The Face

On Bergman's First Summary-Masterpiece

Ansiktet [The Face] by Ingmar Bergman, 1958:



In the opening scene, a troupe of wandering charlatans emerges, primordial, from the earth — the images, from the presence of the carriage to its distant traversal across a wide horizon, recall the travelers of The Seventh Seal / An old gypsy woman (Naima Wifstrand) spits on a raven (the group's family surname Vogler suggests fågel, or bird) / The scream that does not register on the soundtrack — a theater of the mind / As Granny paints the picture (Bergman's eminence of language and dialogue-image) — "A fox on two emaciated legs, covered in blood, with its head hanging by a few sinews. A fox with no eyes, and a rotten hole for a mouth." — the head of Albert Vogler (Max von Sydow) enters the frame in close-up, an artificial visage, constructed out of fake beard, ersatz locks, perched top-hat — a first expression, then, of the title, The Face, and all this might imply / (The film has forever circulated in the U.S. on prints and in the recent Criterion release under the less abstract The Magician) / But the title is not only a call to examine Albert's face, or the faces of any characters in particular — it's a signal to take note of the human face in general, both inside the film and beyond it — the phenomenon of the face / The man found in the woods, "Johan Spegel" (the actor is Bengt Ekerot), bears a name which extends this theme — "spegel" the Swedish word for "mirror" / Albert gets in close to better hear the man's murmur, and the two come face-to-face (another apt Bergman title from later in the oeuvre), and with this image a potential fate is suggested for Albert Vogler specifically as for any man / After Spegel calls Albert out on his dummy beard and wig, the two venture to cross a small stream, and when Spegel stumbles it's because Albert — expert framing here by Bergman, ambiguity of action — has tossed him down / Albert is not the passive entity that a first impression might insinuate / And Spegel's facial hair, plotted in haggard patches, is no less a formulation / The 'capital of the state' is some zone on the outskirts of a woods / Kakfa / The troupe has been summoned to a castle, as it were, in the drawing-room of which they are greeted by Consul Egerman (Erland Josephson), while a police commssioner, Starbeck (Toivo Pawlo), and a "medical advisor," minister of health Dr. Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand), hover on standby, each figure armored in wigs and slathered makeup / Surnames which recur — menacingly, by virtue of the fact — from earlier Bergman films: "Egerman," "Vergerus," etc. / Manda Vogler (Ingrid Thulin), Albert's wife, takes cover as a man, named "Aman" (we will learn later on that the couple have assumed these disguises as a means of facilitating their survival as fugitives on the run) / 'Identity' is humored by the observers: "Aman" is a theatrical trope — Aman is not 'realistically' perceived as actually being a boy, any more than Vogler's beard and moustache, once Dr. Vergerus compels him to submit (as though by the 'suggestion' of authority — again, everything here involves a suspension of disbelief) to an up-close "oral" examination, cannot possibly be taken for genuine / Everyone, in their makeup and get-up, is a performer in the comedy / The autopsy that Vergerus wishes upon Vogler in his initial examination, complete with the removal of the eyes (the organs of control — and of the cinema, and of the spectator — the 'see' of the face), will in fact come to pass later in the film / We have the sense of actors exiting a stage as the troupe withdraws from the interrogation and passes into the antechamber, dark as the wings, while on the soundtrack the examiners' laughs resound, bizarre, hollow, echoes inside the soul / When troupe-member Tubal (Åke Fridell) sells chambermaid Sofia Garp (Sif Ruud) the "love potion," he consults with Granny on how to make do given their exhausted supply — the two address one another in 'stage whispers,' the para-diegetic