https://outskirtsmag.com Outskirts Film Magazine Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:34:57 +0000 https://outskirtsmag.com en https://outskirtsmag.com/outskirts-online-archive Wed, 12 Jul 2023 12:27:54 +0000 Outskirts Film Magazine https://outskirtsmag.com/outskirts-online-archive <img width="3439" height="2669" width_o="3439" height_o="2669" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/72929a19b63a41dcb15a847fbc3371377f735bb3f1e5ec9557b6d65e69b83d75/G000090044.jpg" data-mid="184855897" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/72929a19b63a41dcb15a847fbc3371377f735bb3f1e5ec9557b6d65e69b83d75/G000090044.jpg" /> <img width="2048" height="2014" width_o="2048" height_o="2014" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5374b0382b372ee7ea5a68bcf6531a6bbeeb0208a06a9217f27f1ad69e733a1d/straubs-nestler.jpg" data-mid="184856047" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5374b0382b372ee7ea5a68bcf6531a6bbeeb0208a06a9217f27f1ad69e733a1d/straubs-nestler.jpg" /> <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8f25ec6528b6b35c3905cf9e1f7892460c734cc5ed50e15d6c71dc1dd072abe6/shutki-pro-voynu-v2.mxf_20220321_193648.820.png" data-mid="184856033" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8f25ec6528b6b35c3905cf9e1f7892460c734cc5ed50e15d6c71dc1dd072abe6/shutki-pro-voynu-v2.mxf_20220321_193648.820.png" /> <img width="1440" height="1080" width_o="1440" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ed9fb5bbbc336828cb2d4dd11d190c815e480309e7fe5a759ab4097a62906a69/TRIO_3.jpg" data-mid="184856031" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ed9fb5bbbc336828cb2d4dd11d190c815e480309e7fe5a759ab4097a62906a69/TRIO_3.jpg" /> https://outskirtsmag.com/Real-Graps-Luchadores-Kaijus-and-Wrestling-As-Folk-Poetry Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:34:57 +0000 Outskirts Film Magazine https://outskirtsmag.com/Real-Graps-Luchadores-Kaijus-and-Wrestling-As-Folk-Poetry Real Graps: Luchadores, Kaijus, and Wrestling As Folk Poetry A sweeping essay on how lucha libre and puroresu turn wrestling into national myth for Mexico and post-war Japan, then carry that myth into 1950s and 60s popular cinema through Santo, Rikidōzan, and Godzilla.Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage By Alonso Aguilar <img width="1503" height="1000" width_o="1503" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c097c6656a7f062813ebad29345fe91dea09b446c1d0a995e4416f2f5907c48/terror-of-mechagodzilla-1.jpg" data-mid="247428798" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9c097c6656a7f062813ebad29345fe91dea09b446c1d0a995e4416f2f5907c48/terror-of-mechagodzilla-1.jpg" />The Terror of Mechagodzilla (Ishirō Honda, 1975) Two titans grapple with each other. As they collide, they wreck everything that stands in the way of their mythic tussle. Their antagonism is larger than life, transcending earthly concerns. Each one of them embodies something universal. The massiveness of their figures and their incredible feats of physical strength are just the manifestation of a timeless push-and-pull between opposites: Darkness and Light. Good and Evil. Old and New. Man and God. This is the realm of legend. “The Epic of Gilgamesh” is often cited as humanity’s oldest surviving piece of literature, an ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet dating from 2100 BC. The epic tells of the titular Gilgamesh, the despotic king of Uruk, who is challenged by Enkidu, a warrior of the gods, to a test of strength to determine the future of the kingdom. They wrestle, demolishing walls and destroying thresholds until one of them finally stands tall. In Greek myth, Zeus and Kronos do battle over their bloodline rivalry while exchanging blows at Mount Olympus's peak, with the pantheon of the gods at stake. In the Sanskrit epic of the ancient Indian “Mahabharata”, Krishna inspires Bhima to overcome King Jarasandha in a 14-day Mallayuddha match, with the latter’s throne on the line. The Persian epic poem of “Shahnameh” sees the tragic figures of Rustam and Sohrab on opposing sides of the battlefield, fighting each other without knowing their familial relationship until it is too late. Even the Christian Old Testament sees Jacob wrestling a mysterious stranger until dawn, whose divinity later is called into question. Myriads of cosmologies, religions, and folk traditions stem from vivid accounts of martial arts prowess, the moments when sprawling battlelines assemble in a circle around two grandiloquent figures duking it out barehanded, with no escape other than outlasting and countering the other. As myths show, time works differently in a wrestling match, there’s no pragmatism to be found, as each strike and bodily contortion carries the weight of storytelling; empires rising and falling, cunning betrayals, the kernels of a society hanging from the ceiling over the squared circle. The aesthetics of the wrestling display are the essence of its grammar, a combat form where dramaturgy takes central stage. How this is represented, however, is never uniform. It molds itself from the fabric of the community that withholds it. Like a type of folk poetry, wrestling’s eternal presence lies in its lack of ownership beyond collective embrace, finding ways to amplify or complement cultural identities. Perhaps no two national traditions are as deeply intertwined to the idea of wrestling as a popular form as those of Mexico and Japan. Neither can attest to being the forefathers of this sportive performance art, as its genealogy was already a convoluted compilation of combat and circus spectacles. Both can, however, claim to have marked a cultural milestone in how seamlessly they constructed a national pastime out of intricate fighting choreographies and the atemporal tales of fighting spirits. In Mexico, there’s no need for an introduction. The silhouette of the masked luchador is a national emblem, a communal activity only bested in numbers by the globalised mass appeal of fútbol. Even then, lucha libre feels closer, and more reachable, as it’s almost fully autochthonous. Its phenomenon started in the dawn of post-revolutionary Mexico, in grimy, backdoor gyms and any clandestine space one could surround with ropes. After all, its mecca to this day is a neighborhood venue, Arena México, turned into a national heritage through its messianic enmascarados and how they struck a chord with the rowdy local crowds. In Japan, the post-WWII project of national reconstruction saw something in former sumo fighters turning to “catch wrestling”, an amalgamation of tradition, and the advent of something modern and unexpected. The so-called economic miracle of technocratic advance saw a release valve for the population in the colossus fights at Tokyo’s Korakuen Hall, building from the pioneering work of Rikidozan’s Japanese Wrestling Association into the seminal branching out of his students in Antonio Inoki’s New Japan Pro-Wrestling and Giant Baba’s All Japan Pro Wrestling. By the 1950s, wrestling was a phenomenon in both countries, and it rapidly found its way into another popular art form – this time on the silver screen. The pairing of wrestling and cinema seemed a flawless match from the beginning, as both forms of expression shared a common history of traveling funfair attractions during the heyday of vaudeville. Both were shunned and neglected as lower forms of entertainment. Both were eclectic mixtures of dance, acrobatics, drama, and comedy – sometimes all at the same time. Ironically, cinema was the eventual perpetrator of the demise of the vaudeville acts, stealing both its attention and its class of performers, and projecting their images in giant theaters all around the world at the pace of 24 frames per second. Still, early wrestling’s astounding feats never really vanished from the collective unconscious, stealthily making their way back up, and trading the three-piece suits for more ornate customs and more muscular performers. Rivaled only by the rhythmic thrust of kung fu and the mythical scope of wuxia melee fighting, wrestling positioned itself as an inherently cinematic combat sport, with move sets and techniques conceived around the idea of getting a pop out of the audience. Detached from the sacred ring enclosure, wrestling films work as believable extensions of popular genre cinemas, with their stylized stunts and acrobatics, and which at the end of the day share with it the same guiding principle: to get a primal reaction out of the spectator. Mexican and Japanese studio output from the 1950s demonstrates an understanding of this, although, just as with their own wrestling history, they took different pathways to arrive at an established national form. In Mexico, the banner of cinema’s “Edad Dorada” (Golden Age) tends to be a contentious subject that, depending on who you ask, encompasses the artful melodramas of Emilio Fernandez and Julio Bracho, the noirish sensibility of Roberto Gavaldón, and occasionally, the more risqué and salacious approach of an Alberto Gout. As the quintessential “low brow” expression of mexicanidad, or popular Mexican identity, wresting films weren’t a part of the idealised iconographies of revolutionary enthusiasm and maleante stylishness. Lucha libre was an underbelly, something not far from clandestine cock fights and santería, a sensationalist trope to be frowned upon. Still, its hold on public interest was simply undeniable. Low-end melodramas like Chano Urueta’s La bestia magnifica (1953) and, famously, Joselito Rodríguez’s Huracán Ramírez (1953), began to incorporate the wrestling milieu, in one form or another. Other films shared this exploratory curiosity towards las luchas, like Urueta’s own 12-part serial Los tigres del ring (1957), Tito Davinson’s La furia del ring (1961), and René Cardona’s Las lobas del ring (1965). As their titles can attest, the fact that these works showcased the wrestling ring was part of their novel appeal, positioning the sport as a taboo subject, keeping it at a distance, and treating it with the same kind of exoticism as pulp adventures did with their uncharted, foreign lands. Most of these narratives dealt with confrontations with match-fixing, usually in favor of the rudos or “heels”, and in no instance was the legitimacy of the matches called into question, with the técnicos or “face wrestlers” themselves aligning with authorities to disarticulate nefarious schemes. This format found success, as soon enough, the psychotronic forms most cult cinema aficionados associate with the luchador films as a subgenre began to insinuate themselves: Increasingly outrageous plots, a frenetic pace, longer fighting scenes, baroque editing, et cetera. Rapidly, the backstage corridors of the arena and the ring itself were too small a setting to contain these larger-than-life urban gladiators, and the scope of their significance to the everyday person simply burst over into more transcendental affairs. As the initial narration of Los tigres del ring solemnly puts it: “This is wrestling. A noble sport, full of contrasts, that throughout the centuries, from Ancient Greece and Rome, just like many other uplifting athletic practices, has filled with glory those who have renounced evil and claimed advancement for the human race”. In the luchador genre, there’s no concept of “kayfabe”, the idea that they present a staged and artificial performance as truthful. The fiction of these folk heroes is upheld within and beyond the two out of three falls match stipulation. Their masks never come off. Their unbreakable submissions and high-powered strikes are fully devoted to safekeeping a perception of communal well-being, even while in street clothes. The first forays beyond strictly “ring narratives” came in somewhat grounded pulp schemes of private detectives against criminal gangs, with the luchador as an ally – a masked vigilante standing for law and order, a trend started by René Cardona’s El enmascarado de plata (1954), and followed by Rafael Baledón’s La sombra vengadora series (1955-1956), which steadily moved the genre into more outrageous territory. Fernando Méndez, of El Vampiro fame, made Ladrón de cadáveres (both 1957), perhaps the first encounter of Gótico Mexicano’s noirish and expressionist leanings with the schlockier luchador camp. In that film, former and current wrestlers join forces to stop a mad scientist digging up and reanimating the bodies of their fellow tradesmen to create a mindless army of uber-powerful henchmen. Somehow this is still somewhat linked to sci-fi verisimilitude, at least in a genre that will soon feature covens of witches, Aztec mummies, vampires, time travel, and extraterrestrial beings. The procedural scenes of private investigators following crumbs of clues and finding their way through nonsensical plotlines progressively gave more and more leeway to the exhilarating quests of their spandex-wearing sidekicks, which themselves tended to include a healthy dose of brawling action. It took a couple of years, but with Federico Curiel’s Neutrón el enmascarado negro (1962) and Benito Alazraki’s Santo contra los zombies (1961), enmascarados finally began to star in their own feature films. <img width="1921" height="2824" width_o="1921" height_o="2824" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fbed1563b6873fd616d910bf211047e631e259c4ee84078c3a9519a912e22454/Santo-contra-los-zombies.jpg" data-mid="247428843" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fbed1563b6873fd616d910bf211047e631e259c4ee84078c3a9519a912e22454/Santo-contra-los-zombies.jpg" /> No luchador managed to fill the silver screen in the same way Santo did. He had already become a cult figure in Arena México during the 1940s, and fully canonised as a superhero in comic books throughout the 1950s. The sight of his stocky physique and immortally elegant mask design were synonymous with truth and justice, shining bastions of light for a society that saw him as one of their own, the prime moral shepherd that could guide the flock towards its utmost wellbeing. After all, this was the time of a rapid and violent transition in Mexican society, from rural life and agrarian economies to the globalised ethos of the urban and industrial models, which naturally came with some rough edges: inequality, displacement, marginalization, loss of identity… What Santo and other luchador films had that no other kind of imported escapism did was a sense of belonging to the audiences. The same sweaty hunks fighting on Friday nights were now up on the big screen, spearing goons to save the world. Those movies were not much more nuanced than the spectacles found at the arenas, as the whole subgenre had been consumed by wrestling logic by the time Santo clobbered his first undead creature with a clothesline. The masked luchador transcended banal allegiances and was now an avatar of an ideal of Mexican values, a metaphysical enforcer of Good, who existed beyond earthly desires. As a result, there is rarely a dramatic arc to be found in luchador films. Just like stumbling into a wrestling arena, context comes to the spectator intuitively. The babyface heroes always take the higher ground, respecting the noble art of wrestling and using its power for the greater good. At the same time, the heels – the antagonists – see wrestling as a means to an end, a weapon that facilitates greed, lust, and all kinds of machiavellian impulses. They are simultaneously cowardly and vicious, only striking when they have the upper hand. When Santo, Blue Demon, or Mil Máscaras confront their rival du jour, what is at stake is far more than the well-being of their own loved ones, or even the society they are devoted to protecting. They are also fighting for the integrity of the sport itself. This being Mexico, it is no coincidence that Santo’s whole presentation is heavily indebted to Catholicism, a literal saintly patron of Lucha as an extension of Mexicanidad, or at least, the romanticised version of what it meant at the time. The menace of ghouls, monsters, and warlocks was presented first and foremost as spiritual, a corruption of the core tenet that is Faith, which takes us back to those primordial collisions of ancient myth. Rarely did a luchador have any sort of psychological characterisation beyond their might and unimpeachable moral values, with their ring gear and stage gimmick simply a rotating veneer of diversity. Their presence in popular Mexican films is innately and purely archetypical, and their personal life was fully detached and hidden from their iconic stature. Precisely because of that, these figures became an extension of national folklore, their wrestling deeds absorbing into the fabric of collective mythmaking. In Japan, the embrace of puroresu heroes in film wasn’t quite as seamless, as the combat spectacle itself was essentially imported out of necessity. During the Allied Occupation of Japan, charitable societies tried to sponsor fundraising events to deal with the war’s aftermath and the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In those events, wrestling appeared as one of the carnivalesque attractions on offer. Local judokas and sumo wrestlers were employed to headline these novel events, but the decades-long endemic resignification that happened in Mexico couldn’t be replicated overnight in Japan. There were no neighborhood arenas hosting family nights, and no relationships with the figures that appeared in the ring, as their personas lacked the semiotic power of the over the top luchadores. The spiritual scars of war, however, were deeply felt in puroresu. Seeing their own in the ring began to carry weight once Japanese wrestlers were put against international visitors. A 1954 match between legendary Rikidōzan and tag partner Kimura Masahiko against Canadian team the Sharpe Brothers became a milestone moment. They won. Rikidōzan in particular gained notoriety by defeating foreign wrestlers. In the eyes of the spectators, this was perhaps the only public expression of Japan standing against Westerners that was available to them, a sort of collective post-war catharsis that indulged a self-sanctioned desire. Television broadcasts wasted no time putting Rikidōzan on screen, who like Santo, was a flawless babyface who was cheered for against the cheating antics of dirty heels (mostly American). Unlike Santo, Rikidōzan had an erratic public persona, a much more layered character with problematic traits related to drinking and gambling that made tabloids headlines and, to some, put an asterisk on his standing as a role-model. Ironically, by being a more approachable and human type of folk hero, Rikidōzan perhaps wasn’t as suited for the iconic needs of post-war Japan. He starred in dozens of lighthearted and mostly forgotten films during the 1950s, usually playing himself. While his legacy in the ring makes him one of the most relevant figures in the history of wrestling, his timeless aura didn’t cause the same shockwaves when it moved to the medium of film. As opposed to luchadores, Rikidōzan’s appearance in movies was almost self-referential, inserting him into narratives that, while acknowledging his combat background, did not fully embrace his kayfabe mythology or the logic of wrestling itself. Transferring the squared circle milieu of wrestling to the dramaturgy of films was never a matter of finding ways to frame the action in the ring, or having the same characters and moves that riled up audiences in the arena now up on screen. Each art form deals with dynamic approximations of the artistic trompe l'oeil, eroding in distinct ways the audience’s sense of disbelief through texture, positioning of the performers, and moody suggestion. The two cultural languages developed their own particular methods, with the aforementioned vaudevillian spirit and theatrical overtness much more present in wrestling’s DNA than in most cinematic forms after the arrival of synchronized sound. Generally, a facade of realism and respectability dominated the status quo of moving images in the public sphere, with the more outlandish and sensationalist mannerisms of pulp tradition culturally relegated to the lesser domains of genre. And precisely in the broad strokes and archetypical construction of genre did wrestling and cinema find a middle ground, a return to the unrestrained register of the epic form. Puroresu didn’t develop a cinematic subgenre in its image like lucha libre did. However, its spirit did find its way into the thrust of Japanese popular cinema in unexpected ways. In 1954, around the same time that Rikidōzan started to gain traction as a national emblem, Toho Studio put out in the world what would become one of Japan’s definitive cultural exports – Honda Ishirō’s original Gojira (1954). More a cataclysmic event than a character, Gojira, and the whole kaiju subgenre that would be built in its image, was an embodiment of the same post-war anxieties and sense of catharsis that saw the initial rise of puroresu. Gojira and those kin that would follow were originally framed as antagonist forces against mankind, negligent in their catastrophic indifference, and portrayed as fear-inducing entities whose horror came less by their imposing physical presence and more by their indecipherable, inherently alien motivations. The doom-laden tone of the first Gojira suggests the creature is an embodiment of collective trauma; here the radioactive monster served mainly symbolic and climactic purposes, taken from the same kind of well of epistemic characterization from which mythmaking draws. In the second film, Oda Motoyoshi’s Godzilla Raids Again (Gojira no Gyakushū, 1955), we find as seminal and groundbreaking an image as the first film’s sequence of Gojira slowly emerging from the ocean: a battle of monsters, a mammoth collision in which Gojira finds an equal in Anguirus, another ancient reptile awakened by mankind’s industrial meddling. The visceral impact of seeing these two titanic figures square off opened a pandora’s box for kaiju cinema. Despite it being framed as two feral creatures in a primal duel that was beyond human comprehension, Gojira did already have the benefit of familiarity. Gojira was also a victim of nuclear holocaust, a living manifestation of societal scars. No matter how menacing in silhouette, Gojira had a melancholic aura that surrounded him, a kind of reluctant violence that was born out of necessity and survival instead of maliciousness or ill intention. Gojira’s relationship with combat was noble, and so, as with Rikidōzan’s initial booking as a heel, a public fondness began to build organically, and audiences rallied around the creature. When faced against a foe, he became a symbol of Japan as a whole. Like Santo, Gojira became a form of national conscience standing against all kinds of schemes that put the reconstructing nation in jeopardy, from cynical corporate greed, as in Honda’s King Kong vs. Godzilla (Kingu Kongu tai Gojira, 1962) and Mothra vs. Godzilla (Mosura tai Gojira, 1964), through to colonial subversion in Invasion of Astro-Monster (Kaijū Dai-sensō, 1965) and Fukuda Jun’s Godzilla vs. Gigan (Chikyū Kōgeki Meirei Gojira tai Gaigan, 1972), and all the way to careless militarism in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (Gojira Ebira Mosura Nankai no Dai-kettō, 1966) and Terror of Mechagodzilla (Mekagojira no Gyakushū, 1975). <img width="1200" height="675" width_o="1200" height_o="675" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eb857f1c6a242a23ab5ba2363ba4c3b1cbe38b2d47fc0816bf7cf565e58e1e62/Kingu-Kongu-tai-Gojira.jpg" data-mid="247428837" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eb857f1c6a242a23ab5ba2363ba4c3b1cbe38b2d47fc0816bf7cf565e58e1e62/Kingu-Kongu-tai-Gojira.jpg" /> King Kong vs. Godzilla&nbsp;(Ishirō Honda, 1962) Ontological opposition was resolved through increasingly stylised combat sequences, with each figure’s whole schtick understood by the audience through their superficial presentation and the specific way in which they fought. When faced with a noble adversary like King Kong, Gojira engaged in a no-holds-barred contest of primal brutality. Against the anarchic bloodthirst of Ghidora, Gojira teams up with Rodan and Mothra in a handicap, “Can they coexist?” team-up for the greater good. In another, former foe Anguirus becomes the most coordinated of tag partners, including intricate dual moves, to take out the heelish syndicate of Ghidorah and Gigan. By 1973’s tokusatsu mecha matchup Godzilla vs. Megalon (Gojira tai Megaro), Gojira even ceremoniously shakes hands with partner Jet Jaguar after taking out Gigan and Megalon. There’s a code of honor to be followed, just like when entering the rings of wrestling’s meccas. The same kind of outlandish rogues’ gallery and kaleidoscopic plot structures became the norm for late Showa Era kaiju and ‘60s and ‘70s luchador films alike. Suits and masks had the unenviable position of having to up the ante time and again, some more effectively than others. They did so while working within the tried and tested economical storytelling of the squared circle at its purest – an almost pictorial way of expressing contraposition in the way bodies contort over each other. These tales were unequivocally a part of industrial capitalist reproduction, with their rushed outputs and erratic quality control. And yet, at least during this period of post-war existential uncertainty and national reconstruction, they seemed to transcend those characteristics and genuinely exist as popular expressions: reclaimed, repurposed, and resignified without an ounce of whatever cynical intent came from the studio structures. These are the type of narratives in which, at times, an enthusiastic and incredulous plot description eclipses the nature of the material. In retelling, different stories are melded together or just enough hyperbole is added to make someone who heard or saw the same thing question themselves. It’s oral history at its purest. Just like the film’s inner logic and transfixing grooves, and the unfaltering charisma of the figures that inhabit them, it’s all about the affect built through repetition. It’s cheering everytime the mad scientist is suplexed by an enmascardo or booing whenever the evil astro lizard deceivingly one-ups the local embodiment of hope, despite knowing deep down that the outcome is never in question. These proper names- Santo, Blue Demon, Neutrón, Gojira, Mothra, Gamera- become value statements, not only for the kind of film, but for the sensations deeply associated with them, where the mere suggestion of something deeply familiar being framed differently, reignites the sense of wonder as if it was seeing for the same time. This is the realm of legend. Originally published in Outskirts Nº3 in July 2025. The print issue can be ordered at our online shop. Outskirts Online /&nbsp;Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage https://outskirtsmag.com/Pricked-By-Poetry-On-Hiroshi-Shimizu Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:45:20 +0000 Outskirts Film Magazine https://outskirtsmag.com/Pricked-By-Poetry-On-Hiroshi-Shimizu Pricked by Poetry: The Films of Hiroshi Shimizu In this mammoth appraisal of the films of Hiroshi Shimizu, David Phelps digs into films from across his vast body of work, stretching from Shimizu’s silent days through the war years and finally to his challenging, largely unloved work of the 1950s.Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage By David Phelps <img width="671" height="498" width_o="671" height_o="498" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9cf03f46d483e4077ea88a1d99ada2f23d11c09061066ed871553ba39620fef3/masseurs-and-a-woman.png" data-mid="245576553" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/671/i/9cf03f46d483e4077ea88a1d99ada2f23d11c09061066ed871553ba39620fef3/masseurs-and-a-woman.png" /> The Masseurs and a Woman (1938) I. Many months after watching, there are moments from The Masseurs and a Woman (Anma to onna, 1938) that I cannot shake even from my own forever-tottering mind. They are found in the climax of a film that has, for the past hour, wriggled its way out of any kind of rising action, as we’ve followed a few blind masseurs in a resort town as they compete to outwalk the tourists and hear of some shadowy figure, somewhere in the background of what feels like another film, robbing the visitors. Like Frederick Wiseman in Blind (1987), Shimizu films the masseurs from a series of characteristic reverse dollies that prevent our seeing what’s in front of them any more than they can. We, too, have barely seen the actual drama of this film. And then, in three of the most beautiful sequences of any film, we are confronted with the unspoken story the film has refused to articulate – but this, too, elliptically. A woman with a fan watches the droplets of rain on a river; a blind masseur tells her, desperately, “even though I am blind, I have been watching you,” collapsing to the ground when he realizes she is not the thief he was hoping to save; nobody to save him, no need to save her; and the camera, in one of the rare forward tracking shots of Shimizu’s films, chases a carriage as it carries the woman away. I don’t think there are words for the power of these shots. The drama is, strangely, that the characters themselves are denied the kind of cathartic drama any other film of the era would have given them: the robber is never identified, never seen, and in place of salvation, the rain falls on the river, the parasol twirls, and everyone goes home. There is a drama that might have tied their fates and changed their lives. But that drama is not Shimizu’s interest. The drama is that everyone must leave this film in solitude because that drama was nowhere to be found. II. <img width="1229" height="899" width_o="1229" height_o="899" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2e3f550e148bc5fe90ae19b626a4ac9891192ae6fb11afdacbb10d09a9b26f0f/children-of-the-beehive-2.png" data-mid="245576607" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2e3f550e148bc5fe90ae19b626a4ac9891192ae6fb11afdacbb10d09a9b26f0f/children-of-the-beehive-2.png" /> Children of the Beehive: What Happened Next (1951) What I mean is that much of the drama of the mundane is its refusal to give us the drama we need: the drama that would let us transcend as heroes or villains, to find salvation in death or love. Indeed, all of these familiar storylines are almost – almost – completely absent Shimizu’s films, short of recurring boss and bully figures who serve as forcing-functions for our protagonists to form makeshift worlds of private rituals on the margins of polite society. In other words, much of the drama of the mundane is that characters have to create it for themselves. Part of the immense power of Shimizu’s films, I think, is how often they suggest plotlines of romances and criminal intrigues that none of the characters dare consummate, preferring, like Shimizu, to escape the trappings of melodramas back home to try, for a moment of respite, to play small games with each other instead. It’s the fact that we have to imagine these plotlines, which both the film and characters are happy to tease without ever bringing themselves to enact, that makes the film so much more moving, so much more devastating, than if it had fulfilled its humming, subsurface promises. In place of the usual genre drama of classical cinema, Shimizu’s films are filled with these moments of bored characters inventing competitions to gamify – to drama-ify – the world around them: the walking contests in The Masseurs and a Woman and funny-walks in Tokyo Profile (Tokai no Yokogao, 1953), the waking boys betting which of the elderly snoozers will snore more in Ornamental Hairpin (Kanzashi, 1941), the boys in Children in the Wind (Kaze no naka no kodomo, 1937) staging a nationally-broadcast swimming match as one freecrawls across their living room rug and the other offers sports commentary on a chair. Shimizu is famous, if at all, for his many films of children, but I suspect that’s partly because children have always been the most combustible vantage point for interrogating the mundane – for interrogating the ways humans learn and question social rituals (note the sheer number of Shimizu films about schools’ indoctrination), construct and deconstruct drama as simultaneous directors and actors each time they play (note the sheer number of Shimizu films about kids hanging out with nothing to do), and come to embody and resist state mandates (note the sheer number of Shimizu films about boys facing the humiliation and liberation of nightly bedwetting). In all these ways, children are ambiguous figures, but not least because they let us see the mundane as both the soul-crushing emptiness of a post-industrial era where humans are still expected to behave as cogs as well as a kind of emancipatory space to reconstruct our world in play. And this notion helps us challenge the popular conception of neorealism as a movement born of bombs, as though the industrial genocides of the 1940s had exploded all the innocent, swashbuckling fantasies of another era. It helps us remember that in fact, neorealism was not only a far more morally complicated movement, but one that started with those supposed harbingers of innocence, the children of Manoel de Oliveira’s Aniki-Bóbó (1942) and Shimizu’s Four Seasons of Children (Kodomo no shiki, 1939)—and, fine, Children in the Wind. The ambiguity of what children represent can help us understand why, across these three films, children more or less invented neorealism – not because they’re incapable of acting, but because they’re incapable of not acting. Four Seasons of Children in particular is an encyclopedia of universal childhood gestures: running too fast one way, stopping too fast in the middle of running too fast one way, carrying each other on their backs, fiddling with objects as dad spirals into a self-centered soliloquy, climbing bridges and trees and anything in sight, fake-crying, real-crying, imitating adult niceties (clapping) with zero comprehension of their reason or purpose, forgetting anything important because there’s an animal to play with instead. It helps us remember that neorealism, like Shimizu’s films generally, is the art of documentary performance, of bodies getting to play, to play themselves. The adults’ world, meanwhile, rhymes with the children’s as a series of intrigues and games, but with one difference: the adults are far too serious to know the game is a game, that the roles they play are just that. There’s a simple reason for that, of course: the adults, unlike the children, have to think about money. Money plagues them, empties them, divides them. Shimizu’s films are obsessed with what it might mean to carve true solidarity across the intractable class divides of a profit-seeking world. His answer – children – is a fairly bleak one when you remember what they must grow into. But it is also a measure of hope, registered in the cyclicality of seasons and Shimizu’s own fairly radial plot construction, so grounded in documentary that it can feel like an epiphany. III. <img width="720" height="540" width_o="720" height_o="540" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7132baab751017409f8c080f6e0ff0c08a78dafa5f1f98225a27c7ca3c532f99/children-in-the-wind.png" data-mid="245576611" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/720/i/7132baab751017409f8c080f6e0ff0c08a78dafa5f1f98225a27c7ca3c532f99/children-in-the-wind.png" /> <img width="1440" height="1080" width_o="1440" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0f18648a2c4e05a3f0eb6ddbc9ab9e99a39de4dbb87ac165e947ad18165fdee2/acorns.png" data-mid="245576610" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0f18648a2c4e05a3f0eb6ddbc9ab9e99a39de4dbb87ac165e947ad18165fdee2/acorns.png" /> <img width="1335" height="1004" width_o="1335" height_o="1004" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/af87d0d1e940c0de28dd9aedd2e3ad8913a55336beba967579ca4f8d840dffd0/record-of-a-female-doctor.png" data-mid="245576612" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/af87d0d1e940c0de28dd9aedd2e3ad8913a55336beba967579ca4f8d840dffd0/record-of-a-female-doctor.png" /> Children in the Wind (1937) / Acorns (1941) / Record of a Woman Doctor (1941) It’s understandable that Shimizu’s most beloved films are his bucolic idylls of life in the Izu Peninsula documenting the ceremonies of everyday life for transients – tourists and children – who learn the ways of the locals as they pass through space and time. But that also means that critics have struggled to try to place the other half of Shimizu’s entire filmography, potboilers and programmers which follow none of these conventions, in any kind of coherent framework. The bucolic idylls feel gentle, light, and comic. Surely these others are, by contrast, tragedies? The problem is that comedy and tragedy always intermix in Shimizu’s films, often rugpulling the genre out from under you in the final moments. A more precise designation, I think, is that for at least the first half of his career, Shimizu largely alternated between two different types of films: open and closed. The Open Films indulge the foibles of its playful protagonists as they tease each other across yawning fields and rolling rivulets. It’s in these Open Films that the characters often seem to be play-acting their way to a new kind of realism. But even Shimizu’s camerawork feels different in these films. A tracking shot in a Mizoguchi film is an operatic thing, sweeping our characters into all the bristling bustle of high melodrama. A tracking shot in Shimizu – well, a tracking shot in Shimizu is far more of a bumbling affair, working overtime to catch up to its protagonists, to get the action fully in view, to delineate a world that pours out to the depths and hidden crevices of the frame and then beyond. And this is why Ozu and Mizoguchi have commanded so much scholarly love while the far more documentary, fly-buzzing-off-the-wall, find-things-burbling-forth-and-film-them approach of Shimizu has gone neglected for so long. Mizoguchi and Ozu use every cinematic device to cocreate closed worlds that they seem to be assembling piece-by-piece with every shot and frame. Shimizu’s worlds are quite literally open formally. And that makes them messier things. At some level, his great Open Films seem to operate like attempts to see how much of the world they can contain in a torn-off newspaper fragment of people in a place. The late 30s works in particular represent radical experiments in duration and temporality: Mr Thank You (Arigato-san, 1936) functions almost like a real-time bus tour of Japan while the 2.5 hour Four Seasons of Children, despite being one of a half-dozen films Shimizu shot in 1939, feels to have been filmed across all four seasons, Bruegel-like, to document kids at play as their relationships shift through the adult drama of a year. Neither time nor space nor bodies can be orchestrated or controlled in these films, but can only be surrendered to in slabs of space-time, glimpses of lives lived well beyond the physical and temporal confines of the shot. It’s a wholly familiar post-classical view, familiar from the school of Kiarostami, Hou, Yang, and Somai (a major Shimizu fan), all of whom also innovated late-century neorealism through films about children. But this was 40 years too early, shaped by a filmmaker whose hands trained on the gestures and melodramatic plot devices of silent film. And it means there’s nothing else in cinema quite like Shimizu’s films – not least because of the way duration distends melodrama into something it’s never really been: relatable. For example, if I told you the plot of Children in the Wind – two boys losing their friends after their dad is falsely accused of embezzlement – I’m sure you would immediately understand this story at its desolate core. And yet, on the surface, Shimizu does not seem to understand it himself. Instead, he tells this tale of abject solitude, rejection, and false accusations in a universe of catatonic adults slunk somewhere in the corner of the screen – Shimizu tells this story entirely through long scenes of the boys playing, so that they take the place of the filmmaker in staging scenes purely for their own pleasure. And here we start to understand why, formally, it took children to reshape cinema: because the height of realism is pure performance. The easiest way to make docufiction, to tease the boundary of fact and fiction, is to make a movie about kids. Kids’ play itself becomes a kind of stand-in for Shimizu’s own direction as the children stage their own mise-en-scène with household tools. Emerging organically out of the characters’ own boredom, their actions overtake the drama of the movie itself: they represent both the escapism of genre film as well as the impossibility of escaping from it at all. Letting the kids take over the movie is, in some ways, an acknowledgement that Shimizu’s game is the same as theirs, papering pain with play to trick ourselves that what we’re watching is fun, is joyous, is not what it actually is: some errant act of truancy, two kids-in-all-senses acting out in the shadow of a familial fall. They are reimagining themselves in anger and isolation from social disgrace, of course. And so at some point they run away from home to catch a falling star and make it as far as the end of the block on their dusty, empty street. Their response to being trapped, to having nowhere to go, is, in some ways, to make a movie. IV. <img width="1163" height="895" width_o="1163" height_o="895" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2a25855c7d34dbc899a5a2fbc966c9f88f73ca3295289e17f37b339d8d403059/forget-love-for-now.png" data-mid="245576665" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2a25855c7d34dbc899a5a2fbc966c9f88f73ca3295289e17f37b339d8d403059/forget-love-for-now.png" /> Forget Love for Now (1937) The Closed Films are not exactly loved: they’re narratively programmatic, formally boxed-in, works of creaky machinery that subject the characters to a fatalist plot and mise-en-scène that can feel especially frustrating from a filmmaker who would, like his characters, break these in his serendipitous outdoor films. Above all, though, I suspect these are challenging films because they’re so slow; characters mostly seem to be sitting and staring in the sounds of the film reel itself. But that’s also a reminder, then, that Shimizu wasn’t just a godfather of neorealism but of durational cinema more broadly. In the definitive Closed films – entries like A Woman Crying in Spring (Nakinureta haru no onna yo, 1933), Forget Love for Now (Koi mo wasurete, 1937), and Notes of an Itinerant Performer (Utajo oboegaki, 1941) – the self-sacrificing heroines feel trapped by Shimizu’s suddenly boxed-in interiors to perform socially-mandated roles. The play-acting is no longer emancipatory but fatalistic, as if their sense of self is little more than a record of its own oblation. In all three films, a poor woman is trapped in a building of the wealthy to whom she must devote her life and body. In A Woman Crying in Spring, it is that quintessentially 1930s setting, the inn: the ground zero for a decade without heroes, with only straggling masses plodding from bed to table, where an ensemble enacts a fully three-dimensional theatre through a proxy audience watching downstairs as intrigues unfurl in the bedrooms above. And yet this, too, is an outdoor film, shot on location in Hokkaido. At every moment the snow provides a kind of visual musical accompaniment as it flutters, cries, crashes, and entombs the scenes in dread. Every fight scene is as unnecessarily, beautifully artsy as William A. Wellman’s Track of the Cat (1954), an abstraction of half-seen bodies dancing in shadow against a white blanket of ice. The formal plays of early sound are often heartbreaking: watching one character’s face as another speaks, decades before Éric Rohmer, or a mother calling her lost child’s name against a cavalcade of abandoned spaces where the child is nowhere to be found. And yet it is the gestures that do the emoting: a character pausing at the top of the stairs and lowering her head before descending, or gathering her laundry off the line absent-mindedly at a moment of crisis. Likewise, Forget Love For Now registers as a kind of formal masterclass in how to ground extravagant melodrama in the banal routine of everyday life (echoes of Jeanne Dielman). The film seems to circle the same four sets, repeating sequences in subtle permutations as the characters return to them day by day. As usual with Shimizu, the bleak world of the adults is juxtaposed with the bleaker one of the children as they each deal with the bullying of a boss, the empty camaraderie of their peers, and the embrace of foreigners (dangerously for the mother solicited by rich tourists, fortuitously for the son welcomed by poor immigrants). Here, Shimizu’s interest in the relationship between temporal duration and spatial distance reaches its apotheosis in an unending series of fixed deep-focus establishing shots that let the action emerge from the background until it erupts into the foreground. But these are broken, at pivotal moments, by a few sparing close-ups in the peak of melodrama, and a few of the most beautiful tracking shots I have ever seen in a movie: the camera gliding across an abandoned dance floor towards our protagonist as she stands immobile and askance; the camera then switching 180 degrees to track her as she sashays onto the empty floor; the camera moving into an antagonist as he comes at the camera to reveal us in the middle of a fist-fight. It’s as though Shimizu wants to respond to the movements of his characters with stillness, and to respond to their stillness with his movement, but even that is not quite right. The bigger point is the feeling these gestures evoke in an otherwise icy film; that even at his coldest, Shimizu and his camera literally can’t be unmoved. Still, the Closed Films are formal tests of all the usual platitudes about what “A Shimizu Film” actually is, and no test is greater than Notes of an Itinerant Performer. All in one go and for one of the only times in his filmography, Shimizu tackles a period piece, a tale of the ultra-wealthy, a romance, a political allegory, and maybe most notably, a theatrical picaresque in which the histrionic acting by stage legend Yaeko Mizutani seems like the film itself to be utterly out-of-time from Shimizu’s usual naturalism. Here, the planes of the interiors isolate the characters from each other as they attempt again and again to reconnect across the space of the frame while only showcasing their own theatricality in the proscenium-like spaces of Shimizu’s homes. (If there is one film to understand all the possibilities of deep focus, I’m not sure it’s Citizen Kane; I think it might be this.) But these shots, constantly rupturing the spatial layers Shimizu seems to be opposing, also clue us into what Shimizu is doing. He is making the ultimate Closed film, but he is also making the ultimate anti-Closed film. Its plot, which true to the title seems to be made up scene-by-scene based on our heroine’s latest proclivities, concerns a working-class woman who wants to leave her measly theatre troupe for a position in a prestigious household, where she gradually takes over the affairs of the business in the absence of a patriarch, presumably standing in for all the ‘40s men who had gone to war, and then decides that she wants to leave that too because it’s too “stuffy,” with no room to drink or smoke. It is, in other words, too Closed, just as the theatre itself at the beginning was Closed – a series of roles to perform that left no room for self-expression. In a suspicious happy ending, our heroine prepares to marry her savior-prince, a man we’ve only known from his glowering closeups and his beating her to submission a scene earlier, by pulling up her hair and applying her makeup in a mirror. The show must go on. Presence isn’t an option in the endless mandate to represent one’s family and country and roles in Shimizu’s Closed films. After all, listen to her complaints one more time. What she’s articulating is the political dream of every Shimizu hero young and old. She doesn’t want to be the hero of some film or family or stage. She wants to hang out and chill and just be. She wants to inhabit the Open film. V. <img width="1186" height="896" width_o="1186" height_o="896" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4dfeff9d63dbd5e528b645bfd2d203231cb4952d45fd2c6b6e961bbc7a951ce9/a-woman-crying-in-spring.png" data-mid="245576676" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4dfeff9d63dbd5e528b645bfd2d203231cb4952d45fd2c6b6e961bbc7a951ce9/a-woman-crying-in-spring.png" /> A Woman Crying in Spring (1933) The Closed Films are essential to understanding Shimizu, I think, because they give us the flipside of the children’s mock-playacting and playact-mocking from the Open films. Instead, it is the adult women here who all act in arch theatrics, as they find themselves beaten-down into roles to both subserviently please and strategically maneuver the men around them. Other Shimizu films concern the travelers who pass through other people’s lives. But in the Closed Films, we chronicle these other people’s lives as everyone they meet passes them by. They remain stuck in the places that everyone else will flee. VI. <img width="1024" height="762" width_o="1024" height_o="762" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/848d2f209313a56c3def16c3aa727104d858989f54a46e2473e88b46eb7d1ad5/mr-thank-you.png" data-mid="245576678" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/848d2f209313a56c3def16c3aa727104d858989f54a46e2473e88b46eb7d1ad5/mr-thank-you.png" /> Mr. Thank You (1936) There are three types of films, I sometimes think: films that take place behind closed doors, films that take place entirely outdoors, and then, that secret, complex third thing, films that take place in open doors. Somewhere between Open and Closed lie Shimizu’s three most beloved films: Mr. Thank You, The Masseurs and a Woman, and Ornamental Hairpin. All three crosshatch society at some stopoff point where the wealthy and the working class will meet; all three chronicle characters as passing ships, finding connection in the only place it could exist – and the only place it cannot last. And all three films take place in an outdoors that is also indoors, a vagrant site where strangers congregate to hang out in a moment of leisure, an outside as situated in a bus, a resort town, and a proper resort. We are between the Open and Closed films physically and narratively: the adults here operate in the kind of holiday space that destabilizes their own authority, leveling them to forge relationships with one another like new kids at the school. The fact that their confinement is temporary is what makes the films comic and tragic alike. In these Open-Closed films, plot arises organically only in the final stretch of the film as a kind of byproduct of the characters watching and studying each other in criss-crossing interactions across the first two thirds of the movie. As usual in Shimizu, those interactions are enabled not only by a series of lateral tracking shots and deep focus compositions that feel unable to contain the characters they