By Robert Koehler

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life begins, all too appropriately, with a yolk-colored blob. Like a scientist’s experiment which has been fussed over until it’s lost its original hypothesis (let alone any proof), Malick’s new film is the work of a man who has so overthought his material that it has flipped, and become underthought, a welter of contradictory ideas, a toxic brew of literalism and spiritualism, an acid trip without the necessary acid. He has turned a chamber piece about a Texas family in the post-war era into a bloated behemoth. He has fatally forgotten the wisdom that in the specific lies the universal, and instead imposes an entirely unearned universal construct on top of a small story that should have a running time of no more than 80 minutes, rather than its entirely unjustifiable 137-minute length–a marker of uncontrolled hubris.

I noted in my review in Cinema Scope of Malick’s previous film, The New World, that the key to understanding his cinema is that he’s a birder. This does not apply to The Tree of Life, although there may be more actual birds on screen in the new work. It would be good to report that the key lies in Malick’s previous life (before he became a film director with Badlands in 1973) as a lecturer in philosophy at MIT, where he specialized in Heidegger. The Tree of Life is replete with philosophy, to be sure; oh, my, is it ever, all of it stated, as with every verbal utterance on the soundtrack (most of which are delivered in a nearly inaudible whispered voiceover by the various characters), absolutely and firmly on the nose. But the philosophy is now confused, amorphous, cosmic, furry-headed variations on the now-old New Age movement. Indeed, that would be a better title for the opus: The New Age.

He has made one film, interrupted by another; or, seen from another angle, two films, each refusing to meld with the other. The first is a memory narrative about middle-aged Houston architect Jack (Sean Penn), prompted out of nothing in particular–perhaps, as far can be vaguely perceived from Malick’s fractured depiction of activity, a bad day at the office–to recall his painful childhood growing up in Waco, Tx. with father Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), mom Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) and brothers R.L. (Laramie Eppler) and Steve (Tye Sheridan). As Jack grows up, he develops an antipathy toward his father, whom we are told quite bluntly early on represents ”the way of nature,” while mother represents “the way of grace.” (In Malick’s philosophical construct, “nature” is bad, imposing, arrogant; ”grace” is “never having to justify one’s self.” More on this slice of intellectual nonsense later.) Raised in a “good” home but with a strict, disciplinarian father, Jack begins to rebel as he moves toward his teen years, and flirts with bad deeds. Father, who falls on rough times with his failed attempts to cash in on his various patents, seems to try to re-bond with Jack, even as he moves the family to a much nicer neighborhood. (Even though he’s fallen on bad times, a nifty detail Malick never explains.) Later, one of Jack’s brothers dies at age 19 for no known reason (perhaps in Vietnam, or Korea, or somewhere else, who knows? Does Malick?)–a deliberate though unrealized tragedy depicted, in a true storytelling perversity, not near the end of Tree of Life, but at its beginning.

The other film? This would be Malick’s depiction of the beginning of the local solar system, the forming of Earth and the origins of life, from the microbial stage to the dinosaurs. Again, this is not where The Tree of Life begins proper, but some twenty minutes in, after Penn’s voice whispers things like “Brother?” and “Mother?”, some blobs appear and disappear, Jack’s family is introduced, Jack’s mother receives a telegram announcing the son’s death, and Penn’s adult Jack is seen rummaging around his gorgeous architect’s desk and walking amidst a forest of glassy skyscrapers (presumably The Trees of Corporate Life, given the way they are filmed at extreme low angles with ultra-wide focal lenses in identical fashion to the film’s many actual trees). For no particular reason or catalyst, Malick chooses to jump literally into the cosmos, assembling a gorgeous string of images. Derived from pictures by the Hubble deep space telescope, and processed by the Palomar Observatory and the Digitized Sky Survey at Caltech, the images show the births of stars, galaxies and then our planet, followed by a montage of subatomic particles, cellular organisms, ancient fish and then, finally, two CGI created dinosaurs.

From some closely similar music cues and planetary and prehistoric images to its leaps in time and space, this other film simply and openly begs comparison with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. So, let’s compare. The narrative leap out of the family film into the dinosaur film is not the kind of leap made by 2001’s Moon Watcher ape tossing his bone weapon into the air and transforming in cinema’s greatest edit to a spaceship; there’s no expressive or meaningful transition, but rather, a seemingly arbitrary cut that may have just as well happened sooner or later. The montage of astronomical, geologic, geographic and underwater images that follow in some ways closely parallel the opening montage of primordial landscapes in “The Dawn of Man” sequence in 2001, but they soon have the feeling of a montage in an IMAX film presented in a science park, missing only Morgan Freeman’s narration explaining the development of life on earth. (Perhaps the only spot in The Tree of Life in which voice-over does not occur.) They also indicate a critical problem with the visual nature of Malick’s film, which is that the images are discrete unto themselves, picturesque rather than cinematic, producing the sensation of flipping through pages in a coffee-table photography book (or, in the case of Jack’s family, pictures in the album of a family we don’t know).

