5 stars

Hunger (2008)

André Crous

UK
5*

Director:
Steve McQueen
Screenwriters: 
Enda Welsh
Steve McQueen
Director of Photography:
Sean Bobbitt

Running time: 90 minutes

There is greatness behind every shot in Steve McQueen’s Hunger. This film marks the début of a remarkable talent that does not come round very often and demonstrates what is still possible within the realm of so-called alternative cinema. All the conventional tricks have been avoided, and they have been replaced by new approaches to representation and produced a work that is poetic yet immediate, at times subjective yet never silly, has gritty realism yet shines with an amazingly distinct visual style and is never drab. And despite its minimal use of the spoken word, it rolls along fluidly.

At the end of 1980, after more than four years of a “blanket protest”, during which prisoners refused to don the prison uniforms, since they considered themselves a different kind of prisoner (i.e. a political prisoner), and a “no-wash protest”, which is self-explanatory, an Irish republican named Bobby Sands decided to go on hunger strike in protest against the British government.

Bobby Sands is played here by Michael Fassbender, and his performance strips him down to the bone, both physically and emotionally. The word that jumps to mind is “visceral”, and it covers much of the film, which contains many scenes of prisoners being beaten with many different kinds of weapons – hands and handheld.

In the film’s first 15 minutes, barely a word is spoken, as we follow a prison guard, whose knuckles always seem to be raw, from his home where he looks under his car before puling out of the driveway every morning to the prison where he works. A new boy has just been admitted, and immediately upon arrival, he sides with the rest of the prisoners at the prison (it is Maze prison, which used to be located just south-west of Belfast, in Northern Ireland) in refusing to wear the prison uniform. He is taken to his cell, where the walls are covered in faeces and food.

In one scene, urine streams down a corridor, cascading from mashed potato embankments inside the cells. In another, maggots crawl next to a sleeping inmate inside his cell. To this scene, shot with from a stationary viewpoint, McQueen brings the same beauty as when the prison guard smokes outside in the snow and a close-up of his hands (often repeated throughout the film) shows a snowflake melting on his reddened knuckles.

McQueen fully engages both image and sound, and he stages his action in a way that pushes his film towards a kind of transcendentalism. In another scene, the prisoners are subjected to a cavity search. Scores of guards, in riot gear, line a corridor while a naked prisoner faces the onslaught of batons, fists and feet, until he reaches a central area and is rectally searched in the most violent manner possible. The camera swerves to mirror the energy of the moment, and yet the effect is not confusion but rather inspirational empathy with the prisoners. Then, towards the end of the scene, we realise, with great surprise, that one of the prison guards has been reduced to tears and is standing behind a wall, sobbing.

This brief moment, perhaps more than the technical and visual dexterity of the director, shows his compassion for the whole spectrum of characters in his film and made me think of those few seconds, at the beginning of Return of the Jedi, when the vicious monster that was unleashed on Luke is destroyed and this monster’s keeper is similarly heartbroken. So few film makers realise that it is always more interesting to have characters do the unexpected than the expected actions of their narrative peers.

But it is the film’s much-commented scene at its midpoint, an unbroken take 16½ minutes in length featuring Sands and a priest, that pushes it into the upper echelons of film making and underscores the genius of the filmmaker. Though very different in tone from the aforementioned scene of the full cavity search and some truly violent interactions between the prisoners and their guards, our attention is kept rapt thanks to both the performances and the courage of McQueen, which deliver a breathtaking moment of stasis at the centre of physical chaos.

Even as the film turns towards a more spiritual perspective, while Sands is suffering from the physical effects of being on a hunger strike, the film elegantly switches between direct point of view and oblique point of view, which affects the camera’s movement while still regarding him from the outside. The addition of superimposed birds swarming over his face while the camera hovers menacingly over his hospital bed is no simple-minded Gus van Sant-inspired gimmick but a perfectly distilled, truly magnificent expression of a state of mind.

