2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Released in 1968

If you don’t believe in God, you might as well believe in the movies — where you can be God. British critic Raymond Durgnat once said something to that effect, and it’s not hard to parse what he was getting at: All movies, even the bad ones, unfold before an all-seeing crowd of voyeurs, each free to judge characters when they fail and feel responsible for their success. 2001: A Space Odyssey, which will screen at Cornell Cinema tonight and Sunday evening, pitches this thesis into the infinite vastness of space, where the all-seeing viewer does not judge or relate but sees, for the first and possibly only time, through the eyes of God.

That may sound like a brooding, moralistic slog, but the genius and lasting beauty of 2001 is how light it is on its feet. For a famously accurate film that interrogates mankind’s technical progress, from the first bone-as-weapon to the spaceship that realizes our species’ ultimate Manifest Destiny, the action and ideas embedded within play like music, not polemics. Indeed, 2001 transfixes in its use of music, like when Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube turns a lengthy spaceship docking into a waltz, or when early hominids shriek at a black alien monolith as the discordant creepiness of György Ligeti’s “Requiem” gets under our skin. These moments are brimming with ideas — think about the spaceship’s lyrical movements compared to the hamster wheel dynamics of the astronauts — but you need not mine for meaning to get the full experience, which is to feel awe at the magnificent and fear at the unknown.

Director Stanley Kubrick, who wrote the script with Arthur C. Clarke, had a thing for symmetry and one-point perspective, so that staring at a corridor or wormhole is to stare down its endlessness. The forced compositions betray a meticulous mind, for one, as well as a perceptive, knowing eye behind all the space politics, antagonistic A.I. systems and otherworldly encounters. When we watch astronauts David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) navigate their spaceship, we are not looking at human movement so much as automated motion through narrow, fluorescent spaces. There is no room for choice, and thus error, in the ship’s spectacular, streamlined design, and the symmetrical cinematography drives home both the efficacy and inhumanness of this advanced technology.

This explains why Bowman and Poole are utter blanks — anyone who has a bone to pick about the “bad acting” here is missing the point — and HAL 9000, the task-managing supercomputer on board, is genteel, wise and terribly sentient. 2001 doubles as a cautionary tale for how the human brain can only process so much knowledge, and when our species hits that prophetic “singularity,” we will kneel just as the apes at the film’s beginning did before their monolithic master. Perhaps the most novel and inspiring twist in 2001’s plot involves a certain choice (which I will not spoil, if for some reason you are still reading without having seen the movie before) Bowman makes in a dazzling red room. Bowman’s decision exercises tremendous courage and agency, but its protracted, elegiac aftermath may be one of the saddest scenes in American film. How could [insert climactic event] be such a tragedy? 2001 proposes that once humans hit a point in our applied intelligence, we entrust humanity onto technology and forfeit ours in the process.

Kubrick ejects the tension between humans and technology out the thematic airlock once the final act arrives, with its most memorable title, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.” The events that transpire here are unforgettable, for Kubrick and special effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull discard plot in order to depict something approaching the ineffable. It’s odd how some people approach the “Star Gate” sequence as a puzzle, and are thus frustrated how it refrains from spelling out its secrets. It’s not “about” much anything, except perhaps sight itself. This acid-washed spectacle elapses over a wordless 10 minutes, and it’s worth keeping in mind the literal time of Bowman’s journey probably takes an eternity longer. This sequence and the uncanny one after approximate mankind’s final achievements, if we ever reach them, and how we will no longer just be Homo sapiens once we arrive at the other side.

Exploration has always brought with it violence and, to excuse the violence, moral hierarchies. What 2001: A Space Odyssey, an easy pick for the greatest of films, posits is that the arrogance of man sustains only by the limits of our understanding, and that when our brave rocket man clears that final hurdle, be it literal or metaphorical, the rest of us will answer not to death rays but a deafening coo.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Killer of Sheep

This is the fourth post in Film Stock, a series of reviews appreciating the greatest movies of all time. Charles Burnett's 1977 UCLA thesis film Killer of Sheep is featured today.

