The Cameraman's Revenge

Yes, it’s Silent Saturday, to make up for having missed out on Silent Sunday last weekend (circumstances happily beyond my control). Time to finish off those Griffith Biograph shorts, with this little lot coming from the bonus disc to Kino’s edition of the Birth (which we’ll come to in due course); all of these are Civil War-related like the main feature, so a nice thematic collection, and all one-reelers…

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As titles go, few are as bitterly ironic as that of Kubrick’s fourth film, wherein he really entered the big league of cinema. Here’s another one I probably haven’t seen since around 1995 or so, taped off Channel 7 after they showed it overnight at some heinous hour even I couldn’t have stayed up for… It’s powerful, enraging stuff about a gross miscarriage of military justice in WW1 (inspired by true events), as a French general randomly executes three soldiers for alleged cowardice after they fail to take a strategic position; bitter, ferocious, and—as I now realise upon this re-viewing—as manipulative as all get out. The key word is there in James Naremore’s DVD booklet essay: melodrama. That’s what Paths of Glory really is. It’s not a word you often associate with Kubrick, but Naremore’s right to use it. Kirk Douglas starred and produced; and though Kubrick wasn’t the hired hand he would be for Douglas on Spartacus, it’s still tailored as a “Kirk Douglas” film as Naremore says. His heroism is enhanced by everything being stacked against him, from the borderline psychotic nature of General Mireau to the frankly rigged court-martial; that he cannot and does not win underlines his virtue. It’s a film where everyone takes vengeance on someone lower; Mireau executes three men to cover up his own idiocy, Roget dobs in Corporal Paris to cover his own genuine cowardice, Dax makes Roget lead the execution, even the sergeant threatens the firing squad not to fuck up. And this is before we consider General Broulard, who arguably emerges as the most heinous figure in the film. Really,  while watching the film my stomach was churning at the injustice it depicts, and yet I could never entirely escape the feeling that I was being manipulated in fairly blunt fashion; and as unquestionably brilliant as the film is, I can’t help but feel that I perhaps admire it a little less than I used to.

Michael Curtiz was imported to the US by Warners on the strength of the epics he’d made in Austria in the early 20s. Were they all this strange? I said something recently about the oddness of the part-talkie in the early days of the sound film, and this is an example of that curious form, but it would’ve been an eccentric beast anyway as a silent. It’s actually mostly well done, but god/dess what material Curtiz had to work with. A bit over ten years since I first (and last) saw this, it hasn’t got any less preposterous with time; a melange of WW1 action, romantic melodrama, and Biblical spectacle, fuelled by religiosity, narrative contrivances of towering absurdity, tenuous plot linkages, and moments of genuinely moving power. None of these are in either of the two talking sequences, and we may be glad only two were kept; of the half hour of material missing from the film since it was cut for general release in 1929, I gather most of it was more talking scenes and we perhaps needn’t regret their loss. The mix of ancient and modern is like what DeMille used to do at that time, though less well-managed, and the wartime business in the first hour is a bit of a drag. Once the film goes into Genesis territory, though, we’re in the presence of vintage old-school Hollywood blockbuster, especially once the flood gets underway (three extras supposedly drowned in the flood; amazing to think only three did so); it’s an exceptionally fair imitation of DeMille’s own Biblical extravaganzas (and about as Biblically precise). If the talking scenes were problematic at best, then the Biblical ending to the film reminds you just how good silent film could be at delivering sheer massive bloody spectacle, and just about redeems the problems of the first two-thirds of the film.

I haven’t seen this since, oh, probably the late 90s, and that was the version with the re-recorded music. Which I always thought was ethically dubious, but unfortunately I now find the Criterion edition doesn’t have the unadulterated soundtrack either (Russian end credits seem to suggest a 1986 restoration, wonder if that’s when it was fiddled with). Irritating, but not much to be done about it. Consider the film itself and when it was made, both in terms of Eisenstein’s career and the USSR as a whole. By this time, Eisenstein hadn’t finished a feature since 1929, with aborted projects in the US, Mexico and at home, and the cinematic landscape wasn’t the one he’d left behind in 1929; he had to prove himself all over again. Solution? In a time of Soviet fear of Nazi Germany, make a big historical epic about Russia kicking German arse in the 13th century. It’s been so many years since I saw it that I’d kind of forgotten just how bluntly propagandistic Nevsky is; we’re light years from the comparative humanism of Potemkin (not just because it’s also more about individual figures rather than the mass hero). I don’t think this is as good a bit of filmmaking, but it obviously worked well enough as propaganda that it had to be hidden away after Hitler suddenly became friends with Stalin. And, to be fair, it does still bear reasonably favourable comparison with later films of its action-historical ilk, because it’s in that sort of chest-beating monument vein that Hollywood likes to do… and like some Hollywood films I could name (particularly looking at you here, Black Hawk Down), its careful focus upon one event lets it be dishonest about broader history (no hint here that the historical Alexander later wound up subordinating Russia somewhat to the Mongols). Not my favourite Eisenstein, but still nice to see it again after all these years.