Most critical in a 2001 comparison is how this “Dawn of Life” film-within-a-film climaxes, and how it points to the film’s central philosophical defects. A long-necked dinosaur, first observed at its beach hangout, lopes into a forest where it encounters a smaller, wounded dino prey, looking for all intents and purposes like dinner as it presses a claw like a death-grip on the little guy’s head. But, in a truly Spielbergian moment (and even Spielberg couldn’t conceive of such dino-to-dino kindness in Jurassic Park), big dino takes apparent compassion upon little dino, releasing its grip and consoling it with a gentle stroke. This, we can only conclude, is the birth of love, or, at least, pity. (Compare, if you will, this image of big dino’s gentle claw with Monica Vitti’s white hand on the forehead of Gabriele Ferzetti at the end of L’Avventura for a useful contrasting expression of genuine pity.) This is pure anthropomorphism, and precisely the opposite of Kubrick’s apes-into-men. Such a depiction of dinosaur love is little more than human wish fulfillment, a fantasy–even a romance–of altruism amongst animals, and this after having just been told in blunt terms on the film’s whispered soundtrack that “nature” is bad. Kubrick’s apes, having accidentally stumbled upon the usefulness of bones as weapons, deploy their invention to kill members of a competing band of apes, confirming that man’s innately violent nature is certain to make tools into implements of violence. These, not love, are some of the elements of evolution.

A clearer difference in philosophies, between Malick’s essentially naive romanticism–which proves to gird much of what follows in The Tree of Life–and Kubrick’s Darwinian view of natural selection, is hard to imagine. Yet this probably wont stop the upcoming flow of commentary likening The Tree of Life to 2001, encouraged by the participation of Kubrick’s important special effects collaborator, Douglas Trumbull, with Malick, as well as a spate of classical music selections (John Tavener, Holst) which directly acknowledge the influence of 2001. While Malick’s early films, including Badlands and Days of Heaven, combined an awareness of class conflict and the inevitable clashes of human desire with a fascination with nature that bordered on Pantheism, The Tree of Life dives headlong into a world view that can be summed up in the Beatles lyric, “All you need is love.” Mrs. O’Brien, in one of her few whispered voice-overs as the family moves out of their old Waco house, states that without love, life goes by in a flash. Love is seen to finally bridge the growing barrier between Jack and his father. An increasing lack of love between Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien can be seen to fuel his angry outbursts when he’s confronted with his boys’ disobedience.

At the same time, Malick is either uninterested, unwilling or unable to convey emotions on screen, except through the crutch of all those whispered voiceovers allowing us to eavesdrop on characters’ inner thoughts. The annoying mannerism of the whispering aside (and it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the spectacular misjudgment of the flagrant overuse of this device, to say nothing of its pseudo-poetic language, the on-the-nose obviousness and the particularly vexing issue that about 75% of what’s whispered is inaudible, even when seen in the Directors Guild’s superb big cinema), the emotional undercurrents are crowded off screen for the picturesque. The actual human dimension is replaced by bits of bullet-point dialogue; when Jack faces his father and says, “You’d like to kill me,” it doesn’t shock or resound, because there’s nothing backing it up, since there’s nothing in the father’s behavior that’s remotely homicidal, only aggressive. Malick wants to convey love’s force, and, as he deems it, “grace,” but he can’t find cinematic correlatives for it. His narrative contains all the aspects of a primal father-son conflict, but he drains it away and replaces it with New Age quotations. “The glory” is a term heard often, in a throwback to its use in The Thin Red Line to far more powerful effect, since it was tied to actual human endeavors and historical events. (The New Age effect also flows to the soundtrack: Tavener is a favorite composer with the New Age crowd, as well as the progressive Anglo-Saxon Christian crowd, with whom New Agers have much in common. This is also true of Henryk Gorecki, whose music is also periodically cued.) Even Mr. O’Brien’s real-world work at a giant oil refinery and his efforts to cash in on his various patents comes across as abstract and vacuous, materialist engagements framed in purely spiritualist terms; the refinery resembles nothing so much as a cathedral of industrial pipes, while the Texas state capitol building where O’Brien tramps around aimlessly and to no real purpose is filmed as if it were St. Peter’s in Rome.

The Tree of Life begins with a quotation from the Book of Job (Chapter 38, verses 4 and 7, in which God puts Job in his place), and references Job’s trials with God later during a pastor’s sermon. Nods to God and Job and references and quotations do not, however, by themselves earn meaning. Nor does a train of images early on of the family grieving over news of the son’s death conjure up a Job-like struggle. A detectable pattern emerges: Ideas are stated, and then not explored in cinematic terms. Worse: the ideas contradict one another. Take the matter of grace vs. nature, which Malick clearly intends as his central dialectic. The ways in which these two states of mind/existence are defined by Malick has little to do with any recognizable view of either. Grace is typically associated with either the comforting power of a supreme being, or in Malick’s Pantheistic view, an equilibrium between humans and nature. As for Nature, philosophers have clashed for centuries over it’s essential meaning, ranging from the kind of anthropomorphism dramatized by Malick with his dinos or poets’ use of “the pathetic fallacy” to a more scientific view that sees Nature as an amoral process of birth, life, death, decay and regeneration–the view, if you will, of “2001.” But Malick has wholly confused his terms. Two direct literary influences on The Tree of Life are William Faulkner and D. H. Lawrence; Faulkner for his fracturing of narrative into a stream-of-consciousness, better to convey the unstructured momentum of inner thought and emotions, and for his fascination with the eternal battle between fathers and sons; Lawrence for his concern with the conflict between what he viewed as ”nature” and “will.” Mr. O’Brien is a purely Lawrencian character, which Malick proceeds to utterly misread. Rather than representing nature (that would actually be Mrs. O’Brien, who’s constantly depicted outdoors, under the trees, walking barefoot in the grass, dipping her toes in water), Mr. O’Brien is pure will, and he states it as such in a few lines of dialogue while advising his sons on the cruel ways of the world. His entire character can be viewed as a man trying to exert his will on his sons to follow in his path; the middle son’s interest in music draws him closer to the father, who regrets aborting his own music studies (now channeled into some organ playing of Bach and record-spinning of Brahms and other composers at home), and which seems to spur Jack’s jealousy. This is not nature, but it’s opposite, the human forces impinging themselves upon nature, exactly as Lawrence viewed it.

