Antichrist's Cine-Chthonic Relations

I'm shocked SHOCKED to find the modern masterpiece of 2009, ANTICHRIST, getting such hostile reviews. Why? Call me off the wall but I'm betting a) a lot of critics just don't know much about film history; b) Camille Paglia has fallen from grace in modern academia; c) Many critics never did learn the difference between "exploring" issues of misogyny and actually "being" misogynist, i.e. objectifying (VERTIGO Vs. PORKY'S, for example).

Perhaps Von Trier's films are so polarizing because they rave against cinema and sexuality like an apocalypse of seeing. Compare the much higher reception for Quentin Tarantino's INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, a very similarly pre-de-constructed 2009 film, which together with ANTICHRIST represents the post-modern pinnacle of 2009 box office polarization. But QT's cinematic influences and reference points are written on his sleeve (or soundtrack CD back cover) and Nazis are safer to hate than our own corrupting sexuality. Poor Lars is just lumped in with 'artsy' which we're already presumed to pretend to know. Also, I bet a lot of these critics saw the film at Cannes, and I can't imagine it would seem very good in the context of too little sleep and way too much less-than-worthy artsy tripe, it's all about context.

Below is a small list of films which surely influence Von Trier or at the very least may help one understand ANTICHRIST as more than just "that movie with the scissors." Instead of my own synopses I've attached relevant quotes:

REPULSION (1965)

"Deneuve makes one feel the confusion of a corrupted child: She is an arrested adolescent who, like an anorexic, cannot face her womanliness without visions of perverse opulence and violence. Carol is the personification of sexual mystery -- she is what lurks beneath the orgasms of pleasure and pain." - Kim Morgan, Sunset Gun

VERTIGO (1958)

"There is something mysterious about femaleness -- coming from the facts of woman's physical nature, the endless mysteries of the shadowy womb, and the power of procreation that even she doesn't understand." -Camille Paglia (Salon)

BRINGING UP BABY (1938)-

"One question: If adulthood is the price of sexual happiness, is the price fair?...Why are the vaunted pleasures of sexuality so ludicrous and threatening?" -- - Stanley Cavell (Comedies of Remarriage, p. 125)

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE AKA DAY OF THE WOMAN (1978)

"Unlike, say, “Pulp Fiction” or a Wes Craven film, it’s not Dafoe’s character doing the cutting. Instead, Gainsbourg’s character does the honors of the late-term bris, which may be the reason why so many male critics gave it to very limp thumbs down, while singing the praises of Cannes’ other ultraviolent piece of work, Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Bastards.” Women literally ball-busting on screen? That’s something most of America is not ready for, even as we watch heads roll and blond bimbos get chopped to pieces." -- Drew Grant, The Frisky

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959)

"He-he was lying naked on the broken stones...and this you won't believe! Nobody, nobody, nobody could believe it! It looked as if-as if they had devoured him!...As if they'd torn or cut parts of him away with their hands, or with knives, or those jagged tin cans they made music with. As if they'd torn bits of him away in strips!"- Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor)

LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

"Desire is red and desire is death and desire is woman. There is, inescapably, a fear of, a distance from woman here. And there is a loathing of self, too: the peeping video artist, complete with self-bilocating technical trickery, has (at least initially) the aspect of a cosmeticized and malignant dwarf." - Donald Lyons (Film Comment, 1997)

SEE ALSO:
THE INNOCENTS, THE BLUE ANGEL, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, PERSONA, BETTY BLUE and see my more detailed piece on ANTICHRIST on ACIDEMIC.

The Unknown Paul Wendkos (1925-2009)

I just learned, via Peter Nellhaus, of the passing of one of America's most obscure-but-talented directors, Paul Wendkos.