Kon Ichikawa’s career was plodding along somewhat quietly until he made this, his 27th film, and suddenly everything changed for him. Though it arguably wasn’t as massive a transformation as that undergone by Mizushima, the central character of this film. He’s part of a Japanese army unit in Burma who don’t know WW2 is over until they’re captured by a British squad; they accept their fate with notably greater equanimity than another Japanese unit under siege near the POW camp, and when Mizushima is sent to try and convince them to join his fellow squaddies they vow to fight to the end. Which they do, and Mizushima’s squad think he fell in battle with them. But! We, the audience, know better; we see him helped back to health by a monk whose robe he later steals to disguise himself while he keeps a promise to rejoin his squad. On the way, however, something snaps in him as he discovers that perhaps the real horror of war is surviving it to witness the aftermath, Mizushima’s squad don’t know what’s happened to their comrade and don’t understand why he hasn’t rejoined them, and indeed we don’t really know either until the end. Interesting that this appeared on Criterion at the same time as Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain (which I’ll get to here eventually); this is much the kinder and gentler of the two films. Where Fires basically says “war is hell, and here’s just how fucking nasty it gets”, Burmese Harp says “war is hell but there’s room for humanity when it comes to picking up the pieces afterwards”. It’s been accused, somewhat wilfully I think, of whitewashing Japanese atrocities, but it’s not like those atrocities were known then in the way they are now (and still denied by many), and in any case such a reading ignores Ichikawa’s evident contempt for the “no surrender” mob; his sympathies are clearly elsewhere in this rather splendid film.

From Rome, open city, to Italy, open country. For Rossellini’s next trick, he decided to go from Rome under the German occupation to various bits of Italy as it was gradually liberated from south to north. The film tells six stories, moving variously through Sicily, Naples, Rome, Florence, Romagna and ending in the marshes of the Po river, and it struck me as accordingly somewhat bitty… at 125 it’s obviously longer than Open City, but it has to fit six stories in and I don’t know that any of them are really much more than anecdotal. Plus, while this film is arguably more “neorealist” than Open City (which, remember, featured two of Italy’s biggest film stars; I don’t even know if this featured any professional actors, let alone stars), it’s about as heavy on the melodrama and probably more so on the sentiment, and the fourth segment’s ending in particular works on a level of contrivance I don’t recall from the earlier film at all. Renzo Rossellini’s score further illustrates what I said in my review of Toni about how that film’s lack of music helps diffuse the highlighting of “dramatic” moments; Renzo’s music here is really all about that sort of thick underlining. I’m inclined to agree with Ed Howard too about the non-professional cast giving more of an impression of amateurishness than realism. What interests me in the film, though, is the other theme of language and how it both separates and divides the American soldiers and the people they’re liberating. At the beginning of the film there’s a more or less mutual suspicion (when an American soldier gets shot by Germans, his squad wrongly blame the Italian girl who was guiding them); by the end they’re fighting together, both parties speaking their own language and understanding the other’s. It’s that aspect which I think the film does an interesting job of portraying, and where it probably works best overall.

Another revisitation review. I was right, as my earlier review of this film suggested I would be, to wait for the Criterion release, which is pretty stunning by comparison with the old print; indeed the DVD booklet wryly observes that the new restoration helped wipe out one of the film’s neorealist credentials, i.e. its rather rough “documentary” appearance… But,  of course, over the decades the film’s neorealist cred has gradually been whittled away until it stands revealed as a comparatively straightforward work. It was interesting to watch this again after Toni; if Renoir’s precursor to neorealism hardly lives up to the “everyday people doing everyday things” ideal usually attached to the term, Rossellini’s film hardly lives up to it either. Again, the DVD booklet notes one of Rossellini’s key failings was actually his Nazis in this film, and hints at a possibly homophobic undercurrent by noting how he loathed the gay Austrian actor playing the major (not to mention the lesbian angle involving the German woman and the Italian girl who sells Manfredi out to the Nazis); it’s a very black and white division between good and evil coming from someone who professed to believe in avoiding that sort of thing. Of course, the DVD’s crowning irony is the filmed introduction by the director himself in which he says they didn’t have the luxury of making up stories, then you watch the film and the opening credits basically say “although it’s based on actual events, this is a work of fiction”. Does it matter? I don’t know. Apparently Rossellini was unhappy about the praise the film received cos even he agreed it was so conventional, but I think he was overly harsh; it may be more conventional than some have said, but it’s still pretty damn good, and I think that’s what matters in the end and why we’re still watching it decades later.