quality of which is accentuated + nullified by the presence of two common chairs placed on top of the table — they converse through the footrests — of course this is very funny to watch, but it also highlights Bergman's visual brilliance and magnificent aptitude for blocking his actors in a manner, with a solution, that is always, always interesting / Love potions, gulped in tandem by trouper Simson (Lars Ekborg) and Sara (Bibi Andersson) are another facilitator, agent, of 'disbelief-suspension,' self-suggestion, pretense, a precursor to the bonbons of Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating / The camera moves and faces come into frame like discrete beats, shocks, a montage without montage / "There's a bird's nest in the window." — omniscience of the Voglers — a second-sight that spreads: Sara looking out of frame in the laundry-room where her tryst with Simson's underway announces that she can see (a framing invisible to us) simultaneously the two men in the kitchen, and the light in Vogler's and Aman's bedroom / The magic lantern, the autobiographical touchstone of Bergman, — the magician the filmmaker, the filmmaker deemed a fraud, not solely out of the artifice of his method (though that too — reality comes into focus at what proximity?) but out of the efficacy of his acknowledged charlatanism, too / Vogler's nails bloodied after digging into his palm — Vogler smashing his head off the table — Vogler striking the back of his skull against a closed door: the terrible limits of the body, of this very physical reality, for the being that thinks and feels / "A shadow of a shadow." / And: "The movement itself is the only truth." / Spegel resurrected in his ragged mockery of a 'magician's top-hat,' returned back to death in a coffin with a seal like a labial slit / Dr. Vergerus to Aman-Manda, as he drunkenly invades her bedroom with the hope of seduction: "Because you represent what I despise most of all: the inexplicable." / "Pretenses, false promises, double-bottoms." / Vogler, a golem (see, later, Fanny and Alexander) / Manda asks Vogler in their bed: "Remember when..." but of course this is more or less a soliloquy, life cannot yet have progressed into this realm of historical, immemorial distance for the young, middle-aged couple; what Manda recounts are episodes, created for the expostulation / The chimes of the clock / The parts of Vogler's disguise which will shift to the corpse of his double, Spegel, for the autopsy carried out by Vergerus, likewise his "V"-twin — Vergerus will not recognize the unidentical anatomy, physiognomy of the decoy, in the same way he didn't recognize the artifice of the beard and wig close-up during the initial examination of "V"-twin Vogler when the two first went face-to-face / How the coffin makes its way up to the attic (this contains Vogler, alive) as the black trunk containing 'Vogler's corpse' (i.e., Spegel) is carried up at the behest of the police commissioner — the move, the swap... a certain suspension of disbelief, or suspension of peering too deeply into the logistics, is required now on the part of the spectator / For in The Face 'real' magic is possible, and in Bergman, trunks possess an eldritch capacity (again see Bergman's second and final 'summary-work,' the prism-work which consciously recalls so many of the earlier films — Fanny and Alexander) / "Please stop the clock." / Vogler can 'be' in two places at once, as he bids A(Man-da) within her own room to lock the door to the attic (where he's already present) / Vergerus to Vogler at the climax of their magickal, virtuoso confrontation in the attic: "You induced a momentary fear of death — nothing more — nothing else." — Yet is that not the sum totality at the cusp of actual death? / "I've never seen you before." "I was in disguise — does that make a difference?" / Personae / And then at the ending, we're graced with one of the great final dialogues in movies (after, of course, the deus ex machina of the happy-end swoops in at whose accord but... the magician's, i.e., Bergman's):

