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.

The Last of the Unjust Review

The Last of the Unjust

Directed by Claude Lanzmann

Released in 2013

In 1944, the Third Reich released Theresienstadt, a propaganda film billed as “A Documentary from the Jewish Settlement Area.” S.S. Major Hans Günther coerced Kurt Gerron, a successful German-Jewish actor, into directing a beautified look at the Theresienstadt concentration camp and promised him his life in return. The resulting film showed the outside world a hamlet of happy Jews reading, eating toast, running in the sun and playing chess. It is a typical propaganda film edited in a cut-cut-cut fashion, where any given shot lasts no longer than a couple seconds and truth lies outside of the frame. Before a final cut was complete, the Nazis deported Gerron, his wife and the film’s cast to Auschwitz, where they died on Oct. 28. It should be noted that the gas chambers closed the next day.

Claude Lanzmann includes a clip from the film Theresienstadt in The Last of the Unjust, a new documentary that screened at Cornell Cinema last Wednesday. Watching Nazi propaganda today exposes obvious lies, for we all know what the European-Jewish experience at the time was really like. But Lanzmann screens this clip in the opening section of his film to call attention to his own cinematic style. The Last of the Unjust unfolds over three hours and 40 minutes, a span of time ruled by long takes, wide-angle shots and general quietude. Lanzmann encourages — nay, forces — you to consider what you are watching, to annotate an open document rather than accept what is on-screen as just there.

There is no way you will leave The Last of the Unjust and see Benjamin Murmelstein, the film’s subject, as anything less than a complicated and compelling human being. When Lanzmann interviewed him in 1975, Murmelstein lived in Rome in self-imposed exile because some prominent fellow Israelites believed that he should be hanged. From December 1944 to the war’s end, Murmelstein served as Theresienstadt’s “Elder of the Jews,” the man tasked with talking to, and from some Jewish perspectives, “collaborating” with the Nazis in charge, most notably Adolf Eichmann. Somehow, he was the only Elder, anywhere, to survive the war. After seizing the camp in 1945, Allies in Prague grilled him, “How are you still alive?” “How come you’re alive?” he said in reply, likely leaning forward and peering into their eyes as he does to Lanzmann here.

With his beady eyes and Hitchcockian jowls, Murmelstein makes a fascinating presence to fill a screen for over three hours. Lanzmann does not attack a man some have accused of negligence, at best, and genocide, at worst, so the portrait you will take of Murmelstein is mostly sympathetic. An Elder of the Jews “must be condemned, but he cannot be judged,” Murmelstein says near the end, with his hands behind his back and looking most wise. His predecessors, Jakob Edelstein and Paul Eppstein, were executed, the former forced to watch his wife and son die before receiving a bullet himself. You can say Murmelstein, faced with the challenge to “accomplish something without having any power,” was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Among the historical episodes Lanzmann prompts Murmelstein to retell, two words stand out: embellishment and emigration. Embellishment relates to the aforementioned Nazi documentary and how Murmelstein coordinated efforts to make Theresienstadt look clean and pretty for a Red Cross visit. After comparing himself to the “pragmatic and calculating” Sancho Panza, Murmelstein tells Lanzmann, who is on camera for most of the film as well, “If they hid us, they could kill us. If they showed us, they couldn’t.” While this embellishment occurred near the end of the Holocaust and thus did not have much diplomatic impact, this reasoning is inherently paradoxical: If you lie about your conditions to save your own skin, don’t you risk warping a systematic atrocity into a non-issue?

Murmelstein strikes me as the antithesis to Anwar Congo, the self-proclaimed star of Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing. In the mid-’60s, Congo killed over a thousand innocent people in the Indonesian government’s anti-communist purge, and Oppenheimer spoke with him 50 years later to find a lackadaisical and honest man oblivious to his monstrous actions. Whereas Congo enjoys impunity in the corrupt Indonesian government, Murmelstein hides in Rome, in fear of retribution that he stresses again and again he does not deserve. 

