The great French mind of the twentieth century unmasked! By day, he may fight the forces of intellectual darkness and institutional oppression.
But at night, off come the glasses and on goes the single golden earring; and the true fight is taken to the most frightening enemy mankind has ever faced: the combined destructive force of dirt, soot, and unapologetic grime!
German prog-rock band Popol Vuh wrote and performed the music for several of Werner Herzog's greatest films: Cobra Verde, Heart of Glass, Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, and Aguirre: The Wrath of God.
Although lead member and keyboardist Florian Fricke died in 2001 and the band no longer exists, their music surely does—buried deep within the collapsed heads of Herzog's crazed protagonists, for one! For whether it's the Spanish conquistador left alone with his monkeys or the Irish opera fanatic hauling a ship across a mountain, I simply can't imagine Herzog without the sounds of Popol Vuh.
[d] - direct download
[t] - torrent
[e] - emule
[d][t][e] - Aguirre (1972)
[d][t][e] - Heart of Glass (1976)
[d][t][e] - Nosferatu (1979)
[d][t][e] - Fitzcarraldo (1982)
[d][t][e] - Cobra Verde (1987)
For more reading about Popol Vuh, including some great discographies, read in the following languages: English, Italian, Polish.
Links to some of the more interesting new foreign films released to torrent trackers over the past week:
Assembly (Feng, 2007)
Egg (Kaplanoglu, 2007)
Flanders (Dumont, 2006)
Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! (Yoshida, 2007)
I Served the King of England (Menzel, 2006)
Khadak (Brosens, 2006)
The Capture (Laure, 2007)
Promise Me This (Kusturica, 2007)
Raja 1918 (Torhonen, 2007)
Silent Light (Reygadas, 2007)
Texture of Skin (Lee, 2005)
The Aerial (Sapir, 2007)
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Hamburger, 2006)
As well as some hidden gems:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Asuka Sakura wakes up alone and restrained to a hospital bed. She doesn't know where she is. A young girl with dreadlocks peeks into the room. Then a nurse saunters in. The nurse explains the situation. Asuka is in a psychiatric hospital, she's here because she tried to commit suicide, and she's going to stay in the hospital until she's healthy. The problem: Asuka claims she didn't try to kill herself—she overdosed, yes, but it was an accident; and now she needs to go home and finish her 800 words!
So begins Welcome to the Quiet Room, Suzuki's Matsuo's adaptation of his own novel about the personality and life of a Japanese magazine writer that relies less on plot points than revelations (as we meet and understand the various characters, and we join Asuka in realizing the truth about her own character) and that always manages to escape the tentacles of genre and stereotype. For example, if the story sounds like a sombre, heavy slog through dense mental malaise, rest assured that it's really not. It's zany and free-spirited and quite visually inventive. Having said that, the film isn't entirely light and fluffy, either. Some of the issues it deals with are sombre and heavy. A difficult film to classify? Matsuo would hope so.
Then there's also the film's aggressive strangeness. In one early scene, Asuka's boyfriend, Tetsuo, visits her in the psych hospital's isolation ward, the titular "quiet room" (always said in English), and tries to explain her situation. He's the one who seems on the verge of a breakdown, but she asks for the relaxation:
"Can I put my hands on your bum?"
Quirkiness, certainly. But it does have its charm because the story has well-drawn characters and doesn't rely on quirk to fill in the cracks. Little touches of weirdness like this one punctuate the film, though.
Another aspect of Welcome to the Quiet Room that's hard to pin down is where, if anywhere, it belongs in the long list of films about mental hospitals. It's certainly not a horrific portrayal with chains and blood and sadistic doctors, but it's also not especially sugary, or sarcastic, or Girl, Interrupted. There are sentimental moments within the film that appear to be played with a straight face, but the sentimental mood never sets in for good. In fact, the end of the film is decidedly unsentimental: life-affirming and joyous, but in a tougher way.
The unstable characters aren't treated, as in so many other films, as puppy dogs, either. Some are good-hearted, one is absolutely vile, and their illnesses never dictate that fundamental morality: the good one is still very much bonkers, the evil one will still be evil once she gets her head straight and released.
