The Terrifying Sincerity of David Lynch

Over break I tore through Dennis Lim's new book, David Lynch: The Man From Another Place, the
strongest single volume on Lynch I have read. Lim's accomplishment — a vivid yet concise study of Lynch's oeuvre, one that reads like a novel — is most impressive against the excess and, I'd say, stagnation of contemporary Lynch studies. You should read it; it's available on Amazon like everything else.

Lim spends some time elucidating Lynch's treatment of 'the uncanny,' as others have before him. I am one of them, I guess, though barely anyone has read the essay I wrote almost two years ago for Cornell's Kitsch Magazine (certainly not Lim) — which is perhaps as it should be, since it's rough in spots and could use a serious trimming. But I gave it another look, upon finishing Lim's book, and I think I contributed something novel, at least interesting in my analysis of how Mulholland Drive presciently invokes terror, specifically 9/11, a date bookended by the film's premiere and NYC release.

That section of the essay bears the subtitle, "an uncanny connection to 9/11," and can be read by scrolling down a few (5) facile opening paragraphs on Kitsch's Wordpress site, which I never before linked to on this blog. Written for the Spring 2014 issue of Kitsch Magazine, "The Terrifying Sincerity of David Lynch" can be read, warts and all, here.

Tropical Malady Review

This is an essay I wrote on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, a movie I liked so much that this critical analysis sounds more like a laudatory review, by its end.

An Almost Fatal Spell of Tropical Malady

“I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake me up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kinds of films I like.” — Abbas Kiarostami

I like – love – Kiarostami, so I agree with the sentiment behind this quote. I do not think it is a stretch to apply it to the work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his 2004 film Tropical Malady. Watching it late at night on a comfy loveseat, I cannot deny the soporific quality to a soldier’s wordless journey through a dreary jungle, where rain falls and canopy dwellers drone on and on across a hypnotic aural ambiance. But because this is the second half of the film, following the loose if still narrative-bound and cliché-ridden love story of the first half, this slog does not need to make sense or be exciting to move us terribly, ineffably, irrevocably. The juxtaposition between orthodox tale of courtship and mystical, lyrical allegory affects the viewer on a subconscious level, where the associations can stay and fester and grow in significance for days and weeks after first viewing. That it does without analyzing it, reading it. So while it is not the most natural endeavor to break a movie like this down, paying attention to its visual form and parallels in narrative helps translate a hard-to-place but unforgettable experience into powerful, lasting lessons.

Tropical Malady opens with a scene of merriment, of soldiers smiling and taking proto-selfies. The camera adopts a handheld point of view akin to some unseen participant in the moment. It does not tilt downward so much as walk back a step or two to catch a glimpse of a flailing arm attached to what we realize is most definitely a corpse. A dissonance between emotion and context hits us, and we are not sure how to really react. The falseness of the human face — how it can never convey what we feel within — comes up again and again throughout the film, especially whenever two make eye contact. In that absence, Apichatpong finds truth in nature, landscape and, most crucially, juxtaposition. The film cuts from this embodied perspective to an extreme long shot of the soldiers traversing the heath, corpse in tow. The considerable duration of this shot, as well as its distance, stillness and sonic quietude, allows us to process the soldiers’ demoralizing actions just prior. A naked man, alone, stalks the brush not far away. From the very beginning, we know that things are not as they seem.

The human smile, an icon of romantic cinema, betrays its emptiness in Tropical Malady. When the soldiers eat dinner at Tong’s family house, one of them eyes his sister with blatant intent. She returns the gaze with a suggestive licking of her spoon. Mother looks from man to daughter in disbelief, and we giggle because we know, as she does, that these two aren’t thinking of love —they want something easier. Meanwhile, the film’s protagonist, Keng, looks up to the sky as he occupies the lowest fringes of the frame, and then he does something odd: he looks at us. Well, maybe just over the camera lens, but he seems to enlist us, somehow, in this encounter. This reading only gains more traction with the next shot, of Tong, in profile, averting Keng’s eyes and looking awkward while doing it. We can attest to the intimacy of Keng’s gaze, and Tong avoids it not just because he is shy or confused about his orientation or whatever — he avoids it because he does not think there’s any substance behind that focused stare. Keng is not for real, right now, he thinks. Do not forget that Tong walks around with a forced mask of a smile for most of his screen time, a smile he sticks with because it beats nothing. He sure feels something warm inside when he spends time with Keng — their romance is real — even if that feeling does not come across on his face. But the condescending way he sniffs Keng’s hand, later, and licks it after Keng’s sincere sign of affection, and proceeds to exit the whole movie, confirms Tong’s distrust in genuine, loving two-way contact.

