Beau Travail

BEAU TRAVAIL        A          
France  (93 mi)  1999  d:  Claire Denis 

With banners furled, and clarions mute,

An army passes in the night,

And beaming spears and helms salute,

The dark with bright.

In silence deep the legions stream,

With open ranks, in order true;

Over boundless plains they stream and gleam–

No chief in view!

Afar, in twinkling distance lost,
(So legends tell) he lonely wends
And back through all that shining host
His mandate sends. 

—The Night March, Herman Melville from Timoleon,1891 

Gold in the mountain

And gold in the glen

And greed in the heart

Heaven having no part

And unsatisfied men.

—Gold in the Mountain, Herman Melville from The Works of Herman Melville, 1924

This film grew out of a French TV commission when Denis was approached by ARTE, the most culturally progressive European TV channel, and asked to make a film for a series exploring the theme of “foreignness.”  This is the same company that earlier asked Denis and others, namely Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, COLD WATER (1994), and André Téchiné, WILD REEDS (1994), to make films about adolescence, which resulted in the one-hour made-for-French-TV film U.S. GO HOME (1994).  “Since most of my films deal with that anyway, I worried about how I could avoid repeating myself.”  Having spent her early childhood in colonial French Africa, then moving to the Paris suburbs at age 13, she never felt like she belonged in either place, growing up feeling alienated.  Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, though altering the themes and ultimately the outcome, including carefully chosen excerpts of music from the Benjamin Britten opera, Denis has transposed the ship’s setting to a postcolonial French Foreign Legion outpost in the desert regions of Djibouti, Somalia, one of the places her family lived in the 50’s, so she already had a familiarity with the region.  Shot in just 15 days, what’s so remarkable about the film is the extreme originality, the indirect way of telling the story, reflecting the bad conscience of the colonial occupying power, as almost immediately one detects a solidly abstract visual expressionism, where the near wordless film becomes an intoxicating choreography of ritualized movement, as the group of fifteen muscular men do shirtless calisthenics in formation under the emptiness of the blistering desert sky, drenched with male eroticism and cast in the form of a languorous tropical dream, where a theme of rootless and abandoned men who otherwise have no home adapt to the rigid discipline of the legion.  Perhaps more importantly, Denis hired a choreographer, Bernardo Montet (who also plays one of the French legionnaires), transforming the film into a series of carefully constructed scenes, providing a near surreal structure, intentionally blurring the lines between illusion and reality.     

A taut psychological exploration of the increasingly antagonistic relationship between a Foreign Legion officer, Lieutenant Galoup (Denis Lavant), and a charismatic new recruit, Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin), Galoup narrates the tale in voiceover, where he is fanatically loyal to his commanding officer Bruno Forestier, Michel Subor, who previously played Bruno Forestier 37 years earlier in Godard's LE PETIT SOLDAT (1963) which was set during the Algerian War, actually banned for three years in France prior to the release due to the presence of torture scenes, where Forestier is now much older, seen with a chiseled face, sitting alone from the rest of the men, constantly smoking cigarettes.  The Denis film offers a revisionist perspective by actually engaging in a conversation with that earlier film through a shared character.  But when new recruits arrive, Galoup expresses extraordinary vehemence towards the especially attractive Sentain, especially after Forestier has taken an immediate liking to him, overly insecure and threated perhaps by his own noticeable lack of good looks.  Galoup's jealousy, like Othello, literally drives him to murderous insanity.  With a minimum of dialogue, Denis captures the ritual and repetition of a legionnaire’s life, expressed through beautifully ordered compositions of the men during various maneuvers, crawling under barbed wire, vaulting over bars, walking across elevated parallel wires, marching in formation across the desolate landscape, while also engaged in hand to hand combat.  The homoeroticism of the military experience rises to the forefront from the beauty of the visual composition, but also from the inner workings of Galoup’s mind, as he expresses his love of Forestier (carrying around a photo of him as a younger man) and a growing rage against Sentain.  While the legionnaires come from all races and hues, the film raises questions about the relationships of whites to blacks, especially given the perspective of a former French colony, highlighted in scenes where the men go into town on leave and dance with the local women, where one particular local beauty, Rahel (Marta Tafesse Kassa), seems to be the exclusive girl of Galoup, though he treats her paternalistically, as his primary interest remains Forestier.  While the setting is Africa, the atmospheric mood is one of reverie, spending hot dusty afternoons in the sun, where the monotony of the experience can overwhelm the legionnaires.  The voiceover is actually recalling events from a diary in a flashback mode, offering a ruminating calm, even as Galoup’s plans grow more inflamed, where his desire is more potent precisely because it remains unconsummated.