Killer of Sheep
Directed by Charles Burnett
Released in 1977 (Theatrically in 2007)

Charles Burnett sees so much in life, but so few options in living. Brimming with the little details only the most discerning of artists can subtly capture, Killer of Sheep also offers little, if any, solutions to its characters’ many problems. Time and circumstance herd these men and women through narrow corridors, with sprints of liberating motion now and then, like those eponymous sheep. Killer of Sheep is one of the saddest films I have seen, a superlative all the more remarkable for how steadfastly it eschews histrionics and familiar tragic structure. 

Stan (Henry Gale Sanders) is depressed. Passive voice could describe almost every scene of his, for he seems to have no control of his life. In Watts, Los Angeles, he works in a slaughterhouse killing sheep and cleaning up their blood. At home, his wife (Kaycee Moore) feels unloved and his children lack guidance. A white suburban mother would cringe at how these young boys play: throwing stones at one another, hanging under unmoving train cars, swinging wrenches like toys. One of the boys breaks into tears by the end of almost any encounter, whether he gets fistfuls of sand in his eyes or ridicule from girls in the street. He possesses too soft a disposition to make it on these mean streets. 

So, too, does Stan. With nods to crime in his past, Killer of Sheep presents a wealth of opportunities, in an ostensibly short period of time, for Stan to seize. He could work in a liquor store, managed by a strong white woman, though he worries about the not infrequent hold-ups. He could fix a car with a motor he buys, except it breaks minutes after buying it because his so-called friend insists the very edge of a pickup truck’s flatbed is all the space it needs. He could work with two old criminal associates, whose slick leather jackets remind Stan that to dress nice demands bad things. He could just make a choice and get away and changes things for the better, except he cannot.

If Stan spends most of the film moping at his life’s failures, it is his wife who we, as an audience, latch onto as the story’s moral center. With Kaycee Moore’s beautiful, dignified looks (they recall Michelle Obama’s), the wife, who goes unnamed, bares the tolls of the poor hand her family has been dealt in the most cinematic terms. In a repeated medium shot portrait, Burnett lingers on her face as she verges on tears and strokes her undisciplined hair. In a daytime dance with her husband to the tune of Dinah Washington’s well-used “This Bitter Earth,” she struggles to salve the love between them. It appears to go well, with Stan swaying and allowing his wife to squeeze him, but any connection ruptures once the song ends and Stan bolts it for the door. For a man who has given up hope, even the beautiful things in life serve Stan as sexless obligations. For a woman who hasn’t, it tears his wife to pieces.

Shot in 16mm for Burnett’s UCLA thesis film, Killer of Sheep embraces its budgetary shortcomings as a means to tell its story further, in more subtle and atmospheric ways. In an early kitchen scene, refrigerator door slams and the clatter of glassware drown out the unanswered questions Stan’s wife lobs to him. Their pitiful ability to communicate with one another is tethered to the very acoustics of the room. Not long later, their daughter (Angela Burnett) sings Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Reasons” in an out-of-tune, albeit adorably passionate, register. In the room over, her mother applies make-up, in what is surely an attempt to doll up for her husband’s pleasure, and smiles at her child’s full-throated commitment to the music. Any number of thoughts pass her mind as she listens to her daughter’s scratchy voice — I didn’t know she loves that band ... Does she sing to be happy? ... If only we could afford her a musical education... — but we sense, too, that the artistry and innocence of this moment inspires her more than anything else. 

Burnett returns to the slaughterhouse where Stan toils his days throughout the film, and it is there where he ends it. A long shot of sheep running up a bottlenecking dispatch midway through the film haunts a later shot, of Stan and his friend walking down an alleyway. Above them, boys jump between rooftops, or come close to flying. They are living the happiest days of their lives, whether they realize it or not. Stan does not envy his son’s youth or happiness. As the final scene discloses, Stan smiles at work — where he chains writhing sheep up to a conveyor belt seconds before a technician slits their throats. He’s not even the executioner; he’s more an everyday Charon, ferrying poor souls to their ends. And yet he smiles. The sin of poverty is not that it drowns its sufferers in filth but that it conditions them to expect nothing more. Killer of Sheep understands this. It leaves you devastated. 

