often a sense of moral corruption associated with this particular film studio in terms of its complicity with the Nazis during this part of history.

Douglas Sirk, too, could be criticized for his contributions to the Nazi machine. Filmmakers like Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder (a screenwriter at the time) bailed out of Germany upon Hitler's rise to power, while directors like Ernst Lubitsch and F.W. Murnau were already working in America. But Sirk didn't leave, at least not right away. For a time he stayed and worked for UFA and, by extension, for the Nazis. That being said, in 1937 (after this film and one more), he finally left Germany, supposedly because of political sentiments and because of his Jewish wife. It's also worth noting that, when he got to America, he made "Hitler's Madman", and overtly anti-Nazi film.

"To New Shores" stars Zarah Leander, a Swedish singer who apparently was Germany's biggest star actress during the Nazi years, and this, her first film with UFA, was evidently the film that propelled her to stardom (along with Sirk's next film, "La Habanera", which also starred Leander). Admittedly, it's a strong performance. She does quite well.

Interestingly, the propaganda in this film is actually minimal, all things considered. I found myself surprised that the Nazi government let a film be produced with so little propaganda value. Of course, it was 1937, and the war hadn't begun yet, but still, there's not much here in terms of propaganda. The film is a criticism of social injustice, like much of Sirk's work seems to be ("All That Heaven Allows" is the main example that comes to mind, though, as I said, I haven't seen many of his films). Presumably in order to get the film past the censors, Sirk had to set the film in England, and so all the characters are English, despite speaking German. As a result, the social injustice and cultural decadence depicted in the film can be seen as a criticism of English society specifically, which I'm sure is what the censors were counting on when they passed the film. I do not think, however, that this is how Sirk intended the film to be interpreted. I think Sirk was concerned with social injustice in general and, if anything, in Germany specifically, although he could obviously never convey that kind of message under the strict regulation of the Nazi censors. Nevertheless, much of the cultural criticism in the film has far more implications for Germany than it does for England, and the prison camp to which the female protagonist is sent will inevitably evoke associations with Nazi concentration camps during the war.

Watching "To New Shores", I was reminded very much of Roberto Rossellini's 1942 film "A Pilot Returns". Both films were made in collaboration with the fascist government that ran their respective countries. Furthermore, the films are very similar in style and tone. "To New Shores" has much less in common with the German cinema of the '20s and even early '30s than it does with, for instance, the concurrent French poetic realism films by directors like Marcel Carné, Jean Renoir, and Julien Duvivier.

Overall, it's a quality film with solid entertainment value and a fairly engaging narrative. I never expected that UFA would have churned out a real film like this in the years just before the war. In comparison to Sirk's later work in Hollywood, "To New Shores" lacks both the stylized aesthetic and the intense melodrama that marked those films. It's definitely a melodrama, but it's more subtle and understated than films like "All That Heaven Allows" and "Magnificent Obsession". It's not great cinema, but it's a respectable effort that is probably well worth the watch.

RATING: 6.67 out of 10 stars

Keisuke Kinoshita is a Japanese filmmaker that has never quite gotten his due credit. Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi take the spotlight as the "big three" of Japanese cinema, while filmmakers like Naruse and Kinoshita are left somewhat out of focus. There are, of course, many other well known Japanese filmmakers outside of the big three, but mostly they are from the new wave era (Ôshima, Teshigahara, Imamura, Suzuki, Kobayashi, Kurahara, et cetera). In fact, most Japanese directors can be pigeonholed into either this new wave class of filmmakers, or the classical masters with roots in silent cinema, such as Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Naruse. Kinoshita, however, along with Kurosawa, belongs to neither group. Debuting in the early '40s when Japan was at war, these directors found their roots in a kind of Japanese cinematic limbo, rising to popularity well after the original masters had laid the ground for them, yet preceding the influx of filmmakers that came to be grouped together in the Japanese New Wave during the '60s.

Here we have Kinoshita's debut film, "Port of Flowers", a 1943 wartime effort produced by Shochiku. It begins as a lighthearted and playful diversion, the kind you might expect from a country in the midst of war. Most mainstream wartime films fall into one of two categories: escapism or propaganda. The latter is a means of trying to sway public opinion, boost morale, and garner support for the country's cause, while the former simply seeks to distract audiences from the hardships of wartime life, and all the troubles and anxiety that come with it. Through about the first half of the film, "Port of Flowers" seems to fit comfortably into the escapism category, and I would have preferred it to have stayed there. Unfortunately, by the end of the film, Kinoshita delivers pure and unabashed propaganda. I have no problem with escapism, which is obviously not only a wartime device (the United States engaged it heavily during the depression, for example, and we still see it dominating American cinema to this day). As shallow as it can be, escapism must be acknowledged as an inevitable aspect of the medium, and a positive aspect at that, so long as it's taken in moderation, supplemented with some degree of real culture, real art.

Consequently, I was legitimately enjoying Kinoshita's film, at first. The film's style reminded me of the earliest of Kobayashi's films, which were supervised by Kinoshita, under whom Kobayashi apprenticed, if I'm not mistaken. Unlike Ozu and Mizoguchi, who were quite traditional, "Port of Flowers" exhibits a rather western style of filmmaking. The editing, the humor, and the overall tone of the film probably have more in common with certain American, British, or French films from the '30s than they do with anything Ozu, Mizoguchi, or Naruse were making at the time. It was a light, fun, and entertaining film for about forty minutes. Then comes the propaganda, one large wave of it after another.

It can be difficult to interpret these kinds of films. Often I find I complicate matters by analyzing them from an excessively critical frame of mind, probably because I'm looking for something critical in the filmmaker's message, something I can respect as being more than mere jingoistic propaganda. For instance, there were multiple occasions during "Port of Flowers" were it felt like Kinoshita might be trying to sneak in a criticism of the militarist government and their plunging of the Japanese people into war and despair. The main characters of the film are two conmen who show up at a village where the villager leaders hold in high esteem the memory of a man who had tried to build a shipyard there, and help the village prosper. The conmen intend to fraudulently rob the village of a good deal of money, by pretending to restore their shipyard and build ships. They raise the villagers' hopes, and exploit their loyalty to the memory of the man who had tried to help them. We can easily see this as an allegory for the Japanese militarists' manipulation and deception of the Japanese people. There's definitely room for that interpretation, and I wanted to see it that way. Ultimately, however, by the time the film is concluded, it leaves little doubt as to its nature as an overt propaganda piece.

That being said, if Kinoshita was indeed trying to imbue his film with a critical message, he would have to bury it deeply in order to get it by the censors, so I'm not ruling out that possibility all together. It's almost always difficult to know exactly what a filmmaker is trying to convey with a film, even one as apparently simple as this. I remember having the same issue watching Kurosawa's "The Most Beautiful". It all depends on our individual interpretations of dialogue, symbols, and other facets of the medium. Do the conmen represent the imperialist Japanese government, and the ship symbolizes their deception and manipulation of the Japanese people? Or is the ship simply a symbol of hope, the object by which the Japanese people unify themselves in the face of a common enemy? It seems to be the latter, but again, these things will always be open to some level of interpretation. And yet, the film celebrates the Pearl Harbor attack as a wonderful victory for the Japanese people, and refers to the "American devils" that killed one of their people in a submarine attack, in response to Pearl Harbor. So when all is said and done, there really doesn't seem to be a great deal of room for ambiguity here.

Regardless, I like this film. It's outwardly propagandistic, and it's by no means great cinema, but I think it mostly transcends its shortcomings by achieving a joyously lighthearted tone and a generally fun and entertaining story. It's a quality debut from a director who would only get better.

RATING: 6.33 out of 10 stars

"The Embryo Hunts in Secret" is the type of film that critics can have a field day with (especially if they weren't limited to a thousand words). It raises all the controversial issues in cinema: art versus pornography, gratuitousness, pretentiousness, violence, et cetera. As a community of film lovers, how do we judge a film like this? Certainly, the issue of artistic merit being sacrificed for less noble purposes goes all the way back to the first primordial twitches of the cinematic medium, when Edison/Dickson/Heise films were being churned out in the mid-1890s almost entirely for the sake of profit, with little to no regard for artistic legitimacy. Of course, one could argue that artistry is too much to expect from an art form still in its infancy, but Lumière and Méliès proved otherwise (it should be to no one's surprise that the roots of art in cinema are French, while the roots of capitalism in cinema are American).

In any case, we have here a much more complex issue than the mere streamlining of commercial films for profit. Wakamatsu can be and has been criticized on many levels, but artistic corruption for monetary gain is not one of them. He began his career at Nikkatsu, prolifically churning out pinku eiga for the studio ("pink films", generally referring to the Japanese genre of softcore sex films, from my understanding). While these films were beginning to dominate domestic cinema in Japan, the government did not like them, and they weren't considered critically or artistically legitimate. As a result, when Wakamatsu submitted one of his films to the Berlin International Film Festival in 1965, Nikkatsu gave it a very quiet, low-profile release, and Wakamastu was not happy. He quit the studio, formed his own production company, and began self-producing films.

The first of these films was "The Embryo Hunts in Secret" (1966). The film is about a man who brings home a woman that physically resembles his ex-wife, who ran out on him. He proceeds to drug her, tie her up, and torture her. This constitutes the entire length of the film, start to finish, although there's much more to it, otherwise I wouldn't even be bothering to review it. Wakamatsu imbues his films with undeniable poetry, and as harsh as his films may be in content, they are formally much more comparable to respected art house films than they are to traditional exploitation films, or what some have dubbed "torture porn". Moreover, Wakamatsu is interested not only in the violent/sexual act itself, but in the psychology that produces it. His deconstruction of the basic human need to self-destruct leaves him open to comparisons with the great Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Ôshima, who once said Wakamatsu was the only pink film director that interested him. In Wakamatsu films, there is more of a focus on sadomasochistic tendencies, and issues of dominance and submission, but both filmmakers analyzed human self-destructiveness with political overtones.

There's no doubt that there's more here than just pornography. There is art present in Wakamatsu's films. Anyone at all versed in artistic cinema will recognize that instantly. The question is, what kind of art? True art? Pornographic art? Artistic pornography? I don't pretend to have the answer. Wakamastu, thankfully, is not so easy to classify. Is he just another shameless filmmaker bastardizing the medium by exploiting the darkest of human desires? Or is he an artist that is simply willing to explore aspects of humanity that others refuse to address? Pasolini believed fervently that burying ugliness and depravity — hiding it away from human sight — was the one surefire way to ensure its continued existence. That's why he repeatedly showed us things we didn't want to see. It's also why so many of his films ended on an unnerving note of conspiratorial silence. Wakamatsu's cinema, however, can not be categorically called art as simply and obviously as Pasolini's can, even "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom". I know many have quite ignorantly called that film pornography, but one glance at a dictionary will dispel any such notions. Pornography is defined as material that is intended to be erotically stimulating and sexually gratifying. Needless to say, there is not one single image anywhere in Pasolini's film that can be considered remotely erotic, or even slightly gratifying on a sexual level. Wakamatsu's film, however, isn't as easy to defend. Yes, there is art here, without question, but there is also a definite sense of an individual purging on screen his darkest desires. In my opinion, "The Embryo Hunts in Secret" is actually surprisingly unerotic, certainly by comparison to what it could have been, but we do get the feeling that Wakamatsu is, at least to a certain extent, exploiting the uglier aspects of human nature and desire.

Overall, I really can't categorize Wakamatsu's films. They are art, certainly, but they also possess a pornographic element, admittedly. Somehow, they utilize pornography and transcend it simultaneously. Wakamatsu is truly an enigma. I think "The Embryo Hunts in Secret" is a legitimately good film, and while there is a certain degree of gratuitousness that would be hard to deny, I don't think it's a fully, overtly gratuitous work. By and large, there is substance beneath the violence on the screen. Nevertheless, the element of exploitation is present, so ultimately I call it a good film that falls short of being a great film. I definitely thought it was better than his 1967 film, "Fallen Angels". Wakamatsu is working with much better actors in this film, and the female lead, unlike in the other film, actually seems to mind being tortured. She did quite well with a difficult role here.

I'm out of space, so suffice it to say that this is a film worth seeing, so long as you're not too squeamish.

RATING: 7.33 out of 10 stars

Carl Theodore Dreyer is one of the great silent filmmakers in the history of the medium. "Leaves Out of the Book of Satan", however, is a disappointing effort in his otherwise impressive body of work. This is my opinion mostly because of the film's obtrusive political bias, something I'd never seen Dreyer descend to before. Of course, it's an early work for him, so inasmuch as the great Danish master needs a pass from the likes of this humble viewer, he will receive one.

"Leaves Out of the Book of Satan" is a 1920 Danish film, which I've read from multiple accounts is Dreyer's second effort. IMDb lists it as his third. The Danish film "The President" (1919) — an impressive spiritual melodrama — was his debut. He also made a Swedish film called "The Parson's Widow" in 1920, the same year as this film. It was more of a romantic comedy melodrama, and was decent, if not especially impressive.

Somewhere around this time comes "Leaves Out of the Book of Satan". Dreyer, so they say, had seen D.W. Griffith's 1916 epic "Intolerance", and was inspired by it to make this film. The influence is conspicuous, to say the least. Like Griffith's film, Dreyer's film is a four-part anthology, in which each segment is connected not narratively (apart from the character of Satan), but rather thematically. "Intolerance" wasn't Griffith's only film of this sort. "Home Sweet Home" (1914) was very much the same structure. In that film, like in this film by Dreyer, the first segment is the catalyst which paves the way for the remaining three stories. In the case of Dreyer's film, each segment is about Satan's temptation of an individual in the midst of a moral crisis. As a result, the first segment — the original temptation, so to speak — is a short story of the Passion of Christ. One might expect Dreyer to have opted for the truly primordial story of temptation and original sin: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but for whatever reason, he did not do so. Perhaps it was too mythical, and he wanted something that could be more effectively based in realism.