Wendkos would be far better known today if his first film, the great low-budget noir, The Burglar (1956), were more readily available. The Burglar, an unabashedly arty film based on the David Goodis novel of the same name, starred Dan Duryea in the title role, and Jayne Mansfield as his ward (a serious acting role that preceded her "bombshell" period). A fatalistic heist film clearly influenced by Orson Welles, particularly The Lady From Shanghai, The Burglar ends at an Atlantic City funhouse where a loudspeaker proclaims, "We, the Dead, Welcome You!"

Wendkos directed several other films of interest, the well-known but atypical Gidget (1959), The Mephisto Waltz (1971), and two more stylish noirs, The Case Against Brooklyn (1958) starring Darren McGavin as an undercover cop, and the fascinating rural noir Angel Baby (1961) which stars Salome Jens as an Aimee Semple McPherson-like revival preacher, and has a terrific supporting cast that includes George Hamilton, Mercedes McCambridge, Henry Jones, Joan Blondell, and Burt Reynolds. Angel Baby's striking black and white cinematography, most of it shot in the Deep South, was by Haskell Wexler.

Eventually, Wendkos found his niche in television. He directed several episodes of the '60s right wing sci-fi series, The Invaders (in which aliens were equated with Communists). Of far more interest were a series of made-for-TV movies he directed (he was a pioneer of the form), including The Brotherhood of the Bell (1970), The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975), Cocaine: One Man's Seduction (1983), and the mini-series Celebrity (1984) - all of them distinguished by a paranoid world view communicated through unstable wide-angle compositions, and performances skillfully pushed to the edge of hysteria (Glenn Ford in Brotherhood of the Bell, Dennis Weaver in Cocaine).

If anyone ever published an interview with this *unknown* auteur, I would love to see it.

Brothers in Cynicism

Every time a new film by the Coen brothers comes out, I dread having to hear from the same old so-and-so's who can't bear to slog through the Coens' peculiar brand of pessimism. The words "bleak" and "cynical" often pepper their reviews rather liberally, along with some gasp of regret that the brothers don't seem to have much sympathy for their characters. Jonathan Rosenbaum called their style "pop nihilism", and not in a positive sense. Before the release of their newest film, A Serious Man, I could practically hear them sharpening their claws.

As a die-hard fan of the Coen brothers, it's not so much the predictability of these reactions that irks me, but the general unapproachability of it as a critical argument. Dismissing the Coens as cynics makes as much sense as dismissing Frank Capra as naive: both are true, of course, but neither one is grounds for belittling the quality of their work.

Much of it boils down whether or not someone "gets" the Coens. Even if you understand where they're coming from and what they're getting at, if you don't have, at some subconscious level, something akin to their dark outlook on life, their films will almost certainly be off-putting, unsatisfactory, and pointless. Joe Morgenstern used the word "repellent" in his review of A Serious Man to describe the characters the Coens had written, but it aptly describes his attitude towards the whole film and the Coens' entire oeuvre.

What's so perplexing is that many of these critics seem to think it's a failing on the Coens' part that they have never gotten over this cynicism. Sometimes people call them "juvenile" and sigh: 'Oh, when will the Coens grow up?' As if this were a dark, teenage phase they never developed past, the filmic equivalent of a high school sophomore's black eye-liner and lip piercings. Maybe the Coens, like myself, have just never witnessed anything that suggests that the world might not be such an awful place after all, that people really are good at heart, that life does have some grand and noble purpose. More optimistic veins of thought are certainly nicer, but it's not as if anybody can help being a cynic.


There's a lot to be said for artists who are comfortable and secure enough with their own philosophical leanings to not feel the need to try and sugar coat any unpleasantness. Even if you accept that the Coens are antisocial juveniles - and there's no real good reason you should - then you at least have to grant that they're honest. It would be nearly impossible for any other filmmaker to fake the cynicism that the Coens pull off with total sincerity. Many of the critics who denounce such pessimistic ways often say that they wish the brothers' technical prowess could be put to better use, but what better use for an artist's skills could there be than to create works that communicate to others the way they see the world?