Metropolis

This is the third post in Film Stock, a series of reviews appreciating the greatest films of all time. Fritz Lang's 1927 epic science-fiction/populist epic Metropolis is featured today; it screened at Cornell Cinema last month and I have finally gotten around to writing about it here.

Metropolis
Directed by Fritz Lang
Released in 1927

Many ancient religions begin with a man living in a haze of tranquilizing purity, only for an abrupt introduction of knowledge and suffering to ignite a spiritual reawakening. Christianity, Judaism and Islam have Adam and Eve, while Buddhism owes all to Siddhartha Gautama. Fritz Lang’s 1927 proto-sci-fi classic Metropolis lifts this narrative with protagonist Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), the son of superich industrialist, Joh (Alfred Abel). One can say that Lang tethers every plot point and image to a character or symbol from the Bible, Qur’an, Talmud or any other established religious text. With arresting dystopian art direction and a clear political thesis, Metropolis enhances its age-old tale to rise as a timeless work of art on its own.

For the famous intro, Lang keeps his camera distant as he follows nameless workers descending into the depths of an industrial labyrinth for just another day on the job. 32 years after film history commenced with Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, Metropolis inverts this canonical image to communicate despair and brutal classism. The story effectively begins with Freder, who we can tell is important through a liberal use of close-ups. He wears all white as he frolics about an indoor garden — the Eden symbolism could not be more blatant. Maria (Brigitte Helm) disrupts his peace when she ushers in a group of battered, poor children to his chamber; confused and curious, Freder tracks them back to their subterranean dwellings. There, he watches in horror as an intricate, mechanical complex explodes and transforms into a sacrificial altar where the survivors are herded to die. Whether or not the satanic visions are hallucinations or not does not matter, as Freder faces life-changing truths, deciding to defy his father and fight against extreme capitalist injustice.

Freder’s struggle rages both internally and externally, which allows for close-up decisions and long shot battle scenes. Psychoanalysts revere Metropolis for good reason. Freder must come to terms with his father’s cruelty and considers rebelling against class inequality as atonement for his many years of enjoyment at the expense of the proletariats. After changing clothes to match their black uniforms, Freder relieves a struggling man of his seemingly meaningless task — furiously adjusting the hands of an enormous clock — and substitutes with his own labor. His failure to keep up speaks to the futile and painful work so many “unskilled” hands must persevere through every day. The scene ends with Freder’s arms stretched across the clock like Jesus Christ. In Metropolis, religious metaphors overlap with political, social and technological commentary, and characters serve both micro and macro functions, as signs of human agony and symbols for class disparities.

The subtext in Metropolis relies on montage editing, for sure, but it’s the mise-en-scene envisioned by Lang and production designers Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht that captures the audience’s attention with beauty and meaning. Like Chaplin’s Modern Times (produced nearly a decade later), boss Joh occupies an ornate office far too large for his needs — he is above mere “needs,” clearly. Cinematographer Karl Freund contemplates the cityscape throughout the picture, with emphasis on the central skyscraper, modeled after Brueghel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel. Maria captivates a crowd of laborers with the Biblical story of the Tower, which Lang stages through a very theatrical flashback. Placing his camera before a stage with the proscenium in view, Lang exaggerates the artificiality of this story to, in turn, make the present storyline only that more authentic.

The Alloy Orchestra, prolific silent film composers, accompanied the packed screening I attended at Cornell Cinema. In addition to pounding percussion, legato accordion and spooky keyboard, Ken Winokur and co. added diegetic sound effects, like striking a violin bow to indicate a creaky door or gear. The trio powered through the two and a half hour runtime not only with flawless accuracy but also with consistent energy, giving its all at minute 74 as well as minutes one and 148. Like the Alloy’s rich soundscape, Metropolis offers semiotic depth as deep as the dystopian city it depicts, but there lies the tempting alternative to just surrender to the spectacle.

