Review: Uncut Gems (2019)

Not since maybe Irreversible have I ever been more on edge. It’s 2012 for some reason, and ‘Howie’ a jewelry shop owner and specialty salesman to Rappers and Athletes with interesting taste, begins the Safdie Brother’s follow up to Good Time (2017) already $100,000 in the stink. He then proceeds to dig himself deeper and deeper, betting, pawning, selling inflated goods and pulling favours nineteen to the dozen; risking his own life, the lives of his family, and his devoted mistress for the ultimate win in the form of an uncut black opal as big as a human heart scored from a mine in Ethiopia that falls considerably short of numerous health and safety guidelines. The prospect of snatching victory from the dentures of defeat is Howard’s goal, even to the point of self-sabotage, but like a cornered animal you’ll forget that all pretty quickly once Howard starts pinning IOU’s to the revolver pointed straight at his forehead.

Uncut Gems barely gives you a chance to breath between all the nail-biting, but thanks to a script tighter than Adam Sandler’s colonoscopy, and improv that may at any point be hilarious and devastating, the 140 minutes run by like 15. Rather than feeling like a Gaspar Noe bad trip, or a more beat-by-beat thriller, like a Scorsese, the Safdie’s have set their own carefully engineered – lucid – pace and tone, which is very watchable.

I tend to feel pretty redundant when I write positive things about films with an already existing amount of hype around them, but I just want to throw my piece in there just this one time for Uncut Gems. What an exciting time to be a person who loves films, when work like this can peak it’s head above the indie tabletop to the mainstream. The audience I watched this with were absolutely immersed every time Howard made another dumb decision *groans*, and when the soundtrack lowers to absolute silence, not one whisper was heard.

Obligatory: Adam Sandler Adam Sandler Adam Sandler John Cassavetes John Cassavetes

The Safdie’s nerdiness shines through every way the film is crafted. Danny Lopatin’s score is unlike any other Oneohtrix Point Never stuff I’ve hear before. Sounds like a continuous 80s/90s VHS tape intro mixed with sparkly synthetic sounds you automatically associate with tacky jewelry and that cross-shaped lens flare you’ll immediately associate with Bling/SuperSweetSixteen-era aspiration.

Technically interesting, much smoother movement and deliberate cutting than Good Time as I remember. Understandably so, or I’d get sick. Same bias towards handheld close ups in (very wide anamorphic) 2.39 ratio, plus lots of bluming artificial light bouncing around inside the lens, shooting mainly in dark settings on 35 mil. They literally hired a wizard (a guy called Chris Silano) as a 1st AC, shooting on such a wide aperture – on anamorphic – while moving all the time must have been a huge challenge.

Negs:
I think this has something to do with the Safdie’s actually rooting for Howard at the end, but I wish they took their hand off the edit button a few more times in the final sequence, I wanted to see more from Howard’s brother who obviously showed some sympathy and dismay, to see the guy he grew up with so hooked to this self-destructive, high-stakes lifestyle, to see Howard from outside his own perspective would have been powerful then.

I also didn’t really understand why Kat was so into Howard, to the point of trying to win him back at least, although again, I can’t fault Paloma Elsesser’s performance at all, the ensemble were all fantastic.

Kevin Garnett by normal standards was remarkable, but within context, gave the weakest performance, and also accounted for the least engaging parts of the film. Had he been more assertive I would have believed in him more, maybe that had something to do with his personal drawbacks/conditions of playing himself.

I will say this is a damn near perfect genre film, with a very convincing and memorable performance from Sandler, but the film at the moment, admittedly lacks an emotional honesty outside the propulsion, comic relief and great production. To clarify, by ‘honesty’ I don’t mean the film LIES to anybody, I only saw some potential to know *more* about the characters beyond the overall momentum of the story. Again I’ve referenced this before: the classic ice-scraper scene, from an eerily similar film-making duo in the Coens, for Fargo.

Could the Safdie’s have maybe identified the car boot scene as a point to show Howard at a point where he believes he’s alone and totally out of options? Yes. The answer is yes.

