Sullivan's Travels: A Dialectical Reading

Sullivan's Travels proposes a world in which only two types of movies exist; between popular genre pictures and import-laden message films, there is little to choose. The film sets up a neat dialectic between the two warring conceptions which, at first glance, it seems to resolve in favor of the former (represented primarily through the light comedy), but the film itself, in its multiplicity of cinematic modes, represents another solution to the problem, a true synthesis which culls what it finds useful in the opposing conceptions and uses it to comment on the very notion of the dialectic that inevitably results from the genre-fication of films intrinsic to the studio system. The titular character, Hollywood filmmaker John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) may favor first one than the other type of picture before being confirmed in his initial preference, but he is incapable of seeing beyond the dialectic. To take Sullivan as the film's mouthpiece is to read Sturges' work as a confirmation of the simplistic and hidebound choices that Hollywood proposes as a filmmaker's only options but, fortunately, the film itself makes nonsense of such a narrow reading by successfully combining any number of cinematic modes of inquiry to critique the very machinery that aims at preventing such a combination.

The film begins with Sullivan's declared intention to stop producing the type of makeweight comedy with which he established his reputation (example: Hey, Hey in the Hayloft) and focus on a more serious type of film which would take in the harsh realities of Depression-era America and treat that liberal creation known as "the common man" rather than his customary middle-class milieu. As Sullivan puts it, he wants to make a film that "would realize the potentialities of film as the sociological and artistic medium that it is", a film with "social significance" that "teaches a moral lesson"; in other words the sort of overblown feel-good nonsense that routinely wins major awards and which the film continually ridicules. Throughout the film, Sullivan's defense of the "significant" social picture comes off as shopworn and hopelessly naive; Sturges' ironic presentation of his lead character's discourse allows him to critique both a type of picture (the message movie) and the trite assumptions that enable its creation.

When the studio executives argue that he knows nothing about his potential subject matter, Sullivan decides to go undercover as a hobo and learn about the harsh realities of life in order to better prepare himself for his undertaking, a decision which prompts him to journey from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with only ten cents in his pocket. Lest he become too lonely, he takes with him a beautiful aspiring actress played by Veronica Lake who also goes disguised as a bum. Lake's character, who tellingly prefers Sullivan's light comedic films to any Hollywood message movie, serves as a necessary deflator to his high flown, but ultimately ineffectual rhetoric. As Sullivan speaks enthusiastically of a self-important picture called Hold Back Tomorrow, the Girl snappily replies "you hold it." When Sullivan asks her "don't you think with the world in its present condition... that people are allergic to comedies?" she looks at him disgustedly and offers a definitive "no." Ultimately Sullivan's journey provides him with a superficial glimpse of the down-and-out lifestyle, enough to gather material for a movie, but not enough to suffer more than the occasional discomfort or inconvenience. To his credit, Sullivan eventually acknowledges the superficiality of his travels, concluding "I haven't suffered enough [to make the film]." Only later, after his journey has supposedly reached its end, does he suffer genuine privation, a circumstance which, ironically leads to a reversal in Sullivan's cinematic priorities, causing him to embrace the role of a comedic filmmaker and abandon his plan to make serious films.

The scene in which Sullivan's attitude towards the two types of pictures alters is the key to understanding the film; the viewer's interpretation of the scene dictates his interpretation of the entire work. Following a series of mishaps, a dazed Sullivan attacks a railroad employee and is sentenced to six years at a brutal Southern penal camp. The only respite offered the prisoners from their excruciating labors is the occasional trip to a local church where, after the service, the men are treated to a screening of Disney cartoons, which they find uproarious. Sullivan initially seems baffled by the inmates' exaggerated reactions, but soon joins in with laughter as hearty as any of the others. The ostensible reading of the scene and the one offered by Sullivan at the end of the film, is as a celebration of the Hollywood screen comedy since, as Sullivan notes, laughter is "all some people have." Yet, the scene itself plays more like a parody of a general film audience responding disproportionately to the most debased screen offerings. The faces of the prisoners, which Sturges shows us in a series of close-ups (and repeats in a montage at the film's conclusion) are deliberately scruffy, emphasizing their status as what Sullivan would condescendingly call the "common man". As Sturges intercuts shots of their oversize reactions with footage of a rather ordinary Pluto cartoon, the effect is so incongruous that it seems to make a mockery of Sullivan's simplistic interpretation. Is this the kind of product that Sullivan's Travels is celebrating when it grants its highest valuation to works that provoke laughter?