Modern Times

This is the second post in Film Stock, a series of reviews appreciating the greatest films of all time. Charlie Chaplin's 1936 classic Modern Times is the selection this time around, as it was screened at Cornell Cinema last Thursday. The following article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Modern Times

Directed by Charlie Chaplin

Released in 1936

The sun had already set, but a maroon warmth lingered along the horizon long enough to defy the encroaching darkness for a few precious moments. In these minutes leading up to Cornell Cinema’s outdoor screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times last Thursday night, the view from the Terrace of Willard Straight Hall afforded a stunning panorama of downtown Ithaca at dusk, as well as a powerful metaphor, forced though it may be, on the film’s legacy.

When Chaplin released Modern Times in 1936, silent films had run aground about seven years before (see Singin’ in the Rain or The Artist for the romanticized history). His preceding masterpiece, City Lights, resisted the “talkie” push back in 1931. Modern Times is not completely silent (more on that later), but it is set in the silent film mode Chaplin and his iconic character, The Little Tramp, pioneered. Chaplin had the money, fame and gall to return to the ghost town of silent film and not only put on a show but bring millions around the world back with him. Successful as The Tramp’s swan song was, however, the paradigm had shifted and he had to finally conform, as he did with his talkie, The Great Dictator, four years later. Modern Times survives as the last beautiful respite of a form that faded into the distance.

Chaplin told simple stories with sincerity and certainty, two qualities lost in our nebulous modern times. Like many of his other works, Modern Times propels forward on the familiar romantic comedy tracks Chaplin himself long ago put into place. Our hero, Chaplin’s Little Tramp (listed as “a factory worker” in the credits), falls for the homeless “gamine,” played by Paulette Goddard. She is an orphaned, broke yet defiant girl, and shares a resourceful mischief with The Tramp. They meet when she steals a baguette and clumsily tackles The Tramp to the ground in mid-escape. The Tramp has not a penny more to his name than her but, ever the gentleman, takes the blame for her theft. As a policeman arrests him, he grins and tips his hat to the girl, embodying gentility long lost.

There is a greater purpose to this film, however, than imparting an exemplary love story. Current viewers are likely struck with the immediacy to the images and the ideas Chaplin crafted here. Modern Times is unapologetically political, decrying the strain of industry as deleterious to physical and mental health. The conveyor belts and twirling gears where Chaplin stages some of his most memorable slapstick are instruments of indoctrination. The factory boss — fiddling with a puzzle in his oversized office — commands the bare-chested gear operator, “Section Five, speed her up!” over and over. As production accelerates to breakneck speed, the workers are stripped of any semblance of free will or dignity. Today, we criticize technology on philosophical grounds — What does it mean to be human? Does this implant change me? — but its abuse as satirized through this film is clear and corporeal.

Every scene speaks on multiple planes; comedy doubles as commentary, fantasy as criticism and so on. The Tramp’s monotonous assembly line task of screwing in bolts inspires a nervous breakdown where he turns foolishly daring (famously sliding through the factory’s gears), sexually devious (fixated on ‘screwing’ the buttons on women’s blouses) and joyously mad (wrecking the factory in a flurry of dance). His full-body spasms betray a man turning into a machine, one uncaring and ready to crash. After being subjected to the iconic “Billows Feeding Machine,” which malfunctions and flings food at his face in a still-hilarious frenzy, there is a brilliant moment later on when he sits down in a prison dining hall. As he bends under the table to fix his shoe, the chef walks by and ladles a serving of stew into his bowl. When The Tramp gets up, he looks to the ceiling for a shaft and just shrugs off the instant materialization of his food. Mechanized food dispersal is a little too plausible for him.

Modern Times obviously reflects the sentiments of the working class during The Great Depression, though Chaplin settles for an optimism absent at that time. His critique of the American Dream ends in a caustic embrace, with The Tramp’s last lines — “Buck up, never say die. We’ll get along.” — arriving when all seems lost. Chaplin, a wealthy man at the time and supported by Hollywood studios, could have come across as disingenuous in speaking to the huddled masses. Viewing the movie today through my skewed image of that era and comfortable position in today’s, I nonetheless find his picture bittersweet. As The Tramp and the girl claim a dilapidated shack by the highway their own “paradise,” there is the blatant irony in the disconnect between fantasy (he dreams earlier of them in a comfy house with a stocked kitchen) and reality. But the scene is less a joke than a touching instance of believing your own dreams.