The patients are all women, however—although also all young and attractive women, because this isn't realism, mind you—and one of the more subtle points Matsuo makes is the different way in which craziness is treated in men and women. For instance, Testuo, the boyfriend, is just as substance-abusing, insecure, and off-beat as Asuka—quite a bit more so, even!—and yet he gets his own popular television show whereas she gets locked up. His unbound creativity is good; hers is bad. He's also incredibly thin, a problem that half a dozen of the female patients in the hospital are suffering from and that no one ever mentions about Tetsuo. Hell, he even jerks about and twitches—the tell-tale cinematic sign of insanity!
Where Matsuo ultimately falters, unfortunately, is in having too much love for his own creation. The film's style is always controlled, in a neat contrast to its characters, but the camera often lingers too long on faces and scenes play out well past their strengths. The beginning, in particular, is a slow glide through familiar terrain. It's not unpleasant, but it is slightly unnecessary. Matsuo's skill with the camera never quite matches his skill with the pen, either, which makes much of the slowness seem even slower, as his images are always more functional than beautiful or interesting. Which is not to say that the film is a visual failure—on the contrary, some of the visual gags and effects are very good—but simply that it's not enough of a visual success to succeed during the parts when the narrative doesn't.
It's a good thing, then, that eventually the film's originality does kick in, and, as the characters become absorbing people, the telling of the story speeds up. From that point until past the end credits, Welcome to the Quiet Room is an entertaining, funny, and thoughtful film.
Suzuki Matsuo, 2007
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Tadeusz Konwicki is a Polish author who once in a while put down his pen and picked up a camera to create highly personal, rather unique films that were usually outside of the dominant style of the times. After his debut, Ostatni dzien lata (Last Day of Summer) in 1958, Konwicki made Zaduszki (Halloween or, more aptly, All Soul's Day) in 1961. Both are small films about the relationship and personalities of a young couple.
In Zaduszki, the couple is Wala and Michał: young, alienated, burdened by experiences from the war, and fleeing from something. They arrive at a small resort town, off-season, and take up in an empty hotel run by an older woman and attended by a simple man named Heniutek—played wonderfully by the great Polish actor Franciszek Pieczka. The film documents their failed attempts to connect with each other and find joy in what is visually and historically a grim time.
Most of the film, nevertheless, takes place in the past as Wala and Michał trade flashbacks that narrate episodes from the war that have had a profound impact on who they now are.
For Wala, the daughter of a committed Communist, the ghost is one of a former non-communist resistance fighter who saved her life by betraying his fellow soldiers and whom she, in turn, convinced to repent his reactionary sins to the new Polish security service in exchange for agreeing to take his hand in marriage. He ended up dead, she ended up guilty. For Michał, something of a sensitive playboy, the memories are of women: both beautiful, both whom he loved, and both whom he'll never see again.
The point of it all seems to be that not only can there be no art after Auschwitz, but, even more vitally, there can be no love—at least for those who were directly affected.
Despite the reality of the war that the film contends with, it's imbued with a sense of surreality that lives with the supporting character Goldapfel, one of the few guests in the hotel in which Wala and Michał are staying; and, indeed, their next-door neighbour. A Jew, an old man, supposedly dying but always with a smile on his face, he is the opposite of the two gloomy lovers, with lives wide open yet eternally unhappy.
After Michał gives him a much-needed injection of medicine, Goldapfel invites the young man to his room and offers him chocolates. Later, he appears in a forest, dressed in black and leaning on a walking stick.
"I know, everything I know," is his phrase. He says it often and without the slightest whiff of malevolence.
And when he mentions himself, or is mentioned by any of the townspeople, it's always in the same way, with the same words. He is not simply Goldapfel.
He is "Goldapfel, golden apple."