Yet even while Murmelstein offers eloquence and reason in his defense, he comes across as unapologetically callous and political. His motto, “Survival through work,” echoes, to a disturbing degree, the sign, “Arbeit macht frei (work makes you free),” that welcomed prisoners to Terezin, Auschwitz and other camps. By working within the Nazi bureaucracy to help his people, Murmelstein had to adopt somewhat of a Nazi mindset, emphasizing numbers and paperwork over empathy. One of his truest conclusions is the following: “I did things that others didn’t do, but I’m not a hero. I’m not mad.”

The Last of the Unjust also digs into the bizarre Murmelstein-Eichmann dynamic, flirts with blacker-than-black humor involving misplaced cyanide and spends a lot of time with Lanzmann, in the present day, as he tours Theresienstadt and reads from the Elder’s writing. But the most powerful moment includes neither him nor Murmelstein in the frame. The camera first stares at a wall of names, illegible at such a distance, and pans 360 degrees across Prague’s Pinkas synagogue, where 80,000 such names cover the walls in tribute to the local Holocaust victims. They bleed across the screen, unable to be read and thus, again, willingly ignored. Then without zooming in, the camera finds a crop of names in close-up and Lanzmann gasps, “Then all of a sudden, they become legible.”

To see the Holocaust, nearly 70 years later, for what it was demands not scope but focus. Hone your eyes in on the individual and you will uncover a bundle of paradoxes that amount to one human life. Most did not make it, but Benjamin Murmelstein did. He tells Lanzmann his life for him to make sense of it, and Lanzmann, in turn, passes the burden onto us.

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

Revisiting Mulholland Dr.

Mulholland Dr.

Directed by David Lynch

Released in 2001

You can “solve” this film, I know, because Lynch thought of everything, plot-wise and otherwise, while making it. I also know that I do not want to piece together every little detail, align every event in chronological order and scrutinize what one blue key means against another blue key. The rush one feels watching this film — especially returning to it again and again, once the initial shock of the late-act reversal has worn off — comes from the act of “working things out” yet accepting that the fullness of Lynch’s vision remains beyond your grasp.

I just revisited Mulholland Dr., this being I believe my fifth visit. Cornell Cinema screened this on their brand-new screen with updated speakers and projection equipment. After watching this on big HDTVs, small screens and 480p projectors, I am now convinced it must be seen, at least once, across as large a canvas as possible, in the darkest and largest room you can find. This is a movie about movies, yes, but this is also a movie that downright cherishes the effect watching a movie can have on a person.

As far as breaking Mulholland Dr. down and grasping for formal, narrative meaning, a little of this effort is necessary to at least ground yourself. You can go from there how you please, either pausing the film and taking notes upon every shot, or accepting that things just work out and that you will elect to bask in Mulholland Dr.’s greatness only when watching it - which you do again and again, because you cannot stay away.

But, as for the film’s construction, I think most veterans accept that the first two-thirds are some sort of projection/fantasy of Diane (Naomi Watts). When she experiences this series of scenes is a good question, as well as whether or not she ever does. After the first scene (the bizarre, obviously nostalgia-tinged “Jitterbug”), we catch a quick glimpse of, ostensibly, Diane’s POV on the bed with red sheets. She is sobbing, or at least gasping heavily, yet we don’t see her body. I don’t know what, exactly, happens during this shot, but I know it provides a tragic bookend for the film. This must be a moment, either before or, maybe, after (?) her suicide at the end, and the ambiguity of this one shot serves to remind us that this film works through mood much more than it does through cause+effect, plot-motivated narrative.