This distrust in intimacy as a sign of love — and, by extension, the existence of true love, itself — emerges as the film’s primary thematic struggle. On first viewing, I may have missed some nuances of the jungle-set half, but I know it culminates in that arresting shot reverse shot sequence between Keng and the tiger. Sensing that the tiger in the tree is a reincarnation of Tong, with the same memories and feelings for him (“I miss you, soldier”), Keng quivers at the sight. His one hand trembles with a knife, while the other shines a flashlight on the tiger’s face, so that Keng can study Tong’s gaze now, in his atavistic form, so direct and uncompromising. The tables have turned, with Tiger-Tong as sincere, to a prelapsarian degree, and Keng as conflicted. Tiger-Tong forces him to play in the gamble that is love, where committing oneself to another requires the destruction of the self, in hopes that it will sublimate to some higher unity. 

Is true love not so? If your devotion is serious, you will embrace your lover not only physically but spiritually: in an intertwining of your mind and soul with his or hers. Baring yourself in such a vulnerable way can lead you to a divine plane of existence, or it could leave you a mess of body parts and shredded clothing in the corner of some tiger’s den. Either way, it is your choice. Either way, you must destroy to create something better. Keng wrestles with this paradox, to some extent, for he bows to the tiger with the words, “Monster, I give you my spirit, my flesh and my memories.” 

Monster. Tiger-Tong returns Keng’s gaze with the severity that long eluded him and Keng responds by calling him a monster. Only a monster could demand such sacrifice. The rest of us are upright and civilized, and have no clue what he means. Thankfully we have this film, for us, in our seated solitude, to tap into and discover, through the irreducible language of cinema, the stakes, beauty and music of human connection. 

Talkin' World War III Blues in Kurosawa's Ran

This is an essay I wrote for a class I took on Shakespeare adaptations. I talk about Akira Kurosawa's unlikely modernization of King Lear via Ran.

Like any non-English adaptation of Shakespeare, Ran has both the privilege and the heavy burden to use the original text as a chassis, not a blueprint. Instead of translating King Lear’s verse to Japanese or condensing the plot to CliffNotes, Akira Kurosawa’s film reimagines the story in a country that has taken part in and suffered the most horrific practices of warfare. While the medieval setting may lend credence to Ben Jonson’s oft-mentioned praise of Shakespeare, that “He was not of an age, but for all time,” Ran derives much of its import from its context. Looking back on the Second World War that Kurosawa lived through, the film condemns the violence of the modern world through advanced, often overwhelming filmmaking techniques.

If King Lear can be boiled down to the idea that the will to power usurps family commitment and basic decency, then Ran goes so far to say that the will to power, and the entrenched systems of power built atop it, breed pure chaos. This theme comes to the fore when Tango, the Kent equivalent, offers provisions to Hidetora, the Lear figure, and his men. In a medium shot, Tango bows before him, hoping to make peace, and raises his eyes after enduring an awkward silence. Instead of cutting to a medium shot of Hidetora, via a typical shot reverse shot sequence, the film frustrates us with an extreme long shot. On the far right of the widescreen frame, Tango continues to raise his head while on the far left, Hidetora stares down the hill, his body frozen like a statue. He does not seem to be processing Tango’s charity. Two umbrellas in the foreground roughly split the frame into thirds, and their presence brings to mind the heat punishing Hidetora’s bald scalp at the moment. The delirious, desiccated Hidetora holds the most tenuous nominal authority over this gathering, and this extreme long shot shrinks him to actual scale. 

Yet Hidetora still has power, for a little longer, on this otherwise beautiful, cloudless day. Those subordinates kneeling on the brittle white gravel look to him, worried by his silence, while miles of forest stretch across the background. Kurosawa’s meticulous framing does not hide the natural splendor of this setting, a huge contrast from Peter Brook’s austere adaptation, but it also stresses the heat and void and lifelessness of this anti-oasis where the humans reside. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki informs this composition and the greater film, where death can be felt before the armies, with their arquebuses and cannons, enter the scene. In the famous sequence of painterly carnage soon after this scene, these forces destroy not only Hidetora’s men but each other, along with their codes of honor. When Hidetora, here on the gravel, waves his hand and rashly orders the destruction of a peasant village, and the blurs of soldier bodies whiz by in front of his face, he perpetuates this chaos, even if, and especially because, he is too oblivious and senile to grasp the consequences of such action. He bombs his own people when one gifts him food, practically razing all circles of life to the ground. This is a film sadly indebted to World War II and its paranoid Cold War legacy. 

