258 - l'Argent (Money), 1983, France. Dir. Robert Bresson.

Friday, September 15, 2017

258 - l'Argent (Money), 1983, France.  Dir. Robert Bresson.

Once upon a time there was a counterfeit.  A counterfeit French note, that is.  A fake franc.  A fake 500 francs.

And boy, did it cause trouble.

From a boy's first effort to pass it off into circulation to the arrest of an innocent man to a botched armed bank robbery to prison to a ruined marriage to the death of a child to an attempted suicide to serial capital murder.

Maybe we should stick with real money.

Leo Tolstoy wrote a novella in 1904, which he published in 1910, entitled The Forged Coupon.

Robert Bresson, who had already adapted a few Dostoevsky stories, adapted the first half of Tolstoy's story for this film.

Bresson said that he turned to Russian authors because they were among the best at telling the truth.

All Norbert was trying to do was borrow some money to pay off a friend at school.  Neither his father nor his mother would give him the money.  Good.  Earn it.  But no.  He does not earn it.  He goes to borrow it from his friend.  His friend produces the counterfeit and insists they go try it.  Norbert gives in.

They pass it off at a frame store.

What do the owners of the store do when they detect it?  Especially when they realize it is the third one in a week?  They pass it on, of course.

To Yvon.  An innocent man who works at a gas company.  He is caught when he tries to pay his restaurant tab.  He asserts that he got it from the frame store.  The authorities take him to the frame store to check his story.  The owners of the frame store deny it.  This begins the downward spiral of Yvon's life--as expressed in bleak and fatalistic terms.

Bresson was a different kind of filmmaker.

He aspired to using cinema to explore the interiors of the soul.  And the presence of God in nature.

He gave equal emphasis to sight and sound.  While the visual showed the outer world, the aural had the capacity to show the inner world.  Thus, he put a lot of care into his foley, dialogue, and scoring work, with all sounds added in post.

Where Ingmar Bergman was the filmmaker of the face, Robert Bresson was the filmmaker of hands and feet.

And doorways and doorknobs.

He saw portals as openings into drama.  Many moments happen in a doorway.  Opening.  Closing. Encountering.  Passing through.  Symbolic and literal.

He also elided what others might identify as the big moments--such as the bank robbery or the murders--and cut from one unusual angle to another, with only sound as the signifier of the action.

His passion, however, did lead to dogmatism.

He stated emphatically at Cannes that movies should not entertain.

He wanted all cinema to be art, suggesting that art cannot be entertaining and that entertainment cannot be artistic.

The history of cinema itself contradicts that assertion.

His demands about filmmaking and money dampened his own productivity.  He had tried, for example, to make this film, l'Argent, for four years before he could procure the funds to proceed.

And he insisted on using non-actors in his roles, casting people who had never acted before and further demanding of them that they never act again.  Fortunately, some of his non-actors ignored his demands and went on to become successful actors.

The characters in Bresson movies are often stiff, absent, and unable to express authentic human emotion convincingly.  Yet because it was his aesthetic choice, it developed into an artistic style. Critics were sometimes drawn to it because it felt different and because they could project whatever emotion they wanted onto the blank canvas of the static and emotionless person standing before them.

The Criterion disc fails to provide a commentary, as many do; however, it contains an excellent video essay by Bresson expert James Quandt, as well as an uncomfortable press conference with Bresson and his players at Cannes.

257 - Stalker, 1979, Soviet Union. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky.

Thursday, September 13, 2017

257 - Stalker, 1979, Soviet Union.  Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky.

The term stalker traditionally refers to a hunter, trapper, falconer, or fisherman.  One who uses stealth in the search for quarry or prey.

If one stands uprightly, like a plant stalk, then one might blend in with the environment and not be seen.

Because one might stealthily pursue a person as well as an animal, the word has deteriorated in common parlance into a term for harassment.

This is not a movie about someone who harasses people.

It is a movie about a professional wilderness guide, an explorer, like a Sherpa.

Tarkovsky is also said to have been influenced by the popular series of Rudyard Kipling stories known collectively as Stalky & Co.

For two hours and forty minutes Stalker will guide two men, the Writer and the Professor, through the Zone to get to the Room.

The Zone is a mysterious place in nature where strange things may happen.  It can be dangerous, and one must respect it.  Stalker refers to it as "a maze of traps."

The Room is a place where one gets what one desires.

The challenge is that one gets what one really desires, deep down, rather than what one thinks he desires.

Thus, the mysterious outcome of the previous stalker, a man named Porcupine, still looms largely in the air over their heads.

