[This consideration of Inception is not for the spoiler-wary!]
With Inception, Christopher Nolan has evocatively architected the mind of the dream. Which is in and of itself nothing new; but, admirable for being accomplished through film. Architecture has long been a tool used to envisage spatial relations within dreams. A house is, after all, the classic Jungian dream symbol for the psyche. In this, Inception is not too dissimilar from Charlie Kaufman's filmic constructions—Synecdoche, New York and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—absent their humorous whimsy.
I won't bore anyone with crafting a plot synopsis as review. Rather, I express regret that Christopher Nolan was not made available to me for interview. I would have tailored our conversation to talk less about his film—which stands on its own merits—to talk about what he has discovered in his explorations of dream theory.
The image I find most resonant in Inception occurs late in the film when Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Ariadne (Ellen Page) hazard limbo in search of Mal (Marion Cotillard), who has—in effect—kidnapped Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy). True, the scene is ponderous with exposition but this allowed my perception to slow down to take in the image of the houses in water. Memory has placed these past homes in the fluid matrix of the dream. As Cobb explains, he and Mal built their world in limbo to include the first apartment they shared, the house in which Mal bore him children, and Mal's own childhood home. Walking straight on into her childhood home, one faces the dollhouse, which when opened reveals the safe, in which Mal has hidden her totemic top. By placing it in the safe Mal has made her totem a secret even to herself; however—by Cobb touching her totem and setting it to spin within the safe—he reminds her of its purpose and meaning; a shift which will provide the film's narrative its tragic subplot. I love Nolan's image of the spinning top, not only for being—as Ariadne recognizes—"an elegant solution" to the problem of knowing when one is in a dream; but, because it frames the concern, which I find interesting in its own right. The distinction between the waking life and the dream life is an impassioned concern.
In shamanic dream theory this crisis of discernment would be an opportunity to locate "the scout." I understand "the scout" to mean that which is authentic to the dream in contrast to the many phenomenological and visual distractions with which the dreamer populates and decorates the dream. I'm not convinced that this is something taken into the dream by the dreamer—i.e., by way of the totem, let's say—because I believe "the scout" needs to be something endemic to the dream recognized by the dreamer. In that sense, Nolan is more true to "the scout" in the scene in the bar where Cobb is alerting Fischer to the strangeness of the dream as a means of alerting his awareness that he is in a dream. As I understand it, that strangeness would alert the dreamer to the proximity of "the scout", or to what is most endemically authentic to the dream. Lucidity, however, is always a hazardous dance within a dream. Too much lucidity causes a dream to call attention to itself, which—in Nolan's vision—is represented by projections attacking the dreamer. I'm impressed that Nolan has thought this one out with regard to his introduced fiction of extraction and inception. The notion that one can thieve the dream does, indeed, strike me as criminal.
The central convention of Inception is that a dream can be dreamt within a dream. Nolan structures this as a vertical descent as if one were riding an elevator between the levels of a department store. This premise is, again, not original. In shamanic dream theory these levels would be called "gates" and, allegedly, there are seven gates. If one can manage the instability of the various gates to arrive at the seventh gate, this is when the accomplished shaman (i.e., dreamer) is entitled the choice of not returning to the starting point of the dream and opting instead to propel forward into infinity, which is not quite the same as oblivion. The press notes for Inception are correct when they allow that dreams are where the intimate and the infinite meet, not so much through memory as one would expect or as limbo allows, but through the discipline and process of traveling through the gates, dreaming within dreams.
I appreciated Nolan's texturing this discipline of traveling through the gates with, first, the expansion of time so that a minute in the waking world becomes five minutes in the dream world becomes five years in the dream within the dream and five decades within the cubed dream. I found this a provocatively simple understanding of how the spatial-temporal empties into infinity. Second, I was impressed with the importance of the instability factor in successfully maneuvering within the cubed dream; that something like a van carrying dreaming passengers tumbling over and over will create weightlessness in the embedded dreams. I found the scenes where Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was fighting subconscious security in a depth without gravity to be profoundly thrilling. His strenuous performance involved levitational hand-to-hand combat in a whirling tube set up in an old zeppelin factory in England. Its sensual simulation of the physical qualities of torque was fantastic. And here I must insert applause for composer Hans Zimmer's exciting score, essential to the scene's tension.
Other than for that, I have only two semi-complaints about the film. Ariadne, the name of Ellen Page's character—i.e., the architect hired to create the labyrinths for the extraction—was such an obvious association that it kept pulling me out of the story. One could say it called attention to itself and I wanted to attack it. I get that she builds labyrinths. I get that she guides people out of them.
Secondly, is what I've come to believe is an in-joke—if not a mere synchronicity—structured into the film, though I'm not sure it was intentional. Intentional or not, any joke from Christopher Nolan is appreciated. (When he appeared at WonderCon, he never once cracked a smile.) Here's the in-joke: in Inception, a musical cue is affiliated with the "kick" to bring the dreamers back from their dream state. The chosen musical cue is "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" written by Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire in a signature performance by Édith Piaf. Nolan stages limbo as a place where one grows old filled with regrets and my understanding is that regrets are illuminations that arrive too late. In this sense, "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" is an apt choice, though rendered a bit eerie (i.e., familiar) for Marion Cottiard having won the Oscar® for her performance as Édith Piaf. Again, within Nolan's own visuals, this choice of song made me turn to look at him directly.
My final note: I've watched the film twice, which does it service.
Cross-published on Twitch.