There is a tapestry woven through each of the four segments, and it is in this tapestry that Dreyer forays into political territory that I'd never seen him approach before. In all four segments, the common theme is not only temptation, but more specifically, the temptation to inform on a friend. In the segment about the Passion, it is Judas who is tempted by Satan to inform against Christ to the Sanhedrin. Likewise, in every segment, there is an organization that holds the power of life and death, and uses it, quite recklessly, for their own aims. In the second segment, it is the Inquisition. The third segment is set during the French Revolution in the late 18th century, and this is where Dreyer's political bias really stars to rear its ugly head. His attempts to portray the revolutionaries as relentlessly evil and the poor aristocratic victims as unfailingly innocent were nothing less than ridiculous. And it's not about whether he's right or wrong -- whether I agree with him or not -- it's simply that I strongly dislike bias in cinema. An effort to see both sides of the equation should be instinctive for a great filmmaker like Dreyer. Here, it is certainly not.

The fourth segment is set in then-modern day Finland, during the country's civil war, and Dreyer's sympathies once again lie with the aristocracy. He celebrates the heroism of the Whites, who can do no wrong, and his anti-communist sentiments against the Reds, composed mostly of the working class, left nothing wanting, even by McCarthy's standards. Truly, this film can be seen as right-wing propaganda. Dreyer is clearly in full support of social inequality, and while I try to make a point not to let my personal opinions effect my viewing experiences with films, I do, as I said before, have a strong aversion to this kind of bias, even in instances in which my opinions and the filmmaker's coincide. Really, the moral certainty here is legitimately disturbing.

Setting aside the politics, and looking at the film from a strictly cinematic angle, it still fails to stand out as high quality cinema. The narrative lacks depth, and the dialogue is often very poor (the last line of the film is honestly one of the most cringeworthy I've ever heard -- or read, in this case -- in the history of cinema). Griffith's influence is noticeable, although Dreyer brings to the film some of his own technique, which he was still in the process of honing at this point in his career. He utilizes color tinting, which I think the film would have been better off without.

With all that criticism out of the way, though, one can certainly find commendable qualities in "Leaves Out of the Book of Satan". I think it's the weakest of the Dreyer films I've seen, but it's entertaining enough to justify a viewing, and possesses the beginnings of the unique element of spirituality that Dreyer would refine and perfect in the years to come. One of the film's strongest assets for me was the portrayal of Satan as a sympathetic character. God has condemned him to tempt us, but his countenance is one of remorse, not evil, and he laments every soul that capitulates to his temptation.

I've always wondered how much influence these Scandanavian directors like Dreyer and Victor Sjöström may have had on the filmmakers of the coming decade (the '20s), particularly the German expressionists. It's possible there's some value here in that regard, but overall, I think "Leaves Out of the Book of Satan" is of most interest to serious silent film enthusiasts or Dreyer completists. It is not, by any means, essential silent cinema.

RATING: 5.00 out of 10 stars

Noah Baumbach's second film, "Mr. Jealousy", is a like an amalgam of François Truffaut, Whit Stillman, and traditional Hollywood romantic comedy. I'm not a huge fan of Baumbach on the whole, but he's a fairly good filmmaker, and of the five films I've seen by him, he's never delivered a bad one. "Mr. Jealousy" is probably the weakest of the ones I've seen, but overall, it's still an above average film that welcomely deviates in many ways from the norms of the genre.

Noah Baumbach's quirky sense of humor reminds me in that way of other contemporaneous American filmmakers like Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, and Alexander Payne. In fact, he co-wrote "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" with Anderson. Without a doubt, though, the American filmmaker that Baumbach bears the most resemblance to is Whit Stillman. Of course, the presence of Chris Eigeman in both directors' films certainly adds to this resemblance, but it's more than just that. It's that idiosyncratic brand of humor that they share. It's their focus on youth on the verge of adulthood, or young adults on the verge of having to become real adults. Both filmmakers were clearly inspired by the French New Wave, and I've always said that Baumbach is the François Truffaut of modern American cinema, while Whit Stillman is the Eric Rohmer of modern American cinema.

Truffaut's influence on Baumbach's cinema is immense. It's incredibly obvious, and like Brian De Palma with Alfred Hitchcock, he makes absolutely no attempt whatsoever to hide it. We can feel in Baumbach's films the very same carefree abandon that permeated most of Truffaut's work (apart from his stretch of films in the mid-'60s when he put a ridiculous amount of effort into imitating Hitchcock's style and tone — "The Soft Skin", "Fahrenheit 451", "The Bride Wore Black"). The quirky male protagonist (so often portrayed by Jean-Pierre Léaud in Truffaut's films) and his clumsy attempts at romance and intimacy will all be very familiar to anyone who knows the work of François Truffaut.

The problem with a filmmaker being so heavily influenced by another filmmaker is that he's ultimately so busy imitating the source of his inspiration that he fails to develop any real, unique, individual identity as a filmmaker. He adopts someone else's vision of life, and therefore fails to develop his own vision. This, of course, is not entirely true of Baumbach, who certainly has his own identity as a filmmaker, to a certain extent. Still, I would much rather see him drop all the Truffaut emulation and start making films that are more his own. Truffaut's presence is felt so strongly in many of Baumbach's films that it can really be quite a distraction. "The Squid and the Whale" — especially its ending — was almost embarrassingly similar to "The 400 Blows", and although I think it was a very good film overall — probably the best I've seen by Baumbach — the lack of originality at times was off-putting. And then, of course, "Frances Ha" was a complete Truffaut ripoff (or we can be nicer about it and say "pastiche"). I'm not as big of a Truffaut fan as a lot of people to begin with, and so I'm even less enthused by a director who is attempting to emulate Truffaut. Nevertheless, as I've said, I think Baumbach is a quality filmmaker, and I'll never protest to watching one of his films if I haven't seen it.

"Mr. Jealousy" stars Eric Stolz, whose first non-television role was in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", and who had also shown up in Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" before taking on a role in Baumbach's debut film, "Kicking and Screaming". The female lead in the film is Annabella Sciorra, who I'm not very familiar with. Chris Eigeman costars, as does Peter Bogdanovich, who I love. Bogdanovich is a filmmaker (he directed the fantastic 1971 feature, "The Last Picture Show"), a film scholar, and a bit of an actor. Bogdanovich has taken a shine to Noah Baumbach. I'm not sure why he's picked Baumbach out of the bunch, but he's played roles in several of his films, and seems to serve as a somewhat of a mentor to him, from what I can tell. He had high praise for "Frances Ha", as I recall, and seems to be a big fan of Baumbach's work in general.

The plot of "Mr. Jealousy" revolves around the relationship between a jealous man (played by Eric Stolz) and a "tarty" female (played by Annabella Sciorra) with a long list of past lovers. The film reminded me a bit of "Love & Sex", released three years later, although I think "Mr. Jealousy" is without question a better film. Both films start off with flashbacks to youthful romantic mishaps that traumatized the protagonist and led to his or her current problems with romance. "Mr. Jealousy" also reminded me somewhat of Payne's film school thesis film, "The Passion of Martin". Baumbach's film progresses with a plot line that is a bit far-fetched at times, but it's fairly entertaining all the way through, the performances are solid, and it's basically an enjoyable film.

I'll continue to look for a little more substance and thematic depth from Baumbach than I've found in films like "Mr. Jealousy" or "Frances Ha" — "The Squid and the Whale" is probably closer to what I'd like to see from him. "Mr. Jealousy" plays very much like a standard romantic comedy at times, and yet, at other times, it achieves a new, fresh take on the genre and, for those who know Baumbach well enough, his hallmarks will certainly be recognizable. For fans of his films, "Mr. Jealousy" will probably be satisfactory at the very worst. On the other hand, for those who don't care for Baumbach, there's probably nothing here that's going to change your mind.

RATING: 6.33 out of 10 stars

This is the best of the fourteen films I've seen by Mizoguchi, who is probably most famous for three films he made in the early '50s: "The Life of Oharu", "Ugetsu", and "Sansho the Bailiff". These are very good films, for certain, but I've found that my favorite Mizoguchi films tend to be earlier in his career, during a period that began with the advent of sound cinema (1936 or so, in Japan), and ended in the late '40s. "Osaka Elegy", "Sisters of the Gion", "Story of the Last Chrystanthemums", "The 47 Ronin: Part I", "The 47 Ronin: Part II", "Otamaro and His Five Women", and "Women of the Night" — these films lack the exquisite elements of mood and atmosphere that made Mizoguchi's early '50s films so great, but otherwise I think they are superior. They are very simply but poignantly toned, and they possess a poetry that I believe is unique to this period in Mizoguchi's body of work.

Mizoguchi's camera-work is among the best in the history of the medium. His slow, graceful tracking shots are the absolute quintessence of cinematic poetry. His camera never moves too quickly or too suddenly; it is always perfectly paced with the mood and tone of the film. Furthermore, his compositions are impeccable. He immerses the viewer in diagonally oriented compositions that are not only visually stunning, but seem to perfectly echo, with a geometrical precision similar to what Kobayashi later achieved in "Harakiri" and "Samurai Rebellion", the rigid order and structure of Japanese society, particularly in his jidaigeki (period dramas) set during Japan's Edo period.

"Utamaro and His Five Women" is one such jidaigeki. It is about the real-life artist Kitagawa Utamaro, who lived toward the end of the 18th century. This subject allows Mizoguchi to execute his most thematically profound film by far. While I always profess the brilliance of Mizoguchi's formal talents, my criticism of his films has always been with their content. His meaningful dissections of Japanese society notwithstanding, Mizoguchi was never a filmmaker whose narratives contained a great deal of depth or substance. In a Mizoguchi film, the substance, the beauty, the poetry — they are almost invariably found in the film's form, not in its content. In terms of the content of his cinema, he often relied on increasingly unsubtle social messages and clumsy melodrama as his career progressed, and this has always been a stumbling block for me in my love of his films, even though my respect for him remains immense.

One of the greatest aspects of "Utamaro and His Five Women" is that it lacks the manipulated drama and overwhelming histrionics that Mizoguchi employed in so many other films. There are a few minutes late in the film where, unable to resist himself, he falters and stumbles into the muddy waters of heavy-handed dramatics, floundering about for a moment before regaining his composure. Aside from these few instants, however, the film is almost perfect. It is lighter in tone than most of his other work, and the subtext is profound on a completely different level from anything else I've seen by him.

Utamaro, here, is engaged as a surrogate for Mizoguchi himself. The parallels between these two titans of Japanese art are many, though Mizoguchi never beats us over the head with them, like I might have expected him to. Here, he employs a subtlety that is uncharacteristic of him, and it serves the film wonderfully.

Utamaro wants to "capture the soul of the woman" with his art. Mizoguchi spent virtually an entire career attempting to do exactly that (and for all my criticism of his lack of subtlety, his efforts in that regard truly can not be applauded enough). Utamaro also protests the overuse of color in painting. Like Mizoguchi, he favors restraint to indulgence. With almost a hundred films to his name, Mizoguchi made exactly two color films, both at the end of his career, just before his death (it seems that even artists like Mizoguchi and Bresson couldn't resist the changing tides forever).

Put simply, Utamaro is Mizoguchi. Of course, that's an oversimplification. It's reductive, and it's probably detrimental to the film's essence as a character study. But it's also accurate, I think. After all, how much can Mizoguchi (or anyone, almost two centuries after the fact) know about the life of Utamaro and his true nature as a human being and as an artist? Naturally, Mizoguchi has to fill in the gaps that history has left open, and naturally, he's going to turn to his own experience, his own nature, to do that. For that reason, I feel that, ultimately, while "Utamaro and His Five Women" is undoubtedly a character study, it is a character study, first and foremost, of Kenji Mizoguchi.

It is also a study of the nature of art, and the role of the artist in society (Japanese society, specifically). As an artist, Utamaro has succeeded to some extent in freeing himself from the rigid Japanese social hierarchy of that time period, but he can not truly escape it. Society pervades even art, as Utamaro is continuously spoken down to by highbrow artists who refer to him as a lowly woodblock painter. Mizoguchi detests this kind of social structure — this perceived superiority and inferiority amongst individuals in a society — and while Mizoguchi was not a communist as far as I know, one can certainly detect many leftist tendencies in his films, which are inundated with social messages, and early works like "The Song of Home" had unquestionably Marxist overtones. It's no surprise to see Mizoguchi leaning leftward on the political spectrum, since communism sought to resolve the very issues that troubled him so deeply, but Mizoguchi never bought into it in the end. ''Communism solves the problems of class,'' he once said, ''but overlooks the problems of man and woman which still remain afterwards.''

RATING: 9.00 out of 10 stars

Nagisa Ôshima, I believe, is one of the most fascinating studies in the history of cinema. His films don't tend to be conventionally enjoyable on a par with many other filmmakers of his talent, but they remain, nevertheless, truly fascinating examinations of societal failure and immensely complex exercises in sociopolitical disillusionment. "The Sun's Burial" is no exception. Like every other Ôshima film, it has worlds to say about Japanese society (and, to some extent, society in general), and much of its ideological structure can only be understood in light of Ôshima's larger body of work.

If I had grown up in Japan in the '50s, and seen this film released in 1960 as only Ôshima's third feature as a director, I might not have as many great things to say about it. I would recognize its audacity and, on some level, its intelligence — certainly its social relevance — but the greatest insights the film offers, and my deepest moments of appreciation for its themes and ideas, which were only really possible with some of Ôshima's later work in mind, would have probably been largely lacking from the viewing experience.

