Took in Jacques Demy’s debut film Lola (1961) t’other night, mostly with grimacing disaffection, although I enjoyed the local color of Nantes, the baroque architecture, the dazzling washes of light, Anouk Aimée’s eyes, equally dazzling… She’s one of my favorite Fellini gals, as a matter of fact, and frankly much better served by him. He groks her beauty as Jacques Demy apparently can’t… I felt like Demy was cramming her into this script, and it didn’t sit well. (Not that her vitality or raw sex appeal were in any way unwelcome in my particular living room.) Must be said, however, the film’s ahead of its time: her suitor is an incel 40 years before incels were even a thing! And I won’t judge Demy too harshly based on this evident juvenilia. (Pretty sure this guy was Agnes Varda’s husband, and she’s on another level, I’ve seen two so far—mindblowing—I’ll be spacing her films out like I’m doing with Bergman and Fellini. And Godard. I feel like I should have watched all these people in my youth, what was wrong with me? Actually, I watched plenty back then, just didn’t fucking get it. Thank you, Criterion Collection, for bringing it all back home….)

But Lola’s not the movie I was going to write about; just giving it a mention. I actually started on Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales last night, and I gotta say, it’s a fascinating journey so far through the minds of randy PUAs (Pick-Up Artists) before that was even a thing! Granted, I’ve only seen the first three as of yet, but I strongly suspect the last three won’t disappoint in this regard…. There’s a kind of analytic fervor to both the scriptwriting and the filmic technique, a desire to impose a rational, deterministic scheme on probabilistic events; even as the world throws its curveballs, the key to preserving “morality” (and thus, comfy bourgeois self-entitlement) is to get down to BUSINESS and keep your eye on the ball! You MUST create and preserve Order at all costs. If temptation distracts you briefly, don’t beat yourself up, just toss that hot temptress back into the ditch she crawled out of, and get yourself back to the BUSINESS of transforming life from an organic Process to a mechanical System. Something along those lines, but I’ll revise it as necessary. Will the last three prove me wrong? Honestly, I fucking hope so. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving these films.)

1. The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1961) is only 20 minutes, and it’s hilarious. The protag develops a crush on a woman he passes every day in the street and works up his courage to approach her, lucks out with a sincere improvisation in which he flexes all of his PUA skills and manages to persuade her to let him ask her out next time he sees her. Of course, after that, he never sees her—he takes to haunting the streets at the dinner hour, fingers crossed they’ll cross paths… and being hungry, he ends up snacking on pastries from the corner boulangerie. This becomes his daily routine. Scene after scene of him standing in the street stuffing cookies and sticky gateaux in his mouth while longing for sexual consummation—just cracks me the fuck up! Frustrated by his failure with the original girl, he lays the mack down on the counter girl at the bakery, and she reluctantly agrees to go out with him after much hemming and hawing…. but then the original girl shows up, after all—she had broken her foot—and he simply ghosts the bakery girl, figuring that was the “moral” thing to do, since she wasn’t really the one he’d wanted to begin with. You’ve gotta stick with The Plan.

2. Suzanne’s Career (1963), as a title, neatly sums up the business of being a woman in a marketplace of love. You interview for the position of girlfriend, and if you measure up to the arbitrary standards of the hiring manager, he onboards and integrates you into the corporate culture of his gonads; over time, whether or not you’re a “good fit” for those gonads becomes evident, and you either stay on to advance further in the organization, or you’re shown the door to make your way through the cruel world eventually into the offices of some other business that happens to be hiring, rinse and repeat. Suzanne exemplifies the humility of the applicant, while Guillaume represents the whimsical, self-regarding narcissism of the hiring manager, and Bertrand observes and participates in their antics with a measure of scorn for what he sees, especially in Suzanne’s self-abnegation, but he comes around by the end when he discovers that not only has Suzanne survived this process intact, but succeeded in establishing a steady, stable relationship for herself with a pretty decent fella, while his own love life is pretty much the same shitty mess it’s always been. His big epiphany amounts to: Wow, I thought she was worthless, but turns out she knows this game better than me.

3. My Night at Maud’s (1969) gives us Jean-Louis, soi-disant “Catholic Engineer.” He studies mathematics and probabilities and appears to base his life decisions on Pascal’s Wager, which posits that the chance of God’s existence, however small, warrants betting the farm and believing every word of the Dogma, since the reward (if it’s true) is infinite. Kinda like the lottery, gotta play to win! Heeeey… you never know! It could happen to YOU! You gonna let that cigarillo-chomping mouthbreather ahead of you in line at the corner shop have a legitimate, statistically supported shot at the Dream, but not yourself? Fuck no, buy the ticket, yo, just keep it on the DL from your homies, they won’t let you forget what a hypocrite sounds like… Where was I? Mais oui, Mssr. Catholique, via chance encounter, spends the night with a splendidly sexy divorcée (Maud), but thinks pure thoughts and longs for the blonde he hasn’t even properly met yet (he caught sight of her in profile at Mass last Sunday morning and then pursued her sweet bicycling posterior in his car until la Justice of snarled traffic intervened to derail his righteous quest to become her new bicycle seat), and indeed manages to preserve his vaunted chastity in the face of, yes, stiff temptation. Oh, the trials and tribulations of l’homme moral! Fully revved by the unconsummated night at Maud’s, he PUAs the girl of his rêves in the street (again, on the basis of Pascal’s Wager) and manages to spend the night at her place, too! (In both instances, his excuse is the weather: a snowstorm, a.k.a. probabilistic event.) Again, an entirely chaste evening, but this time he’s in it to win it—and win it he does! I mean, er, win her he does. Her! Sires a child on the new possession and five years later runs into Maud at the beach, spazzes a bit at the recollection of his sublimated sizzle for this fallen hussy, this temptress of worldly delights whom he so manfully resisted at his weakest moment, but thoroughly enjoys the spiritual cat fight that erupts betwixt her and la femme-trophée as they pad past each other in the sand.

