Double Exposure: Spring 2015

DOUBLE EXPOSURE

UNDERGRADUATE FILM JOURNAL COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ISSUE 9, SPRING 2015

FROM THE EDITORS Berlin, Germany Brasília, Brazil Brussels, Belgium Cologne, Germany El Paso, TX Hollywood, CA Kiev, Russia Lisbon, Portugal London, England Los Angeles, CA Mexico City, Mexico Moon LV-223 New York, NY The Nostromo, Outer Space Osaka, Japan Paris, France Recife, Brazil Rio de Janeiro, Brazil San Francisco, CA São Filipe, Cabo Verde Tokyo, Japan Wajima, Japan Wuhu, China

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Alex Robertson

PUBLICITY DIRECTOR Julia Selinger

MANAGING EDITOR Matthew Rivera

MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Bernhard Fasenfest

CONSULTING EDITORS Max Nelson David Beal Will Noah

BLOG EDITORS Nick Lieberman Maya Rosmarin Amelie Lasker

FILMMAKER PORTRAITS by EMMA MERKLING COVER by MAX NELSON (adapted from films by Pedro Costa) SPECIAL THANKS to KATY NELSON

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929)

CONTENTS 4

RAMBLIN’ WOMEN

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THE DOOR OUTSIDE

18

THIS FOREIGN LAND

26

NOTHING EVER HAPPENS

32

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE

38

IRON RAILS AND JUMP CUTS

44

VIBRANT CREATURES

50

IN THE DARK

56

MASKED MARVELS

chantal akerman’s flâneuses

alex robertson katie zheng

chinese americans in chan is missing

max nelson

pedro costa and the limits of control

matthew rivera

the hotel in the metropolis of the movies

julian nebreda

urban violence in contemporary brazilian cinema

hunter koch

a celebration of city symphonies

jess lempit

ridley scott’s corporeal frontiers

chelsea shieh

hirokazu koreeda’s brief illuminations

lucha libre and its cinema

david beal

RAMBLIN’ WOMEN c h a n t a l a k e r m a n ’s flâneuses

by ALEX ROBERTSON

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hantal akerman’s nuit et Jour (“Night and Day,” released in 1991) opens with a pair of slick-skinned black-haired lovers luxuriating in the blue folds of bedding in their Paris apartment.

They tell the audience about their daily (and, as per the film’s title, nightly) routine. “I’m a cab driver at night,” Jack (Thomas Langmann) speaks into the camera. “I like nights better, so I can spend the day with Julie.” Julie (Guilane Londez) breaks the fourth wall in kind: “During the day, he tells me of his night. I have the impression he invents a little, and I invent a little with him.”

We are introduced, in the ensuing pseudo-dialogue, to the temporal

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dynamic whose dissolution forms the narrative of the film: Jack and Julie spend their days within their secluded, setlike apartment, making love and twittering back and forth, always pushing off real-world engagements until “next year.” By night, Jack drives his cab around Paris while Julie walks alone through the city, becoming what Charles Baudelaire would call the flâneur, the solitary stroller of the modern metropolis. The film appears at first to track entirely along these parallel lines of flânerie/mobility and domesticity/inactivity––Jack jumps in his cab, Julie walks the streets of Paris, they come back to their apartment and spend the day together, ad infinitum.

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ulie is but one example among a host of female flâneuses populating Chantal Akerman’s filmography. In her early, experimental “New York Films,” most prominently 1977’s News From Home, the model is Akerman herself, lugging around her camera and tripod to film the seedy alleyways and diners of her newfound urban locale. In these films, Akerman’s flânerie nonetheless remains the formal motivation for her projects rather than their visual subject. She stays put behind the camera, detailing the travels of those who step in and out of her frame, rather than herself. As she began dabbling in conventional narrative near the end of the 1970s, Akerman soon turned away from the undifferentiated masses and grimy hallways of the Upper West Side toward the kind of subject we see in Nuit et Jour: the solitary, invariably female flâneuse, whose aimless or purposeful ambulations express something about the events or locations into which she has been thrown.

By the year of Nuit et Jour’s release, its director had already probed and rearranged several iterations of this archetype, even spanning the hyperrealism of 1975’s Jeanne Dielman to the 1983 musical comedy Les Années 80. Along with Nuit et Jour, however, two films in particular dedicate themselves almost entirely to the wanderings of their female protagonists: the 1978 feature Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (“The Meetings of Anna”) and the 1984 short film J’ai Faim, J’ai Froid (“I’m Hungry, I’m Cold”). To the women in these three movies, walking means very different things: a way to lose themselves in the crowd, to enunciate their own terms of existence, or simply a means of getting from one

place to another. Akerman unfailingly invests all of these disparate experiences with sharp visual and narrative significance. To understand how and why these women walk where they do is, in no uncertain terms, to understand the conditions of freedom and captivity that to this day structure her cinematic oeuvre.

The first “night” scene in Nuit et Jour reveals the pure beauty and sense of discovery which permeates such moments of flânerie. Contra the omnipresent static eye-level shots of News From Home, Akerman here employs a plethora of varied techniques. Static, expansive “landscape” takes, cramped tracking shots, and portrait-like closeups are all stacked upon each other.

The pleasant bustle of Paris at night is imported into the visual and aural design as a flurry of details: trees rustle, buses rumble, men in polo shirts sip beers at sidewalk cafés. As she sings in a whimsical, autobiographical manner (“At night, he drives around in his cab / And at night, I wander around Paris”), Julie’s desire for a contrast to her stagnant, interiorized days comes into immediate relief.

As such, she very nearly matches Charles Baudelaire’s own description of the (invariably male) flâneur, as outlined in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life”: The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s and the water is that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd.

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and

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the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home everywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are the minor pleasures of those independent and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves to definitions.

Julie does not initiate a conversation with any of her fellow street-walkers, nor does she get on a bus, or purchase a beer, or engage in any manner of activity which might tag her as a specific kind of personality. She merely walks; in Baudelaire’s terminology, she merges.

Akerman soon interrupts Baudelaire’s placid idealism, however, when the second “night” scene— and the subsequent events of the film—poses this question: what happens when the flâneuse encounters someone with whom she can’t simply “merge”? What happens, in short, when the flâneuse falls in love?

The interceding figure, in this case, is a coworker of Jack’s named Joseph (François Négret), whose features are remarkably similar: lightly barbed hair, olive skin, even the same sharp and jutting eyes. They meet outside Julie’s apartment after Jack has left for his night shift, an encounter which presents Julie with an entirely new experience: a solitary walk around the city, with someone else. Rather than a sharp divergence, however, the ensuing scene draws upon much of the same visual language as the first: Julie and Joseph stroll in lockstep along sidewalks as cars and rivers purr past them. The Baudelairean ideal is achieved: the two are both thoroughly embedded 6

within and totally ignored by the external world of the city. The single most expressive and eye-catching shot in the film finds the two standing next to the famous monument in the center of the Place de la République, where Julie asks Jack what he likes about Paris. As Jack rattles off a Rimbaudian litany of random people, places, and things—“I like sitting outside, reading for hours; I like lit-up billboards; I like pharmacies with all sorts of toothbrushes”— Akerman slowly moves the camera away from the two fellow flâneuses, bringing into view the constant swarm of cars circling around them.

Jack’s whimsical homage to the city continues in voiceover, even as the two are rendered into mere specks amongst the vast movement of the roundabout. Soon after, Julie begins to fall in love, as foreshadowed by the narrator when the two first meet: “How did what might not have happened, happen? I don’t know yet—maybe Julie was tired of walking alone in the big city.” Socially embedded yet totally solitary, participating while simultaneously disengaging—however one might untangle the feeling of presence evoked by Julie’s flânerie, she has finally found someone with whom to wholly share this experience.

The rest of the film, then, is left to deal with the fallout from this discovery. Julie begins an affair with Joseph, walking and then sleeping with him at night before waking up to hustle home just as Jack gets back from his night shift.

Julie sees nothing wrong with this routine, and repeatedly insists to Joseph that she can love both him

and Jack—that she can, quite literally, occupy two spaces at once. Such an ambition is not unprecedented: when Walter Benjamin, taking after Baudelaire, writes that “Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd,” surely this is akin to what he means. Empathy, often framed as “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes,” is the structuring principle of the narrative and visuals in Nuit et Jour. Most theorists of flânerie would agree that one of its principle joys is the opportunity to be both yourself and someone else, to walk by a café and at the same time imagine yourself as one of its patrons inside the large glass windows—a sort of spatialized empathy.

This is the experience in which Julie engages in the first “night” scene, taking in the simple delight of being somewhere else or someone else after a full day of captivity in her and Jack’s apartment. But as the narrative unfolds, this delight takes on an ominous valence: Julie now wants that simultaneity to inhere in her romantic relationships—to be both “herself-with-Jack” and “herself-with-Joseph,” at the same time.

The freedom offered to Julie through her flânerie then impinges back into the “real world” of her interpersonal relationships in a very direct (and potentially catastrophic) manner.

In J’ai Faim, J’ai Froid, flânerie operates on a similar plane of importance: not just as an idle activity, but as a legitimate and detailed mode of self-expression. The two unnamed protagonists (played by Maria de Medeiros and Pascale Salkin) are both teenage girls who have just

run away from Brussels to Paris.

They speak to each other entirely in Beckett-like circular dialogue: “Come on.” “And now?” “We look for a job?” “No jobs.” “I know.” They eat donuts without paying for them, they run into alleyways, they sing, they kiss. Most of all, they, like Julie, walk for walking’s sake, yanking themselves to and fro wherever their tireless feet lead them. Chantal Akerman is not a director renowned for her taste for narrative cohesion, but J’ai Faim, J’ai Froid’s twelve minutes are a supreme exercise in chaos. Until the very end of the film, the two girls talk to no one but each other, and as such their internalized anti-logic dominates the film’s proceedings.

This takes various forms: questions which are immediately abandoned or for which there is no clear answer; incitations to move “here” or “there” without a purpose; most of all, the ceaseless calls of the film’s title, “I’m hungry! I’m cold!” These snatches of dialogue seem deliberately impossible to connect both to each other and to the breakneck flânerie of their speakers.

Again, we find Akerman challenging traditional, purely “aesthetic” or frivolous conceptions of urban walking. The terms of this challenge are cleared up with the help of the French historian Michel de Certeau and his work The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). In this text, de Certeau pursues at length “a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation,” each footstep an externalized syntactic unit expressing the language of the soul. This helps us to understand the wanderings of the two girls because it reveals that 7

top: J’AI FAIM, J’AI FROID (1984) bottom: LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA (1978)

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photographs by ALEX ROBERTSON

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the “problem” at the heart of the movie is not that they, as walkers and speakers, “don’t make sense,” but that they make too much sense.

(This conclusion, quite fittingly, is the same one which language philosopher Stanley Cavell made regarding Beckett’s own Endgame.)

A typical exchange in the film finds one girl suggesting a task— “I’m hungry!”—followed immediately by the accomplishment of the task—arrival at the shop front of a butcher—and movement on to the next one. The bare functionality of their language and movement is so tightly mapped, so free of error, pause or outside interruption, that the effect is surreal even as its individual components “make sense” in the strongest manner possible.

This holds true, as it does in Nuit et Jour, until an outside figure does intercede. The film’s astonishing conclusion finds the two girls entering an upscale restaurant and singing loudly off-key to its patrons. This is the first time we see the girls acting out their jovial and baffling form of self-expression in a specifically public place, and the public does not take well to it—the manager of the restaurant accosts and begins escorting them out. However, it is at this moment that a most wonderful thing happens: a man eating at the restaurant halts the manager and offers to pay for the girls’ dinner, seemingly entertained by their show. The expression of the girls’ feet and mouths, like that of Julie’s, has suddenly found a destination, a kindred spirit with whom they can share their unique spatial and linguistic articulations.

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Afterwards, they walk back to his apartment and lie down to sleep in his bed. Maria de Medeiros, perpetually hungry, gets up and walks to the kitchen; the man lumbers into bed with Pascale Salkin. The camera lingers on the haunting image of de Medeiros frying and eating an egg with the utmost precision.

This frustrates our voyeuristic expectations: one can almost feel, but never glimpse, the tremors from the next room over. The two girls meet again, when Salkin tells de Medeiros that she has just lost her virginity, and then, in perfect form, reprises her usual line: “Come on, we’re leaving.” In the final shot, the two girls walk down a dark alleyway, again in lockstep, but for the first time away from the camera. The camera does not follow them as they disappear into the fog and the screen cuts to black. One senses that this momentary intrusion of the “real world” upon their ceaseless vocabulary of steps has created an irreparable distance between the two girls, as well as between them and us. The audience is left, both literally and figuratively, in the dark, able only to guess at what this final stroll might convey.

The titular “rendez-vous” of Les Rendez-vous d’Anna present a similar kind of intrusion to those found in the later films. Anna (played brilliantly by Aurore Clément) is a Belgian filmmaker who traverses Cologne, Brussels, and finally Paris to promote her latest work. The film begins in Germany, where Anna, seemingly restless in her hotel room, goes to see a movie before walking back home with a

strikingly blonde, blue-eyed man named Heinrich. By now Baudelaire’s conception of flânerie as a means of absorption into the city and its populace is a distant memory; all the shops are boarded up, no fountains burble or rivers rush, and an uneasy dynamic emerges.

A horizontal tracking shot follows Anna and Heinrich along a sidewalk, Anna in front, looking at her steps, Heinrich following behind her. Suddenly, Heinrich quickens his pace and overtakes Anna before grabbing and kissing her at a traffic corner. Anna’s clear discomfort foreshadows her sudden repudiation of his advances when they arrive at her hotel room and begin to make love. The next day, Heinrich invites Anna over to his house and begs her to settle down with him despite their having just met. Anna speaks barely a word and promptly leaves to board a train to Brussels.