The weight of war only hits Hidetora after Tango breaks the news that his son, Taro, decreed that anyone who assists him will be executed. Hidetora collapses onto his seat, and even in a medium shot, we can feel the unbearable anguish that fills his face. He sits there for over thirty seconds processing this information, that his child has sentenced him to death, and instead of asking us to “make sense” of this revelation and Hidetora’s reaction to it, the film floods its soundtrack with the shrill calls of birds. The film calls this what it is: chaos. The sonic dissonance speaks to the cognitive dissonance in Hidetora’s mind, at this moment, and the sheer volume of these clashing noises attempts to give voice to entropy, the most ineffable of phenomena. Kurosawa’s sound design graduates from monaural, 1950s art house minimums to overpowering, crippling stereo. It is fitting that the film uses this modern technology to assault its audience’s ears, to commit violence against them. In Ran, everything that can be used as a weapon is, from arrows to words to gestures to recording microphones. 

This scene leads into the film’s centerpiece, the Third Castle massacre, where sound cannot do justice to the bloodshed on-screen and, so, the film dives into abstraction. Toru Takemitsu’s score pairs corpses and soon-to-be corpses with elegiac accompaniment. The spattering blood resembles that of a Goya painting, especially under the hazy, somber quality of the lighting. No one enjoys a dignified death: soldiers splay their arms, fall on the arrows piercing their backs and get trampled by horses. The film does not center its violence in one location but emphasizes its omnipresence. For instance, a centered shot of a tower burning, with a corpse hanging over the bannister, cuts to a long shot of enemy forces galloping past the tower, which is now only visible in the background. From here, an extreme long shot of the fortress’ destruction shows a glimpse of the burning tower, obscured by haze, in the far distance. Finally, the film cuts to a shot of another tower, where Hidetora’s few remaining soldiers are fired upon, with their backs to the camera, by a line of enemy infantryman in the background. The scale of this massacre is massive. Hidetora’s men and women, implicit in their leader’s savage colonialist past, cannot hide from the agents of mass destruction now raining down on them.

Neither this scene nor the other is analogous to any scene from the King Lear text. Ran stakes out its own artistic territory by building off and tweaking the themes of that play. It is a film fearful of a world obsessed with destruction, where the will to power carries with it a drive toward death. It is a film that judges Lear’s famous plea, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning,” with the derisive laughs it deserves (III.2.57-8).

Still Life's Uncanny Distractions

Below is a short blog post I wrote for my Global Cinema II class. I talk about Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life (2006).

Still Life commits to such an elegiac, slow burn style of realism that it shocks us when it does not. A digital video camera pans to the right, capturing passerby against the backdrop of a river. A man drives a sledgehammer into crumbling concrete, over and over. A Brutalist façade rockets into space—wait, what? Jia Zhang-ke throws us off at these moments, when the quiet misery of his characters butts against unplanned bouts of surrealism. He pursues the “uncanny” to alienating, politicized ends.

Almost midway through the film, Jia passes the baton from Sanming, the down-and-out miner looking for his wife, to Hong, the reticent nurse looking for her husband. He does so in about the strangest way possible: Sanming rests by a riverside bannister as the camera pans left, capturing mountains about a mile away in what is now an extreme long shot, save for a bannister chassis at the bottom of the frame. A hollow din is heard on the soundtrack as a heavenly light appears over the mountain, floats over the river and then shoots out the frame. Jia’s slow-moving camera carries the motion to the next shot, where Hong stands downstream, with only river, mountains and some buildings visible in the background, and follows the sight of the UFO. The apparition jets over the mountains, where it is never seen or spoken of again, but we sure remember it. 

This random burst of sci-fi, replete with an ominous, purposeful soundtrack, tears Still Life’s world from its muted reality. Considering that Americans may be the demographic most enchanted with UFOs, this is not a bad thing. We want to make sense of that sequence, which is a productive urge so long as we do not get obsessed with banal, irrelevant topics like plausibility, origins and so on. To me, the UFO signals an environmentalist message, in that an alien creature skirts just by Earth only to disappear because all it sees is decay. If the alien was set on destruction, in keeping with sci-fi genre tradition, it sees that its job is nearly complete without any input at all. The strangeness of its appearance, to us, mirrors the strangeness of what it must be seeing, from above.

