I've been writing about film for just over nine years now, and writing in a professional capacity for just over six. When I started this site in November of 2007, I had no notion that I would still be grappling with cinema through the written word nearly a decade later, or that I would eventually be paid to do so. Roughly in the summer of 2007, however, before I had even started trying to write about film, I knew that I wanted to become more cinematically literate, as a sort of personal development goal. To that end, I started watching films with greater frequency than I ever had before at that point in my life. I started going to the theater a few times a week, instead of once every two or three weeks. I started devouring DVDs obsessively using the (then new) movies-by-mail service Netflix. I started taking more risks in terms of the types of films I was willing to pay to see, and I started filling in the conspicuous voids in my cinematic literacy.

One effect of this obsessive consumption was that by the time the end of 2007 approached, something new had happened. For the first time in my life, I felt that I could put together a respectable list of the "Best" films of the year, since I had actually seen (what seemed at the time to be) a healthy chunk of the year's wide and limited releases. List-making is always fun, of course, and the exercise of assembling that Best of 2007 inventory in turned motivated me to maintain my zealous film consumption habits in 2008. And now here it is, 2016, and I've written nine such year-end best lists (plus one that will be published soon), not to mention countless reviews, essays, interviews, listicles, and other miscellanea on the subject of film.

It seems like an appropriate moment to pause and reflect on the past ten years in cinema. It's also an opportunity to compile a different kind of inventory. While I strive to ensure that the feature films on my Best of the Year lists reflect artistic excellence in all its myriad forms, not every film that makes the cut ends up sticking prominently in my memory for years. Nor does every "Best" film inspire the sort of passion that prompts multiple re-visitations. Conversely, some films sneak up on me, becoming vital personal touchstones only in retrospect, sometimes despite the fact that they were regarded without much enthusiasm when I first assessed them in my annual review.

It is with that in mind that I present my Personal Cinematic Canon: 50 films from the past ten years that have emerged as key works in my ever-evolving appreciation of contemporary cinema. Some of these are stone-cold masterpieces by any estimation. Some are fascinating but flawed conversation pieces. Some are amusing larks that nonetheless engender fanboy devotion. Some are esoteric, some are audacious, and some are frivolous, but they have all left a profound impression on me personally. All of these films are essential viewing in my house, and all are films I have fervently evangelized about to others. If you know me personally, these are the films you're tired of hearing about. They are not necessarily great films (though many are), but rather the films that define the last ten years of my cinematic life.

I followed just two rules when assembling this canon: 1) I had to choose exactly five films from each year spanning 2007 to 2016; and 2) I could not choose more than one film by any single director (or animation studio).

PostedDecember 12, 2016

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesEssays

[Note: This introduction to The Passion of Joan of Arc was presented on March 19, 2015 at the Webster University Moore Auditorium as a part of the 2016 Robert Classic French Film Festival.]

I have been privileged to introduce several features for the Classic French Film Festival in recent years, among them some of the most revered cinematic works of all time, in French or any language. From this podium I have been honored to preface such canonical films as Grand Illusion and Beauty and the Beast. Bear that in mind, then, when I say: The feature that will we will be screening tonight is a singular and revelatory experience. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent feature The Passion of Joan of Arc is widely regarded by film scholars as a masterpiece, and justly so. You do not need not to be a connoisseur of the cinema, however, to appreciate its striking visuals, searing pathos, and timeless lead performance by Renée Jeanne Falconetti. It is that extraordinarily rare species of film whose significance is almost immediately self-evident.

Prior to Joan of Arc, director Dreyer had made a respected name for himself in European film, helming esteemed works such as the Danish domestic satire Master of the House and the German romantic tragedy Michael, a milestone in early gay cinema. However, the works that are today regarded as his most formidable and groundbreaking—Joan, of course, as well as Vampyr, Ordet, and Gertrud—still lay years or even decades in the future. It is therefore all the more remarkable that a French production company would invite this Danish filmmaker to write and direct a feature about a beloved French folk hero: Joan of Arc, the maiden whose visions purportedly propelled France to its eventual victory in the Hundred Years’ War.

There had been renewed interest in Joan at the time that Dreyer tackled the project, owing to her canonization in 1920, an acknowledgement by the Catholic Church that her capture, trial, and execution at the hands of the English-allied Burgundian faction constituted a martyrdom. Dreyer also had the good fortune of having access to the recently published transcripts of Joan’s trial, which became the basis for his script.

There were earlier efforts to resurrect Joan for the burgeoning film audiences of late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The most notable of these is Cecil B DemIlle’s silent 1916 epic Joan the Woman, a perfectly handsome feature that exemplifies that director’s grandiose and at times didactic approach to historical drama. However, The Passion of Joan of Arc dwells on a rarefied plane that hovers far above Demille’s film. As Dreyer’s introductory notes for his feature make evident, he was keenly aware that he could have simply made yet another costume drama. He instead opted for a different path. When it premiered in France in October of 1928, The Passion of Joan of Arc was unlike anything that had heretofore been witnessed in cinema.