The five meetings which take place throughout the film follow this general pattern: someone wants Anna to settle down, to marry their son, to hold a conversation with them, to stop moving, and Anna rejects their advances by doing the exact opposite. Her obstinacy occasions some of the most gorgeous depictions of flânerie and its fleeting minutiae in Akerman’s entire oeuvre: the neon “HAUPTBAHNHOF” sign Anna skirts past in Cologne, the whirling storefronts and Roman columns of Paris, the depopulated train station platforms of Belgium. Aside from their pure ephemeral beauty, however, these symbols are imbued with deep and challenging ambi-

guity—that is to say, they’re not merely conduits for Akerman to privilege one lifestyle over another.

This is devastatingly realized in Anna’s fifth and final meeting, when she arrives in Paris to meet her lover, Daniel. Just as with Heinrich, the two go back to a hotel room to make love, but this time the mood is of tenderness, not foreboding. Anna sings a sweet lilting tune to Daniel, Daniel makes pithy jokes to Anna, they lie next to each other and laugh. The camaraderie, however, is interrupted when Daniel is suddenly afflicted by a mysterious illness, prompting him to cough and turn moody and reject Anna’s advances. Anna runs out to grab some medicine, and we anticipate another scene of resplendent streetlights and awnings and brief glimpses into the lives of passers-by, just as Baudelaire would have it. But most of what we see, in extended close-up, is Anna’s own face, her trembling mouth and watering eyes communicating, finally, despondence at the impossibility of a genuine connection, of settling down instead of walking aimlessly—very simply, of being with someone instead of being completely alone.

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he walkers who populate these three films, despite their varying ages, moods, romantic interests, all possess one thing in common: a destination. This destination, this ending up somewhere which is the single inevitable condition of flânerie from Baudelaire to Benjamin to Akerman and beyond, remains as such essential to our inter11

pretive task. Again, we find recourse not in history or theory but in the emotional stakes with which Akerman invests her flâneuses. They all dip and dive in and out of alleyways and cafés, each getting her piece of Baudelaire’s “fleeting and infinite,” and all end up in very different places. But each of these flâneuses, in the end, also possesses a secure sense of where her aimless walking has taken her, both her literal and symbolic destination. This renewed sense of direction, whether negative or positive, is foregrounded by three unforgettable final images. In J’ai Faim, J’ai Froid, the two young girls walk away from the camera into the fog, seemingly having been sullied by the sexual experience which followed their brief admission into a world of stabil-

NUIT ET JOUR (1991)

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ity—of ending up in a home, of some sort, rather than endlessly circling the city streets. In Nuit et Jour, the result is much the opposite. Julie breaks up with both Jack and Joseph; the final shot has her walking toward the camera, her steps triumphant and self-possessed, rejecting what is now revealed to be a doubled captivity in shuttling between her two suitors.

Her smile indicates that she is, indeed, untouched by their sexual advances, now finding in herself the perfect walking partner. The final shot of Les Rendez-vous d’Anna is in some sense the opposite of both. Anna, back in her apartment in Paris, sits absolutely still on her bed, listening to a barrage of voicemails all asking, in essence, the same question: “Where are you?”

THE DOOR OUTSIDE chinese americans in chan is missing

by k at i e z h e n g

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he first time i watched wayne wang’s directorial debut Chan is Missing (1982), I laughed too hard at the opening joke. A white tourist climbs into a cab. Joe, the cab driver and protagonist, counts to three. Like clockwork, the tourist asks: “Say, where’s the best place to get a bite to eat in Chinatown?” Joe explains in a voiceover that he usually tells them the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese food in an attempt to get a higher tip. It’s a funny joke because it’s happened to me before, just as I think it’s probably happened to most folks who are not white and eat food that isn’t chicken breasts. As the movie continues, the joke gets better and better because the more you watch, the more you’re convinced that Chinatown is playing an elaborate joke on all of the gwai lo who need to order off the English menu. It was obvious who belongs and who doesn’t belong in Chinatown the first time I watched that scene, and as I was watching it, I felt like a real insider, a Chinese Chinese, someone who can tell you when sweet and sour pork ribs are good, and when they’re white people bullshit.

The second time I watched Chan is Missing was with a friend of mine. The first thing my friend asked me was if people actually live in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It sounds funny now, but he was serious. My educated, intelligent, Chinese American friend was not sure if real people lived in Chinatown.

Now that I think about it, it’s not as ridiculous a question as it sounds. I mean, I thought I was Chinese Chinese—I know my way around a xiaolongbao and I know how to eat noodles with chopsticks—but I sure as hell don’t live there. He’s a Chinese Chinese, or an American Chinese, or a Chinese American, and he doesn’t live there either. Who lives in Chinatown?

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Chinese Chinese people? People who speak Chinese but aren’t Chinese Chinese? The more I thought about it, the harder it was for me to laugh at the opening joke of the movie. Where’s the best place to get a bite in Chinatown? Well, it’s not like I know, but I Yelped it before I went. Is that any better than asking the cab driver?

Chan is Missing deals extensively with a time-honored identity quandary familiar to many Asian Americans: the feeling that we are neither Chinese Chinese nor Chinese American nor American Chinese and instead are forced to feel the painful tug of countries on two different sides of an ocean.

This is something that I think every Chinese American has thought about at some time in their lives, along with a deeply seated fear that one day, after they have left the earth, nothing will remain to remember them and their stories. This fear of being forgotten, I believe, manifests in the compulsive—but justified—need to proactively and firmly record, narrate, and describe Chinese American experiences. That sense of narrative compulsion is what Chan is Missing is all about.

The basic framework of Chan is Missing is simple and straightforward. It’s a detective story, only without any real detectives. Joe (Wood Moy) and his nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi) are two cab drivers who want to start their own cab company.

To do so, they need to get a license from the city. Their friend Chan knows a guy who can set up the license deal if they both give him $4000. A couple weeks later, however, Chan’s been in a car accident and suddenly goes missing, along with all of their money. Determined to find Chan and their missing business capital, the two men go on a meandering and confusing journey through Chinatown, talking to all sorts of people and confronting the often contradictory politics of a place that appears to 14

be relatively homogenous. As time goes on, Joe and Steve become increasingly unsure about what their friend was involved in and increasingly dubious that they’ll ever get their money back.

Chan is Missing is about “missing” more than just money, though. In one scene in the movie, Joe tells Steve a Chinese riddle about a farmer’s daughter and the farmer’s landlord. The farmer has sent his daughter over to his landlord as a substitute for his overdue rent. The landlord tells the daughter that she can leave if she chooses the door that leads outside, rather than to his bedroom. The daughter knows that both doors in the room lead to the landlord’s bedroom.

So she says: “That door over there is not the door that leads outside.” Joe explains that the daughter has done something very Chinese––she emphasizes the negative to affirm the positive. By saying “that door over there is not the door that leads outside,” she manages to avoid going through both doors and avoids being wrong, thus allowing her to escape the landlord’s lustful advances. In a way, that’s what Chan is Missing does as well; it takes the negative, the hollowed out and missing lives of the Chinese Chinese who live in Chinatown, and it emphasizes the positive––their lives, their experiences, their struggles, and their triumphs. It’s a celebratory (though not necessarily uplifting) movie that cares less about where Chan himself actually is than it cares about making Chan an interesting and complete person. Perhaps for this reason, Chan’s character never appears on the screen. In the logic of the film, it’s enough if there are folks around who are still willing to narrate him into existence.

Chan is Missing can’t seem to stop finding the negative. The feeling that something—or someone—is missing clings to the characters no matter where they go. It even appears in the way that they talk to

each other. Early on in the film, Joe meets up with Steve and his niece Amy (Laureen Chew) in their crowded kitchen at home, and they gossip about people we never get to meet. There’s some guy named Gary who called Amy to tell her that he’s planning to sue the city over a flag dispute. Gary used to be a Chinese nationalist (the “Taiwan squad,” as Amy puts it), but because of the new money flowing in from the mainland he’s jumped onto the “commie bandwagon.” Amy knows another guy named Paul who’s thinking about running for political office. Steve thinks that there are too many Chinese people running for political office in Chinatown and that they’re going to split the vote in favor of the gay candidate coming out of the Castro. All of these people— Gary, Paul, some other guy named Lee who Steve heard was also thinking about running—never physically manifest in the film, but they’re real people. People living in Chinatown who are doing Chinese Chinese or Chinese American things, who are running for office and suing the city, who change political affiliations. It seems silly, but this kind of background noise feels rewarding. Usually when I go to see a movie, the only person on the screen who looks like me is clearly there to fulfill a diversity quota (one notable example would be The Green Hornet, though it should be noted that sometimes studios don’t even go that far and choose to just cast white folks to play Asians, as in Dragonball Z) or else he’s a part of a quiet crowd that seems to be there just so the white hero can kill him and all of his friends off (Red Dawn). Listening to Amy and Steve and Joe chatter about people I might not meet again who are all Chinese and living in Chinatown is a process of validation, an affirmation of stories that should be told, even if only in idle conversation at the kitchen counter. As Joe and Steve drive around town and meet old folks in a Mani-

latown senior center near the International Hotel, ESOL teachers with tired views on Chinese politics, and cooks who wear “Samurai Night Fever” t-shirts, they give us a sense that Chinatown is a vibrant place where people live, play, work, and fight. It’s something that you might miss out on if you just hop in a cab and ask where you can get a bite to eat.

The end of the movie, however, is shot in a completely different style. Suddenly, you’re snapped out of the nitty gritty of Chinatown—instead of the smiling and friendly faces to whom you’ve become accustomed, Wang delivers orderly, rigidly square shots of San Francisco and Chinatown in particular that look like they belong more on the glossy fronts of a $2 postcard than in the movie you’ve just seen. As you’re unwillingly dragged down the cliché vistas that the movie’s precise realism has trained you to disdain, Pat Suzuki’s scratchy, old-timey vocals tease you with antiquated and frankly offensive descriptions of Grant Avenue, one of Chinatown’s central thoroughfares.

It’s a jarring and strangely disappointing transition, and the movie cuts off without allowing you to quite understand what has just happened. In the beginning, you step into a thoroughly Chinese world with the funny and cantankerous Cantonese rendering of “Rock around the Clock,” and in the end you hurry out, accompanied by a song that lewdly states “You can eat if you’re in the mood...the girl who serves your food is an ultra tasty dish!” In a sense, this is what “going to Chinatown” versus “knowing Chinatown” is really all about; the movie lulls you into a sense of false security, of “being down” with its Chinese characters, only to chase you out at the very end with a resounding laugh at your expense. How could someone who doesn’t even know where to go to eat ever really “get” what it means to live in Chinatown? Where does 15

CHAN IS MISSING (1982)

someone like you (or me, or anyone who first saw Chan is Missing from a privileged distance) get the nerve to claim such a vibrant and important space as their own?

In one scene in Chan is Missing, Steve jokes around with Chan’s daughter Jenny (Emily Yamasaki) and an unnamed friend (Virginia Cerenio). The two girls walk past Steve and Joe and stop abruptly. “Hey! You guys were at my house the other day, right?” Jenny asks, posing aggressively with her hands stuffed into her corduroy jacket pockets. Steve slams the door. “Is that, it’s Chan’s daughter. Yeah, that’s Joe-Joe and I’m Steve Chan…Choi…Chan…Choi… oh, hey, what’s happening?” The friend scoffs. “This dude doesn’t even know his own name!” Steve then digresses into a long, joke-y monologue on a mah-jong place in Chinatown: “Mrs. Chong just doesn’t know how to run that mahjong table…you got to get them old ladies’ money…you know what I mean?” The friend laughs. “Hey man, who do you think you are anyway, Richard Pryor or something?”

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It’s a subtle jibe, but it’s also a great scene.

Steve puffs himself up and strikes a pose for two unimpressed girls. The joke runs throughout the dialogue (Chan-ChoiChong; I’ve heard better riffs on Chinese accents on my elementary school playground), but it’s a self-aware, humanizing sense of humor. It’s the kind of banter that I hear my real Chinese friends engage in every day—juvenile and confusing (some may even say self-essentializing and offensive), but real. The moment crystallizes in the most satisfying way possible for me, and packs in some incisive commentary on how Asian folks have co-opted Black forms of expression at the same time. It’s a complete picture of an interaction between some Chinese Americans, not the “Chinese American” I’ve been force-fed my entire life. The specificity is a nice change of pace.

Charlie Chan comes up a lot in Chan is Missing, so I think it’s worth taking a quick cinematic detour into the world of one of Hollywood’s first franchises. Take nearly any scene from, say, Charlie Chan and the

Jade Mask, in which Chan (Sidney Toler in yellowface) is talking to someone, and you’ll find a striking comparison with the scene between Steve and Jenny in Wang’s film.

For example, here’s the detective himself on a wood-hardening process: “Such process extremely valuable to many nation. In war or peace.” After another thirty seconds, the white man Chan is talking to says: “Sheriff Mack in charge of case only to bring [the chief of police] good man.” There are so many levels to this! A white man is pretending to be an Asian man who is bad at speaking English and can only deliver lines in fortune cookie style truisms, and another white man is talking to this white man in yellowface in chopped up baby gibberish because they need to maintain the illusion together! If this is how Asians are supposed to act on the big screen, then, simply put, Chan is Missing forces us to reevaluate how Asians are supposed to act on the big screen.

Instead of the stilted, racist caricatures of Asians that populate the public consciousness, in which we are only allowed to talk

in fortune cookie mumbo jumbo, we have Asians who joke around like Richard Pryor.

Such process extremely valuable to many Asian. In war or in peace.

There’s a scene in Chan is Missing where Henry the cook stands on top of a building smoking, and, in alternating Chinese and English, arguing with Joe. “We’ve been here for 100 years,” he tells Joe, waving his hand around as he looks out onto the city in irritation. “What’s more, 100,000 of us. A hundred thousand Chinese for 100 years. If they haven’t recognized us by now, man, they’re never going to recognize us.” What Chan is Missing tries to do is force you to recognize its characters on their own terms.

Maybe they’re foreigners. Maybe they’re too Chinese. But like it or not, we’re here.

For 100 years and probably many hundreds more, we Chinese Chinese Americans have been and will be here, trying and living, struggling for a little recognition. But while we’re watching the film, we’ve already been recognized.