Like so many leftist filmmakers who engaged Marxist, communist ideology in cinema, Ôshima ended up disillusioned with the ideals he presumably once cherished. This may partially be a result of the naive underbelly of Marxist ideals, which comprise a faith in humanity that rarely proves in keeping with reality, or it may simply be human nature. Human beings are impatient — often too impatient to wait the time it takes for an idea to seep into the fabric of society — and generally unprepared to deal with the frustration of reality; specifically, the reality that ideals almost inevitably give way to human passions, obsessions, and self-serving behavior. Of course, not everyone will agree with this sentiment — and it is their prerogative not to — but it was certainly the defining sentiment behind Ôshima's unique career as a filmmaker.

The earliest film I've been able to see by Ôshima was his second effort, "Naked Youth", made in 1960, the same year as "The Sun's Burial". Both films feature a portrait of troubled youth that makes "The Outsiders" look like a walk in the garden. Ôshima's camera works in extremely close quarters. He gives us close-ups, but they are the polar opposite of Hollywood's beauty shots. They are, in fact, ugliness shots. Ôshima doesn't look closer in order to see the beauty of faces too perfect to be real, nor does he do it in order to enhance the emotional content of his images; rather, Ôshima looks close in order to see every possible flaw in the human condition, every ounce of ugliness and despair that we might otherwise polish over by maintaining a safe distance from our subject matter. Criticize Ôshima if you must, but one thing that can never be doubted is his commitment to his subject. Much like Pasolini, he gets deep, down, and dirty with the depravity he portrays in his films. He doesn't treat human suffering and degradation with Visconti's rubber gloves, as if afraid to dirty his hands with his own subject matter, nor does he share Hollywood's romanticism. Ôshima is authentic in this regard. He is not portraying misery for dramatic effect. There is absolutely nothing romantic in Ôshima's depiction of poverty.

I'm a bit ambivalent as to whether or not "The Sun's Burial" is a purely Marxist film, or whether it's already expressing the disillusionment with those ideas that Ôshima would ultimately become known for. A bit further into the '60s, Ôshima would make films like "Violence at Noon", in which this disillusionment is evident on an undeniable level, and then, eventually, in the early '70s, films like "In the Realm of the Senses", in which any pretense of political material has been dropped all together, and the only thing left to witness is Ôshima's stunning (and sometimes gratuitous) deconstruction of human self-destructiveness.

Is the "The Sun's Burial" criticizing society from a Marxist standpoint, or is it criticizing Marxism itself — and the failure of the left — from a standpoint of disillusionment? I lean toward the former, but the answer will depend on how you interpret the film's symbols, and consequently will vary from viewer to viewer. "The Sun's Burial" explores the nature of revolution in a fashion reminiscent of Tarr's "Werckmeister Harmonies". Tensions mount and ultimately boil over, but where Tarr depicts regret, Ôshima, I think, depicts only necessity.

Filmmakers like Ôshima and Pasolini have created a truly revolutionary cinema, in that it forces us to reckon with aspects of human nature that we'd rather leave buried. Godard fancied himself a revolutionary once, but was too busy theorizing and intellectualizing to be truly revolutionary. I should make a point to say that, in their own right, I cherish Godard's films as much as anyone else's (see "For Ever Mozart" for another fantastic reflection on political disillusionment), but it's worth noting the distinction between what is radical, and what is truly revolutionary. Of course, each viewer will make his own determination of how much value to place in this idea of revolutionary cinema. I don't place a great deal of value in it in and of itself — I'm not a political person — but I do deeply appreciate Ôshima's insistence on showing us things we don't want to see, as if that in itself might prove an antidote to the very problems he depicts on screen.

I'm not entirely sure if I agree with that notion or not, but I've never felt that agreement is a prerequisite for respect, and my respect for Ôshima could span mountains. "The Sun's Burial" is not a masterpiece, but it's a very strong film, and a must-see for anyone who'd like to develop their understanding of political cinema.

RATING: 8.00 out of 10 stars

"A Child Is Waiting" is the third film directed by John Cassavetes, in my opinion one of the two or three greatest American filmmakers to ever live. The main thing that needs to be kept in mind about this film, however, is that it is not truly a Cassavetes film at all. It is much more of a Stanley Kramer film. Kramer produced the film; Cassavetes directed it, but it feels much closer to "Judgment at Nuremberg" than it does to "Too Late Blues", which itself was more conventional and mainstream than most of Cassavetes' work.

It seems that Cassavetes was set, for awhile at least, on being a commercial filmmaker. His debut film, "Shadows" (1959), was a very amateur, underground film. It was the polar opposite of commercial cinema, and while it was not a very good film, I have an immense amount of respect for it. It was an exercise in unmitigated realism that, in some ways, foreshadowed the films of the nouvelle vague, which was just getting underway at the time. Cassavetes' next film was "Too Late Blues", which maintained the realism of "Shadows" to some extent, but also employed a more polished, classicist mode of filmmaking, giving it more commercial entertainment value than its predecessor. It was halfway between "Shadows" and mainstream, commercial cinema.

Then comes "A Child Is Waiting", released in 1963 by Paramount. It stars Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster, who had just appeared together in one of Kramer's recent films, "Judgment at Nuremberg", which Kramer directed himself. As you can tell from the cast, "A Child Is Waiting" is purely commercial cinema, which is highly uncharacteristic of Cassavetes. Nevertheless, his hallmarks aren't completely absent from the film. First, there is the presence of Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes' leading lady for many of his films. Secondly, although it is ultimately a classicist film, "A Child Is Waiting" does utilize a certain amount of the documentary-style realism that Cassavetes was famous for. For a commercial film, it's very minimalistic, and even though it feels more like Kramer's film than it does like Cassavetes', the latter's influence is evident nonetheless.

Interestingly, on a side note, Kramer had produced one other film between "Judgment at Nuremberg" and "A Child Is Waiting". It was called "Pressure Point", and it starred Bobby Darin, who had starred in "Too Late Blues", and Peter Falk, who would star in two of Cassavetes' later films, "Husbands" and "A Woman Under the Influence". I suppose this is likely just a coincidence stemming from the fact that these actors were probably all under contract with Paramount at the time.

Cassavetes wasn't originally supposed to direct the "A Child Is Waiting". When the original director had to pull out, however, the film's screenwriter recommended Cassavetes, who was still under contract with Paramount. Kramer and Cassavetes clashed, evidently because of the unconventional nature of Cassavetes' methods. As we know, Cassavetes loved improvisation (his claim to fame), but Kramer and the film's cast did not share the sentiment. Finally, during post-production, while editing the film, problems between Kramer and Cassavetes boiled over. Cassavetes wanted to highlight the theme that mentally handicapped children (the subject of the film) were, in their own way, superior to the so-called "normal" adults of the world — a theme that absolutely survived to be seen in the final product — whereas Kramer wanted to focus more on the alienation of these children due to their treatment by society, encouraging the idea that they be put in institutions where they can be with other children like themselves and ultimately overcome the isolation that plagued them in the outside world. In the end, Kramer fired Cassavetes, and Cassavetes disowned the film. After its release, Cassavetes said that he didn't think Kramer's film was bad, but simply that it was, indeed, Kramer's film, and not his own. To any viewer who's familiar with Cassavetes' work, this will be obvious within about five minutes of watching the film. Kramer stated that Cassavetes was "difficult" to work with, and with the immense power that Kramer held in Hollywood, this spelled the end of Cassavetes' career as a studio director.

This was, of course, for the best, when all was said and done. It seems as if Cassavetes would have preferred to continue working as a studio director, had it been up to him, and I hate to think of all the great films we'd be bereft of today if things had turned out that way. Having been basically blacklisted as a Hollywood director, Cassavetes returned to the independent method of filmmaking that had produced "Shadows", and the result was what I believe to be his greatest masterpiece, "Faces". "Husbands", "A Woman Under the Influence", "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie", and "Opening Night" followed, all strong, unique films that established Cassavetes as a true auteur, something he'd have been entirely unable to achieve within the studio system.

Nevertheless, "A Child Is Waiting" is a good film, really. I was surprised. I hadn't expected much, and it's actually quite a quality picture. Lancaster is very good, and although Garland, who was dealing with personal problems at the time, was by far the film's weakest link, she avoided an all together terrible performance. She was mediocre, at best, but she did the bare minimum to support the role.

Like in "Judgment at Nuremberg", Kramer asks all the big questions regarding his subject matter. He tackles the subject comprehensively, asking intelligent questions about important issues, and isn't afraid to leave them essentially unanswered. The film's entertainment value is sufficient, but where it really excels is on a thematic level. Despite being a largely forgotten film, "A Child Is Waiting" has some really good things to say, and it is actually a deeper, more profound work than the vast majority of the films that Hollywood was releasing in the early '60s.

RATING: 7.33 out of 10 stars.

Pietro Germi is probably my favorite director of commedia all'italiana films, but to understand him, we have to understand commedia all'italiana, and to do that, we have to examine its roots, which lie in the Italian neorealist movement.

Italian neorealism was forged out of the ashes of World War II. After suffering Mussolini's dictatorship and Italian Fascism, followed by Nazi occupation, followed by American occupation, Italy's identity as a nation had been decimated. The new identity it would build in the postwar years would be defined in every way by the war. In cinema, directors began shooting low-budget, inexpensive films with a realistic aesthetic. This was, on one hand, a product of necessity, due to the economic impact of the war, and, on the other hand, it was an artistic choice, since the neorealists believed in a cinema that echoed reality, which meant natural lighting, nonprofessional actors, and on-location shooting. In terms of the films' content, they often featured a deep sympathy with the working class, which was the hallmark of the Marxist school of thought that was quickly beginning to dominate Italian cinema. Having recently seen the other end of the political spectrum (i.e. fascism) up close and personal, the shift leftward to communism was virtually inevitable. The other notable aspect of these neorealist films is their highly melancholic tone and grim portraits of human despair. This, too, of course, was a result of the horrors seen during the war.

Time heals all wounds, however, and by the mid-'50s, Italians were ready to wake from their doldrums and shake off the depression that had marked the years immediately following the war. Italian cinema would have to adapt. For a nation that was finally ready to laugh again, the influx of comedy into Italian films was only natural. And so the '50s saw the rise of a very unique brand of comedy that would come to be called commedia all'italiana ("comedy Italian style", borrowing its name from Germi's own 1961 film, "Divorce Italian Style").

Italian cinema now had the money and the motivation to make more commercial, more traditionally entertaining films, and while the neorealist mode of filmmaking had largely vanished by the mid-'50s, it survived through commedia all'italiana, which can best be described as an amalgam of the social realism that dominated the neorealist movement and a more conventional comedy. Commedia all'italiana, in a way, can be seen as half comedy, half neorealism, and while infusing neorealism with comedy may not sound like a good mixture, this blend of styles actually created some of the most enjoyable films in Italian cinematic history.

The directors who made films during the era of commedia all'italiana, for the most part, had apprenticed under the neorealists, and as a result much of the neorealist approach permeated their films. While the films they made were certainly comedies, they retained a poignancy, and an element of pathos, that was characteristic of Italian neorealism, and which transcended the conventions of comedic filmmaking. These filmmakers, like many of the neorealists before them, were largely communists, although it's been suggested that many only joined the party in an effort to further their careers.

And this, at last, brings us to Germi. Unlike fellow commedia all'italiana filmmaker Mario Monicelli, who was a committed, lifelong communist, Germi considered himself a social democrat. In other words, he believed in social equality, as did the left, but refused to subscribe to any specific political ideology. Germi and Monicelli both delivered indictments of society in their films, but unlike Monicelli's films, which operate on a sympathy with the working class, Germi's films are an attack on traditional, conservative values in Italian culture, specifically in the south.

While Monicelli's films tend to take place in Rome or northern cities like Turin, the films I've seen by Germi are set in Sicily, where conservative values regarding female chastity and familial honor were, certainly at the time of the film's release, at a maximum. Germi's films seem to revolve around individuals who are compelled toward unscrupulous choices and ultimately cast into a state of chaos by the rigid values of the society they live in. In "Divorce Italian Style", the protagonist lives in a Sicilian society that will not allow him to divorce (not without losing his honor and shaming himself as a cuckold), and so the only course of action left to him is to murder his wife (a comic premise, of course). In "Seduced and Abandoned", the patriarchal head of a family goes to absurd lengths to try to preserve his family's good name by covering up the corruption of his daughter's virtue at any and all costs.

In both films, we have a scenario in which completely normal, or at least non-calamitous events (the failure of a marriage, consensual sex between a fairly young man and a girl on the verge of adulthood) are elevated to a state of complete catastrophe by what Germi sees as society's ridiculous values and mores. "Seduced and Abandoned" is a scathing assault on these kinds of social mores, and despite Germi's refusal to engage a specific political doctrine, it is very much a political film. What makes it so successful, like "Divorce Italian Style", is the way Germi is able to execute his films in such a way as to make them enjoyable on two levels: as a meaningful reflection on the flaws and shortcomings of Italian society, and as pure, lighthearted, comedic entertainment. As the viewer, we have the prerogative of choosing which level to absorb. I recommend both.

RATING: 8.33 out of 10 stars

Of all the directors of the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff is the one who interests me least. That's not to say that I'm not a fan — I can think of very few filmmakers with a gift for adapting written source material on par with Schlöndorff's — but it is that very facet of his art that diminishes my interest in his work. Because he is always working from material that is not his own, his films lack the personal, artistic touch of the New German filmmakers that interest me more, such as Fassbinder or Herzog. That being said, while I don't hold him in the same esteem as some of his contemporaries, there is no doubt that Schlöndorff is a highly talented, highly intelligent filmmaker, and he has had about as much to say about German society as any other member of his movement, even if he uses largely the words of others, instead of his own.

This is a complex issue, of course. Alain Resnais worked from source material, and no one would doubt the artistic or personal qualities of his work. Sometimes the choice of material, combined with the cinematic execution of that material, can achieve a personal version close to that of the medium's greatest filmmakers who worked from their own, original ideas (i.e. Ingmar Bergman or Eric Rohmer). I'm not sure I believe Schlöndorff is comparable to Resnais in that regard, but there is no question that his piercing allegorical portraits of a German society still recovering from the trauma of World War II are as profound as virtually anyone's.

