And I, for One, Welcome Our New Digital Overlords

“Film Is Dead? Long Live Movies,” read a loud and stupid headline blazoned across page one of The New York Times’ Arts section last September. The coverage over the last four or so years of this “film versus digital” debate has led to some woeful hyperboles and conjecture. I wanted no part in it — that is, until I saw Side by Side, a documentary that, as its peacemaking title implies, balances the pros and cons of both celluloid (physical film stock) and digital filmmaking and leaves judgment up to the viewer.

But not even Keanu Reeves, celluloid advocate and Side by Side narrator, can dodge the facts and sensible arguments that point toward one conclusion: Digital is here to stay, with complete domination in its sight. While celluloid still has many years until it shuffles off this mortal coil, financiers and amateur filmmakers have long preferred digital filmmaking technology since it is cheaper. “But film is an art! I won’t sacrifice 35mm just so Lena Dunham can film herself play naked ping-pong with Patrick Wilson in an increasingly inconsistent HBO sitcom!” you may say (you being I). To you, Side by Side makes the most crucial case of them all, in the form of modern auteurs like David Lynch, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher and Danny Boyle all voicing unqualified praise for digital technology.

Christopher Nolan is one of the few talking heads, along with a conflicted Martin Scorsese, who makes an impassioned case for the old-school approach. As much as I believe that film stock captures the superior image, his argument defies objective reasoning. This is a religious matter, devoted to the 115-year-old medium of his forefathers — this time, it’s personal. Nolan’s passion for celluloid has paid off so far: Inception won the Oscar for Best Cinematography in 2011, the only movie shot on film to do so since Slumdog Millionaire broke the mold in 2009. Poor Scorsese and cinematographer Bob Richardson, both vocal celluloid stalwarts, dabbled in digital 3D just once with Hugo, and the Academy slapped Richardson with his third Oscar. We welcome you and Marty to the 21st century, a blood-written note taped to the bottom of Richardson’s Oscar probably said. Don’t look back.

Indeed, Scorsese’s next movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, will be a film-free production; Life of Pi and Skyfall, two digitally-filmed, color-corrected visual feasts, are the favorites to win the Cinematography statue Sunday night; and the Nolan types are a dying breed. Almost all young filmmakers now start with digital cameras, reared on attractive equipment compatible with their MacBook Pros. Out with the old, in with the new. “But, still, is it good? Is all this right?” you plead. I know not all the answers, young lad, though it pains me to realize that the medium responsible for all the enrapturing images in my Ingmar Bergman film seminar will, certainly in my lifetime, become extinct. Yes, well — wait … how is my class watching these Bergman films, you say? They are screened from an HD projector, off high-quality DVDs. It beats watching movies in my dorm.

And this is where this this silly debate hits home. As a viewing platform, film started to lose its footing with the invention of VHS in 1977 (digital movie cameras only took off in the early 2000s). Since then, the home video market has seen Laserdisc, DVD and now Blu-ray and Netflix Instant. Blu-ray represents the pinnacle of any physical storage medium for commercial movies, with its 1080p high-definition resolution and lossless (code for “real sweet”) audio. Specialty distributors like The Criterion Collection have dedicated themselves to re-releasing the treasures of American and world cinema — the works of Fellini, Kurosawa, Fassbinder, Powell & Pressburger and Malick — in pristine condition, albeit in digitally-encoded files.

Over the weekend, however, I noticed a telling update on The Criterion Collection’s Facebook page. In honor of Valentine’s Day, Criterion was streaming all its titles for free — on Hulu. Apparently, you can break up marathons of New Girl and The Bachelor with a little Michelangelo Antonioni or Jean-Luc Godard. I’m all for more access to film, but what if a poor connection renders Yojimbo to look like the screen is smothered in Vaseline? What if someone views Wings of Desire on a 13-inch laptop, at lowest brightness? What if, God forbid, some heathen watches Solaris on his iPhone?

Cinephilia, “the love of cinema,” is dead, provided that “cinema” not only signifies “movies” but also the movie theater as well as the physical medium of film itself. To the millions of you who still go to the movies, chances are, whether you watch The Avengers at Regal Cinemas or even Side by Side at Cornell Cinema, you are watching a digital projection. For the casual moviegoer to the obsessive collector, film is long gone. For filmmakers, it’s on the way out. For all of us, we’ll cherish our access to all the films in the world even as we debase visual and audio fidelity in the process. Just set some limits and don’t you dare watch a film on, to quote David Lynch, “your fucking telephone. Get real.”