Fortunately, the film itself represents an eloquent solution to the dialectic by positing a sophisticated synthesis of the two exclusive modes of cinematic possibility. Interestingly enough, the film begins with a false synthesis, stated even before the terms of the dialectic are introduced. After the opening titles, the first sequence depicts a struggle between two men atop a railroad car which seems to establish the film as a typical action picture. Shots are fired, the men try to strangle each other and they eventually push one another off the train and fall into an adjacent river and die. The words "the end" appear on the screen and Sturges' film begins anew, this time in earnest. The first thing we see is Sullivan, who holds the action picture up as a model of the type of movie he wishes to make, offering his own interpretation. "You see the symbolism of it?" he asks. "Capital and labor destroy each other. It teaches a lesson." To which a studio executive aptly replies "who wants to see that kind of stuff?" The mock-film which opens Sturges' picture offers a wholly unsatisfactory synthesis of the two strains of cinema. It takes the crude filmmaking of the mindless genre picture and attempts to grant it a sliver of significance by overlying a crude allegory onto its flimsy framework. The result is a failed attempt to the meld lowbrow entertainment and middlebrow moralizing which exemplifies the worst qualities of each.

Sturges' film, however, is much more successful in its appropriation of multiple cinematic modes and in combining them to produce a film that has plenty to say, but that, unlike the message films Sullivan aspires to make, is anything but simplistic in its discourse. Sturges is equally capable of calling on outright slapstick (as in an early scene in which Sullivan hitches a ride with a lead-footed boy and leads his entourage on a high-speed chase), sophisticated verbal comedy, melodrama and gritty "realism" (the prison scenes) when it suits his purposes, refusing to confine himself, as the Hollywood of the film's diegetic world insists on its directors doing, to one mode of exposition. That these different modes are used in the service of the film's primary concern, an exploration of the possibilities of filmmaking within the Hollywood system, illustrates a remarkable sophistication on Sturges' part. He uses the conventional tools offered the studio filmmaker to question the efficacy of those very tools. Within a single film, Sturges crafts simultaneously a comedy and a message movie, both as effective as the efforts of any other Hollywood filmmaker. The message offered by Sullivan's film, however, is that such generic divisions are ultimately arbitrary conventions and severely inhibit the creative filmmaker. Only a director of Sturges' genius could prove capable of finding his way out of this restrictive dialectic.

At the end of the film, Sullivan decides not to make his epic of the common man and instead return to the light entertainment that had been his trademark, offering a lame argument about the necessity of laughter. Sturges makes sure his hero hasn't learned a thing either about class (in prison, he continually attempts to call on his Hollywood prestige, disdaining to think of himself in the same terms as the other prisoners) or about cinematic priorities (he moves from one term of the dialectic to the other but fails to acknowledge the possibility of a synthesis). What is so unsettling about the film's ending is that Sullivan's final acceptance of the importance of cinematic comedy seems to preclude the necessity of making any other type of film. It is as if to say that the cinema need aim no higher than Hey, Hey in the Hayloft or a Disney one-reeler. Fortunately, the totality of the film we have just watched definitively undermines Sullivan's simplistic understanding of the cinematic project. Where Sullivan failed, Sturges succeeds. He certainly understands the importance of laughter (he is responsible for some of the funniest films ever made), but he is also willing to acknowledge the greater possibilities (as satire, as a tool for interrogating our roles as consumer, as social being, as watcher of cinema) of screen comedy. There is a world of difference between the intelligent, thoughtful comedies Sturges makes and the feeble-minded product that Sullivan turns out. It is this difference and the uses to which Sturges puts it that ultimately account for the film's singular achievement.

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs

Bertrand Blier's riotous 1978 feature Get Out Your Handkerchiefs takes as its central joke the idea that a 13-year old boy can do what two men cannot: satisfy a grown woman. The two men are Raoul (Gérard Depardieu), the woman's husband, a burly, well meaning, but ineffectual petit bourgeois who claims to teach at a driving school but never seems to work at all and Stéphane (Patrick Dewaere), a parody intellectual complete with beard, glasses and a wall full of books (he owns the complete collection of éditions poches but is never seen reading any of them. In another running gag, he continually waxes lyrical about his love of Mozart, but is completely unfamiliar with the work of any other composer). The woman, Solange (Carole Laure), is a grotesque exaggeration of traditional notions of femininity - she is beautiful, nearly silent, completely without opinions, and perpetually engaged in her sole hobby: knitting.