The four films I've seen by Schlöndorff — "Young Torless", "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum", "Coup de grâce", and "The Tin Drum" — have alternated curiously in style. "Young Torless" and "Coup de grâce" utilized a formal realism (pardon the oxymoron, but I think it's appropriate) with a black-and-white aesthetic, while "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" and "The Tin Drum" were color films that operated within a predominantly classicist mode of filmmaking.

To refer to "The Tin Drum" as classicism shouldn't be misconstrued to suggest that the cinematography is less impressive by technical standards. In fact, classicist films tend to be the most polished of all, but their formal and aesthetic qualities are impressive in a technical way, as opposed to an artistic one. In other words, the cinematography in a classicist film will very often be considerably well executed, but always toward the end of making the film go down as smoothly as possible for the viewer, not toward the end of being artistically expressive.

It's a very important distinction, for the thing I found the most disappointing about my experience with "The Tin Drum" was how familiar it all felt. It reminded me too much of the kind of Hollywood classicism I grew up on in the '90s. Of course, "The Tin Drum" is immensely more complex, immensely more intelligent, and immensely better than virtually any of those films. Furthermore, this familiarity, in actuality, is probably to the film's credit, since it suggests that it served as inspiration for coming generations of classicist filmmakers, and likely influenced a great deal of future films (for instance, possibly, something as recent as "The Book Thief"). "The Tin Drum" also reminded me of an impressive and under-appreciated German film by Helma Sanders-Brahms, "Germany Pale Mother", which was released the next year, in 1980.

Like all the films I've seen by Schlöndorff, "The Tin Drum" views very much like a novel (which is logical enough, since his films are based on novels). Both theme and symbolism are executed very much as they would be in literature, with form ultimately giving way to content. That being said, there was some vaguely surrealist imagery throughout "The Tin Drum" that definitely added a welcome element of visceral potency to the viewing experience.

The film's protagonist is a young boy who, on his third birthday, just after the end of World War I, is given a toy drum by his mother. On that same day he makes a conscious decision (or what he recollects as a conscious decision) to stop growing. He is unimpressed by the adult world, and prefers to avoid it. His refusal to participate in this world is symbolized by the tin drum, which he keeps close by him, attached at the hip, for essentially the duration of the film, and when someone tries to take it away from him — when he feels threatened by the encroaching adult world around him — he beats his drum and yells in an ultra-high pitched voice that is capable of breaking any nearby glass. It is his unique defense mechanism, and his only means of protecting his tin drum (that is to say, his innocence) from the harsh world that envelops him.

"The Tin Drum" is a film about social and cultural atrophy. The child with the drum is a metaphor for a German nation that had suffered petrification after the first war, and as a result, throughout the interbellum, the second world war, and, most importantly, the postwar period, it remained stuck in stasis, unable to grow or progress, like the child in the film. Naturally, as a means for dealing with life and its hardships, this is as ineffective for Germany as it is for the boy with the tin drum. One must eventually leave both the hopes and despairs of the past behind, and embrace the future, however uncertain and intimidating. This is Schlöndorff's criticism of German society. Schlöndorff (and the author of his source material, presumably) declares that it's time for Germany to wake up and move forward, at long last.

I've heard so many mixed reviews about "The Tin Drum", and I think I weigh in somewhere in the middle. For me, it's a very good film, falling a bit short of a truly great one.

RATING: 8.00 out of 10 stars

Ki-young Kim's "The Housemaid" proved an interesting viewing experience for me, in that it ultimately differed very much from what I had come to expect about a half hour into the film. What we appear to have here is another film like Joseph Losey's "The Servant", which was a left-wing, revolutionary exercise in which a lower class man enters an upper class household as a servant, and ultimately takes over the bourgeois home, throwing it into upheaval and chaos. Likewise, in "The Housemaid", a young woman joins a wealthier household as a maid, and instantly things begin to take a turn toward disorder and familial disintegration. It could easily be a revolutionary, communist film like Losey's. It is not.

In fact, it is the polar opposite. It turns out that "The Housemaid" is actually an overtly conservative film. This film is undebatably a defense of traditional family values like faithfulness, fidelity, and monogamy. Another film with a virtually identical plot could have just as easily been an attack on those same values. In "The Housemaid", however, the character of the maid is not the instrument of revolution, the hand of Marxist justice that has come to wipe out every trace of bourgeois society from our microcosmic household (e.g. Dirk Bogarde's character in "The Servant"); rather, she is the face of temptation, the tantalizer that will be the destruction of a healthy, happy family, should the patriarchal figure fall into that inescapable abyss of adultery.

Some viewers have interpreted the film in other ways, though I don't see how they could. This isn't that kind of film. There really isn't anything ambiguous here. The only exception — the one place where interpretation of the film's message might become a bit convoluted — is the framing device that Kim uses at the film's bookends. I would note the likelihood that this was added for the sake of the censors. After all, it is somewhat surprising that Kim got this film passed in the first place, and the frame story, which abruptly obliterates the reality of the film's central storyline, may have been the only reason he was able to do so. Despite my usual partiality for any kind of narrative complexity or nonlinear structure, I felt this device was mildly detrimental to the film's integrity. Regardless, it really doesn't change anything about the nature of the film's message.

Thematically, the key moment in the film comes fairly early on, immediately after the decisive act of infidelity. Kim goes to great lengths to underline this instant as the pivotal moment in the lives of his characters, a moment from which there will be no return. He achieves this rather heavy-handedly, by cutting away from the room in which the action occurs, to a shot of a large tree standing outside the house, which is immediately struck by lightning, as if to make it abundantly clear, written in Fuller-esque boldface type: This is the moment that changes everything! This is the undoing of a family!

It's not a subtle film, needless to say. There are, however, master touches throughout. The cinematography is certainly impressive, as is Kim's direction. The laterally panning shots through the plate glass on the upper floor of the house are fantastic. It is quite a well shot film, and Kim works inspiringly within the limited space of only a few settings.

Dramatically, however, "The Housemaid" was somewhat disappointing. The film can't decide whether it wants to be a Buñuelian art film or a Hitchcockian thriller, and the resulting blend is very uneven, increasingly as the film progresses. Kim never gives this film any real, constant identity. The score was quite poor. With its obtrusive and highly transparent attempts at creating tension and coercing the viewer into a certain emotion, it never ceased to intrude on the viewing experience.

This may be a political film — it certainly has a plainly conservative message — but if it is, it's not because Kim intended it to be. Despite being pressured by his government to foray into political filmmaking on a few occasions, Kim himself was not particularly interested in politics. He once said, "North or south, capitalist or communist, ideology is far less interesting to me than the things that divide the sexes."

Indeed, this is evident in "The Housemaid". Kim is clearly much more interested in the boundaries and barriers between men and women — the impediments that obstruct the path to intimacy and healthy relationships — than he is in any specific political ideology. And this is where the film regains some of its composure. Comparisons have been made to the work of Luis Buñuel and Shôhei Imamura. I can see it, in terms of its portrayal of passion and conflicted attempts at intimacy between the sexes, but on the whole I think those are pretty loose comparisons. "The Housemaid" works best as a psychological drama. When we analyze the motives of the characters, and what drives each of them toward their respective actions, the film comes into focus fairly nicely. When it tries to move into suspense, however, it looses its momentum as a drama, and as a successful, cohesive work of cinema.

All things considered, I think this is a good film. I can't call it a masterpiece, or even a great film, although I know many feel that way about it, but I do think it's quality cinema that's worth seeing. My biggest complaint with the film is its extreme lack of subtlety, in multiple facets of the art of filmmaking. Dramatically, "The Housemaid" goes way over the top one too many times, and thematically, the film essentially boils down to a cautionary tale about adultery and infidelity. Nonetheless, it's a film that deserves to be seen, especially with the relatively small place that South Korea occupies in the cinematic landscape.

RATING: 7.33 out of 10

I discovered Robert Downey Sr. fairly recently, given that, in all modesty, I consider myself rather well versed in cinema. I don't know what I expected, but certainly it wasn't what I got. Without question, this is the appeal of Robert Downey's work: its absolute unpredictability, its complete absurdity. He is not a genius of the cinema, but he's clever as can be, he's unrelenting in his satire, and he's highly original.

This quality — originality, uniqueness; call it what you like — means a great deal to me. I've seen so much cinema, from the late 1800s to the present, from America to Japan and everything in between, that I very rarely stumble across something that is a truly novel viewing experience. The three amateur films that began his career as a filmmaker — "Babo 73", "Chafed Elbows", and "No More Excuses" — were the first experiences I had with Downey, and I was pretty instantly enamored with him. The films aren't masterpieces. In fact, they're far from it. They're filled with flaws and shortcomings, but also with moments of fantastic off-the-wall humor and scathing satire. More than anything, they're almost completely unique. I was reminded very slightly of a few of Godard's films with the Dziga Vertov Group from the early '70s, like "Wind From the East" and "Vladimir and Rosa", and a bit more of Scorsese's early short films, but otherwise I can't really recall any films that came to mind as being similar to these remarkable bundles of absurdist energy.

I next saw "Putney Swope", Downey's first professional film, if I'm not mistaken. It was very similar to its predecessors, only much more polished and professionally executed. Two films later, in 1972, Downey came out with "Greaser's Palace".

The first thing I noted about this film was the change to color. Aside from that, however, the cinematography is very similar to "Putney Swope", utilizing a realist style with hand-held camera-work and so forth. Downey's basic sense of humor is present, but on the whole, "Greaser's Palace" is a very different film from the other four Downey films I've seen. It's much more toned down, and the general mood of the film diverges significantly from what we're used to. Downey deviates somewhat from his usual absurdist farce and buffoonery (although he definitely doesn't dispense with it entirely), replacing it instead with something more quiet and understated, by comparison to his other films, that is. For the first time in any of his films that I've seen, there are moments in "Greaser's Palace" that actually appear to be intended to be taken seriously, at least to some extent. The final shot of the film is absolutely stunning, both beautiful and disturbing on a visceral level. It's truly a very strange film, and while it doesn't all together work, it has its moments.

"Greaser's Palace" is an allegorical film, a parable of the life of Christ. Downey clearly doesn't subscribe to any specific political beliefs or ideologies, and has said so himself. These aren't left-wing films with a social message; they're just raw satire for its own sake. When all is said and done, the primary function of Downey's films is to be enjoyed. It's comedy for comedy's sake. If, however, there was ever a Robert Downey film that felt like it was intended to mean something, this is that film. Religious satire has always been present in Downey's films, but until now it had always been overwhelmed by the much more dominant political satire in his films. In "Greaser's Palace", though, the religious satire is the core of the film. The allegory is extremely thinly veiled, comically so, and Downey pulls no punches.

For instance, I recall three figures standing together in a field near the end of the film. One is a younger man who refers to the older man next to him as his father. The third figure is a man covered in a white sheet, with two holes cut out where the eyes might be. These three not-so-mysterious figures are, of course, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This is Downey's idea of humor. Whether it's funny or not will depend very much on the viewer. While the symbolism and metaphor are far from brilliant, I've found that there is more than enough humor to be found in his irreverence alone. His blatant lack of respect for religion and politics, I believe, has worked to wonderful comedic effect in his films.

I thought "Greaser's Palace" was a mess for the bulk of the viewing, and it probably is the worst of the five films I've seen by Downey — certainly the most flawed — but in its own way it may also be the most interesting. The usual frenetic pace of Downey's comedy is melted into something closer to deadpan humor at times, and by the end of the film I must say that I was vaguely interested. I haven't made a great deal of effort to interpret the symbolism and the allegory, and the specifics of what exactly Downey was trying to say, because ultimately I feel like I'd be left with what I already know: Downey never really tries to say much of anything. He simply makes fun of everything. And here he takes great pleasure in ridiculing religion on every imaginable level.

Is "Greaser's Palace" a good film? I don't think so. But it's interesting, at least in part, and while I think it fails on the whole, I won't say that I wasn't engaged by it for certain moments, particularly towards the end of the film. I found that it had much more impact on me than I could logically or rationally account for. Give it a shot, and see what you think. A film this original and unique earns some respect on those merits alone.

RATING: 5.67 out of 10 stars

"Nana" (1926) is the third film by the great Jean Renoir. I've been unable to find his first film, which he co-directed with another filmmaker, but having seen his second film and solo debut, "La fille de l'eau" (a.k.a. "Whirlpool of Fate"; 1925), I was a bit surprised by "Nana", for a few reasons.

First, there's the star of both films, Catherine Hessling. In "La fille de l'eau", she played an innocent young girl, and she did so about as well as could be expected, given how almost absurdly overdrawn her character was in terms of virtue and purity. In "Nana", suffice it to say, her role is a bit different. She plays a tart, a prostitute. Once again, her character is ridiculously exaggerated, caricatured to an absolutely laughable extent. Here, however, unlike in Renoir's last film, Hessling does nothing to help matters. Her acting in "Nana" is so over the top that it at times becomes a marked hindrance to the integrity of the film. I would expect this kind of performance in a Keystone comedy from 1914, maybe, but not from a Renoir film in the latter half of the '20s.

Furthermore, the narrative breaks down into tragic melodrama in the latter portion of the film, and any thematic substance from the first half of the film is ultimately diluted in the perceived necessities of plot and story. This is unfortunate, but not unexpected; it's common of so many silents from this era.

That, however, is about the extent of my criticism for the film. It's a good film, overall, or at least a solid one. In some ways it surpasses "La fille de l'eau", and in other ways it falls short of it. The narrative in "Nana" is stronger than its predecessor's: The characters are more complex and less archetypal, and the themes are more pronounced while they last. To venture further into the subjective, I'd say that "Nana" has higher entertainment value than Renoir's last film, and that it's more dramatically engaging.