SIDNEY TOLER AS CHARLIE CHAN

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THIS FOREIGN LAND

pedro costa and the limits of control

by MAX NELSON

O

ne way to get to talking about the films of the Portuguese director Pedro Costa, which often seem designed to defy verbal summary, is to call attention to what they refuse to show.

The cut that introduces Mariana (Inês de Medeiros), the young nurse at the center of Costa’s second feature Casa de Lava, proceeds from a close-up on the face of an unnamed construction worker to a still tighter shot of this woman peering down with rapt concentration, firmly closed lips and closecropped hair at a task we cannot see. What is she looking at? Where does she come from? What is she thinking? Whose voice is that creaking on the soundtrack? And whose hands are those, shooting up out of the bottom of the frame—when they do— to take hold of her hair? That the shot lin-

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gers on the hands in question for a half-beat after Mariana wrestles out of the frame is typical of Costa’s beguiling, elusive method of setting up a scene. Direct, intense, sometimes prolonged confrontations—between the camera and its subjects, or, in some cases, between one character and another—give way to sudden evacuations, brief collisions and movements half-glimpsed, fleetingly recorded or sharply curtailed.

Three shots in Casa de Lava, by my count, begin with their only human subjects leaving the frame.

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s‌ of now, Costa’s body of work in‌‌cludes a silken black-and-white fairy-tale (O Sangue), a sinewy urban drama that hovers on just the right side of over-labored social realism (Ossos), a

magisterial work of portraiture devoted to Lisbon’s neglected poor (In Vanda’s Room), a pair of comparatively down-tempo nonfiction movies about the private processes of, respectively, film editing and musical rehearsal (Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? and Ne Change Rien), and a hushed, achingly sad ghost story (Colossal Youth).

His most recent semi-fiction film, Horse Money, is something like an extension of the methods and tone of Colossal Youth.

Both films are organized around a Cabo Verdean immigrant named Ventura, who spends the earlier movie visiting his many symbolic “children” in the housing projects to which they’ve recently been relocated and wandering through the rubble-strewn blocks that were once the Lisbon slum in which he, and they, lived.

Horse Money’s setting is less specific; it could be a hospital, a jail, or—more likely—a kind of purgatory. But it, too, is a movie of concrete, rattling details, starting with the date of the knife fight Ventura recalls having gotten into at a handful of key junctures throughout the film: March 11, 1975, not quite four months before Cabo Verde’s declaration of independence from Portugal.

“I took a spill over there,” Ventura tells one of his “children” during one of his rare excursions outside of streets or rooms in Colossal Youth. (The pair is sitting in a park while Ventura gestures, as often happens in Costa’s films, to a point outside the frame.) “Slipped and fell off the scaffold.” Is he a later incarnation, then, of Leão (Isaach de Bankolé), the Cabo Verdean laborer whose fall from a scaffold in the opening minutes of Casa de Lava sets that movie’s train of events in motion? He often recites an identical wistful love letter to the one that Mariana finds on Leão midway through the earlier film. (For the letter’s text, Costa combined

a handful of notes home from Cabo Verdean emigrants with one of the poet Robert Desnos’ last letters to his wife after his internment in a concentration camp in Flöha.) It’s difficult to see Ventura walk lurchingly through a darkened tunnel near the start of Horse Money without thinking of the lumbering, re-animated body of the dead Haitian man in I Walked With a Zombie, the serene, chilling 1941 Jacques Tourneur horror movie on which Casa de Lava is loosely based.

Like that film, Casa de Lava begins with a movement out of the city. Cabo Verde, in Costa’s films centered on Ventura, comes off as a distant abstraction; to this character so acutely dispossessed, home is not the sort of place to which anyone could actually go; there are no more roads out of Colossal Youth’s Lisbon, for instance, than there are from the fever state in which Horse Money takes place.

One respect in which Casa de Lava diverges from the rest of Costa’s work is that, of all his fictional or semi-fictional movies, it is the only one to imagine a Lisbon from which there are still exits—if only the sort you’d find in a fairy tale. Leão, comatose and near-dead after his fall, finds his way back to Fogo, the island in the archipelago where he once had some family, after receiving an anonymous summons that also, we learn, paid his way across the North Atlantic. Mariana, like Francis Dee’s nurse in I Walked With a Zombie, goes with him.

It is surely on Costa’s mind here that Cabo Verde, for centuries, was a crucial stopping-point in the Atlantic slave trade.

(Ribeira Grande, which once ranked as the archipelago’s most prosperous town, was also one of the area’s most sought-after slave markets, in part because the island colony had an exclusive trading arrangement with the West African coast.) The 19

archipelago’s first settlers brought their own slaves with them to work the land, just as Mariana—the only white, middle-class Portuguese native on which any of Costa’s movies have focused to date— brings Leão to Fogo at the start of Casa de Lava. Near the start of I Walked With a Zombie, Francis Dee’s Haitian driver tells her, as he ferries her to the plantation-style mansion at which she’s been hired to live, about “the enormous boat” that “brought the long-ago fathers and the long-ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat.” Her answer is to look admiringly at the scenery and say that, after all, “they brought you to a beautiful place”— to which the driver replies with a serene “if you say, miss.”

Mariana is not so oblivious. She moves through the movie with a kind of uneasy, owlish watchfulness; a shot early in the film shows her striding through the streets of São Filipe in a loose-fitting sundress swinging her arms briskly at her side, less a stranded tourist than a confident surveyor. She sleeps in a hammock by the hospital or in the sand on the beach, where she fends off a violent assault one night by a young boy. When Costa shoots her sitting at a dance next to an elderly violinist, it’s from behind their backs; as the man makes bantering small talk with the members of his family, who face him from deep in the background, she turns her head, shifts her arm and looks out of the frame with a shadow of a smile at, you feel, less his jokes than her tenuous position in this place to which she doesn’t belong. Inês de Medeiros’ performance is a balance of lostchild sadness—watch the way she plops petulantly down in the sand next to the violinist as they walk the path that leads to the island’s active volcano—and steely, businesslike resolve, with the occasional addition of a third, disruptive ingredient.

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At the end of the shot just described, her eyes widen unexpectedly and shimmer with passionate, hungry attention at whatever it is that holds her gaze. She looks, during these moments in the movie, like a person possessed.

If Ventura comes off as the performer with whom Costa has the most stimulating and intimate mutual understanding, it’s the director’s female actors—Mariya Lipkina in Ossos, Jeanne Balibar in Ne Change Rien and, unforgettably, Vanda— with whom he often stages the most piercing and radiant of his close-ups. There is a way of watching Costa’s films that would set him up as a confrontational portraitist in the spirit of Walker Evans, Lewis Hine or Jacob Riis, whose landmark collection How The Other Half Lives included the photos of New York tenement families that cycle past us in Horse Money’s opening scene. The close-ups through which Costa flips in the atonal montage that opens Casa de Lava—a catalogue of a few of the island’s women, including a dead ringer for Evans’ Allie Mae Burroughs—are, that said, more evasive and circumspect than those of Evans or Hine; their eyes are always angled at a slight tilt away from the camera, which studies them with the sort of blunt, direct gaze they’re unwilling to give it in return. It’s de Medeiros, a member of Costa’s early creative circle who also starred in O Sangue and played a supporting role in Ossos, who participates in the most disarmingly direct of the movie’s close-ups. It can be tempting to say that she’s always looking through the camera rather than returning its gaze. But that’s not quite right. When they point their eyes somewhere, Costa’s characters tend to be less looking than listening, intuiting, and—most often—thinking.

It’s suggestive of the state of Lisbon during Costa’s youth and adolescence that

the filmmaker was born a year before the showy, high-profile 1960 inauguration of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, a massive cement monument to the Portuguese Age of Exploration that juts out, ship-like, into the northern bank of the Tagus. The cross-shaped north side of the Padrão, which faces the city, includes a dedication to “the Portuguese that discovered the roads of the sea”—many of whom, including Vasco de Gama, Francis Xavier and Luís de Camões, appear as towering, full-body sculptures on the monument’s facing sides.

The thought that Portugal’s glory as a nation was somehow linked to its having in a distant past “discovered the roads of the sea” was held in general contempt by 1977, when Costa enrolled in film school. Three years before, the country’s Estado Novo regime had been overthrown in the Carnation Revolution, and its African colonies were set on a fast track to independence. It was during this time that Costa first discovered the films of his life—his later style would owe, by his admission, a profound debt to the television work Godard was then making with Anne-Marie Miéville—and met the teachers who would go on to have a major influence on his life and work: Serge Daney, the brilliant French critic who helped Costa think against the dogmatic strain of Marxism in vogue in Lisbon at the time, and António Reis, the filmmaker whose cinematic vocabulary, a new synthesis of documentary realism, ethnography, fiction and fantasy, gave Costa a model from which to work in his early films. (Another model came from the movies that were starting to make their way by 1980 to Lisbon’s newly-expanded cinematheque, including the complete work of Ford, Tourneur, Mizoguchi, Rossellini and Nicholas Ray.)

Costa had been living on his own since he was fourteen—his mother died when he was still a child—and his movies from O Sangue on have always been about the experience of rootlessness, of drift, of imagining the world as something into which you’ve been rudely thrown. (The exception is arguably his performance movies, like Ne Change Rien, in which the space of the performance in question— editing a film, rehearsing a song—tends to nurture and cushion in a way the environments in Costa’s fiction films barely ever do.) It’s perhaps partly for this reason that the bitter aftermath of Portugal’s centuries-long colonial project, and the relegation of the colonized to Lisbon’s invisible housing projects and slums, had a particular power over Costa as cinematic subjects. It opened up, for him, the chance of making films with one foot in the torturous history of a nation and one foot in the inner, thinking, sensible lives of individual people.

As the feverish, haphazard shoot for Casa de Lava inched ahead, Costa developed a closer bond with the island’s residents, several of whom asked him to pass on messages or letters to their relatives in Lisbon. It was that job that first brought him to Fontaínhas, the impoverished neighborhood where he shot Ossos, In Vanda’s Room, and portions of Colossal Youth; by the time Costa was starting that third film, the neighborhood had been all but torn down. The people of Fontaínhas—including Ventura—all play versions of themselves, and the friendships Costa had developed with them by the making of Vanda gave him more freedom to film them in boredom or at thought than he had ever had with Casa de Lava’s professional cast. (Costa’s relationship with de Bankolé was particularly strained; the two, Costa later remembered, came 21

CASA DE LAVA (1995)

to blows at one point during one of the shoot’s most chaotic days.)

Yet Casa de Lava deserves special attention in Costa’s work as the only one of the director’s movies to deal primarily with the inner life of the colonizer rather than that of the colonized. Luis de Camões could have been describing the drift of Mariana’s thought in one of his earliest elegies, written during the poet’s forced stay at a Portuguese garrison in Northern Africa around 1547: I meditate at times on the newness and oddity of things, such as change, if only I could direct its course, and my mind struck by this foreign land, these new ways of being human, a different people with customs I find strange.

Then again, he could well not be; one of the equally rewarding and frustrating as22

pects of Costa’s style is that his characters, even when we find them lost in thought, never divulge their thought’s full contents.

Certainly one way to take Casa de Lava is as a portrait of a young woman stirred up by her exposure in this town to “new ways of being human”: that, for instance, of the younger girl she communes with in loaded silences, or the aging violinist with whom she develops an unmistakably tender relationship over the course of the film, or the middle-aged Portuguese woman (Edith Scob, famous for her work with the French director Georges Franju) who came to the archipelago many years before with her husband and stayed after the man’s death.

What makes Mariana such a slippery character is that this sort of curiosity is always ceding ground in her to a stronger, more violent desire for control. Part of what comes out whenever Costa films her head-on is her regret over her inability

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)

to steer the town—and the film—in the same way that Camões wants to steer the movement of things at the Ceutan outpost where he’d been brusquely left before that poem’s writing: to “direct its course.” That Casa de Lava comes at its viewers in a series of jagged scenes that shift unexpectedly from day to night and back, alternate between mundane stretches of daily business and blips of sudden, violent action, and often leave themselves open to the intrusion of new, eerier, more dreamlike tones gives you the feeling that the course of the movie is being fought over as you watch it, or that Mariana—to the extent that she acts in the movie as a kind of director—can’t manage to keep full control of the wheel.

The climax of Horse Money, made twenty years after Casa de Lava, is a bitter, agonizing confrontation in a cramped elevator between Ventura and a Portuguese soldier painted head to foot in gold. But to

call it a “confrontation” is not quite right; the soldier never opens his mouth once in the scene’s twenty minutes, and his disembodied voice mingles on the soundtrack with others: occasionally tender, more often hostile, derisive or aloof. Call it instead a picture of what it looks like—and, just as importantly, what it sounds like—for Ventura when he reminds himself what he’s suffered, what he’s been denied, what sins he’s committed, and what his life has come to: the knife fight he got into as a nineteen-year-old when, like many other West African immigrants, he went to hide in the woods during the Carnation Revolution; the wife he left behind when he left Cabo Verde for Lisbon to work—like Leão in Casa de Lava—as a construction worker; the wedding dress he bought her; the ring they made him take off.

That scene, like the rest of the movie from which it comes, resembles what I 23

Walked with a Zombie might have looked like had that film taken place inside the unnamed zombie’s head. The movie’s piecemeal structure makes sense, you could argue, only if you assume that it is Ventura—now afflicted by a nervous ailment that causes a constant tremor in his hand—who is generating each of the scenes through which he moves, in these places, in this order, and under these particular sorts of light. (No other filmmaker has found the same sort of texture, density, liquidness and luster as Costa has in light filmed digitally.) A hospital stay during which a handful of his friends and honorary children keep a vigil by his bed; an encounter with a Portuguese military tank; a confrontation at knife-point in the woods; a handful of aimless walks that take him through construction sites, basements and underground passageways: to watch the movie is to see what this man might see when he projects himself into a gallery of his nightmares, memories and dreams.