Even a contemporary viewer likely has expectations for a work of fictionalized religious and political history. Dreyer seems to savor smashing those assumptions to bits in the film’s opening scenes. Eschewing depictions of Joan’s heavenly visions or military exploits, he begins at the end, with a pitiable, anguished woman in chains. Although the director dictated that a colossally expensive set be constructed to replicate the Castle of Rouen where Joan was detained, the film that he produced absolutely revels in close-ups. It is an approach that is all the more perverse given the near absence of movie star faces in the cast of characters. Sans makeup and often severely lit, Joan’s inquisitors and wardens glower and leer over her like grotesque parodies of piggish masculinity, all warts, jowls, and crooked teeth.

In comparison, Falconetti’s countenance is positively beatific. Also untouched by makeup, it teeters hypnotically between agony and ecstasy. Dreyer pushes his camera straight into the actress’ face in one uncomfortably long shot after another, as tears—those endless tears!—tumble down her cheeks. Falconetti was primarily a theatrical performer, but that is certainly not in evidence here. Hers is a face seemingly made for cinema, capable of conveying oceans of colliding emotions via the tiniest changes in expression. Her Joan is no placid saint, but a character of ferocious feeling, alternately joyous and terrified, morose and contented. She is a woman both devastatingly relatable and not wholly of this world, her pale eyes always appearing to focus on something that lies just beyond the earthly realm.

Truthfully, there is not much of a plot to be found in the film: Joan is questioned, deceived, tortured, mocked, degraded, and ultimately executed by being burned alive. There are no heroic rescues or last-minute pardons. As in a film about the Titanic or the 300 Spartans, we know how this story ends. The genius of The Passion of Joan of Arc is that the tale’s utter bleakness is crucial to is humane power. With terrific forcefulness and urgency, Dreyer places us squarely within Joan’s experience, demanding that we feel the grueling reality of her inexorable doom just as she might have felt it. This makes for a desolate cinematic experience, to say the least, but also one that elicits profound empathy.

The modern viewer is likely to view The Passion of Joan of Arc as a deeply political film, albeit one that is less about the particulars of 1920s France than about the persecution and destruction of deviant individuals through countless eras and cultures. Despite his political conservatism, Dreyer was a filmmaker who was fascinated with the monsters that threatened society’s rules, whether they might be gay artists, proud women, accused witches, mad prophets, vampires, or even the Devil himself. Joan too embodies such outsiders: a woman who would not submit to her male captors, and therefore had to be eradicated.

One final annotation: In its present, nearly complete form, The Passion of Joan of Arc comes to us by a strange, calamitous path. Despite Dreyer’s objections, the film was heavily edited for its initial release at the behest of government censors and Catholic leaders. The original uncut negative was unfortunately destroyed, and the director’s subsequent piecemeal reconstruction of the negative was also destroyed. Prints of several versions circulated in the ensuing decades, until one of those unlikely twists occurred that seem to characterize the history of film. In 1981, a Danish copy of the Dreyer’s original uncut version was found, of all places, in a janitor’s closet in an Oslo mental hospital. Although it differs from an alternate French print in relatively minor aesthetic ways, the Norwegian discovery has permitted audiences around the world to finally experience The Passion of Joan of Arc as closely as possible to the way that Dreyer intended it.

PostedMarch 20, 2016

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesEssays

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[Note: This post contains spoilers. Updated 11/19/15.]

As a general rule, my approach to criticism is textual. My preference is to engage with films primarily as standalone objects, with some measured acknowledgement of both cinematic history and the broader political and cultural context in which those objects exist. Only very rarely do I address the work of other critics. This constraint serves two purposes. First, it maintains my writing’s focus on its raison d'être—the study of cinema—and thereby prevents it from drifting into the arcane back alleys of meta-criticism. Second, it keeps things professional. Too often, in my experience, critical conversations rapidly degenerate into condescending snark, sophomoric name calling, and spiteful assaults on individuals’ character and motives. Most of the time, I have no interest in getting drawn into such knife fights. This is partly because they are a distraction from genuine analysis, and partly because life is short and unpleasant enough as it is.

The above is presented to emphasize the unusual nature of the this post, which is a direct rebuttal to the work of a fellow critic. The piece in question is British writer Mike McCahill’s brief but scornful review of Avengers: Age of Ultron. This post isn't an attempt to punch down at an obscure blogger: McCahill writes for The Scotsman, The Telegraph, and The Guardian, so he's clearly doing something correctly. I'm not offering a blanket condemnation of the man's work. Nor am I making a sweeping endorsement of the Avengers sequel, a film to which my initial reaction was generally lukewarm. However, McCahill’s review almost perfectly embodies the sort of smug, exasperating, and wrong-headed arguments that have been widely leveled against Age of Ultron, and against superhero action features generally. Moreover, his succinct candor regarding what he finds so repellant about the film makes the piece a convenient specimen for dissection.

The trouble with these Avengers get-togethers, it transpires, is not just that they’re too big to fail, but that they’re almost certainly too big to function as drama. Swallowing up every last character, actor, and dollar, the franchise has thus far manifested itself as the lumbering ne plus ultra of modern movie gigantism …

Straight away, here’s an example of the logical chicanery that McCahill will rely on again and again: the use of a clever turn of phrase to mask a sweeping generalization or transparently false claim. Describing any film as “too big to fail”—apparently on the basis of a mammoth cast and budget—requires that one ignore the numerous box office flops that Hollywood inevitably churns out. This isn’t ancient cinematic history: Even when adjusted for inflation, two of the biggest bombs of all time were released just a couple of years ago: 47 Ronin ($151 million in the hole) and The Lone Ranger (at least $95 million). It's one thing to predict that a summer tentpole film is going to make a lot of money, especially on its opening weekend. In my own review, I observed that “[l]egions of film-goers are going to see Ultron, no matter what its virtues, flaws, or […] ethics as a work of cinema.” It's quite another thing to assert that a mega-budget feature is guaranteed to turn a profit.

