The Lost Ones

The really frustrating thing to people like me, and I assume you, aren't films like London After Midnight that been been destroyed, wiped off the face of the Earth by fire and other forms of bad luck, or films that sound fantastic but never got made for one reason or another, like Charles Laughton's The Naked and the Dead. To me, "frustration" implies that a certain amount of hope exists, and in those cases the film is simply gone forever, or was never made in the first place. Whatever longing you might feel to see them comes closer, I think, to nostalgia than actual frustration. No, what's frustrating are movies that were made, are out there, can be seen, have been seen, but not by you because of some legal mess, or indifference, or ignorance. I'm talking about films that aren't lost, but rather hiding.

Recently, I was very fortunate to be able to see one such film, Peter Lorre's sole credit as a director, Der Verlorene, or The Lost One. Filmed in Germany in 1951, it features Lorre first as a kindly, efficient doctor in a refugee camp and then, in a flashback to 1943 as a quiet Nazi scientists who is slowly revealed to be a psychopath. Der Verlorene is a strange film, its story occasionally oblique, but in such a way that doesn't leave the viewer lost, but rather uncertain. It somehow manages to be a story of post-war Germany, a film noir, a spy film, and a serial killer film without ever inducing whiplash, and it boasts a final image for the ages. If you wanted to program a triple feature of The Serpent's Egg, The Great Dictator and Der Verlorene, then you could probably go ahead and do that. Why Der Verlorene is missing, or hiding, I don't know. Apparently there's a German DVD -- there must be, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to see it -- and it has been screened in America, for instance at the Film Forum in 1984 (a screening that led Vincent Canby to call the film "a curiosity". Okay, well, thanks), but otherwise the English-speaking world (or the Spanish, or the French, I'd guess) can't be bothered, apparently.

Sometimes these films aren't even hiding. For many years, I imagined that Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies would simply be unavailable, due to its controversial nature. For at least some of those years, this was no doubt the case, but for I-don't-know-how-long, Titicut Follies has in fact been available on DVD, mainly through Wiseman's own website. I got my own copy not through the site, but in the lobby of the IFC Center in New York, when I was up there a few weeks ago. So "hiding in plain sight" might be a better description of the status of Titicut Follies.

But what of Michael Reeves' The Sorcerers (once released on DVD in England, now out of print)? Joseph Losey's remake of M? Fassbinder's adaptation of Nabokov's Despair? Or Der Verlorene again, which I only saw because of this network of blogs I'm a part of, and comments left at one that I'd almost forgotten about until I received a surprising e-mail? This stuff has a tendency to go in cycles, of course -- Salo was one of these for many years, but Criterion "corrected" that (I'm glad it's available, but I have a hard time sounding too positive about it). The major films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, too -- I remember reading about those on an old, early internet film discussion board, and first seeing El Topo when I rented a bootleg of the Japanese laserdisc from a video store in Norfolk, VA, but all those movies are available in handsome DVDs now. It must be a pisser for those sorts of video stores when being able to provide even a shitty copy of El Topo no longer makes them special, but frankly I'm ready for all that specialness to be wiped away. I know there's a certain element who mourns the day when you really had to dig for this stuff, far more than you do now, so the people who found it were the ones who really cared. Well, I really care. I can care my ass off all day long and still not be able to see Losey's M, though. That's the frustration. You can care and care and care, and you can read about people who have seen one of these movies you've been tracking forever, and they'll say "Yeah, I saw that" like it's fucking nothing, and you won't be any closer to seeing it for yourself because it's simply out of your hands.

Der Verlorene was dropped into my hands, though, and for that I'm grateful. It's an elegant, weird, and bleak little struggle with one country's recent history by a man who'd fled that country, his home, long ago, and I'm very glad I got to see it. I hope this experience has set some sort of precedent.