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

But Why Can't I Save the World?

Courtesy of Santi Slade

After watching Zero Dark Thirty for a second time and binging on both 12-episode, 12-hour seasons of Homeland in just three days, I was struck by a pang of melancholy. For reasons that don’t trouble me nearly as much as they should, this realization had little to do with my supine disregard of exercise or summer internship applications. Instead, I felt insignificant and small, humbled by the extraordinary acts that both Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya (Jessica Chastain) and Carrie (Claire Danes) of Homeland achieve, the latter on a serialized basis.

Granted, these two heroines are among the most flawed protagonists in film and television history; Carrie spends significant screen time crying, screaming, panicking, bugging her eyes out or — and this is how Claire Danes wins all the Emmys — colliding her many bipolar symptoms at once, while Maya sits on the opposite end of the clinical spectrum, possessing more of a psychopathic coldness that I consider to be the film’s apparently-too-subtle critique of America’s callous, post-9/11 foreign policy. Regardless, as I emerged, bleary-eyed, from the couch and the cinema, I could not resist the superficial allure of such “heroic” work. I want to join the CIA!

Even after admiring the gray tones of counter-terrorism in Homeland anddefending Zero Dark Thirty’s anti-war message to anyone who will listen, I find myself at the most base and opportunistic of temptations. As damaged as Carrie and borderline sadistic as Maya may be, they pull off peerless feats of deduction and investigation that are based on hunches only they believe. And that’s pretty cool. In the vacuum of fiction, a writer (or, in the case of Homeland, a room of them) can prescribe witty retorts and enviable bravery to a character and, with a mental breakdown here and a sobbing fit there, still pass off the creation as human. It is when we believe that these superhumans could even possibly be real that the aforementioned sadness, the most unwarranted of phenomena, creeps in.

Let us take a more agreeable example, especially as I remember the more unsavory details of Maya’s character. For me, Harry Potter embodied this saintly, yet still powerfully empathetic, protagonist. Here is a teenager, just slightly older than me when I first read The Deathly Hallows in 2007, vanquishing the greatest evil his world has ever seen. How does he do it? (*Spoilers, I guess*) He walks into a dark forest, guided by the souls of all the family and friends who have perished in the decades-long war he is about to end and accepts that, to fulfill his destiny, he must die. Harry follows through every step without curling into the fetal position or crapping his pants — he approaches his certain demise with maturity and grace. And, after flatlining right there in the Forbidden Forest, he returns to life to kill Voldemort in front of all his peers. Rowling likely intended Harry’s defiant victory to strike the reader as inspirational and comforting, yet I found myself plummeting into an existential crisis as I examined my own life and found my worst struggles woefully pathetic compared to Harry’s. Gee, I haven’t levitated a feather, no less slayed anything close in size or strength to a basilisk or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named!

Am I alone in finding some of our culture’s most popular and satiating movies, TV shows and books inherently depressing? That I expect an answer from a rhetorical question may hold an answer. Moving away from the morally questionable heroines of Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty, the hagiographic elevation of protagonists in more crowd-pleasing works like Harry Potter, Star Wars or Les Misérables may very well provoke an unintended moment of self-reflection. The Sopranos knows this well: In a very meta scene, gangster Christopher Moltisanti freaks out after reading in screenwriting books about how every character has an arc. “Where’s my arc?” he asks.

Of course, the only way to cast off this pall of self-deprecation is to build your own character — in a video game, that is. Super Mario Bros. or Call of Duty don’t cut it, as they focus only on objectives within a predetermined playing style, leaving no other options for the player but to master the mechanics. Bioware’s sci-fi trilogy Mass Effect, rightly considered a masterpiece of the medium, still falls short in granting the player complete control of his or her destiny. Although the player must make a plethora of in-game choices, the core narrative still follows one of three — good, bad or neutral — pre-determined paths that all funnel into basically the same ending. The storywriter has more authority over the narrative than the player, which is no different than non-interactive media like film and literature.