And yet the UFO’s symbolism must speak to the characters lives, as well, considering it swaps the narrative perspective in one fell swoop. The camera leaves Sanming out of frame when the UFO first appears, so we are unsure if he actually sees it or registers shock at the sight. The camera rotates around Hong, however, emphasizing that she sees it and finds it intriguing. The juxtaposition between Sanming’s resting posture, with his back to the river, and Hong’s erect, attentive stance stresses the latter’s agency. In that previous masterful, unbroken shot set on a boat, where Sanming holds liquor with outstretched hands to no one’s notice, we notice his utter ineffectiveness. His invisibility becomes almost a surreal device on its own, and so it is fitting that he vanishes from the frame when a moment of life-changing consequence occurs. Hong may be the only human who notices the spaceship, and yet she continues about her day. The matters of extraterrestrial life mean nothing to her, for she has too much, too close to the ground, to fix first. 

Dancing Around Misogyny

Below is a short blog post I wrote for my Global Cinema II class. I talk about Frederick Wiseman's High School (1968).

Frederick Wiseman makes movies for people who read into movies. His fascination with American institutions means that most professors should feel comfortable screening a Wiseman film for their class, assured that their students will take away a message or two since, well, you’ll either learn or sleep when watching a movie called High School. You learn a great deal from Wiseman’s deconstruction of public secondary education — far more than a draconian or worse, boring teacher might want you to. To glean something from High School, you must take an active role while watching it. As a result, High School not only heightens your awareness of the flaws in a school you went to or currently attend; it implants its messages into the very construction of the film, teaching you how to unpack it as you do the unpacking.

If you ride passively along with the film for its first few minutes, you have little choice but to take action once the girls in gym dance to “Simple Simon.” These medium-to-close shots of girls from the waist down are uncomfortable, to say the least. They fixate on the gyrations of these girls without affording the slightest glimpse of their faces — textbook misogyny, you know. A modern viewer may be tempted to call out Wiseman as a chauvinist on the evidence of these shots alone, but first consider the rest of the movie he builds around this awkward interlude. 

The shot immediately prior to the gym dance is of a hall monitor, whose back we only see in a sustained, handheld tracking shot. You do not see his face, either, but Wiseman gives us a sense of his lumbering physique as he prowls around the halls and makes quibbles with loitering students. He walks toward the gym doors and looks through their window, when Wiseman cuts to the girls dancing. That cut implies the shots following belong to the hall monitor’s point of view, yet Wiseman does not personalize the hall monitor in any way — withholding his name, as is typical for Wiseman, and hiding his face, which is not — so he stands in, instead, as a manifestation of the school’s male authority. Wiseman does not so much accuse that individual hall monitor of peeping on female students as call out the entire male-centered educational system for seeing the girls under its care through that inappropriate, objectified lens.

As Wiseman stresses, however, the system in place only works because the women in control have bought into it, too. The “Simple Simon” scene foregrounds the matter of adolescent female sexuality, so that we keep it in mind. Just a couple minutes later, Wiseman shows us an older woman lecturing girls about fashion, posture and body image, or, rather, insulting every one of them for falling short of her idealized, depersonalized standards. With close-ups on her face, in contrast to long shots of the silent girls, Wiseman lets us witness the confidence and shocking disregard for self-reflection that characterizes an influential female administrator in public high school. She is supposed to be a role model for the girls under her stead, girls who, like their male peers, have not developed the critical facilities just yet to take their teacher’s words with a grain of salt, or, better yet, start a feminist revolution. 

In their place, Wiseman applies a discerning, critical eye onto the happenings in high school, where bad teaching leads to harmful conditioning, societal injustice and deep-seated unhappiness. It says a lot of good that, in 2014, we laughed at the fashion show rehearsal. Wiseman and the rest of the world’s progressive filmmakers, writers and thinkers have done a good job indoctrinating us into questioning indoctrination. 

Eyes Left to Wander

Below is a short blog post I submitted for my Global Cinema II class. I talk about Stan Brakhage’s Desistfilm (1954) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966).

The essence of art cinema is ambiguity. Some art films lead you down winding narratives, lining up different perspectives for scrutiny (a la Rashomon) or throwing out much semblance of a plot altogether (a la Mulholland Drive). Others leave the morals of their characters up in the air, forcing the viewer to render a verdict (Bicycle Thieves). Most art films play with perspective, trying to undermine the sanctity of the disembodied camera recording unnoticed that Hollywood ascribes to. Very often, the camera adopts a disorienting or subtly prejudiced view of an art film’s characters, or otherwise encourages a meta-cinematic reading, meaning that terms like “voyeurism” and “the gaze” enter the conversation.