A Night of Pain - Salo

[I no longer stand by this lazy bullshit]

One thing I neglected to mention in my review of Inside is that the film was, in fact, disgusting and unpleasant, not only morally and philosophically, as I concluded, but on its own terms, to boot. So good job, Inside, because that's what A Night of Pain is all about, after all. But I was feeling kind of depressed after watching Inside, and, with two-thirds of my triple feature behind me, it was midnight. Could I, indeed dare I, continue on with the film that is widely considered to be the most disgusting and disturbing film of all time? Did I have it in me? What was the point of all this, anyway? I smoked a cigarette and then put in the DVD.

Part Three: Oh My Dear Sweet Lord...

So: eating poop. Why do we do it? Who does it benefit? Are we really a stronger nation because of it, as so many people claim? But no...I'm getting ahead of myself.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo needs no introduction, even for those who've never seen it -- I'd never seen it before this past Friday night (Saturday morning, really), and I certainly didn't need anyone to tell me what the deal was. It's the movie you don't want to sit through, but of course you sort of do, because you want to be one of the people who can take it, and for a while there you would have also been one of the few who was able to get their hands on it, because it wasn't available on home video, and arthouse theaters who would show a print of it weren't what you might call common. Then Criterion had to come along and ruin that part of it, so now anyone with a Netflix account can put it in their queue. All that's left to accomplish is the working up of enough nerve to actually have it mailed to you.

Another thing Salo doesn't need in a write-up like this is a plot summary, because there is no plot to be summarized. Here's what happens: in World War II Italy, a group of rich fascists round up a bunch of local youths (some of whom are their own children, unless I'm much mistaken) and proceed over the next several days to rape, torture, humiliate and murder them. Every night, one of two women tells everyone stories of their sexually disgusting pasts to fuel the imaginations of the fascists, although one gets the sense that's not really necessary.

Anyway, that's pretty much it. So where does that leave us? With rape, torture, humiliation and murder. And poo-eating, of course, which is obviously just an example of the aforementioned torture and humiliation. But that scene -- well, two scenes, really, but the second scene makes the first one look like the bit in Defending Your Life when Albert Brooks is eating the greatest omelette he's ever tasted -- is the moment in Salo. It's the shower scene from Psycho, the "I'm mad as hell" speech from Network, Anita Ekberg in the fountain in La Dolce Vita, the billiard scene in Le Cercle Rouge, or the part where that one chick gets hit by a bus in Final Destination. Despite the fact that there are quite a few other images from Salo that those who've seen the film most likely wish they'd never been exposed to, it's the moment where everyone has poop for dinner that has most earned, if that's the word, this film its place in history.

And it's a repulsive scene, all right. It was even worse, in fact, than I'd always expected it would be, although if there is a graphic poop-eating scene that exists in some other film which would somehow be less bad and more tolerable than this one, I can't imagine what it might look like. Anyway, at one point -- I won't describe it -- I raised my hand as though to block the offending portion of the screen from my view, but I didn't go through with it. Because that would be cheating, I guess. So I watched it all, and I hated doing so at the time, but now, on reflection, I can very easily shrug it off. I think I can do this because, you know, they weren't really eating poop. I don't know what they were eating, and I wouldn't even want to eat that, but it's ultimately just a special effect that carries with it no real meaning beyond the initial disgusting shock.

.

That's really how I feel about the majority of the film. Unlike Inside, I will admit that I was able to sense an intelligence behind the camera, although let's be honest about that: is that just because this film was made by Pasolini, and Inside wasn't? If Pasolini weren't Pasolini, and this had been the only film he'd made, would I have sensed an intelligence at work, or simply a man trying very hard to shock me? Because like Inside, I was almost completely unmoved by this film. It registered as a high-minded grotesque show-off, and the ideas that make it so high-minded are simple enough to fit on the back of a postcard. Because Fascism and money pervert everything, you see. Having a great time in Italy (not really, LOL!). See you when I get back. Etc.