This brings me to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the black hole that annihilated the rest of my free time over winter break, and then some. This game makes no attempt to emulate cinema through shot reverse shot dialogue exchanges, “cutscenes” or “quick time events,” a la Mass Effect. Rather, Skyrim throws the player into a massive world of high fantasy, borrowing names and creatures from Norse and Camelot folklore and severing all other ties from the world of our own. Sure, there is an epic story involving a prophecy and a mythical villain, but like Fallout 3, the other popular game by Bethesda Studios, the plot serves as a vehicle for gameplay and not the other way around.

A game like Skyrim offers an oddly empowering experience. Why stick to a sword, bow or fire spell when you can wield them all simultaneously? The citizens of nine cities and countless villages, forts and dungeons depend on your agency to decide a Civil War, reconcile warring factions and kill a plague of dragons, in whatever order you choose. Or you can forget about all that and buy a house, collect potions and assist the local business owner in finding his lost family relic. But be wary about investing too much into your character: The humbling heroics of Harry Potter and Homeland have nothing on realizing that your video game character is living a more listless life than your own.

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Zero Dark Thirty Review

Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Released in 2012

9/11 introduced the world and the 21st century to a new kind of evil. Al-Qaeda struck unannounced and nearly unseen, inspiring fear and a gnawing sense of helplessness that no one has been able to fully shake since. The rules of war changed once again, and the U.S. government adapted with wiretapping and “enhanced interrogation” techniques. If there was one boogeyman behind the madness, it was Osama bin Laden, though it would be an oversimplification, of course, to blame it on any one individual.

The triumph of Zero Dark Thirty is that it takes what could have been jingoistic genre fare — the pursuit and killing of bin Laden — and tangles it in the global turmoil we have lived through over the past 11 years. Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, the Oscar-winning pair behind The Hurt Locker, open the film with a traumatic audio montage of 9/11 distress calls and dot the background and, in a couple of startling moments, the foreground of the plot with other al-Qaeda attacks, like the 2005 London and the 2008 Islamabad Marriott bombings. The result is an epic of incredible focus, a 157-minute film that earns every second. Zero Dark Thirty belongs to us, now, as a candid document of the anxiety and dislocation of our time. The filmmakers closely follow historical record while creating a piece of art, a riveting cinematic experience and the best American film of the year.

Like Argo and Lincoln, spoiler warnings are unnecessary. The foreknowledge of the main plot puts added pressure on the filmmakers to find other ways to generate suspense. Bigelow, cinematographer Greig Fraser and editors Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg respond with a look and feel more polished and artful than a BBC news feed, though not by much. That is a compliment, as the film never brings attention to itself. Sure, Fraser composes beautiful images — Arab fruit markets never cease to dazzle — and Bigelow packs some profound juxtapositions into single frames — a North American map reflecting a white, Muslim CIA official (Fredric Lehne) practicing Salah in his office must mean something. But there is a spontaneity to the film that keeps you constantly on edge, in constant fear that innocent people will die yet again. And when a few dozen of them inevitably do, the film cuts to actual news coverage of the attack, and the line between reenactment and reality stays blurred.

CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) is, in her own words, “the motherfucker who found” bin Laden. She truly is, but the film — in one of the its boldest choices — shies from granting its protagonist too much sympathy. She often loses it with bureaucrats, from her Station Chief Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler) to the Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini, here for comic relief), and not in a sassy, Sandra Bullock kind of way. She is unhinged, bordering on insanity. Multiple characters at multiple times stress the impossibility of her goal or the incompetence of her colleagues; most memorable is a tirade by Mark Strong, reminiscent of Alec Baldwin’s “Always Be Closing” speech from Glengarry Glen Ross but with, you know, actual stakes. While you may admire her resilience, Maya comes off as cold, internal and sexless, the opposite of the giddy Southern housewife she played in The Help. She finds a friend in rival-turned-BFF Jessica (Jennifer Ehle, unjustly shut out from supporting actress awards so far), but even when they trade texts with “brb” and “u” in them, Maya always bends the conversation back to bin Laden. Chastain keeps Maya at arm’s length, which is incredible to think about — somehow, the mastermind behind bin Laden’s death is just not very likable.