Picking apart the rest of the movie is a joy to be had in the cinema, while watching it. However, I have gleaned much from the film by keeping one thing in mind, regarding the first two-thirds of the film: The characters, prior to the ‘blue box switch-up,’ live how Diane (in “real life”) wants them to live, yet stay at a distance because they also embody Diane’s worst tendencies. Like in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Betty (Diane’s innocent, plucky ideal of herself, or of how life should be lived, if it only could) molds Rita (Laura Harring) from a tabula rasa - courtesy of an amnesia-inflicting car crash - into the perfect lover, and not to mention mother, too. (The line between depiction and voyeurism of lesbian acts that some accuse Abdellatif Keciche of crossing in Blue Is the Warmest Color is not in question here. Lynch sort of lingers the camera on Rita’s breasts during that beautiful love scene, but it’s from Betty’s perspective and connotes some mother attachment). Yet Rita lacks an interiority throughout much of the film, and acts like this obsequious doll that just so happens to have this ability for second sight. That is not a criticism, but a symptom of the fantasy and a telling sign that this fiction Diane constructs for herself will be short-lived, for Rita is the one that ends it.

Adam (Justin Theroux) is having the worst day of his life because he stole Camilla (or Rita) from Diane, and you can bet Diane subconsciously transfers her awful life onto Adam’s. “This is the girl,” Adam declares, accepting an actress (named “Camilla Rhodes”) he does not want for his movie (a.k.a. his life). Diane must suffer this feeling every day knowing she cannot have the one, the real Camilla, she wants. “This is the girl,” Diane says to the hitman who, very likely, kills Camilla sometime off-screen, before the demons (that unforgettable old couple) drive her to suicide. She tries to rationalize the murder, of course, by staging the hitman’s daily work as some slapstick farce, where one kill means two collateral deaths, a fire alarm and a whole lot of DNA evidence (I mean, he just throws his cigarette butt onto the fire escape!).

I should catch myself. As fun as the process of writing is, I should abstain from spending too much time dissecting Mulholland Dr. The gut feeling churning in one’s gut while watching this is proof enough that Lynch not only knows what he is doing but, like, knows close to everything, as in in life. The movie makes sense because it works on that subconscious, surreal level, where “sense” is more like nonsense but lodges into our brains and bodies cleaner and quicker than the most lucid of narrative prose.

In that sense, Mulholland Dr. is a movie I cherish above so many others because it lets me have it both ways: The visceral experience - of music complementing image, camera movement embodying the feeling of dreams and moments of silence swallowing us into the suffocating limbo of nightmares - is unmatched. Yet Mulholland Dr. also knows that you are watching it to work it out, so it presents a mountain of clues and somehow reveals their secrets throughout its duration. When we finish watching it, we grasp for meaning and catch some of it — but not all. There is so much more in there, and that is why we return.

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At Berkeley Review

At Berkeley
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Released in 2013

At Berkeley is four hours of lectures, labs, debates, administrative meetings and construction workers laying concrete. It is, by definition, tedious and a test of endurance. It is also distressing, alarming and above all, urgent.

Beneath the mundaneness of what veteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman elects to show us, strife simmers at a medium boil. In true U.C. Berkeley fashion, this discord breaks out into a rousing protest near the film’s end, yet it leads to nowhere. Wiseman understands that our country is in a state of paralyzing crisis, and with that thesis in mind, At Berkeley looks and sounds less like a cut-up collage of video TakeNotes and more like a love letter to a system of higher education with an uncertain, frightening future.

During a lecture on Walden, an English professor stresses that Thoreau may write “a jumble of observations,” but that there is nonetheless a “pattern” to be discerned. Wiseman must have included this line, about midway through the film, as a wink to his audience trying to draw conclusions from this seeming mess of raw footage. He includes no lower-third captions (everyone we meet, including that professor, goes unnamed), no didactic voiceover, no convenient graphics or cutesy animations. Yet, of course, there is much to learn from the film — to say nothing of the lectures themselves. It helps to break At Berkeley into three rough acts: Education, Bureaucracy and Change (Or Lack Thereof).