“Too big to function as drama” is a murkier concept, given that dramatic success is a subjective matter. However, if one assumes that settled critical consensus can be a quick-and-dirty proxy for such success, neither a big budget nor a big cast would seem to disqualify a film from achieving quality drama. The most expensive inflation-adjusted film productions tend to skew mixed in their critical reception, but high points abound: Titanic ($294 million, 88% on Rotten Tomatoes), Tangled ($281 million, 90%), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ($275 million, 84%), Avatar ($261 million, 83%) Spider-Man 2 ($250 million, 94%), and The Dark Knight Rises ($236 million, 87%). It’s possible that McCahill would characterize all the aforementioned films as dramatic failures, but he doesn’t bother. He just asserts that expensive films can’t function as drama, full stop. And if the drama-defeating gigantism in question refers to an outsized cast, the claim is so flimsy that it can’t withstand a moment’s reflection. (Pulp Fiction? JFK? Magnolia? Do the Right Thing? Nashville? The Thin Red Line?)

The “trouble” with the Avengers films in McCahill’s estimation, then, is that they are big and therefore incapable of flopping at the box office or succeeding as works of dramatic fiction, despite the fact that there are abundant examples of big films doing both. Perhaps Avengers: Age of Ultron is an illustrative exception, but McCahill doesn’t make that case. He simply equates bigness with profit and artistic brokenness.

… [W]hile the Avengers themselves—the hall of superhero fame headed by Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk—remain the safest of bets, covering so many eventualities that their triumph is all but assured.

This sort of forest-for-the-trees kvetching is a warning sign that McCahill’s critiques don’t actually engage with the Avengers films—or, by extension, with the superhero subgenre in general—save in the most offhanded, inattentive manner. His complaint seems to be that because the Avengers boast such a diverse array of super powers, they will always emerge victorious from any crisis, and, as a result, the films have no real stakes. This claim is so misguided regarding how genre films function, it’s hard to know what to make of it.

Sure, if they operated together in perfect harmony and utilized their abilities in seamless coordination, the Avengers could arguably overcome almost any obstacle. They don’t, however. This is because while some of them are godlike, they’re all fallible beings brimming with ego, anger, and fear. This isn’t some incidental stumbling block: It's the ultimate conflict at the heart of the Avengers films! A just-the-facts plot summary of Avengers or Avengers: Age of Ultron would describe Loki’s or Ultron’s schemes for global domination, respectively, and what the team does to foil those plans. Those proximal conflicts, however, don’t really describe the stories that the films are telling, any more than Cries and Whispers can be summed up as “a women dies of cancer”.

The “solo” films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) revolve around internal conflicts: Tony Stark’s blindness to the physical and personal devastation he leaves in his wake; Thor’s puffed-up sense of royal entitlement; Steve Rogers’ confusion when the moral order of his world collapses. The Avengers films, meanwhile, are about a team, and accordingly center on inter-personal conflicts. To say that the group’s triumph is “assured” is to willfully ignore significant chunks of dialog in both films, which repeatedly return to the possible dissolution of the heroes' coalition. (Granted, triumph is assured in the sense that the Good Guys almost always win in Hollywood genre films, but the same could be said of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or any tale of adventure, irrespective of how mighty or feeble the heroes might be.)

None of this is exactly obscure: The main question that hangs over the first Avengers is whether Nick Fury’s crazy-quilt assemblage of soldiers, aliens, and science experiments can actually work, given the personalities and powers involved. Can narcissists like Stark and Thor tolerate the command of a squeaky-clean Boy Scout like Rogers? Can the Hulk’s wrath be controlled in such a way that he does more good than harm? Do elite but human heroes like Natasha and Barton even have a place alongside such gods and monsters? Avengers answered such queries with a tentative “Yes,” but Age of Ultron poses the inevitable follow-up questions: For how long? And to what end?

In pre-release interviews, writer-director Joss Whedon has cited this sequel as the hardest work he's ever done, and you can bet most of that toil went on finding an antagonist capable of making any fight seem fair enough for an audience to reasonably cheer. Here, he's settled on Ultron, which may sound like a brand of dishwasher tablets, but is actually an artificial intelligence (voiced by James Spader) with an army of robots at his disposal.

A super group as powerful as the Avengers naturally need a worthy foe, but McCahill's characterization of Ultron's development is just lazy and flat-out ahistorical. It's fine to beg ignorance regarding the minutiae of Marvel's impossibly dense comic mythology, which requires an almost Talmudic rigor to untangle. However, making a blithe assumption that is easily refuted with ten seconds of Googling is just critical malpractice. Ultron did not spring from Joss Whedon's skull like some fully-formed CGI Athena. He's a well-established character who has spent almost five decades antagonizing the Avengers in the pages of Marvel's comics. His origin and characteristics were revised for the MCU, but Whedon didn't have to “toil” to devise him: Ultron is consistently regarded as one of (if not the) most powerful and durable of the Avengers' nemeses. One could cynically argue that this is exact reason Marvel is regarded as such a valuable creative property: It has a ridiculously deep bench of existing characters with detailed histories, providing easy fodder for screenwriters to churn out countless sequels and spinoffs.

