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Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Every programming choice needs its counter, and every canon should be challenged. The Great Movies: The Counter Programming series seeks to undermine the ongoing Great Movies Project. By recognizing the glut of white, European and Anglo-American, straight dudes who generally constitute what we think of as “the masters,” it becomes necessary to widen the frame.

This is an ongoing project to watch a set of films from non-white, non-Western, non-straight, and/or non-dudes. It will be ongoing, probably, forever. Please feel free to chime in about titles and movements I have overlooked, as I know beyond all doubt there are many. The point is not to slam universally loved and respected films. The point is simply to broaden a conception of where films have been made, by whom, and to what ends or concerns. The larger point, as always, is to discover hidden gems in the rich history of cinema. I hope you enjoy it.

Commentary Film Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Awaara, Raj Kapoor, and early Bollywood

by rick November 21, 2016

written by rick

A stern judge, obsessed with questions of lineage and social order, casts out his pregnant wife for supposed infidelity. A fatherless child born to the slums falls in love with a girl impossibly out of his league, only to meet her again under much different circumstances as an adult. Class and caste collide, amid expository songs, Chaplin references, scandalous sexuality, generational conflict, mythic invocation, and an elaborate dream sequence. Raj Kapoor’s 1951 mega-hit Awaara set the stage for many Bollywood productions to follow.

Kapoor was only 27 when Awaara was released, “not too long after 1947 and at a time when the business of Independence (and of course Partition) [was] still unfinished.” He’d go on to become one of the seminal and most beloved figures in Indian cinema, but in 1951, Awaara was just the third release from his newly-minted R.K. Films. The timing informs its themes and helps explain its incredible international success, but also underscores the ambition of Kapoor’s vision.

Awaara presents an elliptical narrative, told mostly through flashback and digression. A frame-story functions as a unifying thread; we begin near the end and move backward, before circling around to the present and closing the days to come. (The frame-story technique is especially relevant, given Awaara‘s self-conscious similarity to the Ramayana, one of the earliest frame-stories that exists.)

Kapoor shares a name with his protagonist, and we begin with Raj’s trial for the attempted murder of the illustrious-looking Judge Raghunath (Prithviraj Kapoor). Our expectations shift almost immediately, though, as a beautiful defense attorney named Rita (Nargis) begins interrogating the judge on the stand. It’s a deft touch. We question who exactly is on trial here, and gradually discover there are connections, for the moment only implied, between each of these three characters. Awaara will spend the next three hours teasing those out.

Elaborate sequence in Awaara

To make a very long story short, Raghunath was married to the virtuous Leela (Leela Chitnis), but his draconian position on criminality came back to haunt him. The judge sentenced a man named Jagga (K.N. Singh) to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, based solely on class prejudice; the jailed would become, predictably, a notorious bandit. Seeking revenge for this original sin, Jagga kidnaps Leela and intends her harm. But upon discovering her pregnancy, he comes to a different plan: he will allow the judge to think his wife was assaulted (a crime that falls on the woman’s honor), and then take vicarious pleasure in the unborn son’s misfortune, which will disprove the pompous judge’s notions of moral predestination. Jagga will effectively play with the fates of man to prove a point, like one of the guys from Trading Places, except more prone to knifing.

Leela Chitnis and Raj Kapoor in Awaara

In due time, Raj develops a lifelong adoration for his classmate Rita, but his attempts at courtship and decent living are foiled at every turn by an unforgiving society. The nature vs. nurture themes play out against the backdrops of both slum and high society, with Raj eventually embracing his outcast status … to a point.

He’s more lovable than ruined (usually), facing hardship with a wink, a skip, and a pratfall (though Awaara gets much darker than the Chaplin films Kapoor clearly adores). Jagga, Raj’s Fagin-like surrogate father, brings him into a life of crime, while Raghunath, actual patriarch, remains disastrously oblivious to his paternity. A reckoning is coming.

Throughout Awaara, there are echoes of both earlier Russian films, with their evocative editing and denunciations of social oppression, and contemporary Italian neorealism, particularly doomed odes to the urban preterite like Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves (though with significantly more dancing than either of those).

Kapoor and DP Radhu Karmakar film the rainy streets, the romantic boat rides, and the perversely ornate interiors of the wealthy with an eye for the emotive image — a scorned thief hanging out with a dog, both lit by a circle of streetlamp; Raghunath alone in his palace of shadows; Raj and Rita’s reflections in the water with the moon behind them. To say nothing of the elaborate dream sequence.

Dream sequence in Awaara

Awaara is excessive on every level. Its visual overload peaks during the dream sequence, but it’s the film’s defining characteristic more generally. This is an ode to Chaplin, a dour social realist agitation, a bouncy musical with a remarkable (and unfortunate) similarity to Carousel, the sort of film that can transition from quiet melodrama to an actual battle between Heaven and Hell without seeming forced.

It was also the sort of film that resonated far and wide: it was rapturously received in Russia and China, where audiences related to it intensely. Russian authorities found it ideologically satisfactory. Its theme, Awaara hoon, was apparently Mao’s favorite. Jia Zhangke sings its praises (and in The Platform, characters are shown watching Awaara.) In 2015, a contestant on a Turkish reality TV show made it his own. Something struck a chord.

Yet, despite the film’s international success, Kapoor’s breakthrough remains resolutely Indian, not just in location photography or technique but text. One critic finds a material-historical reading in the question of paternity and social order:

Prithviraj [as the judge] also represents the bourgeois bureaucratic order of the newly emergent nation-state that cancels out the greater ‘Independence’ promise of profound social upheaval and true liberation from class/caste struggles and so forth. His perspective testifies to an ‘older’ obsession with bloodlines, genealogical purity, and colonial obsession with legal frameworks. His class is that which historically transcended the pre-Independence/post-Independence divide, the very social grouping which stunted the true empowerment of the disenfranchised in a new nation that promised precisely this.

Another emphasizes the mythic:

A thought that occurred to me … was that Awara picks up where the Ramayana ends. The film’s “prologue” has Prithviraj Kapoor—playing Judge Raghunath—facing a terrific reversal in which he stands trial at an attempted murder case where he is actually supposed to be the victim and Raj Kapoor the accused. Raghunath’s ward, a lawyer played superbly by Nargis, defends Raj Kapoor and confronts the gargoyle-like Raghunath (the regretful and brooding Ram in this film) for years ago expelling from his household his very own “Sita”, a wife he believes to have been raped and impregnated with a child he imagines to be the spawn of the “Ravana” of the story, here in the form of Jagga, a vengeful bandit. So it is not Sita who is on trial in Awara’s Ramayana commentary, nor even the perceived “seed” of Ravana (Raj Kapoor) but rather Ram himself, who here, in this moment, becomes “the accused” for his iconically faithless gesture.

Watching Awaara today, without anything approximating familiarity with these contexts, I’m most struck by the film’s ambition. I have no doubt that both these readings have a solid basis — “it can be two things,” as we say. Kapoor’s film synthesizes any number of influences but places them in a unique framework that draws equally on sacred allusion and anxieties animating the moment of its production. And then, he adds spectacle, humor, tragedy, and song.

That’s a lot of lifting for any film to accomplish, a lot of contradictory impulses pulled together into what is, ultimately, an enormously crowd-pleasing piece of entertainment. Awaara‘s success is like a magic trick, or like one of Raj’s sleights of hand. Kapoor would go on to a storied career, but the debut of his Tramp character, and the winding story of his trials and tribulations, would cement his legacy right from the start.