"Gather my apparatus and send them to the palace. But be careful — they're very valuable."

Ansiktet [The Face] by Ingmar Bergman, 1958:







The frames from the film (not 'production-stills') placed above are stolen from various sites around the Internet, as no means of capturing stills from a Blu-ray presently exist on the Mac platform.

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Previous pieces on Ingmar Bergman at Cinemasparagus:

Ingmar Bergman Taught Us Pragmatism Was No Virtue
(On the Death of Ingmar Bergman)

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Le Coup du berger

Brief Look / Effective Debut

Le Coup du berger [Shepherd's Mate / Scholar's Mate] by Jacques Rivette, 1956:



Behold "the night of the third full moon..." — ?... a phrase from Jacques Rivette's earliest surviving/released film, the half-hour-long Le Coup du berger from 1956... a phrase which joins full-circle with the last image that will ever be signed "Rivette," the one at the close of his 2009 small, gentle, precious masterpiece 36 Views of the Pic Saint-Loup / A brief word about the title: "le coup du berger" translates literally as "shepherd's mate," which refers to a particular chess stratagem — I know nothing about chess (despite my love for Nabokov, for Kubrick, but that's the way it goes), I've devoted at least fifteen minutes, three times, to trying to learn the moves and how anyone even wins, but I've forgotten the moves every time and have never been able to make sense of how these moves all add up into a rule-set or a winning move — obviously I'm just not wired for the game — anyway, my understanding is that the "shepherd's mate" is the French term for something referred to as the "scholar's mate" in the U.S. and England and whatever — I learned this years and years back from someone, I can't remember whom, who in any case also struck out the caveat that the translation of the title in English as "Fool's Mate" was a false equivalency based on a misunderstanding of what the specific set of moves was, and he swore that le coup du berger — the shepherd's mate — was in fact equal to the scholar's mate, and not the fool's mate, and if whoever said this was who I think it was I take his word for it / Anyway, the cuckolded husband in the movie, Jean, is played by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (one of the founders of the Cahiers du cinéma... of course the film contains the requisite shot of a yellow Cahiers, laid on a nightstand and sporting a Magnani cover): thus, when we encounter the character portrayed by the same actor in 1971's Out 1 (one of the movies in the diagram I might draw showing the power-relationship among the works I consider the three greatest films ever made), we witness him hunched over a chessboard / Claire [Virginie Vitry] mentions to her husband Jean the ticket she claims to have found by chance... Jean (blankly suspicious of Claire's goings-on) claims to have no interest in the matter... this ticket would unlock the compartment in the station where she and her lover Claude (Jean-Claude Brialy) have 'planted' a fur that Claude has amorously gifted Claire — the idea being, with this ticket announced as merely 'found,' she can retrieve whatever 'turns out to have been left' inside the station-locker — from then on, she'll ostensibly be able to wear the fur around her husband with impunity / As Claire spins the yarn to Jean back in their apartment, his gaze shifts to the wall where hangs a painting built around his wife's body's nudity / Upon retrieval of the fur by the couple, Jean delivers the crushing blow: "A rabbit-skin." / Claire returns to Claude later on to tell him... that the suitcase was empty / And so the camera dollies back in wide long shot as Claire says goodbye to Claude, the long dining room table become an abstract figure, a gameboard / Cut to: — the evening party at Claire's and Jean's — the attendees include Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Robert Lachenay, etc. / Claire's sister (Anne Doat) arrives with the fur / Jean has played the winning move / — Rivette's film deals in admirably clear, 'contiguous' geography of space, despite its character austere and bourgeois, alternating shots held for a long duration with those that only fleetingly show, an effortless and unpretentious shuffle between master-shot and insert / My personal favorite among the film's lengthier shots appears within the party scene, where a young '56 Truffaut, cigar dangling from his mouth in the manner of miston pantomiming grown-up, begins to chuckle, overcome by the camera's presence

Le Coup du berger [Shepherd's Mate / Scholar's Mate] by Jacques Rivette, 1956:



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The frames from the film (not 'production-stills') placed above are stolen from various sites around the Internet; I couldn't get my DVD to correctly rip-for-grab. I'd have liked to present images from the party scene, particularly the image of Truffaut.

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Previous pieces on Jacques Rivette at Cinemasparagus:

L'Amour fou [1968]

La Belle noiseuse [1991]

Jacques Rivette: March 2007

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Bigger Than Life

Unloveable

Bigger Than Life by Nicholas Ray, 1956:



A strong opening replete with classic Nick Ray elements: a tracking shot toward the school, past the seesaw, past the Stars and Stripes / This elementary school does not reside far from the opening of Ray's 1955 Rebel Without a Cause; a more explicitly 'juvenile' locale in Bigger Than Life, but built around strictures not far removed from those of the police station in the previous film — the desks, the corridors, telephones, mahogany / And at a certain rewatch we have to ask ourselves: What are the "extra bills" that this particular teacher, Ed Avery (James Mason), has hanging over his head? — ...he exists in a familial situation not at all unlike those of his fellow colleagues... so...? / He supplements his income working as a dispatcher for the local cab company — he's not even a cabbie — but which is the cushier spot? / And by the way, the amount of business experienced in this workplace would seem to surpass in its degree of frenzy anything that a small town would normally, reasonably, realistically expect / In many ways the world of this film seems tailored, manufactured specifically for Ed Avery, bigger than life, or gross exaggeration of a land and a time in which a purpose might appear for every man? / In reality, or in illusion... / Possibility and want / And when is want "lack" and when is it "need"? / A land and a time in which the suburban American home takes the shape of a Gothic contraption (cf. Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow) / The bizarre modulation between the reason and the logic of Ed Avery's professorial bearing and that of his pedantic 'intellectual' athleticism, the very specimen of Man careening into a wreck of identity / The marvelous scene in which the 'very' x-ray of the Man is measured / "You've always been ten feet tall to me!" / Or Ed in the classroom, prodding his pupils: "Why did Cassius refer to Julius Caesar as 'a colossus'?" / "A cow with five legs?" "It can stand better." / The shopping scene Hitchcock stole for Vertigo the year after / (Again, Ray might have counted among his inspirations for Bigger Than Life the beautiful Sirk tragedy There's Always Tomorrow) / How 'accidental' is the quick glimmer of Nick Ray at the side of the camera as Ed's medicine cabinet mirror swings on its hinge? / All is vanity, or identification / Bigger Than Life examines medicines (of course, the bathroom mirror serves as the perfect symbolic totem of drugs and the man in their grasp) not as the pretense or artificial mechanism for the plot to exist, like a fucking sci-fi film — neither does it shade the proceedings as a cautionary tale re: the horrors of experimental treatment — but rather does so in the context of a means for amplifying the traits that exist on the surface of the specimen already, ranging from vanity to the sense that he, or any of us, 'only have so much time' (so goes the saying, and: literally, in the scope of the fatality countdown of Ed Avery's respective heart-condition), does so in the context of a means for escape from the barricade of one's own routine (note those sad travel posters hanging throughout the house, which Godard will borrow for 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her) / The precariousness of ego... the magical thinking... the fragile construction that is Persona / "Childhood is a congenital disease, and the purpose of education is to cure it!" / Scrutinize Ed's personality before his abuse of the drug cortisone, and contrast it with the 'during' — isn't all the 'archness' only latent? / Once the cortisone has him in its grip is it not too outlandish to repeatedly mishear "Ed" as "id"? / The dye on the edges of the Bible's pages suggest the dislocation of a primal wound, or gash, as Ed goes head-to-head with his wife on the dark staircase of their home / His wife Lou (Barbara Rush, who turns 84 in January) cannot rejoinder theological argument against the proposed sacrifice of Richie (Christopher Olsen, a kind of fetal Rebel-James Dean in his identical red jacket; the staircase the domestic blood-altar in both Ray films), their innocent son, with regard to the murdering parent('s/s') ostensible assumption of all the guilt and damnation circulating the lad / And It's true, hard as it might be for the players to admit, — in this 'married couple,' Ed's the intellectual superior / Yet Lou positions herself before the scissor-blades on the staircase in order to impede the husband's murderous plot / Vertigo blood-visions, Strangers on a Train calliope / Nick Ray detail: Following Ed's hospitalization we see a black janitor mopping up the hospital waiting-room — Richie remarks: "Some people work awful late, don't they?" / This Ray film really dips in and out of Hitchcock, to a more patchwork — or let's say, network-of-testings-out — effect (cf. the entire cortisone 'macguffin', the clinical diagnosis and subsequent explication of the 'pathology') / "It was only Ed's misuse of the drug that brought about this condition." / Prison-cell mise-en-scène in Ed's recovery room, — but who in this menagerie represents the jailer? (the doctors? science? Lou and Richie [cf. the banister/prison-bar trope of the household, which, again, recalls There's Always Tomorrow]? Ed himself?) / One of the most ambiguous of Ray's films, or, we might say, a film that places blame every which way and eradicates the concept / It's got a lame ending, I guess / (I hate when Abe Lincoln's referred to as "ugly") / Outsized themes and their fictional consequences... on-the-nose but beautiful and weird (B. Kite in his brilliant essay that accompanies the Criterion disc cites Ray's best films' "flailings and failings"*) but not bigger than Wuthering Heights or my own life

*You can read Kite's essay here.

Bigger Than Life by Nicholas Ray, 1956:





The frames from the film (not 'production-stills') placed above are stolen from various sites around the Internet, as no means of capturing stills from a Blu-ray presently exist on the Mac platform.