Denis creates a sensuous atmosphere not only with perfectly composed images, but the dramatic power never diminishes between major and minor events, often contrasting close ups with long shots, blending music and natural sound into her film, where she’s not afraid to use silences to match the spacious emptiness all around.  What’s perhaps most surprising, despite the focus on the men, is how carefully layered women are into the landscape, becoming a kind of Greek chorus, where their silent presence is everywhere, amusingly seen staring at the men as they carefully wash and iron their clothes, lining the street markets selling their goods, or seen sitting in the buses riding through the endless landscapes.  When the legionnaires stream into town on leave, they’re seen dancing at the local nightclub with native women, exchanging physical embraces, but rarely words.  The film opens and closes on the dance floor, where the whole film unravels like continual dance sequences, where even in their silence the women are an integral and necessary part of a dance ritual, but their presence is hauntingly ambiguous, silent witnesses, suggesting a potentially unhealthy relationship with the postcolonial presence of the soldiers, who may not be so welcome in the region.  According to Denis, “You always have a moment in life when you’d like to start from zero.  The Foreign Legion is a place where boys go to do that, where people who have no place to go can find a kind of family, especially because they're not asked what they did before.  The legionnaires became an erotic object in film and song—Edith Piaf’s song ‘Mon Legionnaire’ is one of her most famous—but when I saw them walking in the street or going to clubs, their beauty was more sad to me than erotic.  You could see that the Legion is about men together.  These boys who never belonged before now belong to one another.  It’s very touching.”  Tribute to Beau Travail YouTube (8:15), featuring the opening dance sequence with African girls in a disco to “Şimarik (Kiss-Kiss)” by Tarkan (0 to 1:24), calisthenics with a Benjamin Britten chorale (1:25 to 2:25), more unscored calisthenics, (2:25 to 3:45), dance sequence with Rahel (Marta Tafesse Kassa) to Francky Vincent “Le Tourment d’Amour” (3:45 to 4:30), more unscored calisthenics (4:30 to 5:23), march in formation to Neil Young’s “Safeway Cart” (5:23 to 6:50), Denis Lavant final dance sequence up to the end credits to Corona “Rhythm of the Night” (6:50 to 8:15), while this extends the throbbing dance music through the final credits, singing almost in defiance, “This is the rhythm of my life, my life,” CD Beau Travail YouTube (4:59).

The full force of the film took critic Jonathan Rosenbaum by such surprise that he had to admit “I must confess that I’m embarrassed by most of my other reviews of Claire Denis films,” claiming the difference between this film and her earlier work “is quite simply the difference between making movies and making cinema,” comparing it to the quantum leap taken by certain exalted artists like Robert Johnson or Charlie Parker in blues and jazz.  Some of the glorified images of male bodies during training exercises or on maneuvers are comparable to the idealized images of farmers harvesting the fields in Dovzhenko’s EARTH (1930), Eisenstein’s visually astounding battle scenes in ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938), or the glorified sweep of perfectly sculpted battle formations in Jancsó’s THE RED AND THE WHITE (1967) or Kurosawa’s RAN (1985).  While the history of cinema is filled with beautiful young women in various shades of undress being leered at by gawking male directors, male bodies have come under scrutiny before as well, where the term homoerotic suggests it was largely under the gaze of male directors, where the names Derek Jarman or Pier Paolo Pasolini come to mind, or Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), or Fassbinder’s QUERELLE (1982), which has a similar doomed love theme between a superior older officer and a gorgeous looking young sailor.  What’s unique here is how rare it is to find similar themes of male bodies visualized so artistically under a woman’s gaze, including the director and her lifelong cinematographer Agnès Godard, where you may have to go back to Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA (1938) for a similar comparison, where one suspects every single German cameraman in 1938 was male.  If one examines art history, women have typically been systematically excluded from art training, and this argument is raised every year at the Cannes Film Festival as to why there are so few female directors represented in competition, if any.  Only the names of Agnès Varda or the more literary Marguerite Duras are included in the French New Wave, which otherwise produced all male directors, where women were more likely to appear in front of the camera.  With alternating images of stark despair and staggering beauty, the suggestion here is not only is it rare, but from women directors it may be unsurpassed aesthetically.       

The Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge)

A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge)        A 

France  (240 mi)  1977     re-edited 1993 US version (180 mi)  d:  Chris Marker 

The workers will take the struggle from the fragile hands of the students.

One is unlikely to ever see so much collected Communist footage without watching propaganda films, as Marker, a member of the “Left Bank” of the New Wave for his Marxist inspired politics, fought in the French Resistance during World War II, and his films, like ¡CUBA SI! (1961), are often sympathetic to Socialist movements around the world.  His work combines social issues with formal experiment, getting his start as a foreign correspondent and inquiring reporter, where he is especially interested in transitional societies, “Life in the process of becoming history.”  His films are not only set in specific places, they are about the cultures of those places, calling his approach “Involved objectivity.”  An epic, years-in-the-making history of militant/revolutionary struggle from the 1960’s, there are essentially two versions of this film, a 1977 four-hour version in French, which would probably score a higher grade, and a 1993 re-edited, three-hour English language translation, which likely loses something without the original French speakers, such as Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, who are among the collective of French narrative voices.  Ideally, in film essays, one appreciates the tone of the narrative voice, such as the authoritarian, yet highly personal voice of Terrence Davies in Of Time and the City (2008), whose eloquence and perfect diction reflects his devout Catholic upbringing, which he angrily rails against in his heavily autobiographical film.  Without hearing the intended voices when Marker made the film, one can only surmise what must be missing from this American version, as the dry and emotionless English language narrator continually takes the air out of the wealth of material with his monotone and often lifeless readings.  That’s unfortunate, as certainly one of the revelations of this film is the rare historic nature of the collected archival materials, where the narrator should help put this invaluable footage in perspective.  Consider this segment with a French narration, presumably Marker himself, beautifully recalling a childhood experience when he first watched Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) Grin Without a Cat (Opening Sequence) - Chris Marker - YouTube (4:04), emphatically describing that magical moment when he first hears the words “Brothers!”  This opening POTEMKIN sequence is utterly enthralling, especially with that mix of militarism and Mozart in the original score written by Luciano Berio, using carefully edited clips from the original movie, then cleverly introducing chosen footage of 1960’s demonstrations that resulted in bloody clashes with heavily armed police, mirroring the chaos and pandemonium from the Odessa Steps sequence. 