Ultimately, Malick discards these matters for something far more amorphous: Adult Jack’s quest for meaning, conveyed in a manner that can only be described as graduate film school surrealism. In the early reels, Malick inserts strange footage of Sean Penn in his business suit traipsing through what may be a desert in California or Utah; trippy and maybe a bit silly, but quickly forgotten what with the dinosaurs and Jack v. dad tale that consumes much of the film. But then, in the final reel, it all comes back, with Penn’s Jack still traipsing, climbing over rocks, walking through a door standing alone in the wilderness (I’m not kidding), then the roofless family house (or a small section of it replicated by Malick’s longtime production designer Jack Fisk in the desert) and finally reaching a long, flat beach with lots of folks blankly wandering around. They include, in a true stroke of Kitsch, Jack’s family as they were when he was a kid; these are, it seems, the living dead, or ghosts of Jack’s past, or perhaps something else, since almost nobody in this gaggle of beachside wanderers outside of the family is recognizable from the rest of the film. Nothing much happens; Penn and Pitt walk silently together in the film’s only superstar moment, the kids receive a few hugs, the water laps ashore, and then it’s over.

And to what end? It might reasonably be expected that this sequence should be adult Jack’s final cathartic release of emotional memory, an expunging of familial toxins, a recognition of impending mortality as well as a reconciliation with the past. Whether this was Malick’s intention can only be guessed at, since none of this happens, and nothing else either, expect a bunch of images of various people walking on the beach. Literally, and nothing more, pictures. This is important, since endings are important, this is where he ends the film, accented by such postcard Kitsch as a shot of a field of sunflowers. Nothing more clearly points to a film run aground by undeveloped ideas in contradiction than this.

The tragedy of The Tree of Life is the film itself, a project of such profound importance to the filmmaker that he worked on concepts and images for it ever since he’s been a filmmaker–nearly 38 years. He clearly based the family story on his own memories growing up in Texas as a boy in the late 1940s and 1950s, and this is best preserved on film in the many wonderful, Wyeth-like moments of rambunctious boys playing indoors and out, having fun for the sake of it. (The sole moments of anything like lightness in a film utterly devoid of humor, irony or inference.) He sweated out several 200-page drafts, and when producer Bill Pohlad told him a decade ago that his script contained two films that weren’t joined into one, he worked on it some more, making The New World in the interim. It’s now clear that Pohlad’s criticism was precisely on point; what hardly makes any sense is why the film was subsequently funded and produced when the very problem Pohlad defined was never resolved. Like the New Age itself, The Tree of Life is an aspirational quest that can’t come full circle, since it never determines what it is in the first place, and concludes as a cinema con.

Two new documentaries about Hollywood craftsmen opened in Los Angeles this week: Something’s Gonna Live and Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (already on DVD in the UK). Both focus on likeable professionals and are brimming with movie clips, making them compulsive viewing, but I ultimately found the former much more compelling than the latter.

In some ways, Something’s Gonna Live is an expansion of director Daniel Raim’s 2001 Oscar-nominated short, The Man on Lincoln’s Nose, which focused on production designer Robert Boyle (who died last month). Raim’s new feature expands his focus to include Boyle’s associates: production designer Henry Bumstead, cinematographer Conrad Hall, illustrator Harold Michelson, production designer Albert Nozaki, and cinematographer Haskell Wexler.

The group of aging professionals–all of them octogenarians or older during the film’s ten-year production–meet together in living rooms, offices, and at movie screenings, and discuss their history, craft, and what they miss most about the studio system. (A sense of community and accessibility at all levels of production is a common refrain.) What sets the film apart are its tender sense of camaraderie (felt in many candid, informal conversations) and its thematic heft: these artists genuinely want to reflect the human condition, a value often lost in today’s technological extravaganzas.

“These were people who had a very strong appreciation of not only the human condition, but of their social obligation in portraying that condition,” says Boyle. Commenting on the way the original The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) explored different attitudes about money without pinpointing them, he says, “I think we look back on films which were searching for essential truths, sometimes in abstract means.” Wexler adds, “Films have always been commercial, you know….No one ever wanted to make a film and say, ‘I don’t want anybody to see it.’ But people did say, ‘I want to make this film. And I want to make this film because I believe in it.”

Boyle, Bumstead, and Nozaki were USC architecture students looking for work in the ’30s, and the only industry thriving in Los Angeles at the time was film. But while they may have entered the movie business for expediency, they stayed in it for passion. Bumstead designed his last films–Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima–at the age of 91. Raim also recounts one historical outrage: soft-spoken Nozaki was fired from the studio hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and forced to relocate to the Manzanar concentration camp. Paramount eventually rehired Nozaki, who suffered from a genetic eye condition that resulted in his blindness; he retired in 1969.

One of the highlights of the film is its section on Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds (you can watch a clip on Hulu here). Boyle and Michelson revisit the schoolhouse location and marvel at the “new” trees looming over the landscape. Raim uses a four-way split screen to compare the present locations with movie clips, original storyboards, and designs. Michelson suggests today’s digital tools could easily generate birds at the press of a button, but today’s filmmakers wouldn’t leave anything to the imagination.

