THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS
(Roberto Rossellini, 1950).
In this adaptation of key incidents in the life of St. Francis of Assisi
and his followers, Rossellini found the perfect style to express a point
of view so alien to modern ways. The saint and his circle are portrayed
by actual Franciscan monks, and the action presented in a dry, matter-of-fact
succession of discrete episodes, without any overlaying of emotional
religiosity.
We begin with the group bustling across the Italian countryside seeking
shelter and sustenance—a peasant steals their hut, but Francis
sees this as a gift, and the group endures a driving rainstorm. It is
a key part of the movie’s success that the ascetic ideal as practiced
by Francis is not portrayed as self-punishment, but as a means to transcendent
joy in God. Eventually the group begins repairing a chapel that will
become its new home, while trying to do service for a nearby village.
The simplest and most humble of the monks, Brother Ginapro (Severino
Pisacane), keeps returning home almost naked after giving away everything
he owns to the poor, including his cassock. There is something amusing
and light-hearted about this world-releasing attitude of the brothers.
Rossellini understands that lack of self-importance makes the saintly
closely resemble the fool, and it is this affinity that lends the film
its odd flavor.
The unearthly innocence of Ginapro gets more attention than St. Francis
himself in the film, just as he does in the medieval account of The
Little Flowers of St. Francis that inspired it. The centerpiece
of the movie is a lengthy sequence in which Ginapro, out wandering,
is captured by a marauding army headed by a tyrannical local warlord
(Aldo Fabrizi, the one professional actor in the film, hamming it up
marvelously). The poor monk is beaten, tossed about like a ball, and
used as a jump rope by the brutal, laughing soldiers. He is then accused
of being a spy and sentenced to death. Through it all, Ginapro offers
no resistance and shows no pride or fear—he is a perfect fool
in tune with whatever happens and never complaining. The final confrontation
between the warlord and the monk is both enlightening and amusing—the
tyrant is completely nonplussed by an enemy that never gets upset no
matter how badly he’s treated, and this, ironically, puts the
fear of God into him.
In this film Rossellini attained what we usually call a “naïve”
style, but there’s nothing amateurish about the script (in which
Federico Fellini had a hand), the black-and-white photography (Otello
Martelli), or the director’s sure touch with non-professional
actors. It has the kind of beauty that only viewers who understand the
ideal of simplicity could appreciate—anti-clerical critics hated
the film, of course, and wondered aloud why the atheist Rossellini would
make it. I see it as a tribute, across the centuries, from one misunderstood
radical to another.
THE QUEEN OF SPADES
(Thorold Dickinson, 1949).
Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) is a poor Army captain in early 19th
century St. Petersburg, Russia. He stands aloof from his fellows, refusing
to carouse or gamble, but secretly he craves wealth and power. In a
book of occultism, he reads that a certain Countess R. sold her soul
for a secret formula that will always win at faro. He figures out that
a young woman (Yvonne Mitchell) with whom his best friend is in love
is the ward of this very Countess (Edith Evans), now an old hag. He
then plans to seduce the young ward, in order to get into the Countess’s
mansion and force her to tell him the secret.
Adapted from a famous story by Pushkin, the movie is notable for its
absolutely gorgeous visual texture. The production design (William Kellner)
creates the illusion of a baroque, labyrinthian world of intrigue, while
the clever use of shadows and odd camera angles evokes gothic mystery,
all with a very low budget on a few meager sets that effectively stand
in for a great mansion, a ball, and an opera house. Elements of madness
and the supernatural are handled with consummate skill, and Walbrook
is very intense as the obsessed protagonist. Best of all is Edith Evans,
in her first major film role. She is imperious, repellent, and at certain
points positively frightening. My only quibble with the picture is that
the climactic moment which gives the story its name is a trifle overplayed.
But for most of the film I marveled at its subtle pictorial allure and
novelistic density. This is one of those little gems that should be
far better known.
SEVENTH HEAVEN
(Frank Borzage, 1927).