It's superheroes versus supercomputer, then; of human interest, there is-little-to-nothing.

Let’s set aside that fact that Ultron's scheme is to wipe out all organic life on Earth through an artificial meteor strike, and the outcome is therefore somewhat significant to ordinary humans, even if they aren’t participating directly in the conflict. This remarkable assertion—that there is “little-to-nothing” of interest in a story with no mundane human principals—would seem to brand significant swaths of the fantasy and science fiction genres as enormous wastes of time. Is McCahill actually contending that a story about non-human vs. non-human conflict is by definition boring? What about when it’s a time-traveling murder-bot opposed by another time-traveling murder-bot? Mermaid vs. sea witch? Cyborg vs. distributed artificial intelligence? Mouse vs. rat? Gelfling vs. Skeksis? Immortal vs. Immortal? Robot worker vs. sentient spaceship? Lion vs. lion? Android vs. his own sense of inadequacy?

This is Genre Storytelling 101: Non-human characters serve as stand-ins for human desires, fears, and anxieties. Perhaps McCahill doesn’t find the struggle in Age of Ultron particularly compelling for reasons that are specific to that film. That’s not what he states, though: He asserts that because the conflict concerns superheroes fighting an artificial intelligence, it is therefore of no interest. At this point, any fantasy or science fiction fan could be excused for giving McCahill’s review the finger and walking away.

This tussle sends more computer-generated masonry flying than ever, which is an achievement of sorts, but the expensive kit and relentless set-pieces mask a playground-level goodies-vs.-baddies runaround.

Age of Ultron is certainly stuffed chock-full of sound and fury, but to characterize its clashes as "playground-level" is off the mark, betraying a distressing negligence towards what is actually presented on screen. Almost all superhero stories begin with a straightforward delineation between the heroes and villains. The villains are doing bad things—usually for reasons that make perfect sense in their own minds—and the heroes are trying to stop them. If this is bothersome to you, you should probably just stop watching action-oriented genre cinema altogether, because these sharp distinctions are an essential starting point for such films.

However, unless the discussion is limited to fare created for toddlers, almost every superhero tale these days grapples at some point with the fact that, costuming aside, it can be difficult to distinguish heroes from villains in a complex world. The heroes themselves inevitably fall victim to doubts about whether they’re doing the right thing for the right reasons, or whether they still want to do the right thing. The point highlighted above stands: Although providing spectacle is one of the functions of superhero tales, fisticuffs and explosions aren’t what such stories are about. Moral fission and self-reflection have been the norm in superhero films for some time, just as they’ve been the norm in superhero comics for decades. Writers aren’t stupid: Leaving things at the smash-bang-zap “playground-level” gets tedious pretty quickly. McCahill is complaining about something that hasn’t been a significant factor since the gee-whiz Golden Age of comics—and arguably not even then, where gray-area vigilante characters like Batman and the Spirit were concerned.

Granted, there’s a problem with Age of Ultron’s action, but it’s one of essence and execution. One of the ever-more-conspicuous weaknesses of the MCU features is their reliance on a bland, pre-fab pacing model that requires a violent climax roughly every fifteen to twenty minutes. Regarding Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron specifically, one of my main objections to these crossover films is that the action sequences, while serviceable, are unimaginative and unworthy of an alleged assemblage of “Earth’s mightiest heroes.” There’s something backwards when the most outrageous stunts and jaw-dropping exploits are unfolding in a film two screens down the hall at the multiplex, a movie in which everyone is human and the villain’s motive is good old-fashioned revenge. If your film's character roster includes Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Vision, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and Ultron, you damn well better do something extraordinary with your action sequences, something that no other film has done before.

Proper actors are brought in to bolster the beef/cheesecake, yet the two-second appearance of arthouse muse Julie Delpy doing nothing is both a jolting incongruity and a suggestion that all resistance to this behemoth cinema might be futile. They can’t claim the script attracted them: Whedon’s drama is banal, his wisecracks composed of deadening snark.

First of all, on behalf of Scarlet Johansson, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and any other cast members who qualify as beef/cheesecake in McCahill’s estimation: Fuck you. Seriously. “Proper actors”?

I actually agree with McCahill’s assessment of Age of Ultron’s witticisms: The quips are just not as funny as they were in Avengers, and many of them often land with a pained thud that’s wholly uncharacteristic of Whedon’s usual work. Reasonable people can differ on whether the inter-personal Avenger-on-Avenger struggles—or Ultron’s serious daddy issues—are “banal” or not, but at least here McCahill isn’t suggesting that the characters are intrinsically uninteresting just because they’re super-powered.

