Wednesday, March 26, 2008

One-Hundred-Eighty-Two

F O U N D . . . Brad’s last letter to Jenn

Dear Jenn

I know the counselor said we shouldn’t contact each other during our “cooling off” period, but i couldn’t wait anymore. The day you left, i swore I’d never talk to you again. But that was just the wounded little boy in me talking. Still, i never wanted to be the first one to make contact. In my fantasies, it was always you who would come crawling back to me. I guess my pride needed that. But now i see that my pride’s cost me a lot of things. I’m tired of pretending i don’t miss you. I don’t care about looking bad anymore. I don’t care who makes the first move as long as one of us does. Maybe it’s time we let our hearts speak as loudly as our hurt. And this is what my heart says: “There’s no one like you, Jenn.” I look for u in the eyes and breasts of every woman i see , but they’re not you. They’re not even close.

Two weeks ago i met this girl at the gym and brought her home with me. I don’t say this to hurt you , but just to illustrate the depth of my desperation. She was young ,maybe 19, with one of those perfect bodies that only youth and mabye a childhood spent ice skating can give you. I mean , just a perfect body. Tits like you wouldn’t believe and an ass that just wouldn’t quit. Every man’s dream , right? But as i sat on the couch being blown by this stunner, i thought, look at the stuff we’ve made important in our lives. It’s all so superficial. What does a perfect body mean? Does it make her better in bed? Well, in this case , yes, but you see what i’m getting at. Does it make her a better person? Does she have a better heart than my 30 something Jenn? I doubt it. And i’d never really thought of that before. I don’t know , maybe i’m just growing up a little.

Later, after i tossed her about a half a pint of throat yogurt, i found myself thinking, “Why do i feel so drained and empty?” It wasn’t just her flawless technique ore her slutty, shameless hunger, but something else. Some nagging feeling of loss. Why did it feel so incomplete? And then it hit me. It didn’t feel the same because you weren’t there to watch. Do you know what i mean? Nothing feels the same without you. Jenn, i’m just going crazy without you. And everything i do just reminds me of you.

Do you remember Carol, that single mom we met at Acapulco last year? Well , she dropped by last week with a pan of lasagna. She said she figured i wasn’t eating right without a woman around. I didn’t know what she meant till later, but that’s not the real story. Anyway, we had a few glasses of wine ane the next thing you know, we’re banging away in our old bedroom. And this tart’s a total monster in the sack. She’s giving me everything, you know, like a real woman does when she’s not hung up about her weight or her career and whether the neighbours can hear us. And all of a sudden, she spots that tilting mirror on your grandmother’s old vanity. So she puts it on the floor and we straddle it, right , so we can watch ourselves. And it’s totally hot, but it makes me sad , too. Cause i can’t help thinking , “why didn’t Jenn ever put the mirror on the floor?” We’ve had this old vanity for what, 2 years, and we never used it as a sex toy.

Saturday i took a trip to Paris. I bumped into Angelina Jolie. She’s got a pretty good head on her shoulders and she’s been a real friend to me during this painful time. She’s given me lots of good advice about you and about women in general. She’s pulling for us to get back together, Jenn, she really is. So we’re doing jell-0-shots in a hot bubble bath and talking about happier times. Here’s the hottest woman in the world and all i can do is think how she looked like you when u were younger. And that just about makes me cry. And then it turns out Angelina’s really into the whole anal thing, that gets me thinking about how many times i pressured you about trying it and how that probably fueled some of the bitterness between us. But, do you see how even when i’m thrusting inside the pretties cinnamon ring in the world all i can do is think of you? It’s true, Jenn. In your heart you must know it

Don’t you think we could start over? Just wipe out all the grievances away and start fresh.

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Six

INLAND EMPIRE
Reviewed by DVD Verdict Judge Bill Gibron (September 7th, 2007)

Through the darkness of future past, Judge Bill Gibron longs to see, one chance out between two worlds...and that’s definitely David Lynch’s latest masterful magnum opus.

* * * * *
The Charge

A Woman in Trouble

* * * * *
Opening Statement

Look at the tagline. Could a film be any more ambiguous and vague about what it plans on presenting? After all, “a woman in trouble” could mean anything. It offers infinite possibilities and hundreds of interesting connotations. And then there are the inherent inferences involved. Who is this woman? Where does she come from? What kind of mess is she in, if it’s a mess at all? If she’s in trouble, who is there to help her? And if no one is around to assuage her wounds, why not? What’s the context? What’s the motive? More importantly, why should we care? Unfortunately, you can’t come to a film like David Lynch’s masterful INLAND EMPIRE (his capitalization) and expect to have your qualms quelled. Instead, this dazzling digital experiment is a literal interpretation of that formless statement, complete with every possible explanation and none of the necessary clues for closure. This is either the most evocative mess the moviemaker has ever created, or a radically hedonistic slice of esoteric egotism. It stands as a landmark in non-analog filmmaking (blowing efforts by Michael Mann right out of the water) as well as a testament to the power of images. Yet the question becomes, does any of that really matter? Especially if INLAND EMPIRE fails to fully explain our female lead, and the problematic issues she’s facing.

* * * * *
Facts of the Case

We begin with a prostitute facing an abusive John. Within minutes, she is sitting in a dingy room, crying. On TV, a surreal sitcom starring humanoid rabbits unfolds. Suddenly we’re in Los Angeles, at the home of struggling actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern, Wild at Heart). Hoping to land a new role, she is visited by a strange Slavic woman who predicts she will get the part. She also hints that there will be “murder” in this new movie. After accepting the lead, Nikki meets her costar Devon Berk (Justin Theroux, Mulholland Dr.). Together, they are informed by director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons, Dead Ringers) that the shoot may be cursed. Apparently, a previous production tried to helm this seedy storyline about an adulterous couple. Right before the final scenes were filmed, the performers were killed.

Things go along swimmingly at first. The history is forgotten as Nikki and Devon dive into their work. With his notorious womanizing, our leading man is warned about staying away from his costar. Her husband will kill you, and then her, they state. Soon, fate steps in and it appears the pair is involved. During some late-night pillow talk, however, Nikki begins to crack up. She starts seeing visions—of the film set, of her husband, of another quite different life. Running away from the pain, she is propelled into a parallel plotline. Now in Poland, Nikki is a nameless hooker hoping to hire someone to off her abusive spouse. As she spills the story to a sleazy hood, we see the entire enterprise unfold. As part of a group of girls (for sale? as strippers? as pay-for-love whores?), she is jaded by the lack of respect she’s given. Even worse, there’s a man called the Phantom who may or may not be hurting these wanton women. Eventually, our pained prostitute is betrayed, and revenge seems the only way to settle the score—or is it all just part of Nikki’s new movie.

* * * * *
The Evidence

Prepare to be dazzled, disturbed, and dumbfounded by the latest accolade in auteur David Lynch’s growing artistic legacy. INLAND EMPIRE remains a frustratingly fabulous work of unbridled genius, a definitive statement in this director’s long-running desire to incorporate dream logic into his otherwise normal narratives. As is the case with any Lynch effort, there are moments here that break your heart with their beauty and passion. Similarly, there are sequences that will outright frustrate and flummox you. INLAND EMPIRE is a movie that never presents its problems or personalities outright. Instead, it’s all a question of implication: what do certain elements mean, and, vice versa, what does a lack of specific material mandate? Placing a massive burden on his actors, as well as the attention span of the audience, Lynch will languish over situations that seem slight, and then turn around and twist everything into a monumental ball of questionable quirk. Like a painter passively placing brushstrokes on a canvas to see what will blossom and develop, he’s one of the few filmmakers who sees the process as being as important as the byproduct. Eventually, the image will become clear. Until then, we will watch in blind faith as he builds his layers of creativity and prepares to unveil the finished version of his own idealized dementia.

At this point in his career, you either “get” Lynch or you don’t. You either appreciate his idiosyncratic interpretation of the language of film, or you shake your head in baffled disbelief. Hollywood loves to marginalize and manipulate his legacy, calling him everything from a talented visionary to a purposefully obtuse joke. It’s a reputation derived solely from the conventional, a view that forgets to take the actual films into consideration. So walking into INLAND EMPIRE, you kind of know what to expect. It is a sly combination of many of the man’s latter works. It has the tainted Tinseltown angle of Mulholland Dr., the bifurcated personality plotting of Lost Highway, and the far-out fabrications of his online experiments (both Rabbits and the long-delayed AXXON N play a part here). In addition, Lynch has discovered the joys of the digital revolution. Using the camcorder dynamic in creating this “film,” it provided him with a freedom and a looseness that grants him the luxury to follow his every whim. That’s why INLAND EMPIRE feels like the most personal David Lynch experience to date. It’s overflowing with his innermost idiosyncrasies, long-delayed experiments, and astounding artistic flourishes.

For those looking for enlightenment, this is one of the director’s knottiest narratives. There are many ways to interpret what’s happening, but the basic storyline consists of one of two potent possibilities. Perhaps the prostitute we see at the start of the film is so alone and afraid in her pathetic sex-for-pay life that she fantasizes about an existence outside the fringes of reality. In her mind, she becomes a famous movie star, hired to play a demanding part and using that celebrity to step in and save a number of her “friends,” also desperate in their white-slave surroundings. Another view would suggest that Laura Dern’s actress, motivated to win a much-needed part, has turned so inward and method that she can no longer distinguish the meaningful from her motivation. In trying to connect with her character, she loses her own sense of self, frequently disappearing into flights of fractured, fearful fancy. In either case, we are definitely dealing with a “woman in trouble,” and again Lynch is looking for as many literal and metaphysical ways of expressing this ideal as possible. That’s why we get scenes of domestic strife, interpersonal difficulties, professional insecurity, cold-blooded calculation, and intense internal struggle. Relying almost solely on Dern to deliver the goods, Lynch lives up to these hyperbolic conceits, while tossing in a great deal of simple cinematic splendor. His lead deserves complete and utter kudos for taking on such a surreal statement; it’s the medium he’s manipulating that deserves the most praise.

