#804: A Brighter Summer Day

(Edward Yang, 1991)

"You can't even tell real from fake. How can you make movies?"

Art is objects made to look like symbols, or perhaps the other way around. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. In cinema, this takes the form of actors and sets and music and title cards, but the most interesting thing in film has always been the illusion of fantasy made real; the rudimentary science fiction of A Trip to the Moon; the Depression-fighting glamour of The Thin Man; the television-fighting Christian epics of The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur; the current kid-fantasy comic book deluge. All of these genres are wildly different and intended for different audiences. But they represent the history of cinema as an artform primarily concerned with the artificial and imagined conceits of society turned literal on screen.

The real and the fake constantly bleed together in Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day, his four-hour masterwork finally available in the US on home video (or any kind of wide release) after 25 years of bad bootlegs and fleeting repertory screenings. The blurring starts at the top. Taiwan itself is a simulacrum of China, a "republic" in exile, convinced that it will return to claim its country. The generation that lost China's civil war, represented as parents in the film, dreams of  retaking the mainland, yet seems more intent on displaying to themselves their readiness than actually delivering on it - a false show of force rather than the implementation of it.

The implications of this myth - and the dependence upon it - are all around the characters of the film, despite the fact that the movie's core story is not overtly political. S'ir's family lives in a house formerly occupied by the Japanese, a constant reminder that Taiwan is a nation in flux and without the ever-present history of their former country. Tanks roll down the street to nowhere in particular. The night school S'ir is demoted to uses military-style uniforms that mask the ganglife reality of its students (a layer of deceit later extended by Honey's return, where he wears a military uniform to avoid the police).

Within this context, it's no wonder that S'ir and his classmates would turn to American culture, a worldview created by the children of immigrants in a land where tradition is constantly erased. Elvis's disciples in the film, particularly Cat, present renditions of his work that are difficult to visually reconcile: young Chinese men and boys singing like, posturing like, hoping to move like American rock-and-rollers. Cat, subtly one of the most important characters in the movie, does not understand the words but uses phonetic translations of the music to recreate nearly perfect renditions. Is it "a brighter summer day" that Elvis sings, S'ir's sister wonders? The film's English title, it seems, could itself crumble under closer scrutiny.

S'ir and Ming are the false lovers at the center of this story of misunderstood run-ins and quiet injustices. The relationship is built out of imagined connections, mainly because Ming is so obtuse that she allows any boy (or man, in the case of the doctor) to ascribe to her whichever need they have the urge to satisfy. In the case of S'ir, this plays out as the role of protector. Ming's early acquiescence to this dynamic illustrates the typical peril women face in innocent games; what is taken as flirtation and innocence by S'ir is actually Ming's defense against the already typical pull men feel toward her. In Ming's shoes, their interactions are superficially meaningful. She is drawn to S'ir because she thinks he doesn't want precisely what her attention is stirring within him. Look at the final crime that brings their dalliances to a final tragedy: S'ir does not intend to stab her until the very moment he does it. This crime of passion was originally (presumably) intended for Ma (whose own power over Ming by employing her mother casts further tragic light on the girl's facility for choice outside the intentions men place on her). Even this most-real moment is something far different than it looks. As S'ir stands over Ming's body, with the surrounding shoppers as oblivious to what has just happened as they are to the world of teenage games that we've lived with for nearly four hours, he looks down and screams at her that she is not dead. It's hope for reality to pull him out of his nightmare despite the fact that we know it's the other way around.

This final moment couldn't have come without the interrogation S'ir's father experiences. In the most jarring narrative shift in the film, Yang cuts from the white-knuckled terror of the pool hall massacre to the White Terror of Taiwan's purging of suspected Communist sympathizers. This rug pull is addressed in the essay accompanying the Criterion release, though Rayns seems to take it at face value. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that Yang timed the massacre for the halfway point of his epic, nor does it seem surprising that he would follow it with the rest of S'ir's world crumbling around him; this film is a symmetrical arc with a second half that descends into emotional chaos for father and son alike. But the fact that Yang chooses to avoid any of the immediate aftermath of the massacre is the mark of a true storyteller. Like, Ozu, Hitchcock, or Resnais, Yang knows when his viewer can make a narrative jump more elegantly than the average filmmaker does. And here, too, the film's reality bumps up against artifice.

S'ir's father is of course a good citizen of the Republic of China. Though he's taken the same kind of hit most middle class former Chinese men have in the move to Taiwan, there's no indication in the film that he regrets his decision. We even meet a woman whose husband opted out, returning to Mao's China in the 50s to attempt to open up the country during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. This is also why Zhang is interrogated, of course. He happened to be friends with the wrong people, who are really just the people that anyone would know in a messy separation like that of the Communist revolution (mirroring the lower stakes HUAC era in the States). Zhang is a true citizen of Taiwan's Chinese government, yet fear of Communism has turned citizens into spies. Zhang's friend Wang talks a big game, but it's not clear if he is able to back up this posturing; S'ir's mother wonders aloud to her husband if he wasn't behind the kidnapping himself. The ultimate façade crumbles as Zhang is pulled from his interrogation room to glance in on another interrogation - just like his own - taking place in the next room over. It's an assembly line of false confessions, designed to blur the line between truth and fiction and serve up a generation of traitors to excuse the sorry state of the resistance, long since exiled to a tropical island.

As the film's devices extend into metaphor, so too does the push and pull between real and fake. The most overt example of this is the flashlight, a wonderful display of Yang's deliberate plotting and delicate hand with symbolism. S'ir steals the flashlight in the early moments of the film from the movie studio that sits next to his school. From there it winds its way through the plot as doggedly as S'ir himself, almost immediately playing a key role in illuminating Sly's makeout session, but then bleeding into events at school, encounters with Ming, and perhaps most notably in the chilling massacre S'ir is witness to at the pool hall. In the commentary included with the film, Rayns posits that S'ir initially intends to steal the flashlight simply to read in his bed. But this seems far-sighted for a clearly impulsive kid like S'ir, who likely just grabbed the first thing of value on the guard's desk when he was unattended to. Still, the ways in which S'ir (and others) use the flashlight are often childlike and innocent, even when what it reveals is more sinister. S'ir returns the flashlight (where he says the line at the beginning of this post) just before his final act; he's put away childish things and turned toward his fate.

Flashlights are frequently metaphors for truth, shining a light on what was dark. Yet their light is artificial, cutting through the natural darkness to glare at things that were meant to be hidden. The pool hall massacre takes place in the dark because the Taiwanese government is unable (or more likely unwilling) to keep the lights on. S'ir's flashlight cuts through this darkness to reveal the truth hidden by his government. As the tanks roll by, Ming turns the light on and off, bouncing the fake beams off the giant machines lumbering through their world. A war has become a game (just as the doctor accuses Ming of turning love into a game), and the normalization of violence persists. The flashlight's origin in the movie studio extends the metaphor: this light is from a temple of light, a place where without exposure there is nothing. The coincidence of the flashlight motif and the concept of a brighter summer day no longer seems so coincidental.

Yang's basic premise for A Brighter Summer Day, using a real-life tabloid murder from his childhood to construct a wholly fictionalized narrative about his and his father's generation, is filled with potential for exploring the battle between real and fake. Of course, the very nature of cinema, referenced literally in the studio subplot of the film and in the quotation at the beginning of this post, is ripe for examination of the duality - the technical process of individual frames implying motion is just as much of an illusion as the developed method of storytelling within the medium (editing, set design, acting, post manipulation, etc.). Yet there are many conscious and unconscious layers of narrative piled on top of reality. The film's Chinese title is "The Murder Incident of the Boy on Guling Street," yet the boy is not the boy (his used name in the film is not his "real" name in the movie - yet his "real" name is the real name of the actor who plays him, just as his fake father is played by his real father) and the street is not Guling street, but rather an elaborate set constructed for the film. Real-life events are either inserted into the film to anchor the fictional story to history (the Nixon/Kennedy election) or altered to fit the narrative's momentum (the massacre that serves as its turning point is loosely based on a real-life crime that occurred years after the film is set).

The concept can be extended to Yang's directorial style, one that was in line with many of his peers in New Taiwan Cinema. Long takes, amateur actors, and stories that detail the real lives and political context of everyday life are all devices frequently used to eliminate the "lies" of cutting, method acting, or wish-fulfillment and/or pure entertainment in mainstream films. This was not necessarily the conscious intention of these filmmakers, many of whom took their influences directly from previous titans like Ozu, whose frames within frames are on full display here, and Herzog, who showed Yang that film can be deeply personal and need not conform to commercial standards. But they nevertheless reject both Hollywood and what the filmmakers were seeing within their own industry, where romance pictures and war propaganda were being churned out by a tired studio system out of touch with the realities of second- and third-generation life in Taiwan.