One minor flaw is the introduction of Bobby Sands’s character – he simply appears, as if from nowhere, to take centre stage. The characters we meet in the faeces-covered cell give a human perspective to the material, and when they are replaced by Bobby’s plot thread, the connection to the story is retained despite the lack of a back story for Sands. So, while McQueen handles this transition very well, the balancing act does not completely make up for the fact that an important part of the story is missing. Perhaps McQueen assumed we would forgive him this oversight since Sands has some messianic status, an argument underlined by a moment in which he is carried, Pieta-like (or Marat-like?), from a bathtub back to his bed.

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

André Crous

France
5*

Director:
Georges Méliès
Screenwriters:
Georges Méliès
Gaston Méliès
Directors of Photography:
Michaut
Lucien Tainguy

Running time: 11 minutes (at 20fps)

Original title: Le Voyage dans la lune

Méliès was the magician of early cinema. He didn’t only lift the seventh art form to new heights by using it to depict fantastical stories, but in the process, he evoked a sense of wonder in his audience that would colour and enrich many different kinds of films and inspire most of the filmmakers that came after him. He was the first who dared detach the medium of film from its realistic basis – the Lumière brothers had filmed real trains arriving, real human beings leaving a real factory, and real water spewing from a real garden hose to water real flowers. But Méliès had other plans. He had stars in his eyes and his desire to make the impossible visible, even with very rudimentary means, led to this masterpiece called A Trip to the Moon.

Jules Verne, if not an inspiration for the film, was certainly an influence, or at least a kindred spirit. The film opens in a grand hall where astronomers with big pointy hats have gathered to listen to their astronomer-in-chief, Barbenfouillis, who gesticulates very animatedly and makes a drawing on the blackboard indicating his intention to send a spaceship (though it rather resembles a missile) to the moon. Five astronomers are chosen to accompany him on this mission: Nostradamus, Alcofribas, Omega, Micromégas and Parafaragaramus (yes, the spelling is correct).

The names of theses characters have both real and fictional origins, and the combination is quite appropriate to the kind of film that Méliès was producing. Nostradamus, of course, is the renowned 16th-century clairvoyant. Alcofribas is the name used by the novelist Rabelais, whose works incorporated the grotesque and is best known for his novel about two giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Micromégas was the title of, and the name of the main character in, a short story by Voltaire. Said Micromégas was an alien visitor who lands on the earth and observes the strange customs of humans. Besides the Greek root of Omega (the word refers to the last letter of the Greek alphabet), I know nothing about it, nor does Parafaragaramus mean anything to me, though it conjures up images of characters in the world of Goscinny & Uderzo’s “Asterix & Obelix”.

After surviving a fall into a bucket of nitric acid, Micromégas joins the other astronomers aboard the spaceship, which is shot from a cannon into space. The décor throughout is theatrical but never expressionist, and though many of the sets are clearly painted pieces of cardboard, the effect of having these characters move over the painted roofs into a spaceship gains a lot of its energy from the adventure inherent in the imminent exploration of outer space.

Exactly halfway through the film, the spaceship hits the moon, in one of the most famous shots of silent cinema. It is a moving human face, and this man-moon fits perfectly with the slightly strange atmosphere of the film that is about to become even more peculiar. Once the astronomers land on the moon, and their presence is seen as an intrusion, they are punished by Phoebus, who covers them with snow. They hide in a crater, filled with lunar flora, where a planted umbrella takes root and grows to become a giant mushroom. The surreal image is wonderful to behold because of the continuous growth of the “plant”, its movement, inside the frame without any cuts.

With this film, Méliès, the first master of cinematic magic, showed how to dazzle an audience, and he deserves all the recognition of being the first dreamer of the cinema and for engaging our fantasies in a way that demonstrated the far-reaching possibilities of filmmaking.

No Man’s Land (2001)

André Crous

Bosnia and Herzegovina
5*

Director:
Danis Tanović
Screenwriter: 
Danis Tanović
Director of Photography: 
Walther van den Ende

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Ničija zemlja

No Man’s Land is a small yet devastating film about two soldiers from opposing sides stuck in a trench on the battlefield (no man’s land), somewhere near Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The central action of the film takes place over the course of a single day, and in these few hours of sunlight, we get a very human take on the story of war and especially the lives affected by it.