One of the techniques I love in this film is the insistence on showing one person in a conversation without cutting back and forth for reactions. We hear the interlocutor off-screen while mercilessly revealing every smallest gesture and micro-expression of the camera’s subject. Each character receives this treatment in turn; there’s no favoritism. The choice of who to present in a given conversation seems to depend on who’s most likely to be squirming. It requires the actor to truly inhabit the character, to vocalize lines, but also to listen to lines, to demonstrate comprehension and thought-formulation in the muscles of the face, often for several minutes at a time. Just one false move would ruin the take. Something of a tightrope, and I would call it bravura filmmaking.

[ 7-22-22 ]

4. La collectionneuse (1967) is the first of these Moral Tales that I simply found distasteful. None of the characters have any charisma or appeal. The previous films give us characters who, regardless of how unpleasant their behavior may seem, at least appear to harbor within themselves SOME modicum of conscientiousness towards others. Whereas, in this film, I feel like I’m watching sociopaths.

If I’m being generous, the film’s ostensible purpose seems to be to demonstrate the tyranny of solipsism in male-female relations. Our hero Adrien simply cannot imagine that Haydée—who looks maybe 19 and not even glancingly interested in him—is not spending every minute of her time scheming to acquire him for her “collection,” which is defined as the set of all men whom she has taken to bed. Although he clearly wishes to count himself among them, he doesn’t want to have been successfully “collected”; rather, he wants to be the one who “collects” HER. (And then discards, sans doute.)

Of course, his reasoning that she is a collector of men relies solely on the observation that she is sexually liberated and unabashedly active in that lifestyle. It also depends on his reluctant (but ineluctable) attraction to her, which places him in an undeniably submissive posture, a power hierarchy he cannot tolerate. He, after all, has to be on top! He has created a mythology around himself that he is infinitely desirable to women, thus positioned above them in a sexual caste system visible only to him, and so he must be the monarch of his relationships: this is the natural order, and anything else would be an insult to pride and self-respect. Indeed, pride, we must infer, is the basis of morality, for he constantly refers to “morality” as the justification for his endless barrage of cruel, demeaning tactics against this poor girl, when it is clear he simply wants the upper hand and resents her bitterly for her refusal to submit to his domination. It seems to be the habit of the characters in these Moral Tales to fetishize morality as the guiding principle of behaviors that are actually arbitrary and even animalistic—anything BUT moral. Adrien, in the voice-over narration, is relentless in justifying his actions as consequences of adherence to a code of moral conduct, when we can see clearly that he is just horny. (Sort of like how Don Rickles pretends he’s defending the morality of election integrity, when really he just wants that sweet, sweet immunity from criminal prosecution afforded to anyone who sits behind the Magic Desk in the White House. Funny how that is.)

Pretty dismal film, all over. This one’s in color and has that drab, jaundiced palette you often see in 60s films. It is well filmed, anyway, and I did enjoy the languorous narrative tone—envied the vacation vibes… maybe I’ll take one of those, someday? As for the choice to use color film, maybe Rohmer wanted to show how tanned and perfect the bodies were? Frankly, I think I would’ve tolerated the horrid characters much better if the film had been in black and white. There would’ve been a more innocent beauty to their bodies (the shape and sheen) that would have redeemed, somewhat, the ugliness of their souls. Instead, they look like they’re posing for a perfume ad in EVERY scene. Hard to take them seriously….

Yeah, so… the first strikeout in this series. Can’t win ’em all!

[7-23-22] Back here the next day to wonder why I reacted so strongly against this particular film. Somehow, I saw the humor in the first three, whereas this one felt like a grim slog through lives of nitwits. Objectively, now… was it? Or did I have some personal, emotional response that caused me to unfairly malign this piece of art? I’ll have to reserve judgment, methinks, until I’ve completed the Moral Tales…. There’re only two films left in the series, I’ll certainly get to them pretty soon, but they’re both in color, like this one, which makes me nervous…. In any case, let’s see how those play out, and if it seems necessary, I could revisit this one at some later moment… you know… in tranquility.

[7-26-22]

5. I’m happy to say Claire’s Knee (1970) seduced me back into the wicked embrace of les contes moraux. I think perhaps La collectionneuse suffered from excessive vapidity in the characters. They were such empty husks of human beings, there was no way to engage their adventures with any degree of empathy; mostly what you felt was contempt. In Claire’s Knee, it must be said, Claire and her boyfriend Gilles do fit in that mold and could easily have been transplanted over to La collectionneuse without even noticing the change of scenery; if the movie had been about them, it would have been dreadful indeed! Fortunately, their roles in this film are almost incidental. The main three characters are Jerome, Laura, and Aurora (a name that, amusingly, seems to induce epilepsy in French tongues), and they are all delightful (and charmingly scandalous) in their own ways. Which is such a relief—I was rather apprehensive after that last one!