The real/fake relationship can be felt everywhere in the film, both literally and metaphorically. The implications of this dichotomy, pulled throughout the film's mammoth running time, are less straightforward. What does this continual process of illuminating obscured truths say about the world Yang wants to depict? Rayns mentions on the commentary that Taiwan's history was tightly controlled through the first thirty years of its history under Chinese rule, to the point where huge massacres like the one that inspired the pool hall incident were not even covered in the paper. So perhaps Yang's intentions were political, a statement about the struggle of Taiwanese 2nd and 3rd generation children to decode their past. Told lies and half-truths for so long, it would seem cathartic to experience a film like A Brighter Summer Day. This political slant ties nicely into the rest of the New Taiwan Cinema movement, where films shed light on similarly papered-over but significant events like the February 28 Incident where thousands of native Taiwanese were massacred by the Chinese government.

However, I think Yang's intentions were much more personal, and therefore universal. At the end of his brilliant commentary, which, as would indicate its impressive scale, I've already referenced quite a bit, Tony Rayns says that he believes the film is about both father and son and their inability to reconcile their own personal system of beliefs with that of the authoritarian state under which they live. This is as good an explanation of the film's larger purpose as any that I have heard or read, but I'll offer one more.

A Brighter Summer Day seems to be not so much about the individual versus a social or political structure as it is about the fundamental nature of identity - "who am I?" not "how can I be myself?" The rocky path father and son find themselves on is not laid exclusively by the powers that be, but partially by their own doing. One of the key moments in the film is Zhang telling S'ir "if a person will apologize for the things he didn't do, he is capable of anything." This is directly relevant to the situation both find themselves in, where the father is accused of sympathies he does not harbor and the son is associated with the gangs to which he does not belong. But it's also indicative of their internal struggle to make a place in the world. Yang once said that the film was made to address the unspoken choice Taiwan must eventually make, to declare independence or reintegrate into China. Either approach is an acceptance of defeat, and for me this is why the film is not so much about the destruction of the individual as it is about the struggle for a moral and certain dignity within any state, though particularly an oppressive one.

In this regard, both men have fought a losing battle by the second half of the film. Zhang is a shadow of his former self walking home from his son's former school, recreating the scene from earlier where he laid down his stand against false confession. As Rayns notes, S'ir himself is pushed out of the film by the camera, depicted either outside the frame or with his back to us for the final stretch. This is not the oppression of the state - we've seen that come down on him for the first three hours of the film -  but the elimination of identity, his final chance for redemption pushed aside with him. The movie opens with S'ir's fate being discussed by other people as he sits outside. The value of education in the world of the film makes clear the role the radio broadcasts of graduating students play in the film's bookends: this is tragedy of lost potential, of sacrifices made that were never redeemed. Of course, virtually none of the children we've met during the film will be included in any broadcast like the ones we hear, so there are certainly social implications here, the idea of a lost generation. But the continuation of the Zhang family's household chores (and the absence of the men) in the final moments points toward a more personal tragedy. S'ir's cinematic dissolution is a democratic call to Yang's generation, and a tribute to the failed struggle of his father's. These are statements with far-reaching political implications, but they apply first to the individual.

Many people have talked about the novelistic qualities of A Brighter Summer Day; the detail in the setting and plotting; the huge number of speaking parts; the many threads of story that are intertwined so tightly that the running time could not be reduced without sacrificing key moments, a rare case of a four-hour film without any fat. In the modern era, this is most reminiscent of the praise surrounding The Wire, David Simon's five-season examination of the American City at the turn of the 21st century. I am not the first to compare this film to The Wire (on the day of the blu-ray release, Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting made an illuminating comparison chart of gang names on Twitter) but I do so here because the theme of the individual within a system, as A Brighter Summer Day also alludes to, was at the heart of that show's run. But where the two works part ways is on the issues of identity that I think are so vital to the purpose of this movie.

Unlike the father and son of A Brighter Summer Day, the characters of The Wire were unapologetic about who they were. McNulty, the central character of the series, is almost wholly driven by his inability to play by the rules, yet the small amount of impact the wire has on both the drug system and/or policing in Baltimore comes directly from the supreme confidence in his own nature. In fact, attempting to pretend your identity can be altered is often punished. Many of the most significant deaths in The Wire  - Wallace, Omar, Stringer - come when the character attempts to change and get out of "the Game." But their deaths do not come from the system, they come from their own conscious choices to drift back into their old habits, their true identities. There are of course exceptions to the rule; Bubbles and Pryzbylewski have significant character arcs in the show where their identity becomes an awakening. But these exceptions are intentional, and point to the insidious nature of the system, where expectation of even the most revolutionary individuals (McNulty, Marlo, Carcetti) is baked in.

Ultimately, The Wire is a cynical show, not about human nature but about the economic and political structures humans have created. People are people in The Wire, not good, not bad, but flawed and resilient. Partially because it's set in the past, A Brighter Summer Day is something else entirely. The individuals in the film have long since passed the point of change, but it's not too late for the 90s. The movie's events seem so detailed and familiar that they must be real. But they are not. They are constructed around a false memory and lost identity that does not need to be fate and the individual alone can transcend. Yang is telling the viewer that honesty can change Taiwan.

The comparison still continues to hold water because the superficial comparisons are also apparent - a portrait of society as told through its young gangs, storylines we enter midway with a narrative uninterested in providing exposition to ground the viewer, sprawling casts with fully realized biographies just offscreen. It's these elements that in many ways make the two works so appealing (and so seemingly authentic) to such a wide number of people, despite the fact that they never make any attempt to adjust people to lives of the characters - they simply are, and in so being, we recognize humanity. But these similarities - the ones that make them still so popular and vital to outsiders - belie the individuality of each work. These complex, richly symbolic narratives thrive on their dedication to the truth of their characters and the hyper-local world that surrounds them. Unsurprisingly, A Brighter Summer Day was embraced by the Taiwanese youth on its release, just as The Wire found favor with inner-city drug dealers in the 2000s. Specificity and detail go a long way toward tearing down the barriers between real and fake.

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The basic premise of this blog (which was never expected to last long enough to need to stick to any sort of premise) is to record my thoughts immediately after my viewing of a film without any additions or editing beyond typos in a second pass-through (many don't even get this low level of editing as you may have noticed). I've broken this rule a handful of times, usually with something like Last Year at Marienbad or Shoah that affected me a great deal but required more reflection to translate my feelings into words (though both went largely unedited - I just took my time writing them). A Brighter Summer Day is so complex and thought out that both approaches seem unworthy of the movie, which is what prompted me to write what I have written here after seeing the film a second time with commentary and watching some of the extras, not to mention spending a few weeks sitting with it. While I don't consider the observations I've made here to be the final word on the meaning behind the film, I haven't seen this aspect of the movie explored yet, and I think it's an approach to the sprawling story told here that helps illuminate the psychology behind both this film and Taiwanese cinema in general. Any movie with such a rich tapestry of characters, plotlines, and consciously implemented symbols (the radio, the flashlight, the baseball bat, the use of knives and swords, basketball, Elvis, etc.) leaves room for many interpretations. But this is a particularly impressive feat here because Yang's execution is so detailed and both time- and place-specific.

I don't think any of us fully comprehend the impact this film will have in the coming decades now that it is widely available, not just to an American audience, but to international viewers (including those in China) who are willing to import it. Although Yang is not doing anything particularly revolutionary with his camera work or story structure, the complexity and depth of his achievement here unlock the door to cinematic perfection through brute force. Furthermore, his dedication to the world he constructed and his insistence on the specific without concern for internationally familiar context should serve as an inspiring roadmap for developing cinema all over the world. In the last Sight and Sound poll, A Brighter Summer Day ranked #84 overall and placed behind only In the Mood For Love in terms of Chinese films. I expect to see it grow in estimation with its newfound exposure, similar to the current #1 film (and long my go-to choice for my own personal favorite movie), Vertigo, which was also "lost" for decades. In fact, I expect to see this movie in the top ten by the 2032 poll. It's that good, that massive.

One final thing - I don't particularly care to compare the film to Yi Yi, Yang's more successful (internationally) and widely available final film, because they are very different works and are intended to reach the viewer in different capacities. That later movie had a deep emotional impact on me and it continues to be a personal favorite. A Brighter Summer Day is the more important film, however, and this Criterion release will cement its reputation as Yang's masterpiece. As this post likely implies to the reader, I'm perfectly fine with the distinction.