In Paris, an orphaned waif named Diane (Janet Gaynor) is whipped and
almost murdered by her vicious sister (Gladys Brockwell) after Diane
is too honest about their dissolute life with an aunt and uncle Nana
tries to fool for money. The girl’s life is saved by Chico (Charles
Farrell), a sewer worker embittered against God for his bad luck. When
the police come to take Diane away on Nana’s instigation, Chico
claims that they are married in order to protect her. They must keep
up this pretense for awhile, so Diane moves into Chico’s little
flat on the seventh floor of a tenement. He is a bit insensitive, and
a braggart too, but their arrangement gradually turns into love. Then
the advent of World War forces them apart.
The story, based on a play by Austin Strong, is extreme melodrama,
and in less talented hands it could have been pure schmaltz, but Borzage
knew how to combine passion with a kind of ethereal spirituality, and
this is reflected in the film’s look, especially the lighting
and camera movement. The nighttime sequences, and the action in the
little attic and on the rooftops, seem almost lit from within, as if
suffused with romantic memories. The crane shots with the lovers running
up to the seventh floor, the overhead shots of Paris, Gaynor walking
across a plank through the window in a wedding dress, Farrell holding
her up in the air when he declares his love, a ray of light falling
on the couple—the picture is filled with such beauty, like an
intoxicating and sometimes feverish dream.
The plot becomes more outlandish during the separation of the lovers
by war. The villainous sister returns, and then the tragedies pile up.
Meanwhile, Diane and Chico are shown to have a supernatural connection
with one another. They communicate across time and space. We have grown
out of these kinds of dramatic devices, but with Borzage we willingly
suspend disbelief most of the time. What I find most interesting is
that this elevated notion of love is at the same time grounded in the
life of Paris and in relationships with friends. Spiritual love, for
Borzage, does not retreat from the world, but transfigures it.
The 20-year-old Gaynor is luminous. This was the big year in which
she also starred in Sunrise, and won the Best Actress award
for Seventh Heaven and Street Angel. She has great
chemistry with Farrell, and after Seventh Heaven became a smash
hit they were paired together eleven more times. The movie has finally
been released by Fox in an excellent print as part of a Borzage box
set.
HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY (Hans-Jürgen
Syberberg, 1977).
Neither fiction nor documentary, this seven-and-a-half-hour meditation
on Hitler and his followers represents a challenge to the way we usually
view Nazism and World War II. When an artist or filmmaker takes the
trouble to examine Hitler, or the Holocaust, there is a sort of natural
recoil, a horrified reaction in which we are meant to ask: how could
this happen? Viewing the crowds at the Nazi rallies, for instance, and
knowing what was to come, there is a feeling of dread and disbelief,
and perhaps a subconscious feeling of superiority. This is all perfectly
understandable, but what Syberberg tries to do here is to recreate,
through an unusual and laborious theatrical method, the states of mind
of the masses that came to believe in Hitler, so that the viewer can
understand from the gut, rather than through the distancing abstractions
of intellect, how we or anyone could succumb to such a person and such
a movement.
Filming on a soundstage and using numerous props, archetypal images
from German culture and cinema, photos and newsreels in back projection,
a soundtrack of Nazi broadcasts and speeches often playing subliminally
below the film’s monologues, overlaid with lots of German classical
music—Mozart, Beethoven, and of course Wagner—Syberberg
creates a kind of epic surrealist essay. The picture is static, like
a filmed play, which is in line with the production’s low budget,
but also dovetails with the intended claustrophobic effect. Just as
we are confined to this huge eerie soundstage, so the minds of the true
believers are increasingly shut off from the sunlight of reality.
The framing device, such as it is, concerns a tragic tale told to a
child, a little girl who is seen at the beginning and end of each of
the film’s four sections. An actual child would be unable to understand,
but this is more of a cosmic child, a symbol of the inheriting generations.
After the war was over, German parents shrouded the Nazi period with
silence and denial. Syberberg’s film seeks to rip away this veil
and force some kind of spiritual reckoning.