For the first “act” (which runs over 90 minutes), Wiseman immerses us in the college classroom. A current Cornell student may wonder why she or he would watch hours of lectures when we have enough of that already, and that concern is not unfounded: There are a few really, really boring slogs here. While this just might be a symptom of my liberal arts education, I justify these trying sections for a dialectic they explore between STEM and humanities majors. Wiseman shows us students railing against their money-obsessed peers in finance and whatnot, but he has a more fundamental opposition in mind than that oft-mentioned, though no less worrisome, cliché.

Early on, a professor leads a discussion with her students. She says, “We need to talk about not individual behavior but structures of power and systems of decision-making that shift that behavior.” Wiseman must disagree with that quote, to an extent, for he props up the individual behavior of students and administrators as a macrocosm for higher education today. Yet he surely finds fascinating the back-and-forth that follows the professor’s prompt, where students raise their voices about debt, philanthropy and Tea Party rhetoric. They do not arrive at a solvable conclusion, nor does the metaphysics professor who wonders aloud whether, in the realm of spacetime, we approach time or time approaches us. These are questions wedded to the humanities, inherently unsolvable yet beautiful for the way they test and expand the boundaries of the human mind.

That is one side of the coin, and then Wiseman cuts to a pair of robot arms folding a towel with the grace of a wushu master. This long, random and near-silent scene plays like slapstick comedy. Wiseman does not belittle scientific pursuits, mind you, but, with this scene, he quarantines them from the insurmountable concerns currently engulfing the university and the world. The focus on STEM education these days should, at least we hope, amount to a safer, healthier and more efficient world. Yet the most torpid passages in At Berkeley isolate highly educated students to talk about their highly specialized scientific endeavors. What starts as an inspiring look at medical technology restoring a paraplegic’s ability to walk before long eschews the young man benefiting from this technology and instead lets the student talk in exhaustive detail about his Ph.D. I do not think this is me just speaking as a humanities student and “not getting” what he has to say. Rather, I see Wiseman allotting praise for the advances made in STEM fields yet advising those in them to flirt with the questions — whether they be in partisan politics or abstract philosophy — looming over the rest of the world.

This humanities-STEM tension permeates the first third of the film, while the rest hones in on the bureaucracy of the U.C. Berkeley establishment, and how it works hard, with good intentions, to fix problems beyond its control. The smiling Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau leads most of the closed-doors meetings which Wiseman faithfully depicts as dull, occasionally delirious affairs. In one shot, an administrator in the background talks business while a woman in the foreground drinks a Starbucks coffee, swirls it around for a good five seconds and drains it with gusto. “Faculty meetings, in general, are just awful,” former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich says during a standout lecture in the film. Wiseman agrees, so he leaves in moments like that to remind us that, above science, politics and literature, we love the taste of something good.

The film culminates with a student takeover of Wheeler Hall (Berkeley’s equivalent to Goldwin Smith). Crosscutting between the hall and the offices where administrators scramble to quell the type of uprising so core to Berkeley’s culture, Wiseman escalates tension while acknowledging the intractable mess of the situation. Some of the student demands conflict with one another and many more target the California government rather than anything within Chancellor Birgeneau’s purview. But, you know, these students are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore! Wiseman remains stubbornly neutral throughout, to the extent that a “moderate” political group on campus complaining about the protest after the fact comes across as left of center, or right, or I cannot really tell.

At Berkeley entertains in its tedium. It takes the issues — a vanishing middle-class, rising tuition, budget cuts to humanities in the midst of non-stop, overwhelming on-campus construction (*COUGH*) — seriously, while snickering at how intractable our problems appear to be. Perhaps Wiseman, 84 years young, with a career of perceptive documentaries on American institutions behind him, senses the same issues of the past have only intensified over the years. As one of his last projects, At Berkeley encapsulates the frustrations embedded within institutions, even one as exceptional as U.C. Berkeley. But the higher education experience cannot be matched, whether you are studying spectroscopy, reading e.e. cummings or mowing the lawn all day because the school cannot afford another landscaper.