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) is the biggest and most prestigious event of its kind in the Americas—and it's going to be even bigger for its 15th anniversary edition which begins Thursday. This year the fest expands from three days to four and will feature a massive 18 programs from seven countries. The line-up includes works by well known directors (Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, G.W. Pabst) and stars (Laurel and Hardy, Louise Brooks, Norma Talmadge), as well as rarities like The Flying Ace, a 1926 film that features an all African-American cast. And as a special treat, David Shepard and Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films have curated a selection of shorts by George Méliès (the French fantasist best known for 1902's A Trip to the Moon), which will play throughout the festival.
If you've been to the SFSFF before, you don't need me to tell you what a fabulous, class act it is and why it's become a "destination festival" for silent film enthusiasts around the world. The programming is eclectic and fun, the best available 35mm prints are used, the cream of silent film accompanists are hired to do their thing and best of all, it all goes down in our beloved 1922 movie palace, the Castro Theater. As the SFSFF says in its mission statement, "Silent filmmakers produced masterpieces and crowd-thrilling entertainments. Remarkable for their artistry and their inestimable value as historical documents, silent films show us how our ancestors thought, spoke, dressed and lived. It is through these films that the world first came to love movies." And it's through the SFSFF that I've come to love silent movies. Here's a cursory walk through the 2010 line-up.
Thursday, July 15
7:00 P.M. The Iron Horse (1924, USA, dir. John Ford)—In response to the success of Paramount's The Covered Wagon in 1923, Fox studios made this idealized epic about the building of America's trans-continental railroad. Filmed mostly in Arizona with a cast and crew of over 6,000 people, it was Hollywood's first big-scale western and is sometimes referred to as "the silent How the West Was Won." Cattle drives, Indian attacks, saloon brawls—things which later became clichés of the western genre—are said to have had their origins here. George O'Brien, now best known for F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, stars as a railroad surveyor whose childhood sweetheart marries the man who killed his father. The film culminates with the 1869 driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, and Wild Bill Hickcok, Buffalo Bill and Abraham Lincoln all make fictionalized appearances. Dennis James, who owns the only existing 35mm print of the American version of The Iron Horse, will accompany it on the Mighty Wurlitzer.
Friday, July 16
11:30 A.M. Amazing Tales from the Archives: Lost & Found Films—One benefit of having an extra day in the festival is that we get two "Amazing Tales" programs. This first one features presentations by Joe Linder from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, plus Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. The latter duo are now superheroes to silent film lovers everywhere, having discovered a 16mm dupe negative of Fritz Lang's Metropolis that was 25 minutes longer than any previously known version (the restoration of which will be shown at the festival later in the evening.) Donald Sosin accompanies. FREE ADMISSION!
2:00 P.M. A Spray of Plum Blossoms (1931, China, dir. Bu Wancang)—This film is one of several collaborations between its prolific director and China's favorite on-screen couple of the silent era, Ruan Ling-yu and Jin Yan (tragically, Ruan would kill herself at age 24). Loosely based on Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, this adaptation is set in the Chinese army circa 1930 and follows two old friends who become rivals for the same young woman. "Like any Shakespeare comedy, Plum Blossoms is replete with star-crossed lovers, mistaken identity and a satisfying happy ending." Donald Sosin accompanies.
6:00 P.M. Rotaie (1929, Italy, dir. Mario Camerini)—Virtually unknown to American audiences, this late-era Italian silent is noted for its German expressionist influence. Two down-on-their-luck young lovers plan suicide, until they find a lost wallet on a train. They're lured to a seaside resort by a high society sleazeball, who then tries to seduce the girl while her lover gambles away their money at the roulette wheel. A sound version of this film would be released two years later. There will be a live English translation of the original Italian intertitles. Stephen Horne accompanies.
8:15 P.M. Metropolis (1927, Germany, dir. Fritz Lang)—If there's a "star" of this year's SFSFF, it's undoubtedly the new "complete" version of Lang's expressionist masterpiece of futuristic dystopianism. The last Metropolis restoration occurred in 2001 and it screened at the SF International Film Festival with the fest's former artistic director Peter Scarlett translating the German intertitles. At the time, it was believed the world would never see a more complete version. As I mentioned above, a 16mm print of Metropolis with 25 additional minutes was discovered in Buenos Aires in 2008—and those minutes are said to contain not just scene trims, but entire subplots. Just as importantly, the Argentine discovery reinstates Lang's original editing, which in previous restorations has been a matter of conjecture.
The digital restoration of the new material, still clearly identifiable due to the ravages of time, took one year and 600,000€ to complete. This will be the only film at the SFSFF to be screened digitally, which for better or worse is the only format that distributor Kino International is releasing. Argentine archivists Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña will be on hand to do an introduction, and the incomparable Alloy Orchestra will perform their celebrated original score which has been expanded to accommodate the new material. And don't forget to check out the festival's Metropolis Photo Booth, courtesy of the San Francisco Film Museum. Metropolis is now on "rush" status, which means tickets are only obtainable by purchasing a Festival Pass, or by making a Patron or Grand Patron donation to the festival—or by waiting in the "rush" line and hoping for the best.