When it was announced that Lynch was using the digital format as a way of making his next movie, many in his formidable fan base were disturbed. The reaction was two-fold: first, many feared the man couldn’t get financing to create an actual “film” film, and so was “slumming” just to get his muse across. The other, and more oddball, idea was that Lynch was abandoning celluloid in favor of a grittier, gonzo concept. He wanted to go back to his idyllic indie days, and a DV would help him achieve that aesthetic. In fact, both notions held a kernel of truth. Studios, especially the Hollywood heavyweights, are not about to give an already problematic artist (while critically acclaimed, Lynch doesn’t do well with mainstream moviegoers) a huge hunk of cash to run around the globe and create a conceptual collage without any manageable marketing points. So digital allowed him to do more with substantially less…dollar-wise. On the other hand, all craftsmen like to mess with tools to see where the inspiration takes them. In this case, armed with a series of new toys, Lynch could simply go out and play. Similar to when he had the time, location, and unlimited stock to work with (resulting in his first film, the amazing Eraserhead), INLAND EMPIRE feels the closest to this director’s oft-proclaimed imagination than anything he’s done recently. And besides, the movie looks amazing. Lynch understands both the technical and the ephemeral aspects of the medium he’s working in, and he does digital 100 percent right.

The result is one of the most breathtaking accomplishments you will ever see. And hear. It’s important to note that Lynch places video and audio tests and calibration menus on his discs so that people can “tune” their home theaters properly to reproduce (as best as possible) his work outside a big-screen setting. So both sound and vision are incredibly important to him, and with INLAND EMPIRE, he has really outdone himself. This is a startling experience, one that begins as a standard motion-picture drama and descends into both the hearts of darkness and the disturbed. Colors crash and blend, as slow, soft rumbles build to crescendos of aural assault. For Lynch, film is as sensual (meaning, “of the senses") as it is cerebral or emotional. He wants you to get lost in the opticals, to use the bombast blazing out of your 5.1 setup as a doorway into another dimension. Similarly, what you will see onscreen will cause you to question the facets of reality while firing forgotten synapses way off in the back of your brain. The end result is a defining, draining experience, a means of meeting cinema at its very core—and then continuing beyond. Like his beloved meditation, which he claims allows him to tap into the inner pool of possibilities within his creative ocean, Lynch is a magician manipulating echoes and ideas into a test of one’s potential perception.

Sometimes we don’t like what we see. At other instances, the elements can come together so effortlessly that they make the soul soar. Never one to explain or expound (this is the guys who used a psychogenic fugue as a legitimate plot point, after all) while leaving interpretation and intent for others to determine, David Lynch seemingly celebrates the insane and the bizarre. But actually, all he’s doing is redefining experience, one fascinating graphic at a time. It’s as if he taps directly into your nervous system and captures incidents without the benefit of an intellectualized filter. All drama appears found, all horror or happiness arrives spontaneously and unprocessed. While it’s possible to label this as self-indulgent, delusional, excessive, or unapproachable, the proof is that everyone sees what they want when it comes to film. A comedy that causes some to crack up may actually be a witless wonder. Similarly, an action epic that gets your blood boiling and your adrenaline droning may put others into a sound slumber. Love him or hate him, David Lynch at least deserves to be recognized for what he is—a true artist working in an arena that usually shuns such arch philosophies. If it’s not simple, saleable, and strategically targeted at a base demographic, it doesn’t matter much to studio suits. But all art lives beyond its pop-culture calling, and one thing is for sure—decades from now, when scholars are sorting the weakest wheat from the rock-solid chaff, Lynch and INLAND EMPIRE will be among the mighty.

True to his tech-specs word, Lynch supervised the transfer of INLAND EMPIRE to DVD, and Rhino’s release is something quite special. The movie’s amazing look is brilliantly captured by the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. Don’t listen to other sites that criticize this film as an ineffectual DV production. There are only the slightest of hints of the telltale facets we expect from the medium (fuzziness, lack of clarity, unclear contrasts), but Lynch makes them work to his benefit. In this critic’s considered opinion, this is a jewel of an image, a complete representation of what can be achieved with the new advances. On the sound side, things are equally solid. The Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 Stereo mixes provided play with spatial ambiences, and yet both deliver devastating sonic significance. You feel lost in Lynch’s world, enveloped by his music and involved in his effects. Again, there will be those who believe this is less-than-reference quality, and, believe it or not, they’d have a champion in the director. Home video actually sickens Lynch, since it deprives the viewer of the project the way he intended them to experience it—in a theater, with a properly calibrated projector and a full-blown, properly volumized speaker setup. What he hopes to do here is not recreate the Cineplex dynamic as much as give the best possible product for the living room.

As for added content, this stellar set provides lots of insight—as well as a few comic asides. Offered up as something entitled “More Things that Happened,” we are treated to 75 minutes of deleted scenes. Most deal with incidental aspects of the narrative, but there is more material regarding Dern’s hobbled home life and the prostitute’s predicament. “Ballerina” is a nine-minute meditation on an ethereal dancer, captured as only Lynch can. “Quinoa” is the director, at home, making up a pot of the famous South American “superfood” (actually, a small, protein rich grain). Trailers and stills are self-explanatory. The best bits are reserved for two amazing supplements. “Stories” is 30 minutes of Lynch discussing his rationale for the film, what inspired him, and the various issues he has with moviemaking and the industry in general. It’s the closest thing to a commentary you’ll ever get from the man, and its fascinating stuff. Similarly illustrative is “Lynch 2,” a collection of behind-the-scenes sequences showcasing the director as a cross, if calm, curmudgeon. He pisses and moans, demands and barks orders, but always within his mild-mannered Midwestern character. It’s like seeing a dictator shorn of all his sturm and drang, and yet still getting exactly what he wants. It presents a side of Lynch we rarely get to see, and gives the DVD of INLAND EMPIRE the “extra” boost it needs to be a definitive digital statement.

* * * * *
Closing Statement

So, in the end, what exactly was the “trouble” our “woman” was in? Sure, we see someone struggling with a difficult acting role, set inside a film that may or may not be cursed. We see a beaten and abused hooker seek the help of a hitman to take out her cruel and brutal husband. We see other streetwalkers, feigning happiness as the reality of their life hits them hard. And finally, we see an actual Hollywood celebrity, a female noted for her fine, Oscar-nominated work, walk effortlessly through a troubling, tentative experiment in expression. Together, they become all aspects of the gender big picture, a portrait of women as heroes, villains, whores, saints, lovers, adulterers, mothers, and mistresses. Few filmmakers today would even try to make something so all encompassing and endemic, but it’s clear that David Lynch is not your ordinary artist; he never has been, and he never will be. Instead, he continues to clip the boundaries of the art form while redrafting many of its original ideals. You may not like everything inside INLAND EMPIRE, but it’s near impossible to deny its designs. Sometimes, a director is so ahead of the curve that it’s unfair to fault him for not living up to our everyday expectations. As a planned provocateur, Lynch is a man of startling genius—and INLAND EMPIRE is a near-masterpiece.

* * * * *
The Verdict

Not guilty. Both Rhino and their DVD of INLAND EMPIRE are free to go.

* * * * *
Scales of Justice

Video: 96
Audio: 97
Extras: 90
Acting: 100
Story: 95
Judgment: 97

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Forty-Six

Cabin In The Sky
Reviewed by Judge Joe Armenio (Retired), DVD Verdict (2006)

The Charge
“Can’t you see that cabin in the sky, mister?
An acre or two or heavenly blue to plow.”

Opening Statement
This DVD release of Vincente Minnelli’s 1943 musical, Cabin in the Sky, one of Hollywood’s early attempts at a movie with an all-black cast, prefaces the film with a weirdly distancing and apologetic disclaimer which insists that the movie’s depictions of African-Americans “were wrong then and are wrong today,” and then weakly defends the choice to present the film at all, suggesting that it’s worthwhile as a document of a less enlightened time. Someone at Warner thought this apology was necessary in the name of racial sensitivity, but it seems to me wildly facile and reductive; representations of race are complex little buggers, and one can spend an intellectual lifetime trying to parse the intersections of aesthetics and ideology that produce them at a particular historical moment. Stamping them as “wrong,” with the authoritative voice of the reissue preface, cuts off discussion just where it might start to get interesting, besides being pretty insensitive to the great black artists who populate the film itself, among them Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

It seems to me that real respect for both the film and the history of race in the United States would entail neither a curt dismissal of the film nor an unquestioning acceptance of its attitudes, but would try to dig a little deeper into the context that produced it. The preface doesn’t help with that task, nor really does Todd Boyd’s commentary (I’ll talk more about that later).

Facts of the Case
Cabin in the Sky is the story of Little Joe (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, The Jack Benny Program), who is torn between the wholesome demands of home and family, represented by his wife Petunia (Ethel Waters, Pinky), and a dissolute life as a gambler and rabble-rouser, represented by the seductive Georgia Brown (Lena Horne, Stormy Weather). After being shot in a nightclub brawl, Little Joe has a dream which, Wizard of Oz-style, casts various figures from his life as devils and angels fighting for his immortal soul; this struggle takes place to the tune of a Harold Arlen-Vernon Duke score which includes the title song, “Taking a Chance on Love,” “Happiness is a Thing Called Joe,” and “Shine.”

The Evidence
As I already mentioned, Cabin in the Sky was Minnelli’s first film as a director and some of his trademarks are already apparent, such as a surprising darkness (the climactic sequence is downright apocalyptic) and a graceful integration of musical numbers into the film; Minnelli used the songs not merely as set pieces but as devices by which to advance the plot, to tell us something about character and to express emotions raised by the story. Waters’s jubilant rendition of “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe,” followed later by its heartbreaking reprise, is perhaps the most moving example of this. Not all of the musical numbers are so well integrated; the final nightclub sequence, which features performances by Duke Ellington, Horne, and John Sublett (aka “Bubbles"), is more of the old-fashioned set-piece variety.

Like 1936’s The Green Pastures, one of the few other early attempts by Hollywood to make a film featuring African-Americans, black culture is seen here largely as a repository of quaint and colorful folk stories, heavily musical and influenced by a certain naive and heartfelt Christianity. Anderson’s Little Joe is lovable but childlike, easily swayed, never fully a responsible grown man. Petunia is also the sort of African-American woman one sees often in mainstream culture of the period: asexual, fiercely religious, and relentlessly moral (though warmer and not as intimidating, I think, as Todd Boyd makes her out to be). Georgia Brown, on the other hand, is lighter-skinned, slimmer, dangerous, and sexually alluring. In Little Joe’s hallucination-fantasy, the representative of God is an upright deacon who pronounces perfect Standard English in a booming bass, while the devils are stereotypically shiftless, comic bumblers. The film’s final act takes place in the ironically named “John Henry’s Paradise,” the home of music (Duke Ellington’s orchestra), high living (embodied by Joe’s impeccably dressed, hedonistic, violent rival Domino), and beautiful women; it’s a site of pleasure and sin and Joe’s potential demise.