The film, which plays out as subdued farce, begins with a restaurant conversation between a bored Solange and Raoul, discouraged by his inability to make his wife happy (her dissatisfaction manifests itself alternately in an utter indifference to life and a series of minor physical afflictions - fainting spells, headaches - which the film treats as a form of "woman's hysteria"). This dissatisfaction is easily understood (at least by Raoul) as explicitly sexual in nature and finds its clearest physical expression in her inability to get pregnant, a sign for Raoul of his lack of virility. This sexual shortcoming is unacceptable to the husband who takes the extreme measure of picking out a random man from the restaurant (Stéphane) for his wife to sleep with, hoping to achieve a sort of potency by proxy, an arrangement to which Solange is typically indifferent.

The disturbing peculiarity of so readily offering up one's wife for another man's pleasure is evinced in an early scene in which Raoul shows off a sleeping Solange to Stéphane, describing the unsuspecting woman as an angel, the peculiarity furthered by the discrepancy between the descriptor (angel) and the woman's actual function (whore). As in a later scene where Solange is glimpsed naked unawares as she sleeps, the aggression of the male gaze directed on the unwitting female registers as an extreme form of invasion, an invasion that is extrapolated to include the everyday life of the central couple, since Solange's sleeping is really only an extension of her general passivity. Raoul may claim to act with no intention other than to make his wife happy, but as he proudly shows off his sleeping wife for another man's delectation, his violation embodies a hypermasculine attitude which imagines the woman as a bill of goods, able to be transferred at the owner's whim. Blier is canny in how he links this attitude to generalized male fears of sexual inadequacy. The two circumstances really come from the same source, an inability and unwillingness to understand the female sex, an attitude which relegates women to the realm of the mysterious and then, frustrated by this mysteriousness, attempts to reduce them to a more easily malleable form in which this impenetrable personhood becomes a lack of personhood altogether. In the film's first half, Solange obliges by remaining both inscrutable and perpetually passive, but in the second act, she begins to assert a sort of capricious will that proves to be no more comprehensible to the male characters than her initial passivity.

When Stéphane proves as incapable of satisfying Solange as her husband, Blier introduces a fourth character, Christian Beloeil (Riton Liebman), a 13-year old boy, the son of a factory owner in Northern France. The intelligent (he boasts of a 158 IQ), but socially awkward boy not only makes Solange laugh for the first time, but shatters her indifference towards men and, in a final twist, succeeds where Raoul and Stéphane have most shamefully failed, by impregnating the supposedly frigid woman. The film's great joke is that a man so concerned with asserting his sexual potency that he is willing to pimp out his wife is undone by a virginal child who, in contrast to Raoul's burly, masculine appearance, is physically frail and whose long hair stamps him as markedly feminine. That Christian outdoes both men in their alleged areas of strength - he exhibits genuine potency in favor of Raoul's outward virility and offers real intelligence in place of Stéphane's intellectual posturing - only adds to the thorough evisceration of their desperately asserted conceptions of masculinity.

A savage excavation of man's sexual fears, Blier's comedy exposes these fears to an ultimate ridicule as his two male leads end up in jail and humiliated, which the film posits as the logical extension of their misguided efforts to assuage their Freudian anxieties. For the director, man's inability to understand women finds its clearest expression in farce. That the woman, fickle and inscrutable to the end, doesn't come off any better than her male counterparts may grant legitimacy to the men's fears, but it is ultimately they who must suffer for their lack of comprehension.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

It is rather suprising and more than a little depressing to realize how few American directors seem concerned with the way their films look. After self-conscious aesthetes like David Gordon Green and Todd Haynes, the felt absence of a middle-ground of visually attuned directors presents a very real problem for this country's cinema. Even adventurous filmmakers like Todd Solondz seem surprisingly unconcerned with the visual component of their work. So, it comes as no surprise to see critics completely overlook Sidney Lumet's bland and uninspired visual conception in their rush to bestow undeserved accolades on his latest film Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. It seems aesthetics are no longer a critical criterion, as the working reviewer, forced to sit through so many uninspired film products, has become resigned to an unreedmingly drab vision of the world projected onto the screen and has, as if by special agreement, consented to limit his discussion to the other aspects of a given work. After all, the reviewer can't write the same thing every time out. He must develop a certain critical attitude towards mediocrity that allows him to carry out his quotidian task. Yet, when an American film comes along that is even a slight improvement on the commonplace, it is hailed as a masterpiece. Leaving aesthetic considerations aside, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a somewhat absorbing moral drama that falls far short of its epic ambitions. But to suggest that Lumet's latest film is anything more than passable entertainment is to acknowledge the failure of the American cinema by rewarding work that is so far less than the finest the medium is capable of.