At the heart of the movie is a series of conversations between Ventura and another Cabo Verdean immigrant named Vitalina, who, unlike Ventura, can read. In her first scene, she recites her birth certificate in his presence, followed by the death certificate of the man she married young.

Later in the movie, he passes her—it’s unclear how he got it—a letter her husband wrote her before his death. Vitalina moves to a nearby window, reads the letter silently, turns to the camera, looks at it—at Ventura, and us—with an enigmatic smile, then proceeds into the hospital room to which she’s just been called.

That she refuses to share her feelings with Ventura, and with the movie, is another way of saying that Ventura, not knowing her, cannot imagine what the letter might say—no more than Mariana could imagine what the women of Fogo might say 24

when, late in Casa de Lava, she encounters several of them standing silently together in the middle of a road at the dead of night.

Leão, in contrast, does speak after waking up from his coma earlier in that movie.

Him, she can imagine: his irreverence, the demands he makes of her, his lack of respect for the authority with which she once thought of herself as invested.

Casa de Lava premiered at the 1994 Cannes film festival, part of a program of Un Certain Regard selections that also included Claire Denis’ I Can’t Sleep and Olivier Assayas’ Cold Water. Whereas Assayas’ sensibility has quieted down since that furious movie, Costa’s and Denis’ have done something closer to souring or hardening. One way to take Horse Money and Bastards, Denis’ embittered 2013 film noir, is as confessions of the failure of a certain kind of European high modernist cinema—elliptical, fragmented, interested in staging, or making visible, the movement of individual consciousnesses—to do the sort of redemptive political work it was meant to do. Mariana is something like an ideal subject for the sort of modernism to which Costa and Denis, whose movies likewise often reckon with the aftermath of European colonialism in Africa, subscribe: a proud, educated free agent who can be shown coming to grips—revealingly and damningly—with the limits of her own control. There are, in contrast, no lessons left for Ventura to teach himself, no positive epiphanies for him to undergo, nothing about the plumbing of his consciousness that will, in the end, do him any good. Done in the wrong way, mapping the roads of his soul can be just as pernicious, Horse Money hints, as striving to “discover the roads of the sea.” Done right, it will have all the comfort of a diagnosis of a nervous twitch without a cure.

HORSE MONEY (2014)

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NOTHING EVER HAPPENS T H E H OT E L I N T H E M E T R O P O L I S O F T H E M OV I E S

by MATTHEW RIVERA illustration by ZOË FLOOD-TARDINO

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‌‌midst the crowds of elegant ‌ ‌t ravelers parading around the lavish art deco lobby of the Grand Hotel, the great character actor Lewis Stone, playing a hotel mainstay Dr. Otternschlag, remarks, “Grand Hotel.

People coming, going; nothing ever happens.” What Stone sees is the big picture—the art deco elegance, the ceaseless movement of people like polished horses on a carousel.

But looking closer into the darkest corners of the Grand Hotel, into the telephone booths and private suites, reveals a different story— one where time slows back down to a livable pace, and the people, those hotel guests that from a distance seemed to lack any human qualities, suddenly come to life. Behind the plush walls of the Grand Hotel all masks are removed.

Grand Hotel (1932) is the quintessential hotel film, a type of movie that always involves the setting-up of a hotel as the picture frame in which a handful of stories simultaneously take place.

In the 1930s, Hollywood was the breeding ground for a countless lot of these movies (many of them short subjects) due not only to the naturally formulaic nature of the hotel film’s narrative structure, but also to the ensemble casting possibilities the genre permitted.

One of W.C. Fields’ first feature films at Paramount, for instance, was International House, a variety show entertainment where Fields was given second billing under the now hardly remembered Peggie Hopkins Joyce, and above names like Bela Lugosi, Cab Calloway,

Rudy Vallee, and the comedy team of George Burns and Gracie Allen. The hotel—a meeting place for people from all corners of the earth—allowed for a full stock of guest acts and up-and-comers. The studios used these films as a kind of talent scouting, a place to see who could potentially hold their own in a picture, and who wouldn’t be making it onto next week’s pay roll.

For the profit-minded dream factories of the Depression, needing the most efficient way possible to consistently churn out stars and stay out of the red, the hotel film was essential. For MGM, Grand Hotel was a gold mine.

Conceived as a vehicle for one of the greatest ensemble casts in movie history—a lineup of Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore—Grand Hotel follows a series of loosely overlapping vignettes rather than one narrative thread. These stories include that of a hotel thief (John Barrymore) who has come to steal the jewels of a famous dancer staying at the hotel (Garbo), a company executive (Beery) trying to both close a business deal with a competing company and start a fling with his stenographer (Crawford), and an impoverished accountant (Lionel Barrymore), diagnosed with a terminal illness, who has come to the hotel to live his final days in luxury.

Hotel films can tell a number of stories, but they can also fall into a number of genres as well, from comedy like the Marx Brothers’ RKO vehicle, Room Service, to stark drama like Grand Hotel.

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Like a hotel itself, harboring a full spectrum of people and stories segmented by each room, many hotel films cross these genres as quickly as a cut between scenes. In one room, a moment of hilarious splendor is unfolding as a drunk Lionel Barrymore gambles away his life savings, praising “ah life!” at the top of his lungs, while in the next Joan Crawford’s heart is being broken as her love interest, John Barrymore, has fallen for the seductive Greta Garbo.

The city is a place where people of all backgrounds and demographics are brought shoulder to shoulder, and the hotel, a hub of the city’s constant movement, is a place of limitless contrasts and ceaseless irony. The sheer number of stories unfolding at the same time under the same roof makes the hotel perfectly suited to cinema, with its ability to cross cut between locations and maintain an inherent sense of simultaneity. While Grand Hotel is a story told linearly—not using devices like flashbacks or overlapping vignettes—the most prominent idea that arises by the film’s end is that these stories, each related to each other in some way, are all happening at once.

Joan Crawford, of course, does not realize that John Barrymore is holding Greta Garbo in his arms one room over, saying “I’ve never seen anything in my life as beautiful as you are.” But Barrymore also does not realize that Crawford has truly fallen for him—that back in her room, she is in tears as she realizes she has been stood up. These two stories are complete on their 28

own, and could each hold our attention very well due to the hypnotic power of its actors. However, when cutting between these two narratives, a third story emerges, one that only the audience will ever see, of which the characters will always be unaware.

Perhaps this privilege of greater understanding is what makes the hotel film such an enjoyable genre.

Part of the thrill of moviegoing comes from the voyeuristic pleasure of watching another person’s story without their awareness. The viewer’s excitement is at its height when his or her knowledge surpasses that of the people onscreen. The hotel is, in this sense, a doll house, a place where the audience can play the role of god, and observe each room with a sense of complete understanding. Even Lewis Stone’s character, the only one in Grand Hotel who seems to observe more than act, is unaware of the full irony of the movie’s overlapping narratives. By the film’s end, as the characters check out of the hotel, John Barrymore’s body on a stretcher, Wallace Beery in handcuffs, Greta Garbo yet unaware of the loss of her lover, Lewis Stone repeats his opening remark that “nothing ever happens.” Only now, after we have seen just a few instances of what really does happen in the Grand Hotel, the line takes on a completely different meaning. Is Stone unaware of this catastrophic drama that has taken place? Or is he simply making a comment on its pointlessness, that amongst all of the people staying at the Grand Hotel this is only a

handful of stories, a small number of threads, amounting to little in the grand scheme of things?

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he business of a luxury hotel, like the business of the movies circa 1932, is to sell a dream, a complete escape from the outside world.

Grand Hotel, the film, never shows the bustling city of Berlin that lies outside the walls of Grand Hotel, the hotel. However, the city is integral to the film, as the outside “real world” mentioned only at the characters’ lowest moments, in which they reflect on their lives as meager accountants, indebted thieves, or lonely dancers. These people, as if immediately put under a spell upon entering this dazzling world of luxury and escape, live out their dreams, or their nightmares, during their stay at the Grand Hotel.

The hotel has a way of bringing out the fantastic. Within its walls, hotel guests act as if they are in a fantasy, doing things they would never do in the outside world. It is for this reason that the hotel is not only a space for elegance and escape, but also a space harboring questionable morals and the actions they encourage. The hotel houses love affairs, thefts, shady business schemes, suicides, murders. These acts all occur as a test of reality, as if the characters living in this fantastical world have stopped believing that the laws and physics of the external world still apply to their actions.

While the characters in the world of the hotel may believe they are in a fantasy universe, the world of the hotel is still very real

in its stakes. In Grand Hotel’s final scenes, John Barrymore breaks into Wallace Beery’s room to steal the $2,000 needed to pay his debts.

Beery catches Barrymore, and, in an act of surreal rage, attacks him with a telephone, killing him in a short series of angry blows.

This anger has been building up in Beery for some time, and, as if using Barrymore as some sort of punching bag, Beery lets it all out, completely ignoring any of the very real consequences that will result.

Later, as the police escort Beery out the hotel, he shakes his head in disbelief at the crime he has committed. Exiting the fantastical, perhaps delusional, world of the hotel through its revolving door, he tries to hide his handcuffs under his coat sleeve. He still has his pride, and his disbelief that he could have done something so terrible amidst the beauty and escapism of the hotel, a supposed “safe space.” Now he knows there are no safe spaces, his actions in the hotel are just as real as in the city streets just outside, and he will have to confront the very real consequences of his very real actions.

These morally questionable actions are what one would more expect to find in a completely different type of hotel, specifically the down and out hole-in-the-wall hotel to be found in gangster films like Blonde Crazy or Scarface in the 1930s, or noirs like Key Largo or Fourteen Hours in the decades following. This type of hotel is even more explicitly seen as a safe space for crime and wrong-doings, often used as a device by the pulp story29

FROM THE SET OF GRAND HOTEL (1932)

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teller to quickly symbolize the nastiness hidden away in the depths of the city. The Grand Hotel, however, with its heartbreak, its thievery, its infidelity, its murder, its bitter view of the real world, has just as much nastiness and crime as one would expect from those archetypically seedy hotels. Underneath the superficial grandeur, people at the Grand Hotel are still people.

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t‌ first, with its flashy exterior and appearance of dreamtup grandeur, the cinematic hotel seems like just another distraction from the dark realities of the urban universe—another bright neon sign among a lineup of clubs, restaurants, and, of course, movie theaters. However, the hotel film reveals what is underneath the façade of the hotel and, as one might expect, underneath those other venues as well. Put into the context of the city, if the hotel only seems like an escape, what does that say about these other venues of distraction and pastime? What does that say about the audience in a movie theater? Grand Hotel (and by extension the hotel film) tells us there is no escape. This is all the more fascinating when considering Grand Hotel’s release year of 1932, the height of the Depression, when Hollywood’s most important role was to provide escape and distraction, not oppose it.

Throughout the decade, riding on the success of Grand Hotel, all the major studios released a wave of ensemble cast vehicles with a luxury hotel as its central location. The catch, as one can see a

desperate studio-era writer pitching to a cigar-wielding producer, was that the hotel would be located in a different major metropolis. In London (RKO’s Top Hat), Hollywood (Warner’s Hollywood Hotel), even Wuhu, China (Paramount’s International House), the formula, it was found, could work anywhere. Grand Hotel’s Berlin location is certainly not essential to the film—it was even remade by MGM as Weekend at the Waldorf, taking place in New York. The city is essential to the hotel film because it gives the context of an immediate reality waiting outside the surreal decadence of the hotel, but the specific city in which the hotel exists does not make much of a difference.

The classic hotel film, à la Grand Hotel, transforms the city into a place of generalities. In the hotel film, the urban world is simply a symbol for reality, an opposition to escapism and extravagance.

The city is immediately at hand, there to remind us that the hotel is only a small oasis in the ugliness of the real world, and a fleeting one at that. As we check out of the Grand Hotel, we understand that the hotel truly only wears the mask of an oasis. While new guests revolve into the hotel, hopeful looks on their faces as they enter the safe space they believe it to be, we exit through that same revolving door, knowing full well what awaits them. Lewis Stone’s remark—“people coming, going, nothing ever happens”—takes on yet another meaning as the cycle undoubtedly begins again.

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THE SHOCK DOCTRINE urban violence in contemporary brazilian cinema

by j u l i a n n e b r e da

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recent ‌ study by an ngo reported that po‌lice in Brazil have killed over 11,000 peo‌ple in the last 5 years. This amounts to approximately 6 killings per day or, to put things in a broader context, a few more than police officers in the US have committed over a period of 30 years. With an economic rise that has brought a stronger middle class and expanded various urban areas of Brazil, the pressure has increased drastically on the country’s favelas—Brazil’s shantytowns.

Filled with poverty and historically dominated by drug trafficking and warring gangs, the favela is also an endemic feature of Brazilian urban culture.

In Brazil there is a resurgence of new, militarized police forces that work independently of local police organizations, designed to forcefully eradicate corruption, drug trade, and gang warfare in favela communities. Such is a feature of a government under pressure both nationally, with broad economic expansions, and internationally, with the World Cup and the Olympics to prepare for.

Luxuries and securities that have recently become attainable for many Brazilian people are intrinsically linked to this recent bloodshed. This is the stage for Brazilian drama today. Within this context it is not surprising that the urban cinema of Brazil has become fixated with representations of aggression and violence—elements that have taken over and now permeate all popular narratives of contemporary Brazilian urban life.

Amidst this festival of violence comes Neighboring Sounds: a film about life in a middle class neighborhood in Recife, where recently-built, stark, modern condos accommodate a new leisured class. Neighboring Sounds is a film without any onscreen deaths or a single gunshot.

Crime and death, much like the film’s working class characters, operate tensely offscreen. Directed by Brazilian film critic Kleber Mendonça Filho, the film offers a counter-narrative and cinematic alternative to the spectacle of violence of the gritty urban genre exemplified by City of God, a landmark Brazilian feature. This genre, defined as an “aesthetic of reality” or “shock of the real” by Beatriz Jaguaribe, has become the major cinematic approach for Brazilian narratives of urban life and inequality.