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

Decasia & Just Ancient Loops Review

Decasia

Released in 2002

Just Ancient Loops

Released in 2012

Directed by Bill Morrison

What a pretty mess.

Whatever your feelings on Bill Morrison’s Decasia and Just Ancient Loops, two experimental films Cornell Cinema screened at Sage Chapel Tuesday evening, you should agree that this pithy assessment of mine approaches some objective, albeit cursory, truth. For Morrison’s work discovers a beauty in what most would consider ugly, nonnegotiable trash: destroyed and/or decomposing celluloid film stock from the ancient, lesser-known annals of silent cinema. By assembling these clips together and asking us to find meaning in their perceived deficiencies, Morrison works in a most peculiar mode of the “found footage” form. These decrepit moving images take on new life, paradoxically, through the invasion of decaying, dying elements. It is an awesome, sometimes startling and often maddening experience.

I say “maddening” knowing that that was partly Morrison’s intent. Why else would he commission Michael Gordon to compose a score for Decasia where the orchestra plays out-of-tune, in repetitious and shrill drones? As an admirer of Philip Glass and current experimental electronic acts like Oneohtrix Point Never, I am totally on board with cyclical, stubbornly non-harmonic music styles. Yet Gordon’s soundtrack does not traverse as wide a range as it should in a film with such cryptic, alien images, instead climbing up to the higher registers early on and just staying there, wailing almost the entire time. Pairing these sounds with the film makes for a somewhat suffocating experience, piquing anxiety at times when the images provoke free-floating curiosity. Perhaps I am overly irritable, or maybe the Sage Chapel’s speakers were too loud, but it narrowed my perspective on Morrison’s work.

At the time, at least. Reflecting on what Morrison actually did, on the ineffable tinge of Decasia’s exploration of life and death — how art, at least film art, suffers corporeal violence in the same way humans do, yet how it can potentially better from it — I find it impossible not to be moved. Some of these shots just stay with you. An expressionless boxer punches at a stream of eaten-up nitrocellulose, unknowingly battling a force more powerful and eternal than the human opponent it replaced. White wisps of liquefied chemicals tear at the face of man and, later, a hook-nosed woman, resembling an effect similar to the Dementor’s kiss in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, or Stephen Gammell’s infamous illustrations in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Intensified film grain mingles with the ants crawling about a tight macro shot, confusing the identity of each. Extreme reversals in contrast render Mary Pickford, America’s golden girl, into a maniacal, glowing beast, and a sunny cloister into a nightmarish vision that could have been pulled from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon.

I mention other films and movie stars, old and new, because I believe Morrison operates in that referential, meta-cinematic mode. Bookended by a shot of a whirling dervish, Decasia obsesses over movement — some of it chaotic, but most of it rotational, like a projecting film reel. Mechanical movement meets an arc light to create life, or recreate it, or, better yet, to revive it, as the subjects in these 100-year-old clips take back that energy robbed by the grave. Rather than obliterate meaning and function like a magnet to a computer hard drive, the deterioration of film stock amplifies backgrounds, hides protagonists, quite literally pulls apart human emotions and provokes them anew through the most abstract forms, like frame-filling black and white blotches that become, on their own, lyrical films in the vein of Stan Brakhage. Morrison probably wants you to support film preservation after seeing how time and poor conditions ravage celluloid, but the unfamiliarity of most of the source material (culled from University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections, by the way) just fascinated me more, encouraging my mind to go wild with associations. Whether he intended to or not, Morrison created quite a decadent Rorschach test for cinephiles.