What we’re looking at here is a loose modernization of that prototypical French roman scandaleux Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Believe it or not, I read that novel back in college (not for a class or anything… but that would’ve been cool!), and I even managed to summon up most of the author’s name just now before resorting to Google to give me “Pierre,” which I never would have gotten. And of course, there’s a great 80s film adaptation… a couple of them come to think of it. Stephen Frears did Dangerous Liaisons, and Milos Forman did Valmont. Holy shit, I’m on a roll! I’m going to look those up to save potential embarrassment, however…. Vindicated. I seem to recall the Frears was better than the Forman, but face it, I was a teenager when I saw these movies, so it’s plausible I was full of shit. Probably not going to test that theory out anytime soon, though… Preferable to continue in ignorance of my adolescent shittiness.

The point being we have a couple of diabolical schemers collaborating to lave their corruption in the refreshing spray of girlish innocence. Aurora is a writer looking for material and has taken the ethically dubious step of creating mischief in the real world so that she can observe and record the ensuing mayhem in her novels, becoming like as unto a Goddess in our sublunar realm. In this case, she encourages her old friend Jerome, with whom she has been unexpectedly reunited during a July holiday, to seduce Laura, the lively, burgeoning 16-year old daughter of her host. Aurora is cheerfully evil, smiling blandly through every obscene suggestion she makes as if it were perfectly reasonable for a man (such as Jerome) planning to be married inside of 6 weeks to pursue carnal pleasures with a minor. He goes along with it because he is so laid back and easy-going, but mainly, we suspect, because the ripe young fruit being set before him is so enticing.

His pursuit of Laura fizzles due to her intelligence and self-awareness—her perspicacity in seeing through his act. She comes to understand that her attraction to him stems not from sexual heat, but rather from filial affection; she had confused her desire for a father figure (her own father being deceased) for lust. A practical man, perceiving he won’t succeed with her, Jerome’s lechery immediately transfers to Claire, Laura’s stepsister, in the form of an erotic obsession with her knee, which he longs to touch after seeing it pressed against a ladder. Intriguingly, Laura is present and witnesses his witness of the holy knee, but we are not given access to her impression of the scene. Did she perceive the dirty layers of his perversion in that moment? Or did her innocence protect her from understanding?

He even describes all of this to Aurora, who suggests baldly that the only cure for his predicament is to touch the knee. And he manages to arrange a situation in which the act can be performed: isolate Claire, mangle her emotions until she breaks down into tears, and then “comfort” her by massaging the knee. The caress of the knee is the victory of analysis over innocence. She accepts his caress at face value despite its clear disingenuous intent, which subtly defiles her in his eyes and removes her from the category of innocence, thus sating his appetite for corruption and resolving his desire for her. He is now free to return to his fiancée with a clear conscience.

I will say, although I’ve disparaged her relentlessly here, I actually came to admire Claire in the end for defying Jerome’s nasty bit of emotional sabatoge. He incites her tears by maligning her boyfriend’s fidelity. The final scene of the film depicts her and Gilles (the boyfriend) in conversation (with ever-nasty Aurora eavesdropping from her balcony!), the gist of which conveys both his innocence of the charge and her acceptance of his explanations. We sense that they are not in danger of breaking up over this injustice, and that is something of a relief.

[7-27-22]

6. Love in the Afternoon (1972), or shall we call it by its French title L’amour, l’après-midi to distinguish it from the Billy Wilder film of the same name? I saw someone online call it Chloé in the Afternoon, which is intriguing, but I don’t know where they got that from…. Whatever it’s called, I LOVED it right up till the end when it walked off a cliff. What the fuck.

I’m sure I’d be disputed by anyone who heard me say it—which my site’s visitor statistics (or lack thereof) reassure me won’t ever happen—but I got some serious Eyes Wide Shut vibes from this film, right from the start. One of the first shots gives us Frédéric’s wife Hélène performing ablutions in da buff, full length from behind (interesting contrast with one of the final shots of Chloé in da buff, full length from behind… both women are gorgeous, but I’ve just gotta give it to Chloé); a nearly identical shot of Nicole Kidman opens Eyes Wide Shut. Like Tom Cruise, Frédéric spends his days at work bored out of his mind because the modern world is a fucking soulless machine within which humans must struggle on a daily basis to survive as organic, loving, principled, ecstatic creatures of infinite spiritual dimension. Frédéric must abandon his wife and children every single day in order to “make a living” and maintain a respectable “bourgeoise lifestyle.” Meanwhile, his wife, also working, must abandon her children to a nanny, a stranger in the household whose only function is to be the mother to her children that she’s not allowed to be. The modern family is thus demonstrated to be a monstrous deformation of what human beings actually need and desire. Any wonder that these people are so fucking unhappy? Ha ha!

I think this last moral tale is the first to feature a married protagonist. He spends the movie falling in love with Chloé, and it’s a wonderful relationship. I really enjoyed experiencing their development as friends. He is put off by her, at first, and there is quite a bit of friction in their chemistry, but you feel, underneath it, the genuine mutual esteem. Each of these people sincerely cares for the other. And it’s not as if he doesn’t love his wife; he does, I believe him, but he also protests a bit too much. Probably because he feels guilty about his ever-expanding affection for Chloé, spending all that time with her in the afternoons (which otherwise, he avers early in one of the numerous voice-over narrations, are so dreadfully dull and oppressive), and feeling so natural with her, so comfortable and relaxed.