Certainly in 1943 a feature film with an all-black cast was a rarity, and seeing so much of Anderson, Waters, and Horne on screen was a rare treat and a somewhat progressive move; perhaps the demands of wartime unity gave a spur to the production of a film which would please African-American viewers. How much a viewer in 2006 enjoys Cabin in the Sky will be determined by his own moral and aesthetic calculations: Is he more offended by the caricatures on display, or moved by the skill and vigor with which the director and performers give them life? It seems to me that one can find some of the “cute” ungrammatical dialogue wince-inducing, the jokes tired, and the plot patronizing, and still not dismiss the film. One of the reasons why I find the DVD’s disclaimer distasteful is its willingness to condemn the film’s stars as accomplices to racism. Certainly Waters’s and Horne’s characters are stereotypes, but they’re never simply stereotypes; to hear Waters’ rich, stately, majestic delivery of “Cabin in the Sky” or “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe” is to hear an artist of the highest order at work, and that’s a pretty radical statement in itself.

The technical presentation is impeccable, and the film comes with a commentary by scholars Todd Boyd and Drew Casper, both of whom teach at the USC; Boyd focuses on thematic issues, mapping the system of stereotypes at work quite expertly, even if he makes as many banal points as salient ones (do we really need to have it pointed out that the devils wear black and the angels white, with all the attendant racial implications?). He also has a clunky delivery that I find depressingly common in DVD commentaries; wouldn’t it be a good idea to write something out beforehand? (For example: “This becomes central in the process of the film as it goes forward.") Casper is more concerned with film technique, sounding weirdly frantic and breathless throughout. I found him helpful with his scene-specific comments, but overwrought and a little creepy. The commentary also features a few remarks from Anderson’s wife and daughter, who say that they loved their husband/father very much, and that he was a fine artist and a good man; they don’t go much beyond that. There are also (very) brief clips from Lena Horne and dancer Fayard Nicholas.

The 1946 short film, “Studio Visit,” is narrated by one Pete Smith, chief of publicity for MGM, who shows off some of the studio’s “talent”: a shell-game illusionist, a little girl with an improbable sense of balance, and Lena Horne, who sings “Ain’t It the Truth” while lounging in a bathtub, a performance that had been cut from Cabin in the Sky (perhaps for being too risqué, although, of course, you can’t see anything through the suds). Finally, the DVD includes the surviving audio from another performance of “Ain’t It the Truth,” this one by Louis Armstrong, which was also cut from the film (the video has not survived, unfortunately, and the audio is accompanied by scenes from the film and publicity materials). Armstrong appears as a devil in the film, delivers a few lines, and blows a few bars on the trumpet, but it’s frustrating that his big number was cut and partially lost: he was at a down point in his career in 1943, and I guess his performance was considered disposable.

Closing Statement
Disclaimer aside, Cabin in the Sky is more than a historical document; it doesn’t quite have the force of some of Minnelli’s later musicals, but it shows off his already vigorous and artful style, and its cast breathes life into a well-meaning but condescending story.

The Verdict
Not guilty.

Scales of Justice
Video: 90
Audio: 92
Extras: 78
Acting: 80
Story: 90
Judgment: 85

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Thirty-Seven

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin’s Priestess of Depravity by Mel Gordon
A Feral House book
Reviewed by Len Bracken, Bookslut

Anita Berber was Weimar Germany’s decadent dancer extraordinaire. Her style if not her lewd inclinations inspired Leni Riefenstahl and Marlena Dietrich to the point of plagiarism: the former launched her acting career as the understudy who filled in for Berber, copying her every move, and the latter, whom Berber dated, borrowed Anita’s fashion sense and confident demeanor. Unmatched by her imitators, Berber danced through life, slinking her sable-wrapped-yet-otherwise-nude form across the chessboard tiles of hotel lobby floors. At one point she was everywhere—in the streets of Berlin with traces of powder on her nostrils and a pet monkey around her neck, on the silver screen playing macabre characters, in newspapers and entertainment reviews, and on stage in wispy costumes, dancing to words by her first husband, the expressionist poet and notorious international con artist, Sebastian Droste:

. . . Ah-jump over the Shadow
It torments, this Shadow
It devours, this Shadow
What does the Shadow want
Cocaine
Shrieks
Animals.

Mel Gordon brings together a dazzling array of photographs, drawings, paintings, anecdotes, poems, manifestos and other material into this short yet informative biography. Working with a novel about Berber by one of her contemporaries and monographs and articles by dance specialists, Gordon, a U.C. Berkeley professor and the author of numerous books on Germany, notably the biography Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant, brings deep historical knowledge to his subject.

The height of Berber’s career and nude dancing coincided with the Inflation, and the author depicts this period primarily by its natural, hedonistic response to war and economic distress, although Gordon doesn’t dwell on it. Surprisingly, no mention is made of the noteworthy takeover of the country by soldier and worker councils following the war. Gordon prefers to remain close to his subject, the schoolgirl raised by her grandmother in Dresden where she attended body movement schools before moving to the capital at age 16 to become a dancer. Gordon knows from his encyclopedic Voluptuous Panic, now in an expanded edition, precisely where Berber fits in the erotic world of Weimar Berlin, and he fills in the background with plenty of interesting oddities, such as showgirls sliding down a giant razor blade.

Seen as a morality tale for the era, Gordon reports that Berber died from tuberculosis at 29 after a tour of Greece and the Middle East. But the author is clearly fascinated by Berber and sympathizes with her, especially when she was paid to do more than dance. It seems that Gordon himself was caught up in the 1990s Berber revival, in which her dances were recreated in several cities. The author even helped choreograph her moves for a new wave musician.

Gordon makes the point that Berber’s career was buoyed at various points by the graphic arts and her appearances in magazines. The best photographs show elegantly long, tapering legs with a narrow waist and slender shoulders—the body of a professional dancer. In movie stills she appears in an Eton-Boy tux with trousers, sporting a monocle; or again shooting an older man, possibly her father, with a pistol. Otto Dix captured her in 1925 wearing the tomato-red “Morphine” costume in a painting recently on exhibit at the 2006-07 “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and nicely reproduced in the book. The semitransparent cloth clings to a long waist at the center of the painting. Dix hints at the muscles of her abdomen, her belly button and a small band of fat below it—all very smooth in contrast to the diagonal folds of the skirt and the rise of her breasts. One hand presses against her hip. The other curls toward her private parts, seen as a faintly dark triangle, with the fingers hovering like red-tipped pincers. Dix contrasts the high-collar dress blending into her auburn hair and the crimson background with Berber’s powder-white face and large eyes. She wears a fierce expression in the portrait that was turned into a national postage stamp in 1991—an expression at once determined with her glassy eyes staring at a point in the distance, yet whimsical with ornately colored lips.

That’s how she looked when she danced to the words in the poem “Morphine,” which is reproduced with others in the back of the biography: “strange flowers and greenhouse plants, painted people and listless sounding bells.so far.so.distant.merging.breathing.” These poems originally appeared in the Berber-Droste collaborative book The Dances of Depravity, Horror, and Ecstasy (Vienna, 1922) and Gordon draws a strong portrait of Berber’s first husband and dance partner, making this more like three books in one.

It was with Droste that Berber created some of her biggest scandals on the stage and in crime stories in newspapers across Europe. Gordon recounts how Droste finally conned Berber, stealing her furs and jewels to fund a transatlantic journey and his transformation into a baron. In New York Droste would manage to stage a Carnegie Hall recital and was featured in now-famous photographs by Francis Bruguière, while coexisting with sex guru charlatans in an Upstate love colony and reporting firsthand for German newspapers on the hanging of Gerald Chapman.

When they were still together in Europe, Berber and Droste were banned from most the top venues in Europe and expelled from Vienna—what Gordon calls “madness on tour.” Although never performed, in their book the perverse couple envisioned a dance with Berber catching Droste’s sperm in her mouth as he hangs from a rope above her.

Her second husband was another dancer, an American who met the dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhaven in New York and rented a room from her in Berlin. Anita heard about the well-connected arrival and caught his first performance in the city. She waited for him after the show, taking him for one of Anita’s nights on the town. He was content to go along with her plans. In an effort to restart her career, the cocaine-addicted cabaret star married the young American two weeks later.

Gordon quickly moves from incident to incident in this tumultuous life—from Berber’s arrest in Zagreb on charges of spying to Munich where she was shunned by her violin maestro father—always coming back to Berlin and dancing. Her last tour stretched from Athens to Cairo, Baghdad to Beirut and on to Damascus. When she finally returned to Berlin, using funds raised by friends to make the trip, she had tuberculosis on top of her addictions to drugs and alcohol. Berber would soon die in a Kreuzberg hospital, a trend-setting woman living in times that, for all the disruptions, encouraged artistic experimentation.

Gordon’s biography gives us Anita Berber’s irrational, artistic response to those times. The book shows a life striving to live beyond all limits, a life like the best art that fails for its excess but wouldn’t be the best without it. Berber left behind her performances, her drawings and poems, but with Gordon’s portrayal, Berber’s life itself can be seen as her unfinished masterpiece.

* * * * *
From Feral House . . . . .

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is the first contemporary biography of the notorious actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin during the 1920s.

In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber’s celebrations of “Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy” were condemned and censored. She often haunted Weimar Berlin’s hotel lobbies, nightclubs, and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine.

Multi-talented Anita saw no boundaries between her personal life and her taboo-shattering performances. As such, she was Europe’s first postmodern woman. After sated Berliners finally tired of Anita Berber’s libidinous antics, she became a “carrion soul that even the hyenas ignored,” dying in 1928 at the age of twenty-nine.

• Includes nearly two hundred photographs and illustrations, including some that recreate Berber’s salacious and enduring “Repertoire of the Damned.”

• Berber was a lover of Marlene Dietrich and influenced and associated with Leni Riefenstahl, Lawrence Durrell, Klaus Mann, and the founder of modern sexology, Magnus Hirschfeld.

• An early movie star, Berber acted in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and the silent epic Lucifer.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Monday, October 29, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Thirty-Four

Pornography: The Secret History Of Civilisation

Appelllate Judge Mike Pinsky, of DVD Verdict, urges you to check out this documentary he’s got hiding under his raincoat.

The Charge

“You cannot imagine a revolution without shocks."—Lasse Braun, European porn entrepreneur

The Case

I have offered a theory for years that every technological advance in communication since the invention of the printing press has been spread and made cheap enough for consumers thanks to pornography. Usually, people just look at me indulgently, nodding their heads as if they are simply humoring me. Even my students do this. Well, apparently I am not the only person who thought of this. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the producers behind Party Monster and Inside Deep Throat, believe that such a theory is worth five hours of television time.

Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation—well, you see its thesis right in the title. Over the course of six episodes, this 1999 documentary series, created for Britain’s Channel Four, examines six turning points in the history of art and commerce and places pornography squarely at the center of each one.

Episode One: The Road to Ruin: The word pornography (which literally refers to writing for or about prostitutes) only appeared in English in 1857: the Victorians invented the genre as way of containing the improper by taxonomy. It was associated with addictive behavior, with pathology. It terrified the mainstream. When Pompeii was uncovered around this period, the Victorians discovered that the noble Romans liked sex—everything from paintings of couples both straight and gay in explicit couplings to a statue of the god Pan porking a goat. I expect the Victorians decided that this was what caused Vesuvius to erupt. One museum curator jokes that all good people of taste in ancient Pompeii apparently had to have sex pictures in their homes.

But the ancient Romans would have seen the Pompeian dirty pictures as a necessary part of public discourse. Fertility was the health of the nation. The satisfaction of desire was the marker of affluence. Queen Victoria’s assertion that women should not enjoy sex but should lie back and do it for the good of England would have puzzled Romans. For the Victorians, fertility and desire were markers of lower-class status. Poor people needed children and the distraction of sex; the rich could afford to live without them.

Episode Two: The Sacred and the Profane: The expansion of printing in the 17th and 18th centuries led to a censorship war. Again, class is the key. Even before the printing press, wealthy patrons could commission religious books with erotic images illuminated in the margins. One book we see even includes naughty pictures of the baby Jesus!

But the printing press made books cheaper and opened up a market for porn for the masses. The use of sexual imagery in the hands of the church and state is “not just telling you what to do with your body, but how to think,” according to one historian. Sex is used to draw attention, but also to warn you against sin. However, once the masses learn that sexual desire is permissible, social unrest against the authorities that have always controlled desire always results. The notorious Fanny Hill by John Cleland was as much a social satire in an age of Enlightenment political awareness as it was a dirty book. (You can find a free copy easily on the web and discover this for yourself.) Even the French Revolution was accompanied by often brutal satires (including the work of the Marquis de Sade) of the aristocracy fucking while Paris was falling apart.

Episode Three: The Mechanical Eye: The development of photography changed everything. Now caricature became specificity; representation became realism. Photography encouraged static poses (an effect of exposure time, so to speak). In order to convince authorities that the new medium was “artistic,” photographers shifted focus exclusively toward female nudity (earlier porn was more egalitarian by comparison). Of course, at first, all this was only for the wealthy who could afford those early daguerreotypes. Once reproducible photography brought prices down, once again the democratization of porn had social and political consequences.

It should be clear by this point that the consistent theme of Pornography is that class politics is the central factor in the development and dissemination of erotic material. Most discussions of pornography focus almost exclusively on gender issues. Bailey and Barbato are trying a different approach. Porn is celebrated as a form of resistance against authority. Throughout the documentary, there is little discussion of the typical criticisms against porn: sexual exploitation, criminal activity, psychological trauma. Of course, these arguments have been so well documented elsewhere. Perhaps Bailey and Barbato felt that the other side had its say for long enough.

On the down side, their documentary appears on DVD from Koch Vision with no subtitles or extra content. Jeez, guys, you came this far. How about some outtakes or even just a research bibliography? There is so much material to cover here that those with an actual scholarly interest in this stuff (like us popular culture professors) might want to follow up.

Episode Four: Twentieth Century Foxy: From the underground economy of stag films to peep show booths to the public celebration surrounding Deep Throat (check out Bailey and Barbato’s Inside Deep Throat for more on this) and the surreal Behind the Green Door. The early films were made for all-male, ritualized group gatherings ("stag parties"). The Hays Code (and later the MPAA) struggled to keep sex marginalized. The result was almost exactly what would later cause the rapid drop in prices for camcorders and webcams: people started making movies in their homes. The promise that porn would go mainstream fizzled.

Considering the prevalence of film clips in this episode, I suspect that it might be a good time to mention what you are already thinking: Pornography is pretty explicit for a made for television documentary. There is no actual penetration shown, but pretty much everything else is fair game. Female nudity is something that has almost become routine (and the documentary has theories as to why). But if too many penises give you the willies (I know, but I figured we needed to get that joke out of the way already), then you will not feel comfortable with this series. Pornography does not shy away from showing bodies and describing everything bodies do, right out in the open with good lighting. This is history, and the show treats every artifact with respect. Better still, the documentary does not try to go to the other extreme and dry the material into intellectual leather: tough and hard to chew. There are great stories and interesting historians who show us this material in a much livelier fashion than the usual abstracted talking heads.

Episode Five: Sex Lives on Videotape: Speaking of prominent experts, I spotted cultural critics Douglas Rushkoff and Camille Paglia (both of whom I have taught in popular culture courses) in this episode. And check out the cool clips from Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Anyway, this episode focuses on the shift toward interactivity through video tape, camcorders, and the turn toward amateur production. Some film lovers thought video was cold, inorganic, hard—but it was cheaper and faster. It took a few years (and the development of digital video) before it looked good, though. The porn industry expanded to massive proportions.

Back in Episode One of this series, a Cambridge professor points out that the Victorians were so “passionate about repressing” sexual desire that they couldn’t stop talking about sex. Is it possible that sex may become so omnipresent, so acceptable in all its forms, that it may just seep into the mainstream and become just another commercial enterprise? Just visit San Fernando’s “Porn Valley,” where dozens of production companies, distributors, and studios reside, and wonder if anybody in the neighborhood even pays attention.

Episode Six: Pornotopia: Or, you could just stay at home and play on the computer. The apotheosis of pornography has come in the digital age. Now, even as we leave the body behind for virtual experience, pornography has permeated our culture. It can be accessed anywhere at any time. It can go live; it is completely plastic and manipulable. Without borders, pornography slips under and around all efforts at censorship; no law can directly touch it. Everyone can participate. For Bailey and Barbato, the democratization of technology is complete. Everyone becomes connected, and getting plugged (and plugged in) becomes more than just the fulfillment of desire. It becomes an act of self-determination and resistance.

I am not sure I entirely buy Bailey and Barbato’s porno-political manifesto, but I am also not sure they entirely buy it either. There is a dry sense of humor about this entire series. There has to be. You cannot be a historian or cultural critic scrutinizing a museum full of erect phalluses or a cluttered and decidedly unerotic porn-movie set and not laugh. Authority figures have always viewed sexuality as a control issue, and pornography has long been a weapon in the satirist’s arsenal.

Bailey and Barbato’s documentary never tries to apologize for its content by distinguishing between “erotica” (which implies something artsy) and “pornography” (which implies something sordid). Sexual imagery of all sorts, whether intended to arouse, edify, inspire, or whatever, is all fair game. This avoids stuffiness. Literate and entertaining, Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation never displays its naughty bits for prurient reasons. In short, Pornography is fun, intelligent, and blessed with wisdom and wit. And that’s really sexy.

Scales of Justice
Judgment: 90

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Friday, October 19, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Twenty-Nine

Imprints of Joy

Half past five at the Embassy. I wait for my “parasol” from last night. I need a whisky. I’m very shy deep down, and ready to be furious if she doesn’t show up. It’s my curiosity that would be most disappointed..
Five thirty-five. There she is! Can it really be her? Ravishing, tall, slim, with a small mouth and full lips, and dark porcelain eyes. She casts aside her fur coat in a gust of warm perfume. We’re going to dance. Mexican? Cuban? Her very small head sits on a very long neck. She is tall; her mouth is at the level of my chin. When we dance my mouth is not far from her mouth. Her hair brushes against both.
“Romanian. My name is Renée P… I was a model at Doeuillet...” Delicious. She takes off her gloves. Long, little girl’s hands. Something in my mind starts dancing at the thought that one day perhaps she would agree to paint the nails of those hands…
---Diary, Paris, March 7, 1930.

Jacques Lartigue, the famous French photographer & artist, met Renée Perle in Paris in March 1930. He was soon won over by the grace and elegance of this Romanian-born professional model. For a period of two years she was both his companion and his favorite model for paintings and photos.

“ . . . . From the beginning, this obsession with bodies in motion is matched by an eye for beauty and glamour, and Lartigue begins taking what are now called society portraits before he reached his teens. ‘Women - everything about them fascinates me,’ he records in his journal. ‘Their dresses, their scent, the way they walk...’

He married his first wife, Bibi, in St Tropez, and, as with every glamorous woman he subsequently encountered, he was entranced by her beauty. He photographs her in bed, in the bath, and, daringly for the time, on the lavatory. She stares back at his lens, accepting and at ease. The Hayward has included some of his early 3D stereoscopic images here - the viewer has to look through binocular lenses fitted into a wall - and the sense of intimacy in some of them is extraordinary.

By 1919, Lartigue had established himself as a society photographer and was moving with the season along the Riviera and Côte D’Azur, in search of the glamorous and exotic. His intoxication in the presence of female beauty is transferred to the viewer in image after image of the wondrous Renée Perle, his lover in the early Thirties. ‘The small mouth with the full parted lips! The ebony black eyes!’ he enthuses in his journal, but it is the images that truly capture the languid beauty of one of the great muses of the 20th century. . . . ” from “A machine for trapping beauty” by Sean O’Hagan, The London Observer

“John Galliano calls Renée Perle, the inspiration behind his fall show, “a kittenish Parisian coquette.” Jacques Henri Lartigue, who immortalized her in his pictures, had another term: angel. The revered photographer met his muse in 1930 on the Rue de la Pompe. He thought she was Mexican, but he guessed wrong; Perle was Romanian, and a model once employed by the French dressmaker Doeuillet. “She is beautiful,” Lartigue told his diary. “The small mouth with the full painted lips! The ebony black eyes. From under her fur coat comes a warmth of perfume. The head looks petite on her long neck.” The pair spent two years together, cavorting as if on eternal vacation in Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, and Biarritz, with Lartigue’s camera always at the ready. In the “shadowless heaven” of his photographs, glamorous women, including his first and second wives, Bibi and Florette, abound, but Perle’s lacquered hair, slender silhouette, modern T-shirts, armfuls of bangles, and talonlike nails shone the brightest. “Around her,” Lartigue wrote, “I see a halo of magic."”
—Laird Borrelli, Style magazine

Postscript:  All that’s generally known about Renée Perle, is from her time with Jacques Henri Lartigue and the photos he captured of her during their two years together.  He, the photographer; she, the model, muse, and mistress.  Beyond that, she’s an immortal memory and a mystery.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Twenty-Eight

La Belle Noiseuse
Reviewed by Appellate Judge Dan Mancini (Retired) (2004)

Judge Dan Mancini might actually be able to talk you into watching a four-hour movie about a guy painting a picture. See, it’s a nude picture.