To be crude, to enter 9/10 territory this film needed to either totally blow my mind creatively, or maim my heart in some way in some way I didn’t know it could be maimed. Uncut Gems didn’t do either, but as a genre film it’s among the best I’ve ever seen. And I’m only 22 but hey now!

To be even cruder, I gotta ask, is this a Reservoir Dogs moment, or a Magnolia moment? Will the Safdie’s commit to the ‘inimitable rising stakes’ blueprint for the rest of their career? Now they have eyes, it’ll be interesting to track their progress.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 3 on the horizon????

For real, these are a duo who – with their current playbook – are never gonna be courted by the likes of Marvel, so it’s good we have them.

Please bow your heads. Give thanks.

Amen.

 

 

Edit: Ethiopia not Nigeria

Some Images from The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

The spectators imagine the lodger walking about upstairs – Hitchcock might have used a glass panel

Unusual use of Extreme Close Up

The Landlord and Landlady cover their anxiety by cleaning and reading the newspaper

Awesome scene ending in this 4th wall break – which there are a surprising amount of in this film.

Use of some obstruction to emphasise the Detective – similar to techniques by Danny Boyle and Kieslowski

Silent thrillers seem to love maps – compare with M and Mabuse

Review: Blow Up (1966)

“Sometimes reality is the strangest fantasy of all”

Finding it hard to express how great Blow up is. Wow. ‘Thomas’ (David Hemmings also of Profundo Rosso) is a young very successful very confident photographer with a short attention span, who photographs an event he later finds out wasn’t the story he assumed. Prepare to be whisked upon a ride through heavy eye-lashed, rocking, drugged up 60s London, and breathlessly confronted with the difference between the eye of a camera and actuality.

I’d be here all night going through the ways this film goes hard, but one of the important things that stands out is mood, and if you’re inclined, genre, which flows and changes from thrilling to playful to dramatic. Blow up is an example of the brilliant potential of magical realism, where metaphor clashes with reality in unexpected ways, the use of this device explains how mood can fluctuate like it does, because it tells us where the epicentre of the story is: the mind of the main character.

Unlike a conventional Thriller, Thomas isn’t forced into an alien situation which could dictate the mood, and unlike a detective thriller, he isn’t all that interested in justice or revenge. There is a unique motive behind what the character does but I won’t get into that (too long too rambly). Thomas’ story takes place over about 48 hours continuously, and across that, his attention flits to and away from the primary problem he encounters and in turn, mood/genre fluctuates from Thriller to Drama. Spontaneous, controlling and above all, horny as fuck, he’s distracted by and attracted to objects. Because of this a fantastic contrast is created between objects, and with a more profound sense of loss towards the end.

A comparison I keep thinking of is The Bicycle Thieves (1948), an example of a linear story with a tragic ending. A modern example could come from the Safdie brothers, but there are still stark differences here aside from the obvious visual ones.

It’s all brilliant, the editing, writing, a lack of super in-your-face score, the hugely creative shot composition, the transforming, interactive set. I wouldn’t want to be mates with the protagonist, he is a shithead for more reasons than Director Antonioni intended. (Read light sexual assault). There is an inseparable chauvinistic context to Blow Up, the female characters are built to be controlled and rebel off-screen. But without exonerating I also want you to see that chauvinism is built into the flaws of the main character, and that as well as having its shithead moments, a huge amount of thought is stuffed into the development and pay-off of the themes and ideas in the story.

Watch it for yourself if this is on your list of films to watch – give it a good boost up the ranks.

I might come back to this with more thoughts, for now it’s a strong 8 maybe a light 9/10, I wasn’t moved to tears, or to any other emotional extremes but that ain’t everything.

Review: Fishing For Love: How to Catch a Thai Bride (2018)

Note that now the documentary has been named ‘Heartbound: A Different Kind of Love Story’ – so if you’re searching on imdb, that’s what it’s called.