Of course, she wants more; why would a beautiful young woman spend so much time with a man? It’s not like he’s gay, after all. He’s married, but that’s no impediment; this is France we’re talking about. She tells him straight up, she wants his baby. She’ll raise it on her own. How trés moderne! (I hope I’m getting these Frenchisms right! Once again, my visitor count preserves me from embarrassment…)

So… right on the verge of consummating this relationship we’ve been so deeply present with for the last 90 minutes, this dipshit chickens out, sneaks out the door leaving a stunningly naked Chloé waiting for him in her bed, and runs home to his wife, who seems uncomfortable and even distraught at his awkwardly timed arrival (the afternoon!); we are given to infer that she herself may be conducting an affair. The pair commences lovemaking as we look politely out the window—at the afternoon, I guess—and Fin. Jesus fucking Christ. I won’t deny, I really liked Hélène—she was cute and friendly, and had a very cozy bond with Frédéric—but I was actually rooting for Chloé. I had trouble with her at first because she’s rather neurotic and nervous, not very comfortable in her own skin, and preoccupied all the time with the ridiculous circumstances of her life… and there was so much disharmony between her and Frédéric in the beginning, I just felt tense whenever they were together… but over time, they seemed to fit better and their emotions started to flow in the same channels… you felt a real friendship happening. I was surprised and pleased by that; I hadn’t expected it, although I don’t know what I was expecting… I guess something sociopathic like the previous movies!

So when he left her hanging like that—and in such a humiliating position, stretched naked on the bed, offering herself to him, awaiting his love, even while he’s grabbing his coat and sneaking out—it was just so unbearable, such a betrayal… And what is wrong with me, one wonders, that Frédéric’s fidelity to his wife ends up feeling like a betrayal! In any case, this is a good spot to bring up Eyes Wide Shut again. Remember the ending of that? The couple reunites and reaffirms their marriage with that famous line, “Let’s fuck”? Same ending. Frédéric and Hélène reaffirming their marriage and running off to fuck. It’s the same movie, essentially! We get a glimpse of the wife’s psychodynamics, but mainly stick with the husband, whose own endless self-analysis and doubts about the integrity of his marriage lead to risky wandering and adventures, but he “rescues” himself from moral peril just in the nick of time…. Something like that, anyway. Ha ha! I’m too tired to work it out in any more detail than that. Anyone who’s read this far… well, I feel for ya.

Okay, that’s all six of Six contes moraux, and I rate the overall experience as highly enjoyable and thought-provoking, if at times infuriating. My favorites are a tie between My Night at Maud’s and Love in the Afternoon, even though that ending really fucking disappointed me. I can’t believe I wrote all this shit about them, too! I’ve been on a tear, for some reason, but I’m sure it won’t last. I would like to write about Fellini, though…. and I’ve got so many Bergmans to tackle yet; I had a great time writing about him, I’m sure there’s still fuel in the tank for the rest. And I’ve been loving all these French movies, just something about French people that turns me on. So we’ll see, maybe I’ve got a few more of these to go…. ;)

Apparently, my Contact page was labeled “Piss Off” in the site menu. Must’ve been some fookin’ Tralfamadorian trolls hacked my site! Ahem. Anyway, the menu is now friendlier, inviting you to “Get in touch.” I glanced in at my “Link Heap” page as well, and a foetid stench of dead links engulfed and / or suffocated me, and I had no choice but to retreat shamefacedly, a failure in every dimension of Internet Presence. Which is to say, I’m aware of the issue, and maybe someday I’ll do something about it, but I make no promises!

T’other night, I plunged head first into Bergman’s Summer Interlude (1951), included on the same disc as To Joy (1950). It’s tempting to call the films twins, they share so much in structure, theme, and imagery. All the same, Summer Interlude might be the prettier twin, you know, the talented one.

First of all, it’s just a beautiful film. We’ve lost so much these days by shooting everything in color. Color tricks you into thinking you’re seeing something “real.” So it’s a lie. Whereas, black and white captures reality and explicitly transforms it into a dream. It’s honest. You can’t look at a black and white movie and understand it as anything other than an artistic creation. Not so with color; one is lulled into passive acceptance of the “reality” of what is seen. Can we all agree it isn’t healthy to look at images on a screen and think of them as “real”? (Apparently, this is how we ended up with Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian; I rest my case, y’r Hon’r.)

You can literally SEE THE LIGHT in a black and white scene (it’s the “white” part). In a color scene, there is no light, per se, only an assortment of frequencies sliced out of the spectrum and artfully composed. You can see shadows, somewhat, but even those are usually muddied by a dense enmeshment of color. Black and white removes the distractions that color preserves, forces you you actually look at a composition and interpret what you see. We must also remember the brain’s propensity to fill in the gaps whenever information is missing: this processing power engages the attention and the imagination more intimately and powerfully. I’m making all this shit up as I go, of course, but it’s probably true.

Summer seems to be a predilection for Bergman. Indeed, the first movie in the collection is Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)! Wild Strawberries and To Joy both transpire in summer, and now… Summer Interlude. A season that lasts, I would guess, about 2 or 3 months in Sweden. Ha ha! Given Bergman’s proclivity, so far, for nostalgia, it makes sense he’d focus on Summer, it being, after all, the time of year most likely to beckon to the longing reflectivity of latter years. Also, an easier time to make a movie! Honestly, that’s probably it; and now I seem to recall that Bergman’s main gig was as the director of a theater, and he made his films in the off-season, so there’s your answer, Sherlock.

I’m quite taken with Maj-Britt Nilsson, who plays Marta in To Joy and Marie in Summer Interlude. Her eyes are a touch too close together, which causes her eyebeams to intersect at an unusual angle, sharpening her smiles, but also her insults. Her body buzzes with easy, nimble energy… appropriate since her character is a ballerina! You feel no regrets at all watching her for 90 minutes in a row. There are moments when I don’t quite believe her, but I think that’s more Bergman’s fault than hers…. He’s still a little clumsy in his craft, isn’t he? By Wild Strawberries, he seems to have found his rhythm, but in this movie, he’s still a tiny bit unsure of himself, and I wouldn’t even say that if I hadn’t already seen Wild Strawberries (or, come to think of it, The Seventh Seal).