The film tells the story of a botched robbery, staged by two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) on their parents' jewelry store, an undertaking that results in the accidental death of their mother, as well as the aftermath of the event, as their insufficiently detailed plans crumble through a series of mounting miscalculations. The film announces its ambitions early on, when the daughter of Ethan Hawke's character acts out the role of Edgar in a high school production of King Lear, a work with which the film seems anxious to draw significant parallels. Apart from the narrative similarities between the film and the play, Lumet here serves notice of his intention to recreate something of Shakespeare's epic achievement. The film aspires to not merely the nihilism of Lear, but to its tragic grandeur as well. The betrayal by one's own children, the central plot pivot of each work is, however, not in itself sufficient to achieve a true sense of the tragic; it is what happens after the betrayal that matters. In Lumet's film, the brothers try desperately to cover their tracks as a series of unexpected complications arise, the most significant of which is their father's discovery that his sons are responsible for their mother's death, a discovery that prompts him towards a filicidal revenge. The problem is that this revenge is neither as shocking nor as devastating as Lumet believes it to be. As the director lingers over the moment, introducing complications to prolong the scene, adding swirling strings to the soundtrack and concluding the scene with a fade out to white, we are asked to view this final action as a gesture of great moral significance, whereas it registers as merely the last in a series of rather absurd complications that follow from the robbery, reminiscent of the similarly absurd entanglements that resulted from the robbery attempt in the director's earlier Dog Day Afternoon. But, whereas in that film, Lumet was able to treat the situation with a certain absurdist humor, here he falters under the weight of his seriousness. The botched robbery is a situation that lends itself far more easily to a comic rather than a tragic treatment and the relative successes of Lumet's two films point up the difficulty of handling such material without a leavening layer of humor (excepting a single scene where an impossibly nervous Ethan Hawke attempts to retrieve a CD he left in a rental car). This is not to say that any material cannot be treated in any number of ways, simply that Lumet's handling of the later film's dramatic unfolding fails to adequately support his larger ambitions.

The film is further hampered by its decision to tell its story non-sequentially, a narrative device that can often add a unique perspective to a work of art, but one that must carry its own justification. Here, the splintered narrative serves only to add a level of suspense to the film, as it forces the viewer to piece together the constituent elements of the plot (presumably this is what some critics meant when they insisted that the film made audiences work), but it would seem to distract from Lumet's true concerns, since the real question the film asks is not what happened, but what significance (or rather lack of significance) can be read into the resultant events. Ultimately, the events are completely meaningless, which is indeed Lumet's point, but this point would be better taken if the narrative was presented unemphatically or set off with a dose of absurdist humor rather than everywhere weighted with a forbidding import. The director's final insistence on the dramatic quality of his material, given ultimate expression in the film's last scene, fails to raise the work to the level of the tragic, but it has the unfortunate consequence of undercutting the director's nihilistic reading of his own film. It is as if he wanted it to have it both ways, to pay lip service to the notion that the world is meaningless and all humanity corrupt, but then to acknowledge a meaning by calling on a conventional attitude to his material that treats the events as constituent elements of a grand modern tragedy freighted with great emotional and moral weight. That King Lear was able to achieve this sense of the tragic in the face of an ultimately meaningless universe is a tribute to the remarkable breadth of vision of Shakespeare's conception. Lumet's attempts to implement something of this contradictory program should not be held against him - after all most directors try for too little - but his inability to fulfill his ambitions combined with his unconcern for his film's visual program mark Before the Devil Knows You're Dead as considerably less than a full-fledged success. That the film is more engaging than the average Hollywood product doesn't make it a masterpiece; it must still be assessed on its own dubious merits.

Winter Light

Winter Light: Rarely has a film been so un-self-conscious in its willingness to debate the problem of God's existence. And yet, by placing its baldly articulated theological discussions at the center of the film, Ingmar Bergman ensures that the work's effect is consciously muted, often leaving the viewer with the impression of sitting in at a colloquium rather than looking at a work of cinema. The film's extraordinary evocation of a barren, isolating world and its unique ability to capture the poignance of ordinary faces in a series of remarkable close-ups, the product of Bergman's keen eye and Sven Nykvist's stark black-and-white photography, establish an apt aesthetic correlative for the film's verbal dialectics, but, at nearly every moment, the work threatens to devolve into little more than a filmed theological roundtable. That it never quite crosses the line into talky abstraction is the result of Bergman's absolute commitment to his material as well the rigors of his aesthetic conception, but this dangerous balance points up the perils of the director's approach.