The cinematic context of Neighboring Sounds can be further understood by comparison with a more contemporary landmark in Brazilian film, and an undeniable successor to City of God in terms of style, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within. Released in 2010, The Enemy Within is a sequel to the first Elite Squad and became the highest grossing Brazilian film in history. The film is based on a confessional book of the same name written by a Brazilian sociologist and two former members of BOPE, Rio de Janeiro’s elite paramilitary police force. The Enemy Within shows events torn from the headlines of Rio’s recent history and attempts to leave no stone unturned in a violence-fueled condemnation that aims at all levels of Brazilian society—from militia warlords to corrupt politicians, and even police officers themselves.

The film moves in a quick, pseudo-documentary style from a favela shootout, to a meeting with the governor and president, to the set of a populist talk show. Its story revolves around

the tension between Roberto Nascimento (Wagner Moura), a violent and uncompromising captain of the BOPE, and Diogo Fraga (Irandhir Santos), a human rights activist and politician.

Situated at opposing political and moral ends of the film’s universe, the characters move through the underbelly of Rio de Janeiro’s world of crime and corruption to meet somewhere in the middle and join forces by the end of the film. “O sistema,” the system, is the name the film gives to its all-encompassing network of colluding influences, trafficking, police violence, media control, and political corruption. In its broad moralizing strokes, The Enemy Within leaves almost no one free of culpability.

The specific correspondences between the movie’s characters and their real-world inspirations are alarming to the point of desperation, considering that many of the people depicted— and, at the very least, the system which spawned them—are still at large. Elite Squad’s director, José Padilha, begins the film with a seemingly clear enough indication of its objective: “Though there are many coincidences with reality, this film is a work of fiction.” Yet the film’s overarching tendency toward reportage betrays the intent of its filmmaker. All of the characters are loosely based on real people. The real Captain Nascimento is an amalgam of two captains of the BOPE police force who chose to write an account of their experiences, while Fraga, the left-leaning activist, is based on Marcelo Freixo, an anti-crime politician who has since become a political exile after receiving various death threats.

Padilha keeps the veils that separate these characters and their stories from reality as thin as possible. That space between reality and fiction is what this form of 33

Brazilian urban realism is intent on exploring and blurring.

This tendency has a precedent in City of God (or Cidade de Deus) and comes packaged with a certain style.

Both films present violence that is palpable and ever present, though—as per mainstream convention—obscured at its most exploitative extremes. In The Enemy Within, for example, a scene in which a kidnapped journalist is threatened with rape by corrupt militia officers cuts directly to the same officers ominously tearing off teeth from charred black skulls as bodies are burning behind them, presumably the next day. Not much later in the film, the leader of a slum gang is tortured and choked with a plastic bag by police officers looking for information that the audience knows he cannot provide. These moments of violence follow one after another; their style is aggressive, the camera work is shaky, oppressively tight, and unrefined. The film’s violence is propelled forward by a compulsion to account for a sense of “reality”—to depict recent events in a raw manner, not shying away from crudeness or violence.

This same style and responsibility towards “genuine” representation motivates City of God, also a massive economic success in its home country. The emphasis on “realism” is key here. Though its violence is over the top and its scope immense, the film proclaims that it represents a real feature of contemporary Brazilian urban culture. The commercial success of both movies at least seems to suggest that this cinema resonates with many different people in Brazil. The intensity of its condemnation, by The Enemy Within’s end reaching even Brasília, Brazil’s capital, marks the extent of widespread disillusionment with both urban 34

living and government attempts at reducing violence.

This tendency towards a calculated “aesthetic of reality” on display in both City of God and The Enemy Within undeniably borrows its elements and tropes directly from mainstream Hollywood cinema. On top of the fact that Elite Squad is a franchise in itself, generating James Cameron-level numbers in domestic revenue, the more essential narrative and cinematic elements of “realist” cinema also have an American character.

Again, while certain aspects of The Enemy Within are taken from recent history and reality, telling elements of the narrative are fictionalized. Captain Nascimento of the BOPE and Diogo Fraga, the human rights advocate and politician, are placed on opposing sides of a domestic dispute. In the film, Fraga is depicted in an unlikely marriage to Nascimento’s divorced wife. This domestic melodrama feels tacked on to a story of far greater ambitions, but its necessity in a familiar Hollywood structure allows the film to conform to dominant narrative principles. Though this element has little purpose in the narrative, the sheer melodramatic absurdity of this timeworn Hollywood trope stands out in a film that poses itself as responsible towards a certain “reality.” The film itself acknowledges this tension in the first line spoken

by Captain Nascimento; right after the title card announcing its closeness to real events, he states, “It might seem like a cliché from American cinema but…”

Shots of helicopters with armed police officers shooting down at Favela gunmen could be torn directly from Apocalypse Now, and scenes of quick-witted police bickering and sudden double crossings share the pace of something like The Departed. Nascimento’s acknowledgment at

CITY OF GOD (2002)

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the beginning of the movie tells a deeper truth: American cinematic tropes and clichés have themselves been absorbed into the reality of Brazilian crime and police proceedings.

This is the cinematic landscape into which Neighbouring Sounds is born and to which it responds. Unlike its purposely unpolished contemporaries, the film is highly visually constructed, with careful and deliberate camera work. The film centers around the lives of different characters in a middle class neighborhood of apartments in the city of Recife. It is split into three chapters, each titled with alterations of the word “guard”: Guard Dog, Private Security, Security Guard. Guarding is an important notion in an essentially crime-free, socially gated neighborhood that happens to also be in a violent and unstable city.

Depictions of violence, however, are entirely kept out of the film. The fast camera work and violent action of Elite Squad and City of God are exchanged for a stable camera and deliberate pace.

Characters wake up and go through humdrum days. A single man in his 20s gives tours of cookie-cutter real estate condos with whitewashed walls and small, windowless rooms for maids. A flower wreath at the bottom of a building is the only indication of a dead body: a tenant’s, we are told in passing, who killed herself recently. A stressed-out mother struggles to overcome domestic boredom by drugging a dog whose barking bothers her, remodeling a vacuum cleaner into drug paraphernalia, and masturbating with her washing machine.

Quietly she struggles to change the symbols of her domestic incarceration into tools of liberation. A group of residents argue over firing a long-employed security guard. One of the tenants’ son shows a film he’s edited on his laptop, spying on 36

the old man asleep; middle aged housewives, outraged at the guard’s apparent indolence, thank the child for the great video. This is the camera used at its most exploitative, as a tool for a moralizing and classist condemnation. It is the kind of video that contrasts with Filho’s project as a whole. His characters are petty and bourgeois, but fully actualized. He is equally intent on portraying their struggles and abuses as individuals as he is in demonstrating the grand repercussions of their social statuses and alienation.

What Filho achieves in Neighbouring Sounds by foregoing outright violence and an intense pace in favor of a more meditative and symbolist technique is a new kind of portrait of urban living in Brazil. Divorced from American influences of violent fantasy and spectacle, here violence in its quotidian form can be properly understood. As Filho said in an interview at the British Film Institute, “Crime is big deal in Brazil; however, I’ve never been mugged or assaulted. I know very few people who’ve ever been robbed.” This ominous condition is prevalent throughout the film. Crime and menace, though offscreen, is ever present at the edges, threatening to break in. The portrait’s admittedly narrow social focus achieves more for realist representation by denying the fantastical, overdetermined images of “authenticity” that have become ubiquitous with portrayals of urban life in Brazil today.

The film depicts neighborhood life in shades as grim as one would expect it to be in the sheltered center of a city where inequalities separate all too cleanly the “dangerous” neighborhoods from the “safe” ones. A shot of one of its many protagonists looking over from the roof of one of the lifeless condos allows the audience to see the shanty towns in the distance,

NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (2012)

dwarfed and asphyxiated by the wealthy skyscrapers that surround them. “Architectures of oppression,” Filho calls them.

Characters struggle to find a place in these new, vacant environments, though a sense of historical continuity is expertly staged.

Black and white photos of the same land’s prior usage as a sugar plantation are shown at the beginning and end of the film.

These sequences frame the world we experience within the familiar and oppressive terms of labor relations. Filho conveys a deep disappointment towards the supposed opportunities of the modern city and democracy. Landowners still rule the day, their fields replaced with condos, their guns with private security groups.

Neighbouring Sounds achieves a telling representation of the plight of many Brazilians by what it keeps offscreen—a refreshing alternative to the condemnatory broad strokes of films like Elite Squad.

This alternative acknowledges the strange rhythms and small rebellions of urban

living in unequal societies—the children of maids watching TV and playing comfortably in their employer’s house; rich, white kids entertaining themselves with stealing car radios and wearing “gangster clothes”; private security guards sneaking into people’s houses with maids for quick sex. It manages to do this while also acknowledging the persistent forms of oppression that trap individuals, not in corrupt and morally decrepit action (as is the wont of mainstream “spectacle of violence” films), but in a languid stupor of inaction. Just as Filho describes, the violence that contemporary middle class Brazilians see onscreen is not a violence that is present to them in an immediate sense. Behind the chain link fences—or behind the veneer of the World Cup and the Olympics­—one perceives the reality of urban Brazil by a different sign, not a gunshot in the head but a soft cry heard through the cracks. Overheard down the street. Pulsing through the air.

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IRON RAILS AND

JUMP CUTS a celebration of city symphonies

by h u n t e r ko c h illustrations by z o ë f l o o d - ta r d i n o

W

e shall sing the great crowds tossed

a‌ bout by work, by pleasure, or revolt; the many-colored ‌ and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals; the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the yards under their violent electrical moons; the gluttonous railway stations swallowing smoky serpents; the factories hung from the clouds by the ribbons of their smoke; the bridges leaping like athletes hurled over the diabolical cutlery of sunny rivers; the adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; the broad-chested locomotives, prancing on the rails like great steel horses curbed by long pipes, and the gliding flight of airplanes whose propellers snap like a flag in the wind, like the applause of an enthusiastic crowd.

—F.T. Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism”

The 20th century heralded in two defining moments of the modern age: the second industrial revolution, with its emphasis on manufacturing, transportation, and huge cities, and the advent of abstract and avant-garde art. As with most art, much of the avant-garde movement was a reaction to what had come before or what was happening at the time.

Modern art became a rejection of the conventional. Where art had consisted of representation, the avant-garde saw the chance to deconstruct, reassemble, and create what had never been seen.

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When reflecting on the structure and style unique to film, we see that the rise of industry, specifically in the modern industrial city, had a significant impact on the development of avant-garde cinema.

This era brought the world speed, electricity, and an all-around energy that had yet to be seen in society. The city was essentially the embodiment of this overwhelming new sense of vitality. The city, then, lent itself to cinema for one main reason: a direct expression of temporality. The movement and power of modern transportation, for example, could be somewhat expressed in a painting, but film allowed for a true translation through cuts and montage, allowing movement and energy to be conveyed through multiple methods. Hence, the city provided an existing framework from which avant-garde filmmakers could experiment with montage, structure, and commentary through cinematic techniques.

Non-fiction, avant-garde films centered on the city swiftly blossomed in the 1920s. Collectively, these films comprise the so-called “city symphony” genre.

Always a quintessentially global and industrial city, New York provided ample inspiration for one of the first notable city symphony films. Produced in 1921, Manhatta is a ten-minute silent film, comprised of static shots of lower Manhattan interspersed with intertitles containing Walt Whitman poems.

Interestingly, Manhatta was directed by Charles Sheeler, a painter and photographer, and Paul Strand, also a photographer. Unlike their con-

temporaries in Russia, Sheeler and Strand did not utilize the theory of montage to make any overt commentary or arguments about New York City. Rather, the film serves as an experiment in temporality and an early avant-garde reflection on industry and modernity.

Manhatta seems to be less strict of a cinematic exercise than later city symphony films; the general structure of the film does not rely on the cinematic techniques of cutting or montage in order to construct an argument or thesis about New York City. Sheeler and Strand were not making films like their Russian contemporaries Eisenstein or Vertov. Instead, the film’s subject and intertitles are the aspects that most strongly contribute to the praise and reflection on the size and power of New York. The intertitles are selected from excerpts of Walt Whitman’s poems “Mannahatta” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” The poems describe the power and beauty of Manhattan, with Whitman writing of the metropolis: “The free city! no slaves! no owners of slaves!/ The beautiful city, the city of hurried and sparkling waters! the city of spires and masts!” The general formula for the film involves a card with a portion of the poem, and then an image of that subject. One card displays the line “This world all spanned with iron rails,” and then immediately presents three shots of steam trains.

Following the last intertitle, which reads “Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me,” is a shot of 39

the sun setting over Manhattan in all its glory. Again, the filmmakers take portions of Whitman’s poetry and display corresponding imagery. There exists no infusion of negativity within the images. The film shows the grandeur of the high rises, new construction of ever-taller buildings, efficient transportation, and concludes with a beautiful image of New York City’s skyline; the viewer gets an overwhelmingly positive look at the modern city of Manhattan. Moreover, the shots are certainly beautiful and well-composed, but they are static and not much more than moving photographs.

The film, then, feels more like an existing work of art paired with the temporal aspect of film. Again, the argument isn’t within the film per se, but within a poem. The film aspect serves to augment the argument, but within this context the shots could not stand alone; what makes the film interesting and what distinguishes it from simply being a collection of images is the reflection and praise of New York City provided by the intertitles.

But the film does not need to be “pure” cinema in order to be important and interesting. If there is one thing Manhatta conveys well, it’s that moving images are powerful artistic tools. With Manhatta, we see a non-narrative structure along with a composition that is not like a strict documentary or newsreel. Manhatta was a step towards utilizing cinema as a medium in and of itself, one that was able to craft meaningful aesthetic and social commentary through its 40

form. The importance of the city itself in shaping this form is not clear-cut. Whitman, for example, wrote poems about nature as well; one can imagine, then, a film in this similar structure but exchanging the shots of Manhattan for views of mountains and prairies.

But since the city was the center of industry and trade, and increasingly so in the beginning of the twentieth century, it comes as no surprise that a film with Manhattan as its subject would be made.