Throughout it all, Chaplin gets away without saying a word. That is not to say he is entirely silent; the climax of the film consists of the Tramp’s famous song, sung in gibberish and expressed through pantomime. But with clever use of diegetic sound — the feeding machine’s instructions are told through a record player, the factory boss speaks through television monitors — Chaplin retains the mystery of his Tramp, which he feared would be lost if he had to speak. He appeases the audience’s expectations by subverting them at every turn.

I can speak with certainty that the magic of this film was only fully retained through Cornell Cinema’s special nighttime open-air screening. I watched it for the first time on a lazy day over the summer. The disc was The Criterion Collection Blu-ray (which the Cinema also used), yet the afternoon glare clashed with the LCD television’s projection. What a difference to watch it under the stars, surrounded by some hundred students and professors resting from their own stress and labor. The audience Cornell Cinema attracts is one of love, patience and respect. I think back to our generation’s beloved Amélie, when the eponymous protagonist looks behind her at the faces of bliss populating a movie theater. This type of cinema transcends art, propaganda or entertainment — it shoots, hits and sinks right into the soul.

Alien

This is the first post in Film Stock, a series of reviews appreciating the greatest films of all time. In the spirit of the just-released Prometheus, inaugurating this collection is Ridley Scott’s 1979 opus, Alien. A choice like Casablanca would be more classical and an essay on The Tree of Life would appear more legitimate, but I would like to start with a film that is a masterpiece by all accounts yet also thrilling entertainment and a hallmark in modern moviemaking. Film Stock will update periodically, as per my schedule (I don’t get paid for this, after all). The criterion for a film selected is at least two (often more) viewings several months (often years) apart. I aim to cover a wide range of film history. To prove this, no Christopher Nolan … for now.

Alien

Directed by Ridley Scott

Released in 1979

What I would give to know nothing of Alien and watch it again for the first time. Unfortunately, that can never happen. I imagine few people are out there [reading this] who do not know that scene — that scene, when the whole movie changes. If you have no idea what I am getting at, by all means stop reading this and watch this movie untarnished while you still can. But for the rest of us, the alien — later labeled “xenomorph” — and its gruesome method of reproduction are as close to public domain as R-rated science fiction can reach. There is no scene in film history with such an unexpected punch. Psycho’s shower scene. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” “Nobody’s perfect!” Alien’s Last Supper owns it.

It speaks to Ridley Scott’s brilliance, then, as to why watching Alien for the third time the other day, with the same foreknowledge of the twist as my first viewing, remained as shocking as ever. For that infamous dinner scene, in particular, the suspense relies mostly on the framing of the shots. Scott does not rely on quick cuts to artificially escalate tension; he sustains a shot on Parker (Yaphet Kotto), Dallas (Tom Skerrit) and the ill-fated Kane (John Hurt, perfect as always), only to cut to his friends dining around him. None of them realize what is really happening until it happens, or even after. The characters are not fleshed-out to the extent of a character study a la Raging Bull, but the agonizing, sustained duration with which Scott forces us to watch Kane’s brutal demise, and his friends struggling to save him, defines corporeal and emotional pain.

Consider that it takes about an hour to reach this point. It is a horror movie, and there is not a drop of blood until it is halfway done, and truthfully not much after that. As the alien picks off the remaining crewmembers, most of the deaths are depicted off-screen (shadows against a cat’s head, for instance) or through rapid, almost subliminal shots of gore (usually the alien’s phallic inner mouth pulverizing a head). One of the most notorious jump scares in film history — Dallas’ trek through the ventilation system — is also one of its most craftiest, fooling the viewer with a tracking shot that focuses on the foreground, only for Dallas to illuminate the background with his flashlight and *!!!* *static*. Scott tells the story from the parceled viewpoints of the Nostromo’s inhabitants, only quickly cutting when a vantage point, no, when a friend, has been terminated. The steady pacing, before, during and after duress, is the film’s secret weapon, acclimating the audience to the ship’s confines and acquainting us with our fellow humans, who we are powerless to save. We just watch. Or don’t.