Along with Jean Eustache’s film The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), these are definitive expressions of innocence lost, reflecting the aftermath of the failed French revolution in May 1968 and the end of the French New Wave, while Bertolucci’s film Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione) (1964) is a wonderfully insightful critique of the Communist Party leading up to that promised day when the revolution would finally come.  Marker’s video essay is comprised entirely of archival footage on revolutionary events between 1966 and 1977, dividing his work into two parts, first examining the unity and optimism gearing up for May 1968 in France, while also documenting the subsequent collapse of global socialist struggles, leaving the Left fractured and in disarray afterwards.  If there is one word that encapsulates what the 60’s was about, that word would be Vietnam.  Marker shows footage of American armed merchants selling their wares, including explosive devices that can be hooked up to common household items such as soap dishes, proudly displaying their effectiveness, claiming this could easily blow up a car as well.  America’s fascination with weapons is displayed by an overzealous Air Force pilot filmed while on a mission dropping bombs and napalm on Vietnam, positively exhilarated that he was able to obliterate live targets seen running on the ground out in the open Air Force pilot in Vietnam: at war and loving it - YouTube (2:00).  Perhaps the poster faces of revolution in the 60’s were that of a youthful Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, both advocates of guerilla warfare.  While this tactic may have worked in Cuba, leading Parisian socialists were not so quick to pronounce this an effective strategy in Europe.  Nonetheless, there is plenty of footage of Castro analyzing the various international strategies, such as the Cuban Missile crisis or the Russian decision to abandon Cuba, where more than any other, he is the most featured speaker.  The film examines the effectiveness of Stalinism, suggesting one of the problems of the Russian Revolution was the lack of input from ordinary citizens, where it was not a people’s revolution, ruling instead through despotic control, using the police and armed military to prevent dissent, so the socialist mindset was never accepted by ordinary citizens, believing it was imposed upon them rather than a collective method where everyone contributed to the whole, which is exactly how Russia always portrayed itself in the propaganda films.  By contrast, the Chinese Revolution is a people’s revolution, where ordinary people are the engine that generates activism, where they have a personal stake in the output, generated by local party council meetings where they are constantly feeding input to the top.  The problem, however, is corruption, where a few would rather consolidate their own power, taking advantage of their position in the party for special favors.  Nonetheless, effective or not, there was a growing influence of Maoism, especially after the Sino-Soviet Split, where even the American Black Panther Party carried around Mao’s Little Red Book, aka Quotations from Chairman Mao.   

Without ever endorsing any particular method, Marker is careful not to editorialize, but offers perhaps the best composite overview and critique of his own failed Marxist dream, occasionally interjecting an eccentric electronic score that adds a fragmented touch of dissonance or discord, where the events leading up to May 1968 are prefaced by other Protests of 1968, including a worldwide series of demonstrations and strikes, largely comprised of students and workers, including the Tlatelolco massacre of 200 protesters in Mexico ten days prior to the 1968 Summer Olympic games, where not a single country lodged any protest.  May 1968 is significant because the world might be a different place had there been a different outcome, truly a historic moment in time when the Parisian student demonstrations combined with nationwide French worker strikes creating the largest general strike in the history of an advanced industrial nation, a prolonged two-week strike involving 11 million workers and nearly a quarter of the French population.  The impact was so significant it brought about the collapse of the De Gaulle government, but there is still plenty of disagreement about what went wrong, where the general consensus is the lack of a cohesive direction, where the Communist Party all but supported the government, as the leftist student movements never made the case for a worker’s movement, the foundation of any socialist revolution, allowing a wedge to be brought between the two groups which the government capitalized upon.  Major Ralph “Pappy” Shelton is seen in his Pentagon offices describing the capture and killing of Che Guevara in the mountains of Bolivia, proudly gloating at this success, eager to assess blame that Che’s mistake was relying upon a Communist Party that hadn’t established a footing and never connected with the locals in Bolivia, leaving him isolated and vulnerable.  This event seems to foreshadow more ominous occurrences yet to come. 

Marker’s analysis of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 1968 is nothing short of breathtaking, perhaps the high point of the film, as it capsulizes the deflated hopes of those advocating international socialism, that call to arms for fraternal brotherhood so brilliantly depicted in POTEMKIN.  Even Castro is outraged, calling it an illegal act when a socialist nation militarily occupies another nation, as it goes against everything the international brotherhood of socialists stand for and only weakens their position worldwide.  Marker also provides stunning footage of recently elected Socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile addressing a gathering crowd, charming and completely relaxed, displaying a candid logic and intelligence while attempting to alleviate tensions about converting the nation to a socialist state, claiming there are already capitalist precedents.  He is also seen giving a surprisingly honest speech about the necessity of imposing a wage freeze to avert inflation, for which he received jeers and hisses at a worker’s hall gathering where he speaks about a worker’s moral obligation, but he was the tragic victim of a U.S. backed military coup shortly afterwards, allegedly committing a forced suicide while surrounded by an armed opposition, immediately installing military head Augusto Pinochet.  We see Allende’s daughter Beatriz gravely addressing a crowd in Cuba afterwards, receiving a warm reception, but she later committed suicide.  A collection of TV reports, guerrilla newsreels, government propaganda, speeches, and various interviews, the images are drawn mainly from rarely shown footage shot by others, chiefly outtakes from other documentaries, Marker has a way of distilling seemingly disparate ideas in surprisingly provocative ways.  A memorial to those free spirits who fought for liberty, equality, and human solidarity, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, the national motto of France, Marker’s film is bluntly critical, while remaining poetic and perceptive in its analysis, a landmark work where there is nothing else remotely like it.  Unfortunately, a moving and significant credit at the end remains untranslated in the American version, paying tribute to the collective nature of filmmaking, “The true authors of this film are the countless cameramen, technical operators, witnesses and activists whose work is constantly pitted against that of the powers that be, who would like us to have no memory.”