On the other hand, there was an element of visual poetry in "La fille de l'eau" that is missing from "Nana". Perhaps it's the issue of color tinting, at least in part. I've always felt that color tinting degrades a film's artistic value. "La fille de l'eau" was not tinted, and it preserved a certain artistry in the film's aesthetic that the tinted images in "Nana" simply can not match. I will concede, though, that if Renoir is going to insist on color tinting, the tinting in "Nana" is handled well — a series of similarly toned warm tints, providing a more consistent visual mood than, for instance, the messy rainbow of colors from all parts of the visible spectrum in Fritz Lang's "The Spiders" films.

"La fille de l'eau" also featured impressive montage, and one wonders where the editing talents displayed in that film disappeared to for "Nana". That's not to say that "Nana" is poorly edited, but simply that it doesn't exhibit the noticeably skilled use of montage that we saw in the former film. Renoir is credited for the editing in "Nana", whereas I can't find a credit for the editing in "La fille de l'eau", so it's possible that it wasn't Renoir's editing talents that we saw in that film, although I'm still willing to guess that it was.

Finally, "La fille de l'eau" gets a nudge for a fantastic dream sequence that I'm sure anyone who saw the film will remember. But enough contrasting. There are certainly similarities as well. The most obvious place where the two films can be compared is in their social inclinations. Both films, and for that matter every Renoir film I've ever seen, feature a blending of characters from different social classes. "Boudu Saved From Drowning", "The Lower Depths", "Grand Illusion", "The Diary of a Chambermaid", "The Golden Coach" — Renoir loves to throw lower class characters and upper class characters into the same setting and see what comes of it. It's his way of exploring his humanist disposition. Other filmmakers have done it in their own way. Kurosawa liked to look to the lower classes alone to find the true nature of humanity. Visconti, though not exactly a humanist, liked to look largely to the upper classes to explore human nature. Renoir likes to look at both, together — the coexistence of the two in a particular setting — and he defines humanity through the shared qualities, as well as the conflicts, that arise under those conditions.

"Nana" is a very much a male film, in that, like Luis Buñuel, there is a focus on the power of the female, and the manner in which a woman can trigger a maelstrom of chaos in the lives of the men who fall at her feet, and who set aside everything — even that most precious social status and respectability — in order to attain the object of their passion. This theme has the potential to be feminist, of course, but not here. The film's sympathies are almost entirely with the despairing male characters, and the female tantalizer is depicted as an absolutely ridiculous human being (although she is ultimately afforded a small degree of humanity).

On a side note, there's a role in 'Nana" for Werner Krauss, the German actor who appeared in films like Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and Pabst's "The Joyless Street". He's good. In fact, excluding Catherine Hessling, the whole cast is pretty good.

The film is made by a fairly young and inexperienced Jean Renoir, and yet it is clearly the work of a professional. Renoir was not the master of the cinema that he would later become, but already he was a good filmmaker, and his talent for storytelling is evident even this early in his career.

RATING: 6.00 out of 10 stars

I've always said that I could never choose a favorite filmmaker, but that if I had to, it would be Ingmar Bergman, for certain. A bit of a contradiction, I admit, but there you have it. For me, he is the grandmaster of the cinema. I've seen exactly forty of his films, and "After the Rehearsal" may be the greatest of them all.

Of course, that depends very much on your tastes. We see here a very different Bergman from the one many viewers are accustomed to. There are, after all, two Ingmar Bergmans: First, we have Bergman the magician, the cinematic sorcerer who made films like "The Seventh Seal" and "Persona". Secondly, we have Bergman the realist, emerging during the latter period of his career, with films like "Scenes From a Marriage" and "Autumn Sonata". These films aren't quite realism, of course — they're still very formal — but they're certainly very stripped-down and minimalistic by comparison.

"After the Rehearsal" is probably the most extreme example of this latter category of Bergman's cinema. It is a minimalist exercise in what is essentially filmed theater. As a result, those looking for the kind of cinematic wizardry that Bergman displayed in so many of his films up through the '60s (and which he revived for "Fanny and Alexander" in 1982) may be a bit disappointed by this film, strictly in aesthetic and stylistic terms. Nyqvist's cinematography is absolutely masterful, as always, but it's masterful in the same way it was in "Scenes From a Marriage" — unrelenting close-ups of the frail human condition, et cetera — versus the kind of technical and formal mastery he displayed in "Fanny and Alexander" or Tarkovsky's "The Sacrifice". This is a low-budget, theatrical production, so don't expect a grand tour de force of Bergmanian cinema.

On the other hand, when it comes to content, that's exactly what "After the Rehearsal" is. It offers the most insightful, profound exposition yet of Bergman's identity, essence, and point of view as an artist, as a filmmaker (and as a theater director), and perhaps most notably, as a human being. Every line, every word, every expression, every intonation, every gesture is a revelation of the most meaningful variety, for those who are familiar with Bergman and his way of expressing ideas. Never before has Bergman condensed so much thought, so many ideas and themes, into one film (and quite a short one at that). This is a concentrated exercise in subtextual expression, and on that note, I have two caveats to issue to those considering watching this film.

First, as we know, most audiences today don't like to be provoked toward thought, analysis, or self-reflection, so if you're turned off by the idea of watching two people talk for seventy minutes straight, save yourself the effort and skip this one. "After the Rehearsal", even more than normal for a Bergman film, requires the ability to think in thematic, subtextual, and metaphorical terms. Even for the most avid Bergman fans, and even by the strictest Bergman standards, this film requires patience and thorough analysis.

Secondly, I'm a firm believer in experiencing a filmmaker's body of work chronologically. I know many viewers don't share this compulsion, but I must stress that it is crucial for this film. "After the Rehearsal" is a deep and painstaking reflection on everything Bergman has ever done and everything he has ever been during the course of his long and illustrious career. If you haven't seen the vast majority of Bergman's previous work, this film will be impossible to fully appreciate.

Virtually all of Bergman's recurring themes are present in "After the Rehearsal", such as the idea of human beings as actors in this often shoddy, second-rate production that we call life. Bergman's characters engage in emotional dialogue or intensive introspection, and then, hearing the words come out of their mouths, they experience shame and mortification as a result of what they perceive to be their own playacting and histrionics, and so they subsequently backpedal over their previous statements with a tone of fatigue and despair. It's not just Bergman's characters, however, that exhibit this behavior. Bergman himself does it, from film to film. The first time we saw it was in "Prison" (1949), his sixth film, when he criticized himself in a moment of self-reference that cited a scene from "It Rains on Our Love" (I believe). Since then, and especially in his later work, it's been a constant for Bergman, although much more subtle and less explicit than it was in "Prison". In a way, it provides a metaphor for what Bergman does with "After the Rehearsal".

"Fanny and Alexander" is considered Bergman's swan song, and I suppose it is. He officially retired from cinema afterwards, and everything he directed since then, with the exception of "The Making of Fanny and Alexander", was a television film, including "After the Rehearsal", in which Bergman makes one last attempt to clarify himself, to backpedal on a career of directing films and plays, and to explain what it all meant, and what he has become in light of it.

"After the Rehearsal" is a highly self-reflexive, metatextual meditation on what it means to be a director. The power, the manipulation, the messy emotions and relationships with actors who often confuse the role they play in a film (or play) with the role they play in life. The two roles begin to converge, and at the helm of it all, there is Bergman, a man who is slowly but surely distancing himself from the world around him. The world of cinema. The world of theater. The world of life.

Ultimately, that's what "After the Rehearsal" is about. It's Bergman's explanation and exploration of the reasons why he has chosen to distance himself from the world of filmmaking, and it's brilliant for every moment of its 72 minutes.

RATING: 9.67 out of 10 stars

Kurosawa's best films often had a combination of warmth, which is present in essentially every film he ever made, and bleakness, which seems to pop up only every two or three films, as if Kurosawa were prone to depressive spells. This unique blend of moods can be found in "The Idiot", "Drunken Angel", "The Lower Depths", and again here, in "Dodes'ka-den", a heartfelt examination of human misery, which, like all Kurosawa films, lacks the intellectual and artistic mastery of many of his contemporaries, but also possesses a warm humanism that very few filmmakers have ever been able to achieve.

Released in 1970, "Dodes'ka-den" (the quirky title is explained in the film's first sequence) saw Kurosawa at a critical juncture in his career. Entering Japanese cinema later than his classical Japanese contemporaries (i.e. Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse), but before the Japanese New Wave crowd that would follow (i.e. Suzuki, Imamura, Teshigahara, Ôshima), Kurosawa occupied a unique place in Japanese cinema. His films were very western in both style and content, and they broke from the more traditional values of Japanese filmmaking.

Prior to "Dodes'ka-den", Kurosawa was able to get by with a profoundly felt film once every four years or so, while filling out the in-between years with exercises in shallower classicism usually based in the chanbara (samurai) genre of Japanese cinema. Strangely, these latter films — "Seven Samurai", "The Hidden Fortess", "Yojimbo", "Sanjuro" — were often championed the same as the others. Granted, they were effective, sometimes wonderful exercises in entertainment, but they tended to lack both the vision and the thematic depth that marked his best films.

For that reason, I was delighted to see "Dodes'ka-den" be the type of film it was: simultaneously despairing and humanistic, since I didn't really know what to expect from this one. Kurosawa himself had remarked, after his last film, "Red Beard" (1965), that he felt he had reached the end of a certain creative cycle, and that whatever happen from that point forward, it would be different.

It certainly was. Television had become an increasingly dominant aspect of Japanese culture, diluting the devotion of Kurosawa's previously loyal fan base, and Kurosawa himself seemed to be entering a kind of artistic down-cycle. The rise in popularity of television meant Japanese producers were making less and less money, and were therefore less and less willing to take risks on artistically innovative films. In 1966, Kurosawa's long-term contract with Toho expired, and a troublesome detour through Hollywood ensued.

Kurosawa and David Lean were set to direct the Japanese and American sequences, respectively, of the 1970 film "Tora! Tora! Tora!", but neither man ended up directing a single shot for the film. Ultimately, this failed undertaking, along with a series of other issues in Kurosawa's professional life (his broken relationship with longtime collaborator and screenwriter Ryûzô Kikushima; exposed corruption within Kurosawa's production company), sent Kurosawa's career into a downward spiral from which it appeared he might never recover.

Indeed, the next decade was a dark one for Kurosawa. He was desperate to make another film, but was struggling. Then something happened that has become one of my favorite off-screen moments in cinematic history. Three of Japan's most famous filmmakers — Masaki Kobayashi, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Kon Ichikawa — came to Kurosawa's rescue, and the four of them formed a production company called the Club of the Four Knights, to whom the concept for "Dodes'ka- den" is credited during the opening titles of the film. The idea was for each of the four filmmakers to direct one film each, but this never happened, and it has been said that true motivation for the formation of the company was to support Kurosawa and help a titan of Japanese cinema to get back on his feet again. It was a beautiful gesture, one too uncommon in the often dog-eat-dog world that is the film industry.

Unfortunately, it didn't pan out. "Dodes'ka-den" had a small degree of critical success, but was a box office failure. The film lost money, and in 1971 Kurosawa attempted suicide by cutting his wrists and throat. Fortunately, he survived, and a few years later he was approached by the famous Soviet film studio, Mosfilm, to make a Russian film. That film, "Dersu Uzala", which I've not yet seen, was moderately successful both financially and critically, beginning Kurosawa's recovery as a filmmaker. Still unable to find financing for a new project in Japan, though, he was assisted by none other than George Lucas, a massive Kurosawa fan, in making his next film, "Kagemusha" (1980), for which both Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola were producers. It was the first of Kurosawa's final five films, a period during which he regained his status as a master filmmaker.

As for "Dodes'ka-den", Kurosawa's despair is palpable throughout, but so is his warmth and compassion for humanity. It was Kurosawa's first color film, and the color palette is quite beautiful. The film isn't successful at every turn, but it is on the whole. It has very little plot, meandering back and forth between the various inhabitants of what is closer to a trash heap than a town (maybe a small step up from the setting of "The Lower Depths", which is the film I'd say "Dodes'ka-den" has the most in common with). Some viewers, hopelessly addicted to plot and story, might find fault in this, but I wouldn't share that criticism. I felt that the film's drifting plot line gave "Dodes'ka-den" its greatest strength: a narrative that, like its characters, wanders from place to place in search of meaning and happiness, and, like its characters, having not found it, settles down here, in this den of hardship and human suffering, where goodness and sorrow exist side-by-side, unconcealed by the pretensions of a "regular" society that may be less impoverished, but is also less honest, and, for Kurosawa, ultimately less human.

RATING: 8.00 out of 10 stars

Watching Béla Tarr's "The Outsider" was a similar experience for me to watching Bresson's "A Gentle Woman", in that both films saw me witnessing the use of color from a director that I had previously thought constitutionally incapable of anything but black-and-white. Tarr's vision of life, of course, is best suited to the black-and-white medium, as was Bresson's, but like "A Gentle Woman", the uncharacteristic use of color did nothing to sully my appreciation for this impressive film.

Tarr would become best known for his more formal, highly metaphysical works, such as "Damnation" and "Werckmeister Harmonies", but here, early in his career, we see him at the completely opposite end of the cinematic spectrum. In his early features, instead of sheer, unmitigated formalism, Tarr opted for absolute realism. These films are more political, where his later work tends to be more philosophical (nihilistic, specifically). Instead of Tarkovsky-esque camera-work infused with a certain Bressonian drabness, which is the style that dominates Tarr's later films, what we get here is something closer to Cassavetes than to Tarkovsky or Bresson.

Whether Tarr hadn't fully formed his vision of life and of cinema yet, or whether he simply didn't have the means to make films any other way at this point, I can't say for sure. But what's certain is that these early Tarr films are a completely different experience. An inferior one, ultimately, but they're still impressive films in their own right.