marshall from space to space, but by a transitory site that enables the characters to play at something other than their job in the outside world. What am I supposed to write in my diary? the kid in Ornamental Hairpin asks. I do the same things everyday: I eat, I wash, I sleep. Well, says the adult, don’t just think about what you do. Think about what you observe: the old men outsnoring each other, as if in competition; the hobbled man crossing the bridge; the people horrified by others having a good time. It’s that potential for emancipation – for the characters to be something other than what they do, to become stand-in audience members observing each other with love – that can turn Shimizu characters into ghosts of a sort, their bodies premature elegies for the lives they have led. For what are Shimizu’s transitory sites for people of all classes to intertwine and watch the lives of others, if not miniature cinemas? The lower the stakes, the greater the resonance and relatability. The old man’s message is, of course, a manifesto for Shimizu’s own diaristic practice, to tell the story of romance and war through the banalities of people hanging out, to understand that that’s what it means to hang on the precipice of love and death. In the hands of pretty much any other writer-director, Mr. Thank You’s 78 minutes in a bus would probably teach us the backstories of each passenger, their motivations for going to Tokyo, their political oppositions that would pit them against each other in a climactic brawl seismically heaving the bus against the cliffs. The snobbish, upper-class mustachioed would stand in as the specter of repressive norms, taunting the young girl for her position as a courtesan. At some point, she’d call out the moral hypocrisies of all the passengers and break down in tears, as we wonder what side we’re on. But that is not Shimizu’s Mr. Thank You. In fact, that is the opposite of Shimizu’s Mr. Thank You, in which we find out almost nothing about the characters’ past or present, infer the most major dramas through their silence, and discover drama in its most primal form: the character’s decisions about where to place their body, who to align themselves with as seatmates. The mustachioed man is mainly teased by the young woman, not vice-versa, as Shimizu builds drama from documentary – from the characters’ offerings of sweets and alcohol to pass the time, from the shifting countryside caught by enacting this entire film on site, by the real-life workers Shimizu met along the way who counterpoint the more upwardly mobile figures on the bus. Voyage to Italy would not arrive for another 20 years. Mr Thank You ends with an elision as radical as the finale of Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji, 1962): an entire wedding, conveyed only through the presence of the wife within a shot on a bus ride home from a city where she was supposed to stay. But the removal of the central drama everywhere in the movie is crucial to understanding the difference between Ozu and Shimizu. For Ozu, the drama is so important that it must be experienced through its consequences: the empty rooms of a home our protagonist has abandoned for matrimony. For Shimizu, however, the drama is so totally unimportant that what matters is not the staid ceremony of characters dutifully playing their role in the wedding itself, but the relationship in its smallest hang-out moments that let us witness the characters negotiating their own personality in real-time. And this is key, here: the characters are constantly renegotiating the roles they think they should play with each other to break formalities for little sparks of feeling. The bus, we realize, is one of the few democratizing political spaces, like a rave might be today – a place where social and class difference dissipate in the face of sharing chocolates or a drink. It is a political place where, for a few hours, collectives can genuinely arise. Mr. Thank You, our friendly busdriver, stands in for Shimizu himself, gently nodding his appreciation at all of life’s foibles and failures, collating these characters for a few hours to see what happens when you create a collective from a broken world. He is not so far from the titular protagonists of The Masseurs and a Woman, who in watching and steering the action come to take the place of the director and audience alike. The difference is simply where Shimizu tips his genre in the final minutes – comedy in Mr. Thank You (a wedding), and a kind of tragedy in The Masseurs and a Woman that’s far more familiar than any classical tragedy. The tragedy of being alone, living your life, with nobody to take care of you at all. Shimizu would invert Mr. Thank You after the war. In Tomorrow There Will Be Fine Weather (Asu wa nipponbare, 1948), an opening 20 minutes of silent movie gags on a bus turns increasingly declamatory as the gaggle of bus passengers – who of course all happened to know each other years ago – turn against each other and themselves after the bus breaks down in the countryside. Shimizu writes and directs us into familiar terrain: a ragtag crew of physically disabled outcasts converge in a single location for a couple hours to confront their hopes and fears. Instead of a film about passengers in the bus, we now get one about passengers out of the bus. Like most of Shimizu’s postwar films, the movie is more dramatic for a simple reason: the characters are angrier. In various ways, nearly every character rages at the ways they submitted to the inevitable compromises of the war, serving, not serving, sleeping with men who could help them dodge the draft to save their family. No real reconciliation proves possible in this ghost diorama – only small moments of grace from the usual Shimizu chorus of passengers on the sidelines, watching and intuiting the drama on our behalf as they recite poetry, take each other’s arms, and dissipate into shadows in the midday sun. It is Shimizu’s most Bruegelian film, a panorama of human emotions in a faintly unfeeling world. And it introduces a new note here, unfamiliar from his earlier work, that would come to inflect that output that followed. Grief. VII. <img width="720" height="540" width_o="720" height_o="540" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/53856b3dae52f95c0b932690fcc78a344d56ed25eafa2baa29e032b32a16ea68/nobuko.png" data-mid="245576727" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/720/i/53856b3dae52f95c0b932690fcc78a344d56ed25eafa2baa29e032b32a16ea68/nobuko.png" /> Nobuko (1940)I have been making the case for Shimizu as one of the Great Major Filmmakers, but I would be remiss not to make the case for him, William-Wellman-like, as one of the Great Minor Filmmakers too. Much like Wellman, for every small genre-defying masterpiece Shimizu would toss off here and there, he would immediately retreat to the most generic storylines he could find as a kind of skeleton that he could flesh out with formal experimentation alone. These genre films are, in a way, Shimizu’s sketches, as you watch him trying out new devices before taking on a sort of real-life painting a year or two later. Still, there’s no way around this: Shimizu would undoubtedly live a lavish legacy in the annals of academic film journals if he simply hadn’t made most of the films he did. Frankly, without his intermittent piles of dreck so programmatic that he was dubiously renowned for telling his ‘50s crews to roll camera, no instructions on acting or cinematography worth his time, well, I would also have an easier time writing this piece. But just as form and content dissolve in his best films, they often diverge wildly in his worst, as formal experiments to vainly make fairly uninteresting material interesting. In impressive muck like Home Diary (Katei nikki, 1938) – a bit like watching your favorite DJ remix your least favorite songs – you find astonishing formal daring-do: sweeping camera cross-cuts and zooms. Even a more classically conventional film like Nobuko (1940) will excuse a dazzling lateral shot tracking the protagonist in the background of another building from the camera as she flits through a crowd toward the foreground, just as Shimizu’s ethnographic verité musical Sayon’s Bell (Sayon no kane, 1943) ends with pigs and ducks waddling through a funeral march as the camera glides through a graveyard to catch them from afar. These are far from personal films, exactly: Nobuko’s classic comedy of a rural schoolteacher trying to instruct far more suave children could pretty easily be reset in the US with a Janet Gaynor-type lead, the script preserved word-for-word, while Sayon’s Bell remains an admirably-and-deeply problematic celebration of the indigenous population in Taiwan gamely assimilating to Japanese culture. But they are also both, in exact opposite ways, formally perfect films. In particular, Shimizu’s propaganda films like Sayon’s Bell are kind of fascinating things because they substitute the requisite plot and character development – things which Shimizu prefers to approach obliquely in his major films, like a clothesline on which to hang pet movements, gestures, and jokes – with some morally hollow messaging. This means, of course, that we lose the emotional core of his best work for some empty preaching even he clearly doesn’t believe. And yet the assignment to hand us a message leaves Shimizu liberated formally to deliver it however he likes, a testament to the way that minor cinema lets directors do audaciously experimental shit with camera and sound: extended real-time singing sequences in unbroken tracking shots through mountain paths in Sayon’s Bell, or a legendary 100-shot crescendo of soldiers on the march in the dimensional whiplash of A Star Athlete (Hanagata senshu, 1937). For all of Shimizu’s long lateral takes pulling bodies across intersecting planes in an almost slow-cinema-ish durational deep space choreography, A Star Athlete reminds us that he was one of the masters of cutting dynamically across characters on the move. That film’s infamous Noel-Burch-approval-stamped montage of the soldier’s march, for example, counterpoints a far less-remembered 8-minute stroll of two bickering lovers near the opening of The Golden Demon (Konjiki Yasha), from the same year. Protagonists wandering down mountain paths are a Shimizu staple, usually in single tracking shots drawing them forward, but in The Golden Demon, Shimizu’s camerawork operates in a kind of start-and-stop call-and-response with the action, pausing and flipping 180 degrees when the characters halt, precipitating them into confrontation with sparing close-ups, and then pulling them back into a harmonious lockstep with a slow-moving dolly. If I ever got to teach a class on decoupage, I’d love to show these two sequences from A Star Athlete and The Golden Demon as exemplars of how to show characters walking. It’s as though the characters’ maneuvers are puppeteered by the camera’s own in a criss-cross ricochet of stasis and scuttling. Both are a tour de force of the ways camera motion and stillness can not only underline action but catalyze it. VIII. <img width="251" height="195" width_o="251" height_o="195" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a1083303d27568b0f70f592ea87d23cc75f9c8457dc97f1d5d87da08fac3c5c0/children-of-the-great-buddha.png" data-mid="245576728" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/251/i/a1083303d27568b0f70f592ea87d23cc75f9c8457dc97f1d5d87da08fac3c5c0/children-of-the-great-buddha.png" /> Children of the Great Buddha (1952) Almost uncharacteristically, Nobuko practically initiates a cycle of films that feels the most important to Shimizu personally: the School Films. Nobuko itself is in some ways, I guess, a great work of studio fluff. But for the rest of his career, Shimizu would make occasional breaks from such for-hire throwaways to make his real high-order labors of love, his docufictions on schools. Three of these – Children of the Beehive (Hachi no su no kodomotachi, 1948), Children of the Beehive: What Happened Next (Sono ato no hachi no su no kodomotachi, 1951), and Children of the Great Buddha (Daibutsu sama to kodomotachi, 1952) – are traditionally linked as a trilogy starring the children of the orphanage Shimizu himself established after the war. But it’s a cycle that could extend far earlier and later as well. For there really has never been a filmmaker outside of Frederick Wiseman or Abbas Kiarostami as obsessed as Shimizu with schools: with the ways they represent imperial indoctrination and education-as-an-instrument-of-freedom simultaneously, the ways they corral social order out of the chaos of childhood at the frontiers of civilization, and the ways they place adults as government vessels, empathetic humanitarians, hierarchical punishers, and students of their children all at once. Or rather – with the ways that schools themselves are movies in miniature, sites that force children as untrained assets of all that is raw and real to play a role for the adults around them. As Kiarostami and Godard understood much later, any school film is documentary and fiction at once, or rather, a kind of documentary of its own staged fiction, a record of children learning to act and perform their assigned parts. I have personally struggled with some of Shimizu’s late-period work, which, like a lot of ‘50s films by great ‘30s filmmakers, seems to have mastered the unfortunate art of genre competency. Who does Shimizu think he is proficiently eyeline matching all these shots-reverse-shots? Howard Hawks? But at some point I had to accept that his late-period game is just interested in different things. Or rather, he’s interested in the ways that the most basic point-and-shooting can give space for characters to present themselves in their own terms. Shimizu’s earlier films are dazzling choreographies, but in a way he had to escape his own formal mastery for the films to become cocreations with his young actors. The School Films are as much their films as his, as Shimizu remains one of the few filmmakers genuinely interested in leaving his camera running to learn from them. Shimizu’s style, here, isn’t reduced to convention out of the usual late-stage soullessness. It’s reduced to convention because he no longer can force the action of the film to obey his formal precepts; it’s reduced to convention because he’s leaving room for this fiction to molt its skin and emerge as documentary. He has to point and shoot as simply as possible to let the action go where it needs. Only a quarter of Shimizu’s filmography survives, but my sense is that The School Films kick off properly with Introspection Tower (Mikaheri no tô), released in January of 1941, the same year as Ornamental Hairpin, Notes of an Itinerant Performer, Record of a Woman Doctor (Joi no kiroku), Dawn Chorus (Akatsuki no gasshô), and Acorns (Donguri to shiinomi). The documentary trappings here that would come to dominate Shimizu’s work, including an extended opening tour of the actual school, are both a kind of light agitprop touch of state-sanctioned filmmaking, as well as an abdication of authorial clarity. Like many of Shimizu’s attempts to humanise propaganda by making the figures more conflicted about their duty, this turns out to be a frustratingly ambiguous film: a paean to the collective labor of, um, uh, children, as well as a record of institutional indoctrination of kids that all too often seems to be indoctrinating us as viewers into its view of state apparatuses as kindly places to homogenize the marginalized masses. And yet the Shimizu style of making a movie – map out an enclosed institution in the middle of nowhere (bus, spa, school), pack it with characters from all walks of life, and see how they negotiate their space with one another, how drama can erupt from documentary as the professors start hanging out on playground swings – feels radical enough in the 1940s to completely destabilize this kind of work of ambient propaganda, and make you wonder whether this is truly smirched by the gunk of imperial sanctimoniousness or in fact a trenchant criticism of schools as fascism’s ground zero around the world. The uneasily gentle but not quite uncritical view of authority continues in Record of a Woman Doctor, starring Shimizu’s ex-wife Kinuyo Tanaka. In a way, Woman Doctor inverts Nobuko from the previous year: instead of a rural bumpkin going to the big city to learn a lesson from her students in an ultra-classical comedy, we now follow an urban doctor going to a small village to learn a lesson from the children in what amounts to a kind of documentary PSA. And yet both serve as a kind of generic Rosetta Stone to the tropes he would reorient across another half-dozen films of the institutional figurehead trying and failing to play a role that hides all sense of self. One decent heuristic for Shimizu is that his best films tend to be two things: plotless and crowded. Indeed, Record of a Woman Doctor is both at once, a scenic portrait of rural mobs: throngs of villagers pressed hard against the doctors to witness unseen operations; packs of schoolchildren served tea in class by a teacher who changes diapers and bemoans the lack of day care. This teacher is the closest thing in a Shimizu film to a hero: a man who gave up his dreams to attend to the dull necessities of daily life in the provinces. Given the vaguely propagandistic focus here – country folks learning the importance of modernization through that familiar domestic soldier archetype, The Good Doctor – it’s easy to miss that this is also a School Film, posing the key questions of all his great films: how to separate the dancer from the dance, or rather, the bureaucrat from the bureaucracy, the worker from the work. If nothing else, schools are perfect environments in which to test humans’ own commitment to their institutional role. This being Shimizu, that commitment will of course show its cracks, as townspeople and doctor learn to love each other—a sign of humanist classicism that’s harder to find in the post-classical School Films of Kiarostami or Wiseman, but one whose sentimentality was probably as radical a gesture as Shimizu was permitted in the context of a medical ad he worked to elevate to semi-neorealist greatness. And there’s a bigger point here: Propaganda proved a formal turning point for Shimizu, a forcing function to extol the kind of adult authority he had always despised by dealing with it as blankly as possible through the alibi of an impartial documentary. If Shimizu’s later films take a more ambiguous view of institutional authority, it’s because propaganda had trained him to undermine the authority figures he was supposed to eulogize by making them haplessly human – rendering figures like the soldiers in A Star Athlete as lovably incompetent. It was a humanist’s way to both subvert and problematically magnify propaganda at once, contouring the Imperial Army like a frat party, but it would transform Shimizu’s desire and ability to film institutions with grace. What propaganda gave him, I mean, is a kind of language to chart postwar Japan through its schools. In what remains Shimizu’s most canonically important film, Children of the Beehive, Shimizu gets closer to documentary than he ever could in the studio era, chronicling the cities and towns of postwar Japan through the eyes of the non-actor kids of his real-life orphanage. Weirdly, though, what makes this a work of classic Neorealism, is not simply his dedication to ‘40s verité, but to using ‘40s verité to make his most blatantly hamfisted melodrama since the silent era – shrink-wrapped in the kind of tirelessly prestigious score popular in postwar documentary, filmed in shaky shot-reverse-shots that upend the deep-focus durational mise-en-scène of his earlier work. But the documentary and melodrama aren’t really in tension: both the disingenuous form of “life caught unawares” and the depiction of working class poverty are just evidence of how raw this movie is, for better and worse the work of a filmmaker completely relearning his craft, like some kind of student filmmaker making the best of a MacGyver toolkit of a couple kids, a camera, and a devastated nation. So look: what I personally think is pretty insignificant against the tide of critical consensus. But for me, Children of the Beehive: What Happened Next is his greatest school film, a miraculous assemblage of absolutely mundane real-life interactions between the kids as they discuss accents, catching raccoons, peeing the bed, and even, in an extraordinary 4th wall break, the filmic contrivances of the first movie. (Characters in the School Films have a compulsive tendency to comment about watching earlier entries like Introspection Tower and Children of the Beehive to emphasize that those weren’t real life.) All of this banality is necessary not only as a record of lived-in history back in the countryside – a direction Shimizu had been pursuing in his propaganda years – but to ground the melodrama in the fullest credibility when it comes. And when it does finally come, in a tight sequence of a boy failing to meet the mother who has abandoned him, we see that Shimizu was there all along. The culmination of this sequence is two shots – a long shot as he runs in a distant plane to the ocean, a speck within the shot, and then a shot not of the boy but of the ocean waves themselves as they overtake the camera – that in all their gentle, devastating violence, feel impossible for any other filmmaker to have conceived. It’s not until the final installment, Children of the Great Buddha, that Shimizu goes full documentary in a semi-send-off to his career. His last independent film, it’s a movie that Shimizu clearly relished as his great passion project, spending a year researching Buddhism to put everything he learned into a film, like an audiophile self-financing a film about their record collection. Plot is mercifully inconceivable here. The kids themselves take over the documentary, narrating a series of tours of the Buddhist temple in Nara, often spuriously, correcting each other as they dream of finding home, or at least a night of sleep in the Buddha’s arms. And the sequences of the boys circling the statues, as if at any moment the past, what little is left of this glorious past in bombed-out Japan, might come alive, well – the sequences of the boys circling the statues represent some of the most haunting postwar filming this side of Resnais. In a career trying to film documentaries with the tools of fiction, this is probably the closest he came, and a film nobody else could have made. It’s boring, beautiful, bewildering, and one of the apotheoses of one the greatest filmmakers. Shimizu’s final School Films would attempt to intertwine all the strands of his career. In theory, The Shiinomi School (Shiinomi gakuen, 1955) should mark some kind of perfect intersection of Shimizu’s films on children and the physically disabled: the boy with the broken leg in Four Seasons of Children, the hobbled soldier with the wounded foot in Ornamental Hairpin, the sick and out-of-shape soldier in A Star Athlete. But in this late film about disabled children who have been bullied by the outside world, the landscape has become both more sentimental and more hollowed-out, more bleak. In those three earlier films, the resolution would always remain the same, pulled directly from the opening of Shimizu’s first extant feature (The Blacksmith of the Forest / Mori no kajiya, 1929): another character carries the hobbled child on their back. Individual struggles are, in those more sanguine Shimizu films, a test of collective solidarity to overcome. In their own ways, those films would all detail the socially downtrodden developing requisite skills and networks far surpassing those of very lonely adults whose own quests for power destroy their ability to collectivize. By contrast, at the end of Shimizu’s career, The Shiinomi School faces us with its mawkish tale of do-gooder adults selflessly saving a pen of fairly anonymous disabled children. Gone is the ambiguity of Introspection Tower about the role of education in standardizing the quirks of kids’ behavior in service of some imperial notion of normality. And yet, with all of Shimizu’s great focus on restoring fiction to documentary, this remains almost certainly the best document of the methods of schooling disabled youth until Wiseman’s series on the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind in the 1980s. The end of the film – the children struggle phonetically to read their notes to their dead friend, real children reading the script of the film itself, their letters rippling in the wind – attains a kind of sadness unique to Shimizu: a devastation begotten out of the banality of the awkwardness of everyday life. That devastation overtakes Shimizu’s final School Film, Girl’s Reform School (Naze kanojora wa sô natta ka, 1956). Still, it might sound strange to say about a movie that covers self-induced abortions, sex trafficking, and child abuse over the course of 80 minutes and about half a dozen docufiction vignettes, but in a sense Girl’s Reform School is not only Shimizu’s cruelest film, but the closest he ever got to filming utopia. For what he gives us is a kind of marriage of heaven (the school as a site of salvation) and hell (the outside world as a crucible for all the girls’ bad behavior). In so many ways, it is the culmination of decades of work and nearly a dozen films on schools. As usual, we find ourselves in a familiar rural getaway for outcasts who will form a microcosm of outside society as they intersect across slow tracking shots wafting in and out of buildings and