The film takes as its central problem the silence of God in the face of an increasingly destructive modernity. Forced to confront his own dubious faith when a parishioner brings up the difficulty of belief in a world continually under the threat of nuclear destruction (China's recent announcement of its atomic capabilities standing in for the annihilative instincts of the century), Pastor Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand) outlines the problems of faith in a series of discussions with the disillusioned parishioner (Max von Sydow), an ex-lover (Ingrid Thulin) and a saintly hunchbacked sexton (Allan Edwal), the only character who seems capable of a genuine belief. Unable to reconcile his notion of a benevolent God with a destructive and isolating world (a world made palpable through the film's sparse settings and stark cinematography), Ericsson, at the height of his desolation, articulates a desire to accept the non-existence of God because only then would the world make sense, but he is ultimately as incapable of giving in to this lack of belief as he is of fully accepting the existence of a compassionate deity. Forced to struggle from a middle ground between faith and godlessness, Ericsson's position comes to represent something like the universal state of conflicted modern man.

Most of Bergman's films court a very specific type of danger: the director's tendency to let his weighty dialogue do most of the work. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the visual aesthetics of his films; indeed, he has a strong eye for composition and is especially attuned to the possibilities of expression in the human face. Still, whatever aesthetic achievements his films offer frequently register as little more than a setting for the treatment of the work's true concerns, which are generally conveyed primarily through dialogue. Since the dialogue, for all its seriousness of purpose, is often somewhat less than profound, this creates a genuine problem in the director's aesthetic conception. This problem is certainly one that must be acknowledged in any assessment of Winter Light since, more than most of Bergman's films, it partakes of this dangerous reliance on the spoken word and, ultimately, this reliance is what prevents the film from entering the first rank of the director's work.

Yet, if we evaluate the film within the framework Bergman has created, it offers a number of gratifications: a clearly articulated presentation of the very real spiritual predicament faced by not only outwardly religious figures, but anyone who takes the fate of humanity seriously; a rather stunning evocation of a world stripped bare of adornment and any sense of comfort, with the wide open spaces of the church separating rather than bringing together its parishioners; a series of sharply-defined close-ups that seem to capture the essence of the characters, most famously in an uncut six-minute portrait of Ingrid Thulin, but also in a telling shot of Gunnar Björnstrand that distills the film's essence into one remarkably cinematic image. After Ericsson learns of the death of his conflicted parishioner, Bergman trains the camera on his face, framing him by a window, the screen filled with a neutral white light. Slowly, Nykvist's camera zooms in, coming to a stop as Björnstrand's head nearly fills the screen. The Pastor cries out "My Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?" echoing Christ's famous words, words that will be repeated in a later discussion between the Pastor and his sexton. Having captured Ericsson at the lowest point in his spiritual crisis, Bergman slowly allows the camera to move back from his face, returning to its initial position, isolating the Pastor in a cloud of whiteness. It is this sense of isolation, expressed throughout the film in Bergman's framing, in the wide spaces of the church, in Ericsson's rejection of the possibility of female love, and in the acute spiritual crises of the characters that stands as the inevitable result of the sense of impending catastrophe and the corresponding loss of the ability to believe that afflicts nearly everyone in the director's universe. Only in his conclusion does Bergman offer a measure of hope, but it is his evocation of despair that stays with the viewer. Ultimately, we must take Bergman on his own terms. If we are willing to accept these terms, we are rewarded with a particularly resonant articulation of a uniquely modern sense of crisis that we are able to get from few other filmmakers.

On the Bowery

Lionel Ragosin's extraordinary 1957 film On the Bowery (which screened Saturday evening at the Anthology Film Archives) makes nonsense of the customary distinction between fact and fiction. An uncommonly revealing portrait of a group of alcoholic men living on the streets and flophouses of New York's then-notorious slum, the film overlays a thin narrative structure onto a documentary framework that provides unique access to the intimate details of the Bowery residents' lives. With the exception of the lead actor (Ray Salyer - and his claims to having worked as a professional actor are largely apocryphal), the cast is comprised entirely of real-life Bowery residents who more or less play themselves, but their experiences are given shape by Ragosin's script, which builds chunks of dialogue into coherent speech while retaining the unique verbal mannerisms of the speaker and affixes a sliver of a plot to the proceedings. The film is crafted in such a way that it is difficult to determine where the documentary footage leaves off and the fictional segments begin, but such considerations are largely irrelevant. The fictional framework imposes a structure on the documentary footage, resulting in a unified conception that allows for a more vivid presentation of setting and grants greater potency to Ragosin's singular cinematographic essay than would be possible relying solely on one or the other mode of exposition.