You can rely on BBC Storyville documentaries to pull it out of the bag pretty much every time, but ‘Fishing For Love: How to Catch a Thai Bride’ is an outstanding example, and best of all it’s free to watch on iPlayer. A BOOTIFUL story about the people living on an imaginary border between the city of Pattaya in Thailand, known for Gap Years and sex tourism. And the Netherlands, where in a small fishing village, over 900 Thai women have married mostly older European men.

Sommai, with her cheekbones of Granite is the fucking Stoic image. Once a prostitute, now a match-maker for Thai women to meet sensible Danish men. In Pattaya, where unemployment is common, these women are after stability, a way to provide for their families, an alternative to the sex industry.

This sort of subject usually looks no further than poking fun at how hopeless and/or sexist European men who marry young Thai women can be, but this Documentary stands well clear of the tradition. Co-Directors Sine Plambach and Henrik Ipsen maintain intimate relationships with the people involved on both sides of the cultural divide, over a long period of time.

Through the almost OTS camera perspective and edit you get such a raw perspective into the lives of these people. We’re physically present during all of the awkward silences and stabs at communication, as they gossip and confess to one another. It doesn’t really push for an outlandish style but it’s not at all in need of one. You find yourself becoming invested in these people without really noticing it’s happening. The craft is totally aimed at creating understanding and empathy, one of the core goals of this handheld constructed truth, leading way back to the Direct Cinema movement of the 50s-60s.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000flgx/storyville-fishing-for-love-how-to-catch-a-thai-bride

8/10

Review: Obsession (1976)

Saved to blog because tlet twitter threads are getting out of hand let’s face it.

Obsession 1976. A super visually competent thriller starring Cliff Robertson aka Uncle Ben and John Lithgow aka GOAT. Brian De Palma basically iterating on the Hitchcock creations Vertigo and Rebecca with a louder bang. Impressively fluid camera and distinctively wide compositions, like Spielberg, using foreground and background as devices for staging or in other words visual contrast, rather than the modern convention of cutting or pulling focus. There’s more to say on this, with visual refs but BFIplayer doesn’t let you take crudding screenshots. Thought there wasn’t much complexity to the story, or convincing detail outside the squashed cockpit the plot puts you in. (By which I mean, I didn’t get a palpable sense of the world e.g. Italy emblematic of this was the end of the film, which avoided a lot of very sticky questions)

The lady vanishes vibes at the beginning, which I must say was brilliantly designed, and mostly delivered on the huge potential to bring back motifs e.g. rotating.

But saying that, I look like a fool when I say I didn’t see that twist coming, and to pull off de-aging someone like that without VFX and not look silly was very impressive.

The final sequence was also pretty stunningly choreographed on all fronts, especially the red paint and the strip lighting. But I thought there were missed opportunities to create more interesting scenarios with John Lithgow, it’d have given both characters more to chew on.

There’s something nostalgic, or at least earnest about films like this which really appeals to me. Visually it actually reminded me of Suspiria which came out the year after in 1977, that also has a really fun attitude to genre, and fondness for psycho-drama/”high melodrama” that’s basically woven into its fabric.

Plenty of great ideas, but the gamut of themes and tones is too wide. Misses the more disturbing aspects of Hitchcock, more external than internal.

Strong 6/10

Review: Hausu (1977)

Like an unending advert without a product to sell, I had so so so much fun watching Hausu (1977), this film is basically the origin of all Adult Swim output (although that kind of remark is kind of catch-all). For a new generation of TV-literate Japanese youth, in the context of a struggling feature film industry at the time, prolific Arthouse Advertising Director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi was given carte blanche by Toho industries to direct a “Jaws type” movie based on his daughter’s own wild horror inflected fantasies.
The result is Hausu, a story about a schoolgirl nicknamed ‘Angel’ and her six friends who visit her aunt’s house that eats people. Yes that’s right, the house eats people.