pulling our protagonists down hallways in slow-motion pirouettes. But more fully than in his other work, Shimizu dares to imagine his most progressive ideals actually working, if only for a few brief moments. What if all the cruelty of Japan’s post-war existential desert internalized by a population of dispossessed preteens… well what if that cruelty could be stared down by kindness, crafts, and lullabies? The movie never pretends these will solve the ills of making money to feed a hungry family. But it does imagine they’re the basis for a semi-anarchist space where kids can be given sovereignty instead of punishment. As often in Shimizu, the point is not simply how easily we could give each other grace, but how hard, how impossible, it is for all of us to receive it. IX. <img width="1000" height="750" width_o="1000" height_o="750" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/38b096c00b6cd1d46f8a180c8cb85c1b9fbcf5a1a4dadd6a7d7a88be5c477cba/mr-shosuke-ohara.jpg" data-mid="245576781" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/38b096c00b6cd1d46f8a180c8cb85c1b9fbcf5a1a4dadd6a7d7a88be5c477cba/mr-shosuke-ohara.jpg" /> Mr. Shosuke Ohara (1949) I have no great interest in biography, and neither did Shimizu: there are no great heroes in his film, no transcendent love affairs, no depictions of the tortured depths of the human psyche. There are only a few occasional Shimizu characters obsessed with writing their story – the money lenders in The Golden Demon and Four Seasons of Children – and they are all villains. The characters Shimizu loves are the ones, like him, who crave coexistence with the world, who lead their lives as rituals cocreated with their social and natural landscape. In a way, he reminds me of another filmmaker who was born extraordinarily wealthy and spent her life making semi-documentary performance pieces of the poor, Shirley Clarke. And yet, in one of Shimizu’s last great masterpieces, Mr. Shosuke Ohara (Ohara Shôsuke-san, 1949), we get something akin to an allegorical autobiography. This is not exactly apparent. This is a film and filmmaker, after all, that chooses to depict two men sending off a donkey by following the donkey instead of the men: if there are heroes here, the camera is decidedly uninterested in them. And Mr. Shosuke Ohara is full of these meandering touches of the incidental that few other filmmakers would show, then or now: men slumped over drunk in the corners of shots, a woman clipping her toenails during conversation, a series of tracking shots of a decaying ceiling when the protagonist talks of all he’s lost. In one of the many dazzling lateral tracking shots, the camera follows the trajectory of two characters through an adjoining room of seamstresses on the other side of the wall from where they’re ostensibly walking, and the effect of Shimizu’s filmwork here – with its deep focus vision of multiple rooms, even multiple stories in every shot – is to track the wealth of objects and roles as they’re slowly hollowed out to nothing by the end. But you see where I’m going. It’s hard not to wonder if this story of a charismatic loaf “born with a silver spoon” who claims to spend all his money preserving his privilege, but actually, we suspect, is wasting it all in a revolt against his inheritance so he can spend time with vagabonds and thieves instead, is something of Shimizu’s self-portrait. For what’s this story, if not that of a director who can no longer direct his world? But in that sense it is also, I guess, something of a post-war manifesto for Shimizu’s own artistic practice in the wake of a barbaric era. X. <img width="1920" height="815" width_o="1920" height_o="815" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1c168995555709480b074a0f766b6f0f86b70f25de837c7ba205c05c3e7b3e17/image-of-a-mother-.png" data-mid="245576787" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1c168995555709480b074a0f766b6f0f86b70f25de837c7ba205c05c3e7b3e17/image-of-a-mother-.png" /> Image of a Mother (1959) I’ll say it again. ‘50s Shimizu is not remotely the same filmmaker as ‘30s or ‘40s Shimizu. To accept him means accepting a filmmaker who feels defeated by the classical conventions of his era, both in terms of the society he depicts and the grammar he employs to do so. By the end of his career, the long-held long shots with several planes of intersecting action, the lateral tracking shot, the metered returns to the same shots with shifting perspective—all of these staples of his earlier work would dissipate into a kind of blandly literate regimen of shots and countershots, establishing shots, and close-ups. These late films will occasionally come alive for a few moments in supple tracking shots of a singer commanding the camera to follow her like an amulet (The Sentimental Idiot / Ninjo Baka 1956) or of street life in the stalls (Dancing Girl / Odoriko, 1957) or of gliding shot across an empty house (Tale of Jiro / Jirô monogatari, 1955), like a cinephile startled out of his stupor to glimpse, for a second, the light from the machine. The mechanistic frigidity of 1950s filmmaking was clearly very good for formalists like Hitchcock and Ozu; for freewheelers like Shimizu, so much was lost. There is another essay to be written here on exactly why the most rambunctious visionaries of the ‘30s found themselves bound to the cogs of melodrama machinations in the ‘50s, a period in which movie producers seem to have figured out just a little too well what worked. But there is also, I suppose, some case to be made for any Late Style generally that feels haunted by phantoms precisely because the filmmaker has erased the life from their work. In Sound in the Mist (Kiri no oto, 1956), Shimizu does an exceedingly good impersonation of Naruse via Sirk, as bodies careen into foreground in a kind of formal, split diometer exaggeration of space that exaggerates the melodrama in turn; I’d like to wishfully think of A Mother’s Life (Bojô, 1951), in which an impoverished mother tries to offload her children to her family, as some kind of allegory for Shimizu abandoning his own practice. And yet, there are wonders here. In some alternate universe run by a less eurocentric critical establishment, Tokyo Profile would surely be listed along with Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) and the quite similar Little Fugitive (1953) as the defining works of urban neorealism. As often is the case in a neorealist city, a child is lost, though here she serves something of the same role as the earrings of Madame De or the STDs of Le Plaisir (1952) or the gun of Winchester ‘73 (1950) or the debt of The Inside Story (1948): a midcentury hyperlink, a circulated structuring device to teach us about characters by the ways they respond to her. But unlike in any of those films, which condense time and characterization to a series of vignette crystallizations, Shimizu’s focus is characteristically duration: what the characters do when they have nothing to do, how they fill their free time telling stories and performing silly walks, how these archetypes of contemporary society intersect in near-real time and real locations across a series of tracking shots mapping their movements against each other. Like so many of Shimizu’s late movies, Tokyo Profile is another cruel film – stories of theft, poverty, cheating, and exploitation all structured around a lost child – told like a musical comedy, as the characters soft shoe their way through streets and cantinas and classes and music halls and towers as if at any moment they could break into dance. Shimizu feels at every moment on the verge of inventing a whole new genre that it would take Chantal Akerman to perfect decades later: musical realism. But the full bleakness of Shimizu’s late years on fully flourishes – or is it wilts? – in his final film. It feels like one of those jokes of the film gods that the first film of Japan’s great bad boy Nagisa Oshima and the final film of its gentle good boy Hiroshi Shimizu would each come out in 1959 as studies of the cynicism of pigeon-raising youth looking to the sky in a grimy Tokyo. Then again, I suppose you could argue that Oshima – with his return to pre-classical 90 degree cuts, focus on children betrayed by an adult world, and experiments in documentary fiction – picks up strands of Shimizu across his work. For sure, the world of ghosts in Image of a Mother (Haha no omokage), here the remnants of a child’s dead mother and the life she left behind, is a world that brims like Oshima’s with latent anger, with eruptions of wild physical violence out of a deadened landscape of slouched bodies and slowly dripping taps. And so, when you accept this hollowed-out filmmaker, when you see the anger at his core at what this prosperous new world built on an atomic bomb entailed, you can see what it means for him to return to his favorite subjects, the cruelty and anger of children, and to set them in a nearly-plotless rumination of childhood anger – to set them in the land of the dead. The place where Shimizu’s filmmaking ends, in 1959, in the last proper year of classical cinema, is the place where filmmaking ever since begins. September-December, 2024 With special thanks to Edo Choi, Alexander Fee, The Museum of the Moving Image, The Japan Society, and all the projectionists, print handlers, restorationists, and interns – and I was once one myself at MoMI – who made the Hiroshi Shimizu retrospective possible. Originally published in Outskirts Nº3 in July 2025. The print issue can be ordered at our online shop. Outskirts Online /&nbsp;Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage https://outskirtsmag.com/Those-Who-Meddle-In-Defence-of-Henry-Koster Fri, 12 Sep 2025 07:41:41 +0000 Outskirts Film Magazine https://outskirtsmag.com/Those-Who-Meddle-In-Defence-of-Henry-Koster Those Who Meddle: In Defence of Henry Koster Mounting a heroic and lonely defence of the much-maligned Hollywood filmmaker Henry Koster, Lukas Foerster dives deep into the intricate science of Kosterology, investigating the man's massive filmography with wit, sophistication, and a Kosterian sense of mischievous fun.Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage By Lukas Foerster<img width="1200" height="1600" width_o="1200" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a639ae9ee64e053304d960ef7010cfdc1d430b27d4efeec628c6f4349fe36574/harvey1950_2.jpg" data-mid="238148197" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a639ae9ee64e053304d960ef7010cfdc1d430b27d4efeec628c6f4349fe36574/harvey1950_2.jpg" />Harvey&nbsp;(Henry Koster, 1950) Let’s start with an axiom: he or she who meddles is always right. To say this also means saying that the world is not fine as it is, unmeddled with. Things will not work out on their own. Simply leaning back and observing the natural order of things – and also, more importantly for the cinema of Henry Koster, the human theatre – will not do the trick. What we need in order to unleash the best possible version of this world and ourselves is some kind of trickster, someone who is at the same time of the world and outside of it. A catalogue of figures that might fit the bill: orphans, teenage girls, drunkards, grumpy old men, nuns, angels, spinsters, imaginary rabbits. Often, they come in pairs. Old men and young girls go especially well together in Henry Koster’s meddler’s films. She or he who meddles is always right. To say this also means saying, though, that the world is not irredeemably rotten. Indeed, looking at it from the outside, perpetual happiness is almost a given. Koster’s cinema is chock-full with well-meaning, smiling, well-groomed (and often well-fed) people embedded in neat worlds of Old Hollywood production design, people whose natural habitat is the slightly claustrophobic coziness of the soundstage. People surrounded by people. That is, people always already inducted into communities, especially into (extended) families. Even the trickster is a loner only in the beginning, if at all, and does his or her best to immerse him- or herself into a community in need of healing. A community that is also very much eager to be healed. Healing means: things falling into place in ways they should have to begin with. It does not necessarily mean progress, or lessons learned, or evil conquered. Healing is not a moral prerogative, or a moral victory won, but a feat of miraculous engineering. In Koster’s films, just about anything can be in need of engineering (and healing). Sometimes, a hospital needs to be built (Come to the Stable, 1949), and sometimes, a cathedral needs not to be built (The Bishop’s Wife, 1947). Sometimes, an orchestra must be allowed to play (A Hundred Men and a Girl, 1937), and sometimes, a dancer must not be allowed to dance (The Unfinished Dance, 1947). Sometimes, an airplane’s tail needs to both break off and not break off (No Highway in the Sky, 1951). Only one thing is certain: Healing means succumbing to the powers of movie magic. Henry Koster’s special brand of movie magic remains mostly unheralded. Even among die-hard auteurists, his name is given hardly a mention. If at all, he is remembered as the director of some random, decidedly old-fashioned childhood favorite, be it A Hundred Men and a Girl with Deanna Durbin, The Bishop’s Wife with Cary Grant and Loretta Young, or, of course, Harvey (1950) with James Stewart. Indeed, Koster was a popular hitmaker first and foremost. Throughout his career, he turned most of what he touched into gold. In the 1930s, his most productive decade, he directed popular classics in four different countries and three languages. He also almost single handedly saved a Hollywood studio, Universal, from bankruptcy with his musicals starring Durbin. In the 1940s he was a solid, studio-hopping hitmaker, and in 1953 he turned The Robe, the first film in CinemaScope, into one of the biggest blockbusters of the decade. While his films had an increasingly harder time at the box office during the final years of his career, he still managed to pull off an occasional future television classic like Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962). <img width="5223" height="4015" width_o="5223" height_o="4015" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6edf93683ac0072d959205d21c0930cba50434aa0da19f30f5d4fd6266f21600/TheRobe.jpg" data-mid="238148215" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6edf93683ac0072d959205d21c0930cba50434aa0da19f30f5d4fd6266f21600/TheRobe.jpg" /> The Robe&nbsp;(Henry Koster, 1953) Koster, born 1905 as Hermann Kosterlitz in Berlin, Germany, started out as a screenwriter during the silent era, and switched to directing in 1932. He hit his stride early, with his second film. The Ugly Girl (Das hässliche Mädchen, 1933) is a musical comedy in the giddy, hedonist style popular in the late Weimar Republic - but already there are traces of a different, more sentimental tone slipping in, like the Pygmalion style transformation of the main protagonist. It also turned out to be the last film the director made in his native Germany; Hitler took power in Berlin during the film’s production, and Koster, a Jew, resettled in Vienna. There, he teamed up with producer Joe Pasternak, screenwriter Felix Jackson, and Hungarian-born actress Franziska Gaal - all fellow emigres no longer allowed to work in Germany - to create three tender, heart-breaking musical comedies that proved extremely popular with local audiences. As did The Crosspatch (De Kribbebijter, 1935), Koster’s sole Dutch film made around the same time. In 1936 Koster, Jackson and Pasternak left for Hollywood. Gaal stayed behind at first. She came later, separately, for her own brief, unfortunate Hollywood career. She was replaced, in Koster’s first American films, by Deanna Durbin. In some ways, Koster’s German language films with Gaal – Peter (1934), Little Mother (Kleine Mutti, 1935), Catherine the Last (Katharina, die Letzte, 1936) – feel like blueprints for his later Hollywood work. There is the characteristic mixture of humour and sentiment, already fully developed, as is Koster’s feel for gentle satire, his eye for hyper-expressive, almost comic-book-style human behaviour as well as his knack for using music both as a tool of the characters’ self-expression and as a narrative device, as something that is internal and external at the same time. In short: Koster comes into his own as a director of modern fairytales infused with a sense of everyday utopia. Even the theme of benevolent alcoholism is established early, in Peter, by one of the greatest performances of Felix Bressart, an actor very much in tune with Koster’s style. Indeed, if you’ll allow the tangent, I’d say that the pleasures of boozing might be the single most consistent motif running through Koster’s filmography. Only in Harvey, alcoholism comes close to taking centre stage, though, in most of his other films it is presented, again and again, as just another part of the world. The striking absence of moral judgment in Koster’s work is never more obvious than in its depiction of heavy drinking. Alcoholism even of the more destructive sort has to be accepted, even supported as an individual’s solution to the problems the world throws at all of us. And yet, Koster’s cinema also changes once he moves to Hollywood. As fantasies about female upward mobility by way of marriage, the Gaal films, as well as The Ugly Girl and The Crosspatch, have their roots in the European operetta tradition. Their engineering is still the engineering of an older, more patriarchal age, stuck between feudalistic norms and an emerging modernity. The decisive agent for this kind of engineering is fate - a power strictly external to the social forces it acts upon. This means that the engineering does not happen in the film, but is enacted upon it. By the director, of course. The one key element Koster adds to his formula at Universal is American pragmatism. The difference is most obvious when comparing his two most important leading ladies: Gaal is, in almost all of her films, a woman-child, a woman in her thirties often playing teenagers and always exuding an air of naive innocence. Deanna Durbin, on the other hand, 14 when she was signed at Universal, really is a teenager, and whether or not she is innocent is besides the point. Because she is, first and foremost, an engineer, a meddler, molding the world according to her wishes. What’s more, she really is a pest while doing so. Her whole persona is built around mechanisms of emotional extortion. Her first film, Three Smart Girls (1936), is especially blunt about this. The task she sets for herself in her debut is to reunite her estranged parents. A feat she accomplishes, in the end, by the crudest of behaviouristic tricks: When father meets mother again, Deanna is standing next to him, lifting his arm for him, and waving it towards her. The film does not even try to hide the fact that she gets away with her downright terroristic shenanigans only because of her cuteness. Three Smart Girls starts with a close-up of her singing, and later on, again and again doubles down on the premise that she who has the voice of an angel, can do no wrong. Unlike with Gaal (or Shirley Temple, or even, despite her also being one of cinema’s great pragmatists, Mary Pickford), a shot of Durbin is never just whimsical, never just something to be consumed on its own terms. Durbin close-ups point inevitably towards the future. They are always action images (exchange-value rather than use-value) - and they are all the more effective since Koster, who generally prefers long shots depicting the interaction of several people in one frame, uses close-ups sparingly. In other worlds: on screen, Durbin is a tool, and proudly so. Firmly establishing him in Hollywood, Three Smart Girls is the most important film in Koster’s career. It is not among his best, though. His later Durbin films wisely opt for more ridiculous premises in order to hide their mechanistic underpinnings. In A Hundred Men and a Girl, Deanna again wins over an old man by manipulating his hands - in much more intricate and playful ways, though. This time, she tricks a conductor into working with an orchestra comprised of unemployed musicians - by smuggling the artists into the conductor’s mansion, where they start doing their thing. And once the conductor starts listening to the music he loves, he cannot help himself: his hand is starting to itch. The orchestra conducting the conductor: this is the kind of gentle irony Koster’s best films thrive on. Continuing with Koster’s leading ladies, he unfortunately only made one film with Danielle Darrieux, who, in The Rage of Paris (1938), combines Durbin’s go-getter-persona with Gaal’s more lyrical, almost faun-like presence in a highly original slapstick performance. Together with Koster’s last Durbin-film, It Started With Eve (1941), it is also the closest Koster ever came to directing a bona-fide screwball comedy - a genre he clearly was more than qualified to excel in but that ultimately did not seem to interest him all that much. The Rage of Paris and It Started With Eve are very funny, to be sure, yet in both films the formation of the central couple keeps getting sidelined for other attractions. In the latter, for example, Deanna clearly prefers the company of her love interest’s father - played by Charles Laughton as one of Koster’s many wonderful grouchy old men - to that of his son. After It Started With Eve, Koster left Universal for MGM - while exchanging, on that occasion, Durbin for an even younger actress, Metro’s emerging child star, Margaret O’Brien. Fitting his generally unsatisfactory experience at the studio, he only made two films with O’Brien (and unfortunately never got to work with the Freed Unit), of which one, however, is among his most intriguing. Based on a 1937 French film by Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein, The Unfinished Dance plays out like a dark inversion of the Koster formula. O’Brien plays a young ballet student obsessed with an up and coming ballerina (Cyd Charisse). When a visiting European dancer threatens to steal her idol’s limelight, she engineers her downfall - literally, with Cyd’s rival vanishing into a hole on stage. There clearly is nothing whatsoever redeemable about O’Brien’s actions and indeed she spends the rest of the film repenting. And yet… she gets her wish. The foreign dancer is forced to retire, while Cyd Charisse continues her rise to stardom. What’s more: O’Brien’s desperate close-ups are as intense and as emotionally true as were Durbin’s gleaming ones in earlier Koster films. So, is there really a difference between the two? In The Unfinished Dance, Koster’s moral universe collapses completely, and yet, the show must go on. Fittingly, the film is taken over by full-blown, almost phantasmagorical artifice in ways Koster’s films normally are not. We are lost in a counter-world of escalating cinematic stage tricks and free-floating wide-eyed cute-little-girl-affect with nothing tangible left to hold on to. In the same year, 1947, both the fantastic and religion enter Koster’s cinema for the first time with full force: The Bishop’s Wife has Cary Grant roaming the earth as an angel. He encounters a world already enchanted, though, as evidenced by the beautiful first scene in which the Christmas decorations displayed in store windows lend the surrounding cityscape an air of giddy, almost utopian unreality. In what follows, the rather straightforward approach to social engineering of the Durbin films makes way for a more ironic, and ultimately absurdist mode of constructivist fantasy play, like when Grant, allegedly sent to earth to assist a bishop in building a cathedral, ends up saving the man’s marriage instead - by wooing the bishop’s wife. Come to the Stable, Harvey, and the underwhelming The Luck of the Irish (1948) follow a similar pattern. At the height of his creative powers, Koster excelled as Hollywood’s leading soft surrealist, creating films in which sentimentality is inseparable from ingenuity. As is escapism from an unwavering commitment to the traditional fabrics of society. Despite all the tongue-in-cheek metaphysics, religion in Koster is a social force first and a spiritual one, at best, second. Like family, it is a force that brings people together, proving an inexhaustible well of “inner enlightenment” that helps people adapt to a changing world. Of course, this kind of worldview - that might be traced back to both New Deal idealism and older European ideas of the romantic tradition - was bound to collide with the increasingly cynical and, ultimately, combative societal mood of the post-war decades. As it, indeed, did. The key film and turning point in Koster’s oeuvre is not his biggest commercial success, The Robe, but one he made two years earlier. No Highway in the Sky is the first Koster film in which the meddler must fight not within the community, but outside of and against it. The mood is set early, in a scene of two men inconsequential to the plot visiting an aeronautical engineering site - a self-contained world of machinery, claustrophobic and threatening. The hero, played by James Stewart, is a loner and can only conquer this world - and the business interests supporting it - by retreating into the abstract spaces of mathematics. Koster assembles an ersatz community around him, consisting of his girl-genius daughter, a warm-hearted stewardess, and Marlene Dietrich playing, more or less, herself. The female companions assist him in reaching his goal, yet in the end he remains locked into his own mind. No Highway to the Sky might be the only film in which Koster ably tackled the post-war modernity