Off the top of my head, some of the major ways Summer Interlude recapitulates To Joy:

1. Structure: begin in the present, flashback to show us the doomed relationship, then return to the present for emotional mop-up.
2. Theme: grief.
3. We learn of the lover’s death before even meeting him or her: it’s just inevitable. To Joy dooms the girl, whereas Summer Interlude dooms the boy.
4. Why did the lovers die? Randomly. No fault of their own, nor of anybody else. God said, Fuck you, today’s the day.
5. Classical music! In To Joy, it’s the orchestra, which gets plenty of screen time, and in this one it’s the ballet: lovely, dramatically side-lit dancers with long shadows. Both of these movies celebrate the “Working Class” of the performing arts, the people in the trenches doing the hard work—whether sawing on the strings or pumping out the pliés! Grit and determination, we are given to understand, fuel the Arts just as much as they do the Trades.

I’m sure there’re more points, but I don’t feel like summoning them up…. If anything occurs to me, I’ll add it to the list!

Marie shuts her emotions down for 13 years after Henrik’s death. In her grief, she learns to “build a wall around herself” to prevent further harm. It’s represented visually by the theater makeup so thickly applied to her face. You can barely recognize her face behind it, it’s almost literally a wall. How is she able to tear it down? She acquires Henrik’s diary, after all these years, and it’s not the act of reading it that frees her from her self-made prison, but of giving it to someone else to read—her current lover who’s on the verge of leaving her due to her emotional freeze-out—so that he can understand why she has been so cagey with her affections. She’s literally given herself away, and now she’s free.

Nilsson does an amazing job portraying both a bubbly teenager and an “aging” 28-year old professional ballerina. Bergman has a real knack for filming women, I’m realizing…. He’s able to see past their beauty and bring out the richness of an inner life… which is a real trick when you’re filming such beautiful women!

In fact, on reflection, these early films tend to feature kind of flat, one-note male characters up against vitally portrayed females who crackle with a certain, shall we say, complexity. It isn’t until Wild Strawberries, really, that you get a male with significant depth and pathos. Maybe that was his breakthrough film? I haven’t seen enough to judge yet, I suppose!

That’s probably enough about that. I thought I had things to say about the “Uncle” character, and was going to talk about all the mirrors (Bergman loves him some mirrors, let me tell you!), but I don’t feel like it. Kinda wrote too much already, frankly, what the fuck am I doing? These were just going to be little summaries or reader responses…. If I change my mind later, I’ll come back and edit this post. So there.

Was it a year, two years ago? Via discounts, coupon codes, and sheer megalomania, I acquired the Criterion box sets of both Fellini and Bergman, and all I can say is “Je ne regrette rien,” or some such pretentious thing. (You can’t fake pretension, not when you’re speaking French in an American accent—that’s the genuine article—’specially iffin you don’t even know French in la première place.)

I binged on some of the Fellini a ways back, while Bergman bided his time; whereas more recently, I finally began the Bergman, and even the earliest, let’s-face-it hamfisted examples have been blowing me away. A brutal energy and honesty in Bergman, you might even call it uncomfortable, right from the beginning. This is going to be a ride! The box set contains something like 30 movies, arranged ingeniously NOT in strict chronological order, but rather in a sinuous motion through the developing artistry of Bergman over time in the medium of film. You get the bright stars of his masterpieces with the minor works sprinkled evenly between. Keeps you interested: you don’t have to wade through all the juvenilia before finally getting to the “good stuff.”

The one I watched last night (competent juvenilia) was called To Joy (1950), whereas the last one I watched a few weeks ago (masterpiece) was Wild Strawberries (1957), which melted me right into my cushions. We’ll see how that assessment holds up to my next viewing, of course, at which point maybe I’ll write about it… if I’m still writing about films by then. Kinda like keeping a dream diary, you’re enthusiastic for the first few entries, then it all just fades away, doesn’t it? In any case, I don’t feel prepared to react to that one, especially since it’s been a few weeks now, I don’t have fresh images, and I really want to watch it again.

For now, To Joy. Hmm, what could THAT title be referring to? You guessed it, Einstein: Beethoven. And lo, the film is filled with classical music, our protags being violinists in an orchestra, dramatically portrayed with various saucy angles and a surprisingly agile camera swooping around like some harpy haunting the concert hall, seeking out our lovely couple in their respective seats.

Right as the film starts, Stig learns that his wife Marta has been killed by an exploding kerosene stove. His head arcs down to the table where his weeping begins, dissolves into literal harp strings (from their orchestra), and we are delivered into the past to examine the journey of their relationship: from its inception through marriage and concluding in Marta’s death, survived by Stig and their children. What a strange feeling, to KNOW Marta’s fate in every scene, in which so many transmissions of sympathy and deep feeling pass between their animal spirits; to see Stig’s enjoyment of her vitality and generosity, having already seen his future grief.