#797: The New Land

(Jan Troell, 1972)

The New Land picks up immediately where The Emigrants left off, yet it is a distinctly different movie. First off, it's significantly darker, with two specific sequences that are incredibly disturbing. Secondly, and more importantly, its momentum is on the decline, with a distinct backward-facing focus.

In an interview Treoll gave recently, he mentioned that there was one sequence in the book that convinced him to make the movies. It involved Ullmann's character remembering a doll she had dropped down a well in Sweden, and how the doll got more beautiful in her memory as the years went by. This sequence didn't end up in the movie after all, but he used this when developing this second movie (and during the swing scene at the beginning of The Emigrants, which is a sort of placeholder metaphor for the sequence, and one I have to think inspired Malick when he made Tree of Life and really all of his films). If The Emigrants was about beginnings and potential, The New Land is about endings and regrets. The final scene in which von Sydow is shown surrounded by his descendants in a picture just before his death will forever be etched in my memory, particularly the line about how his children no longer speak Swedish. This, to me, represents the heart of the film, the idea that all that has come before it means nothing.

The symbol Criterion chose for its cover backs this up. Here is a massive tree that has stood in Minnesota for generations, simply taken by von Sydow with a crude etching on the trunk. It is a uniquely American idea (At least in the West) and alternately inspiring and tragic. The tragedy is of course most stark in the sequence involving the American Indians who attempt to fight back against the injustice brought down on them, only to fail and be executed. But it's here in even the most innocent of encounters, like when von Sydow first meets his new neighbor.

The most noteworthy sequence in the film is surely the flashbacks to the brother's journey toward California, one of the most intense and jarring sequence I've seen from this era of filmmaking (surely Inarritu has seen this film many times). It makes you remember just how conscious of a filmmaker Troell is, something that is easy to overlook given his loose and seemingly instinctual style, but it's also simply a pleasure to watch because it's so rhythmic and visceral.

After six hours of this story, I felt genuinely sad and moved when this was over. I was a little worried about the length of this story, especially after having a mixed response to Here Is Your Life. But this is a great movie (it really should be considered one full movie, as it was sometimes shot concurrently and always intended as a full story), and one that was consistently engaging and surprising. I read one person's comment somewhere on the internet calling the film "the prequel to Fargo," and I like that characterization even though it belies the universality and scale of the film. This is a movie about the making of our country that fits nicely next to El Norte as a superior humanist depiction of the immigrant experience.

#796: The Emigrants

(Jan Troell, 1971)

The Emigrants is that rare sprawling epic that feels persistently human-scale. Despite covering thousands of miles, many characters, and countless sets and structures, the film never feels like anything more than the story of three people, a husband and wife and his brother, struggling to make a place for themselves in the world. The entire first half of the film takes place in Sweden, with the intermission hitting as they first glimpse the ship that will take them to America. Yet these early scenes never feel superfluous or slow because the characters are so vivid and the filmmaking so poetic.

Like many directors who are their own cinematographer, Troell uses his camera in a primal, instinctual fashion. His work consequently feels less refined than most directors, but his eye and talent for drawing the camera toward the most interesting thing in the field elevates this tactic and gives his work a unique feel. Despite the fact that film is an adaptation (of one of Sweden's most popular series of novels) and Troell was approached to adapt the book rather than choosing it on his own, the film always feels like it has just one hand at the helm. This approach underscores the affection for the characters, making this a movie about the experience of these people rather than just a story about specific individuals. We are emigrating along with them.

There is criticism of The Emigrants from some for painting a picture of the journey of American immigrants in the 1800s as too rosy, framed by a sentimental nostalgia. I actually agree with this characterization of the film. Yes, there are horrible deaths and crushing labor here, and certainly the experience of traveling far away from your home in awful conditions with only slight hope of making it is conveyed effectively. But even this negative experience pales in comparison to what people like this actually went through to get to America in the 1800s. An actual film about this experience would have likely been substantially darker and more explicit, something that likely wouldn't have flown in the early 70s, but more important would have made for a far different movie.

Rather than damn the film, however, I think this more lyrical approach elevates it. The Emigrants isn't meant to depict the true experience of the journey as much as the emotional and psychological effect on these characters. The delivery of this content is meant to underscore the things that are lost and gained by the family along the way. The naturalism of the scenery and Troell's technique fit with the devotion to the land and the Earth they move across. The movie isn't about learning how awful people had it in the mid 1800s, but about the potential in these leaps of faith, potential that we all know was fulfilled by subsequent generations. That the movie comes from Sweden and not the United States makes it more bittersweet - this is a generation of Swedes that saw their system broken and strove for a better life. Sweden itself would soon modernize just like the US, but these were the people who couldn't wait. In this way, The Emigrants is a story of striving, not struggling.

#782: The Apu Trilogy

 (Satyajit Ray, 1955-59)

After more than 800 spine numbers and nearly twenty years, there are few titles that can compete with The Apu Trilogy for the title of most significant achievement in the Criterion Collection. As the spectacular (but brief) documentary on the supplements explains, the three films' negatives were heavily damaged in a fire, leaving Criterion and its partners with a painstaking task of restoring the damaged film and/or reconstructing a master print from various prints sprinkled throughout the world (the process used most generally for Apur Sansar). The finished versions of the films we see on these blu-rays are absolutely stunning, especially Pather Panchali, the crown jewel of the set. This film - certainly one of the ten or fifteen most important works in cinema history - has been transformed from a barely functional relic of a forgotten era to a pristine jewel in cinema's rich history. There have been glorious transfers in Criterion's day. But it is quite clear that nothing compares to this.

But what's most amazing about the story behind these restorations is that the stature of the films themselves is equal to this remarkable product. These are living breathing artifacts of a crucial turning point in cinema, monuments to a new era yet every bit as relevant today as they were when they were released. Quite simply, if you are receptive to the average Criterion film, The Apu Trilogy will have an enormous impact on you. It's the kind of movie experience that brings to mind only a handful of comparisons that can compete with its humanism, its cinematic sophistication, and its importance to one of the five major centers of filmmaking. You owe it to yourself to watch these movies.

Links to individual reviews:

783. Pather Panchali
784. Aparajito
785. Apur Sansar

#785: Apur Sansar

(Satyajit Ray, 1959)

The final chapter of The Apu Trilogy is the most affecting. This is partially because of the commitment already put in to this character, the emotional stakes that come with four prior hours spent with a human and watching him grow from his first moments to a grown man. But the film also features the biggest gut punch of a death in an already formidable line of gut-punch deaths. Compounded by the fate of the relationship between Apu and his new son, the film's central turning point is quite overwhelming. But even as the film turns toward a poetic third act and a hopeful ending, the emotions of the thing never feel forced or manipulative. Apur Sansar is heartbreaking and uplifting. This trilogy is, like Yi Yi, the story of what encapsulates all of human experience in the era of cinema - family, modernity, art in an age of technology, love, education, belief, and most of the all the individual struggling with all of this to grasp at meaning in existence.

As the father of a boy who is about to turn five, Apur Sansar is a complex emotional ride. On the one hand, I've watched Apu's whole life - I've seen the loss that has come from being close to people, and I've seen his struggle to define himself as an individual. Through this experience, the impact of his wife's death hits so hard that it isn't a surprise that he walks away from the son he hasn't met - nor is it a move that turns me against him. Yet I know the joy and rewarding existential moments he is missing by rejecting his child. I also know the dependence of a child on their parents and the bond between a father and a son, so his logical decision is nevertheless tragic. I cried through the second half of this movie, both for Apu and for his son.

Apu says that he abandons his son because he couldn't bear to be reminded that he lived because his mother died. It goes much deeper than this, of course, back to his home village and the death of his sister, through to the moment when he had no one and nothing and decided to do something he deemed honorable in a naïve and romantic moment of foolishness. It's impossible for virtually anyone reading this post or watching this Criterion release to fully understand Apu's motivation, yet Ray has lent his life such a universal humanism that it's impossible not to relate. The final moment does not feel forced because we know this human, we know it is inevitable he will open his heart to this boy, and we root for them as they walk off into the distance even though there is almost certainly more heartbreak to be had.