– It treats the horror genre with such a great sense of humour, not the ‘Cabin in the Woods’ // ‘Deadpool’ type of meta-commentary, but fully embracing and exaggerating the form, much like Suspiria, but TWIST, the characters in the film despite their near death seem like willing participants. The fact that their characters are so deliberately fake both engages you with the unreal world and sends very clear signals that they’re pawns in a game and players on a stage, ready to use their assigned attribute (Fantasy, Beauty, Smarts, Musicality, Kung Fu, Greed). The plot plays out in brilliant predictability because of the obvious conflicts these have with eachother, for example Fantasy is the one who sees everything but no one believes her.

– – It shows with more transparency the big idea particularly of B-movie horrors, that so long as the character doesn’t want to die, so long as they struggle convincingly, you can still engage with the horror as a surrogate, and connect with the character in that way.

– – – In this way you can definitely compare it to Evil Dead stuff. Both of them are so enjoyable to watch because despite the extremity of the experience, the detachment from reality, you still know what the rules of the game are. At no point does Hausu desire to take you out of the story it’s chosen to tell.

– – – – It’s like visiting Starbucks from Hell, the coffee cup could bite your nose, the shop could be 60 stories tall, you could have four arms, but if the walls are green and there’s a black and white stock image of an old Italian man in a Fiat, you know it’s a Starbucks!

– – – – – Abstraction and metatextuality condense all kinds of information, and sometimes

Poster for ‘The Vanishing’ (1988)

deliver info more effectively, even powerful emotions. See the intro to Mulholland Dr. Source-less sounds of wind and seagulls from Angel’s step mother indicate her importance. The multiple intros we get of characters in Hausu are like cheerful memorials. Like a missing poster, already a rose-tinted historical record.

 

– – – – – – Talking of brand and advertising, this film gave me a thought that if most Advertising is structured to propose a problem you want to solve, removing the product from the equation is very jarring and potentially horrific. Say if you created a story that repeated the presence of a problem, an insect bite for example, that the protagonist cannot possibly solve and has to scratch.

– – – – – – – I guess that’s pretty telling of how passive we are as surrogate characters in advertising.

– – – – – – – – Wondering if John Carpenter film They Live does anything similar to this.

– Such a wide variety of practical and VFX in this film which are all awful and brilliant at the same time. For all of the film there are fake matte painted skies, one of which the director uses about 7 times. Everything painted with blooming technicolor, vibrant backdrops often keyed out with green-screen, reminded me of the similar psychedelic experiences in Altered States.

– – These techniques are crucially 2 dimensional, and often flatly framed, directly positioned for your eyes. This is Horror designed for an audience.

– – – Ôbayashi also frames his shots to my eyes in a very intuitive way a lot of the time, to convey information almost like a story-book. See shot of Melody’s arm ominously beckoning Fantasy.

– – – – Apart from the weird editing techniques: dissolves, Half-frame rate/slowmo, iris without zooming, green-screen, match cutting etc etc. The actual pacing is pretty on point and I love the cross-cutting from one often completely extreme and wacky scenario, to other characters in mundane scenarios : see Angel engulfed in flames cut to a cut on Music’s finger.

– I love the hilariously useless male saviour (the only male character). From a Feminist angle there’s definitely shit you can read into. The fact that the HOUSE only eats young girls of MARRIAGEABLE age. SPINSTERS, THE VILLAIN. The film has little to say about hetero relationships, it’s more about the female experience, deliberately sans men. Beneath the stylistic veneer, Angel’s grief over losing her mother and dealing with a new step-mother is on the one hand very much like a folk-tale, and on the other has genuine emotional resonance.

– – The father composes film soundtracks for spaghetti westerns – an indication of Ôbayashi’s integration of western cultural influence – as Spaghetti Westerns were an American Import initially shunned for their OTT style, maybe Ôbayashi is making his own statement for the international audience. Or maybe conforming to a more Hollywood influenced Japan.

– – – (From the Masters of Cinema booklet written by Paul Roquet, 2009) “The film was a commercial, for Japanese cinema itself, aimed at getting audiences back into the theatres”

It’s a very good film, it deserves to be watched and re-watched.