To watch A Serious Man - their most morally sophisticated work - is to feel what it's like to be Joel or Ethan Coen, to see the world as a pointless series of endless sufferings and inconveniences, surrounded by insufferable buffoons and irrational cretins (a sensation I'm rather familiar with, and, I assume, so are many others). This is not a world of their making. This is the world they live in. If David Denby really did think A Serious Man was "hell to sit through", I can't imagine what he'd think of sitting through an entire lifetime of it.


As a western New York Gentile from the 1980s, I have no overt connection to the 1967 Jewish Minnesota suburb of A Serious Man, but I feel a taut psychological bond to the intellectual frustration, the passive misanthropy, the hopeless irony that permeates its every scene, a bond expressed principally through laughter. Where critics like Denby see a film that dehumanizes life and drains it of meaning, I see a film that structures the horrible train wreck of life into a fine, sharp joke.

Perhaps I'm also an emotionally-stunted creep, but there's something close to genius in anyone who can make humor out of pure unhappiness. Life is miserable, you'll never get the answers you want, death is just around the corner, and isn't that just hysterical?

Carl Dreyer says Drive Safely and Save Lives!

They Caught the Ferry (1948) is a short highway safety film – much like the ones we used to watch in Drivers Ed. - produced by the Danish Film Commission, and directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, the legendary auteur of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (The Word, 1955), and Gertrud (1964).

It’s a macabre little story about a young couple on a motorcycle frantically racing across the countryside from one ferryboat to another. (When they stop at a rural gas station, fans of Scandinavian cinema might expect to see Max von Sydow manning the pump – as he does in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.) The couple encounter various obstacles along their way, including a railroad crossing, and a road hog whose face – as we see when the couple maneuvers around him – is the face of Death. The only ferry they end up catching is the mythical rowboat that carries souls to the Underworld. Hence, the irony of the film’s title.

You might be reminded of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (especially the great “Breakdown” episode directed by Hitch himself) or certain episodes of The Twilight Zone. I also thought of “The Monkey’s Paw” episode from the Freddie Francis-directed feature version of Tales From the Crypt, in the course of which a driver takes a look in his rear-view mirror and sees this.


They Caught the Ferry is an exercise in pure visual storytelling. Those who associate Dreyer with the slow-moving cameras of Day of Wrath and Ordet, or the near-stasis of Gertrud, might be surprised by the style of this little film (made between Day of Wrath and Ordet) which is all about speed, and uses every trick in the filmmakers’ book – fast cutting, dutch-angled POV shots of the countryside, inserts of the speedometer, and shots of the wind blowing through the couple’s hair – to convey the impression of steadily accelerating motion.

All of this was reflective of Dreyer’s personal and deeply held spiritual beliefs. For him, stasis equaled eternity. Speed killed.

Memo to Michael Bay: GI JOE KICKS YOUR ASS!

Superheroes with toy franchise tie-ins get a lot of heat... unless critics had a real lively sense of humor they trashed both TRANSFORMERS (as well as WOLVERINE, TERMINATOR SALVATION, etc.) but GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA does everything right. AND it gets a lot less things wrong. One can only hope the Michael Bays, Brett Ratners and McGs pay attention when watching JOE (though its director, Stephen Sommers, certainly has some crap under his belt, such as VAN HELSING). Here's some things they might look for:

1) DEADPAN: The key, as with the best John Carpenter films, is the universal Deadpan: Just compare Channing Tatum, first-rate in his second-rateness as the "Most American" Joe" to, say, the comedic everyspazzisms of (Tatum's real life friend) Shia LaBeouf in TRANSFORMERS, and why is Tatum so good? Because he scraps the winks and wails, and underplays! Ditto the amazing Sienna Miller. When these two are together, sparks fly because they don't! (Bay would show literal sparks, probably coming out of someone's ass)

2) RACE: There's a lot less racial "consciousness" and more of a racial celebration in JOE. For one thing, the main black character--Marlon Wayans in JOE's case--is actually given a personality beyond the carefully compiled compendium of "safe" cliches that make most token black characters so invisible (i.e. they're loyal and don't interrupt when their white friends are talking). Instead he's allowed to have a genuinely ballsy "take charge" persona as well as sensitivity. He knows when to move in and when to back off in his amorous pursuits of this fellow Joe chick who is... white! She ain't blond (her dyed red hair could denote some ghetto roots), but hey, Sen. Strom, baby steps.