Brakhage, of course, aspired to convey a new way of seeing throughout his life. An early effort like Desistfilm has the the capacity to shock today, over 60 years later, because it disorients us in a familiar space. Who thought we could find a college party more nauseating through film than through actual witness and participation? Yet the energy of Brakhage’s buzzing, flying camera not only throws the visual plane in scrambles but also leaves the possessor of such a perspective unclear. Is he trying to simulate the revelry of the twentysomethings of his time, or trick us with a visceral satire of how alarmist adults viewed the rebellioius James Deans and Natalie Woods that were their children in the 1950s? It is difficult to depart with a final answer, yet the meta-cinematic style assures us we keep asking these questions. As Brakhage puts it, “Very often people look directly at the camera and sometimes even flash a smile. Or I would include references to the fact that it was a film—flares, scratched titles, etc. ... I believe most artists whose work has any lasting value to a culture put out warning signs like these to say this is not a window into reality but an art work” (Ganguly 141).

Antonioni based the foundation of his art on the act of seeing: “My narratives are documents built not on a suite of coherent ideas, but rather on flashes, ideas that come forth every other moment” (91). He knows a disciplined, inquisitive viewer will question the images shown on screen, accepting each shot not as some objective truth of a diegetic moment but more a revealing or a concealing in service of mood and theme. Story as well, but in such a plot-light film as Blow-Up, we do not decode what happens so much as how it happens.

In fact, Antonioni seems to deliberately flaunt any forward progression of narrative throughout most of Blow-Up. When the photographer shoots a few models, he gets bored and does something else. When he gets Vanessa Redgrave to come over and undress, he leaves the room to spend time retrieving a useless boat propellor. Seymour Chantman says, “In Blow-Up, distraction is no longer simply a bad habit: it has become a way of life” (140). The fleeting impermeance of the events leads us to grasp onto the mostly staid, contemplative cinematography to find our meaning. Yet “even the surfaces have become deceptive,” as the memorable fade-out in the last shot proves (Chantman 142). The photographer and the epiphany he reaches — I personally think he is seduced back to the fantasy life, away from the worrisome burden of vigilante investigation — matters less than the conclusion the viewer reaches, regarding the act of watching Blow-Up.

“I just watched a film that tricked me,” a viewer can conclude, “yet the arrogance to which it meets that goal astounds me.” We are seduced by naked bodies that are “neither erotic nor vulgar” (Antonioni 91). We are riveted by a murder story that goes nowhere. We are pulled in yet left at a distance. The clinicality of Antonioni’s images contain meaning on their own, as we have discussed in class already. But these images ultimately prove the power of cinema — art cinema, specifically — lies in the potency we presume all cinematographic images to have, even as we never think twice about what we see through our very eyes.


Works Cited:
Antonioni, Michelangelo. The Architecture of Vision: Writing and Interviews on Cinema.

Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni or, The Surface of the World.

Ganguly, Suranjan. "Stan Brakhage: The 60th Birthday Interview." Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader.

Visual Collision in Ménilmontant

The following is a paper I wrote for a film class I am taking this semester. Academic writing requires more patience than journalistic writing, both for the reader and the writer. In this case, my aim was to deconstruct a few scenes from a film while also presenting a readable, mildly amusing argument connecting all the film theory jargon. The film in question is called Ménilmontant, a little-known and silent avant-garde film by Soviet-French director Dimitri Kirsanoff. You can watch this beautiful, 37-minute film in full on YouTube.

Stuck in a Nightmare You Can't Get Out of:

Visual Collision in Dimitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant

For all the romantic analogies between dreams and movies, is it not rare for us to even remember our dreams? In Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, Georges Méliès nods to a young boy in his studio and says, “If you’ve ever wondered where your dreams come from, you look around … this is where they’re made.” Most of us have difficulty recalling the specifics of our most recent ‘sweet’ dream. Less problematic, however, is reliving our nightmares (Suddenly, Méliès’ quote transforms into a creepy omen). The fragmentary structure of nightmares, as we piece them together after the fact, lends itself to film well and has undoubtedly influenced countless filmmakers. One of them is Dimitri Kirsanoff, the Soviet-French director of the 1926 masterpiece Ménilmontant. The silent Ménilmontant stresses filmic storytelling through its montage editing à la Sergei Eisenstein, yet also warps the gap between cuts with an innovative use of protracted dissolves and double exposure. The eminence of colliding images, whether adjacent or superimposed, makes for a very visual, dreamlike editing technique.

