The Vertigo-Narcissus Connection

In celebration of the birthday of director Michael Powell (1905-1990) today, I’d like to share with you this clip from Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 color masterpiece, Black Narcissus, a story of spirituality, sexuality, and madness set in the exotic Himalayas. Note in particular the many similarities to the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo made almost a dozen years later - the moving camera P.O.V. shots, the nuns, the chapel, the vertiginous wooden staircase, the church bell that dominates the composition of the last few frames, and the suspense created when we realize that one or more of the characters (Powell discoveries Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron, below, both playing nuns) is about to fall from a very great height. Earlier in the film, the screen turns red to communicate the Byron character’s encroaching insanity, an effect that foreshadows Marnie.

Hitchcock and Powell were buddies. Powell had been a still photographer working on Hitchcock’s sets in the 1920s. Both were English directors with a taste for Germanic expressionism. In the mid-40s, when Powell was about to make A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven), Powell asked Hitchcock if he could recommend an American actress to play the female lead, and Hitchcock suggested Kim Hunter, whom Powell cast.

Folks who complain when other directors, e.g., Brian De Palma, borrow from Hitchcock seem to forget that Hitchcock was one of the biggest borrowers in film history – always, of course, adding his own personal stamp to what he borrowed. Hitchcock borrowed from Welles, Lang, Powell, and many others. They, in turn, borrowed from Hitchcock. As additional evidence of the admiration/envy that Hitch seems to have felt toward Black Narcissus, note that at the end of the ‘40s, when Hitchcock was about to shoot his most ambitious color project to date, Under Capricorn (another melodrama set in an exotic land), he hired Powell’s Black Narcissus cinematographer, Jack Cardiff.

Méliès Magnifique

The general line on Georges Méliès (1861-1938) is that his films were rooted in the theatrical. He had been a stage magician before he was a filmmaker, so many commentators have viewed his films as mere extensions of his magic act. The Infernal Cauldron made in 1903 (above) helps to dispel this notion. With its lovely color tints carefully applied frame by frame, it owes as much to painting and illustration as it does to stage performance. It not only entertains (like a theater piece) and evokes the viewer’s sense of wonder (like a magic act); it evokes the aesthetic pleasures of the most beautiful illustrations one might stumble across in a 19th Century childrens’ book.

[Tip o' the chapeau to Ross Freedman.]

Thoughts on Antichrist

I screened Lars Von Trier's new film Antichrist a few nights ago in bed, on my iPod touch (insert slightly guilty shrug), while my wife slept beside me. Throughout most of the running time, but particularly during the first 20 minutes or so, I felt her angrily kicking me in the hip to halt my distracting giggles. For all that has been written about this film so far, and Von Trier's characteristically self-destructing demeanor at Cannes, I feel compelled to point out one thing: Antichrist is undoubtedly a comedy, and one of the funniest I've seen in a long, long while. Much, much funnier than Von Trier's misfire The Boss of it All. If this film was indeed intended as a solution to crippling depression, I can't imagine a better project.

But labels can be problematic. What attributes qualify a film as a "comedy"? I suppose I'm using the term at its loosest, to simply identify a work of narrative art that is intended to provoke laughter. There's the need, however, to also state that this isn't an overt satire -- aside from the masterly opening sequence, a illuminated pointillist gag on jewelery commercials (complete with operatic score) where the two main characters graphically fuck while the product of prior fucking plummets to his icy grave. The film isn't precisely a parody, either (though some have pointed to the mystic gore of Dario Argento as a target), nor is it that most oxymoronic of subgenres, self-aware camp. Antichrist is an experiment in gnostic extremism, both a ravenous comment on and a grimacing departure from earlier Von Trier works (most notably Breaking the Waves, a similarly grim tale of disheveled distaff sacrifice), as well as something of a portrait of endurance. Dreamy, brutal scenarios float by, softly bumping into one another without much thematic connection -- there's a story about a couple coping with the freakish death of their son, but the methods of "making peace" depicted herein are like a snarling "fuck off" to Kübler-Ross. The man, played by Willem Dafoe, attempts to force his vaguely scholar wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg, to confront her self-implicating psychosis, but she slowly begins to embody her fears rather than dismissing, or even succumbing, to them. Dafoe also gets his testicles crushed, his leg drilled, and member stroked to a thick, frothy, crimson orgasm. Get the joke? Maybe you have to have been there...