of high-tech consumer culture, instrumental reason, and social alienation head-on. Otherwise, his work does not generally survive contact with it; Koster’s cinema does not exactly collapse afterwards, but he stops being a great filmmaker. To be sure, even before that, like virtually every contract director in the studio era, he occasionally was handed projects he was not able to fully make his own. After No Highway in the Sky, though, the ratio inverts. Among his later works there are some interesting oddities like the wacky Gothic mystery My Cousin Rachel (1952), a film that seems to be constantly trying to figure out the meanderings of its own plot, or D-Day the Sixth of June (1956), a surprisingly intimate World War II blockbuster. The series of three films he made in the 1960s with Stewart, Mister Hobbs Takes a Vacation, Take Her, She’s Mine (1963), and Dear Brigitte (1965, pointing towards Brigitte Bardot’s unfulfilled potential as yet another lovely Koster leading lady) provide quite a bit of pleasure too, in the way they acknowledge and play around with their own old-fashionedness. Still, in the end it mostly comes down to Uncle Jimmy vs These Strange New Times. Koster’s cinema no longer believes in the power of its own engineering. The Robe itself is quite a bit better and weirder than its reputation suggests, too, if only because in the end the titular robe ends up doing the heavy lifting of spreading the lord’s word. No sweeping spiritual revelations in this one, just a surprisingly high-strung and idiosyncratic attempt to put as much money and as much of Richard Burton’s overacting on screen. I will not try to make a case for Koster as a stealth CinemaScope stylist, and even less so when it comes to the often ill-advised projects he tried his hand at in the mid to late 1950s. In quite a few of his widescreen movies, ‘scope really just means cramming in more stuff, which results in rather uneasy arrangements and people cohabitating on screen that were never meant to. Even projects that would seem to play to his strengths, like the Gregory La Cava remake My Man Godfrey (1957), or his swan song, the biopic The Singing Nun (1966), fall flat. Maybe Koster was one of those artists capable of shining only in tune with rather than in opposition to the times. Of course, the changing realities of studio filmmaking after the 1948 Paramount Decree took full effect might have played a role, too. Only once, in 1955, did his cinema regain its full force again. Good Morning, Miss Dove has Jennifer Jones playing a geography teacher feared yet also admired by all of her students, or rather, the entire community she serves. Hospitalized after suddenly overcome by illness right in the classroom, her sickbed is turned into the site of the last synthesis, the final&nbsp; proof of successful engineering of Koster’s cinema. Flashbacks reveal examples of her benevolent meddling in the lives of her students, and we see the grown-up results of this meddling – now adults – start to flock her way. In the end the whole town seems to have been assembled in front of the hospital door. For one last time, a community declares itself worthy of movie magic, Koster style. <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4e079f231054f879d07b5519b7b7b0f32a57e7f3ff772a5f7d5e1cefab93a73c/AHundredMenandaGirl2.jpg" data-mid="238148217" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4e079f231054f879d07b5519b7b7b0f32a57e7f3ff772a5f7d5e1cefab93a73c/AHundredMenandaGirl2.jpg" />A Hundred Men and a Girl&nbsp;(Henry Koster, 1937) Originally published in Outskirts Nº3 in July 2025. The print issue can be ordered at our online shop. Outskirts Online /&nbsp;Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage https://outskirtsmag.com/Pepe-Studies-on-Imagination Fri, 23 Feb 2024 15:39:59 +0000 Outskirts Film Magazine https://outskirtsmag.com/Pepe-Studies-on-Imagination Studies on Imagination: Pepe by Nelson Carlo de Los Santos From Santo Domingo, an open correspondence between Julia Scrive-Loyer (Simulacro Mag) and Diego Cepeda (Outskirts Film Magazine) on&nbsp;Nelson Carlo de los Santos’ fourth feature film, which premiered in competition this week at the 74th edition of the Berlinale.Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage By Julia Scrive-Loyer and Diego Cepeda <img width="3830" height="2758" width_o="3830" height_o="2758" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/be40f7548726e05fd668da9a7e563ade2a9aecd9be8f85a579f765654291f218/Pepe.jpg" data-mid="205311664" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/be40f7548726e05fd668da9a7e563ade2a9aecd9be8f85a579f765654291f218/Pepe.jpg" />Pepe&nbsp;(Nelson Carlo de los Santos, 2024) Pepe (2024), Nelson Carlo de los Santos’ fourth feature film, premiered this week at the 74th edition of the Berlinale, the first Caribbean film to be part of the Official Competition since Strawberry and Chocolate (Fresa y Chocolate, 1994) by our beloved Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. A voice that claims to be from a hippopotamus. A voice that doesn’t understand the perception of time. Pepe, the first and last hippo killed in the Americas, tells his story with the overwhelming orality of these towns. Derek Walcott once said that all of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory, and also, that there is a territory wider than this – wider than the limits made by the map of an island: the illimitable sea and all that it remembers. Thinking about the immediate experience of watching a film like Pepe is the closest thing to remembering a childhood dream, which is why a pair of ‘two-legged’ creatures write these notes hand in hand. This is an open correspondence in Santo Domingo between Julia Scrive-Loyer (Simulacro Mag) and Diego Cepeda (Outskirts Film Magazine). DIEGO CEPEDA: Truth or imagination? How can we begin to talk about Pepe, if not, in the first place, through dreams, intervention, or joy? A few months ago, we had the opportunity to see Cocote (2017) again, and one of the things that struck me most was the composition of the space in which it is set. Oviedo was an invented territory within Dominican geography. In Pepe, we go from Namibia, in southwest Africa, to the margins of the Magdalena River in Colombia. Although the places are not invented, they are filmed with a dream logic. The camera that is launched into the void interferes with their coordinates, makes them diffuse; the maps begin to blur, and one could say that at some point in the film, one landscape begins to imitate the other and that it is in this game of imitation, of misdirection and camouflage that the story of this ghost comes to seek us out. Likewise, the film begins with a military operation, a sound intervention in which the words are sometimes understood and sometimes reveal their condition of noise. When do the words end, and when does the music begin? — How do I know what a word is?&nbsp; — as we listen a few moments later. The joy of a film like Pepe rests in this undefined line, which is the place where its particular voice is born. JULIA SCRIVE-LOYER: I love the idea of Pepe’s ghost coming to find us. I think that what I find particularly moving about the movie is how playful and unlikely it is. It approaches childhood’s imagination by creating and transforming through words. Throughout history, the power of words has often been used dangerously and harmfully, but here, this power manifests itself in a beautiful way – using words to try to understand and describe the unknown and, therefore, create new images and new meanings. On one side, there is the speech Pepe builds with these words – the surprise of those sounds coming out of his mouth – which allows him to tell his story. And when Pepe stays silent, and we stay with the inhabitants of the Magdalena River, their words transform him, and we enter something much more magical than a talking hippo. We sail through the myths and transformations of Pepe, from a log to a caiman, a shadow that gazes at his reflection in a cartoon. That dialogue between the stranger and the worlds it visits allows us to see that world in a new light: the oddness of a funeral filled with cumbia, the queens of the river arriving at the beauty pageant in their flowery boats, the makeshift taxi on the old train tracks. Everyday life becomes unbelievable when seen through the eyes of Pepe, who looks at them from afar. Then there’s the audiovisual language, the film’s fabric, which, as you said, transforms coordinates, makes two rivers rhyme, turns words into sound and sounds into music. And finally, there are the languages Pepe speaks, their particular phonemes and syntax that vary depending on what he’s trying to express, the origin of the feeling he has at any given moment, the physical reminder of someone else’s memories… What is owned and what is not in the body of the displaced? In that last and fatal encounter, Pepe talks to us and to his murderers. He talks to them in their languages, and there’s dignity in that personification; it becomes a battle of equals, a painful and horizontal gaze, which finally rises to the sky, returning us to childhood, to impossible images, to a bittersweet infinity. CEPEDA: It is a film in which history dances and dismantles, in which the world is illuminated, as you say, thanks to the creative insistence between word and vision. Pepe stands halfway between two ‘opposing’ fronts in the history of experimental cinema. David Gatten summed them up as follows: Stan Brakhage thinks that naming things prevents seeing; Hollis Frampton thinks that naming things is what makes it possible to see. The freedom in Pepe — both of the character and of the film — is to escape language, to get away from the roads we have already travelled as hunters, with our guns and our cameras, with our interpretations and metaphors. To escape, even, from the place of enunciation. — I don't remember how I was told this story, perhaps through the eyes of another, or maybe I saw it in the scars of an elder. — This ghost speaks to us, but what makes it speak? The whole film could be thought of as the manifestation of a tale that wanders in search of its narrator and its listener, a tale that wants to intervene in the heart of history, moving from one character to another, from Pepe to Betania, or from Candelario to the German hunter. It is a circular story that relates violence with the absurd, rebellion with affection and difference with freedom. SCRIVE-LOYER: ‘The whole film could be thought of as the manifestation of a tale that wanders in search of its narrator and its listener’. I want to focus on this, not only because I agree, but because I love, while listening to and reading reviews of Pepe, some people’s bewilderment at the part of the movie where Pepe ‘disappears’ to give way to ‘fiction’. Some are upset by this change, unhappy, betrayed, even… Where is Pepe? And why is he so quiet? Nevertheless, Pepe is there, the narrator is present; he just stopped talking and is now observing. Speaking in strictly emotional terms, the moment that closes the part of the ‘quiet Pepe’, the last time we see him alive before we hear the news of his death, moves me deeply. In a bird’s-eye shot, Pepe and what I assume is his mate stand quietly in the river until one of them swims away, and Pepe is left alone. The magic of cinema exists, and this shot is irrefutable proof of it because, at that moment, even though I can’t hear him, I know Pepe is thinking. Making an – albeit uncalled-for – reference to The Departed (2006), which was screened in Berlin on the same day as Pepe’s premiere, I can feel him like Martin Sheen smoking one final cigarette as he waits for his murderers to step out of the elevator. A last moment of lonely dignity, a last quiet moment. If, for some, the rest of the movie didn’t show how lovingly it was made, this moment alone would make it clear. Pepe weaves the film’s syntax and, from that flying ship he has now become, eternal and harmless, he observes us and observes himself. He travels to places he has only heard of in tales, a personal and uncertain mythology, to try to understand where he came from, where he lived, and what for. In the end, isn’t it beautiful that we, as viewers, beg for a hippo to keep talking to us? CEPEDA: I want to end with a quote from a 1994 lecture by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, called ‘Another Cinema, Another World, Another Society’ that resonates with this mysterious voice speaking in Afrikaans, Mbukushu and Spanish: ‘Indeed, we all speak - literally and metaphorically - the language of our respective colonisers, and sooner or later what happened to Caliban in ‘The Tempest’ happens to all of us; when we wish to think and speak on our own, without intermediaries, a cry comes out: the first thing we express is our indignation. ‘You taught me language,’ says Caliban to Prospero — ‘and my profit on ‘t / Is I know how to curse: The red plague rid you /&nbsp; For learning me your language!’<img width="5120" height="2759" width_o="5120" height_o="2759" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b818268c78f46dbee4cc5a6355916b9cb02a925b9bf1122e0b84d08862134834/Caribe.png" data-mid="205311689" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b818268c78f46dbee4cc5a6355916b9cb02a925b9bf1122e0b84d08862134834/Caribe.png" /> Leer en español en Simulacro Mag Outskirts Online /&nbsp;Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage https://outskirtsmag.com/Christian-Petzold-Speaks-About-Afire Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:01:23 +0000 Outskirts Film Magazine https://outskirtsmag.com/Christian-Petzold-Speaks-About-Afire &nbsp; Who Die, When They Love: An Interview With Christian Petzold - Outskirts Film Magazine Who Die, When They Love: An Interview With Christian Petzold A conversation with Christian Petzold from the Viennale about his latest film, John Cassavetes, horror movies, and the complexities of characterisation.Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage By Christopher Small <img width="3543" height="2362" width_o="3543" height_o="2362" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/db0b5dfc2a0cc214abc0ac9399dff1a7f7b31a83dafe822f83b0e3c3c5ba71e5/AFIRE_1.jpeg" data-mid="195664457" border="0" data-scale="96" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/db0b5dfc2a0cc214abc0ac9399dff1a7f7b31a83dafe822f83b0e3c3c5ba71e5/AFIRE_1.jpeg" />Afire&nbsp;(Roter Himmel, Christian Petzold, 2023) Then the princess came one evening, quickly speaking to him, softly, ‘Your true name – I wish to know it, your true homeland and your nation.’ And the slave said, ‘I am called Mahomet, I am from Yemen, and my tribe, it is the Asra, who die, when they love.’ — Heinrich Heine, ‘Der Asra’ (1846) In Christian Petzold’s Afire (Roter Himmel, 2023), a writer is unable or unwilling to admit that what he’s writing (a novel called ‘Club Sandwich’) is shit – and unable or unwilling to relate to those around him. Thoughts are jumbled, painful, impossible to express, whether in art or in normal conversation. In between searching for excuses not to work, Leon (Thomas Schubert) can only gaze out passively at the people around him: namely, his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), the lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs), his publisher Helmut (Matthias Brandt), and especially Nadja (Paula Beer). They’re all staying in a cottage on the Baltic coast; Leon because he needs to finish his novel, Felix because his mother owns the place, Nadja because she’s a friend of Felix’s mother, and Devid because he’s sleeping with Nadja (and later with Felix). Leon, unable to relate up close to anybody around him, is most at home observing them each as objects from a distance; when Nadja in particular – the evident object of his affections – finally approaches him, he quickly becomes brittle and irate. A shared dinner starts out with harmless banter and flirting between Leon’s three companions, but soon Leon begins to cruelly taunt Devid and, through his sheer unpleasantness, causes the whole party to disband. Even so, Nadja asks him afterward, for the hundredth time, to join them for a swim at the seaside, and for the hundredth time, he declines, averting his eyes and arrogantly muttering a stupid excuse – he ‘needs to write’, knowing full well he’s not writing anything. Able to experience neither the joy of creation, which depends on a push-pull between communal experience and private reflection, nor the simple joys of hanging out, for which he’d actually have to relax and consent to spend time with the others, Leon is adrift in a sea of excuses while repeatedly insisting he won’t actually go swim – the activity that everybody else participates in. Repeated extensions of friendship from the others, like Nadja’s or Felix’s, are met with hostility because Leon’s an asshole, but also because he can no longer relate to their world, so bound up is he in his self-imposed exile as a ‘writer’. Inevitably, after each hostile outburst, Leon makes a self-pitying apology, usually to Nadja or sometimes to Felix, for being such a massive dick, something that happens repeatedly throughout their stay. As always in Christian Petzold's movies, this is all conveyed through a matrix of elegant point-of-view shots: in even the most throwaway of moments, the world is first looked upon, pondered from a distance, and then engaged with. For Leon, this is a serious problem, as he’s a mediocre writer but an even worse communicator – of his basic desires, of his own inner life, or simply how he wants to spend an afternoon. He trails Felix to the beach and doesn’t go in the water. He drags his papers and laptop into different parts of the house or garden in a vain attempt to stimulate creative inspiration. When all else fails, and when nobody’s around, he stands at the side of the summer house and bounces a rubber ball against the wall. Wildfires burn at the peripheries of the town, within sight of their cottage, ever present, spoken about by the group, glanced over the tops of trees – a menace that remains, for now, at an uneasy distance. Meanwhile, Leon’s body, unlike Devid’s or Felix’s more muscular ones, remains covered throughout Afire; we never actually see the broad tribal chest tattoo glimpsed between the folds of his shirt, we never see him vulnerable, relaxed, at ease enough to get undressed like the others. Neither does he express much with his body, even if covered up. For the most part, he is either sitting with his head in his hands, falling asleep in public places, or trudging from one place to another, pissed off. Nadja’s physical presence, by contrast, is, for Leon and for us, built up piece by piece, first by the intrusive and unrestrained sounds of her making love with Devid in an adjacent room, and then as a distant figure pacing back and forth while engaged in her various chores. Leon observes her through the window, silently falling in love. This poor young man, Leon the outcast, remains a bystander to all that happens in the film. Devid, the beefy local lifeguard, goes from fucking Nadja to fucking (and falling in love with) Felix; Felix from suffering through a vacation with Leon to fixing the roof of the cottage (and falling in love with Devid); Nadja from nobody knowing her to everybody loving her. Even Leon’s publisher, Helmut, who arrives at the cottage for a short meeting with Leon to try to salvage the first draft of Club Sandwich, gets distracted from his mission. While at the cottage, he gets corralled by Nadja into staying and joining them for dinner outside; distracted, again by Nadja, from thinking about Leon’s book (she wows him with the depth of her literary knowledge, reciting Heidrich Heine’s poem ‘Der Astra’ twice1); and, finally, as the sky turns red with the flames of a forest fire creeping evercloser to their summer house, Helmut's chest gets tight, he collapses, he’s rushed to the hospital. Stupefied in every sense of the word, Leon can hardly process what’s going on. Drive him to the hospital, Nadja implores Leon, tossing the keys at him. Leon spits back that, though he can drive, he doesn’t have a licence; Nadja, exasperated, snatches back the keys and speeds off with Helmut herself. Despite his professed vocation as a writer (and thus, implicitly, somebody curious about human drama), Leon never opens his eyes to take in the details of the real-life spectacle unfolding in front of him. Following a tragic final twist, Leon is face to face with Nadja, who is simply asking for him to be genuine, who is, despite everything, trying to save him by loving him – and he flubs it, sinking back into stumbling, cowardly irresolution, sickening her to the extent that she refuses to talk to him for a whole year afterwards. Leon is thus neither protagonist participating meaningfully in the action, nor distant observer, at least not one emotionally intelligent enough to make sense of it all, to provide any clarity on what’s unfolding. By the film's epilogue, Leon has been able to find an artistic form for the mercurial emotions that previously dictated his existence. He returns to Helmut’s office with a new novel – Club Sandwich has been scrapped in the meantime. Naturally, it’s a story of their summer, of Devid and Felix’s love, of love and tragedy folded into one another’s arms, of the spectral version of Nadja he fell in love with. Leon’s outsider perspective, his fatal dissimilation, has finally turned, as in many classic romantic melodramas, into a magnificent artistic obsession, producing a work that speaks a language its author couldn’t long ago. That is how he is, finally, able to relate to Nadja, in one sense as a writer but also, more importantly, as a human being. Ultimately, Petzold, the major romanticist of contemporary cinema, suggests that the central metaphor isn’t that Leon’s feelings of grief for what they all lose and his adoration for Nadja are as untameable as a wildfire ripping through a dry Baltic forest. Instead, it’s that the spectacle itself – the confrontation with this reality, this death, this dissolution, this traumatic unravelling of his ego – has finally handed him the tools to make something worthwhile of it. Christian Petzold once again risks being called kitschy, here as in all of his greatest films. Afire is an especially rich text, but it’s also a pleasurable movie the likes of which don’t get made so often on a decent scale anymore. In Petzold’s case, it’s his own conflicting impulses between lyricism and cool analysis, between the corny and the cerebral, that act as something like genre constraints or the demands of a studio system, spawning abundant, fertile contradictions within the text. Indeed, the final act of Afire has no right to work at all. Yet situated as it is in a world of interlocking gazes and inarticulate emotions, this somehow makes the contrived deus ex machina more absurdly real. Wasn’t it Douglas Sirk who said, about his own work, that it doesn’t really make much sense except emotionally? Petzold, virtually alone in cinema today, keeps this particular flame burning. The above text appeared in Outskirts Nº2. What follows is a conversation with Christian Petzold that I had in late October 2023 at the 61st Viennale, intended as a complement to the printed text and with the intervening eight months of the film being out in the world. CHRISTIAN PETZOLD: I just got back from the United States. I went to see the headquarters of this company that I love [The Criterion Collection]. They had a closet filled with their DVDs. Do you know it? OUTSKIRTS: The Criterion Closet. PETZOLD: Yes, I did that. They took me there. I hadn’t seen this whole thing before! I received a black bag and was told I can take five DVDs out of their collection. The DVDs in that closet are not in alphabetical order. They are scattered. So you find them by coincidence. You take one DVD, and you have to comment on it. And they give you five minutes, so it can look a little bit rushed... And this, well, I like this whole thing so much. OUTSKIRTS: Did you take films that you had already seen? PETZOLD: Yes, films I had seen many, many times in my life. And some that I sometimes pretend to have seen. [laughs] But the first movie was Husbands (1970) by John Cassavetes. Which makes me think of a story, which involved the first American distributor for a movie of mine, Barbara (2012). This guy, who is one of the owners of this company, was the assistant of John Cassavetes when he was young. And he told me the story of Husbands. Cassavetes and his team shot it, and they’re looking at all the rushes in the editing suite. The the editor says to Cassavetes, ‘I can't find the story in all this – I’m sorry, I can't work with this material.’ So Cassavetes grabbed a typewriter and went to the Chelsea Hotel, locked himself in a room. There he wrote a novel based on the experiences he had during the shooting, based on the material he had shot. And Cassavetes then handed this novel to the editor. ‘Now I understand it’, the editor said. And this idea I liked so much: that you need literature to find a structure in a film – in this case, a novelisation of Husbands that Cassavetes had written in the Chelsea Hotel. This was the gift of adaptation, in a way.