Ultimately, it is the film's masterful evocation of place, a place drawn with exact specificity, that makes the work so compelling. Ragosin gets down an extraordinary amount of detail. In the opening sequence, a montage of quick, fixed images set to a jazzy background, we see a row of men passed out in the midday street beneath the 3rd avenue el, police taking drunks away in a paddy wagon, the signs atop a city block, mostly advertising flophouses. As the camera moves inside a bar and focuses on a specific group of figures, we take in the faces and verbal patterns of the area's inhabitants. Salyer's smooth face and faint Midwestern accent serve as a foil to the well-worn countenances and gruff voices of the other men, the flesh hanging loosely from their faces, the eyes hollowed-out and vacant. The men speak unhurriedly, only occasionally breaking out in a drunken excitement. The words are garbled, heavy with outmoded slang ("plugged nickel"), ultimately unemphatic. The film takes us inside the various destinations of the neighborhood, the flophouses, where men pass the night if they haven't spent their last bit of change on drinks (in which case they sleep on the street), the Mission, which offers free bedding and showers in exchange for enduring an insipid sermon and pledging a commitment to sobriety and, of course, the dives where the men spend most of the day. Although the predicament of these men is by no means an isolated phenomena, the film is very specific in its evocation of place. The segments that detail the Bowery's various locales are composed largely of documentary footage, but there is more to articulating a specific setting than merely running a camera over a carefully selected environment (a lesson lost on many contemporary non-fiction filmmakers). With his unmistakable eye for detail, Ragosin is able to capture images that get to the heart of these settings: men playing dominoes or reading the newspaper in a flophouse lobby, a drunk going to sleep on a tiny flophouse bed, his bottle of whisky set off to the side, men laying newspaper on the Mission floor to sleep on.

What narrative the film contains details the arrival of Salyer, his introduction to the locals, his attempts to get clean at the Mission, his relapse into drunkenness, his getting robbed and his eventual attempt to leave the city, an attempt whose potential for success (the film ends with him waiting for the bus out of town) is called into question by a character's knowing insistence that "he'll be back." By using the narrative device of an outside observer (who becomes a participant), the audience is invited to see the Bowery from a certain objective distance, picking up on the unique details that are too much a part of the other men's lives to warrant comment, but which Salyer inevitably observes. Ragosin is content to milk the narrative for any cinematic usefulness it can provide, but he is equally likely to leave it aside for long stretches of time and focus on footage of the locals going about their daily business. Throughout the film, Ragosin favors fixed shots which allow the scenes to unfold in their own time with a seeming lack of directorial interference. This sense of "documentary objectivity" is of course patently false, since we know most of the dialogue is scripted and the shots are perfectly lit and carefully arranged. In fact, this artifice, so expertly employed, marks Ragosin's film as one of the most beautiful film treatments of so ugly a subject. This beauty doesn't distract from the miserableness of the images, but it allows for a certain appreciation of the men as people, even as they go about their daily humiliations. An extraordinarily vivid portrait of a unique place and time, Ragosin's On the Bowery remains one of the forgotten gems of American cinema.

La Chinoise

Halfway through Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film La Chinoise, a student radical quotes Mao on the necessity of "attacking on two fronts," an address to the artist that demands he pursue both revolutionary content and radical form and an admonition that became something of a mantra to the post-Weekend Godard. In response, another student expresses the impossibility of acting simultaneously, using the example of the difficulty of processing words and music together. In the film's own radical form, it is precisely this simultaneity of comprehension that it asks the viewer to undertake. The film's rapid cutting and constant barrage of information create an unassimilable wealth of content that the viewer cannot process in its entirety. For example, he is often asked to follow a detailed conversation on the interrelations of art and politics or the nature of language, while reading texts printed simultaneously on the screen, requiring committed engagement on both the audio and visual level (or if the viewer cannot understand French and is reading the subtitles, on two visual levels). Often before the viewer can fully process the information, Godard has already cut to the next image, one of a vast visual catalogue that takes in comic books, archival photographs, printed texts and the director's own artfully arranged compositions. Godard's radical form, his attempt to incorporate a vast array of texts (both audio and visual) into his free-form film essay and ask the viewer to process an impossible amount of information represents a break with even the director's earlier work. For all Godard's prior formal innovations, an attentive viewer was always able to assimilate the entirety of his films' content, for no matter how much information was presented, it was never so relentlessly simultaneous. Here Godard melds a more radical aesthetic strategy to his more radical content and challenges the viewer to keep up.