November 21, 2016 0 comments

Commentary Film Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Community, Capital, and Patriarchy in Wild Geese

by rick August 29, 2016

written by rick

Shirō Toyoda’s The Mistress is based on Mori Ogai’s Romantic novel Wild Geese (and sometimes referred to by the title of the original, as Criterion does). The film is in some ways a familiar melodramatic narrative about the crushing of a woman’s desire under patriarchy — a treatment dismissively summarized in 1959 by Bosley Crowther of The New York Times as “a morally mawkish situation upon a tear-misted screen.” But this (ironically patriarchal) scorn misses so much of the film’s nuance and historical context, not to mention the beauty of its images.

In his early days, Toyoda apprenticed under Yasujirō Shimazu, whose Our Neighbor, Miss Yae was discussed earlier in this series. The two share similar social concerns and a focus on a changing society, not to mention a fluidity with camera movement that distinguishes their approach from the more celebrated works of artists like Ozu.

Shirō Toyoda director of Wild Geese

The narrative of The Mistress / Wild Geese is simple enough on its face. Our protagonist Otama (the great Takemine Hideko) was once tricked into a false marriage, and is now deemed “damaged goods” (a term her scheming neighbor feels comfortable deploying to her face).

With an ailing father and few other options, she agrees to become the mistress of Suezo, a man she believes to be a widower who runs a kimono shop.

In fact, she is tricked once again: his wife’s not dead at all, and he’s a despised moneylender. In the mean time, she falls in love with a local college student, Okada, who passes by her new house every day, but circumstances conspire to keep her trapped, like the caged bird on her windowsill. Okada will be leaving to pursue a medical career in the West, her father (initially far more sympathetic) has grown accustomed to living in less brutal poverty than before, and Suezo vows never to let her go.

wild geese3

It’s not hard to see how Crowther and others might simply read this as a “weepie” and blithely move on. But, even ignoring the fact that “weepies” have long been dismissed by male critics for entirely insulting reasons, the subtexts both Ogai and Toyoda sneak into the tale make it far richer.

The Mistress / Wild Geese is also the story of a conflict between rationalism and individual desire, head and heart, with special attention to a woman’s place in a changing Japan. Set in the late-19th century but screened for audiences after the Second World War, there’s a palpable sense of outrage and sorrow for the traditional “caged bird” of such melodramas. As the story progresses, Okada begins to consider breaking free from the shackles imposed upon her, but this desire butts up against the contradictory realities of her situation.

As Joel Irvin writes:

In Toyoda’s film, the heroine, Otama, is no longer resigned to suffer in silence. Like her contemporaries, she raises her voice in rebellion against the one who has caged her. This Romantic ideology of victim consciousness resonated strongly· with the audience of postwar Japan. This criticism of authority is also found in the popular 1947 novel, The Setting Sun, by Osamu Dazai, when the character Kazuko speaks of a time when adults taught their children that revolution and love were evil. After the war, however, distrust of the former beliefs developed and Kazuko “came to believe that revolution and love in fact are the best and most delicious things in this life … Humans were born for love and revolution.”

This sensibility is contrasted with the feudal-borne sense of duty and propriety voiced constantly by the other characters, especially their repeated refrain to “be reasonable,” to recognize the limitations of desire and love-matches and provide for the community (in this case, embodied as literal patriarchy by Otama’s father). These rationalist societal codes aren’t so much contrasted with the anti-communal, capitalist impulses embodied by the moneylender as they are integrated with them. This is a society rife with contradiction, but only resulting in further female subservience, now to capital and the dominant norms of the community.

Rationalism takes other forms, too. Her college-student love is studying to be a doctor, that ultimate rationalist profession, and hoping to pursue a career opportunity in Germany, that ultimate rationalist nation. He may love Otama, but there’s no place for that here, and he has things to accomplish. (How single-minded is he? Irvin notes that in the book, Okada’s evening walks are so rigorously routine that neighbors use them as markers of time, a sly reference to a famous legend about the regularity of Immanuel Kant’s afternoon constitutional in Königsberg.)

wild geese1

Meanwhile, Toyoda time and again frames his heroine through the slats of her new home, evoking a symbolic prison. Suezo’s gift of a caged bird with which to “amuse” herself doubles down on this symbology (as does the heroic Okada’s killing of a snake who threatens the bird; the snake is dispatched, the whole in the cage filled, the bird once again without recourse to the sky).

The Mistress / Wild Geese exhibits all of this without laying it on as thick as it might sound; we spend far more time studying the shifting looks on faces and the spaces between foreground and back, emphasizing power relations and internal psychologies. And, though the film focuses most acutely on the relations between mistress, scorned wife, maid, and the assorted neighbors Suezo profits from as a usurer, there’s enough unease to go around.

Okada’s friend, a liberal arts student who knows he’s in love with Otama before he does, puts it plainly, implicating the entire society with a shrug:

You’re a brilliant student in medical school, and she’s an uneducated, kept woman. In today’s Japan, you two can’t be involved romantically. Just like her, neither you not I are free from the restrictions of this Meiji era. But for all that, will you conform to those restrictions or break out of them?

That is: head or heart? There is little doubt which one the men of this film will choose. Otama may be a different story. As we watch her watch the wild geese of the title ascend in the film’s closing frames, her face is impassive, revealing nothing. Perhaps she’s resigned to this fate. Perhaps she’s looking to a new day and a less rigid social order. Perhaps she’s making a plan.

Toyoda keeps it in tight close-up. We’re left only to wonder.

August 29, 2016 0 comments

Shared smoke in Jean Genet Un Chant d'Amour

Film Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Jean Genet and Cinema’s Open Fly: Un Chant d’Amour

by rick August 3, 2016

written by rick

Un Chant d’Amour is Jean Genet’s only film: a 26-minute, black-and-white, imagistic collage and fantasy of ideas. It’s startlingly beautiful, sensuous, and animated by themes — homosexuality, transgression, dominance, voyeurism — that characterize all of the mercurial artist’s work.

The short is also fairly, and hilariously, summed up by Letterboxd user Tyler, as “Almost definitely the best film ever made about gay men masturbating in prison.”

Frequently banned and famously litigated after an unauthorized attempted showing in Berkeley, CA in 1966, Un Chant d’Amour is arguably remembered now more for its notoriety than its content.

Like Cocteau’s “Orphic Trilogy”, Un Chant d’Amour is rooted in both film and dance. (Indeed, Cocteau is rumored to have shot the film itself.) It is, notably, a silent, in an era when that marked a definite aesthetic decision rather than a technical need. It focuses on an imprisoned man’s relationship with the man in his neighboring cell, and, it would seem, the jailer’s jealousy of their relationship.

For Genet, these things merge in a Surrealist fashion — a triad of dominance and submission in flux. It is never clear exactly who is in control: the nature of the relations seem to indicate a subversive reversal of expectation. It is the jailer who is shut out and the prisoners who are linked despite their walls. He eyes them through outsized cell windows, powerless to stop the lust he controls but cannot participate in. His entry into this congress comes via punishment: for instance, the use of his gun to demand allegorical fellatio. Oh, gosh! That’s our Genet!

There are other prisoners — notably a Black man who disrobes and masturbates, apparently embodying yet another variation of desire, gesture, and otherness — but it is these two we are drawn to. At one point, they make a break for the woods, and enjoy each other’s bodies there in ways the cells disallow. Of course, this is impossible, so we know we are in a fantasy realm. It is always up for debate whose fantasy we are experiencing.

Genet blurs the lines so effectively that Un Chant d’Amour becomes a set of reflections on desire rather than a narrative. The idea — clearly conveyed in exquisite photography that is indeed pornographic but so removed from the digital thrusting of our age that the word barely seems to apply — is that all of these images exist at once, in conversation. No one dreams alone. It’s scandalous in a fundamental way. As has often been the case, the censors were not wrong.