One night, under thick fog, a group of Bosniaks forming a relief squad are led to their base, but the guide gets lost and they end up falling asleep. At daybreak, they discover that they are sitting ducks and when the Serb forces arrive in their tanks, the Bosniaks have to run for cover. Čiki (Branko Đurić), who wears a Rolling Stones “Tongue and Lip” T-shirt all the way through the film, initially appears to be the only one to survive, and he ends up in a trench halfway between the Bosniak and the Serb camps – in no man’s land.

When two of the Serbs are sent to the trench to make sure that all the Bosniaks had been killed, one is killed by Čiki and the other, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), a young inexperienced soldier, is injured. Nino and Čiki, both speaking the same language, Serbo-Croatian, have a heated discussion about the origin and the development of the war, and Čiki, his gun pointed straight at Nino, finally has to agree that the Serbs started all the madness. Many such admissions are made under duress, and Čiki doesn’t fail to remind Nino who has the gun.

But they are both stuck in the trench together for two reasons: Neither of them can be sure that the other side will respect a cease-fire if they are rescued or return to camp; and a bouncing bomb had been placed under a Bosniak soldier, who turns out not to have been dead, and unless a deminer saves the soldier, Ćera, his friend Čiki insists that they all stay in the trench. Since he has the gun, there is no use arguing.

Tanović’s script is light on action but heavy on tension and very incisive dialogue that clearly captures the human face of the drama of warfare. These are two people who often don’t know what to do next, but when one of them sees an opportunity to establish power over the other, he goes for it. Caught in the middle is Ćera, who can’t move for fear of setting off the bomb underneath him and blowing them all to pieces.

When UNPROFOR (the United Nations Protection Force) is called in to mediate and resolve the situation, we realise very quickly that they are out of their depth, somewhat willingly, and refuse to get involved because they are in Bosnia strictly for the purpose of delivering humanitarian aid. A French sergeant, Marchand (played by Georges Siatidis, who is fascinating in this role), is clearly frustrated by his superiors’ lack of compassion but manages to secure media exposure (and pressure on UNPROFOR), when he meets Jane Livingstone, a news correspondent out in the field.

Livingstone’s overly dramatic character, and her news broadcasts, are perhaps the only weak spot in the film and suffers from the film’s small budget, but her purpose is clear: Her presence at the scene compels the UN to protect lives instead of merely sustaining them, but she will also go to great lengths to interrogate all the parties implicated in the story without really grasping anybody’s point of view. From the outside, the whole setup seems like internal madness, but the subtitles provide the viewer with a very fine understanding of the different reasons for the soldiers’ actions.

The film shows the inadequacy of the UN and especially UNPROFOR during the war. This is understandable, given the international forces’ infamous timidity when faced with the situation at Srebrenica in 1995, which they allowed to happen because of such administrative restrictions as a mission of non-involvement.

No Man’s Land advances in a way that gives us a sickening feeling of inevitability, and a situation that is grim because we see people doing things they know to be wrong, but which they must do to save face or to obey the orders of their callous superiors. The humiliating effects of these decisions are visible in the close-ups of Ćera’s face. The film contains almost no extradiegetic music and makes important points in a subtle way, by means of a photo in someone’s hand or a story about a girl in Banja Luka whom both Nino and Čiki had known.

Tanović is a Bosniak himself, but his film treats the two sides with equal respect and is certainly one of the most poignant war films of our time. A comment by one of the men in the relief squad at the beginning of the film (“A pessimist thinks that things can’t get worse; an optimist knows that they can”) becomes more and more relevant to the situation the men find themselves in. These are not heroes: They are men caught in a war, and they don’t want to die. No Man’s Land‘s acknowledgement of this basic truth makes the film stand out from the crowd.