#784: Aparajito

(Satyajit Ray, 1956)

Aparajito is the middle film in the Apu Trilogy, but like Pather Panchali before it, it was not assumed there would be a follow-up. This makes the film different from the majority of second films in a trilogy, even though it also has a bit of the abrupt ending that many middle films have. One similarity it does share with such movies is the leap in technical skill on display that often come from maturity, larger budgets, and a confidence to take risks borne of success. I mentioned the talent and sophistication Ray brought to Pather Panchali in my thoughts on that film, but a small budget and the enormous challenge of doing the shoot in the village where it was set meant some things were destined to be compromised. Aparajito has significantly fewer barriers, and as a result it is a slicker and more complex film - though not necessarily a better or more important one.

The pacing of Aparajito is particularly noteworthy. The film starts out with Apu not much older than he was in the final moments of the first film, still spending his days exploring and getting into harmless trouble. However, this time it's in the streets of a well-populated town where his father has moved the family to make a better living. The first half hour or so of the film is spent establishing his new life and that of his mother's while building up the signifiers and thematic underpinnings of what is to come both in this movie and the next. (Many of these signifiers needed explanation for me, provided by the solid short special feature on the disc.)

The movie takes a dramatic shift when (spoiler etc.) Apu's father dies, and this is really where the momentum for the rest of the trilogy gets going. Apu's journey into adulthood through education and independence is a story of modernity and the toll it takes on humanity, something that comes into focus even more in the evolving relationship with trains in the third film. But it's also a humanist story of a cultural awakening in the midst of a changing society. This is the core strength of Aparajito on its own, and the film would be quite impressive separated from its beginning and ending chapters simply because it depicts this evolution so gracefully.

#759: The Confession

(Costa-Gavras, 1970)

This is usually not the place to discuss current entertainment news, let alone political news. But watching Costa-Gavras's deeply disturbing and intense film has clear implications for what's happening in the world today both generally and within the United States. The now decades-long debate in this country over torture and its benefits or lack thereof represents an extreme abandoning of the lessons of the past and America's dedication to at least ostensibly projecting an image of moral authority in the world.

Like any good film that attempts to tell the complex and unflinching truth, what you take from The Confession will likely be informed by your worldview. For conservatives, this is likely to be seen as a takedown of the socialist satellites of the USSR and by extension a rejection of the underpinning communist philosophy. As a work of art, this would be a largely useless piece of propaganda that would have outlived its usefulness three decades ago. For people who are more generally cautious of institutional power (a group to which Costa-Cavras himself undoubtedly belongs considering his decades-long stretch of career choices), The Confession is much more universal, and presents a harrowing argument against coercion as a tool in law enforcement. That said, I do think there is a strong anti-communist message here, though it's one that isn't necessarily shared by the director. Costa-Gavras simply tells the truth in The Confession, but his final moments end on a call for Lenin to rescue his movement from the evils that transpired in its wake. I'm not sure Lenin (or anyone) could help, for the very nature of the system created in Russia guaranteed corruption of power - after all, it's not capitalism or communism or any other political system that owns the darker side of human instinct, and only an open society can root out the ill-willed forces that would threaten to destroy it.

It's this larger point that goes beyond interrogation methods and torture that seems more important to me at this stage in history. Maybe I just thought of the comparison because the news is happening right now, but The Confession reminded me most of the battle Apple is currently fighting to keep its operating system secure. Although smart phones may be just a momentary blip in technological terms, their current dominance means that they represent the greatest threat to authoritarian governments today. Giving these governments access to any phone they wanted would mean that criminals would also have access to them, for sure, but even more importantly it would mean that dissidents and political fighters would need to go elsewhere for security. The Confession does not have any direct implications in this regard (even home computers were unheard of when it was made) but it does highlight the damage that can be inflicted on people when their government is given total control over their lives. Although the torture sequence that takes up the bulk of the first half of the movie is intense enough, it's the second half that highlights this terrifying truth, making it equally if not more disturbing.

Of course, I haven't discussed the movie much, but instigating political discussion (and ideally action) is largely the purpose of Costa-Gavras's films. Though he is a very cinematic and technically sound director, his main focus is using the medium to get a political response. The Confession was added to the Collection along with its follow-up State of Siege, which I have yet to see. But it also joins two masterpieces already included, Z and Missing, similarly political thrillers. While I don't think The Confession is quite as good as those two films, it's more universal than either, ironically because the journey is so personal and hyper-specific. I don't know that I've ever seen a better indictment of torture, and the film's complex depiction of the state's manipulation will sadly resonate even as the USSR grows more distant in the rearview mirror of history.

#778: A Special Day

(Ettore Scola, 1977)

Don't read a goddamn thing about this movie before you see it.

A Special Day is a stunningly beautiful movie starring two stunningly beautiful people. The cover Criterion chose for the film is accurate, but it's also a bit misleading. This is not a Sirkian melodrama or a doomed romance - although in some ways it stands in for these subgenres. It's not a movie about Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni - although you never forget these are the people you are watching. It's not even a sepia-toned period piece about the faded nostalgia of misremembered good old days - though again, the film's cinematography is unique and sumptuous.

This is a movie about Italy. I've mentioned briefly before the country's unwillingness to confront its complicity with Nazi Germany, but Rome, Open City was about much more than that, whereas A Special Day confronts this issue head-on. By 1977, Italy had been celebrating Liberation Day, a remarkable national agreement to present its history as a sunny lie, for 30 years. It's still intense in America in 2016 to see the six minutes that open this film in which Italy welcomes Hitler and the Nazi leadership into Rome, but to Italians in the late 70s it must have been a slap in the face. It's especially remarkable considering the fact that Scola was one of the most significant comedic filmmakers of his generation (though by this point he had turned to outright political drama) and these are arguably the two biggest stars in Italian cinema history. Yet here is a film that begins with documentary footage using contemporary broadcasts describing the jubilation upon Hitler's welcome, with little more than some credits beforehand to assure viewers they were at the right theater.

This theme is not just established at the beginning and then forgotten as the personal drama plays out - a loud radio playing the parade along with planes flying overhead keeps the pressure of the impending war pressing down on the couple throughout the film. It's hard as an American to understand what this means or would feel like to most viewers of the movie, people who were either alive during the time the film was set or were raised by people who lived their prime during the time.

The story between the two leads is radical as well, particularly Mastroianni's sexuality. There have been some objections to the couple's consummation of their relationship considering his sexual orientation, but I think the film handles it in a very moving and respectful way. The emotional connection between the two characters is earned, and even though the film often dips into melodrama, it has enough nuance and complexity to avoid falling off the deep end.

I really loved A Special Day and think this is a great choice from Criterion. Although the cast alone would be enough to make it a no-brainer in the Collection, the cinematography and vital take on the politics of Italy in both the 1930s and 1970s is what elevates it to an essential release.

#809: Phoenix

(Christian Petzold, 2014)

Phoenix is Vertigo in the Holocaust, where obsession is replaced with devastating loss of self. The protagonist, disfigured beyond recognition in the final moments of the concentration camps, struggles to restore her previous identity, finally finding her voice in the destruction of her former life. Like its vaunted ancestor, the plot is contrived, the metaphors obvious, but the film is executed with such taut skill and precision that it's impossible to avoid being sucked into its world. This is one of the great films of the 2010s.

It would be difficult and ill-advised to discuss Phoenix and not mention The Best Movie Ever Made. The scene where Nelly tries on her dress (which her husband does not know is her dress), desperate for him to recognize the truth and accept her as she truly is instead of searching for a ghost, has an odd funhouse quality to it because we as viewers are watching a film behaving like another film. We see echoes of the past in this present viewing, and Nelly's longing (and the shadow of death) is deepened by the connection.

Post-war Berlin is of course not 50s San Francisco, and Johnny does not have the conflicted psychosis of Scottie (though note the similarities between the two names). But there are more significant differences between the two films than the setting and reverse quality of the secrets being kept. For one, if Phoenix mirrors Vertigo then we only get one side of the first film's mirror - we never see Nelly and Johnny married and happy before Nelly is taken (even in flashback, which would have been an extremely easy and expected device for a less mature filmmaker to use here). If the second half of Vertigo is an extension of the fever dream Scottie has before being committed, then Phoenix is all fever dream, a theory extended onto Criterion's beautiful cover where Nelly emerges from what is either train smoke or the wreckage of Berlin, haunted by (or haunting) the nightclub where she encounters her husband.

Just as the structure diverges, so too does the central mystery. Nelly does not hesitate to unload her identity because of a crime committed, but because she is afraid her husband will not accept her (because she does not accept herself). In both films, it is a secret being kept by the woman that keeps the couple apart, but in Phoenix the betrayal is being kept by the man. These comparisons could continue long after they have outlived their usefulness, and Phoenix ultimately needs to be taken on its own. In this regard, the film's central connection to the Holocaust is most notable.