The most effective part of the film, for me, is the end sequence, when the fascist guards are executing all of their remaining captives. We see all of this from a distance, as the leaders of this atrocity watch it all through binoculars from the country house where the majority of the film takes place. The violence is sadistic, but the sadism is just one element of the sequence. Everything is more or less casual and largely free of the kind of ceremony that has surrounded most of the film (though there is a bit, as each of the fascist leaders have a turn with the binoculars, handing them off to the next in line). And then there's the film's enigmatic final moment, which involves two of the guards not participating in the execution deciding to dance together -- which highlights the ambivalent and corrupt sexuality of the rest of the film, in a way -- and ends with one guard asking the other, "What is your girlfriend's name?" The other responds, "Marguerite." The end.

Now, however, I have to make a confession, which, among other things, might explain the disjointed quality that I suspect is a feature of this post. About halfway through Salo, I got really tired. I wasn't so much bored by the film -- though I honestly don't think there's a hell of a lot to latch onto in it, outside of that last section -- as I was just crashing from a week at work and over four hours of straight, punishing movie-watching. And so the truth is that a great deal of the dialogue in this film -- the perverse philosophical conversations of the fascists, primarily -- completely blew right by me. Now, I felt at the time that the point of each of these scenes was the same, and can be summarized like this: "These guys sure are wrong about everything they are saying." But I don't know that for sure, because I was too tired to focus on any of it. "When's that poop scene coming??" my fuzzy brain kept saying. And when the poop scene had come and gone, my thinking ran along these lines: "Man, that poop scene sure was gross. Before that I thought that maybe I wanted a snack or something, but now I don't even want to. Some of those guys weren't even being forced to eat the poop! That bad guys were eating it on purpose! That is so messed up. Oh shit, they're about to rape somebody again." Which should give you some idea of the immense power of the poop-eating scene, but should also indicate to you that I wasn't really firing on all cylinders by that point. I even called it a night with a half hour to go, and finished watching the film the next morning, a fact which probably explains whatever clarity (not much, probably) I brought to my reading of the ending.

So perhaps there is much I didn't get about Pasolini's final film. Maybe it's impossible for me to appreciate and understand the film without watching it a second time. Which is a shame, since I will never do that, but whatever ignorance I'll retain about Salo for the remainder of my life is something I think I'm quite comfortable with.

Poop.

A Night of Pain - The Piano Teacher

At roughly 8:30 pm on February 20, 2009 – a Friday, as I remember – I began to follow through on what turned out to be a fairly bad idea. Not a thoroughly horrible idea, fortunately, but still, all things considered, not a great one, either. The idea, as some of you may be aware, was to watch three movies, in a row, which, over the years, had each attained a level of infamy due to their unpleasant and shocking content. These films are considered to have an effect on the viewer not dissimilar to a kind of psychological assault. Even if the viewer ultimately considers these films to be good, he or she can’t exactly claim to be happy to have made the decision to watch them.

Some people, when faced with the opportunity to watch such films don’t hesitate to do so. I believe that some such people consider it a badge of honor to have these particular notches on their belts. “Oh, you haven’t seen that movie?” they like to be able to say. “Is it because you can’t handle watching live dogs fed into a trash compactor? It’s all fake, you know. Anyway, I didn’t have much problem with it, myself. Besides, as a film, it’s quite fascinating to see how the director constructs the mise en scene in such a way as to make the audience complicit in the action. For you see, in the cinema…” and so on until you want to throw your drink in their face.

Then again, some of them are simply curious, or fascinated by the grotesque. I know I am! And that curiosity and fascination, no matter how I try to distance myself from it, is what brought me here today, reasonably fresh from viewings of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside, and, the granddaddy of all such films, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. I chose to watch the films in ascending order of infamy, which, by my calculations, put The Piano Teacher at the front of the line. And so, as I mentioned before, last night at 8:30, after a lovely dinner with my wife (who chose not to take part in this, and to retreat to the TV in our bedroom), I began.