“I look back at the film,” says Boyle, “which had a lot of imperfections. Which, as I look back, didn’t matter. The imperfections were part of the film process. If you made it today it would be absolutely perfect. Every bird would be in place. And there would be millions of them. There would be nothing left to the imagination. I think in our version of The Birds you could imagine a lot of things. What wasn’t seen was as important as what was.” Michelson concurs, “It’s so sophisticated today that it almost doesn’t mean anything anymore. Now write me a good story.”

The elegiac tone was all the more poignant at last weekend’s public screening that attracted roughly a dozen viewers (including Wexler himself). The film is only playing for a week, and is still seeking a distributor even though its world premiere occurred at last year’s AFI FEST. At a time when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art still threatens to whittle away at its repertory film program due to a supposed “lack of funds” (although president Melody Kanschat admitted in print the program covered its costs last year), the under-the-radar feel of this tribute to titans in a company town raises the question, Why isn’t there major industry initiative to preserve its heritage?

Presumably, the industry is so focused on films opening on Friday they don’t stop to think about films from last week, let alone last century. But Something’s Gonna Live–a reference to artistic legacy–is a sensitive and important documentary, taking its time to observe and listen to its subjects, and uncover the creative values that underly their work. It’s a film the industry should cherish.

Craig McCall’s Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff is a more slick–and conventional–biography than Raim’s film, and it begins to run out of steam about halfway through, as it plods through a laundry list of titles, clips, talking heads, and juicy but derivative anecdotes. In many ways, it seems like a movie version of Cardiff’s autobiography, Magic Hour: A Life in Movies (1997).

Cardiff, who passed away last year, was one of the first great color cinematographers (Powell and Pressburger films, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The African Queen, and many more); he was also a director, photographer, and painter. Eloquent but earthy, Cardiff claims his adolescent reading of a pornographic book first inspired him to delve into the arts.

He first entered the film business as an actor in 1918, and began working as a clapper boy in the early days of sound production, eventually becoming a camera operator. Cardiff was selected by Technicolor as its resident technician in Europe, winning the position over countless interviewees by skipping over technical details and talking about Rembrandt and painting instead. The film provides ample evidence of Cardiff’s skill as a colorist, a quality Powell and Pressburger took advantage of in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and subsequent pictures. (The film reverses expectations by shooting the heaven scenes in black-and-white and the earth scenes in color.)

Cardiff lensed countless films, and the documentary tries to cover as many as possible, padding material with unnecessary still-life arrangements of movie props, and sound bites by the likes of Ian Christie and Martin Scorsese (oddly lit devilishly from below), and Thelma Schoonmaker. On the plus side, its highlighting of Cardiff’s work on the quasi-documentary Western Approaches (1944) and Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949), emphasizing its long takes by cleverly fast-forwarding through one of them, inspired me to add these titles to my viewing pile. Another highlight of the documentary is the clips it incorporates from Cardiff’s 8mm home movies he acquired on movie sets.

Cardiff is a major figure and this documentary is a decent tribute, but its form is so routine and the content so summary, it lacks conviction and ultimately seems too polished for its own good.

Yesterday, I attended the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ preview of the world re-premiere of John Ford’s Upstream (1927), which screens for the public tonight. “Re-premiere” because the film was long believed to have been lost before it was rediscovered last year in the New Zealand Film Archive; the film is part of 75 American silent films that are currently being brought to the U.S. under the guidance of the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF).

In addition to the NFPF and the New Zealand Film Archive, the re-premiere is possible with the cooperation of the Academy Film Archive, which found the film and supervised its preservation, which was paid for by Fox, who owns the rights. The NFPF’s Annette Melville tells me an effort on this scale probably couldn’t have happened in previous decades, when rights holders and archives were more possessive with their materials; global communications and current technologies are helping facilitate new discoveries, and recent attitudes embrace this cooperation as a win/win cultural scenario.

Upstream is a big win for John Ford enthusiasts. It’s one of only about a dozen films that survive today from Ford’s silent period, which numbered over 60 titles. It was made in 1926 at a time when Fox was under great expansion, in large part under the creative inspiration of F.W. Murnau, who had been invited to the studio and given carte blanche to make Sunrise. I’ve written about Murnau’s influence on Frank Borzage before in conjunction with Janet Bergstrom’s excellent documentary on Edition Filmmuseum’s DVD of The River, but Murnau’s influence was widespread.

Sunrise was produced at Fox from August of ‘26 to February of ‘27, when Ford saw a rough cut and went on record proclaiming it the greatest film yet produced, and suggesting that he didn’t think it would be surpassed for a decade. Ford travelled to Germany to shoot some footage for upcoming works and to study Murnau’s craft. As Joseph McBride describes it in Searching for John Ford:

“During his month in Berlin, Ford gave himself a crash course in German filmmaking techniques. He screened several of the major expressionist films and spent time with Murnau, who graciously showed him some of the extensive preproduction designs for his pictures and explained his shooting methods.”

Ford’s next two films–Four Sons and Hangman’s House (both of which are available in the Ford at Fox DVD box set) where highly indebted to Murnau’s mobile camera, moody sets, and expressive acting. As Tag Gallagher describes it in John Ford: The Man and His Films:

Ford was enchanted by the intense stylization of Murnau’s painterly invention, in which a character’s conscious rapport with his physical world seemed suddenly palpable. Ford’s movies had been relatively unstylized. But henceforth lighting creates dramatic mood through emphatically contrasting black and whites, macabre shadows, shimmering shafts of light, chiaroscuro, and other abstractions.