Bergman blocks the actors in provocative ways. He doesn’t just throw some actors on the screen and direct them to say their lines at each other; instead, he finds ways to position them against each other in space. You might call it Psychological Geometry. For example, in one scene, he places Stig to the left, Marta in the middle, and a mirror on the right, arranged so that Stig seems to be looking away from Marta, whereas the mirror image of Stig looks toward her, and meanwhile, her gaze is moving everywhere! Another scene on some rocks at the seashore: the actors shift into different orientations within the shot, depending on the development of feeling in the scene. Stig and Marta face each other—he leaning back, she leaning forward—but then he sits up and his head crosses to the other side of hers, so that now they’re looking in opposite directions—at odds with each other—but then they move again for a fervent locking of eyes and a rise in feeling… It’s all precisely staged and for my money, pretty effective!

The ocean, the seashore, the waves crashing in and rolling out, an emphasized image in this film: the perpetual cycle of wrath and retreat enacted both by Nature and by Melodrama. Incredible, indeed infuriating at times, how bipolar these people are! Screaming one second, ecstatically embracing the next. It’s hard to gauge who they actually are underneath it all. Keeping us audience members off-kilter in this manner is extremely effective at ensnaring our sympathy for the characters. We experience their love more strongly as it becomes more tempestuous and unbalanced. You yearn for them to come together, and then you’re cringing as one or the other throws unwonted bombs into their seemingly imminent serenity. I almost felt like an abused lover myself in this storm! Stig keeps flying into adolescent fury or miring in depression, but he’s always grounded back into cheerfulness by Marta’s steadiness… not before he’s hurt her in some careless fashion, of course. So you hate him for hurting her, but you love him even more for what appears to be his unfeigned feeling for her that always draws him back into her orbit.

And you understand also that this whole film is his flashback—she’s already dead before we even catch sight of her—so everything is subjective to him. The result being, she’s mostly angelic and faultless throughout, while he’s wracked with guilt over every little misstep that he’s made, every destructive decision, every selfish failure to see and love her as she has deserved. You sense he resents her for having this power over him, but he’s also grateful for being held securely and safely in that power. (And naturally devastated to lose it.)

Curious bit in the film that kind of threw me: Stig deems himself a loser and a mediocrity (especially after he fucks up his violin solo debut), and so he seeks solace and excitement in an extramarital affair. Openly—he doesn’t even hide it from his wife! That is some swingin’ bohemian clique these people are rockin’ in midcentury Sweden, eh? The girl he swoons for is a nymphet type, fully grown but coquettish and, hm, limber, shall we say? She is the wife of an elderly fella who loves to, in the modern parlance, get cucked; I’m not sure what they called it back then…. In any case, he’s the one who brings them together and luxuriates in the lather of their concupiscence. This film came out in 1950! Scandalous! (Admittedly, I’m kind of overselling it here; it’s nowhere explicit.)

Even though the film is a flashback from Stig’s perspective, I wasn’t sure what to make of a few breaks in that structure, when we hear the thoughts of other characters. Even the conductor of the orchestra has his say! I wonder if Bergman simply didn’t care about narratorial consistency, or were these bits meant to portray how Stig imagines other people view him and his relationship? This is something we do: imagine the reactions of others to our own actions. Being in a relationship is to be observed by others in the activity of that relationship; one observes the observers and experiences a vicarious thrill wondering what they think of it all.

After all, everyone is completely alone, their relations always mediated by social forces or physical distances or even interior monologues, which no matter how ardent and seemingly full of feeling, no matter how sincerely felt, are just self-serving propaganda, a stream of words designed to persuade ourselves that we are feeling what we believe to be appropriate in a given context. Building ourselves moment by moment through the living process, creating the person we present to the world and also to ourselves. What is underneath it? Who really built that person? With what consciousness, what design, did he or she do it? Did you make choices? Did you wish for what you got? Or for something else, something you never got? Did you feel helpless to make yourself in a shape of your choosing, or did someone else make you, and you merely accepted the “gift”? Who’s “responsible”? (We’re getting into Vivre sa vie territory, here! That one has really haunted me, I’ve got to get back to it soon!)

Just realized, A Ship to India (1947) has the exact same narrative structure as To Joy. It starts by revealing the fates of the main characters, then flashes back for the rest of the story before returning to the present for a final resolution of emotional elements… Intriguing! I wonder how often Bergman uses this particular structure… I’ll keep an eye out as I progress through the oeuvre. What it comes down to is the nonlinear exploration of consciousness. What is a consciousness? What form does it take in time and space? A person, a WHOLE person, doesn’t even exist in time, but rather folds time endlessly within himself as he grows and progresses through the naturally encoded stages of his organism. Wildly different parts of your life will butt up against each other within your consciousness, separated by years, yet simultaneous in YOU… you could be an old man peering across time into your own childhood, seeing it so clearly you weep…. and that’s exactly how Wild Strawberries works! Holy fuck.

That’s probably a good note to end on. Writing undeniably aids the understanding, doesn’t it? Wasn’t really the intention here, but I feel pretty good about the result…. Shit, I can’t do this much work for every movie I see, though, can I?… Ha ha! Whatever.

Some more films, eh, while I’m in the mood…. on a roll—better sip from the cup while there’s something in it. Spoilers, of course, or what would be the point?

First off, Alphaville (1965), which reverses the ostensible relationship between humans and machines: the machines run the people. (Which is to say, it accurately predicts the Internet.) Alpha 60, the central computer, literally codes human consciousness by means of a continually updated “Bible,” which turns out to be a dictionary of acceptable words (à la 1984). The criterion for inclusion is “rationality,” with emotional words removed and replaced. It seems that lacking the word for “love” removes the capacity for it. Alpha 60’s voice is electronically degraded and sinister, an articulated croak that sounds more weary to me than evil. Must be exhausting operating all those humans at once! Anybody who defies the semantic order is executed most peculiarly: machine-gunned off a diving board, then finished by lovely knife-wielding female swimmers. (Imagine the job description in THAT Help Wanted ad!) I’m thinking the script wanted sharks, but chicks are cheaper (and très jolies).