Saturday, July 17
10:00 A.M. The Big Business of Short Funny Films—A few years back the SFSFF instituted a Director's Pick program and the pickers have included Terry Zwigoff and Guy Maddin. This year's selection is by Pete Docter, the Oscar-winning director of Pixar's Monsters, Inc. and Up, who has chosen to screen three comedy shorts. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle directs himself and Buster Keaton as a cook and waiter respectively in 1918's The Cook. Inducted into the National Film Registry in 1998 is the Hal Roach-produced Pass the Gravy, a 1928 yarn about a prize rooster and feuding neighbors. Then in the 1929's Big Business, Laurel and Hardy play California Xmas tree salesmen whose argument with a customer escalates into all-out war. Pete Docter will be interviewed by Leonard Maltin and Dennis James will be this program's accompanist.
12:00 P.M. Variations on a Theme: Musicians on the Craft of Composing and Performing for Silent Film—The title says it all. The panelists in this special program comprise a who's who of silent film composers and accompanists, including pianists Donald Sosin and Stephen Horne, organist Dennis James, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, the Alloy Orchestra, and Swedish musician and composer Matti Bye. Chloe Veltman, Bay Area culture correspondent for The New York Times and producer and host of NPR's VoiceBox, will moderate.
2:00 P.M. The Flying Ace (1926, USA, dir. Richard E. Norman)—Between 1920 and 1928, white film producer/director Richard E. Norman made six feature films that sought an alternative to the demeaning portrayal of African-Americans found in silent cinema. His production company turned out everything from westerns to comedies to gangster flicks, but unfortunately, The Flying Ace is the only one that survives today. In this film, a WWI fighter pilot returns home a hero, only to become embroiled in a battle against railroad thieves. Introducing the film will be Rita Reagan from the Norman Studios Film Museum in Jacksonville, Florida. Donald Sosin provides accompaniment.
4:00 P.M. The Strong Man (1926, USA, dir. Frank Capra)—This slapstick comedy was Capra's second feature, and it stars Harry Langdon as a Belgian soldier who comes to America in search of the female pen pal he corresponded with during the war. He's accompanied by German strongman performer Zandow the Great, whom 98 lb. weakling Langdon must replace when the great one becomes incapacitated. This will be my first Langdon film and from what I read, his wide-eyed, man-child persona is an acquired taste. Those who love him rank Langdon with the greats like Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, and many consider The Strong Man his best film. Prior to the screening, the 2010 Silent Film Festival Award will be presented to Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury. Their company Photoplay Productions specializes in restorations of silent era films, many of which have graced the SFSFF over the years. Stephen Horne accompanies this one.
6:30 P.M. Diary of a Lost Girl (1929, Germany, dir. G.W. Pabst)—After obtaining incendiary results with Pandora's Box, Pabst and leading lady Louise Brooks collaborated once more on this story of a girl's ruination and a young woman's regeneration. After getting pregnant by her pharmacist father's lecherous assistant, Brooks' character is sent packing to a hellish girl's reform school. She manages to escape, then dabbles in prostitution en route to becoming a countess. The restoration being screened at the festival was made by the Cineteca di Bologna and includes seven minutes of previously censored footage. I only experienced Pandora's Box for the first time several nights ago, courtesy of Netflix' Watch Instantly, so now I'm really hot to catch this follow-up on the big screen. This SFSFF Centerpiece Film is also the Founders Pick, chosen by the festival's originators Stephen Salmons and Melissa Chittick. The film will be introduced by actor/writer/director and SFSFF board member Frank Buxton, and the fantastic Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra will provide the accompaniment.
9:30 P.M. Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922, Denmark/Sweden, dir Benjamin Christensen)—In the early 1980s, there was a Bay Area cable station that only screened public domain movies, and it screened the same ones repeatedly. That's where I first caught late-night bits and pieces of this seven-chapter, reverie-disturbing "documentary" exploring "the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients." Reportedly the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, it was banned in the US for depictions of torture, nudity, satanic worship, sacrilege and sexual perversion. Come for the comprehensive tour of medieval torture devices; stay for the flying witches kissing the ass of Satan (portrayed, as is a brief appearance by Jesus, by the director himself). Making their SFSFF debut accompanying Häxan is Sweden's Matti Bye Ensemble.
Sunday, July 18
10:00 A.M. Amazing Tales from the Archives: First the Bad News…then the Good!—In this second set of Amazing Tales, clips and slides will be used to discuss various silent film preservation issues. First up is the Library of Congress' Mike Mashon, who will talk about the "fascinating and devastating reality of American silent film survival rates." He'll be followed by Annette Melville from the National Film Preservation Foundation, who will "present a way to bring back some of this history via a major international repatriation project." More good news—the presentation will include a newly preserved print of the 1920 Mutt and Jeff cartoon, On Strike! FREE ADMISSION!
12:00 P.M. The Shakedown (1929, USA, dir. William Wyler)—The great William Wyler directs James Murray (King Vidor's The Crowd) as a boxer who travels from town to town staging rigged fights, until he meets up with an orphan and a benevolent waitress who inspire him to mend his ways. Leonard Maltin will be on hand to interview the Wyler children about their father, and Donald Sosin will accompany the film.
2:30 P.M. The Man with a Movie Camera (1929, USSR, dir. Dziga Vertov)—I recently watched this avant-garde masterpiece for the first time in 30-plus years on Netflix' Watch Instantly, accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra's rip-roaring, magisterial score. It unequivocally Blew. Me. Away.—and I can scarcely believe I'll be seeing it on the gigantic Castro screen with the awesome Alloys performing live! If you got shut out of seeing them perform with the sold-out Metropolis, this ought to make for one helluva consolation prize. Hell on Frisco Bay's Brian Darr has done the program notes for this, which I anxiously anticipate reading.