Porcupine had led his brother into the Zone.  His brother died.  When he got to the Room, Porcupine got rich.  Then he committed suicide.

Why?

Ostensibly, Porcupine wanted his brother's life back, but the Room knew that deep down he wanted money more than his brother, so the Room supplied it.  The conscious awareness of this fact drove Porcupine to his own despair.

In the Room the fulfillment of desire brings suffering with it.

Stalker wends his way through the Zone by tossing metal nuts with cloths tied to them.  By doing so, he can test the force fields and discover invisible paths for the men to take.

Unfortunately, his headstrong companions do not understand the need for respecting the Zone as Stalker does.  One of them tries to walk ahead.  The other grows obsessed with going back for his rucksack.  They keep Stalker's hands full in his responsibility to keep them safe.

The film begins, in the real world, in sepia tone monochrome.  Only when they get to the Zone do we revert to color.

Stalker gives its characters and its landscapes time and space to breathe.  To seek.  To find.

And the film, like nature, emerges through slow and steady growth through the artifacts of human ruin.

256 - Fox and His Friends, 1975, Germany. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

256 - Fox and His Friends, 1975, Germany.  Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Everybody loves you when you're rich.

Fox!  The Speaking Head!

Fox is not rich.  Fox is a carnival actor.  A travelling side show.  A freak for hire.

Fox is not a freak in real life, but he plays one on the stage.

The Speaking Head!

But today, just as they are about to begin the show, as Klaus, the carnival barker, the owner-operator, is calling to people to Step Right Up, two policemen visit him on stage.

And they are not coming to see the peep show.

They are coming to arrest Klaus.  For tax evasion.

Fox is out of a job.  Fox is his nickname.  His real name is Franz.  Franz Bieberkopf.

No worries.  He will win the lottery.  He plays the lottery every week.  He is bound to win.  If he lives long enough.

Fox needs his lottery fix so badly he says he is going to die if the ticket office closes before he makes his purchase.

But what do you do when you lose your job and have no cash?

Fox knows exactly what to do.  Become a street walker.

Fox is picked up by a man named Max.  Fox calls him Uncle Max as a joke, and he says his name really is Max.  Good guess, Fox.

He asks Max to take him to the ticket office.  Hurry!  Before they close.  Max refuses to lend him ten marks though.

No worries.  Fox can con a florist.

They stop at the florist.  Fox goes in.  The florist looks him over.  Fox says he wants two dozen flowers for his sister--a dozen crimson, a dozen white.  The florist is pleased.

Fox leaves the florist with ten marks and no flowers.  He has conned the florist.  He makes it to the ticket office just as she is closing.  At first she refuses him.  He is late.  But Max uses his wiles to talk her into selling Fox a ticket.

Good thing too.

Because Fox really does win the lottery.  This time.  500,000 marks.

According to my quick and crude internet search, one German mark in 1975 equalled 2.48 U.S. dollars.  So 500,000 marks was $201,613.  Likewise, $201,613 in 1975 is worth $947,256.04, using the Consumer Price Index, in July, 2017, the latest month available on the site I used.

So Fox has won around a million dollars.

Fox is a working man.  A carnival worker.  Uneducated.  Without cultivation.  Uncultured.  And hardly able to read.

His new friends are upper-class.  And cultured.  They act and speak circles around him.

He embarrasses them.

Yet the moment he is into money, they know exactly how to play him.

Eugen takes him home.  Fox falls in love with Eugen.

Philip discovers it and is angry with Eugen--until Eugen tells Philip what he is doing.

Max talks Fox into investing into Eugen's company.  100,000 marks.

Eugene talks Fox into buying their own apartment and filling it with lavish furniture.  80,000 marks.

They buy clothes at Philip's clothing store.

He will give Klaus 30,000 marks when Klaus gets out of jail.

And the list goes on and on.

He will pay for everything.

Until he has nothing.

Until Eugen and Philip and Max and the others can enjoy all the money he won.

And all the money he gives them.

Fox was pure.

And for a time Fox was happy.

Are you happy?

Happy?  What's that?

It's when you're together with someone you can talk to.

Fox was happy because he had someone to talk to.  Someone to love.  Someone he thought loved him.

But they took him for all he was worth.

Until even in his death two boys strip his pockets bare.

As he lies alone on the dirty subway floor.

255 - The Double Life of Veronique, 1991, Poland. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

255 - The Double Life of Veronique, 1991, Poland.  Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

I have a strange feeling.  Like I'm not alone.  Like I'm not alone in the world.

So says Weronika.

She is right.

She is not alone in the world.

She has a doppelganger.  A double.