Excerpts from a 15-page Marker essay entitled Sixties originally released by Icarus Film Distribution Company upon the film’s 2008 DVD release, seen here:

Sixties - MARKER - 2008 - Critical Quarterly - Wiley Online Library 

In May anyway the final whistle came quickly: with the first casualty. Not too serious for revolutionaries, but it’s a fact, the murder of Pierre Overney by a Renault watchman would bring everyone back to the real value of lives, things and words. On the workers’ front, the great wave finally met its dikes, a phenomenon summarised by former minister Edgar Pisani in one sentence, ‘a terrible connivance between the conservative apparatus of the CGT (the communist-led union) and the conservative apparatus of the government’. And a great disorder fell on everyone’s mind.

Strangely, the small clannish fights used to draw a kind of overdetermination from the fact they had developed in this fuzzy space of the imaginary revolution. Left to their own devices amidst a reassured country, they became weakly and purposeless. Historical Anarchy had died – heroically – in Spain. To refer to it now made no more sense than being a royalist, unless it became an ideological business, quite profitable at that. The Communist Party had missed every helping hand offered by History and started the long spin of a motorless airplane. French Maoism would remain a landmark in the history of teratology. The foolishness of morons is a plague, but statistically speaking we have to put up with it. What is fascinating is the foolishness of clever people and in this particular case, some of the cleverest.

Elsewhere, things were more violent, more difficult than in France, but the curve was the same. For having gleaned a few traces of these luminous and murky years, I tinkered with these films. They don’t claim to be any more than that: traces. Even the most megalomaniac, A Grin Without a Cat (originally four hours long, wisely reduced to three but without modifying the content, just shortening it, with a short monologue at the end), is in no way the chronicle of a decade. Its inevitable gaps would become unjustifiable. It revolves around a precise theme: what happens when a party, the CP, and a great power, the USSR, cease to embody the revolutionary hope, what looms up in their place and how the showdown is staged. The irony is that thirty years later, the question is irrelevant. Both have ceased to exist and the only chronicle is that of the unending rehearsal of a play which has never premiered.

China Express (Goluboy ekspress)

CHINA EXPRESS (Goluboy ekspress)           B+                  

aka:  Blue Express

Russia  (62 mi)  1929  d:  Ilya Trauberg

It’s not often that you can see a film that advocates armed insurrection, but this is certainly one of them, the first feature film by Soviet filmmaker Ilya Trauberg who began as a film critic before venturing into making films.  His documentary LENINGRAD TODAY (1927) caught the eye of Sergei Eisenstein who hired him as an assistant on his 1928 film OCTOBER (TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD) commemorating the tenth anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution in which the Bolsheviks seized power, a film noted for using striking juxtapositions of symbols to comment on the events.  Cinema was still in its infancy during the 20’s when the new Soviet state headed by Vladimir Lenin understood the medium could be used to communicate with the masses, a position later copied by Joseph Stalin.  The State Film Institute in Moscow, aka VGIK, was established in 1919 to train a new generation of filmmakers, the oldest film school anywhere in the world, where Bolshevik Newsreels by Dziga Vertov were the major form of earliest Soviet cinema, but they also created agit-prop films where they attempted to educate the populace about the goals of Communism, using young emerging filmmakers to send the message.  Lev Kuleshov taught a promising group of film students in the early 20’s, including Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, who then began their own filmmaking careers in the middle 20’s, where Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) brought Russia international acclaim, heralding a new style of Soviet cinema, heavily propagandistic, preaching the party line about the virtues of a worker state, using shorter scenes, quick cuts, and a rapid-fire editing technique to produce a rhythmic style of accumulating dramatic tension, paying particular attention to close-ups in what became known as Soviet montage.  To illustrate the burgeoning industry, in 1923 the Soviets released just 38 feature films, but by 1928 that figure was up to 109.  As it turns out, the greatest creative achievements of the Silent era in Soviet cinema, where noted directors Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Vertov produced their most acclaimed works, came from a brief period of film prosperity from the mid 20’s to the end of the decade.    

While CHINA EXPRESS is blatant propaganda, very much in the cutting edge style of early Soviet cinema, it begins with tugging sentiment, where the happy greeting of two Chinese brothers quickly turns to sorrow with the realization that their sister has been sold into servitude to a corrupt capitalist merchant who hideously treats her as his own property.  Both mired in poverty, neither can lift a finger to help the girl, who is forced to endure the cruel and degrading treatment of her new owner.  This sets the stage, and the train, in motion, becoming one of the earliest unstoppable train movies, like Buster Keaton’s THE GENERAL (1926), where nearly all the action takes place on the train, ultimately a coming of consciousness picture where people slowly rally to her defense, not just a young girl, but fighting for the plight of all exploited workers across the nation.  To make things easily understood, the coach fare is divided by social class, where first class contains the white European dignitaries and the wealthy Chinese aristocrats, second class contains the professionals and merchants, while third class are the poor and slaving workers.  Like POTEMKIN, there is an incendiary spark that produces instant outrage, when a pair of inebriated Englishmen decide to brutally molest the Chinese girl, threatening her with rape until her brother intervenes and kills one of the white men, which sends a shock wave into each coach.  The brother along with his rescued sister return to the protection of his Chinese comrades in third class, while first class erupts in enraged fury, immediately sending in armed troops to apprehend the offender.  But the Chinese passengers, a stand-in for the Russian masses, stick up for one another and rather than be shot down like dogs, decide to arm themselves with guns and ammunition from a munitions shipment on the train.  This is one of the few films you’ll ever see that encourages Asian minorities to arm themselves against the corrupt power of the white ruling class, who are guided by their deplorably racist intentions. 