Parallel to the film’s treatment of Maya lies the big rhetorical question of Zero Dark Thirty: We killed bin Laden, but at what cost? This core, and obviously unanswered, question has gone over the heads of all the senators and columnists manufacturing a baseless controversy over the film’s alleged “pro-torture” stance. Indeed, the first half-hour consists of graphic sequences where agent Dan (Jason Clarke) and eventually Maya waterboard and emasculate an al-Qaeda suspect (Reda Kateb, in a thankless role), not to mention confine him to an awfully small box. For one, the prisoner never seems to disclose any actionable intelligence, though that plot point is up for debate. The larger issue remains Maya’s, and in turn the U.S. government’s, own morality in executing this mission. Regardless if torture was necessary to locate bin Laden or to win this war, Zero Dark Thirty wants you to consider whether these two goals were morally bankrupt from the start. Far from lionizing President Obama or excusing Dick Cheney, the film sees past partisan politics and quietly contemplates whether justice during wartime can be called justice at all. The final shot grants credence to this reading, and it is not heretical to consider the cost of a 10-year quest for vengeance. In this way, Zero Dark Thirty approaches something akin to Direct Cinema (a documentary film genre that aims to record objective truth) by staging some version of the truth, refusing a didactic little bow and letting the audience think for itself. That last part may be the problem.

I had conflicting emotions during the final 30 minutes, when SEAL Team Six flies to, invades and clears bin Laden’s compound. Viewed on a big screen with surround sound, the experience will render you immobile (a special shout-out to sound designer Paul Ottosson, who engineers the mesmerizing stealth helicopter sound effect, and sound mixer Ray Beckett, who keeps the gunfights startling and realistic). The deliberate pacing and night-vision lighting immerse you to an almost unbearable extent, like a fly on the soldiers’ helmets. The sequence inspires fear, angst and awe, the latter of which stuns the soldier who took the final and fateful shots — all he can say is “I shot the third floor guy,” as his comrades scramble to vacate the premises. Around this moment, I was on the verge of tears as a Navy SEAL handed one of Osama’s children a glowstick to quiet her down and coax out her father’s name for confirmation. I don’t know how to explain this emotional impact or why it struck me then. The mastery of Zero Dark Thirty is that it operates on an ineffable register, free to collide feelings and abstain from easy answers. Call it relativistic or postmodern or any viable, theoretical tag. All I know is that the world post-9/11 has been one of confusion and contradiction. Zero Dark Thirty also knows this, and by draping America’s triumphant moment of victory under the same ambiguity, it has rewritten history while staking a spot in it, too.

Final Verdict:

5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Top 10 Films of 2012

Thanks to late-December releases and Netflix Instant, 2012, in my mind at least, redeemed itself as an important, diverse and damn good year for movies. Zero Dark Thirty, not even in wide-release until this Friday, and Bernie, the streamable indie darling, were particular standouts in my viewings over the past few weeks. The list below reflects, in somewhat arbitrary order, the films that challenged me and hit a deeper register than just entertainment.

But allow me to conduct inventory first: I wrote 20 film reviews this year in addition 13 columns; reviews of television, video games and stand-up comedy; an obituary and untold college essays, one viewable here. There are plenty more interviews and Cornell-specific write-ups viewable on The Cornell Daily Sun website. The numbers above in no way can be described as "prolific," at least compared to those who do this professionally, but it was a healthy and experimental year of writing that I hope I can top in 2013.

My Top 10 Films of 2012: 

1. Zero Dark Thirty
2. This Is Not a Film
3. The Master
4. Lincoln
5. Life of Pi
6. Bernie
7. Skyfall
8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
9. Cosmopolis
10. Cloud Atlas / Holy Motors (tie)

A few honorable mentions that could easily swap places with most of the above picks: Amour, Brave, The Grey, Moonrise Kingdom, Seven Psychopaths and Silver Linings Playbook.

Django Unchained Review

Django Unchained
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Released in 2012

Quentin Tarantino has outdone himself once again, but Django Unchained, his longest, bloodiest and angriest film yet, is not necessarily better off for it. This cartoonish Spaghetti Western/Blaxploitation epic tackles the ignominy of American slavery while retaining the wordy humor and gratuitous action typical of the auteur’s work. It makes for an entertaining two hours and 45 minutes that never bores, but Django’s identity crisis precludes it from saying really anything about its sensitive subject matter.