Tarr's debut feature, "Family Nest", from 1979, was a black-and-white exercise in kitchen sink realism, which is as dissimilar to the style of his later work as one can possibly imagine. Nevertheless, "Family Nest" bears some similarities to those later films in terms of content. All Tarr's films seem to incorporate characters who are trapped and paralyzed by either social or existential conditions. In "Family Nest", an indictment of the Hungarian society and government of the time, the prison was a social one, not a metaphysical one. As a result, there was actually an implication that, if freed from the oppressive weight of this flawed society, these characters might actually be able to find some degree of happiness. Characters in future Tarr films would not be so fortunate. In those films, it was the oppressive weight of human existence that imprisoned them, and that, unlike society, is entirely inescapable.

"The Outsider", released in 1981, continued predominately in the realist mode of "Family Nest". Tarr decided to go with color here, which was effective despite being inconsistent with his other films, but otherwise the style here is very similar to his first film. In both cases we have a low budget production with hand-held camera-work, nonprofessional actors (I believe), and an overall realist aesthetic. However, unlike "Family Nest", there are moments in "The Outsider" that really do move toward formalism. So you can tell that Tarr did at least have that vision inside of him when he made this film, even if he was just beginning to express it, and to nourish it as it evolved bit by bit into what would eventually become his preferred style of filmmaking.

Other than the superficial change to color, the place where "The Outsider" can be most contrasted with "Family Nest" is the source of the conflict, which was external in "Family Nest", and is internal in "The Outsider". On a content level, "The Outsider" is a bit of a cross between a traditional exercise in social realism and an existential meditation on the human spirit (i.e. Ingmar Bergman). In "Family Nest", the problems that were responsible for the misery of the central characters were largely external, originating outwardly in their flawed environment and social milieu. In "The Outsider", the fundamental barrier that stands between our protagonist and happiness is an inner one.

This chicken-egg conundrum was eventually resolved by Tarr, by the time he reached "Damnation", maybe before. In "Family Nest", the despairing human spirit is an echo of a broken social climate. The misery begins on the outside, and is carried inward by victims of a flawed system. In "The Outsider", however, this model of human suffering is reversed. Society is the fractured form spawned from existential discontent, an inherent burden of the human condition. Misery originates in the interior world of the human soul, and ripples outward into society, thus moving in a direction opposite to the one it took in "Family Nest".

Finally, in "Damnation" and Tarr's subsequent works, the question of from where human misery originates is resolved. Or, rather, I should say, it is ignored all together. It has been asked, and no answer having been found, it is set aside as inconsequential. In "Damnation", neither the tormented interior world of the soul nor the desolate exterior landscapes hold the source of human despair. Anguish is simply a reality of human life, and so we find it in both worlds: the internal and the external. The forsaken, barren landscapes of the physical world are simply a reflection of the anguish in our souls, and conversely, the suffering that is inherent to the human soul is merely a reflection of the cold and harsh universe that envelops us. The inner and the outer worlds of human existence are mirror images, and in that image we find despair, anguish, and misery. There is no origin.

Ultimately, "The Outsider" is a formative work for Tarr, and by no means one of his best films, but by any other standards than the extremely high ones that Tarr has set for himself with his more recent films, it's a legitimately impressive film. Expect something closer to Michael Fengler's "Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?" and not "Werckmeister Harmonies", for instance, and this will hopefully be as satisfying for you as it was for me. I much prefer formalism to realism, but in the latter category, it doesn't get too much better than this.

RATING: 8.00 out of 10 stars

Jacques Demy, at his best, was one of those directors who, like Charlie Chaplin, Akira Kurosawa, Jim Jarmusch, or Ernst Lubitsch, could ascend to the ranks of the greats without possessing the immense intellectual and artistic faculties of many of his contemporaries (i.e. Bergman, Tarkovsky, Godard, Pasolini, Antonioni, Buñuel, Bresson, et cetera). Unfortunately, Demy was never as consistent or as prolific as Chaplin or Kurosawa, for instance, who released one good-to-great film after another for such an extensive career. Nevertheless, films like "Lola" and particularly "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" showed that cinema could be masterful without being artistically ambitious. Like Ozu, Demy proved that a true masterpiece could derive from emotional expressiveness, not only intellectual expressiveness.

In addition to this emotional depth, the other impressive facet of Demy's cinema was, of course, his stylistic abilities. "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" is truly one of the most stylistically impressive films ever made; visually sumptuous on a level entirely of its own. "The Young Girls of Rochefort" also demonstrates Demy's capacity for stylistically rich and luxurious cinema. We can even see it as early as "Le bel indifférent", his 1957 short film based on a Cocteau play.

Resplendent visuals and extreme emotional potency — these two things Demy did as well as just about anyone to ever sit in a director's chair. "The Pied Piper", therefore, was a bit perplexing to me. It wasn't by any means poorly filmed, but like "The Model Shop", Demy's other previous film made outside of France, it simply lacked his usual flare for lush and lavish visuals. By comparison to his French films, "The Pied Piper" is very mundane, aesthetically speaking.

As for the emotional potency, there is very little. There's not much plot, which in and of itself is absolutely fine by me, but the film seems to lack the emotional punch that we're used to from Demy, although naturally that will vary from person to person, to some degree.

Furthermore, although the film is definitely a fantasy, which is in keeping with Demy's last film, "Donkey Skin", it is really quite gloomy in its mood. Demy, who is usually so filled with life and energy, is quite dreary here. Of course, "The Model Shop", an American film, was also rather dull in tone and lifeless compared to his usual work, so perhaps Demy is a product of his environment. Perhaps his milieu determines the nature of his films. Working in France, his films tend to be filled to the brim with warmth and vibrancy. Outside of France, he seems to be another filmmaker all together.

"The Pied Piper" is also extremely cynical. Demy, who has always been the classic romantic, takes a completely different look at humanity in this film. Instead of his characteristic enthusiasm for life and romantic fervor, "The Pied Piper" is deprived of anything that could be perceived as the kind of life-affirming fun and joyousness that permeated most of his previous films. Truly, he is unrecognizable here.

The film, which is set in Germany in the 1300s, satirizes the Catholic Church and politicians, among other things, and paints a very grim portrait of humanity. It stars Jack Wild, John Hurt, Donald Pleasence, and others, including Donovan, who composed and performed the music for the film. As far as that goes, let's just say he's no Michel Legrand. One of the most ridiculous aspects of the film was the way that '60s/'70s culture so obtrusively pervaded a film that was meant to be set in the 14th century. Throughout the film, Donovan plays music on a style of six-string guitar that I'm almost certain did not exist at the time, and the music he plays sounds so laughably like the '60s/'70s that it became difficult to take anything I was seeing seriously. Generally a period piece makes an effort to disguise the modernity of its production, but not here.

At times this film reminded me of the later work of Roberto Rossellini, such as "Blaise Pascal", "Cartesius", and especially "The Age of the Medici". Needless to say, those were historical films, and Demy's film is a fantasy, but the style and tone of the films are similar in some ways.

While "The Pied Piper" is not truly a musical, Donovan's score and the songs he plays on a few occasions during the film certainly are a large part of defining the overall feel of the film, and he simply can't do for "The Pied Piper" what Legrand was able to do for "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" or even "The Young Girls of Rochefort". Donovan's music here just isn't very good, and it contributes nothing of any real value to the film.

At the end of the day, this film represents to me the paragon of mediocrity. It is certainly not a bad film, and certainly not a good one. The most interesting parts of the film are the social commentary and satire that Demy delivers with a surprisingly scathing and uncompromising bluntness, but even there, the film doesn't really say anything new or different than what we've seen many times before in cinema: Authority is corrupt and human vice takes root where man attempts to attain or maintain power. Demy exposes religious officials' use of apparent piety and ecclesiastical values as a thinly veiled disguise for greed and immorality. This really isn't anything original or profound in terms of new ideas in cinema, but it's interesting coming from Demy, who I wouldn't have pegged for this kind of cynicism.

I can't say I'd recommend this film, but I don't think it's a real waste of time either. There will inevitably be those with whom the film clicks, but I'm guessing that the majority of experienced filmgoers won't take much away from this one.

RATING: 5.00 out of 10 stars

Luis Buñuel, I believe, is one of the ten greatest directors of all time, and "Mexican Bus Ride" is a perfect example of why; not because it's one of his best films, but because it's one of his worst films, and yet it's wonderful. It's certainly not Buñuel at his most brilliant, but it may be something near Buñuel at his most delightful. This was a joyous viewing experience for me.

Buñuel began his filmmaking career in Paris, directing a short film in 1929 called "Un chien andalou", which was co-written by none other than the great surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí. It wasn't exactly the first film of its kind — René Clair's "Entr'acte" in 1924 was stylistically similar — but it was extremely audacious and a milestone in the attempt to bring true, uncompromising art to the cinema.

Buñuel and Dalí collaborated on one more film, "L'age d'or", in 1930, which was followed by Buñuel's documentary short, "Las Hurdes" (a.k.a "Land Without Bread"), in 1933. That marked the end of this early period in Buñuel's career. He would not make any more films for fourteen years.

In order to break back into the film industry, Buñuel had to accept a commercial, mainstream project that was, artistically speaking, beneath his dignity. And so his fourteen-year hiatus came to an end with the release of the 1947 Mexican film, "Gran Casino". It was the only truly bad Buñuel film I've ever seen, but it served its purpose: It got Buñuel on his feet again, and the subsequent run of Mexican pictures that Buñuel directed was fantastic.

The most famous films from this Mexican period in Buñuel's career came at the end of it, in the early '60s: "Viridiana", "The Exterminating Angel", and "Simon of the Desert", after which he returned to making mostly French films to finish his career, and his final three films — "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", "The Phantom of Liberty", and "That Obscure Object of Desire" — are perhaps his greatest masterpieces.

Still, the early films from Buñuel's Mexican period are a true pleasure to watch. Amongst them, we have more serious films like "Los olvidados", an uncharacteristic exercise in social realism, and "Susana", which in many ways was an early dress rehearsal for "Tristana". Those are probably the best films out of his first half-dozen or so Mexican films, but the others, excluding "Gran Casino", are very enjoyable films. They were lighthearted comedies, with varying degrees of drama. They include "The Great Madcap", "Daughter of Deceit", and "Mexican Bus Ride". While none of these are likely to be considered truly great films, and certainly aren't among Buñuel's best, they occupy a very special place in his body of work for me. I'll always have a soft spot for these films.

Of these six films that began his Mexican period, "Susana" was undoubtedly the Buñuel film that reminds us most of the later work that would ultimately define his identity as a filmmaker. It worked on one of Buñuel's most recurring themes: the sexual frustration — the full-fledged torment — that a man can undergo at the hands of a beautiful woman who withholds intimacy. "Tristana" and "That Obscure Object of Desire" are the best-known examples of this, but it's a constant theme throughout Buñuel's body of work, and we see it here in "Mexican Bus Ride", albeit very watered down compared to his later work.

In addition to the marvelous entertainment value of the film, "Mexican Bus Ride" stood out to me as being the first Buñuel feature to really include all of his hallmarks as a filmmaker — all of the elements of the cinema that would eventually constitute his essence as an artist. Granted, they all came in very small doses in this film — they were very unrefined at this point, and none of them fully developed — but they're present, nonetheless.

Buñuel was known as "the father of cinematic surrealism". His oneiric tone and surrealist mode of filmmaking were essential facets of his cinema, and he delivers a great dream sequence in "Mexican Bus Ride". It comes about halfway into the film, and it only lasts about five minutes, but it was a welcome addition to an already very enjoyable viewing experience.

Buñuel was also known as "the scourge of the bourgeoisie". He went beyond the requisite for a leftist filmmaker when he attacked both bourgeois society and bourgeois individuals themselves, generally through unrelenting, scathing satire. This aspect of his cinema isn't by any means present in "Mexican Bus Ride" to the extent that it is in, say, "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", but it's there, and it's not difficult to detect.

Surrealism, female sexual dominance, and satirization of the bourgeoisie — these, to me, are the three pillars of Luis Buñuel's cinema, and the most fascinating aspect of his films is observing the various ways in which he's able to intertwine these themes. In "Mexican Bus Ride", all three are somewhat diluted, as Buñuel hadn't yet fully discovered his identity as a filmmaker (or hadn't yet been allowed to fully express it, perhaps), but they're present, together, for the first time in his career in Mexico. Buñuel certainly wasn't able to be as extreme here in his expression of his ideas as he would be later on, and he goes light enough on these themes that, if we weren't looking for them — that is to say, if we didn't know Buñuel so well — we might not attach much significance to them. But for the veteran Buñuel fan, it's all there.

"Mexican Bus Ride" is a legitimately good film. With all his outright brilliance, I often forget how downright fun Buñuel could be, and this film was a great reminder.

RATING: 7.33 out of 10 stars

Here is a French-Italian film by a Greek filmmaker, Costa-Gavras. The film was released in 1970, and stars Yves Montand, with Simone Signoret costarring. The acting is impressive and all the performances are very solid. Stylistically, the film feels similar to Costa-Gavras's last film, "Z", utilizing polished camera-work in what is ultimately a classicist mode of filmmaking that was popular for many political films in the '60s through the mid-'70s, such as Schlondorff's "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum". The cinematography looks quite good, and you would expect as much, given that it was done by the famous cinematographer of the French New Wave, Raoul Coutard, who worked on virtually all of Godard's and Truffaut's early films, as well as "Z".

Like all the Costa-Gavras films I've seen, "The Confession" is a highly political film, delivered from a communist perspective. It's based on a novel by Artur London, in which London details his true-life experiences of being abducted, tortured, and put on trial by the Czechoslovakian government in the early '50s.