It’s a simple narrative, but its power lies in its evocations, invocations, and the montage-based contradictions the images introduce. There’s an extreme kind of seduction going on that mirrors that between the figures presented, a looming question of power and presence. Genet may have only made one film (though not for lack of trying), but it’s a heady mix of fear and desire. And, yes, also gay men masturbating.

And who was Jean Genet, the force behind the provocations of Un Chant d’Amour? An excellent question clouded by a lengthy history of self-mythologizing, answerable only through a mind-boggling resume of scandal, oppositional politics, and counter-cultural beatification.

Genet was an orphan, raised in a poor village in remote France by foster parents who eventually shipped him off to a penal colony for several years. Dishonorably thrown out of the Foreign Legion for extreme gayness, he reconstituted himself as a thief and prostitute, spending a fair amount of time in jail here and there.

His writing brought him to the attention of Cocteau, who he idolized and imitated, along with Picasso, Sartre (who wrote an entire book, “Saint Genet”, in his honor), and later Derrida. After May ’68, Genet became immersed in revolutionary politics, an outspoken proponent and ally of the Black Panthers in the U.S., the Baader-Meinhoff faction in Germany, and the Palestinian liberationists (he was in Beirut at the time of Sabra and Shatila, an experience that seems to have affected him deeply). He was the titular inspiration for David Bowie’s “The Jean Genie” and Glenn Milstead’s Divine in John Waters’ works, who took the name from one of Genet’s novels. Genet died an icon, controversial to the end, of liberationist struggles and groundbreakingly frank depictions of queerness. His legacy is long and weird, contradictory and subject to the kinds of routine re-inventions he himself seemed to treasure.

It’s tempting to apply some of these tendencies to Un Chant d’Amour, to decode it by way of the auteur. Throughout his art, he would return to images of wooded areas, as he does in the film. Do these evoke a nostalgia for his own provincial youth, re-routed through long-simmering desire? The peepholes and jailers could surely relate to his own imprisonments, punitive spaces where he ironically also discovered a truer sense of himself and his sexuality. The holy, sexy criminals that haunt the film, the mixture of pleasure and pain, the sensuality invented on the margins and in opposition … we could keep going.

Is Un Chant d’Amour, as the Alameda County Superior Court ruled in Landau v. Fording, simply “cheap pornography calculated to promote homosexuality, perversion and morbid sex practices”? Perhaps (though it certainly doesn’t look cheap). But I prefer to watch it as a fully realized expression in and of itself, a film in love with bodies, images, and the grace of the silents its creator grew up watching.

Pornography, to quote another famous case, is something one knows when one sees it. For Genet, obsessed with the eye in the doorway and bodies on display, seeing is always the point. And cinema, focused on gesture and figure and shadow, is ideal for this. As he wrote, with a characteristic eye toward scandal, “In effect the cinema is basically immodest. Let us use this faculty to enlarge gestures. The cinema can open a fly and search out its secrets…”

Un Chant d’Amour is just that – an opening of a fly. It’s deeply immodest and entrancing. It earned its notoriety.

August 3, 2016 0 comments

Film Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Gentle narrative, odd coda: Hometown of the Heart

by rick July 19, 2016

written by rick

Stories of childhood occupy a central place in our collective storytelling legacies. Like any art form, cinema has no shortage of entries: Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Kiarostami’s Where Is The Friend’s Home?, Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, Spielberg’s E.T., and probably whatever you just watched. Yong-Kyu Yoon’s gentle 1949 Hometown of the Heart (Maeum ui kohyang) is a classic of the genre.

Why is this so? Perhaps because we – artists, readers, writers, filmmakers, filmgoers – all were children once. Perhaps because the progress from childhood to adulthood provides ample narrative space for a range of recognizable tensions and transitions, in the traditional Bildung fashion. Maybe, Occam’s Razor-style, we just generally think kids are pretty cute.

Min Yu, who plays Hometown of the Heart’s protagonist Do-Seong, sure is. He’s an orphaned child, with a mother in Seoul he longs for and a father he never knew. He is being raised in a Buddhist temple, an environment defined by rigor and routine he finds stultifying. His orphan status make him a pariah to the village kids, who mock his enforced monkishness as they frolic in nature. Do-Seong dreams of a mother’s return, of city life in glamorous Seoul, or, if nothing else, the freedom to play in the woods.

Director Yong-Kyu Yoon approaches the story with stately grace, lingering on small moments. Comparisons to Ozu are apt. Pillow shots are absent – Yoon prefers twilight landscapes and movement, compared to that Japanese master’s insistence on low-angle domesticity – but the sensibility seems close. Both eschew dramatic fireworks for simple, empathetic images that manage to emphasize both internality and the relations between humans in the world.

In Hometown of the Heart, Do-Seong’s dreams come true, but in complicated fashion. He discovers a new maternal figure in Eun-hee Choi, the great Korean actress in an early role as a widow who lost her own son. Their connection is immediate and obvious – a child without a mother and a mother without a son. The arrival of his prodigal birth mother complicates matters. This is a story of family, invented, lost and found. It’s also a story of a longing for rootedness, for other people and places to complete you.

In a revelatory essay, Dafna Zur contrasts the film with Homeless Angels (Jip oepnneun cheonsa), made a decade earlier and representing a different approach. Whereas war-era Korea imagined a childhood progress from a state of wildness to one of productivity, Hometown of the Heart nearly fetishizes the release both the forest and the city could provide – a new freedom characterized by escape from structure and stricture. In this and so many other ways, the Bildung is rooted in and animated by concerns of time and place. When we tell the story of a child, we tell stories about ourselves.

Hometown of the Heart has several odd codas. The film was rejected by South Korean censors for its apparent political bent (in fairness, it feels quite leftist in orientation), and its director eventually moved to the North instead. Its star, Choi Eun-Hee, went on to fame and glamour, but was kidnapped half a century later by North Korean agents in her older age and amid a declining career. (North Korea denies this, but North Korea denies a lot of things.)

It’s a bizarre story, and one it’s hard to believe hasn’t been made into a movie: in order to create a desperately desired homegrown film industry, Kim Jung-Il and his family spearheaded abductions of filmmakers and stars, holding them in bondage and forcing the creation of cinema. A few classics were created through this coercive, nightmare process. Like The Act of Killing, it stands out as a testament to the desire and horror that images generate, our desire to exist and to replicate the things we adore.

Hometown of the Heart is a world removed from these – a small story of a boy who misses his mom. But every story exists in a context. This is a fascinating and troubling one.

July 19, 2016 0 comments

Commentary Film Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Ruins and Hope in Spring In A Small Town

by rick June 30, 2016

written by rick

A crumbling city wall runs along the hillside above the Dai estate, a once-great residence in similar disrepair. Through its cracks, we see the empty skyline stretching forever, and stones are scattered among the weeds. It’s an image of loneliness, faded glory, and nostalgia, and it forms the metaphorical centerpiece of Fei Mu’s 1948 masterpiece Spring In A Small Town.

A hushed melodrama that many have compared to Strindberg, Ophuls, and Renoir – and that clearly influenced Wong Kar-Wai, whose In The Mood For Love could be called a variation on its themes – Spring In A Small Town has had a curious history.

Rarely seen for decades, Fei Mu’s film was deemed politically regressive after the Communist Revolution, with state censors “suspicious of the film’s refusal either to romanticize the lives of ordinary people, or to make two-dimensional fools of the property-owner classes.” In fairness, those censors were, thankfully, correct on both counts. If sensitive portrayals of yearning and loss set amid post-war ruins are legitimate grounds for hiding art from public view, then Spring In A Small Town should’ve indeed been refused distribution. Of course, a less totalitarian sensibility would hold those qualities in high esteem instead, and it’s now more often referred to as one of the greatest Chinese films of all time.