From the opening credits, where Django (Jamie Foxx) and a gang of whip-scarred slaves shamble through the desert, the film insists on depicting slavery in explicit and uncompromising detail. There are grainy 16mm close-ups of Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), wailing as an overseer relishes in maiming her frail body with a whip. There are at least 100 historically accurate racial epithets, used more often as shorthand than as heated insults. A central plot point involves the fictional gladiator sport of “Mandingo fighting,” where two slaves fight to the death with their bare hands. White owners lock a naked slave inside a steel “hotbox” and feed another to rabid dogs. This is Tarantino’s first film with scenes I found tough to watch.

It is worth noting that the brutality above occurs mostly off-screen, while the abundant shootouts focus on every spurt, mist and trickle of viscous blood, often in slow-motion. Even in the underexposed first scene, when Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) guns down Django’s owners in the dead of the night, Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson (Hugo, JFK) backlight the murders to make the bloodshed startlingly visible yet comically abstract. A shot of an overseer’s blood splattering over cotton buds is even quite pretty, not to mention a shameless metaphor. There’s a clear divide between the violence against slaves and everyone else — as a rule of thumb, the more blood a character loses on screen, the less you should care about him or her.  It’s welcome, if not really brave or original, to elevate slaves above their owners — this is a Blaxploitation pastiche, after all — but by trivializing one current of violence and coarsening the other, Django props up America’s darkest chapter of history as justification for an ultraviolent and by-the-numbers revenge plot.

Tarantino lays the groundwork for a mature meditation on violence, which most would agree he’s about due for. Before saving Broomhilda from “Candyland,” a vast plantation owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), Django and Schultz raise money as morally questionable bounty hunters. Though the bounties always advise “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” the two take no chances and only turn in corpses. The sudden introduction to this practice makes for a bit of classic Tarantino dialogue, as Schultz cites little-known laws to talk a lynch mob into paying him $200. Later, there’s a haunting moment when Django snipes an outlaw from atop a cliff-face and we see and hear a panicked little boy run to his dead father’s side. But as the film jumps to the “rescue” second act and especially the final “revenge” act, this ambiguity disappears and the sides revert to unimaginative stereotypes. For all the sick fun Tarantino is having with us, it is disappointing that the trade-off is of any meaningful insight into the fertile, if problematic, backdrop of slavery.

Harsh as I may sound, Django Unchained is indeed a lot of sick fun. Waltz, DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson have jumped to the front of the Oscar race thanks to Tarantino’s juicy lines and monologues. DiCaprio’s speech about phrenology and the “subservience” of the “Negro brain” ranks up there with the Superman suit soliloquy in Kill Bill, and Jackson as Calvin’s parroting, conniving Uncle Tom inspires perhaps the film’s most grounded discussion on race. There are peculiar yet wise casting choices, like Jonah Hill as a bumbling white supremacist, Miami Vice’s Don Johnson as a plantation owner and Dexter’s James Remar, who for some reason plays two different characters. With his thirst for violence and limited psychological insight into his character, Django is the weakest of the bunch, with as much depth and charm as a generic video game anti-hero. His painfully passive wife fares no better; Washington admitted to IndieWire how she “barely survived” shooting the film, a believable toll considering every scene asks her to scream, shudder and surrender all agency. Once the film hits its second or third ending and the far more interesting characters have met their fate, the film reminds you that it’s all a love story, after all. The romance is as enchanting as … again, a video game comes to mind.

Django Unchained is a hell of a movie, for better or worse. As a long-time admirer of Tarantino’s oeuvre, I am content that this film merely exists and further pleased that it’s a seething and energetic marathon of cinema. But Tarantino’s maximalist approach here reveals his weaknesses, as his dedication to being a bloody, composite filmmaker flattens the nuances required for great filmmaking. Sure, there are nuances and flourishes here and there — nothing screams “final cut privilege” like multiple extreme close-ups of Schultz pouring Django his first beer. Yet somewhere a broader artistic statement is lost, which is almost fatal for a film with a subject that requires some tact. Whereas Inglourious Basterds wisely shied away from the heavier horrors of the Holocaust and instead stuck to full-out satire, Django Unchained accosts slavery in all its squalor and offers no better endgame than a “kill them all” revenge fantasy. It is awkward to come away from a film about slavery and think how the director needs to grow up.

