The Innocents (1961) goes well beyond the original source material. This is not merely a case of sexual repression. It is sexual projection, a mapping of desire and repulsion onto the possession delusion made concrete and real. A desire so powerful it broke through the surface of reality. A hideous self-loathing becomes entwined by a foreboding religious terror. She is tormented by the very demons which possess and consume her. She is nightly ravished by her tormented dreams. The paranoid mind must seek out clues from the barest of facts drawing the most far reaching assumptions, weaving out of whole cloth the unholy presence of this sickness. The explanation becomes its expiation. She seeks out in Ms. Grose an ally for her paranoid delusion. Every minor detail must be made to conform; every behavior that deviates in the slightest manner is evidence of a foul crime. Capote is at his masterful best and Clayton’s pacing and direction are chilling. The use of deep focus, a somewhat lost art form, and minimalist lighting force us to endure the unrelenting grip of her self-possession.
Category: Cinema
Ray Carney on Cassavetes
“In Cassavetes’ work, personality is plot; behavior is narrative. Living does not involve doing anything but being something – a much harder task for both a character and a viewer to deal with.”
Cassavetes
“Other films depend on a shorthand, a shorthand for living. You recognize certain incidents and you go with them. People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films. They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings and keep ahead of the movie. But that’s boring. I won’t make shorthand films. In my films there’s a competition with the audience to keep ahead of them. I want to break their patterns. I want to shake them up and get them out of those quick, manufactured truths.”
Gravity’s Rainbow
“If there is something comforting–religious, if you want–about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
Art
“Art is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Picasso (maybe)
Muriel, or the Time of Return
Where does reality reside? In our memories alone? The fragments of our daily lives broken and reassembled into a coherent whole? We usually construct the story centered in first-person: This happened to me; this is the story of MY life. An illusion, though perhaps a necessary one given the elusive nature of what we mislabel “the events of our lives”. In truth, nothing ever happens to us as there is neither a happening nor an us, but a trace, a remnant of what has elapsed. Time erases us long before the action arrives to cleave to our bodies. Events are superficial and cannot penetrate. The action is determined, but the contours of our being are left undetermined. The decentralized rhythm of existence conjoins a greater totality within the duration. Not my broken pieces. Our broken pieces, synthesized into a totality we struggle to comprehend.
Muriel perfectly conveys this deeper reality. From the edits, the disconcerted shifts of time and tempo and emotion, to the dialogue shifting between the objective (the trite and commonplace observations that we tell to mask our deeper feelings), to the subjective, the unconscious, the longing, the haunting memories that evoke loss, grief, regret.
As Resnais explains: “A classic film cannot translate the real rhythm of modern life. In the same day, you do twenty-six things, you go to lectures, to the cinema, to your party meeting etc. Modern life is fragmented. Everybody feels that; painting, as well as literature bares witness to it, so why should the cinema not do likewise, instead of keeping to the traditional linear construction?”
And like a shroud or a tapestry hung above the scenery, appears the angel, Muriel. The haunting figure of a murdered woman, an Algerian girl tortured and raped by Bernard and a companion, hovers over our world like an omen, a judgement, a collective death sentence, but also hints at, if not the possibility of salvation, perhaps the miracle of atonement.
Gun Crazy
The central moral is clear: never fall in love with a carny.
Ebert on Louise Brooks
“Her job as an actress wasn’t to lead us in the proper reaction. It was to observe its reality.”
Or in Lulu’s own words: “The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.”
Nostalghia
“Feelings unspoken are unforgettable.”
James Gray on Rossellini
Stromboli: Rossellini shows an amazing “ability to move beyond the traditional markers of narrative.” The film combines the quotidian and mundane with a religious examination of the mysteries of the soul. “You realize we are all grappling with the struggle of what it means to be a person, and that will be eternally unresolved.”
The Hack 