The focus on the film’s political undercurrents is a bit ironic, given how steadfastly Mu focuses on the quiet, quotidian, and interpersonal. All art is, in some sense, political, but Spring In A Small Town is first, foremost, and overwhelmingly a melodrama, far more Letter From An Unknown Woman than Man With A Movie Camera.

With only five characters and a handful of sets, the film is highly theatrical, relying on the evocation of mood (through repetition, framing, and design) to hint at internal dynamics. Its focus is a woman named Yuwen (Wei Wei), who introduces us to the time and place via voiceover. It’s from her vantage point we will mostly process the rest of the story.

Yuwen is married to Liyan (Shi Yu), the heir to the Dai estate who has watched it fall into disrepair after the Sino-Japanese War – the characters navigate a broken landscape they have no money left to fix. Their marriage, though characterized by pro forma kindness and respect, is similarly bruised, seemingly fixed in time. Liyan believes he suffers from tuberculosis, a source of stress for the couple; his younger sister Meimei tends to think his ailment more mental than physical. It’s unclear what Lao Huang, the last remaining servant, thinks – he appears and vanishes, in and out of the frame, like a kindly ghost from long ago.

Yuwen deals with the depressive monotony of an unchanging, fallen landscape and a more or less loveless marriage to an invalid through walks along the ruined city wall. In fact, this is where we first meet her, and the two – woman and wall – are joined in our minds. Her subjectivity and interiority are made manifest through the image; at the same time, the locale implies an escape from drudgery, a permeable barrier that’s both stone and what lies beyond.

Things change suddenly with the arrival of Zhang Zhichen, Liyan’s childhood friend, now a doctor and adorned in western dress, returned after a decade to the radically changed estate. Yuwen’s portentous narration implies early on what we come to discover – she too has a history with Zhichen. The two were young lovers but missed their chance, and now reconnect under impossible circumstances for all involved.

Generally speaking, little transpires outwardly – Spring In A Small Town is far more interested in longing than resolution, in glances than embraces. The narrative follows how each of these characters navigate an emotional chasm that none of them are eager to address out loud, but recognize to a person. As a result, the film takes on a sense that the things that matter are those that go unsaid, and the dialog features repetitions and polite placeholders desperately concealing the tumult beneath.

Meaning is conveyed instead through physical metaphor and framing. In a series of masterful choices, Mu fills us in on what characters cannot say. An early scene features the central four characters on a rowboat, taking the rare day out of the house: as the younger sister sings and the husband smiles, the camera moves languidly from Yuwen’s face, clenched, to Zhichen’s, pained, and back. It is as though we’re stealing the glance that the lovers cannot.

In others, Mu emphasizes divisions within the frame – doorways separate husband from wife, again evoking notions of passage and separation; light from a single window creates frames within the frame, literalizing the emotional distance between characters. These are quiet touches that become more and more resonant as the film continues.

In the end, Liyan attempts to abandon this life, at least in part out of love for the wife who he (with his illness) and fate (in its ambivalence) have made miserable. But Zhichen, the doctor and friend who would’ve conceivably benefited from that sacrifice, brings him back. Leaving town, Zhichen promises the younger sister he’ll return the following spring, perhaps even in time for her summer vacation. The husband climbs the hill to the ruined wall to join his wife, the first time we’ve seen them together at this locus of the film’s meaning, and they gaze into an unsure future as the camera fades.

It’s an evocative and powerfully ambiguous climax. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but it’s clear that things are not as they have been. The introduction of vitality and life, in the form of Zhichen and nearly forgotten love, has reanimated a static emotional landscape. It’s not clear there is happiness in his wake, but there’s hope. If not for something better, than for something different.

Is this what the censors feared? There’s something unstable and dangerous in the kind of desire Mu portrays, even if the portrayal itself is a remarkable portrait of repression. The “narcotizing effect” they decried only throws into relief this final moment – neither resignation nor resolution, it’s an image of potentiality, blocked by the ruined walls of the past and a cloudless sky which might, eventually, explode.

Part of an ongoing effort to watch a set of films from non-White, non-U.S., non-male, and/or non-straight filmmakers and depart a little from the Western canon. The intro and full list can be found here.

June 30, 2016 0 comments

Commentary Film Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Anti-Militarism and Let’s Go With Pancho Villa!

by rick June 23, 2016

written by rick

Towards the end of Fernando de Fuentes’ 1936 epic Let’s Go With Pancho Villa!, Miguel Ángel del Toro ‘Becerrillo’ (Ramón Vallarino) asks, “The Revolution will triumph. Why do we stay?”

It’s the central question in this stridently anti-authoritarian, anti-militarist, and (possibly) anti-Revolutionary drama, considered to be the first Mexican “super-production”. The third in a celebrated trilogy but also a disastrously received film that nearly derailed its director’s career, Let’s Go With Pancho Villa! almost definitely contributed to his posthumous reputation as, in A.O Scott’s words, “the Mexican John Ford.”

With its huge battles, bitter characterization, and emphasis on figurative landscapes, the Ford comparison is apt. For his part, de Fuentes had this to say instead: “Mexican cinema ought to be a faithful reflection of our severe and tragic way of being, not a poor imitation of Hollywood.”

In any case, the film is certainly severe and tragic. Becerrilo (“little calf,” a play on his surname bestowed upon him by none other than insurgent leader Pancho Villa) is one of six central characters, collectively dubbing themselves “The Lions of San Pablo,” who join the fight for Mexican independence, but find their fervor and loyalty deeply betrayed.

Long before Becerillo utters his fateful words, de Fuentes foreshadows what’s to come. The film opens with a scrolling prologue, half expository intro and half apology-in-advance, emphasizing that the events depicted are meant to honor bravery but also acknowledge the cruelty of war, drawing a parallel between the bloody Mexican countryside and the trenches of France. A montage follows (the first, but not the last, nod to contemporaneous Russian filmmaking) that introduces images of guns firing, a woman making tortillas, and logs being split. This triad – heroic violence, domesticity, and division – animates the rest of the movie.

Becerillo is the first of our protagonists to make an appearance. He’s a prisoner of the haughty local general, and the one splitting those logs. Blamed, rightly or wrongly, for selling off a gun to local rebels who’ve been busy shooting soldiers at the base, he escapes, and finds his way back to the town of San Pablo. It’s there that he, the honorable Don Tiburcio Maya (Antonio R. Frausto), Melitón Botello (Manuel Tamés), Martín Espinosa (Rafael F. Muñoz), and the brothers Rodrigo and Máximo Perea (Carlos López and Raúl de Anda) resolve to join with Pancho Villa’s forces and fight for their homeland.The narrative, drawn from well-known source material of the time and assuming audience familiarity with the revolutionary context, doesn’t waste time filling us in on details. Back stories are in short supply: we simply head off to war.

Francisco “Pancho” Villa himself (played by Domingo Soler, alternating between a heroic posture, an aloof presence, and deeply unhinged sociopathy) is introduced doling out corn to peasants. He welcomes the new recruits, and they beam with pride at his attention.

It’s not long, however, before their nighttime conversations turn to discussions of how they would like to die, how they wish they could live, and how they would like to be remembered. There is a longing for home, but the focus – whether it’s a true one, or an act for their comrades, is open to question – is on what constitutes “a good death.” A prolonged scene details each of their fatalistic desires; each will be fulfilled in turn, with maximum irony.