Within the train itself, the spirit of revolution is in the air, with both sides armed to the teeth with plenty of innocent bystanders who just happen to be there.  The first wave of militia sent in are shot, so the imperialists and their bought-and-paid-for Chinese associates send an entire army to attack the coach class car which holds its position and refuses to be bullied by armed oppressors defending imperious white men who think they can rape Chinese girls with impunity.  With fighting inside and outside the train, with more offensives to gain control of the engine, and still more battles going on outside to control the railway switches, the train is a bloody battleground of the political ideologies of good and evil.  Featuring a steady stream of close-ups and nearly non-stop action, the film has been citied as the main inspiration of Josef von Sternberg’s SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1932), a film that helped transform a not-very-successful German actress into an international sex goddess, Marlene Dietrich as the world-weary courtesan Shanghai Lily, known in the film as the “White Flower of the Chinese coast.”  CHINA EXPRESS is hardly subtle, but it is notable for staging a worker’s revolt on a speeding, out of control train, where the train itself becomes synonymous with the fiery, yet unstoppable revolutionary movement surging across the lands of Mother Russia.  It’s a bit ironic, as the Chinese are depicted as a metaphor for the Russian people in the film, but seen some 80 years afterwards, the Russian Revolution fizzled out with glasnost and the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, unable to meet the needs of the extended empire, where the ideology of Communism never took root in the hearts and minds of its population, leading to severe economic stagnation, where the Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen fiercely nationalistic separate countries that couldn’t wait to kick the Russians out.  On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party remains the founding and current ruling party of The People’s Republic of China, but has integrated capitalist measures into their overall Marxist social strategies, heading one of the strongest economies in the world, and by any measure remains one of the world powers.  If only they’d allow unfettered Internet access and expressions of dissent, perhaps the world would be a better place, but as is, the revolution remains a work in progress. 

The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli)

THE CRANES ARE FLYING (Letyat zhuravli)          A               

Russia  (94 mi)  1957  d:  Mikhail Kalatozov

1956 was the 20th Congress of the Communist Party and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made a speech denouncing Stalin and the Stalinist purges and the gulag labor systems, revealing information that was previously forbidden, publicly revealing horrible new truths, which opened the door for a new Soviet Cinema led by Mikhail Kalatozov, once Stalin’s head of film production.  This film features a Red Army that is NOT victorious, in fact they are encircled, in a retreat mode, with many people dying, including the hero, in a film set after 06-02-41, the German invasion of Russia when Germany introduced Operation Barbarossa, a blitzkrieg invasion intended to bring about a quick victory and the ultimate enslavement of the Slavs, and very nearly succeeded, actually getting within 20 miles of Moscow in what was a Red Army wipe out, a devastation of human losses, where throughout the war 22 to 26 million Russians died, or 15 – 20% of the entire population.  Historically, this was a moment of great trauma and suffering, a psychological shock to the Russian people, but the Red Army held and prolonged the war 4 more years until they were ultimately victorious.

During the war, Stalin used the war genre in films for obvious morale boosting, introducing female heroines who were ultra-patriotic and strong and idealistic, suggesting that if females could be so successful and patriotic, then Russia could expect at least as much from their soldiers.  Stalin eliminated the mass hero of the proletariat and replaced it with an individual, bold leader who was successful at killing many of the enemy, an obvious reference to Stalin himself, who was always portrayed in film as a bold, wise and victorious leader.  But Kalatozov changed this depiction, as THE CRANES ARE FLYING was made after Stalin’s death, creating a political thaw and causing a worldwide sensation, winning the Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or in 1958, as well as the Best Director and Best Actress (Tatyana Samojlova), reawakening the West to Soviet Cinema for the first time since Eisenstein’s IVAN THE TERRIBLE (1944) in the 40’s. 

Adapated by Viktor Rozov from his own play, this film features brilliant, breathtaking, and extremely mobile camera work from his extraordinary cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, using spectacular crane and tracking shots that literally glide through the streets, always creating an exhilarating sense of motion, featuring near hallucinogenic images of wartime, battlefields, also Moscow and crowded streets that are urgently vivid and real.  The story is simple, a couple blissfully in love are separated by the German invasion.  Boris (Aleksey Batalov) is called to the front leaving Veronica behind, who is superbly played by Tatyana Samojlova, who represents for Soviet films a more truthful character, asking Boris selfishly, “What about me?” when he announces he is off to war.  When Boris hears his father, a doctor at the hospital, consoling a wounded, demented soldier who wants an immediate end to his life because his girl married someone who stayed at home, his father tells him that it would be her disgrace, not his, as she would never know his bravery, describing such a woman:  “There will be no pardon for her.”

With Boris off to war, Veronica is chased by Boris’s cousin Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin), who uses his corrupt influence to get an exemption from serving in the army, eventually raping Veronica in a visually dizzying air raid sequence, where Veronica is under siege from Mark at the same time Russia is under siege from Germany, mirroring the war in her personal relationship, revealing the enemy within.  Losing one’s virginity was cause for marriage in Soviet society, which actually boosted Mark’s chances, particularly after not hearing from Boris after 4 years of war, so he was presumed dead.  But she hates Mark and retains her romantic yearning for Boris, as expressed in one of the many brilliant scenes when she actually exposes Mark cheating on her.  In perhaps the sequence of the film, her mind in utter turmoil, shot in a wintry bleakness, she runs towards a bridge with a train following closely behind her, a moment when the viewer is wondering if she might throw herself in front of that train in despair, but instead she saves a 3-year old boy also named Boris who was about to be hit by a car.

Another exceptional scene captures the death of Boris on the battlefield, who dies a senseless death, and his thoughts spin and whirl in a beautiful montage of trees, sky, leaves, all spinning in a kaleidoscope of his own thoughts and dreams, including his lost love, envisioning an imaginary wedding with Veronica.  This film features the famous line, “You can dream when the war is over.”  In the final sequence, when the war is finally over and soldiers are returning in a mass celebratory scene on the streets, where Veronica finally learns for certain that Boris died, all are happy and excited with the soldier’s return, but Veronica is in utter despair, passing out flowers to soldiers and strangers on the street in an extreme gesture of generosity and selflessness revealing with poetic insight “cranes white and gray floating in the sky.”