Upstream is being touted as a late-’26, Murnau-influenced production, but having seen the film, I’m hard pressed to make a very strong case for that. Firstly, it’s a light drama with a lot of humor, so it doesn’t afford a lot of opportunities for brooding cinematography. Its plot revolves around a love triangle in a boarding house full of eccentric vaudeville performers, and an opening title card describes their lives as “burlesque.” An ostentatious actor goes to Europe to play Hamlet and is an unexpected success, and a lot of the film stresses the difference between passion and loyalty and earning respect versus caprices of fame and shallow pride.

There are a few moments in the film that evoke Murnau’s expressionism: a long traveling shot down a dinner table featuring various characters is unusual for Ford, who typically preferred stasis; a nervous actor imagines the spirit of his mentor in a shot that recalls the climax of Nosferatu; flashbulb explosions from news reporters precede a character’s entrance and emphasize the emotional potency of the moment in the eyes of his abandoned lover; and the stage decor of the Hamlet production compares to the grandeur and artificiality of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), with the play’s resounding applause doubly-exposed for intensity. But by and large, the film feels like an effective but fairly classically styled studio drama, and citing examples such as these can seem a bit reaching.

This may have to do with the fact that Upstream was made prior to Ford’s Berlin tour, which by all accounts seems to have been the decisive event for his evolution as an artist. Another lost film that exists in part is Ford’s Mother Machree, which was shot in September ‘26 but not released until ‘28 after it had been retooled for sound. Gallagher describes the surviving footage, writing that “pre-Murnau Ford–pretty and picturesque, just like The Shamrock Handicap–contrasts with post-Murnau expressionism,” and cites examples of the latter, such as “angled shots of a tenement staircase” and another shot’s “theatrically expanded perspective.” There isn’t anything so overt in Upstream, so I suspect it was made even before Mother Machree (I haven’t yet been able to track down production dates).

If that’s the case, it’s not really fair to judge the film in relation to the work of Murnau. Upstream is an entertaining film with very charming performances, good timing, and breezy humor; one scene involving foot play under the dining table and mistaken identities is particularly funny, largely from the way the scene is cut and the way the actors play against type. Any rediscovered Ford is a welcome turn of events, and this film helps flesh out the talents and aesthetic inclinations of the filmmaker on the brink of his artistic evolution.

By Robert Koehler

Following the New Media Film Festival screening last night at Downtown Independent in downtown Los Angeles, festival programming director Noel Lawrence (center) moderates a very new media panel discussion on Johan Grimonprez’s fascinating film on Hitchcock, doubling, paranoia, the Cold War and catastrophe culture, Double Take. In the foreground to the right is co-editor Tyler Hubby, who discussed the process of working for five solid months with Grimonprez during his residency at the Hammer Museum, where they culled UCLA Film Archive footage of everything from episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, rare promotional footage of The Birds (which becomes the key filmic reference point, shot during the October Missile Crisis), Folger’s Coffee commercials, and a forest of Cold War and early Space Race newsreel footage (among other things).

Grimonprez was also on the panel and is actually in this photo….on the laptop on the left side. Currently in Basel (presumably for the art fair, though I couldn’t confirm this), Grimonprez spoke on Skype audio and mic’ed through the laptop. This proved fascinating and valuable, since his thoughtful and voluminous answers to questions from the panel and the audience became perhaps more coherent and digestible by being on audio. The effect was doing a panel discussion via radio, and it concentrated the mind.

This was especially useful in the case of Double Take, which my Cinema Scope colleague (in the best and longest interview in English with Grimonprez in the summer 2009 issue available here) Mark Peranson refers to as “a post-Internet film.” I asked Grimonprez to expand on this notion; he noted that the complex ways in which the film adapts fiction (two Borges stories inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Double and adapted by novelist Tom McCarthy), edits fact and history in a kind of “drama,” and how the central theme of Hitchcock encountering his double who wants to kill him is given a hall-of-mirrors treatment that has the rapid, fractured sensibility of what one experiences on the web.

This webby viewing experience also has its doubling, since Grimonprez deliberately simulates the viewing effect of watching TV with a remote control; Hubby noted that those Folger’s ads were inserted every ten minutes in the film to create the illusion of watching TV. In the film, TV is viewed as a weapon of control, both seductive and as a tool of technological dominance: Hitchcock himself understood this, ironically commenting on the medium as host of his own show, while the film gauges the growth in nuclear weapons, space exploration milestones and steps forward for (Western) TV. Double Take may be some kind of masterpiece of cinematic history storytelling, media analysis and the “in-between” film–in between fiction and non-fiction, between cinema and television, between journalism and music. This is a key to its vitality and importance, and why it’s a film that must be seen.

LACMA is halfway through its series devoted to cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, one of RKO’s prime cameramen in the 1940s and ’50s, and thus one of the key strategists behind the shadowy “noir” look in films such as Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943), Out of the Past (1947), and Clash by Night (1952). But for me, the big discovery has been Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a movie that has managed to completely escape my notice over the years despite the fact that it’s sometimes credited as being the first American film noir.

I write “American,” because as James Naremore argues in his excellent book, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, “film noir” was a 1930s French term applied to Popular Front movies such as Pépé le Moko (1936), Hôtel du Nord (1938), and Le jour se lève (1939) that was revived post-WWII when The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (1944) opened in Paris. Borde and Chaumeton’s seminal book, A Panorama of American Film Noir (1955) dates American films noirs from 1941, which is pretty much what I’ve always accepted, but Stranger on the Third Floor–released a year earlier–is unquestionably a fully-formed American noir.