De Fuentes films several gripping battle sequences, each staged on epic landscapes or in the shadows of monumental structures. He favors low shots of faces set against empty skies, slightly askew angles, and a general sense of foreboding and menace, of small bodies eclipsed by the looming structures that tower above them. As our heroes die one after another, he frames their deaths in tableau – draped over stationary weaponry, or surrounded by bewildered comrades. One shot, of bodies strewn across a trench stretching into the distance, recalls Griffith’s image, introduced with the title card “War’s Peace” in Birth of a Nation. It’s grisly business out there, and the chasm between machismo rhetoric and facts on the ground is emphasized.

By the end of the film, only Tiburcio remains, as his friends and townsmen predicted. Becerillo, who wondered why they stayed on, has contracted smallpox, and Tiburcio is ordered to burn him alive lest others get infected. (Why can’t you shoot him first? This question is never even posed.) The “Little Calf,” who wanted a military funeral, is consumed by flames while a solitary trumpet plays, and Tiburcio salutes, weeping.

In return for this unfailing loyalty, Tiburcio is scorned by Villa and his men, all afraid he may now himself be a carrier. The final shot tracks Tiburcio’s solitary walk, along train tracks, back into the night, as the heroic revolution departs in the other direction.

It’s not hard to see why audiences might’ve recoiled from such an enormously negative vision of the father of Mexican independence. But honestly, the film laid the groundwork long before. There is what amounts to a game of Russian roulette in a cantina presided over by the capricious general – a hero’s life is sacrificed for no other reason than it is bad luck for 13 men to drink at a table. And watch how Soler doles out badges to the surviving members of the Lions of San Pablo: noticing one is missing and discovering he died, Soler’s Pancho Villa absent-mindedly tosses and catches the medal while hearing the story. “A shame,” he notes, as if discovering dinner would be slightly late.

From its title’s exclamation point on down, Let’s Go With Pancho Villa! is seething with anger and irony, which only throws into relief de Fuentes’ mastery of heroic tropes. It’s unfortunate that no better transfer of the film exists to date – some enterprising restoration folks should really get on that. It would be far better served by a cleaner print than I was able to find.

But the version we have demonstrates in no uncertain terms what was intended. Even the prologue knows already what audiences will discover – this is an epic concerned far more with the small-scale tragedies of individual lives and deaths than anything approaching the grandeur of national revolution. It reserves as much affection and time for peasant songs and tortilla-making as it does for machine gun battles. And huge, visceral, carefully orchestrated military set-pieces are deployed in the service of empathy for minor characters … the ones who fight and die in the wars they are sold, by men who mostly hide behind them.

Is that fair to Pancho Villa? This is a film that does not care. Its allegiance is firmly with the abandoned soldier, walking alone into the night. It’s propaganda of the most humane sort.

June 23, 2016 0 comments

Commentary Film Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Fireworks: Look Back On Kenneth Anger

by rick May 27, 2016

written by rick

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039383/” name=”Fireworks” description=”A surrealist dream of a dream involving homoerotic fantasy, sailors, and masochism.” director=”Kenneth Anger” producer=”Kenneth Anger” actor_1=”Kenneth Anger” ]Like his hero Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger is a mercurial and scandalous figure in 20^th century art. An Aleister Crowley-influenced occultist, associate of counter-culture figures ranging from Mick Jagger to Charles Manson acolyte and convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil, and author of the notorious Hollywood Babylon, a profoundly dubious book of gossip which The New York Times famously proclaimed to be “without one single redeeming merit,” Anger’s notoriety often threatens to overshadow his artistic output as an avant-garde filmmaker. But Fireworks – his first film, made before he turned 20, and a seminal (pun intended) work of experimental gay cinema – stands as testimony to a startlingly unique vision.

As legend has it, Anger (born Kenneth Anglemyer) filmed Fireworks in his parents’ Hollywood home while they were away for the weekend. Like Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, both earlier entries in this series, Anger’s short takes the form of a “trance-film,” a series of images that don’t merely blur the division between the fictive and the real but destabilize the notions themselves. (Anger himself called Fireworks “a dream of a dream.”)

Should we summarize the “plot” of a dream?

Fireworks opens on a skewed vision of the Pieta, with a sailor clutching a prone man in his arms, before seguing onto a sleeping figure (Anger himself), seeming to awaken, seemingly with an erection. He removes the bedsheet to reveal what seems to be a carved African idol of some sort where the phallus would seem to be. He gets dressed, languorously, the camera lingering on his torso and, briefly, his crotch.

A door on the other side of the room reads “GENTS”, with a wire sculpture dangling in front of it that unmistakably recalls Cocteau, and he enters. On the other side, he encounters a sailor, bare-chested and flexing. We cut back to the original room, where the sailor lights our protagonist’s cigarette with a flaming pile of sticks. (The first, but not the last, bit of linguistic camp Anger has up his sleeve.) Still smoking, Anger re-enters the GENTS room, where he is brutally – and, by all evidence, willingly – assaulted by what has now become a group of sailors, all fists and chains and metal rods.

The camera flashes over his face again and again as fingers plunge into his nostrils, releasing a torrent of blood and fluid. A bottle of milk is smashed over him, and glass from the bottle is used to eviscerate his chest, revealing a mechanical heart. The milk itself than pours over his body, viscous and white, washing away the blood. He is again physically intact after the violations.

He once again enters the “GENTS” room, which now leads, as one would’ve initially expected, to a row of urinals, before which we briefly glimpse our protagonist, prone, now wearing the sailor’s cap.

We jump-cut back to the bedroom, where the original bare-chested sailor approaches. The sailor opens his pants to reveal an explosion of the titular fireworks emanating from his crotch, and we close on a jumpy image of the two in bed, with physical scratches to the film creating a halo of light around the dream-sailor’s head and eyes, and what seems to be a Christmas tree on fire.

Much has been written about “what it all means” – from analysis as the pre-Stonewall fantasies of queer youth to deep Lacanian readings about phallic displacement and “masochism as an act of subversion” – and I certainly won’t pretend to know. The overriding sense is one of loose connection – of desire, violence, submission, transgression, explosion as processed metaphorically and viscerally in turn. As in Blood of a Poet, the body is centralized and made profoundly unstable and vulnerable, and as in Meshes of the Afternoon, there is never certain, solid ground on which to stand, as allusions multiply and contradict.

Iconic figures of masculinity take on different, fraught resonances (and may come replete with low jokes: seaman, semen). Even milk, that “wholesome” staple of the All-American diet, is deployed with tongue firmly in cheek. As a teenager, Anger exploded in Fireworks as a fully-formed provocateur, even if it’s never quite clear what he’s “saying.” If we’re to take him at his word, it’s this: “This flick is all I have to say about being 17, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July.”

That’s probably true, as far as it goes. But the fact that it’s up for debate for 70 years later, and still manages to scandalize probably means he did his job.

May 27, 2016 0 comments

Commentary Film Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Cinema and dream-logic in Meshes of the Afternoon

by rick May 10, 2016

written by rick

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036154/” name=”Meshes of the Afternoon” description=”Maya Deren’s experimental masterpiece opened up the fields of anti-narrative and dream.” director=”Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid” producer=”Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid” actor_1=”Maya Deren” ]

Maya Deren’s hugely influential 1943 short Meshes of the Afternoon played a key role in kicking off the New American Cinema Group, and has lost none of its power to entrance in the 70-plus years since. Whether taken as feminist allegory, surrealist intervention, cinematic mindfuck, puzzle movie, or Lynchian horror story, it’s impossible to look away. By literalizing the unconscious on film, Deren opened up new possibilities for representation and anti-narrative.