Obviously the Holocaust is well-worn territory for film in general and specifically within the Collection. Just as American music as both an artform and a cultural signifier is fundamentally tied to slavery and its aftereffects, I don't think it's unreasonable to link European film after World War II to the Holocaust as the towering and defining historical event that the artform is forced to grapple with. Phoenix manages to deliver a story unlike most (though The Night Porter came to mind) but the various details seemed overly plotted. The idea that her husband would betray her, she would survive but in unrecognizable form, though close enough to lead her husband to think it was conceivable that their friends would think it was her after she tracks him down and calls out his name and he doesn't put two and two together seems almost ludicrous. Yet this convoluted logic hardly matters when Nelly is standing across from her husband who has no idea that she is the woman he is teaching her to become. The beautiful rubble of Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the war gives the film a post-apocalyptic vibe. In fact, the movie has an odd science fiction feel to it, as if the world has been fabricated around it. When Nelly returns to a bench she used to linger on with her husband, he quickly pulls her out of the fantasy back into this fabricated fever dream of a world. She must never stray back into reality, at least while he has her under his spell.

Phoenix works on its own as both a literal story of survival and a metaphor for the larger guilt both survivor and perpetrator felt in the aftermath of the war. It's noteworthy that the film never shows any actual Nazis, it even makes a point of mentioning that the landlady where Nelly finds an apartment never liked them. This isn't a movie about the enemy of World War II, but about the collateral damage inflicted on Germany. It's also a way of exploring a deeper and more universal sense of self, however, and this is where the film becomes most intense and overwhelming to watch.

The final scene is the one that everyone talks about - it's even mentioned in the brief description of the film on Criterion's listing. It's a scene deep with symbolism and unspoken emotion. It comes as unexpectedly as it goes and hits you hard in the gut. It absolutely wrecked me for about 24 hours. Yet it's also cathartic, a final release from the intensity and heartbreak of the previous ninety minutes. This one scene makes the film worthy of its praise, but the moment would not be nearly as effective if the rest of the movie wasn't so hypnotic and haunting. Phoenix and its central figure appear in the night, still cloaked in the smoke of the greatest crime of the 20th century, and before you are able to wrap your mind around them they are gone.

#721: Love Streams

(John Cassavetes, 1984)

One of the hardest things I had to get over in my initial burst of activity in this journey was making assumptions about a film based on prior films by directors I was less than enthusiastic about. Staring at 10 Ozu or Fassbinder films and assuming they would all be boring or distasteful (respectively) was not going to allow me to open my mind to an individual piece of art and experience it with a fresh perspective. This would inevitably take me down the path to viewing my watching habits as a chore to be completed. Avoiding this pitfall has paid dividends, particularly when looking at the two directors mentioned above - Ozu is now one of my most loved directors, and while I may have a more, ahem, complicated relationship with Fassbinder, a few of his films have been spectacular cinematic experiences I will treasure.

Still, this isn't always easy, and it gets progressively harder the deeper into a filmmaker's Criterion catalog you get. After having a fairly mixed response to the Cassavetes box, when Love Streams popped up as a Criterion release I couldn't help but think "dammit." This is especially true because of the nature of the film. As I mentioned in my post on Une chambre en ville, many Criterion films from the 80s are late-era works by the established masters of 50s and 60s cinema, and many of them are not particularly good when viewed outside the context of their respective director's oeuvre. So knowing that I didn't like Cassavetes too much and seeing that Love Streams was a lesser-known later work from the director made me quite wary. It immediately seemed like a token release only for the fans, a movie that wouldn't belong in the Collection without the name above the title. I sat down to endure it and file it away on the blog.

I was totally wrong. Not only do I think Love Streams is deserving of its place in the Collection, I think it's one of the best Cassavetes films, and it's the one that I loved the most. What's most interesting about my reaction is that this is most definitively A Cassavetes Film, with verite-style camera work, craft-heavy performances, and deliberate pacing. It's also got all the raw drama and broken characters of his more high-profile work from the 60s and 70s. Yet the movie never seems like an exercise in character craft the way even his strongest early films like Faces do. This is a fully formed world Cassavetes reveals, and the fact that the movie is based on a play would be difficult to pull out of what we see (apparently it was heavily rewritten by Cassavetes). Rowlands in particular, one of the great underrated actresses of her generation, inhabits her role so seemingly effortlessly that you hardly remember you are watching a performance. The way Cassavetes shoots her only underscores this impressive feat - look at the shot they used for the cover, the way he frames her in between the composed background and the harsh imposing foreground, squeezed into a folding chair. Her brother is reaching out to her but we can only see his hand - the camera doesn't move to reveal him, but instead lingers in this middle-ground emptiness for the length of the shot. Nothing about the way Cassavetes does this is overbearing or even necessarily prominent, yet it is deliberately present. This is filmmaking of the highest order.

Although it doesn't get to the core of what I loved about the film, the most striking thing about watching the first half hour of the movie was how much it reminded me of Boogie Nights. Despite the fact that this film wasn't available for large stretches of its afterlife, I have little doubt that PTA saw the movie and examined it for style and rhythm. The most obvious comparison is the custody scene, which PTA seems to have lifted almost directly from this movie, but Rowlands in general must have had an impact on Amber, Julianne Moore's character in Boogie Nights, and Cassavetes also seems like a direct influence on the Burt Reynolds character. Similarly, the way Cassavetes pities his characters while following them unflinchingly into their emotional depths and living with them there is the most impressive achievement of Boogie Nights (and PTA's early career in general). The characters that Cassavetes and Rowlands portray here are not good people, but they are people, real and breathing and fighting for life.

Boogie Nights, of course, is packed with flashy cinematic flourishes and modern ideas about editing, music use, and dialog. Love Streams is a much quieter and more confident picture. Part of this contrast is that one film was made at the beginning of a career, the other at the end. But most of it is the way in which the two directors work. I am a big fan of PTA, and I think the last three movies he's made will eventually have a stronger reputation than any of the first four. But he's a director that is constantly crafting a movie. He wants you to know it's a movie, partially because he wants you to see all the things he's doing, but mostly because he really likes movies. Why not make your movie a movie?

Cassavetes doesn't particularly care for movies. He's a filmmaker almost incidentally, because it's the pen he uses to craft his work. Just as he carried on his acting career to support his filmmaking, his filmmaking is there to support his worlds. What's most important to him is his characters and their inner-journeys, and finally how this reflects back onto our own inner-lives. I think this is a big part of why I didn't immediately identify with his films (I'm a movies guy, fyi) but here with his craft so refined and spare it doesn't keep me at so much of a distance. There is plenty of heartbreak in Love Streams, but the way Cassavetes lets his characters breathe assures us that they will live to fight again.

There's always a lot of consternation on the internet about projects like mine. "Gosh darnit, movies shouldn't be a mission to complete!" etc. There's probably something to that, and it certainly isn't for everybody. But with an infinite number of films available (especially these days with streaming), picking a curated set of movies and forcing yourself to take in each and every one means you will inevitably watch a large number of movies you would never otherwise watch. Many of these movies will end up being ones you never should have watched after all (Salo and The Magic Flute come to mind in my own journey, for entirely separate reasons). But a handful will change the way you look at movies, and over the course of a journey it will change the way you look at watching movies. Love Streams reveals for me personally that even after nearly 800 of these films I still have things to discover and learn in the most unexpected places. I'm eternally grateful to Criterion for that, and whether you are doing what I'm doing or pick whatever you're in the mood for tonight, I hope you make an effort somewhere in your artistic consumption to force yourself out of your comfort zone.

#291: Heaven Can Wait

(Ernst Lubitsch, 1943)

I recently rewatched one of my favorite movies for (surprisingly) the first time since I began this blog, so I thought I'd put down a few thoughts on what Heaven Can Wait means to me both as a work of cinema and on a purely emotional level.

I came to Ernst Lubitsch through the work of another significant director in my life's journey through cinema, the great Billy Wilder. My first exposure to Wilder came - like many budding cinephiles - from Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, but as I soon graduated to the impeccable The Apartment and Ninotchka, which he wrote for the director he idolized, Ernst Lubitsch. His stories of Lubitsch (including Wilder's famous office sign that read "How would Lubitsch do it?") clued me in to the high stature of the earlier director and gave Wilder a deep connection to early comedy and the original Hollywood. I loved Ninotchka, not so much for the brilliant but dated satire of communism and capitalism alike, but for the small, perfect moments that I would soon find out were examples of the "Lubitsch touch," that ineffable genius that would come to be bastardized but never equaled in screenplay writing through the rest of Hollywood history. Soon after I saw The Shop Around the Corner and To Be Or Not to Be, but in the 90s many of Lubitsch's movies were difficult to find - some, like the best, Trouble in Paradise, weren't even available on VHS.