Final Verdict:

3 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Dancer in the Dark Review

Dancer in the Dark
Directed by Lars von Trier
Released in 2000

There is a moment in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark when the sadness becomes just too much to bear. It is not one particular scene; there are a good half dozen that push the infirm Selma (Björk) into unwinnable scenarios, each worse than the one preceding. Different viewers will reach different moments and break in different ways. Some will sob, in full faith of the film’s melodrama, while others will fume and swear and call the whole thing trash. For me, director and writer von Trier pushed too far about 15 minutes from the end, when he crossed some unacknowledged threshold of mine where tragedy twists into sadism and emotion into forgery. I was fully aware the flickering frames were nothing more than an artificial creation aimed at extorting maximum misery from its viewer. Up to that point, however, Dancer in the Dark balanced its pain with its pathos and caught me under its experimental spell.

This 2000 film is set in Washington State in 1964, though von Trier does not take great lengths to transform his native Denmark and Sweden into an American period setting. With digital video cinematography, the aesthetic looks rather timeless, in a grainy, neorealist kind of way. Selma’s primary struggle —coping with illness in poverty — is timeless by itself, so she also faces more severe mid-century injustices, like misogyny and the Red Scare, although on little more than a cursory level. As it stands, Selma, a Czech immigrant, works a monotonous job in a metal processing factory, saving her minimal wages in a tin container for her son’s optic surgery. He suffers from the same hereditary disease that is turning her blind. Even with her magnifying glass spectacles, she can barely see a thing, yet she insists on walking home every night, shuffling between the railroad tracks that pass by her trailer home.

Selma escapes through music. The factory’s metronomic clangs or tonal hisses entrance her into song, which, in turn, propels the film into full stop musical numbers. Von Trier brightens the washed-out colors and cuts furiously between dozens of cameras for the five songs, which, while confined to Selma’s mind, progress the story by reflecting on what has happened or is soon to take place. The choreography and effort put into the music’s production is as sincere as anything Gene Kelly or Stanley Donen tackled in the 1950s. Of course, von Trier adds his depraved touch, like when he reanimates a corpse for a ballad or directs his characters to frolic about death row. Von Trier’s unorthodox staging matches Björk’s alien voice, which freely climbs and falls octaves as “industrial” rhythms loop in the background. Dancer in the Dark reaches beauty when it resorts to music; considering the first song enters nearly 40 minutes in, perhaps it should have included more of it.

A multitude of familiar character actors join Björk, who swore off acting after this draining experience. David Morse (The Green Mile) plays an anemic police officer who provides Selma and her son a place to live, and Cara Seymour (American Psycho) serves as his witless wife. Peter Stormare (Fargo) once again plays a dim simpleton, here pining over Selma and seducing her with car rides after work, which she politely refuses. Swedish star Stellan Skarsgard (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Zeljko Ivanek (Damages) and Siobhan Fallon (Men in Black) fill in smaller roles that remain potent, especially in Fallon’s case. Catherine Deneuve (Belle de Jour) nails an unexpected lead as Selma’s closest confidant and mother figure, Kathy, clocking in the second-most screen time in the process. One of the cinema’s few canonical beauties, Deneuve wears minimal makeup in an unglamorous performance that relies on a lot of stricken reaction shots as she watches misfortune ruin her dear friend.

And there is plenty of misfortune. Independent cinema prides itself with probing the depths of human nature — John Cassavettes started the anti-industry with his rough domestic drama A Woman Under the Influence. So, not only is Lars von Trier excused to provoke, it’s his job. He mostly eschews shot reverse shot, instead panning back and forth or zooming in with a handheld camera as characters pour out their hearts to one another. I bought it all, including the central, agonizing scene of betrayal, perhaps because Björk seemed as shocked as her character Selma. It is after this point when, not only does the magic dissipate — that is clearly the point — but the passion devolves into artifice. There is no apparent self-referential commentary that von Trier wants to impart by calling to attention the deceit of his medium (they’re actors!), and the social backgrounds of his characters are so shallow that the Brechtian technique of gestus — “character action typical of a class” — seems an invalid excuse.

“In a musical, nothing dreadful ever happens,” Selma muses, with a smile. It is von Trier’s simple-minded goal to defy that thesis. Some will be able to weep in acceptance of his vision. Some will seek to burn the man in effigy. I am thankful for much of the film’s beauty, as embodied aboard a slow-moving train during the Oscar-nominated song “I’ve Seen it All.” Dancer in the Dark sees music as a buffer from life’s ills and the common force between all mankind. It’s the hackneyed case that mankind is callous and evil that I could have done without.

Final Verdict:

3 Stars Out of 5

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.