A Matter Of Life and Death & Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946, 1947)

Britain’s masters of above board perversity produce two dissimilar yet singularly representative works. In the former, David Niven’s very David Niveny pilot fights to remain on Technicolor earth than the black and white afterlife when he survives a bomber crash. In the latter, a bunch of nuns are sent into an erotic/nostalgic reverie in their new exotic environment and by the sight of David Farrar’s shorts. Both films seemed filled with formal contradictions to accompany their narrative ones, the depiction of Life and Death’s aforementioned afterlife, Narcissus’s cold hothouse, whereas most stories of eroticism are enacted in claustrophobic interiors, this one’s is positively agoraphobic, despite being shot entirely on studio sets. Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth becoming more beautiful the more nutso she gets (although that could just be me). What sticks in the minds eye the strongest in the films are the moments of sheer beauty, a beauty borne out of neuroses (which is perhaps what links Scorsese so closely, explicitly and implicitly, to their pictures). Images as broad as the vastness of the Himalayas or as intimate as small town projected through a camera obscura, or as heartbreakingly unsentimental as Niven dictating a telegram to his family knowing that he’s certainly going to die. The irony of course is that he doesn’t but falls in love. It is not the auratic impressiveness of Wagner or Malick, but an interior vision depicted on the screen in otherworldly Technicolor. Driven by a veddy English brand of neuroticism their films are at once immediate and distant. Like I said, contradictory. The Archers give credence to the idea that films are the embodiment our collective dreamscape.

Liebelei (Max Ophüls 1933)

I saw this picture at the historic Portage Theater (in need of saving), in a perfectly fine 16mm print with rather eccentric subtitles. All in all it was an experience of viewing the past through a concatenation of filters. In 2012 watching a print of a film that I would guess was struck in the 70s of a film from 1933 of an 1895 play by Arthur Schnitzler. What makes this particularly unique is that every moment stands it seems at the brink of an entirely new epoch, historically and cinematically:

1895 End of the 19^th century, the publication of the Freud and Breur’s Studies on Hysteria, and the birth of the cinematograph.

1933 The rise of fascism, with Hitler’s ascendance to power. Since they were Jews, Schnitzler and Ophüls’s names were removed from the credits, So this a film that was neither written nor directed and instead appeared on the screen from nowhere. I would also note that this is around when sound cinema reached maturity.

2012 Digital age, death of film/cinema as a mechanical medium, as well as the mechanism itself?

The effect is one of seeing ghosts. The sense we are watching the shadows of the dead reanimated. Which is both true and untrue, the mechanistic/chemical medium so tied an external reality (the players, the sets, etc.). But it’s not re-presenting reality, they aren’t moving on the screen. It just looks like that. Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes? Still though I can’t shake the feeling that I was seeing a dream of the 20^th century that is about to become a nightmare. All this begs the question; what the fuck am I talking about? I don’t know. Film has aura.

The Raid: Redemption (Gareth Evans, 2011)

A work of anti-humanist cinema of space and movement made all the more exhilarating for its lack of irony or bloat vis-a-vis the essence of its technique. Art expressed through the collision of mechanized men cut and choreographed to within an inch of its life. The argument has been made that the film resembles a video game, point being that it lacks significant character development and the plot is thin; which are both true, but miss the point. Proof that, by and large, critics are still tied to Aristotelian (by way of Robert McKee bullshit) concept of dramatic construction, and dramatic construction-period as the cinema’s only appropriate mode. You can’t just make a picture where a bunch of guys kick the shit out of each other. However, I would posit that you can make a picture where a bunch of guys kick the shit out of each other artfully. And artfully they do. So while the camera may be shaky and the cutting may be fast; this is not the chaos cinema that everybody won’t shut up about. It takes skill, craft, and yes art to shoot these things right. All of which Evans has in abundance. An intuitive formalist, he knows that this picture doesn’t need anything more, so outside of a few half-hearted stabs at feeding the audience some pathos, he just lets the premise play out without gussying it up. And play out it does. Like an adrenaline shot to the gonads. Who could ask for anything more!