The efficacy of the student radicals in the film is everywhere undercut and yet, Godard shows a certain affection for his characters that results in a surprisingly warm undertaking. Unlike the pure cynicism of his earlier Masculin Feminin where he coolly paints the male radicals as sex-obsessed dilettantes and dismisses the potential for involvement in any of the female characters, La Chinoise allows for the genuineness of feeling that results in a committed engagement, even if it is only temporary. One long scene in particular serves as a deflater to the claims of radicalism made by the students. In the scene (which also provides a respite from the constant barrage of information), Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky) discusses the revolutionary project with her professor (Francis Jeanson, her real life mentor) as they ride on a train through the countryside. Godard has Raoul Coutard fix his camera on the two as they sit facing each other, in a medium shot with the evolving landscape visible through the window between them. As Jeanson sounds Véronique on her program, he exposes a certain naivete on her part, evidenced in a lack of direction in her planning and a dangerous unconcern with the consequences of her actions. Although she is unable to adequately respond to Jeanson's arguments, the commitment with which she espouses her revolutionary rhetoric indicates a genuine belief in her project, a level of conviction that comes across as wholly admirable. When she does finally take action, though, deciding to kill a supposed "reactionary", the scene is played for farce, and represents the film's comic high-water mark, undercutting the seriousness of the radical project. Véronique's ultimate lack of direction is revealed in the film's final scene in which we learn that at the conclusion of the summer holidays she disbanded the Maoist cell and went back to college. The voice-over which has the last word in the picture, though, suggests that, while she may have abandoned her revolutionary program, her flirtation with radicalism still served a valuable purpose in her development, even if it was pursued with a certain youthful aimlessness. In the end, Godard is willing to treat his part-time radicals with a gentle indulgence unavailable to their counterparts in Masculin Feminin, an indulgence that probably results from the (at least temporary) authenticity of feeling with which they approach their radical project.

That the students are playing at being radicals is everywhere emphasized, as Godard stresses the essential theatricality of their performances. In one sequence, a member of the cell (Juliet Beto), dressed as a Vietcong and her face streaked with blood, calls for help as a toy United States Army plane hoisted on a string "attacks" her. They play at education as well, turning their apartment into a makeshift classroom, while they take turns lecturing the others. The slow, even pans that Godard employs in these sequences, which run back and forth between the "teacher" and the "students", emphasize the formal and ritualized elements of the project. In addition, Godard calls constant attention to the fictional nature of his own creation. In one sequence, he stages a mock-interview with Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), one of the radicals who identifies himself as an actor. In the interview, the subject repeatedly emphasizes his vocation as a peformer and seems to be speaking simultaneously as character (Guillaume) and actor (Léaud), the dual role serving to blur the lines between reality and fiction. This blurring is furthered by Godard's decision to interrupt the interview to show Raoul Coutard behind his camera, filming the sequence, and the sound man recording the audio, images that further dispel any pretense of fictional objectivity. Even the consequences of the radicals' actions aren't real. The botched assassination that forms the one instance of narrative intrusion in the film is quickly dismissed, no penalties are extracted, the students free in the end to return to school. This theatricality need not preclude genuine enthusiasm for the project, but it probably rules out a sustained commitment to the cause.

The aesthetic program that Godard employs throughout the picture was the first step towards a new kind of politically-committed filmmaking that he would pursue through the rest of the 1960s and early '70s, his attempt to radicalize both form and content and an approach that resulted in a more extreme experimentation than in the present work. That his commitment was ultimately not much-longer lived than that of the students in La Chinoise hardly matters. What matters is the level of intensity and invention he brought to the project. The result, at least in the present instance, is a radical, challenging and surprisingly warm cinematic creation that employs unique formal strategies for engaging the viewer and stands as a simultaneously maddening and deeply satisfying work of art.

Lust, Caution

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is a slick piece of cinematic entertainment weighted with a significance that derives mostly from its turbulent historical setting, but why such a formula need automatically exclude a satisfying visual program is a question that has too frequently needed to be asked. It has become the function of the "well-crafted film" to smoothly transport viewers from one plot point to the next, taking in the gravity of the subject matter with ample consideration, while ignoring such "lesser" concerns as aesthetics. Writing in 1996, Jonathan Rosenbaum noted, "take Apollo 13, Leaving Las Vegas, Dead Man Walking and six others of this year's Oscar winners, and I doubt you'll find a hint of... aesthetic liftoff anywhere." Lest the reader reject the comparison, noting that the films Rosenbaum cites are Hollywood prestige pictures and Lee's movie is a Chinese-language art-house picture, it should be noted that Lust, Caution, despite its arty trappings and its director's Taiwanese provenance, is every bit as slickly-crafted as any mainstream American picture and every bit as much designed for the viewer's easy delectation, provided that delectation is based on considerations of pacing and historical gravity and doesn't demand a correspondingly gratifying visual conception.