Contrary to journalistic convention, Naremore also argues there isn’t a very strong historic connection between German expressionism and film noir. But Pépé le Moko and Marcel Carné’s Popular Front films boasted German cinematographers Jules Kruger and Eugen Schüfftan, respectively; the latter was an UFA special effects guru who worked with Fritz Lang, and later as a cinematographer for Robert Siodmak and G.W. Pabst (though admittedly not on their most expressionist titles).

Stranger on the Third Floor was created by a Hungarian writer (Frank Partos), a Latvian director (Boris Ingster), and an Italian cinematographer (Musuraca), but it showcases a German heritage: Peter Lorre in fiendish makeup stars as a serial killer stalking the streets; shadowy, cramped rooms convey a clenching sense of Kammerspiel; and an expressionist dream sequence predates the graphic lighting in Citizen Kane the following year (both films share the same art director, Van Nest Polglase). A tribute page for the film offers an evocative selection of images.

There’s a psychological intensity to the movie that belies its awkward dramaturgy. (Nathanael West, who died in 1940, purportedly provided some ghost writing, but the screenplay is no literary achievement.) Though it begins with a witty play on mistaken identity–a man’s fiancee almost doesn’t recognize him after saving a seat for him–its story about a partial witness at a murder trial who suffers mounting self-doubt oscillates between earnest melodrama and absurd exaggeration. The trial features an absent-minded judge, a sleeping juror, and several comments about the inadequacy of the public defender: “I wouldn’t let him defend me if it was for stealing an apple,” groans one observer.

Steadily, the witness (John McGuire) questions not only the limits of his knowledge, but his own moral character; searching his memory for every offhand remark he ever made against a nagging and hypocritical neighbor, a series of flashbacks slide into a sweaty reverie as he imagines himself judged by his speech rather than his actions: “MURDER” proclaims newspapers in what must be 300-point type, and the sequence boasts a transfigured world with geometric shadows, echoing voices, and histrionic, leering faces.

Stranger on the Third Floor is a perfect example of a movie that likely would have been lost in the annals of film history if it wasn’t for the idea of “film noir” elevating and sustaining its reputation; hopefully the fact that it predates the official noir histories won’t diminish its appreciation, because its visual qualities are significant, showcasing Musuraca’s cinematography in its formative stages.

By Robert Koehler

Jean-Luc Godard (and his Les Inrocks interview) marked the starting point for this year’s Cannes blogging, partly because I anticipated that his Film Socialisme would certainly be one of the major films at the festival. It is that, and more, since the film’s impact will long outlast the mere week and a half of Cannes. Godard retains his tendency to upset conservative-minded critics, such as the army of Anglo-Saxon writers (with the anticipated exceptions like the New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis) who continue to refuse to allow that the movies can be anything more than be based in narratives with cause and effect. The simple fact, and seldom acknowledged, is that for the vast majority of critics attending Cannes, a frankly experimental film which happens to find its way into the official selection (itself pretty rare) will be about the only time during a year’s span when they’ll be forced to confront non- or anti-narrative. Because he retains a large personality, with an equally large and calculated propensity to stir controversy, Godard’s actual position as an experimental filmmaker tends to get lost in the discussion. But Film Socialisme is a work that can’t be properly assessed without identifying it, first, as militantly experimental.

Although broken into three roughly identifiable sections–the longest, opening section dwelling on a cruise liner in the Mediterranean (which is the ideal vehicle to launch a discussion on the sources and ramifications of European history, and which makes Film Socialisme the child of Oliveira’s similarly discursive movie-on-a-cruise-ship A Talking Picture); the second around a family and a gas station, featuring a France 3 journalist, a donkey and a fabulous llama; and a brilliant montage climax generated by a re-visit to Odessa and the steps made famous in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin–Film Socialisme is a sustained essay, delivered as a text composed largely of citations from a vast range of sources. The past and future of Europe is the central subject; the perception of image with text is the experiment.

This is managed in several ways. First, in a different manner than Kirby Dick did in Chain Camera but with the same democratic attitude, Godard arranged for a group armed with cameras to shoot around the ship, and with various media, ranging from cell phone cameras to high-end HD. The variation in image quality (and sound quality, which Godard heightens for distortion at points, and crystal-clarity at others) is his most extensive exploration to date of the nature of the video image. It represents a kind of culmination of his three-decades-long experiments with video, Godard being the first major director of his era (along with Antonioni) to treat video as a legitimate alternative to film stock. The ship itself is Europe, with one identifiable American–Patti Smith–strolling through the corridors like a minstrel.

On a single viewing, the text is as usual with Godard (though not more so than usual) only partly penetrable, and the comprehension is further altered by Godard’s other major experiment here: The English-language subtitles are abstracted, with complete sentences compressed to their key words. French-speaking viewers have said that the subtitles augment the spoken text, which is too much for the ear to absorb; Les Inrock critic-writer Serge Kagansky, who co-interviewed Godard and viewed the film beforehand, saw it naturally without subtitles and was interested to learn that Film Socialisme is perhaps not fully complete until the subtitles were added. With the subtitles, Godard not only plays a game of selecting words, but duplicating the wordplay he frequently enjoys doing with his on-screen graphics and titles, including jamming two words together. (If I’m able to see it again before leaving Cannes, I’ll provide examples–impossible on a single viewing.)

This all creates a fascinating reading-watching-listening experience that expands cinematic spectatorship far more than any 3D innovations, even if, like adjusting to iambic pentameter in the first minutes of a Shakespeare performance, your motor functions aren’t ready for it. But it also underscores how Godard’s films are designed to be seen more than once, not as a failing of the work itself, but by design. This alone makes them truly annoying to conservative critics, who more and more require that an entire film be instantly consumable and comprehensible on a single viewing. If the film fails this test, it’s by definition a failure in toto.