Napoléon (1927)

André Crous

France
5*

Director:
Abel Gance
Screenwriter:
Abel Gance
Director of Photography:
Jules Kruger

Running time: 240 minutes

Napoléon, by French filmmaker Abel Gance, is an experimental epic that has achieved the status of legend, with good reason. The story of the young Napoleon Bonaparte (the film charts his development from school boy till the age of 27, when he successfully invaded Italy) is presented as a visual feast that keeps churning out scene after scene, the one as breathtaking as the next. The entire film is accompanied by a masterful orchestral score composed by Carmine Coppola that deftly integrates melodies from a few other works, including, among others, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise”, and Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique”. The 2000 restoration of the film has a score by Carl Davis, which has been performed at various public screenings of the film in the past few years, most notably at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

The film is a cinematic tour de force and contains a multitude of memorable scenes, from the snowball fight at Napoleon’s school and a scene with his pet eagle to the scene where crowds of people learn the new French national anthem, a double storm scene and the climactic tricolour triptych that makes visible Napoleon’s desires for himself and his country. At one point, during a chase on horseback across the Corsican countryside, Gance even fixes his camera to a saddle in order to give us Napoleon’s point of view.

These are all scenes that one can talk about extensively, for they demonstrate the skill of the director and the joy he found in telling the adventurous story of Napoleon’s rise to power. I was incredibly moved when the song’s composer, Roget de Lisle, sang “La Marseillaise”: The soundtrack had already been hinting at the gorgeous melody for a while since Danton, Marat and Robespierre had received word of the composer’s arrival, and when de Lisle finally performs his work, the effect is overwhelming exhilaration. The combination of the music itself, the passion on de Lisle’s face, the emotion on the listeners’ faces, in close-ups presented in rapid-fire succession, and the sunlight that pierces the stained glass windows behind them all signal this moment as a cohesive turning point for France and national unity. It is an absolute gem of a scene; if you thought the performance of “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca was wonderful, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

However, as much as this rendition of one of the country’s definitive trademarks elicits emotion in the viewer, there are even greater things to be said about the effect that a completely liberated camera can have on the viewer’s reception and interpretation of events on screen. In a well-known scene referred to as the “double storm”, Gance cuts between a physical and a metaphorical storm simultaneously brewing in different places. While Napoleon is stuck at sea on a small sailboat, the sirocco throwing him hither and thither like a wet rag doll in waters ready to swallow him at any second, people at the Paris Convention are growing more and more impatient with each other, and ultimately their event degenerates into complete chaos. At the convention, as blood begins to boil, the camera starts swinging from the ceiling, over the heads of the revolutionaries inside the enormous hall. The result is an awesome sequence of shots unlike any other I have ever seen in a film.

From the very beginning, it is clear that Napoleon Bonaparte is a testy little upstart, but rather than wanting to provoke, he acts out of pride and concern for his country. Born in Corsica in 1769, when France conquered the island, he sees himself as French, though his fellow schoolmates don’t quite agree. Napoleon has a born sense of strategy – as is made evident in a brilliantly staged fight against other boys, which he wins despite being hugely outnumbered and underestimated – and a genuine love for France. He is fearless, and his audacity leads to a moment one could compare to the scene in Birth of Nation when the Confederate flag is rescued from the front lines of the Union.

Later in the film, shortly before the sopping wet Battle of Toulon, Napoleon orders one of his officers to replace a cannon. When the officer tells him that it is impossible, Napoleon firmly asserts: “Impossible is not French!” Napoleon’s delicate features and slight frame hide a soldier with nerves of steel, eyes like a hawk, and military brawn like few others. “He is made of granite heated in a volcano”, declares one of his school teachers in Brienne.

There are many other great scenes to mention, including a pillow fight at his school that precedes Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct by more than five years and ends with a frame subdivided first into four, then nine, different angles of the same scene to reflect the different points of view of the schoolboys.

The film has rapturous energy, and while I didn’t much care for the scenes dealing with his courtship of Joséphine de Beauharnais, nor the scenes taking place shortly after their very unromantic wedding, in which he becomes a sentimental fool, writing her one letter after the other in which he proclaims his love for her and his frustration at being separated from her, the film is strong enough to cope with such whimsy.