4:30 P.M. The Woman Disputed (1928, USA, dir. Henry King, Sam Taylor)—Norma Talmadge makes her final silent film appearance in this tale of a prostitute who's unable to escape her past. Set in Austria during WWI, her character is coveted by an Austrian and a Russian officer, and she must spend "a night of passion" with the latter in order to save the townspeople who've scorned her. Based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, the film co-stars Talmadge's off-screen lover, Gilbert Roland. Stephen Horne provides accompaniment.
7:30 P.M. L'heureuse mort (1924, France, dir. Serge Nadejdine)—The 2010 SFSFF closes with a French comedy that captivated the festival's staff at last year's Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Théodore is a failed Parisian playwright who falls off a boat while on holiday and is presumed drowned. When he returns home and learns that that his plays are now all the rage, he impersonates his own brother in order to perpetuate the posthumous acclaim that eluded him while "alive." Director Nadejdine was previously a ballet master in Russia, a job he'd take up again after moving to the US. The character of Théodore is played by Nicolas Rimsky, who also wrote the screenplay from a novel by Countess Baillehache. Leonard Maltin will introduce the film and the Matti Bye Ensemble will accompany it.
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
It's time to make noise about San Francisco's upcoming Silent Film Festival (SFSFF), launching at the Castro Theatre this Thursday July 15 with John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924) and continuing through the weekend with 11 classics, more shorts, more amazing tales from the archives, and an on-stage panel Variations on a Theme: Musicians on the Craft of Composing and Performing for Silent Film.
The heralds have been busy. At Hell on Frisco Bay, Brian Darr has enunciated summer's silence with a detailed entry that includes one-of-three posters designed by David O'Daniel specifically for SFSFF. Whereas at SIFFBlog, David Jeffers has posted anticipatory reviews of The Flying Ace (1926), The Shakedown (1929), L'Heureuse Mort (1924), Big Business (1929), The Cook (1918), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), Rotaie (1929) and Metropolis (1927).
Speaking of Metropolis, tickets for this highly-anticipated event have gone on rush. I had the great fortune to attend the North American premiere of Fritz Lang's recently-restored classic at the first-ever Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival in Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, California. Introduced by TCM's Daytime Host Robert Osborne, my experience of the screening of Metropolis was enhanced by an erudite essay "Metropolis Resurrected" in the festival's souvenir program written by Bret Wood.
As indicated at his website, Bret Wood is the writer/director of the feature film Psychopathia Sexualis (2006). His first feature was the documentary Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films (2003), which was acclaimed as "unnerving and much fun" (The New York Times) and "endlessly fascinating" (Los Angeles Times). Filmmaker Magazine called it "A Lynchian view of the nightmarish underbelly of middle America." His previous documentaries include Kingdom of Shadows (1998, narrated by Rod Steiger). He has written several books on film, including Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film (co-written with his wife, art/film critic Felicia Feaster). Wood's film-related essays have appeared in Sight and Sound, Film Comment, Positif and other publications. He also works as an editor, graphic artist and producer of classic films on DVD. He is currently developing his award-winning screenplay The Seventh Daughter.
Bret Wood has generously granted permission to replicate his TCM souvenir catalog essay on Metropolis on The Evening Class as a gift to the San Franciscan audience about to share this thrilling experience. My thanks to him and Turner Classic Movies.
* * *
Seldom has the rediscovery of a cache of lost footage ignited widespread curiosity as did the announcement, in July 2008, that an essentially complete copy of Fritz Lang's Metropolis had been found.
When it was first screened in Berlin on January 10, 1927, the sci-fi epic ran an estimated 153 minutes. After its premiere engagement, in an effort to maximize the film's commercial potential, the film's distributors (Ufa in Germany, Paramount in the U.S.) drastically shortened Metropolis. By the time it debuted in the States, the film ran approximately 90 minutes (exact running times are difficult to determine because silent films were not always projected at a standardized speed).
Even in its truncated form, Metropolis went on to become one of the cornerstones of fantastic cinema. Testament to its enduring popularity, the film has undergone numerous restorations in the intervening decades. In 1984, it was reissued with additional footage, color tints, and a pop rock score (but with many of its intertitles removed) by music producer Giorgio Moroder. A more archival restoration was completed in 1987, under the direction of Enno Patalas and the Munich Film Archive, in which missing scenes were represented with title cards and still photographs. More recently, the 2001 restoration—supervised by Martin Koerber, under the auspices of the Murnau Foundation—combined footage from four archives and ran a triumphant 124 minutes. It was widely believed that this would be the most complete version of Lang's film that contemporary audiences could ever hope to see.
Then in the summer of 2008, the curator of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine discovered a 16mm dupe negative that was considerably longer than any existing print. It included not merely a few additional snippets, but 25 minutes of "lost" footage, about a fifth of the film, that had not been seen since its Berlin debut.
The discovery of such a significant amount of material called for yet another restoration.
Spearheading the project was the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung (hereafter referred to as the Murnau Foundation). Established in 1966, the Murnau Foundation's goal is the preservation and continued circulation of a large portion of Germany's film heritage. Ranging from early cinema to the 1960s, the collection of more than 6,000 films (silents, talkies, and shorts) includes works by Murnau, Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Douglas Sirk.
Film restorer for the Murnau Foundation, Anke Wilkening coordinated the endeavor.