The film was released in 1957 in Russia, and according to some reviews, “the silence in the theater was profound, the wall between art and living life had fallen...and tears unlocked the doors.”

Foreign Correspondent

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT        B+                  

USA  (120 mi)  1940  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

I fought for my country in my heart in a very difficult way, because sometimes it’s harder to fight dishonorably than nobly in the open. 

—Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall)

An often neglected but gripping spy thriller story about sending a new fresh American reporter to London to cover a European war that hadn’t truly gotten started yet sounds like the ideal perspective for Alfred Hitchcock, a British citizen newly arrived in America, with this only his second Hollywood film following REBECCA (1940), which won the Academy Award as Best Picture, both released in the same year.  It’s something of a rousing patriotic effort supporting the British war effort, a daring gesture considering America’s official position at the time remained neutral, but many British nationals felt uneasy about living and working in Hollywood while their country was on the brink of war.  By the time the film finished shooting, the war still hadn’t begun, but when it did shortly afterwards, Hitchcock added the final scene written by Ben Hecht.  While this is a complicated and convoluted story, written by a committee of writers, it’s basically a harrowing, behind-the-scenes thriller of political intrigue and espionage that involves kidnapping and murder in an attempt to obtain government secrets.  In many ways it foreshadows the exposed traitorous activities of NOTORIOUS (1946), but also the way ordinary men can become drawn into matters of international concern, like The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959), where in each there’s an accompanying romantic angle.  Initially seeking Gary Cooper, he turned down his chance to work with Hitchcock, claiming it was just “a thriller,” a narrative genre not yet in favor with the public, but one whose reputation was enhanced considerably by this director.  What’s perhaps most notable about this film is there are no proven stars, no one to carry the picture, so the often confusing, labrynthian puzzle aspects of the story carry the suspense.   

Joel McCrea is the everyman reporter Johnny Jones sent to cover what was *not* being reported in the newspapers in America, where the newspaper editor Mr. Powers (Harry Davenport) takes an interest when first hearing about him, “Hmmm, beat up a policeman, eh? Sounds ideal for Europe,” but not before changing his name (from his secret files of names) to one more befitting the sound of a foreign correspondent, giving him the ridiculous byline Huntley Haverstock.  Sent to cover a peace movement organization led by Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), which newspapermen cynically think is the work of well wishing amateurs that have little hope of stopping a battle trained army sent on a mission of nation destruction and obliteration, he quickly discovers that the only views he’s really interested in are from the candid and straight-talking daughter of the leader, Laraine Day as Carol Fisher, where screwball comedy perhaps best describes their rapid-fire dialogue that almost completely advances the love interest.  But they continually get interrupted and separated by quckly developing events on the ground, as Johnny witnesses the assassination of Van Meer (Albert Bassermann), an important Dutch diplomat, in a tribute to a similar scene where a man gets shot in the eye in front of a large crowd on the Odessa Steps of Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925), where here the gunman is disguised as a photographer and escapes in the rain underneath a crowd of umbrellas with Johnny in hot pursuit, ending in a extended car chase sequence out into the windmills of Holland, where the car they are chasing simply disappears.  One of the best sequences of the film is Johnny’s internal search of one of those windmills where he finds the car stashed, where the geometric structures are so fully utilized, using a heavily stylized interior set design by Alexander Golitzen and cinematography by Rudolph Maté, where he hides in the tight corners and vertical stairways, evading a large operational gear system that suggests Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES (1936), where he actually loses his coat in the gears and has to follow the circular motion to grab it back, where he witnesses a meeting of the kidnapping team, accidentally stumbling onto Van Meer who was supposedly shot, as a double was used to make the world think he was dead, where he has instead been drugged and continually interrogated for secret information. 

Of interest, the Nazi’s are never named or identified as the enemy, nor are there references to Germany’s military advances in Eastern Europe, but the extensive network of criminals all speak German and continually look suspicious.  The intense action apparently brings together the two would-be lovers, who finally succumb in each others arms with instant plans for marriage, where written into the script is Hitchcock’s own eccentric marriage proposal to Alma Reville, his wife for over 50 years.  Of course, by the time Johnny gets police to the crime scene, they have all but disappeared, leaving many to question his version of events.  Their plans to announce their engagement to her father get thwarted when Johnny sees one of the kidnappers working for Fisher, which she identifies as a loyal family employee, which certainly takes some of the steam out of the marriage and ratchets up the intrigue, as Fisher attempts to construct an unsuspecting net around Johnny to maintain his silence, while he seems to be the one behind the dastardly assassination and kidnapping plot, continuing to hide behind his cover as a credible peace movement activist.  Meanwhile, Johnny hasn’t filed a single report of what he’s uncovered since the day he arrived, stymied by his affection for Carol, where in his view, “I'm in love with a girl, and I'm going to help hang her father.”  This moral dilemma pales in contrast to the political events of the hour, as Britain is rapidly advancing into war against Germany.  The source material for the film is Vincent Sheean’s own autobiographical account, Personal History, of when he got his start as a reporter covering the growing political turmoil in Europe.  The complexity of the historical era is beautifully portrayed as a series of government lies, deceits, and betrayals, where the actual studio settings resemble the crowded London subway station, Westminister tower, or Holland’s flat plains, and the many action sequences are a marvel of detail and construction, which continue throughout the film, right down to the last few scenes where Hitchcock films a particularly enthralling TITANIC (1997) disaster-at-sea special effects sequence, enhanced by none other than William Cameron Menzies.  The final added-on scene of Johnny reporting the news in Europe back to America on radio broadcasts while bombs are falling behind him extends the screaming intensity of the madness of war, where the love aspect also recalls Michael Powell’s divinely romantic postwar film, STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN (1946), where a British air force pilot deliriously falls madly in love with the voice of an American WAC air traffic controller after his plane’s been shot down and he’s heading rapidly to the ground in his last few seconds of life.  Now that’s a war romance.            