The Charge

“If I go the whole way, there’s blood on the canvas…on La Belle Noiseuse you see blood."—Edouard Frenhofer

Opening Statement

The idea for La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker) came to director Jacques Rivette while editing a scene in his 1988 film La Bande des Quatre in which two characters discuss Honoré de Balzac’s short story The Unknown Masterpiece. In the story, a 17th-century painter named Frenhofer intrigues his colleague and a young acolyte with tales of a painting he’s been struggling with for a decade. The acolyte convinces his beautiful lover to pose for the master provided Frenhofer shows them the painting—called La Belle Noiseuse—when he’s completed it. Billed by Frenhofer as a perfect realization of mimetic representation, the finished painting is incomprehensible to the colleague and acolyte, either a work of madness or of genius so complete it’s beyond their ability to perceive.

Rivette and his long-time writing partners Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent joked that if they adapted Balzac’s story and no one went to see the movie, it would truly be The Unknown Masterpiece in every sense. It may have begun as a joke, but the idea took hold of Rivette, and grew into his next film. La Belle Noiseuse isn’t an adaptation of Balzac but uses the short story as inspiration, a point of departure. Moving his story from 17th-century Paris to modern-day provincial France, about the only elements Rivette keeps are characters’ names, the name of the painting, and a philosophical fascination with the production of art. La Belle Noiseuse is less concerned with its masterpiece, though, than with the symbiotic relationship between artist and model, and how that symbiosis becomes the source of a work of art.

Facts of the Case

Edouard Frenhofer (Michele Piccoli, Contempt) is an enormously talented painter who’s fallen into decline and obscurity since abandoning a potential masterpiece called La Belle Noiseuse a decade ago. The rigors of Frenhofer’s search for truth proved too much for the project’s model, his wife Liz (Jane Birkin, Blowup), and the aging artist chose life and marriage over art.

Frenhofer finds new inspiration in a young woman named Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart, Mission: Impossible) when she and her lover Nicolas—an aspiring artist and admirer of Frenhofer’s—visit his chateau. Marianne agrees to pose for Frenhofer, but they end up in a battle of wills as he tries to peer past her disguises and capture her true nature on canvas.

The Evidence

Balzac’s Frenhofer is a spiritual disciple of the Flemish mannerist painter Jan Gossaert, renowned for his portraiture and detailed, full-sized nudes (Frenhofer makes references throughout the story to his mentor Mabuse, Gossaert’s nom de plume, though he died nearly a century before the story’s setting and had no connection to the French tradition). In the story, the painter is obsessed with capturing the essence of life through an eerily mimetic reproduction of his subject, and his madness/genius takes the form of a rejection of the artifice of line in favor of minutely-studied color, shading, and contour. By contrast, Rivette’s Frenhofer is a post-impressionist whose struggle at the boundaries of expression involves seeing beyond the physical to the deeper existential or transcendental “truth” of his model.

While Balzac’s piece is focused on representation of the material in art, he treats the actual modeling session only briefly and elliptically. Relayed in a single paragraph, we remain with Frenhofer’s colleague and acolyte outside the studio, wondering what’s going on inside. But long stretches of Rivette’s four-hour film are consumed with the sessions, which play out over the course of at least three days. They are the staging ground for the filmmaker’s simultaneous exploration of character and the nature of art. The initial session is awkward as Frenhofer and Marianne rarely speak, and he gives her little direction, allowing her to strike natural poses. There’s a timidity to the proceedings. She poses slumped and fidgety as nearly any woman standing naked in front of a stranger would; he assesses her clinically, avoiding eye contact, as he scratches out pen and ink drawings. In the next marathon session, his demeanor changes. He begins to pose her, selecting the furniture on which she sits or reclines, and directing the placement of arms and turn of head—sometimes moving them into position himself. The poses are less natural, but more formally, compositionally beautiful. Frenhofer’s casually dictatorial behavior and the physical rigors of maintaining the unnatural poses anger and exhaust Marianne. It’s as though the painter is trying to break her down mentally and physically in order to get at the real Marianne beneath. By the third session, they’re mildly antagonistic compatriots, looking for La Belle Noiseuse together. When he loses hope of successfully executing his grand design, she pushes him onward because she now has a stake in the painting, too.

Throughout these sessions, Rivette’s camera is trained on Frenhofer and his hands (played by artist Bernard Dufour) more than on Marianne. Just as, paradoxically, Frenhofer must push past the physical presence of his model in order to render that unique humanity that makes her her, he must also find a way to express those intangibles via the rigidly mechanical processes of drawing and painting. La Belle Noiseuse is a singular film because it allows us to watch those processes nearly uninterrupted. Rivette uses cut-aways to compress Dufour’s studies slightly, and the first session contains a few jump cuts, but the distended scenes still feel as though they’re unfurling in real-time. Rivette nearly fetishizes the physical details of the artist’s studio environment: the texture of the paper and canvas on which Frenhofer works; his slapdash use of water and ink, charcoal, paint; the sounds of pen, chalk, and brushes; and the slow revelation of form from the hasty dashing of lines. And by favoring Dufour’s studies over Emmanuelle Béart’s nude form, Rivette highlights the intermediary function of the artist—the energy in Frenhofer’s work alters our perceptions of Marianne. We begin to see her in light of the artist’s interpretation of her, just as we see the film’s characters through Rivette’s careful interpretation. While La Belle Noiseuse is a work of the 1990s and doesn’t necessarily feel of a kind with the director’s earliest films as a New Wave innovator, this radical approach to the use of time is a twist on the sort of self-consciously uncinematic and naturalistic approaches that defined that movement. It makes for a unique cinematic experience, hypnotic or excruciating depending on the degree to which the viewer is invested in the hard-fought evolution of Frenhofer’s work.

The model in Balzac’s story (named Gillette) is little more than a romantic abstraction who, passive and subservient, submits herself to Frenhofer’s project out of love for Nicolas and the belief that her lover’s proximity to a great master in the act of creation will prove invaluable in his quest for greatness. She knowingly sacrifices their relationship out of deference to his ambition, the humiliation of her naked body being given to the wizened Frenhofer irrevocably severing the bond between lovers. In Rivette’s film, Frenhofer, who lives a comfortably bourgeois life with his wife Liz, isn’t the fevered genius of the short story. The modeling sessions still have a corrosive effect on Marianne’s and Nicolas’s relationship but the director steers clear of the obvious sexual subtext. It works in Balzac’s story because of the subtlety with which the writer handles it, as well as the fact he’s working in a non-visual medium. Playing it up in the film, where we see Marianne nude and are privy to her sessions with Frenhofer and the psychological struggle between the two, would yield cliché. Instead, the catalyst for the erosion of Marianne’s relationship with Nicolas is her growing involvement and passion in La Belle Noiseuse itself. At first agreeing to model as a favor to Nicolas, she’s soon an active participant, and the vitality of Frenhofer’s work reveals aspects of her own character of which she was unaware, as well as revealing Nicolas as a smaller artist than she’d previously understood. Frenhofer’s relationship with Liz is equally fascinating. Her replacement as his model creates a psychological tension refreshingly free of sexual jealousy—Liz isn’t worried her husband will sleep with his beautiful young model, but melancholy over the forced recollection their marriage couldn’t have survived the sort of piercing dissection of her person required when she was his model. The tension between the characters is palpable but understated. It never strays into melodrama, and the actors reward us with careful and natural performances, surprisingly void of pretension considering the subject matter.

Rivette cut two different versions of La Belle Noiseuse: the full four-hour cut and a 130-minute edit called Divertimento. New Yorker’s DVD offers the longer cut (which actually runs about 230 minutes, but is intended to be exactly four hours in length with a 10-minute intermission), spread across two discs. In order to best capture the paintings in Frenhofer’s studio, Rivette and cinematographer William Lubtchansky (Va Savoir) opened up the vertical space of their compositions by shooting the picture at the full 1.37:1 aspect ratio (though they carefully framed shots so they would work matted to 1.66:1). The DVD maintains the full screen aspect ratio, and the transfer is sharp and detailed, though edge enhancement is excessive, producing some haloing as well as an overall quality that often looks rooted in a video source rather than film. The source materials were incredibly well preserved, exhibiting few flaws and accurate colors. Shot on location at a rustic French provincial estate, the simple clarity of the film’s cinematography immerses us in a gorgeous, textured, lived-in world.

The original French audio is presented in a stereo mix that is more than adequate. Excerpts from Igor Stravinsky’s Agon and Petrushka appear at the beginning and end of the movie, but it is otherwise absent a score. Dialogue, ambient noise like crickets, and the carefully recorded sounds of Frenhofer’s pens and brushes working on paper and canvas, are all reproduced with perfect clarity. It’s difficult to imagine any of it would benefit from a more elaborate mix.

Disc One of the set also contains a handful of supplements. Jacques Rivette offers a jovial 13-minute interview in which he discusses the genesis of project, details the different editorial approaches taken with the two cuts of the picture, and touches on the inspiration he drew from Stravinsky’s modernist music. Screenwriters Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent are featured in a 21-minute interview in which they rehash some of the background information, but then discuss the influence on the film of art-focused literature like Henry James’s The Liar and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Oval Portrait. Unfortunately, Bonitzer annoyingly dominates the conversation, often contradicting and talking over Laurent. Finally, there’s a theatrical trailer, and selected filmographies for Rivette, Béart, Piccoli, and Birkin. The extras may not sound like much, but I found them sufficient. La Belle Noiseuse is a deliberate, resonant film that’s best absorbed and pondered rather than dissected and explained.

Closing Statement

La Belle Noiseuse is probably the most subtle, detailed, and complex examination of the artistic impulse and the psychological and emotional demands of art production ever committed to film. Its pacing, length, and the simplicity of its plot versus its complexity of theme will make difficult viewing for some—their loss. It is an utterly unique piece of cinema. That alone makes it worth at least four hours of your time.

The Verdict

Not guilty.

Scales of Justice
Video: 90
Audio: 95
Extras: 30
Acting: 95
Story: 95
Judgment: 90

* * * * *
Some choice selections from Emmanuelle Béart’s work.

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Twenty-Seven

Emmanuelle Béart
The face of a virgin and the body of a whore

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* * * * *

The kiss of death
In a 20-year career, Emmanuelle Béart has played neurotics, prostitutes and femmes fatales.  Now she’s tackling Aids.
Jon Henley, of the London Guardian, meets her.