The formal experiments don’t stop there, but what struck me watching Film Socialisme after recently watching Godard’s 1980 Every Man For Himself as part of IndieLisboa’s survey of the Berlinale Forum 40th anniversary was how Godard is now thoroughly immersed in his second round of a radical, non-narrative phase following a narrative phase. In other words, we’ve been living for the past decade-plus (including such masterpieces as Histoire(s) du cinema and Eloge de l’amour) through a new variation on his Dziga Vertov period with Jean-Pierre Gorin.

The politics are, of course, different now: No less radical, yet independent, untethered to any party or ideological line, equally critical of every phase of contemporary European life. My colleague Larry Gross has aptly noted that Film Socialisme contains no caustic words against the U.S. or U.S. culture, though I suppose it could be argued that the lavish displays of conspicuous consumption on the cruise ship are at least partly an American creation, an American thing. Godard’s attention is trained on Europe and the Levant, with a kind of geographic tour guide list posted on screen that includes Egypt, Palestine, Hellas (Greece) and Barcelona. This is more or less Oliveira’s focus in A Talking Picture; the difference is one of a sense of history, with Oliveira concerned for the impact that contemporary terror may have on certain cultural traditions and continuities and its own additions to the historical record, while Godard is more combative, against what he perceives as a Germanic domination of the idea of “Europe.” I don’t read this as Godard taking a stance as a man of Switzerland against Germany, since he also tosses verbal scuds against his own country. (Besides, he readily celebrates Germany on the soundtrack, from several Beethoven cues to his habitual use of music from the catalog of Manfred Eicher’s ECM Records, based in Bavaria.) Instead, the laments that pepper the audio text in Film Socialisme seem to derive from a sadness for what Godard perceives as the small place which Europe has become, its rapid irrelevancy in the face of world historical movements. An American may easily counter that Europe is destined by geography to always be at the center of world history, and though it has become in Thomas Friedman’s phrase a “flatter” place, its range of cultural and linguistic diversity remains impressive and really pretty wonderful.

What is certain is that a second viewing of Film Socialisme will evoke a completely different set of responses than the first, virginal viewing, and that ideas and issues that passed me by at first will stand if full foreground the second time around. (I’m wondering, for example, what bits about socialism that I didn’t perceive this time may hit me the next time.) What won’t go away regardless of how many times one views the film is Godard’s opposition to artists rights and intellectual property, which ends “Film Socialisme” on the kind of note that would make visitors to Pirate Bay smile. It’s actually here where the irascible J-L G finally points his guns at (corporate) Hollywood, with a display of the FBI warning against unauthorized copying. During the course of Film Socialisme (as he’s done countless times, most lavishly in Histoire(s)), Godard thieves from all sorts of movies, from John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn to Potemkin. Is he a pirate? Godard answers, in the film’s final and already-classic graphic title: NO COMMENT.

The Southeast European Film Festival concludes tonight at UCLA. A highlight has been the US premiere of Goran Devic’s and Zvonimir Juric’s The Blacks, a trancelike, psychological thriller about a group of Croatian special forces during the Bosnian war. It’s being touted as the first Croat feature to address Croatian war crimes, but it’s not a message picture; it merely references Branimir Glavas‘ famed Garage Case as a backdrop for its existential drama.

Five armed men slink through a forest as they follow the tracks of a previous party; a shocking event twenty minutes into the picture triggers a flashback to the day before, setting the stage for the enigmatic prelude, gradually answering questions along the way. So masterfully does the film relay information that any plot summary would rob a viewer of its narrative pleasures. Long camera takes focus intently on the brittle, preoccupied characters, dressed in commando black and often enshrouded in darkness; the men speak to one another in minimal sentences. A vivid sense of menace permeates the picture, with a rumbling unease that envelops the characters at every turn. But this isn’t a typical action picture–the danger isn’t an enemy around the corner, it’s the void originating from within the characters’ own psyches.

Like William Wellman’s Track of the Cat (1954), the film is effectively a black-and-white movie shot in color. Its desaturated hues, dark uniforms, and light walls render its unveiling moral crisis in stark visual relief. The aging commander is an intractable man driven by conviction, who would rather take action than consider its consequences. The men in his charge make note of his inconsistencies and respond in subdued, individual ways; most seem too deflated from the experience of war to mount any form of protest. The Bosnian war ushered in widespread drug abuse, and alcohol and heroin infuse their paramilitary activities.

Yet there are sparks of human recognition, awareness that resembles awakening, which occasionally flitter across the faces of the militia. But the flashback structure of the film reinforces the trajectory of fate, and the encroaching nightfall and darkening visuals suggests the closing of an era of carnage, its secrets and nightmares no longer confined to obscurity.

The three-and-a-half-day TCM Classic Film Festival wraps up today with the North American premiere of the newly restored Metropolis (1927) tonight. The Festival has been somewhat of an experiment in its first year, screening good prints of well known films in the heart of Hollywood for a high fee ($20 per screening if seats are available, or $500 passes). Most Angelenos think the Festival is prohibitively expensive, but that may be because we can see titles like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Playtime in 70mm here on a regular basis.

The Festival seems well attended (though by no means sold-out), virtually everyone has a pass around their neck, and line conversations revolve around hotels and air flights. A man seated next to me yesterday (from New Orleans) speculated that maybe only 10-20% of the audience was local. That’s all well and good for TCM and those who can afford festival tourism in this economy, but it does raise questions about film festivals and their relationships with host cities in general.