Note—Hitchcock is seen early in the movie walking in front of Johnny Jones reading a newspaper.

The First Rasta (Le Premier Rasta)

THE FIRST RASTA (Le Premier Rasta)          C                    

France  Mauritius  (86 mi)  2010  d:  Hélène Lee and Christophe Farnarier

What this attempts to be is a documentary exploring the roots of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica, focusing on one individual who allegedly founded the movement in the 1930’s, Leonard Percival Howell, who was one of the 25,000 Jamaicans working on the Panama Canal as exploitive labor, where they were treated like a slave class by the dominating colonial powers, developing a socialist worldview, where footage from Eisenstein’s POTEMKIN (1925) is utilized to express his internationalist “workers of the world” sentiment.  When the Canal was completed just prior to World War I, and the subsequent Russian Revolution, the Jamaicans were quickly expelled from Panama, becoming rootless exiles abandoned by the world, mostly penniless and uneducated.  Marcus Garvey attracted the attention of many blacks, as he spoke to the heart of displaced Africans, advocating a “Back to Africa” movement which inspired a Black Nationalist movement within Jamaica, a former slave colony that remained under British colonial rule.  In the early 1930’s a religious and social movement called Rastafarianism evolved in Jamaica, claiming Garvey as a prophet, where Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia, was considered a living God, known as “Ras Tafari,” as prophesized by Garvey who claimed an African King would be crowned.  Followers of Emperor Salassie withdrew from Jamaican society and refused to pay taxes to Britain, rejecting Christianity as a “white religion,” calling discriminatory Western culture a modern day Babylon.  Howell established the first Rastafarian community in 1939 on a remote Jamaican hillside location called the Pinnacle, where what attracted Howell’s attention was learning to be self-reliant without depending upon the whites, where many Rastafarians adopted the naturally grown ganga (marijuana) as their sacred herb.  

One particular difficulty with this film is the state of confusion running throughout, as the filmmakers use the African style of talking history, where friends and family of Howell describe what they remember about their experience, where for some of the elders this is more than 50 or 60 years ago, where what is immediately evident is that none of the “witnesses” have any formal education, so their descriptions of life at the Pinnacle are vague and incomplete, never really mentioning why they came together as a group in the first place, what spiritual kinship they shared, or what initial hardships they must have endured attempting to be completely self-reliant for such a large group of nearly 3000 people.  Viewers may be scratching their heads trying to figure out what was really happening and why, as one envisions something like a back to nature utopia, but Howell himself expressed interest in multiple wives, which was not addressed, and no one describes any food arrangement, work requirements, or communal rules, yet this went on for some twenty years, but the director certainly offers little help in pulling this Pinnacle material together with pictures or stories or any sort of historical reference.  Instead the film is a series of fragmented recollections, tainted memories, really, as much of it is filled with the bitterness of disillusion, as shortly after a visit to the island by the British Queen in 1959, prior to achieving independence in 1962, the Pinnacle was subject to a major police raid that destroyed the living compounds, burning much of it to the ground while also making several arrests, basically shutting down the operation and sending people fleeing in all directions.  No one mentions any legal basis or justification for the raid, even in the most general terms other than to suggest they were defying colonial mentality by attempting to be free and liberated.  However there is some reason to believe there may have been an ongoing series of raids before the community was destroyed, where the perceived negative social repercussions from the out of control ganga drug enterprise within Jamaica may have become the tipping point.    

It begs the question, now that they are an independent country, what’s stopping them from building another self-reliant Rastafarian community?  Instead the painted portrait is of a scattered presence on the island, with many living instead in urban ghettos, largely responsible for creating bass heavy ska music in the 50’s before evolving into Reggae music in the 60’s, which became internationally accepted due to the influence of the acclaimed Bob Marley, who accentuated many Rastafarian themes in his music, like Bob Marley & The Wailers 'Rastaman Chant' (2:24), but you won’t find them here in this film.  Instead, the filmmaker likes to gather a group of guys, young and old, on the street playing drums and chanting Rastafarian songs, where a singer calls out, like a church preacher, which is followed by a choir response, creating a hypnotic rhythm, much like the Cuban Guaguancó style music seen here:  Guaguancó - YouTube (1:41).  We see this stylized arrangement 4 or 5 times in the film, each seemingly on-the-spot, where it’s apparent music has endured even as much of the Black Nationalist sentiment has become marginalized.  Instead the music suggests one love, one heart, and a kind of universal interracial community living in harmony, much like predominate Mardi Gras themes, which also mix French, African, and Indian cultures into a rhythmic and highly percussive beat.  What’s missing from the discussion is any mention of education or cultural rights, as a prevailing theme throughout the film is a portrait of dispossessed people who remain poor and uneducated inside Jamaica today, whose collective political voice remains silent, perhaps representing only about 1 % of Jamaican society, yet their desire to remain opposed to the typical societal dictates of greed and consumerism and instead advocate a healthier back to the land lifestyle of self reliance remains admirable.  But this documentary is spotty at best, leaving out a more historical perspective for personal talking points that simply don’t reveal the whole story of what remains an elusively intriguing subject.   

The Battle of Algiers

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS                       A                    

Italy Algeria  (123 mi)  1965  d:  Gillo Pontecorvo

God be with you.                     