Weronika lives in Poland.  She is a soprano.  She has a heart condition.

Veronique lives in France.  She is a music teacher.

The one girl, as a little girl, looks through a glass globe at Christmastime.

The other girl, as a little girl, looks through a magnifying glass at Christmastime.

She and she and we will look through many glass globes, prisms, windows, magnifying glasses, eyeglasses, camera lenses, and filters throughout the film.

Reflections create doubles.

Weronika sings in the rain.  The other members of the choir run from the rain.  Weronika stands her ground.  She finishes the final note.  The rain cascades down her cheeks like tears.

After the concert she joins the other girls as they run through the rain, looking for cover.

She makes love with her boyfriend.  Her fingers run through the fringes of the cover.  We will see fingers and fringes, and specifically a shoelace, throughout the film.

Weronika travels to Krakow.  On the train.  The glass pane on the train refracts light, compresses and expands images of the countryside.  Weronika watches through a glass globe, like the one she held as a child at Christmastime, and the buildings of the landscape pass her eye upside down.

The choirmaster rehearses the choir.  See how she trains them.  Weronika watches.  Weronika joins in.  The choirmaster hears it.  She likes it.  She offers her to audition.

Weronika leaves happily.  She bounces her ball.  It hits the ceiling.  A gold dust drops like flakes on her face, as the rain formed tears as she was singing before.

She walks outside.  Past a political protest.  We are in Poland near the fall of Communism.

A woman boards a bus.  A Frenchwoman.  A French tourist.  Taking pictures.  She too wears a red sweater and a black coat and red gloves.  Weronika watches her.

At this moment Weronika is watching Veronique.  She holds her gaze.

Veronique takes pictures.  We will see the proof sheet later in the film, and we will see that Veronique captured Weronika, and that she too was watching.  Taking note.  Observing her own double.

Weronika attends the audition.  She sings.  She twists a string through her fingers as she sings.

She walks through the leaves.  She falls in the leaves.  Her heart is struggling.  She is ill.

She sits on a park bench.  She grips her heart.  She feels pain.  The camera tilts at a forty-five degree angle.  The Polish cinematographer makes a Dutch angle.  A man walks by.  He opens and closes his coat.  She smiles.  Life can be absurd.

Weronika stands on stage.  She learns she has won the role.  The soloist.  She will sing solo in the concert.  A woman sits in the seats in a black hat.  She is not happy.

Weronika rides on the trolley tram.  She looks through the glass out the back window.  Her image refracts.  Her boyfriend follows on his motorbike.  She gets off.  They talk.  She apologizes for not calling.  She is young and free and pursuing a career.  They depart.  She turns and chases him.  Give me a ride home.  He takes her home.  I'll call.

Weronika sings the solo.  Another woman joins her.  The duet.  The double.

She grips her heart.  She sings.  The world grows wobbly before her.  She sings.  She works through the pain.  She hits the high note. She falls.  She dies.

Kieslowski suggested this character earlier in Dekalog: Nine, when the surgeon Roman had a patient named Ola, who was going to have surgery on her heart so that she could sing.

The choir is singing and the orchestra is playing the music of the great 18th-century Dutch composer Van den Budenmeyer.  The same composer whose work Ola sang in Dekalog: Nine.  Van den Budenmeyer's work was also used for the musical score of Three Colors: Blue, where Juliette Binoche is a composer who helps finish her deceased husband's final composition.

Kieslowski used the musical compositions of Van den Budenmeyer without obtaining the rights and paying royalties.  Therefore, he received a letter demanding payment, or else a lawsuit was to follow.

The only catch was that Van den Budenmeyer never existed.

The score of this film was composed by Kieslowski's colleague Zbigniew Preisner.

Preisner composed the music for Dekalog, Three Colors: Blue (Song for the Unification of Europe, 1 Corinthians 13), Three Colors: Red, and The Double Life of Veronique.  In all the films, the music is attributed to the fictional character Van den Budenmeyer.

Kieslowski and Preisner share a good sense of humor.

After Weronika dies, we take up with the life of Veronique, and we follow her journey and her experiences.

Veronique makes love with her boyfriend.  Through a shimmering and refracting glass.  She turns on a lamp with a green globe.  Golden light falls upon them.  She feels sad.  She feels as if someone has just died.  As if she has just lost someone.  Her boyfriend offers to stay but she says no.  He leaves. She cries.

Veronique is an elementary school music teacher.  She too has a heart condition.  She meets a man at a school assembly, a puppeteer performing a puppet show.  Afterwards she watches out the window as he packs his van and leaves.  He looks up at her.