The supervillain scientist who created Alpha 60? Professor Von Braun! Named after the Paperclipped Nazi (and father of the German V2 rocket) who delivered America to the Moon (as well as global missile dominance). Godard was clearly based.

Sweetly, Von Braun’s daughter Natacha is introduced to love by Lemmy Caution, visiting from the Outer Planets—our lone noir hero bustling energetically against all this totalitarian oppression—who spirits her out of the city (after killing her father, natch) so that she can finally utter the syllable that will release her soul from its captivity in Daddy’s machine (three syllables, actually: “Je vous aime.”). Natacha is played by Anna Karina, who I now understand was Godard’s wife and muse at the time, which explains so much… can’t blame him in the least, she’s got that, you know… how do you say… Je ne sais quoi. So far, her evocation of Laurie is most pronounced in Vivre sa vie (cf. previous post), but I see flashes of it in these other films. Less so in Alphaville, admittedly. Her character is mostly a robot, under the thumb of Alpha 60.

The film’s so dark, taking place at night, and frenetically confusing, that I always struggle with wakefulness watching it. This was my third attempt and the first one in which I even caught the central thrust of the film: that it’s about an evil computer, etc. My two previous attempts (years ago, folly of youth) didn’t even get me that far! So maybe I am a touch more ready for Godard now….

I have to wonder if HAL from 2001 (1968) is modeled after Alpha 60. Both are embodied by CU’s of a lightbulb, brightening and dimming as it processes and communicates information. Reverse shot with CU on the human interlocutor, emphasizing the gulf in both form and function between a person and a computer. HAL’s voice is smooth and affectless, like a deep state bureaucrat, whereas Alpha 60’s voice is damaged and effortful, Henry Kissinger in French. In both cases, the voice is omnipresent, you almost feel it’s being spoken directly to the mind, bypassing the impurities of physical transmission. If God were to speak to you, would he make the air molecules move? Or would he reach directly into the molecules of your consciousness and move THEM?

You could view Alpha 60 as a metaphor for God, I think: a manmade engine of social control, operated by an elite class to enslave a mass populace through the manipulation of language and culture. How does an individual match up to that? (Well, he doesn’t, obviously, not in real life, anyway.) Lemmy’s solution: be a firecracker and a loose cannon, and fly off the handle unpredictably and therefore uncontrollably. Whatever. Didn’t seem to work for the Beats or the Hippies, did it? Did it work for anybody?

Lemmy Caution is apparently an actual character from French pulp noir films, played by the same actor, Eddie Constantine. Godard really loves smooshing pop culture into his films! He stuffs Kafka and Rimbaud impersonators into Band of Outsiders (1964)… as wanna-be gangsters! They team up with Anna Karina (named Odile after a character from Raymond Queneau, which I know NOT from consulting online oracles but from watching the film: Odile literally buys a copy of the eponymous book from a newsstand and reads from it) to steal money from her uncle. Is he her uncle? I’m a little unclear on the relationship, actually.

Interesting dynamics between Odile and her amorous litterateurs: she seems to find Arthur more exciting, accepting his proffered cigarettes immediately after rejecting Franz’s, which if these guys are their namesake authors, I totally get. Rimbaud’s far more exciting! But this fellow in the film is really more akin to the sleazy, post-poetic, gunrunning Rimbaud, version 2.0, not the ecstatic adolescent synesthete we all adore. He even pours liquor in her Coke while she’s not looking. Blech!

Franz eventually manages to turn Odile’s attention on him by turning his own attention… on us! He gives us one of those patented Godard 4th-wall breaking monologues, in which he professes his love of Jack London and tells a story about an Indian in Alaska who’s banished from the tribe for being a liar, so he goes out on his own and sees the civilized world, finally returns home to his village and describes the trains and the airplanes and the massive buildings the size of mountains… and the tribe banishes him again for being an even worse liar. Somehow, this story seems to break some of Odile’s ice, enough at least that she ends up with him in the end, whereas our favorite poetic gunrunner ends up dead in a ridiculously staged, completely unserious shootout.

There are a couple of what I would term “orgasmic” scenes, in one of which the trio vigorously dances for several uninterrupted minutes in a café, and in the other of which the trio runs through the Louvre “in record time.” I think 9 minutes 43 seconds? Beating the previous record-holder (an American, of course, who else would run through the Louvre without looking at the paintings and congratulate himself for his speed?) by 2 seconds. I can’t help but see these scenes as threesomes. Everything was in code back then. Nowadays, these would have been explicit sex scenes. Am I wrong?

Wow, I had more to say on these movies than anticipated…. There really is something to writing thoughts out, isn’t there? They multiply and reinforce each other. So easy to forget all that fun stuff, even for someone who’s soi-disant “a writer.” I couldn’t even watch a movie for three straight months, frankly, much less write about it. I just sat in a chair. I’m still sitting in that chair, of course, but at least I can distract my mind to some degree for the time being. Trying to keep trying….

[ I’ll be spoiling the films I write about here, so don’t read further if you haven’t yet seen ’em. ]

Been trying to take in more film. I used to be very film-oriented, not so much in recent years. I know the things I see will spill out of my consciousness with the swiftness of tears from crocodiles; perhaps a few notes are in order? Giving it a shot, anyway. We’ll catch up with a few here and see what happens.