Deren is a fascinating figure in mid-century art, theory, and critique – and one who arguably has never received her due, despite a cinematic lineage that includes such luminaries as Stan Brakhage and Jack Smith. In a short piece, dated 1960 and titled “Some Metaphors For The Creative Process”, she wrote, “The problem of the artist, then, is to rob the vaults only of those riches that are relevant to his need.” In Meshes of the Afternoon, we find her and husband-collaborator Alexander Hammid at the peak of their banditry of the subconscious.

Meshes of the Afternoon seems to tell a story – or perhaps our viewership simply imposes one on the sequence of images, because we expect one to be there. Silent and circular, Deren is much more interested in resonances and magical, Symbolist association than narrative in any traditional filmic sense.

Our protagonist (played by Deren) falls asleep on a couch, shortly after glimpsing a figure on the street. We enter something of a dream-like state. Specific images occur and reoccur – a key, a knife, a piece of bread. A record player spins, though no sound is emitted. A flower becomes a motif. Certain figures play prominent roles, notably a Grim Reaper-like character with a mirror for a face, reflecting nothing.

Deren’s unnamed woman tries desperately to race after the cloaked Death-Mirror-Person, but finds herself in slow-motion, always lagging behind as it turns a cobblestone corner. Suddenly, we cut back to the sleeping Deren, who observes these goings-on from her window. The scenes are repeated from the point-of-view of her double, who seems encased behind the glass of her bedroom window, trapped. Later, there is a tripling, and three Deren’s sit at the kitchen table – surrounding … a key, a knife, a loaf of bread.

Male figures emerge, and it is an open question whether they represent lovers or murderers. When one moves in close to her, we actively wonder if it’s for a kiss or a kill. Deren remains impassive throughout, but her gaze occasionally wanders back to the camera, a look that seems to represent a challenge to the audience. She doesn’t exactly break the fourth wall, but the emphasis on artifice is clear. It’s like the moment in a dream when you realize you are asleep, but powerless to affect any changes in the story your brain, or heart, or something else has in mind.

It’s an aggressively elusive 14 minutes. Like the Surrealists, an association Deren herself rejected but which seems hard to avoid while viewing the film today, Meshes of the Afternoon comes across as fixated on the unknowable, resonant but always out of reach. The initial experience that begins the film is fractured and mediated through all kinds of anxieties and dim connections as our protagonist dozes. She might die, or she might just dream of dying, or dream of a dream. The entire film is an astute exploration of things that can’t be said or explained, but only shown. Like many an experimental filmmaker to follow, Deren swears by the integrity of the image itself … and then seeks to undermine it. There is no ground to stand on in this realm. As in Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy, we float through instead, prisoners to the camera lens.

You could go on forever about the meanings buried in this particular text. It invites and eludes analysis. Watching it for the first time recently, I was enraptured by the movements, repetitions, and score, which punctuates scenes rhythmically. Does Deren’s character’s encasement in glass seek to comment on patriarchy? Or on the various gazes that constitute viewership (and, so, patriarchy)? Is theorist Wendy Haslem right that, “As European émigrés, Deren and Hammid invest their film with an acute sense of restlessness and alienation … reflect[ing] this uncanny estrangement in the doubling, tripling and quadrupling of its central character … and in its cyclic narrative, a structure that seems condemned to repetition”? Are we dealing with Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return? Why is the hooded Death figure constructed as a kind of mirror? What would the key unlock?

But, like waking from a dream, it all blurs together into a mood, a sense of the uncanny, and no answers are provided. Unlike a dream, Meshes of the Afternoon is 14 minutes you can play back if you so choose, and wonder at it all over again.

Next up: Kôzaburô Yoshimura’s The Ball At The Anjo House (1947)

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036154/” name=”Meshes of the Afternoon” description=”A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.” director=” Maya Deren” ]

May 10, 2016 1 comment

Commentary Film Great Movies: The Counter Programming

Migration, sin, and redemption in The Blood of Jesus

by rick May 3, 2016

written by rick

Famously included as part of the “Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection” – a trove of early race films uncovered in a warehouse in that town, 80 miles outside Dallas, in the 80s – Spencer Williams’ The Blood of Jesus (1941) has had a strange journey to prominence in discussions of the period in which it was filmed.

The film itself was long considered “lost” (though the Library of Congress, at least, had a copy a decade before Tyler). Originally funded, like many race films, by white entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on the segregated Black market denied entrance to mainstream theaters, it was widely viewed as a bit of curiosity, despite being enormously successful in its day.

Williams – a long-time bit player in the silents (including as a tornado-swept passerby in Buster Keaton’s iconic Steamboat Bill, Jr.) and later most famous for playing Andy “Hogg” Brown in the still-controversial “Amos n’ Andy” radio show – is an interesting figure. A prominent director, he tended (then as now) to be overshadowed by his more prolific, celebrated, and independent compatriot Oscar Micheaux. The minstrely-inflected nature of “Amos n’ Andy” didn’t help his legacy, which is still being recuperated from some amount of general embarrassment.

The Blood of Jesus is a full-on passion play, exhibiting many of the trappings one would expect of the kind of theatrical performances that occurred (and still do) throughout many churches around Easter. Its focus is on the rural Southern Black church, its intended audience, and it features numerous Gospel and Blues numbers (usually contrasted against each other in interesting ways).

The film tells the story of Martha Ann Jackson (Cathryn Caviness), a devout woman accidentally shot by her non-religious husband Razz’s falling rifle. (Williams himself plays the wayward husband finding faith through killing his blameless wife.)

As she lays on the bed dying, we follow her into a kind of spiritual limbo. She meets a guardian angel (Rogenia Goldthwaite) and a slick agent of the devil known as Judas Green (Frank H. McClennan), both of whom try to sway her to their sides. Green flatters her with new clothes and tempts her with the worldly ways of nightclubs and that horrible jazz music, but, after briefly becoming embroiled with a pimp in a roadhouse who wants her services (which seem more about robbing patrons than servicing them), she eventually flees to the sanctity of Christ.

Prone before the t-shaped sign at a crossroad, offering Hell one way and Zion the other, she sees instead the Son of God on the Cross. She’s smeared (rather messily on the face) with his blood, and given another chance at life on earth. In the meantime, her husband has found faith and been redeemed through his grief at her bedside. The miracle seals the deal.

There is a lot to unpack here. The film opens on a community Baptism, including that of Martha. Williams gets some laughs out of one would-be Church member who flees the water thinking there’s a snake – “Last year, it was an alligator,” someone mutters. Not everyone is so hyped for the next world. The broad[schema type=”movie” url=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033406/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1″ name=”The Blood of Jesus” description=”Famously included as part of the “Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection” – a trove of early race films uncovered in a warehouse in that town, 80 miles outside Dallas, in the 80s – Spencer Williams’ The Blood of Jesus (1941) has had a strange journey to prominence in discussions of the period in which it was filmed.” director=”Spencer Williams” producer=”Alfred N. Sack” actor_1=”Spencer Williams” ] comedy might play now as embarrassing, but I’m willing to bet audiences at the time laughed at the cartoonish speed with which he runs out of there.

We meet Razz back at the couple’s home, having just killed a boar – hunting on the Sabbath being the first indication that he’s shirking his duty to the Lord. As it turns out, he wasn’t “hunting” so much as “shooting one of his neighbor’s boars and stealing the body,” so his sin is compounded. The violation of the Sabbath would be bad enough; this is a violation of community norms, too. And then he lies about it to his wife.