3) RELATIONSHIP DYNAMICS: JOE takes a a page from Joss Whedon's BUFFY to see how relationships and events in "normal" life can reverberate to a larger mythic canvas. The Baroness turned evil because Joe couldn't face her at her brother's funeral (he just drove by on his badass motorcycle in the Arlington cemetery rain, etc. etc.) Rather than some drab "You killed my father" "But I AM your father" bit of linear by-the-portable-Jung cliche, we zoom back and forth from the present Bondian crisis to past traumas, most of which develop character AND expend firepower.

4) COMPLEXLY MOTIVATED VILLAINS: They all "fell" from grace at some point, and they mouth their bad dialogue in that rarest of styles: the selfless straightforward, not wincing or mincing when their dialogue clunks to the floor. One is a Halliburton-style industrialist, another a deformed mad scientist type (BRICK's Joseph Gordon Hewitt!) and another a self-centered ninja still harboring a grudge against his little white adopted and better-at-kung fu brother who blew up his spot at kung fu school (Nothing it turns out, is cuter than two little tykes wailing kung fu on each other in a Chinese kitchen flashback - with cleavers!).

5) COMPETENT EDITING: No matter what's going on in JOE, you can follow it. The edits are tight but not whiplash insane or Bay-level insecure, or shredded down to meaninglessness as in the disappointing QUANTUM OF SOLACE. There's a trust in the thrust of the story to override the sugar-addict guitar pick whittling style of so many current action films, which aren't happy unless they're cross cutting by nanosecond between 18 different incomprehensible and overly loud set pieces. More than anything, JOE's ingenious editing strategies remind me of the good early Hong Kong action films like MADAME CITY HUNTER and SUPERCOP 2!

Lastly, JOE manages to involve character arcs and development that for once are NOT cliches, because they connect to the truth...truths of being a tough, rough, heart of gold military type (they remind me of some very cool rangers I know) as opposed to a kid who is a "hero" based on his ability to own a possessed sports car or play a video game. While Michael Bay is spending millions on CGI to make a giant robot dance around like a spazz to bad top 40 rock, JOE is smashing up cars in Paris while flashing back to proposing to his girl (now the hot leather badass villain known as Baroness!) all without the requisite bullshit throwaway gags and punch lines. In short, all while keeping a completely straight face! It ain't been this good since STARSHIP TROOPERS or, another classic JOE reminded me of, the Sam Hodges' 1980 FLASH GORDON!

Like TROOPERS, JOE does the atom-splitting antithetical dichotomy bit, turning the CGI military spectacle into into both an effective critique of the military-industrial complex AND a veritable Sears catalog worth of cool new deadly stuff for sale! If the future is even half this rad, I'm glad I'm still alive to watch it happen... later, when it comes on DVD... and blu-ray! And did I mention Dennis Quaid as the leader of his beloved Joes? Shit son, there ain't even a foul-mouthed robot or annoying anthem rock songs to fuck this up. I'm not saying Channing Tatum is the new Vin Diesel, but if even if he's just the new Scott Walker, the sleeping 15-year old boy in all of us can finally wake up and look unashamed into the draft board future. Ride on, big Joes. Ride on...

Bright Lights issue 66 now online

Issue 66 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online.

From the editor

Keep watching the lights...