Zaduszki ends on an enigmatic, though not altogether pessimistic scene—a zero sum from the addition of negative integers. It's also a scene that was uncannily remade by Noah Baumbach at the end of his Margot at the Wedding:
Wala gets on a bus, ready to leave the resort town; Michał is to stay for a while. The bus begins to move, the two characters gaze at each other through the bus windows. Suddenly, Wala yells for the bus driver to stop; he does, and she exits the steps of the vehicle and embraces Michał in the town square in the falling rain.
Earlier, in one of the flashbacks, a communist party functionary meets a priest along a riverbank. The functionary's been trying to catch some fish.
"Greetings, greetings my solemn missionary!" hails the priest, "Were the fish biting today?"
The functionary shakes his head.
"No? Oh, that's a shame. You see, our fish here are rather apolitical. But, Father, please forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Tadeusz Konwicki, 1961
7
As Cannes 2008 is now upon us, here's a look back at last year's selection of films. Titles with links are available online. Where possible, bittorrent is given preference over emule. Quality varies, and one or two may be fakes. Subtitles sometimes provided, sometimes not. I'm also sure I missed a fair share of films, but couldn't find a list of everything that played. Still, if you can't get out to France to enjoy this year's batch of cinema, perhaps something here will be a worthwhile substitute.
The Competition
My Blueberry Nights (Wong)
An Old Mistress (Breillat)
The Edge of Heaven (Akin)
No Country For Old Men (Coen)
Zodiac (Fincher)
We Own the Night (Gray)
Love Songs (Honore)
The Mourning Forest (Kawase)
Breath (Kim)
Promise Me This (Kusturica)
Secret Sunshine (Lee)
4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days (Mungiu)
Tehilim (Nadjari)
Silent Light (Reygadas)
Persepolis (Satrapi)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Schnabel)
Import Export (Seidl)
Alexandra (Sokurov)
Death Proof (Tarantino)
The Man from London (Tarr)
Paranoid Park (Sant)
The Banishment (Zviaguintsev)
Un Certain Regard
Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou)
You, The Living (Andersson)
Actresses (Bruni-Tedeschi)
Santa Fe Street [2] (Castillo)
Liberation Day (Chung)
Just About Love? (Doillon)
The Pope's Toilet (Fernandez)
A Wandering Bride (Katz)
The Band's Visit (Kolirin)
Mister Lonely (Korine)
Magnus (Kousaar)
Blind Mountain (Li)
My Brother Is An Only Child (Luchetti)
California Dreamin' (Nemescu)
Solitary Fragments (Rosales)
Terror's Advocate (Schroeder)
Water Lilies (Sciamma)
And Along Come Tourists (Thalheim)
Pleasure Factory (Uekrongtham)
Out of Competition
Boarding Gate (Assayas)
Go Go Tales (Ferrara)
Days of Darkness (Arcand)
Triangle (various)
U2 3D (Pellington)
A Mighty Heart (Winterbottom)
Ocean's Thirteen (Soderbergh)
Sicko (Moore)
Special Screenings
The 11th Hour (Conners)
Fengming, a Chinese Memoir (Wang)
Return to Normandy (Philibert)
The War [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] (Burns)
Imagination (Leiser)
60th Anniversary Tributes
Boxes (Birkin)
One Hundred Nails (Olmi)
Crossed Tracks (Lelouch)
Ulzhan (Schlondorff)
Documentaries on Cinema
Brando (Freedman)
Lindsay Anderson, Never Apologize (Kaplan)
Maurice pialat l'amour existe (Faux)
Pierre Rissient (McCarthy)
The Shorts
Ah Ma (Chen)
Ark (Jonkajtys)
The Last 15 (Campos)
Looking Glass (Rosenlund)
My Dear Rosseta (Yang)
My Sister (Geffen)
The Oates' Valor (Cahill)
Resistance aux tremblements (Hems)
Run (Albiston)
To onoma tou spourgitiou (Papavassiliou)
Ver Llover (Miller)
Michelangelo Antonioni's debut feature is a lusty, Italian noir about a beautiful woman, Paola, who married into money but maintained a long and passionate love affair with a former flame—a handsome-but-poor gent named Guido who was once engaged to Paola's now-dead best friend.