Almost every interview I have read with Emmanuelle Béart refers - usually, if the interviewer is male, within the first three lines - to her staggering, or striking, or stunning beauty. This is, of course, true, but it is not why I am interviewing her, so I will try not to mention it too much. The fact is that she has a new film out, Les Témoins, or The Witnesses, which opens this week, and we are sitting in the quiet, semi-private side room of a cafe on the absurdly Parisian Place de la Contrescarpe in the fifth arrondissement to talk about that.

And perhaps just a little bit about her staggering beauty.

In any event, Béart is dressed today in grey tracksuit bottoms and a black cashmere sweater, with no makeup. She is drinking still mineral water through a straw but has given up cigarettes, which is a big relief because interviews with her - particularly if the interviewer is male - also tend to go on about how sensual the act of smoking becomes when performed by Béart, describing at great length her slender fingers and full, Bardot-esque lips. I, though, do not have to bother with that.

The movie, then. The Witnesses, by respected French director André Téchiné, is set in 1984, in the early days of the Aids pandemic. It tells the story of Manu, a young man from the rural southwest of France who comes to Paris. He shares a cheap hotel room with his sister Julie, a would-be opera singer, and, out cruising one night, meets Adrien, a middle-aged doctor, with whom he starts a cheerful - and chaste - relationship. Through Adrien, Manu meets Sarah, a children’s book writer, played by Béart, and Mehdi, a policeman, who enjoy a very Gallic “open relationship”, but have rather inconveniently just had their first child. Manu falls for Mehdi; Mehdi falls for Manu; the two begin a relationship (unchaste) and, as the film’s blurb puts it, all five main characters “become protagonists in, and witnesses to, a contemporary tragedy”.

Not a lot of laughs, but a good film, an honest film, about a period at once fresh in the mind and long, long ago; an age before the internet and the mobile phone (and, crucially, before antiretroviral drug treatments) when Aids was a mysterious and alien scourge that seemed to strike blindly and savagely. Téchiné, who has said Aids was “the fate I escaped”, films it all coolly, from a distance. You sense that he is somehow in mourning, but he does not do pathos. The Witnesses is not a film that tries to take the emotions hostage, and is the better for it.

That is also what appealed to Béart. “We talked about it, and André told me about this notion of just bearing witness to the period, this terribly violent period in the mid-80s when someone one knew was dying of Aids almost every week,” she says. “For anyone of our generation, especially in the arts or the theatre, it was a dreadful time. For André, this is much more than just a look at those years; it’s his flesh. I accompanied someone to their death for the first time round about then. But I liked the idea of coming at this subject from a certain distance. Sarah has a line, when she’s explaining her need to write Manu’s life story, ‘I want to bear witness to his passage among us.’ That’s what this film is about.”

Béart has just turned 44, but remains instantly recognisable as the scampering wild-child goatherd she played in Claude Berri’s Manon des Sources, her breakthrough role over 20 years ago. She considers each question carefully, and then answers it fast and intelligently.

“It’s a brilliantly structured film,” she says. “The history, the humanity of that whole episode is contained in this small group of five people, all linked. And André blows away the taboos. Take Mehdi: he’s Muslim, he’s a macho cop; he loves his wife, he desires his wife, has sex with his wife; he’s not gay, he falls in love with a boy. There’s a scene where he offers to do Manu’s laundry, when Manu’s really sick in his caravan, and Manu says, ‘Don’t, it’s all covered in shit’, and Mehdi just says, ‘I don’t care.’ Theirs is a very strong, a very beautiful love story.”

Of her own character, Béart says Sarah is “audacious, a real product of May ‘68 - a woman who demands her liberty, wants to play around and is happy for her husband to play around, but for whom this is the first time that it really hurts. She’s quicker, stronger, less rooted than I am. In fact, at one stage I said to André that I didn’t have the right kind of energy, and he’d better find someone else. It wasn’t the way Sarah thinks so much as her urgency, her instant reactions. It was a physical problem for me.”

She overcame it. Béart has played a great many problematic women since Manon: the embittered prostitute in Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie; the virtuoso violinist in Claude Sautet’s Un Coeur en Hiver; the recalcitrant - and very naked - artist’s model of Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse; the lovelorn Jeanne in Régis Wargnier’s Une Femme Française; flighty Gilberte in Raoul Ruiz’s loving adaptation of Le Temps Retrouvé. She has played some right stinkers, too: Claire Phelps, Tom Cruise’s squeeze in Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, was not her finest hour.

She likes to say she fell into acting by accident, and continues to do it for love. The daughter of a former model of Italian and Greek extraction and a French balladeer (they separated when she was only nine months old), Béart grew up in the south of France as the eldest of her mother’s five children. She was kicked out of five schools - “I wouldn’t say I was a rebel as such, but I certainly wasn’t right at school” - and at the age of 15, armed with nothing more than “a scary ability to impersonate almost anyone with considerable precision”, left home to au pair in Montreal. Vogue magazine and director Robert Altman spotted the potential of those china-blue eyes and delicate, heart-shaped face. She decided she would try acting “as a way to be independent and make money”, and Manon des Sources followed swiftly after drama school in Paris.

In 1994, working with Claude Chabrol on L’Enfer, that most prolific of French directors uttered a phrase that stuck and that she hates. “Emmanuelle,” Chabrol said, “has the face of a virgin and the body of a whore.” Sucking her straw, Béart concedes that acting is “really not a cerebral profession. Sensuality and sexuality are very strong, very present in this job. My body is an instrument for me to use.” But at the same time, she insists “that is just one of my faces. The public has this image of me as very sexual, but that really is not the whole picture. I have played women who are not beautiful, women who are broken, who are anything but femmes fatales or temptresses.”

This is true, but given how often Béart gets her kit off on screen, you could be forgiven for wondering which she prefers. And not just on screen, either. A couple of years ago, she caused an absolute furore in France by appearing, at a magnificent, rounded, 41 years of age, on the front cover of Elle magazine frolicking naked on a Mauritius beach. The title’s 550,000 printrun sold out in three days; French men who would not be seen dead reading a woman’s magazine besieged the news-stands to buy what rapidly became a collector’s item, and the biggest-selling Elle of all time.

She has, of course, an innocent explanation: “We’d just arrived for a beauty shoot, it was 5am and I desperately needed a swim. The photographer was a friend, and she asked if I’d mind if she took a few photos. When I saw them, it was me who suggested they use those. It was a riposte to all those skinny, semi-anorexic adolescents that women’s magazines inflict on us; it was to say, ‘Look, I’m 40, this is my body, this is my plenitude, these are my curves, I like them and I’m proud of them.’ It’s true, I feel better in my body now than when I was 20. Why not?”

Naked or not, in any case, Béart intends to continue gracing our cinema screens for some time to come. “People ask, what’s in me that makes me keep going?” she asks. “I say, What’s not in me that keeps me going. What needs do I have, for recognition, for compensation, for psychoanalysis, for the pleasure of inhabiting a role, for extraordinary meetings with remarkable people? I’m less desperate now to express what’s inside me, that’s true - I act these days because it keeps me awake and interested, an eternal student. I’m obsessive about learning all there is to know for whatever I’m doing. That’s what makes you advance and grow. It’s like your job: you had to learn all about me for this interview, otherwise these 45 minutes would have been a waste, which would have been a shame. But now I have to go”.

· Les Témoins is released on Friday.

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* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Monday, October 15, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Twenty-Four

The Double Life Of Veronique
Reviewed by Chief Counsel Rob Lineberger, DVD Verdict (2006)

The Charge

“It deals with things you can’t name. If you do, they seem trivial and stupid."—Krzysztof Kieslowski

Opening Statement

DVD covers are loaded with catchy superlatives like “uplifting,” “powerful,” or “incandescent.” An actress is “a revelation” with “heart-stopping beauty” and her performance is perhaps “a triumph” or a “tour-de-force.” The cinematography might be “ravishing” and the soundtrack “mesmerising.” You often find yourself momentarily caught up in such hyperbole, even though the back of your mind knows that these flashy blurbs are trite clichés. More often than not, such piles of gilded words taint otherwise decent works with the whiff of salesmanship.

When applied to The Double Life of Véronique, however, you might rediscover that these worn-out words once had a purpose. They honestly apply. Superlatives can only suggest how you will feel once Véronique works her magic on you.

And the best part is yet to come. Criterion, a company with a reputation it should be impossible for any company to live up to, outdoes itself on this DVD release. Perhaps mounting competition from Warner Brothers and Fox has spurred Criterion to even greater heights, or maybe the body of favorable critical discussion of this film is so vast that Criterion had easy pickings. In any case, Criterion has delivered a perfect release that can best be described as “film school in a box.” The Double Life of Véronique may be “the DVD release of the year!”

Facts of the Case

Irène Jacob (Red) is Weronika; a sensual Polish choir girl with her head in the clouds and her feet in the wet puddles of Krakow. Weronika unsuccessfully explains to her father the feeling that she is not alone in the world. We later learn of Véronique, a French woman with uncanny parallels to Weronika. The two look identical and share (almost) unique personal mannerisms, yet are distinctly different. Their intuitive bond shapes them both, and leads Véronique to a deeper understanding of love and life.

The Evidence

If you read the charge above, you’ll understand that any triteness or absurdity inherent in the plot description will vanish under the incandescence of the film watching experience. Words don’t fully convey it. The Double Life of Véronique deals with the spiritual, intuitive, emotional inner world of human beings. It is the stuff of dreams and whimsy and cannot be contained by words alone.

Yet it is my job to try. Have you ever felt like you have a double in the world? Have people seemed to recognize you, or have you ever lapsed into easy, intimate conversation with a stranger? How did that feel? How would you translate it to the screen?

I’m a North Carolinian, but I once moved to Lafayette, Indiana. While pumping gas in one of my first days there, a man walked up and started chatting eagerly with me. He thought I was a sports photographer from nearby Frankfort. Another lady approached me to tell me she loved the Lifestyle spread I did. In the coming years, I was approached routinely, almost bashfully, by people eager to talk to me. Some wanted to tell me how my pictures and the newspaper I work for changed their lives, and some just wanted to renew acquaintances. Unlike any of my previous “don’t I know you from somewhere?” encounters, each of these people had no ambivalence whatsoever that I was this charismatic newspaper photographer from a nearby town. In fact, they often thought I was playing a gentle hoax on them when I protested to be a programmer named Rob Lineberger. (Brent, if you’re reading this…tell Drew Brees he single-handedly led me to a fantasy football championship. Thanks.)