The sticking point in this passage is the implication that there can’t be any legitimate reason for Julie Delpy’s brief appearance as Black Widow Ops headmistress Madame B other than surrender to the Marvel machine. In Age of Ultron—and in MCU television series Agent Carter, but let’s stick to the film—it’s established that the Black Widow Ops program once educated select Russian girls in the arts of spycraft and assassination, all under the guise of ballet instruction. Sublimation of the girls' individual desires and morals to the program’s rigorous training were paramount, to the point that “graduation” from the project’s Red Room consisted of forced sterilization (the better to avoid future emotional entanglements).

The choice of Delpy for this blink-and-you'll-miss-it role—and recall that a fleeting presence in the MCU is practically a guarantee of future, meatier appearances—evokes intriguing associations based on her prior work. One of Delpy’s most prominent early roles was in Agnieszka Holland’s epic Eastern European WWII drama Europa Europa. In that film, the actress played an ardent Nazi determined to give up her unborn child to the SS’s notorious Lebensborn program, through which it would be raised in a pure Aryan household. More recently, Delpy directed and starred in The Countess, dramatizing the life of Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer Elizabeth Báthory. The film depicts Báthory’s young life as bleak and cruel, culminating in her unintended teen pregnancy, her lover’s gruesome execution, and the vanishing of the child. Later, Báthory develops a delusion that bathing in the blood of virgin girls will give her eternal youth, and to that end commands her retainers to kidnap and murder countless victims.

The relevance of these meta-textual correspondences to the Black Widow Ops program should be obvious, but we needn’t range that far afield. Perhaps something about Delpy’s look just seemed right: a compartmentalized weariness has always seemed to hang on her characters, highlighted by those heavy eyelids and an inevitable snarl of frizzy blonde hair threatening escape. Regardless, why would one assume that there is no artistic rationale for slipping Delpy into a five-second cameo, unless one’s intent is to facilely indict corporate blockbuster filmmaking for… something? Devouring all the “proper” actors, maybe?

By all means claim Age of Ultron as fun, but it looks very much like the kind of fun the suits want you to have—an utterly impersonal, corporate triumph.

This is what’s known as “stating the obvious.” Yes, the experience of watching Age of Ultron is intended to be broadly entertaining, and yes, Marvel and Disney want as many people as possible to watch it, because that will make them truckloads of money via the sale of tickets, DVDs/Blu-rays, merchandise, and so on. And? What does it mean that the film “looks like” capitalist-approved fun? Is there some secret visual signature embedded in the action that betrays it as a corporate diversion? McCahill doesn’t say. Certainly, Age of Ultron is impersonal in the sense that it’s a finely-calibrated corporate product, designed to appeal to as many people as possible, rather than the work of an auteur’s uncompromising vision. This isn’t exactly an original observation. You don’t get critical brownie points for calling attention to the corporate nature of a $280 million film, except perhaps from politically allied readers who lap up such banal statements as if they constituted brave truth-telling.

Watching these logo-simple characters (the starred shield, the arm-and-hammer, the not-so-jolly green giant), I wondered whether we weren’t meant to be cheering for the likes of Marvel, Disney, Google, Apple, and Coca-Cola as they boosted their global market share.

It’s hard to imagine a snarky swipe at the superhero genre more fatuous than one directed at the supposed simplicity of the character designs. When superheroes first rose to popularity in comics’ Golden Age, bold and distinctive visual design utilizing primary colors was a virtue from both an aesthetic and technical viewpoint. (Bear in mind that comics were one of the most cheaply produced printed mediums, and therefore every dot of ink mattered.) Moreover, a stark, simple look for a character is a convenient means of orienting the reader in graphic storytelling. As the eye moves from panel to panel, a bright, distinctive costume—say, Superman’s red-and-blue garb with the stylized “S”—serves as a landmark that makes it easier for the brain to interpolate the action that occurs between the static images. (This is elementary stuff; children understand it intuitively, but an adult like McCahill can always turn to Scott McCloud’s celebrated Understanding Comics.)

In part, the art direction of superhero films is a legacy of the genre’s comic roots, but "logo-simplicity" still has a practical purpose in cinema. A brightly-colored costume or distinguishing device—Captain America's shield or Thor’s hammer, for example—is a handy visual marker even in a moving image, particularly amid the chaos of a super-powered throwdown. (This is one reason I’m increasingly annoyed by the cinematic trend of turning boldly-colored heroes into desaturated blobs of gray.) Moreover, the iconographic function of colors and symbols can have a mythic dimension. As is commonly observed, what are superheroes if not the modern era’s gods and goddesses? Hulk is green for the same reason that Krishna is blue: so you know him when you see him. Complaining that Cap’s shield is “logo-simple” is like lodging the same gripe about Zeus’ thunderbolt, or the Christian cross, for that matter. By definition, a symbol should be easily identifiable; ridiculing it for simplicity is just a tautology.

More broadly, I’m not sure what to make of McCahill’s likening of superheroes to America’s mightiest brands. It feels like an anti-corporate or anti-neocolonial non sequitur rather than an insight. Sure, the Avengers themselves are now corporate symbols in some sense, and their dissemination across the globe on T-shirts, backpacks, and Odin-knows-what does make for a striking illustration of American economic and cultural hegemony. However, equating cheers for the on-screen victory of the Avengers with off-screen economic jingoism is incoherent and kind of insulting. Is the implication that anyone entertained by the Avengers’ triumph over Ultron is, in reality, being subconsciously molded into in unthinking booster for the quarterly corporate “win”? McCahill doesn’t connect the two ideas in any substantive way, but that doesn’t stop him from implicitly casting anyone who is thrilled by super-heroic exploits as a guileless consumer drone.