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Previous pieces on Nicholas Ray at Cinemasparagus:

They Live by Night [1948]

In a Lonely Place [1950]

On Dangerous Ground [1952]

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Kagamijishi

Ozu and Theater: 2

Kagamijishi by Yasujirô Ozu, 1936:



The opening narration of Ozu's single documentary/essay, Kagamijishi, characterizes its subject, the legendary kabuki performer Kikugorô Onoe VI, with the following: "His corpulence was a great aide to playing young, ingenuous girls with generous curves." / The film opens with an abstract of kabuki vs. nô, then proceeds to detail in brief some of the actor's famous parts to date (Ozu cuts between stills of the performer and black-and-white presentations of paintings which detail the various roles), in the process glossing the history of the early 20th-century Japanese stage / From there we move on to contemporaneous footage shot by the filmmaker of the "lion dance" (one of many lion dances in the annals of kabuki), the Kagamijishi as it's called — and which I wouldn't know how to translate that well; maybe something like "the little lion with the concussive head" / I do know I've never seen such vigor on the screen / I dreamt of this film at the top of an intermediate slope while skiing at age 14 / Later I dreamt I was trying to explain Budd Boetticher to Paul Krugman / What is the distance of The Triumph of the Will from kabuki? / Life is the sadness of gesture / With kabuki, etc., you must know the story before you attend the performance / Every auteur-movie about theater is superb / Each one is at once more inviting to a popular audience than most of the other films in the directors' oeuvres while displaying glimmers, as by revealing the flip-side of a fan in quick snaps, the most obscure technique / Constantly Kagamijishi exemplifies mise-en-scène / The tree-decor whacked by the lion's mane shall sway / The dynamism of a late-night talk-show set / The curtain drops, one is speechless and thoughtless / At the close of what is possibly the most serious of all the movies by Yasujirô Ozu

Kagamijishi by Yasujirô Ozu, 1936:








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Previous pieces on Ozu at Cinemasparagus:

A Straightforward Brat

Friends Fighting Japanese-Style

Tokyo Chorus

A Picture-Book for Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But...

Where Have the Dreams of Youth All Gone?

Passing Fancy

A Tale of Floating Weeds

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A Tale of Floating Weeds

Ozu and Theater: 1

Ukigusa monogatari [A Tale of Floating Weeds] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1934:



For the first time in Ozu's cinema: the burlap swathe backgrounds the title credits / For a repeat: "Kihachi" gets reused (from Passing Fancy) as the name for Takeshi Sakamoto's character / Ukigusa monogatari — in English, A Tale of Floating Weeds, released by Criterion on a fine DVD and perhaps distributed via English-subtitled prints as A Story of Floating Weeds... this might be taken as an academic quibble, monogatari [tale] vs. den [story], but each word carries different 'notes' in English as in Japanese... (for example, it's a bit strange, I think, even though it's perpetuated in innocence, that Tôkyô monogatari has always been known as Tokyo Story rather than A Tale of Tokyo...................) / Now let's talk about moxa treatments / I love when films from the '30s or '40s depict medicinal applications which therapeutically lacerate the subject's back, whether the picture be A Tale of Floating Weeds or Clouzot's Le Corbeau / Everything finely tactile in a film, especially the laying of hands on an actor's shoulder-blades, relays vicarious comfort / (Digression: Maybe the most tactile film ever made, and one of the greatest feature debuts, is Martel's La ciénaga) / I'll lightly dip in and out of A Tale of Floating Weeds here, — it's the Ozu film which, for no good reason, 'practically speaking,' I've 'lived with' the most, possibly because for the longest time it was the earliest of his pictures I had access to, and so I felt if I could really internalize this one... to tell the truth I don't remember what I was thinking, I don't know why it was important... I know it can't hurt to watch an excellent film by any great director multiple multiple times over the years, it almost doesn't matter which movie / Mark of the Vampire, La ricotta, or Séance / These days I sort of see this film from a distance / Maybe it's Sakamoto / I'd like to show it to a new audience, explain that every auteur-movie about theater is superb / If the entire work doesn't spring back into focus for me then, I'll look at it fondly still, and there's always Ozu's 1959 color remake titled simply Ukigusa [Floating Weeds], one of the most beautiful color films ever made, and starring the sublime Machiko Kyô, who turns 87 in March / The source of the "floating weeds" in the early film's title: the fishing scene featuring Kihachi, the leader of the itinerant acting-troupe, and his son Shinkichi (Kôji/Hideo Mitsui) — in which their lines are repeatedly, synchronously cast — graceful and eloquent expression of the flow of all things, time included / Kihachi's troupe has rolled back into the town where his son lives, still raised by his mother; his father's identity has always remained unknown, and Shinkichi has known Kihachi solely as an 'uncle,' a 'family-friend,' a father figure... this so that the boy would formulate goals unsullied by the blood-association, direct himself toward aspirations elevated beyond a life as a begging trouper / But 'honor' takes its leap of faith in either scenario, makes its sacrifice / Who's to say whether this ever would have mattered for the boy / The truth is Kihachi felt the 'call of the road' / And the link between father and son might be as tangible as the fishing line but it too disappears beneath the flow / Otaka (Rieko Yagumo, of Mizoguchi's films), a level below in the company's hierarchy, and an unspoken 'wife' of Kihachi, invades the family's home (which doubles as a restaurant) as jealousy takes hold and suspicion percolates; she drops her cigarette casually to the floor: "Thank you for taking care of the master every day." / Kihachi shoves her out of the establishment — cut: close-up of Otaka with her palm to her face — she's been slapped / Otaka asks fellow-trouper Otoki (Yoshiko Tsubouchi) to seduce the son: cut to a pillow shot of a pail and some dice / Otoki waits by the tree, flags blowing in the breeze, as the boys ride past on bicycles — she waits for him in the same place after the show — a good student-boy finds his libido, seduced away from work for frolic with a transient actress, in unwitting defiance of Kihachi's nebulous vision / Backstage: dangling Edison bulbs, newspaper advertisements clipped to which enhance the ambiance / (......Love blossoms because if it didn't, that would be false; Otoki pleads: "Don't get mixed up with a traveling player like me." — cut to: shot of Shinkichi's parked bicycle [image of the boy's respite taken in the company of the actress] in the foreground, while deeper in the frame, in focus, Otoki walks away from Shinkichi — cut to: shot of Shinkichi's face — cut to: the counter-shot, Otoki balancing-walking on the train rail... — terrific elegance, the work of a master; and a drama based on the gaze upon events, life incessantly positioning its constituents in the role of audience.......) / Slowly, without sentience, petals flutter down from the exposed rafters which have been letting in the rain / Otaka: "He's cheap, like you, playing around with actresses." — a profession slightly above Whore — all these false roles played like prostitution / At this pronouncement Kihachi strikes Otaka again, petals spiraling to the floorboards — and now we see the blow — and she raises her hand to her face in the same position as earlier (as did Otoki after Kihachi slapped her upon her arrival at the theater from saying goodbye to Shinkichi) / Mise-en-scène: making things happen in the frame, and making the frame happen / Later, nearly bankrupt, the troupe sits and watches the appraisal of their inventory / The appraiser in disgust tosses the dog costume of Tomibô (the great Tomio Aoki) aside after smelling the shit-stink near the tail / This scene is followed by a devastating shot of the strewn accumulations — the dog's mask, etc. — upon the appraiser's estimate and offer / It's all worth a pittance / "Like father, like son — so fast with the girls." / There's hitting in silent Ozu which there isn't in talkie Ozu, action, and melodrama / Shinkichi raises his left hand to his left cheek, always the target for Kihachi's right-handed swing / There's a resolution of sorts / And as Kihachi and Otoka depart for a new future on the train in the night, nothing can be certain / 'Makeshift families' — implying 'somehow you make it work' / Only it might not work

Ukigusa monogatari [A Tale of Floating Weeds] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1934:













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Previous pieces on Ozu at Cinemasparagus:

A Straightforward Brat

Friends Fighting Japanese-Style

Tokyo Chorus

A Picture-Book for Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But...

Where Have the Dreams of Youth All Gone?

Passing Fancy

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Nightfall

Chance Operations?

Nightfall by Jacques Tourneur, 1957:



Jacques Tourneur invented the "bus shot" in his and Val Lewton's Cat People: during a scene already teetering on the edge of infarction a bus careens suddenly into frame to pick up waiting passengers — a quotidian detail reconfigured as a mechanism for delivering a shock — is the Cat People bus shot an exploitative device conceived outside the world of the film, its sole purpose a jolt against the audience slammed deus ex machina-style on the part of the director, or is it something more interesting: its sudden impact, unexpected blast, a too-natural phenomenon in a supernatural world? / A bus shot of sorts occurs in Nightfall within the first five minutes of the picture, as a bus nearly smashes the physical camera apparatus that's in the process of tracking backward at the moment the bus enters frame / But what is 'the world' at this early moment of the film? / The modern world? / No discernible source of tension yet — except Tension itself / A series of dissociations permeate Nightfall / No discernible source of tension yet — except an author / Or: some presence-'off' / Let's come back to this shortly / For now draw attention to Anne Bancroft at her most beautiful ever / To the smile made of the lovely imperfect teeth that could tear off a man's collar / She convinces me less in her sympathetic moments / But, again, we'll come back to this / "Mind if I just look?" "See anything familiar?" "Familiar looks very different." / ....For the time being: When the tension discovers a reasonable origin — the two heavies (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) who confront Jim Vanning (aka "Art," played by Aldo Ray) — another vehicle almost smashes into the camera head-on / We should now begin to ask ourselves why must this camera die? / And the movie keeps moving / It becomes The 39 Steps / Kill the lights / It becomes The Killers (Siodmak) / Menacing, hunting duo / It becomes The Big Heat before the car-bomb / Domestic tranquility for Ben Fraser (played by James Gregory), the insurance investigator trailing Vanning, and Mrs. Fraser played by Marlon Brando's sister Jocelyn / Their household is a vision of peace, twinned with the opening encounter between Vanning and Marie Gardner (Bancroft), two alone who come together, as 'the promise' (INLAND EMPIRE) / "Do I look like a married man?" / (The tenderness and vulnerability between damaged souls: the five-dollar bill, the vodka, the warm martini, the way Bancroft crumbles and clutches her bills, the "No girl ever has.") / Two worlds / The shadow-self / The shadow-man / A man is trailed by his opposite / A man is trailed by his demons / Nightfall is a film that has little to do with literal night; its landscapes, which are psychoscapes, figure largely as day-for-night exteriors, apartments brightly lit at 3am, snow decked pastures in Wyoming, over-exposing, sunlight-terrible, like the scene in the woodland gorge in Build My Gallows High (Tourneur's preferred title for Out of the Past) / Nightfall is the overlap-oeuvre for the worldviews of Tourneur and Lewton, with the title that might have been used by the latter for a magnum opus / Chance presides in Nightfall — the manner in which destiny is built on a foundation formed of the slimmest probabilities which nevertheless come to pass: (1) Stumbling into these robber-killers in the wilderness, who will hunt Vanning for weeks after... (2) Sitting down next to Marie / Anne Bancroft in that bar... (3) Doc's bag looking just like the one that holds the loot... (4) Doc's young wife happened to write Vanning indiscrete letters, which in hindsight might implicate him in her husband's murder... / And then beyond 'chance,' there's the fabricated coincidence: that Ben Fraser, the man Vanning met at the beginning of the film, should also be aboard the same bus, on his way to Butte, Montana as Vanning and Marie are en route to the scene of the crime in Moose, Wyoming / And the elements that don't 'fit together': the Al Hibbler theme song placed across the opening credits; the 'mystical' arrivals across space and time of the killers; Bancroft's sympathy, empathy, her niceness, her innocence, that contrasts with her position and disposition in her first minute onscreen, contraindicate the rapacious qualities of her gaze and jaw... most people in life are not even 'nice,' let alone open to a proposal of marriage after two days; the uncharacteristically humid (for LA), strangely nocturnal heat remarked upon in the opening sequence but which seemingly plays no dramaturgic purpose — rather, serves to 'negative' the Wyoming cold and white of the wilderness — in other words, a purity that embodies its opposite / Its shadow / For the world of Nightfall is a dream-world / Where immaterial desires take shape / Where movie-residue resonates / Where fears walk (pursuers, near-accidents, and accidents that come to pass though one somehow survives to cut/warp to a subsequent moment) / Where interior Fantasy and unfulfilled Wish, the presence-'off' of the subconscious, govern / The inland empire that no camera can film / And Nightfall is one story of that kingdom, of and by the interior author / The Man of Dreams cannot trust the material world / Oil-derricks are killing him / Buses are killing him / Auto-grilles are killing him / Snow-tractors are killing him / Smashing up bodies / Machines want the camera to die / Prosperity, love, tenderness / The world around us wants these in ruin / We are never truly alone / We walk with fear or desire / The other side of the mirror / Our fantasy-world / Our impulse-world / At the end of the movie the killing pair show-down as in a mirror — even the doppelgänger has a shadow-self / Which itself has an impulse / The positive and the negative — as in the last image of the film, the black bag of money laid on the snow, an abstract lump and a blot on the Field of Vision / "Every night I got that much closer to tomorrow my chances got that much better." / "Things that rarely happen are always difficult to explain." / Nightfall, in the sense of 'snowfall' / Like a prayer