As the city symphony genre progresses, however, the links between avant-garde cinema and the city in general become clearer.

Manhatta was almost conservative in some respects. It was an influential experiment, but for the most part, it was not a uniquely cinematic piece of art. Cinema’s growth into a distinct medium arguably began with the advent of the montage theory. Put forth by several Soviet filmmakers, most notably Eisenstein, Kuleshov, and Vertov, the theory of montage essentially outlines how editing and cuts affect a film’s rhythm, tone, or intellectual thesis. The theory has been so influential in the avant-garde that from our perspective it borders on tautology.

Before this theory, however, there wasn’t a general structure for the deliberate employment of cutting.

As we see with Manhatta, cutting was a matter of simple logic; one shot comes after another, this process tracking the progression of the poem. In a narrative film, cutting is (usually) logical, as it follows the chain of events and the

visual foci within those events.

For the montage theorists, however, cutting isn’t just there to allow for more shots in a film. Edits and montage are essential parts of the film, parts that have the potential to create interesting works of art, explore theses, and set the tone and rhythm of the film.

It comes as no surprise that Dziga Vertov, one of the most prominent montage theorists, utilized a city to create his montage-filled magnum opus Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a celebration and exploration of life in a Soviet city that shuns narrative and character development. The film is, instead, a highly experimental documentary; Vertov utilizes every technique in his repertoire to highlight the beauty, rhythm, and vitality of the city. The majority of Vertov’s most striking and interesting images in the film were created with effective use of cutting, often

in distinct ways. For example, there is a scene where a couple watches a teller fill out forms at what we can presume is a bank. Here arises the famous Kuleshov effect. The woman and man lean their heads on their hands. Shown alone, they could be bored, tired, or worried.

But paired with shots of bank files and an earlier shot of a happy couple at the bank, the audience sees that they are most likely concerned about their finances. The use of montage allows for the construction of tone within a scene, something that normally may have been established with explicit intertitles.

In a completely different style, Vertov uses montage to develop a rhythm and momentum, as seen towards the end of the film. A set of hands uses spoons to play music on a washboard and various bottles, with shots of workers laughing and relaxing. The cutting between various workers and the hands be41

comes increasingly fast, so much so that it begins to appear as if each frame contains a different image.

Suddenly, there are images of pianos and dancing feet. The frenzy of images signifies a type of energy and joy that exists within the city’s labor force. This type of rapid cutting is most at home in the context of a modern city. Vertov’s avant-garde style extends beyond pure montage, utilizing techniques such as double exposure and split screens. Some of the most spectacular images are the result of these techniques paired with the city. For example, he uses double exposure effects and splits a frame into two mirrored shots to increase the perceived size of crowds. These effects

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aren’t there for their own sake; Vertov used them to promote general Marxist sentiments about the power of workers and the positives of the industrialization of post-revolution Russia.

Around the time Dziga Vertov was creating Man With A Movie Camera, Walter Ruttmann was producing his city symphony film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). Ruttmann’s film is more structured than Vertov’s. The film is not necessarily a narrative, but we see a general flow in the film that’s provided by the inherent rhythms of city life. It begins with the camera entering the city in the early morning. The streets are empty, except for a few stray

individuals. Soon, people wake up and walk to work; shops open; children walk to school. At lunch, the movement of the city stops as workers eat. Then, the city is fired up again; everyone continues to work until the evening, where Ruttmann showcases the vibrant nightlife of 1920s Berlin. The film is a chronological account of a day in Berlin.

Like Man with a Movie Camera, Berlin features extensive use of montage, but this use is distinct.

The film keeps up a steady pace, but Ruttmann more often uses cutting in an “intellectual” fashion; that is, he makes pointed social commentary throughout. For example, we often see the upper-class enjoying food or going about their day, cut between shots of wild animals in a zoo. This sharp juxtaposition perhaps insinuates the animal-like nature of the bourgeoisie, or maybe is there just for comic effect. A more explicit example is a scene where a high-class dining club is presented before cutting to poor children scrounging in the street for food.

Compared with Vertov’s film, Berlin is more reserved and subtle in its experimentation and tone.

Man with a Movie Camera reads like Soviet propaganda at many points, but Berlin is not a polemic.

Ruttmann does criticize aspects of Berlin’s society, namely rampant inequality and, in a few instances, the chaos that arises in a dense metropolis. But he is not a Luddite rallying against industrialization and the city. Berlin acknowledges the cities’ problems, but

still loves its subject. Ruttmann finds inspiration in the machinery and transportation of the city; he rejoices in this era of Berlin’s history. He presents breathtaking imagery of the bustling streets, hypnotic and abstract sequences of machines, and a closing montage showcasing Berlin’s gorgeous and electric nightlife.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is compelling, above all, in its preservation of Berlin just two decades before the city’s near-total demolition by the allied campaign’s destructive bombings of World War Two. Indeed, this is a crucial quality of the city symphony genre that is often unfortunately overlooked. Whether they depict the Manhattan of the gilded age, communist Russia immediately after the revolution, or Berlin during the chaotic twenties, city symphony films don’t simply champion the principles of an epoch; they also reflect and preserve a physical space. Cities change and are destroyed over time, and political climates may change the atmosphere of a city in a matter of years. The city symphony offers us an indispensable tool to understand what life was like during a specific era, both in terms of artistry as well as in terms of the common man. We look at these films, nearly a century after their genesis, not only to observe and reflect on a moment in time, but to remind ourselves of what has changed since, to find new ways of seeing—and thus of living within—the “many-colored and polyphonic surf ” of our own era.

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VIBRANT C R E AT U R E S r i d l e y s c o t t ’s c o r p o r e a l frontiers

by JESS LEMPIT

S

cience fiction films––where slick, advanced technology, dystopian politics and the rich mysteries of space are frequent subjects–– typically imagine progress in terms of the transformation of society: its engineering capabilities, its socio-economic systems, the new spatial frontiers to which it has access. However, director Ridley Scott, in Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982) and Prometheus (2012), imagines earthier and more familiar forms of futuristic transformation, placing the human body in conversation and in conflict with technology and biology. Scott imagines the human body as a site of transformation and vulnerability. In his science-fiction films, all of which suggest that our technological feats may soon outpace our physical

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capacities, familiar aspects of human anatomy become foreign and strange.

Evolution, reproduction and violent transformation are ley lines in these three films, where human biology is no longer the pinnacle of nature’s innovations but a fecund breeding ground for more advanced, non-human forms of life.

Alien opens onboard the commercial mining ship Nostromo, en route to Earth, as its crew rests in hypersleep chambers.

MOTHER, the ship’s computer, intercepts a message broadcast from an intelligent origin—a message which the crew are legally bound to investigate. The Nostromo’s crew members awake prematurely, and they land on a foreign planet wracked by a violent storm. Having ventured into an abandoned alien ship, a

handful of them find first an enormous humanoid skeleton, ribs broken open, seated before a weapon, and then a vast room filled with eggs. Kane (an incredibly young John Hurt) approaches an egg, which opens up and releases an alien life form onto his face, its tail tight around his neck and an appendage deep in his throat (hence Alien fans’ nickname for the creature: “facehugger”). The Nostromo and its crew leave after determining there are no survivors to rescue. Soon, however, it is evident that the alien threat remains on their ship, picking off crewmembers until Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the sole survivor, finally neutralizes it.

Alien was Ridley Scott’s second feature film, and remains one of his best received works. Scott’s early background as a BBC set director/designer and TV commercial director comes out in Alien’s meticulous visual construction and narrative economy. The Nostromo is a marvel, with a solidity and verisimilitude that comes from Scott’s attention to details like steaming pipes, wall texturing, and the complex tangles of electronics inevitably found on a spaceship. Alien depends for much of its tension on contrasts of dark and light, and obfuscating effects like flashing emergency lights, deep shadows and broken pipes heighten the fear and suspense felt by the audience. Some of its visual effects have admittedly aged; the nuclear explosion that finally destroys the Nostromo looks more like a faded illustration on a math textbook than a mushroom cloud. The aliens themselves (xenomorphs, in the film’s lingo) still captivate, frighten and repulse. In part, their power comes from their imaginative design by artist H.R. Giger and the ingenious practical effects used by Carlo Rambaldi to bring them to life. But if they continue to work as objects of fas-

cination and fear, it’s also because of the traumatic ways they interact with humans, their resemblance to and exaggeration of familiar human forms, and their haunting ability to transform the human body into something alien.

The “chestburster” scene midway into Alien is the most famed of these transformations. Kane is brought back to the Nostromo quickly after the facehugger attacks him, having eaten through his glass helmet with a squirt of acid, penetrated his throat with a slick, tentacle-like appendage, and wrapped his face and neck in its fleshy body, crab-like legs and muscular tail. Kane is sedate, unresponsive, presumably being fed air by the creature, whose lungs inflate and deflate gently over Kane’s cheeks. The ship’s Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) and Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) attempt to remove the facehugger, accidentally releasing a powerful liquid that eats through the ship floor when they cut one of its “fingers.”

They perform a scan that reveals the organism is pumping oxygen, and perhaps a fluid, into Kane’s body, and ultimately determine there is nothing they can do to remove the alien without killing Kane or endangering the crew.

However, the facehugger detaches of its own accord and leaves Kane apparently healthy, a temporary relief that is affirmed when the creature’s corpse is found later in the film. The crew, momentarily comforted, decides to eat with Kane before reentering hypersleep. Kane eats, relaxes with the crew, and appears to be enjoying himself—when suddenly, he begins choking, then seizing. Soon, he’s lying supine on the table. Members of the crew attempt to stabilize him when a burst of blood appears through his shirt.

In the midst of his seizure, the bloodstain grows larger until a snakelike creature 45

erupts from his chest. Erect, slimy, and sharp-toothed, the creature scans the room before screeching and slithering quickly away, to the horror of the assembled crew. Kane twitches gently, but is clearly dead.

This parasitic lifeform has transformed Kane from a functional human being into an incubator or “womb” for a more advanced species. Ash, who turns out to be a little more than human himself, calls it a “perfect organism,” its “structural perfection” complemented by its lack of “conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Kane’s male body is un-gendered by the alien, which penetrates him in a quasi-sexual manner, impregnates him with its young, and primes the younger organism to be “birthed,” bloody and violent, out of his body. The medical exam scene shows the phallic tentacle in Kane’s throat releasing something into him, represented by pinkish particles on the scanner screen. During the dinner scene, the crew members surround Kane at the table like a medical team aiding a woman in labor, clad in white coats and crowding tight around opened legs. Humans, in Scott’s vision, have been outpaced by xenomorphs, advanced creatures that bastardize our reproductive systems to use us as fertile ground for their own young. This transformation, the movie suggests, would make humans unfit for life in the far future, where our imperfect bodies—deprived of natural defenses and beleaguered by conscience—would be little better than fodder for organisms with stronger instincts and more aggressive natures. In this future, our bodies are vulnerabilities rather than strengths.

Prometheus is Ridley Scott’s 2012 return to the universe of Alien, after three sequels of varying quality were produced under the direction of James Cameron, 46

David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, respectively, in addition to several ill-conceived crossovers with the Predator franchise. In Prometheus, Scott refocuses the Alien franchise’s narrative from the creature-feature formula of its sequels back to the more philosophical bent of the first film. Prometheus, which visually recalls much of Alien, follows the outer-space expedition of archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) as they attempt to make contact with an ancient species of aliens called the Engineers.

Though multiple body transformations occur in Prometheus, the most disturbing is unquestionably Elizabeth Shaw’s impregnation with an alien fetus and the abortion she subsequently performs on herself with an automated surgical device. Shaw’s terrified protestation that she can’t be pregnant—she had been infertile—and her desperation to abort suggest just how powerfully wrong her pregnancy is. She runs to the surgical pod, yelling “Get it out, get it out,” hurriedly injecting herself with pain medicine before the machine slices open her improbably bulging abdomen and removes the slimy organism from her womb. She rips its umbilical cord out of her, panicking as the fetus’s tentacles spread and it begins to struggle in the pod’s claw. Shaw barely waits for the surgical machine to staple her incision before scrambling out of the pod and attempting to kill the fetus with automatic decontamination protocols. Shaw battles immense pain from her wound for the rest of the film, but eventually, like Weaver’s Ripley, is her ship’s sole survivor.

The self-abortion scene in Prometheus makes explicit what was implied in Alien: in this version of the future—and specifically in this version

of outer space—the human body is the transformative element. The stasis of the Engineers and their liquid “black death” is only interrupted when humans, having been forcibly knocked down the evolutionary chain, interact with them, acting as nourishment and vectors for alien organisms. Shaw’s xenomorph fetus represents the ultimate horror—an unwanted, unknown life growing inside her, feeding itself parasitically from her body—perhaps even a pointed reflection on what it is like to carry an unwanted human child.

Shaw becomes mother to an abomination, an enormous, many-limbed alien that parasitically reproduces like the facehugger in Alien. Scott further shows that the Engineers are our genetic ancestors, suggesting that human bodies in fact fit into the horrific cast of the facehugger, chestburster and the xenomorph. However, in this dystopian vision of the future, we are not the same as these alien forms—we are lesser. Shaw’s biology has been transformed and re-purposed by a species evolved to take advantage of human bodies. The crew of the Prometheus lack sufficient technology or training to prevent their bodies from being thus exploited or transformed. The technical innovations that allow for space travel and exploration cannot refit human bodies, arcane and ancient, to succeed in the future. The sort of transformation by virtue of which humanity could keep pace with technology is, Scott suggests, that of the human body into the automaton, or into some other form of synthetic life.