The plot begins like Citizen Kane, with Paola's rich businessman husband, Enrico, hiring an investigator to look into Paola's past life to see what can be dug up. He perhaps has his suspicions, but no concrete evidence of wrongdoings. At this point, the film seems like it's going to be told in flashbacks through this detectivistic framing device, as the private eye travels through the geography of Paola's early, humble life, uncovering facts and soliciting opinions.
However, the film soon abandons this tease, and slips more comfortably into a chronological narrative: the affair between Paola and Guido is still ongoing and, as the couple realizes that they're being tailed, they begin to hatch a plan about what to do. The planning comes a bit too naturally, though, because not only are the two lovers lovers, they're also secret conspirators in the death of Paola's best friend and Guido's once bride-to-be. Several days before the wedding, Paola, Guido, and the dead woman were getting into an elevator, but the elevator wasn't there (idea for a film title: The Elevator That Wasn't There!), the dead woman didn't notice, Paola and Guido did, and because they didn't say anything, she backed into the shaft rather than the lift and fell to her death. Ever since, the two lovebirds have been tainted by the stench of guilt.
It's a testimony to Antonioni's creativity and skill as a filmmaker that he can take an obscure death-by-elevator, combine it with an ordinary plot, compose a climax in which Guide, our would-be assassin (he and Paola eventually decide to do away with rich Mr. Enrico Fontana), rides a bicycle to his crime scene, and still make the film appear not only serious but also substantial.
One of the elements of Antonioni's style that I'm beginning to notice is his interest in the background. Antonioni's camera seldom looks only at the foreground, even when important things are happening in the foreground; he's constantly gazing deeper into the frame. Here, we see a rugby game going on. The motion of the players makes it nearly impossible not to look at them.
A similar idea in this shot, as Guido and Paolo communicate at the river's edge. What's interesting about this one is that the long diagonal invites the eyes to follow it up the screen, into the horizon—but, at the same time, it links his face to hers: you begin on one plane, recede into another, and then end again on the first. It's a bit like walking down the street and ending up beside where you began.
More playing with depth happens here: Paola tries to convince Guido to convince her to murder her husband. At the beginning of the shot she has the upper hand, the power, and her on-screen size reflects that.
As Guido refuses to be taken in, however, Paola shrinks—moves away from the camera. It's a shot that reminds me of two famous ones in Citizen Kane: the conversation on the stairs, and the impossible window.
Another nice touch, albeit this time related to sound, is a scene in which Paola and Guido have an illicit meeting in a city park. In the first shot, Antonioni introduces both characters as well as an old man wandering in the park while playing guitar and whistling. Although the old man then disappears from the film's image track, he remains a presence on the sound track throughout the scene: his guitar and whistles haunt the couple as they figure out a way to persuade Paola's husband to buy a car for her from Guido, so that he can make some money.
This is the typical shot I associate with Antonioni's later films: two figures in one shot, but alienated from one another, and both seemingly lost in an evocative landscape.
Here's a slightly different example. This time, the characters are separated by the empty space. It's almost like a Sergio Leone showdown, except there's no sign of Blondie.
Lucia Bosé, meanhwhile, is absolutely dazzling in the film as Paola. And often quite literally. Here, her white dress appears to emit an angelic light: ironic, no doubt, because she's quite the devil. In other memorable scene, she wears a dress that causes her to sparkle.
Black clothing suits her much better. No clothing would probably suit her best. A true screen beauty.
But, to rejoin the plot (already in progress): after finally deciding to shoot Paola's husband, Enrico, the whole endeavour suffers an unexpected shock. Although Guido is on the spot and primed with his pistol, Enrico, under stress from the detective's report he has received about Paola's infidelity, floors his sports car straight down the road and clean off a dangerous curve—only seconds away from the spot in which Guido was to shoot him in the head. Guido rides his bicycle to the scene of the fiery crash and sees the dead man's body pulled from the flaming wreckage.