I neglect to comment on Just Ancient Loops, Morrison’s most recent effort, which premiered just last year (compared to the original 2002 release of Decasia, his most famous work). Running 26 minutes compared to Decasia’s 70, Just Ancient Loops concerns itself with a more explicit spirituality and the way we visualize such unknowable, unseeable divinity. Ancient cinematic reenactments of Jesus’ resurrection (they look hand-painted, so we’re talking like 110 years back) coexist with clips of jungles, roller coasters and a playful moon. The most jarring sequence comes as the film’s most serene: a CGI scale modeling of Jupiter and its four Galilean moons, with the perspective swooping back to dwarf each orbiting rock against the gaseous giant behind it. This goes on for a couple of  minutes, and I may have checked my watch at least once during that duration, but I look back and think to myself: Man, even if this all doesn’t make sense, isn’t fleeting boredom via a visionary artist’s exploration of the cosmos a beautiful problem to have?

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

Chasing Ice Review

Chasing Ice

Directed by Jeff Orlowski

Released in 2012

In a packed theater on the first warm Monday of the year, a rapt audience watches ice melt.  Cheers or snores could reasonably follow, but this audience sits in captivated silence at Cornell Cinema. The film is Chasing Ice, the subject is climate change and the evidence is entirely cinematic.

Aside from director Jeff Orlowski, the man responsible for many of the documentary’s images is its star, James Balog. This nature photographer studied science at the University of Colorado, but since he sees “the modern world of science [as] all about statistics and computer modeling,” Balog works in the artful medium of photography. After shooting a popular National Geographic cover story on melting glaciers (“The Big Thaw”), Balog established the Extreme Ice Survey, a study that fuses art and science to visualize the effects of anthropogenic climate change. The task Balog and his crew set themselves seems simple — to take photos of glaciers with secured, time-lapse cameras — but faulty technology, violent weather and Balog’s own health present enough trials to make for, at the very least, a brisk 75 minutes.

The time-lapse montages present the most naked and arresting — “beautiful” would also be apt — evidence of global warming I have seen yet. It is a shame the filmmakers think the James Balog’s story even stands a chance. Balog, who was in attendance at Monday’s Cornell Cinema screening and answered questions afterward, engages through his work, and Orlowski would have been wise to let that work speak for itself instead of padding the film with footage of Balog spending time with his family, getting knee surgery, etc. The resulting melodrama plays like network television programs, or the autobiographical sections of An Inconvenient Truth that your biology teacher fast-forwarded through. It all diverts the narrative from the real protagonist: Earth. This is not necessarily Balog’s fault, as the responsibility lies with the filmmakers to legitimize the material at hand. But there is a whole montage of Balog making the CNN/NBC interview circuit, and one shot in particular of a studio makeup artist brushing up Balog’s face — weren’t we talking about melting glaciers?

We were, and the images, whether still, moving or time-lapse, redeem this film from its dips into bathos or narcissism. I wonder what any global warming deniers could possibly say after witnessing them, but who cares what Sean Hannity thinks, anyway. There is a spectacular sequence where a glacier the size of lower Manhattan “calves” (separates) off its surrounding fjord, and the cameras just watch. The voice-over jumps back in too early for my cinema vérité tastes, but the high resolution digital camcorders show us icebergs three times taller than the Empire State Building rolling forwards and backwards, or, in one stomach-churning shot, soaring miles out from the water and then submerging once again. The five-minute episode sells the whole movie, although, as Balog was quick to remind us in the post-screening Q&A, over 4 million people have already seen the video, for free on YouTube (one of them, unknowingly, being me last December).

After the film, Balog proved to be as aphoristic, ruggedly handsome and self-promoting in person as on screen. I mean that last adjective in good humor, for Chasing Ice has earned its fair share of honors, including a White House screening on April 22, and Balog made a point in listing as many as his prepared notes could accommodate. In all seriousness, though, Balog peddled some real nuggets of wisdom, especially in his survey of the people who should worry about global warming: “If you eat food, breathe air, drink water or pay taxes, climate change affects you.” He also addressed the hybrid nature of his work when he said, “The combination of art and science reveals what one cannot do on its own.” When you realize that the footage of crumbling glaciers represents only a microcosm of an escalating global trend, what is revealed is not so much a number or idea but the urge to let loose all the expletives you know in the direction of your nearest Congressman.

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.