Napoleon as a boy (Vladimir Roudenko) and as an adult (Albert Dieudonné) were both cast very well, and even at a young age, Roudenko’s eyes convey a striking maturity. Napoleon is an inspirational figure, who persuades his nation to do things they never allowed themselves to dream about, and in the process he becomes a messianic figure. A messianic figure with an instantly recognisable bicorne – something Gance teases us with when Napoleon first appears on-screen as a young boy.

The film deserves all the praise it has received. Not only did Gance make an epic film worthy of its subject, but he employed techniques unheard of at the time that served the story incredibly well and keeps the audience galloping along all the way as history unspools in front of our eyes. The film was meant to represent the first part (out of six) of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, but Gance spent his entire budget on this first instalment, and therefore Napoléon ends before the title character even gets to the throne. Nonetheless, this monumental film shows what the cinema is capable of and serves as a rousing reminder that representations of real events can be every bit as exciting as life itself.

Final note: This review refers to the 1981 edition of the film. Around the turn of the millennium, Kevin Brownlow added about half an hour’s worth of footage to restore the film to a version that approaches the original. The running time of 330 minutes on some websites refers to the film’s length when shown at 20 frames per second (fps), as opposed to the 240-minute version shown at 24fps.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

André Crous

USA
5*

Director:
Buster Keaton
Screenwriters:
Jean Havez
Joseph A. Mitchell
Clyde Bruckman
Directors of Photography: 
Elgin Lessley
Byron Houck

Running time: 44 minutes

Sherlock Jr. is a film that uses every trick in the book to produce electrifying moments of comedy that can still thrill audiences today. It is also a shrewd representation of the place of film in our lives.

The poster shows Buster Keaton as a detective and as a beloved (projectionist). The credits merely list him in his parenthetical capacity, and in fact, this occupation embraces the central part of the film, which takes the audience on a journey full of twists and turns that is very clearly related to the first part of the story.

Keaton, the man with the expressionless face who manages to find himself in extraordinary situations, stars as a guy who wants to be a detective as much as he wants to marry the Girl, but when he is framed by another suitor in the matter of a lost pocket watch, and his detective skills fail him, he dreams up a scenario in which he is the ultimate sleuth. This part of the film is presented in a way that excites by means of its presentation and its content.

This medium-length film is interesting on many levels, and while the action transcends mere slapstick (it is not repetitive and does not have any condescension for the film’s characters), Keaton’s conception of the film’s biggest stunts makes for remarkable commentary on the perspective of the viewer. Consider the following movements:

1) During a film screening in a big theatre, with a large audience watching, Keaton approaches the big screen and walks into the film. He subsequently appears in different scenes as the film cuts from one location to the next, and Keaton has to keep up with objects that appear out of nowhere.

2) In this film-within-a-film, Keaton follows some undesirables to their hide-out. He puts a rounded suitcase with a costume inside on the outside of the window, and when he escapes from the house by jumping through the window, he is instantly covered by this costume, and the criminals don’t recognise him. This particular scene is further enhanced by a cut-away image (produced by means of a kind of double exposure, a gimmick Keaton also uses to great effect in his 1928 film, The Cameraman) when the inside of the house can be seen “through the walls”. Technically, it must have been quite a job, but the final effect is breathtaking.

There are many other instances of such trickery, and in spite of (occasionally) less than perfect editing to disguise the manner in which they were done, the products are unexpected and work very well. Two other moments specifically target the perspective of the viewer:

1) When Keaton has already “entered” the screen, the camera dollies closer and closer, until the screen fills the frame, so that any subsequent scenes or cuts would appear like any other film and we forget that we are watching a film that is also being watched by the film’s audience. In this way, the second-level film becomes just as real or just as fake as the first-level film.

2) When Keaton wakes up from his dream and looks through the window of his projectionist’s booth towards the screen, his face is framed by a very clear border, similar to the image he himself is looking at: the framed image of the film in the theatre.