At a traffic light she tries to light a cigarette.  She inserts it in her mouth backwards.  He sits in his van next to her.  He gets her attention.  She looks up.  He points to the cigarette.  It is in backwards. She reverses it.  She laughs.  The light turns green and they go their separate ways, each taking a different fork.

Veronique answers the phone.  No one speaks.  She speaks to the silence.

In a red glass the image of the Polish Weronika sings her solo just before collapsing.  Does Veronique see it?  Does she hear it?

She goes to her father's house.

The puppeteer is Alexandre Fabbri.  He makes puppets in doubles.  Because he is hard on them and needs a back-up in case one breaks during a show.

He also writes children's books.  He wants to write an adult book.  About a woman who has a double. But they never know each other.

Alexandre and Veronique will discover this mystery together.

She will show him the pictures she took when visiting Poland.  The picture with Weronika in it, standing, wearing similar clothing, looking the same.  Alexandre thinks it is a picture of Veronique but she explains to him that she is the one who took the picture.  The picture is of a stranger.  And yet not.

It is her double.

She cries.

"All my life I've felt like I was here and somewhere else at the same time."

254 - Dekalog: Ten, 1990, Poland. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Monday, September 11, 2017

254 - Dekalog: Ten, 1990, Poland.  Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Exodus 20:17 - Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house. . . .

Deuteronomy 5:21 - Neither shalt thou covet thy neighbor's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbor's.

Artur plays in a metal band.  City Death.

Jerzy is his brother.

Their father has died.  Their father, Czeslaw Root Janicki.

We saw him two movies ago.  In Dekalog: Eight.  He was the neighbor of the older woman who taught ethics classes.  Zofia.  He showed her his recent acquisition of stamps depicting the 1931 German flight of three zeppelins over the North Pole.  The Polarfarht.

Now he is dead, and the two brothers attend his funeral and begin the process of going through his belongings.

His apartment had tremendous security.

In going through it they discover his stamp collection.

It turns out to be mighty.

When Artur takes a few to a stamp convention, the man manning the booth goes and gets the president of the organization.  The president in turn goes home with them.  It is he who alerts them to the fortune they have in their possession.

When they first acquire the stamps, Artur gives the three zeppelins to Jerzy's son, who in turn trades them to a young man on the street.

In tracking down the young man and a string of street sales, Jerzy finally meets a stamp salesman who may be his own only connection into that world.

But he may also be crooked.

And he may also have opened a Pandora's box of problems for the two brothers.

The brothers are about to go on a journey together.  And they will have their brotherhood tested along the way.  Will it survive?  What will come of them?

The brothers are played joyfully by veterans Jerzy Stuhr and Zbigniew Zamachowski--both of whom will appear a few years later in Three Colors: White (1994).

This film is a fitting close to the Dekalog series.

253 - Dekalog: Nine, 1990, Poland. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

253 - Dekalog: Nine, 1990, Poland.  Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Exodus 20:14 - Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Exodus 20:17 - Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.

Deuteronomy 5:18 - Neither shalt thou commit adultery.
Deuteronomy 5:21 - Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbor's wife.

Matthew 5:27 - You have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Roman is a surgeon.  His wife Hanka is a flight attendant.  They love one another.  They want children.

Roman is impotent.  His colleague, who delivers the diagnosis, recommends he leave his wife.

Roman delivers the news to Hanka.  She takes it bravely.  She says she loves him, that love is in the heart and not between the legs, and that they will be all right.

He offers for her to take a lover.  She declines.

What he does not know is that she already has one.

He has the opportunity, but he declines.  He has a patient, a singer, who needs an operation and who might be available to him if he were to make a move.  But he does not make a move.

He sees another man snooping around.

When his wife loans him the key to her mother's house in order to retrieve some items, he makes a copy.

He visits clandestinely.

He observes her tryst.

He goes again and hides in the closet.  He witnesses her breaking up with the other man.  She tells him she does not want to see him again, that she loves her husband, and that she wants him never to find out.  The man leaves.  Then she sees Roman hiding in the closet.  The man returns and offers marriage.  She shuts the door on the other man.

She discovers how much she has hurt her husband.  She apologizes.  Sincerely.  Profusely.

She offers to follow through with adoption.

He suggests they take some time apart.  She agrees to go on a ski trip.  The other man tries to follow her.  Roman mistakenly believes the affair is not offer.  He leaves a note.  He drives his bicycle off a bridge.

She rushes home.

She does this before finding out about his attempt.  She does it the moment she runs into the other man on the slopes.  She wants to be with her husband.

They will reconcile.