To an extent, this kind of facetious, scripted commentary masquerading as criticism is galling because there probably is a thought-provoking anti-capitalist dissection of Age of Ultron waiting to be made. A deep Marxist analysis of the film would make for a fascinating read, but that’s not what McCahill presents. He’s just taking hackneyed potshots at an Age of Ultron that exists only in his imagination, while hoping that no one will detect the sleight-of-hand. It’s lazy, it’s boring, and it’s irritating. It’s compelled me to mount a defense of a film I wasn’t that enthusiastic about to begin with, a film that suffers in spots from bad screenwriting, tiresome sexism, uninspired action, and unmistakable executive monkeying. Nonetheless, flawed filmmaking is no excuse for downright shitty criticism.

PostedMay 8, 2015

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesEssays

[This introduction to Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast was presented on March 13, 2015 at the Webster University Moore Auditorium as a part of the 2015 Classic French Film Festival.]

This is the fourth consecutive year I’ve served as a presenter at the Classic French Film Festival, and for me it is an especially exciting return to the podium. In part this is because Cinema St. Louis has entrusted me with the honor of introducing the festival's opening night feature. And in part it is attributable to the fact that tonight’s film is among the most iconic, influential works of both French-language and fantasy cinema. However, the lion’s share of my enthusiasm stems from the sheer distinction of tonight's feature, Jean Cocteau's 1946 film Beauty and the Beast. It is, in a word, a spellbinding creation.

Although the film was adapted from Marie Leprince de Beaumont's beloved eighteenth-century fairy tale, Cocteau faced an uphill battle in bringing his cinematic version of Beauty and the Beast to life. Filmed in the lean, post-Occupation years of late World War II, the production was troubled by shortages and technical setbacks. Moreover, the landscape of French cinema at the time was dominated by poetic realism, setting Cocteau's film in opposition to the prevailing tastes of filmgoers and critics. If his press notes for the film's American release are any indication, the director was exasperated by the French public's inability to accept Beauty and the Beast on its own terms. As he indicates in the film's preamble, Cocteau's wish was that viewers approach this fairy tale with the absolute receptiveness of a child.

This is not to say that Beauty and the Beast is a puerile or simple-minded work. Indeed, it is a far cry from the sweet story of love triumphant that one might expect. Although twentieth century cinema had a penchant for sanitizing and infantilizing fairy tales in the process of translating them to the screen, Cocteau's approach to the source material is psychologically knotty, erotically charged, and strangely contradictory.

The broad strokes of this Beauty and the Beast are familiar, such that even today's elementary school set would likely find it comfortable territory. The film is replete with the tropes of medieval literature and folklore, from fey curses to a magic mirror to a pair of vain, wicked sisters just begging for their comeuppance. De Beaumont's original tale is in part a gender inversion of the medieval motif of the 'loathly lady,” a hideous crone who is restored to loveliness by the affections of a noble-hearted suitor. Cocteau's adaptation also features allusions to classical mythology, befitting the director's persistent fascination with such legends in his films, plays, poetry, and designs.

Despite this well-worn lineage, Beauty and Beast continually upends expectations regarding the contours of a neat and tidy fantasy fable. Plot elements are introduced and then quickly forgotten or discarded. The boundaries between the mundane and magical, normally sharply delineated in fairy tales, are uncannily smudged in Cocteau’s telling. The villains wear their hearts on their sleeves, while virtuous Belle remains a conflicted and enigmatic figure to the end. Far from being cowed by the Beast, this Beauty seems to straightaway discern the romantic and sexual power she holds over him. When the Beast is at long last transformed into a beaming prince, Belle's reaction is one of vague disappointment. This was notoriously mirrored by actress Greta Garbo, who allegedly stood up at the conclusion of a screening and demanded, “Give me back my Beast!”

Certainly, the film's lead performances are central to its otherworldly charms. It’s difficult to imagine the feature succeeding so splendidly without the coquettish, luminous presence of Josette Day as Belle, or without Cocteau’s longtime partner and muse Jean Marais as the Beast. Hissing, snarling, and shrieking like a raspy mountain cat from beneath the layers of fur that conceal his chiseled countenance, Marais nonetheless conveys the sense of a profoundly shamed and troubled soul. One can easily understand why the actor regarded it as one of the most challenging and successful roles of his career.

Even absent its leading man and lady, however, the film would still stand as a sumptuous and amazingly tactile realization of the fantastic, a novel stripe of cinematic magic. If tonight is your first encounter with this magnificent work, it is the marvels of the Beast’s enchanted castle that will doubtlessly linger: disembodied arms holding aloft candelabras that ignite on their own accord; statues that exhale smoke and study interlopers with bright, moving eyes; a locked pavilion filled with riches; a living bed and talking door; a glove and necklace ensorcelled with faerie glamour. Through the power of the Beast's magic, tears become jewels and a loyal steed always knows its rider's wishes. To experience these wonders requires only that, as Cocteau entreaties, we set aside our adult cynicism for a short time and say the magic words, “Once Upon a Time…”

PostedMarch 14, 2015

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesEssays

[This introduction to Jean Renoir's Elena and Her Men was presented on June 22, 2014 at the St. Louis Art Museum as a part of the 2014 Classic French Film Festival.]