One late night on TCM I came across Heaven Can Wait, a Lubitsch picture that was well-regarded in its time (Lubitsch and the picture were even nominated for Oscars), but had slipped into his second tier as the director had gone out of fashion and its stars had failed to attain the legendary status of Lubitsch luminaries like Greta Garbo and Jimmy Stewart (Ameche is now much better known for his later career as an older character actor in films like Trading Places and Cocoon, while Tierney - who made the absolute classic Laura right after this film - had a tragic decline in the 50s due to poor treatment for mental health issues). There have only been a handful of movies in my life that I've stumbled upon and loved as much as I loved Heaven Can Wait.

The movie is a sort of unconventional romantic comedy, in that it's a comedy and a romance, though it doesn't follow the typical boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-becomes-a-gorilla template of a romantic comedy. The entire movie is told from the perspective of Ameche's character after his death, where he makes the case to the devil why he should be in Hell. This is the kind of high concept premise for a movie that Lubitsch often used as a jumping off point, which is to say the movie isn't really about Henry Van Cleve getting into Hell anymore than My Dinner With Andre is about eating food. The Devil does have a few great lines, most notably "Sometimes it looks as if the whole world is coming to Hell." But it quickly transitions to Van Cleve's life story. It never gives up the narration, using it most often to transition from one segment of his life to another, and Lubitsch (and his screenwriter, Samson Raphaelson) uses Van Cleve's birthday as a anchor in each segment to tell the story, most elegantly with the use of ties as birthday presents as Henry gets older.

There are many great things about Heaven Can Wait, but the star of the film is Charles Coburn, who plays Van Cleve's grandfather. Coburn was one of the great character actors of all time and he steals every scene he's in here, even the ones with Eugene Pallett, another legendary actor who plays Van Cleve's father-in-law. Coburn almost never has a line come out of his mouth that is anything less than the best line in any other movie it would find itself in, and his character is the beating heart of the film. I love so many moments from Coburn - and often quote "And so farewell Mr. E.F. Strable, we'll take Martha, you keep Mabel!" - but the one I always come back to is when his son (and Ameche's father) declares that he would never even know where the backdoor of a show would be and he promptly replies "It's around the back, down an alley. You can't miss it." It's a great Lubitsch joke, but the way Coburn delivers the line with a mix of exasperation, condescension, and matter-of-fact honesty sells it so brilliantly that you wonder where talent like that has gone.

Coburn and Pallette (who has a great scene at his breakfast table) are eternally memorable in the film, but the rest of the supporting cast leaves the film with a wealth of riches. Allyn Joslyn as Albert is pitch-perfect as usual, but Signe Hasso as the French maid and Spring Byington, who was another great character actor from the era, have their moments, too. Gene Tierney was beautiful, but she never really had the screen presence of the top tier stars of the 40s. Still, her best scene here is when Ameche convinces her to run away with him (or so he thinks) and she breaks down in tears about the risk of living alone in Kansas and she nails it. Ameche, too, rises to the occasion, with a mile-a-minute delivery that sells his character's sly behavior as lovable and innocent.

It's this sly behavior that makes the film a complicated love story, though. When evaluating Van Cleve's philandering in the context of what is a memorable and moving love affair, two pieces of context need to be taken into account. First, Heaven Can Wait was made in the code era, when clear extramarital affairs needed to have clear consequences (see: Double Indemnity). This means that Van Cleve's indiscretions were destined to be a little vague. It's not entirely clear how far he goes either before or after he is married to Martha, though the implication is certainly there. Second, the film is told from Van Cleve's perspective as he makes his case to the devil, providing us with an unreliable narrator. This means that the way Martha is portrayed (an unflinching angel with the best of intentions) or the way Albert is portrayed (a clueless know-it-all with nothing but the short end of the stick) or really even the way Van Cleve himself is portrayed cannot be fully trusted. Now, of course, the film breaks this rule on multiple occasions, most notably when Martha runs away and we see her parents before her arrival and while Albert helps her return. And, as I mentioned before, Lubitsch is really using this framing device as a way to tell the story rather than as the intended thrust of the narrative. So the influence of both pieces of context are difficult to pin down. Perhaps the code wasn't a conscious barrier to the story Lubitsch wanted to tell, and perhaps Raphaelson never intended to lead the audience to believe Van Cleve was bending the story, and each scene was written without the second-hand nature of the telling in mind.

It's the love story itself that makes you want to believe that the code played no part but Van Cleve's storytelling made him out to be worse than he was. Henry and Martha seem so perfect for each other, so in love and so well-matched in what they want from life and what they can take in the other person, that you can't help but forgive Henry his indiscretions as much as Martha can. The final moment of the couple together dancing as their life together has passed by is one of the beautiful scenes in Lubitsch's career, and it caps off one of the great Hollywood love stories I've ever seen. If Henry is unfaithful to Martha, and if Martha was as perfect as she seems, then she knew it and didn't care, she was willing to accept the bad with the good, and isn't that enough for us to avoid judgement? Surely if Satan himself can do it we can, too.

The rest of the movie manages to balance the light and the deep with similar ease. The movie never stops delivering quick lines and delightful scenarios, but it also has a depth that the average comedy lacked even in the golden age of Hollywood. Lubitsch manages to show the evolution of New York from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century with ease, while the circular nature of the film's family lends weight to Henry's life arc. His son's indiscretions plant the seed for Henry's own realization about his youth, while his own maturing over the course of the film underscores the inevitably of life's forward pull. Like many movies of the era, Henry is a protagonist born into wealth who never has to worry a day in his life, but this is forgiven as another of his mild indiscretions. The concern of both Henry and the film is women, and anything else is merely a distraction.

Heaven Can Wait is one of the few movies I have actually suggested to Criterion - I did so way back in the early 2000s. I suggested it because I felt confident that Lubitsch was enough to get anyone's attention, and if they actually saw the thing it would be impossible to avoid falling in love with it. These many years later it still affects me in ways that are unexpected considering just how little any of it relates to my own life experience or relationship. That speaks to Lubitsch's ability to take something that is essentially a piece of craft and make it breathe. The director made better movies in his career, but none of them are closer to my heart than this one.

#783: Pather Panchali

(Satyajit Ray, 1955)

I watched Pather Panchali a few years ago in a version that was so bad that I decided to wait for the restoration to watch the next two films in the series. The quality of the film's image - which was worse than many budget restorations of silent films I have seen - was so bad that it was difficult to get into the story even. So when I blind bought the trilogy at the most recent B&N 50% sale, I decided I had to rewatch Pather to get the full effect. I was absolutely right - this viewing was a revelation of the kind you rarely get, and Pather Panchali is certainly one of the great films of cinema.

Pather Panchali begins before its supposed protagonist is born, and in many ways the film is a passing of the torch from one Ray child, the sister who steals fruit from an orchard that once belonged to her family, to another, Apu, a young boy whose watchful eye and innocent perspective are a stand-in for that of the viewer's own lens. Although my own children are younger than this pair and reversed in gender order, the relationship is immediately recognizable, comprising both battle-weary enemies and siblings with an unbreakable bond of love. The sad deaths that consume the final third of the film are of the gut-wrenching variety, though the simple poetic framing of Ray's camera gives us the big picture and never lets us forget the larger story at work.

The fact that Ray didn't initially plan on making the other two films in the trilogy lend the final moments an ambivalence that the knowledge of subsequent films has replaced with hope and a sense of beginnings. Apu only knew this world for a short time and it will be difficult for him to recall many of the things that shaped him. As a complete story, however, the film's structure shifts away from establishing details to a portrait of a family struggling to free themselves from poverty. Until Apu finds the necklace, the true protagonist of the film is the mother, desperate to transcend the shame her daughter and husband have brought upon her and struggling to make a life in difficult circumstances. She is a remarkable character only because Ray chooses to make her remarkable, and it lends the film its humanist qualities, a trait that defined world cinema post-Rome, Open City and pre-Breathless.