 —Jaffar (Saadi Yacef ), FLN military chief as he sends women with explosives in their baskets to bomb French targets

It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it. But it’s only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin.         

—Si Ben M’hidi, FLN leader

Legality can be inconvenient.            

—French reporter at a news conference, commenting on the methods of torture used by Colonel Mathieu

Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences.       

—Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) in 1957, followed by a montage of graphically horrific methods of torture, shown to the music of a Bach organ Prelude 

Often imitated, but never equaled, as bold and raw a film as one is ever likely to see, a thrilling, in-your-face examination of the last bloody vestiges of the French colonial occupation in Algeria in the 1950’s, street by street, house by house, shown with such realism that it resembles a documentary.  This strikingly original Black & White film proves you don’t need a big budget, great actors, or beautiful photography to produce a masterpiece, instead this film relies on precise and meticulous direction which relies on suspenseful storytelling which never lags, using real people and locations and what resembles a hand-held, cinema vérité camera style to lend an extraordinary authenticity to the people inhabiting the streets of the Arab Casbah region of Algiers.  Also noteworthy is the objective balance in getting both sides right, where neither side's conscience survives unscathed, from the exhilaration of the Arab resistance fighters, who rely on terrorist measures in their battle for liberation, including moments of horror when the bombers themselves realize that, by their actions, Arabs would be killed alongside the French, to the French, who express an admiration for the determination of the opposition, yet they rely on their much greater military firepower, turning the region into a police state, but are reduced to using methods of terrorism and torture themselves to counter a largely invisible enemy whose ability to stay united with what seemed like so little was shocking to an established European power that inhabited Algeria for 130 years.  This is Frantz Fanon style filmmaking, as never has there been a more Wretched of the Earth style exposé of the devastating effects of Colonialism, where the Motherland pretends to be paternalistically friendly and helpful while draining the nation’s wealth and resources, continually undermining the colonized citizens with humiliating and demeaning racist depictions, where the colonizer continues to exploit the colonized as second class citizens.  The similarities to Iraq and the Gaza Strip remain powerfully unsettling.  The film was banned in France at the time of its release while winning the Golden Lion as the Best Film of the Venice Film Festival in 1966. 

  

The film remains the seminal work on documenting revolutionary tactics, which includes targeted assassinations of police and bombings in heavily populated European areas, including a truck driver showing early signs of the inclination to become a suicide bomber, while also depicting the anti-terrorist police methods as well, which also include bombings, mass arrests, guarded security check points, and the routine use of torture in interrogation methods.  Wasting no time, the film gets into the heart of the action with an opening segment of torture that could just as easily be from Rossellini's OPEN CITY (1945), leading the French to the hiding place of the last head of the Algerian Resistance movement in 1957 before telling the rest of the story in flashback motif, going backwards in time and showing the earlier meetings of organizing the structure of various militant cells which were designed specifically so that information was spread to as few people as possible, limiting the knowledge that each individual may know while still allowing the entire organization to make strategic strikes.  My guess is that this technique is still used today, which shows how relevant the film really is, offering what amounts to a timeless perspective while actually documenting a specific historical event.  Structurally, the film plays out much like Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925), which shows the mutiny on a Russian battleship and the rallying of the sympathetic masses in 1905 only to lead to their crushing defeat, documenting the preliminary events that led to such outrage that it sparked the Russian Revolution in 1917.  Similarly, Pontecorvo, an Italian Marxist director who commanded the anti-Fascist Milan Resistance in 1943, painstakingly reconstructs actual events that visualizes the birth of Algerian independence, which began as an idea, requiring education of the masses, mobilization of contacts, acts of resistance, and eventually a call to arms.  But the French response was swift and demonstrably harsh, turning Algiers into an occupied police state where citizens could be rousted out of their beds at any time and subject to brutal interrogations, with their leaders targeted for arrest, assassination, or extinction.  The irony, of course, is that some of the heavy handed French police were former Resistance fighters themselves against the Nazi occupation or survivors of the Holocaust.       

Much of the accuracy and rich detail comes from Saadi Yacef, playing Jaffar, who was the actual FLN military chief in 1956 and ‘57, the brains behind the resistance operation until he was captured and sentenced to death, writing his memoirs in prison, Souvenirs de la Bataille d'Alger, published in 1962, the year Algeria obtained their independence, which were used in the making of this movie, where he is also one of the film’s producers.   Yacef was eventually pardoned when Charles De Gaulle returned to power and currently serves as a Senator in the Algerian National Assembly.  One can’t say enough about the sheer artistry in making this film, where the construction of the story and the use of editing is simply outstanding, while the cinematography by Marcello Gatti shooting without a tripod captures the seedy authenticity in a manner that is unrivalled, taking Italian realism to new heights, displaying the vibrancy of the impoverished Arab quarters like its rarely been seen, using all non-professional actors (except for the French Colonel played by Jean Martin, himself a fierce critic of the French occupation), who comprise a multitude of human faces, showing narrow streets that are always crowded and overpopulated, like a labyrinth where the density is unimaginable, with women dressed from head to toe in long, flowing robes, where the French police in their uniforms couldn’t appear more out of place.  Particularly compelling is the integration of sound and music, using the bold percussive sounds of Ennio Morricone to move the action along contrasted against the soft, spiritual sounds of a Bach Passion or an organ Prelude while prisoners are being tortured, also the opening movement of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony, which was written to commemorate the eerie calm outside the Palace Square in 1905 before unarmed protestors were massacred by the Tsar, mournful music which is heard as the French are conducting raids to round up Resistance fighters who would later be tortured or killed.  The film retains an impassioned honesty and a no-nonsense sense of outrage using a staggering, newsreel-like authenticity, providing us with a time capsule view of history in the making.  Really, nothing this riveting has ever been made—either before or since.