After the gun falls to the floor, and Martha with it, we are treated to a depiction of Heavenly ascension that borders on the avant-garde. One might wonder how Williams was able to get the gauzy images and large cast heading skyward on a meager $5,000 budget. It turns out he borrowed it outright – the footage is from a 1911 Italian film, L’Inferno, simply interpolated into the film itself. It’s one of several direct nods Williams makes to earlier productions, as well as evidence of some rather scrappy, if copyright-shrugging, techniques.

At one point in a wide-ranging, fascinating lecture and Q&A about race films, preservation, and Williams, scholar Jacqueline Stewart remarks that his natural filmic descendant today is Tyler Perry. She contrasts this lineage with that of Oscar Micheaux, whose set of cinematic impulses might be found most prominently in the work of someone like Spike Lee.

Stewart quickly complicates the comparisons and argues against any sort of straight line of influence – Lee has claimed never to have seen any race films until after leaving film school, for one thing. But watching The Blood of Jesus, it’s clear what she means more generally. If Micheaux’s focus on intra-racial conflict, interrogation of hierarchies, and appeal to uplift calls to mind Spike’s work, there’s more than a touch of Perry in the morality play that is The Blood of Jesus. (Of course, Spike also went to Kickstarter for his Ganja & Hess reboot, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, which draws heavily on similar themes, but that’s a story for another day.)

For one thing, as Stewart notes in the video above, The Blood of Jesus is a redemptive tale – but who is redeemed? Sister Martha is the one who goes through the trials and tribulations and temptations, but it is her husband who finds God – she was already on the side of the righteous. Numerous shots link her suffering with the Savior’s, but the narrative implicitly places her as a figure watched and observed by the central male figure.

As in many such tales, the Devil (played to the cheap seats by a a near-comically theatrical James B. Jones) employs a surrogate to prey on her vanity in order to win her over to sin; vanity, of course, being the classic feminine foil. Where Micheaux – in Body and Soul, for instance – controversially attacked the hypocrisies of the Black Church, Williams’ narrative is solidly within the socio-theological framework, one that audiences would surely recognize. As Stewart notes, the question of “authenticity” haunts race films in general, but it’s surely part of the appeal of Williams. Paired with musical standards sung by an actual local choir, cast with local amateurs in the leads and every other part, and reiterating a well-known story, The Blood of Jesus is populist entertainment and intended more for spiritual than social uplift.

The use of music bears further mention. The choir songs and deathbed dirges signal one such use, but there’s also the nightclub jazz on the other, the soundtrack to the “city” that exists as temptation for Martha, steering her away from the Lord.

Stewart and others astutely note that this adds an additional subtext to the film – a juxtaposition of city and country that speaks to anxieties about the Great Migration. Here, there is considerable overlap with Micheaux: just as in God’s Step Children, our protagonist takes in a show, listens to some city blues numbers, sees an acrobatic dancer, and so forth, all definitive aspects of city life in the film’s vernacular. The moralizing is a bit less strong in Micheaux’s deeply weird film – in fact, the two viewers there are a semi-incestuous couple, an upright brother and his half-sister right out of the convent, which is scandalous – but the semiotics are the same. Jazz represents the lure away from grounded rural communities to an unstable, potentially wicked city life.

Williams takes this even further. Not only are the music and clothes of urbanity a lure away from the traditional homes in the community and Church, they are outright diabolical. In a touch that must’ve seemed a bit excessive even in 1941, Williams stages the climax before the cross with a jazz band playing on the back of a truck driven by the devil, who abruptly drives off to Hell after Christ banishes him from the sacred space on which Sister Martha has fallen, face all covered with the Blood of the Lamb.

In its apparent technical amateurism, it’s easy to ridicule The Blood of Jesus as naive or “primitive” – or to exalt it for just that reason, as J. Hoberman of The New York Times would do when he called it “a masterpiece of folk cinema” (though his writing about it now seems more nuanced).

The words “primitive” and “naive” always come off distasteful, a haughty, near-colonialist positioning of viewer over text. In this context, in which I am a white viewer watching a film by and for Black audiences from 75 years ago, this is even more dodgy.

In any case, watching The Blood of Jesus directly after Micheaux’s God’s Step Children, I’m not sure “amateur” is in any way how I would describe Williams’ film – the line-readings are better, the performers are clearly more comfortable, and he’s made the most of his miniscule funding. There is, as it were, a good faith attempt to depict relations between believers and non-believers, and no real condescension or ironic approach to the passion play. Though grounded in the rural, Southern Black Church of the early 20th century, it’s not an unfamiliar narrative to anyone who came of age attending Mass at Easter, but it’s also imbued with the politics and debates of its time and place. The material aspects of its production only deepen the resonance it must’ve had for its audience in 1941.

Again, like all the race movies glimpsed in this series so far, The Blood of Jesus is testimony to the ways in which cinema was being deployed to address anxieties and issues of interest to communities shut out, violently, from the theaters and the mainstream. I struggle to imagine what it must’ve felt like to see anything resembling your experience on screen for the first time.

Viewing these films, I find myself drifting further and further away from notions of “the text itself,” the idea that you must view a film in its four corners and nowhere else. The more you look at old films, the more arbitrary this idea becomes. The question isn’t whether this is a good or bad film, but rather what it means that it existed in the first place, how it came to be preserved, and how it should be viewed today.

Refusal of “extra-textuals” is a mark of bourgeois, and incredibly dull, privilege, and does little to contextualize the cinematic production we encounter. Spencer Williams and Oscar Micheaux continue to have things to say today, and not all of those things are in the films — though the films themselves remain crucial to watch.

Next up: Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren, 1943

May 3, 2016 0 comments

Commentary Film Great Movies: The Counter Programming

The incestuous racial politics of Oscar Micheaux and the ambiguous text in God’s Step Children

by rick April 27, 2016

written by rick

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028942/” name=”God’s Step Children” description=”A young light-skinned Negress struggles to find her place in both the black and the white worlds.” director=”Oscar Micheaux” producer=”Oscar Micheaux” actor_1=”Alice B. Russell” ]Part of an ongoing effort to watch a set of films from non-White, non-U.S., non-male, and/or non-straight filmmakers and depart a little from the Western canon. The intro and full list can be found here.

Oscar Micheaux – the wildly prolific and successful early 20^th century director of “race films” and generally considered to be the first Black filmmaker – courted controversy throughout his career. His depictions of Black middle-class life and values, and his often negative portrayals of some of his characters who did not embody what he saw as the best moral and social hopes for his people (rooted, in part, in an admiration for Booker T. Washington and a focus on social uplift), did not always sit well with other leaders at the time. Or since.

This was never more true than in God’s Step Children (1938), a film that drew actual pickets from the NAACP and others. Watching it today, it’s not hard to see why. Even if the focus on “passing” and the still-shocking statement from its protagonist that “the Negro does not like to think” somehow didn’t draw outrage, the constant theme of incest presumably would have.

We began this series with looks at two other Micheaux films: Within Our Gates and Body and Soul. Both contained similar elements that characterize Micheaux: a pedagogical focus rooted in cultural uplift, a celebration of bourgeois virtue, and, of course, the near-total absence of white characters. These were films by, for, and starring members of the American Black community, imbued with Micheaux’s rather heavy-handed politics.

They were also both silents, unlike God’s Step Children – to the detriment of the latter. The stilted phrasing of the actors skirts self-parody, and, on the whole, the film has a thrown-off kind of feeling. Indeed, Micheaux is said to have favored first-takes and refused re-writes. Still, if the dialog is abysmal and the delivery worse, God’s Step Children remains a fascinating narrative grappling, however clumsily, with big themes, and, as in the earlier two films, plays around with its narrative in interesting ways.

