Three Dead Bodies

Often in Robert Altman's films, characters who die submerge into a neighbouring water body: it's as if they dissolve into liquid and lose their material nature, significance.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) / Robert Altman

The Long Goodbye (1974) / Robert Altman

The Player (1992) / Robert Altman

The Revival of the Dead

Obsession (1976) / Brian De Palma

One is not prone to discussing the class-consciousness prevalent in De Palma’s work; the excitement of his films seems to derive as much from the perverseness of his directorial design (particularly; in terms of the central plot, the mood of the piece and the various rhythms/double-rhythms), but also, from (what seems like an) inevitable, and yet, unforeseen engagement of societal classes. In Obsession, for instance, De Palma revises Hitchcock’s Vertigo by entirely severing the original story’s connection with dreams, magic or enigma at-large, and re-depositing it instead in a world of open manipulation, schemers and hustlers – where the reincarnation is no longer the result of one man’s obsessive fantasy, but of his business partner’s (unbelievably) elaborate plan to annex the protagonist’s mind, and through it, his money. In short, De Palma airlifts Vertigo from Hitchcock’s private architecture and places it, as such, in America. Two great achievements of Obsession: the first is De Palma’s recognition of the plausibility of the central plot itself; a man obsessed with a dead lover/wife spots another woman who looks just like her and aims, through his own set of eccentric and aloof habits, to reincarnate the deceased in the alive. While Hitchcock’s film’s working class detective can hardly, in a ‘real’ world afford to devote most of his life to the peculiar pursuit of this young girl who bears an uncanny resemblance with his lost love, De Palma corrects this technicality by rendering the same plot as a holiday film. The rich businessman goes to Italy for a business meeting and spots this replica (what’s more, she works as a restoration artist, how cute!) – tells his partner to trudge on along to America while he will stay on for a few more days. These ‘few more days’ being the point of De Palma’s larger awareness (which he posits in Blow Out as a complete theory); that only a multimillionaire on a holiday can savour the luxury (as opposed to the hope-agony of Scottie in Vertigo) of rediscovering, perhaps, a lost love. In finishing therefore, this triumvirate (with Laura, and of course, Vertigo), De Palma’s point is made, i.e., only three types of people can spend their lives obsessed with the dead: detectives, rich men on a holiday and of course, at a larger level, cinephiles.

Obsession’s larger achievement is in the final shot of the film, when De Palma paints the final stroke over his Vertigo restoration – he dispenses with the wonder inherent in the circular tracking shot that captures the resurrection/reunion in Vertigo and replaces it instead with the bottom-line reality of such a complex affair: when the man and the woman enter the world-ending embrace in Obsession, she overdramatically and in a high-pitched voice, squeals: ‘Daddy! Oh daddy!’ And this is really how De Palma summarises for us the whole Hitchcock film; as some sort of a modern variation of the old Frankenstein-legend, wherein the reproduced girl is no longer a myth, and she does not see the fanatic whose obsessiveness makes her existence possible as her lover, but as her father, her progenitor and her creator ( of course, this is a terribly sentimental moment; imagine the Monster calling Frankenstein his father, but also a bit of a joke on ol’ Jimmy’s age in Vertigo) . Two other significant facts about this scene; it is set in the symbol of concrete, real and practical contemporary existence, the airport, and is thereby relocated from the dreamy, neon-lit hotel room of the Hitchcock film, and lastly, this scene ends the film (unlike Vertigo, where Scottie must suffer till he can exterminate this agent of recurrence herself). This is because the larger irony of the project – the story of a man restoring an object from the past being filmed by a man restoring an object from the past – is not lost on De Palma, and therefore, just like Scottie, he must end eternal recurrence with his own piece. How? By ensuring that the reunion scene is the final scene of his story, so that by the time the end credits begin to roll, the ghosts of an unhappy past are entirely exorcised.

Quality

From an interview with Eye Magazine, an excerpt:

Three Times (2005) / Hou Hsiao-Hsien

R. Roger Remington: How do you define quality?

Massimo Vignelli: Quality, like Modernism, is an attitude, which means that one does not go below a certain standard. Quality is a way of living, a life attitude and a constant fight to eliminate any hint of vulgarity from one’s mind. This is a constant job of enormous proportions because the bombardment that we continuously have, the amount of seduction that we receive from life, makes this fight against crudeness a very heavy job. It’s like the devil. I suppose the priest would call [vulgarity] the devil, and call quality the state of holiness.