With Sigourney Weaver’s prolific acting schedule in the many years since this film, often starring as a yappy bureaucrat or fast-talking heroine, it is easy to forget this understated performance in her first leading role. Aliens would give her more lines and cement Ripley as the quintessential female action hero. But here Weaver tackles the part without any camp, transcending the admirable benchmark Jamie Lee Curtis set in Halloween two years earlier. Scott certainly dreamed of greatness for Alien, but his dreams only came true with Weaver’s talent and willingness to break ground beside him.

What a remarkable character they created. Ripley revolutionized Hollywood and all those who watched and continue to watch her. Without Alien, we may not have ever seen Clarice Starling, Sarah Connor or Beatrix Kiddo.

Here was a woman, beautiful she may be, not typecast as the clueless female caricature awaiting her male savior. She organically takes charge above her peers, each of whom could surely do the same (except Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) … poor Brett). But only Ripley had the foresight of the fatal contamination Kane’s alien contact would wreck and the strength to persist with such a tough verdict, even if the literally corrupt Ash (Ian Holm) bypassed her wishes. And only Ripley made it to the end, not by superiority or radical political correctness, but because she was coarse enough to think like the alien and take the bitch out herself.

Some feminists decried the sexualization of Ripley once aboard the escape vessel, when she takes off her clothes aboard the escape vessel she believes is safe. “Stripping her narrative competence with her uniform,” Vivian Sobchack writes in Alien Zone, a collection of essays on science fiction cultural theory, “Ripley no longer represents a rational and axesual functioning subject, but an irrational, potent, sexual object — a woman, the truly threatening alien generally repressed by the male-conceived and dominated genre.” Whoa now. Sobchack makes a good point on the ‘uncovering,’ be it will, of the true woman, who is also alone and captured in low, voyeuristic camera angles. But she does not see the true critique and brilliance of the sequence, where Ripley must adorn the spacesuit no woman had worn to the point, become the ‘man’ and kill the hermaphroditic male rapist for good. 

With such subtle imagery, Scott is not substituting Ripley for a male surrogate to win the day but thrashing the expectations the sci-fi audience already conceived for her character. The little striptease is almost sinister in its intention: For the first time, the film incites cheap arousal from the predominantly male voyeurs yet then reintroduces the sexually relative monster and robes Ripley in men’s clothing for a bloodless finish. Scott’s provocation makes for the most satisfying unsatisfying climax in thriller history, no pun intended.

Someone with a familiarity in art history, design and sculpture could speak in more impressive terms, but as a construction leader of my high school production, I know the work it takes to create a set and Alien’s little world is a fully realized, nuanced masterpiece of the craft. The utilitarian hallways Ripley sprints down, with their monotonous pipes and wires that run in stark contrast to Star Trek’s primary colors. The stark geodesic bubble where crewmembers access the ship’s computer, Mother. The resistance of the failsafe levers that Ripley fails to overcome in time. Overwhelming with detail, the Nostromo’s design stands an unparalleled achievement in art direction to this day. Scott, who had a hand in the visual design with Roger Christian, Leslie Dilley, Stan Winston and the essential H.R. Giger, makes love to the set with his camera. Every scene captures an area of the ship from a new viewpoint. The lens flare illuminating the crew during the ship’s descent likely inspired J.J. Abrams. It is a grimy, empty, dreary ship, yet never a depressing or boring view.

There is a complete universe inside and outside the Nostromo. Today, that means “sequels!” and it did in 1979, too, as three successors bore the Alien name over the next 18 years. While James Cameron’s Aliens remains one of his greatest accomplishments (among many, I should clarify), it is a decidedly different film, expanding the mythos while losing its mystery. Meanwhile, the final two films fumble a little too much with their legacy. Alien, Ridley Scott’s perfect film, one with Jaws and Psycho, transcends its genre with multiple levels of meaning on image and soundtrack. Like Spielberg and Hitchcock’s best, the thrills survive without attention to its politics or ideology or aesthetics. But they are all there, ripe for discovery upon each viewing, dealing naked thrills and scary truths.