In Scott’s hypothetical future, automata and synthetic humans are better equipped for the challenges of existence, suffering few of the vulnerabilities with which humans struggle in Alien and Prometheus. Both of these films feature

AI in human form—the mutinous Ash, revealed only at the end of Alien to be robotic, and the intellectually curious but cold David (Michael Fassbender) in Prometheus. Ash has a scientific directive to gather as much data as possible on the aliens for his corporate owner, who perhaps sees in them an economic opportunity. His manner is careful and considerate, but remarkably aloof and unsympathetic. David, however, is perhaps a more advanced intelligence, incapable of feeling true emotions but certainly capable of understanding them in others, and of responding appropriately. Unlike the human crew, his mind is unfettered by irrationality, anger, jealousy, or the “morality” derided by Ash. His body is healthy, perpetually young, and suffers none of the vulnerabilities produced by biology; he can’t get sick, age, or be injured. He doesn’t need to breathe or sleep. He would be the perfect vessel for a mind, save for the fact that his will and curiosity is in the service of his creator— Peter Weyland (a digitally aged Guy Pearce), the ancient CEO responsible for funding their mission. The suggestion that artificial intelligences are the solution to the problem of human biology in Alien and Prometheus is taken further in Blade Runner, in which the engineering of synthetic life has come so close to recreating humanity that ordinary humans might become obsolete.

Blade Runner, unlike Alien and Prometheus, takes place on Earth, in Los Angeles. The year is 2019. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) walks the city’s neon-lit, perpetually raining and gloomy streets.

L.A., blue-grey, dim, and grimy, with hovercars and bursts of flame crowding the night air, resembles more a rainy underworld than the sunny metropolis of today. In this dystopian neo-noir, Deck47

ard, a retired Blade Runner whose task was to track down synthetic, engineered humanoid beings (called replicants) and “retire,” or execute them, must confront the fact that save for their short lives, these beings have matched and even surpassed humans both physically and emotionally. He derides the false memories of Rachael (M. Sean Young), an advanced ”Nexus 6” model of replicant, who has been implanted with a false childhood and therefore an “emotional cushion.” It’s very late in the film, when the rebellious replicant he’s been hunting imparts his memories in the seconds before his lifespan ends, that Deckard is forced to recognize the Nexus 6 specimens’ humanity.

Roy (Rutger Hauer) tells Deckard: I have…seen things you people wouldn’t believe…attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those…moments…will be lost in time, like tears…in…rain.

Roy, it becomes clear, has a capacity for wonder, nostalgia, longing, and despair. He exemplifies the transhumanist fantasy of his creator, Dr. Tyrell, who designed him as a perfect vessel: strong, sure and enhanced, driven by an emotional mind tempered with consistent rationality. Scott suggests the replicants’ superiority to humans by calling attention to their physical prowess in action scenes, surefooted and quick where Deckard often lumbers behind them. Near death, Roy lifts Deckard to safety with one extended arm.

The replicants’ impressive physicality softens during emotional revelations; though Roy’s face expresses feeling naturalistically when he meets Tyrell, his false eyes lightly reflect red in the dim 48

candlelight. He is humanity engineered beyond its physical vulnerabilities, yet with its emotional and intellectual capabilities intact. Rachael represents the future of this achievement. She is an experimental being, possessing all the traits of Roy and his generation, as well as implanted memories which save her from the earlier replicants’ anger and distemper. It is unclear how long she has been living, and how long she can live. Perhaps it was with her that Tyrell succeeded in extending the replicants’ lifespan, having failed with Roy and the others. Scott suggests a post-human future in which our best features are distilled and engineered into beings more equipped to handle the future— physically and mentally—than we are.

While Alien and Prometheus place humans in an evolutionary chain that has extended far beyond them, Blade Runner imagines us in the position of the Engineers. We become creators, parents to the future superbeings who live among us, indistinguishable from ourselves. These superbeings put humans at a distinct disadvantage physically and emotionally. The truly disturbing aspect of Blade Runner is not just that it conceives of a future in which human life can be replicated, but also that it suggests humanity’s immediate instinct to banish and enslave the threatening synthetic life it has created. The future Ridley Scott imagines is terrifying—a place in which the essence of the human soul is quantifiable, reproducible, and marketable by multinational corporations. Where this vision ultimately arrives is a further frontier in speculative fiction: not just the transformation of the world or of space through technology, but the transformation of the body, and of life itself.

top: ALIEN (1979) bottom: BLADE RUNNER (1982)

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IN THE DARK H i r o k a z u K o r e e d a ’s brief illuminations

by CHELSEA SHIEH

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ear the beginning of kokoro, one of the Japanese author Natsume Sōseki’s most famous novels, an elderly teacher tells his student, “You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egoistical selves.” While Kokoro was published in 1914 during Japan’s transition from the Meiji Period to the modern era, the contemporary Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda’s films play on similar themes as those present in Sōseki’s acclaimed novel: loneliness, cross-generational tension, loss, and rebirth. Koreeda has an eye, or a sensitivity, for giving places a spe-

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cific emotional texture. Many of his films play on a contrast between urban and rural landscapes, with the city depicted as a place of extreme alienation (Nobody Knows, Air Doll), and the countryside or nature as a sort of secluded haven in which the characters undergo momentous psychological transformation (Distance, I Wish). The characters in his films often travel from an urban environment to a pastoral one, and Koreeda recycles imagery as well––telephone poles, peaceful beaches, and railroad tracks often indicate, or anticipate, a momentous change that is about to come for the characters.

Maborosi (1995), Koreeda’s first feature film, is a slow-paced,

deeply moving film about a young woman, Yumiko (Makiko Esumi), who must cope with her husband Ikuo’s (Tadanobu Asano) sudden, unexpected suicide. Yumiko ends up remarrying and moving from bustling Osaka to a small town near the sea, but throughout the film, she is haunted by the memory of her husband’s unexplainable death. In Maborosi, the characters rarely ever outwardly express their thoughts or feelings, whether through dialogue or through action. Instead, much of the emotion in the film is expressed via the external environment. After learning of Ikuo’s death, Yumiko goes on a bike ride and passes by a set of train tracks, ushering her into the next stage of her life. (She is soon to be remarried.) There are many shots of the landscape of the rural fishing village to which she relocates; Koreeda’s long, sweeping shots over the ocean evoke images of cleansing, change, and progress for Yumiko.

The characters—Yumiko and Ikuo in particular—are usually bathed in darkness and shadow.

Yumiko is often seen wearing dark clothing and shot from a medium-long distance; most of the time, she is figured only as an obscured black shape, a silhouette. In one scene, not long after Ikuo’s suicide, Yumiko sits next to an open window in her house and flips through a photo album containing pictures of the two of them. In the next shot, she lifts her head and looks out the window, her face illuminated by sunlight while the rest of her body remains immersed in shadows. As Yumiko’s grief and sadness at Ikuo’s death deepen, the shadows

pull her body into the background, sinking her into a canvas of static darkness, while the sunlight reveals her face, calmly reminiscing, if only for a moment.

Koreeda’s use of shadows draws upon ideas that Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, a major Japanese writer of the 20th century, articulated in his illuminating 1933 essay “In Praise of Shadows.” Throughout that essay, Tanizaki laments the gradual disappearance of Japanese traditions and aesthetics that came about as the country adapted Western technological advancements that emphasized light and illumination. Tanizaki writes at length on the beauty of shadows in Japanese aesthetics. Gold lacquerware, he insists in one section, is “not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light.” Instead of saturating every shot in Maborosi with artificial or natural light, Koreeda chooses to use light minimally, only illuminating certain moments in certain shots in order to more powerfully convey their significance, such as in the aforementioned shot of Yumiko holding her photo album, enjoying a rare moment of serenity. Such shots echo Tanizaki’s belief that shadow and light are a balancing act; they play off each other. A hint of light can highlight the beauty of a subject or object that is covered in shadows.

This calls to mind the “maboroshi no hikari” that lends the film its title: the illusion of a brilliant, beautiful, yet ephemeral light. It’s this illusion, Yumiko’s new husband later claims, that led Ikuo to suicide.

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The fleeting nature of shadows touches upon larger themes in the film as well: the transience of life, and the importance of moving on from a state of mourning. The final shot of Maborosi, from the inside of Yumiko’s new house, is beautifully covered in shadows, focusing on an open window which reveals the ocean and the blue sky beyond, the curtain fluttering in the breeze.

Yumiko’s rebirth is implied—as if she has flown out the window, free from the weight and burden of past loss. The shadows in Maborosi suggest the beautiful yet darkening nature of loss, and Yumiko’s preoccupation with her memories of Ikuo illustrates her immersion in her past. Yet, like shadows, this pain is neither lasting nor eternal, and Yumiko finds reprieve from her grief in acceptance, which only comes with time. It is only in this rural seaside village, which Koreeda carefully constructs with wide, sweeping shots of the gentle ocean, idyllic streets and small houses bathed in sunlight—all free from the pull of shadows—that she can finally begin anew.

In his latest film, Like Father, Like Son (2013), Koreeda (a new dad himself ) explores what it means to be a father. Ryota Nonomiya (Masahuru Fukuyama) is a successful businessman whose dedication to his work keeps him from spending much time with his wife, Midori, and his son, Keita. The Nonomiyas discover that Keita is not their biological son; when he was born, a vengeful and insecure nurse swapped him with another couple’s baby. Koreeda’s favored contrast between ultra-ur52

ban and ultra-rural settings features prominently in Like Father, Like Son. The Nonomiyas live in a new, hotel-like high-rise building in the city; Koreeda himself remarked that during location scouting, he tried to find a place that “didn’t look like a house where someone would want to live.” The Saiki family, whose son Ryusei is the Nonomiyas’ biological child, live in stark contrast­ —they live above the dingy lighting shop they own in a working-class town that Ryota, upon arriving to visit, immediately pronounces as “pathetic.” The Saikis, however, have a completely different approach to parenting. To them, spending time with their children is natural and necessary; Yukari, the father, declares that “time is everything” when it comes to raising children. Ryota, however, struggles for much of the film to grasp this concept—and his lack of emotional understanding with Keita results in a simultaneously humbling and mortifying turn of events.

The train tracks so prominent in Maborosi resurface in Like Father, Like Son. After the Nonomiyas discover that Keita is not their biological son, they drive home. Stopping in front of the train tracks, Ryota angrily punches his car window, solemnly stating, “Now I understand.” The reappearance of train tracks in this scene is a reminder that the Nonomiyas, too, are moving onto a new chapter in their life—one that, given Ryota’s tenuous bond with Keita, will call for the inevitable destruction of their family. Towards the end of the film, the two families take a trip together to go hiking in a forest. In one of the movie’s most painful scenes,

Ryota tells Keita that he is going to live with Ryusei’s parents, and Keita, wide-eyed, asks if this is because Ryusei’s parents love him more than they do. Keita and Ryota’s backs are to the camera; they are kneeling in front of a small, gently flowing river divided midstream by a large boulder. After a pause, Ryota says, “Yes”.

The boulder, the river, the forest––all of these elements draw upon Koreeda’s use of nature as a place for transformation. Keita, heartbroken, splits from his father. In the end, Ryota breaks down and goes to see Keita, who has been staying with the Saikis, to apologize. Upon seeing him, however, Keita runs away, forcing Ryota to chase after him until he finally apologizes to Keita, acknowledging his failures as a father. They end up on two parallel paths separated by a line of trees right next to another river, an unusual yet familiar setting.

Until now, the movie has been marked by stark dichotomies—between the contrast of the Nonomiya’s and the Saiki’s ways of parenting, between Ryota’s stiffness and Yukari’s natural exuberance, between bourgeois urbanism and small-town working-class life, and finally between nature and nurture, which constitutes the central debate of the film. The parallel paths that Ryota and Keita end up on—simple, yet symbolically charged—provide a space for the confrontation that finally gets to the real heart of the movie: Ryota’s love for Keita.

The scene then cuts back to the Saiki family’s house, where both families reunite at last as they all head inside. There appears, finally, to be a sense of emotional solidarity among

all of the characters. Though we’re left to wonder about what exactly the two families will do next, the film ends on a note of quiet uplift, a mark of Koreeda’s recent departure from the central theme of death that dominated his earlier work (Maborosi, After Life, Distance). Perhaps this is why his newer films are a bit easier to digest—his mid-career film Nobody Knows (2004), about a family of four children who must survive on their own after being abandoned by their young mother, is especially torturous—as there’s been a shift in tone and content, a greater focus on the trials of the living, and more attention paid to small, perhaps even banal, yet ultimately heartwarming details. Koreeda himself attributed this change to his becoming a father, explaining that “I just feel that I’m more attracted to the story of life, being alive, and trying to face life.”

The most memorable scene in Maborosi takes place towards the beginning of the film. Yumiko visits Ikuo at the factory he works at, catches his eye and makes funny faces at him. In one of the few close-up shots in the entire film, Ikuo smiles back at her. This seemingly minor event resonates deeply for the rest of the film as the only shot that reveals any sort of interiority or characterization about the otherwise fleeting and mysterious Ikuo. What it reveals is, simply, that he loves her. This only makes the rest of the film even more painful, and renders Ikuo’s suicide even more inexplicable. The image of him smiling at Yumiko lingers over the rest of the film like a shadow—a kind of “maboroshi no hikari” itself.

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In Like Father, Like Son, the trigger that causes Ryota to finally understand his failures as a father occurs right when he and Ryusei, his biological son, are starting to get along. Skimming through photos of Ryusei on his camera, Ryota discovers a series of photos of himself, taken secretly by Keita; the photos are charming documents of Ryota sleeping in various locations in the house. This scene was inspired by an experience Koreeda himself had one day when he was away for work and, while aimlessly looking through his phone, discovered a rather unflattering photo of himself sleeping, which he quickly deduced was taken by his daughter.

“In my filmmaking,” he stated in an interview, “one of the things I am trying to do consciously is to

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (2013)

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show the things in our daily lives that seem banal and ordinary, but that are actually very, very special.”

It is this small event of Ryota discovering photos of himself—this snapshot not of Ryota, but of Keita’s rarely-glimpsed perspective of him—that permits Ryota to gain a bit of understanding about Keita’s love for his father. Koreeda gives us just a momentary glimpse into Keita’s mind, and the effect is much like the deep, lasting impression created by the brief shot of Ikuo’s smile in Maborosi. In a way, the essence of the “maboroshi no hikari” is transferred, in Like Father Like Son, to the fleeting nature of childhood, whose snapshots can only be captured in these moments of affection between a parent and a child.