9/10

 

Review: It Comes at Night (2017)

A family is alone in their dead relative’s house amidst a recent highly infectious disease outbreak, resources are scarce and times are desperate. One night a stranger breaks in.

‘A Zombie Movie Without Zombies’ is a good tagline for the one among the new slew of bigbrain A24 Horror fliques. ‘It Comes At Night’ is a dark, good looking, broody character-driven paranoid Horror, so it ticks all the right boxes.

I really do want to give Trey Edward Shults (Writer Director and Co-Editor) the benefit of the doubt because from this project alone, I know he’s a talented Director but I’m just not sure what the film was trying to do or say, essentially beyond

“Wowee this is a depressing and stressful situation we are in.”

I’ll give it to ye that the idea of trusting only your family as an adolescent is intriguing and there is definitely subtext you could compare with the Black Death, but aside from non-essential characteristics of the direction/performances I didn’t notice anything interesting coming from that.

Above all else, the characters are not well drawn in the script. We know next to nothing about anyone, no matter how well performed they are. The most memorable scenes where characters talk alone end super abruptly when things are about to get interesting: “I used to be a teacher. Want to know about the history of the Roman Empire? I’m your guy” YES PAUL I WOULD IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING RELEVANT TO SAY ABOUT IT. Characters more or less become copies of one another and boil down to Man/Woman, Husband/Wife and equations of rationality when faced with peril. I like the dynamics of power, and as I mentioned, the subtlety of performance from Joel Edgerton. I also think Kelvin Harrison Jr. has real expressive face they give it their all which I respect. But there are many many aspects of the film that could improve.

Dream sequences are frustratingly repetitive, not inventive or illuminating psychologically. If Travis only ever dreams about going out into the forest, for one thing, thems some boring ass dreams, and for two thing, why not USE THAT? Why not make him an ‘unreliable narrator’ by having him sleepwalk (as we saw in Hereditary), why not put him in an unexpected situation where he HAS to venture out into the forest? On top of that, the sound design does not make it clear we are changing between dreams/reality –  which I would be fine with if in other respects the sequences hadn’t been so conventional – we’re talking multiple shots of Travis sitting up fast-breathing+sweaty.

Why doesn’t the disease do anything to you psychologically or physically other than making you all scabby/vomity? Would it not be cooler – more provocative for characters if there were no symptoms, only subtle hints. At the table, there’s another layer of uncertainty you could add.

IDEA: What if the disease makes you thirsty. Water is a finite resource, it would create some messed up situations where characters are killing people who are only asking for water, or keeping captives dehydrated for weeks to see if they turn.

IDEA: What if the disease slowly removes your ability to articulate, like a stroke. You’d be lucid, but unable to defend yourself, especially in such fragile social circumstances.

They’re presumably at his Grandpa’s house, Travis has been there a billion times, he knows the area well enough, why don’t him or his mother display familiarity with their surroundings? Wouldn’t there be an old rope swing, why isn’t Sarah more of an asset because of how well she’d know the town having grown up there? Sure she hasn’t lived there for a while, but why isn’t it at least mentioned?

Why don’t we see more of their everyday survival? How do they get food and water, does it require a lot of risk or simply hard work?

Perhaps it would have been interesting if Travis’ mother died. stressing the relationship with his father to the limit and also underlining his racial separation. Or maybe if Travis (lol ‘Travis’ like the ‘Paul’ of black guys in movies) decided to defend the family once Paul (The ‘Travis’ of white guys) thought they were infected – he could have used Paul’s double standard against them and left – or threatened to leave, turning it into a messed up coming-of-age story.

Why aren’t the animals brought back in any meaningful way?

The reason I’m taking this scatter-gun approach to criticising the film (perhaps in ways the writer/director would say are completely antithetical to the point of the story) is because I feel the passion is there and the film’s well made, but there are thematic voids in the story and the characters.