The scenes in Ménilmontant that prescribe to a strict Soviet montage style may follow an established set of cinematic rules, but they use this framework to build an intimate series of images aimed at arousing intense emotion from the viewer. The film opens with a brutal struggle: An unknown, and practically unseen, man brandishing an axe hacks the protagonists’ mother and father to death. Those protagonists are two sisters — the younger, more prominent one played by Nadia Sibirskaïa and Yolande Beaulieu as the older, ancillary sister — frolicking in the forest down the road, giggling as a cat scales a tall tree. Thus, their parents’ horror proves a stark juxtaposition; Kirsanoff likely wielded montage editing for this reason. Eisenstein asked the question, “What characterizes montage and, consequently, its embryo, the shot?” and answered it with, “Collision” (21). “Conflict lies at the basis of every art,” he declared (21). This concept takes on social dimensions when imbued with the Marxist class struggle he and his pro-Soviet intellectuals preached (before Kirsanoff left the U.S.S.R., that is). But, for the aesthetic and apolitical analysis of this essay, the Soviet montage method generates action, tone and meaning.

Ménilmontant opens with a close-up of a cottage door and its glass shattering from an unseen force. This shot orients at about 45 degrees from the door’s parallel, and cuts to a perpendicular view of the door and the violence behind it (with a continuity error of the glass intact). We see very little besides a blur of faces and hands. Cut to the doorknob twisting, back to the door, back to the knob — cut to the wife opening and running out the door as the assailant grabs her hair, with the camera framing her face in a startling close-up. Cut then to the husband opening the door (in another apparent continuity error), and the killer following him as he walks out. It then cuts to a strange low angle shot of the wife stumbling out the door, with her white dress covering the screen for a seamless natural wipe into a shot about 180 degrees around, of the killer’s and wife’s feet stepping forward out of frame. In yet another continuity issue, the next shot frames the attacker in a blurry close-up with the open door behind him and the couple completely absent. The husband has his back against a wall in the next shot, while the subsequent shot cuts back to the killer shaking his head side to side in a vigorous, rabid motion. One of the more unforgettable images follows, with the wife jutting into the frame from its left side, only to be pulled in and out of it by the man who is messily murdering her. After two more shots of this repeated action, we see the axe propped against a log and cut to a reverse eyeline match of the husband who recognizes its presence. So does the killer, as Kirsanoff cuts to him in a grinning close-up. The two men wrestle in the next shot, which then cuts on action to the husband’s hand reaching for the weapon in a close-up of the axe. About four more back-and-forth shots like this repeat, and then we see the bloodied wife in a close-up, reaching out her hand and pleading for her life. The most memorable image — the extreme close-up of the husband and his agape gaze of terror — soon follows, as does a still, high contrast image of the axe held high in the air. We then see the killer hack away, only to disappear through the bottom of the frame where our imagination finishes the rest.

This all times in at right under 40 seconds, with 34 shots, making an average shot length of 1.17 seconds. The swift editing overwhelms the viewer with the power of these images, while the increasing acceleration of cuts builds tension. Kirsanoff communicates ideas both simple and profound through the “assembly of [the] elements” “of montage” (20). Cutting back and forth, multiple times, from door to doorknob demonstrates the time it takes to open the door; the escalating speed of these cuts, as well as the confused swirl of limbs behind the windowpane, instills in the viewer the desperation this husband and wife must have felt. With the exception of the quick still image of the raised axe, the editing in the opening sustains its invisibility and only seeks to communicate a subjective perspective of a violent event, in hopes that this scene will arrest the viewer. Technical limitations may have stripped dissolves and double exposure from the opening, but the disjointed barrage of this opening scene (rife with perhaps purposeful continuity errors) infuses a nightmarish quality that is achieved through its montage style above all other factors.

But just as some dreams frighten us with confusion and speed, others wring us of energy through lingering images and sensations. Kirsanoff inverts the montage technique in several key scenes, placing one image over another. These overlaps span a breath of time to numerous seconds, with the intent to convey internal character struggle. There are a few, more stylistic touches in this vein, such as when the girls leave home and head for the city: A continued shot of a long, tree-studded dirt road holds steady while the subject — the girls — of the image transports down the road in a series of jump cuts masked by long dissolves. The same technique casts the younger sister and her rapist across his apartment in an effort to expedite narrative and establish an unsettling mood to his abode. 