Still, Lee outdoes most of the Hollywood crowd at their own game, which is why Village Voice critic Nathan Lee's poorly-considered objections to the film on the grounds of boredom are especially surprising (he describes the "yawns [being] stifled" in the screening room). The film is deliberately crafted to exclude the possibility of boredom. Every trick in the entertainer's bag is discharged. When the action threatens to drag, Ang Lee brings in the comical antics of an amateur theater troupe turned would-be revolutionary outfit to neutralize the threat of a too immodest insistence on his own seriousness. When a certain setting has served its purpose, Lee smoothly cuts forward several years in time, shuttling his story between Hong Kong and Shanghai and keeping the action fresh and immediate. The film is expertly paced, smoothly modulated and effortless in its shifting between modes of exposition (suspense, high drama, low comedy) and it is in these qualities, rather than in any aesthetic pleasures, that the viewer must look for his sustenance. Ang Lee reminds us in every scene that he is one of the most successful screen entertainers working today.

In her review, Manhola Dargis objects that the film "feels at once overpadded and underdeveloped: it's all production design and not enough content." I suppose it depends on what one means by content. If it's a question of a sharply defined narrative, a specific and clearly evoked historical setting and characters sketched with enough complexity to carry the film convincingly, all arranged into a seamless narrative conception, then Lust, Caution has no shortage of content. If the film lacks the "psychological depth" that Dargis requires and it is, perhaps, a little obtuse on questions of character motivation, we can't fault it too much on those grounds, since the complex psychological portrait is one rarely achieved in the cinematic medium, a medium that requires, at most, a convincing presence on the actor's part that gives the illusion of psychological coherency, but can never hope to capture the complexity of a corresponding treatment in more expansive forms such as the novel. No, film must seek its artistic triumphs elsewhere.

Ultimately, then, the film's weakness is not one of narratological content or characterization, but one of aesthetic conception. Dargis notes the film's heavy emphasis on "production design" and, indeed the settings, whether exterior (the streets of Shanghai and Hong Kong) or interior (the lavishly appointed residences of the film's wealthy characters), seem thoroughly studied, but Lee's unexacting eye for composition renders these settings continually flat and lifeless. In the film's opening sequence, he seems impatient to move his camera as frequently as possible, indulging in a series of lightning quick pans between the constituent elements of his mise-en-scène. Later, he settles down and shows less anxiety to move the camera, but even when he holds it in place, he fails to convincingly frame his images, preferring a drab and seemingly arbitrary scenic arrangement, as if a too artful composition would detract from the insistent demands of the film's plotting. The filming of character interactions hew strictly to shot/reverse-shot conventions and never does Lee seem interested in departing from any of the standard techniques common to the commercial filmmaker. But what is most disappointing is that, even within these conventions, Lee does not know how to properly view his characters within their settings and leaves us instead with a series of uninspired compositions which miss the aesthetic possibilities that the film's content continually opens up.

Much has been made about the film's sex scenes, the series of graphic encounters between Tony Leung and screen newcomer Tang Wei which famously earned the film an NC-17 rating. How, then, do these scenes register with the viewer? They are brutal, impassioned and absolutely essential to the film's program. The film's plot revolves around a young revolutionary, Wong Chia Chi (Wei) who insinuates herself into the household of Mr. Yee (Leung), a brutal and high-ranking member of the Chinese collaborationist government during World War II. By gaining sufficient proximity to Yee's person, an access that can only be obtained by becoming his lover (Yee is notably cautious and never allows himself to be placed at a disadvantage), Wong plans to assassinate the traitorous official. Apart from the important role they play in the unfolding narrative, the scenes drive home the pure physicality of the sex act (particularly in the sadistic touches that Yee brings to the proceedings) and allows the viewer access to the intimacy that Wong is forced to enter into with her victim, an intimacy which ultimately complicates her feelings for Yee and undermines her project. The graphic depiction of sex, in all its contortions, is the only way to successfully illustrate the potency of the act, which has too often been taken for granted as a character motivation in the cinema, while remaining entirely off-screen, relegated to the viewer's imagination. If sex, especially when pursued with such intensity, inevitably alters one's perceptions of the other party, then only by giving ample expression to that act are we made to feel the necessity of such an alteration, most obviously in Wong, but also, to a lesser degree, in the seemingly impassive Mr. Yee. In these scenes, Ang Lee finally comes alive and it is only here that he seems concerned with providing aesthetic satisfaction. If his compositions are still generally uninspired, his choreography makes up for it. These scenes, which don't make their first appearance until roughly two-thirds of the way through the picture, are the only sequences which transcend the pure entertainment of the rest of the work and stand on their own as fully realized set-pieces. If Lee could have brought that sense of cinematic exploration to the rest of the film, he might really have created something worthwhile. As it is, he delivers a slickly-crafted entertainment that only occasionally threatens to become anything more significant.