Paola, meanwhile, at her home, dressed in a ravishing dress (one of the film's themes is the difference between the rich and poor; and, even here, the conditions in which Guido learns of Enrico's death—a wet, cold night—is different from Paola's more cushy and bright surroundings), is all nerves as she awaits a telephone call from Guido, informing her that the deed's been done. But when police cars finally appear beneath her window, to tell her that Enrico's been in an accident, she thinks they've come to arrest her for murder! In a well-shot sequence, she flees into the dark outdoors:
The vertical bars of her own prison?
Soon enough, however, Guido arrives and tells her what actually happened. They both begin to suffer from a case of the Guilt. In one of Antonioni's sliest images, they get into a taxi that, for them, becomes a symbolic arrest for their (thought) crime: the backseat of the taxi doubles for the backseat of a police van.
There is no flee.
The emotions of their past "murder" combine with the stress from this one, and eat up their love, their relationship, and their happiness.
In the end, Guido embraces Paola, and then leaves her forever. As the film ends, she's left white, crying, alone against the cold wet stone of a mountainous building—a touch of Guido's world, and a reminder of what was once her own.
Guido gets into a black car, the camera pulls back, and Paola cries. The complex crimes she's committed won't put her in jail. But jail she could have paid her way out of. For the first time in her life, money is of no use to Paola. And, for perhaps the first time in his, Paola is of no use to Guido.
In the film's quiet but stunning final shot, his car drives away into the shadows along a wide, wet, empty street. The point of view is Paola's: both physical and psychological. Once the streetlights go out, she'll be left alone in total darkness. Will morning ever come?
This shot, incidentally, is similar to the final shot of Antonioni's 10-minute documentary about Roman street cleaners Nettezza Urbana.
Which neatly brings me to the final thing I want to say about Cronaca di un amore: although certain details in it can be traced back to Antonioni's earlier work, the film is so confidently and competently made that it's almost shocking to see the jump between short documentaries in 1949 and this feature in 1950. It's not all down to Antonioni, of course—the actors do a fine job and the score is very good, for example—but so much of it is down to Antonioni's direction and his superb visualization of an ordinary script that as good a film as Cronaca di un amore is, it's at least twice that good as a debut: excellent.
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950
7
Another well-made documentary short by Antonioni. The subject of this one is the production and consumption of the "photo novel" or fotonovela: a most-cinematic type of comic in which the frames are photographs rather than drawings.
Compared to the handful of other Antonioni shorts I've seen, L'amorosa menzogna is more unique in its style and rather more interested in what its documenting.
One of the more surprising elements in the film is the strong influence of postwar neorealism—something Antonioni's other early works eschew in favour of a more classical and composed style. Although the shots in L'amorosa menzogna are still well-crafted, there is less of the obvious "beautification" that is apparent in films like Sette canne, un vestito or Gente del Po. Urban life in L'amorosa menzogna is more understood than recreated.
For the first time, Antonioni also masters the human face—many of which fulfill the frame in a great sequence near the end, as a crowd of women swarms one of the stars of their favourite fotonovela:
Compared with these figures, the ones in past Antonioni films are flat, lifeless. Notice also the playfulness of the shot, as the lone man in the crowd tries to sneak-a-peek overtop the five women!
And in all of these shots, Antonioni lets go of his beloved landscapes; the faces are given the entirety of the screen. Perhaps the result of a boost in confidence?
In terms of content and themes, L'amorosa menzogna looks very much forward to Blowup. The creation of an Italian fotonovela becomes an early version of the (re)creation of a London crime: the arrangement of individual frames, all "real", into a manufactured narrative that has little to do with reality.
Through a glass darkly? Well, it depends on which eye you open.
Because all eyes do not see alike. The human eyes are seeing three still figures, one of which is pretending to hold a glass of wine. The camera eye, meanwhile, sees that glass: in a later shot, an artists paints it into the frame, and therefore into existence.
L'amorosa menzogna is a fascinating sketch of ideas that would resurface in 1966, and a good example of Antonioni's maturation as a filmmaker.
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1949
6