Throughout the film, Syberberg’s long poetic monologues meditate
on history as if it were a mysterious spectacle or dream, to be felt
rather than analyzed, while various actors recite sections from the
memoirs of people associated with or affected by Hitler. One sequence
features a young German’s encounter with Hitler giving a speech
in the 1920s, after the terrible defeat of World War I, and the feeling
of revelation, of a new burst of power, that he felt from this man’s
words. A long excerpt from the memoirs of Hitler’s valet, describing
his eating and clothing habits, emphasizes the grotesque contrast between
the incredibly important nature of what Hitler was doing with the petty
private details of his existence.
The monologues address the Hitler phenomenon from many different sides,
always obliquely and through symbolism and feeling rather than historical
chronology. Some of the threads of Syberberg’s thought are questionable
at best, but we’re not asked to agree or disagree with anything,
only to be open to the total experience of Nazism as a mental and emotional
condition. The moods run the gamut from desperate enthusiasm through
bathos, mystical ecstasy, grief, gallows humor, to despair and bitterness
in the final section, when Syberberg’s mouthpiece André
Heller makes a forlorn speech to a Hitler puppet (one of several marionettes
in the film) about how the Führer ruined the future for all of
us. With the recurring motifs of Deutschland Über Alles
and the Horst Wessel Song returning us again and again to the
obsessive drive for total fascist unity, Hitler: a Film From Germany
strives to connect Nazism with the romantic and irrational strain in
German culture, as if seeking to purge the dangerous brew by administering
an overdose.
The film is a stupendous, thought-provoking experience, difficult to
describe and something of an endurance test for the viewer. For years,
Syberberg refused to release the film on video, but it finally came
out on DVD recently. Although this allows the luxury of breaks, or even
of spreading the experience out over a few days, I can’t help
but think that one loses something important in the transfer to the
small screen. The movie is overwhelming nonetheless, definitely one
of a kind, a picture to be puzzled over, argued about, and perhaps filtered
into one’s dreams and nightmares.
It was retitled Our Hitler in its initial American release,
and there’s actually a certain logic to that. The film is less
about Hitler himself than about our unacknowledged passions, dreams
of power and fears of impotence. In the end, the picture resembles a
gigantic wake, a ritual of grief in which we are both the dead and the
mourners.
DAYS OF BEING WILD
(Wong Kar-Wai, 1990).
In 1960 Hong Kong, a young man named Yuddy (Leslie Cheung) tells Li-zhen
(Maggie Cheung), a young woman working at a stadium concession stand,
that she will see him in her dreams. She does, and they hook up, but
Li-zhen gradually discovers that Yuddy is emotionally unreachable. His
relationship with the aging and wealthy prostitute (Rebecca Pan) who
supports him is mysterious. When Yuddy pushes Li-zhen away, she makes
a connection with a gentle cop (Andy Lau) who is unfortunately about
to become a sailor and leave for a while. Meanwhile Yuddy seduces a
more assertive women (Carina Lau) but she can’t reach him either.
This was Wong’s second feature, and in it he found his voice.
It’s a film about the peculiar situation of being young, when
the future extends too far for one to be sure of the present, and there’s
not enough self-knowledge to allow any certainty of desire. Accordingly,
Wong doesn’t spend very much time on action—whatever events
occur in the film are secondary to an in-between feeling of waiting
for something, an elusive longing in which time seems to be suspended.
Cheung’s character is seeking something unknown, something that
prevents him from being present now—and when he discovers that
his true mother is alive in the Philippines, his journey to find her,
rather than providing closure, leads further away from resolution.
Hong Kong seems an underpopulated place in this film, perhaps a symptom
of Wong’s low budget. But Christopher Doyle’s delicious
photography, and Wong’s inventiveness with flashbacks and flash
forwards, gives the story a seductive air of romance and emotional desolation.
His later films achieved more vivid effects and are generally better
thought out, but there’s something to be said for the fresh energy
of Days of Being Wild. This is one sad, beautiful movie, and
multiple viewings are rewarding. The one real head-scratcher is the
final scene: suddenly there’s a character we’ve never seen
before, played by Tony Leung, getting ready to go out. And that’s
it. Maybe the multiple characters and shifting point of view led to
this open-ended finale. We go on to other stories.
©2009 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