This episode deals straightforwardly and honestly with a painful part of many people's lives.

The longing for love.  The desire to be faithful.  The need for another to be faithful to you.  The fear of betrayal.  The pain of discovery.  The hope of healing.

The power of forgiveness.

The reward of perseverance.

The ministry of grace.

252 - Dekalog: Eight, 1990, Poland. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Saturday, September 9, 2017

252 - Dekalog: Eight, 1990, Poland.  Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Exodus 20:16 - Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Deuteronomy 5:20 - Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Matthew 19:18 - . . . Thou shalt not bear false witness.

A little girl walks hand-in-hand with an adult through a dark alley.

An elderly woman exercises in the park.

She carries flowers home.  She runs into her friend.  He collects stamps.  He has recently received a commemorative series featuring the 1931 German flight over the North Pole.  He calls it Polarfahrt. He recounts that the flight was made by three zeppelins.  She encourages him.  She invites him to bring them by and show her.

They live in the same apartment as do all of our protagonists from these films.

We will come to realize that her neighbor deals with the recent past--the War, Fascism, Communism--by living in the distant past.  A more peaceful time.

She gets her mail.  She straightens a painting in her apartment--twice.  She walks past shelves of books.  She places the flowers in a vase.  She retrieves food from the refrigerator.  Kieslowski takes the time to develop the details of people's daily habits in each of these films.  For various apparent reasons.  It is character development.  It can be symbolism.  It might be instrumental to the story.  A key set of objects here will be mismatched cups.

The off-kilter painting will recur throughout the episode.  Life falls askew.  Our efforts to straighten it provide mere temporary relief.

The woman nurtures life with the flowers (although technically she killed them in cutting them to bring them to her home)--as do several key characters in these films.  They breed life to counter urban drab.

She drives to work.  The University.  The Dean calls her in.  Mrs. Elzbieta Lorenz has come to see her.  Research exchange.  She has translated nearly all the professor's works.  They met once in the States.  She would like to sit in on some lectures.  Our lady would be delighted.

Our lady is named Zofia.

Zofia introduces Mrs. Lorenz to the class.  Mrs. Lorenz works for an American institute that researches the fate of Jewish children saved during the War.

The class is an Ethics class.  They are in the midst of discussions.  People are sitting in the aisles.  It must be popular.  Zofia opens the class for discussion.  They have been talking about "ethical hell."

A woman raises her hand.

Elzbieta listens, fingering her necklace.  On her necklace hangs a cross.

The student poses a scenario.  She tells the story of Dekalog: Two.  A woman is pregnant with another man's baby.  Her husband is dying.  She demands that the doctor tell her whether or not her husband will live.  If he lives, she will abort the baby.  If he dies, she will keep the baby.  The doctor knows abortion is wrong, and he is put in a position where the life of the baby is in his hands.

Zofia says she knows the story.  Warsaw is a small town.  She asks the students to write about the scenario.  She adds that the child is still alive today.

She states that the life of the child matters most.

Elzbieta raises her hand.  She tells her own story.  In February, 1943, a six-year-old Jewish girl is taken to a home for hiding.  She is required to have a certificate of baptism in order to protect her identity.  She is taken to the home of a Catholic couple, who are asked to act as the girl's godparents for the baptism.  It is just before curfew.  There is little time.  The couple state that they cannot act as godparents for the baptism, because they cannot violate their conscience and bear false witness.

Zofia asks Elzbieta for details.

Elzbieta provides them.  In front of the class.  The mismatched cups.  The green oil lamp.

Zofia grows tense with recognition.  Elzbieta finges her necklace.

We know that Zofia was the woman.  And that Elzbieta was the girl.

A girl raises her hand and conjectures.  It would not be bearing false witness against a neighbor, because it would not be against the neighbor.  She implies it would be for the neighbor, in this case for the life of the neighbor.

A young man raises his hand.  Perhaps fear was the motive.

Zofia finishes the class and the class adjourns.

The two women will go on a journey together of exploration and understanding.

Forty years ago Elzbieta was the six-year-old Jewish girl seeking asylum.  Elzbieta was the woman seemingly denying it.  Now she is an Ethics professor.  Elzbieta has spent her career translating Zofia's works.  They have met only once before in professional passing.  Zofia has never known Elzbieta was the girl.  She has spent her life wondering what happened to her.  Worried about her.

Zofia explains her motives to Elzbieta, and they make sense.

It turns out a falsehood was born against another neighbor, one that nearly got him executed, and one that could have gotten Elzbieta killed as well.

They go on the journey together.  Through the city and through the past.

And come to terms.