Nightfall by Jacques Tourneur, 1957:









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Quadrille

Based on a True Story (la vie)

Quadrille by Sacha Guitry, 1938:



Let's come right out and state the obvious: Delubac was a Rohmer actress avant la lettre / And what more is there to say about this film in which every line of dialogue rings so absolute that all commentary would seem verbiage, superfluous / Guitry's Quadrille is just another masterpiece / The author plays Philippe de Morannes, editor-in-chief of the daily Paris-Soir; his long-time girlfriend Paulette Nanteuil (the exquisite Gaby Morlay, a Perfect Woman 'of middle-age,' a gestural dynamo, sexual catastrophe, brows plucked into resembling hedgehog spines or a broken promise to Emil Jannings' face in Faust, — she doesn't know the difference between a truth and a lie and I think she'd bring a soupçon of drama to any loved one's deathbed, in the process charm the pants off every witness to the scene; — to speak axiomatically is to affirm Quadrille as her most potent, most erotic performance)... Philippe's Paulette gives up her flesh and a pound of her heart to Hollywood star Carl Herickson (George Grey speaking witness-protection English) during the lothario's whirlwind Paris publicity tour; Philippe and Paulette showdown / These elements more or less comprise the main course in what Andy Rector calls Guitry's banquet / Events followed by the requisite suicide attempt on the part of la signora di tutti which in turn sets the stage for a happy ending (ah, Guitry!) that prefigures ABC's Batman series by twenty-eight years / And then there's the mix-up of letters... — cf. Une femme est une femme and Montparnasse-Levallois by Jean-Luc Godard, who starred in Jacques Rivette's lost 40-minute 1950 film Le Quadrille / "Men don't cheat on their mistresses." / "In your happiness you don't consider yourself unfaithful, whereas I've been cuckolded." / The scene where Guitry walks in on Paulette, confronting her the morning after the tryst and forcing her to explain herself... breathtaking, toxic, astonishing... the scene a great career builds toward, with no equivalent in movies... flaying the truth of the matter / The closest thing (closest and other) is Bergman or Cassavetes / There is no 180-degree rule / The psychography of career-actresses / From the point at the 37-minute mark where this confrontation, Philippe's disquisitions, commence... Guitry settling in with body and breath... till an hour and a minute... there's nothing that can be adequately written about this... / Why write it / Watch it / — "My Philippe, I love you!" "Easy for you to say." "Yes, because it's true!" "Yes, it seems you see no contradiction."

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Quadrille by Sacha Guitry, 1938:












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Previous pieces on Guitry at Cinemasparagus:

The Pearls of the Crown [1937]

Dé-si-ré! [1937]

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Cruel, Cruel Love

"You Can See the End from Here"

Cruel, Cruel Love by George Nichols, 1914:



What's the opposite of "Tramp"? (WWI-era) — Chaplin of Making a Living? Tango Tangles? / ......Time passes, more and more characters resemble Burt Lancaster in The Leopard / Cruel, Cruel Love starts out like the closet scene in Blue Velvet but with all the genders swapped / A mirror structured by two voyeurs / A single roll of Chaplin's shoulders could be considered the '14 equivalent of an Alec Sulkin tweet / Sets that precursor The Jerry Lewis Show / Once, all professional men looked like Strindberg / The fantasy devil-sequence, the dynamics of the close-ups (with Chaplin's facial acrobatics), and the backward tracking (driving) shot of a charging wagon make this George Nichols's most audacious Chaplin one-reeler to date / The one with death-throes that make the sitting public throw its arms wide, keep coming back every time / Talent — — is — — Talent

Cruel, Cruel Love by George Nichols, 1914:









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Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:

Making a Living [Lehrman, 1914] / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. [Lehrman, 1914] / Mabel's Strange Predicament [Normand, 1914] / Between Showers [Lehrman, 1914] / A Film Johnnie [George Nichols, 1914] / Tango Tangles [Sennett, 1914] / His Favorite Pastime [George Nichols, 1914]

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