More interesting for Angelenos, the program has included a few rare or recently restored films. The highlight for me has been Elia Kazan’s Wild River (1960), purportedly the first color film set in the Depression South. In 2002, it was added to the National Film Registry–a decided improvement over the indifference with which it was initially greeted–and it was recently restored by the Film Foundation (with help from the Academy Film Archive and Fox). It begins unconventionally with a montage of black-and-white documentary footage depicting devastation caused by the flooding of the Tennessee River, capped by a heartrending interview with an exhausted survivor who stands in the mud and describes family members who have drowned.

What follows is a dramatization of the newly formed Tennessee Valley Authority and its efforts to acquisition the river and surrounding land from private owners to build a network of dams that will usher in technological progress but erase local history. Such themes are more widespread in movies from other parts of the world–Jia Zhang-ke’s 2006 masterpiece, Still Life, about the Three Gorges Dam in China, springs to mind–but less prevalent in American cinema. (Apparently, Kazan worked on a labor documentary in 1938 close to the setting of Wild River, and nursed the feature for 25 years through an assortment of writers.)

Montgomery Clift plays Chuck Glover, a bookish, emotionally withdrawn TVA employee who has to convince the last private landowner, 80-year-old Ella Garth, to sell her island before the waters rise. He is utterly stymied, however, both by the elderly woman’s steely resolve not to sell, and by the region’s racial politics when he offers good-paying jobs to Garth’s black workers and upsets the local businessmen. Fortunately, Glover’s budding romantic relationship with Garth’s widowed daughter-in-law (Lee Van Cleef) becomes an empowering and provocative force in his life and those around them.

Increasing the sense of a world transitioning from old to new is the story’s chilly autumnal setting; the leafless trees, misty river, and overgrown grasses of Garth’s island are captured in stark CinemaScope, making it seem near the brink of death even before it submerges forever. Late-career Clift is ideally suited for expressing the subtle modulations of Glover’s awkward interactions with others; his nervous ticks reach a fevered erotic pitch in conjunction with Van Cleef’s passionate, unbridled earthiness. The film is a simmering character study for much of its length, hinging on difficult exchanges perennially caught between private/public, urban/rural, male/female tensions, fighting to emerge from deep within the characters’ psyches as they try to give expression to feelings they cannot define. It’s likely that its first audiences thought it was emotionally convoluted and slow-moving with little release, and it is–which is precisely why it’s also gripping and lingering.

The 2010 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles debuted last night and will continue through Sunday, April 25th. It’s one of the better produced local festivals and takes place in Hollywood at the posh Arclight Cinema. It aims to strengthen ties between filmmakers of Indian descent, audiences, and industry people, so its line-up emphasizes popular hits and Bollywood films, but it also includes documentaries and the occasional art film.

A standout with elements of the latter category this year is The Man Beyond the Bridge (screening Sunday), Laxmikant Shetgaonkar’s FIPRESCI-award-winning drama, fresh from Berlinale’s Forum section. It’s a fascinating story set in Goa, India’s smallest state nestled in the Western Ghats mountain range, a biodiversity hotspot threatened by human development.

An isolated and weary forest service guard named Vinayak (Chittaranjan Giri)–who’s spent fifteen years chasing away poachers and who recently became a widower–faces a new crisis when villagers (across a bridge) decide to erect a temple in the forest. The villagers are quickly rallied by the combined tactics of a politician and a religious guru who assert the right to use the forest to protect it from their own sense of moral contamination. “This land belongs to the people,” they contend. “We came first, the government came later; this temple is an ultimate symbol of our culture, tradition, and humanity.” Meanwhile, the construction whittles away at the dwindling preserve.

The plot is further complicated when Vinayak, almost in spite of himself, begins to shelter a mad and mute woman (Veena Jamkar) whom the villagers have completely shunned. Vinayak–whose day to day activity largely consists of shouting at poachers–initially treats her like a stray animal, leaving her food on the doorstep of his meager stone house and literally dragging her into a washhouse. But a bond slowly develops between the two social outcasts that gradually offers them human companionship and love. Their unconventional relationship enrages the villagers, however, and a final confrontation mounts between the nonconformists and the religious mob.

The film is based on a short story by Konkani writer Mahabaleshwar Sai, and it skillfully balances an array of tensions between control and freedom, cultural heritage and moral claiming rights, natural resources and development, public piety and personal transformation. While some of the dramaturgy and camerawork feels conventional–the periodic use of crane shots unnecessarily inflates what is essentially a rural character drama–Shetgaonkar is a master of the long shot in which a detached and wider perspective gives rise to thematic contemplation, and the film’s cinematography is beautfully naturalistic without devolving into the merely picturesque.

There’s a fascinating emphasis on costuming as well; the colorful saris of the villagers contrast with the outcasts’ brown garments and Vinayak’s preference for plain t-shirts and quick changes into uniforms whenever his superiors show up becomes a telling motif for a man exhausted by his sisyphean task.

The Man Beyond the Bridge was years in development due to the vagaries of Goan film funding, but the time spent refining its screenplay shows in the way the film artfully builds its narrative conflicts. It’s an accessible movie but one whose degrees of import and subtle dualities expand with the kind of attention they richly deserve.

I’ve got an article in this week’s LA Weekly about the films of Ross Lipman, whom many readers will recognize as the UCLA restorationist behind classic films by independent luminaries such as Kenneth Anger, John Cassavetes, John Sayles, and Charles Burnett. However, his upcoming show at REDCAT on March 30 (a Tuesday event rather than the Theater’s typical Monday night film schedule) should expose more people to his own film, video, and performance work, and shouldn’t be missed.