Quality is when you know that you have reached a high level in your work, when it really sings, when it touches you, when it responds. Quality is a level of intellectual elegance that is unmatched in other forms. When you see that there is no more vulgarity in it, you’ve got the sense of quality. So quality is something that you can achieve by continuously refining your mind through exposure to things which are the best manifestation of people that came before you, or are around you. This is what you obtain by nourishing yourself away from anything which has vulgarity in it. Quality is when you solve all of the problems that you have to solve in a way that is beyond the expected. So it is the sum of many things, and the answer to many searches. Quality is a by-product of passion, curiosity, intensity and professionalism.

Artist Manifesto #1: Jean Renoir

In order to consider film seriously, one would have to first accept the precept that film directors are artists (or at the very least, believers in the possibilities of art) - once established, it is easier to locate, as in the work of all artists, an idea resident in their marrow. Often times, exclusively.

La Chienne (1931) / Jean Renoir

A Dominatrix and Her Client

Detour (1945) / Edgar G. Ulmer

Both of Ulmer’s two well-known films feature a detour that is of enormous consequence within the events of the narrative – in essence, both Black Cat and Detour exist as ‘what if’ situations, i.e., the fundamental truth of their being coerces the audience to posit an alternative narrative permutation as hypothesis. But there is a catch: in Black Cat, the accident of the vehicle at night that forces the tourists to stray from their original path and deposit themselves as guests at the house of Hjalmar Poelzig is merely a geographical diversion; naive young American lovers unwittingly drift off into unknown, sinister alien territory. The film is bathed in similar tourist-paranoia; the Eastern-Europeans are creeps, played by actors who most famously embody (in other films) two of the most notorious pop-culture villains and their accents are their chainsaws. Even so, it isn’t as moralising as the backpacker-horror films of American 70s or those of the Australian 00s – it is still sympathetic towards its protagonists and doesn't punish them for straying off the normal or the tread path (horror for all its transgressions is a conservative genre; comedy for all its assurances, a radical one). 

It is the other film which exists as a great moral thesis - an unreliable narrator and a loser pianist Al Roberts intimates to us the details of his journey from New York to Hollywood to marry his dull girlfriend, aspiring actress Sue. On the way, he says, everything that can go wrong, does. A man gives him a lift and later, dies in the car itself. He decides to take off with the car, having assumed the identity of the dead man and with the intention of disposing off the car once he makes it to Hollywood, but on the way, he meets Vera, a woman who happens to see through his masquerade and threatens to blow his cover unless he becomes her accomplice in crime. Later in their hotel room, he causes the murder of Vera too - by accident, he insists. Ofcourse, you could take a lot of this on face-value as a viewer and believe Roberts’ version, but if one were to put it under scrutiny, it reveals very willing participation in all the scandal that he comes across. Firstly, with his passenger dead, it doesn’t even occur to him to perhaps locate a hospital; instead, he disposes his body off like a real pro and takes off merrily with the money and the car. Then, he offers a pick Vera up at the petrol station (why, you charmer!) – even later, when he discovers the black heart that beats inside the woman, he decides to go along for the ride, like a willing accomplice, never using force or coercion or blackmail or simple wits to get out of the situation. Instead, he submits to her – theirs is a keen psycho-sexual relationship, that of a dominatrix indulging her client; after all, both of them are role-playing too. In that, he only pretends to be a victim of fate (‘no matter which way you run, fate will find a way to trip you’, goes one of his thousand laments, he is a pretty whiny jerk) but actually, he brings it upon himself.

The operative question here, therefore, could be as to what the titular 'detour' indicates. It is certainly not a geographical one, considering he moves rather steadily and singularly towards Hollywood. It is also not a detour from his original plans, because he adapts them as he goes along - he is in it for the ride, an extended bachelor party before he becomes a routine American. Thus, it is a detour from conventional morality – a diversion from traditional notions of faithfulness and loyalty, of a rejection of avarice and care for the fellow man – Al Roberts is a cheater, a deserter and a conman, even if he’d rather pretend otherwise. The period of the film’s production also ensures that he is punished for this detour – if it were the 70s, Al and Vera would have escaped with the money to Mexico. 

