Coeur Fidèle (1923)

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Coeur Fidèle (1923) – J. Epstein

It’s like watching the language of cinema being invented sometimes – except that some of the lyrical moves of these early silent films seem to have been lost to the ages in this era of CGI action films.  And “The Faithful Heart” is as far from an action movie as you can probably get, although perhaps the bare bones melodrama plot has made it into a fair few action movies (boy falls in love with girl who is taken away by different bad boy until she is rescued/released by the original boy).  Here instead, we have a gauzy romantic look at yearning, full of giant close-up heads, sometimes superimposed onto images of the vast ocean (as the film takes place at the docks).  Equally impressive is a sequence at the funfair featuring dizzying rhythmic cutting that bespeaks an impressionistic vision of the heroine’s alarm.  All told, director Jean Epstein herein demonstrates a mastery of the medium that is beautiful to look at, even as the plot feels like simply a shell to hold his ideas.  But oh what ideas!

  

Inside Out (2015)

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Inside Out (2015) – P. Docter

I’m a psychologist and I do have to deliver an hour lecture on emotion every year, so I came to this film, knowing that Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner (high profile emotion researchers) were consultants on it, as a kind of homework assignment. So, yes, I was here out of a sense of duty rather than because I thought the film would be good.  I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of animation for kids (apart from Miyazaki films).  However, I found Inside Out to be a highly enjoyable, even emotional, experience.  Knowing the science behind emotion may have helped, although it is probably lightly fictionalized (or subject to poetic license) in the film.  Basically, we follow Riley, an 11-year-old girl, who is literally controlled by her emotions from a command tower inside her brain.  The basic emotions are all here:  joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust (no room for surprise, I guess).  The film sketches out their functional role by showing how Riley’s emotions guide her behaviour and also dictate others’ reactions to her.  For example, sadness helps to elicit sympathy and help from others.  The events that provide the opportunity to display and detail Riley’s emotions revolve around her family’s move from Minnesota to San Francisco; any kid that has moved knows the mixed emotions that this would entail.  Things feel pretty honest and also moving.  Pixar’s animation doesn’t let things down.  Thumbs up from me, but I wouldn’t show it to my six year old – yet.
 

  

Une Femme Est Une Femme (1961)

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Une Femme Est Une Femme (1961) – J.-L. Godard

This early Godard feature is all about Anna Karina – she is in virtually every scene and the script blurs her real life (born in Denmark, travelled to France) and her character (a stripper who wants to get pregnant, but her boyfriend is not keen).  Actually, it is hard to know whether the plot actually does reflect issues in the Karina/Godard relationship or not but he suggested that elements were taken from the Ernst Lubitsch comedy “Design for Living” which sees Gary Cooper and Frederic March in a menage-a-trois with Miriam Cooper.  Here, Jean-Claude Brialy is the boyfriend and Jean-Paul Belmondo is his friend who is solicited to impregnate Karina – in jest or not, we don’t know – and the Belmondo character is actually named Lubitsch.  So, the whole thing is rather playful and this extends to Godard’s treatment of the soundtrack, which threatens to see the characters leap into song and dance but then stops short.  Indeed, the music obtrusively blurts out at the wrong moments consistently throughout the film, making the film seem self-consciously organized according to some secret directorial intentions to which the audience is not privy.  This is certainly in line with my views of Godard, particularly as his career progresses after his early hits – he is inscrutably intellectual, working out his own concerns according to a theoretical logic all his own.  Critical and cultural theorists have found this a rich vein to mine.  However, for the casual viewer, there is enough to enjoy in the vibrant colours (in widescreen with cinematography by Coutard) and stylistic experimentation (breaking the fourth wall, etc.) even if the plot is ridiculous and the whole thing tends toward the abstract (but again not as abstract as Godard would later become).

  

Judex (1916-1917)

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Judex (1916-1917) – L. Feuillade

Louis Feuillade mastered the serial format in the heyday of the silent era (most notably with Fantomas and Les Vampires) and this is his third major work (that is still available to be seen).  The story begins with Favraux the unscrupulous banker (a villain for all time, it seems) receiving threatening notes from an unknown character, Judex, who plans to avenge Favraux’s past misdeeds if he doesn’t donate a portion of his millions to charity.  Of course, he doesn’t and the banker is subsequently struck down dead! His daughter, in penance for her father’s evil ways, does donate the money.  But then it turns out that Favraux is not really dead – only kidnaped and imprisoned in a secret underground cell by Judex.  A couple of bad characters (including femme fatale Musidora) discover this and plot to recapture Favraux and force him to share his wealth (once reclaimed) with them.  And on and on it goes for 5 ½ hours across 12 or 13 episodes.  Although each episode does not end with a fabled cliffhanger, the story contains a number of twists and is generally full of adventure.  Georges Franju remade it (at a more modest length) in 1963 and tightened things up and added a bit of a surreal flourish.  However, the original stands well on its own, even if it is less daring than Les Vampires.

  

The Round-Up (1965)

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The Round-Up (1965) – M. Jancsó

I was afraid to watch this film about a government’s detention of political rebels in a distant Hungarian outpost for fear of seeing images of torture and degradation.  Unfortunately, however, the film has lost its ability to shock in the era of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Manus, Christmas Island, Villawood, etc.  The time is the 1860’s and the captors make good use of psychological techniques to divide and conquer the prisoners.  For example, one poor soul is told that he will escape execution if he can find another rebel who had committed more crimes against the government than he.  Things spiral downward as he acts in increasing desperation.    Jancsó moves people and horses around in geometric patterns out on the bleak Hungarian plains with only a sort of corral with cells and a white-walled interrogation building to break the monotony.  His trademark longshots are also in evidence.  Having seen The Red and the White (1967) and Red Psalm (1971), also about conflicts and revolts in panoramic landscapes, before this one seems also to have weakened the impact of The Round-Up.  Otherwise, as it likely did in the 1960s with its direct allusion to the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the film would hit one as a bold declaration of man’s inhumanity to man (and woman), something the world already knew too much about.

  

Naked Youth/Cruel Story of Youth (1960)

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Naked Youth/Cruel Story of Youth (1960) – N. Oshima

Nagisa Oshima’s second film is a key entry in the Japanese new wave of the 1960’s but is still quite conventional by his later standards.  Miyuki Kuwano plays a motherless high school girl (“Mako”) who comes under the influence of bad boy “Kiyoshi” (played by Yusuke Kawazu) who seems to care little about anything or anyone.  He uses violence to get his way (including with Mako) and sells his body to an older woman for money and favours.  She is hopelessly and helplessly naïve but sees value in rebelling against her father, older sister, and school.  Together, they develop a scam to rob older guys who pick her up on the street but this doesn’t always turn out well.  Most of the time, they are alienated and confused, not caring about the consequences of their actions.  Oshima is purposefully sensational and melodramatic here, commenting explicitly on post-war Japan’s social problems.  But he also uses the widescreen format to create dazzling colour arrangements, bordering on the experimental and he wilfully defies viewer expectations (as in a long scene where Kiyoshi simply eats an apple in giant close-up).  Oshima would take this approach further in the rest of his career but here he sows the seeds of his later rebellion.