What makes the film *powerfully* funny, however, is the way that Von Trier cultivates a nebulously creepy tone between the laughter. There's a reverential fear of the natural world pulsing from the film's core (an appropriate topic for a decidedly technological artform) that seems a daring continuation of Von Trier's ob-gyn nightmares from the brilliant miniseries The Kingdom -- stillborn foals, talking foxes and impossibly resilient ravens worm subcutaneous anxieties into us without ever seeming bombastically evil (as with most of the film's milieu there's something a few ticks from normal about them that's off-putting). Von Trier even fashions these dainty natural curiosities as Grimm-like entities. Under Gainsbourg's fever they assume the tripartite "Satanic" avatar of "The Three Beggars": which sounds a bit like unnervingly grotesque characters from a Medieval woodcut print. The guffaws here are more like nervous subterfuge, but rather than using such faint elements of damnation as mere foreshadowing, Von Trier has no qualms about revealing our greatest fears for harmless wildlife; it's our loved ones, under the influence of confusion, that pose the most intense threat, and the impartial horror of ecology moves at its own pace, on a parallel timeline.

Antichrist isn't too likely to win Von Trier new fans -- those who already find him needlessly sadistic and misogynist will find much for their antipathetic dissertations here. But for those of us who have often wondered how a Danish film director could inexplicably have access to our most curiously severe imaginative content, Antichrist is, as with the best of Von Trier's oeuvre, the therapeutic movie of the year. But don't get too excited about playing analysand to Von Trier's bespectacled doctor; he challenges perversions with merciless barbs, and -- in Antichrist especially -- they aren't all for the patient's benefit.

Henry Gibson 1935-2009

Henry Gibson was not only a gifted comedian (Laugh-In), but a remarkable character actor with at least three great performances to his credit: Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Nashville and, more recently, as big tipper "Thurston Howell" in Magnolia (above) by Altman disciple, P.T. Anderson.

Born as James Bateman, he adopted the name Henry Gibson (according to the L.A. Times obituary) as a tribute to Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. He made his screen debut as a student named "Gibson" in Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor.

[Image via Bill Ryan]

Alan Turing, 1912-1954, 2009

Since we're commemorating dire events today, here's one from queer history worth noting. From today's Guardian website:

Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay.

Describing Turing's treatment as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair", Brown said the country owed the brilliant mathematician a huge debt. He was proud, he said, to offer an official apology. "We're sorry, you deserved so much better," Brown writes in a statement posted on the No 10 website.

Turing is most famous for his work in helping create the "bombe" that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines. He was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 after admitting a sexual relationship with a man.

Below is a review I wrote of Breaking the Code, the 1997 BBC film of Turing's life starring Derek Jacobi. Previously released only on VHS, maybe renewed interest in Turing will get us a DVD.

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Alan Turing was one of those gifted homosexuals all too common in queer history — a brilliant mathematician who did pioneering work on early computers and helped make England safe for heterosexuals by cracking the German "Enigma" code during World War II. In return, this unapologetic "nancy boy," as his shocked mother calls him, was harassed, robbed, arrested, hospitalized, and forced to take estrogen as a condition of being probated rather than jailed. The surprisingly athletic Turing (he held records in marathon running) developed breasts from this bizarre treatment and eventually fell into a depression. His death in 1954 at age 42 is believed to be a suicide, from a strychnine-laced apple, though some think it may have been an experiment gone wrong.

The 1997 film Breaking the Code, the Masterpiece Theatre version of Turing's life, gives equal time to Turing's passionate intellectual curiosity and his pursuit of homosexual pleasure. The film, adapted by Hugh Whitemore from his play (which was based on Andrew Hodges' biography), structures the story around flashbacks and flash-forwards, an apt metaphor for the kind of psychic dissonance Turing must have suffered in trying to be as free in his personal life as in his scientific pursuits at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain.