But even in the context of a thriving international film community, Pather Panchali is striking. The movie stands out immediately just by nature of its subject matter, swimming in a wave of European and Japanese films that crashed into American arthouse theaters in the 50s. But the film distinguishes itself actively rather than through its mere existence. Perhaps the two things that stand out most to me are the sophistication of Ray's technique and the intimacy of his depiction of rural India. Although they are linked, it is worth addressing each separately.

Ray's technical proficiency was by no means predestined. Though he came from a distinguished family with a tradition of artists, he had never made a film when he began work on Pather Panchali, using his own money in initial shooting. The fact that India was almost non-existent on the international film scene further underscores the uphill battle Ray faced. Although Indian cinema began producing neorealist work after independence, Ray's film was the first to generate any notable attention in the West, meaning he no roadmap for this kind of success (which is not to imply he was expecting it or crafting the film with this in mind). His crew had little experience, his actors were mainly amateurs, and his funding meant that many techniques and multiple takes were often unavailable. Still, the film manages to deliver a style that was both elementary and intellectual. The way Ray blocks his characters and the moments he chooses to move the camera have rarely been improved upon in the ensuing 60 years. Many of his shots in the fields and the forest are stunning displays of black and white cinematography. I was particularly struck by his balance of Japanese formalism, often with minimal cinematic flourishes when in intimate household moments with the family, and Western naturalism, both in his scenic shots and in the way that the village sinks into the forest and water around it. The camera is both the documentarian and poet

Ray was famously inspired by Bicycle Thieves to make movies, and this is clear in his depiction of the family's struggles in his debut film. Yet the jump for De Sica from his stature in Italian society (he was raised in poverty in Lazio outside of Rome) to the world of Antonio and his son in Bicycle Thieves is not hard to contemplate. Although it was certainly impossible for Ray to ignore poverty in his own country, the jump from his own bubble to the world of Apu is extraordinary. That Ray was able to enter this world without presenting it as "separate" from that of the viewer is even more impressive. Part of this is the proximity of such living conditions - Ray only needed to go a few miles outside of the city to shoot Pather Panchali, something that would be difficult to achieve in Europe or America. But most of it stems from his gentle hand with the camera and his dedication to the universality of his characters' struggle. Pather Panchali is not about a poor Indian family any more than Home Alone is about the difficulties of life in the wealthy Chicago suburbs. Yes, this is a world very different from our own (and from Ray's), but it is also about people who love, work, gossip, mourn. They are petty or angry sometimes and elated and entertained others. The way Ray reserves judgement allows us to see these emotions through their eyes instead of through our own or Ray's. When Apu goes to see the train, we begin to feel what it must have been like to see a train for the very first time anywhere in the world, what power and beauty one could experience with the revelation of industry. It frees the moment from a contrast in societies and allows it to simply stand. It's consequently one of the great scenes I've ever seen.

I won't be watching these in close viewings - I've decided to space them out over a few weeks to give each film time to breathe. But I am certainly looking forward to the next two films, and I remain grateful that Criterion and its partners put so much love into the finished product. Pather Panchali's place in history can be hard to overstate and seeing it look this beautiful reminds even the most jaded cineaste that there are still treasures to be uncovered and rediscovered.

#714: Lola

(Jacques Demy, 1961)

Lola is the first film both in Criterion's boxset of Jacques Demy's core early films and of the director's overall filmography. Built with overlapping stories of relationships both emotional and fleeting, the film straddles the many worlds of French cinema. At times it seems like a quaint relic of the French system, a light and occasionally Soapy romance of criss-crossed lovers. Other moments feel like kin to the New Wave classics being made at the same time, in love with movies and reality in equal measures. The film recalls Ophuls (to whom it is dedicated) as often as it predicts Jeunet. It hints at the darkness of his next film, Bay of Angels, as easily as it predicts his technicolor-splashed later work. It manages to feel playful without resorting to comedy and tragic without delivering bad endings for its characters. I think it's an undersung masterpiece.

The story of Lola isn't much of one at all, as simple coincidences give way to poignant exchanges of love both sexual and familial. Characters remind characters of other characters, cities pop up in the past, future, and fantasies of various people who are unaware of the connections they share. The nature of the city of Nantes is reflected in the various players, constantly coming and going - when they are there, they want to leave, when they are away they wonder when they will return. The movie is at once as fantastical as a David Lynch movie (is Cecile perhaps literally Lola, whose real name is after all Cecile?) and as humanistic as a Marcel Carne melodrama. Frankie, one of the sailors that defines Nantes as a constant state of flux, sleeps with Lola but bonds with Cecile, who reminds him of his sister. Roland pines for Lola, whose heart belongs to Michel, but desires to flee to an island in the South Pacific, where unbeknownst to everyone Michel has made a fortune. The plot doubles back on itself frequently and revolves around a cafe where Roland lounges with a painter - it's apparent that the film had a huge influence on Amelie.

All of these elements make Lola a joy to watch. There's a certain feeling of serendipity and a charmed melancholy that Demy is able to deliver here that is almost never present in a director's debut. His work is not as stylized as Wes Anderson's - though simultaneously more about movies than the younger director - but the combination of a breezy tone and deep sadness is shared by the two filmmakers. It's much more in line with Truffaut's elemental 400 Blows than the aggressive newness and removed cool of Breathless, but it has none of the animosity toward conventional (or maybe safe) filmmaking that both directors had in their earliest work. A casual viewing of Lola would do fine, which ironically is perhaps what has made its place in history less noted than its contemporaries.

But dig a little deeper and what's here delivers elements that reward investigation and reflection. Lola is a powerful woman, perhaps saddled with the cliche dancer/seductress role so overused in film but defiant in her self-sufficiency. Anouk Aimee is both perfectly cast and perfect as Lola, to the point where she seems as inseparable from the character as the character feels separated from the world of the movie. Demy's deliberate technical flaws are also gems waiting to be reevaluated for their influence on future filmmakers, their own small ripple in the torrent of New Wave's storm. Then there is Nantes itself, shot as sleepy and wild, a temporary town of fairs and dances and markets where scheming smugglers hide, as mysterious as Casablanca but without the wartime tension, so people and things and ideas and love flow freely through its ports. The city is just as much the star of Lola as Lola, and it makes the movie feel just as alive and magical now as it must have felt fifty years ago.

#688: Dry Summer

(Metin Erksan, 1964)

Dry Summer is my favorite film in the World Cinema boxset so far. The film features one of the great villains in Criterion - Osman is a true piece of shit, the kind of character that makes your skin crawl and wish you could climb into the movie so you could smack the shit out of him. At times I hated him so much (and he seemed so over-the-top despicable) that I felt uncomfortable watching the film. But the incredible direction and suspense of the final sequence won me over.

One of the most interesting things about the film is how Erksan is able to take a socialist premise not dissimilar to that of Redes and create a timeless morality tale laced with Hitchcockian suspense. The movie's themes are reminiscent of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, though Bogart and friends are arguably more admirable than Osman prior to the discovery of the gold, and the way in which greed and hubris overtake the respective protagonists seems guided by an invisible hand - just not the one such craven capitalists pray to. Dry Summer might not be the towering parable Huston's film is, but it is a grand statement from an under-explored corner of the cinematic globe.

#682: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

(Elio Petri, 1970)

Note: There's a chance that if you've seen a movie I'll reference I am about to ruin the ending of this movie, so if you care about that sort of thing, stop reading.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is a direct precursor to American Psycho, to the degree that I'm shocked at how little this connection is discussed. Basically, the movie is to fascism what that movie was to capitalism, and it's just as biting, hilarious, and challenging intellectually. Of course, this movie came out thirty years before that one and nearly two decades before the book upon which that was based, so there's a pretty good case for the film as a cutting-edge satire ahead of its time.

Of course, the film fits perfectly into its era of Italian filmmaking, and makes a nice double feature with Marco Ferreri's Dillinger Is Dead from the previous year. Both films are major send-ups of Italian masculinity, and derive much of their pleasure from the unexpected actions of their main character and how they subvert expectations of their characters. Petri's film is more immediately engaging, no doubt, because the narrative is structured in such an engaging way. I guess it's a bit like Absolute Power, where a murder is shown in great detail but we don't know who the perpetrator is until the big reveal afterwards (is that too obscure of a reference now?). Either way, it starts the film off right and sets the tone for what is one of the most entertaining recent Criterion releases - and one of the best.

#686: Redes

(Emilio Gómez Muriel and Fred Zinnemann, 1936)

The first half of Redes left me a little cold. It was obvious how huge the influence of the film had been on future Latino cinema and other socially conscious cinema - especially films about labor and worker's rights. But having seen so many of the films that followed in its wake lessened the impact of the story, and while the footage itself was impressive and worth watching, I didn't see the spark of cinematic innovation that made the film historically important and timelessly impressive.