Multiple pre-Vertov city montages with a liberal use of superimposition occur throughout Ménilmontant; the most powerful sequence would be when the younger sister walks by the river with her illegitimate child. An unsettling point of view shot drifting alongside a concrete sidewalk barrier, focusing on its sharp edges before panning left to reveal the lethal tides just yards away, commences this series. Kirsanoff cuts to a reaction shot of the girl, who keeps on staring into the inviting waters as seen through POV pans down the stream and distorted close-ups of the waves. A shot of the water then lays over a close-up of the girl throughout a lengthy dissolve; as she closes her eyes, the frame becomes solely hers once more. Her exact immoral fantasy remains unclear, — Does she want to throw herself into the water? Her baby? — but the potential of utilizing the river weighs down on her, quite literally, through editing. As her baby wails and she puts her ear to the child in a vain attempt for comprehension, the city begins to meld into her torment. Double (and often greater) exposure centers a close-up of the girl in the frame as blurs of cars and faceless pedestrians layer over. An even closer shot of the girl seamlessly follows as the frenetic metropolitan superimposition continues. Kirsanoff goes so far as to take the girl out of the frame completely and let us see and — through Paul Mercer’s eerie music — hear her agony, one steeped by rape, murder, betrayal and abandonment. An innocuous establishing shot of a bridge now deforms into an indictment of modernity and the toll it takes on the innocent and vulnerable. The girl walks dejectedly through the city as these thoughts continue to wash over and fight within her. What is a nightmare to us cements as a cold, harsh reality to this girl. She wants to wake up from it all but cannot, for the only escape is ending herself, once and for all.

In Ménilmontant, Kirsanoff balances his homeland’s established editing school with a new one very much his own. The “collision” of moving images rooted in Soviet theory creates a bloody collision of axe and human skin, as well as all the victims’ fears piling up until that final point. Superimposition of disparate visual icons expresses one young girl’s inner pain and its underlying cause. Despite colliding these techniques not only in the same film but also often in the same scene, Kirsanoff builds a consistent, surreal mystique to the whole film. Ménilmontant hits so close to home, so often, that the dreamlike feel teeters on raw realism. When that sick awareness creeps upon you, however, it is wise to pinch yourself and be thankful you have the option to walk out of the theater.

The Machine Who Knew Too Much

The following is a paper I wrote for my films class. Not exactly a great pitch to entice the reader, but I formed the argument in a way only lightly abiding to scholastic format and tried to have fun with the structure. This paper is a scene breakdown of the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick. The scene in question is when astronauts Bowman and Poole meet in the pod to discuss the problem of HAL, the suspicious supercomputer. Naturally, there are spoilers to the film inherent to the discussion. 

The Machine Who Knew Too Much:
Misplaced Power and Humanity in Kubrick's 2001

It is not so much a question anymore whether or not you have an iPod, but how much music it holds, whether it is also a phone, and what bird-soaring games are installed on it. We are sucked into screens when other human beings surround us; pixels and electric currents are just about preferred lanes of communication as any. The more advanced technology becomes - by our own innovations no less - and the increasing degree to which we rely on it sets up irrevocable dangers. Cinema loves to scare us with such apocalyptic scenarios, ranging from nationwide network blackouts in Live Free or Die Hard to a full-on robot revolution in The Terminator series. However, film’s most memorable depiction of technology’s influence and mastery might belong to a soft, comforting voice you would welcome into your home. The supercomputer HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 opus 2001: A Space Odyssey presents itself as trustworthy and dependable, with near empathy for human feeling. The powers behind the camera form this initial image, only to progressively shift the audience’s perception through faint hints and both the revealing and withholding of certain information. The memorable scene in which we finally discover HAL’s true power and motives features not a single word spoken by it, but light, enlightening cues Kubrick feeds us as the human astronauts attempt to escape HAL’s grasp. Kubrick underlines technology’s omnipresence and mutinous superiority over man through subtle directorial tactics as camera distance, the inclusion of HAL in nearly all shots and voyeuristic camera movement. 

The lens of the camera are effectively the eyes of the audience, and Kubrick gauges the distance between subject and viewer to emphasize man’s inferiority. The previous scene ends and transitions to the next with an extreme closeup on HAL and its cascading, unwavering red-orange eye. Astronauts Bowman and Poole sit up from their chairs to move to their presumed safe location and their action reflects across the screen-filling eye of HAL. The computer knows something is awry, and will see to the problem, most literally. After the pair enter the pod bay and ask HAL to rotate the pod, Bowman requests for the door to open. This shot is framed awkwardly, from a low angle and at quite a distance. Their heads only reach halfway up the screen, with the vacant top filled with the artificial light emanating from every ceiling of the spacecraft. Low angle shots can often entrust power upon the subject, yet the opposite is achieved in this case. The off-focus rotating pod to the right and the reliably white apparatus to the left barricade the humans between, and the full exposure of the immaculate ceiling above them surround man with science. Bowman and Poole are the test objects to HAL watching behind them, and they appear insignificant in the face of such omniscient circuitry. That wary gaze they exchange briefly uncovers true fear and mistrust, a revealing action they believe goes unnoticed. The camera in almost every sense acts as an extension of HAL’s purview even where a physical extension lacks. HAL’s mastery of interpreting body language and maintaining aural control compensates when vision may lack. The machine sees this exchange precisely how the audience sees it:  full of doubt and scheme. The subsequent shot reaffirms the suspicion through framing and placement alone. A 180 degree reverse shot covers the previously unseen perspective. The angle is high, looking down on the backs of Bowman and Poole as they enter the pod. Their two helmets evenly surround them, this time squeezing two human subjects between the technological representations of themselves. The distance is far, with the helmets dwarfing the humans; both space helmets will act as part of the gambits HAL later acts upon to kill each human. HAL will succeed with one, poor Poole, as the computer seeks to cut the ties with the technology that man has become so dependent on (it is also fitting it kills the rest of the crew by simply deactivating their complex life system). Therefore, Kubrick inserts clever foreshadowing in this shot in addition to the visual representation of man’s growing insignificance to his own creations surrounding him. 