An early scene (1929) brings together Turing's dueling obsessions in the person of Christopher (Blake Ritson), a handsome, equally science-minded schoolmate who visits his friend for the weekend. Christopher's wide-eyed description of seeing one of Jupiter's moons through his telescope amounts to a verbal caress, which Turing longs to return. "I wish we could live here together, just you and I . . . wouldn't that be wonderful?" The soundtrack here takes an acceptable liberty, superimposing the endearingly kitschy "Someday My Prince Will Come" from Snow White (actually released eight years later). The poison apple that killed Turing more ominously echoes Snow White.

The film shifts quickly from here to 1952, when an adult Turing (Derek Jacobi) picks up a decidedly less innocent version of his "prince" — an unemployed piece of trade named Ron Miller (Julian Kerridge). Their relationship, clearly economic on Miller's part, triggers Turing's downfall when the prince becomes a thief and an angry Turing turns him into the police, who instead arrest the older man for sodomy.

Between Turing's early schoolboy romance and his downfall at the hands of the British authorities, the film shows fascinating glimpses of his work life. He's inducted into Bletchley Park's coterie of code-breakers, among them Patricia Green (Amanda Root) and head cryptanalyst Knox (Richard Johnson). Green is aware of Turing's homosexuality but falls in love with him anyway. The pragmatic Knox tells Turing he doesn't care personally "if you go to bed with choir boys or cocker spaniels," but urges restraint for the sake of the project — breaking the Germans' heavily coded transmissions.

Turing's dislike of protocol extends to his work. Frustrated by the lack of funding, he appeals directly to Winston Churchill, who orders that Bletchley be supplied with every resource it needs. Turing's success helped end the war, but typically that wasn't enough to save him from Britain's antiquated sodomy laws, which arguably destroyed him.

While Breaking the Code has some of the uncomfortable insularity of its origins as a stage play, it's redeemed by consistently strong performances. True to Masterpiece Theater standards, the film treats Turing's actual love life with "tasteful" discretion – mirroring contemporary views of the homosexual body as something that must be hidden and arguably feeding the same kind of homophobia that was Turing's undoing. Nonetheless, Derek Jacobi makes the character's passions come alive in spite of the absence of who he really was, sexually speaking.

Quotation of the Day - La Belle Captive

La Belle Captive (1983) is an erotic noir mystery by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad. It is also quite tongue-in-cheek. The following three images which appear in succession in the film capture something of the movie’s fetishistic flavor.



If the last shot reminds you of the orgy sequence in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, that’s appropriate because, like Eyes Wide Shut, Marienbad, and several of the films of David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire), La Belle Captive is a dream film. Don’t look too hard for significance. As in the best dream films, the story and images seem to flow directly and unmediated from the filmmaker’s subconscious to you.

The film was photographed by Henri Alekan, a master of dream cinema, who also shot Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, and who would later shoot Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. The film’s soundtrack alternates Wagner with accordion tangos - just like Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou.

THE STORY - Walter (Daniel Mesguich) is a secret agent of some kind who takes his orders from a black-leather-clad brunette who rides through the film on a motorcycle like the Princess of Death in Cocteau’s Orpheus. One night in a disco, Walter meets a beautiful long-legged blonde (Philadelphia-born Gabrielle Lazure, above) who refuses to give him her name or telephone number. Driving home from the disco, he encounters the same blonde, lying bloodied and handcuffed in the middle of a country road, apparently the victim of an accident. He takes her to the nearest house, a mansion of course, where the Eyes Wide Shut-type guests appear to be expecting her. After a wild night of surreal, quasi-vampiric love-making, Walter wakes up alone in a ruin. Was the girl a ghost or some other type of supernatural anima? As in Vertigo, Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, Jess Franco’s Venus in Furs, and so many other films of this kind, the protagonist spends the rest of the film searching for her. Meanwhile, the police suspect him of murder.

STRUCTURE - At one point, the film cuts to a shot of Walter unconscious in a laboratory, hooked up to various recording devices while observed by two "scientists" who had previously appeared in the film in other roles. "Aha," we say, "this confirms everything we have seen up to now as the protagonist’s dream." And then he wakes up in another location, and we realize the shot of the scientists was a dream-within-the-dream.

THE QUOTATION - Walter visits an expert on the supernatural. He asks the expert if it was possible the girl he met might have been - you know - dead? "Oh certainly," says the expert - who also happens to be the girl’s father, "Most of the people you see in the street are dead. That’s why it’s so crowded everywhere."