I might have missed something, either in the performances, or maybe the production design, but right now it’s a very bare-bones screenplay with decent performances and nice – if not a bit generic cinematography. Nowadays you can turn to any cop-drama and find the same thing, probably written more substantively too.

I’m still very much for A24 letting directors do their thing, this is a pretty good dud, but a dud nonetheless.

5/10

Review: Vampyre (1932)

Say Carl Dreyer’s follow up to crazy good The Passion of Jean of Arc (said in clunky English). Vampyre (1932) is one of the very first European talking pictures and generally considered to be pretty pioneering (so I hear) within the Horror Genre. And although not especially “Scary” or “”Entertaining”” to the average viewer with better prospects for a Friday night beyond their bedroom door, at only an hour long, it is packed with a number of very interesting techniques considering *when* it was made, and who by.

As well as being one of the first talkies, it was the first Sound picture Dreyer made as a guy with a keen interest in the technology currently in development. He approaches it foremostly as a cinema enthusiast (translation: nerd) with an aim to adapt and transform the cinematic language. This means you can expect less interstitial titles, and the new technique of layering orchestral stings along with atmospheric sounds, production sounds and dialogue.

Vampyre has a number of things in common with Fritz Lang’s M (1931 – just a year prior) born from how both film-makers adapted to the high expense of using sound, (Note that this is an independently financed film, the very first sound feature was released only 5 years prior, and I think at the time less than half of local theatres even had the ability to play synced sound + video) the soundtrack doesn’t run entirely through the film, often all audio will just cut off entirely. But one of the common tools and effects between Lang and Dreyer was to use the necessary sparsity of their dialogue to economise the story, and as they’re Thriller and Horror respectively, their very prominent mix and rare uses of dialogue definitely add spades to the creepy atmosphere.

(Although I think Lang recognised this more keenly in ‘M’, it’s a real technical marvel)

Lang’s Hans Bekert whistling Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ and Dreyer’s noisy ghosts jump out of the frame because they’re merging techniques from both the silent and modern era by using the new technique of off-screen sound.

• Also note the great moment a landlady shouts for “SILENCE!” Dreyer has a sense of humour about it.

You can find a modern appropriator of these techniques and aesthetics from Guy Maddin’s in ‘The Hidden Room’, which similarly exploits the murkiness and mysterious link between screen and psyche, that visual artifacts like focus, vignetting and heavy film grain seem to add to a picture.

And talking of modern cinematic techniques, Dreyer experiments, with varied success by modern standards, with optical techniques like masking, soft focus and double exposure, and camera techniques like complex dolly movements you could even compare to much later film-makers like Lumet, PTA or even Woody Allen (one of the things I noticed with a great scene in Annie Hall was the rotating camera). Dreyer also experiments with perspective, notably when the main character looks up from the perspective of a coffin. The use of Extreme Close Ups on yellowed books and grotesque faux medieval illustrations also seems to be a trope of Gothic Cinema inherited from this, and films like Haxan, 30 years later in The Cremator, and another 50 years later in What We Do in The Shadows (You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead). These are just the one’s I’ve noticed, I’m sure there’s much more to the lineage.

Interesting stuff, I definitely admire Dreyer more after seeing this. Although he was very accomplished by this point in his career, Vampyre is in a way, more relatable work to me because he seems like a student film-maker, playing around with the form in his tool shed.

• On a train right now so I can’t check who the cinematographer was but I’m sure it was a different guy because Jean and Vampyre are not similar in terms of lighting.

Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Interesting to see Tarantino treat the goals you need to hit in a story so loosely in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, filling screen-time with skits and prolonged nods to film history he treats with longing, loving care and which seem to have a life equal to the overriding narrative. Unlike any other Tarantino picture, I felt the same immersion you might experience in a video game like GTA or adventure like Lord of the Rings, because in order of attention, Tarantino puts the world and it’s lifestyle first. Story second. But on the whole, this isn’t a bad thing.