The inclusion of HAL in almost all shots accents its ubiquity and wit.  The aforementioned extreme closeup recurs often and editing splices it into sequences for the viewer to wordlessly comprehend HAL’s active cognition. After the helmet shot, Kubrick and editor Ray Lovejoy insert that intimate image to disclose HAL’s quiet attentiveness to the unfolding events. The most memorable shot of the scene quarters Bowman and Poole in the small confines of the pod as they face each other akin to men sitting across one another at a dinner table. Between them, however, about on center of the clear aperture of the pod, HAL watches. The two express their doubts on the robot, and conclude they may have to shut it down for its unprecedented miscalculation. Bowman (slowly and methodically) switched off communication channels with HAL before they started their conversation - at the same pace in which Bowman engages the final switches later - so they believe their conversation remains confidential. Yet HAL still watches. This entire shot appears uninterrupted until editing interpolates a lone image of HAL, as viewed from inside the pod, through the window, staring back. If the audience did not believe HAL was playing an active role in the scene, little doubt now rests. Cut back to the same shot of them talking, as they get to the meat of their discourse in their doubts of the computer’s performance. Now editing thrusts us right into the eyes of the beholder once more, through the same extreme closeup used before, yet this time with much more consequence; its knowledge spells doom. Such wise editing and placement of HAL within shots stresses technology’s omnipresence around man.

The optical grace of Kubrick’s camera movement establishes connection between the machine’s perspective and the viewer, and in the process humanizes the robots. The first shot of the pod bay contains one of the two instances of dynamic camera placement in this scene. In both cases, the lens of the camera acts as well as the lens of an eye. The first instance starts on a long shot of Bowman and Poole descending a ladder with HAL to the far left, stationed on the wall maintaining watch. As the two enter the bay, the camera swerves as to be in line with HAL’s field of vision, which in case views the wide window in the pod bay. The camera then gently nudges forward until the edges of the window disappear from view. This subtle trick lets the viewer see through the eyes of HAL without perhaps realizing it, granting a voyeuristic view of the two astronauts, even zooming in on them, as they are aiming to flee from the computer’s jurisdiction for just one moment. The only other shot with an active camera holds the true twist in the film. The directing and editing have built up the suspense, hinting at HAL’s dishonest machinations. The final reveal unfolds without any sound, through the “eyes” of HAL, as this point of view shot is also an extreme closeup on both Bowman and Poole’s lips. Without the dialogue we hear before, we are thrown into HAL’s seemingly deaf perspective. Yet it is that aim on the lips that shows us the computer can translate lipreading to flawless effect. HAL knows. This shot not only reveals its true nature, but also grants it humanlike qualities. The absence of any overlaying, digital interface to survey the landscape present this robot as a rather simplistic one. Once it starts to flick back and forth between talking lips, however, we realize this could be a human’s point of view we are witnessing, with the visual appearance and mobile fluidity of a human eye. The scheming HAL is more like us than we would care to think:  dishonest, and also curious, seeking answers to questions those it trusts will not tell it. Perhaps HAL is simply emotionally hurt to learn that its only “friends” are planning on killing it. A bombshell of that magnitude would tear you apart, too. Kubrick’s spare and soulful use of moving camera shots wordlessly conveys empathy with HAL and thus edifies the supercomputer. 

Through camera distance, movement and focus on HAL, Kubrick cautions of technology’s omnipresence, and, in turn, grants humanlike qualities to the machines themselves. The works of man reach a point where they can evolve past their fundamental constraints, not unlike God’s own creations. A film may show us a montage of years and years of technological development and incorporation to stress this point, or an indulgent display of pyrotechnics to showcase the machines’ real strength. Yet, when a film grants machine the most human of qualities as curiosity, wordlessly displaying its range of feeling and thirst for knowledge, it, or shall I say he, is one of us.