Having lived through this odd experience, I can say that Krzysztof Kieslowski has brought to the screen emotions and intuitive strands that most filmmakers can only dream of realizing. Attempts to capture intuition and double lives almost invariably lead to failure. They are indecipherable, or worse yet, trite. But in Kieslowski’s deft hands, themes of intuition, psychic bonds, double lives, sensual paradox, and whimsy become achingly real. The Double Life of Véronique is as riveting as it is inexplicable.

Oddly enough for a nebulous film, critical response to the film has been cohesive. The points made by lucid critics and film analysts—many of them in this very DVD release—had me nodding my head. Rarely has such an ephemeral film led to such marked agreement. The Double Life of Véronique may seem ineffable at the time of viewing, but it inspires concrete eloquence afterward.

What is so inspiring about this film? Let’s start where Kieslowski puts his own focus: on Irène Jacob. Her best actress award at Cannes was clearly earned. Jacob is arresting in everything she does, from rapture to sorrow. Our introduction to adult Weronika is overwhelming in its sensuality and its transparency; the character is thrown open to us, vulnerable and uncaring. Kieslowski invites us to revel in her beauty, her voice, her posture and attitude. If you had a crush on Amélie, then Weronika will steal your heart. As the film unwinds, we delve deeper into little mysteries about Weronika and Véronique, all the while acutely aware of Irène Jacob’s feminine energy, lithe grace, and open emotional states. Unlike Audrey Tautou’s Amélie or any Breillat heroine, there is no reticent edge in Jacob. She is as approachable as film leads get.

The Double Life of Véronique does not technically start with Irène Jacob, but with an upside-down reflection of Krakow, Poland. This subtle opening blossoms into a nonstop stream of altered perceptions. Weronika is often seen in reflection, where her face touches her mirrored face. She sees herself reflected in the glass of the frame that holds her portrait. She looks through windows that warp the surroundings. Kieslowski continually and masterfully reminds us that we are seeing something greater than reality, though he rarely moves beyond the “real” world. Yet his trickery is not off putting.

Indeed, Slawomir Idziak’s cinematography and Jacques Witta’s editing are powerful reinforcements of Kieslowski’s themes. The use of yellow-green filters gives the film a unified air of mystery and spiritual warmth. It is hard to put my finger on why the filters have such a powerful effect, but they transform what we see subtly and thoroughly. Witta makes sure we know exactly what is happening—until he purposefully blurs our perception of who is who and what is what. The film constantly thwarts a secure sense of time and place, but the effort is playful and meaningful rather than malicious.

I can barely count the number of times that Slawomir Idziak caught my breath with a stunning shot or a telling pan. His reveals are delicate and his composition bold. The camera is so deft and sensitive that it becomes painful to watch. Many times I longed to crawl into the frame and comfort Véronique, to know her as a person rather than a movie character. Other times, I simply marveled at the composition within the frame.

Images are nothing without sound to complement them. Zbigniew Preisner’s score can only be described as haunting. (Well, “mesmerising” works too I suppose.) If you don’t love music, you will after this. Describing music is even more futile than describing cinematography; allow me to direct you to the Soundtrack Collector link in the sidebar.

To recap: masterful direction, poignant acting, compelling story, perfect soundtrack and perfect cinematography combine in an ambitious attempt to explore the inner dialogue of the human spirit. The Double Life of Véronique is why I watch movies. It is not the release of the year but a once in a lifetime movie going experience.

As for the DVD presentation, it is equally flawless. Let’s get the one flaw I noticed out of the way. The 1.66:1 transfer is smooth, detailed, and inviting to the eye. Kieslowski and Slawomir play with textures and colors to heighten the film’s spiritual effect. Our perception blurs both literally and metaphorically as we become drawn into Véronique’s point of view. But in one or two scenes, the detail becomes actually blurred, as though the transfer went momentarily soft. It is over almost before it begins, and hardly a Hawthorne Birth-mark-type situation.

Otherwise, the release is a wonder. Take the liner notes. No mere three pages of fluff stapled together, this hefty volume is a Cliff’s Notes Master’s Degree on The Double Life of Véronique. Jonathan Romney, Slavoj Zizek, Peter Cowie, and Krzysztof Kieslowski himself tell us what is great about this film. If you even suspect that written film criticism would interest you (which is self evident since you are reading this film review) then you will love these four takes on the film.

Speaking of takes on the film, film scholar Annette Insdorf’s commentary is hands down the best commentary I’ve ever heard. Have you ever listened to a commentary track where something important or mystifying happens on screen, but the commentator is blathering on about the previous roles of Actor XYZ or how the producer funded the film? Insdorf doesn’t do that. She answered my merest hints of questions as though we were telepathically linked. She does so with no dead air and no annoying vocal mannerisms. I’d listen to her talk just because; even better that she is intelligibly discussing a metaphysical film. Better still, her comments never seem like reaches. They are all plausible, even to the point where she provides an explanation for someone blowing his nose in the street.

Criterion also makes the film legible by retranslating the subtitles. From what I’ve heard from those who saw The Double Life of Véronique upon its theatrical release, the subtitles were its Achilles heel. You might have seen a slightly different ending if you caught that theatrical release; Criterion throws that in and even reveals why there is a different ending. It speaks volumes to the divide between Europeans and Americans.

If Véronique isn’t enough for you, Criterion has supplemented her with four short films totaling about an hour. Three of them by Kieslowski give us a taste of his documentary prowess and reveal The Double Life of Véronique‘s abrupt departure from his preceding work. The Musicians by Kieslowski’s teacher, Kazimierz Karabasz, shows us the tradition from whence some of his ideas came. Karabasz evokes poetry from prosaic circumstances, and showed Kieslowski how much can be said through the ostensible lens of reality.

So much for the liner notes and Disc One. There is another disc yet to go.

The features on Disc Two complement each other to provide a holistic view of Kieslowski and how The Double Life of Véronique fits into his filmography. The most directly applicable feature towards that end is Kieslowski—Dialogue. We see him working; gently coaxing the performance out of Jacob while listening to technical suggestions from the crew. He then speaks directly on the themes and challenges inherent in the film. The horse’s mouth is always a good place to start.

If the short films on Disc One didn’t give you a comprehensive enough feel for Kieslowski’s roots, then 1966—1988: Kieslowski, Polish Filmmaker completes the picture. This pure documentary goes into minute detail about the director’s political environment, influences, and stylistic changes over the years. It is dryly narrated, but intriguing in content and execution. It is basically a soup-to-nuts primer on Kieslowski.

Perhaps the best testament to Kieslowski and the purest sense of his self comes from the trio of interviews with actress Irène Jacob, cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, and composer Zbigniew Preisner. Each knew Kieslowski in different circumstances. Idziak went to film school with him. Preisner drank vodka with him and raced cars with him. Jacob abandoned her vacation in the States and flew back to Europe on her own dime just to audition for him. Yet the three share remarkably similar conceptions of who he was, how he worked, and what interested him as a human being. Jacob’s account is most relevant to The Double Life of Véronique. She straightforwardly relates how the pair worked together on Weronika/Véronique. But her focus morphs into a discussion of what drove the film, what Kieslowski was attempting to convey. Her words gave me chills. She laid his aims bare and summarized them with concise grace.

Criterion has been attentive to every detail, from the style of the cover art to the menu explanations of each feature. They reworked the audio, video, and subtitles and obtained accounts from Kieslowski’s key collaborators. In short, they have done everything possible to convey his defining work to you with absolute clarity.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Irène Jacob pours much of herself into the key roles in The Double Life of Véronique. Her personal quirks are meant to enthrall you. But because she is bringing her human fallacies to the surface, you might find her quirks irritating. If she does not compel your undivided attention, she will no doubt become a distraction that will take you out of the film. Personally, I was stricken by complicated feelings, almost primal, that hovered in the neighborhood of infatuation, ardor, and compassion. I hope the same for you, or this will be a long movie.

The Double Life of Véronique is tantalizing, almost maddening, in its refusal to spell anything out. At one point, Kieslowski even considered providing a slightly different version for each theater. In other words, the movie is largely about chance and whimsy. As such, the director doesn’t care where the pieces precisely land, only that they hover gracefully. There are precious few answers, and the answers aren’t the point anyway. The film ends rather abruptly, leaving us bereft of the closure we’ve come to associate with a film’s finale.

So if Kieslowski is so reticent with answers, why the anvil at the end? Véronique’s new lover, a puppeteer and author, beats us over the head with a story about two linked girls while Kieslowski beats us over the head with the spare marionette (which the spare Weronika holds stiffly in her hands.) Okay, we get it: God made two of them. Fortunately, this foray into exposition is brief.

Closing Statement

I’ve reviewed a lot of movies and been burned out on careworn themes and genres. The Double Life of Véronique made my spirit sit bolt upright. It flared my nostrils and widened my eyes. It made me ashamed that I have never before experienced a Kieslowski film. Don’t let my shame become yours. See this.

The Verdict

Not guilty! Not guilty.

Scales of Justice

Video: 98
Audio: 100
Extras: 100
Acting: 100
Story: 100
Judgment: 100

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Twenty-One

SADA ABE

In May 1936, Sada Abe committed the most notorious crime in twentieth-century Japan—the murder and emasculation of her lover.  What made her do it?  And why was she found guilty of murder yet sentenced to only six years in prison?  Why have this woman and her crime remained so famous for so long, and what does her fame have to say about attitudes toward sex and sexuality in modern Japan?

Despite Sada Abe’s notoriety and the depictions of her in film and fiction (notably in the classic In the Realm of the Senses), until now, there have been no books written in English that examine her life and the forces that pushed her to commit the crime. Along with a detailed account of Sada’s personal history, the events leading up to the murder, and its aftermath, this book contains transcripts of the police interrogations after her arrest—one of the few existing first-person records of a woman who worked in the Japanese sex industry during the 1920s and 1930s—as well as a memoir by the judge and police records.

Her story has been told in three different films (Nobuhiko Obayashi’s “Sada”; Nagisa Oshima’s “In the Realm of the Senses”; and Noboru Tanaka’s “A Woman Called Sada Abe”) and a book (William Johnston’s “Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan”).

Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star steps beyond the simplistic view of Sada Abe as a sexual deviate or hysterical woman to reveal a survivor of rape, a career as a geisha and a prostitute, and a prison sentence for murder. Sada endured discrimination and hounding by paparazzi until her disappearance in 1970. Her story illustrates a historical collision of social and sexual values—those of the samurai class and imported from Victorian Europe against those of urban and rural Japanese peasants.