I’m puzzled with some aspects of the film, he gives a lot of time to waning Western star Rick Dalton, and his stunt double Cliff Booth, but gives very little of the same kind of attention to Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie. I can only see this as a deliberate attempt to be distant and respectful of the real-life woman, given the famous circumstances of her death. But on the one hand, the fact that Tarantino chose to change the history of that event, while at the same time painting a mythic portrait of her almost as a kind of living gravestone before then, makes it seem like Quentin wasn’t that interested in the living-breathing woman who was killed in 1969 when he wrote and directed this thing. Tate functions as the same kind of beautiful, grainy backdrop as Hollywood itself, cemented into the walk of fame. I see this as a disservice to both women. I don’t know much about Sharon Tate but I’m sure she amounted to more than that.

It’s the same sort of distance I didn’t really understand the justification for in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, that as an outsider/voyeur, the audience is left guessing about the key events of the story. A film I liked, and which drew direct influence from Coppola’s film was Mustang (2015), directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, which, though it had flaws of it’s own, told a fuller story of the lives of young women in captivity.

That’s all I have to say right now, apart from yes, I understand the need for slow editing, but the film could have done with an intermission. I think the cinematography was really lush, the colours pop partly thanks to great costume and design. For some reason at just under 2 hours in, the combination of knowing the end was close, the dying of the light, the Momas and the Papas, plus the precise use of wider Animorphic lenses, my jaw dropped. The precision of this shot right here is phenomenal.

Brad Pitt is just limitlessly charismatic, Dicaprio also perhaps more impressively so, able to transform from insecure stuttering alky to tobacco-spitting badass. Reminded me of a slightly less panto version of Hugh Grant from Paddington 2. My smile was ear to ear when the plastered and clueless Rick Dalton managed to stop the murderous cult just by behaving like an asshole.

Plenty of memorable moments like this, and full of great performances, but I’m not sure how much I’ll remember in a week.

Review: Triumph of the Will (1935)

I saw Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will 1935 today. The notorious propaganda film and a production of unprecedented scale, made by Leni Riefenstahl in collaboration with The Nazi Party. I was struck by a multitude of different things. Firstly, I won’t recommend watching this to just anyone, but I don’t think that for the intellectually/socially/historically/whateverlly curious at least, it should ever be ruled out. In fact I’d argue under the right circumstances the experience can be enriching. But neither am I presuming to have all the right opinions about this, these are all my own, however shite or poorly formed.

I think there’s a huge amount to be gained by this documentation remaining public in a perverse way. Obviously not in the case of everybody who decides to watch it, but overall I see it acting in a way opposite to it’s original intention, exactly by being effective as a blueprint for persuasion, we’re conveniently equipped to recognise the rhetoric in it’s naked amorality, thanks to our knowledge of, and acceptance of facts like genocide. Thanks to this film, we can also appreciate the pretty unique optics of fascism and totalitarianism, the huge grandiose displays of concrete, unity, the generation of myth, the Christlike leader.

I say Christlike because the film is presented as a specifically Christ-like journey. We open in the clouds flying down with him into Nuremberg, and remain close to him, on his level or above him throughout the first 9 minutes, in which we don’t even get a good look at his face. This is Adolf the material human being, whose mandate burdens us but gives him courage. From there we optically progress towards Adolf the “deity” who not only gathers support from the average older Nazi hanging out on the street but whole groups of uniformed Nazis, hooray! At the end of the film his disciples gather to declare a sacred exceptionalism of the inception of the party, of all it’s members and of the “eternal” (gotcha there) history set to unfold.

“As a party, we had to remain in the minority, in order to mobilise those with a fighting spirit and a sense of sacrifice. And these never the majority, but always the minority.”

“…only the best National Socialists are party members.”

• Hitler, the Party and Germany. Each idea is distinct, indistinguishable and unified at the same time under the umbrella of the ideology. Like a holy trinity.
• Oh yeah and the hall looks a lot like a church lol.

Clearly all that’s left is for Hitler to be killed by bunch of Romans and there you have it, we’ve come full bloody circle people! And get a load of the amount of times we see fire, wonder what that could mean. It could mean that they want to set fire to things. Yeah.