Articles

Roman Polanski: What's on Trial?
By Karin Luisa Badt

Looking at Charlie: Modern Times
An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
"Buck up! Never say die! We’ll get along!"
By Alan Vanneman

Past Sunset: Noir in the West
"I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me."
By Imogen Sara Smith

On the Escarpment, Off the Escarpment: It Helps When the Love Is Strong
Especially when the lovers aren't
By D. J. M. Saunders

Porno to the People: The Danish Revolution That Liberated America
"Tease was out, honesty was in."
By Jack Stevenson

The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual
"We keep returning to this story about pod people because we're terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era."
By Jesse Stommel

The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover: Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover
How a movie exposé of "abuse of power" defends those in power and their institutions
By Jay Rothermel

Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah
"In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality — and its alternate currents — is caught with a glance."
By Rob Faunce

Can't Repeat the Past? Of Course You Can't — and Shouldn't
Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century
By Suzanne del Gizzo

Blake Edwards vs. Hollywood: Sunset and the Myth of Hollywood's Golden Age
A tour of Edwards' curious 1988 film, with side trips to variations by James Ivory, John Schlesinger, and others
By Barry Wurst II

Actors

Delphine Seyrig: The Eternal Return
"Seyrig is capable of stopping an entire film with one decisive physical gesture, one smile, one glare, one sound from her smoky, murmuring voice."
By Dan Callahan

Sean Connery: A "Natural Thrust"
"Connery, never a martyr to false modesty, remains as voluble and combative as ever."
By Christopher Sandford

Directors

Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men
"I'm shitting bricks, thinking he's onto me."
By Damon Smith

Film and Film and Film: An Interview with Jonas Mekas
"One who knows how to, as they say, 'read' the images, can tell everything about me."
By Jon Lanthier

Columns

Bright Sights: Play Time, Gaumont Treasures, Diary for My Children, Winstanley, Marlene, Bill Douglas Trilogy
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
By Gordon Thomas

Letter from New York (c. 1980)
"The problem is other people — crazy people."
By Howard Mandelbaum

Movies

Film Kills: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 1
"Tarantino thus concedes some of his omnipotence to the medium he so deftly manipulates."
By Vlad Dima

"Do You Find Me Sadistic?" Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 2
"This is the World War II film confronting its Jungian shadow, acknowledging its darkest impulses and finally purging them."
By Lee Weston Sabo

Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
"His plan mirrors Johnny's, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place.""
By Robert Castle

Critical Distance: What Knowing Knows About 9/11
"Where Cloverfield provocatively blurs the line between being 'about' 9/11 and being (mere) entertainment, Knowing lands squarely in the latter camp."
By Devan Goldstein

Playing It Safe with John Dillinger: Michael Mann's Public Enemies
"Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery to alter his face and to try to remove his fingerprints. But Public Enemies does not dare to depict that kind of desperation and that determination to survive under any circumstances."
By Joan McGettigan

"They Come in Peace": Andy Fickman's Race to Witch Mountain
"Only saviors can save polluted planets, yellow cab drivers are losers . . ."
By Jay Rothermel

Far from Elementary: Debra Chasnoff's Straightlaced: How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up
"I told him, 'I'm not gay. My neck was cold.'"
By Gary Morris

Festivals

After the Surge: The 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival
"An alternative agenda for the festival might be: what can we make of modernism?"
By Lesley Chow

Bucking the Tide: The 2009 New York Film Festival
This year's strong, idiosyncratic line-up reminds us that moviegoing can still be more than "a museum experience"
By Megan Ratner

Lucky 13: The 2009 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
Getting out of the ghetto
By Gary Morris

From Air Dolls to the Anchorage: The 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival
"VIFF remains the unspoiled oasis for cinephiles looking to get away from it all."
By Ben Cho

Books

In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by Chris Welles Feder.
By Joseph McBride

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Politot
By Jon Lanthier

America’s Film Vault: A Reference Guide to the Motion Pictures Held by the U.S. National Archives, by Phillip W. Stewart
By Matthew Kennedy

Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor, by Dan North
By Deborah Allison