MABOROSI (1995)

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MASKED MARVELS lucha libre and its cinema

by DAVID BEAL

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O

n january 26th, 1984, ‌Rodolfo Guzman Huerta showed his face on Mexican national television for two seconds.

Never before in his 40-plusyear career had Huerta—better known as the wrestler and film hero El Santo—revealed his true face to his admirers, let alone to his entire country. In lucha libre wrestling, a luchador never unmasks, he is unmasked; he shows his face if and only if a rival defeats him in a major contest. But here on a nationally broadcast talk show was the 20th century’s legendary luchador enmascarado—a Mexican Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, universally known even among non-fans—unrolling his silver teardrop mask to the bridge of his nose, revealing features darker and more mysterious than the mask that covered them, sending shockwaves through the society that had valorized him for so long. Over the next week, speculation surrounded El Santo’s decision; in retrospect, he might have sensed something wrong swirling inside of him, something he needed to release into the world while he still could. On February 5th of the same year, in a biographical sleightof-hand, he died of a heart attack.

He was buried with his mask on.

Scholars of North America track shreds of Robert Johnson photographs like bloodhounds; Mexico, by contrast, tends toward preserving the secrets of its national legends. Larger-than-life statues and monuments still exist in the country to commemorate El Santo and his mask, but the secrecy of

his civilian identity remains sacred.

His face is less captivating than the decorous poise of the mask itself, reality somehow less real than the spectacle of elaborate concealment.

When the film magazine SOMOS published photos of El Santo’s face in 1999, outrage and controversy ensued. Everyone knew that Rodolfo Guzman Huerta was El Santo, not the other way around; the image of El Santo’s mask was so pervasive for so long in Mexican popular culture that his mask had become his essence. And the mask of the most fabled wrestler in Mexico, of course, required a design as pure as Eden: two droplet eyes above a half-moon nose and a silver leaf-shaped mouth. Why would it ever need to leave his face?

Masking and unmasking are only part of the story of lucha libre. The name translates to “freestyle wrestling” or “free struggle,” but as in U.S. wrestling it’s something of an open secret that matches are rigged, and that winning a match mostly signifies a wrestler’s good standing with the promoters. According to Heather Levi, the phenomenon of lucha libre parallels the post-revolutionary Mexican political system, in which “electioneering took place behind closed doors, elections ratified decisions that had already been made, and people who appeared to be opponents were really working together.” In lucha libre, this plays out as a battle between técnicos (honest law-abiding wrestlers) and rudos (evil and corrupt wrestlers). Roland Barthes says that “what wrestling is above all meant to portray 57

is a purely moral concept: that of justice.” Nowhere is this more visible than in the conventions of lucha libre. The rudos break the rules, but rule breaking is a respected part of each match’s narrative structure, and it gives the spectacle a heightened ethical dimension: social justice, not only individual glory, is at stake in each match.

Perhaps for these reasons, lucha libre wrestling was Mexico’s single most iconic popular entertainment for the 20th century.

Wrestlers captured the mass imagination like Batman or Superman; comic books and movies showed wrestlers fighting crime and other evils; street peddlers sold (and still sell) lucha libre toys and merchandise and facsimile masks. By the end of his career, El Santo had participated in over 5,000 wrestling matches and had long been a mythical, marketable character outside the ring. Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing until the early 1980s, he starred in a series of over fifty “luchador films,” quickly produced cash-ins on lucha libre’s massive national appeal. Taken together, the El Santo movies (and derivative movies featuring other wrestlers like Blue Demon and Mil Máscaras) are among Mexico’s most widely seen cultural products, the films that dominated movie screens after Mexican Cinema’s “Golden Age” in the 1930s and 40s had passed. Their titles often mimic wrestling matches: Santo vs. los zombies (1961); Santo vs. el cerebro diabolico (1962); Santo vs. los cazadores de cabezas (1969); Santo vs. los secuestradores (1972). True 58

to character, El Santo never filmed one scene in any of these movies without his mask; he even wore the disguise on his lunch breaks.

The extreme popularity of luchador films—they were not B-movies, but the main attraction —is partly attributable to the fact that wrestling matches couldn’t be broadcast on television between 1954 and 1991. An ex-revolutionary promoter named Salvador Lutteroth had brought professional wrestling from El Paso to Mexico in 1933; by the early 1950s, lucha libre was popular enough among both working-class and middle-class audiences to have a television presence. When lucha libre disappeared from TV in 1954, the given reason was its supposedly corrupting influence on young boys; hidden reasons may have been that television broadcasts were threatening ticket sales for live wrestling, and that government forces wanted to keep lucha libre out of respectable middle class homes. The population of Mexico City had increased by almost 500% between 1920 and 1950, but the middle class began migrating to the suburbs, far from the central arenas where most live wrestling events took place. Without accessible television or live performances, it was cinema that filled the gap for non-urban audiences, and film-going became the main way to experience wrestling outside of the city. As a result, luchador films almost always featured long wordless sequences of big arena wrestling matches, sometimes wholly unrelated to the film’s main plot. Their

presence can often halt the plot in its tracks, rendering the rest of the film briefly frozen and speechless.

Usually, however, the wrestling sequences are far more riveting than what surrounds them.

Near the opening of 1962’s Santo vs. las mujeres vampiro (Santo vs. the Vampire Women), a match appears on a TV screen and quickly fills the entire frame. For ten minutes El Santo participates in a two-ontwo parejas contest with three other wrestlers. The match is ungainly and exhilarating, with the intricate harmony of a furious string quartet. It’s the music of combat that isn’t quite combat, combat that’s more dance than fight, more union than conflict, more love than hate.

These are Grantland Rice’s Four Horsemen transplanted to an indoor arena—Four Pinballs jockeying beneath nine harsh arena floodlights, surrounded by ecstatic screams and jeers. The camera never gets too close, never joins the fight—the lens represents the eye of an audience member—but the bliss of the filmmaking emerges from its unobtrusiveness, from its ability to communicate the nimble grace of real bodies locked into each other, subtly maneuvering and scrambling and jostling in the ring. U.S. professional wrestling encouraged performers to play to the TV cameras; cinematic lucha libre matches, by contrast, can feel private and businesslike, with wrestlers privileging swiftness over brute strength, agility over muscle, cooperation over struggle.

As El Santo was starring in two movies per year, the Santo char-

acter was also popping up in Jose G. Cruz’s weekly comic strip, Santo, el enmascarado de plata. Cruz’s comic ran for nearly thirty years (1951-1980), rivaling the popularity of the films and sharing many of their narratives. The El Santo movies can often seem like comic strips plastered on a screen; the comics, in turn, can often seem like movies plucked off a screen and slapped on a page (Cruz was fond of the photo-montage technique, in which speech bubbles accompanied photographs instead of drawings). Cruz even wrote some of the early films, and there’s an endearing clumsiness to the scenarios inspired by his comics: one moment, we’re watching syrupy melodrama; the next, knockabout comedy; the next, supernatural intrigue. Santo is usually fighting against some paranormal force—zombies, mummies, aliens, la llorona—on behalf of the common man. There’s a set of goofy stock actors and formula plots; the flimsy recycled sets have a cardboard charm. For popular entertainment these movies can also be painfully slow-paced, with uninterrupted shots of Santo either in transit—walking, running, climbing pillars, scaling walls—or punching whack-a-mole villains over and over and over again. But in nearly every movie, there are at least one or two scenes of Buñuelian imagination: nightmare visions, psychic animals, cruel and sultry gazes.

If anything, the films’ tonal fluctuations echo the shifting roles of the luchador himself. The stories position him as (1) a thinker, 59

sitting in an office among bookshelves, investigating supernatural conundrums or playing gumshoe for a layman, (2) a fighter, on the streets or in a house or in a cave, punching out villains or outrunning danger or sneaking past vampire-witch-murderers, and (3) an entertainer, performing in the ring for an attentive and loving public.

Sometimes these roles will overlap; in El hacha diabólica (1965) an axe-wielding bad guy appears out of thin air as Santo is wrestling in the ring, and Santo has to fight off el hacha while wrestling his initial opponent. Occasionally, Santo is a lover, but wholesome romance is usually absent or peripheral; El Santo mostly exists in a noir-world where women are evil seductresses who tempt male protagonists into danger. (Some luchadora films starring female wrestlers were made in the 1960s, but they weren’t exactly touchstones of progressive cinema; Doyle Green argues that these films mostly exploited women as “objects of voyeuristic-fetishistic pleasure for men.”)

The most striking characteristic of the luchador protagonist, though, is that he never removes his mask no matter what role he happens to be fulfilling in the film’s scheme. Santo walks through workaday life wearing capes, sweaters, business suits, or just tights—but, unlike Peter Parker or Clark Kent, his mask is glued to his face. Santo doesn’t split his identity in half to accommodate the demands of conventional society; society already accepts him as a fixture of the existing order. This is still somewhat 60

true of lucha libre culture today; it’s not out of the ordinary to see photographs like Lourdes Grobet’s portrait of Blue Demon Jr., which shows the son proudly donning his father’s famous blue-and-silver mask—but otherwise simply wearing a dress shirt and black slacks.

Masks were pervasive in Mexican fertility rituals and pastorelas long before they were used in lucha libre. But even if the luchador mask owed some of its staying power to the way in which it dovetailed with indigenous cultural practices, it had its direct origins in the United States of the early 20th century rather than ancient Mexico. In 1915, a wrestler under the alias of “The Masked Marvel” made his first appearance in New York City, challenging Ed “Strangler” Lewis.

The Strangler eventually unmasked the Marvel (whose real name was Mort Henderson) but the character of the Marvel itself continued, floating between different wrestlers for brief periods in the following years. The gimmick of the Masked Marvel eventually drifted to realms beyond wrestling and went to work disguising a Delta blues singer (Charley Patton used the pseudonym when he recorded for Paramount Records), a comic book hero (Centaur Comics debuted a character with the name in 1939), and the espionage-fighting protagonist of a film serial (Republic Pictures’ 1943 The Masked Marvel).

The tradition of the Mexican wrestling mask, then, was not quite invented from whole cloth nor was it part of an age-old lineage; it drew from a variety of

EL SANTO VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN (1962)

sources in popular culture and ancestral traditions. One of these sources was particularly troubling and sinister. A U.S. wrestler performing as Cyclone MacKay first thought to bring the Masked Marvel character south to Mexico, and in 1934 he asked a Mexican bootmaker and lucha libre fan named Antionio Martínez to fashion him a disguise: “a hood,” Cyclone said.

“Something you can put on, tie on, like the Ku Klux Klan or something like that.” Klansmen may have been perpetrators of a very different kind of spectacle;the connection, nonetheless, casts a shadow over lucha libre culture. Few luchador films were released in the U.S., but the masks have a trace of perversity in their DNA. The luchador mask, however, serves a different function from

its racist inspiration; the masks lean on individual flair, and they are designed to express the character of the performer more than to identify him as part of a collective.

Back-row audience members needed to distinguish wrestlers from each other, so each mask contains different bold, bright, sharply delineated forms—thunder insignias extending from eyeholes like daggers, horns protruding from eyebrows, crosses or stars or flags branded into the middle of foreheads. If Japanese noh masks are designed to reveal different subtle emotions when worn at different angles, luchador masks are the polar opposite—gutsy, immodest, frontal assaults on the eye. Today’s masks have had to up the ante, and they are far more elaborate than the earlier masks of El Santo and 61

SANTO, EL ENMASCARADO DE PLATA

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his cohorts; the wrestler La Parka, for instance, seems to have styled his entire costume as a cross between Gene Simmons and the devil from Black Orpheus. Cut-off jaws are more common in mask designs now, but spandex is still the primary material. And until a wrestler is defeated in a mask-betting fight, his face stays concealed; his ordinary identity is fused with his larger-than-life wrestling persona. (Lourdes Grobet’s great photo-book Lucha Libre: The Family Portraits shows modern wrestling stars wearing their masks as they pose with their families in ordinary household settings.)

Masks are passed down among wrestling families, parent to child; El Santo’s son and Blue Demon’s son both wrestle professionally wearing their fathers’ masks. But if masks are a way of defeating time or cheating death in lucha libre, luchador films themselves had a deadline. The genre began to decline as the 1970s wore on; El Santo was growing older (though you’d hardly know it) and the genre came to seem goofy and conservative. Doyle Green argues that the conventions of the genre had simply become too predictable, as audiences grew hungrier for the avant-garde: “[M]exploitation’s own decline in the 1970s was…the result of its own increasing inability to reflect the demands and aspirations of a new, radicalized, counter-culture youth audience.” The 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which the Mexican army fired on hundreds of student demonstrators in Mexico City, had savagely ruptured Mexican society and exposed the fraud-

ulence of its supposedly democratic political structure; no longer did the picture of morality in luchador films seem connected to real experience. By 1982, El Santo had starred in his last movie, Santo en la furia de los karatekas; two years later, he was dead.

Lucha libre survives today, though with the advent of televised matches it began to take more cues from U.S. wrestling and lost some of its distinctive flair. But even after the death of El Santo, lucha libre retained its soul, perhaps because, like all wrestling, it’s tangled in such a varied and dense web of cultural practices. It’s sport, theater, and mass catharsis all rolled into one spectacle, reflecting and shaping the society that produces it. Taking after El Santo himself, lucha libre rarely shows its face; it has rules and patterns but few inherent properties, and to some degree it fits the mask of the culture or era that’s nurturing it. It’s borne along by its devotees from the bottom and its promoters from the top, straying through different forms, mediums, and channels as years pass and leaders change and heroes perish. But to me lucha libre seems most comfortable in the medium of cinema, where the tension between art and commerce has often played out like a dirty wrestling match in a dingy arena. The films, if nothing else, are fascinating concoctions—phonedin prefab jobs that take on a life of their own, like ghosts in a loosely tuned machine. They are a lost breed, buried along with El Santo and his mask and so many other irretrievable relics of history.

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Sponsored in part by the Arts Initiative at Columbia University. This funding is made possible through a generous gift from the Gatsby Charitable foundation.

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