Two-Faced Jerks

Underworld U.S.A (1961) / Samuel Fuller

There is a sequence of immense cruelty in Fuller’s film – a dying man who has murdered the protagonist’s father asks him for forgiveness, ‘I gotta die with a clean slate’, he tells him and clutches onto the younger, more alive man’s coat-lapel as a plea. In return, the protagonist, who has gotten himself implicated (and therefore, in prison) repeatedly over the years only to preserve proximity with the dying man (since he’s been serving a life-term), asks for the names of the other three men involved in the murder. He presses onto the older man to the point of blackmail, repeatedly reminding him of possible post-death retribution in case he does not give his partners up. With the terms of the barter agreeable to both parties involved, the old man proceeds to rat. He then demands of the other man to keep his side of the bargain, at which point, the younger man takes the dying man’s hand and severs it from his coat-lapel, letting him die with blood on his hands. He does the dishonourable act by lying to a man on his deathbed – but the thing with Fuller is, there isn’t much honour at any rate, there is no glory or pride too; there is only dignity and individuals trying to salvage whatever little of it they can. The protagonist’s been the liar in this scene, the two-faced jerk, but who’s to say about the old man prepared to divulge the identities of his partners for an entirely selfish purpose – only because he’s dying and well, death means there aren’t any stakes involved anymore. Fuller will confuse the issue even more; the old man’s desire for forgiveness is entirely hokey – he is, after all, the man who murdered a father in front of his child and ended his possibilities for a normal adulthood. In that, Fuller is clear that the dying man’s more successful murdering partners – Gela, Gunther and Smith – who are honest (and even proud) of their criminal excursions are more admirable than this sniveling old man who believes an afterlife remission will save him. 

Reanimation

Projectorhead, the online film journal I also run, recently published its first yearly Almanac, which featured writers from around the world recollecting the previous year in cinema for them. Those interested can read it here.

Two Lovers (2012) / James Gray

I also contributed an essay on James Gray, called The Private World of Mr. Gray to Bangalore-based film magazine Deep Focus Cinema for their Mar-May 2013 issue. It's admirable that the magazine's out in print, because that is a blue moon in the skies of Indian cinephilia now. For those interested in the magazine or in subscriptions, you can learn more at the magazine's site.

An excerpt:

James Gray’s films are set inside a practical world.  A world whose rules aren’t dictated by a romantic commitment to the exalted yet equivocal notions of morality, loyalty, brotherhood, belonging or even love – this statement has larger implications than one may imagine; it is not enough for characters in a Gray film to carve their existences through broad strokes of subverting conventional gestures or patterns of behaviour, they must do more – subversion is, after all, an act that still depends on a relative existence– the subversive first requires an object to apply his radical impulse to. The men and women in Gray’s films, instead, exist in some of a movie-vacuum, they do not resemble or seem like people in other movies – they seem plucked out of Gray’s experiences, people he has met, some he has dated, a few he hates, others that he loves and one that he sees in the mirror. The choices they make or the decisions they take, which so often propel Gray’s unusual, even peculiar narratives forward, aren’t influenced by commitments to higher principles or grand (but hokey) moral devices, but by the strange and overwhelming force of the human impulse – as a result, these characters can come across as unreasonable, downright stupid, imperfect idiots and yet, at the risk of a cliché, more human. Perhaps that is why epithets that are most commonly attached to Gray’s films are ‘classical’, ‘old-fashioned’, ‘vintage’ and such - apart from the fact that the aesthetic construction of his films is undoubtedly influenced by fundamental principles of old-timey filmmaking (camera on tripod, economy of shots, meticulous cutting, narratives driven by repartees, soundtracks that swell up, sodium-vapour lighting), there is also the truth that audiences will deem as being ‘classical’ any behaviour in a film that they can relate to. Why? Because beyond its conventional definition (classical: anything that can be classified), the word is also meant to evoke the feeling of an object that existed back in the past, in our past, essentially, anything that we can identify by the virtue of already having seen it. But this is a confusion: Gray’s characters are not relatable (and therefore, ‘classical’) because they existed in the past or, as is sometimes alleged, belong to ‘a 30s MGM film’, but because in them, audiences in front of a movie-screen can see reflections of themselves: people on a Gray screen are people like they are, down to the marrow – they do not exist as gross exaggerations or underplayed variations – they are direct renders.