"We discussed the new approach with experts and German archive partners to establish a team for the 2010 restoration," Wilkening explains. "The project consisted of two main tasks: the reconstruction of the original cut and the digital restoration of the heavily-damaged images from the Argentinean source."
Returning to Metropolis was Koerber, Film Department Curator of the Deutsche Kinemathek, who had supervised the 2001 restoration. "Three people worked on what we call 'edition'—meaning sorting out the material and determining the order of shots, making aesthetic and technical decisions, etc.: Anke Wilkening, Frank Strobel, and myself," says Koerber.
As word spread of the discovery of the Buenos Aires negative, nervous aficianados worried that archival politics might hinder the integration of the rediscovered footage into Metropolis. Koerber explains this was never the case. "They were always willing to cooperate. In fact, they offered the material once they identified what it was."
Once obtained by the Murnau Foundation, the 16mm negative was digitally scanned in 2K by the Arri Group in Munich.
The condition of the 16mm negative posed a major technical challenge to the team. The image was streaked with scratches and plagued by flickering brightness. "It had all been printed from the 35mm nitrate print, which means they have become part of the picture," says Wilkening. The source 35mm element was later destroyed (probably due to the flammability and chemical instability of the nitrocellulose film stock).
An unfortunate lesson was thus learned from the restoration. "Don't throw your originals away even if you think you preserved them, and even if they are in bad shape," Koerber says. "If we could have had access to the 35mm nitrate print that was destroyed after being reprinted for safety onto 16mm dupe negative some 30 years ago, we would have been able to make a much better copy today."
Fortunately, advances in digital technology allowed the team to at least diminish some of the printed-in wear. "If we would have had the Argentinean material for the 2001 restoration, it would have hardly been possible to work on the severe damage," Wilkening says. In 2010, however, "it was possible to reduce the scratches prominent all over the image and almost eliminate the flicker that was caused by oil on the surface of the original print—without aggressively manipulating the image."
Under Wilkening and Koerber's supervision, the visual cleanup was performed by Alpha-Omega Digital GmbH, utilizing digital restoration software of their own development.
At one time, purists objected to the use of digital technology in the restoration of film. But it has become an indispensible tool for preservationists. "[Digital technology] has made things possible we could only dream of a decade or two ago," Koerber says. "Digital techniques allow more precise interventions than ever before. And it is still evolving—we are only at the beginning."
"The work on the restoration teaches us once more that no restoration is ever definitive," says Wilkering. "Even if we are allowed for the first time to come as close to the first release as ever before, the new version will still remain an approach. The rediscovered sections, which change the film's composition, will at the same time always be recognizable through their damages as those parts that had been lost for 80 years."
Viewing Metropolis today, the Argentine footage is clearly identifiable because so much of the damage remains. The unintended benefit is that it provides convenient earmarks to the recently reintegrated scenes.
Other changes are not so noticeable. Because the Buenos Aires negative provided a definite blueprint to the cutting of Metropolis—which in the past had been a matter of conjecture—the order of some of the existing shots has been altered in the 2010 edition, bringing Metropolis several steps closer to its original form.
It is important to note that the "new" shots are not merely extensions of previously existing scenes. In some cases, they comprise whole subplots that were lopped off in their entirety.
"It restores the original editing," Koerber says, "restoring the balance between the characters and subplots that remained and those that were excised."
"Thanks to the Argentine find, the film's structure changes thoroughly," explains Wilkening, "especially the three male supporting characters—Josaphat, Georgy, and "der Schmale" (the Thin One)—who had been diminished to mere extras due to the elimination of two large scenes."
"Parallel editing becomes now a major player in Metropolis," Wilkening says. "The new version represents a Fritz Lang film where we can observe the tension between the preferred subject, the male melodrama, and the bombastic dimensions of the Ufa production."
The 2010 restoration took about one year, from conception to completion, and was performed at the cost of 600,000€ (approx. $840,000). But Wilkening is quick to point out that it is but the latest chapter in an ongoing saga, and pays tribute to the other preservationists who have so vigorously championed the film. "Metropolis is the prototype of an archive film. Decades of research for the lost scenes and various attempts to reconstruct the first release version have produced a large pool of knowledge of this film."
Asked how the Metropolis restoration compared to other projects in which the Deutsche Kinemathek participated, Koerber replies, "No comparison. Metropolis is more complex in many ways. On the other hand, it is also more rewarding, as the [availability of source material]—film material as well as secondary sources—is exceptionally good."
Currently, Wilkening is finishing a restoration of Lang's Die Nibelungen saga, and is optimistic about future projects. "Like everybody we would be keen to find the lost films of Murnau and Lang." But she adds, "I would be happy to turn from the holy grails to some films which are existing in the vaults of the archives, but are forgotten and hardly considered for restoration as they are not part of the canon."
On behalf of the Deutsche Kinemathek, Koerber says, "We were happy to be a partner with the Murnau-Stiftung and provide all the necessary expertise as well as the documents from our collection (script, music, etc.). I hope this successful cooperation will be a model for future projects."
"The project was a very good experience regarding team work," Wilkening says. "The collaboration of the different individuals with different backgrounds—historians, musicians and technicians—was exceptionally fruitful."
Now that Metropolis is—at least for now—behind them, preservationists resume their watch for new opportunities, and forgotten cans of film that might offer other cinema treasures a second life.