&nbsp; OUTSKIRTS: Well, it's funny that you mentioned Husbands. I saw Afire at the Berlinale and then a few months later, I saw Something to Remind Me (Toter Mann, 2001), one of the last films of yours that I hadn’t seen. And in all three films, what I find fascinating is our strange relationship to the protagonist. Somebody who is so irresolute, who doesn’t know how to express themselves, or refuses to, in the case of Nina Hoss’ character in Something to Remind Me. In the case of Afire, it’s because Leon can’t express himself. In the case of Something to Remind Me, it’s because as an audience, there’s no way inside this person’s head. And that’s a little like our ambiguous relationship to the protagonists of Husbands, with whom we rejoice in the mania of life but who we are also a little repulsed by. PETZOLD: Well, when I remember Something to Remind Me, I remember the three protagonists: one is a male subject. Living the penthouse like a captain on a big ship. Peering out into the night from high, like in a Melville story. And he’s very lonely, surrounded by the sea, living his melancholy dreams. He has a vast collection of records. Surrounded by that music, he’s alone. And the woman he meets, she’s coming out of the water, the swimming pool, at the beginning. She’s like a nymph. And so, in contrast, you have Nina Hoss playing someone who wants to take revenge, a bloody revenge, and yet she hasn’t had a life and a love of her own. She’s infected, consumed by the plans she has made to kill a man. She’s infected by a missing life. So this is her tragedy. And you have a third guy, who has killed someone, because he is ugly, and he's lonely, and nobody loves him. He’s killing because he wants to make a connection with people. So with these three protagonists, I’m building a narrative system. They are, together, their own system of different parts and contrasts. This was the idea. And it’s a little bit like in Husbands, where these three men, representing different things, do the same on their own journey. At home, there is an ordinary life that’s waiting for them, but out there the rules are different. It’s a little bit like one of those Hangover movies. It’s The Hangover (2009) without jokes. [laughs] OUTSKIRTS: And yet somehow still funny. PETZOLD: That’s exactly right. <img width="1700" height="1133" width_o="1700" height_o="1133" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/65dc2d4e9258cf995dcae571e8dd4269136e0ca9ae72e2525549f8b663837a90/GB_RoterHimmel_Petzold__Q4A7288-_cHeidrunHenke_1.jpg" data-mid="195670889" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/65dc2d4e9258cf995dcae571e8dd4269136e0ca9ae72e2525549f8b663837a90/GB_RoterHimmel_Petzold__Q4A7288-_cHeidrunHenke_1.jpg" />Thomas Schubert and Christian Petzold on stage at the Viennale - October 2023. Photo Credit: Heidrun Henke, Viennale.OUTSKIRTS: It’s been a while since I last saw Husbands, but I remember towards the beginning that the main characters are very abusive to their wives. And yet, somehow, this doesn't destabilise the film, doesn’t entirely disrupt our identification with them. It adds a deep strangeness and a complicated kind of dissonance. PETZOLD: Well, that’s perfectly put. All protagonists who are interesting are sad, they are weak, in one way or another. You need that weakness. When you have someone who’s strong, who has fantastic morality, who’s vigorous – well, you’re not going to be interested in watching somebody like that for 90 minutes. When you see a Martin Ritt movie with Paul Newman, as a half Native American, half white guy in a stagecoach with others [Hombre, 1967], you know he’s the best guy, he can kill everyone, he doesn’t need the help of others. And yet there's something in him that makes him different, his empathy. And this makes him weak – to feel for other people. Therefore, you’re interested in him, in this ‘problem’ of his character. And this kills him at the end, brings about his demise. This is interesting. But if he’s a killer, or he doesn't need anybody, you’re not interested. You always need a scar in the character of your hero. OUTSKIRTS: But it is taken to such an extreme in Afire. I just saw Thomas [Schubert] in the [Viennale] press lounge as I was waiting for you, and I couldn’t find my words to say too much to him. I didn’t know what to tell him, because in this film, he has the most difficult and thankless part that you can possibly imagine, and yet he makes it beautiful. You’re quite cruel in denying us a certain kind of mercy with him and to us an audience. There are moments where we feel that you’re about to let him be okay, somehow. And then you just pull back again. He doesn’t want to go to the beach. He can’t work. Again and again and again. And yet, what’s kind of a miracle about his performance is that there’s still something there. We’re not totally repulsed by him. PETZOLD: Life is inviting him from the first second. Do this, do that. And he refuses. It has something to do with Protestant ethics, which kills your desire to realise your desire. You can see him like someone in a prison, a prison of his own making, a prison of himself. At the same time, you can always feel and see his desire: behind the windows, behind the doors, behind the walls. You hear the life, the sex, the lust of other people. And Leon wants to be part of that, but he can’t. And always, if someone wants something but can’t get it, he is the hero, at least in my book. I’m interested in him. You can feel that in his inner monologues, there’s a constant fight. And he doesn’t want to show that fight. The best actors are those who hide something, fighting not to express a hidden urge. Like a child who has fallen down in the street and has cut their knees and their palms and are bleeding everywhere. There are kids who, in that moment, will start crying and shouting immediately. ‘Mommy, help me!’ But if you see a child who doesn’t want to cry, who fights against the pain, this is the moment that I start crying. This is a human fight; where someone is fighting against something. This gives me something to work with as a director. And so actors like Thomas Schubert playing this part, who want to hide themselves, are much more interesting than actors who truly, openly express themselves. OUTSKIRTS: Well, the way that you stage scenes, which is very different from Cassavetes, for example— PETZOLD: Yeah, totally. OUTSKIRTS: It’s almost like we are experiencing the world simultaneously with the protagonist. In the literal sense that often it’s a shot of his face, then it looks to the side, and you see what he’s seeing. And he moves slightly, the camera moves with him. So this prison, this world that he’s in, is also the prison that we’re in, because we’re peering—to some extent—outside, like him, always. PETZOLD: Of course, but it’s also a question of morality. Everything like this is. Each day, the DOP and I talk about the position of the camera, after we have seen the rehearsals. There is no storyboard set in advance. We see the rehearsals and then think about it. So with Afire, I said to [the DOP] each morning, ‘We have to remember our fundamental position here. The film’s a portrayal of someone. We are not this guy. We are portraying someone who's watching the world and can’t be be part of it. So we are interested in him and but it’s not direct identification. It’s just a portrayal.’ In that moment, we understood that we have to produce, in the audience, something in relation to Leon. We are not him, we cannot be him. We see him watching a woman, but we don’t see the women through his eyes, not directly. Because when we see the woman through his eyes, we are part of his desire. And then in this moment, Paula Beer’s character, for example, would be an object. No, we insisted that she must be a subject. When she’s riding her bicycle, I have the feeling that she has a life of her own outside of the frame. But if I am Thomas Schubert, if the audience feels they are just Thomas Schubert’s character, then she’s just living in my subjective impressions. When she leaves the frame, there is no life for her anymore. And so the whole movie was constructed that way, playing with that idea as best we could. We start directly with these two young men in a car, Leon and Felix. Driving in the forest. We don’t know anything about them. No names. That’s the opening scene. OUTSKIRTS: Like in a horror movie. PETZOLD: Like in a horror movie, yeah. But in a horror movie, well, they make it very fast. Two men in the front and three girls in the backseat. And one of the girls is very beautiful and maybe a little bit stupid. And thus she had to die very early in the film. You get the idea. But in Afire, we as an audience have to think about these two guys, we have to produce something here that isn’t immediately obvious. We are not [Leon], but we are watching him and thus have to fill in what he is thinking, what he’s doing. We have to be curious. Because, you know, when you have a beautiful young woman, like Paula Beer, squeezed in between three men, as I do with the guys here, it can easily become a very bad movie. You can see her thighs, her breasts, you can see her half naked. I knew we should never see her naked. We just hear something. We hear that she has a certain lust for life. We can see her smile, we can see that she loves to live. She has no problem to earn very little money working as an ice cream vendor. She is by herself, and happy. And so she is not an object. This was, of course, also important for Paula [Beer] herself. She’s always telling me how much she hates to read those kinds of scripts or see those male directors who love to show the naked body of young women. Often those guys will say to their cinematographer, taking the camera themselves, ‘Hm, I’ll operate the camera for this shot, don’t worry.’ OUTSKIRTS: This problem is faced by a lot of filmmakers who don't want to film sex in that way, because they see it as a form of exploitation, or appropriation. But you need it for this film, in some way. You need sex. PETZOLD: Yes, that’s right! OUTSKIRTS: You need them to also be bodies. So it’s a very interesting solution to have it so that Leon only hears Nadja or the two men having sex. It’s actually more disturbing, because then he’s also part of it, implicated in listening. He’s also projecting himself into it. It’s his discomfort that we’re feeling, in a way. For me, it speaks to this idea that, for me, all of your greatest films come so close to a certain… danger. Frankly speaking, to being really quite bad. You come so close to a certain tipping point, after which the given film would easily be a horrible one. Like you said, two men or three men and the girl— PETZOLD: Fuck, yes! OUTSKIRTS: It comes so close. And then, wow, you survive it somehow, stronger. PETZOLD: Yes, but you have to know where that border is. You have to move very close to the border. Because cinema is there at the border; that’s the place of cinema. For example, it’s not a problem to film sex nowadays. There's so many intimacy coaches, and all that stuff. It’s easy. But I don’t like actors who are confident after they play naked, play having sex. Because after they have done so, they are proud. I don't like to point a camera at their face and capture that pride. ‘We have made it!’ I don’t like seeing that in the film. It’s the same as when I have to use some complex special effects. For example, with a car accident; there are special companies who make this happen. They come from Cologne or somewhere like that. They’re talking loudly with their walkie talkies. Wah-wah-wah. Specialists. And I hate it, when they have made the accident—the car, upside down, burning, whatever—and the whole crew starts to clap. There’s a pride in the air. Come on, it’s a job like any other. I wouldn’t clap my hands when someone was repairing the fuse box in my apartment. Neither do I like it when the pilot lands the plane and everybody starts to clap. It’s his job! Once actors have made a sex scene together, there’s that same proud face, like they conquered it. I don’t like it. However, what was interesting in this film was to make acoustic sex. Now that that is very, very difficult for the actors. OUTSKIRTS: How does something like that affect the casting process? PETZOLD: When I am casting, and I’m searching for new actors, supporting actors, I never watch the DVDs they send me. I just hear the DVDs. I close my eyes. You can hear if someone is good or is bad. You can hear it. When I was a child and my parents would have guests at home, they’d be sitting there at the kitchen table in their conversation. We the children are sitting on another table, not so far away. And we can hear when the adults start to lie. We can hear it. Mnh-mnh-mnh. They’re ambitious, they’re pretentious. You can hear it in the sounds, in their voices, in everything. So when two actors have to have sex in an acoustic way, they’re in one room. They have microphones. They close their eyes, and then their imagination starts. Incidentally, there’s this Marshall McLuhan book, ‘Medium Cool’—there was also a Haskell Wexler movie based on it. McLuhan said TV is cool, radio is hot. In Rwanda, the radio makes the genocide, not the TV. Television, visuals, images, are too cold. Neither can you start a pogrom with TV alone. It always begins with radio, music, the voice. So here, the actors are lying on the bed. They close their eyes and have to make their sounds of love. They have to imagine a scene. And this is something totally different. To imagine is something very close to real intimacy, because you become part of the mix. This was hard work. I can hear it on the headphones immediately when something’s not good. We wait for one day, and then we do it again. With that extra night to think about it, the actors are suddenly brilliant with their sex noises. I know they like each other, of course, so I know it will work. It’s not hard for them to imagine doing it together. For example, the two guys who had to make sex noises [Enno Trebs and Langston Uibel], they’re lying there in that special room and I am outside with a with headphones. Already after 120 seconds, they come out. ‘No problem for us’, they say. They’re not proud. The work is done. [laughs] Well, overall this time [on Afire] was the luckiest work I ever made up my life. These two months together with these cars, this house, and these people, the forest, was really perfect. <img width="2423" height="1310" width_o="2423" height_o="1310" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c66c85876270bf0108b0fb89dcbaa1afa97429d4a5e2bbf171b98a14678ce98d/Afire_main.jpg" data-mid="195663717" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c66c85876270bf0108b0fb89dcbaa1afa97429d4a5e2bbf171b98a14678ce98d/Afire_main.jpg" /> OUTSKIRTS: Since the Berlinale, I have been thinking a lot about this film in relation to the history of melodrama. Everything that you’ve spoken about so far concerns this tension: between what you’re depicting and how you’re orienting yourself, and us as an audience, to it. When talking about a film like Something to Remind Me, you clearly still remember it as its distinct, structured parts, as genre elements: which position each character fulfils, what their relation is to historical archetype. That’s also what I feel in Afire. On one hand, a sort of looseness, a modernist looseness. But on the other hand, a very classical idea of narrative construction, that every person has to fulfil a role in some sense. This person has to write a book, or this person has to fall in love, these two men have to fall in love in contrast to them. And also Paula Beer’s character, what she represents. I think it is the most romantic idea in this very romantic film. She has to save him by loving him. And he won’t let her. PETZOLD: That’s right. That’s something from the American movies I like so much. Like Husbands. We started with Husbands and we will finish with Husbands, okay? [laughs] I have the feeling that there are no supporting actors in my favourite American movies. The whole frame is filled with subjects, filled with these people as possible subjects. In the ‘90s, when I was a student, I told myself that when I would eventually write a book or direct a movie, all my characters have to be worth telling a 90 minute story about, a film from their position. In this narrative world that we’re seeing, they happen to be meeting there and fulfilling specific roles, but that’s just in this world. This is an idea that I took from John Cassavetes movies. Or, for example, when Paul Schrader is writing a script for, say Taxi Driver (1976), for example. He’s got a character, Wizard, another taxi driver, played by Peter Boyle. He’s an idiot, he gives bad advice, he doesn’t know anything. But you feel totally that it would be worth it if Martin Scorsese’s camera would start following him for the next 90 minutes. I’m immediately interested in him, just from a fragmentary meeting. And so there is a fixed narrative conception, a melodrama, as you describe it. But on the other hand, all of them—the writer, the student, the lifeguard—would be interesting to follow in any direction for 90 minutes. I really feel it would be worth making a movie out of all of them. But in this moment, in these two days, when these characters are meeting in one place, in one space, it’s simply the story of their relationships. It is very important for me to make it like this, that’s it. OUTSKIRTS: And then at the centre, you have Leon who can’t access the world of the others at all. PETZOLD: You want to smack him across the face! Because it’s his job as the writer to do that. He had to bring these characters together. He had to give their relationships, their ambiguities, a structure. He’s the writer! Only at the end, when everything’s broken—two are dead, one has cancer, the girl is missing—can he write his story. This is what I hate about literature, that one can always only write it down when something’s dead. In this case, this is Leon’s ultimate fate. This is the story. And this is the story of all stories. All writers are sentimental. They have to kill something first, and only then can they start writing. OUTSKIRTS: That’s what's so beautiful about the ending [of Afire] to me. It feels somehow ‘happy’ in its sentiment. But then when you just look at their faces, Leon’s and Nadja’s, and you see something unresolvable. It’s like you describe. Leon’s only now tentatively able to access this world through his writing because everything is destroyed. The relationships are completely uncertain. He's standing there, and like a spectator he’s completely impotent. It’s a very Hitchcockian idea. And ending where the character is peering out at a world they can no longer access. PETZOLD: Yeah. And I am a Hitchcockian, I must say. He brought me to cinema when I was 15. What you’re saying makes me think about the last shot of Vertigo (1958), when James Stewart is standing there at the top of the tower, looking down at Kim Novak’s dead body far below. He is now back, a male subject who’s no longer impotent. He has triumphed over his fears, his vertigo. It’s a triumph of his character, but it’s the saddest story in the world in the same moment. OUTSKIRTS: Because it cost everything. PETZOLD: Yeah, it cost everything. Outskirts Online /&nbsp;Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage https://outskirtsmag.com/The-Image-is-False Fri, 06 Oct 2023 10:30:29 +0000 Outskirts Film Magazine https://outskirtsmag.com/The-Image-is-False The Image Is False: The Lodger as Hitchcock’s Manifesto Revisiting Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller, the opening film of Locarno76, to ask whether a film so full of sounds can truly be called 'silent’.Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage By Arta Barzanji <img width="1200" height="930" width_o="1200" height_o="930" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/89a214236d7fbfc6057fbcd555a20ed4096c3094cf420c0f9ca8e62ad401d236/the-lodger.jpg" data-mid="192903181" border="0" data-scale="96" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/89a214236d7fbfc6057fbcd555a20ed4096c3094cf420c0f9ca8e62ad401d236/the-lodger.jpg" />The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog&nbsp;(Alfred Hitchcock, 1927) The first film I watched at this year’s Locarno Film Festival was not a compelling new release or world cinema discovery of the kind the festival is known for. Still, it constituted the most thrilling experience I had during the entire 12 days of my stay in Switzerland. The enormous 3200-sitter Palexpo FEVI, typically reserved for the premieres of films in competition, was filled to the brim for the occasion. Members of Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana took their places on the stage in front of the screen. A few decisive words appeared: ‘The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog… Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.’ Beyond the shadow of a doubt, it was bound to be a glorious afternoon. V.F. Perkins argued that silent films often faced a choice between clarity and economy if they were to exceed a certain range of subjects and situations, especially those that didn’t fall within or close to pure action. Lacking the benefits of spoken dialogue and sound design, these films were left with no choice but to rely heavily on intertitles (often mixed with diegetic text) to fully convey the complications of the plot, or to forgo such plot intricacies in favour of more modest premises which were developed largely through movement and physical action. While this applied in manycases, it doesn’t seem to be a binary that ayoung Alfred Hitchcock was much bothered by. The reason could be gleaned from another assertion by Perkins: ‘The sound film’s innovation was not the talking picture but the audible picture.’ Working backward from this statement, one could argue that The Lodger isn’t a silent film, but an inaudible one. The film opens with a close-up of a screaming woman. Soon after we see police officers listening to off-screen eyewitnesses and taking note of their testimonies about the murder that has just taken place. Later in the film, Hitchcock suggests the sound of the titular character’s footsteps by showing others who take notice of the movement of a chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Hitchcock overcomes the two-fold problems of clarity and economy identified by Perkins by not conceiving The Lodger as a film without sound, but as a sound film that precedes sound technology. The images don’t substitute for the absence of sound as much as they imply the existence of specific sounds that we aren’t able to hear. &nbsp; For a film with a relatively complex plot, The Lodger resorts to the use of intertitles only sparingly. Hitchcock takes advantage of newspapers, typed letters, and storefront signs to convey important information through language while reducing the need for intertitles. Yet language is rarely if ever used in this film to convey the emotions or desires of its characters. Problems of communication or the circulation of information become central both to Hitchcock and his characters. The Lodger’s second scene, following the murder with which the film begins, depicts the process of printing and distributing a newspaper. We’re introduced to the principal female character, Daisy, as one of these papers reaches her workplace, which alarms her about the serial killer who is still at large. Thus, the subject of the plot (murder of blonde girls) and the apparatus for its conveyance (newspapers/cinema) are directly linked from the outset. The circulation of information within the world of the film isn’t simply about the content of what is being shared, but also about the apparatus through which that information moves. And this applies as much to the diegesis as it does to non-diegetic information. If the newspaper is the device through which characters in the film learn about the murders, we as viewers perceive the workings of the narrative, to a large extent, through their reactions to these texts. Or rather, their reaction, as filtered through Hitchcock’s image-making instrument, which presents a vision that’s at once objective (the language) and subjective (their response or interpretation). Hitchcock here combines ‘objective’ plot information (delivered through language) with the subjective reactions and responses of his characters and reintegrates the two, resolving both the problem of economy of expression (because it adds up to an efficient mode of communication) as well the issue of clarity (since the expressivity of his approach itself clarifies the meaning). The Lodger’s images thus acquire a double significance, functioning both as images for us, the viewers outside the film, but also as images for the characters inhabiting the film world. <img width="1440" height="1080" width_o="1440" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e89b7cc9bfdb8ede6e6b01dbf51c48b866ca481ad7db051e281a9e2744820dd1/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20230802_200928.825.jpg" data-mid="193353878" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e89b7cc9bfdb8ede6e6b01dbf51c48b866ca481ad7db051e281a9e2744820dd1/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20230802_200928.825.jpg" /> <img width="1440" height="1080" width_o="1440" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4a35e96e139966a95d1688a4d6c78ce5e011276f60e1800abe920a3f73f23877/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20231007_200622.746.jpg" data-mid="193353879" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4a35e96e139966a95d1688a4d6c78ce5e011276f60e1800abe920a3f73f23877/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20231007_200622.746.jpg" /> Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo at the newspaper office The Lodger’s images are often obscured, deformed, or ‘disguised.’ In the very first scene of the film, we see the distorted reflection of a man, something which frightens a witness as she momentarily mistakes this image for that of the murderer. The eponymous lodger makes his entrance framed within the front door of Daisy’s family home, against the hazy backdrop of the London fog. A hat and scarf cover most of his face, which means he (like the distorted reflection in the first scene) seems to match the description of the murderer provided by the witness in the first scene. Upon first learning about the serial killer and his fixation with blondes, a dazed Daisy says ‘No more bleach for me.’ It turns out that she isn’t a natural blonde, but neither the killer nor the lodger know that. To them, as well as to us, she represents the image of a blonde. In the context of Hitchcock’s career, this particular image would take on accrued significance with each new film. Still in the early stages of his career here, a young Hitchcock is already preoccupied with exploring the unreliability of images. Not of the falseness of a particular image, but the inherent potential of images to belie the reality of a situation. When the lodger enters the room he’s renting for the first time, he notices framed pictures of blonde women all over the walls. His disturbed reaction seems only to confirm our suspicion that he’s the murderer. Yet, later we learn that his sister, who was also a blonde, was murdered by the real killer. Ever since then, he’s been trying to think like the killer in the hopes of finally catching him. The lodger is also an image, with the difference that he’s an image self-consciously constructed to imitate the killer, based on the reports circulating about his appearance in the newspapers. One is the image of the prey, and the other is the image of the killer. She’s disguised when uncovered (since she’s not a real blonde), and he is disguised when covered (trying to imitate the killer’s looks). If obtaining and communicating information is the main goal of the characters (and the main challenge of the film), confirming the veracity of that information is the challenge for the same characters (and the viewers). Since images are the primary means through which the film communicates information to us, the issue becomes one of the reliability of images. Within the diegesis, ‘image’ acquires more and more importance. Daisy’s jealous boyfriend, who happens to be a detective, falsely deduces that the lodger is the killer. As he stares intently at a footprint left by his new romantic rival, his thought process is conveyed to us as a series of images passing through the portal opened by the footprint in the form of a supercut of the various clues from throughout the film that suggested the lodger is the killer – to the viewers and the jealous detective alike. While by implication, we understand this is meant to be a visualisation of what the detective is thinking, what we literally see is a man looking at a series of images, images that appear to incriminate another man in a murder. Again, the image lies, misleading us and the characters alike to accuse an innocent man. This point is made ever more effectively since we have also, thus far, shared the detective's assumptions about the lodger. The disguised appearances of the killer, the lodger, and Daisy; the incorrect indictment drawn from the images in the footprint hole; all are followed by the handcuffs clapped on the lodger that give him a new false appearance of a convicted criminal. Believing the false image of the lodger in cuffs, the crowd forms an angry mob to exact retributive, vigilante justice. Hitchcock himself appears in a cameo as a participant, sporting a particularly frustrated look after they are stopped from killing the innocent lodger at the last moment. <img width="1440" height="1080" width_o="1440" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/67de34fb2ab435ca069658a65702580182e57c25f7403a1feb9e0c59afacf692/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20230908_165928.365.jpg" data-mid="193353753" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/67de34fb2ab435ca069658a65702580182e57c25f7403a1feb9e0c59afacf692/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20230908_165928.365.jpg" /> <img width="1440" height="1080" width_o="1440" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a9a98590c7ebe977570da31d645cab73fc5dd0e624528e6b8182850c41fad1f0/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20230908_170024.657.jpg" data-mid="193353754" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a9a98590c7ebe977570da31d645cab73fc5dd0e624528e6b8182850c41fad1f0/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20230908_170024.657.jpg" /> The absence of audible language in The Lodger, similar to almost all silent films, leads to the use of written language as formal compensation. But The Lodger’s use of the written word is both quantitatively and qualitatively unique. In addition to the relative sparseness of the intertitles, instead of giving us concrete information about the plot or the characters’ state of mind, the words reveal, more broadly, aspects of the apparatus of the circulation of information and images. They aren’t simply words (as in a sound film), but images of words. Thus, they retain a potential for unreliability, like all the other images of the film. This is forcefully confirmed by the re-contextualization of a text introduced as a non-diegetic which turns out to be diegetic. The Lodger began with flashing words that seemed to be mysterious and stylized intertitles: ‘To-Night Golden Curls’, followed by the close-up of a screaming woman looking in terror offscreen left&nbsp; at the killer looming&nbsp; over her. The film ends with the image of a woman (Daisy) being embraced by a man (the lodger), as the camera slowly tracks towards them. From the window in the background, we see the familiar words ‘To-Night Golden Curls’, flashing from the neon sign of a London nightclub. The camera gets close enough to cut the lodger out of the frame. Daisy’s eyes pierce through the upper left side of the frame&nbsp; to an unidentified point beyond it, as she wears a peculiar smile. Rather than a feeling of relief and safety, the ending carries a vague sense of unease and perversity. After all, if the central thesis of the film (and arguably, the central paradigm of Hitchcock's oeuvre as a whole) has been the unreliability of images, why should we trust the happy outward appearance suggested by this final image? <img width="1440" height="1080" width_o="1440" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/657cf2fb0dd24c6fab8942e6341fd7377fe5de5683f7ecd7798cc4d1f3103bfe/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20230910_165317.845.jpg" data-mid="193353945" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/657cf2fb0dd24c6fab8942e6341fd7377fe5de5683f7ecd7798cc4d1f3103bfe/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20230910_165317.845.jpg" /> <img width="1022" height="770" width_o="1022" height_o="770" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/934cc3a7f32dda793b77d8e2781c17387a89443e3c158ad7f98307b2edc45a90/lodger.jpg" data-mid="192903180" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/934cc3a7f32dda793b77d8e2781c17387a89443e3c158ad7f98307b2edc45a90/lodger.jpg" /> <img width="1440" height="1080" width_o="1440" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/01331c9d138cc7ecc83f9397cdc461be31d316dc5189e26951fa0902b625ba47/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20230802_201111.411.jpg" data-mid="193353967" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/01331c9d138cc7ecc83f9397cdc461be31d316dc5189e26951fa0902b625ba47/The.Lodger.A.Story.of.the.London.Fog.1927.1080p.BluRay.x264-WiKi.mkv_20230802_201111.411.jpg" /> Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage https://outskirtsmag.com/Counter-Programming-a-Programme-Yet-to-Come Mon, 18 Sep 2023 08:10:14 +0000 Outskirts Film Magazine https://outskirtsmag.com/Counter-Programming-a-Programme-Yet-to-Come Counter-Programming a Programme Yet to Come Grappling with the Locarno Film Festival's Extensive Retrospective of Mexican Popular Cinema.Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage By Nathan Letoré <img width="1024" height="819" width_o="1024" height_o="819" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e3e607d0480b12f2bd05923c22288c9e4352c719cc56defdc7b0cb952c544bc3/pueblerina.jpg" data-mid="191077098" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e3e607d0480b12f2bd05923c22288c9e4352c719cc56defdc7b0cb952c544bc3/pueblerina.jpg" />Pueblerina (Emilio Fernández, 1949) As expected, the retrospective devoted to Mexican popular cinema at this year’s Locarno Film Festival was, like almost every year, one of the main highlights of the festival. ‘Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema’, curated by Olaf Möller, was ostentatiously conceived as a counter-history to most official histories of Mexican cinema, focusing on popular cinema in all its incarnations. This being Olaf Möller, of course, the term ‘popular’ was stretched in different and sometimes conflicting directions: few of the films belonged to the auteurist canon one discovers when digging into Mexican cinema for the first time, others were what one might call ‘cult’ objects, and others yet had once had meagre, one-week theatrical runs before slipping into oblivion. ‘Popular’, in this case, could diffract in many directions. A popular film can be a film that shows the lives of regular people; it can be a film that aims to reach these people; it can also be a film that draws a mass audience. But another, less immediately visible, axis tangentially cut through this: an image of Mexico's film industry, its bigger studios as well as its smaller ones, as a site of international exchange, of men and women making a film on their way to Hollywood or elsewhere, or coming back from it. This certainly applies to one of the few figures viewers not so familiar with Mexican cinema might already have heard of, Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández, and his equally famous cameraman Gabriel Figuoera. Trained in Hollywood and having co-directed a film with John Ford, Fernández, however much he might represent and even symbolise the canon Möller was trying to shake up, is an unavoidable figure. To speak of a canon is to speak relatively, of course. It is not the same to speak, in Europe, of discovering Indian cinema beyond Satyajit Ray. For one, almost all of Ray’s films are available on DVD. Discovering Mexican cinema beyond Emilio Fernández, when very few of Fernández's films are available in any form, is a different story. Only one of Fernandez’s films was shown in Locarno, and far from his most famous. Pueblerina (1949) was introduced as one of the major ‘small films’ of Fernández's cinema, and of Mexican cinema more generally. And, sure enough, it was one of the supreme masterworks of the retrospective – what in God’s name&nbsp; does a ‘major’ Fernández look like? – and was none the lesser for our expectation that it would be. Aurelio, having spent six years in jail after killing the man who raped his betrothed Paloma, is released for good conduct. He heads back home to make good on his wedding. Paloma (the ‘pueblerina’ of the title) initially refuses him, considering herself spoiled by the rape and the child it resulted in, and the land-owning González brothers of Aurelio’s victim tell him in no uncertain terms he is not welcome back. The introduction to the film stressed the hieratic postures of Fernandez’s cinema, tied to a certain mythology of the land and the peasantry inherited from the revolution. It is impossible to do without such a reading; Fernandez films his characters from below, monumentalising them either heroically or menacingly, and his close-ups are visions of lacerated souls yearning for each other or sizing one another up for the fights ahead. Music is omnipresent. In a central scene, Aurelio and Paloma tell the band to play on even though no one has turned up at their wedding. Though Aurelio is popular within the community, the Gonzalez family has issued a public threat: anyone helping Aurelio or being seen with him will be considered an enemy. The fiesta scene, staple of so many films in the retrospective, is here hollowed out, warped into a spectacle of desperate self-affirmation. Aurelio gets drunk and loud as the music swings back and forth between diegetic and melodramatic. Comparisons to John Ford are inevitable, and not only because of their joint directorial effort; Fernandez shares the same ability to capture a community's inner conflicts, to magnify classical tropes into heroic destinies that embody the community’s regeneration. Though he does not share Ford's easy-goingness or his ability to grant dignity to moments of quiet relaxation and the sharing of daily struggle, Fernández’s is similarly a monumental style, born of intensity and fateful decision-making: populist film- and myth-making of the highest order. Similarly attuned to social fault-lines and the moral codes of rural labour was Julio Bracho’s Take Me in Your Arms (Llévame en tus brazos, 1954).&nbsp; The film was one of two in the retrospective starring Ninón Sevilla, one of the most compelling star presences of any studio system anywhere during the classical era. She here plays Rita, a fisherman’s daughter in love with trade unionist José, who is busy leading a strike against local land-owner and factory boss Don António. Don António offers Pedro, Rita’s father, who is indebted to him, that he will write off his debt in exchange for Rita’s services as a maid (the next step is left unsaid but still clear to all participants). Pedro refuses but Rita, unwilling to let her father's fishing boat be taken away, leaves with Don António at dawn. Unflinching in her refusal of Don António, she despairs at ever obtaining José's forgiveness, and finally drunkenly and unwittingly succumbs to Don António's foreman Agustín. Given no choice now but to use sex as a weapon, Rita makes it to Mexico City where she starts dancing and is ‘kept’ by political heavyweight Don Gregorio, who, for his election campaign, must rely on the local trade unions. Naturally, José is the leader and spokesman of these unions. As is often the case in Mexico classical films, sex is a marker for morality as well as politics, a displacement onto the melodramatic female body of the boss’s power over the male worker. Bracho films Sevilla with gusto: low angles emphasising her vigour, her square jaw a mark of determination, her gaze burning through the frame with desire or defiance. Sevilla, as was mentioned in the introduction by Viviana García-Besné, spent her life in a relationship to the studio’s producer, whom she couldn't marry; his family disapproved at a union with a dancer and actress. She put up her own money to produce this film, an intervention which ultimately led to the break-up of the studio. Mapping this biography too closely onto the film is probably simplistic, but it certainly does illuminate a good deal, and it’s difficult to escape the sense that Sevilla is the key authorial personality behind the film (something which Bracho’s other films in the retrospective, as will be discussed below, seemingly confirmed). Here is a rare film in which exerting power upon a woman in sexual terms scars but does not degrade: Rita remains a fiercely proud agent of her own destiny, including when she breaks down crying in front of José, who is too tied up in class- and sex-based assumptions about her to believe her words. The film deftly navigates counterposed viewpoints, alternating not only between Rita's subjectivity and the way she is seen by others with startling ease, but also making clear the dialectic between other characters' perceptions of her and her own ability to shape the situation, something that is a stake in the narrative, an object of suspense. Take Me in Your Arms was doubtless one of the major revelations of the retrospective. The other film starring Sevilla, and using her in almost exactly the opposite way, was Alberto Gout’s 1951 Sensualidad. A sleazy tale of manipulation by a dancer sent to jail and hell-bent on seducing and precipitating the downfall of the judge who sent her there… that is, until she falls in love with his son. The film holds together mostly through its actors: Sevilla, of course, with her broad, rigid jaw used here to denote maximum vulgarity and ruthlessness, seems incapable of giving anything other than an energetic performance that would grant the full force of conviction to each of her character's intentions. And that’s despite the Manichean script she is given to work with, which makes her into a sacrificial victim of the film’s reaffirmation of upper-class morality, killing her precisely when she stops being dishonest. Less exuberant but just as impressive is Fernando Soler as the repressed judge: instead of letting his stern, paragon-of-virtue pokerface crumble, he lets it sag more and more as the film goes on, his moral rectitude decaying but the imperative of appearances never disappearing. <img width="1024" height="576" width_o="1024" height_o="576" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bc5e3f82c3d88edbe0cb7332c854bced4b70291de5355c1e04541dce29a6bfb7/espaldas-mojadas.jpg" data-mid="191077961" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bc5e3f82c3d88edbe0cb7332c854bced4b70291de5355c1e04541dce29a6bfb7/espaldas-mojadas.jpg" />Wetbacks (Alejandro Galindo, 1955) Social themes got a distinctly more academic, politically statist (and sometimes outright reactionary) treatment in two films by Alejandro Galindo. Wetbacks (Espaldas Mojadas, 1955) follows Rafael’s (David Silva) attempts to illegally cross the Rio Grande into the USA from Ciudad Juárez, and his disillusions with working conditions as an illegal alien once there. U.S. frontier authorities, invisible behind their glaring spotlights, are only barely more menacing than the human traffickers who thrive off the cheap, easily manipulated labour offered by migrants with no other choice. Friendship is offered to Rafael by a dandy hobo, who has managed to make it across the border legally but refuses to work, instead taking advantage of the superior American train system to hop around without ever indulging in the sin of labour. One aside about communism initially sounds fine enough with its promise of everyone being equal – that is, until one realises it means everyone working rather than everyone drinking champagne. That brief mention provides fair warning for Rafael and the audience not to draw undue political conclusions from his working experiences. In many ways a lesser but still evident example of the genius of the system, Wetbacks showcases an industry's ability to probe social quandaries within certain carefully circumscribed ideological parameters. Rafael's is a tale of personal re-affirmation; he finds love with an American-born Mexican, María Consuela (Martha Valdés), whom he convinces to travel back across the southern border. Once back in Mexico, he finally asserts his dampened manhood by beating up his former boss (Víctor Parra, also memorably seen in El Suavecito [1951]) and rolling him into the river, where he gets shot by the U.S. border guards who mistake him for one of the wetbacks he had long been slave-driving. After this triumph, Rafael grimly watches as his boss is shot dead. He stoically declares it solves nothing; everyone else cheers. A prime example of ideologically having your cake and eating it too. Far more haunting are the scenes of Rafael's work in the Arizona desert, and of the empty, despairing moments spent watching on as a convoy of prostitutes is brought in to distract the men. Close-ups ooze sweat and grime, heat drives everybody crazy, and a tracking shot that shows men sleeping under the train, alongside the tracks they have just laid, ties up togetherness and alienation, work and rest, makeshift joy and real despair in a single image. Galindo was, like Julio Bracho, one of the directors given several slots in the retrospective. In both cases the gap between the major work and then the minor was astonishing, opening up questions about the less satisfying aspects of a retrospective which, in its better moments, was very satisfying indeed. Bracho’s The Pharaoh’s Court (La corte de faraón, 1944) is a sex comedy based on a 1910 play in which a spirited and very sexy slave is to be married to an impotent general. Zaniness, the focus of Möller’s introduction, certainly is on full display. Talking of sexual innuendo would be to get the tone wrong: jokes are full-on bawdy, punctuated heavily by reactions to the camera. The rhythm is not so much frantic as panicked, rushed rather than speedy. Maybe I was too tired; I didn't laugh once. Galindo's The Mind and the Crime (La Mente y el crimen, 1964), at the other end of the spectrum, was an example of a film that, at the time of its release, sank without a trace, begging the question: what makes it ‘popular’? A hallucinatory hodge-podge of pseudo-scientific pronouncements about the criminal mind (of course tied to prostitution, sexual fragility and perversion, and the lower depths of society, and duly justified by shots of covers of the latest books by ‘world-renowned’ psychologists), Galindo’s film is a failure as a cinematic enquiry into crime, and only works in fragments—say, as a collection of bizarre but deeply striking mood shots. <img width="1400" height="1137" width_o="1400" height_o="1137" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9e42ee8ad8f88f42952369522aac3212b4f4d4c2ca21ec1e33d9b8248fa2e4a9/la-mente.jpg" data-mid="191077962" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9e42ee8ad8f88f42952369522aac3212b4f4d4c2ca21ec1e33d9b8248fa2e4a9/la-mente.jpg" /> There are quite a few possible explanations for such wide dissonances: a focus on lesser-known studio hands, of course, and the possibility of investigating which of the various genres these directors were capable of working in, and that studios were capable of producing. An attraction for the bizarre, for the eccentric, the unexpected. Probably, too, a willingness to discount traditional definitions of aesthetic value in order to find value in and reclaim seemingly unworthy objects. All of which are objectives which, theoretically, resonate or have resonated with me as a cinephile. Yet it was difficult, when faced with some of the actual films, to shrug off the feeling of frustration, a sense of missed opportunity at some of the pathways along which the retrospective embarked. This, of course, is probably tied to my own knowledge and preferences as a viewer, as well as my own itinerary as a cinephile. The retrospective's aim, as set out by Möller in his opening contribution to the festival’s public roundtable, was to eschew the twenty or so classics that ‘always get shown’. This makes perfect sense... if one has seen those twenty films (a safer assumption to make about, say, Japanese cinema than Mexican, at least in Europe). If not, one faces the conundrum outlined above with regards to, to restate the example, the non-availability of almost all of Emilio Fernández’s films on DVD or Blu-ray (which is not an end in itself, nor a perfect measure of mainstream awareness of a director, but a telling indicator nevertheless). This begs the question of just how ‘canonical’ these films are in a European context; making this retrospective feel at times like a counter-hegemonic proposition to a hegemonic position that has yet to be built.