The last few sequences of the movie did away with this dispassionate stance. Redes final half is beautiful, lyrical, and moving. It's an angry but hopeful work, like all great political cinema must be, and even if things haven't changed as much as its filmmakers probably hoped they would, it's easy to see what films like this have done in the ensuing 75 years - and just what they can be capable of.

I've never fished for a living in Mexico in the 1930s, but Redes shows me what that might be like. Better yet, it does this with both a documentarian approach (which was the film's original intention) and an impressionistic touch. The quick cut montage at the end of the film is both high art and deeply grounded in the world of its characters. Seeing moments like this in films from the 30s is a humbling experience - seeing it come not just outside Hollywood but outside any studio system is a reminder that great art is rarely driven by commerce. In 2013 just as in 1936, it is an outsider's responsibility to tell stories that aren't being told. But it is their prerogative to tell them in a way that has never been done before.

#663: Shoah

(Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

[There are a number of times during Shoah when an interviewee says there are no words to describe their experience. Although it is crude to compare watching a movie to what these people witness in their lives, there are truly no words to describe Shoah. It is both one of the truest representations of cinema and undoubtedly the most harrowing and life-altering film I have ever seen. There is no other film with which to compare it. There is, perhaps, no other film. Some thoughts, messy and honest:]

It took me nearly a month to watch all of Shoah. Part of this is my busy schedule and the film's nearly ten hour running time, but most of it is the need to fully digest and attempt to comprehend each section of the movie. As it moved deeper into its narrative, it became more and more difficult for me to process. There were moments when I stopped paying attention because the emotions were overwhelming. Other sections I rewatched because they were so dense and perspective-altering.

Shoah is a reminder that horror movies are made to understand our deepest fears, while documentaries about horrors are meant to destabilize those same fears. Nightmare on Elm Street is therapy and Irreversible is abuse, but both of these things are comfort, in a way. Shoah is uncertainty in the form of truth. It's the electron knocked out of its orbit, hurtling towards us.

I've never been to Germany, though my last name is German, from a family that emigrated in the 1850s. In some ways, Lanzmann paints a more damning picture of Poland, though his account is extremely controversial and should be balanced by the knowledge of how many Christian Polish people died during the war, often fighting what they knew was a losing battle. But it is Germany that is stained by the Holocaust, and the German people - many of whom had no idea what was going on - who must live with it until there is no longer a Germany. I don't think I could ever go to Germany after having seen Shoah. I don't really think there should be a Germany any more to go to.

Many of the key people Lanzmann interviews in the film are now dead. Lanzmann interviewed them in the 70s, just 30 years after the events they describe. It is horrifying to me that the 70s were just three decades after the Holocaust. It fills me with great sadness to think that the men and women who can tell us first-hand what happened will soon all be gone from this Earth. I want them to have peace, I want the pain to be gone from their eyes. I want them to live forever, though. I don't want anyone else to tell their stories but them.

Fuck Saló.

My maternal grandparents were 20-something American Jews when they found out about the Holocaust. My grandfather fought in Europe, spending time in France and Italy, mostly. I don't know if it matters that you are Jewish - maybe if you had family in Europe that was killed or barely survived like they did it meant more to you. I like to think it didn't, but it's hard to find the kind of impact the Holocaust should have had in American culture in the late 40s. Sometimes it's hard for me to believe there was any culture.

I lived through 9/11, like we all did, only I was a little closer than most and still miles away. I lived just below Canal St. and watched both towers fall. I saw people walking up the streets covered with soot and dust, some with minor injuries that were ripples from the tidal wave that hit the bottom of the island. Rumors swirled of more attacks and we all wondered what could possibly happen next. I say this because we all try to take our own experiences and feel like we can relate to the stories we hear. The fear and confusion I felt that day and in the subsequent weeks is my own, but I am ashamed of it. I have lived a life of privilege. We all have.

Perhaps the most harrowing section of the film is a letter that ends the first half in which problems with the vans that were being used to commit mass murder are laid out in bland bureaucratic prose, referring to the Jews as the "merchandise." It's a chilling inadvertent commentary on any system's ability to normalize the ultimate horrors through political language and mental separation. The letter was written by Walter Rauff, a Nazi whom many consider to be responsible for the murder of 100,000 Jews. He also allegedly worked with Israel after the war as a secret agent meant to foment unrest among the new country's neighboring enemies. When his mission failed, the Israeli secret service helped him escape capture and flee to South America, where he worked with Pinochet and died of lung cancer in the 1980s. This kind of self-serving purposeful dismissal of justice is almost as horrific as the crimes of which Rauff was accused.

Although the bulk of the film's information comes from spoken words, like all pure cinema you don't need the sound to understand the full impact. There are essentially three images in Shoah. The most common is not human, but is instead the scene of the crime, as one understated synopsis put it. The camera winds its way through contemporary Europe, spending most of its time in the overgrown ruins of the camps themselves. Unlike Night and Fog, shot twenty years earlier and whose poetic and haunting exploration of the camps is in no way rendered obsolete by this definitive work, Shoah is shot in a workmanlike manner that dwells on the natural elements of the ruins' surroundings. Lanzmann has no interest in telling you what it was like to be in the camps by showing you this footage. He is binding all of us on Earth to them through common signifiers. It's a constant reminder that this happened, not in a place but to humanity, perhaps if one is inclined in front of God, surrounded by Him. The second image in Shoah is of the complicit, the Polish citizens who stood by and watched and the German SS and bureaucrats who were at best willfully ignorant. Some of these people are unrepentant and soulless, content to rattle off facts as if their testimony absolves them. Most, however, are at war within themselves, desperate to justify their inaction even when it was clearly justified and they really were powerless to help. These people are us, and we must reconcile that knowledge with who we believe we are today. The third image is the survivor, and this is the image one will never forget. The stories in Shoah are unlike any you have heard before, but the look in the eyes of these men and women is indescribable. If there is one feeling they all have, it is guilt. I think most Holocaust survivors would reject being called victims, even though the horrors they went through and must live with are incomprehensible. They are survivors because someone else died in their place and there was nothing they could do about it. They are at their most emotional when they plead with Lanzmann to understand that there was nothing they could do, even if what they did do was more than any of us could have. They do not cry for themselves, but for their families, for strangers.

Lanzmann is a controversial figure, particularly in Poland where the film was denounced as an attack on the Polish people that omitted much of the hardship and tragedy that country suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Certainly, if you only watched the film and knew nothing else of World War II history, the depiction of Warsaw in the final sequence of the film would lead you to believe that things were normal and sunny for the non-Jewish population. Yet Lanzmann's forceful perspective on the Holocaust is essential to his telling of the story. His anger and disgust is present in his interviews with SS members, while his aggression towards the Polish who in some ways benefitted from the deportation of the Jews is evident and sometimes feels illogical and unfair. But without this emotion the film would feel dead and the story would not have nearly as much impact because there would be nothing with which to engage. Telling the story of a grand tragedy without a perspective is an act of cowardice. Lanzmann knew that.

I don't think most people know that the Nazis kept their industrial-scale mass murder of the Jews secret from even high-ranking members of the SS. Many people chose to turn a blind eye, for sure, but there were undoubtedly many who honestly had no idea of what was being done in their name. As explained by the only historian in Shoah, the reason this was so easy to do was that every other thing done to the Jews by the Nazis was old hat in Europe. Basically anything up to the actual "final solution" had been done before, so most Europeans basically said "Here we go again." Perhaps more difficult to conceive of is what he indicates that this means - up until this point, the Nazi bureaucrats did not need to make their personal mark on what they were being asked to do. It was only when they were asked to commit the greatest organized crime against humanity perhaps in history that they needed to think outside the box. Because the secret needed to be kept, nothing could be detailed in communication from the leaders to the field, which meant they were somewhat on their own. The Holocaust was, in essence, a triumph of middle management.

Everyone should see Shoah, but don't ever see Shoah. It's a terrible truth that once it's known you can't forget. It's history made eternally relevant, a social service that is invaluable. It's hopefully something we'll never need, but it's vital to have it on reserve. It's also a living thing, cinema that sinks into you even in its most static, uncinematic moments. Roger Ebert said it shouldn't be judged against other movies and vice versa, and I know exactly what he means. As a film, it would rank with the greatest ever made. But there are no films to rank it with. There is only Shoah.