Part One: Mild Discomfort

Or maybe not so mild, really, but I’m trying to build to a kind of crescendo by the end. You understand, I’m sure. But it’s true, the phrase “mild discomfort”, as applied to The Piano Teacher, doesn’t really cut it. Michael Haneke is actually something of a genius when it comes to making films that slide into the brains of the audience and start vigorously scratching. Apart from the weak pose of a film that is his overrated Funny Games, I have been absolutely riveted to the point of frozen existential terror (okay, that’s probably an exaggeration) by Cache’, Code Unknown, The Castle and, most especially, the brilliant The Seventh Continent. And now again here, with The Piano Teacher, whose titular character is played brilliantly by Isabelle Huppert.

The teacher’s name is Erika Kohut, and at the end of every day, which she spends teaching highly talented piano students, and training them for the big leagues, she goes home to her apartment, which she shares with her mother (Annie Girardot), who is quite critical of her daughter, and who seems to have something to do with the reserved and repressed woman Erika seems to be. Except that Erika isn’t really repressed, or maybe she was, and when she eventually fought through the repression, it was like a dam bursting, complete with all the resulting carnage.

The first time we realize something might be up, in a small way, is when she meets a young man named Walter (Benoit Magimel). He is something of a piano prodigy, and Erika clearly likes him (though she will eventually be the sole vote against him when he applies in front of a panel of music teachers for a place in Erika’s master class), or at least finds him fascinating. The bulk of their first conversation together, however, involves Erika talking about the details of the madness of Schubert and Schumann, her two favorite composers.

So, she’s interested in madness. Who isn’t? The problems, and the discomfort, begin when we start to see Erika away from her mother and students, which doesn’t really happen until about a third of the way into the film (this is one of the things that distinguishes this film from the next two in this triple feature). And the first thing we see her do, when completely left to her own devices, is go to a sex shop – if that relatively mild term is really the one I want here – and go into a booth where she feeds a machine coins so she can watch hardcore pornography (which Haneke shows us, too). Although Erika may take advantage of this service in the manner that we would all initially expect her to, we don’t see that. What we do see is Erika picking up the used tissues of the male customer who preceded her in this booth, and smell them. Watching that, I thought, “Finally! I’m uncomfortable! And I thought this project was going to be a bust!”

That action, paired with the hardcore images, made me think that I should probably prepare myself for anything and everything. Now, this film is much more than a series of shocking episodes, stacked one on top of the other, but in fairly short order we are treated to a scene where Erika retreats to her bathroom at home so that she can slice at her, ahm, area, with a razor blade, and another where she goes to a drive-in and walks around until she finds a couple having sex in the back seat of their car. While spying on them, she starts to urinate. The guy half of the couple having sex sees this and, as any of us would, gets very angry and yells at Erika until she runs off. I can understand the guys anger, but really, if you’re going to have sex in public, people are going to want to watch you while they pee. That’s always been part of the deal.

Eventually, Erika begins a…I guess you’d call it a relationship, with Walter, though it’s a relationship that holds a lot of frustration for the young man. By the end of the film, I had far less sympathy for him than I did when Erika first began her incredibly sadistic tease, because it turns out that he’s kind of a scumbag. But we don’t know that at first, and initially I could share his frustration at being strung along by Erika, until the scene where she finally, and meekly, shares with him a list of violently masochistic desires she has – she would like to punched a lot, for one thing – that would, one hopes, give any man pause. Except that it’s at this point that my sympathies more or less completely shifted to Erika, who up to this point had seemed cold and mean and frightening, because she suddenly becomes shy and fearful of rejection, not to mention deeply embarrassed by her own desires, yet hopeful that Walter will understand. Well, he doesn’t. And he’s not kind in letting her know that. This long series of scenes ends with the film’s biggest shock (even though it’s not graphic, it’s still a corker), one which devastates Erika and makes her desperation for Walter so great that she follows him to hockey practice and promises him everything he could want from her. Though he claims he’s disgusted by her, he’s willing to use her neediness to get sex from her, an act of vicious selfishness that leads to this charming bit of dialogue, delivered by Walter: “You should wash your mouth out more, not just when my cock makes you puke.”

Boy, how many times have I had to say that in my life!? Also, spoiler alert.