[1] One of the consequences of this curatorial choice, then, is to provide, if not a better picture of Mexican cinema than ‘the classics’, at least a more varied one, fuller in terms of genres and registers. The question of quality – or beauty, or aesthetic power, or whatever you want to call it: that inescapable bugbear of film criticism which one would, theoretically, intellectually, like to be rid of but which one can never quite shake off – as it lies at the heart of why we are cinephiles and not cultural studies scholars. In this perspective, it becomes incidental; the films are not selected simply for their ‘worth’ however defined, but for their ability to flesh out a picture of an object, Mexican cinema, evidently in need of fuller exploration in general. At this point, one clarification is necessary: my critique is not, though it might sound like it, an invitation to remain safely within the terrain of the ‘classics’. Rather it is a critique of the idea that moving beyond the classics would seem to imply sacrificing the criterion of quality. Take Me in Your Arms and Wetbacks were prime examples, and more will be discussed below once frustrations have been vented, of moving beyond ‘famous’ titles and providing aesthetically worthwhile discoveries – something not all, or most, titles could lay claim to. Is this a socio-historical view, in which the film has value based not on aesthetic value but on its sheer existence as a forgotten work? Not completely, of course: Möller is a famous iconoclast, constantly seeking reappraisal of what he considers established aesthetic judgments. But it is partly the idea nevertheless; Möller, in the roundtable, again expressed nostalgia for a time in which cinema was not divided into different target audiences, and how this nostalgia rests on the idea that cinema was, back then, a way of making sense of the world, or at a prism through with it could be approached. Understanding these films, today, becomes a way of understanding the world of the past. Fair enough, but I guess that what I look for in cinema, at this point in my cinephilia, is not a full understanding of the world but the construction of a gaze onto it. Put another way, I feel sympathy for the idea that seeing everything, making aesthetic quality an incidental concern, allows one to understand the world more fully, and the voracious completism the idea entails... but I also don't believe in it anymore. The idea belongs, maybe, more to academia, its encyclopaedic cultural studies departments, and their belief that understanding the history of aesthetics is equivalent to understanding social developments. This is an assumption that is only partly verified and which obfuscates as much as it illuminates. It’s also not cinephilia, or at least my version of it. Concern for finding beauty wherever it hides is not the same as declaring all maligned objects beautiful, nor is declaring any object worthy of exploration the same as declaring any object worthy of appreciation (and thus inclusion in a major retrospective of a relatively neglected national cinema). <img width="1925" height="1100" width_o="1925" height_o="1100" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1a4fc5e438796d1fab8a9516463a74518c6658c3165464a2ef9fad246f22bf7b/rey-del-barrio.jpg" data-mid="191077965" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1a4fc5e438796d1fab8a9516463a74518c6658c3165464a2ef9fad246f22bf7b/rey-del-barrio.jpg" /> The King of the Neighbourhood (Gilberto Martínez Solares, 1950)Lest the preceding few paragraphs be taken as a conservative defence of high art against the plebs, let me link back with a clearly popular film which succeeded where the two I mentioned above failed, and work through the differences. The King of the Neighbourhood (El rey del barrio) is a 1950 comedy by Gilberto Martínez Solares starring Tin-Tan (Germán Valdés), a hugely popular comic presence I had never heard of and now want to know much more about. Here, he plays a kind, loving, and generous railway worker who also postures as a tough gang leader to a bunch of hoodlums who somehow buy it... until they don't. In the meantime, he has fallen in love with the new neighbour, who needs money to take care of her ailing mother, leading Tin-Tan to try ever more desperate heists with his gang – which then fail because of his foibles and deficiencies as a gangster. The film is twice as long as it needs to be in terms of pure plot, giving the lie to (or, when some of the scenes fall flat, confirming) the necessity of comedy being even more tightly paced than suspense. The King of the Neighbourhood is conceived not so much as a linear unfolding as a collection of sketches, many of which work thanks purely to the winning charm of its performer, whose extravagance never veers into the hysteria of a Jerry Lewis but remains on the level of winsome petulance. Some of the set pieces, notably Tin-Tan's overly eager attempts at burglary, are sublime. In one particular case, he poses as an Italian singing teacher, his every answer both a satirical characterisation of the&nbsp; persona he is parodying and a concrete way of getting out of having to sing himself. When his rich student, played by Famie ‘Vitola’ Kaufman, finally does start singing, Tin-Tan joins in with the histrionics, his antics both a parody of classical opera and a musically convincing and rhythmically fitting counterpoint to the main tune. Like Jerry Lewis acting out a CEO to the sound of a trumpet solo, this is hilarious because, beyond the successful parody, it works as music. Santo vs. the Vampire Women (Santo vs. las mujeres vampiro, 1962) is something else. The film belongs to an era of cheapies made to tap into a newly emerging market. A coven of vampire women awakens from under a centuries-old curse. Their aim? To sacrifice a young woman, descendant of the one who sacrificed herself to keep them locked under the curse. Alfonso Corona Blake, the director, seems to have no evident concern for pacing whatsoever: the opening scene is fifteen minutes of vampirical exposition, creating its own temporality divorced from suspense. Santo is only introduced half an hour into the film, in one of two sequences (only the second one of which is related to the plot) that show him in the wrestling ring. He only intervenes twice in the plot, and in the second case, the climactic confrontation, he is immediately captured and rendered powerless by the evil vampires; his contribution is rather to distract them, in his incompetence, from the approaching dawn, which is what will ultimately foil their schemes. A far cry from both conventional heroism and conventional suspense then; Blake is seemingly more interested in the processes at play before his camera (vampiric rituals, the logistics of kidnapping, the physical truth of wrestling as spectacle, both in the ring and outside it) than in its ultimate narrative finality. Hard to call it major cinema, but just as difficult to deny that it doesn’t, on a scene to scene basis, have its own compelling power. <img width="1024" height="576" width_o="1024" height_o="576" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/999b6eb995db870598bf301fc088ab836ee5cd7523c0a18a65dd14afb2780a3e/el-caso.jpg" data-mid="191077966" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/999b6eb995db870598bf301fc088ab836ee5cd7523c0a18a65dd14afb2780a3e/el-caso.jpg" /> The Case of the Wee Murdered Woman (Tito Davison, 1955) If my impatience with what quite often felt like strained originality or contrarianism is one of the threads of this text about Locarno’s retrospective of Mexican popular cinema, it's only fair to finish with an example of these very same objectives done right. Tito Davison's The Case of the Wee Murdered Woman (El caso de la mujer asesinadita, 1955) was introduced by Olaf Möller as a fever dream, unlike anything else we will have seen. Though there is the usual element of hyperbole to this statement, I can happily report that it holds. One can find elements of comparison, of course: the fervent love-beyond-death romanticism of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) or Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), and, at the other end of the spectrum, the nonsense-as-freedom-comedy of some memorable secondary characters in Capra or Lubitsch, as well as the double-crossings of Wilder's. The mixture of it all is Davison's own. The plot: Mercedes lives with her husband Lorenzo and her three in-house servants. One night, after falling asleep on the couch, she is woken up by a couple escaping the storm, who are shocked to find her asleep in what they pretend to be their house; they insist that they bought after the previous owner's wife was murdered. Accompanying them is a man pretending to be a Sioux Indian, whose portentous declaration about the great plains becomes a running gag throughout. The dream-like fusion of factual absurdity with matter-of-fact logic in its organisation is vindicated when it does, after all, turn out to be a dream. But over the next few days, Lorenzo brings back both an attractive new secretary who is none other than the woman in the invading couple, and an American business partner, Norton, who has the physical traits of the Sioux Indian. As Mercedes grows closer to Norton, he in turn reveals having had a dream which announced his own death in a car accident, and hers by poisoning. If Mercedes and Norton grow closer by successive touches in which the tragically romantic element grows gradually more pronounced, Lorenzo and his secretary Raquel belong, despite the clear murderous direction the plot takes[2], to a quasi-slapstick tone of bumbling sexual attraction. The mixture of tones the film achieves is astonishing: dreams are stumbled into without any of the classical fade-ins or effects, absurdity is quietly accepted, suspicions of murderous intentions give way not to suspense but to hilarious exchanges of teacups... Call it Peter Ibbetson (1935) meets screwball. If any film of the retrospective was able to show a national industry's willingness to go ostentatiously but deeply wild, to follow impulses through all their contradictory alchemy, to let working professionals use existing tropes to create truly original combinations, this was it. [1] &nbsp; Of course, this argument is tied to me being a European viewer attending a European festival, and a non-specialist in Latin American cinema generally. I can well imagine the liberating, or at the very least intriguingly expansive, effect that such a retrospective would have and is having in Mexico, according to many of the participants at the roundtable. [2] &nbsp; Interestingly, The Case of the Wee Murdered Woman was, with the rhythmically off but superbly shot and moody The Witch’s Mirror (El espejo de la bruja, 1962), one of two films in the competition making good Hitchcock's initially planned ending to Suspicion (1941): a wife knowingly drinks a glass of milk poisoned by her husband. Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage https://outskirtsmag.com/Menus-Plaisirs Thu, 07 Sep 2023 10:02:55 +0000 Outskirts Film Magazine https://outskirtsmag.com/Menus-Plaisirs Frederick Wiseman’s Little Pleasures Venice Review: Frederick Wiseman’s Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (2023)Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage By Christopher Small <img width="2560" height="1619" width_o="2560" height_o="1619" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4a2bdec27a75f1ee8bb2f45028990089cbbbdd1e70a49fe901e897c7015b2c91/menus-plaisirsfeatured-scaled.jpg" data-mid="190033078" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4a2bdec27a75f1ee8bb2f45028990089cbbbdd1e70a49fe901e897c7015b2c91/menus-plaisirsfeatured-scaled.jpg" />Menus Plaisirs - Les Troisgros&nbsp;(Frederick Wiseman, 2023) Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, about a three Michelin-star restaurant in the south of France, is Frederick Wiseman’s 47th film. He has produced singular works of non-fiction—until 2007 mostly for public television—steadfastly since 1967, when he was 38 (he’s now almost 94). Then the movies were considerably shorter; since the early ‘90s, his films have ballooned in length. For the first two decades of his career, his runtimes averaged anywhere from 85 to 130 minutes. After Near Death (1989), a six-hour portrait of the doctors and patients in an intensive care ward at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, they became consistently longer. Menus Plaisirs, which is exactly four hours, comes a close fifth place, length-wise, at the top of his filmography. At the Venice premiere last week, Wiseman, who is well-known for his vigorous energy and punishing shooting and editing schedule, walked with a cane and, in speaking about the new film, wavered uncertainly a little over his responses. I couldn’t help but wonder whether he still personally wields the boom pole and microphone during production, as he has for all previous films up until recently.Among other things, the epic length of Wiseman’s documentaries assure our total absorption in the intricacies of the institutions he takes as his subjects. He is driven by a genuine and unflappable curiosity about all aspects of a place: committee meetings, janitor routes, tours, helpline desks, budget negotiations, and so on. Menus Plaisirs is no exception. We see the meticulous work of the chefs in the kitchen, the wealthy customers eating out front, the farmers who raise the livestock in adjacent farms, the curing of a breathtaking number of cheeses at a local dairy, the sourcing of local vegetables and herbs from vendors in the nearby region, the conscientious and thoughtful construction of a menu not only at the main restaurant but also at others belonging to the Troisgros family. This overplenty of procedural detail means that, blissfully, the film only truly begins to flower in one’s mind once its four hours are over. As ever, Wiseman, in structuring the film, simulates the passing of one day to another, with para-fictional structures woven out of the reams of material gathered during the shooting. Part of the pleasure of his films is the way we are always conscious of the way he is, as an editor, regulating our attention. He builds, say, from an intense discussion about grapes and all the microscopic flavours that can influence them from one season to the next to procedural work in the kitchen (chopping and preparing ingredients, for example) and then on to the second half of the work day, during which light slowly turns to dark and the restaurant grows populated again. Wiseman is building a framework for us to understand his play with time, the expansion and contraction of it from one sequence to the next. There is a stupefying amount of work and professional expertise at play in Menus Plaisirs. What sets it apart from Wiseman’s recent films is that those movies, even and especially when they were about cultural institutions, depicted the work of bureaucracies of one kind or another, whether in the organisation of a city, a rural town, a district in Queens, or a major museum, library, or university. There, Wiseman often seemed to be suggesting that bureaucratic structures, for all their tedium, complexity, and even violence, are essential to the operations of a free society. In Menus Plaisirs, we see relatively little of the specific bureaucratic organisation of the restaurant and the hotel that make up La Maison Troisgros. Glimpses of these procedures are limited, perhaps necessarily by the requirements of shooting in a prominent private business, to a few general discussions about budgets and costs, a couple of shots of the receptionist taking calls inquiring about bookings at the hotel, and a sequence or two with Marie-Pierre Troisgros, who handles the administration of the place. Far more space is given over the work of creation on the part of the chefs: the intricacies involved in preparing these dishes, the supporting work from a galaxy of kitchen staff, the requirements of storage, packaging, wrapping, preparing, slicing, dishing up, and so on. Outside, the dishes are served to those who can afford it: wealthy customers and their families. In one discussion, we hear about a customer’s reservation of a 15,000€ bottle of wine for later in the season. We see laughable posturing on the part of some American businessmen who are evidently trying to impress the expert head waiter serving them a variety of local wines. We see a sleek helicopter touching down on a makeshift helipad in the garden of the restaurant without ever seeing who was travelling in it. Wiseman’s unblinking camera never acknowledges the fundamental tension at play here, between the meticulous, artistic craftsmanship behind the walls of the kitchen, the performance-like precision of the waiting staff, and then the extraordinary class privilege of the diners, but it was impossible, at least for me, not to feel his ironic gaze bearing down on these people, as well as, speaking for myself, a healthy amount of class hatred at seeing so much effort, such an Olympian amount of work, preservation, and preparation, go into dishing up a series of evening meals for the French bourgeoisie. Michel Troisgros, the head chef and co-owner, with his wife, of La Maison Troisgros, is the mediator between these two worlds. He shapes the smallest of behaviours of the front-of-house staff and guides their collective approach to the customers, but he also works with great focus in the kitchen, obsessing over the tiniest position of a raspberry on a desert plate or gently scolding a sous-chef about the right time to drain an animal brain of blood, and then, moments later, is out schmoozing expertly with the customers, repeating well-worn anecdotes and flattering their banal insights into the food and the region. As is often the case with Wiseman’s recent films, and particularly with those that carry the name of even more internationally renowned institutions in their titles, he has an evident respect for the powerful figure who has granted him access to this world—in this case, Michel Troisgros. Invariably, he sees these people as figures of identification, in this film as much as with the administrators and politicians who run places like the National Gallery in London or the Boston City Hall, two institutions at least nominally committed to the public good. These are men and women who are fluent in the work of institutional diplomacy and management, and they are also often the ones who granted him, in a friendly way, permission to shoot in these locations. In the case of Marty Walsh, who was Boston Mayor at the time Wiseman shot City Hall in 2020 (he later became Biden’s Secretary of Labor), the drive on his part to resolve political conflicts and fight the good fights is undeniable, though Wiseman is also able to show the limits of that work; in other cases, the muddling-through attitude of cloistered leadership figures for whom Wiseman has an apparent affection is less flattering. This is not to say that his style has been totally subsumed by this proximity to influential institutional figures—partly because it is, in its essence, expansive and multifarious and partly because charismatic figures had always asserted themselves at different times in his work—but centering the managerial influence and charismatic power of deans, head chefs, supermanagers, financial directors in this way does, in my view, weaken his overall institutional project. Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros is primarily a film about improvisation and performance, about straddling the line between a world of process and creative discipline and another of extraordinary wealth and abundance. Wiseman has depicted the horrors of poverty and wealth with equal shrewdness in a variety of situations and institutions throughout his career, but in Menus Plaisirs this structure, moving from kitchen to restaurant, struck me as a comment on the production of art itself: that cultural production is doomed not only to ephemerality (of which cooking, like theatre, is the prime example) but also to isolation from other, less specialised strata of society. The final conversation we hear in the film, indeed, underlines this idea. A customer asks Michel Troisgros why they moved the restaurant from the centre of a nearby town to the seclusion of the countryside. For Michel, the answer is self-evident: they wanted to get away from the noise, the scooters, the traffic, the interruptions of normal life. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall windows ubiquitous in La Maison Troisgros, now, there is only wide-open countryside: trees, cows, vineyards, rolling hills. Wiseman, who built a career making films on public television, seems to be suggesting that the intense perfectionism involved in spending countless hours stitching together massive, intricate works of art perhaps dooms these same works, primarily at least, to being consumed by audiences of the privileged. And yet, in the same breath, he also suggests that, for the sake of the work itself, it is worth doing anyway. Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage https://outskirtsmag.com/A-Lion-in-the-Land-of-the-Soviets Thu, 27 Jul 2023 14:59:39 +0000 Outskirts Film Magazine https://outskirtsmag.com/A-Lion-in-the-Land-of-the-Soviets A Lion in the Land of the Soviets A Lion in the Land of the Soviets By Miriam MartínOutskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage Translated by Lucía Salas <img width="837" height="1135" width_o="837" height_o="1135" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a57751b2b2296c667867bb3c781a458922907bb29e44d444232198d0d5266d31/146228.jpg" data-mid="186348187" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/837/i/a57751b2b2296c667867bb3c781a458922907bb29e44d444232198d0d5266d31/146228.jpg" />The Enchanted Desna (Zacharovannya Desna, 1964) The boy Aleksandr sees forms in what is alive. In the bark of oaks and willows he sees men, horses, wolves, snakes, saints. He sees battles in the clouds between giants and prophets. All is ambiguous, in all there is a double life, all calls for comparison. The child detects in things the inclination to other things, the dream of other things. He sees in his peasant father a model to draw knights, gods, apostles, scientists, in spite of his wretched clothes; an ancient statue covered with rags. He hears two horses, abused by this father, say acutely that every time he raises the whip against them he is, in reality, punishing ‘his own misfortune’. But the proletarian horses do not only recognise those who resemble them. He also hears them talk about the time when they had beauty, that is, when they did not work. Of the time when they still had wings. The boy Aleksandr is an adult who can still be a boy because he is an artist. Not a professional artist, let’s be clear, but an artist like Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who painted, who wrote, who made films, an athlete of sensibility and the only one of the usual great Soviet filmmakers who was born poor. In 1928 he married Yuliya Solntseva and in 1964, eight years after his death, she filmed The Enchanted Desna from his childhood memories. Mosfilm paid for the film and the phrases written in Ukrainian were translated into Russian (not all of them: if someone sings, they sing in Ukrainian). So, Dovzhenko’s childhood memories are not filmed by him, because he dies, they are filmed by Solntseva, because she loved him, and they are filmed in Russian because Mosfilm pays, except for the songs, considered perhaps untranslatable and free from any ecumenical function. The film is made of disidentifications. The adult-artist-boy Aleksandr-Oleksandr moves in time and space. We see him in uniform in what was supposed to be ‘the last war of mankind’, fighting in retreat with a group of soldiers, crossing the Desna River with the help of the civilians he leaves behind. And he does not come out unscathed from their reproaches, he listens with an attention that causes him sadness and shame and yet he listens, he thinks of the Styx, the enemy fire lightens the transit between two worlds, Aleksandr notices that something new has ignited inside him. Communism is, above all, a matter of perception. And the artist bitten by communism comes here and there, does this and that, participates and observes his participation, does not neglect any possibility. From the trenches, he interrupts another night adventure on the river – his father takes him in a canoe, he is six years old again, asks the shooting star to fall and she falls, the fish to splash and it splashes – because a lion suddenly appears. In Ukraine. He imagines the lion and then a conversation with his inner editors, who ask him for verisimilitude, programmatic realism, not the dry realism of class-conscious horses. But why couldn’t he write ‘as a boy of the Desna, who wanted lions to roam everywhere in real life’? The film grants, amplifies this wish. In borrowed words: When I was little, the grass was taller than me and was full of sky. Where is the grass’ sky, that zenith within reach? The cloud has risen to a devilish height. Yuliya Solntseva lowers for us the unreachable cloud, so we can feel the children’s feeling or even make our feelings child-like. Childhood happens out in the open, away from home, away from home. Running in fast motion through the sunflowers, shaking the apple trees in slow motion, hurtling downhill! The desire to put it all in your mouth. The secret corner where to go die when we misbehaved and were sent to hell, and we did not separate the words from what they give a name to, credulous, drunk with literarity, which is the greatest fantasy. Hell red, poppy red, sun red, the scythe’s ris-ras. Although the voice-over alternates verbs in the past tense, it is impossible to write off something that is offered to us with such concreteness. It is time regained. In the end, the Desna is dammed. It progresses. Explosions and cement. The bulldozers devour the earth choreographically, the cranes dance. The workers throw sparkles, hanging from metal structures, like tumblers. There we find Aleksandr, naturally. And where is he going? He goes to a flood, half a century before. And it’s a party. What film that is for the construction of dams – favourable in its forms, where appropriate – would show you the everlasting spring floods as we dreamed of them as children? A different, better world, Venice. Entire families plus animals on straw roofs, children in trees and, along the now sailable streets, Aleksandr and his father coming to the rescue in a canoe. In the son’s eyes, the father splits into two once again: a Vasco da Gama who, lacking oceans, sank his ships in taverns. It is Easter and the priest, in charge of blessing the paska bread from roof to roof, has the deference to fall into the water and provoke a general burst of laughter. The adult-artist-boy says that those who did not live in harmony with the forces of nature, who did not freeze in winter, got soaked in spring, burned in summer and got muddy in autumn, do not know the joy of living. In his head, dialectically, there is room for what does not fit in the heads of the engineers. He bids us farewell, wishing us ‘power and clarity of spirit to appreciate ordinary beauty’. Was there ever communism in the Soviet Union? We do not know. But there were, of course, communists. <img width="2036" height="1369" width_o="2036" height_o="1369" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/686481bb845ce4809bd02a3bb011135cc12d0baf835da8f4fdf31cb28fa04acc/Comunistas.jpeg" data-mid="186253134" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/686481bb845ce4809bd02a3bb011135cc12d0baf835da8f4fdf31cb28fa04acc/Comunistas.jpeg" /> This text was originally published in Outskirts Nº1 - August 2022 Outskirts Online / Get the Print Issue / Back to Homepage