07/14/10 UPDATE: At the Film on Film Foundation's blog, Carl Martin takes the digital restoration of Metropolis to task: "We have here the worst possible scenario from a purist preservationist perspective: a poorly duped 16mm copy of footage from a heavily scratched and oil-mottled print (since destroyed), worked over digitally and projected digitally to boot." Despite my assurance that my experience of the digital restoration and its Alloy Orchestra score was a memorable evening of cinema, Martin refuses to attend on principle. "Digital prints are like step children to you?" I queried. "Like step children with missing chromosomes," he responded wryly.
At SIFFblog, David Jeffers has put up his final two anticipatory reviews: Iron Horse (1924) and The Strong Man (1926).
Cross-published on Twitch.
The critical reception to Srđjan Spasojević's A Serbian Film (2009) [official site] has been characterized by qualified reviews that remind me of the classic depiction of the Buddha in his "fear-dispelling" (abhaya) and "boon-bestowing" (varada) mudrās, which is to say the knowledge (i.e., experience) that this film imparts is offered only by way of overcoming aversion to—or more simply put, withstanding—the perverse violence it depicts. Whether critics or audiences are up to that onerous task remains to be seen.
By "qualified reviews", I offer these examples: At Fearnet.com Scott Weinberg writes: "I think the film is tragic, sickening, disturbing, twisted, absurd, infuriated, and actually quite intelligent. There are those who will be unable (or unwilling) to decipher even the most basic of 'messages' buried within A Serbian Film, but I believe it's one of the most legitimately fascinating films I've ever seen. I admire and detest it at the same time. And I will never watch it again. Ever."
At The Temple of Ghoul, Dejan Ognjanović asserts: "A Serbian Film is the most shocking film you're likely to see this year—or any year soon. And the most shocking thing about it is how well made, well acted and poignant it is."
At Twitch, Todd Brown concurs: "A Serbian Film is one of the most incredibly raw and transgressive films I have ever seen. This is a film that left me feeling dirty and assaulted, a film that will surely spark protest and deservedly so. A film that contains a flurry of genuinely shocking imagery sure to spark genuine horror and revulsion from its audience. Spasojević is always going to be the man responsible for that film.
"There is, however, another part of [me] that feels an overwhelming admiration for Spasojević and what he has done here. A Serbian Film is one of the most assured and technically accomplished debut films I have come across in some time. More importantly, as raw as the imagery may be it is never without a point. As extreme as it gets this is no mere exploitation film. No, this is a satire as sharp and pointed and genuinely shocking as was Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal when it first appeared on the scene suggesting that the poor sell their children as food. A Serbian Film is an astoundingly bold piece of work, one that will not just trigger a firestorm of criticism—any fool with bad taste can do that—but one that also has the substance and purpose to withstand it. And Spasojević is always going to be the man responsible for that film."
By contrast, Alison Willmore's purposely spoiler-laden review at IFC protests that "while Serbian Film absolutely has aspirations beyond exploitation, they feel applied after the fact. Most of the graphic sequences, which are grouped near the end, don't come across as specific to the commentary on the Serbian national mindset toward which the film makes occasional gestures. They're more like live-action recreations of guro's greatest hits" [NSFW link!] and she concludes: "Movies can use transgressive topics and imagery toward great artistic resonance.... They can also just use them for pure shock/novelty/boundary-pushing, which is where I'd group Serbian Film. That it comes from a country that's spent decades deep in violent conflict, civil unrest, corruption and ethnic tensions makes it tempting to read more into the film than I think it actually offers—ultimately, it has as much to say about its country of origin as Hostel does about America, which is a little, but nothing on the scale its title suggests."
As reported by Eric Kohn to the Wall Street Journal, Spasojević was quick to jump to his own defense, explaining to his stunned Alamo Drafthouse audience at the film's SXSW premiere that A Serbian Film is framed as an angry reaction to the country's rampant censorship laws. "This is a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government," he said. "We’re giving this back to you." As of its SXSW screening, A Serbian Film had not yet been seen in Serbia though—according to the film's website—it recently premiered there in mid-June. "In the past 10 to 15 years," Spasojević explained, "the only films made in Serbia have no connection to Serbian reality." This is suggested straight off in the film's opening title credits where a deceptively charming title replete with ethnic accordion music is interrupted and slammed with a violent substitution. According to Spasojević, A Serbian Film is "about the monolithic power of leaders who hypnotize you to do things you don't want to do. You have to feel the violence to know what it's about."
In perhaps the least qualified review of the bunch, Harry Knowles at Ain't It Cool News deems the film "brilliant" and "handsome" and predicts: "I would fully expect this film to be shortened by a minute or two for domestic distribution. I completely get this situation because in its current state, there are a handful of theaters in the United States that would have the chutzpah to show the film that was shown at Midnight at the Alamo Drafthouse South in Austin. That's not a false praise, it is a reality. This is a film that when the prints were made … twice, the film developer burned those prints because they didn't understand what they were looking at. This is a film that without breaking any major rules … seems to, but again if you take a very reasoned look at what you are seeing at any given moment, you realize what you are not seeing onscreen at the same time."