While Keaton doesn’t approach his subject with the same complexity as Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo, it remains a very entertaining film that touches on some important aspects of film reception. Unlike Chaplin, Keaton does not behave at all like a child, but rather like a very lucky average Joe, and since his technical skills enable a very entertaining telling of his story, he is by far the more serious director. In Sherlock Jr. he manages to craft a film that, while clearly not meant to be a feature-length idea, has enormous potential to entertain.

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

André Crous

USA
5*

Director:
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Screenwriters:
Gore Vidal
Tennessee Williams
Director of Photography:
Jack Hildyard

Running time: 114 minutes

It is truly remarkable that this film, whose subject is always implied but never mentioned by name, can have such a strong impact on a viewer who has grown up in a much less restricted era of movie-going. I knew this film from a Gore Vidal interview in The Celluloid Closet, in which he, the screenwriter, admitted that the finale was overblown, and the very visible reference to the demise of Frankenstein’s monster in the film by director James Whale was a bit over-the-top. I knew that the unseen protagonist was gay and killed because of his sexuality, so I did go into the film suspicious of the words about him, wary of things said and particularly of things unsaid. Perhaps this knowledge made me susceptible to a positive bias towards the film. On the other hand, the film pretends to look for the truth and yet persists in obscuring this most basic component of the story, always putting up a smokescreen in front of the viewer. And nonetheless, the film is intriguing from beginning to end.

A young woman named Catherine Holly has been diagnosed with dementia praecox following the death of her cousin, Sebastian Venable, at the hands of a street mob in Cabeza de Lobo, Spain, the previous summer. The reason for the death and the exact way in which he died remain a mystery until the very end, but our suspicions grow about the exact nature of the relationship between the two cousins when Sebastian’s overprotective mother, Violet, wants to have Catherine lobotomised for “babbling” about the events of Sebastian’s final hours. The doctor who is to perform this operation is Cukrowicz, who tries to piece together the puzzle from the fragments given to him by the supposedly insane Catherine and Sebastian’s snobbish mother.

While the screenwriters were obliged to remove references to homosexuality, it is significant that Montgomery Clift was chosen to play Dr Cukrowicz, whom Violet mistakes for her own son. Clift was gay, and even though nothing is intimated about his character’s sexuality, his casting could not have been unrelated to his sexuality. Perhaps that is a sweeping statement, but it makes perfect sense in this film where so much had to be suggestive rather than overt.

By means of imagery such as the Venus flytrap and the painting of Saint Sebastian, the film prepares us for the swallowing of poor Sebastian by the angry mob in the film’s final act. “Nature is not created in the image of man’s compassion”, says Dr Cukrowicz, and this statement, made early in the film, after Violet’s account of the “flesh-eating birds” that ravage the young sea turtles on the Galápagos Islands, paints a truthful though ominous picture of the world that will be revealed to us. “[T]he ones who eat flesh, the killers, inherited the earth. But then, they always do, don’t they?”

Cukrowicz is a serious man who barely ever blinks and is aware of the experimental nature of the work he does. In his very first scene, in the hospital’s operating room, director Mankiewicz heightens the tension with small details, both visual and auditory, that include a constant buzzing in the background. Katherine Hepburn is marvellously stiff-upper-lip as Violet Venable, who has a borderline incestuous obsession with her late son. The character of Catherine is the only place where the film and the story trips up, ever so slightly: She is put, under Cukrowicz’s care, in what seems to be the least protected mental institution in the world, where she roams freely, provoking all kinds of riots among both male and female patients. Elizabeth Taylor, who plays this role, is also in the unenviable position of appearing onscreen for the first time after we have spent a long and poignant scene in the company of Clift and Hepburn, and her acting (or her character) is no match for theirs.

Suddenly, Last Summer is a joy to behold, even more so today, because the care with which Vidal (and Williams, although he distanced himself from the film) removed the references to Sebastian’s homosexuality while leaving in just enough to make us wonder. The casting of Clift and the image of Sebastian being devoured by a mob of young men are equally impressive and give ample food for thought, as they imply what could not be said outright.