The first misconception that must be dispelled is the idea that this is somehow an anti-communist film. It most certainly is not. Many viewers have noted the idea that, unlike "Z", which blatantly glorified communism, "The Confession" is much less politically biased, revealing the faults in both sides of the political spectrum. I have to completely disagree. "The Confession" is just as overtly pro-communist as "Z". Viewers should be reminded that it's not actually communism that Costa-Gavras is attacking in this film. Rather, he's attacking a specific regime in Czechoslovakia that corrupted communism and twisted it into a fascistic, totalitarian entity that, for Costa-Gavras, is not truly communism at all. Stalinism is the target of Costa-Gavras's criticism here, not communism. At no point in the film is the inherent virtue of communism ever brought into question. At most, the film provides a warning, like Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others", regarding how quickly socialism can become fascism, and a reminder of the often thin line that separates the two.

So, while Costa-Gavras is certainly making a critical commentary on the challenges of sustaining a true socialist state, he is never, at any point, questioning the notion that communism is intrinsically righteous and that it remains the ultimate goal toward which humanity and society should strive. That idea is axiomatic in "The Confession" just as it was in "Z". For Costa-Gavras, communism is still infallible, and therefore if something is flawed, then it must not be actual communism (in logic, I believe this is referred to as the "No true Scotsman" fallacy).

In spite of this, I have a lot of respect for what Costa-Gavras did with this film. Yes, it's blindly faithful to the idea of communism, but it is at least willing to concede that communism is, indeed, corruptible. It may be infallible, in Costa-Gavras's eyes, but under the wrong conditions, it can be mutated into something that is fallible. This is sophistry, of course, but that's the point: With "The Confession", Costa-Gavras manages to condemn the corrupting of communism, and the form this corruption took, without ever condemning communism itself. It's a bit of a copout, admittedly, but it's much more than many staunch communists of the day were willing to acknowledge. Much like the protagonist of the film — that is to say, like Artur London himself — Costa-Gavras remains loyal to the idea of communism, in spite of everything he's seen in the events depicted in the film.

So there really is nothing anti-communist here, anymore than it would be anti-Catholic to acknowledge the existence of the Inquisition. An anti-communist film would endeavor to challenge the merits of communism, to doubt its inherent worth. Nothing could be further from the reality of this film. Communism is accepted by Costa-Gavras as an innately righteous entity, and nothing in the film denies that idea. However, Costa-Gavras has at least had the courage to confront the reality that even socialism can make mistakes, and he seems to firmly believe that those mistakes need to be acknowledged and rectified, and not rejected and hidden away from the public eye. Sadly, many communists did not agree. They feared that the film would provide ammunition for anti-communists, and they saw it as an attack on the integrity of communism. They preferred, evidently, that the truth be buried, which is quite hypocritical, since it goes against the very principles of communism, and the idea that, as Antonio Gramsci said, telling the truth is a revolutionary act in itself.

As a result, I appreciate Costa-Gavras's courage in making this film, as I do Artur London's in writing the novel that it's based on. It shows a genuine commitment to one's beliefs, which is something I can deeply respect, whether I share those beliefs or not.

Politics aside, I think most viewers will find this film very entertaining. It tells an intriguing story, it's well acted, and it benefits from impressive direction on Costa-Gavras's part and characteristically high quality cinematography from Coutard. Stripping the film of its communist ideals, what we're left with is a film about an individual bearing the burden of human injustice, and ultimately suffering for maintaining blind loyalty to a cause. It was a loyalty that, when all was said and done, only traveled in one direction. In this way, the film carries thematic similarities to many of the chanbara (samurai) films that Japan churned out in the '60s. So I don't think the communist implications of the film should be much of a turnoff to even the most ardently anti-communist viewers. Other than an unfortunately propagandistic ending, Costa-Gavras makes it easy enough to set all of that aside and interpret the film on much broader terms, if the viewer is so inclined.

RATING: 8.00 out of 10 stars

Mario Monicelli was one of the successors to the neorealist movement in Italian cinema, which began in the mid-'40s and catapulted Italy to the forefront of international cinema. Following it came a generation of Italian filmmakers — including Fellini and Antonioni — who had apprenticed under the neorealist directors, and who kept Italian cinema alive for one more generation while the "big three" neorealists (Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti) moved in increasingly disparate directions.

Monicelli was one such filmmaker to emerge from the waning neorealist movement. His first big success, I believe, was the 1958 film, "Big Deal on Madonna Street", which is the first major film I know of from the commedia all'italiana genre ("comedy Italian style", taking its name from Pietro Germi's 1961 film, "Divorce Italian Style"). It's a wonderful comedy, and I'd recommend seeing it, if possible, before "The Organizer".

Commedia all'italiana is generally characterized by a mixture of mildly over-the-top humor and a gentle poignancy that anchors what could otherwise be absurdist farce. There tend to be light political undertones which unobtrusively satirize contemporary life in Italy, and an emotional undercurrent that stems from a sympathy with likable characters who simply can't get a foothold in modern society.

This all fits "Big Deal on Madonna Street" to a tee, but what about "The Organizer"? The film, released in 1963 and starring Marcello Mastroianni, has all the aforementioned qualities, but in smaller doses. It goes heavier on the drama, and lighter on the comedy, which is nearly always saturated with a pathos that exceeds what is typical of the commedia all'italiana genre. The resulting blend is sometimes uneven. There were times when I wasn't sure if something was supposed to be sad or funny. But I suppose there's no need for the two to be mutually exclusive, and there were other times where the humor and drama came together wonderfully.

"The Organizer" is halfway between a standard commedia all'italiana film and a more traditional neorealist exercise like "Bicycle Thieves" or "Umberto D.". We can certainly see the neorealist influence all over the film, but we can also see Monicelli's own unique brand of comedic farce in this entertaining blend of cinematic styles.

Monicelli was a lifelong Marxist and communist. Other than the apolitical Fellini, and perhaps Rossellini, whose politics are still a bit of an enigma to me, Italian cinema was filled with Marxist thinkers and self-proclaimed communists: Visconti, Pasolini, De Sica, Antonioni, Rosi, Bertolucci, Pontecorvo, and Monicelli. In fact, cinema in general has been filled with them: Godard, Gorin, Marker, Varda, Fassbinder, Ôshima, Eisenstein, Kalatozov, et cetera. More narrow-minded American viewers will need to be reminded that communism did not have the terrible connotation in Europe in the '60s that it has in America today. McCarthy did his job well in demonizing communism for Americans, but being a communist in Europe in those days was simply about politically engaged individuals seeking to rectify the social injustice they saw all around them. Today we associate it with tyranny and Stalinism, but that is very far from the reality of communism for Europeans who embraced it during the era in which "The Organizer" was made. Communism was simply a natural and inevitable response for countries like France and Italy, who had recently seen the other end of the political spectrum up close and personal. Americans have always been the quickest to scoff at communism, partly because we live in the capitalist center of the world, but also because, here on the other side of the Atlantic, we've been largely spared the ugliness of fascism (although McCarthy certainly gave us a glimpse).

The reason I delve into such contentious territory — something I would normally prefer to avoid — is because "The Organizer" is a plainly Marxist film, brazen in its declaration of political rights and wrongs, as those who discuss politics will almost invariably be. If your political compass is locked in a fixed anti-communist position, you will likely be unable to enjoy this film, which would be a shame, because there's a lot to enjoy here if you can set politics aside. I'm not political by nature, so I've never had any issue doing that. I respect the prerogative of filmmakers to express their ideas, even ones I don't agree with (in fact, those are often the perspectives I find I learn the most from), and so political cinema — of any variety — is always welcome on my television.

Overall, however, "The Organizer" is actually relatively unbiased, compared to many other exercises in left-wing cinema. Monicelli calls it a Marxist film, and it most certainly is, but it's Marxist in the humanist sense as much as it is in the communist sense. There is, of course, a deep sympathy with the working class, and that, on the whole, is the dominant tone of the film: sympathy. It's not so much the angry revolutionary mode of filmmaking that we see from, say, Godard in the early '70s. It's based much more in an empathy for human suffering, and a desire to see despairing individuals liberated from the prison walls created by their social class. This desire, after all, was the core of communism, before it was bastardized by Stalin.

"The Organizer" is an insightful film about the complexities and moral dilemmas surrounding revolution, and while I prefer less biased reflections on the subject, such as Fellini's "Orchestra Rehearsal", Herzog's "Even Dwarfs Started Small", or Tarr's "Werckmeister Harmonies", Monicelli does a respectable job of observing the obstacles that stand in the way of the revolutionary process. He is committed to a specific ideology, without question, but this is not by any means mindless propaganda. This is a high quality film that works both as a dramatic contemplation on the nature of revolution, and as a comedy based in lighthearted entertainment. Enjoy it on whichever level you prefer.

RATING: 8.00 out of 10 stars

Bernardo Bertolucci was probably the last in the line of great filmmakers from Italian cinema's heyday. The neorealist movement, helmed by Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti, brought Italian cinema into the spotlight in the mid-'40s. The next generation, who had apprenticed under the neorealists, included Fellini, Antonioni, and Monicelli. Following that, Pasolini apprenticed under Fellini, and then, finally, Bertolucci apprenticed under Pasolini. This is all a bit of an oversimplification, mind you, but that's approximately how we arrive at Bertolucci on the Italian cinematic family tree.

"Before the Revolution", released in 1964, was Bertolucci's second film. His 1962 debut effort, "La commare secca" (a.k.a. "The Grim Reaper"), had been a critical success, although I'd call it only a good film, not a great one. Pasolini's influence is very evident in both films.

Bertolucci is clearly a student of cinema. The era of "new wave" directors, who came around in about 1960 and engendered a changing of the guard all across the cinematic landscape, were notable for being the first generation of filmmakers to have any significant critical background. Previous generations of filmmakers had no serious, consistent means of exploring the cinema of other countries, not to mention other generations. These '60s filmmakers, however, thanks to the likes of Langlois and Bazin, were raised on film clubs and therefore exposed to a much wider spectrum of the cinema. As a result, this era of filmmaking is the first to be so heavily subject to that all-important aspect of the cinematic process: influence.

It's never difficult to identify a director who has an immense love for cinema. Their films are filled with allusions, pastiche, and references galore, and they exhibit all sorts of influences stemming from different cinematic styles. Bertolucci is one such filmmaker, and "Before the Revolution" is one such film. This is most obvious in one scene, which features explicit dialogue regarding the political merits of many contemporaneous filmmakers, but even aside from that, we can detect a vast world of inspirations in this film. "Before the Revolution" is like an amalgam of Pasolini, Godard, and a left bank nouvelle vague director like Resnais or Varda. Godard's jump cuts and playful style are present at times. We see compositions that are distinctly reminiscent of Varda's "La Pointe-Courte" or Resnais's "Hiroshima mon amour" (similar compositions can also be seen in Antonioni's early '60s work, such as "L'eclisse", as well as in Bergman's "Persona" and Godard's "Une femme mariée"). Most notably, the film shares Pasolini's proclivity for a highly poetic form of cinema. There is poetic narration, but like "Accattone" or "Mamma Roma", the core of the film's poetry is in its visual style.

Visually, "Before the Revolution" is absolutely stunning. It's formally impeccable, and the cinematography warrants some analysis. At times it emulates Pasolini's unique pseudo-realist technique, and at other times it is much more formal, featuring very slow, smooth, graceful, poetic camera-work. Some of these latter shots are very much ahead of their time, reminding me of the more recent films of Terrence Malick, or Sorrentino's "The Great Beauty". We can see a good deal of virtuosity in the young Bertolucci here.

As for the film's content, it's very much a communist film, focusing on all the usual topics: revolution, the bourgeoisie, et cetera. The film's protagonist is Fabrizio, a young man who has committed himself to the revolution and to breaking free of his bourgeois chains. The film's other two central characters are Cesare, Fabrizio's revolutionary mentor, and Gina, Fabrizio's aunt with whom he begins a love affair. Each character plays their role. Fabrizio is the bourgeoisie, Cesare the revolutionary, and Gina the troubled soul, essentially apolitical because she is too wrapped up in her own existential angst to concern herself with political or revolutionary action.

Cesare tries to win Fabrizio over to the revolutionary cause, and Fabrizio wants to be won over, but is he truly committed? Can a bourgeoisie ever be truly committed to the revolution, or will he always bow out "before the revolution" materializes? Perhaps he has too much to lose to truly act on his ideals when the moment for action finally arrives. This was the core of the conflict between workers and students within the revolutionary movement, discussed at length in Godard's "A Film Like Any Other". Workers fought the revolution out of necessity, but the students could always go home to mommy and daddy as soon as the fire got too hot. As outmoded as they may sound in America today, these ideas were central to political cinema for a long time. This issue — the complexities of attempting to break the oppressive bonds of bourgeois society — has been the subject of a great many political films, and it is again here.

I'd like to think of "Before the Revolution" as a film about the difficulties of achieving social change, the aspects of the human condition that drive individuals to revolt against society, and the basic need for comfort and security that ultimately undermines the ideals of those who act out of ideology and not practical necessity. The film can certainly be seen that way, and I, personally, want to think of it in those terms because I am not a political person. I'm more interested in subjective portrayals of one individual's vision of life than I am in the politics of revolution. That being said, what Bertolucci intended here was probably not a subjective contemplation of the futility of revolution, but rather an objective reflection on the necessity for total revolution — the need to wipe out every trace of bourgeois society in order to achieve any genuine positive social change.

Like most great films, a lot is left open to interpretation here, although maybe less than what appears at first glance, if you know the politics of the time. Certainly, this is an immensely complex, largely under-appreciated, and truly great film.

RATING: 9.00 out of 10 stars

Homoeroticism, transvestitism, gender confusion, dominance and submission, borderline pedophilia — there has never been another, and certainly will never be another like Ernst Lubitsch. No one who's familiar with his films could ever be surprised to see the myriad of taboo subjects covered in "I Don't Want To Be a Man", but even I was flabbergasted a few times in this one. You won't see many 1910s films like it. In fact, you won't see many 2010s films like it. And any you do see will certainly not have Lubitsch's inimitable gift for tackling such controversial material with such a light, innocuous hand ("the Lubitsch touch", as they call it).