All the more reason to honor the bravery of Holehead's programmers George Kaskanlian and Eric Ringer and their Roxie Film Center venue for allowing San Franciscan audiences to experience the film on its own merits and on their own terms. At least a handful, I know—myself included—felt A Serbian Film worthy to view twice, irrespective of Scott Weinberg's qualifications. I don't know if we benefited from the advance ballyhoo but the Roxie audience cheered on this masterpiece of depravity. If—as mythologist Joseph Campbell has suggested—the transgressive is part and parcel of the heroic, Srđjan Spasojević's A Serbian Film heroically wrestles with the visceral power of the projected image, raising the serious specters of prurience, voyeurism, and the staged distance of horror as entertainment, which—in many ways—comes off morally bankrupt by comparison to the raw and honest engagement presented in Spasojević's accomplished debut. I'm reminded of the philosophy behind Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. I'm reminded of Max Renn's conflicted fascination in David Cronenberg's Videodrome. I was kept on edge by Wikluh Sky's droning industrial score punctuated by singular notes struck on a triangle that felt like a ball peen hammer was striking my nerves directly. I was fully riveted by the powerhouse performances of Srđan Todorović as A Serbian Film's unwitting protagonist Miloš and Sergej Trifunović as its maniacal antagonist Vukmir. And I was reminded most of all of the Buddha in his "fear-dispelling" and "boon-bestowing" mudrā, aware that somewhere inbetween these attitudes, fear itself becomes the gift.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Distribution possibilities don’t allow me to give an outright review, but I thoroughly enjoyed this successful overview of the American horror film. Visually, Andrew Monument's Nightmares in Red, White and Blue (2009) [official site] resembles one of those TV docs that pop up around Halloween time, counting down the scariest moments of what-have-you, but while those programs want only to be top ten lists of memorable movies, Nightmares takes it a step further by contextualizing those successful scares. More than any other film genre, horror is an industry that has grown along with its viewers, adapting to what makes its audiences afraid—World Wars, genocide, government paranoia, etc. Even trashy film can be a wonderful chronicler of the human experience, directly or indirectly, because it will always be a product of the times in which it was made. With talking heads from horror bigshots like John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and George Romero and narrated by Lance Henriksen, I have to say: I took a class on the horror film in college and Nightmares is very much a condensed but equally insightful version of that information, for thousands of dollars less in tuition.
Cross-published on Ornery-Crosby and Twitch.
Future X-Cops (Mei loi ging chaat, 2010) is a paint-by-numbers, sci-fi action flick that's doing gangbusters in China but is unlikely to make it past the bargain bin here in the US. The reason for its success abroad is simple: Andy Lau is one of the world’s biggest superstars. They used to call him the "Chinese Tom Cruise," but I think Lau's publicists would prefer to steer clear of that comparison these days. Still, it's hard not to compare the relative slump the two stars find themselves experiencing in 2010, with Cruise's Knight and Day pulling in the smallest opening weekend in 15 years for the one-time sure thing, and Lau slumming it in Future X-Cops. A possible thread regarding Lau's intentions here leads to his relationship with director Jing Wong, who coincidentally directed a film called Future Cops with Lau back in 1993. That film was a Street Fighter parody with no relation to Future X-Cops, but the possibility remains that this is a case of old friends scratching backs. It better be because, contrary to what X-Cops would indicate, Lau is not usually this bad an actor.
Here are the numbers Lau and Wong paint in Future X-Cops: In the year 2080 the world has been saved from an energy crisis by a scientist who has invented a giant shield that envelopes the earth and soaks up solar rays. The loss is so devastating for the energy companies that they create a team of cyborgs to assassinate the scientist by going back in time to 2020 and stopping him from ever inventing the solar shield. Super-cop Kidd Zhao (Lau) travels back as well, to protect the young scientist and to seek revenge for the loss of his own wife.
It's a simple set-up and, although it bars the film from bringing anything terribly original to the plate, it could still be a good time. After all, I cannot count on ten hands the number of horror films that tread familiar ground and still emerge as pieces of relevant cinema. But X-Cops unfolds as you would expect, with some broad humor and a misty-eyed love story, hoping to cover all the bases. As a sci-fi fan, the film's worst insult is that it relies on visual effects and I've seen better CGI in pictures 10-years-old, including a few Asylum pictures(!). I considered enjoying X-Cops on the level of camp but found myself incapable of submitting to an experience that never decides whether it wants to be funny, thrilling or romantic. A somewhat novel scene at an amusement park did cause a smile, and bad guy Kalon is played seriously by Siu-Wong Fan of Ip Man (2008) and Riki-Oh (1993) but he's not really on screen enough to chew any of the cheap-looking scenery.
If you're a Lau or STV Chinese-action-flicks fan, you're likely steeled for a film like Future X-Cops already. Anyone else is looking for action in all the wrong places.
Cross-published on Ornery-Crosby and Twitch.
I wonder how often filmmakers work backwards from a good title, as director Júlíus Kemp has admitted to doing with Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009). The film itself seems to work its way backwards as well, opening threateningly with real whale-hunting footage and a gritty look, but perhaps sensing its slim chances of living up to the similarly titled Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Reykjavik drops the grit about a half hour in to focus on black comedy. It's a smart move, and the film is often darkly funny, I only wish the filmmakers had gone back and reworked the whole thing because I can see a lot of viewers shutting it off before they get to the good stuff.
After the whaling footage we are introduced to an international cast of harpoon fodder—a rich Japanese couple, a drunk Frenchman and a few other forgettables—and everyone speaks in their native language or terribly stilted English. The realities of working with such a diverse cast make the "getting to know you" phase of Reykjavik feel like everyone is playing charades. It's hard to spot those often clearly-defined heroes or villains—well maybe you can pick out the villains. Initially, it's hard not to compare Reykjavik to Texas Chainsaw, no matter how dissimilar they wind up being. The villainous family are whale fishermen down on their luck, similiar to Texas' family of slaughterhouse workers, and they come to the faux rescue of the whale watchers after a violent accident. Then there's the casting of Gunnar Hansen as captain of the troubled boat. Having played the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface in the original 1974 Massacre, Hansen is a well-known name to horror fans and a big reason Reykjavik is getting so much play at horror-themed festivals like Holehead.