Jean Renoir's 1956 feature Elena and Her Men is rarely cited as one of the director's more enduring cinematic accomplishments. Critics have even labeled it with that dreaded adjective, “lesser". As in: “Elena is lesser Renoir.” Certainly, the film falls at the later and less well-regarded end of the director's filmography. Renoir had spent most of the 1940s making films in Hollywood, which had been a somewhat disillusioning experience for him. He subsequently traveled to India to shoot his first color film, The River, before returning to Europe in the early 1950s. There he helmed three features in succession: The Golden Coach, French Cancan, and Elena and Her Men. All three were luscious Technicolor productions that blended light comedy, romance, and music. None of them were especially loved in their time by audiences or critics—with the notable exception of nascent French New Wave figures such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Elena and Her Men in particular was dismissed when it premiered in Paris in September of 1956, and then in the U.S. in the following March under the suggestive English title Paris Does Strange Things. The contemporary New York Times review decried the film as a “bewildering” “fiasco” with “horrible acting”. With all due respect to the late great Times critic and professional curmudgeon Bosley Crowther, he was just plain wrong about Elena.

Jean Renoir was always a reflective and self-effacing artist, and he freely admitted after the fact that his primary motivation for making Elena had been the opportunity to work with iconic Swedish performer Ingrid Bergman. At the time, the actress was near the end of her self-imposed exile in Europe, a situation necessitated by American outrage over her affair with and then marriage to Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Bergman had not previously portrayed the lead in a comedic feature, and Elena demonstrates that Renoir understood how to utilize the actress' world-renowned glamour (and sexual notoriety) as a farcical building block.

Her character, Elena, is a Polish noblewoman of dwindling means, dwelling in a turn-of-the-century France that is ripe with nationalist sentiment. Strong-willed but fickle, romantic but ambitious, Elena is the shimmering star around which a cluster of love-besotted men orbit. These suitors collide and careen off one another, creating ripples in the French political order and along armed European borders. The white daisy that Elena bestows as a good luck charm multiplies as the film goes on, marking the lapels of soldiers, supplicants, and spin doctors like a telltale thumbprint. The flower seems to say, “Elena Was Here”. However, the woman herself remains an enigma. Elena's motivations are obscure and contradictory: she seems to relish the pragmatic power that her beauty and charm afford, but also craves the pure, poetic love of a devoted man.

Foremost among the men that dance on Elena's strings is the guileless General Rollan, portrayed by director Jean Cocteau's dashing muse and partner, Jean Marais. Rollan is loosely based on real-world French officer and politician Georges Ernest Boulanger. A hero of the Franco-Russian War, Boulanger became a populist conservative icon in the late nineteenth century, and was nearly goaded into toppling the Republic in a coup d'état. Renoir and co-writer Jean Serge hastily fictionalized the script out of respect for Boulanger's living descendants, resulting in a film that feels gently rather than viciously satirical. The story's target it not the specific weaknesses of French culture, but the general gullibility of humankind. Leaders rouse the masses with jingoistic pomp, while the leaders themselves are cajoled by scheming lackeys.

In this and other respects, Elena and Her Men shares more than a few features with Shakespeare's comedies. There is the shifting love triangle at the center of the plot, as well as a secondary, more buffoonish romantic rivalry. Like one of the Bard's bawdy farces, the film includes costume swaps and mistaken identities, betrothals and rendezvous, and a tidy yet cynical ending. Elena even features a troupe of traveling performers, in the form of a Roma circus caravan. The Golden Coach, French Cancan, and Elena and Her Men all deal with spectacle and illusion. The earlier films approach these themes through, respectively, the commedia dell'arte and the French café-chantant. Elena's gypsy carnival folk merely underline what is already apparent from the Bastille Day military parade, the sensational newspaper headlines, the hawking street musician, the choreographed dinner party, and the worshipful bordello madam. All point to one truth: everything is a performance for someone's benefit.

PostedJune 22, 2014

AuthorAndrew Wyatt

CategoriesEssays

[This introduction to Pierre Étaix's The Great Love was presented on June 27, 2013 at the Webster University Moore Auditorium as a part of the 2013 Classic French Film Festival.]

It’s a unique pleasure to stand before an audience of fellow cinephiles and introduce a film that can accurately be labeled a lost gem. Pierre Étaix’s 1969 feature, The Great Love, is such a film. Until recently, it had been missing in action for over four decades, along with most of filmmaker’s works. Due to legal snarls and poor preservation, Étaix's films had languished unseen by the vast majority of the contemporary public. Even Francophiles who were aware of his reputation and influence did not have access to his catalog. This tragedy has now been remedied. Moreover, now that his films have been resurrected for theatrical and home video appreciation, viewers are presented with an uncommon opportunity to experience a director’s work with virgin eyes. To date there are no book-length English-language biographies of Étaix or retrospectives on his filmography. His features and shorts have not been subjected to decades of exhaustive critical analysis and commentary. They are in, a word, still fresh, their newly exposed surfaces clean, sharp, and untouched by the conventional wisdom that often covers films like an oxidized crust.