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Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan

The Cruelest Cut
by Yuki Allyson Honjo, Japan Review

On May 18, 1936, Sada Abe strangled her lover Kichizo Ishida with an obi cord. She removed his genitals with a knife, daubed in blood “Sada and Kitchi together” on the sheets, and carved her name on his arm with a knife. She neatly wrapped Ishida’s genitals in a magazine cover and washed her hands. Carrying the souvenir of her lover, Abe stepped out of the inn and into Japan’s collective popular imagination.

When her crime was discovered the next day, it was an instant sensation. With a “sexually and criminally dangerous woman on the loose,” the nation was gripped with “Abe Sada panic”: newspapers printed extra editions and a mad rush of curiosity seekers created a large traffic jam in Ginza. She evaded the police for days and was eventually caught in an inn in Shinagawa, where she had planned to commit suicide. In a widely published photo (Click here for original photo) taken shortly after her arrest, her kimono is slightly disheveled; she has an odd smile on her face. The policemen are smiling as well, and all look rather pleased with themselves.

Abe confessed freely to the crime and was clearly a danger to no one but herself. They asked her why she killed Ishida. “Because I loved him,” she answered. Men could legally control women in any number of ways. Killing him, she said, was the only way she could really and truly “monopolize” and control her man.

As William Johnston, the author of Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan points out, Abe’s story still remains current, almost seventy years after the event. While similar crimes have been committed, even in the jaded post Lorena Bobbitt world, Sada Abe remains a well discussed subject of numerous books, essays and multiple films. For example, Nagisa Oshima’s film (1976) In the Realm of the Senses was based on Abe Sada and her relationship with Ishida, as was Noburu Tanaka’s Abe Sada Story (1975) and Nobuhiro Obayashi’s Sada (1998). She became an icon, someone to be feared, and an exotic object of lurid and prurient male fantasy.

This book focuses on the historical Sada Abe. Johnston uses a wide array of primary and secondary sources in Japanese and English to create a multi-dimensional and sympathetic portrait of Sada Abe. In the back of the book, he includes a translation of the published transcripts of Sada’s police interrogations. While Abe’s responses are fascinating, so are the police questions. The police ask, as if this were the normal course of action, “If you loved Ishida so much, why didn’t you bring up the idea of a double suicide?” Johnston’s book argues that while Sada Abe was a unique individual, the difficult circumstances around her life were generally unremarkable for the day.

The youngest daughter of a tatatmi mat maker, she came from middle class, if not affluent, family. Spoiled by her mother, she was allowed to do largely as she pleased as a child. In her teens, she was a victim of an acquaintance rape. While her family defended her (contrary to some of the fictional and semi-fictional accounts of her life) and tried to mollify her with presents, Abe became a surly and uncontrollable teenager. With her parent’s money, she was able to fund her aimless lifestyle. Her father eventually sold her to a geisha house: there is some debate on whether it was Abe’s wish (geisha were glamorous stars of the day) or whether it was punishment for Abe’s sexual promiscuity, which was also not unusual.

Abe soon found that life as a geisha was not all that she imagined. True geisha were accomplished women: they trained for years in the arts, many since they were children. It became evident to Abe that, with her lack of discipline and training, she was unlikely to become a star in the geisha world. As a low ranking geisha, her services were mostly sexual and she spent five years plying her trade. After a bout of syphilis and thus consequently facing regular examinations, she chose to become a licensed prostitute.

After a few years in the trade, she tired of it and its conditions. She attempted to leave the business. However, because of her contract which indentured her to over two thousand yen in services (one thousand yen was sufficient to buy a house at the time), she took an assumed name to evade her creditors. With no real skills to her name, she first took a job as a waitress, became a mistress to various men, then a private prostitute, and then again tried to “go straight” working as a maid in a restaurant named Yoshidaya. The owner was Kichizo Ishida, whom she would eventually murder after a passionate affair.

Johnston’s analysis is particularly strong in setting the sometimes astonishing events of Abe’s life in historical context. As a public health expert, Johnston’s discussion of the sexual mores of the 1930s Japan give us greater understanding of the period and of Abe herself. In the 1930s, sexual values and the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior were in a period of flux and differed across class boundaries. On the one hand, given the importance of family reputation, virginity was prized among the upper classes to ensure proper succession. Among commoners, women had far more sexual freedoms and sexual experience was expected for women and men alike.

“Modernity,” with import of western Victorian norms, contributed to the “transformation of Japanese values governing sexuality.” In Sada Abe’s day, these dual definitions of acceptable behavior were in conflict. For example, Sada Abe’s sister Teruko had multiple lovers: as punishment, her father sold her into a brothel. Johnston tells us that this was not an uncommon course of action. However, her father bought her back. Teruko later married, and “her sexual history was no obstacle to marriage for somebody of her natal class.”

One of the most extraordinary passages of the book concerns Keijiro Hosoya, the senior judge in the case. He wrote candidly on the case and admitted to frequenting “cafés” where paid “dates” with women were arranged. When reviewing the case Hosoya found himself excited by the candid sexual details.

Contemporary sensibilities supported taboos on sexual intercourse during a woman’s menstrual period; Hosoya did not want the case to arouse the other judges sexually if they might then discover that their wives were having their periods, since they would be without the proper means of relieving their excitement, Consequently, he determined when their wives were having their periods by asking them about who had bathed the children of if their wife had taken a bath, since bathing also was taboo during a woman’s period. This way he established a time when all three wives would not be menstruating, and he set the trial for that time. (Johnston pp. 135-36)

Hosoya ran a tight ship: he tolerated no laughter, applause, or any public display of emotion. Discussion of crime would be a violation of the 59th article of the Meiji Constitution on public morality. He required witnesses to say “Ishida’s extremity” to get around this issue. Clearly navigating this terrain of sexual politics was challenge for the judge.

One weakness of the book is that Johnston spends too much time trying to understand Abe’s motivations and how the circumstances of her life led to her crime:

One particularly revealing thread is her difficulty accepting social boundaries. She remained forever on the margins of society. From adolescence, she lived outside the boundaries of “normal” women, but for her the “abnormal” became the ordinary. Eventually she lost her bearings so completely that murder and mutilation, which to her made a kind of logical sense, became acceptable. (Johnston p. 14)

At the end of the day, we will never really know what drove Abe to strangle her lover and how she justified these actions in her head. Johnston argues that heightened love and passion led to her moment of madness. Indeed, this is an interesting assertion, but it does not lead anywhere. Hundreds of young women had similar stories, but they did not strangle their lovers. Johnston tries too hard to make a connection between the circumstances and the crime.

Abe did not get the death sentence as she desired: instead, she was sentenced to six years in prison. After serving her time, she tried to return to a quiet life, but the persistence of her celebrity drove her out of hiding. Ishida’s penis and testicles were moved to the Tokyo University Medical School’s pathology museum, but they disappeared. In the same vein, Abe’s fate remains a mystery. She too disappeared after 1970, perhaps finally getting the peace and anonymity she craved.

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SADA
A Film by Nobuhiko Obayashi

D V D - R E V I E W - B Y - D E R E K - H I L L

Based upon the life story of the notorious prostitute Sada Abe, who in 1936 murdered and castrated her married lover for reasons that have perplexed the Japanese people ever since (let alone the filmmakers who have committed the tale to celluloid over the years), Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1997 film, Sada, is almost unclassifiable in its fever-dream approach to the material. Rich with character detail as much as it is resplendent with a love for visual style and theatrical artifice, Obayashi seems to be not only attempting to make the story of the infamous Sada Abe but trying to reconfigure and redefine Japanese cinema as well. That he only partly succeeds should not come as a surprise: the film is too long by about twenty-minutes and the mix of low-brow slapstick comedy and ironic melodrama never quite gels with the story’s more tragic and solemn moments. But this type of cinematic blenderizing of disparate genre styles and emotional states is nothing new for Asian audiences, although it can be quite disorienting and baffling to Western eyes who expect a consistency of style and tone (i.e. naturalism) with their drama.

Nevertheless, Sada is frequently haunting, unforgettable, and yes, amusing in a way that Nagisa Oshima’s turgid version of the story, In the Realm of the Senses, never comes close to being. (Sada Abe’s tortured tale of love and death was also made into the film A Woman Called Sada Abe, directed by Noburu Tanaka for Nikkatsu studios.) The big difference between Oshima’s over praised art-house shocker and Obayashi’s film is primarily one of style, although there is also the issue of thematic focus to take into consideration. Oshima’s hermetic interpretation of the story is mainly concerned with the fevered sexual obsession and power-plays that Sada and her lover acted out within the privacy of their ryokan room. Obayashi, on the other hand, relegates the last days of Sada’s sexual delirium to a small part of the film, and instead treats her entire life as a story worthy telling.

With its hyper-stylization, frequently arch performances from the supporting cast, and its almost clinical reappraisal of Japanese cinema, Obayashi’s film should easily be a pretentious mess. But somehow Sada maintains its cinematic equilibrium among all the pretty colors, due no doubt to the striking central performance of Hitomi Kuroki, who was recently seen in Hideo Nakata’s horror film Dark Water. Kuroki manages to convey Sada’s innocence, fragility, strength, and predatory ambition within the most delicate of facial expressions as she generates a fully-realized portrait of a larger-than-life enigma. Tsurutaro Kataoka likewise lends a quiet dignity to his role as Sada’s lover, the respectable restaurant owner Tatsuzo Kikumoto, and beautifully realizes the character’s volatile emotional and physical needs hidden behind his affable, ironic smile and almost whimsical demeanor.

But the real star of the film is director Obayashi himself. In his liner notes to the film, included with the DVD, writer Richard Kadrey aptly compares Obayashi to Baz Luhrmann, whose own frenetic visual style attempts to reconfigure the way we view popular cinema. Director Todd Haynes, who skillfully reworked the melodramatics of Douglas Sirk for modern audiences in his 2002 film Far from Heaven, would also be an appropriate comparison, though Haynes has far more patience with melodrama and a greater visual surety than Obayashi. Obayashi dutifully reenacts Sada’s early years and her climb to the top of the prostitution ladder with the requisite melodrama and tragedy along the way, but his heart isn’t anywhere near as dedicated as Haynes’. If it weren’t for the over-abundance of visual trickery and the magnificent performances of its leads, much of Sada would simply be interminable to sit through.

Sada has been given a low-key yet marvelous release onto DVD from Home Vision Entertainment. The film’s lysergic visual palette always looks stunning, and the frequent black & white sequences are likewise always crisp and sharp. Although listed by some sources (i.e. IMDB.com) as being shot at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, the film has been given a full-frame (1.33:1) presentation on disc, which looks fine and does not seem to compromise the picture. A theatrical trailer, director and actor filmographies, and liner notes are also included.

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