So, shocked I indeed was by the first film in my triple feature. But I was also – and not to change tones too suddenly, I hope – quite moved by Huppert, who, despite the film’s extreme subject matter, is actually amazingly quiet in her brilliance here. And Haneke shoots it all in his typically cold style, moving his camera to a distance just far enough back to allow us to see all the little details of Erika’s life, the things that sum her up, even though you still can’t really explain her.

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End of Part One. This will not, as I previously claimed, be one long post, but rather three longish posts, because otherwise no one would finish. Plus, I would have run out of steam by the end, and my writing would have suffered, and nobody wants that. And let's not forget that by splitting this into three parts will raise my post count, which for some reason I seem to care about. Anyway, now we all have an opportunity to visit loved ones, maybe get something to eat, and ultimately regroup before settling down to deal with Inside. And boy do I ever have an opinion on that one. Stay tuned.

Prologue: In Which I Explain How I am Going to Hurt Myself

[UPDATE UPDATE: Ignore the update below this one.]

[UPDATE: A genuine, no-fooling triple feature is looking like a distinct possibility at the moment, so look for one long post on this madness some time on Saturday.]

Anyone who read this post knows the basic score: this weekend, I'm going to watch The Piano Teacher, Inside and Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, in that order, and record the experience here for posterity, or as evidence in case anything should happen to me. The only question that remains to be answered (well, other than "What the fuck!?") is "How exactly am I going to go about this?" And the answer is still pretty much "Search me, chief." At one point, I thought I might do that thing that's so popular these days, despite the fact that everyone seems to hate it, called "live-blogging". Here's an example of how that might have looked:

9:30 pm - I put The Piano Teacher into the DVD player. It is dark outside, and the wind is blowing. My cats are looking at me. The fat one wants his treats. Well, you're not getting any, because you pissed in my shoes again. Hey, I think my pizza's ready. I don't really want pizza, but egg salad takes too long to make. I should have just bought some, pre-made.

And etc. Since I've decided not to go this route, I think you'll agree that we've all dodged a bullet. But what options are left? Nothing too interesting, I'll tell you that much. I have to get started on this tonight, though, so here's what'll happen: I'm going to watch all three as fast as I can. A genuine triple feature is a possibility, depending on how long I can stay awake tonight. If I manage that, then on Saturday I'll write up the whole thing as one experience. If that doesn't pan out, which it more than likely won't, then I'll just end up writing three posts, one for each film, all going up between Friday night and Saturday afternoon. If I end up with three posts, I'll try to keep a kind of flow between them all -- for when the piece is eventually and inevitably collected for publication -- and if anyone doesn't happen to check in until the second or third post is up, or even if you all decide to wait until Monday, I'll provide links to the previous installments. Because scrolling down is a pain.

So that's it. Extremely simple and not worth the effort of writing this, really, but I did want anyone who was interested to know that this little project is still "on", as they say. So be on the lookout!

I Am Going to Hurt Myself

For some reason, I got it into my head a few days ago to punish myself with movies. I don't know what specifically I'm guilty of, that I should rain such abuse upon myself, but I'll bet it was something bad because at the top of my Netflix queue I have grouped the following three films:

To get to these three movies, I first have to watch, and return, Ninotchka, Woodenhead, and A Place in the Sun, but once that's done it's going to be a belly-slicing, unpleasant sex-having, poo-eating extravaganza at my pad.

I've never seen any of these movies, but why see them like this? Why lump them all together like that? How about, instead, watching a triple-feature of Salo, Lady and the Tramp and Anchors Aweigh? Or Inside with The Ghost and Mr. Chicken and Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow? Why deliberately set out to ruin my life? Subconciously I must know myself to harbor a great evil in my soul.

But my festering spiritual malignancy could possibly -- though I promise nothing -- be your gain, in that I'll more than likely end up writing about the experience. Perhaps I'll even do a genuine triple-feature of these (that was not my original plan, but maybe...) and, I don't know, live blog the son of a bitch. So look for that in the not too distant future, should you be so inclined. If, on the other hand, you don't see a post on this in about a week and a half, you'll probably know why. (Hint: It's because I'll be dead.)