Previous review of Rome, Open City here.

What a curious end (more or less) to Renoir’s film career. Apparently another director, Joseph Lefranc, had spent years trying to get this film made, but Renoir got the job on the grounds that he’d kind of already proven he could do the material (i.e. French prisoners of war escaping German internment) a quarter-century earlier with La grande illusion (Lefranc had to settle for being Renoir’s assistant director here). As such, it often seems to get dismissed as just a remake of that film, but surely the dynamics of the two films are different: the 1937 film is about officers, the 1962 film about conscripts and NCOs; the earlier film looks at the common ground between the French and German aristocrats, while the latter’s titular figure is visibly unimpressed at having to accept help at the end from a German farmer’s wife (married to a French fellow to boot, who says at least he now has land of his own in Germany that he never could’ve had in France), even though it’s a German girl who helps effect his last escape attempt. What’s interesting here is the tone the film takes in depicting the corporal’s many and varied escape attempts (he’s pretty elusive as a character too, it has to be said); IMDB files it under “comedy” as well as “drama”, and certainly it has its lighter moments to justify the designation (although at times Joseph Kosma’s score doesn’t seem to recognise when the film’s being funny), but there’s still something essentially uneasy about the humour and the way it combines with the more essentially serious parts. The whole thing adds up to something that I found really hard to get a grip on, and so apparently did critics at the time, who admired the fairly new talent with whom Renoir populated the film’s main cast but were cooler towards the man behind the camera (though the Cahiers mob liked it as they generally did with Renoir)… and, alas, the industry pretty much gave up on him too after this, with only one more TV film to come and that only eight years later. Interesting, this, but I’m really not sure if I liked it or not.

Here the Renoir box jumps ahead to what I suppose is mid-period; as this film demonstrates, Renoir had now started exploring the deep focus and long take techniques that kind of became his signature, but it also finds him in the position of having finally made it. The first two features and the two shorts we’ve seen so far represent a filmmaker starting out, but a decade later he’s blossomed with the coming of sound, had a hit with Le grand illusion, and was now trying his hand at an epic that I don’t think quite works. 1938, let’s not forget, was the year before a certain war broke out; Germany was expanding its territory by annexing Austria and the Sudetenland, and obviously there were fears of Germany expanding westwards too. As such, La Marseillaise has been interpreted (and rightly, I’m sure) as Renoir’s call “aux armes”, trying to get France to unite after the failure of the Popular Front in mid-1937, and by situating it mostly at the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars, when France was menaced by Prussia and Austria (taking the side of the deposed monarchy), he was clearly trying to send a message about who to unite against. (And we all know how THAT worked out.) La Marseillaise is big filmmaking, focusing largely on a group of Marseillais citizens marching north to Paris to take part in the festivities, and the end result is fairly long (132 minutes) and episodic stuff that makes few concessions to those who don’t already know the history. Unlike, say, Eisenstein’s October, Renoir has room for individual characters, but therein lies probably the film’s biggest problem; Renoir can’t seem to decide what he’s more interested in, the Big Subject Matter or the Little People fighting the battle, so that the latter never really felt that well-developed despite what I’m sure were Renoir’s best intentions. Bomier is no doubt meant as a major character, and maybe Renoir should’ve made him more central or something.

What a difficult film to approach, let alone appraise; I don’t suppose any film touching on the Holocaust is ever easily approachable, but this is harder than most. Second Run’s presentation doesn’t altogether help (an odd glitch at one point fucked the image up), being a non-anamorphic presentation of what should’ve apparently been a Scope film in cropped form, although on their website they note that was all they could get either from the production company or the Polish archives. But the film was also famously “cropped” in mid-shoot by the death of director Andrzej Munk, with the unfinished thing being released two years later with additional stills and commentary. It’s that which really makes the film hard, because Munk never got to shoot whatever else he had to do (plus reshoot existing scenes he was unhappy with). It’s a story of two women, one a prisoner at Auschwitz,  the other a German guard; the latter sees the other boarding a cruise ship she’s travelling on, and this spurs her to remember their time in the camp in two different ways, one in which she tries to convince herself she treated the other woman well and the other in which she remembers what actually happened. I can’t believe no one seems to know how Munk actually intended to end the film, but so it seems; interestingly, the commentary at the end of the film seems to speculate that whether or not the other woman actually was the prisoner from Auschwitz was perhaps meant to be left an open question. The DVD booklet essay insists we take the film as it exists as a finished work, and to some extent that’s possible, but with so much apparently still unclear about what Munk was really going to do with it if it hadn’t been for that accident in 1961, it’s hard to say anything too definitive about the film, least of all whether he was successful with it.