Loosely drawing on themes from 1934’s Imitation of Life (famously, and gorgeously, remade by Douglas Sirk 25 years later), God’s Step Children tells the story of Naomi, a light-skinned girl dropped off as an infant with Mrs. Saunders, a devout neighbor who raises her as her own. The reason for Naomi’s abandonment isn’t spelled out, but it’s safe to infer that her skin tone has something to do with it.

We flash forward to a school-aged Naomi, now a young terror and miscreant. When she’s dropped off at the local school for Black children, she hightails it instead to the one for local whites – even in elementary school, her rejection of her race, and her desire to pass, is clear. Mrs. Saunders might be blind to this, but her other child Jimmy is not, who even declares Naomi should have the notion beaten out of her. As Naomi morphs into a full-fledged antagonist and Jimmy becomes the film’s moral center, it’s not hard to tell where Micheaux’s allegiances lie.

When Naomi is caught maliciously tripping her classmates on the playground and asked to atone for her misdeeds, she literally spits in the teacher’s face, declaring, “I hate you and I hate this school.” Punishments ensue from teacher and foster mother alike, leading Naomi to create rumors intended to get her teacher fired. She’s portrayed as a pretty loathsome little girl – any sympathy for the existentially and racially adrift orphan is more or less absent. Deciding they have no other option, the adults ship her off to a convent school instead, if she’s ever going to make something of herself and tame her nastiness.

The narrative picks up many years later. Adult Jimmy is a handsome, debonair figure, dressed in fashionable suits and sporting a Duke Ellington mustache. He’s engaged to the teacher’s daughter Eva (played, curiously, by Ethel Moses, the same actress who played the teacher – it makes for a confusing moment in the film). Eva is a model of bourgeois femininity and grace, which we know because she plays the piano.

Jimmy is a self-made man, having worked as a Pullman porter, saved scrupulously, and is now set to buy his dream farm. By all available evidence, this represents Micheaux’s, or the film’s, vision of respectability and honest success. When another Black man tries to tempt Jimmy with get-rich quick schemes running rackets, he’s haughtily rejected, leading to Jimmy’s famous denunciation of the “Negro [who] does not like to think,” a blistering speech that still manages to make one queasy. It’s an irony that seems lost on Micheaux’s film: we are meant to despise Naomi and admire Jimmy, though both adamantly reject their fellow Blacks in exceedingly broad terms, though in differing ways.

At this point, Naomi returns from the convent, a beautiful young woman in fashionable dress. And cue the mind-bogglingly overt incest themes. As Jimmy and Naomi cautiously check each other out after all these years, their mother makes the following pronouncement:

“Well. I have never seen such a meeting between brother and sister. You act like two long-lost lovers. Come now, boy, take her in her arms and kiss her. Can’t you see what she needs?”

Yes, yes, I suppose we can, Mrs. Saunders.

The two take off for the city for some post-convent fun. They take in a show, featuring a quite lascivious dance, which Naomi at first stares at bewildered but then begins to enjoy, perhaps a bit too much, gazing sidelong at Jimmy with desire. It is true that they are not related by blood, but that does nothing to drain this part of the narrative of shock.

Naomi makes plain her love for Jimmy, suggesting how happy they could be if he broke it off with Eva and married her instead, but this is not something Jimmy is prepared to do. (Does he want to? The text is ambiguous.) Fidelity – to say nothing of anti-incestuous uprightness – is emphasized as a middle-class virtue to which one aspires. Instead, Jimmy and the mom set her up with a neighboring farmer named Clyde, portrayed as Black country bumpkin, well-meaning and well-liked, if not sophisticated and easily duped. The film deals with Clyde roughly. Naomi agrees to marry him despite her vocal distaste, not just for his manners but his appearance: “I could never love a man who looks … like that!” she declares. Yikes, Naomi.

A year later, there’s a baby in tow, but he’s introduced only to be foisted off by Naomi on (once again) Mrs. Saunders. The narrative has come full-circle – the light-skinned infant from the start, rejected for that reason, has been replaced by a dark-skinned infant at the end, rejected just the same. Mrs. Saunders accepts out of duty in both cases, because that’s what one does. Naomi then reprises the famous speech from Imitation of Life, in which she brazenly declares her total rejection of her race and leaves for the city to pass as white.

This, as in all “passing films”, does not end well. This is not a genre I had quite realized was so prominent, though — in its combination of fraught anxieties, palpable tragedy, and inherent narrative tension — it’s not hard to understand its appeal. Micheaux’s film doesn’t punish Naomi with violence from without, a common trope, but rather self-harm. Returning to the farm to discover a blissful vision of middle-class life in which she no longer has a part, having relinquished her claim to participation both in the family and the community, she takes her own life. Her young son glimpses her at the window peering in, but is told there was no one there. Did Mrs. Saunders not see her prodigal daughter, or is this simply her final rejection of the foolish young woman who refused to know herself? The text is, again, ambiguous.

I have addressed little of the actual cinematic qualities of the film. This is for two reasons. First, if they are to be taken at face value, there is little to discuss. God’s Step Children is not a visually distinguished film, and Micheaux, never particularly heralded for his eye, seems totally indifferent to images here. Secondly, the film itself was cut and re-cut in response to protests, and entire scenes are said to be missing. This is almost a paradigm of the free-floating text, a copy for which no original exists. We have only the text to examine. But what a bizarre, rich text.

This is a film steeped not just in intra-racial anxiety but, by necessity, that of class. God’s Step Children posits several possibilities: the boot-strapped and heroic Jimmy, the no-good racketeers operating on the fringes and doing their own people discredit, the bourgeois schoolteacher, Clyde the old-style but still virtuous farmer, Mrs. Saunders, devout and bourgeois. Naomi functions mostly as a threat to her family’s class ascendancy – the implication being that a good faith embrace of Blackness and the wider community will lead to social uplift, when paired with Christian virtue and a rejection of sin. It is Black pride as civic virtue. Her rejection of her people leads to her exclusion from the self-made racial communities, and ultimately to her downfall and death.

So, what about that incest, though? Comparing the film to Michaux’s Veiled Aristocrats (1932), which dealt with similar themes, J. Ronald Green writes:

“The meaning of this repeated incest configuration is unclear but suggestive. The meaning is surely inflected by the main difference between these two instances: in Veiled Aristocrats the woman is healthier in two ways – she is afraid of the incestuous moment and she rejects leaving her race; in God’s Step Children, the woman is unhealthy in those respects – she vamps her brother semi-incestuously … and she obsessively hates her race and passes for white.”

A reasonable reading, though it doesn’t exactly explain why it should be incest rather than something else that serves this narrative function. One possibility, already discussed, is that it lays bare Micheaux’s convictions about the relation between virtue and social uplift – it’s just a particularly shocking model to deploy, and fits in well with the melodramatic/tragic impulses of the time (and themes borrowed from the Victorian literature he loved so much).

One final possibility: it is yet another double in a film full of them. We already have two infants, at the beginning and the end; two farmers, embodying separate modes of engagement; two couples, in Jimmy/Naomi and Jimmy/Eva; two models of masculine behavior, in Jimmy and the racketeers; we even have an extra-textual doppelganger in Ethel Moses, who plays both a mother and her own daughter. Why not the supreme doubling as a metaphor for a community at odds with itself, under the unspoken social pressures and racist terror of the age?

Does Micheaux intend any of this? I would submit it doesn’t matter. When you have only a text, many readings become possible. God’s Step Children is a scandalous one, but also a striking sociological examination of the cultural tensions that animated 1930s film, and art more generally, on the margins.

Next up: The Blood of Jesus, Spencer Williams, 1941

April 27, 2016 0 comments

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