I saw Crimes of the Future (2022) a few weeks ago, Cronenberg’s vaunted body horror renaissance. Tragically boring. Not even a provocative concept. We’ll evolve to eat plastic? Who gives a fuck? Surgery as performance art? Okay, whatever. The performances have a certain oddness, but feel mostly unmotivated and unfulfilling. Oddness for its own sake. The only character that thrives onscreen belongs to Kristen Stewart: she at least seems turned on by what’s happening, an engaged inhabitant of her world. Everyone else is phoning it in, they might as well be zonked on a couch in some opium den. This movie would have been much better with Kristen Stewart at the center and with some kind of conflict or narrative to drive it forward. The concepts alone are unstimulating, certainly not worth marinating in without relief from dramatic elements. I peeked around online; the reviews seem to be muted but respectfully positive, but I didn’t find anybody who found an interesting idea in it, so I daresay I’ll probably not give it another chance. [LATER] I suppose I’ll put a pin in this film. Having recently attended a literary event that turned out to be mostly devoted to the philosophy of Cronenberg, I feel I may too lightly have dismissed a work by someone so clearly advanced and plugged-in…. If I return to it, however, it will probably be after some extended marination in his earlier filmography.

I also saw Men (2022). Garbage. I’ll let the crocodile weep it out, I don’t care to remember it. I take that back, I’d like to remember at least the scene wherein our protagonista encounters a musical tunnel in the countryside. [LATER] Actually, I also very much enjoyed the extended weirdness of the multiple birth sequence at the end, just can’t stand the final product of all that… emergence.

Anything else in the theater? Oh yeah, The Northman (2022). Very enjoyable. Big Screen emanations from both Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy. There’s a kind of lust you feel for a movie star who’s putting out certain charismatic emanations, not sexual but existential, as if they could inhabit your body, or vice versa. Whereas Nicole Kidman just looks bizarre, I was kind of shocked; she’s not aging gracefully, shall we say. (I haven’t seen her in years, maybe it’s simply the contrast with my memories from the 90s. She used to emanate strongly to me, not so much in this one!) The story is apparently the original version of Hamlet, without all the self-doubt and PSYCHOLOGY ’n shit. Just single-minded bloody revenge. To be or not to be? Pshaw! More like, do you feel lucky, punk? And then you climb Yggdrasil to Valhalla, it’s all good. Robert Eggers has had a good run, three movies so far, all terrific, the others being The Witch and The Lighthouse. Logan enjoyed those, I’m sure he would have loved this. He wasn’t much for arthouse fare, but if it contained the entertaining elements, he was game. Entertainment’s entertainment, after all. (Fun fact: the cowriter of this movie (I discovered when it came up in the credits) is Sjon, a fella from Iceland whose novel From the Mouth of the Whale I excerpted in Gone Lawn several lifetimes ago, back when I was a little more, hmm, “active,” you might phrase it, in the literary scene.)

They have a bunch of French New Wave films up on Criterion right now. Seems like a good opportunity to catch some films I’m ashamed to say I haven’t seen. Last night, for example, I watched Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962). Punched me right in the gut. For one thing, Anna Karina in this role reminded me of Laurie in so many ways, it was unnerving. I hadn’t noticed that in other movies of hers that I’ve seen, so I’ll have to pay attention next time! There are some incredible scenes in this film. Karina’s character is an aimless girl who vaguely wants to be an actress but falls into prostitution instead. Works for a pimp who’s playing pinball when they first meet, and guess what, she essentially becomes his pinball for the rest of the movie, careening from john to john, her trajectory pretty much predetermined by some kind of social / moral physics. At the moment when she attempts to direct her own fate (leave the pimp), she’s rubbed out like a pencil mark. She might as well have never lived. And yet, the scenes! If she hadn’t lived, we wouldn’t have these incredible scenes from her life! Par example, she watches Dreyer’s Joan of Arc in a movie theater, and Godard simply cuts her into the scene, as if she were Joan! Or at least, with Joan. The part where they tell her she’s going to burn at the stake… you see Joan’s tears, then Karina’s tears! If there’d been a camera, you’d have seen my tears, too! And there’s a scene later that is so Laurie-like. The pimp takes her into some dive where he confers with a, uh, business colleague, and she wanders around, out of place, ignored, but wanting to be seen, plays the jukebox, improvises a dance, makes herself the center of attention, attends to the attention she’s receiving, swells into significance by proxy of being seen, yet there’s nothing inside, she’s all surface and triumphant for it. She’s a character with a void inside that she calls freedom, that she uses to justify herself—her decisions or lack of them—but she’s yearning for meaning… martyrdom maybe, like Joan? Impulses and emotions flit in and out of her expressions, across the icy shimmer of her eyeballs, her bodily movements instinctual and feline. This is the first Godard I’ve seen that grabbed me so completely. I liked Breathless well enough, I guess, but other than that one, I had never been able to connect much to a Godard. This one, however, just shattered me. My understanding is: Godard varies wildly, so it could be this will be the only one that floors me like this, but at least it’s possible now. And maybe I just need to revisit the other Godards I’ve seen. It’s been years. Could be I wasn’t ready, and now I am? I really grokked the weird edits and off-kilter timing of the music, for example. The camera was simply looking around the way a person would, indeed the way Karina herself would. And the music jumps in and out the way your attention does. You’re lost in thought and the sounds of the world fade, and some other soundtrack replaces them, but then you snap back and the music falls off, the world returns, you’re back in it, you don’t even know why….

I had some others in mind, but this is getting ridiculous. Maybe another night, if the moxy moves me.