Once you get to the actual massacre, Reykjavik drops the pretenses of plot and becomes kind of fun. It still feels like it was written in one sitting, but now those numerous narrative inconsistencies bring big dumb applause. It can be hard to tell how much is meant to be taken as comedy, but at some point I decided I was going to have a good time with it and that was not hard to do. The harpoon I mentioned earlier is particularly enjoyable, the violence fairly brutal and the character reversals completely off-the-wall. It never makes any real sense, but in its own way Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre is better than most STV horror. Still, I imagine its best days will be on the festival circuit. Watching with a crowd of like-minded fans, all of them playing spot the reference, is the kind of mindless experience that we go to these festivals for.
Look at that, I went the whole review without a single Eyjafjallajökull joke.
Cross-published on Ornery-Crosby and Twitch.
[This consideration of Inception is not for the spoiler-wary!]
The image I find most resonant in Inception occurs late in the film when Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Ariadne (Ellen Page) hazard limbo in search of Mal (Marion Cotillard), who has—in effect—kidnapped Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy). True, the scene is ponderous with exposition but this allowed my perception to slow down to take in the image of the houses in water. Memory has placed these past homes in the fluid matrix of the dream. As Cobb explains, he and Mal built their world in limbo to include the first apartment they shared, the house in which Mal bore him children, and Mal's own childhood home. Walking straight on into her childhood home, one faces the dollhouse, which when opened reveals the safe, in which Mal has hidden her totemic top. By placing it in the safe Mal has made her totem a secret even to herself; however—by Cobb touching her totem and setting it to spin within the safe—he reminds her of its purpose and meaning; a shift which will provide the film's narrative its tragic subplot. I love Nolan's image of the spinning top, not only for being—as Ariadne recognizes—"an elegant solution" to the problem of knowing when one is in a dream; but, because it frames the concern, which I find interesting in its own right. The distinction between the waking life and the dream life is an impassioned concern.
In shamanic dream theory this crisis of discernment would be an opportunity to locate "the scout." I understand "the scout" to mean that which is authentic to the dream in contrast to the many phenomenological and visual distractions with which the dreamer populates and decorates the dream. I'm not convinced that this is something taken into the dream by the dreamer—i.e., by way of the totem, let's say—because I believe "the scout" needs to be something endemic to the dream recognized by the dreamer. In that sense, Nolan is more true to "the scout" in the scene in the bar where Cobb is alerting Fischer to the strangeness of the dream as a means of alerting his awareness that he is in a dream. As I understand it, that strangeness would alert the dreamer to the proximity of "the scout", or to what is most endemically authentic to the dream. Lucidity, however, is always a hazardous dance within a dream. Too much lucidity causes a dream to call attention to itself, which—in Nolan's vision—is represented by projections attacking the dreamer. I'm impressed that Nolan has thought this one out with regard to his introduced fiction of extraction and inception. The notion that one can thieve the dream does, indeed, strike me as criminal.
The central convention of Inception is that a dream can be dreamt within a dream. Nolan structures this as a vertical descent as if one were riding an elevator between the levels of a department store. This premise is, again, not original. In shamanic dream theory these levels would be called "gates" and, allegedly, there are seven gates. If one can manage the instability of the various gates to arrive at the seventh gate, this is when the accomplished shaman (i.e., dreamer) is entitled the choice of not returning to the starting point of the dream and opting instead to propel forward into infinity, which is not quite the same as oblivion. The press notes for Inception are correct when they allow that dreams are where the intimate and the infinite meet, not so much through memory as one would expect or as limbo allows, but through the discipline and process of traveling through the gates, dreaming within dreams.
I appreciated Nolan's texturing this discipline of traveling through the gates with, first, the expansion of time so that a minute in the waking world becomes five minutes in the dream world becomes five years in the dream within the dream and five decades within the cubed dream. I found this a provocatively simple understanding of how the spatial-temporal empties into infinity. Second, I was impressed with the importance of the instability factor in successfully maneuvering within the cubed dream; that something like a van carrying dreaming passengers tumbling over and over will create weightlessness in the embedded dreams. I found the scenes where Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was fighting subconscious security in a depth without gravity to be profoundly thrilling. His strenuous performance involved levitational hand-to-hand combat in a whirling tube set up in an old zeppelin factory in England. Its sensual simulation of the physical qualities of torque was fantastic. And here I must insert applause for composer Hans Zimmer's exciting score, essential to the scene's tension.
Secondly, is what I've come to believe is an in-joke—if not a mere synchronicity—structured into the film, though I'm not sure it was intentional. Intentional or not, any joke from Christopher Nolan is appreciated. (When he appeared at WonderCon, he never once cracked a smile.) Here's the in-joke: in Inception, a musical cue is affiliated with the "kick" to bring the dreamers back from their dream state. The chosen musical cue is "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" written by Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire in a signature performance by Édith Piaf. Nolan stages limbo as a place where one grows old filled with regrets and my understanding is that regrets are illuminations that arrive too late. In this sense, "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" is an apt choice, though rendered a bit eerie (i.e., familiar) for Marion Cottiard having won the Oscar® for her performance as Édith Piaf. Again, within Nolan's own visuals, this choice of song made me turn to look at him directly.