This is an especially precious circumstance with respect to The Great Love, which is Étaix's first color feature, his last narrative feature, and his finest cinematic achievement. It’s easy to enthuse over the shagginess and frivolity of his first film, The Suitor, or the ambition and earnestness of his circus fable, Yoyo. The Great Love, however, feels truly special, like a hardy hybrid species that blends together the best qualities of its forebears with novel new features. As with all great films, it resists easy categorization. At times, it seems to be a pitch-black domestic comedy concerning the miseries of married life and the foolishness of infatuation. In other moments it resembles a more gently philosophical work that poses questions about identity and contentment. Turn it this way and it appears to be little more than a delivery system for a succession of charming sight gags. Rotate it that direction and one can see a experimental work that continually upends the viewer’s expectations regarding the language of cinema.

The narrative core of the film is marvelously simple. Étaix and his co-scripter, the renowned French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière , often began their collaborations with a premise that could be conveyed in a single sentence. In the case of The Great Love, the story is one of the oldest in fiction: a married man contemplates an affair with a younger woman. From this seed, the scenarists summon forth a colorful bourgeois backdrop populated by vibrantly realized comic characters. Étaix, as usual, plays an exaggerated version of himself, here presented as a hard-working married homme who can’t quite shed his rascally, discontented leanings. Unthinkingly, he once settled down with Florence (Annie Fratellini), the proverbial Nice Girl from a Good Family. And so he finds himself, ten years later, playing the role of a devoted husband, dutiful son-in-law, and spit-polish member of the nouveau riche. All of which makes him secretly (if only modestly) unhappy. Into Pierre’s comfortable yet glum existence flutters the divine Agnès (Nicole Calfan), a luminous vision of French beauty who happens to be two or three decades his junior. He is immediately smitten, and inasmuch as the film has a dramatic arc, it consists of the ensuing multi-dimensional struggle between Pierre’s dreamy romanticism, his moral conscience, and the ice-cold waters of reality.

More so than any other feature film that Étaix made, The Great Love demonstrates why he should not be regarded as merely a clown (or illustrator or writer or educator) who happened to create films. In this feature, one can observe ample evidence that he is a film artist. Rather than relying on wordplay and wisecracks, Étaix employs visuals, music, and sound effects to create his gags. Unlike most comedies since the advent of sound, The Great Love is not a film that can be quoted to one’s friends for an easy chuckle—it must be seen and heard to be appreciated. The film’s finest moments are joyously cinematic, featuring gags that are broadly theatrical in spirit but dependent on cinematography and editing for their effect. In one of the film’s standout sequences, Étaix depicts a daisy chain of malicious neighborhood gossip without revealing what precisely is being whispered. As in the Telephone Game, Pierre’s banal encounter with a passing woman evolves in each successive retelling into an ever-more-scandalous indiscretion. This elaborate joke works so wonderfully because of the way that Étaix cunningly utilizes repetitions and variations to create escalating absurdity.

This is but one example of the ways in which The Great Love exploits its medium to splendid effect. Étaix often uses cuts, composition, and camera movement to create his visual punchlines. He is fond of dropping a playful reveal into a shot reverse shot, and of pulling out from a close-up in order to recontextualize the action for humorous effect. At times, he toys with the conventions of narrative cinema to prod at the Fourth Wall. In an early scene, the narrating Pierre keeps revising a flashback when he cannot recall exactly where he sat at a particular café—to the eventual exasperation of the waiter. Other memorable aspects of the film are less about cinematic method than the pure magic of the possible. In the film’s most pointedly bizarre sequence, Pierre dreams of his bed gliding out onto a motorway in the French countryside, where he and the lovely Agnès pass other pajama-clad drivers. Étaix and his crew have never explained exactly how this rolling bedframe effect was achieved, which is emblematic of the director’s whimsical approach to cinema. Like an illusionist, he is loathe to reveal too much, lest the spell be broken.

Étaix’s sensibilities were shaped not only by the traditions of French clowning, but also by silent and classical era film comedians such as Buster Keaton, Max Linder, and Laurel and Hardy. Notwithstanding the film’s minimal dialog and reliance on visual gags, however, The Great Love never feels like a throwback or an homage to an earlier epoch of moviemaking. Like the works of Étaix's contemporary and fellow Frenchman Jacques Tati, the film seems to exist in its own category, somehow at once old-fashioned and cutting-edge. If The Great Love has a spiritual antecedent in cinema, it is found not in live action comedy features, but in animated short films. Like Walt Disney Productions’ landmark Silly Symphonies of the 1930s, Étaix's film possesses an appealing blend of well-oiled cinematic craftsmanship, precise comic intuition, and nervy artistic experimentation. And as in the animated work of Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, and Friz Freleng in subsequent decades, The Great Love has a somewhat absurd, freewheeling sense of humor that employs well-worn comedy conventions to explore film's surrealist potential. Even so, what ultimately leaves the strongest impression is the mesmerizing self-assurance of Étaix's feature. Like a truly timeless cartoon, The Great Love feels both lighthearted and completely uncompromised—the work of an artist who has gracefully channeled his own creative excitement directly into his film.