Lubitsch left Germany and came to Hollywood in 1923, and the American film industry would never be the same. He brought with him his sophistication, his innuendo, and his playful mischievousness. He introduced Hollywood to sex. He pioneered the cinematic musical, making the first ever truly modern musical with "The Love Parade" in '29. His influence on American cinema is as great as anyone's since Griffith.

Most of us know Lubitsch from either his run of musicals — "The Love Parade", "Monte Carlo", "The Smiling Lieutenant", and "One Hour With You" — or his subsequent non-musicals, "Trouble in Paradise" and "Design for Living". That lattermost film was made in 1933, the last year before the Hays Code was enforced, and therefore, the last year that Lubitsch would ever be able to be the filmmaker he was born to be. Lubitsch's gift was to make comedy out of contentious subject matter, and so for a director who thrived off of suggestion and sexual innuendo, the Hays Code was effectively the end of Lubitsch. Of course, he made some good films after that — "To Be or Not To Be" and "Heaven Can Wait" came in the early '40s, and were both quality films — but Lubitsch would never again be able to make films that genuinely reflected his true nature as a filmmaker, and his unique sensibilities as an artist.

I think a little bit of censorship, however, was good for Lubitsch. The Hays Code obviously involved far too much of it, but even before '34 when the code really kicked in, there was still censorship. The standards were much looser, but there were standards, nonetheless. And so Lubitsch was forced to express things implicitly that he might otherwise have expressed more explicitly, to much lesser effect. The waggish innuendo that was Lubitsch's bread and butter was necessitated by the presence of censorship. Without some degree of censorship, his films would probably lack some of the qualities he's now famous for.

"I Don't Want To Be a Man" is a good example of this. The restrictions placed on filmmakers in the late 1910s in Germany were clearly even slacker than those in Hollywood's pre-code era, and so many of these early German silents by Lubitsch are more forthright and candid in their treatment of controversial subject matter than his American films were. In a way that makes them all the more riotously entertaining, but it also deprives them of that wink-of-the-eye style of suggestive humor that was Lubitsch's greatest asset as a filmmaker.

There's another reason these early silents by Lubitsch are interesting: They were made prior to the expressionist movement in German cinema. All of the German films I've seen from the '20s can be classified as either part of the German expressionist movement or the New Objectivity movement (an early movement in cinematic social realism). These Lubitsch films, however, from the years before expressionism catapulted German cinema to new levels of popularity, belong to neither movement. So I'm happy to see some German silents that aren't so easily categorized.

Truly, "I Don't Want To Be a Man" transcends classification. Almost never before have I seen such a plethora of taboo subjects in one film. We've seen some of these themes in other Lubitsch films, like the homoeroticism in "Design for Living" (though it was dialed down from Coward's source material), but to see so many of them crammed together into one 45-minute film was quite a ride. However controversial the subjects may have been, though, their treatment was as innocent as can be imagined. Everything in a Lubitsch film is lighthearted by nature.

Saying that a filmmaker was "ahead of his time" is one of the most overused statements in all of film criticism, but here I have no reservations in saying that Lubitsch's films were truly as far ahead of their time, socially, as any films I've ever seen. He was openly and merrily conveying aspects of human socio-sexual tendencies that many individuals are sadly still struggling to come to grips with today, in the year 2015, almost a century later. His films have been accused of being sexist, and watching a movie like "The Smiling Lieutenant", we can see, to a certain extent, why that has been considered. There has certainly been much debate over the nature of Lubitsch's significant role in determining the treatment of female characters in Hollywood cinema. Consequently, some of his films may be more controversial now than they were in their own time. As open-minded and liberal as he was, Lubitsch was never even remotely concerned with being politically correct, and so his body of work remains a fascinating place to study the direction that cinema has taken.

"I Don't Want To Be a Man" is a feverish assault of controversiality and taboo-breaking fun. It's not a great film, but it's a solid film and a joy to watch, and it's unlike anything else from its time (or from any other time, really). I would think that almost anyone would find it worth its 45 minutes, and fans of Lubitsch especially will, I'm sure, be quite satisfied with it.

RATING: 6.00 out of 10 stars

Sergei M. Eisenstein is such an enigma. He's simultaneously one of the most frustrating and most beautiful filmmakers in the history of cinema. His films are blatant propaganda of the most shameless variety, and yet, Eisenstein's mode of visual storytelling is absolutely exquisite. Formally, he's truly one of the greatest masters of cinema to ever live. In that regard, he belongs right next to names like Mizoguchi, Ozu, Bergman, Fellini, and Tarkovsky. In any other regard, he does not. Consequently, whether or not Eisenstein appeals to you will probably depend largely on which facet of cinema most engages you as a viewer: form or content.

Those who find that their cinematic standards for quality rely mostly on content will probably be annoyed and unimpressed by Eisenstein. The jingoistic propaganda in his films beats you over the head the instant the film begins, and never relents. Eisenstein had absolutely no sense of things like subtext, character development, or applied themes. The content of his films is about as shallow as you'll find anywhere in cinema. On that level, Eisenstein's films generally amount to a Soviet cheerleading session.

That being said, I'm not sure there's ever been a greater master in the history of the cinema when it comes to the visual, formal aspects of filmmaking. Eisenstein was a true artist. His eye for compositions was as masterful as any other filmmaker that ever sat in a director's chair. On a visual level, Eisenstein's films are an absolute treasure and are truly awesome to behold. Therefore, viewers who are most affected by a film's form, and not its content, will likely have a very deep appreciation for Eisenstein.

Finally, for viewers like myself, who are equally engaged by form and content, Eisenstein remains the most confusing of all directors. On one hand, I find myself disgusted by the obtrusive propaganda in his films; on the other hand, I find myself completely enamored with his gifts as a director, as a formalist, as an artist. He is very much like fellow Russian filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov in this way. Both directors polarize viewers for this very reason. I don't think Kalatozov was quite as shallow in the content department as Eisenstein was, and I don't think he was quite as brilliant in the form department, but his overall combination of shallow propaganda and stunning formal brilliance is similar to Eisenstein's.

In this respect, "October (Ten Days That Shook the World)", Eisenstein's third film, is very much like any other Eisenstein film. The film was actually co-directed (and co-written) by Grigori Aleksandov, who had collaborated on Eisenstein's debut film, "Strike", as a co-writer. Eisenstein's second film, "Battleship Potemkin", is probably his best known film, and is generally considered his masterpiece. Of these three early silent films by Eisenstein, however, I might choose "October" as the best of them. It's very close, but I give the edge to "October" over "Battleship Potemkin" simply because Eisenstein's visual finesse is even slightly more impressive in "October" than it was in "Battleship Potemkin". With Eisenstein's first three films — "Strike", "Battleship Potemkin", and "October" — I've found that each film is a slight improvement over the last in terms of sheer formal mastery. Some of the shots and compositions in "October" (in fact, just about every single one of them) are simply amazing, not just for 1928, but by any standards at all, from the birth of cinema all the way through today's age of digital filmmaking. And as with any true master of filmmaking, it's not just the utter beauty of the shots that's so impressive; it's the way that the director uses those shots in the syntax of a visual language that only cinema can provide.

Eisenstein arranges images and intertitles in such a way as to truly create his own cinematic language, much like Godard would do decades later. The cinematography in Eisenstein's films is gorgeous — the compositions impeccable — but he doesn't move his camera much, and a great deal of the work is done in the editing room. That's where this language is truly spoken. Eisenstein revolutionized the art of editing and montage in cinema.

"October" opens with an image of revolutionaries charging up a grand set of stairs to topple a massive statue of the Tsar. The stairs look similar to the Odessa steps on which the civilians were slaughtered by Cossacks in "Battleship Potemkin", and so there's an interesting (and possibly intentional) duality here. In "Battleship Potemkin", the people were massacred as the soldiers advanced on them ruthlessly and inhumanly, forcing them down the stairs. Now, in "October", the film begins with the people charging back up the stairs, reclaiming the power that was taken from them under the Tsarist dictatorship.

Despite the title of the film, "October (Ten Days That Shook the World)" actually takes place over about nine months, in the year 1917. It begins with the February Revolution, in which the Tsarist autocracy was overthrown and replaced by a provisional government of aristocrats and nobles, which itself was overthrown that same year in the October Revolution. The film spans these two revolutions.

If you haven't seen Eisenstein before, it's difficult to explain his style of cinema. It's something that really needs to be seen to be understood. The best way to explain "October" is to say that, if you've seen "Battleship Potemkin", this film is very similar in style to that one. If you haven't seen "Battleship Potemkin" or any other Eisenstein silents, then you probably should — like him or not, he's a massive figure in the history of cinema — and although "Battleship Potemkin" is considered his masterpiece, I think "October" is as good of a place to start as any other.

Overall, this is a good film. It's filled with both master touches and conspicuous shortcomings, but the former outweigh the latter significantly.

RATING: 7.00 out of 10 stars

I'm a big Werner Herzog fan. He's right on the edge of my top dozen all-time greatest filmmakers. So when I heard that he had worked in theater and opera as well as cinema, I'd always wanted to explore that facet of his art. Finally, with "Giovanni d'Arco", a 1989 filmed opera, I was given a chance to do just that.

I must say that, as much as I love it, I'm very much a novice when it comes to opera. For that reason, I won't go too far into analyzing the operatic aspects of the film. I've read other reviewers stating that the film's biggest flaw was the Italian libretto, written by Temistocle Solera. I thought the libretto was solid enough, but again, I don't really know up from down when it comes to opera. The only other filmed opera I've seen prior to this was Ingmar Bergman's 1975 film, "The Magic Flute" (Herzog also put on a production of "The Magic Flute", in 1999). I think Bergman's film is superior to Herzog's, but "Giovanna d'Arco" was an impressive effort nonetheless.

The "Giovanna d'Arco" opera, by the famous Giuseppe Verdi, is beautiful. In spite of my limited knowledge of opera, I thought the singers were excellent. The baritone especially, Renato Bruson, was fantastic. Susan Dunn, in the title role, and Vincenzo La Scola, the male lead, also impress. Overall, I thought all three felt a bit flat in the acting department, but the singing was simply gorgeous.

"Giovanna d'Arco" was directed for the stage by Herzog and Henning Von Gierke, and was directed for video by Herzog and Keith Cheetham. It was broadcast on television in 1989. The set design is stunning, and Herzog and Cheetham's method for filming the opera was quite effective. They don't take us inside the world on the stage as much as Bergman did in "The Magic Flute"; instead, they keep their distance, making us feel like a member of the live audience in the opera house (which, by the way, is itself incredibly beautiful — I was instantly reminded of the opening segment in "Fitzcarraldo", or Visconti's "Senso").

The Joan of Arc story has been done so many times that one can imagine Herzog must have been somewhat reluctant to attempt to bring it back to life. Obviously, the first thing that is likely to come to mind is Dreyer's masterpiece, the 1928 film "The Passion of Joan of Arc". Even Georges Méliès's short film from the year 1900 was an amazing piece of early cinema. Later there was Bresson's "The Trial of Joan of Arc" — a quality film, though not one of Bresson's best. I still haven't seen Victor Fleming's 1948 version of the story, starring Ingrid Bergman, which I've read mixed reviews about. I did, however, see another Joan or Arc film starring Ingrid Bergman — a 1954 exercise in filmed theater by Roberto Rossellini called "Joan at the Stake", which was disappointing. More recently, of course, we have films like Luc Besson's "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc", which was simply awful.

As common as the Joan of Arc legend is in cinema, though, this operatic adaptation provides a completely different angle on it, and one can only imagine how powerfully Joan of Arc's story must have appealed to Herzog. It shares so many of his career-long themes. Herzog has always been a highly spiritual filmmaker, obsessed with stories about characters who accept gargantuan spiritual undertakings, not out of faith, but out of compulsion — an outcry against a cold and unsympathetic universe. These characters are often on the fringes of sanity (or beyond them), such as the protagonists of "Signs of Life", "Aguirre, the Wrath of God", "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser", "Heart of Glass", "Stroszek", "Woyzeck", or "Cobra Verde". Joan of Arc, with all her visions and apparitions, is right up Herzog's alley.

Herzog's films nearly always see his characters taking on tasks that are far too great for them, such as Fitzcarraldo trying to lug a steamship over a mountain. Herzog's protagonists, pulled apart internally by entropy and the inherent absurdity of existence, rebel against a meaningless universe. They act out in assertion of their tormented existence. This is what spirituality means in a Herzog film, and Joan of Arc fits nicely into this modus operandi of his. Like so many Herzogian heroes, she is spiritually compelled to undertake a colossal challenge that can only destroy her.

I know cinema quite well, but not opera at all, so I really have to judge "Giovanna d'Arco" as a film, not as an opera. Yet, if this were a traditional, non-operatic exercise in filmmaking, I would say it was a mediocre film, neither good nor bad. I would say that the story was engaging enough to hold your attention, but not much more. I would say that the film wasn't nearly as thematically profound as it could have been. My reaction would be very lukewarm. As a result, the opera really was the core of "Giovanna d'Arco" for me. The beauty of the music is what elevates this film from decent to legitimately good.

I'd love to hear someone truly knowledgeable in opera discuss how good "Giovanna d'Arco" is (or is not), strictly as an opera. I can't offer any input there, except to say that it impressed me as a novice. As a film, however, I'd say that it is good, but not great. For fans of Herzog, it's more of a curio than anything else. There really isn't much here to be recognized as Herzog, beyond the themes I mentioned earlier. All in all, however, I would recommend this film to anyone. It is a unique type of viewing experience that is far too scarcely seen by today's filmgoers. It was wonderful to have the opera brought into my home the way Herzog did here.

RATING: 7.00 out of 10 stars