Most of the film isn’t so speech-heavy. To this day, Riefenstahl is praised for her editing ability. Her hand is present from minute to minute and also at the broad structural level. The parallel story she tells, alongside the ‘Hitler as Christ’ comparison, is of building momentum, gathering from demographics the Nazis want to target, and guiding them towards a cinematic climax.

The film is primarily aimed at the men of Germany to persuade them to fight. The Party wanted to galvanize the youth by invoking aspirational figures and ‘constructing a public’.

A public made of their peers in Hitler youth camps, having fun, eating well and doing manual labour in a distinctly communist way.

((Correct, by this I mean very homoerotic))

Clamouring to see their leader in person. Growing up to be in the SA or SS, trained to behave as one body with pride in their leader. Then finally the public which consists of the admiration you’ll be sure to receive upon your victorious return from battle good sir.

In practice, moment to moment, this mainly consists of repeating 1000 ways to do the Kuleshov effect and weaponising the assumptions people would have probably had about the form and therefore truthfulness of documentary film-making at the time.

But if you see this film again today you ascertain that it does not contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is true. And it contains no tedious commentary at all. It is history. A pure historical film …it is film-vérité. It reflects the truth that was then, in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary, not a propaganda film. Oh! I know very well what propaganda is. That consists of recreating certain events in order to create a thesis or, in the face of certain events, to let one thing go in order to accentuate the other. I found myself, me, at the heart of an event which was the reality at a certain time at a certain place. My film is composed of what stemmed from that.

Riefenstahl – 1964

See also Soviet Film-making pioneers Dziga Vertov and Eisenstein for a better idea of what inspired Riefenstahl.

Battleship Potemkin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca0c4vEc5Is
Man With a Movie Camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGYZ5847FiI
Man With a Movie Camera is actually really entertaining no word of a lie.

• Note also the huge advantage synced sound and video had for the purposes of propaganda. Yippee!

As I mentioned before light and shot angle are also important devices. The Aryan face is invariably shot in very direct light to exaggerate their ideal angular features and reinforce the graphic unreality /myth-like timelessness Riefenstahl aims to create. Of course, Hitler and party members are normally shot from very low, almost in profile, with the subject looking forwards to accentuate the Kuleshov technique she loves so much. Battalions are shot above helmet height to produce abstract repeating, almost architectural patterns and remove individuality. Which would be very effective, if it weren’t for one soldier almost tripping over at the end which is absolutely hilarious.

One of the ways the film touched me more than any cool cinematic techniques, ominous speeches or architecture, was actually thinking about the document as a historical record, as a series of events that actually happened, and was populated by individuals. Looking into the faces of Nazi soldiers, no matter how innanely evil or filled with genocidal potential they may be as a collective, you’re forced to wonder what their lives were like as people.

I started to write a sentence which started “With dreams-” but caught myself half way. The word ‘individuals’ is kind of useless unless you want to defend a point about a collective. And so are misty ideas about ‘families’ and ‘desires’ if you have no available detail to back them up.

Maybe what Riefenstahl accidentally captured, at the very least, were faces. It’s impossible via the powers of propaganda to turn every single German face into an emblem for the eternal Reich, or an icon for oncoming war. There’s always humanity in the face of an unforgivable stranger. It doesn’t matter what uniform they’re wearing or how they’re represented. There’s something about the face which trumps history, distance and form in terms of how we connect with another person, even if the connection only travels in one direction.

It’s something Elem Klimov knew for a fact when he made ‘Come and See’ (1985). A film about German-led massacres in rural Russia. It ends with this montage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2KUzLcha-o

Which if not lifts from, then references Riefenstahl’s work directly, as part of a cultivated propaganda machine which helped make an icon of the man, and attempts to reverse the process with a futility that’s depressingly self-aware. Fuck that whole film’s depressing. Go watch it.

Anyway yeah I rated this film a 5/10 because I’m a centrist. Now that’s progress!

Thanks for reading.